THE WINTER CITY Read online

  Voices reached her. She realized, with surprise, that she was listening to Maria Anas and Ilya. The woman was speaking in a harsh, angry tone which Helen had never heard her use before; the anger was so intense that it bordered on fear.

  ‘He is never to come here again,’ the woman said. ‘Never! Do you understand?’

  Ilya’s voice, by contrast, was low, repeating one phrase with stubborn insistence. Ilya was telling his mother that he was no longer a child. Helen had no idea what it was all about. But for one moment, standing in the shadows on the landing, she had a strange feeling of fellowship, as though she and this woman shared some unacknowledged dread. She pressed her hand to her side and leant against the wall. It was some moments before she recovered herself sufficiently to walk across and knock on the door. At first there was silence. Then she heard a dragging noise as the curtain, which divided the alcove where the family slept from the main part of the room, was drawn across. Footsteps crossed the wooden floor and Maria Anas stood at the door.

  ‘Please come in.’ The woman was pale and agitated, although she tried to smile. Behind her the room was empty. Ilya, presumably, had been banished to the alcove.

  Helen, who was also confused, stood by the door drawing off her gloves in the slow, absent way which so exasperated Kate. She was conscious, while she plucked at each finger, of the room. Usually this room, in which there was no concession to comfort, was kept scrupulously clean and fresh, but tonight there was a smell of fat and stale vegetables and the sink was cluttered with unwashed dishes. Helen noticed that a saucepan was simmering on the stove and near-by a clean bowl and a large spoon were laid on a tray. Usually when she arrived Mrs. Anas’s husband had finished his meal. Helen frowned down at her gloves, as though surprised to find that she had taken them off. She wondered whether she should offer to forgo her lesson, but decided that this might seem to be a reference to the quarrel which Mrs. Anas must realize that she had overheard. It seemed better to say nothing.

  Mrs. Anas seated herself at the table and began to look at the notes which she made with great care after each lesson so that she knew exactly what they had done. She was wearing a thick, black dress with long sleeves which Helen had seen countless times before. It was frayed at the neck and cuffs and there were darns at the elbows. But, bending over her notes, straining her eyes in the poor light, the woman was beautiful, with that indestructible beauty of fine bone structure.

  Helen leant back in her chair, her eyes closed and her lips moving. Maria Anas had tried to break her of this habit of rehearsing sentences before she spoke, but tonight she did not notice. Eventually, Helen said loudly, pitching her voice rather high:

  ‘I hope that Ilya is recovered? I was at the restaurant yesterday . . .’

  ‘Yes, he is better, thank you.’ She hesitated, and Helen began to rehearse another sentence. Maria Anas went on: ‘Mr. Lawrence told me that he had been hurt. He found me at the hotel’

  Helen blinked, disconcerted in the middle of preparing her sentence, and said vaguely: ‘That was nice of Mr. Lawrence.’

  ‘Yes.’ Maria Anas looked at Helen as though she expected something more.

  ‘Do you know him well?’ Helen asked.

  ‘No.’ Maria Anas gave an unexpected bite to the negative. ‘But my husband knows him.’

  Helen began to prepare her sentence, which was about the weather, again.

  ‘Tell me,’ Maria Anas said, staring down at the table, ‘He is a man you would trust?’ She spoke in English.

  ‘Why, yes,’ Helen said; and then, for some reason, she found herself qualifying the remark, not because she distrusted Doyle but because it was, after all, so impossible to assess him. ‘At least, in most of the obvious ways. Why do you ask?’

  Maria Anas did not look up. ‘It is just that it is good to be careful, you understand? And he is a reporter . . .’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, I don’t believe his paper prints much of what he writes.’ Helen laughed. Maria Anas laughed, too, but her eyes were anxious.

  There was a long silence. Helen watched the lamp flicker in a draught from the window. This time she managed to formulate her sentence without interruption.

  ‘The wind is strong tonight,’ she said slowly, ‘and I think it has changed its direction because there is . . .’ she hesitated, and then finished lamely, ‘there is dampness. You understand?’

  Maria Anas looked up and Helen saw that she had not been listening. There was fear in the woman’s eyes. Sitting at the table the two women faced one another, unable to speak, yet drawn together. Maria Anas said suddenly:

  ‘Forgive me. I have lost some of my notes for last week.’

  She went abruptly to an old chest in the corner of the room and began to turn over its contents. Helen saw her glance almost furtively at the big, wooden clock which stood on a shelf above the fireplace. At last she found the remainder of the notes and came back to the table. She looked down at the neatly written pages. After a moment she passed her hand across her forehead, then with an effort of concentration, she said:

  ‘Last week we were speaking of . . .’

  She stopped, her head lifted as though some sound had caught her attention. Helen listened, too. In the distance someone had begun to walk down the street. Mrs. Anas said: ‘Forgive me,’ and went to the window. Helen watched her as she stood peering into the darkness, her face intent; then she saw the shoulders droop and the hand that had been on the window latch dropped listlessly as the woman turned away. Once more she glanced at the clock.

  ‘I am sorry.’ She sat down again. ‘Just now you said something about the wind, did you not?’

  Helen repeated her observation.

  The curtain across the alcove jerked back and Ilya stepped out. He wore an old overcoat and a very determined expression. Maria Anas jumped up and went to him, catching him by the arm.

  ‘Have I not told you? You are not to go out tonight.’

  He began to argue and she pushed him back towards the alcove.

  ‘You are twelve. And at twelve you obey your mother still. Go back at once!’

  He glanced across at Helen, defiant but embarrassed by the presence of a stranger; embarrassment won and he turned sullenly on his heel and pulled the curtain across the alcove. Helen heard the bed creak as he flung himself down on it. Maria Anas came back to the table, her hands smoothing her dress in a nervous movement.

  ‘He must rest his head.’

  Her voice was flat, as though she did not expect to be believed. Helen would have offered to leave, but she had the impression that the woman did not want to be alone with her fears. They bent forward again over their exercise books.

  ‘When you speak descriptively—for example, as of the wind changing direction, you should not . . .’

  Time passed. The wooden clock on the shelf above the stove ticked loudly.

  Then, in the distance, they heard the sound. Far off, on the cobbled street, rhythmic, metallic—left, right, left, right. Maria Anas’s fingers closed on the edge of the table; Helen saw the knuckles white beneath the tight-stretched skin. The woman’s body had become rigid. The measured steps came nearer; they were in this street now, at the far end. Somewhere in the house a door was closed and the bolts shot fast; across the road a window slammed to. A woman called out sharply and a child’s voice answered. Then silence except for the ticking of the clock and the rhythm of marching feet. Left, right; left, right, left. The agonized fingers gripped the table. The patrol was nearly there. Helen began to count, one, two, three, four, just as she had counted in the blitz when she heard the swish of a bomb and prayed that it might pass over her. The veins stood out on Maria Anas’s hand. Left, right, beneath the window now, and still marching on down the road, dying away in the distance over the cobbled stones, just a faint, metallic echo in the night, and then, for a moment, stillness.

  The fingers on the table relaxed, the dark head bowed and Helen heard the woman mutter beneath her breath ‘Mother of God . . .’ The curt
ain was drawn back and Ilya came slowly into the room, shaking with terror and relief. Below doors opened and there were voices again in the street.

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Does it matter, so long as it wasn’t here?’

  ‘I want to find out.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Come back.’

  The three of them sat silently in the room, Helen and Maria with her arms around the boy. They listened to the opening of the windows and the unbolting of the doors, to the sound of the voices in the street. Life returning.

  Then immediately below a door banged and footsteps hammered on the stairs. Maria jumped to her feet and jerked open the door. Helen saw them on the landing as Maria and the boy ran to him, and he put his arms round them both, holding them close. After a moment, he looked over his wife’s shoulder and smiled at Helen apologetically.

  ‘She thinks I leave her,’ he said. It was a poor joke, but they all laughed.

  As she walked through the still streets on her way back to the flat, Helen prayed that it might always end like this for them, in joy and laughter. She prayed with fervour, as though her own salvation depended upon the granting of this prayer. The snow, which had been threatening for so long, was beginning to fall heavily but she stumbled forward, scarcely noticing it.

  As soon as she reached the flat she rang up Paul Daniels on a pretext in connection with their date the following evening. The telephone rang several times before he answered it; in the moments that she waited, she realized how deeply involved she had become.

  Chapter Seven

  THURSDAY

  I

  By the next day the snow had stopped and the temperature had risen considerably. In the early morning the city sparkled and groups of small boys threw snowballs and built snowmen in the parks. By mid-day, the snow was mostly slush and the small boys were at school.

  When Paul Daniels walked down the steps of the British Embassy he saw a line of army lorries moving towards Avenue Kapitol. He stood, hunched in his raincoat, and watched morosely as they went by. The lorries were empty, but they looked ominous just the same. There were rumours of extensive troop movements, although those, so far, had not been substantiated; doubtless there would be some who would see the army lorries and would not notice, or would conveniently forget, that they were empty. Paul could imagine the headlines in some Western newspapers.

  ‘And that,’ he said to himself as he went on his way, ‘is about all I can do—use my imagination instead of information.’

  He had just had a bitter encounter at the Embassy. He hoped that the red-headed young woman concerned was not a friend of Helen Jenner since he had been displaying all the facets of his personality which Helen considered most objectionable. He reflected, with some pride, that he could be objectionable. He was still feeling angry and frustrated when he entered the restaurant off Martin Zinnemann Street at which he habitually dined. Unfortunately, other people habitually dined there, too. He saw Rosamund and Pickard with a disgruntled Dulac. He was in no mood for Pickard’s company and he was about to go when Dulac called out: ‘Paul, why don’t you join us?’

  Paul glared at him, but Dulac was getting bored with his companions and he only laughed. Neither Pickard nor Rosamund registered any enthusiasm at the prospect of Paul’s company.

  ‘I don’t think much of your Press relations at the Embassy,’ Paul said irritably to Pickard as he sat down.

  ‘I don’t give a damn what you think.’ Pickard, too, had had a trying morning.

  Dulac sawed at the meat. ‘Bah! This food.’ He looked round for a waiter and pointed indignantly to his plate. ‘How am I supposed to eat that?’

  The waiter shrugged his shoulders. Two men at a near-by table joined in with protests. The waiter picked up all their plates and flounced out. Paul drummed his fingers impatiently on the table while he waited for his meal to arrive and glanced repeatedly at his watch. Rosamund noted this display of nerves with disapproval. She looked composed, but rather consciously so, and the marble smoothness of her face owed more to art than to nature.

  ‘From what I saw of the behaviour of the Press at the Embassy,’ she said to Paul, ‘they weren’t making the situation any easier.’

  ‘It’s not our business to make things easy. We just want . . .’

  She interrupted him sharply: ‘Do you realize what will happen if there is serious trouble?’

  He shot her a malevolent glance. ‘I probably realize it a damn sight more . . .’

  ‘The Embassy will be expected to shelter a large number of miscellaneous Western Europeans who have had the misfortune, or the stupidity, to get left behind in this city when the balloon goes up. And you, Mr. Daniels, will no doubt be among them.’

  ‘My God, what’s that?’ Jean Dulac asked as the waiter shot a plate in front of him. He received no reply and proceeded to prod suspiciously with a fork.

  ‘I am very sorry about the Embassy’s extraneous duties,’ Paul’s temper was rising, ‘but I would have thought that one of the things it most certainly had to do was to run an efficient information service.’

  ‘It does run an efficient information service,’ Pickard snapped.

  ‘The only person I could get hold of this morning was a chit just out of school who said that “everyone was in conference” and she couldn’t speak to the Press!’

  ‘You probably frightened the life out of the poor child.’ Rosamund gave a bright laugh.

  ‘I sincerely hope so.’

  Dulac pushed his plate to one side. ‘I wish you would frighten the cook.’ He lit a cigarette: Rosamund frowned. ‘Did you know that Doyle took his car out on the Senka road last night to see what he could find to support these rumours of troop movements, and he was ordered back by the special police?’

  ‘I was with him,’ Paul answered.

  ‘What a devastating combination!’ Rosamund, who was finding it difficult to strike her usual note of Olympian amusement, sounded malicious.

  ‘Did you remonstrate with the police?’ Dulac asked.

  ‘Yes, I did, and they were suspiciously polite. There had been a smash-up further down the road, a landslide, an avalanche, an earthquake—I’ve forgotten which.’

  They sat in gloomy silence for some time, then Rosamund pushed back her chair. ‘Will you excuse me, gentlemen? I feel that there is so much that I should be doing.’

  She walked across the room, her flaxen head held very erect. Paul reflected that it was the first time he had seen her make such a self-conscious exit.

  ‘Our Rosamund is a trifle strained,’ he murmured. ‘Can it be the woman has feelings after all?’

  ‘That was a rather tasteless remark,’ Pickard said angrily.

  Paul reached for the salt. ‘Granted.’

  ‘A wonderful woman, don’t you think?’ Pickard said to Dulac. ‘So dignified,’ so civilized.’

  Dulac shrugged his shoulders. ‘A woman one admires, perhaps.’ He did not admire her himself, but he could see that others might. ‘But not a woman to live with. She is so . . . so neat and tidy, so well-ordered.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Inside as well as outside.’

  ‘I thought the French admired intelligence.’

  ‘But intelligence and order are not the same thing.’

  Pickard put down his fork with a clatter. ‘The trouble with France,’ he said in a loud voice, ‘is that it makes a virtue of disorder. And where has it got you? You’re a journalist, you study these things. You must realize . . .’ He broke off as a waiter appeared by his side, and snapped: ‘Well? What is it? I’m in the middle of my lunch. Can’t you see?’

  There had been a telephone call, the waiter informed him; he was to return to the Embassy immediately. Pickard folded his table napkin with deliberation and got up. He clapped Jean Dulac on the shoulder.

  ‘Sorry if I offended. We are all under a bit of a strain.’ He went out, looking purposeful, his mouth in a straight line and his jaw thrust forward.

  Dulac looked enquiring
ly at Paul and Paul nodded. ‘I suppose we ought to find out what that is all about.’

  They paid for their meal and hurried out.

  The usually impressive foyer of the Embassy resembled a left-luggage department in one of the more depressing London stations. An elderly man carrying a suitcase was shouting at one of the messengers:

  ‘But I must see him at once. My wife is ill and I must leave the country. I’ve checked out of my hotel.’

  A porter steered a trolley containing a mountain of files out of a lift; he was flanked by two handsome men wearing pearl-grey suits and mournful expressions. Two of the Workers’ Peace Movement party were talking earnestly to an unfortunate clerk whom they had got with his back to the wall. One of them was saying:

  ‘. . .’ desperate situation. A crowd outside the Party offices calling for the release of those men who were arrested in the square on Wednesday morning.’ He returned to his own grievance: ‘When can we leave?’

  The clerk intoned: ‘We are making representations regarding the transport situation.’

  Paul caught sight of Kate walking along one of the corridors carrying a bundle of files.

  ‘Why did they bring Pickard back?’ he demanded. ‘What’s happened?’

  She looked at him in surprise, her chin resting on the top file.

  ‘He went off with the key to one of the safes. Sir Edward wanted . . .’

  Paul, muttering under his breath, turned on his heel.

  She called after him: ‘I heard that, Paul Daniels!’ She went on, cutting short his impatient apology: ‘Doyle hasn’t been here all morning. I looked out for him particularly.’

  ‘He’ll be around somewhere.’

  ‘What sort of a journalist is he? All the rest of the pack are in full cry and he doesn’t put in an appearance.’ The files wobbled and she steadied them with her chin.