‘The Paris of the East,’ Harriet said, somewhat in ridicule, for they had disagreed as to the attractions of Bucharest. Guy, who had spent here his first year of adult freedom, living on the first money earned by his own efforts, saw Bucharest with a pleasure she, a Londoner, rather jealous of his year alone here, was not inclined to share.
‘What is it made of, the arch? Marble?’ she asked.
‘Concrete.’ It had been built previously by a fraudulent contractor who had used inferior cement. When it fell down, the contractor was put in prison and the arch re-erected to the glory of Greater Rumania – the Rumania that came into existence in 1919 when the Old Kingdom acquired, as a reward for entering the war on the side of the victors, parts of Russia, Austria and Hungary. ‘And so,’ said Guy, ‘like most people who did well out of the war, she is now a nice comfortable shape.’
While Guy talked, young men howled past the trǎsurǎ in racing cars, each with a foot on his accelerator, a hand thumping up and down on the hooter. The horse – revealed by the street lights as a phantom horse, a skeleton in a battered hide – was not disturbed. Equally undisturbed was the coachman, a vast cottage loaf in a velvet robe.
Guy whispered: ‘A Skopit. One of the sights of the city. The Skopits belong to a Russian sect. They believe that to find grace we must all be completely flat in front, women as well as men. So, after they’ve reproduced themselves, the young people hold tremendous orgies, working themselves into frenzies in which they mutilate themselves.’
‘Oh!’ said Harriet. She gazed in wonder at the vast velvet backside of the eunuch before her, then she gazed out at the dark reaches of the Muntenia plain, on which the city stood like a bride-cake on a plate. ‘A barbarous country,’ she said.
They had now passed the last of the houses. On either side of the road, adazzle beneath the dark, star-lighted violet of the sky, were the open areas owned by the restaurants that had no gardens in the town. Each spring, when the weather settled, they shut their winter premises and brought their chairs and tables up the Chaussée. Within these enclosures the limes and chestnuts, hose-drenched each morning, spread a ceiling of leaves.
When the trǎsurǎ stopped at Pavel’s, one of the largest of the open-air restaurants, there could be heard above the traffic the shrill squeak of a gypsy violin. Within the shrub hedge of the garden, all was uproar.
The place was crowded. The silver-gilt glow from the globes set in the trees lit in detail the wrinkled tree-trunks, the pebbled ground, and the blanched faces of the diners that, damp with the excitement of food, gazed about them with deranged looks, demanding to be served. Some rapped with knives on wine-glasses, some clapped their hands, some made kissing noises at the waiters, while others clutched at every passing coattail, crying: ‘Domnule, domnule!’ for in this country even the meanest was addressed as ‘lord’.
The waiters, sweating and disarranged, snapped their civilities and made off before orders were complete. The diners shouted to the empty air, sometimes shaking their fists as they seethed in their seats, talking, gesturing, jerking their heads this way and that. It was an uproar in which there was little laughter.
‘They all seem very cross,’ said Harriet, who, caught into the atmosphere, began to feel cross herself.
A waiter, flapping at the Pringles like an angry bird, conveyed to them the fact they were blocking the way to the kitchen building. They stood aside and watched him as he rushed to an open window and bawled into the kitchen’s bang and clatter. The cooks, scowling in the heat from the giant grill, ignored him. The waiter brought his fists down on the sill, at which one of the cooks lunged at the window, flinging himself half from it as an enraged dog flings himself the length of his chain. He struck the waiter, who fell gibbering.
‘It’s all just Rumanian animation,’ said Guy as he led Harriet to an alcove where the foods were displayed beneath a canopy of vines.
The heart of the display was a rosy bouquet of roasts, chops, steaks and fillets frilled round with a froth of cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets of artichokes, small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches, apples and grapes. On one side there were French cheeses; on the other tins of caviare, grey river fish in powdered ice, and lobsters and crayfish groping in dark waters. The poultry and game lay unsorted on the ground.
‘Choose,’ said Guy.
‘What can we afford?’
‘Oh, anything. The chicken is good here.’ He pointed in to the grill, where spitted birds were changing from gold to deeper gold.
As he spoke a woman standing nearby turned, looked accusingly at him, and said in English: ‘You are English, yes? The English professor?’
Guy agreed that he was.
‘This war,’ she said, ‘it is a terrible thing for Rumania.’ Her husband, who was standing apart, gazed away with an air of non-participation. ‘England has guaranteed us,’ said the woman, ‘England must protect us.’
‘Of course,’ said Guy as though offering her his own personal guarantee of protection. He glanced over at the husband, smiling to introduce himself, and at once the man started into ingratiating life, bowing and beaming at the Pringles.
‘Even if we are not attacked,’ said the woman, impatient of this interruption, ‘there will be many scarcities,’ she looked down at her high-heeled shoes, shoes that seemed too small for the legs above them, and said: ‘In the last war there were many scarcities. I remember my father paid for me two thousand lei for shoes of felt. I wear them to school the one day only, and when I return, no soles left. And food! How terrible if Rumania were short of food!’
Guy turned, laughing, towards the alcove. ‘Could Rumania be short of food?’
‘No? You think not?’ She paused and glanced at her husband. ‘It is true,’ she said, ‘we have much food.’ The husband shrugged and smiled again.
At last Guy was released. Harriet, who had been watching the activity of the restaurant, said: ‘There are no free tables.’
‘Oh yes, there are.’ Firmly, short-sightedly, Guy led her to a table marked ‘Rezervat’.
‘Nu nu, domnule.’ The head waiter pointed them to a vacant table beside the orchestra.
Harriet shook her head: ‘The noise would be intolerable.’ The man grumbled.
‘He says,’ said Guy, ‘we are fortunate to find any table in a time of war.’
‘Tell him it’s our war, not his. We must have a better table.’
The head waiter flung out his hands in a distracted way and called to an assistant to take charge of the Pringles. The assistant, dodging like a rugger player through the hazards of the garden, led them to a platform where half-a-dozen privileged tables were raised above the rest. He whipped a ‘reserved’ notice from one and presented it like a conjurer completing a trick. Guy handed him a bundle of small notes.
Now, seated as on a headland, the Pringles gazed across the surge at a wrought-iron cage, lighted with ‘fairy’ lights and hung with green branches and gilded oranges, where the orchestra laboured to be heard above the general din. Squeaking and pompomming at an insane pitch, the instruments produced an effect not so much of high spirits as of tearing rage.
Guy tilted forward his glasses and tried to focus the spectacle before him. He was, Harriet knew, happy to be in this advantageous position even though he would not have demanded it for himself. In appreciation, he stretched his hand to her across the table. As she touched it, she saw they were being observed from the next table by a man who, meeting her glance, smiled and looked away.