‘But the Rumanians would be bewildered.’
‘They’d love it. A new idea – that’s all they want.’
Having, with a few words, reduced the task to an absurdity, Guy swept off, leaving her with the sense that she had made a great deal of fuss about nothing.
Clarence offered to drive her wherever she wanted to go. One evening in early May they drove to a suburb where there was a factory that made theatrical tights. Harriet, when called for, found Clarence’s associate Steffaneski in the car. Clarence was combining the trip to the factory with some Polish business. The two passengers greeted one another rather blankly. Neither found the other easy company and each had regarded this occasion as his own. Clarence, who had nothing to say, seemed equally displeased with both of them. It was as though the presence of each had caused a rift between himself and the other. It occurred to Harriet that Clarence was the friend of the solitary personality, and he wanted to be the only friend. He was the friend of Harriet and the friend of Steffaneski – but not of both together. Siding, as he did, with the misfits, he was troubled now by not knowing with which to side. His face was glum.
As they drove out through the long grey low-built streets that stretched towards the country, Harriet, who thought the Count the least occupied of men, broke the silence by suggesting he might take part in the play.
He turned from her in morose scorn. ‘I have not,’ he said, ‘time for such things. I do not make play while the war is fought.’
‘But you can’t fight here.’
Steffaneski, suspecting he was being teased, gave an exasperated twitch of the lips.
In this area of Bucharest the buildings were of all wood. These were not the shacks of the very poor, but roomy, well-built shops and houses like those in a Middle West shanty town. The wide, unmade road, under water in spring, was still a quagmire, with stretches of standing water reddened by the evening sun.
The car rocked and squelched, then came to a standstill. Clarence pressed the accelerator. The wheels turned in the mud but did not move forward.
‘We’re here for the night,’ said Clarence.
‘Perhaps Count Steffaneski would get out and push,’ said Harriet.
The Count stared, unhearing, from the window. Clarence, unamused by Harriet’s humour, was becoming acutely irritable, when, unexpectedly, the wheels caught and the car lunged forward.
They found the address Harriet had been given. She had hoped for a theatrical workroom, a sort of studio perhaps, with something of the self-contained creative life she most missed in Bucharest. What she found was a large wooden hut like a garage. Inside there was a single room where a dozen peasants, some still at the level of peasant dress, were working on knitting machines. There was not even a chair to offer the customer. The light was failing. Some oil-lamps hung from the rafters and the air was heavy from a smoking wick.
A gaunt little man, wearing peasant trousers but a jacket that was part of an old morning suit, came forward, unsmiling, and raised his brows. As he stood beside Harriet, silent and expressionless, she could not tell whether or not she were conveying her needs to him. She had written down the sets of measurements in metres and, beside each, the colour required. When she finished speaking, he nodded. She could not believe he had grasped it all so quickly. When she tried to explain further, he bent, touched his ankle and drew his hand up to his waist.
‘Da, da, precis,’ she agreed.
He nodded again and waited for her to go.
She went, doubtfully.
‘All right?’ Clarence asked as he started the car again.
‘I don’t know.’ She could not believe that the man had grasped so rapidly what had been conveyed in very poor Rumanian.
On the way back, Clarence turned into an alleyway, a deep rift of mud, and stopped at a warehouse, another wooden hut, its doors held with a padlock. It housed the goods sent out from England for the relief of the Poles. Harriet, when she followed the men in, gazed about in wonder at the bales of linen, the sheets, blankets and pillows, the shirts and underwear, the crates of knitted garments.
‘What are you going to do with it all?’ she asked.
Clarence said: ‘That is what we have come here to decide.’
Harriet, wandering round and examining things, waited for a discussion to take place, but neither of the men said anything.
Harriet fingered a pile of shirts and suggested they could let Guy have some of them. ‘He only owns three,’ she said.
Clarence thrust out his lower lip, looking wary and important. After some reflection, he said: ‘I might lend him a few.’
‘Yes, do.’ Harriet began picking out the largest shirts.
‘Just a minute.’ Clarence strode over to her with an air of nervous decision, obviously afraid she would get the better of him, and said: ‘I will lend him two.’
She gave a laugh of derisive annoyance. ‘Really, Clarence, are you sure you can spare them?’ Clarence looked the more obstinate.
Steffaneski, consciously aloof from their quarrel, said: ‘Is it not to be decided what we do with this stuff?’
‘It might be sold to the Rumanian army,’ said Clarence.
The suggestion, tentative as it was, was accepted without hesitation: ‘Agreed. Now I wait in the car.’ Steffaneski strode out, leaving Harriet and Clarence to face one another, each in a state of sparking annoyance.
‘What about underwear?’ Harriet began turning over a pile of vests.
Clarence pushed her away: ‘I have to account for these things.’
‘Guy has almost no underwear.’
The more Harriet persisted, the more obstinate Clarence became; the more she felt his obstinacy, the more she persisted. At last, Clarence said: ‘I’ll lend him two vests and two pairs of pants.’
She accepted this offer defiantly, knowing he expected her to refuse.
When they left the warehouse, Clarence locked the doors ostentatiously. Harriet, smiling with anger, carried her prizes to the car, where Steffaneski, one shoulder hunched against a window, sat biting the side of his left thumb. He stared into the distance.
Returning to the city’s centre, no one had anything to say. When they reached the cross-roads and the statue of the boyar Cantacuzino, it was late twilight. The office workers were fighting their way on to the trams. In the Calea Victoriei the car was held up by the crowd round the window of the German Propaganda Bureau.
Harriet said: ‘There’s a new map in the window.’ Without speaking, Clarence stopped the car and got out. Rising tall and lean above the heads of the Rumanians, he stood for some moments and gazed into the window, then turned in a business-like way and opened the car door. ‘Well, it’s begun,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ Harriet asked.
‘Germany has invaded the Lowlands. They’ve overrun Luxembourg. They’re already inside Holland and Belgium. They claim they’re advancing rapidly.’
As he got into the car, neither Harriet nor Steffaneski spoke. Chilled with nervous excitement, she reflected that while they had been wrangling about shirts and underwear this news had been waiting like a tiger to pounce on them.
‘This comes of the folly of Belgium,’ said Steffaneski. ‘They would not permit a Maginot Line to the sea. Now’ – he struck his finger across his throat – ‘Belgium is kaput.’ He sounded more angry than anything else.
‘Not yet,’ said Harriet.
‘Wait. You know nothing. But I – I have seen the Germans advance.’
‘Yes, but not against British troops.’
‘Wait,’ said Steffaneski again, his face impassively grim.
Clarence hooted his way round the crowd. The windows of Inchcape’s office were dark. Clarence smiled at Harriet, reconciled to her in the exhilaration that comes when outside events take over one’s life. She smiled back.