She went to the arm-chair where the red kitten lay sleeping, and, as though to assert the true seat of her compassion, she held it to her face, saying: ‘I love you.’ She kissed it wildly. ‘And I don’t love anyone else,’ she said.
20
The thaw had reached the mountain village of Pre-deal just before the Pringles. The snow was wet and sliding wetly down from the rock faces above the houses. The hotels were emptying as the skiers went to the higher alps. On Easter Saturday the rain began.
Guy cared for none of this. He intended, he said, to produce a play and the choice was among Macbeth, Othello and Troilus and Cressida, copies of which he had brought with him. He had spoken of this intention during the winter, but Harriet had hoped nothing would come of it. Now, she realised, it had attained reality for him.
‘I shall put it on at the National Theatre,’ he said.
She looked at Troilus and Cressida and saw it contained twenty-eight speaking parts. Dismayed, caught into the difficulties of such a production as into the toils of a prophetic dream, she tried to reason with him, but he simply laughed, seeing no difficulties at all.
She said: ‘Very few of the students are good enough to play Shakespeare.’
‘Oh, they’ll only take minor parts. There are other people – friends, the chaps at the Legation …’
‘Do you really think the Legation men will have time for amateur theatricals?’
Guy merely replied: ‘There’ll be nothing amateur about my production.’
‘And the costumes! The expense, the work – and then, perhaps, no one will come.’ She spoke with an anguish which made him laugh at her.
‘It will be tremendous fun,’ he said. ‘Everyone will come to it. You wait and see. It will be a great success.’
His confidence reassured her, but at the same time she suffered the possibility of failure. She tried to persuade him to moderation: ‘Why not just do a reading in the lecture hall?’
‘Oh no. We must do the thing in style. Rumanians only respond to snob appeal.’
‘And when are you thinking of starting it?’
‘As soon as we get back.’
It was late afternoon when the Pringles returned to their Bucharest flat. Two days before they had sent Yakimov a warning telegram. When they entered the sitting-room, there was no sign of him.
‘There you are!’ Guy congratulated himself. ‘He’s gone. I knew we’d have no trouble with him.’
Harriet, not so sure, went into the bedroom. She was stopped as she entered by its heavy, unfamiliar smell. The curtains were pulled close. She threw them open. The windows were shut. She opened them, then, looking round at the disordered room, saw on the bed, cocooned in blankets, huddled knees to chin, head buried, Yakimov, in the depths of sleep. She went and shook him angrily.
‘Wake up.’
He came to consciousness slowly. She pulled the covers from his face and one eye looked at her with an injured expression.
‘Didn’t you get our telegram?’ she asked.
He dragged himself up, trying to smile. ‘Dear girl, how delightful to see you back! Did you enjoy your trip? Tell Yaki all about it.’
‘We expected you would be gone before we returned.’
‘Yaki is going: going this very day, dear girl.’ His face, swollen and damp from sleep, the skin pink like scar tissue, turned resentfully to the open window. ‘Dreadfully chilly,’ he said.
‘Then get up and dress. The bed linen will have to be changed.’
Wincing at the cold, Yakimov came from under the covers, revealing pyjamas, torn and very dirty, made of flame-coloured crêpe de Chine. ‘Sick man,’ he murmured as he found, and tremulously covered himself with, a tarnished dressing-gown of gold brocade. ‘Better take a bath.’ He hurried off and shut himself in the bathroom.
Despina had appeared by now, expressing delight at the Pringles’ return, but holding up her hands to warn her mistress that there had been catastrophe in her absence. The red kitten was dead.
‘No!’ Harriet cried, Yakimov and every other annoyance forgotten in the face of this news.
Despina, nodding in sombre sympathy, related how the kitten had died. One morning, when she was cleaning the room, it had gone on to the balcony and run along the balustrade to the balcony of the next-door flat. There the servant (‘a Rumanian, of course,’ said Despina meaningfully) had hissed at it and flicked it back with a duster. Startled, it had lost its footing and fallen nine floors to the cobbles below. Despina went down and found it dead. It had, she was sure, died instantly.
Harriet wept. The loss seemed to her unendurable. She stood crouched together, weeping with intent bitterness, in agony, as though the foundations of her life had been taken from her. Guy watched her helplessly, amazed at so much grief.
‘And the servant did it!’ she burst out at last. ‘The beastly peasant.’
Guy remonstrated: ‘Darling, really! The girl didn’t realise what she was doing.’
‘That’s the trouble. They have the equipment of humans and the understanding of beasts. That is what one hates.’ She wept again. ‘My kitten, my poor kitten!’ After a while, she blew her nose and asked: ‘And where was Yakimov when it happened?’
‘Ah, that one!’ Despina spoke scornfully. ‘He was asleep.’
‘He would be asleep.’ Harriet’s anger with the peasant servant was now carried over to Yakimov and Despina tried to divert her by encouraging it.
‘What has he done,’ she asked, ‘but eat, eat, eat and, sleep, sleep, sleep!’ She had, she said, spent all the housekeeping money the Pringles had left with her. She had managed to obtain credit at a shop where she was known to have English employers, but the credit was limited. On Easter Sunday Yakimov had invited in guests – another Prince and a Count – and had demanded a fine meal. Despina, afraid for the honour of the Pringles, was at her wits’ end. She had gone to Domnul Professor Inchcape and borrowed two thousand lei.
‘Did you tell him why you needed the money?’ Harriet asked.
Despina nodded.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He laughed.’
‘I bet he did.’
Despina broke in with another grievance, speaking so rapidly that Harriet could not follow her. Guy translated in a deprecating tone: ‘He wanted her to wash some clothes. She refused.’
‘Good for her.’
‘A mountain of clothes,’ cried Despina.
‘He’s leaving today,’ Harriet promised her and sent her to make tea.
When the tea was brought in, Yakimov appeared, dressed. His demeanour was so nervous that Harriet could say nothing. Despina had bought some iced cakes for the home-coming and he ate his way through them with absentminded sadness. After tea he sat on, huddled over the fire. Harriet, longing to see the back of him, asked where he had found a room.
‘Haven’t found one yet, dear girl.’
‘You’ve left it very late.’
‘Not been fit to trudge around.’
‘Aren’t you going now?’
He answered brokenly: ‘Where is poor Yaki to go?’
Despina was working in the bedroom. Harriet, half imagining Yakimov might take himself off in her absence, went to speak to her. A few minutes later Guy came in and spoke to her, quietly and urgently: ‘Darling, be charitable.’
At the word, something turned over inside Harriet in self-accusation, yet she said: ‘This is my home. I can’t share it with someone I despise.’