Inside the carriage where the Pringles sat there was no sound but an occasional grunt and the buzz of captive flies. The dark-blue plush smelt of carbon and was sticky to the touch. Granules of carbon lay among the dust on the window ledges. The other occupants of the carriage were army officers, all sprawling lax and sleepy with boredom, on their way to the frontier to guard a country that had lost almost everything it possessed.
Guy, with a rucksack of books between his knees, sat in full sunlight, pushing up his glasses as they slipped down the sweat on his nose. He was planning a course of studies.
The English journalists who had flown in to cover the abdication were still in Bucharest, detained by one outrage after another. In all, eight oil engineers had been kidnapped by the Iron Guardists. One of them had been found dead (‘of a heart attack’, said the newspapers) in a Ploesti back street. The rest survived, the worse for ill-treatment.
That morning the old minister who had thought it better to be united under the Russians had also been picked up dead in the Snagov woods, his hair and beard torn out and stuffed into his mouth. He had lately become a fanatical Guardist, but that had not saved him.
Galpin never left the Athénée Palace. With the aspect of a prophet who sees his worst predictions fulfilled, he said to anyone who entered the bar: ‘It’s simply a case of “Whose turn next?”’
They were all, it seemed to Harriet, awaiting a final collapse that might extinguish them. All, that was, except Guy. With the new term approaching, he was absorbed in preparation for it. He managed to be as busy as he had ever been, while Harriet spent more and more time with Sasha. Like people in a waiting-room, they sat on the balcony exchanging nonsense rhymes, playing paper games, telling ridiculous jokes, and giggling together as helplessly as children. There was no time to put one’s mind to more serious pursuits. She knew they were on the verge of confusion, but Sasha appeared to believe their life could go on, uneventful and carefree, for ever.
She had been longing to get away from the capital, but now their week-end was come her apprehensions were heightened. Anything might happen while they were away. And what of Sasha, left in Despina’s care? It had been during their last trip to Predeal that the kitten had fallen to its death. Despina, sympathising with her fears, had promised to open the door to no one. Sasha, however, had been no more concerned by her departure than the kitten had been.
He said: ‘We have a villa at Sinai,’ speaking as though it stood there empty, awaiting the family’s return. ‘I know Predeal. Sarah went to school there. Hannah would not go – she would not leave my father.’
Harriet remembered the little girl. ‘I could see she adored your father,’ she said.
Sasha nodded. ‘She cried all night when he married again.’
‘Did you mind?’
‘We all minded, but Hannah most. We did not want another mother.’
‘You loved him very much, didn’t you?’
‘We all loved him.’ Sasha still identified his feeling with those of his family. He did not acknowledge the separation. He added: ‘She wanted to take him from us. She was beastly. Wicked.’
Harriet laughed. ‘When I was a child I used to think my aunt was a wicked stepmother, but now I realise she was just rather stupid. She said anything that came into her head. She probably forgot it the next moment and thought I did, too.’
After a long delay, the train moved out of Ploesti into foothills that were straddled by the old wooden derricks of pioneering days. Beyond this area were alpine meadows, but soon the rocks broke through and the landscape changed into the grey shale and pines of the lower Transylvanian Alps.
When they left the stale and stifling carriage, the Pringles were startled by the glassy outside air. Scentless in its purity, it was as cold as ether on the skin. They wanted to start walking at once, but first they had to report their arrival to the police. The police officer, unshaven and grimy, reeking of garlic, pushed aside a collection of dirty coffee-cups and stamped their permits with extreme slowness. Free to stay in Predeal for no longer than a week, they carried their luggage through the long main street to the hotel.
The village, with its grey highland look, was in shadow, but the peaks above were still looped in the reddish light of the evening sun. Minute glaciers, like veins of marble, made their way down the grey rock-surfaces. Snow lay already on the upper ledges. At this height the autumn was fairly advanced. Patches of beech were golden-tawny, thrown like lion-skins among the black fur of the pines.
Predeal was both a winter and a summer resort, so out of date that the village hall announced an English film.
Harriet was slightly unnerved by the extraordinary quiet of the place. She felt they had been mad to leave the capital at such a time. If there were an invasion, they would receive no warning here. But Guy stretched his arms, throwing off the year’s worries in a moment. As he breathed the light and tonic air, he said: ‘This is like flying out of a fog.’
Their bedroom was small and bare with a stove that was lit at evening and fed with pine-logs. They were met by a scent of wood-smoke, delicate and sweet, that comforted Harriet. She began to look forward to her holiday. As soon as they had dropped their bags they went out to walk in the blue, chill air. The sky changed to turquoise. The shops lit up. The village street hung on the mountainside like a chain of light. They found the village bright enough during the day, but a wintry gloom came down after the shops shut. There was no entertainment but the cinema where the film broke down a dozen times during a showing, each break being numbered on the screen and described as an ‘interval’. In their little ski-ing hotel there was nothing to do. Guy set out his books of verse and novels by Conrad, preparing to spend the holiday in work.
On their first morning, as he chose an armful of books to take to the public gardens, Harriet said: ‘But can’t we go for a walk?’
‘Later,’ Guy promised. ‘Let me break the back of this first.’ She, he suggested, might visit the famous confiserie, the farseeing owner of which had laid in vast stocks of sugar in early summer. Now people came from all the large cities to eat his cakes.
Harriet was surprised to discover how greedy this fact made her feel.
Guy took a seat in the small ornamental garden where the grass, damply green in the mild, misty sunlight, was scattered over with russet leaves. There was nothing to see here but some beds of small, brick-coloured dahlias. Harriet wandered off through a neighbouring market where the ground was heaped with apples, tomatoes and black grapes. Some of the notorious Laetzi gipsies stood about – wild, bearded, long-haired men who eyed her as though they were cannibals.
The confiserie was crowded. The inside tables were all taken and the counter was tightly packed about with people who had to hold their plates above their heads. Outside there were chairs vacant near the rail. Harriet soon discovered why. The beggars were at her elbow even as she sat down. There were three children, their bones hung with scraps like greasers’ rags. One, with a withered leg, hopped with his hand on the shoulder of a smaller boy. The third, a girl, had lost the sight of an eye. Perhaps she had been born that way, for the eyeball remained in its socket, blankly white, like a filling of lard. The children were urged forward – not that they needed much urging – by two teen-age girls who now and then stopped their whine of ‘Foame’ to titter as though this persecution of the foreign woman were too funny for words.
Harriet handed out her small change, but it was not enough to buy release. The children went on jigging and whining beside her. While waiting to be served, she watched a small green and gold beetle crawling towards a hole in the rail beside her. If it went to the right, they would get away. It went to the left and it suddenly seemed to her that their danger had become acute. Her appetite had gone. She ordered coffee. While she waited she stared out at the road and watched a peasant leading a horse and cart out of a lane opposite. The horse, its bones straining against its hide, stumbled when it reached the main road cobbles. At once the peasant flung back his whip and lashed the creature about the eyes. The blows were given with savage deliberation as though the man wanted no more than an excuse to vent a chronic rage.