Then it dawned on him. She was talking about the evening when Peter and Niki had come to his little flat in the evening. He turned angrily to Niki who sat next to him around the corner of the table.
‘Did you invent this nonsense?’
But Niki only hung his head in mock shame and, grinning wickedly back, did not answer. He was sitting too far away for Laszlo to go on without attracting attention so, ignoring Niki, he turned back to Magda and was about to speak when the thought flooded through him that if Niki had told this pack of lies to Magda he had surely related them to Klara. Angry as never before that the sweet Klara, so pure and innocent, should have been exposed to the frivolous Niki’s thoughtless slanders, the blood rushed to his face.
‘You’re blushing! See how you’re blushing!’ Magda whispered triumphantly. ‘What a bad fibber you are!’
Before Laszlo could reply a long serving dish floated between them. Like a silver ship carrying on its deck a pile of little grass-green and white striped hearts, a wonderful and famous dish, the fifth course that evening, was called Chaud-froid de bécasses panaché à la Norvégienne.When this battleship sailed away its place was at once taken by two destroyers in the shape of oval silver sauce-boats. The conversation which had been interrupted by the arrival of the woodcock, was finally killed when an arm stretched out towards Laszlo’s glass and an unctuous voice murmured in his ear, softly and mysteriously, ‘Merleblanc ’91?’
Laszlo looked across the table to where, farther up, Klara sat between Fredi Wuelffenstein and the Principe. And so low were the décolletages that year that all he could glimpse of the girl over the mass of silver ornaments on the table were her head and bare shoulders.
He had not seen her in evening dress for at least a year and it struck him how she had filled out in the intervening months and how much more beautiful she had become. When he had last seen Klara she had been somewhat skinny and undeveloped, almost anæmic, still with the body of an adolescent though she was nearly twenty-two. When he had thought about her, which was often, he had not thought so much about her body but always about her expressive grey eyes. And now, suddenly, she was all woman, radiant with femininity. Her face had a higher colour, her mouth was fuller and redder, her neck and shoulders and the curve of her breasts were all rounded out with the fullness of a baby’s flesh and the bloom of ripe apricots, and her pale smooth skin shone with an inner glow, not the glow of alabaster or marble but rather that of some ripe and living fruit. As the sea reflected the sun’s rays on the arms and bare flesh of a bather, so the light of the electric chandeliers reflected through the prism of the multifaceted silver touched the pale salmon-colour of Klara’s skin with a myriad tiny lights, glowing green and mother-of-pearl on her shoulders, dancing at the corners of her mouth as she spoke and under her chin, moving back and forth with every slight movement she made. A modern Venus Anadyomene, thought Laszlo, gliding above waves of frozen silver. And in his delight he forgot all his previous annoyance.
Klara felt his eyes upon her and from across the table she looked up at him with a smile in her eyes.
He wondered if she sensed how beautiful he thought she was.
By the time the dinner was coming to an end everyone was talking at once and the conversation at the centre of the table was all about the latest political events in the capital. The prince, a member of the Austrian Herrenhaus in Vienna, had begun the subject.
‘Is it true that the two-year Military Service Bill has been passed? We don’t seem to have heard anything about it!’ His manner implied that he took it almost as a personal insult that the news had been made public in Budapest before it was known in the capital of the Empire.
Old Kanizsay overheard the prince’s words. He could hardly believe his ears. ‘Nah, so was!’ He was shocked, for to someone who had started his career in the army when military service had been twelve years, this seemed hardly credible. ‘Two years to make a peasant into a soldier! Absurd! Have they announced it in the House? Has His Majesty agreed?’
‘Surely His Majesty knows best!’ said Szent-Gyorgyi in faint reproval.
‘It was forced on the Government by pressure of public opinion,’ explained Lubianszky, who never lost an opportunity of putting the blame on the Minister-President. ‘Tisza thought that it would help to get the Defence Bill passed. Of course he was wrong, and it’s all been for nothing!’ And he started to retell the story of the uproar in Parliament on November 18th, stressing how all the Standing Orders had been cynically ignored.
Kanizsay seemed to like this. ‘Diese Tintenschlecker! Diese Bagage! — these penpushers! What rubbish!’ he said, referring to the Hungarian opposition, and when Lubianszky turned towards Abady for confirmation, the old field marshal looked in Balint’s direction and said:
‘Kennst Du diesen Tisza? Was ist der für ein Kerl? 1st er ein guter Kerl? — Do you know this Tisza? What sort of a fellow is he? Is he a good fellow?’ he asked in a loud nasal hectoring voice.
Balint had to laugh. ‘Oh, yes! He is quite a good Kerl!’
But Lubianszky was not content to leave it at that. He started to explain at some length what a mistake this show of strength had been, how there was nothing left now for the Government to do but to resign and thereby make legal the disputed amendment. Lubianszky did not have an easy time with his political dissertation as almost every sentence was interrupted when a servant offered him the dessert: a mountainous ice-cream — ‘Bombe frappeé à la Sumatra?’ — or dishes of whipped cream, biscuits and petitfours. Then, as he started again, a liveried arm extended in front of his face and a sepulchral voice murmured in his ear: ‘Moët &Chandon Réserve? Tokay ’22?”
All the older men present — Kollonich, Szent-Gyorgyi, and even Wuelffenstein, though he was sitting some way away beside Klara, began to join in the discussion. Only Count Slawata said nothing, though he seemed to listen intently despite the fact that as the talk became more heated the others mostly spoke in Hungarian. With his eyes screwed-up behind the thick glasses in the manner of so many shortsighted people, he listened and observed.
‘Are you interested in all this?’ asked his neighbour, the beautiful Countess Beredy, her voice tinged with contempt for the nonsense that men seemed to think important. Slawata turned towards her and gazed short-sightedly into her deep décolletage which was made all the more provocative because her dress only appeared to touch her arms, shoulders and body here and there, thus affording most tempting glimpses of her body.
‘For me,’ answered the diplomat, ‘they might as well be talking Chinese!’
Fanny laughed, a deep-throated sensual sound that suggested she was recalling some voluptuous memory. At such moments she resembled a languorous cat, her long eyes narrowed to slits, her well-shaped, fine-drawn mouth curved in a feline smile of satisfaction, as if she had just feasted off several canaries.
The host, who tended to lose his temper in all arguments unless everyone agreed with him, was becoming flushed and cross even though his views were almost identical to those of Lubianszky. Both of them hoped for the fall of Tisza, but Kollonich thought it should come later, after he had had an opportunity of clearing up the present mess, while Lubianszky was for his immediate dismissal. At this moment, thought the prince, everyone should back him up in his role of ‘chucker-out’.