‘No.’ With a sense of giving Sophie a last chance, Harriet said: ‘The trouble is, I do not speak Rumanian.’
‘But the landlord will speak French. I am sure you speak very well French?’
‘I hardly speak it at all.’
‘That is extraordinary, sure-ly?’ Sophie’s voice soared in amazement. ‘A girl of good family who cannot speak very well French!’
‘Not in England.’ Harriet stood up.
Sophie encouraged her on the way out: ‘The landlord will not eat you. He will be nice to a young lady alone.’ She laughed, apparently delighted at the thought of it.
Harriet did not see Guy again until the evening. She told him she had come to an agreement with the landlord. She had taken the flat for six months.
‘And what did Sophie think of it?’
‘She did not see it.’
‘She dealt with the landlord, of course?’
‘No, she could not come. She wasn’t dressed when I called.’
‘But she promised to go with you.’
‘She said she hadn’t understood.’
Guy’s expression left Harriet in no doubt but that Sophie had understood perfectly. He routed his dissatisfaction with a burst of admiration for Harriet: ‘So you did it all alone? Why you’re wonderful, darling. And we have a flat! We must have a drink to celebrate.’ And Harriet hoped that for a few days, at least, she would hear no more of Sophie.
10
When they moved into the flat, the Pringles discovered that in negotiating with the landlord Harriet had not been as clever as they thought. Some of the furniture was missing. The bedside rug had been taken away. There were only two saucepans left in the kitchen. When telephoned, the landlord, with whom she had dealt in a mixture of English, French, Rumanian and German, told Guy he had explained to Doamna Pringle that these things would be removed from the flat.
They also discovered that if they wanted electricity, gas, water and telephone, they must settle the bills of the previous tenant, an English journalist who had disappeared without trace.
The flat was on the top floor of a block in the square. From the sitting-room, which was roughly coffin shaped, five doors opened. These led to the kitchen, the main bedroom, the balcony, the spare-room and the hall. The building was flimsy. What furniture remained was shabby, but the rent was reasonable.
When they took possession, on a day of exceptional cold, the hall-porter who brought up their luggage put a hand on the main radiator and grinned slyly. Noticing this, Harriet felt the radiator and found it barely warm. She told Guy to ask the man if it was always like this.
Yes, the flat was hard to let because it was cold. So the rent was low. The boiler, explained the porter, was not big enough to force the heat up to the top floor. Having made this revelation, he became nervous and insisted that the flats were of the highest class, each having attached to it not one servant’s bedroom but two. He held up two fingers, pulling first one, then the other. Two. One was behind the kitchen, the other on the roof. Harriet said she had not noticed a bedroom behind the kitchen. The porter beckoned her to follow him and showed her a room some six feet long and three feet wide, which she had mistaken for a store cupboard. Guy surprised her by showing no surprise. He said most Rumanian servants slept on the kitchen floor.
When they had unpacked, they went out on to the balcony and surveyed the view that was their own. They faced the royal palace. Immediately below them, intact among the disorder left by the demolishers, was a church with gilded domes and crosses looped with beads. Apart from the Byzantine prettiness of this little church, and the palace façade, which had a certain grandeur, the buildings were a jumble of commonplaces, the skyline mediocre: and much was in ruins.
It was late afternoon. A little snow was falling from a sky watered over with the citrous gleams of sunset. Already, as the Pringles watched, the buildings were dissolving into dusk. The street-lamps came on one by one. At the entrance to the Calea Victoriei could be seen the first windows of the lighted shops.
A trumpet sounded from the palace yard. ‘Do you know what that says?’ Guy asked. ‘It says: Come, water your horses, all you that are able. Come, water your horses and give them some corn. And he that won’t do it, the sergeant shall know it: he will be whipped and put in a dark hole.’
Harriet, who had not heard this jingle before, made him repeat it. As he did so, they heard a creak of wood below. The church door was opening and a light falling on to the snow-feathered cobbles. A closed trǎsurǎ drew up. Two women, like little sturdy bears in their fur coats and fur-trimmed snow-boots, descended. As they entered the church, they drew veils over their heads.
This incident, occurring there at their feet, beneath the balcony of their home, touched Harriet oddly. For the first time she felt her life becoming involved with the permanent life of the place. They might be here for six months. They might even be allowed a year of settled existence – perhaps longer. With so much time, one ceased to be a visitor. People took on the aspect of neighbours. There was a need to adjust oneself.
She said: ‘We could have done worse. Here we are at the centre of things,’ and she felt that, like herself, he was more impressed by that position than he cared to admit.
‘We should buy things for the flat,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t we go to the Dâmboviţa?’
‘Why not?’ The term had ended. Guy was on holiday. With the high spirits of a move accomplished and refreshment due, he said: ‘First, though, we will go and have tea at Mavrodaphne’s.’
This was the newest, the most expensive, and so, for the moment, the most fashionable of Bucharest cafés. The Pringles had visited it before, but this visit was a gesture of belonging. They were going where everyone went.
The café was situated in a turning off the Calea Victoriei. This was an old street that had been renovated with black glass, chromium and marble composites so that the buildings gleamed in the street lights. Within the brilliant windows were French gloves and trinkets, English cashmere garments and Italian leatherwork, tagged with exotic words like ‘pulloverul’, ‘chic’, ‘golful’ and ‘five-o’clockul’. These shops stayed open until late at night.
The enormous windows of Mavrodaphne’s were steamed over by inner heat and outer cold. A colony of beggars had already established rights in the shelter of the doorway. They lay heaped together, supping off the smell of hot chocolate that came up through the basement grating. They roused themselves in a hubbub when anyone passed inside. Within the door was a vestibule where a porter took the greatcoats of visitors and a piccolo, kneeling at their feet, removed their snowboots. This service was imposed. Customers were required to enter the better restaurants and cafés as they would enter a drawing room.
When the Pringles arrived, the whole vast area of the café, warm, scented, tricked out with black glass, chromium and red leather, was crowded for the ‘five-o’clock’, which for most people here meant coffee or chocolate, and cakes. Only a few had acquired the habit of drinking tea.
There seemed to be no vacant table. Wandering round in their search, Guy said: ‘We are sure to see someone we know,’ and almost at once they came upon Dobson, who invited them to join him. He had dashed out, he said, on some pretext, life in the Legation being now such that the girls had no time to make a decent cup of tea.