The Balkan Trilogy (56 page)

As for the war, it was at a standstill. Events, it seemed, were becalmed in the oppressive, dusty, windless heat of midsummer. People believed the worst was over. A euphoria, one of the periodic intermissions in its chronic disease of dread, possessed the city. Gaiety returned.

Then, in a moment, the mood changed. The Pringles, out walking after supper, heard among the crowds the shrill ejaculations of panic. The newsboys came shrieking through the streets with a special edition. Those who did not already know learnt that the Führer had called another conference. The Hungarian and Rumanian ministers, ordered to Rome, were required to reach speedy agreement.

The sense of outrage was the more violent because only that morning the new Foreign Minister had broadcast a speech of the highest optimism. He had pointed out that in 1918 the Germans had been as weak as the Rumanians, and today, by their energy and determination, they ruled the world. The implication had been that Rumanians might do likewise – yet here they were ordered to reach agreement with an enemy whose sole intention was to eat them up.

Gabbling in their rage, people shouted to one another that they had been betrayed. Rumania was to be divided among Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria. The whole of Moldavia would be handed to the Soviets as the price of Russia’s neutrality. The Dobrudja, of course, would go to Bulgaria. Even now the Hungarians were marching into Transylvania.

Word went round that the Cabinet was sitting, then that the King had summoned his generals. Suddenly people were convinced that Rumania would fight for her territory and they began shouting for war. As they swarmed towards the square to demonstrate the defiance of the moment, Guy and Harriet made their way to the English Bar, where Galpin was in a state of excitement. His scout had brought the news that Maniu, the leader of the Transylvanian peasants, was making a speech calling on the King to defy Hitler and defend what was left of Greater Rumania. ‘This means war,’ said Galpin, ‘this means war.’

On the way home, Harriet said: ‘Do you think they will fight?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Guy, but the violence of feeling about them seemed to be such that they went to bed in a half-expectation that they would awake to find the country in arms.

Next morning all was quiet and when Guy telephoned David he learnt that Maniu had indeed made an impassioned speech demanding that they hold Transylvania by force, but he had been ridiculed. The new Guardist ministers had pointed out that while the Rumanian army was defending the western front Russia would march down from the north. It was their belief that only by implicit obedience to Hitler could
they hope for protection from the arch-enemy, Russia. At this an old statesman had burst into tears and scandalised everyone by crying out: ‘Better to be united under the Soviets than dismembered by the Axis.’

But the Rumanians, harried themselves, decided to harry someone. Next morning, as Guy was leaving for the University, a messenger handed him a second order to quit the country within eight hours.

He gave it to Harriet, saying: ‘I haven’t time to deal with this. Go and see Dobson.’

‘But supposing we have to go?’ she protested.

He said, as he had said last time: ‘We won’t have to go,’ but Harriet did not find Dobson so reassuring.

When she entered his office with the paper, he sighed and said: ‘We’re getting a lot of this bumf at the moment.’ He rubbed a hand over his baby-soft tufts of hair and gave a laugh that deprecated his own weariness. ‘I wonder,’ he said, as though the matter were not of much importance one way or the other, ‘do you really
want
to stay? The situation is tricky, you know. There’s a pretty steady German infiltration here. Whether you realise it or not, they’re taking this country over. I very much doubt whether the English Department will be permitted to reopen when the autumn term begins.’

Harriet said: ‘We’re not supposed to leave without orders from London.’

‘That’s theoretical, of course. But if Guy’s work here is finished …’

‘He doesn’t see it as finished. At the moment he’s running the summer school and he’s extremely busy.’

‘Oh, well!’ Dobson gave his head a final rub and said: ‘I’ll see what I can do. But don’t be too hopeful.’

She returned to the flat to await a call from him, not hopeful, indeed prepared for the possibility that they would be given no choice but to go. Whether she liked it or not, their going would cut through a tangle of anxieties.

Wandering round the room, examining their possessions, wondering what to take and what to leave, she looked into
the writing-desk drawers and came upon the envelope marked ‘Top Secret’. As she took it up, the flap fell open and she saw there was nothing inside. Some moments passed before she could remember what it had contained.

The previous winter a certain Commander Sheppy – described by David as ‘a cloak and dagger man’ – had come to Bucharest to organise the young men of the British colony into a sabotage group. His intention had ended abruptly with his arrest and deportation. All that had remained of ‘Sheppy’s Striking Force’ was a plan, handed out to the men, a copy of which had been inside this envelope; a section through an oil well, intended to show the inexperienced saboteur where to place a detonator. Both Guy and Harriet had forgotten its existence. Now, here was the envelope unsealed and empty. The plan had disappeared.

This fact bewildered her, then it began to work on her imagination and she was chilled.

As soon as Guy came in to luncheon, she said: ‘Someone has stolen the oil-well plan Sheppy gave you.’

She remembered as she spoke that she was supposed not to know what had been inside the envelope, but Guy had forgotten that. He said merely: ‘But who would take it?’

‘Perhaps Yakimov.’

‘That’s unlikely.’

‘Who then? Surely not Despina or Sasha. It means someone has been in while we were out. The landlord perhaps. Despina says he’s a member of the Iron Guard. And probably has a key.’ The realisation brought down on her a painful sense of doom and Guy, seeing her distraught, changed his attitude and said: ‘It
could
have been Yakimov …’

‘Then you had better speak to him.’

‘Oh, no, that would give the whole thing false importance. Better say nothing, but you could try and be nicer to him. Let him see we trust him.’

She said, exasperated in anxiety: ‘You think that will make a difference? If Yakimov isn’t grateful now, he never will be. In fact, he’s resentful because you take no notice of him. Why
didn’t you leave him to fend for himself? You interfere in people’s lives. You give them a false idea of themselves, an illusion of achievement. If you make someone drunk, he’s likely to blame you when he wakes up with a hangover. Why do you do it?’

Buffeted by this attack, he remonstrated: ‘For goodness’ sake! The plan might have been taken months ago. We can’t tell who took it – but whoever it was, if he’d wanted to make trouble we’d have heard by now.’

She thought this equivocal comfort.

After Guy had gone to the University, she threw herself on to the bed, oppressed by the sense of events becoming too much for her. A few days earlier Despina, treating the matter as a joke, had described Yakimov’s discovery of Sasha in the kitchen. ‘But I was ready for him,’ she said. She had told him the boy was her nephew and he had believed it. ‘The imbecile!’ she cried, tears of laughter in her eyes, but Harriet could not believe that Yakimov had been so easily deceived. She had hoped he would mention the incident himself, so she could tell him that Sasha was one of Guy’s students; but he did not mention it, and his silence disturbed her more than any questioning could have done.

Suddenly, with the thought of Sasha in her mind, she sat upright, shocked by the realisation that when they went they would have to leave him behind. What would become of him? Where could he go?

Thinking of Sasha’s trust in them, his dependent innocence and need, she was stricken by her own affection for the boy. She could no more abandon him than she could abandon a child or a kitten. But he was not a child or a kitten to be carried to safety: he was a grown man who could not leave the country without a passport, exit visa and transit visas, and he was a man for whom every frontier official would be on the watch.

It had been in her mind that their going, if they had to go, would cut through a tangle of anxieties. Now all these anxieties were forgotten in her concern for Sasha.

She put her feet to the ground in an impulse to rush up to him, to insist that he think of someone, anyone, whom they could approach on his behalf, but stopped herself. They had had this out. There was no one, so what point in alarming the poor boy?

She was still sitting on the bed edge, brooding on this problem, when the telephone rang. Dobson said: ‘It’s all right. I’ve been through to the
prefectura
and told them H.E. requires Guy’s presence here. The order’s rescinded.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she said with a fervour that must have surprised him.

‘By the way,’ he said before he rang off, ‘you’re wanted at the Consulate. Just a formality. No particular hurry. Drop in when you get a chance.’

The next afternoon, Guy having no classes, they went to the Consulate.

The Vice-consul, Tavares, shouted: ‘Come in, come in, come in.’ Elaborately casual and cheerful, he said: ‘It’s like this …’ He opened a drawer and pulled out some roneoed sheets, which he threw down in front of Guy and Harriet. ‘Every British subject required to fill one in. Never know these days, do you? So, just for the records, we want a few details: religion, next-of-kin, whom to notify in the event of death (as it were!), where to send kit, etcetera, etcetera.
You
understand!’

‘Yes,’ said Harriet.

When the forms were filled, Tavares noticed that Guy had failed to disclose his religion. Guy said he had no religion. Tavares laughed off this revelation: ‘What were you baptised?’ he asked.

‘I wasn’t baptised.’

Tavares flicked a finger to show that nothing could surprise him. ‘Must put something,’ he said. ‘Y’wouldn’t want to be planted without ceremony. Why not put “Baptist”? Baptists don’t get baptised.’

In the end, Guy put in ‘Congregational’, having been told that old soldiers who claimed this denomination were able to avoid church parades.

Walking home, Harriet said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d never been baptised?’

‘I didn’t think of it. But you knew I was a rationalist.’

‘But no one’s
born
a rationalist.’

‘In a way, I was. My father would not let me be baptised.’

‘This means when we die we’ll be in different places. You’ll be in limbo.’

Laughing, Guy said: ‘I don’t think so. We’ll be in the same place, don’t worry. A hundred years from now we shall be exactly where we were a hundred years ago – which is nowhere at all.’

But Harriet was not satisfied. She brooded over their postobitum separation all during tea, then suddenly, when Yakimov had gone off to have a bath, she lifted the teapot and poured cold tea over Guy’s head. While he sat stolidly acceptant of her follies, she said: ‘I baptise thee, Guy, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,’ which was all she knew of the baptismal service.

9

Harriet had never heard the word ‘
abdic
ǎ
’ before the night of the Guardist reception, now she heard it everywhere. The King had been deposed for his misdeeds once before. The concept of deposition was not new, yet people seized upon it as though it were a prodigious solution of their problems. During the apprehensive days of the Rome Conference they talked of nothing else.

The King had always had his enemies – if he ever emerged from the palace, it was in a bullet-proof car – but to most people he was only one knave of many, and a shrewd, diverting knave, the hero of half the jokes that went around. This attitude changed overnight. Suddenly, he diverted no one. He was the bane of the country. True he had been clever: he had declared for the Axis – but too late.
Too late
. He had been too clever. He had played a double game and lost. Anyway, Hitler loathed and distrusted him. The country was paying for his sins. He must be abjured, for with such a man on the throne there could be nothing ahead but disaster.

These opinions were so widespread that they penetrated even to the King’s apartments.

He was induced to broadcast, a thing he did seldom and never very well. The radio vans were already outside the palace when the Pringles were having breakfast. Another van, with a loudspeaker on its roof, stood beside the statue of Carol the First. It had been announced that the King would speak at ten o’clock; he came to the microphone shortly before noon.

During the morning a few dozen idlers hung round the loudspeaker van, and when the speech began it gathered in a
few more. The listeners showed no enthusiasm, appearing to have nothing to do but listen, and Harriet, watching them from the balcony, switched on her radio set for the same reason. She had heard a broadcast by the King a year before (when he had promised that Rumania would never suffer defeat) and had little hope of understanding his halting Rumanian, but when he started to speak she realised he had been very thoroughly coached for this occasion. He pronounced each word with an earnest deliberation, in a charged voice, so she imagined him shocked into a painful sobriety.

While he was talking, she watched a file of young men who came out of the Calea Victoriei and crossed the square, carrying banners and distributing leaflets. Whatever their message was, it aroused more interest than the King, who was, she gathered, promising his people that whatever sacrifices they might be called upon to make, he would be beside them, whatever their sufferings, he would be there to suffer with them. Dramatically, his voice breaking with emotion (much as he had made the promise that Rumania would never suffer defeat), he promised that he would never abdicate.

As he spoke the words ‘
Nu voi abdic
ǎ
niciodat
ǎ
’, the young men reached the palace railing, where they came to a stop and stood with banners held in view of the palace windows.