The Balkan Trilogy (33 page)

‘Then get up and dress. The bed linen will have to be changed.’

Wincing at the cold, Yakimov came from under the covers, revealing pyjamas, torn and very dirty, made of flame-coloured
crêpe de Chine
. ‘Sick man,’ he murmured as he found, and tremulously covered himself with, a tarnished dressing-gown of gold brocade. ‘Better take a bath.’ He hurried off and shut himself in the bathroom.

Despina had appeared by now, expressing delight at the Pringles’ return, but holding up her hands to warn her mistress that there had been catastrophe in her absence. The red kitten was dead.

‘No!’ Harriet cried, Yakimov and every other annoyance forgotten in the face of this news.

Despina, nodding in sombre sympathy, related how the kitten had died. One morning, when she was cleaning the room, it had gone on to the balcony and run along the balustrade to the balcony of the next-door flat. There the servant (‘a Rumanian, of course,’ said Despina meaningfully) had hissed at it and flicked it back with a duster. Startled, it had lost its footing and fallen nine floors to the cobbles below. Despina went down and found it dead. It had, she was sure, died instantly.

Harriet wept. The loss seemed to her unendurable. She stood crouched together, weeping with intent bitterness, in agony, as though the foundations of her life had been taken from her. Guy watched her helplessly, amazed at so much grief.

‘And the servant did it!’ she burst out at last. ‘The beastly peasant.’

Guy remonstrated: ‘Darling, really! The girl didn’t realise what she was doing.’

‘That’s the trouble. They have the equipment of humans and the understanding of beasts. That is what one hates.’ She wept again. ‘My kitten, my poor kitten!’ After a while, she blew her nose and asked: ‘And where was Yakimov when it happened?’

‘Ah, that one!’ Despina spoke scornfully. ‘He was asleep.’

‘He would be asleep.’ Harriet’s anger with the peasant
servant was now carried over to Yakimov and Despina tried to divert her by encouraging it.

‘What has he done,’ she asked, ‘but eat, eat, eat and, sleep, sleep, sleep!’ She had, she said, spent all the housekeeping money the Pringles had left with her. She had managed to obtain credit at a shop where she was known to have English employers, but the credit was limited. On Easter Sunday Yakimov had invited in guests – another Prince and a Count – and had demanded a fine meal. Despina, afraid for the honour of the Pringles, was at her wits’ end. She had gone to Domnul Professor Inchcape and borrowed two thousand
lei
.

‘Did you tell him why you needed the money?’ Harriet asked.

Despina nodded.

‘And what did he say?’

‘He laughed.’

‘I bet he did.’

Despina broke in with another grievance, speaking so rapidly that Harriet could not follow her. Guy translated in a deprecating tone: ‘He wanted her to wash some clothes. She refused.’

‘Good for her.’

‘A mountain of clothes,’ cried Despina.

‘He’s leaving today,’ Harriet promised her and sent her to make tea.

When the tea was brought in, Yakimov appeared, dressed. His demeanour was so nervous that Harriet could say nothing. Despina had bought some iced cakes for the home-coming and he ate his way through them with absentminded sadness. After tea he sat on, huddled over the fire. Harriet, longing to see the back of him, asked where he had found a room.

‘Haven’t found one yet, dear girl.’

‘You’ve left it very late.’

‘Not been fit to trudge around.’

‘Aren’t you going now?’

He answered brokenly: ‘Where is poor Yaki to go?’

Despina was working in the bedroom. Harriet, half imagining Yakimov might take himself off in her absence, went to speak to her. A few minutes later Guy came in and spoke to her, quietly and urgently: ‘Darling, be charitable.’

At the word, something turned over inside Harriet in self-accusation, yet she said: ‘This is my home. I can’t share it with someone I despise.’

‘He has no money. No one will take him in unless he pays in advance. Let him stay. It doesn’t cost us anything to let him sleep in the chair.’

‘It does. It costs me more than you could ever guess. Go and get rid of him.’

‘Darling, I can’t. The fact is, I’ve already told him he can stay.’

She turned her back on him and went over to the dressing-table, reflecting, in a sort of dazed wonder, on how it was that Guy, seemingly reasonable and the most gentle of men, always got his own way.

Guy, accepting her silence as agreement, said with confiding cheerfulness: ‘You know, darling, it would really pay us to keep Yaki here, where we have a hold on him.’

‘You mean you may get back some of the money he owes you?’

‘No, the money’s not important. It’s the play. He’s ideal for Pandarus. His voice is the very voice of Pandarus. He could make my production.’

‘Oh, that damned production!’

‘If we turn him out,’ Guy went on happily, ‘he’ll be found wandering and ordered out of the country. If we keep him, he’ll have to behave. And I’ll make him work. You wait and see.’

She replied with decision: ‘I don’t want him here,’ and, sweeping past Guy, she returned to the sitting-room, where she found Yakimov settled into the arm-chair with the
ţ
uic
ǎ
bottle.

21

A few days later, Guy invited his friends in to a first reading of
Troilus and Cressida
. Before they arrived, Harriet opened the French-windows on to the balcony. Outside, an azure light glinted over the cobbles and silvered the roofs. The days were growing long and warm, and the evening crowds were coming out again. The murmur of the traffic, muted for months by snow, came distinct and new through the open windows. For the first time that year, she left the doors open.

Guy was cutting an old Penguin edition of the play. It was evident, from the businesslike manner in which he answered her, that he was excited.

Harriet had been told she could read Cressida. Yakimov, for whom a camp-bed had been bought and placed in the spare room, was beginning to realise that Guy seriously intended him to take the part of Pandarus. He was expected to learn it by heart. When the order had first been given him, he had dismissed it with a smile: ‘Can’t possibly, dear boy. Always was a poor scholar. Never could remember anything.’

‘I’ll see you learn it,’ Guy replied, and when Yakimov put the matter from his mind, Guy, suddenly and with an astonishing firmness, made it clear that if Yakimov wished to remain in the flat he must play Pandarus. This persuaded him to read the part. Before the night of the first rehearsal, Guy took him through it half-a-dozen times.

Guy, he realised, had complete faith in his ability as a producer. He seemed to have an equal faith in Yakimov. Yakimov himself, with no faith at all, could have wept to find Guy, usually so easy-going, turned to task-master – and no
lenient task-master, either. By the evening of the reading he was beginning to remember the lines in spite of himself. He did not know whether to be relieved or sorry. Rising a little out of a nadir of depression, he did his best to greet the visitors. Finding himself treated as one who had an important part in the proceedings, his spirits rose and he began to feel rather pleased with himself.

Inchcape, when he entered, pressed a hand down on Yakimov’s shoulder and said: ‘Good Pandarus – how now, Pandarus?’

‘I have had my labour for my travail,’ Yakimov automatically replied, and at Inchcape’s crow of amusement his old easy smile returned.

Guy had had the play typed and duplicated and was now handing out copies to each person who arrived. Soon all the men were present. Bella had been invited and was coming in after a cocktail party. The room became noisy with talk. One of the men was telling a funny story about Hitler’s conduct of the war, when Guy called everyone to attention. His manner suggested that the war might be a joke, but this production was not. Rather to Harriet’s surprise, the talk stopped at once. The company seated itself and looked to Guy for instructions. He said: ‘Cressida will read her first dialogue with Pandarus.’

Calmly, Harriet moved out on to the floor, mentioning that, unlike most of the girls she had known at school, she had never been ambitious to go on the stage.

Guy frowned at the levity of this approach. Aloof and patient, he said: ‘Will you please begin.’

Yakimov read: ‘Do you know a man if you see him?’ to which Harriet replied with the gaiety of repartee: ‘Ay, if I ever saw him before, and knew him.’

Harriet thought she did rather well. They both did well. Yakimov, who scarcely needed to be anything other than himself, spoke in his delicate, insinuating voice, only accentuating a little, now and then, its natural melancholy or note of comic complaint.

At the end Guy said no more than ‘All right,’ then, pointing to Dubedat, said: ‘Thersites.’

As Dubedat ambled out, the bugle sounded from the palace yard, and Harriet began the old chant of ‘Come, water your horses …’

‘Please!’ Guy commanded her and, silenced, she raised an eyebrow at David, who started to snuffle. Ignoring this, Guy repeated: ‘Thersites,’ and Dubedat, his legs still scaled from the ravages of winter, came on to the floor in his new spring outfit of T-shirt and running shorts.

‘Begin reading Act Two, Scene One. I’ll do Ajax for the moment.’

Dubedat read Thersites with a Cockney snivel that was only a slight exaggeration of his normal speech. At the end of the scene, he was applauded, but Guy, not so easily satisfied, said: ‘The voice will do. But the part calls for venom, not complaint.’

Swallowing convulsively, Dubedat set out again, reading at a great rate, but Guy stopped him: ‘Enough for now. I’d like to hear Ulysses.’

Inchcape, whom Harriet was certain would refuse to take a part, now got to his feet with a look of deep satisfaction. Hemming and huffing in his throat, he took a step or two into the middle of the room, and, with feet elegantly planted, shoulders back, looking even now more audience than actor, he said with a smile: ‘I’m an old hand with theatricals. I always produced the school play. Of course we never attempted anything as frisky as this.’

‘Act One, Scene Three,’ said Guy. ‘The long speech: “What glory” etcetera.’

Still smiling, matching his tone to his smile, Inchcape read with a dry and even humour that Guy accepted, anyway for the moment. ‘All right,’ he nodded and Inchcape, taking a step back, twitched up his trousers at the knees and lowered himself carefully back into his seat.

Clarence and David were not yet cast. Guy now suggested that David might attempt Agamemnon.

David’s lips parted in alarm. As he came out slowly into the middle of the room, snuffling down at his feet, Harriet saw he was not only amused at the position in which he found himself: he was pleased. After some hesitation, he began to read, pitching his elderly don’s voice on too high a note so that he sounded querulous.

Guy broke in on him: ‘Give it more voice, David. Don’t forget you’re the General of the Grecian forces.’

‘Oh, am I? So I am!’ Moving his feet nervously, he pushed his glasses up his nose and started again on a deeper note.

Harriet and Yakimov, their star positions fixed in a firmament otherwise chaotic, sat together on the arm-chair, Harriet on the seat, Yakimov on the arm. They had nothing to say to each other, but she felt him relaxed as the impossible had become for him possible, and even, maybe, enjoyable.

Harriet had been feeling a painful anxiety on Guy’s behalf. She would have been glad for the production to collapse first rather than last, so sure was she it must collapse sometime.

Now she was beginning to realise she might be wrong. Contrary to her belief, people were not only willing to join in, they were grateful at being included. Each seemed simply to have been awaiting the opportunity to make a stage appearance. She wondered why. Perhaps they thought themselves under-employed here, in a foreign capital, in time of war. Perhaps Guy offered them distraction, a semblance of creative effort, an object to be achieved.

Guy’s attitude impressed her, though she had no intention of showing it. He had the advantage of an almost supernatural confidence in dealing with people. It seemed never to occur to him they might not do what he wanted. He had, she noted with surprise, authority.

In the past she had been irritated by the amount of mental and physical vitality he expended on others. As he flung out his charm, like radium dissipating its own brilliance, it had seemed to her indiscriminate giving for giving’s sake. Now she saw his vitality functioning to some purpose. Only someone
capable of giving much could demand and receive so much. She felt proud of him.

David, coming to the end of a long speech, looked uncertainly at Guy.

‘Go on,’ said Guy. ‘You’re doing splendidly,’ and David, shouldering importance like a cloak, went ahead with renewed enjoyment.

Bella, arriving in a suit of black corded silk, hung with silver foxes, was asked if she would play Helen.

‘Is it a long part?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Thank goodness for that!’ she exclaimed over-fervently.

Inchcape, bending towards her, said: ‘You are Helen of Troy. We ask only that you should be beautiful. Yours is the face that launched a thousand ships.’

‘Dear me!’ said Bella. She threw off her furs and her cheeks grew pink.

She took the floor, read her exchange with Pandarus and came, flushed and serious, to sit near Harriet. She was, Harriet was beginning to realise, a woman of considerable competence. She knew nothing of acting; she never had been on a stage; her movements were stiff, yet she had done well.

‘What about Troilus?’ Inchcape asked. ‘Who can we get for him?’

Guy replied that he was hoping to cast one of the Legation staff for the part. He was waiting for the Minister’s approval.

‘And Achilles?’ asked Inchcape. ‘Rather a tricky part!’

‘I’ve one of the new students in mind, young Dimancescu, a good-looking boy and a junior fencing champion. He went to an English public-school before the war.’

‘Indeed! Which?’

‘Marlborough.’

‘Excellent!’ said Inchcape. ‘Excellent!’