She recognised this as a peace offering and refused it regretfully: ‘David has invited us out, so I’m afraid …’
‘Oh, don’t apologise.’ Clarence turned his face away. ‘If you don’t want to come, someone else will.’
Harriet laughed. ‘Who for instance?’ she asked.
Clarence sniffed and smirked, so she realised, not without a touch of pique, that he really had some substitute up his sleeve. She could see he was waiting for her to ask who it was. Instead she moved away from him, giving her attention elsewhere, and found herself listening to Dubedat, who had by now had several drinks handed to him.
Taciturn when sober, garrulous when drunk, he was keeping Toby away from the others with a stream of talk. His subject at the moment was poverty, his own poverty, a condition which he had once flaunted as a virtue.
Before the war he had climbed arduously into a scholarship worth £150 a year. He had become an elementary school-teacher. Remembering his description of the Dâmboviţa Jews as ‘the poorest of the poor and the only decent folk in this dirty, depraved, God-forsaken capital’, Harriet realised that his attitude, like his dress, was changing. Now he was saying: ‘God, how I hate poverty. It’s not only an evil, it’s a disease and if you don’t get rid of it, it becomes an incurable disease. It rots your guts. You become gutless. You crawl. You don’t give a damn for yourself. Any way of escaping it is excusable. When you’re poor you can only afford to mix with people as poor as yourself. If they’re stupid, they bore you. If they’re intelligent, they’re discontented and depress you. So you never escape. Your nose is kept firmly down in the dirty water of reality. It’s the greatest destructive force in the world, poverty. Half the world’s intellect has been blunted or destroyed by it. None of us escape from it whole. Even the elephant hides are marked by it.’
All this was spoken rapidly, in a hectoring tone that Harriet recognised as the tone in which he had played Thersites in Guy’s production of Troilus. He had excelled in the part, and something of it seemed to have entered into him. Here, she thought, was a transformed Dubedat, a Dubedat who had found eloquence.
The main salon must have overflowed, for the guests could now be seen standing about in the hall. Soon the hall was also crowded. Suddenly the occupants of the bar were startled to hear a chorus of singing from both salon and hall. Community singing at an Athénée Palace reception!
People looked at one another as they recognised the song which the members of the Iron Guard had been advised to sing ‘only in their hearts’.
‘Capitan-ul, Capitan-ul,’ came from the resplendent guests outside.
Before any of the English could say anything the man whom Galpin called his scout appeared struggling in through the press at the bar door. Once through, he paused to straighten out his wrinkled cotton jacket, then sidled over to Galpin. Galpin bent down to receive the news, his eyes roving about with intent attentiveness.
‘Well,’ he said when all had been told, ‘this is really something! Didn’t I tell you there’d be trouble? A voice has been raised, a solitary but significant voice – and it has called on the King to abdicate.’
His listeners gazed at him, too startled to comment. He went on to explain that, seeing the Cabinet ministers arriving, people had collected outside the palace. ‘Then the news began leaking out. People realised the next question was going to be Transylvania – and suddenly someone bawled out “Abdicati”.’
David said: ‘Good God!’
‘What happened then?’ Guy asked.
‘Nothing – that’s the extraordinary thing. Everyone bolted, of course. They probably expected the guards to shoot, but they did nothing. There wasn’t a murmur from the palace …’
Wanda broke in anxiously: ‘But the King would not abdicate? No?’ She spoke so seldom that everyone stared at her and she turned her eyes from one to the other with an expression of dramatic agony.
Accredited to an English Sunday paper that did not inquire too closely into the truth of what it printed, she had recently lost her job because the news she was sending bore no relation of any kind to the news being sent by other journalists. The result was that she had turned to Galpin for help and their relationship, once broken, had been renewed.
She was wearing a black Schiaparelli suit like a man’s dinner suit, lightened by a tie of very bright pink. The heels of her shoes were also pink, and so overrun that her feet slipped sideways. She had tilted a miniature top-hat over one eye and from under it her hair streamed to her waist like pitch. She was as grimy as ever and dramatically beautiful, and as she looked at Clarence he looked back with bleak and lustful gloom murmuring: ‘I don’t know,’ which meant, Harriet knew: ‘How is it other men can get women and I can’t?’
When she looked at David, he sniggered and answered her: ‘Who knows? I hear he keeps a plane ready in the back-yard just in case. You can’t really blame these Balkan kings if they’re a bit light-fingered. They never know from one day to the next what’s going to happen.’
Wanda gave a gasp of disgust at David’s levity and turned her tragic, inquiring gaze on Galpin, who said: ‘No need to worry about Carol. He and his girl-friend have got vast sums salted away abroad. Anyway the Germans will keep him here. It takes a crook to hold this country together.’
David’s mouth dipped in contempt of Galpin’s predictions and he contradicted them authoritatively: ‘The Germans will not keep him here. They’re not taken in by his conversion to totalitarianism. They know it’s mere expediency. The new men in Germany are, in their way, idealists. They’re not like the old-fashioned diplomats who don’t care how dishonest a man is so long as he’s playing their game. They’re dedicated men who’d hand Carol over to the firing-squad without a blink.’
‘But this is terrible,’ Wanda moaned: ‘He is such a splendid king with his helmet and his white cloak and his beautiful white horse.’
‘It may be terrible,’ David indulgently agreed, ‘but he’s brought it on himself. He tried to play off the powers one against the other – and he didn’t succeed. As for us, we haven’t done much better. We could have bought up the Iron Guard any time we liked. Had we given a hint of recognition to the Peasant Party, they would have been with us. It’s not too late. Maniu could still start a pro-British rising in Transylvania. But, even now, all the Legation is worrying about is how to keep in with the bloody sovereign.’
Wanda sparked with exalted indignation. ‘You are an Englishman,’ she accused him. ‘You have a great empire and a fine king, and yet you want your Legation here to rouse a rabble of peasants! Is it possible?’ Excited into unusual volubility, she gazed again from one to the other of the circle, and cried: ‘The last words I write to my paper were: “At the word of command, every man in Rumania will rise to defend the throne.”’
Snuffling happily to himself, David murmured to Guy: ‘Just what you’d expect from the Poles. They still sing “Poland has not perished yet”!’
Whether or not the news of the Salzburg conference had reached the reception, the singing went on. Harriet saw the view from the bar door was blocked by the backs of men standing in a row, shoulder to shoulder, across the doorway.
There was a pause outside, then the voices of the Guardists rose in the Horst Wessel. Someone gave a command, and gradually this song was also taken up by the guests.
From the other side of the bar Hadjimoscos’ voice rose in admiring awe: ‘Such a demonstration of loyalty I have never before heard.’