‘Oh, come!’ Guy laughed at her. ‘You used to complain that because you are half-Jewish, it was the Rumanians who were “not nice” to you.’
‘It is true,’ she agreed: ‘No one is nice to me. I don’t belong anywhere. I don’t like Rumanian men. They live off women and despise them. They are so conceited. And the women here are such fools! They want to be despised. If the young man gives them un coup de pied, they do like this.’ She wriggled and threw up her eyes in a parody of sensual ecstasy. ‘Me, I wish to be respected. I am advanced, so I prefer Englishmen.’
Guy nodded, sympathising with this preference. He had avoided marrying her himself, but he would have been delighted could he have married her off to a friend with a British passport. He had attempted to interest Clarence in her unfortunate situation, but Clarence had dismissed her, saying: ‘She’s an affected bore,’ while of Clarence she said: ‘How terrible to be a man so unattractive to women!’
‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘it is expensive, Bucharest. Every quarter my allowance goes, pouf! Other summers, for an economy, I let my flat and go to a little mountain hotel. Already I would have taken myself there, but my allowance is spent.’
She paused, looking at him with a pathetic tilt of the head, expecting his usual query: ‘How much do you need?’
Instead, he said: ‘You’ll get your allowance next month. Wait until then.’
‘My doctor says my health will suffer. Would you have me die?’
He smiled his embarrassment. Harriet had forced him to recognise Sophie’s wiles and now he wondered how he had ever been taken in by them. Before his marriage, he had lent Sophie what he could not afford, seeing these loans, which were never repaid, as the price of friendship. With a wife as well as parents dependent on him, he had been forced to refuse her. His refusal had kept her at bay for the last few months and he was acutely discomforted at the prospect of having to refuse her again.
Leaning forward with one of the persuasive gestures she had effectively used in Troilus, she said: ‘I worked hard for the play. It was nice to have such a success, but I am not strong. It exhausted me. I have lost a kilo from my weight. Perhaps you like girls that are thin, but here they say it is not pretty.’
So that was it! She wanted a return for services rendered. He looked down at his desk, having no idea, in the face of this, how to reject her claim. He could only think of Harriet, not certain whether the thought came as a protection or a threat. Anyway, he could use her as an excuse. Sophie knew she could get nothing out of Harriet.
He was beginning to recognise that Harriet was, in some ways, stronger than himself. And yet perhaps not stronger. He had a complete faith in his own morality and he would not let her override it. But she could be obdurate where he could not, and though he stood up to her, knowing if he did not he would be lost, he was influenced by her clarity of vision; unwillingly. It was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. Good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.
He was troubled by her criticism of their acquaintances. He preferred to like people, knowing this fact was the basis of his influence over them. The sense of his will to like them gave them confidence: so they liked in return. He could see that Harriet’s influence, given sway, could undermine his own successful formula for living and he felt bound to resist it. Yet there were occasions when he let her be obdurate for him.
While these thoughts were in his mind Sophie’s chatter had come to a stop. Looking up, he found her watching him, puzzled and hurt that he let her talk on without the expected interruption.
As she concluded in a small, dispirited voice: ‘And I need only perhaps fifty thousand, not any more,’ she dropped all her little artifices and he saw the naïveté behind the whole performance. He had often, in the past, thought Sophie unfairly treated by circumstances. She had been forced, much too young, to face life alone with nothing but the weapons her sex provided. He thought: ‘The truth is, she’s not much more than a scared kid,’ thankful nevertheless that he did not have fifty thousand to lend her.
He said as lightly as he could: ‘Harriet looks after the family finances now. She’s better at it than I am. If anyone asks me for a loan, I have to refer them to her.’
Sophie’s expression changed abruptly. She sat upright, affronted that he should bring Harriet in between them. She rose, about to take herself off in indignation when a sound of marching and singing distracted her. They heard the repeated refrain ‘Capitanul’.
‘But that is a forbidden song,’ she said.
They reached the open window in time to see the leading green shirts pass the University. Sophie caught her breath. Guy, having talked with David’s informants, was less surprised than she by this resurgence of the Iron Guards. He expected an appalled outcry from her, but she said nothing until the last stragglers had passed, then merely: ‘So! We shall have troubles again!’
He said: ‘You must have been at the University during the pogroms of 1938?’
She nodded. ‘It was terrible, of course, but I was all right. I have a good Rumanian name.’
Remembering her annoyance with him, she turned suddenly and went without another word. She apparently had not been much disturbed by the spectacle of the marching Guardists, but Guy, when he returned to his desk, sat there for some time abstracted. He had seen a threat made manifest and knew exactly what he faced.
When they had discussed the organisation of the summer school, Guy had said to Inchcape: ‘There’s only one thing against it. It will give rise to a concentration of Jewish students. With the new anti-Semitic policy, they might be in a dangerous position.’
Inchcape had scoffed at this. ‘Rumanian policy has always been anti-Semitic and all that happens is the Jews get richer and richer.’
Guy felt he could not argue further without an appearance of personal fear. Inchcape, who had retained control of the English Department, wanted a summer school. His organisation must do something to justify its presence here. More than that, there was his need to rival the Legation. Speaking of the British Minister, he would say: ‘The old charmer’s not afraid to stay, so why should I be?’ If anyone pointed out that the Minister, unlike Inchcape and his men, had diplomatic protection, Inchcape would say: ‘While the Legation’s here, we’ll be protected too.’
Guy knew that Inchcape liked him and, because of that, he liked Inchcape. He also admired him. With no great belief in his own courage, he esteemed audacious people like Inchcape and Harriet. Yet he tended to pity them. Inchcape he saw as a lonely bachelor who had nothing in life but the authority which his position gave. If a summer school made Inchcape happy, then Guy would back it to the end.
Harriet, he felt, must be protected from the distrust that had grown out of an unloved childhood. He would say to himself: ‘O, stand between her and her fighting soul,’ touched by the small, thin body that contained her spirit. And he saw her as unfortunate because life, which he took easily, was to her so unnecessarily difficult.
He picked up a photograph which was propped against the inkstand on his desk. It had been taken in the Calea Victoriei: one of those small prints that had to be provided when one applied for a permis de séjour. In it Harriet’s face – remarkable chiefly for its oval shape and the width of her eyes – was fixed in an expression of contemplative sadness. She looked ten years older than her age. Here was something so different from her usual vivacity that he said when he first saw it: ‘Are you really so unhappy?’ She had denied being unhappy at all.