Harriet was hurt by his coldness: ‘But aren’t we going to walk in the park?’
‘I won’t have time. I have a students’ meeting. David will be in the Doi Trandafiri at one. You can come there if you like.’
When he had gone, Harriet, more desolate than at any time before her marriage, picked up a red kitten that was now her companion in the flat, and held it for comfort to her throat.
The kitten had been a stray, found wandering one night in the snow. Guy thought it might be one of the wild cats that lived in the half demolished buildings in the square, but it had been a long way from the buildings. The Pringles took it home. It became at once Harriet’s cat, her baby, her totem, her alter ego. When anyone else picked it up, it turned into a mad little bundle of pins. Guy was frightened of it, and the kitten, sensing that it had the upper hand with him, would bite him savagely. When he was seated, forgetful of it, it would fly up the back of his chair and land, all teeth and claws, in the thickness of his hair. He would cry for Harriet to remove it.
Guy applauded Harriet, who, picking up the kitten with all the confidence in the world, was never bitten or scratched. ‘The thing,’ she said, ‘is not to be nervous.’ To the kitten she said: ‘You may bite other people, but I’m different. You don’t bite me,’ and the kitten, fixing her with its curious stare, seemed to realise they met on equal terms.
Guy, though he remained nervous of it, was proud of the little creature that changed into a fury in his hands. He admired its red-gold colour and the way it would hurtle like a flying cat from one end of the flat to the other. Despina, always eager to echo admiration, said it was a most exceptional cat in every way. If the Pringles had to leave Rumania, she would take it and care for it herself.
Harriet, standing now gazing through the French-windows at the snow-crowned palace, imagining herself abandoned by Guy, felt for the kitten a passion of tenderness as though it were the only love left to her. She said to it: ‘I love you. I love you with all my heart.’ The kitten seemed to take on a look of serious enquiry. ‘Because you are wild,’ she added, ‘because you are warm; because you are living.’ And, of course, because Guy had turned against her.
She reflected that he had asked Klein to try and discover what had happened to Sasha Drucker and because of this was meeting him with David at the Doi Trandafiri. He had never, as she felt inclined to do, let the matter drop. He was faithful to his friends, but (she told herself) indifferent to her. All these people – David, Klein, the Druckers, Dubedat and a host of others – were his faction: he bound them to himself. She had no one but her little red cat.
Almost at once, she revolted against the situation. Putting the cat down, she dialled Clarence’s number at the Propaganda Bureau and said to him: ‘Guy was taking me for a walk in the park, but he has had to go to a meeting. Won’t you take me?’
‘Why, yes of course I will.’ Clarence sounded only too glad of an excuse to leave his office. He came round at once for her and drove her to the park.
It was the beginning of March. The wind was relaxing a little. More and more people were walking abroad, and once again nurses were bringing children to play in the open air. No new snow had fallen for two weeks, but the old snow, blackened and glacial, lingered on. It was lingering too long. People were tired of it.
As Harriet walked with Clarence along the path that lay under Inchcape’s balcony, they looked up and saw the summer chairs and flower-baskets heaped with snow. Icicles hung firm as a fringe of swords from every edge. Yet there was a smell in the air of coming spring. Any day now rain would fall instead of snow, and the thaw would begin.
When they reached the dove-cotes, they stopped to watch the apricot-coloured doves that were already perking up their bedraggled tail-feathers, dipping their heads and languishing their soft, gold-glinting necks from side to side. The air was full of their cooing. Behind them the snow was sliding from the branches of a weeping willow. A false acacia, buried all winter, was appearing again, hung over with pods that looked like old banana skins.
Under the chestnut trees by the lake some children were feeding the pigeons. A solitary salesman, with nuts and sesame cakes, stood with his hands under the arms of his short frieze jacket, and slowly raised one knee at a time in a standstill march, his feet so bound with rags he seemed to have gout in both of them. The children were bundles of fur. The little girls wore ear-rings; they had necklaces and brooches over the white fur of their coats and bracelets over the cuffs of their fleecy gloves. A little boy with a gold-topped cane struck the ground authoritatively, agitating the pigeons that fluttered up and, after flying a half-circle of protest, settled down quickly before the food could disappear. Between bites, they moaned and did a little love-making.
Suddenly excited by the coming spring, Harriet felt her quarrel with Guy was of no importance at all. As they crossed the bridge, from which they could see the dusty ice of the waterfall, she paused and leant on the rail and said: ‘Everything is wonderful. I want … I want to be …’
Clarence concluded smugly: ‘What you are not?’
‘No. What I am. The “I” that is obscured by my own feminine silliness. In some ways, I suppose I am just as absurd as Sophie or Bella.’
Clarence laughed. ‘I suppose you are. Women are like that, and one likes them like that.’
‘No doubt you do. But I don’t imagine I exist to enhance your sense of superiority. I exist to satisfy my own demands on myself, and they are higher than yours are likely to be. If you don’t like me as I am, I don’t care.’
Clarence was unruffled. ‘You mean, you do care,’ he said, ‘that’s the trouble. Women want to be liked. They can never be themselves.’
‘And you, my poor Clarence, can never be anything but yourself.’ She moved to the other side and looked to the widening lake, from which the snow had been swept. The restaurant was now no more than a cape of snow, but someone had crossed it – the footsteps were cleanly cut – and brought out the wireless set. It was playing across the ice. The music was a Russian waltz and there were half a dozen skaters pressing forward against the wind, turning and lifting feet to the waltz rhythm. This end of the lake was so overhung with trees that it seemed enclosed, like a room. The branches, lacy with frost, glimmered an unearthly silver-white against the pewter colours of ice and sky.
Clarence crossed over to her. Staring down at the scored and riven surface of the lake, he said soberly: ‘There are things one can never leave behind.’
‘Such as?’
‘One’s childhood. One can never recover from that.’
As they turned back on their tracks, she knew he wanted her to question him, and asked, not very willingly: ‘What sort of childhood had you?’
‘Oh, a perfectly ordinary one – at least, it would have seemed ordinary to anyone outside it. My father was a clergyman.’ After a pause, he added: ‘And a sadist.’
‘You really mean that? A sadist?’
‘Yes.’
The wind was behind them now. Released from its stinging onslaught, they walked slowly, feeling almost warm. Harriet did not know what to say to Clarence, who looked sombre and in-drawn, possessed, it seemed, by the memory of childhood as by the memory of an old injustice. She would have chosen to say: ‘Don’t think about it: don’t talk about it,’ but, of course, the thing he needed was to talk. She had a pained sense that something was about to be inflicted on her.
‘But worse than that – worse than my father, I mean – was life at school. My father sent me there because the headmaster was a believer in corporal punishment. He believed in it, too.’