The Night of Wenceslas (26 page)

After a moment he burst out, ‘Nicolas, understand! For myself, I would sooner beg in the gutter! It is your dear mother I think about. She has no idea what things cost. She thinks her annuity covers everything. It doesn’t even pay the hotel bill! I must buy her clothes, cigarettes, the little extras she likes… I am not complaining, my boy. Don’t think I complain. It is my whole pleasure to do these things for her. But lately, I don’t know, business isn’t so good… I think I’m getting old. Too old,’ he said, nodding to the sheet of stamps he had dropped when I came in.

All this was, in its way, rather more hideous than all the primitive things that had been happening to me for the past three months. We sat staring at each other in dismal silence. Something came to mind, after a while. Throughout his recital, Imre had been calling Cunliffe by another name.

I said, ‘This man you went to see in London. What do you call him?’

‘Vogler. It wasn’t Vogler you saw?’

I said, wearily, that I supposed it was. Vogler; and Vogler on the list of half-remembered émigré names I had handed to Roddinghead. I said, ‘He called himself Cunliffe. He had an office in Francis Street and a secretary with glasses and her hair parted in the middle.’

‘
Yoh, yoh
. That is Anna, his daughter.’

Bunface. Miss Vogler. Cunliffe’s daughter. I had rumbled that one, too, that afternoon when Roddinghead had told me about it. It was nice to get it confirmed. It didn’t seem to help the present situation a great deal.

Imre sighed presently. ‘Well, Nicolas, I have now told you all. You think badly of me?’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘I am bitterly ashamed, my boy. I apologize to you.’

‘You don’t need to feel ashamed. I understand.’

‘Maybe in the long run you won’t feel so badly. After all, if the government is really interested, it can’t be …’

‘It isn’t. That was just a lot of hokum, too.’

‘Oh, I am sorry. I am sorry, Nicolas.’

We sat again in turgid silence. After a while, sighing gustily, he said, ‘So one door closes, another opens. It isn’t the end of the world. At least you can go to Canada with a clear mind.’

I said, ‘Yes,’ returning to the familiar lunacy.

‘After all, you’re an intelligent boy. You can learn the business quickly. And you’ve got to admit the prospects with Bela are magnificent.’

‘Yes. If he’ll do anything for me.’

He was looking at me in an odd sort of way. ‘If he’ll do anything for you! You mean you don’t know? You haven’t heard?’

‘Heard what? What about?’

He was gazing at me in astonishment, the hairs of his nose waving in his powerful breath. I said, ‘What?’ in a kind of squeak, practically leaping up and down in front of him. ‘What is it, Uncle? What are you trying to say? What in God’s name is it I’m supposed to have heard?’

‘About Bela,’ he said.

Typically, he’d left it to the last. Bela had written. He had written saying specifically that I was his heir. He had written to say that he had sent me a one-way ticket. He wanted me in the business right away.

‘Naturally,’ Maminka said, ‘I told him you would have to consider it After all, does he suppose you can drop all your important business to fly to him the minute he remembers his responsibilities? He was always thoughtless, even as a boy. I told him perhaps you wouldn’t care for the business, perhaps you would wish to act merely as a kind of consultant. I told him …’

I said, ‘Yes, Maminka. If you could just please try to remember when you wrote him. If you could try to think again.’

‘My dear child, I’ve told you – a month, two months ago. What does it matter? Let me look at you again.’

‘And he hasn’t replied?’

‘But of course he wouldn’t, at this time of the year. This is the time they are so busy. I know Bela.’

I only hoped she was right. Her clear almond eyes were smiling gaily at me. A large number of undigested items had recently come my way. I said, ‘And Maura was here? Maura was actually here three times?’

‘
Bobitchka
, I’ve already told you. You are like a little puppy dog. Try to stand still for a minute.’

‘And you can’t remember when she was here last? Do you think it was when Bela’s letter came? Was it when she heard about Bela?’

‘Nicolas, I’m not a calendar. Imre might know. Maybe I would think better with a cigarette. Do you know that ogre has tried to stop me smoking for good! He says it is my throat. Oh, I understand very well his reasons! Darling boy,’ she said, catching my arm, ‘I implore you to stay still for a minute. You are making me quite giddy. Here, come and sit with me. Now tell me everything from Prague. Whom did you see? Where did you go? Did Baba weep to see you again?’

I told her presently. It was a very detailed story, containing everything she wanted to hear. She sat and held my hands, her lovely eyes alive with recollection, exclaiming from time to time. It is always a pleasure to tell Maminka a story, and this one certainly had many merits. It didn’t contravene the Official Secrets Act, 1911.

I went back that night after borrowing a quid from Imre. I had meant to ask for five but, remembering what he had told me, desisted. I had only twelve and six left from the other pound. I didn’t know how I was going to manage. I thought God would provide. I thought Maura might, at a pinch. I felt slightly drunk.

I thought of Maura, speeding after my headlights through the dark New Forest. I was pretty sure why she’d stayed away from Bournemouth. Bela’s letter; the big time. She hadn’t wanted to push herself. She hadn’t wished to give the appearance of getting her foot in the door. The young master might have other ideas now. If she had only known; that I had been through all this before. There was a lot Maura didn’t know. There was a lot she was going to know. I shoved my foot down and fairly let rip.

Just before Lyndhurst the road bends sharply right. I took it at sixty and suddenly was ramming the brake pedal practically through the floor. A pony was standing in the middle of the road looking into the headlights. I don’t know if I touched him. I skidded right, left, tyres shrieking, tree trunks rearing into the beam both sides. Car going over, over … not quite. Steady. Stopped. Silence. Light beams staring calmly into shrubbery. I had stalled.

I got out after a moment, heart still in my throat. The car was slanted into the shrubbery, nose buried in a bush. The registration plate was bent. That seemed to be the only damage. I got back in and started and reversed slowly. She came out quite easily and I pulled into the side of the road and switched off again and lit a cigarette and watched my hands still shaking. I thought it was the sort of Charleyish move I could always expect of myself: to come through the three dangerous and fantastic months in Prague and end by piling myself up against a tree in the New Forest. I started off again presently. I didn’t go at more than forty after that.

I had left Bournemouth just after seven o’clock. It was a quarter to ten before I drew up outside her house.

She had been washing her hair. It hung straight and damply gleaming and pleasantly scented. She was in a dressing gown and had no make-up on and seemed so small and finely-drawn, after some I had known, that I wanted nothing so much as simply to gaze at her. We were sitting on the floor in front of the gas fire, holding hands.

She said, ‘Oh, Nicolas, if only I’d known. If only you could have given me some hint.’

‘I couldn’t. I shouldn’t be telling you about it now. They could still put me in prison.’

‘And you only guessed when this man asked about your nanny?’

I nodded. Some slight amendments had been needed to the official version. Vlasta had undergone a change of sex. ‘Yes. I knew I had never mentioned Baba. And later on, of course, when I heard that Baba was not in fact dead, I realized where the information must have come from. It could only have come from Imre, because he was the only person who said Baba was dead.’

She was silent for a long time. I withdrew one hand and put my arm round her and kissed her neck. It smelled of shampoo.

She said, ‘You’re quite sure about us, are you?’

‘Never surer of anything in my life.’

‘And you want to go to Canada right away?’

‘Don’t you want me to?’

‘Because I’ve been thinking.’ Her eyes were blinking rapidly and intelligently at the gas fire. ‘I want to go with you. We could get married first. I mean, if you’re really sure you want to. If you’re absolutely certain of it. We could get a special licence.’

I looked at her and felt the faintest pang. She was a wonderful girl, a splendid girl in so many ways. If she didn’t just have this thing about working everything out. Her eyes flickered at me and I realized I had been too long in answering.

I said, ‘Why, Maura, that’s
just
what I want. That’s a marvellous thing.’ And it probably was.

‘It would only take a few days. And there are lots of things you need to clear up first – your car and other bits and pieces. And the Little Swine – we must have a clear understanding about your shares. He’ll have to buy you out. Oh, Nicolas,’ she said, taking my head in her two hands and kissing me gently on the lips. ‘You’re a lovely old idiot. I should have been looking after you long ago, do you know that?’

And again she was probably right.

‘If only you’d told me about all this business. If only you could have dropped a word right at the beginning.’

‘Well. It’s over now, and there’s nothing you could have done about it. And anyway,’ I said, a bit irritably, ‘I got away with it. That’s something in the circumstances.’

‘Oh, Nicolas, of course it is. You’ve been tremendously clever and terribly brave, and I love you. But you ought to have been a bit more careful about that man Cunliffe. You could have looked him up in the Law List right away.’

‘Why should I have looked him up in the Law List?’

‘Well, why not? He didn’t have anything about being a solicitor on his notepaper. And he was telling you about this legacy. I’d have looked him up. I’d have looked him up right away. It’s the first thing I would have done. And then none of this need have happened.’

And she probably would; and it probably needn’t, I thought with a sudden grave and lowering feeling in my vitals.

‘Oh, Nicolas, I’ve upset you.’

‘No, you haven’t, silly.’

‘Yes, I have. And I didn’t mean to. And I bet I wouldn’t have looked up the list, that’s only a thing you think of afterwards. Oh, Nicolas, you silly old silly, I do love you, and I wanted to make up to you for everything.’ She was kissing me in a certain kind of way between her words, and presently my spirits recovered. And she did make up for it.

It was after one when I left. I tiptoed down the stairs and out into the dark square in some confusion of mind; excited, perturbed, not knowing, as they say, whether I was on my knee or my elbow.

I drove home slowly and put the covers on the car and went in and up the three flights and switched the light on. The letters were lying as I had left them on the plush tablecloth. I went through them again, standing there in my raincoat. It was there, of course; a franked envelope I had mistaken for a circular.

It was dated 23rd August, five weeks ago. The ticket was inside.

I took off my raincoat. I went and brushed my teeth in the bathroom and undressed and switched off the light. Mrs Nolan had drawn the curtains. I knew I wouldn’t sleep for a bit, and I didn’t want to lie in the dark. So I opened the curtains and got into bed and lay there with my arms behind my head, looking out at the night sky.

I had been shuttling about a bit lately. I wasn’t sure that I knew myself. Too many things happening, a surplus of experience still to be absorbed. I thought maybe none of it had happened. Maybe it was a dream and I would shortly awake to face another day in the service of the Little Swine. But I knew it was not a dream. There was that inner disturbance, the sickness of events; a sensation of distances having been covered. It was not unpleasant. It was not particularly pleasant. I had been living it up, after a fashion.

An aeroplane drifted slowly across the window, winking like a firefly. Long ranges of cloud stood coldly corrugated in the moonlight. The sky was still now; not racing as on that other night, when the iron king had leapt with his iron horse in the moonlight.

None of it had been necessary, Maura had said. None of it
need have happened. I didn’t know about that. The pony in the New Forest need not have happened. It had happened. A part of oneself went out to meet the event. A part of oneself remained involved with it; one was diminished by it. It took time to recover what had been lost.

The aeroplane vanished slowly off the edge of the pane. I thought there was rather more Thinking going on here than was strictly called for. Events were mainly incalculable, their significance always dubious. If experience taught anything, it was not to think too much, but to sharpen up the responses. It was a lesson I had learnt on the night that Wenceslas leapt in the moonlight. I thought I’d got it now. I thought my responses had sharpened up a bit, and closed my eyes and went to sleep, not dissatisfied.

Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire. He left school early and worked as a reporter before serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first novel,
The Night of Wenceslas
, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim and drew comparisons to Graham Greene and John le Carré. It was followed by
The Rose of Tibet
(1962),
A Long Way to Shiloh
(1966) and
The Chelsea Murders
(1978). He has thrice been the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and, in 2001, was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award.