‘Nonsense.’
‘Yes, forgotten,’ Yakimov insisted bleakly. ‘Dear fellow, Guy. Best in the world. Salt of the earth, but a trifle careless. Doesn’t understand how a poor Yak feels.’
Harriet was startled by this criticism – she had imagined she was the only one who criticized Guy – and the more startled that it should come from Yakimov. Yakimov, picked up when hungry and homeless, had been lodged by them for seven months and she felt angry that he should dare to criticize Guy, and criticize him in front of Alan.
Yet, startled and angry as she was, she realized he had spoken out of a genuine sense of injury. Guy had made much of him, then, the play over, had abandoned him. Guy imagined he was all things to all men, but did he really know anything about any man? Did he know anything about her? She doubted it. She, too, was beginning to accumulate a sense of injury.
Yakimov had suffered from coming too close to Guy. Guy was, she suspected, resentful of those near enough to hamper his freedom. It occurred to her that he might resent her. Why, for instance, had he not told her himself that Lush and Dubedat had asked for a part in the revue and been rejected? He may have forgotten to tell her, but more likely he had not chosen to tell her. He would not admit that he felt about them as she did. He would rather protect them against her judgement.
She felt his attitude betrayed the concept of mutual defence which existed in marriage.
But perhaps it existed only for her. It would be impossible to persuade Guy that he betrayed a concept that did not exist for him. He would condemn it as egoism. He might have his own ideas about marriage, but she doubted it. Having married her, he simply ceased to see her as another person. She had once accused him of considering her feelings less than those of anyone else with whom they came into contact. Surprised, he had said: ‘But you are myself. I don’t need to consider your feelings.’
In Bucharest, where he continued his classes for Jewish students in spite of Fascist demonstrations, he said: ‘They need me. They have no one else. I must give them moral support,’ yet he seemed unable to understand that, living as they did, she, too, needed ‘moral support’. As she met every crisis alone, it seemed to her she had been transported to a hostile world, then left to fend for herself.
Here, if she had nothing else, she had her work and the friendship of Alan and Yakimov. Alan, seeing her daily, had become more easy company. He would talk freely enough, though he had areas of constraint. One of these was Pinkrose and everything to do with Pinkrose.
When Harriet asked, ‘Does he object to my being in the office?’ Alan shrugged and would not reply. Pinkrose had imposed himself on the office. Useless though he was, he had become Alan’s superior and must not be discussed. Still, he could be mentioned in relation to the Twocurrys.
Alan said: ‘Gladys appointed herself chief toady to Pinkrose the minute she set eyes on him. I suspect she’s a bit infatuated with him.’
Harriet wanted to know how the Twocurrys ever achieved their position in the Information Office. Alan told her:
‘We started the office on a shoestring. I had to take any help I could get. Later we got a grant and I could have had a real secretary: one of the delightful English-speaking Greek girls. Instead I kept on old Gladys and Mabel. They needed the money. I just hadn’t the heart to chuck them out; and now I’ve got Gladys spying on everything I do and at the slightest upset rushing off to complain to Pinkrose. The moral of this story is: never let your heart get the better of your sense.’
‘You could get rid of her now.’
‘Oh, Pinkrose would never let her go. He described her the other day as “invaluable”.’
‘I suppose they aren’t paid much?’
‘Not much, no. They scarcely get a whole salary between them; but then, they scarcely do a whole job. Mabel, in my opinion, is more nuisance than she’s worth.’
The letters sent in to be typed by Miss Mabel were written very carefully in letters an inch high. Her speech, which Harriet heard seldom and always found distressing, was understood only by Miss Gladys. She never moved unaided from her chair. If she had to visit the cloakroom, she put up a panic-stricken babble until Miss Gladys led her away. When the time came for their departure, Miss Gladys would first put on her own coat and hat then grip her sister by the upper arm and get her out of the chair. While Miss Mabel mumbled and moaned, demanded and protested, Miss Gladys fitted her into her outdoor clothing. Both wore hats of sunburnt straw. Miss Gladys’s coat was bottle green and Miss Mabel’s coat was of a plum colour reduced in its exposed places to shades of caustic pink. Miss Mabel, who was delicate, was not allowed out without a tippet of ginger-brown fur.
When they left the office, where did they go? How did they live? How did women like the Twocurrys come to be in Athens at all? Alan said they had been the daughters of an artist, a romantic widower, who had saved up to bring himself and his little girls to Greece. They had found two rooms in the Plaka and the father, while alive, made a living by drawing Athenian scenes which he sold to tourists. That had been way back in the ’80s and the sisters still lived on in the Plaka rooms. Before the war Miss Gladys had worked at the Archaeological School piecing together broken pots. She had taken Miss Mabel with her every day and, said Alan, ‘the Head, not knowing what on earth to do with her, shut Mabel up with a typewriter. Weeks later, mysterious sounds were heard through the door … thump-thump-thump. She had taught herself to type. When the war started, the Archaeological School closed down and the Twocurrys were thrown upon the world. I seized them as they fell. And now,’ Alan gave his painful grin, ‘you know their whole history.’
‘So the office is all their life.’
‘I doubt whether they have any other.’
Harriet doubted whether she herself had any other. But it was a life of sorts. Her position in the office, though minor, was recognized. She was even invited to a party by the Greek Minister of Information. Delighted by this courtesy, she wanted to share it and hurried to ask Alan if she might take Guy with her. Alan telephoned the Ministry and a new card was delivered addressed to Kyrios and Kyria Pringle, but Guy, when he saw it, said he could not accept. His revue was to be staged at Tatoi during the first week in February and rehearsals were now so intensive, be had no time for parties. In the end, it did not matter. Metaxas, whom the war had changed from a dictator to a hero, died at the end of January from diabetes, heart failure and overwork. The party had to be cancelled.
20
The revue, like the war, went on. Death was incidental to the times and the needs of the fighting men were deemed to be the major consideration. During the last week of rehearsals Guy disappeared from Harnet’s view and the only daylight glimpse she had of him was at the funeral of an English pilot which they attended in the English church. He then had a look of frenzied incorporeity that came of not sleeping or eating or bating effort for three days at a time. In the few minutes that they spent together after the funeral ceremony, she protested that Guy was over-doing it. The revue, after all, was, as he had said, a joke. The audience of airmen would not be overcritical. But Guy could not do less than his utmost. He was just off to Tatoi for the dress rehearsal and would probably not manage to get home that night. Where would he sleep? Well, if he slept at all, he would probably doss down on the floor at the house of one of the Greek students who lived near the airfield. He had not returned to his adolescence; he had, she decided, never left it.