He stared at her, rebuking her with his long silence, then he said with decision: ‘No, I don’t. If you want to know what I think of you staying here, after all it cost me to send my lady wife home – I think it wasn’t playing the game.’ His brief nod underlined his opinion and he strode from her to join his associates round Sheppy.
At that moment Guy, Clarence and Inchcape arrived together. Guy and Clarence were at once seized upon by Dobson and taken to Sheppy. Inchcape was left, as Harriet had been, to find entertainment as best he might. He wandered over to Harriet, one eyebrow raised in a frown of bored enquiry.
‘What’ve we been dragged here for?’ he asked.
‘No one seems to know.’
‘Which is Sheppy? I’m told he’s an odd-looking cove.’
Harriet pointed out Sheppy, who was now taking Guy, Clarence and some other young men to a corner of the room. When he had them to himself, he seemed to be lecturing them.
‘What’s he up to?’ Inchcape stared over at the group. ‘And the chaps he has picked out – what have they in common?’
Harriet was about to say ‘Youth’, but said instead: ‘They probably all speak Rumanian.’
‘So do I.’ Inchcape turned his back on Sheppy. ‘Well, I can’t waste time here. I have people coming to dinner.’
Sheppy did not keep the young men long. Clarence joined Harriet and Inchcape, who at once asked him: ‘What’s it all about?’
Clarence gave a provocative smile. ‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
Inchcape put his glass to his lips and swallowed its contents. ‘I must be off,’ he said, and went with strides too long for his height.
Guy was still talking to the other young men. These were four junior engineers from the telephone company, an eccentric called Dubedat and an adolescent member of the English family Rettison that had lived in Bucharest for generations.
Harriet said: ‘Inchcape was wondering what you all had in common.’
‘The flower of the English colony,’ smirked Clarence.
‘What does Sheppy want?’ Harriet felt both pride and anxiety that Guy was among the chosen. ‘He really looks fantastic.’
‘Fact is, we don’t know yet. He’s calling us to a meeting after Christmas. I’d guess he’s a “cloak and dagger” boy – the lunatic fringe of security.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘He hinted he was here on a secret mission. But I shouldn’t have told you that.’ Tilting back on his heels, displaying a diffident flirtatiousness, Clarence seemed to suggest she had wheedled a confidence out of him.
Harriet smiled it off but realised, whether she liked it or not, she had involved herself with Clarence. Nothing, she knew, would convince him she had not made a first move in his direction.
Impatiently she said: ‘What is Guy doing over there?’ Guy was, in fact, talking enthusiastically to Dubedat.
Harriet had seen Dubedat about in the streets. He was a noticeable figure. He was said to have been an elementary-school teacher in England and had been ‘thumbing’ his way through Galicia when war broke out. He had walked over the frontier into Bessarabia. When the refugee cars came streaming down through Chernowitz, one of them gave him a lift. He called himself a ‘simple lifer’. He had arrived in Bucharest in shorts and open-necked shirt, and for weeks wore nothing more. The crivat had eventually forced him into a sleeveless sheepskin jacket, but his legs and arms, remaining exposed, were whipped raw by the wind. When he walked in the street, his large, limp hands, mauve and swollen, swung about him like boxing-gloves on strings. Now, under Guy’s regard, his face, hook-nosed, small-chinned, usually peevish, glowed with satisfaction.
Harriet asked Clarence: ‘Does Dubedat intend to stay in Bucharest?’
‘He doesn’t want to go home. He’s a conscientious objector. Guy is taking him on as an English teacher.’
At this piece of news, Harriet moved to take a closer look at Dubedat, saying: ‘I’ll go and see what they’re talking about.’
Guy was including in his audience the engineers, who stood together with the bashful air of obscure men unexpectedly given prominence. He was on a favourite subject – the peasants. Describing how they danced in a circle, their arms about each other’s shoulders while they stared at their feet and stamped, he put out his own arms to the engineers. As they drew nearer, Dubedat’s expression changed to one of hostility.
Guy said: ‘The peasants just go round and round, stamping in time to that hysterical music, until they’re completely crazy with it. They begin to believe they’re stamping on their enemies – the King, the landowner, the village priest, the Jew who keeps the village shop … And when they’re exhausted, they go back to work. Nothing’s changed, but they’re not angry any more.’
Harriet, having reached Dubedat’s side, noticed the sour smell that came from him. He had been watching Guy’s performance with his lips open so that she could see his yellow and decaying teeth. The creases of his nostrils were greasy and pitted with blackheads: there were crusts of scurf caught in the roots of his hair and grime beneath his fingernails. As he lit a new cigarette from the stub of an old one, she noticed the first and second fingers of his right hand yellowed by nicotine.
The engineers, having moved into the aura of Dubedat, began edging away again. Guy, however, was not worried. On the contrary he seemed like radium throwing off vitality to the outside world – not that he thought of it as the outside world. So spontaneous was his approach to it, he seemed unaware of any sort of frontier between himself and the rest of humanity.
Watching him, Harriet felt a wave of irritated love for him and heard this echoed by Clarence, who said behind her: ‘Let’s get Guy away from here.’
They had arranged to go that evening to see a French film at the main cinema and would have to leave soon. Harriet was about to speak to Guy, when young Rettison, on the fringe of the group, broke in in an accent that was peculiar to the Rettison family. He was a sleek, self-possessed and self-assertive young man who looked like a Rumanian. He said: ‘It has always been the same here. It was the same before the King became a dictator. It always will be the same. The English here criticise the King. They forget he is pro-British. We wouldn’t have such a good time if he weren’t here.’
Guy said: ‘The King’s pro-British because Britain is pro-King. That’s the policy that’s going to wreck us all.’
The engineers glanced nervously towards Dobson, a representative of British policy, and Harriet said: ‘Darling, if you want to see the film, you must come now.’
Guy wanted to see the film, but he also wanted to stay and talk. He looked like a baby offered too many toys.
‘Come along,’ said Harriet and, to encourage him, she strolled on with Clarence out of the hotel. When Guy joined them he had brought Dubedat along too.
Clarence had his car with him. Harriet sat in the front seat beside him, while Guy sat with Dubedat in the back. As they drove across the square, Guy drew information from Dubedat. He asked him first where he came from.
Harsh and nasal, with a slight north country accent, Dubedat’s voice came reluctantly from a corner. ‘I’m a scowse,’ he said. ‘From the dregs of the Liverpool soup.’
He had won a scholarship to a grammar school, but at the school he had found not only the boys but the masters prejudiced against him. Everywhere he had gone, it seemed, he had met with prejudice.