‘Did he receive a reply?’
A strange faraway light came into Miss Hope’s eyes. ‘I believe he did, yes. Edgar Wallace sent Cyril his autograph. The Guesthouse on the Thames, that’s correct. Well, few writers can resist the allure of royal patronage and second-rate writers are particularly susceptible. All of Edgar Wallace’s books are quite ghastly. I don’t suppose you have read any?’
‘No.’
‘He apparently boasted that he could write a book in a week! Well, let me tell you one thing – it shows! He had three secretaries, I read somewhere, sitting in the same room – he would walk about and dictate a different book to each one.’ She watched Tancred Vane as he scribbled in his notebook. ‘I hope you are feeling better?’
‘I am much better. Thanks to you.’
‘Jolly good.’ She beamed at him. ‘Jolly good.’ Suddenly she rose from her seat and smoothed down her skirt.
‘What’s the matter?’ He blinked. ‘You aren’t – you aren’t going, are you?’
‘I’m afraid I am. Don’t look so disappointed! I’m sure you will find sleep more salutary than my silly old yarns.’
‘I won’t! Must you go?’
‘Ah, Lady Antonia Fraser’s memoir. I’ve been reading it. What a terrifying creature the late Pinter seems to have been. Unfortunately, my answer, unlike hers, will have to be, yes, I must go. I am sorry, Tancred, but I’ve got to go. So much to do! All kinds of unresolved problems. My niece – my great niece, actually – an absolute calamity-’ Miss Hope broke off and shook her head. ‘Young people nowadays!’
‘When – when will you come again?’
‘Soon.’
‘When exactly?’
‘Soon.’
‘When is soon?’
‘Soon enough.’ She adjusted her hat and pushed the pince-nez up her nose. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, perhaps. At half-past three? We’ll have tea together. We’ll have a proper powwow then. And now – now you must go to bed.’
Tancred protested that he did not feel in the least sleepy.
‘You need to make an effort, my boy. All great artists need to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries. You wouldn’t want to develop into one of those insomniacs who get sent to a kurhaus in the mountains, would you? Have you ever been to a kurhaus? Such strange places! Staffed by werewolves and vampires, or so everybody said. Sinister sanatoria, my mother called them. They have them in the Balkans. Or used to.’
‘I’ll go to bed later,’ he prevaricated.
‘No. Now.’
‘How happy is he born and taught,’ Tancred quoted sullenly, ‘that serveth not another’s will.’
‘Whose armour is his honest thought – and simple truth his utmost skill. See? I know my Sir Henry Wotton!’ She patted his cheek. ‘Come on, let’s go. Chop-chop.’
‘Five more minutes?’
‘Chop-chop.’
‘Three minutes – please!’
She remained adamant. ‘Chop-chop.’
He sighed. She held the door open. She accompanied him to his room.
Tancred wondered whether a casual onlooker might not find their relationship a trifle on the odd side. Miss Hope had already suggested – as a joke, no doubt – that perhaps she could move into the Villa Byzantine and keep house for him. It was not inconceivable that a casual onlooker might get the idea that Miss Hope had a crush on him. He smiled. Ridiculous – impossible – at her age!
As he reached for his pyjamas, she turned round primly and faced the wardrobe. A minute later he lay in bed and she kissed his forehead lightly, then stepped back. Before she shut his bedroom door, she whispered through the crack, ‘Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing you to sleep.’
10
Vie de Chateau
The story of how Miss Hope had become involved with the Bulgarian royal family in the early years of the war, how she and her parents had idled in the wilderness while the face of Europe was being changed, was quite remarkable, to say the least.
Tancred Vane found himself thinking about it, going over details, as he lay in bed in his darkened room, unable to sleep. It had been such a vivid account. He now felt the irresistible urge to listen to it again. He wanted, nay, longed, to hear Miss Hope’s voice once more.
He had actually recorded her story on tape and the cassette recorder stood on his bedside table, so all he needed to do was to reach out, locate the button and then press it – voila.
‘It was back in 1941. My father was appointed Head of Chancery at the British legation in Sofia. Mother had the gravest doubts about living in Bulgaria and so did I, if I have to be perfectly honest. A girl at school had told me Bulgarians were cannibals. She said Bulgarians were grim, gnome-like and extremely ferocious and that they liked nothing better than drinking blood. I think she must have been thinking of Borneoans.
‘My poor mother dreaded becoming marooned in a strange country, among people with whom she’d find no common bond. She feared she might be made to feel like Keats’ Ruth. That’s my favourite poet, yes – fancy you remembering! The sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn.
‘Well, we’d been warned that life in these parts of the Balkans lacked the choreography and grace of Western civilization, that wealth was rare, and either impossibly ostentatious or hidden – that no sponsoring of arts and letters or any form of cultivated living ever took place.
‘Glory and prosperity were said to have eluded Bulgaria. Bucharest had acquired a pseudo-Parisian sheen and Athens a Levantine cosmopolitanism, which is better than no cosmopolitanism, but Sofia – alongside Belgrade and Tirana – never amounted to more than a dull, quasi-oriental provincial capital, lacking aristocracies of the blood or the spirit.
‘The reports, however, turned out to be inaccurate and Sofia came as a most pleasant surprise. It was a thoroughly decent place, you might say. We were given a fine house made of yellow stone and hordes of servants. There was a marvellous well-tended garden with roses proliferating like a tapestry of Burne-Jones! We were befriended by the ruling elite, whose members, my mother discovered soon enough, had been educated in France, Germany and even in England. And immediately my parents started receiving invitations to the palace – to luncheons, soirees, garden parties and charity galas.
‘Well, in a couple of months, as you know, Bulgaria was to abandon its neutrality and join the war as Germany’s ally. Consequently, all the British subjects living on Bulgarian territory would leave and the British legation would close – but that time had not come yet.
‘Officially at least, we were not yet the enemy.
‘The third of August was the anniversary of King Boris’ ascension to the throne. That was when the annual garden party took place at the royal palace in Sofia. My parents were certainly invited and on that occasion they decided to take me with them. I was just fifteen – a very mature fifteen, I must emphasize.
‘Dr Goebbels had come from Germany especially for the occasion. I have the most vivid recollection of him limping nimbly through the glittering throng. Although temperatures that day couldn’t have been higher, an icy wind seemed to blow as he passed me. It was as if an evil, solitary, cruel god had clambered down among the bustle of pleasure-seeking, cowardly, pitiful mortals!
‘Prince Cyril had with him his maitresse-en-titre, a cabaret singer of Magyar extraction called Victoria Kallassi, and their infant son Clement, known as Clemmie. To bring a bastard baby – what they used to call a badling – to the King’s anniversary garden party was not the done thing of course, but Cyril enjoyed being outrageous. Cyril had a talent for getting away with things.
‘That poor badling! He died five years later – fell in Lake Garda and drowned, or so I heard. I vividly remember the swan-shaped white pram and his corpulent and rather peevish-looking Austrian nanny. Her name was Fraulein Guldenhove.