“It certainly is,” said Mihály.
They were silent for a while. At last she spoke:
“I’ve a message for you. From a very old acquaintance.”
Mihály promptly stood up.
“Éva Ulpius?”
“Yes, a message from Éva Ulpius. That you are not to look for her. You won’t find her anyway. It’s too late. You should have, she says, in that house in London, when she was hiding behind the curtain. But you shouted out Tamás’s name, she says. And now it’s too late.”
“Even to speak to her?”
“Much too late.”
The cry of pain swelling up through the wall as if in grief for the rising dawn, in lamentation for the passing of night, now lost its strength, became a faltering, broken wail, tearing at itself, murderously. The woman shuddered.
“Look,” she said. “The dome of St Peter’s.”
Above the grey city the cupola hovered, white and very cold, like unconquerable eternity itself. The woman ran off down the hill.
Mihály felt an immeasurable fatigue. It was as if he had all the while been anxiously clutching his life in his hands, and had just let it slip away.
Then he suddenly pulled himself together and rushed after the woman, who had now vanished.
Down below there was a tight crush of people. Most were taking their leave, but Waldheim was still reading aloud from the Symposium and holding forth. Mihály scurried here and there in the seething crowd, then raced to the main gate hoping to find the girl in the press of people boarding coaches.
He arrived just in time. She was climbing into a splendidly old-world open carriage, where the shape of a second woman was already seated, and the coach moved off briskly. The other woman he recognised instantly. It was Éva.
XVII
THE BANKERS’ DISCUSSION was becoming interminable. The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given. The lawyers dazzled one another with their skill in sliding down the very steepest sentences without falling off, while the powerful financiers said little, listening suspiciously, their silence saying more eloquently than any words: “Count me out.”
“No deal will come of this,” thought Zoltán Pataki, Erzsi’s first husband, with resignation.
He grew steadily more restless and impatient. He had noted several times of late that his mind would wander during discussions, and ever since he had noticed that fact he had become even more restless and impatient.
The protracted blast of a car-horn sounded beneath the window. Previously, Erzsi would often wait in the car down below if the discussion went on at length.
“Erzsi … try not to think of her. It’s still painful, but time will cure that. Just keep going. Just keep going. Emptily, like an abandoned car. But just keep going.”
His hand made a gesture of resignation, he pursed his lips oddly, and he felt very very tired. In recent days these four connected acts kept recurring in automatic sequence, like a sort of nervous tic. Thirty times a day he thought of Erzsi, made the resigned gesture, pulled the wry face, and felt a wave of exhaustion. “Perhaps I should see the doctor about this tiredness after all? Oh, come off it. We’re getting on, old chap, getting on in years.”
His concentration returned. They were saying that someone should go to Paris to negotiate with a certain finance group. Someone else was arguing that this was quite unnecessary, it could all be settled by letter.
“Erzsi’s in Paris now … Mihály in Italy … Erzsi doesn’t write a single line, but she must be horribly lonely. Does she have enough money? Perhaps the poor thing has to travel by Metro. If she leaves before nine and goes back after two she can get a return ticket. It’s so much cheaper — poor thing, that’s surely what she’s doing. But perhaps she isn’t alone. In Paris it’s difficult for a woman to remain on her own, and Erzsi is so attractive … ”
This time what followed was not the gesture of resignation, but a rush of blood to the head and: “Death, death, there’s nothing else for it … ”
Meanwhile the meeting was moving towards the consensus that they really would have to send someone. Pataki asked to speak. He threw all his energy behind the view that it was absolutely essential to pursue the matter with the French interest on a personal basis. When he began to speak he was not entirely clear what the issue was, but as he spoke it came back to him, and he produced unassailable arguments. He carried the meeting with him. Then the exhaustion once again overwhelmed him.
“Of course someone’s got to go to Paris. But I can’t go. I can’t leave the bank just now. And anyway, what would I be going for? Erzsi hasn’t invited me. For me to run after her, to run the risk of a highly probable rejection, that’s quite impossible … After all, a man has his pride.”
He brought his words to an abrupt close. Persuaded, the meeting agreed to send a young director, the son-in-law of one of the big financiers, who spoke exceptionally good French. “It’ll be an education for him,” the older men thought to themselves with fatherly benevolence.
After the meeting came the most difficult part of the day, the evening. Pataki had once read that the most important difference between a married man and a bachelor was that the married man always knew who he would dine with that evening. And indeed, since Erzsi had left him, this had been the greatest problem in Pataki’s life: who would he dine with? He had never got on with men, had never known the institution of male friendship. Women? This was the oddest thing. While he was married to Erzsi he had needed endless women, one after the other. Every one seemed to please him, one because she was so thin, another because so plump, a third because she was so exactly in between. All his free time, and much that was not free, was filled with women. There had been a maîtresse de titre obscurely connected with the theatre, who had cost him a great deal of money (though she had brought with her a degree of publicity for the bank), then various gentlemanly diversions, the wives of one or two colleagues, but chiefly the typists, with the occasional maid-servant for the sake of variety: an inglorious collection. Erzsi had a real grievance in law, and Pataki in his more optimistic moments reckoned that this was why she had left him. In his more pessimistic mode he had to acknowledge that there was another reason, certain needs which he had been unable to meet, and that consciousness was particularly humiliating. When Erzsi left he had discharged the maîtresse de titre with a handsome redundancy payment, that is to say, made her directly over to an older colleague who had long aspired to the honour, he had ‘reorganised’ his secretarial staff, surrounded himself with one of the ugliest workforces in the bank, and lived a life of self-denial.
“There should have been a child,” he thought, and was filled with the sudden sense of how much he would have loved his child had there been one, Erzsi’s child. With rapid decisiveness he telephoned a cousin who had two positively golden children, and went there to dinner. En route he purchased a horrifying quantity of sweets. The two golden children probably never knew what they had to thank for three days of stomach-ache.
After dinner he sat on in a coffee-house, read the newspapers, vacillated over the question of whether to go yet again and play cards for a bit in the club, could not finally make up his mind, and went home.
Without Erzsi, the flat was now unspeakably oppressive. He really would have to do something with her furniture. Her room couldn’t just stand there as if she might return at any moment, although … “I’ll have to get them to take it all up to the attic, or have it stored. I’ll have it fitted out like a club-room, with huge armchairs.”