Guy was not much interested when Harriet described the sense of grievance in the city. His worries were elsewhere. There was, she thought, a sumptuous aloofness about his manner these days. His preoccupation was the deeply contented preoccupation of the creator: he was not to be shaken by trivialities. Even Inchcape, coming in one breakfast time – his usual time for unexpected visits – could rouse little curiosity in Guy, although he made it evident that his news was likely to please Guy less than it pleased him.
He would not sit down, but strolled about the room laughing in high delight at what he had to tell. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Well, well!’
The Pringles, knowing that, given encouragement, he would only procrastinate further, waited in silence to hear it.
At last he relented. ‘You’ve heard what’s happened to your friend Sheppy?’ he asked.
They shook their heads.
‘Ha!’ squawked Inchcape; then, coming to it at last: ‘He’s been arrested.’
‘No!’ said Harriet.
‘Yes. Down by the Danube. The ass was caught with the gelignite on him.’
‘Trying to blow up the Iron Gates?’
‘Something like that. They were caught in a river-side bar, shouting drunk, talking quite openly about bringing Danube shipping to a standstill. They imagined, because Rumania is supposed to be a British ally, the Danube bargemen would be happy to help sabotage their own livelihood. What a pack of fools! Anyway, they’re all under lock and key now. “A fair cop,” I believe the expression is.’
‘Who got caught with him? Anyone we know?’
‘No, none of the local conscripts were there; only the top brass. This was Sheppy’s first expedition – and his last.’ Inchcape slapped his thigh, crowing at the thought of it. ‘The first and last sally of Sheppy’s Fighting Force.’
Harriet smiled at Guy, but Guy might have been a thousand miles removed from the whole matter. She asked Inchcape: ‘What will become of them?’
‘Oh!’ Inchcape twisted his mouth down in his ironical smile. ‘No doubt the F.O. will get them out. They’re much too valuable to lose.’
Rumania did not want a diplomatic incident just then. Sheppy and his ‘henchmen’ were flown back to England. After that came official denial that he had ever existed. No saboteur, it was stated, could slip past the net spread wide by Rumania’s magnificent body of security police. But the story had got around and it added to the general sense of insecurity and victimisation. The press began to write openly of the injustices being suffered by a peaceful nation in someone else’s war.
Harriet could now read enough in the Rumanian papers to realise how rapidly Rumania’s too distant allies were passing out of favour. No one had been reassured by Chamberlain’s declaration that ‘Hitler has missed the bus’. If it were true that England was now an impregnable fortress, then ‘tant pis pour les autres’ said L’Indépendence Romaine. The fact that Germany, without making any move, was now receiving seventy per cent of all Rumanian exports was not, said Timpul, any cause for self-congratulation. Germany’s demands would increase with her needs. What she was not given she would come and take. Universul wrote slightingly of those who used Rumania in time of peace but in war-time not only abandoned her defenceless, but sought to sabotage her resources. When, oh when, they all wanted to know, could the great, generous-hearted Rumanian people, now left to buy off the enemy as best they might, again look forward to those summers of joyous frivolity they had known before this senseless war began?
Harriet, a member of an unfavoured nation, felt shut out from Guy’s world to face the painful situation alone. With little else to do, she often dropped in at the Athénée Palace to look at the English papers. They were exceptionally dull, concerned usually with some argument about mine-laying in Norwegian waters.
The hotel was as dull as the papers. It was an inert period between seasons: a time of no news when the journalists were elsewhere. Nothing was happening in Bucharest. Nothing, it seemed, was happening anywhere in the world. And, despite all the apprehension, it was likely enough nothing would happen.
But in Bucharest, anyway, apprehension was not groundless. The political atmosphere was changing. A notice appeared under the glass of the café tables to say it was forbidden under threat of arrest to discuss politics. And arrest, it was said, might lead one to the new concentration camp being organised on the German model by Guardists trained in Dachau and Buchenwald. People said the camp was hidden somewhere in the remote Carpathians. No one could say exactly where.
One showery morning, as she came from the hotel, Harriet was struck by the appearance of a young man sheltering beneath the lime trees that over-reached the garden wall.
The rain had stopped. The young leaves flashed their green against a sky of indigo cloud. The cloud was breaking. A gleam touched the wet tarmac. The young man, although neither beggar nor peasant, remained by the wall with nothing to do apparently but stand there. He was dressed in the city grey much worn by the middle classes, but he was unlike any middle-class Rumanian Harriet had ever seen. He was hard and thin. His was a new sort of face in this town. Looking at his hollowed cheeks, meeting his unfriendly gaze, she told herself he must be one of the Guardist youths newly returned from Germany. He looked at the moment not so much dangerous as ill-at-ease. Here he was, returned to a city grown unfamiliar to him, a destroyer, perhaps, but for the moment powerless.
After she had seen this one, she began to see others like him. They stood about the streets, their pallid, bony faces sometimes scarred like the faces of German duellists. They watched the pampered crowds with the contempt, and uncertainty, of the deprived. They were waiting as though they knew their day would come.
To Guy, Harriet said sombrely: ‘They’re a portent. The fascist infiltration.’
‘They’re probably not even Guardists,’ Guy said.
‘Then what are they?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
He was cutting down Ulysses’s speeches in his copy of Troilus and Cressida, giving all his mind to the job, determined not to let outside things distract him.
Harriet had been comforted a little by Clarence’s indignation when he found she was no longer in the cast. He left a rehearsal to telephone her, vehemently demanding: ‘Harry, what is this little bitch doing in your part? Have you walked out of the show?’
‘No, I was put out.’
‘Why?’
‘Guy said he couldn’t work with me. He said I didn’t take him seriously.’
‘Why should you? It’s only a footling end-of-term show, anyway. If you’re not in it, I don’t want to be in it.’
Harriet reacted sharply to this. It was important to her that Guy’s project should succeed. ‘You must stay in,’ she insisted. ‘He will need everyone he can get. And it will probably be quite good.’
Clarence, who had been given the sizeable part of Ajax, did not argue about this, but grumbled: ‘It’s awful having Sophie around. She’s beginning to queen it insufferably.’ He said he had no intention of attending all the rehearsals. Between his work for Inchcape and his work with the Poles, he was much too busy.