The Balkan Trilogy (75 page)

She had been longing to get away from the capital, but now their week-end was come her apprehensions were heightened. Anything might happen while they were away. And what of Sasha, left in Despina’s care? It had been during their last trip to Predeal that the kitten had fallen to its death. Despina, sympathising with her fears, had promised to open the door to no one. Sasha, however, had been no more concerned by her departure than the kitten had been.

He said: ‘We have a villa at Sinai,’ speaking as though it stood there empty, awaiting the family’s return. ‘I know Predeal. Sarah went to school there. Hannah would not go – she would not leave my father.’

Harriet remembered the little girl. ‘I could see she adored your father,’ she said.

Sasha nodded. ‘She cried all night when he married again.’

‘Did you mind?’

‘We all minded, but Hannah most. We did not want another mother.’

‘You loved him very much, didn’t you?’

‘We all loved him.’ Sasha still identified his feeling with those of his family. He did not acknowledge the separation. He added: ‘
She
wanted to take him from us. She was beastly. Wicked.’

Harriet laughed. ‘When I was a child I used to think my aunt was a wicked stepmother, but now I realise she was just rather stupid. She said anything that came into her head. She probably forgot it the next moment and thought I did, too.’

After a long delay, the train moved out of Ploesti into foothills that were straddled by the old wooden derricks of pioneering days. Beyond this area were alpine meadows, but soon the rocks broke through and the landscape changed into the grey shale and pines of the lower Transylvanian Alps.

When they left the stale and stifling carriage, the Pringles were startled by the glassy outside air. Scentless in its purity, it was as cold as ether on the skin. They wanted to start walking at once, but first they had to report their arrival to the police. The police officer, unshaven and grimy, reeking of garlic, pushed aside a collection of dirty coffee-cups and stamped their permits with extreme slowness. Free to stay in Predeal for no longer than a week, they carried their luggage through the long main street to the hotel.

The village, with its grey highland look, was in shadow, but the peaks above were still looped in the reddish light of the evening sun. Minute glaciers, like veins of marble, made their way down the grey rock-surfaces. Snow lay already on the upper ledges. At this height the autumn was fairly advanced. Patches of beech were golden-tawny, thrown like lion-skins among the black fur of the pines.

Predeal was both a winter and a summer resort, so out of date that the village hall announced an English film.

Harriet was slightly unnerved by the extraordinary quiet of the place. She felt they had been mad to leave the capital
at such a time. If there were an invasion, they would receive no warning here. But Guy stretched his arms, throwing off the year’s worries in a moment. As he breathed the light and tonic air, he said: ‘This is like flying out of a fog.’

Their bedroom was small and bare with a stove that was lit at evening and fed with pine-logs. They were met by a scent of wood-smoke, delicate and sweet, that comforted Harriet. She began to look forward to her holiday. As soon as they had dropped their bags they went out to walk in the blue, chill air. The sky changed to turquoise. The shops lit up. The village street hung on the mountainside like a chain of light. They found the village bright enough during the day, but a wintry gloom came down after the shops shut. There was no entertainment but the cinema where the film broke down a dozen times during a showing, each break being numbered on the screen and described as an ‘interval’. In their little ski-ing hotel there was nothing to do. Guy set out his books of verse and novels by Conrad, preparing to spend the holiday in work.

On their first morning, as he chose an armful of books to take to the public gardens, Harriet said: ‘But can’t we go for a walk?’

‘Later,’ Guy promised. ‘Let me break the back of this first.’ She, he suggested, might visit the famous
confiserie
, the farseeing owner of which had laid in vast stocks of sugar in early summer. Now people came from all the large cities to eat his cakes.

Harriet was surprised to discover how greedy this fact made her feel.

Guy took a seat in the small ornamental garden where the grass, damply green in the mild, misty sunlight, was scattered over with russet leaves. There was nothing to see here but some beds of small, brick-coloured dahlias. Harriet wandered off through a neighbouring market where the ground was heaped with apples, tomatoes and black grapes. Some of the notorious Laetzi gipsies stood about – wild, bearded, long-haired men who eyed her as though they were cannibals.

The
confiserie
was crowded. The inside tables were all taken
and the counter was tightly packed about with people who had to hold their plates above their heads. Outside there were chairs vacant near the rail. Harriet soon discovered why. The beggars were at her elbow even as she sat down. There were three children, their bones hung with scraps like greasers’ rags. One, with a withered leg, hopped with his hand on the shoulder of a smaller boy. The third, a girl, had lost the sight of an eye. Perhaps she had been born that way, for the eyeball remained in its socket, blankly white, like a filling of lard. The children were urged forward – not that they needed much urging – by two teen-age girls who now and then stopped their whine of ‘
Foame
’ to titter as though this persecution of the foreign woman were too funny for words.

Harriet handed out her small change, but it was not enough to buy release. The children went on jigging and whining beside her. While waiting to be served, she watched a small green and gold beetle crawling towards a hole in the rail beside her. If it went to the right, they would get away. It went to the left and it suddenly seemed to her that their danger had become acute. Her appetite had gone. She ordered coffee. While she waited she stared out at the road and watched a peasant leading a horse and cart out of a lane opposite. The horse, its bones straining against its hide, stumbled when it reached the main road cobbles. At once the peasant flung back his whip and lashed the creature about the eyes. The blows were given with savage deliberation as though the man wanted no more than an excuse to vent a chronic rage.

She leapt to her feet with a cry, too appalled to care for the surprise of her neighbours. By the time she reached the pavement, the assault was over. Horse and peasant had turned the corner and were away down the road. She knew, if she pursued them, her Rumanian was not good enough to make her protest effective. Anyway, it would be ignored.

She gave up all thought of cakes or coffee and hurried back to the public garden. When she reached Guy, she could scarcely speak. Surprised by her agitation he said: ‘Whatever is the matter?’

She sat down, exhausted, and gulped back her tears. Seeing the peasant vividly, his brutish face absorbed and horribly gratified by the outlet for his violence, she said: ‘I can’t bear this place. The peasants are loathsome. I hate them.’ She spoke in a convulsion of feeling, trembling as she said: ‘All over this country animals are suffering – and we can do nothing about it.’ Feeling the world too much for her, she pressed her face against Guy’s shoulder.

He put his arm round her to calm her. ‘The peasants are brutes because they are treated like brutes. They suffer themselves. Their behaviour comes of desperation.’

‘It’s no excuse.’

‘Perhaps not, but it’s an explanation. One must try to understand.’

‘Why should one try to understand cruelty and stupidity?’

‘Because even those things can be understood: and if understood, they can be cured.’

He squeezed her hand, but she did not respond. He talked to distract her, but she remained withdrawn as though violated and unable to throw off the shock.

After a while he picked up his books again. ‘Why don’t you take a proper holiday?’ he said. ‘We’re quite well off at the present rate. Wouldn’t you like to take the boat to Athens?’

Her expression lightened a little. ‘You mean you would come with me?’

‘You know I can’t. Inchcape doesn’t want me to leave the country. And I have to prepare for the new term. But that’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.’

She shook her head. ‘When we go, we go together.’

After tea, Guy felt he had done enough for the day and was willing to take a walk. When they reached the forest, he looked in through the aisles of pines, all intent and silent as though each tree held its breath, and refused to enter. He said that within living memory it had been a haunt of bears. ‘Let’s keep to the road. It’s safer.’ The road carried them above the trees into the bare rock fields where the cold was keen. The sky was mottled with a little cloud and here and there a chill
hung on the air like powdered glass. At first Harriet thought it was ash blown from a bonfire, then she found it was melting on her skin. She said with wonder: ‘It is snow.’ When they reached the first white pool of snow, she pressed her hand on it, leaving the intaglio of her palm and fingers. Much lighter and surer on her feet than Guy, excited by the rarefied air, she climbed at great speed until she was alone amid the silence of the topmost slopes. She heard Guy shout and, looking back, saw him standing a long way below, like an unhappy bear, defeated by the shifting rubble of the path. She sped down into his arms.

They returned to the hotel, which stood by a dimpled meadow that was covered with small flowers. Some cows had been driven on to the grass during their absence and Guy paused, unwilling to cross among them. He saw all the animals as potential enemies. He distrusted the Bucharest cab-horses and had even been frightened of Harriet’s red kitten. She took his hand and led him towards the nearest cow, which lifted its head to stare at them but did not cease to chew. Watching its mouth slipping loosely from side to side, Guy said: ‘These beasts are probably dangerous.’

Harriet laughed. ‘I love them,’ she said.

‘What, these frightful creatures?’

‘Not only these. All animals.’

‘How could you love something so totally different from yourself.’

‘Why not? I don’t simply love myself. I think I love them because they are different. They are innocent. They are hunted, harried, slaughtered by human beings who imagine they have a God-given right to destroy whenever it’s in their interest to destroy.’

Guy nodded. ‘You want to protect them. I can understand that. But why this extraordinary love for them? It doesn’t seem reasonable to me.’

She did not try to explain it. Guy, she knew, believed that man’s compassion for his own kind was the only true compassion to be found in this cold universe. She longed for proof
of a more disinterested compassion; a supreme justice that would avenge all these tormented and helpless innocents. Trembling with her own excess of feeling, she stretched out her hand to the cow, but at the threat of her approach it moved warily backwards.

After supper, Guy lay on the bed propped with pillows and gave himself up again to his books. Harriet, drowsy from the mountain air, lay in the crook of his arm, happy in his warmth and contact. He paused in his reading to say: ‘You do not see much of Bella these days. Or Clarence either. You have made so few friends in Bucharest! Don’t you feel the need of people?’

She said: ‘Not when I have you – which isn’t often.’

‘You’ve quite enough of me. If you had more, you’d be bored.’

She glanced up at him, realised he believed this and smiled in denial, but he was not looking at her. She closed her eyes and slept.

When they came down to breakfast on Sunday and found Dobson sitting at one of the tables, Guy gave a great cry of ‘Why, hello.’ He would, Harriet knew, have been equally delighted had the newcomer been almost anyone known to them: and it might have been someone worse than Dobson who seemed charmed by the sight of them. He had driven up late the previous night ‘for a breath of air’, and would have only one day in Predeal. He suggested that after breakfast they should go for a walk together.

Harriet left it to Guy to make his excuses, but the invitation was too much for him. It was not only that he was a little flattered by it: he could not refuse the diversion of fresh company.

As they left the hotel, Dobson suggested they should visit a Russian church a couple of miles away, saying: ‘We might hear something interesting. I was enormously fortunate last time I went there. They were singing the
Cantakion
for the Dead.’

Dobson spoke on a note of such breathless anticipation that Guy paused only a moment before saying: ‘All right.’ At
the same time he looked at Harriet as though she might save him, but she, a little piqued, said she would like nothing better.

They went behind the village, climbing steeply among small châlets and villas. The path was dusty, slippery with flints and overhung by old chestnut trees, their leaves ochred and reddened, forming parasols of colour that set the shade aglow. The ground beneath them was stained with trodden nuts and leaves. In one garden stood a giant rowan, weighted and bronzed with berries. Many of the villas were shuttered, their gardens overgrown as though they had been unvisited all summer.

The path dwindled, the houses were left behind, and they came out on to a plateau that stretched away into remote upland hills. They walked silently on the grass that was short, greyish and set with harebells and wild scabious.

Dobson talked easily and pleasantly. Harriet found his presence in Predeal reassuring. It was true that as a diplomat, especially protected, he had less to worry about than they had, but it was unlikely he would leave Bucharest if danger were imminent. Harriet, nearly two days away from the tensions of the capital, was beginning to feel like a patient propped up for the first time after an operation; Guy asked if anything had happened since they left Bucharest.

‘Well,’ said Dobson, ‘Friday, as you probably know, was the anniversary of the death of Calinescu. The Guardists spent the day marching about.’

They were in sight of a hollow from which the golden domes of the Russian church rose among trees.