They Were Divided (15 page)

Laszlo remained alone in the darkening room. Two bank notes lay upon the table before him and so he had enough money to drink himself into oblivion. With money he could drink, and with drink he could forget … and now especially he needed something to wash away that sentimental heart-ache he had momentarily felt when Fabian had seized the Purdey with his great coarse hands and practically run out of the door with it. Why, he wondered, had that action given him such a sudden stab of pain? Why now, suddenly, when so long ago he had decided that anything that reminded him of his lost past was hateful. Oh, well, it was good that he had seen the last of it!

Laszlo was still barefooted since he had taken off his sodden boots and socks on coming into the room. He decided he would have to send old Marton out for brandy so he picked up one of the notes and stepped out onto the hallway that separated the part of the house where he lived from Marton’s own lodging. This was a widish room with a fireplace, behind which was the kitchen that had been used by all the inhabitants of the house when it had lodged two tenant families. He opened the door opposite and there was the old servant crouching down on the floor with a
candle
beside him: he was stretching the hare-skin on a plank of wood. Caught in the act he stared up as his master too
dumbfounded
to speak. Laszlo burst out laughing.

‘You old rogue! Now I’ve caught you! Out with it, where did that hare come from?’

‘I caught it.’

‘How? Not while it was on the run, I’ll be bound.’

‘With a snare.’

‘Bravo indeed! I like that. Very clever. Where, may I ask?’

Balogh did not want to answer that. Still, he said, ‘In the forest.’

‘I see! In the forest! Well, if Azbej can steal my forest I suppose
I can steal his hares! Why not? Now go over to Bischitz’s and bring me half a litre of brandy, the best he has. We’ll talk about all this later …’

And so Laszlo became a poacher, and his life was changed. In a few days he had learned the essentials from old Marton, how the snares were prepared and where were the most likely places to set them. After a while they would go in turns to the forest, Laszlo in the evening to set eight or ten snares in places they had already planned together, and Marton at dawn to collect the game. They caught two good hares in the first week.

This was the first thing in many years to give Laszlo any pleasure. His fingers, trained to the intricacies of the violin and keyboard, soon adapted to tying the most delicate of snares; and these he hung with such skill and art where his prey had trodden a path at the foot of a thornbush thicket, or along a branch, that neither man nor beast could have said they were there.

There was only one snag: he soon found that hares rarely went deep into the forests when the weather was fine nor even when the sky was merely overcast. Then they stayed out in the meadows and ploughed fields. They went to the woods only when it was exceptionally windy or when there was snow in the air. Then, and only then, was it worth the effort of setting the traps and snares.

This was not enough for Laszlo, for he had become so fond of this new game that he wanted to play it every day.

Between the house where Laszlo lived and the road was some wooden-plank fencing but only on each side, running from the road to the little stream that ran at the bottom of the slope behind the house. On the left there was only a hedge between, a piece of vacant land between Laszlo’s little house and the Bischitz’s shop; while on the right, between it and the grounds of Laszlo’s old manor house, Azbej had added a fence of dry sticks near the bank of the stream. There, as the place was sandy and close to water, he had also placed his new hen-run. Azbej had started to raise Orpingtons whose brown eggs were so popular that he hoped to export them even to England. A long hen-house had been built with a flat sandy yard between it and the stream. At the far end, just under the slope of the hill on the top of which had been built the manor house itself, the new owner had built a house for the farm overseer. It was all neat and clean and new – a
model chicken-farm – and the yard was filled with big golden hens who scratched disconsolately at its sterile surface where no insects, or worms, or other favourite morsels were to be found. Their eyes darted from left to right as they searched in vain. Their only excitement came, twice a day, when their feed would be brought in … and that was all. They were bored. Every so often one would approach the dry-wood fence and peck its way along searching for some way of escape to the Paradise Garden beyond.

Late one afternoon Laszlo strolled down to the bank of the stream near to where old Marton was cutting up a fallen alder tree. The first snows had come and gone and it had been dry freezing weather ever since. That day it had clouded over and Laszlo went down to ask the old man if the snow was coming again, because if so it would be a good moment to set the traps in the woods and he would have time to do it before it got dark.

Marton stopped his work, leaned on his axe and threw back his head. He wiped the sweat from his face and from his long moustaches, and sniffed the air.

‘No snow today!’ he said laconically.

Laszlo stood there for some time watching the old man as he worked. He felt thoroughly out of temper because he had set his mind on going to the woods that evening. Finally he turned and started slowly to walk back to the house.

The branches of the fallen tree had blocked the garden path so Laszlo was forced to make a detour along the hedge beyond which Azbej had erected his fence. Until that moment Laszlo had been thinking of nothing but his annoyance that the weather was so contrary but now, seeing before him the new wooden fence, the neat poultry-yard, the farm beyond it and, high on the hill behind, the white manor house itself, with its new pink roof shining through the bare winter trees, a fresh thought struck him. For a moment his face darkened with anger as he looked at
everything
that had once been his and then slowly a wicked smile appeared on his face. Between the laths of the poultry-yard paling he could see a few hens peering at him and all too clearly
searching
for an opening through which they could reach the tempting worked soil with its wealth of fallen seeds that was waiting for them on the other side.

Laszlo looked around. There was no one in sight, and even old Marton had his back to him.

It was obvious that he would only need one snare, and that the hedge would hide him as he set it.

He hurried back to the house, collected a snare, and a steel screwdriver from the gun-case, and in a moment or two was back by the fence. He bent down and with a swift turn of the
screwdriver
forced one of the wooden palings out of its lower socket. Then he grasped a live twig from the hedge in front of the opening he had just made, bent its end back in an arc and attached his snare to it. All this was done so swiftly that in a couple of minutes he was back beside the house apparently just idly looking up at the sky. For a while he stood there, every nerve taut. He listened hard. Dusk was falling and this was the moment when all the birds usually found their way back to the hen-house. In less than half an hour they would all be inside again and so there was not much time left for one of them to discover the trap that had been set for it. Laszlo then began to wonder if a trapped bird would make such a noise when the noose tightened that the farm people would be alerted and discover what he had been up to … and then the shame of being found out. The shame!

For what seemed like an eternity he heard nothing. Then there was a sudden brief fluttering of wings, and then again
nothing
. The trap had been sprung.

It was almost more than he could do not to run down excitedly. Nevertheless he managed a lazy stroll and, sure enough, from the branch he had so cunningly bent so as to be sprung by the snare, a fine fat Orpington hen was hanging, as dead as anyone could wish. Laszlo unhooked it swiftly, hid it under his coat, and then he did run, as swiftly as possible, back into the house. He felt no remorse at all for having caught one of Azbej’s birds, and that what he had done was nothing less than common theft never even passed through his mind. If he thought of it as anything at all it was as a simple act of revenge and as such gave him the
satisfaction
of paying back in his own coin someone who had robbed him. The moment that this occurred to him Laszlo’s heart took a great leap of joy and triumph; and if he had somehow regained all his lost inheritance it would have made him no happier than he was at that moment.

From that day on Laszlo set his hen-trap every eight or ten days. He always did this on his own for it was obvious that old Marton wanted nothing to do with it. He never spoke his mind, or indeed said anything at all on the subject, but Laszlo sensed that in his book wild game was God’s gift to whosoever might catch it but that poultry belonged to the man who raised and fed it. Accordingly, though he would cook any bird that Laszlo took,
he would not eat it. He was even reluctant to pluck and draw such birds, so Laszlo found that he had to call upon young Regina to get this done. She came eagerly. All Laszlo had to do was to give the girl a little private nod when he was drinking his tot of brandy in the shop, or a discreet wave from over the hedge, and she would somehow contrive to come at once, no matter what she was supposed to be doing. Though no one could have noticed that she was doing it, Regina somehow managed to keep a
permanent
watch on Laszlo’s house and on him if he were out of doors. For her any reason was enough if she could be near him.

Sometimes when she disappeared from the store her father and mother would start calling for her, and then she would sneak home, making sure that she always appeared to be coming from somewhere quite other than where she had really been. When she went to Laszlo’s she would cross the piece of empty land between the houses through the gate that her father had put in the hedge when he had rented it some years before; but she would never come back the same way, for if she had she knew her parents would guess where she had been. A moment or two after they started calling she would reappear as if coming from the stream, or from the roadway, or even from the house opposite; and even though she sometimes got a slap on the face she never let on where she had been.

Her love for Gyeroffy was like that of a faithful hound.

Of course she was still a child and the deep love she felt for the young man was utterly innocent, though she experienced all the ecstasy and suffering of a grown woman. If Laszlo spoke to her she was happy, and she suffered and felt excluded when he talked to other people.

She loathed Fabian. On those occasions when Laszlo and Fabian went into Ujvar together and did not come back until the next morning, she knew instinctively that they had been enjoying themselves with other women – horrible, coarse creatures, no doubt – and she was consumed by jealousy and hurt rage and cried all night. The following day she would try her best to be angry and not keep glancing at Laszlo’s house; and she would decide not to go if he should call out for her. But a single word or a casual glance from him was enough to make her forget all her resentment, and then she would once again be his faithful
doglike
slave. And yet, behind this unthinking bondage, there was something else – a young girl’s perennial curiosity about what the act of love was really like. On the days after his trips to the town
Regina did all she could to get close enough to him, either in his own house or else in her father’s shop, to be able to look closely at him, to study his face and hands and how he moved; and she would lift her delicate straight little nose and sniff the air around him: and when she thought that she had seen or sensed some legacy of that night spent away from home, a strange scent or a bite-mark on his skin, she would become strangely upset and her throat would constrict. It was unspeakably painful … and yet mysterious and attractive too.