‘I expect it would have been the same whatever happened. You offer yourself to be corrupted.’
He considered this in silence for some moments, then concluded: ‘Anyway, I’m lost. I let everyone down. I’d even let Guy down.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Why are you so sure?’
‘You don’t mean enough to him.’
‘Hah!’ said Clarence in sombre satisfaction that she should diminish him in this way.
The others had come to a stop at the gate. Seeing Harriet and Clarence appear, they were about to pass through when someone darted out of the shadows and accosted them. David and Klein went on, but Guy remained talking to the newcomer.
Clarence distastefully asked: ‘What lame duck has Guy picked up now? Is it a beggar?’
‘It doesn’t look like a beggar,’ Harriet said. Despite their dissension, she and Clarence were at once united in disapproval of Guy’s readiness to encourage everyone and anyone.
As soon as they were within earshot, Guy called excitedly to Harriet: ‘Who do you think this is?’
Harriet did not know and she could see no reason for excitement. The man, about whom nothing was familiar, wore the decayed and dirty uniform of a conscript. When she had seen him moving in the distance, she had thought he was young. Now, in the uncertain light from the main road, he had an appearance of decrepitude found in poverty-stricken old age.
He was tall, skeletal, narrow-shouldered and stooped like a consumptive. His head, that had been shaved, was beginning to show a greyish stubble. The face, grey-white, with cheeks clapped in on either side of a prominent nose, would have seemed the face of a corpse had not the close-set, dark eyes been fixed on her, alive in their apprehensive anguish of need.
She was repelled by such misery. She wanted to go out of sight of it. She shook her head.
‘But, darling, it’s Sasha Drucker.’
She did not know what to say. Sasha, when she saw him nine months before, had been the well fed, well dressed son of a wealthy man. Now he smelt of the grave.
‘What has happened to him? Where has he been?’
‘In Bessarabia. When his father was arrested, he was taken to do his military service. He was sent to the frontier. When the Russians marched in, the Rumanian officers just took to their heels. There was disorder and Sasha got away. He’s been on the run ever since. He’s starving. Darling, he must come back with us.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Too shocked to say anything else, she moved out of the aura of Sasha’s desperation and walked ahead with Clarence, wondering. When Sasha was fed, where was he going?
As they crossed the square towards the Pringles’ block, Harriet, feeling the need of some other presence to share the burden of Sasha’s condition, asked Clarence to come in.
‘No fear,’ he said, rejecting responsibility.
‘What on earth are we going to do with this boy?’ she asked on a note of appeal, but she could expect neither help nor sympathy from Clarence that evening. He laughed. ‘Put him in with Yakimov,’ he said as he made off.
There was nothing to eat in the kitchen except bread and eggs. In this heat, in a country where refrigerators were almost unknown, fresh food had to be bought each day. While she made an omelette, Harriet could hear from the cupboard-sized room next door the snores of Despina, the maid, and Despina’s husband.
As Sasha ate the omelette with apologetic eagerness, a little colour came into his face. He looked, Harriet thought, like a sapling devastated by storm. She had remembered Sasha Drucker as a dark, gentle, protected youth, the darling of a large family, who had the gentle and unsuspecting air of a domestic animal. Now when he glanced at her, he did so with the wary look of the hunted.
Opposite him, watching him, Guy’s face was constricted with concern for the boy. He was deeply hurt by Sasha’s condition. He turned to Harriet and said in the persuasive tone she had come to suspect: ‘We can put him up somewhere, can’t we? He can stay?’
She said: ‘I don’t know,’ exasperated that Guy spoke openly in this way. She felt the realities of the situation should be privately discussed before any decision could be taken. Where, for instance, was Sasha to be put?
Sasha himself sat silent. Ordinarily, he would surely have shown some reluctance to be forced on her hospitality like this, but now she was his only hope. When he had eaten, he looked at her and smiled with an agonised emptiness.
Guy offered him the arm-chair. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’
Sasha shifted diffidently, not rising. ‘I would prefer this wooden chair. You see … I have lice.’
‘Would you like a bath?’ said Harriet.
‘Yes, please.’
When she had given him towels and shown him the bathroom, she returned to the room free to confront Guy. ‘We can’t possibly have him here,’ she said. ‘Our position is insecure enough. What would happen if we were caught harbouring a deserter – especially Drucker’s son?’
Guy stared at her and asked with a suffering expression: ‘How can we refuse? He has nowhere else to go.’
‘Has he no other friends?’
‘No one who would dare take him in. He’s at the end of his tether. We can’t put him out on the street. We must let him sleep here, anyway for tonight.’
‘Well, where?’
‘On the sofa.’
‘What about Yakimov?’
Guy looked disconcerted. Blustering a little, he said: ‘Oh, Yaki’s all right,’ but he knew Yakimov was not all right. They dare not trust him.
Seeing the consternation on Guy’s face, Harriet pitied him, but the impasse was of his own making. He had persuaded her to take in Yakimov much against her will; and she could not help feeling some satisfaction as she waited for him to offer a solution. He had none to offer.
He asked unhappily: ‘Can you think of anyone who would give him a bed?’
‘Can you?’ There was a long pause while Guy’s face grew more troubled, then she said: ‘You could tell Yakimov to go.’
‘Where could he go? He hasn’t a penny.’
During the silence that followed, Harriet reflected on their diversity. Guy, typically, wanted Sasha in the flat without giving any thought to the problem of having him there. She, perhaps, was over-conscious of difficulty. If it rested with Guy alone, there might be no difficulties. He would have trusted Yakimov and Yakimov might have proved trustworthy. She was annoyed at the same time, seeing his willingness to have Sasha here as a symptom of spiritual flight – the flight from the undramatic responsibility to one person which marriage was.
Guy gave her a pleading look as though she could, if she would, reveal a solution. And there was a solution. Pitying him at last, she said: ‘There’s a room of some sort on the roof: a second servant’s bedroom.’
‘That belongs to us?’
‘It belongs to the flat. We couldn’t use it without telling Despina. She keeps some of her things there.’
‘Darling!’ In his relief, his face glowed with delight in her. He sprang up and threw his arms round her shoulders. ‘What a wife! You’re wonderful!’
Which, she told herself, was all very welclass="underline" ‘He can only stay one night. You must find somewhere else for him. I’m not sure we can trust Despina.’
‘Of course we can trust Despina.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘She’s a decent soul.’
‘Well, if you think it’s all right, you must go and wake her up. She knows where this room is. I don’t.’
Guy, about to go happily off to tell Sasha that all was well, paused, blankly surprised at being given the onerous task of waking Despina.