Glancing up, Harriet found Clarence’s gaze fixed on her. He looked away at once but he had caught her attention. She noted his long, lean face with its long nose, and felt it unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory and unsatisfied. As she assessed him, his eyes came, rather furtively, back to her and now he found her gazing at him. He flushed slightly and jerked his face away again.
She smiled to herself.
Guy said: ‘I asked Sophie to join us here.’
‘Why, I wonder?’ Inchcape murmured.
‘She’s very depressed about the war.’
‘Imagining, no doubt, that it was declared with the sole object of depressing her.’
Suddenly all the perturbation of the garden was gathered into an eruption of applause. The name of the singer Florica was passed from table to table.
Florica, in her long black and white skirts, was posed like a bird, a magpie, in the orchestra cage. When the applause died out, she jerked forward in a bow, then, opening her mouth, gave a high, violent gypsy howl. The audience stirred. Harriet felt the sound pass like a shock down her spine.
The first howl was followed by a second, sustained at a pitch that must within a few years (so Inchcape later assured the table) destroy her vocal chords. People sitting near Ionescu glanced at him and at his women. Sprawled sideways in his seat, he stared at the singer and went on picking his teeth. The women remained impassive as the dead.
Florica, working herself into a fury in the cage, seemed to be made of copper wire. She had the usual gypsy thinness and was as dark as an Indian. When she threw back her head, the sinews moved in her throat: the muscles moved as her lean arms swept the air. The light flashed over her hair, that was strained back, glossy, from her round, glossy brow. Singing there among the plump women of the audience, she was like a starved wild kitten spitting at cream-fed cats. The music sank and her voice dropped to a snarl. It rose and, twisting her body as in rage, clenching her fists and striking back her skirts, she finished on an elemental screech that was sustained above the tremendous outburst of applause.
When it was over, people blinked as though they had survived a tornado. Only Ionescu and his women continued, to all appearance, unmoved.
Inchcape, not himself applauding, pointed in amusement at Guy, who, crying ‘Bravo, bravo!’ was leaning forward to bang his hands together. ‘What energy,’ smiled Inchcape. ‘How wonderful to be young!’ When there was silence again, he turned to Harriet and said: ‘She was a failure when she toured abroad, but here she’s just what they like. She expresses all the exasperation that’s eating these people up.’ As he turned in his seat, he suddenly saw Ionescu’s party. ‘Oh ho!’ he said, ‘Ionescu complete with harem. I wonder how his wife enjoyed the performance.’
‘You think,’ Harriet asked him, ‘she knows about Florica and her husband?’
‘Dear me, yes. She probably has on record everything they have ever said or done during every moment they have spent together.’
To encourage him, Harriet made a murmur of artless interest. Inchcape settled down to instruct her. He said: ‘Rumanian convention requires her apparent unawareness. Morality here is based not on not doing, but on recognising what is being done.’
They had been served with a rich goose-liver paté, dark with truffles and dressed with clarified butter. Inchcape swallowed this down in chunks, talking through it as though it were a flavourless impediment to self-expression.
‘Take, for instance, the behaviour of these women in company. If anyone makes an improper joke, they simply pretend not to understand. While the men roar with laughter, the women sit poker faced. It’s ridiculous to watch. This behaviour, that fools no one, saves the men having to restrict their conversation when women are present.’
‘But the young women, the students, don’t they rebel against this sort of hypocrisy?’
‘Dear me, no. They are the most conventional jeunes filles in the world, and the most knowing. “Sly”, Miss Austen would have called them. If, during a reading in class, we come on some slight indecency, the men roar their enjoyment, the girls sit blank. If they were shocked, they would not look shocked: if they were innocent, they would look bewildered. As it is, their very blankness betrays their understanding.’ Inchcape gave a snort of disgust, not, apparently, at the convention but at the absurdity of the sex on which it was imposed.
‘How do they become so knowledgeable so young?’ asked Harriet, half listening to the talk between Clarence and Guy, in which she caught more than once the name of Sophie. Clarence, half in the party and half out of it, was taking a bite or two of paté.
‘Oh,’ Inchcape answered Harriet, ‘these Rumanian homes are hot-beds of scandal and gossip. It’s all very Oriental. The pretence of innocence is to keep their price up. They develop early and they’re married off early, usually to some rich old lecher whose only interest is in the girl’s virginity. When that’s over and done with, they divorce. The girl sets up her own establishment, and, having the status of divorcée, she is free to do what she chooses.’
Harriet laughed. ‘How then is the race carried on?’
‘There’s a quota of normal marriages, of course. But surely you’ve heard the story of the Rumanian walking with his German friend down Calea Victoriei – the Rumanian naming the price of every woman they meet? “Good heavens,” says the German, “are there no honest women here?” “Certainly,” replies the Rumanian, “but – very expensive!”’
Harriet laughed, and Inchcape, with a satisfied smile, gazed over the restaurant and complained: ‘I’ve never before seen this place in such a hubbub.’
‘It’s the war,’ said Clarence. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may be starving to death.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’
The second course arrived, a duck dressed with orange. As this was being carved, Inchcape said quietly to Harriet: ‘I see your friend Sophie Oresanu in the distance.’
Not avoiding the underlying question, Harriet replied: ‘She is not my friend. I have never met her. What is she?’
‘Rather an advanced young lady for these parts. Her circumstances are peculiar. Her parents divorced and Sophie lived with her mother. When the mother died, Sophie was left to live alone. That is unusual here. It gives her considerable freedom. She worked for a while on a student’s magazine – one of those mildly anti-fascist, half-baked publications that appear from time to time. It lasted about six months. Now she thinks the Germans have marked her down. She’s taking a law degree.’
‘Really!’ Harriet was impressed by the law degree.
‘It doesn’t mean anything here,’ said Inchcape. ‘They all take law degrees. That qualifies them to become second assistant stamp-lickers in the civil service.’
‘Guy says the Rumanian girls are intelligent.’
‘They’re quick. But all Rumanians are much of a much-ness. They can absorb facts but can’t do anything with them. A lot of stuffed geese, I call them. An uncreative people.’ While speaking, he kept his eye on a young woman who now mounted the platform and, stopping at the table and ignoring the others present, stared mournfully at Guy. He, talking, failed to notice her.
In a plaintive, little voice she said: ‘’Allo!’
‘Why, hello!’ Guy leapt to his feet and kissed her on either cheek. Sophie suffered the embrace with a slight smile, taking in the company as she did so.
Guy turned cheerfully to Harriet: ‘Darling, you must meet Sophie. Sophie, my wife.’
As Sophie looked at Harriet, her expression suggested she was at a loss to understand not only how he had acquired a wife, but how he had acquired such a wife. She eventually gave a nod and looked away. She was a pretty enough girl, dark like most Rumanians, too full in the cheeks. Her chief beauty was her figure. Looking at Sophie’s well developed bosom, Harriet felt at a disadvantage. Perhaps Sophie’s shape would not last, but it was enviable while it lasted.