Stamboul Train (29 page)

‘Well, I'm not very much interested in business,' Mr Stein said.

Myatt repeated with amazement, ‘Not interested in business?'

‘Golf,' said Mr Stein, ‘and a little place in the country. That's what I look forward to.'

The shock passed, and Myatt again noted that Stein gave away too much information. Stein's expansive manner was his opportunity; he flashed the conversation back to the agreement: ‘Why do you want this directorship then? I think perhaps I could come near to meeting you on the money question if you resigned the directorship.'

‘I don't want it for myself necessarily,' said Mr Stein, puffing at his pipe between his phrases, squinting sideways at Myatt's lengthening ash, ‘but I'd like—for the sake of tradition, you know—to have one of the family on the board.' He gave a long candid chuckle. ‘But I have no son. Not even a nephew.'

Myatt said thoughtfully, ‘You'll have to encourage your niece,' and they both laughed and walked downstairs together. Janet Pardoe was nowhere to be seen.

‘Miss Pardoe gone out?' he asked Mr Kalebdjian.

‘No, Mr Myatt, Miss Pardoe has just gone to the restaurant with Mr Savory.'

‘Ask them to wait lunch twenty minutes, and Mr Stein and I will join them.'

There was a slight tussle to be last through the swing door; the friendship between Myatt and Mr Stein grew rapidly.

When they were in a taxi on the way to Mr Eckman's flat, Stein spoke, ‘This Savory,' he said, ‘who's he?'

‘Just a writer,' said Myatt.

‘Is he hanging round Janet?'

‘Friendly,' Myatt said. ‘They met on the train.' He clasped his hands over his knees and sat silent, contemplating seriously the subject of marriage. She is very lovely, he thought, she is refined, she would make a good hostess, she is half Jewish.

‘I'm her guardian,' said Mr Stein. ‘Ought I perhaps to speak to him?'

‘He's well off.'

‘Yes, but a writer,' said Mr Stein. ‘I don't like it. They are chancy. I'd like to see her married to a steady fellow in business.'

‘She was introduced to him, I think, by this woman she's been living with in Cologne.'

‘Oh yes,' said Mr Stein, uncomfortably, ‘she's been earning her own living since her poor parents died. I didn't interfere. It's good for a girl, but my wife thought we ought to see something of her, so I invited her here. Thought perhaps we could find her a better job near us.'

They swerved round a miniature policeman standing on a box to direct traffic and climbed a hill. Below them, between a tall bare tenement and a telegraph-pole, the domes of the Blue Mosque floated up like a cluster of azure soap bubbles.

Mr Stein was still uneasy. ‘It's good for a girl,' he repeated. ‘And the firm's been taking up all my time lately. But when this sale is through,' he added brightly, ‘I'll settle something on her.'

The taxi drew into a small dark courtyard, containing a solitary dustbin, but the long stair they climbed was lighted by great windows and the whole of Stamboul seemed to flow out beneath them. They could see St Sophia and the Fire Tower and a long stretch of water up the western side of the Golden Horn towards Eyub. ‘A fine situation,' said Mr Stein. ‘There's not a better flat in Constantinople,' and he rang the bell, but Myatt was thinking of the cost and wondering how much the firm had contributed to Mr Eckman's view.

The door opened. Mr Stein did not trouble to give his name to the maid, but led the way down a white panelled passage which trapped the sun like a tawny beast between its windows. ‘A friend of the family?' Myatt suggested. ‘Oh, poor Eckman and I have been quite intimate for some time now,' said Mr Stein, flinging open a door on to a great glassy drawing-room, in which a piano and a bowl of flowers and a few steel chairs floated in primrose air. ‘Well, Emma,' said Mr Stein, ‘I've brought along Mr Carleton Myatt to see you.'

There were no dark corners in the room, no shelter from the flow of soft benevolent light, but Mrs Eckman had done her best to hide behind the piano which stretched like a polished floor between them. She was small and grey and fashionably dressed, but her clothes did not suit her. She reminded Myatt of an old family maid who wears her mistress's discarded frocks. She had a pile of sewing under her arm and she whispered her welcome from where she stood, not venturing any farther on to the sun-splashed floor.

‘Well, Emma,' said Mr Stein, ‘have you heard anything from your husband?'

‘No. Not yet. No,' she said. She added with bright misery, ‘He's such a bad correspondent,' and asked them to sit down. She began to hide away needles and cotton and balls of wool and pieces of flannel in a large work-bag. Mr Stein stared uncomfortably from steel chair to steel chair. ‘Can't think why poor Eckman bought all this stuff,' he breathed to Myatt.

Myatt said: ‘You mustn't worry, Mrs Eckman. I've no doubt you'll hear from your husband today.'

She stopped in the middle of her tidying and watched Myatt's lips.

‘Yes, Emma,' said Stein, ‘directly poor Eckman knows how well Mr Myatt and I agree, he'll come hurrying home.'

‘Oh,' Mrs Eckman whispered from her corner, away from the shining floor, ‘I don't mind if he doesn't come back here. I'd go to him anywhere. This isn't
home,
' she said with a small emphatic gesture and dropped a needle and two pearl buttons.

‘Well, I agree,' Mr Stein remarked and blew out his cheeks. ‘I don't understand what your husband sees in all this steel stuff. Give me some good mahogany pieces and a couple of arm-chairs a man can go to sleep in.'

‘Oh, but my husband has very good taste,' Mrs Eckman whispered hopelessly, her frightened eyes peering out from under her fashionable hat like a mouse lost in a wardrobe.

‘Well,' Myatt said impatiently, ‘I'm sure you needn't worry at all about your husband. He's been upset about business, that's all. There's no reason to think that he's—that anything has happened to him.'

Mrs Eckman emerged from behind the piano and came across the floor, twisting her hands nervously. ‘I'm not afraid of that,' she said. She stopped between them and then turned round and went back quickly to her corner. Myatt was startled. ‘Then what are you afraid of?' he asked.

She nodded her head at the bright steely room. ‘My husband's so modern,' she said with fear and pride. Then her pride went out, and with her hands plunged in her workbasket, among the buttons and the balls of wool, she said, ‘He may not want to come back for me.'

‘Well, what do you think of that?' Mr Stein said as he went downstairs.

‘Poor woman,' Myatt said.

‘Yes, yes, poor woman,' Mr Stein repeated, blowing his nose in an honest emotional way. He felt hungry, but Myatt had more to do before lunch, and Mr Stein stuck close. He felt that with every taxi they shared, their intimacy grew, and apart altogether from their plans for Janet Pardoe, intimacy with Myatt was worth several thousand pounds a year to him. The taxi rattled down a steep cobbled street out into the cramped square by the general post office, and then down-hill again to Galata and the docks. At the top of a dingy stair they reached the small office, crammed with card indexes and dispatch-boxes, with only one window that looked out on to a high wall and the top of a steamer's funnel. Dust lay thick on the sill. It was the room which had given birth to the great glassy drawing-room, as an elderly mother may bear an artist as her last child. A grandfather clock, which with the desk filled most of the remaining space, struck two, but early as it was Joyce was there. A typist disappeared into a kind of boot cupboard at the back of the room.

‘Any news of Eckman?'

‘No, sir,' said Joyce. Myatt glanced at a few letters and then left him, crouched like a faithful dog over Eckman's desk and Eckman's transgressions. ‘And now lunch,' he said. Mr Stein moistened his lips. ‘Hungry?' Myatt asked.

‘I had an early breakfast,' said Mr Stein without reproach.

But Janet Pardoe and Mr Savory had not waited for them. They were drinking coffee and liqueurs in the blue-tiled restaurant when Myatt and Mr Stein exclaimed how lucky it was that his niece and Myatt had met already and were friends. Janet Pardoe said nothing, but watched him with peaceful eyes, and smiled once at Myatt. She seemed to Myatt to be saying, ‘How little does he know of us,' and he smiled back before he remembered that there was nothing to know.

‘So I suppose you two,' said Mr Stein, ‘kept each other company all the way from Cologne.'

Mr Savory asserted himself, ‘Well, I think your niece saw more of me,' but Mr Stein swept on, eliminating him. ‘Got to know each other well, eh?'

Janet Pardoe opened her soft pronounced lips a little way and said softly, ‘Oh, Mr Myatt had another friend he knew better than me.' Myatt turned his head to order lunch, and when he gave his attention again to them, Janet Pardoe was saying with a sweet gentle malice, ‘Oh, she was his mistress, you know.'

Mr Stein laughed heartily. ‘Look at the wicked fellow. He's blushing.'

‘And you know she ran away from him,' said Janet Pardoe.

‘Ran away from him? Did he beat her?'

‘Well, if you ask him he'll try and make a mystery about it. When the train broke down he motored all the way back to the last station and looked for her. He was away ages. And the mystery he tries to make of it. He helped someone to escape from the customs.'

‘But the girl?' Mr Stein asked, eyeing Myatt roguishly.

‘She ran away with a doctor,' Mr Savory said.

‘He'll never admit it,' Janet Pardoe said, nodding at Myatt.

‘Well, really, I'm a little uneasy about it,' Myatt said. ‘I shall telephone to the consul at Belgrade.'

‘Telephone to your grandmother,' Mr Savory exclaimed and looked with a bright nervousness from one to the other. It was his habit when he was quite certain of his company to bring out some disarming colloquialism which drew attention to the shop counter, the apprentices' dormitory, in his past. He was still at times swept by an intoxicating happiness at being accepted, at finding himself at the best hotel, talking on equal terms to people whom he had once thought he would never know except across the bales of silk, the piles of tissue-paper. The great ladies who invited him to their literary At Homes were delighted by his expressions. What was the good of displaying a novelist who had risen from the bargain counter if he did not carry with him some faint traces of his ancestry, some remnant from the sales?

Mr Stein glared at him. ‘I think you would be quite right,' he said to Myatt. Mr Savory was abashed. These people were among the minority who had never read his books, who did not know his claim to attention. They thought him merely vulgar. He sank a little in his seat and said to Janet Pardoe, ‘The doctor. Wasn't
your
friend interested in the doctor?' but she was aware of the others' disapproval, and did not trouble to search her mind for the long dull story Miss Warren had told her. She cut him short, ‘I can't keep count of all the people Mabel's interested in. I don't remember anything about the doctor.'

It was only the vulgarity of Mr Savory's expression to which Mr Stein objected. He was very much in favour of a little honest chaff about the girl. It would seal his valuable intimacy with Myatt. When the first course was on the table, he brought the conversation round again. ‘Now tell us some more of what Mr Myatt's been up to.'

‘She's very pretty,' said Janet Pardoe, with audible charity. Mr Savory glanced at Myatt to see whether he was taking offence, but Myatt was too hungry; he was enjoying his late lunch. ‘On the stage, isn't she?' he asked.

‘Yes. Variety.'

‘I said she was a chorus girl,' Janet Pardoe remarked. ‘There was something just the faintest bit common. Had you met her before?'

‘No, no,' Myatt said hurriedly. ‘Just a chance meeting.'

‘The things that go on in these long-distance trains,' Mr Stein exclaimed with relish. ‘Did she cost you much?' He caught his niece's eye and winked. When she smiled back, he was pleased. It would have been tiresome if she had been one of those old-fashioned girls in front of whom one could not talk openly; there was nothing he liked better than a little bit of smut in female company; so long, of course, he thought, with his eye turning with disapproval to Mr Savory, as it was quite refined.

‘Ten pounds,' Myatt said, nodding to the waiter.

‘My dear, how expensive,' said Janet Pardoe, and she watched him with respect.

‘I'm joking,' Myatt said. ‘I didn't give her any money. I got her a ticket. Besides, it was just a friendship. She's a good creature.'

‘Ah, ha,' said Mr Stein. Myatt drained his glass. Across the blue tiles a waiter came, pushing a trolley. ‘The food's very good here,' said Mr Savory. Myatt expanded in the air of home, faintly aromatic with cooking; in one of the public rooms a Rachmaninov concerto was being played. One might have been in London. At the sound of the music a memory swam up into his mind and broke in scarlet light; people stuck their heads out of windows, laughing, talking, jeering at the fiddler. He said slowly to himself, ‘She was in love with me.' He had never meant the words to drop audibly into the bare blue restaurant; he was embarrassed and a little shocked to hear them; they sounded boastful, and he had not meant to boast; there was nothing to boast about in being loved by a chorus girl. He blushed when they all laughed at him.

‘Ah, these girls,' Mr Stein said, shaking his head, ‘they know how to get round a man. It's the glamour of the stage. I remember when I was a young fellow how I'd wait outside the stage door for hours just to see some little hussy from the front row. Chocolates. Suppers.' He was stopped for a moment by the sight of a duck's grey breast on his plate. ‘The lights of London,' he said.