Territorial Rights (7 page)

‘She’s a cookery teacher, but that’s only a hobby. She’s rich. I rather liked the look of her,’ Robert said. ‘She was showy and flashy which I think is right for a mistress.’

Lina started to cry. She said, ‘I don’t understand half the words you say, and now you want another woman, you have desire.’

Robert repeated in French, which she could better follow, all he had said and more; he spoke quite slowly with a venom that had no bearing on the present occasion; except that, feeling in a bad mood, he saw no need whatsoever to control it.

Lina said, ‘I will meet with your father. I will meet with Curran. I will tell them the story how I got away for a better life. It’s a great story.’ She was crying even more, as she worked herself up with the drama of her story.

Robert started to feel enjoyment, and laughed.

Lina Pancev, now aged thirty-five, had grown up in post-war Bulgaria. Her father had disappeared the year she was born, while Bulgaria was still under German occupation. Victor Pancev had been a minor official at the court of King Boris of Bulgaria; the king was a fairly silly man who had playmates rather than friends; Victor Pancev was one of these. The king collapsed and died one day, poisoned, it was said, at the instigation of the Germans. Victor Pancev disappeared on the day of the funeral, never to return. Some weeks later his wife, in Bulgaria, had a letter from a friend who had seen him in Venice where he was staying with a Bulgarian count at a house called Villa Sofia. She had a postcard from Victor himself, not in his usual style, to say he was well and busy. Shortly after this, Lina was born.

Amid the chaos of war, when Russian liberators in Bulgaria followed upon German liberators, and in Italy the Allies finally liberated right, left and centre, the noble owner of the Villa Sofia in Venice died a natural death, while his friend Victor Pancev was killed. This was all that could ever be ascertained afterwards by his friends. Who killed him and why, nobody knew. It was said that he was killed by monarchist agents of Bulgaria who suspected him of having been part of the plot to poison King Boris. But the two maidservants who remained in the Villa testified only that he was found dead in the garden and that his body was ‘taken away’.

The two servants were Katerina and Eufemia. They inherited the Villa under the will of the old count, who had no relatives at his death; it was supposed they were his illegitimate daughters.

Lina Pancev grew up in communist Bulgaria in the midst of a large family of cousins, uncles, aunts, and step-brothers, for as soon as Victor Pancev’s death was officially established his widow had married again.

Lina had no interest in the past, King Boris and all that set about whom her elders sometimes let fall nostalgic phrases, even sentences. She had an early talent for drawing; later she learned to paint objects with photographic exactitude, and to portray people a little larger than life. She did views of monasteries, hills and landscapes, cloudscapes, flowers on a table; she went to the Black Sea and did work-groups at the docks all looking in the same direction, very tanned; and she excelled at women, large and strong, coming out of a shoe factory near her home, all looking healthy and refreshed after a good day’s work. These women were in some demand from Lina’s hand. It might have been, when she finished her studies in applied architecture at the university, that she could have been able to earn her living by her paintings alone.

One summer, her second cousin and boy-friend, Serge, returned from London, having spent six months there on a student exchange programme. Lina sat by the open window, doing nothing, with the flower-boxes of pink geraniums on the sill beside her, listening to Serge as he talked during the long summer evening. He was lean-faced, tall and idealistic, with vivid large brown eyes and a dark skin.

Lina’s mother came in with a bowl of fruit, jaunty, still with her slim figure, her hair smartly cut, her dimples and pointed chin. She laughed as Serge, without waiting for the knife and the fruit-plate to come, took a peach and bit right into it with his white teeth. Lina laughed, too. The mother left the room and Serge continued to talk against the noise of traffic and children in the street below.

He spoke in the manner of his own education; automatically he exaggerated, and he meant it. England, he said, was full of ideological contradictions. They were hypocrites, especially the young people; their left-wing movement was a laugh. Nice people sometimes, but only because of their innocence; they simply did not know themselves, and how truly they were bloated capitalists. Three meals a day, and always money in their pockets; you couldn’t distinguish between them and the Americans.

Most of all Serge talked about the woman in Hampstead he had stayed with for a while; it was a love-affair ‘at least if you call it a love-affair when there’s no illusion of permanency on either side’.

Lina prepared a supper of ham omelettes; she laid two places, for they were alone in the house, her step-brothers and sisters being either in the country with relatives or at a youth camp, and her mother gone off to play cards, her step-father working late in the shipping office where he was a manager, international section. Lina told Serge to stop eating the fruit lest he spoil his appetite, and to save up his story while she went to prepare the supper. She felt the woman in Hampstead was the part of his tale she was hungry for, like supper. Swiftly she cut the bread and bore it in with the omelettes, all on one tray, with the tomato and cucumber salad.

‘Well, what about her, your London woman?’ she said after they had started to eat. Serge, encouraged by the success of his general report, had, in Lina’s short absence in the kitchen, assembled the next part of his story to mind, in closely remembered detail which he arranged for the best possible effect. He wanted simultaneously to make Lina jealous and to impress her with his masculinity in having managed to have a love-affair in the midst of all his busy time in London; and he wanted also to reassure her that the woman, capitalist bourgeoise as she was, left-wing as she claimed to be, was not remotely to be thought of seriously by an intellectual Bulgarian like himself.

‘Her name,’ said Lina, with an air of first things first.

‘Deborah,’ he said.

‘How old?’

‘About thirty-eight, with two children, one ten the other thirteen, both girls, sulky and ugly.’

‘Deborah is ugly?’

‘Maybe she is now. I haven’t seen her for three weeks. She had a tough face and a lanky figure. No make-up and she didn’t comb her hair very much, maybe twice a week. Occupation, journalist, very spiteful in her writing. The house was a terrible mess, especially the bedroom. It was a pretty house in itself, very expensive, but Deborah let everything go, maybe years ago, as she let her husband go. She trails around with long skirts and droopy shoulders all day. She drinks and she takes a little drugs. Not much to sleep with, but it was an experience, a love-affair for the time being; you can’t get much in London.’

‘Rich?’ said Lina.

‘Oh, yes. Of course she thought she was poor. She always complained about money. But she had money from the husband and maybe that money was really for the children, but she lived off it. When there was someone she didn’t like, she would try to make money out of them. It seemed so, all the time. First, the husband, and then when she needed money badly she would write an article against someone in the public eye, attacking them for the best parts of their work, people like sculptors or writers: she would pick out the best of their work and make it out to be the worst, or maybe she would attack a man for his car, or a woman for her clothes, all the time pretending to be the social conscience of her age. The articles made her a lot of money as she told me she made a private joke of them. Bernard Shaw used to do it, she said, and built up his reputation by attacking the reputations already made. There is no such thing as objective judgment in London. Deborah lives how she likes; she can order in the carpenter to build cupboards in her house whenever she likes; there were eight rooms for three people, herself and the girls. She called herself left-wing, nearly communist. It’s very, very funny, Lina. You have to go there to realise how it is.’

‘Why did you go with Deborah if you despised her?’

‘I didn’t despise her. I just saw she didn’t know what she was doing or saying. She was generous, sometimes. I couldn’t afford to buy her many presents, only little things like one flower, one dahlia on a stem, which she loved. She let me do some cooking in her kitchen and she bought in the food. Then sometimes we went out for a meal and paid each our own share, but sometimes she paid for us both.’

‘And the poor daughters?’

‘Hateful. Rude and horrible. I think Deborah could see they were terrible and secretly didn’t like them, either. She gave them money to go out and eat pizzas or English sandwiches at mealtimes, and they had money for the cinema. It was always money in the hands of those girls, a dreadful upbringing. One of them called me “that bloody Pole” in my own presence. Deborah merely said “Bulgarian”, and left it at that.’

Serge went on about Deborah and some of her friends in London, late into the evening. ‘Will you write to her?’ Lina asked. ‘Well, no, I don’t think so,’ said Serge, ‘and yet, maybe later on I’ll write a note. It depends how I feel later on. And then, you know, Deborah might be useful.’

‘She might be dangerous,’ Lina said.

‘That’s a very bright point. She might indeed. But she’s very boring, even to her friends, I could see that.’

‘Dangerous people often seem boring,’ said Lina.

‘So do useful people, very often,’ mused Serge.

He did not discern what type of alert interest Lina was taking in his story, his anecdotes of London, of university life, his hosts and hostesses, the Hampstead of Deborah and the Deborah of Hampstead. He understood only that she was entertained by his travellers’ tales, and the absurdity of the foreign ways he was describing.

He was unaware that the same story that can repel can also enchant, according to the listener. It happened that Lina’s imagination was inflamed with the exciting possibilities of western life, the more Serge reported what he had perceived as hilarious decadence. Taking it for granted she was exactly of his mind, he expounded on the wastefulness, the selfishness, the inequality, the social injustice and the hypocrisy of western left-wing ideas, illustrating them with anecdotes till Lina’s mother came home, looked in on them, smiled, said goodnight and went to bed. Even then Serge went on and on, while Lina drank in the marvels, as they appeared to her, of wearing long skirts and tangled hair in an eight-room house, very expensive, with two liberated daughters and a husband who wasn’t there but who paid the bills. She was stirred by the sheer magic of being a woman with enough money to take a handsome Polish or Bulgarian student out to dine at a restaurant and home to bed. Lina, who was then twenty-three, transformed in her mind as she listened, even the farthest peripheries of Serge’s account ‘… She was arranging flowers in the sitting-room. She had only just got home from the office, her car was still outside the gate. There was a ring at the bell; she opened the door; it was a man who said he was the piano-tuner for the people upstairs who had a flat there—you see it was a divided house. Well, she let him go up, without thinking any more about it, and do you know, he was a big-time thief, he took all their. …’ To Lina, the magic ideas were contained in the phrases, ‘just got home from the office … her car outside the gate’; ‘… piano-tuner for the people upstairs …’; ‘… she was arranging flowers in the sitting-room’; and it didn’t signify in the least to Lina that the story was about a big-time thief, so long as these phrases were dancing in her ears, making colours in the mind’s eye. It was rather like the time, only a few years ago, when a tourist-lady from Moscow had called with a letter of introduction to Lina’s mother in Sofia. The stranger had reminisced a while, talking wistfully about the years before the war, the late nineteen thirties, in the same way as the old White Russians were said to speak of the years before the revolution. The woman tourist’s husband had evidently been in trouble, there had been a misunderstanding. It was a long story, during which Lina made tea, sliced a lemon and prettily put out some sweet biscuits. The voice droned on: ‘… and, well, there was I with my husband in prison and my daughter Kyra to bring up and educate. She had to go to her dancing lessons, there was a state scholarship of course, but how could I manage to make her frocks? To walk to the dancing class she had her bronze velvet dress with lace collar and cuffs, so charming, but
. …’ Whereupon Lina, careless of the woman’s past plight, was quite carried away by the thought of the small daughter being taken to her state dancing class in a velvet dress and lace collar, in the sunny Muscovian springtime. Lina, for all her twenty years at that time, felt a heart-yearning for Moscow, and spent many months brooding how she could manage a student-exchange or some sort of work-permit to leave Bulgaria and go to the Soviet Union, to Leningrad even, or wonderful Moscow.

But her dreams fed on Serge’s stories of London after that first night of his return, and on subsequent warm nights when they had taken a boat down the river all day under the blazing sun. More and more she wanted to hear about the ‘sociology’ of the West. She slept with Serge as if he was a bourgeois sea with the waves breaking over her. She told him she had found out a lot more recently about her father; he had been ‘killed in the war’ only so far as it was during the war that he died, and his calling had something to do with the court of King Boris, but he had not been in the army, he had been in the Bulgarian consular service; what he had been doing actually during the war in Venice, where they said he was buried, she did not know, since there never had been a Bulgarian consulate in Venice. Lina said she would like to find out, and meant to travel to Italy one day.

That would be a good thing, said Serge; she ought to travel. One could appreciate the Republic of Bulgaria better having been away for a while.

She already had a job as an art teacher in a secondary school. Many years after Serge’s return, Lina managed to get a trip to Paris with an educational group tour. There, on the day before she was due to return, she left her hotel, left the group, went to the police station and defected. ‘Name: Lina Pancev … Sex: female … Occupation: painter and teacher of art, advanced grades. Degree in Education 2nd Class. University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Former residence Sofia, Bulgaria. The above-described individual states that she seeks refuge in the West for political and ideological reasons. We are informed that her group …’