‘Oh, no,’ Sophie cried. ‘The Cişmigiu is not nice in this heat. And the café is too poor, too cheap.’
Guy turned doubtfully to Harriet, looking to her to change their plans, but Harriet merely smiled. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the park,’ she said.
‘Won’t you come with us?’ Guy asked Sophie. When she complained that she could not, the sun was too much, she might get a headache, he took her hand consolingly and said: ‘Then let us meet for dinner tomorrow night. We’ll go to Capşa’s.’
As they crossed the road to the park gates, Harriet said to Guy: ‘We cannot afford to go to expensive restaurants every night.’
‘We do so well on the black market,’ he said, ‘we can afford Capşa’s once in a while.’
Harriet wondered if he had any idea of what he could, or could not, afford on a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year.
A peasant had brought a handcart laden with melons into the town and tipped them out at the park gates. He lay among them, sleeping, his arms crossed over his eyes. The melons were of all sizes, the smallest no bigger than a tennis ball. Harriet said: ‘I’ve never seen so many before.’
‘That is Rumania,’ said Guy.
Repelled by their profusion, she had an odd fancy that, gathered there in a flashing mass of yellow and gold, the melons were not really inert, but hiding a pullulating craftiness that might, if unchecked, one day take over the world.
The peasant, hearing voices, roused himself and offered them the biggest melon for fifty lei. Guy was not willing to carry it about so they went on, passing out of the aura of melon scent into the earthy scent of the park. Guy led Harriet down a side-path that was overhung by a block of flats and pointing up to the first floor, that had a terrace before it, he said: ‘Inchcape lives there.’
Enviously, Harriet saw on the terrace some wrought-iron chairs, a stone urn, a trail of pink ivy geranium, and asked: ‘Does he live alone?’
‘Yes, except for his servant, Pauli.’
‘Will we be invited there?’
‘Some time. He does not entertain much.’
‘He’s an odd man,’ she said. ‘That edgy vanity! – what is behind it? What does he do with himself alone there? I feel there’s something secret about him.’
Guy said: ‘He leads his life, as we all do. What do you care what he does?’
‘Naturally I’m interested.’
‘Why be interested in people’s private lives? What they are pleased to let us know should be enough for us.’
‘Well, I just am. You’re interested in ideas; I in people. If you were more interested in people, you might not like them so much.’
Guy did not reply. Harriet supposed he was reflecting on the logic of her statement, but when he spoke she realised he had not given it a thought. He told her the Cişmigiu had once been the private garden of a Turkish water-inspector.
Brilliantly illuminated on spring and summer nights, it had a dramatic beauty. The peasants who came to town in search of justice or work saw the park as a refuge. They slept here through the siesta. They would stand about for hours gazing at the tapis vert, the fountain, the lake, the peacocks and the ancient trees. A rumour often went round that the King intended to take it all from them. It was discussed with bitterness.
‘Will he take it?’ Harriet asked.
‘I don’t think so. There’s nothing in it for him. It is just that people have come to expect the worst from him.’
In the last heat of the year, the greenery looked coarse and autumnal beneath a dust of light. The air was still. Noon weighed on everything. The great tapis vert, with its surround of leaf-hung poles and swags, its border of canna lilies and low bands of box, looked as unreal as some stage backdrop faded with age. A few groups of peasants stood about as Guy had described, but most of them had folded themselves into patches of shade and slept, faces hidden from the intolerable sun.
Everything seemed to give off heat. Harriet half expected the canna lilies, in great beds of sulphur, cadmium and red, to roar like a furnace. She stopped at the dahlias. Guy adjusted his glasses and examined the flowers, which were massive, spiked, furry, lion-faced, burgundy-coloured, purple and white, cinderous, heavy as velvet.
‘Fine,’ he said at length.
She laughed at him and said: ‘They’re like the invention of some ghastly interior decorator.’
‘Really!’ Accepting the visible world because he so seldom looked at it, Guy was at first startled, then delighted, by this criticism of nature.
They followed a path that branched down to the lakeside. The water, glassy still, stretched out of sight beneath the heavy foliage of the lake-fed trees. The path ended beside a little thicket of chestnuts beneath which a small, derelict summerhouse made a centre for commerce. Here the peasant who had any sort of stock-in-trade might begin a lifelong struggle up into the tradesman’s class. One boy had covered a box with pink paper and laid out on it, like chessmen on a board, pieces of Turkish delight. There were not more than twenty pieces. If he sold them, he might be able to buy twenty-two. With each piece, the purchaser was given a glass of water.
‘One eats,’ said Guy, ‘for the pleasure of drinking.’
A man stood nearby with a weighing-machine. Another had a hooded camera where photographs could be obtained to stick on passports, or on the permits needed to work, to own a cart, to keep a stall, to sojourn in one town or journey to another.
At the appearance of the Pringles, some of the peasants lying on the ground picked themselves up and adjusted trays from which they sold sesame cakes, pretzels, matches and other oddments, and peanuts for the pigeons. Harriet bought some peanuts, and the pigeons, watching, came fluttering down from the trees to eat them. She was watched by some peasants standing near, whose eyes were shy and distrustful of the life about them. Newly arrived in the city, the men were still in tight frieze trousers, short jackets and pointed caps – a style of dress that dated back to Roman times. The women wore embroidered blouses and fan-pleated skirts of colours that were richer and more subtle than those worn by the gypsies. As soon as they could afford it, they would throw off these tokens of their simplicity and rig themselves out in city drab.
Three girls, resplendent in sugar-pinks, plum-reds and the green of old bottle glass, were posing for a photograph. They might have been dressed for a fair or a festival, but they drooped together as though sold into slavery. Seeing the Pringles watching them, the girls looked uneasily away.
As they passed among the peasants, Guy and Harriet smiled to reassure them, but their smiles grew strained as they breathed-in the peasant stench. Harriet thought: ‘The trouble with prejudice is, there’s usually a reason for it,’ but she now knew better than to say this to Guy.
The path through the thicket led to the lake café, which was situated on a pier built out into the water. On this flimsy, shabby structure stood rough chairs and tables with paper tablecloths. The boards creaked and flexed when anyone walked across them. Just below, visible between the boards, was the dark and dirty lake water.
The Pringles, seated in the sun, breathed air that was warm and heavy with the smell of water-weed. The trees on the distant banks were faded into the heat blur. An occasional rowing-boat ruffled the lake surface and sent the water clopping against the café piers. A waiter came running, producing from an inner pocket a greasy, food-splashed card. The menu was short. Few people ate here. This was a place where the city workers came in the cool of evening to drink wine or ţuicǎ. Guy ordered omelettes. When the waiter went to the hut that served as a kitchen, he switched on the wireless in honour of the foreigners. A loud-speaker over the door gave out waltz music.