Guy was looking grave. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said: ‘Sophie’s in a state of depression. She wants me to go over and see her. Alone.’
‘At this time of night? Tell her it’s out of the question.’
‘She’s threatening to do something desperate.’
‘Such as?’
‘Jump out of a window, or take an overdose of sleeping-tablets.’
‘Let me speak to her.’ Harriet took the receiver and said into it: ‘What is the matter, Sophie? You are being very silly. You know if you really intended to do anything like that, you would do it and not talk about it.’
There was a long pause before Sophie’s voice came, tear-fully: ‘I will jump if Guy doesn’t come. My mind is made up.’
‘Then go ahead and do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Why, jump, of course.’
Sophie gulped with horror. She said: ‘I hate you. I hated you from the first. You are a cruel girl. A girl without heart.’ There came the thud of her receiver being thrown down.
‘Now,’ said Guy severely, ‘I shall have to go. There’s no knowing what she may do if I don’t.’
‘If you go,’ said Harriet, ‘you won’t find me here when you come back.’
‘You are being absurd,’ said Guy. ‘I expected more sense from you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I married you. You are part of myself. I expect from you what I expect from myself.’
‘You mean you are taking me for granted? Then you are a fool. I won’t tolerate any more of this Sophie nonsense. If you go, I leave.’
‘Don’t be a baby.’ He went into the hall and started to put on his coat, but his movements were uncertain. When he was ready, he stood irresolute, looking at her in worried enquiry. She felt a flicker of triumph that he realised he did not know her after all, then she choked in her throat. She turned away.
‘Darling.’ He came back to the room and put his arms around her. ‘If it upsets you, of course I won’t go.’
At that, she said, ‘But you must go. I can’t have you worrying about Sophie all night.’
‘Well!’ He looked into the hall and then looked at Harriet. ‘I feel I ought to go.’
‘I know,’ she said, solving the problem as she had intended to solve it all along. ‘We’ll go together.’
The front door of Sophie’s house was unlatched. The door into her flat was propped open with a book. When she heard Guy’s step, she called in a sad little voice: ‘Come in, chéri.’ As he pushed wide the door, Harriet, behind him, could see Sophie sitting up in bed, a pink silk shawl round her shoulders. On the table beside her the picture that had been face downwards on Harriet’s first visit now stood upright. It was a photograph of Guy.
Despite the smallness of her down-drooping smile, Sophie was much restored. She put her head on one side, sniffed and began to speak – then she noticed Harriet. Her expression changed. She turned on Guy.
‘Your wife is a monster,’ she said.
Guy laughed at this statement, but it brought Harriet to a stop in the doorway. She said: ‘I’ll wait for you downstairs.’
She waited for about five minutes in the hallway of the house, then went out into the street. There she started to walk quickly, scarcely aware of the direction in which she went. For the first few hundred yards, feeling neither cold nor fear of the empty streets, she was carried on by a sense of injury that Guy should choose, after such a remark, to stay with Sophie: that he was, in fact, still with her.
Harriet was resolved not to go home. She found herself in the Calea Victoriei moving rapidly towards the Dâmboviţa, then she asked herself where she could go. In this country, where women went almost nowhere unescorted, her appearance, at this hour, luggageless, in an hotel would rouse the deepest suspicion. She might even be refused a room. She thought of the people she knew here – Bella, Inchcape, Clarence – and was disinclined to go to any of them with complaints about Guy. Inchcape might be sympathetic but would have no wish to be involved. Clarence would misunderstand the situation. Whever she went, she would take with her an accusation of failure against Guy’s way of life. She reflected that for her, and for Clarence, life was an involute process: they reserved themselves – and for what? With Guy it was a matter to be lived.
Contemplating in Clarence her own willingness to escape from living, she felt a revulsion from it. She had, she knew, done her worst with Sophie. She had made no attempt to flatter, she had not admitted herself to be vulnerable, she had not wanted Sophie’s assistance. She had made none of those emotional appeals to which Sophie, once put into a position of power, might have responded with emotion.
Had she, she wondered, lacked charity? Had Sophie had some justification in seeing her as a monster?
She had withheld herself. Now she could not defend herself. She turned and walked slowly back to Sophie’s house. She arrived at the doorstep as Guy came out. He took her hand and tucked it under his arm.
‘That was nice of you,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘I told her not to be ridiculous. She really is as big an ass as Bella, and she’s a great deal more of a nuisance.’
PART THREE
The Snow
14
The New Year brought the heavy snow. Day after day it clotted the air, gentle, silent, persistent as time. Those who walked abroad – and these now were only servants and peasants – were enclosed in flakes. The traffic crept about, feeling its way as in a fog. When the fall thinned, the distances, visible once more, were the colour of a bruise.
Those who stayed indoors were disturbed by the outer quiet. It was as though the city had ceased to breathe. After a few days of this, Harriet, hemmed in by her surroundings, ventured down the street, but her claustrophobia persisted outside in the twilit blanket of snow, and she lost her way. She returned to the flat and telephoned Bella, who suggested they go together to Mavrodaphne’s. Bella called for her in a taxi.
The two women had met several times since Christmas and a relationship that neither would have contemplated in England was beginning to establish itself. Harriet was becoming used to the limitations of Bella’s conversation and did not give it much attention. Bella was easy, if unstimulating, company, and Harriet was glad, in the prevailing strangeness, of a companion from a familiar world.
In the café, while Bella described the latest misdoings of her servants, Harriet gazed at the café window, through which there was nothing to be seen but the mazing, down-soft drift of snow. Occasionally a shadow passed through it, scarcely distinguishable as a cab, or a closed trǎsurǎ, or a peasant with a sack over his head. More often than not the cabs stopped at Mavrodaphne’s. The occupants, having sped the pavements, escaped the clamour of the beggars in the porch and entered the heady warmth with the modish air of hauteur. Turning their backs on the barbarities of their city, they saw themselves in Rome or Paris or, best of all, New York.
Bella raised her voice against Harriet’s inattention. ‘And,’ she said, ‘I have to keep all the food locked up.’
Recalled by Bella’s aggravated tone, Harriet said: ‘Why bother? Food is so cheap here. It’s less trouble to trust them.’ She regretted this remark as she made it. Tolerance, after all, should come of generosity, not expediency. Bella disapproved it for a different reason. She said:
‘That attitude is unfair to other employers. Besides, one gets sick of their pilfering. If you’d had as much as I’ve had …’
When advising and informing the newcomer, Bella was as smug as an elder schoolgirl patronising a younger. Now she was in the presence of wealthy Rumanians, she reverted to refinement. Harriet could hear in her voice – especially in phrases like ‘you daren’t give them an inch’, and ‘the better you treat them the more they take advantage’ – the exact inflections that had once made her aunt’s dicta so irritating. For some moments it recalled an odd sense of helplessness, then she suddenly interrupted it.