THE WINTER CITY Read online

  Soon they were out in the street. They walked slightly apart and talked about the weather, the deficiencies of the Hotel Kapitol, and the bad state of the pavements. It was very cold still, the wind was knife-edged; there were few people about and their feet were loud on the deserted cobblestones. The part of the town through which they were passing was old with twisting streets and crooked houses. The moon silvered the steeply sloping roofs, outlined the curved edge of turrets and gables, and cast dramatic shadows in narrow alleyways. Outside an inn a lantern creaked in the wind; the doors of the inn were closed and only a dim light showed through a latticed window. Helen glimpsed a few people gathered round a fire. Probably they were talking about the potato famine, or the day’s events in the square, but just for one moment, grouped in the window frame, they evoked memories of childhood myths and fairy stories. The night had become enchanted. At every twist and turn of the crooked road she was filled with excitement, with an unreasonable and foolish hope.

  The enchantment persisted when they reached the bar. She felt the same exhilaration she had experienced on her first visit abroad when every place that she saw seemed full of infinite promise because it was so alien and unexpected. She had thought that she had years ago exhausted such capacity for wonder. But this time, beneath the exhilaration, there was a bitter knowledge of the transience of such happiness and because of this knowledge, the moment was infinitely more precious. Yet, as Paul went away to find a waiter and she saw him dissolving in the crowd, she thought suddenly that she should get up and leave; that she should run through these silent streets back to the cloistered isolation of her flat. She acknowledged the wisdom of such a course and then, with a rare recklessness, dismissed it. Excitement took possession of her again, and she looked round the room, studying the people and absorbing them into her own fantasy until they, too, seemed gay and reckless.

  There was a circle of tables in the centre of the room lit with lanterns, round the outer edge of the circle there were small, cavelike recesses in one of which she herself was seated. The crowd under the lanterns was mixed. She saw one or two familiar faces, two girls from the American Embassy and a couple of men from one of the Press agencies; there were a few students; several citizens, quiet, anonymous; and, at a near-by table, a group of army officers talking softly, but with animation. There was an undercurrent of excitement, something expectant in the atmosphere. One of the army officers mentioned the name ‘Matthias’; the name jolted Helen and she turned away from them.

  Paul was threading his way towards her. One of the men from the Press agency stopped him, and he glanced in her direction, smiling apologetically for keeping her waiting. There was something intimate in the smile. Her heart hammered violently and she felt again a desire to run away. She had put her hat to one side and she tossed her head, shaking her hair back. Her eyes wandered round the room. She would not look directly at Paul, but she was intensely aware of him. When he joined her she began to talk quickly.

  ‘How attractive these people are when they are roused!’ Her eyes rested for a moment on the army officers. ‘Their faces are so vivid. I have never noticed it before.’

  Paul did not answer.

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  She sensed that his reaction to the atmosphere was different to hers and this disquieted her.

  ‘They frighten me,’ he answered simply.

  ‘But why?’ She felt angry with him, as though he was being deliberately disruptive.

  ‘I wonder what they will bring on themselves. On us . . . There is already the beginning of an agitation about those people the special police arrested in the square.’

  ‘But is that serious?’

  ‘Every uprising needs its martyrs.’

  Helen was living at this moment on an intensely personal level and her mind refused to take in what he was saying. Paul, however, found it difficult to evade the day’s events. He could not, for one thing, believe in the immunity of the onlooker; it had seemed to him lately as though they were all in a gigantic lift which was plunging down and he doubted whether it would stop for the onlooker to get out. But tonight he had wanted to escape. In the Hotel Kapitol he had been oppressed by the morgue-like atmosphere; he had hoped that here it would be better, but, in fact, it was worse. It drove him to the conclusion that he was trying to escape from himself. He looked speculatively at Helen. It was through her alone, he thought, that he could obtain release; he wanted to give himself to her completely, now, at this moment. She was watching the people moving to and fro; her face was not vivacious, but it had a rare sweetness which astonished him. He felt inferior and there seemed to be a great distance between them. His immediate need, he realized, was not something which he could put to her. It depressed him when he thought how long it would take before he could know her, and his mind turned disconsolately to the brunette with whom he could have had his way with despatch. For a time they were silent.

  One of the army officers glanced over his shoulder and eyed them uneasily, as though suspicious of their silence. A pianist, seated somewhere outside the radius of light, began to play a soft, nostalgic waltz. It was getting late. One or two of the citizens got up and walked towards the door, quiet, anonymous.

  ‘Why do you feel so strongly about this country?’ Helen asked Paul.

  He considered the question for a moment, his head tilted back, his eyes narrowed. It was one of the nice things about him, she thought suddenly, this way that he had of hesitating before he answered, as though it mattered to find the truth and tell it to you.

  ‘I came here just before the war, for a long summer holiday,’ he said. ‘It was the summer that war broke out; perhaps in retrospect that gives it a special quality.’

  ‘I know,’ she answered, thinking of her own life. She had been married at eighteen. They had had one glorious summer together before David went to the war and came back, bored and discontented, a man she had never really known again.

  Paul went on: ‘And the time of life, perhaps, too. The age when there is always a promise of magic around the next corner.’

  One of the army officers was scribbling notes on a piece of paper and the others were prompting him; they looked over their shoulders at Paul and Helen, and saw that they were absorbed in one another.

  Helen said gently: ‘You didn’t come here alone?’

  ‘No.’

  He hesitated for a moment and then fumbled in his wallet and produced a worn snap. Helen saw three young people leaning against the parapet of an old stone bridge, laughing in the bright sunlight. There was Paul, his face a little formless, lacking character, with a strand of hair blowing across his forehead; and another young man, fair and athletic-looking. Two not very interesting young men with a girl between them. But the girl was different. She was small and sturdy with short, dark hair, a rather square face with a snub nose and a very wide mouth. She looked a schoolgirl still; the irrepressible schoolgirl who is the despair of all schoolmistresses. Helen found herself laughing down at the face in the snap.

  ‘Life never had a dull moment for her, did it?’ She handed him the snap. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She was killed in an air raid on London in 1943.’ He put the snap away in his wallet, slowly, with a sense of finality. ‘You know, death is never real unless you are there to see it for yourself. I was abroad at the time. When I came back to London, I always expected that one day I would meet her, clattering down the street in her headlong way.’

  ‘Were you married?’

  ‘We were engaged.’

  ‘And there has been no-one else?’

  His mouth hardened. ‘No-one that counted. I played around a lot after the war. There was ample opportunity.’

  She was looking at him over the rim of her glass, her face grave. It was the first time, talking to her, that he had felt that she was so in harmony with him. He was tempted to play for sympathy; to talk about the aftermath of the war, the nerve strain and exhaustion, the senselessness and lack of purpose;
to lament the careless, mis-spent years that had followed. He was about to develop the theme, when he saw a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth as though she knew exactly what was going on in his mind. He sighed resignedly and reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘I was about to embark on a heart-rending story.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘You don’t seem a self-pitying person.’

  He drew on his cigarette, watching her, then he stubbed it out nervously.

  ‘I wanted to impress upon you that I was human, I suppose. It seemed a good opportunity, while you were tolerating me.’

  It jarred her out of her ease. She had shrunk from any intimacy with a man for so long that this sudden challenge seemed a brutal assault.

  ‘Don’t I usually behave as though you were human?’ she asked in a dry voice.

  ‘No, you do not!’ He began to light another cigarette. ‘You seem to regard me with positive antagonism, as though I were some kind of savage animal.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nonsense!’

  He was relentless. ‘What is it about me that you don’t like? There must be something, I don’t imagine these things.’

  The directness of the question appalled her. She made a weak movement with her hand as though to ward him off, but he persisted.

  ‘Please believe me, I don’t enjoy this kind of conversation any more than you do. But I really want to know.’

  The bright circle of light seemed to have faded and they were alone in their dark cave. Helen’s mouth was so dry that she could hardly speak. He seemed to her, she told him, to be cruelly intolerant of those less gifted than himself; he was impatient, his words stabbed out, shattering confidence; she herself had felt crushed at times by his intellectual energy. . . . The words rambled on, superficial and unimportant, no longer seeming to represent her feelings. When she had finished he sat looking down at his glass, his face flushed and stiff, like a child who has been put in the corner. She could not bear his distress.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I really have no right to take you to task in this way. I have so many faults of my own.’

  ‘I like people to be frank,’ he said dejectedly.

  ‘Do you? I hate it! I don’t ever want people to tell me my faults or my short-comings unless I particularly ask them.’

  ‘But I did particularly ask you,’ he pointed out.

  There was silence again. Finally, she said in an unsteady voice:

  ‘At least it has had one good effect. I find I don’t dislike you any more.’

  He looked up and she smiled, a little uncertainly. As he watched her face he saw that she was afraid. Although he had broken down a barrier he would need to go very gently with her.

  ‘This calls for some kind of celebration,’ he said. ‘Another drink, at least.’

  He got up to look for the waiter. She saw the room again, its details bright and clear. The army officers were leaving; she watched them as they walked out. It was very late.

  ‘Now I am lost,’ she thought. ‘Now I am lost indeed.’ Her body ached with the agony of it. And yet, she smiled, and was glad.

  II

  Doyle and Kate dined together that evening at their favourite restaurant. It was not a very successful evening.

  ‘Doyle.’ Kate pushed the cheese plate to one side with the action of a person prepared for argument. ‘Where did you go after you left me last night?’

  Doyle picked up the wine bottle and filled his own glass. ‘I don’t think you should drink so much,’ he said. ‘It makes you repetitive and quarrelsome; I’ve noticed it before.’

  She rose to the bait. ‘A pretty poor time I’d have with you if I didn’t drink! What would I do all evening?’

  ‘I can think of things we could do. Why don’t we, Kate? You’re not a bit prudish in other ways.’ He watched in amusement as her mouth tightened in a firm line. ‘But I wouldn’t make an honest woman of you, that would have to be understood. I can’t abide honest women.’

  Her expression had become watchful. ‘Doyle, don’t be evasive. Where did you go after you left me?’

  ‘Now what has that got to do with you, I wonder? You had the offer of my company for the night and you turned it down.’ He poured out a glass of wine for her. ‘Drink up, Kate.’

  ‘I have a hangover.’

  ‘It’s the way to cure it. Do I have to tell you that?’

  She sipped absently at the wine. Her face was becoming flushed. The air in the restaurant was stuffy and Doyle, who had been drinking since early evening, swayed forward and brought himself to with a jerk.

  ‘You said you were going back to your room,’ Kate persisted, speaking slowly, ‘but you didn’t. Jean Dulac called there with that randy girl, Mona, and you were out.’

  ‘Good thing! You should be pleased.’

  ‘But where . . .’

  ‘You clutter up your mind, Kate, that’s your trouble.’ He reached across the table and took her hand in his. ‘Forget about yesterday. Exist for today. Life has to be lived minute by minute, Kate.’ Even to him that sounded a trifle banal.

  ‘You’ve had too much to drink,’ she said severely.

  ‘You have no sense of romance. But I suppose that is to be expected, coming from a country where all that counts is having a refrigerator and a fast car.’

  This time she did not rise to the bait. After a moment, she said with transparent casualness:

  ‘Do you ever see Karel or his wife now, Doyle?’

  He poured out another glass of wine. The bottle was nearly empty.

  ‘It’s not a good thing to have friendships with these people,’ he said evenly. ‘It makes things difficult for them.’

  ‘That’s what Paul said, I know. But you didn’t agree with him.’

  ‘I never agree with Paul on principle. Life would be so dull if one couldn’t argue with Paul.’

  ‘Doyle, do you still see Karel and his wife? Because Dr. Van Hals thought that he saw you with Varya a week or so ago at one of the villages on the Senka road.’

  Blood darkened Doyle’s face. ‘What the hell are you up to? All the evening you have been behaving like a bloody terrier snuffling after a buried bone.’

  ‘All right.’ She tried to sound dignified, but she was afraid of his anger and her voice shook. ‘We won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Oh, yes we will!’ His eyes were cold, and, in spite of his anger and the drink, unexpectedly alert. ‘What did the good doctor have to say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything, except that he saw you.’

  ‘Then why is it so important?’

  ‘You’re the one that is making it important.’

  He looked down at the table. It was astonishing how blank his face could be sometimes, but a vein at the temple was taut and Kate was conscious of the physical effort that was needed for him to control himself at this moment. Her lips trembled.

  ‘Doyle, I’m frightened.’

  The mischievous smile suddenly flashed out; turned on with a switch, Kate thought miserably.

  ‘So that’s it!’ he exclaimed. ‘You suspect that I am about to seduce the wife of my friend. Shame on you, Kate!’

  ‘You know that isn’t what I meant. I don’t care about Varya; from what I’ve seen of her she isn’t your type, anyway. But you said something the other week about discovering a modern equivalent of the cloak-and-dagger adventure . . .’

  ‘Kate, my dearest, my sweet one! You should know me well enough not to take too much notice of the tales I tell when I have been drinking.’ He looked round for the waiter and beckoned him over. As he counted out the money for the bill he went on talking; he was gay and very persuasive. ‘You really shouldn’t be so gullible. Good God, woman! If you take all my fantasies so seriously I shall have to start telling the truth!’

  It was unlike him; his normal reaction would have been to expand the original lie into something really outrageous. Kate watched him, her plump young face unusually strained. When they left the restaurant and turned into Martin Zi
nnemann Street, she felt a sickness that was not entirely due to the wine. She put her hand to her head, ‘Doyle, I must sit down.’

  He took her arm. ‘A brisk walk in this lovely night air will soon put you right.’

  After a few minutes she said: ‘I just have to sit down. My legs are made of rubber.’ She sat down at the bottom of the flight of steps which led up to the cathedral. Doyle sat beside her. In the moonlight her face was shining with sweat and it had a greenish tinge. She looked frightened and ashamed, like a young child. He put his arm round her and said quite gently:

  ‘We shall freeze to death here. Come and sit in the cathedral for a minute or two . . .’

  ‘We can’t!’

  ‘Nonsense! The door stands wide, my love, offering ancient sanctuary.’ The hinges had, in fact, rotted and the door leant outwards. ‘We can’t do any harm,’ he went on, propelling her up the steps. ‘The vestments will have been removed long since and we shall be left with a few Party pamphlets and the mosaics.’

  ‘Oh, stop talking like a bloody book!’ she moaned.

  They were crossing the threshold and Doyle’s voice echoed in the dark, domed interior: ‘Tell me, do you like Byzantine architecture, Kate?’ He touched a switch by the door and a dull light glimmered in the roof. It seemed to Kate that a shadow moved against one of the pillars.

  ‘Doyle!’ she cried. ‘Turn out the light. We shall get into trouble.’

  ‘It’s so dim no-one will notice,’ he answered carelessly, ‘And, in any case, I should like to look around now that we are here, I have always wanted to come in.’

  Kate followed him as he walked down the nave. Except for a table and a few chairs, distributed at random, there appeared to be no furniture. Kate sat down at the table while Doyle went to study the mosaics. There was a pile of pamphlets on the table and several paper-covered books. She picked up one of the pamphlets. On the front there was an action picture of a boy poised above a vaulting-horse; inside there were pictures of boys and girls running a relay race, eating at a works canteen, gathering in the hay; all the scenes were taken in bright sunlight and all the boys and girls looked healthy and vigorous. Kate put down the pamphlet and peered at the line of pillars; there was no discernible movement, but then it was too dark to see distinctly.