The Night of Wenceslas (6 page)

It was after one and Jack was busy serving sandwiches and beer. I ordered a Scotch and inquired if they still had the name of the man who wanted to buy a car.

‘I think we threw the bit of paper away,’ Jack said. ‘I’ll find out.’

The place was filling up. I finished the whisky slowly and the warmth of it and the buzz all round me and the masticating City jaws began to draw a veil of sanity over the bomb-lit areas of my mind left by the interview with Cunliffe. The idea of going to Prague to steal a secret formula seemed more grotesque than ever. Looking around me I decided suddenly, no nonsense
and once and for all, I wouldn’t do it. Enough was enough. What could Cunliffe do about it? I had the car and the logbook. If I sold it quickly and handed over the money he could have no legal claim on me.

Thinking thus, I ordered another double and with some excitement began to plot out my moves. First there was the business of getting hold of Jack’s man – or, for God’s sake, anyone who wanted to buy a car. There must be thousands of them. One way or another I could have a hundred and fifty quid plus within twenty-four hours. …

This escaped-convict-like scenting of the new landscape took me through the second whisky, and I was just beginning to perceive with a sinking heart that by working flat out I might be able to get back where I started, minus the car, minus my Little Swine prospects, probably minus Maura, when Jack came over.

‘Phyllis says she threw it away. He’ll probably be in again. I’ll keep an eye open.’

‘Thanks, Jack.’

‘Having your ups and downs like the rest of us?’

‘Like the rest of us,’ I said faintly. ‘I’ll have another of these.’

With the third whisky, I
knew
I was back where I started, but the prospect was not so cheerless as it might have been. Nodding dolorously to the whisky, I felt the presence of old friends here. Here was indecision and sloth and confusion. …

One thought seemed to be drawing clear of all the rest, it seemed to me after a while. Indecision argues an alternative. Somewhere in that blind country of the mind one of me had accepted Prague
as
an alternative.

I was waiting across the road with a splitting headache when Maura left the office at half past five. I waved limply and she came across, surprised.

‘What are you doing here? Is anything wrong?’

I had arranged to meet her at half past seven. Since three,
when I had left the Princess May, I had been dozing on a seat in Lincoln’s Inn Fields wondering what the hell I ought to tell her. I seemed to spend half my life doing that. When five had struck, the prospect of waiting around for another couple of hours had become suddenly unbearable. My head was throbbing. If I went back home and crawled on the divan the chances were I wouldn’t get off it. I had taken myself queasily to wait opposite her office.

‘I got away early,’ I said, slipping automatically into the daily fantasy of life with the Little Swine. ‘I thought I might as well pick you up.’

She stared at me. ‘Have you been drinking, Nicolas?’

‘I had a couple.’

‘Spirits?’

‘Look, can we go and sit down somewhere?’ People were streaming home all round us. I felt ramshackle enough to topple over and over if one of them bumped into me.

She looked at me in a decidedly odd manner, but made no comment. We walked meditatively to a Lyons’ tea shop.

Over the tea she said quietly, ‘What’s up, Nicolas?’

I’d been beating my tired brain to find the words for this one. I said, ‘It’s damned awkward but something’s cropped up that might interfere with my – my plans.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘I might have to go away for a bit, Maura.’

‘How long for?’

‘I’m not sure.’

She looked at me without speaking for a long time. ‘I see,’ she said quietly. ‘We won’t be seeing so much of each other in the future – have I got the drift right?’

‘No, you haven’t.’ I took her hand over the table. ‘You haven’t got it right at all. I love you, Maura,’ I said, groaning inwardly and savagely cursing Cunliffe, Pavelka, the entire Czechoslovak Republic, and my two hours of fuddled gloom. ‘I love you and I meant to ask you to marry me, but now a lot’s happened unexpecredly. … I’m going to Prague,’ I said, listening to my own voice with a certain unearthly fascination, and knowing
as I said the words that I must have made the decision hours before.

‘Prague?’ She stared at me and her mouth dropped open. ‘Did you know about this at the weekend?’

‘No.’

‘But there was something. … It’s the glass business, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said truthfully. ‘But for God’s sake, keep it to yourself. I shouldn’t have told you at all, really. I’ve never done anything like this before. …’

‘And I’m sure you’ll make a success of it,’ she said, pressing my hand. Her eyes were shining. ‘Oh, Nicolas, you fool you – you don’t have to pretend to me. And you don’t have to prove anything to me. You’re trying, and you’ve got him to give you this chance. That’s what counts – your attitude to it. Can’t you see that, Nicolas?’

I gazed at her with the shocked but dull resignation of some elderly beast after an unsuccessful attempt with the humane killer.

‘It’s not quite like that, Maura. Don’t bank on anything concrete coming out of it. …’

‘I’m not banking on anyone but you, Nicolas, dearest. I’ve got complete faith in you, my darling.’

There was rather more than the normal quota of endearments here and embarrassment was added to my ruined condition. I pressed her hand silendy.

‘Your mother will be delighted to hear the news.’ She knew I was going to Bournemouth over the weekend. ‘I’ll see you on Monday, I suppose?’

This seemed doubtful. If I did go off on Tuesday there would doubtless be many essential preliminaries to tie me up on the Monday. My head, which had eased a little when I sat down, now began to throb again. I said wearily, ‘I’m not dead sure when I’m going off on – on this thing. It could be Monday or Tuesday. I’ll have to get in touch with you.’

‘Monday or Tuesday!’ Her eyes opened wide. ‘Is it so urgent? So silly little Nicolas had to go out and get tight to tell me. …
Silly little Nicolas,’ she said softly, with love, brushing my mouth with her hand.

Too wrecked by the events of the day to fall in with this sort of talk easily, I could only smile like a silly little Nicolas. The attempt cannot have been successful. Maura showed immediate concern.

‘Oh, Nicolas, you’re looking terrible. You’d better get off to bed.’

The car was where I had left it in the side street next to the Princess May. I drove Maura home and made to kiss her briefly. She grasped me in a close, love-communicating hug that jarred my head and made me grit my teeth.

I drove home slowly and left the car without covers and walked upstairs, holding my head. The divan waited solidly in the darkening room, and I embraced it with a muted groan. Almost at once, sleep, like some rhythmical, snoring vacuum cleaner, consumed the awful day.

Saturday was hot, and I was up early and unrested with that glazed efficiency of movement that often follows a drinking session. I ate breakfast, and shortly regretted it, and by nine o’clock was on the road, trembling all over with a nerveless and unidentifiable feeling of apprehension.

Somewhere around Winchester with its chain groceries and post office vans, however, the apprehension began to diminish and I even felt a slight accession of confidence. The events of the past few days, it was a fact, were no more insane than the previous reality of life with the Little Swine. Through the New Forest the road was sun-dappled, and I sang a little, cautiously.

In my mother’s presence, I thought, I would see the proposition for the grotesque and unthinkable nonsense that it was. Maminka, faery of vision though she might be, was at least a constant in my life. The young man of affairs I knew about and could cope with. The young secret agent, never. Let him, this Cunliffe, just try and take the car, I thought. Let him just try.
In the freshness of the morning, with the tree shadows falling hypnotically across the bonnet, I abandoned Cunliffe; abandoned Maura, too, and every other complication, and felt free as any bird. Who was Maura? I thought. And who the, who the, who the, I sang as the tree shadows fell rhythmically across the bonnet, who the hell was Cunliffe?

Somewhat dazed by the rush of sun and shade and with only the mildest groundswell of despair, I drew up at the Pleasance Hotel at eleven-thirty.

Imre, who had evidently been lurking in the foyer, came out at once, and stood rather helplessly like some huge, embarrassed baby in his black alpaca jacket.

‘Nicolas, my boy! It is good to see you. There is so much to talk about.’ The hairs of his nose were waving in his powerful breath. ‘We will walk in the garden, it is such a pleasant day.’

He was gripping my arm tightly as I walked with him. ‘How are you, Uncle?

‘Thank you, thank you.’

‘And mother?’

‘She is a remarkable woman. Today she is in excellent health. Of course, she expects you. This, naturally, must be taken into account. But Nicolas, I must tell you …’

He was labouring under some powerful anxiety, the hairs of his nose billowing.

‘You have not told her about Bela?’

‘I could not. This was an impossibility. Her health … I would like you to understand, Nicolas …’

He was in the throes of some large agitation. I said kindly, ‘No harm done. There are plenty of complications anyway …’

‘Complications,’ he said. ‘
Yoh
, complications!’ He stopped in the path and faced me, breathing stormily. ‘You will not be angry, my boy? Promise me you will not be angry.’

‘What is it?’

‘How to explain?’ he said, looking at the sky. ‘I decided – it seemed a sensible thing to do – that while she was not well enough to hear the sad news about Bela, she could hear the
good news about you. After all, good news. … Your mother has wonderful recuperative powers.’

‘What is it you’ve told her?’

‘It is not what I have told her,’ he said with some heat. ‘It is what she has made of it. She is a wonderfully imaginative woman. … I merely said,’ he went on hastily, noting my expression, ‘that you had had a success in business and might be travelling abroad. I wanted to work round to Canada – I suppose you will have to make a trip there – so that in a week or two perhaps we could come round to the subject of Bela. … And right away she took it you would be starting your father’s business again in Europe. In Prague,’ he said nervously.

He was gazing at me apprehensively, but I said nothing.

‘Your mother does not keep up with the news,’ he said anxiously. ‘She thinks Prague is as she left it. It is not possible to tell her of the changes. … You are very angry?’ he said at length.

I was not angry. I was merely enfeebled. Short of jumping on his shoulders and tattooing with my fists on his head or driving endlessly there and back through the New Forest to resurrect my mood of nihilistic freedom, there was nothing to be done.

‘I think we should go in,’ he said, looking round. ‘She will have seen your car. We must cheer up, she will expect it. You don’t know what it is, my boy,’ he went on aggrievedly as we walked back, ‘when an imaginative woman gets an idea in her head.’

I do, I thought with melancholy. Better than you. Better than anyone. There was a weird and lowering feeling of inevitability in my vitals as I walked up the steps to the hotel. I knew I would be going to Prague on Tuesday.

Maminka was smoking a cigarette and writing a letter at her little escritoire when we went in.

‘Nicolas,
bobitchka
! But you are so thin. You are working so hard. Why have you not been to see me? Let me look at you. Come, kiss me.’ It was seldom necessary to speak for the first five minutes in my mother’s company, and I made no attempt to
do so, merely smiling at her with melancholy affection. My mother demands much affection and can always claim it. She is tall, with large, beautiful almond eyes. Her hair is grey, rinsed with blue. She has the complexion of a young girl and has enjoyed, all her life, perfect health.

She engulfed me now in kisses and caresses, speaking rapidly as Imre, only slightly subdued by our conversation, watched with somewhat proprietorial pride.

‘Stephanie,’ he said at length, reproachfully, noticing her cigarette for the first time. ‘It is the second cigarette you have smoked this morning. You promised me. Your throat…’

‘I have been writing letters,’ she said loudly. ‘I must smoke when I am writing letters. Of course,’ she said confidentially to me, ‘it is not my throat that worries him. It is the price of the cigarettes. Oh, you will be repaid!’ she told him scornfully. ‘I know you keep an account of the small loans. Be so kind as to let me have a list. My son will attend to it very shortly now. Really,’ she said, drawing me to her again, ‘the creatures one has to rely on these days.’

‘Stephanie,’ said Imre, with pain, ‘you know this is not the case …’

‘But you, Nicolas,’ said Maminka, disregarding him entirely. ‘I cannot tell you how delighted I am at the news. Of course, I had not the slightest doubt that you would open the offices again. Your father often spoke of it. Can you get the same building, do you think, on the Prikopy? I used to look in every day on my way to Wartski’s in the Vaclavske Namesti. There was a little lift with golden gates, and such a darling old man who worked it. He had a fresh flower for me every day. Ah, those days! Will they ever return? Now sit down and tell me all.’

I sat down with acute enervation. ‘It isn’t anything important, Maminka. Just an exploratory visit. Nothing might come of it, you know. Things have changed greatly.’

‘Of course. Nothing stands still,’ said my mother with great energy, looking swiftly at Imre. ‘Men of affairs have to be up and about. Are you thinking of taking Nimek with you?’

‘No.’

‘Your father had a high opinion of his shrewdness. He is a low creature and I could never see the need for taking him into partnership, but he is undeniably shrewd. Would it not be safest to take him?’ she asked wisely.

I regarded her with helpless affection. ‘Maminka,’ I said, ‘Nimek is running the business now. Don’t you remember, I told you?’