When the plane landed, Harriet walked with Dobson across the airfield to the barrier. A chauffeur awaited him and as he handed over his luggage, Harriet glanced back and saw that her suitcase had been put out on the grass. Her plane was taxi-ing across the field.
She gave a cry and said: ‘They’re going without me.’
‘Surely not,’ Dobson said, but the plane was already rising from the ground. He spoke to the Bulgarian chauffeur who went to the customs-shed and came back with the information that the Rumanian plane had announced it would go no farther. Passengers for Athens must proceed on the German Lufthansa.
‘But why?’ Harriet was alarmed, remembering that Galpin had said: ‘When trouble starts, the air-service is the first thing to stop.’ She asked: ‘What has happened?’ but there was no one who could tell her.
Dobson said: ‘Probably some rumour has scared them. You know what the Rumanians are like.’
Harriet said: ‘I can’t go on the Lufthansa.’ She was genuinely afraid. A story going round Bucharest described how some British businessmen in Turkey travelling on the Lufthansa, contrary to protocol, had been taken not to Sofia but to Vienna, where they had been arrested and interned.
Dobson smiled at her fears. ‘For myself, I’d feel safer on the Lufthansa than on any Rumanian plane.’
‘But it’s forbidden.’
‘Only in a general way. You won’t be allowed past the barrier here: you can’t return to Bucharest: so you have no choice but to travel in the transport available.’
The large Lufthansa stood on the airfield with a German official at the steps. Harriet felt sick at the sight of it. Stricken by her own plight, she appealed to Dobson: ‘Please wait with me until I go.’
He said: ‘I’m afraid I can’t. The Minister’s expecting me for luncheon.’
Near tears, she pleaded: ‘It’s only about twenty minutes.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Dobson made a murmur of regret. He had lost his lightness of manner and she felt something inflexible beneath the reverence with which he said: ‘I cannot keep the Minister waiting.’
After Dobson had been driven away, Harriet sat for a while on the bench by the shed and gazed at the German plane. Passengers were beginning to board it and she knew there was no purpose in delay. As Dobson had pointed out, she could neither stay here nor return whence she had come. She knew now what it was like to be a stateless person without a home.
Five men were filing up the steps of the plane, all, it seemed to her, inimical. Immediately in front of her was a little old man pulling on a string a toy dog, a money-box of sorts. He glanced back at her with a smile and as she noted his straggle of grey-yellow hair, his snub pink face, his wet blue eyes, she thought he looked as sinister as the rest. However, when she reached the official at the step, he produced a British passport and his aspect changed for her. Looking over his shoulder, she read that he was a retired consul called Liversage, domiciled in Sofia, born in 1865. The Germans treated the two British nationals with frigid courtesy. Harriet was thankful for the presence of this old man and his toy dog.
As they entered the plane, he stepped aside to let her choose her seat, and when she sat down, sat down beside her. He took the toy dog on his knee and, patting its worn hide, explained: ‘I collect for hospitals. Have collected hundreds of pounds, y’know. Thousands in fact. Been collecting for over fifty years.’
The journey no longer frightened her. She asked herself, was it likely they would divert the plane in order to capture one young English woman and a man of seventy-five?
As they flew over the mountains, Mr Liversage talked continually, pausing only to receive the answer to some question he had asked. Where was she coming from? Where going? What was she doing in this part of the world?
‘Is your husband a ’varsity man?’ he asked. He spoke pleasantly, but the question was clearly important to him. Her answer would place her. She wondered, would a provincial university be described as a ‘’varsity’? She decided to say: ‘Yes,’ and Mr Liversage seemed content.
Near the Bulgarian frontier, the sky began to clear. Over Macedonia, the plane suddenly emerged into brilliance, coming almost immediately into sight of the Ægean that sifted its peacock blues and greens against the golden shore of Thrace. They passed, almost at eye-level, a mountain like an inverted bucket, but before she could comment on it Mr Liversage had talked them past it. While she looked below, seeing the Sporades fringed purple with weed, lying in shallows of jade and turquoise, Mr Liversage talked of his life in Sofia where he had ‘a nice little place, nice little garden: lived very happily’. But he had been advised to leave. Bulgaria, too, was threatened by the war that crept east like a grey lava to overwhelm them all.
‘So here we are!’ he said, his old hand with its loose, liver-spotted skin, patting the dog’s rump. ‘Going to Athens. Probably settle down there. Bit of a lark, eh?’
Perhaps it was. Harriet smiled for the first time since she had entered the ravaged flat the night before. The memory had begun to retreat as they flew out of the Balkan world, leaving behind all intimations of autumn, returning into summer. Everything below was parched to a golden-pink. The sun, pouring in through the windows, grew steadily fiercer as the day advanced.
Throughout the journey, which lasted until evening, Mr Liversage held his dog on his knee. He had brought a packet of sandwiches, which he shared with Harriet. Sometimes, as he talked, his hands were tensed about the dog so his knuckles shone, but his manner, matter-of-fact and cheerful, suggested it was for him an everyday occurrence to be uprooted in this way and no cause for complaint. The plane flew due south, showing no inclination to turn from its course. Indeed, Harriet realised, they were already over Athens.
‘We will meet again,’ said Mr Liversage as they began to descend.
Seeing the marble façades and the surrounding hills luminous in the rose-violet light of evening, she was thankful to come to rest in so beautiful a place.
29
When, after luncheon next day, Harriet came upon Yakimov, she felt jolted.
She had been wandering about the unfamiliar streets in a transport of release from all she had left behind. The previous evening she had gone to the cinema where the news-film had shown not the inexorable might of the German panzer divisions, but a handful of British sappers planting a mine among scrubby bushes somewhere in North Africa. At the back of her mind was the determination to return to Bucharest, but meanwhile there was the solace of this new world where to be English was to be welcome.
Yakimov, perched like a grasshopper on an old-fashioned bicycle, interrupted a dream, reminding her of the past. He leapt from the machine at the sight of her and came running downhill crying: ‘Dear girl! But this is wonderful! What news of the Hispano?’
‘It has been sold.’
‘No!’ He fetched up breathlessly beside her and began excitedly mopping his face. ‘Just when your poor old Yaki was asking himself where he could get a bit of the ready! What did she fetch?’
‘Sixty thousand.’
‘Dear girl!’ His large, pale, shallow eyes seemed to brim their sockets in delight, so she had not the heart to tell him that his sixty thousand was now worth less than ten pounds.
He was wearing his tussore suit and his Indian yellow shirt. The dark patches beneath his arm-pits had become darker and now had an edging of salt crystals. A leather strap over his shoulder held a leather satchel filled with roneoed sheets. She asked what he was doing, bicycling in the heat of the early afternoon.