The Balkan Trilogy (5 page)

Guy tilted forward his glasses and tried to focus the spectacle
before him. He was, Harriet knew, happy to be in this advantageous position even though he would not have demanded it for himself. In appreciation, he stretched his hand to her across the table. As she touched it, she saw they were being observed from the next table by a man who, meeting her glance, smiled and looked away.

‘Who is that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘Does he know us?’

‘Everyone knows us. We are the English. We are at war.’

‘But who is he?’

‘Ionescu, the Minister of Information. He’s always here.’

‘How odd to live in such a small capital!’

‘There are advantages. Whatever happens here, one is in the midst of it.’

Ionescu was not alone at his table. He had with him five women of different ages, all plain, staid and subdued in appearance, from whom he sat apart. He gazed fixedly at the orchestra stand and picked his teeth with a golden pick.

‘Who are the women?’

‘His wife and her relatives. The wife is the one nearest him.’

‘She looks down-trodden.’

‘She probably is. Everyone knows he comes here only to see the singer Florica. He’s her latest
affaire
.’

Harriet watched a man below, who, newly served, guarded his plate with one hand against the waiters and passers-by while with the other he forked-in his food, eyes oblique, as though fearing to have it snatched from him. She was hungry herself.

‘Will they ever bring the menu?’ she asked.

Guy said: ‘Sooner or later someone will remember us. There’s Inchcape.’ He pointed to a man in late middle-age, thickly built and very upright, who had paused with an ironically humorous courtesy while a group pushed fiercely past him searching for a table. As Guy rose and waved, Inchcape nodded up to him, then, when free to move, did so with the same air of amused irony, giving, for all his lack of height, the impression of towering over those about him. He had, Harriet remembered, once been headmaster of a minor public school.

As he advanced, she noticed someone was following him
– a taller, leaner man, no more than thirty years of age, who came sidling among the tables, effacing himself behind his companion.

‘Why, Clarence!’ Guy called on a rising note of delighted surprise, and the second man, smirking, cast down his eyes. ‘That,’ said Guy, ‘is my colleague Clarence Lawson. So we’re all back together again!’ He stretched out his hands as the two arrived at the table. They seemed both pleased and embarrassed by his enthusiasm.

Taking Guy’s left hand, Inchcape gave it an admonitory tweak. ‘So you’ve got yourself married!’ he said and turned with a mocking half-smile towards Harriet. She saw that beneath the smile his glance was critical and vulnerable. One of his men had brought back a wife – an unknown quantity, perhaps a threat to his authority. When Guy made the introductions, she greeted Inchcape gravely, making no attempt to charm.

His manner, when responding, admitted her to his grown-up world. It changed as he turned back to Guy. Guy, it seemed, was not a grown-up; he was a boy – a favoured boy, a senior prefect, perhaps, but still a boy.

‘Where did you go this summer?’ Guy asked Clarence, who was standing, a little aloof, from the table. ‘Did you do that bus journey from Beirut to Kashmir?’

‘Well, no, I didn’t.’ Clarence had an awkward, rather confused smile, that made the more surprising the firm and resonant richness of his voice. Catching Harriet’s eyes on him, he looked quickly from her. ‘Actually, I just stuck in Beirut. I spent the summer bathing and lounging around the beach. Much as you might expect. I did think of flying home to see Brenda, but somehow I never got around to it.’

Guy asked Inchcape what he had done.

‘I was in Rome,’ he said, ‘I spent a lot of time in the Vatican Library.’ He looked at Harriet. ‘How was England when you left it?’

‘Calm enough. Foreigners were leaving, of course. The official who examined our passports at Dover said: “The first today”.’

Inchcape took a seat. ‘Well’ – he frowned at Clarence – ‘sit down, sit down,’ but there was nowhere for Clarence to sit.

A chair was brought from a neighbouring table but Clarence remained standing. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I only came to say “Hallo”.’

‘
Sit down
.’ Inchcape impatiently slapped the chair seat and Clarence sat. When all the party was settled, Inchcape surveyed it, drawing down the corners of his lips in ridicule of the announcement he had to make. ‘I’ve just been put in charge of British propaganda in the Balkans,’ he said. ‘An official appointment.’

‘Why, splendid!’ exclaimed Guy.

‘Umph! It’ll lead to a rearrangement of duties, of course. You,’ he nodded to Guy, ‘will take over the English Department – a much reduced department, needless to say. You can get some of the local teachers of English to give you a hand. I’ll remain in charge; all you’ll have to do my dear fellow is work.’ He pushed Guy’s shoulder in humorous dismissal, then turned to Clarence: ‘We’re opening a propaganda bureau in the Calea Victoriei opposite the rival establishment. You will be required to bring out a news sheet.’ He smiled at Clarence but did not attempt to touch him. Clarence, tilted back from the table, his hands in his pockets, his chin on his chest, was not responsive. He seemed to be rejecting patronage with an uneasy air of ease. ‘You’ll have plenty of other jobs to do, of course.’

Clarence said slowly: ‘I’m not at all sure I can take on this sort of work. I’m seconded from the British Council. The Council is purely cultural and Lord Lloyd …’

‘I’ll deal with Lloyd.’ Inchcape jerked upright and looked about him. ‘Where’s the waiter? What about a drink?’ He turned his neat Napoleonic face towards a waiter, who, conscious of having neglected the table, now sprang on to the platform with exaggerated alacrity.

When their order had been given, Harriet said to Inchcape: ‘So you think we shall stay here?’

‘Why should we not?’

Guy said: ‘Woolley stopped us earlier this evening and tried to order Harriet home.’

Inchcape, eyes and nostrils distended, looked from Guy to Harriet and back again: ‘Woolley took it upon himself to give you orders?’

Enjoying Inchcape’s indignation, Harriet said: ‘He said that he is the leader of the English colony.’

‘He did, did he? The old fool’s in his second childhood. He spends his days in the bar at the Golf Club getting sustenance out of a bottle, like a baby. In his dotage; his anecdotage, I’d say. Ha!’ Inchcape gave a laugh, cheered by his own wit, then he fell to brooding and, after a pause, said: ‘Leader of the English colony forsooth! I’ll show him who’s leader if he tries to order my men about.’

Guy and Clarence exchanged smiles.

Harriet asked Inchcape: ‘If there were an invasion, if we had to leave here in a hurry, where would we go?’

Inchcape, still annoyed, answered shortly: ‘Turkey, I suppose.’

‘And from there?’

‘Oh!’ His tone became milder. ‘Make our way through Syria to the Middle East.’ He assumed his old joking manner. ‘Or we might try a little trek across Persia and Afghanistan to India.’ But he still spoke grudgingly. He interrupted himself to say: ‘But there’ll be no invasion. The Germans have better things to do with their troops than spread them out over Eastern Europe. They’ll need all they’ve got to hold the Western front.’

Clarence stuck out his lower lip. He ‘hmmd’ a bit before remarking in a casual tone: ‘Nevertheless, the situation is serious. I bumped into Foxy Leverett today and he advised me to keep my bags packed.’

‘Then you’ll keep them packed a long time.’ Inchcape now shrugged the matter off. He might have been dealing with a junior-school fracas of which he had had enough.

The piccolo arrived, a scrap of a boy, laden with bottles, glasses and plates. Breathing loudly, he set the table.

Glancing up, Harriet found Clarence’s gaze fixed on her. He
looked away at once but he had caught her attention. She noted his long, lean face with its long nose, and felt it unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory and unsatisfied. As she assessed him, his eyes came, rather furtively, back to her and now he found her gazing at him. He flushed slightly and jerked his face away again.

She smiled to herself.

Guy said: ‘I asked Sophie to join us here.’

‘Why, I wonder?’ Inchcape murmured.

‘She’s very depressed about the war.’

‘Imagining, no doubt, that it was declared with the sole object of depressing her.’

Suddenly all the perturbation of the garden was gathered into an eruption of applause. The name of the singer Florica was passed from table to table.

Florica, in her long black and white skirts, was posed like a bird, a magpie, in the orchestra cage. When the applause died out, she jerked forward in a bow, then, opening her mouth, gave a high, violent gypsy howl. The audience stirred. Harriet felt the sound pass like a shock down her spine.

The first howl was followed by a second, sustained at a pitch that must within a few years (so Inchcape later assured the table) destroy her vocal chords. People sitting near Ionescu glanced at him and at his women. Sprawled sideways in his seat, he stared at the singer and went on picking his teeth. The women remained impassive as the dead.

Florica, working herself into a fury in the cage, seemed to be made of copper wire. She had the usual gypsy thinness and was as dark as an Indian. When she threw back her head, the sinews moved in her throat: the muscles moved as her lean arms swept the air. The light flashed over her hair, that was strained back, glossy, from her round, glossy brow. Singing there among the plump women of the audience, she was like a starved wild kitten spitting at cream-fed cats. The music sank and her voice dropped to a snarl. It rose and, twisting her body as in rage, clenching her fists and striking back her skirts, she finished on an elemental screech that was sustained above the tremendous outburst of applause.

When it was over, people blinked as though they had survived a tornado. Only Ionescu and his women continued, to all appearance, unmoved.

Inchcape, not himself applauding, pointed in amusement at Guy, who, crying ‘Bravo, bravo!’ was leaning forward to bang his hands together. ‘What energy,’ smiled Inchcape. ‘How wonderful to be young!’ When there was silence again, he turned to Harriet and said: ‘She was a failure when she toured abroad, but here she’s just what they like. She expresses all the exasperation that’s eating these people up.’ As he turned in his seat, he suddenly saw Ionescu’s party. ‘Oh ho!’ he said, ‘Ionescu complete with harem. I wonder how his wife enjoyed the performance.’

‘You think,’ Harriet asked him, ‘she knows about Florica and her husband?’

‘Dear me, yes. She probably has on record everything they have ever said or done during every moment they have spent together.’

To encourage him, Harriet made a murmur of artless interest. Inchcape settled down to instruct her. He said: ‘Rumanian convention requires her apparent unawareness. Morality here is based not on not doing, but on recognising what is being done.’

They had been served with a rich goose-liver paté, dark with truffles and dressed with clarified butter. Inchcape swallowed this down in chunks, talking through it as though it were a flavourless impediment to self-expression.

‘Take, for instance, the behaviour of these women in company. If anyone makes an improper joke, they simply pretend not to understand. While the men roar with laughter, the women sit poker faced. It’s ridiculous to watch. This behaviour, that fools no one, saves the men having to restrict their conversation when women are present.’

‘But the young women, the students, don’t they rebel against this sort of hypocrisy?’

‘Dear me, no. They are the most conventional
jeunes filles
in the world, and the most knowing. “Sly”, Miss Austen would have called them. If, during a reading in class, we come on
some slight indecency, the men roar their enjoyment, the girls sit blank. If they were shocked, they would not look shocked: if they were innocent, they would look bewildered. As it is, their very blankness betrays their understanding.’ Inchcape gave a snort of disgust, not, apparently, at the convention but at the absurdity of the sex on which it was imposed.

‘How do they become so knowledgeable so young?’ asked Harriet, half listening to the talk between Clarence and Guy, in which she caught more than once the name of Sophie. Clarence, half in the party and half out of it, was taking a bite or two of paté.

‘Oh,’ Inchcape answered Harriet, ‘these Rumanian homes are hot-beds of scandal and gossip. It’s all very Oriental. The pretence of innocence is to keep their price up. They develop early and they’re married off early, usually to some rich old lecher whose only interest is in the girl’s virginity. When that’s over and done with, they divorce. The girl sets up her own establishment, and, having the status of divorcée, she is free to do what she chooses.’

Harriet laughed. ‘How then is the race carried on?’

‘There’s a quota of normal marriages, of course. But surely you’ve heard the story of the Rumanian walking with his German friend down Calea Victoriei – the Rumanian naming the price of every woman they meet? “Good heavens,” says the German, “are there no honest women here?” “Certainly,” replies the Rumanian, “but –
very expensive!
”’

Harriet laughed, and Inchcape, with a satisfied smile, gazed over the restaurant and complained: ‘I’ve never before seen this place in such a hubbub.’

‘It’s the war,’ said Clarence. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may be starving to death.’

‘Fiddlesticks!’

The second course arrived, a duck dressed with orange. As this was being carved, Inchcape said quietly to Harriet: ‘I see your friend Sophie Oresanu in the distance.’

Not avoiding the underlying question, Harriet replied: ‘She is not my friend. I have never met her. What is she?’

‘Rather an advanced young lady for these parts. Her circumstances are peculiar. Her parents divorced and Sophie lived with her mother. When the mother died, Sophie was left to live alone. That is unusual here. It gives her considerable freedom. She worked for a while on a student’s magazine – one of those mildly anti-fascist, half-baked publications that appear from time to time. It lasted about six months. Now she thinks the Germans have marked her down. She’s taking a law degree.’