The Balkan Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

fiercely held was the inner pavement beside the shop windows. Guy, too temperate, and Harriet, too light-boned, for the fray, were easily thrust out to the kerb, where Guy gripped Harriet’s elbow to keep her from slipping into the gutter. She broke from him, saying: ‘I’ll walk in the road. I’m not a Rumanian. I can do what I like.’
    Following her, Guy caught her hand and squeezed it, trying to induce in her his own imperturbable good humour. Harriet, looking back at the crowd, more tolerant now she was released from it, realised that behind its apparent complacency there was a nervous air of enquiry, an alert unease. Were someone to shout: ‘The invasion has begun,’ the whole smug fa ç ade would collapse.
    This unease unmasked itself at the end of the Calea Victoriei where the road widened in a no-man’s-land of public buildings. Here were parked a dozen or so of the Polish refugee cars that were still streaming down from the north. Some of the cars had been abandoned. From the others women and children, left while the men sought shelter, gazed out blankly. The well-dressed Rumanians, out to appreciate and be appreciated, looked affronted by these ruined faces that were too tired to care.
    Harriet wondered what would be done with the Poles. Guy said the Rumanians, once stirred, were kindly enough. Some who owned summer villas were offering them to Polish families, but stories were already going round about the refugees; old anti-Polish stories remembered from the last war.
    Near the end of the road, near the cross roads where the turbaned boyar, Cantacuzino, pointed the way to the ChickenMarket, a row of open tr ǎ sur ǎ s waited to be hired. Guy suggested they drive up the Chaussée. Harriet peered at the horses, whose true condition was hidden by the failing of the light.
    ‘They look wretchedly thin,’ she said.
    ‘They’re very old.’
    ‘I don’t think we should employ them.’
    ‘If no one employed them, they would starve to death.’
    Choosing the least decrepit of the horses, the Pringles climbed into the carriage, which was about to start when commanded to a halt. A tall, elderly man was holding out his walking-stick with an imperious air.
    Guy recognised the man with surprise. ‘It’s Woolley,’ he said. ‘He usually ignores “the culture boys”.’ Then his face lit with pleasure: ‘I expect he wants to meet you.’ Before Woolley could state his business, Guy introduced him to Harriet: ‘The leading English businessman, the chairman of the Golf Club’, enhancing from sheer liberality of spirit such importance as Woolley had; then, turning with tender pride towards Harriet, he said: ‘My wife.’
    Woolley’s cold nod indicated that duty not frivolity had caused him to accost them. ‘The order is,’ he announced in a nasal twang, ‘the ladies must return to England.’
    ‘But,’ said Guy, ‘I called at the Legation this morning. No one said anything about it.’
    ‘Well, there it is,’ said Woolley in a tone that implied he was not arguing, he was telling them.
    Harriet, exasperated by the mildness of Guy’s protest asked: ‘Who has given this order? The Minister?’
    Woolley started, surprised, it seemed, not only by the edge on her voice but by the fact she had a voice at all. His head, hairless, with toad-mottled skin, jerked round and hung towards her like a lantern tremulous on a bamboo: ‘No, it’s a general order, like. I’ve sent me lady wife home as an example. That was enough for the other ladies.’
    ‘Not for me, I’m afraid. I never follow examples.’
    Woolley’s throat moved several times before he said: ‘Oh,don’t you? Well, young woman, I can tell you this: if trouble starts here, there’ll be a proper schemozzle. The cars and petrol will be requisitioned by the army and the trains’ll be packed with troops. I doubt if anyone’ll get away, but if you do, you’ll go empty-handed, and it won’t be no Cook’s tour. Don’t say I haven’t warned