‘You could get work of some sort.’
‘That’s not so easy in a foreign country. Anyway, I’m staying while Guy stays.’
The gipsies, excited by the growing crowds, were darting about in their chiffon flounces, accosting people with shrieks of ‘Domnuli … domnuli … domnuli.’
Harriet noticed Sophie standing among the flowers in a yellow dress cut to enhance her large bosom and small waist. Whom was she waiting for? She looked up and, noting Clarence above her, began moving from basket to basket with the peculiar precision of someone conscious of the limelight. She smiled admiration all about her, then paused at a basket packed with rosebuds. She picked one out, sniffed at it ecstatically, then held it at arm’s length. Harriet half-expected her to stand on the point of one foot and pirouette. Instead, she approached the vendor.
The summer before, Harriet had watched Sophie bargaining for violets. Then she had bargained sharply; now she was all artless sweetness. When the gipsy named a price, she made a little movement of hurt protest but, helpless in a world where even beauty had a price, she paid without argument.
Harriet looked at Clarence. Clarence was watching Sophie with a peculiar smile. ‘Is she waiting for you?’ Harriet asked.
‘I suppose so.’ Clarence smirked, knowing he had surprised her: ‘Sophie seems to have become attached to me for some reason. She said the other day that when I’m drunk I have a dangerous look.’
‘Oh, really!’ Harriet laughed with more irritation than amusement: ‘I’ve seen you drunk often enough, but I’ve never seen you dangerous.’
Clarence grunted, saying after a pause: ‘Sophie says you have no heart. I’m sure she isn’t right.’
‘Do you want a woman with a heart?’
‘No. I want someone as tough as old boots. In fact I want you. I knew you were my sort of woman the first time I set eyes on you. You could save me.’
‘You’d do better with Sophie.’
Guy called to Harriet and he and Inchcape descended the steps. She followed with Clarence. Sophie, down on the pavement, showed surprise at seeing Clarence, but it was all spoilt by Clarence’s reluctance to see her. She had to catch his arm. ‘I have had,’ she said, ‘a little chat with Mr Dubedat and Mr Lush. Ah, how nice is Mr Lush! So straightforward, so honest, so simple and so kind of heart. A true representative of England, I would say.’ Her glance at Guy and Inchcape suggested they might well take a lesson from Mr Lush, then she smiled at Clarence. Mumbling, shamefaced, he asked where they were going.
‘I like so much Capşa’s,’ said Sophie. ‘The garden there is so nice.’
Clarence looked at Inchcape and the Pringles, but there was no escape. As they went in one direction, he was led off in the other.
11
Drucker’s trial had been twice postponed, then suddenly, at the end of August, it was announced for the following day.
There was consternation among ticket-holders given less than twenty-four hours in which to arrange the luncheon and cocktail parties attendant upon such an occasion. Princess Teodorescu, with so many friends to be transported to the court-house, was forced to appear herself in the Athénée Palace foyer and commandeer every car-owner with whom she could claim acquaintance. Among them was Yakimov. Delighted to be drawn into the fun, if only in the capacity of chauffeur, he spent his last hundred lei getting the Hispano cleaned.
These were the dog days of summer when, at noon, the sky was like an open furnace, but Yakimov was not much discomposed by the heat. He walked nowhere. He would drive the distance between the Pringles’ flat and the hotel, even though the Hispano accelerated so rapidly, he was scarcely started before he must stop again. He enjoyed what he called ‘the cut and thrust’ of Bucharest traffic. He had regained all his old skill as a driver. Foxy Leverett, seeing him pull up outside the Athénée Palace, said: ‘You ride that car, old boy, as though you’re part of it.’ Although he had to admit that drink and misfortune had bedevilled his nerves, he could, when he chose, keep ‘the old girl’ going at a steady hundred.
On the first morning of the trial he rose early and, bathed and dressed in his best, reported at the hotel lobby.
Galpin was there, watching preparations. ‘Going to the trial?’ he asked.
‘Why, yes, dear boy,’ smiled Yakimov.
The English journalists were the only ones not invited and Galpin said glumly: ‘A waste of time, the whole slapstick. His Majesty won’t get a penny out of it.’
‘You mean he can’t confiscate the oil holdings?’
‘I mean he’ll be out on his ear.’
Before Yakimov had time to be perturbed by this prediction, he was seized on by Baron Steinfeld, who orderd him to escort Princess Mimi and Princess Lulie. The two girls were clearly displeased at being relegated to Yakimov, who could only hope that the sight of the Hispano, newly polished, its chrome asparkle, would console them. Mimi, indeed, gave him a cold smile, but Lulie kept her narrow, sallow face averted and her eyes fixed on the distance. Even when crushed with him in the seat, the girls maintained an aloof silence. He pressed the starter. The engine whirred and died. He pressed it again. Again the engine whirred and died, whirred and died.
The girls gazed blankly through the windscreen.
The indicator marked ‘Essence’, broken some years before, stood permanently at ‘demi’, but the tank was empty. He had been driving on Foxy’s two hundred litres and had completely forgotten the need to replenish them.
Lulie, dropping her eyelids, murmured: ‘Quel ennui!’
‘We’ll have to take a taxi,’ Mimi said and looked at Yakimov, but Yakimov had no money for a taxi. He jumped from the car, promising to be back ‘in a brace of shakes’, and hurried to the bar, where he set about trying to borrow money. Galpin did not lend money. No one else had any money to lend. By this time the lobby had cleared. The other cars had started off. When Yakimov emerged again, still penniless, the princesses had disappeared.
He stood for a long time beside the car, mourning over it and begging help of everyone known to him who entered or left the hotel – but there was no one in Bucharest these days who was willing to lend him anything.
In the end he had to leave the car where it stood, immediately outside the hotel entrance, and after two days the manager ordered him to move it.
He had begged Dobson to make him an advance on his remittance and had been reminded that the whole sum had gone on his visas and the cost of retrieving the Hispano from the Yugoslavs. Yakimov’s heart sank. However would he get to Freddi?
‘Couldn’t you lend your Yaki a thou or two?’
‘No,’ said Dobson. Guy also said: ‘No.’ This was the end. The days of his refulgence were over for ever. He was not only penniless, he was nearly in rags. He had only two things left in the world – his car and the sable-lined greatcoat which the Czar had given his father.
He would have to sell the car. Having made that decision, he was suddenly gleeful. He would be in the money again. He would ‘make a packet’. With this thought in mind, he set out to visit car salesrooms, which confirmed what Dobson had said. Only a few persons could afford to run a car like the Hispano, and those few were all Jews. As Jewish cars were being requistioned by the army, it was unlikely anyone would buy it at all.
At last a salesman, whose window was at the junction of the Calea Victoriei and the Boulevard Breteanu, lent Yakimov a can of petrol with which to bring the car to the shop. ‘C’est beau,’ he admitted when he saw it, but he would not buy. He agreed to display the car and would try to sell it for Yakimov. So it was driven into the large triangular window and left there.