The Night of Wenceslas (25 page)

I had had a cup of tea and an Osborne biscuit at Queen Anne’s Gate. This was the only food I had consumed since breakfast. I was not so much hungry as devitalized. An enormous number of things had happened to me since I had walked these streets last. I felt I should have returned exhilarated, bouncing with joy, everything changed in some large and mysterious way. Nothing had changed. The grey buildings were as they had always been. The buses trundled drably along. The people walked by intent on their business. The wind whipped the leaves. I had been away and now I had come back. The summer was gone. I was three months older.

As I came to number seventy-four, I got out my latchkey – miraculously retained through all my changes of clothing – and opened the door. I don’t know what I expected to happen. Nothing did.

The hall was in darkness, the wireless on in Mrs Nolan’s lair. I stood there for a moment, listening and taking in the familiar odours. I didn’t think I could bear to face her. I closed the door quietly behind me and walked slowly up the stairs.

On the third floor, I opened my door and switched on the light. Everything in its accustomed place, neat, tidy, dusted. I might never have left it. Beside the plant pot on the plush tablecloth, however, was a large pile of letters. I flipped over them. Library reminders, football pools, circulars, two letters from my mother, three from Maura. … I didn’t look any further. I took off the mac presented to me at the Embassy and sat down on the divan and lit a cigarette, looking round.

All this was far from being in the spirit of the returning traveller. I thought what I needed was a sleep. I stubbed out the
cigarette presently and flaked out on the divan and went off almost immediately.

I must have slept for three hours. It was quite dark when I came to. I knew where I was before I opened my eyes, and lay there for a few moments feeling the sudden warm rush of relief and satisfaction flowing over me. The old batteries were charging up again, I thought. I was home, anyway.

I went down to Bournemouth next morning. Mrs Nolan had been in a considerable twitter when I had poked my head round her door the previous evening. She had been sitting toasting her legs at the first fire of autumn, but had bustled about in high excitement getting me something to eat and priming me on all that had gone.

It seemed that an exquisite man from the government had called to tell her about me, what an important job I was doing, and the arrangements I had made for paying the rent. My young lady had phoned very often at the beginning, but not for some weeks now. Mr Gabriel had been phoning regularly from Bournemouth. And another foreign gentleman had been phonning, too, a Mr Nimek, and very angry he had been.

All this, together with the familiar food and the well-remembered brown-boot-polish tea had proved highly revivifying. Imperceptibly, as she shaded in the ten missing weeks, I had felt a curious internal reconstitution taking place, as though ribs and organs were being replaced after a period of disuse.

I didn’t ring up Bournemouth. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I thought I’d better think of that on the way down, and immediately after breakfast went round to the enterprise of Ratface Rickett to claim my car. It was a new and refined version of the Ratface I had known, a most mannerly little Ratface, who gave me a kindly salutation and actually shoved in four gallons without cash or cavil before waving me off the premises. By eleven o’clock I was half way there.

At this time yesterday, I thought, slowing down through Winchester, I was sitting by the window on the third floor of the Embassy in Prague. Just twenty-four hours before I had been a
prisoner in the middle of Europe, staring out at bare branches and grey skies. It seemed unbelievable. The whole episode was unbelievable: the night on the Vaclavske Namesti, the hours in the arms of the perfidious giantess of Barrandov, the alleys, the furniture store, the boiler room. No longer even a nightmare; too remote and impersonal for a nightmare; something I had read somewhere at some time and had remembered, names and all. Vlasta, Svoboda, Borsky, Vlcek, Galushka, Josef, fornicating Frantisek, Roddinghead.

Of them all, only Roddinghead, detached and derisive, lingered as a flesh and blood reality. Only Roddinghead could inspire belief that these other phantoms had actually ever existed; that they still existed, going about their business far away in grey and steepled Prague.

No future in it, cock, Roddinghead had said. No future indeed. Not even a very meaningful or profitable past. My only legacy of three dangerous and demented months was a bill for rent and a certain facility with a blunt instrument. Someone had steered me into all this. Someone should pay for it, I thought, swinging on to the A35. But I doubted if anybody would.

The old booby was examining a sheet of stamps when I went into his room. The glass fell out of his eye and his mouth dropped open with shock.

‘Nicolas! Nicolas, my boy! Oh, thank God! It is wonderful to see you.’

‘Hello, Uncle. How’ve you been?’

‘She has been worrying dreadfully. I just haven’t known what to tell her. Have you been to see her yet?’

‘I’ve just arrived. I thought I’d better have a word with you first. How is she?’

‘Let me look at you, my boy.’ He stood up, shaking a bit. It was none too warm in the room. He had a muffler on and a cardigan underneath the alpaca jacket. He looked distinctly older, folds of skin hanging from his face and his eyes a bit
glazed. His breath was whistling out with its accustomed vigour, however. ‘Oh, thank God you are here. Since the man from the Foreign Office came her head has been full of nothing else. She worries me from morning to night. She is a remarkable woman your mother when she gets a single idea in her head.’

I smiled back with exasperated affection. Some people have a permanent claim on one’s affections, whatever they do, however they behave. It was impossible to think of him merely as a man, subject to the same pressures and temptations as other men. He was neuter, a huge, flabby, permanent old booby with a single preoccupation.

He sat down again, shaking, and pulled the muffler tighter round his neck. ‘She asked him,’ he said, ‘she asked him how long you would be in Prague. I didn’t know where to put myself.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was astounded. He asked why she should think you were in Prague. So of course – you know your mother – she told him. She told him you had gone to start up the family business again. She told him your entire history from a baby. I couldn’t make out what was happening. I didn’t understand this business with the government. I didn’t know what to think, Nicolas. And she sees I am worried,’ he said, tapping a finger against his forehead intensely. ‘She has a wonderful intuition, your mother. All the time she asks questions. She makes herself ill. She doesn’t give me a moment’s peace. And I’m ill myself, Nicolas. I am not a healthy man. But enough,’ he said. ‘Enough about me. Tell me what’s been happening to you. Tell me everything.’

I had meant to do this. I had meant to tell him each single and minute detail of it, the beatings-up, the running up and down alleys, the constant terror; the whole of the three awful months. I had been thinking about it as I parked the car and walked into the hotel and up to his room. I had been thinking of the expression on his face when he knew that I knew. I had thought of it a lot since that afternoon on the third floor of the Embassy in Prague. Now that it came to the point I couldn’t do it.

I said instead, ‘Why did you do it, Uncle?’

‘What, Nicolas? What do you mean?’

‘Why did you spy on me for this man Cunliffe? Why did you send me out there?’

‘I send you? Cunliffe?’ He looked at me wildly. ‘I don’t know what you say, Nicolas. I don’t understand you.’

‘You’d better try. I don’t know what you called him. I mean the man who asked you for all the details of me. The one you telephoned when I left Bournemouth last time. The one who made up the story about Uncle Bela dying.’

The room went perfectly still. The hairs at his nose stopped waving for a moment. Then they began again, very fast. He breathed heavily. He leaned forward. ‘I should like you to understand, Nicolas,’ he said, and cleared his throat, breathing noisily – ‘I should like you to understand, my boy, that all was intended for the best. I love you. You are like my own son to me. Not only for the sake of your dear mother. Do you think I could do a bad thing to you?’

‘Why did you?’

‘Why did I? It’s a bad thing? It’s not better than working for Nimek?’

I opened my mouth, but he held out his hand, breathing loudly. ‘Sometimes, Nicolas, it is necessary to give a little push. I wasn’t happy at your progress with Nimek. I could see there would be nothing with him. I had to consider the effect on your mother. She wants you to be a success.’

I goggled at him. It was hard to know where the hell to start. I said, ‘Do you know why I went out there? Do you mean to say you’ve got no idea what I was supposed to do?’

‘I didn’t want to know. I didn’t ask. It was enough that you were working for Mr Pavelka!’

He told me about it then. How Cunliffe had written to him saying he was looking for a smart young man to be an assistant to one of his clients. How he had gone up to see him and learned the client was Pavelka.

‘Pavelka! You wouldn’t have remembered Pavelka from the olden days. He was a big man, colossal! It would have been
your father’s dearest wish that Mr Pavelka would take an interest in you.’

Cunliffe had told him the job was confidential; that Pavelka had grown a little eccentric and wished to investigate my capabilities in his own way, and that I must know nothing about it. So Imre had told Cunliffe everything about me; about my expectations from Bela; about how I worked and how I lived; that I earned very little and spent that little on the car. …

I said, ‘Did you know he was going to make up the story about Uncle Bela dying?’

He looked at the floor, breathing noisily. He said, ‘That I couldn’t understand. I tell you frankly, Nicolas, I was uneasy. But he told me Mr Pavelka positively insisted. He said he wanted to see how you would react to the news. Nicolas, I am no great business man! I don’t pretend I have made a success of my life. Pavelka, to me, is a colossus. If I understood how his mind works maybe I would be as successful as Pavelka.’

‘Haven’t you met him?’

Only once, in Prague, many years ago.’

‘You didn’t meet him here in London?’

‘No, no,’ he said smiling. ‘Pavelka isn’t interested in me. Pavelka is still a very big man. I thought I was acting for the best for you, Nicolas. If he wanted that kind of peculiar investigation, I didn’t want to stand in your way. I was worried only for your mother. I knew you would want to run down and tell her this news about Bela. I would have to put you off. I didn’t feel good about that. What was I to do? Tell me, Nicolas. Tell me if you think I did wrong.’

‘I don’t know, Uncle,’ I said, gazing helplessly at the old booby. ‘I don’t know about anything. Didn’t he tell you he meant to send me to Prague?’

‘No,’ he said uneasily. He didn’t look at me.

‘But you knew it. You guessed it.’

He said in Czech, ‘No, no, it wasn’t so.’ He was breathing like an express train.

‘What made you tell him Baba was dead then?’

He didn’t answer, clenching and unclenching his hands.

‘Why didn’t you tell
me
she was dead?’

He said, ‘Nicolas …’ and stopped. The heavy folds of flesh on his face began suddenly to shake. The puckered mottled flesh round his eyes screwed up. He was crying. I said with shock and horror, ‘Oh, no, Uncle. Uncle, please don’t. I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. Please stop it. It isn’t anything.’

He bent forward so that I shouldn’t see his face. I put my arm round his shoulders. They shook tumultuously. He got out his handkerchief and buried his face in it. His shuddering neck was fat, creased and badly in need of a haircut; and so bloody pathetic I practically joined him with the hanky. I felt full of shame and self-disgust.

He blew his nose presently and sat up, mopping his eyes. They were watery and discoloured. I looked away. He said thickly, ‘I must tell you all, my boy.’

‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear anything more about it. It’s forgotten.’

‘It isn’t forgotten. I can’t forget it.’ He shook his big, stupid old head. ‘I am ashamed! I am ashamed before you, Nicolas! Of course I guessed it. Ah, I’m not such an old fool as that. He started asking me if you knew anyone in Prague, if anyone was there still. Oh, this was later after I’d had time to think about it. He asked me if you’d had a nanny or a governess who might still be there. Of course I remembered Hana. I didn’t want any trouble for you or for her. I told him she was dead. He asked if she’d been married, if you knew her husband. I said you wouldn’t remember him. …

Of course, when your mother gave you the letter to Hana, I had to tell you the same thing. But I was already very nervous. I couldn’t understand this business. I was beginning to wonder what they wanted you to do. I thought you’d found out and didn’t want to speak to me again. You remember, I telephoned you. I asked if you were offended with me about anything.’

‘Yes, Uncle, I remember.’ I did remember, just at that moment. It seemed a lifetime ago.

‘And I began to wonder if Pavelka was really involved, or if this man was just tricking me – he was always sly, that one,
even in the old days. He used to be a lawyer. It really was for Pavelka?’

‘Not really, Uncle. Pavelka was fooled, too.’

‘He fooled Pavelka also?’ he said, and sat nodding his head for a bit, comforted in a melancholy sort of way, and then looked at me and looked away again. ‘But still this is not all, Nicolas. It is still not the worst. There is the money.’

‘What money?’

‘He gave me fifty pounds. He said it was an introduction fee if you proved suitable for the job. I spent it. I couldn’t give it back again. We would have had to move out of here if he wanted it back again.’

There wasn’t anything to be said to this, and a rather miserable silence fell.