Pinkrose flinched as though the question were inexcusably personal. ‘I really cannot say,’ he said.
Inchcape said: ‘Oh, he’ll soon be taking himself off.’ He leered at Pinkrose, repeating as though his friend were deaf: ‘I was just saying, you’ll soon be taking yourself off.’
‘My goodness gracious! I’ve only just arrived,’ said Pinkrose. ‘A special passage had to be arranged for me; and I imagine the same will be done for my return.’
‘Who do you think’s going to arrange it?’ Inchcape asked.
Ignoring this question, Pinkrose went on: ‘And what about my lecture, I’d like to know? Isn’t it time you fixed a date?’
‘We’ll have to abandon the lecture.’
‘Abandon the lecture? Are you serious, Inchcape? I plan to range over the development of our poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson. Central Office was of the opinion it would have considerable influence on Rumanian policy.’
Inchcape laughed through his teeth. ‘My dear fellow, if Chaucer came here it would have no influence on Rumanian policy. If Byron came, if Oscar Wilde himself came, he could not get an audience for a public lecture on English literature.’
‘Are you suggesting I should return home without a word? A pretty fool I’d look! What would my colleagues say?’
‘Tell them you left it too late. You should have come six months ago.’
‘I was not invited six months ago.’ Pinkrose’s lips quivered. For a moment he looked as though he might burst into tears, then he suddenly smiled. ‘But you are, as they say, “having me on”. My leg is being pulled, isn’t it?’ He glanced about in an inquiry that no one attempted to answer.
Harriet had her own inquiry: ‘If no one will come to the Cantecuzeno Lecture, who is going to turn up to hear Guy?’
‘That’s different. Students are young, loyal, uncommitted, eager to learn … But it’s the look of the thing that matters. We must open.’
‘Is Guy expected to run the Department alone?’
‘Well, if the students turn up in force, I might take a seminar for him.’
There was a long silence. Harriet felt she could have said more, but the drink, warm and sweet, had begun to release her from care. If this were not the best of all possible worlds, what did it matter? Perhaps the best was yet still to come.
Dobson yawned and said he was taking a short holiday in Sofia. ‘I want to hear some opera,’ he said.
Guy turned to Harriet. ‘Why don’t you go with him?’ he suggested.
Harriet’s fugitive happiness was gone. For some moments she was too embarrassed to speak, then she protested: ‘Darling, you are extraordinary! What makes you suppose that Dobbie would want me to go with him to Sofia?’
Dobson sat up to assure her: ‘I should be delighted.’
‘Of course he would,’ said Guy, who had never doubted it. He looked at Dobson and explained: ‘The situation here is becoming too much for her.’
‘I should never have thought it.’ Dobson smiled as though Guy were being slightly ridiculous. ‘As indeed he is,’ Harriet thought. She felt particularly annoyed that after she had, as she imagined, demolished the question of her going, it should be brought up again.
Pinkrose had finished his pot of ţuicǎ and his eyelids were drooping. He nodded forward, then, rousing himself with a start, said: ‘I shall return to the hotel. I like an early night.’
‘Yes.’ Inchcape rose, saying briskly: ‘To bed. In this barbarous corner of Europe, where else is there to go?’
Outside, a wintry wind blew among the trees. Dobson, finding that Inchcape and Pinkrose were also returning to Bucharest next morning, offered them a lift. Inchcape was inclined to accept, but when Pinkrose saw the De Dion he shook his head decisively. ‘Oh, no! Dear me, no! I never could travel in an open car.’
‘Oh, get on, you old stick-in-the-mud!’ Inchcape, irritated beyond endurance, gave Pinkrose a push that sent him teetering down the road towards the main hotel.
The drive back to Predeal was very cold. Harriet was depressed, feeling that in some ways Guy was intolerable. When they reached their room, conscious of her withdrawal, he put his arm round her and said: ‘Don’t worry. We shall be all right.’
‘I’m not worrying,’ she replied coldly.
‘You aren’t sorry you came to Rumania with me?’
She shook her head, but moved out of his hold.
‘Are you sorry you married me?’
He evidently needed reassurance, for when she said: ‘Sometimes I am,’ he looked very grieved. He asked: ‘Do you feel you needed a different sort of person?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Who? Clarence?’
‘Good heavens, no. No, no one I have met. Perhaps no one I shall ever meet.’
He asked despondently: ‘You mean you no longer love me?’
‘I don’t mean that, but I’m not sure you want to be loved very much. You want room for a lot of other people and things.’
‘But I have to work,’ he expostulated. ‘I have to see people, to move around. You move around, too …’
‘Yes, there’s plenty of give and take. You are quite willing for me to spend any amount of time with other people: Clarence, for instance, or Sasha. It gives you freedom and you know there’s no risk. You’re too good to lose.’
He stared at her, hurt, looking as though this were all too much for him and she realised they were arguing on different levels. He was being practical, she emotional. She wanted to accuse him of selfishness, to point out that his desire to embrace the outside world was an infidelity and a self-indulgence, but she realised he would never understand what she meant.
‘You’re never mentioned before that you are discontented.’
‘No?’ She laughed. ‘Truth is a luxury. We can only afford it now and then.’
He laughed, too, his dejection gone in a moment. Humming to himself, happily and tunelessly, he prepared for bed.
Dobson had left before the Pringles appeared for breakfast. The cold of the previous night had presaged a change in the weather. The sky was indigo with cloud. White mist unrolled like cotton-wool down between the mountain peaks. Everything outside looked bleak and wet.
The hotel was desolating in this gloom. The central heating had been turned on that morning, but so far it had done no more than fill the air with the reek of oil and rust. In the main room the bare wooden chairs and bamboo tables were damp to the touch. A smell of dust came from the bulrushes that stood about in pots.
A drizzle began to fall. No one in Bucharest thought of rain and the Pringles had not come prepared for it. Saying: ‘You won’t want to go for a walk today,’ Guy settled down to his books.
Harriet wished they had gone back with Dobson. Although she thought of their return as something like a plunge into a boiling cauldron, she looked forward to the warmth and entertainment of the capital. Besides, she was anxious about Sasha.
Watching Guy contentedly preparing a course for which there might be no students, Harriet wondered where for him reality began and ended. He could be misled by the plausible, deceived by the self-deceiving, impressed by the second-rate: all in the name of charity, of course. But was such charity truly charitable?