‘I haven’t got a pension,’ said Mrs Ramsden, ‘but I’ve got me savings. All invested here. I’ll stay here. Whatever happens, I’ll take me chance.’ A stout woman, noted for her enormous feathered hats, she was the most lively of the three. She had come to Bucharest when widowed, after the First World War. She had never gone home again. She frequently told the table: ‘I’m sixty-nine. You’d never believe it, but I am.’
Now she said: ‘When Woolley packed us all off last September, I was that home-sick, I cried my eyes out every night. Istanbul is a dirty hole. I’d never trust meself there again. Might end up in one of them hair-eems.’ She brought her hand down heavily on the knee of Miss Truslove and suddenly shouted: ‘Whoops!’
Miss Truslove was looking disturbed. In her mournful little voice, she said: ‘I wouldn’t care to stay on here, not with a lot of Germans about.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Ramsden, ‘you never know your luck.’
Galpin had at first seemed resentful of Mrs. Ramsden and her vitality. When she first settled herself at the table, her hat shifting and shaking as though barely anchored on her head, her blouse of shot-silk creaking as though about to split, he asked discouragingly: ‘No private pupils this afternoon, Mrs Ramsden?’ She answered briskly: ‘Not one. English is out these days. Everyone’s learning German.’
Now he turned on her with scorn: ‘You don’t imagine you can stay here under a German occupation, do you? Any English national fool enough to try it would find himself in Belsen double quick.’
At this Miss Truslove started sniffing, but as she searched for her handkerchief, she was distracted, as was Galpin, by the appearance of the Polish girl, Wanda.
Wanda had broken with Galpin. She had lately been seen driving with Foxy Leverett in his de Dion Bouton. People, surprised at this sight, sought to explain it away. Foxy, still a frequent companion of Princess Teodorescu, had, they said, been ordered to associate with Wanda and try to persuade her to moderate the irresponsible nonsense she was sending to her paper as news. Whatever their relationship, she had been much alone since Foxy had had to give his time to the play. Now here she was, turning up in the garden, like the rest of them.
‘I’ll be damned!’ said Galpin, his eyes staring out at Wanda so that the whole of the chocolate-brown pupil could be seen, merging at top and bottom into the bloodshot yellow of the sclerotic.
She had made something of an entry in a tight black dress and shoes with very high heels. Her bare back and arms were already burnt brown. Ignoring Galpin, she greeted Screwby. ‘Any news?’ she asked. There was none.
The women, recognising in her the same tense consciousness of peril that united them all, moved round to make room for her. She sat, leaning forward over the table, her brow in her hand, her lank hair falling about her, and stared at Screwby. She was a silent girl, whose habit it was to fix in this way any man who interested her. She asked: ‘What is going to happen? What are we going to do?’ as though Screwby had but to open his lips and their dilemma would be solved.
Screwby made no attempt to play the rôle allotted him. He grinned his ignorance. Galpin began to talk rather excitedly, trying to give the impression that Wanda’s entry had interrupted one of his stories. He started half-way through a story Harriet had heard from him several times – how, when a newspaper-man in Albania, he had attempted to break into the summer palace and interview the Queen, who had been newly delivered of a child.
‘I wasn’t going to be kept out by that ridiculous little toy army round the gates,’ he said.
‘And did you see her?’ Mrs Ramsden played up to him.
‘No. They threw me out three times. Me – who’d gone round Sussex collecting two pints of mother’s milk a day for the Ickleford quads.’
Wanda’s silent presence made Galpin’s talk more aggressive and grotesque. As he talked, he watched her, his eyes standing from his head like aniseed balls. She ignored him for an hour, then rose and went. He stared after her glumly. ‘Poor thing,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry for her. Really I do! She hasn’t a friend in the place.’
They stayed on in the garden until the evening, when the scent of lime was strongest. Galpin had his portable wireless-set and repeatedly tried to get the promised report of Churchill’s speech. The bats were darting about overhead. Mrs Ramsden bent down, frightened for her hat.
‘They have to be cut out if they get in,’ she said, adding: ‘But it’s not just them: it’s what they leave behind.’
The trees grew dark beneath a sky sheened like a silver plate. Unlike most other café gardens, the hotel garden was not illuminated. The only light came from the hotel windows. The possibilities of the garden had never been exploited. Grass grew in tufts from the pebbled floor. No one bothered to brush from the tables the withering lime-flowers. Except for a few clandestine Rumanian couples who sat where they would be least observed, the English usually had the place to themselves.
At last the speech began. The Rumanian couples rose out of the shadows and moved silently forward to hear Churchill promise that England would never surrender. ‘We shall fight on the beaches,’ he said. ‘We shall fight in the fields.’
Mrs Ramsden bowed her face down into her hands. Her hat fell off and rolled unnoticed under the table.
Each day the crowd round the German Bureau window saw the broad arrows of the German advance stretch farther into France. One crossed the Somme and veered south towards Paris. The spectators said that surely, some time soon, there must be a stop. No one could contemplate the loss of Paris.
Harriet passed the window on her way to Bella’s flat. She need not have gone up the Calea Victoriei or, going that way, she could have kept to the other pavement. Instead she brushed through the crowd, giving the arrows a glance which was meant to be indifferent, and went on with her head in the air.
Bella, as Harriet entered her drawing-room, cried: ‘What do you think?’ giving Harriet, for a second, a pang of hope, but Bella’s excitement was merely a state of mind produced by her success as Helen. All she had to say was: ‘They’ve still got that portrait of Chamberlain hanging up at the club. Him and his flower Safety. I called in the servants and ordered them to take it down at once. I made them put it face to the wall in the toilet.’
The dressmaker was delivering the women’s costumes, and Bella had insisted that Harriet come to see the final fitting.
The dress, made from cheap white voile from which peasant women made their blouses, was of classical simplicity. Bella had been displeased to find all the female characters were to dress alike. She wanted to have her own costume made, contemplating something rather fine in slipper satin. Now, having to put on the voile dress, she thrust out her lower lip and walked to and fro before the glass of her gigantic wardrobe, giving petulant little tugs at the bodice and skirt.
The dressmaker, on her knees, sat back on her heels and watched. She had been the cheapest Harriet could find – a tiny creature, very thin, smelling of mouldy bread. Her face, which had one cheek full and one caught-in like a deformed apple, was dark yellow and heavily moustached. She twitched nervously when Bella paused near her and, raising her hands appealingly, began to talk. Ignoring her, Bella said: ‘Well, all I can say is, we’re going to look like a lot of vestal virgins. Of course, I’ve got plenty of jewellery – but the others! I don’t know, I’m sure.’
‘Must you wear jewellery?’
‘My dear, I am Helen of Troy. I am a queen.’ She turned sideways, drew back her head and, with a stately and reflective air, observed the line of her fine bosom and her bare, round, white arm. The dress had an elegance and perfection scarcely to be found among the best English work: ‘I think we need a little colour – a square of chiffon. A big hankie, perhaps. A nice blue for me, or perhaps a gold. Other colours for the other girls.’