When the coffee was brought, Yakimov murmured to the waiter: ‘Cognac.’ Immediately a bottle and glasses were put upon the table.
‘What is this?’ Clarence demanded.
‘Seems to be brandy, dear boy,’ said Yakimov.
Clarence called the waiter back: ‘Take it away. Bring me my bill.’
The cheese tray still stood beside the table. With furtive haste, Yakimov cut himself a long slice of brie and folded it into his mouth. Clarence and Steffaneski watching with astonished distaste, he said in apology: ‘Trifle peckish, dear boy.’
Neither made any comment.
When the bill was paid, Clarence took out a notebook and noted down his expenses. Yakimov, whose sight was long, read as it was written:
Luncheon to Count S. and Prince Y.: Lei 5,500
Advance to Prince Y., British refugee from Poland: 10,000
For a moment Yakimov was discomforted at seeing his fantasy so baldly recorded, then he forgot the matter. As they left the restaurant, his well-fed glow was like an extra wrap against the cold. He said to Clarence: ‘Delightful meal! Delightful company!’ He carried his smile over to Steffaneski, who was standing apart.
Clarence barely responded.
Yakimov had expected the offer of a lift, but no offer was made. As Clarence and Steffaneski drove off without him, the glow began to seep from him. Then he remembered he had twelve thousand lei. He went into the confiserie attached to the restaurant and bought himself a little silver box full of raspberry pastilles. Holding this happily, he called a taxi and set out for his new lodgings, where he would sleep the afternoon away.
12
A few days before Christmas, Bella Niculescu, meeting Harriet in the street, invited her to tea. Guy’s only comment on this incipient friendship was: ‘She’ll bore the arse off you.’
Harriet said: ‘You scarcely know her.’
‘She’s just a typical bourgeois reactionary.’
‘You mean, her prejudices are different from yours.’
‘You’ll see for yourself,’ said Guy and, reminding her that they had been invited that evening to the Athénée Palace by a Commander Sheppy, he went to give a student private coaching. Harriet was left with doubts about her coming tea-party.
Bella’s flat was in a new block on the Boulevard Brǎtianu. Walking there, Harriet felt the wind blow shrill across the desolate lots. Through the vents in the peasants’ huts could be seen the flicker of lamps. The only crowds now were on the tramcars that clanked their way out of darkness into darkness. When she passed the vast black skeleton of the Ministry building, she saw a fire burning in a ground-floor corner. Beside it sat a huddle of workmen too old for the army and no use for anything else.
The blocks of flats rose out of the gloom like lighted towers. Their hallways, visible through glass doors, indicated the grandeur to which the designers of the boulevard had first aspired.
Harriet was shown into Bella’s sitting-room. Low-ceilinged and very warm, it was carpeted in sky-blue and set about with walnut tables and blue upholstered arm-chairs. In the midst of this Bella, in a cashmere jersey and pearls, was seated before a silver tea-service.
Sinking into one of the chairs, Harriet said: ‘How comfortable!’
Bella replied: ‘It’s cosy,’ as though Harriet had meant the reverse.
‘This looks like English furniture.’
‘It is English furniture. Our wedding-present from daddy. He bought it for us from Maples. Everything came from Maples.’
‘And you brought it all this way? That must have been a business.’
‘It certainly was.’ Bella laughed, relaxing a little. ‘The amount it cost us in bribes, we might just as well have paid duty and have done with it.’
While they were waiting for the tea to be brought in, Bella offered to show Harriet over the flat. They went first to Bella’s bedroom, that contained a large double bed with highly polished walnut headboard and a pink counterpane braided, ruched, embroidered and embossed with satin tulips. Bella, touching out the collection of silver-backed brushes, silver-boxes and cut glass on her dressing table, said: ‘These peasant servants have no sense of anything.’
She opened a door and disclosed a bathroom, as hot as a hot-house and closely packed with pink accoutrements.
‘Delicious,’ said Harriet and Bella looked pleased.
‘Now the dining-room!’ she said and Harriet wished she had courage to tell her that she did not need to be impressed. She wanted to find herself in sympathy with Bella, who was, in a way, her own discovery – anyway, not a ready-made acquaintance imposed on her by Guy.
After luncheon with the Drucker family, she had said to Guy: ‘Your friends are disappointed in me. They expected you to marry someone exactly like yourself,’ but she had, she suspected, exceeded Bella’s expectations.
In the dining-room, where Bella paused expectantly before a sideboard coruscant with silver and cut-glass, Harriet asked: ‘Do you use this stuff?’
‘My dear, yes. Rumanians expect it. They look down on you if you can’t make as big a show as they do.’ Bella smiled at the pretensions demanded of her, but her voice betrayed respect for them.
‘The Pringle flat can provide nothing like this,’ said Harriet.
‘Didn’t you bring your wedding-presents?’
‘We married in haste. We only got a cheque or two.’
They had returned to the sitting-room, where tea awaited them. ‘Oh, I had a very big wedding,’ said Bella. ‘We came here with ten large packing-cases – full. Even the Rumanians were impressed. Still, you won’t have to entertain them. The real Rumanians never mix with foreigners.’
Harriet admitted they had been invited only to Jewish house-holds and Bella, gratified, was about to say more when she noticed something amiss among the silver on the tray before her. She stopped and her lips tightened. With a purposeful movement, she pressed a bell in the wall and waited. Her silence was intent. When the servant appeared, Bella spoke two words. The girl gasped and fled, to return with a tea-strainer.
‘These servants!’ Bella shook her head with disgust. Becoming suddenly animated, she talked at length about the sort of servants to be found in Rumania. She placed them in two categories: the honest imbeciles and the intelligent delinquents, the words ‘honest’ and ‘intelligent’ being, of course, merely relative.
‘Which have you got?’ Bella asked Harriet.
Inchcape’s man, Pauli, had acquired for Harriet his cousin Despina. ‘She seems to me,’ said Harriet, ‘not only intelligent and honest, but very good-natured.’
Bella grudgingly agreed that Hungarians were ‘a cut above the others’ but she had no doubt Despina ‘made a bit’ on everything she was sent out to buy. Harriet described how Despina, on being shown the cupboard that passed for a servant’s bedroom in the Pringles’ flat, had sunk to her knees and, kissing Harriet’s hand, had said that at last she would be able to have her husband to live with her.
Bella saw nothing astonishing in this story. ‘She’s very fortunate to have a room of any sort,’ she said, and almost at once returned to the subject of the real Rumanians whom Harriet was never likely to meet. ‘They’re terribly snobby,’ she kept saying as she gave examples of their exclusiveness.
Harriet was reminded of Doamna Flöhr’s claim that the exclusiveness of the Jews was the exclusiveness of the excluded. What, she wanted to know, had the Rumanians to be so snobbish about? She said: ‘They must suffer from some profound sense of inferiority.’