She ended with a final twang and let the strings die slowly in the quiet room. It was very effective. I said sincerely, ‘Vlasta, that was marvellous. Play another.’
‘You like the balalaika?’
‘I like the way you do it.’
‘The balalaika is for firelight,’ she said with a mournful smile. ‘Switch off the light.’
I did so, with an anxious look at the clock. It was a quarter past twelve. Outside the rain was still pouring steadily, thunder rumbling distantly. I took my seat again in the easy chair in the red glow of the fire. She had poured out two more drinks and drained hers with a single toss before beginning to pluck the balalaika again.
I don’t know how many songs she played. She poured more drinks between them. I sank back in the warm darkness, aware I should be going, unable to go, thinking just one more, and just one more. At some point she moved over to lean against me as she sang. I dropped my hands to her shoulders and played with her damp hair. Its odour came up strongly in the dimly lit room.
She swayed from side to side as she sang, and I swayed with her, head beginning to spin, fire rolling, darkness lurching. I
cupped my hands under her chin, and, as the room rolled and the low voice sang, dropped them inside her dressing gown.
She didn’t stop singing; bombs rolling warmly, smoothly, heavily in the dark. And then the balalaika had stopped and she had turned round and was nuzzling my face. ‘
Milacek
.’
‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Stay now.’
‘Your father.’
‘It’s too late. He won’t come.’
‘How do you know? How can you …’
‘The concert must have ended late. He will come early in the morning. They have a motor bus. It has happened before.’
My heart was thumping, mouth dry, the girl’s face swaying in the dim light. I said huskily, ‘Vlasta, are you sure?’
She stood up and pulled the sash. Her dressing gown fell open. She had nothing on at all underneath.
‘I am sure,’ she said.
I
WAS
rowing this enormous boat with a rope round my neck and the man hitting me over the head with a shovel when it gave a final lurch and I came up out of it. I opened my eyes. A large white face was circling several feet in front of me. It stopped after a while and turned into a clock, which, after much diligent frowning, I calculated to be registering ten minutes to seven.
There was an awful numbness at the back of my neck and my head seemed to have been crammed forward over my eyes. I lay
quietly for a while puzzling why this should be and trying to think where the hell I was, and suddenly remembered and sat up in a panic. I was going home today. I was due at the airport at ten. Three hours.
I had been lying on her arm. Her large, beautiful body lay stretched out on top of the coverlet, one massive tanned leg across mine. Her bomb-like breasts rose and fell profoundly. She was fast asleep and moodily magnificent.
She had loved with such ferocity last night that even in my drunken excitement I had been unnerved at the appalling strength of her. In this shattered morning state I was more than unnerved. I felt broken, ruined, and in much physical danger.
Across the chair, in some disarray, lay the inhumanly large clothes of her father. I had no wish to be around when he arrived; still less, a far graver and more urgent contingency, when his insatiable daughter should awake.
She lay sleeping like the mother of the universe. I began trying to manoeuvre my leg from under hers. This was no simple operation, and in the course of it her arm came round in a loose movement batting me numbingly on the ear.
She was turning over.
I waited in palpitating and queasy silence, but apart from a sombre, muttered ‘
Milacek
,’ she did not awake.
I drew myself slowly off the bed, watching her minutely. The Norstrund was on the floor beside the almost-empty slivovitz bottle. I picked it up and tip-toed into the bathroom.
My clothes were still damp and crumpled. I put them on swiftly. The room lurched. I rammed my tie in my pocket and left my shoe laces undone and tip-toed back to the doorway. She had turned half on her side, knees drawn up. She was sleeping soundly with the healthy and magnificent grace of some satisfied jungle beast. I said silently, Goodbye, Vlasta, goodbye
milacek
, and let myself out quietly.
I walked softly up the gravel path to the side road, but once there tied up my shoe laces and began to run. It was a still morning, hot already, the sun glinting everywhere. My mouth was parched, stomach gravely uneasy.
At the main road I stopped and looked up and down. There was nothing in sight, no trucks, no farm wagons, not even a bicycle. The telegraph wires hummed softly in the silence. A tangy smell was coming up off the road in the early heat I began to panic again. I had a terrifying feeling the girl had woken up and was storming around looking for me and would shortly come bounding up the road in amorous fury. It was a damned long way from the hotel. Too far to walk; two hours at least. And I had to pack and pay and get to the airport.
In a state of mild frenzy, I began to trot up the road, and five minutes later had to slow down, gasping. A couple of minutes after that, I saw a horse and trap pulling out of a side road ahead of me and yelled like a madman for the driver to stop. He did so, staring curiously as I panted up.
‘You drive to Prague?’ I asked in Czech.
‘Yoh.
’
‘
Dobry den
,’ I said belatedly as I clambered up.
‘
Dobry den
’ He was a little wizened carrot of a man, in shiny gaiters. He still looked curiously at me, but apart from a sly remark of ‘How goes the night work, comrade?’ made no comment as we trotted down to the shining river.
We crossed the water at the Jiraskuv bridge and he dropped me at the corner of the Mezibranska and I walked past the museum and up the Vaclavske Namesti, quiet for once in the still of this sunny Sunday morning, and got in the hotel by ten past eight. I had a shower and packed and went down for my breakfast and had paid the bill by twenty past nine. And then with nothing to do, but a compulsive need to do it, I called a taxi and left.
I was too early to go through the customs but, with a mindless sense that it might show the innocence of my luggage and of my conscience, I left my case on the inspection table and walked up and down, grateful, in a complex way, for this confusion of stomach and mind that obscured the terrors of the final handicap.
There was no need for worry. The customs officials showed no interest in my luggage. They didn’t notice the Norstrund.
Five days after leaving it, only ten hours since parting from
the beautiful giantess on the bed at Barrandov, I was back in Fitzwalter Square. I let myself in with my latchkey and paused for a moment in the hall, leaning against the front door, grinning with disbelief.
Mrs Nolan came out of the kitchen with a loaded tray. ‘Hello, duck,’ she said. ‘Back already? You’re just in time for tea,’ and passed into the dining-room.
I had told Mrs Nolan I was visiting my mother in Bournemouth, and having no desire to enlarge on this or indeed to do anything but flake out on the divan and gaze with hilarious relief at the plush tablecloth and the plant and the entire sanity of my familiar surroundings, I remained in my room.
I couldn’t believe I was back. I couldn’t believe I would not shortly awake to find myself in the bed at Barrandov with the large and brooding Vlasta; or in the green and gold splendour of the Slovenska with the noisy Vaclavske Namesti outside and the Norstrund to be guarded. I couldn’t believe I’d got away with it.
I picked up the Norstrund and opened the cover. It was still crinkled a little in one corner. I ran my hand all over it. It was smooth and flat and innocent, a very expert job indeed. Impossible to believe that I had here the secret of a new industry; that I had blarneyed my way past Svoboda and Czernin and Stein and Vlcek and Galushka, had emerged from the muscular embraces of Vlasta Simenova, and had smuggled it out.
I was still somewhat dehydrated from the slivovitz, and presently went down to the bathroom and drank from the tooth-mug. While I was there I thought I might as well have a wash and took off my jacket and bent over the bowl. This familiar action, in shirt sleeves and braces, and the sight of my own face in the small cracked mirror, convinced me suddenly as nothing else had done that I was back. I towelled myself vigorously in the mirror and showed my teeth and smiled. I even said, ‘Well, Pan Whistler, you made it,’ and winked at my image, feeling at
that moment extraordinarily debonair and alive and also, my nostrils carrying still the sharp odour of the girl at Barrandov, a bit of a young dog.
I went back to my room still smiling vacuously, but once there thought I’d better ring Cunliffe right away and picked up the Norstrund, out of habit, and went downstairs again.
Mrs Nolan had been watching out for me.
‘You’re surely not going out again before you’ve had a cup of tea, ducky?’
I had intended phoning from the hall but now thought better of it. ‘I won’t be a tick, Mrs Nolan. I’m only walking up the street.’
‘Brought her a nice book back, have you?’ She winked at me. ‘She’s been ringing up, you know. She hasn’t forgotten you.’
I had not spared so much as a moment’s thought for Maura, and now, reminded, felt the familiar distractions settling on me. I had no wish to see Maura yet, no wish to think about any of that at all. I said, ‘Did she leave any message?’
‘Only for you to get in touch with her when you got back. No further news about the other thing yet, I suppose?’
It was so long ago, such a lifetime ago, that I couldn’t think for the moment what the devil she was talking about.
‘The other thing – your poor uncle.’
‘Oh, no. Nothing further. I wasn’t expecting to yet.’
‘No, well. These things take time, don’t they?’ She had lowered her voice in referring to the other thing, but now raised it again. ‘Well, off you go then. Only don’t make a meal of it. And don’t you go catching her by surprise – you might get one yourself,’ she added with a playful little shove.
I went down the street thoughtfully, several familiar worries returning to mind. They were still in an unresolved and uncoagulated state, however, by the time I reached the telephone box and I took out the torn bit of diary sheet Cunliffe had given me and dialled his number with elation.
‘Hello. This is Nicolas Whistler.’
He said, ‘Who? Oh. You are back. Excellent. Just one moment,’ and went away for a while. ‘I am very glad to hear
your voice, ‘he grated warmly when he returned.’ Did everything go as planned?’
‘Yes. A few worrying moments, but no hitches. I’ve got the doings all right.’
‘That’s wonderful. I don’t think we should discuss it on the telephone, you know.’
‘No. Do you want me to come round right away?’
‘I don’t think,’ he said slowly, ‘I don’t think that’s absolutely necessary.’
‘Later this evening?’
There was a pause. ‘I don’t think you should come here at all. See me in the office in the morning.’
I said, ‘All right,’ with some disappointment.
‘There isn’t anything – nothing went wrong in any way?’
‘No. It’s just that I’ve been carrying the bloody thing around for several days. I thought it was urgent.’
‘It is indeed. I will see you tomorrow, Mr Whistler. At nine o’clock. Goodbye.’ He hung up right away.
My features in the little round mirror were sheepish and disappointed. I replaced the receiver and went outside. It was too early for a drink. I went back for tea, with the Norstrund.
In the night, I woke up, parched again, but couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. For some reason, I felt depressed as hell. A lot of things had come crowding back to mind and I turned over on my back and licked my lips and thought of them.
The night Maura was in this room. Just a week ago. She’d said the fellow on the first floor had let her in. I knew something was wrong with that, but couldn’t place it at the time. I could now. He was deaf. Not just hard of hearing; practically stone deaf. You had to dance about like a lunatic in front of him to attract his attention, our Mr Larkin. So he was the one who’d heard the doorbell and let her in.
I thought about Cunliffe then. He’d been surprised, no doubt about it, by my call. He hadn’t known I was back. Nor had a lot of people. Nor had Maura. But she’d been ringing up to find out.
I thought, oh no, how could it be? Why should Maura have me sent out on such a dangerous mission? But it hadn’t sounded very dangerous the way Cunliffe had explained it. It hadn’t, in fact, been very dangerous. It might have sounded a lot better, a lot more useful and enterprising than sticking stamps for the Little Swine.
But how could Maura have met Cunliffe? He was a moneylender. She hadn’t been borrowing any money. She had never mentioned any social occasion when she might conceivably have met him. She was a typist in a West End estate agency.
I turned on my side and tried to sleep, but I knew I wouldn’t unless I had a drink, so I got up and had one and returned to bed and slept, heavily.
The sun was shining on Mrs Nolan’s aspidistra when I awoke and somewhere below that jolly lady sang as she bashed about with the crockery. I felt extraordinarily refreshed and full of beans. And why not? I thought, springing out of bed. I had nipped behind the Iron Curtain and found time to dally on the way. I had returned with a secret worth, say, a king’s ransom. I seemed to have swapped for good one way of life and almost any change would be an improvement.
As for Maura – Maura was an imaginative girl with a talent for shoving her nose in. She’d meant for the best. And everything probably was for the best. There would be time to sort out Maura. For the present, there were things to be done this day.
The depression of the night seemed to have been a last poisonous kick out of the slivovitz, and I dressed and breakfasted and picked up the car and wove in and out of the traffic to Francis Street in a very agreeable frame of mind, arriving there sharp on nine.
Bunface had not yet arrived, but Cunliffe had left his inner office door open, and called, ‘Is that you, Mr Whistler? Please come right in.’
He was sitting waiting for me, still in his street coat, and I placed the Norstrund modestly on his desk and he took both my hands, smiling whimsically into my eyes without saying a word.
‘You see?’ he said at last, releasing my hands and picking up the Norstrund. ‘I told you how it would be. I never doubted for a minute that you could do it.’
‘No. Well,’ I said, dropping negligently into a chair, ‘there were one or two worrying moments. Is Mr Pavelka coming along?’
‘Mr Pavelka is out looking for a factory,’ he said, smiling. ‘In Ireland at the moment, I believe. As you saw for yourself he has the highest hopes for this – this new process.’
He had opened the Norstrund and was running his fingers as I had done over the flyleaf. I thought: Ireland, looking for a factory, estate agents, Maura; and saw in that moment exactly how it must have been, Pavelka with his great creased dog’s face explaining earnestly what he wanted, and Maura saying
Glass,
glass – I wonder, Mr Pavelka
, her busy little brain working on it right away.
Everything fell into place then, and I sat there grinning at Cunliffe, and he looked up from the book and caught me grinning and said, ‘Yes, he’s a very impetuous man, Mr Pavelka, but you should be complimented at the confidence he has in you.’
And I was complimented; really quite touched.
I like you
, he had said.
You look like your father
.
I told Cunliffe everything that had happened to me in Prague then, with some personal exceptions, and he listened quietly, his large grey intelligent eyes unblinking.
‘Yes,’ he said at the end, ‘it’s really much as I thought. We’ve been getting reports out, of course. And now,’ he said, slipping the Norstrund in his briefcase, ‘I’ve got to go somewhere with this.’