She heard no more about the Force until a few weeks later, when Guy telephoned from the University to say he would not be home for supper. He had been called to a meeting.
‘Not one of Sheppy’s meetings, I hope?’ said Harriet.
Guy admitted it was, and added quickly that Clarence, who had refused to attend, had offered to take Harriet out to dinner. That, said Guy, would be nice for her. Clarence would take her to the new restaurant, Le Jardin, and Guy would meet them both later, in the English Bar.
Clarence called for Harriet while she was listening to the news. The Mannerheim Line had been breached but, except for the fighting on the Karelian peninsula, the war was at a standstill.
Clarence listened to such news as there was with a rather stern expression. He seemed to feel strain at being alone with Harriet, and Harriet, enjoying his embarrassment, talked vivaciously. She said that although there were people who still believed that ‘something must happen soon’, a good many now regarded the war as practically over. Anyway, no one gave it much thought these days. It had become like a background noise that could attract attention only by its cessation. The Jews were so confident, the black-market rate for sterling was lower than it had been before war started.
Clarence listened to all this with an occasional murmur, then picked up the book she had been reading. It was one of the D. H. Lawrence novels on which Guy was lecturing that term.
‘Kangaroo,’ he read out scornfully. ‘These modern novelists! Why is it that not one of them is really good enough? This stuff, for instance …’
‘I wouldn’t call Lawrence a modern novelist.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Clarence flipped impatiently through the pages. ‘All these dark gods, this phallic stuff, this – this fascism! I can’t stand it.’ He threw down the book and stared accusingly at her.
She took the book up. ‘Supposing you skip the guff, as you call it! Supposing you read what is left, simply as writing.’ She read aloud one of the passages Guy had marked. It was the description of the sunset over Manly Beach: ‘The long green rollers of the Pacific’, ‘the star-white foam’, ‘the dusk-green sea glimmered over with smoky rose’.
Clarence groaned through it, appalled at what was being imposed on him. ‘I know!’ he said, in agony, when she stopped. ‘All that colour stuff – it’s just so many words strung together. Anyone could do it.’
Harriet re-read the passage through to herself. For some reason, it did not seem so vivid and exciting as it had done before Clarence condemned it. She was inclined to blame him for that. She turned on him: ‘Have you ever tried to write? Do you know how difficult it is?’
Well, yes. Clarence admitted he had once wanted to be a writer. He did know it was difficult. He had given up trying because, after all, what was the point in being a second-rate writer? If one could not be a great writer – a Tolstoy, a Flaubert, a Stendhal – what was the point in being a writer at all?
Disconcerted, Harriet said lamely: ‘If everyone felt like that, there wouldn’t be much to read.’
‘What is there to read, anyway? Rubbish, most of it. Myself, I read nothing but detective novels.’
‘I suppose you do read Tolstoy and Flaubert?’
‘I did once. Years ago.’
‘You could read them again.’
Clarence gave another moan. ‘Why should one bother?’
‘What about Virginia Woolf?’
‘I think Orlando almost the worst book of the century.’
‘Really! And To the Lighthouse?’
Clarence wriggled in weary exasperation. ‘It’s all right – but all her writing is so diffused, so feminine, so sticky. It has such an odd smell about it. It’s just like menstruation.’
Startled by the originality of Clarence’s criticism, Harriet looked at him with more respect. ‘And Somerset Maugham?’ she ventured.
‘Goodness me, Harry! He’s simply the higher journalism.’
No one else had ever called Harriet ‘Harry’ and she did not like the abbreviation. She reacted sharply, saying: ‘Maybe Somerset Maugham isn’t very good, but the others are. So much creative effort has gone into their work – and all you can say is “Really!” and condemn them out of hand.’ She rose and put on her coat and fur cap. ‘I think we should go,’ she said.
Le Jardin, recently opened in a Biedermeier mansion, was the most fashionable of Bucharest restaurants and would remain so until the first gloss passed from its decorations. Situated in a little snow-packed square at the end of the Boulevard Brǎteanu, its blue neon sign shone out cold upon the cold and glittering world. The sky was a delicate grey-blue, clear except for a few tufts of cirrus cloud. The moon was rising behind the restaurant roof, on which the snow, a foot thick, gleamed like powdered glass.
The interior of Le Jardin was the same silver-blue as the out-of-doors. The house had been gutted to make one vast room, and the proprietor, breaking away from the tradition of crimson and gilt, had trimmed it in silver with hangings of powder-blue. These cool colours, more fitted for summer than winter, were made appropriate by the sultry warmth of the room. The restaurant’s décor had been described in the press as ‘lux nebun’ – a challenge to the war world in which it had opened. But there, Harriet noted on arrival, was the usual Rumanian sight of a fat official, with his hat on, packing cream cakes into his mouth.
As Harriet passed between the tables with Clarence, there was a little murmur of comment: first, that she should make this public appearance with someone other than her husband, then the common complaint that English teachers – they were all regarded as ‘teachers’ – could afford to come to a restaurant of this class. In Rumania a teacher was one of the lowest-paid members of the lower-middle class, earning perhaps four thousand lei a month. Here was proof that the English teachers were not teachers at all but, as everyone suspected, spies.
When Harriet and Clarence were settled on one of the blue velvet banquettes, Harriet returned to the subject of Clarence’s writing. For how long had he tried to write? What had he achieved? To which publisher had he sent the results? Clarence squirmed under these questions, shrugged and was evasive, then admitted he had produced very little. He had planned a novel and written six pages of synopsis, very carefully worked out, but it had got no further than that. He could not visualise scenes. He did not know how to bring his characters to life.
‘So you gave up? Then what did you do?’ Harriet asked, for Clarence was nearly thirty and must have some sort of career behind him.
‘I joined the British Council.’
‘You had a good degree?’
‘Quite good.’
He had been sent to Warsaw. Harriet questioned him about his two years there. Where Guy’s memories would have been all of the conditions of the country and its people, Clarence’s memories were personal, tender and sad. His face became wistful as he talked. Harriet, realising there was about him something poignant and unfulfilled, felt in sympathy with him.
In Poland he had fallen in love for the first time. He said: ‘It’s extraordinary to look back on the things that used to be important to one. I can remember a night in Warsaw … I can remember standing under a street lamp and turning a girl’s face to catch the light and shadow. As I did so, it all seemed significant. I don’t know why. It would mean nothing now. And I remember walking with her to the Vistula and seeing the broken ice on the water. And we went through streets where they were building new houses, with everything half finished and the pavements muddy, with planks across them. But she wouldn’t have me. She turned up at the office one day and said she was engaged to someone else. I believe she’d had this other man all along. I’ll never forget it.’