Shortly after this, Sindbad travelled up to Pest and sought out Mrs Boldogfalvi.
‘I arranged things with Albert,’ he told her as he settled himself in her room. The woman squeezed his hand in gratitude.
‘My saviour! I was really frightened of that wild young man.’
‘I have found him a post,’ Sindbad went on. ‘He won’t trouble you again.’
Mrs Boldogfalvi stroked his cheek. ‘Milord,’ she trembled.
Sindbad shrugged. ‘Madam, if you wish to enrol me among your worshipful admirers would you please invent some new name for me.’
Polly put her finger on her lip and nodded in agreement.
‘My poor Albert,’ Mrs Boldogfalvi said later. ‘I wonder if he thinks of me.’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ answered Sindbad coldly. ‘I have arranged a very nice house for him.’
‘You are a wicked man, a devil!’ cried Polly, frowning. ‘And that is what I shall call you from now on.’
The Red Ox
The inn had a gate at the back which opened on to a winding side street where starving stray dogs waded through knee-high mud, sniffing at the rubbish. The gate seemed to be made expressly so that gypsy bands might cart their double basses and dulcimers through it at night, or so that penniless tramps could sneak through under cover of a winter fog at twilight and find somewhere to sleep beneath the straw in the stable. No one would have believed that this suspicious-looking gate, which, like many rural gates, was covered in red and white graffiti advertising the name of the second fiddle, and an incised heart commemorating the love of the stable lad for the barmaid, should serve as an entrance for women a little lower than princesses in rank, raising the dreamy frills of their skirts above their delicate shoes, clutching their hands to their hearts at the grotesque circumstances, their lips trembling under their veils as they passed the lamp-post where any night they might find some poor man stabbed through the heart, his lifeblood leaking away, all this so they could take a final farewell of Sindbad.
In those days Sindbad spent all his time at The Red Ox inn. He had gained some notoriety in town on account of a divorce which was settled amicably enough, and of one young lady, who had been determined to commit suicide on his account, then being despatched to a convent, though within a few years she had given birth to half a dozen beautiful children.
Having died and grown wise, he revisited The Red Ox in ghostly form, and found the vaulted room in which he had once hidden away utterly unchanged. The cupboard in the wall opened no more easily than it did then; some murdered tradesman might have been gripping it fast from within. A long shoehorn peeped out from under the bed like a watchful lapdog. The lamp hanging from the vaulted ceiling threw a sad light across the floor just as it did when it used to shine in the face of sleepless over-excited men counting the raindrops on the roof or warming a revolver under the pillow. Once upon a time lovers’ eyes might have been drawn to the circle of light reflected on the limewashed wall; someone has left a window open in the house and the night wind is banging it bitterly against its jamb. The lock might have been stolen from a cell of the local monastery and down the cool brick-lined hallway one can already hear the uncertain approach of delicate feet. The kiss tastes of salt and tears and perfume, it is possibly the first yielded by some foreign princess to the man inside, the meeting at this mutually convenient staging post having been arranged in a correspondence comprised of long letters. Then they travelled on, by mail coach or by boat, one to the north, the other to the south, leaving nothing behind at The Red Ox except a forgotten hairpin which would later be found by another sleepless traveller who would turn it between his fingers and wonder about the history that lay behind it.
‘Do you hear the wind moaning?’ Sindbad asked himself one Sunday afternoon in winter as he settled in the room. The logs made such a row in the stove it seemed as if a troop of frozen wandering spirits had come to life in the snow-covered bark of the pine and were beating their fists against its walls.
The hall was haunted by the familiar smell of beer barrels and yesterday’s paprika stew, a fact that did not go unremarked by hungry frost-bitten travellers as they trooped into breakfast, where they would stab at the meat with their pocket knives in evident gastronomic delight. Horses shook their bells in the yard as if preparing to set out for some Christmas Eve party a long way off; an old grey-haired, upper-class woman in a man’s overcoat slurped at her spiced wine; and, as the unfamiliar bells of the church of the unfamiliar town rang for noon, the green walls of its storeyed tower glinted coquettishly in the sunlight, still competing for attention in its mad old age. The ringing usually began once the horn of the mail coach was heard, and the large yellow vehicle boomed and rattled over the stone bridge, down the snow-covered street with its tiny shops, whose owners rubbed their hands in the hope that the coach just now arriving might hold not merely the village schoolmistress or the notary in his green hat worn at a jaunty angle and his frock coat, together with other local officers in whose honour, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, The Red Ox provided freshly opened kegs of beer, but some long-desired, rich, potential customer.
As the mail coach passed the inn on its way down the clean street with its smell of monkshood, Sindbad glimpsed a tinder-coloured bonnet through the frost-scarred window, accompanied by the usual long wolfskin coat, grey officer’s gloves and short boots. This was she, Francesca, who in her youth had danced through the winter balls with such conspicuous grace, and with whom Sindbad had spent so many delightful days staying in Number Seven, the corner room, whenever they came into town from the nearby village, when the snow came up to one’s waist and the sounds of music rose up from under the balcony. Long ago, one winter night when the smell of hot punch blended with the scent of ball-dresses in the cold hall, when the girls’ hair had come undone and was blowing like long grass in the wind and everyone was gently humming along with the bitter-sweet waltzes being played by the band, Francesca had been far kinder to Sindbad than the voyager deserved. She laid permanent claim to him that night during a brief absence from the hall, and an hour later, in the course of the quadrille, while Sindbad, who seemed to have reverted to adolescence, was still blethering on about eternal love, she stared at him coldly, angrily, almost malevolently. ‘Leave me alone. Be off with you. I’m not in a good mood,’ she said. Sindbad departed at dawn, his hot, aching head leaning against the darkest corner of the coach, leaving the music of the ball ever further behind him. A day or two later the wind would sweep one or two vestiges of that heavenly music into his memory. It was like being on a hilltop and hearing music in the brightly lit castle across the valley. Three knocks echoed from the room next door. At the sound of this prearranged signal Sindbad felt a mixture of anticipation and shyness, something he had always felt throughout his long life whenever he set out for a rendezvous.
‘How white your hair is now!’ exclaimed Francesca after she had taken full stock of Sindbad. ‘There are long boring nights in the village when I put my feet up in front of the fire and try to conjure up a picture of you, but I can only manage your voice. There has only been one man since then with a voice like yours, a horse-dealer who tried to steal my cross-bred mare from me.’
Sindbad smiled sadly. ‘I have never completely forgotten you.’
‘You really should have given up lying by now, especially since I hear that liars are put in irons in your present abode in the afterlife.’
Her voice had become sharper and harder, and her look more commanding than it had been in her girlhood. Sooty-faced robbers might have broken in on her at night and she would calmly have shot them. The horses of her carriage might have bolted, throwing the driver, and she would have taken over the reins. Her children might have died in an epidemic and she would have cradled the head of a little corpse in her lap throughout the night.