‘I’m sorry,’ said Harriet.
‘Why be sorry? At least I was alive then. I could feel.’ He reflected on this, then said: ‘I’ve never had the woman I wanted. I always seem to want bitches and they always ill-treat me.’
‘What about your fiancée?’
He shrugged. ‘She’s a good girl, but, really, she stirs nothing in me. With her, there’s nothing to fight against. She’s just a punching bag. So am I, for that matter. Anyway, who knows what will happen? The last time I wrote to her, I said: “It may be ten years before I get home again.”’
‘You think that? And Brenda is willing to wait?’
‘I suppose so.’ Clarence sighed deeply. ‘But I did advise her to marry someone else.’
‘After Poland, where did you go?’
‘Madrid. I was there when the civil war broke out. The British were being evacuated and I jumped a lorry going to Barcelona. I offered myself to the International Brigade, but I was pretty sick. I’d caught a chill on the way. I’ve always had this trouble with my chest. When I got better, I was put in charge of a refugee camp, where I was more use than I would have been in the lines. But I wanted to fight. Not fighting was a sort of sacrifice.’
‘Anyway, it let you preserve your integrity intact.’
Clarence kept his head hanging for some moments, then, hurt, he said quietly: ‘I might have expected you to say something like that.’ He suddenly gave a half-laugh of satisfaction that she had fulfilled his worst expectations, then he said: ‘Someone had to look after the camp.’
‘A woman could have done the job.’
He raised his brows, considered this, then drawled: ‘No, not really,’ but he did not enlarge on his denial.
‘So there were no bitches there!’
‘Oh yes, there was one – a magnificent bitch. An English girl looking after a crowd of evacuee children. She did exactly what she liked. She slept with anyone she wanted. Even with me. Yes, one night she pointed at me and said: “I’ll have you,” and I followed her out.’ Clarence sat for a while silent, smiling at the memory of it.
‘Nothing came of that, I suppose?’
‘What could come of it? She had a Spaniard she was mad about. One of the English fellows went on leave to Paris and she ordered him to bring her back an evening dress. When he brought the dress, he gave a party, thinking she would dance with him: but she just ignored him and danced all night with the Spaniard. I like tough women. Women of character.’
‘You like being pushed around.’
‘Not necessarily.’ He sat withdrawn for a while, before he said: ‘In Spain there was colour and heat and danger. Things were significant there. Life should be like that.’
‘There is danger here.’
‘Oh!’ He shrugged his contempt of the present.
Throughout the meal Clarence pursued his memories, that were all much alike. Contemplating those worlds of delight from which he felt himself excluded, he said several times: ‘Life should be like that.’ When he had talked himself out and was waiting for the bill, Harriet asked him: ‘You like feeling dissatisfied with yourself. Why is that?’
Clarence stuck out his lower lip but did not reply.
‘For you do like it,’ she insisted. ‘You enjoy revealing your worst aspects.’
He said: ‘We all get corrupted. Even Guy.’
‘In what way is Guy corrupted?’
‘Before he married he owned hardly anything. He had no room of his own, not even a cupboard. People used to put him up: they loved having him. He didn’t mind where he slept. He’d sleep on the floor. Now you’re surrounding him with bourgeois comforts. You’re corrupting him.’
‘I thought he used to share a flat with you.’
‘Well, he did last spring, but when he first came here he had literally nothing. I’ve never seen a man with so few possessions.’
‘Now you’re blaming him for having a home like everyone else.’
The waiter arrived. Clarence, as he started to settle the bill, repeated obstinately: ‘You’re corrupting him.’
Harriet said: ‘He must have wanted to be corrupted or he would never have got himself married. A single man can go round sleeping on floors. A married couple are less welcome.’
Clarence did not reply. When they left the restaurant, Harriet realised he was rather drunk. She suggested they leave the car and walk to the hotel. He replied brusquely: ‘I drive best like this,’ and shot them with a series of violent movements round the corner and across the square. They jerked to a standstill outside the Athénée Palace.
They were late, but Guy was not in the bar and Albu had seen nothing of him. Harriet and Clarence decided to wait for him. The journalists – only a handful of whom were still in Bucharest – were in the telephone boxes in the hall. Harriet, alert now for the excitement of alarm, said: ‘I believe something has happened.’
‘What could happen?’ Clarence was gloomily ordering brandy.
Yakimov stood alone at the bar, holding an empty glass. Harriet was careful not to meet his gaze, but she had noticed a change in him. He was a down-at-heel, uncared-for figure very different from that she had met first in the garden restaurant. Then he had been allowed to dominate the scene, now it did not seem possible he could dominate anything. He was sallow, rheumy, crumbled – a man in defeat. When he sidled up to Harriet saying: ‘Dear girl, how nice to see a human face,’ he looked so abject that she had not the heart to turn her back on him.
Drooping against the bar, holding the empty glass out at an angle that prevented its being overlooked, he sighed and said: ‘Haven’t been feeling too good. Bitter weather. Tells on your poor old Yaki.’
Harriet asked coldly if he had seen Guy. He shook his head.
‘Has anything happened?’
‘Not that I know of, dear girl.’ He glanced over his shoulder, then, stepping nearer, confided despondently: ‘Just had m’head bitten off by m’old friend, Prince Hadjimoscos. He was off to some party or other. I said: “Take me along, dear boy,” and what d’you think he said? “You’re not invited.” Not invited! I ask you! In a town like this. But I don’t let it worry me. It’s just anti-British feeling. It’s growing, dear girl. I can feel it. Haven’t been a war correspondent for nothing. They’re beginning to think the Allies are too far away.’
‘I’m surprised they didn’t think it long ago.’
Albu had put two glasses of brandy on the counter. Yakimov eyed them, and Clarence, with resigned annoyance, asked him if he would take a drink.
‘Wouldn’t say “No”, dear boy. Whisky for me.’
Having accepted his drink, he began to talk. Veering between complaint and a tolerant acceptance of suffering, he described how his friends Hadjimoscos, Horvath and Palu had all been horrid to him. There was only one explanation of it – anti-British feeling. After a while, realising that this despondent talk was not holding his audience, he made a visible attempt to pull himself together and give some entertainment in return for his drink.
‘Went to see Dobson this morning,’ he said. ‘Heard most amusing story. Foxy Leverett came out of Capşa’s last night, saw the German Minister’s Mercedes parked by the kerb, got into his Dion-Bouton, backed down the road, then raced forward and crashed the Mercedes. Devil of a crash, I’m told. When the police came up, Foxy said: “You can call it provoked aggression.”’
As he finished this story, the journalists began to return. Looking at the Polish girl who had entered with Galpin, he said, half to himself: ‘There’s that dear girl!’ His large eyes fixed on Wanda, he bent towards Harriet and said: ‘You’ve heard that Galpin’s got her attached to some English paper?’ Yakimov’s tone subtly expressed derogation of the sort of paper that would employ Wanda. ‘Charming girl, but so irresponsible. Sends home all sorts of rumours and gossip, doesn’t care where she picks up the stuff …’ His voice faded as the two approached.