A Place to Stand Page 5

  “We can arrange that later,” he said airily. “Naturally I understand. You are very good. But now, this must be done carefully. It is better that you bring them here; make an appointment for yourself, when you have fixed up a time with them—it might be my secretary who answers the telephone next time. Go with them into the waiting-room, and give only your name—they can seem to be some poor clients of mine who are on the doormat with you.” He smiled. “I have many poor clients. You will then come in to me; after a suitable interval you go out, and I will come with you—at the waiting-room door you can indicate them to me, and I will take them in.”

  “Yes, I’ve got all that,” she said.

  “They must bring their passports,” he added sharply. “Are they in their own names?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They were blank when I brought them in; only the photographs.”

  “May one ask, how did you bring them in?” he asked curiously. “Though, of course, all these things are pretty easy for you”.

  “I brought them in a box of chocolates!” Hope said, with a candid grin.

  The doctor slapped his thigh. “Admirable! That is really an idea! Did you think of it yourself?”

  “No—a friend did.” She smiled, pleased at this tribute to Sam.

  “A Yugoslav?”

  “No, an American.”

  That surprised him too, a little. But he let it pass, and went on to the next point.

  “This apartment is sometimes watched, because I am foreign, and have done this sort of thing before; therefore you must ring up just beforehand to make sure that at this end the coast is clear. Say, as if just to confirm—‘Dr. Kraljic is expecting me at eleven, isn’t he?’ Can you do this?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “Shall you do it from home?” he asked, partly from curiosity.

  “No. I’ll do it from my hairdresser’s—that’s only five minutes away. They can be mooching around in the street outside.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “You are experienced in intrigue, I see.”

  It was on the tip of Hope’s tongue to say “No, I’m not; I’m learning all this as I go along”—but she didn’t. Let him think that she was! So she merely smiled and said Fine, that was all settled then; and it was terribly good of him, and she couldn’t thank him enough. Then she gathered up her bag, drew on her left glove—leaving her right hand ungloved to be kissed in farewell, as well-bred women learn to do in Hungary—rose, and left. Driving home in the car his phrase about her being experienced at intrigue came back into her mind. What an idea, in connection with Hope Kirkland! But that reminded her to go round by the market and get some flowers to account for her outing. It was all rather fun, and anyhow she had got to be a good intriguer till this thing was put through; she mustn’t make any careless mistakes, and let Stefan and young Hempel down through some silliness. Or Sam either, some part of her mind reminded her—for it was Sam who had let her in for this. But this doctor business would be about the end of it; once they had got their certificates they would just breeze off, and that would be that.

  For some reason which Hope wouldn’t let herself work out there was discomfort in that last reflection. She switched to thinking of how thrilled Stefan would be when she told him that Dr. Kraljic would give them their unfitness certificates; how they would all praise and thank her for fixing it. That thought brought her to the flat; she sprang out, gave her car-key to the new liftman and told him to ring the garage and tell them to fetch the car back. Then she shot up in the lift to rejoin her family.

  4

  “WHERE’S Father?” Hope asked, pouring herself a sherry in the little sitting-room before lunch, and then beginning to rearrange the flowers she had brought in—she had already arranged them once in the pantry.

  “Bill wanted to see him, so they fixed to lunch at the Nemzeti Casino together,” Mrs. Kirkland said—“he rang me about an hour ago.”

  The Nemzeti Casino was the strange name given to the most exclusive men’s club in Budapest: Englishmen were apt to think that to call a club a Casino threw a certain light on the Hungarian character. It was true that plenty of gambling took place there, but mostly at rummy.

  “Why did Bill want to see him?” Hope enquired, idly.

  “Your Father didn’t say, but he sounded fussed. I think he’s worried about the Germans, and Bill too. It’s getting hard enough to get oil out of Rumania already and if they were to come in here, it would make business pretty well impossible,” Mrs. Kirkland said.

  “Did Father say that? When?” Hope asked.

  “Last night, when you were out.”

  “Oh well, people are always talking about the Germans coming in—and I’ll say they do come in, some places,” replied Hope. “But it won’t make much difference to us, I don’t suppose—they’ll want gas, and they’ll probably be glad enough to have Father fix it for them.” She went over, put a record on the gramophone, and switched it on; Lucienne Boyer’s deep husky expressive voice floated out into the room, to a deliciously delicate clear accompaniment, singing J’ai rêvé de t’aimer—one of the prettiest of all her songs. Hope leaned back in a chair and listened, her eyes far away, her thoughts in some remote fairyland. Parmi des fleurs sans nombre—lovely to love someone among innumerable flowers; and then the wistful calm of the verse about the summer fields: Et l’ Angélus du soir, the Angelus bell ringing out across the flower of the grass, while two sat hand in hand, and thought together about how Our Lady loves and blesses lovers.

  Across these dreams her Mother’s voice came almost as a shock. “Hopey, my child, I want to talk to you.”

  Ever since she could remember, the words “my child” on her Mother’s lips had been a sort of gale warning to Hope; they invariably preluded a discussion about something she would rather not have talked about, even if not a really unpleasant business like a scolding. She sat up, her eyes wary, and took a sip at her sherry. Could her Mother have heard anything?—about where she had been yesterday, and today? The very idea made her nervous; as a result she spoke more coldly than usual.

  “O.K.—What is it?” she almost drawled.

  “Your Father and I have been thinking about you,” Mrs. Kirkland began; the cold voice made her quite as nervous as Hope. “We think it would be a good plan to announce your engagement.”

  This was a relief in one way, but Hope felt irritated nevertheless.

  “Why?” she asked flatly.

  “Well dear, it’s customary to announce engagements. And—” Mrs. Kirkland hesitated; she found this part more difficult to express. “We think it will be fairer to other men, and easier for you, if everybody knows that you’re engaged to Sam—as they will after a proper formal announcement.”

  Hope fell into a panic. Less than an hour before she had told Dr. Kraljic that she was engaged to a Polish refugee; if she couldn’t stop her parents from carrying out this ghastly idea of theirs he might easily see the announcement, or hear of it from the dentist, and know that she had lied—and then perhaps he wouldn’t give the certificates. Another horrid possibility flew into her mind—even if she headed Mother off, would the doctor ask Stefan and Hempel which of them was her fiancé? Why hadn’t she thought of that before? He might have done it without. She would have to warn him—them; telling them both would be easier. (Hope was too flustered, and thinking too fast, to work out why it would be easier to tell both than one.) Yet another alarming thought occurred to her—unpleasant ideas seemed to be bombarding her like hailstones—why were her Father and Mother bringing this up just now? Could her Father have heard something? He was apt to be very knowing and well-informed.

  Panic often leads to temper—it did so now.

  “My dear Mother, will you please leave me and Sam to arrange our own affairs in our own way? Sam’s quite adult, even if you think I’m still an infant. I suppose you imagine I can’t look after myself, and stand off any men who start getting fresh with me? Well, I do assure you that you are mistaken.”

>   “Now Hope, do please not be angry—there’s no need for it,” replied Mrs. Kirkland, becoming a little vexed in her turn. “Your Father and I are not suggesting anything unreasonable; and as to treating you like a child, if we had meant to do that we would just have announced it, without consulting you at all.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!” Hope flamed.

  “Why not? I don’t see what you have to get so worked up about, anyway. What’s wrong with announcing it? We’re not ashamed of having you engaged to Sam Harrison; and I wouldn’t have thought you were ashamed of being engaged to him.”

  Her Mother’s literalness and the weakness of her own position brought Hope to her senses, more or less—also she was recovering from the shock of the suggestion. She pulled herself together.

  “Of course I’m not,” she said, “and maybe you and Father are right. I’m sorry I was so mad. But look, Mother, we must ask Sam first—I don’t think we ought to do it without putting it up to him, do you? I’ll write tonight—and we’ll hear in a few days.”

  “I don’t suppose Sam will mind,” said Mrs. Kirkland, relieved. “Very well—you write to him. He should be asked—I see that. I expect he’d have thought of it himself if he hadn’t gone off in such a rush.”

  Lunch was announced at that moment, and Hope got up and gave her mother a kiss before they went in. That had been an awkward corner, but it was turned now, and she’d been a fool to go into a flat spin over it. It would be five or six days at least before she could get an answer back from Sam, and by then, with any luck, Stefan and Hempel would have their certificates, and be clear away over the frontier.

  At three Hope set off for the Penzio, telling her Mother that she was going to see Sister Scholastica at the Sacré Cœur, one of her old mistresses—unluckily Mrs. Kirkland was in when she set out, and she was beginning to run short of excuses for these expeditions. But Mrs. Kirkland, though grateful for Hope’s admirable French, never felt at ease with the good nuns, and it was a moral certainty that she wouldn’t see any of them for ages, if at all.

  Old Mme Moranska was alone when Hope arrived. She did not know where the others were, she said, but they would probably be in soon. So once again Hope waited; but this time she felt quite happy and at ease, and talked away in French. The old lady fell into reminiscences of their life at home in Poland. Jurek a second cousin, had been with them a great deal as a child, because his parents were dead—“so it was natural that he and Litka should get engaged in the end; they fell into one another’s mouths like ripe fruit. But oh, how wild he was! It was he who started Stefan riding the ice-floes in the spring.”

  “Riding ice-floes?” Hope asked, astonished.

  “Yes. When the ice breaks up it comes down the Vistula in great blocks, immense—and the boys would go upstream and get on to one each, and then come rushing down on the flood-water, balanced on the ice, and shouting!”

  “But wasn’t it rather dangerous?”

  “Oh yes, very. My husband forbade it, of course; but if he was away they would do it—naturally they always got wet through, and then they would creep in by the back door and Jadwiga, our old cook, who always spoilt them, would smuggle them upstairs and change them, and dry their things in the kitchen.” The old lady got up and went over to the pile of canvases leaning against the wall—“Look, this is our house; it stands, as you see, right on the river,” she said, drawing one out and handing it to Hope.

  The picture showed a white house, long rather than high, plain and dignified, standing on a gentle green slope above a wide river, with a background of high trees which stretched away to the right—on the left was the pale gold of cornfields.

  Hope liked it; it seemed to her very good, in its skilful simplicity: the various tones of green, the way the pale gravel of the drive before the house repeated the pale gold of the harvest-fields behind, and the river reflected the high soft blue of the sky. She praised it, and asked who had painted it?

  “My husband,” Mme Moranska said. “He painted well, it was considered; he called himself an amateur, for he could give little time to it, he was too busy with the estate and the farm. But his pictures always commanded a ready sale if he showed them in Warsaw, as he did occasionally.”

  The past tense caused Hope to ask, as she felt she ought to—“He is dead, Madame?”

  “Ah yes indeed. He died on our journey out. We suffered many hardships, and they were too much for him; he was old, and not strong.” Hope murmured sympathy, and the old lady went on talking about the past, and their life at home in Poland. From her words, even more than from the picture, now propped against the table-legs, Hope gathered a singularly vivid impression of a big roomy happy house, full of warmth and food and servants and ease; as she listened she looked round the dismal room in which they sat, and realized a little what it might mean, now, to be a European—or at least to be a Pole. The loss of all things! That was what it really amounted to, or at least the loss of all the things that made the external framework of a life—home, the beloved house and still more beloved garden, horses, harvests, game in the winter, the home-raised turkeys and the home-cured hams and home-brewed raspberry eau de vie; the devoted service of people whose families had attended one’s own family for generations, with affection and respect on both sides. She was vexed with herself that she had not thought to bring some flowers when Mme Moranska artlessly mentioned how pretty the chrysanthemums used to look, massed in pots at the foot of the stairs in winter in the big central hall—“and in summer we had hortensias there, the blue and the white. Litka loves hortensias.” (Hope had lived long enough in Hungary to know that hortensias were hydrangeas.)

  She was about to ask more about Litka when the door opened, and a pretty girl, brown-haired and brown-eyed, a year or two older than Hope, came in, and was greeted by the old lady—as Hope herself had been the first time she stood at the door—as “Litka, kochana!” (Dear Litka!) She was introduced, and Mme Moranska, seeing them together, exclaimed, as Hempel had done, at their resemblance to one another. She made them stand side by side before the dingy mirror over the mantelpiece, and when she did Hope could see it for herself: much the same rather triangular face, with emphatic eyebrows, wide mouth, and small neat nose, under the same bright brown curly hair. They were still commenting on the likeness and the slight differences—Litka’s nose was larger than Hope’s—when the two young men came in.

  Stefan, after the usual greetings and hand-kissing, said eagerly to Hope—“You have heard again from Sam?”

  “No—better than that,” she replied, smiling.

  “What, then?”

  “I have got a doctor to give you your certificates.”

  “Impossible!” Jurek burst out—again in that low undertone. But Stefan stared at Hope. “Is this true?” he asked, also very low.

  “Yes, perfectly true,” she said, nodding her head, and smiling more emphatically still—this was the moment she had been waiting for, and she was enjoying it.

  “Who is it?”

  “It may be the one you were thinking of”—and now she lowered her voice. “It’s a Dr. Kraljic.”

  “But the very one we tried so hard to get hold of!” Jurek exploded again, still under his breath. “How could you still arrange this? He has stopped doing it.”

  “Well, he’s going to do it for you,” Hope said. “I’ve come to settle everything up with you.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you can.”

  “This is most wonderful,” said the old lady. She went over to Hope, and slightly to the girl’s embarrassment enfolded her in a warm embrace. “How much you do for us, you who hardly know us!” she said.

  The general rejoicing was so great that for a little while Hope had some difficulty in getting the two young men to concentrate on the arrangements; Hempel was the most vocal, but they all had a great deal of delight and thanks to express, always in low discreet voices. At last, however, they got down to it.

  “When can you come?” she
said. “Fix a time, and then I’ll ring up and make the appointment.”

  “Any time!” the irrepressible Hempel muttered—but “We must choose a time that suits you,” said Stefan Moranski.

  “We’ll really have to fix a time that suits Dr. Kraljic!” said Hope, “but I expect he’ll fit us in; doctors in Budapest seem pretty elastic about their appointments. What can you manage?—any time tomorrow? All right—I’ll offer him 11 to 1, and 4 to 7. No, that won’t do—I have a cocktail party at half 6—I’ll have to say 4 to 6. Then I can ring you up, and just say the time.”

  “But this is clever!” said Hempel.

  “Wait till you get it straight,” Hope said. “Listen. I’ll give you the time on the telephone, but twenty minutes before whatever time I say, you two will parade in the Vörösmarty Tér outside Alphonse, the hairdresser. I’ll go in, as if to make an appointment, and call Dr. Kraljic—he says his place is watched, sometimes; if everything is all right I’ll nod when I come out, and you can follow me round to his consulting-rooms. I’ll leave my car in the Tér and go on foot. We’ll all go up and go in together—I’ll give my name, and you can give yours; he’ll see me first, and when I come out, he says he’ll come to the waiting-room door, and I’ll point you out. Then I’ll go off and he’ll call you in and fix you up, and no one will know we came together at all.”

  “But you have it all worked out!” said Hempel in astonishment.

  “Well naturally. He suggested most of it. But is all that quite clear?”

  “Yes, perfectly,” Stefan said. “It is admirably combined.”

  Somehow or other the suggestion arose that the four young people should go off and have a drink, to celebrate this arrangement. They walked down to the river in the silvery-blue dusk: the flower-stalls at the street corners were brilliant with paper-white narcissus, snowdrops, jonquils, and violets, and when they reached the river the lights were coming out along the embankments—the jewels of that careless beautiful woman Budapest, most feminine of cities; in that magical half-light the Danube was really blue. Hope was extraordinarily happy: happy to have brought off a coup which meant so much to people she already liked as well as pitied, happy at the thanks and praise she had earned; happy above all simply to be with them. They were so astonishingly lively and gay, in a different way from her normal run of friends, and at the moment she felt very much one of them, included in their affectionate high spirits. Jurek and Litka were walking arm-in-arm, as a betrothed couple may, she beside Stefan, for the moment almost as intimate; she had a faint prick of conscience on Sam’s account, remembering that she had told the Serbian doctor that she was Stefan’s fiancée—well obviously Stefan’s, as Jurek was engaged to Litka. In a way (the thought shot into her mind), it would be nice if she were!—Stefan was terribly nice, especially in this gay unbent mood. But then a stubbornly realistic feeling came in to correct these romantic ideas begotten of the magical hour, the magical light, the general exhilaration and triumph. I’m not really one of them at all, she thought; there’s so much, past and present, of their life that I know nothing about—it’s just a sort of accidental hitch-up.