The Drowning People (17 page)

“In what way?”

“I don’t think we should communicate at all, Jamie.”

“What?”

She smiled at me. “We know what we have. It won’t go away. But I want us only to write or speak when I’ve done what I have to do and not before. This … hide-and-seek isn’t good for either of us, and I’m sick of running around like a guilty child.”

I nodded, though I did not wholeheartedly share her distaste.

“It’s time to get things sorted out, once and for all,” Ella continued. “I haven’t thought of Charlie as I ought to have done; I haven’t thought of Sarah, either. And I know she’s watching, watching everything I do. She knows something’s up. That’s why we mustn’t write to each other.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you see? When I’m with you I’m too happy to be tragic. And it would be the same if we wrote to each other every day while you were in Prague. You need to be my reward, Jamie, not my distraction. I must extricate myself from this tangle so that I can enjoy you … unfettered, as it were.”

“But Ella…”

“Please Jamie.”

“But …”

“Don’t you see how a clean break, even for such a short time, will help me? How it will help me to arrange things?” She took my hand. “I want this to be permanent; I want us to be permanent. Open; above board; acknowledgeable. I don’t want us to sneak around like this anymore. And I need an absence of distractions if ever I’m going to sort out this mess. I owe that much at least to Charlie, don’t you think?”

I nodded sullenly, beginning to understand.

“Now don’t get like that. We have time. You’ll only be away for two months. And when you get back we won’t have to skulk around like criminals. You can meet Daddy and Pamela properly; I can meet your parents. We can go down to Seton and not have to stay in the village pub and avoid the guards. Don’t you see how different it will be then? How lovely?”

I nodded again, less sullenly this time, slightly mollified.

“So go to Prague and don’t write. Your letters—anything from you—make me too happy, as I’ve said, to be tragic. And tragedy is the least I can do for Charlie; I owe him that much at least, don’t you think? I’m going to have to take my time over this. You can’t break off an engagement overnight, you know; particularly when the circumstances are as they are.”

I nodded again.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” She looked at me anxiously from across the table.

“I think I do,” I said. “I don’t like it, but I understand.”

“Good.” She squeezed my hand.

“But you’ve only got until Christmas,” I said. “Once Christmas comes you won’t be able to get rid of me.”

“I won’t want to, stupid.” She squeezed my hand. “I don’t want to now. But for both our sakes I must.”

“I know.”

And we kissed each other lingeringly.

CHAPTER 13

P
RAGUE SPREAD BELOW ME
: a city of arched bridges; sharp steeples; gracious domes. Bathed in a morning light sharper and colder than the light of London, the mist rising from the Vltava was a brilliant, dreamy ribbon in the gray blanket of the city. “Close your eyes,” said Eric beside me, as the wing dipped. “We are about to pass over the suburbs.” So I closed my eyes and was allowed to open them only as we landed at an airport with a name full of consonants, a concrete carbuncle designed—so far as I could make out—to deter visitors and thus secure and protect undisturbed the splendors of the city it served. My memories of Eric are clearer now. I see him sitting in that airplane, his large frame cramped by an encroaching pair of armrests, his eyes bright with the excitement of travel, his voice softly pointing out the landmarks of a city neither of us had ever seen but which he at least had read about.

Prague and I were yet to be introduced. But even as I saw her for the first time I knew, as sometimes one knows instinctively, that I would not find her as I found London; that she was not reserved, not distant, not cold. Proud, yes. But Prague’s pride was alluring, enticing, and shrouded in romantic mystery. Not for her, as I was to discover, were the triumphant boulevards of Paris or the sneering skyscrapers of New York. She was a city of cobbled streets and hidden staircases; of courtyards hung with flowers and filled with whispers; a city where palace and tenement lived side by side, together, and crumbled uncomplainingly with picturesque dignity. Brutal investment and unthinking, unquestioned improvement were foreign to her as yet. Developers and housing ministers might corrupt her suburbs;
paneláky
and office blocks might rise steadily on her perimeter; she might be under siege from all sides. But the center of the city, the few square miles that held her essence, had kept themselves pure. Prague is at heart a town of romantic guile; it knows how to charm and to seduce all who would conquer, change and improve. Governments might come and go, regimes might rise and fall; but the Hrad would remain impassive, standing guard over the city it has protected for centuries.

All this I sensed dimly, as a taxi took Eric and me onto the highway and then through leafy suburbs with strange art nouveau houses set in overgrown gardens Decay was almost tangible here; but the once magnify cent buildings faced the change in their fortunes with dignity and a certain impressive acceptance. Not so the newer, uglier achievements of the Communist housing initiatives. These towers, the
paneláky
which ringed the city’s approaches, turned sullen faces to the world and stared malevolently out over ill-lit streets.

“Where did your aunt live?” I asked Eric. “Somewhere out here?”

“Oh no. She was a woman who had to be in the thick of the things. Without the smell of the traffic fumes she was unhappy. Her house—her apartment, I should say—is in the centre and just as she left it
apparemment
. We will live in the real Prague. These prisons are not for us.”

And with a secret relief I watched as we left them behind and descended the steep cobbled avenue that cuts down from the Strahov Monastery to the Malá Strana, the baroque “little quarter” of winding streets crushed together beneath the castle which was to be my first contact with the city proper. Before us was the Vltava; in the distance the twin towers of the Charles Bridge and its line of statues, sinister and black with age and soot. It startles me how vividly I see this all, how completely the view forms in my mind. I have never gone back to Prague since Eric and I left it, for its associations are painful; but I have never forgotten it. It strikes me that the city I know and the city it is today are probably different, must almost certainly be different. Perhaps all Prague’s streets are tarred now; perhaps its corners boast the fast-food outlets of other cities; perhaps its monasteries and palaces are hotels. I do not wish to return. I am content with a mental revisiting of the city that awed a young, impressionable man, quick with life. I wish to dwell again on her mysteries, to laugh at her mannerisms, to sample her tastes and smile at her eccentricities. I wish to experience again the tingling of those first few moments, the rush of that first spectacular view.

As I stared out of the window, Eric was asking our taxi driver, in German, how he felt about the fall of Communism. I listened idly, my attention fixed on the great sweep of the city fanned out below us.

“He says his countrymen have become like Americans,” Eric translated for me. “Money, money, money. It has become the new obsession.”

Our driver nodded. “I speak English. A little. Too,” he said shyly.

Eric nodded encouragingly. “This is Georg,” he said to me.

Georg and I nodded at each other in the rearview mirror and I said my name.

“Before the Fall,” Georg went on, “people used to talk, to discuss. There was much … going to the theater. But now,” he looked at us sadly in his mirror, “there is only work. Work to make money. That is all there is. Since the Fall it is the foreigners who fill our theaters.”

Georg was a dignified old man; and the tranquillity with which he described the infiltration of his culture belied the strength of his resistance to it. He faced the new army of invading imperialists defiantly. “They,” he said—meaning me and capitalists like me—”try to conquer our minds. They want to make us slaves. All we think of now is money and sex, sex and money. That is all that matters.” As he tackled the increasing traffic he warmed to his theme. “Not even Havel has written a play since the revolution,” he told us. “He sits in his palace up there on the hill”—a wave of a wrinkled hand indicated the Hrad behind us, its mullion panes glinting serenely in the morning light—”and is cut off from us. He leaves us to be exploited by the West and by each other. It must not go on.”

There was nothing for us to say; and the drive continued in silence until, with another shake of his head, Georg deposited Eric and me on the corner of a street of grand old houses. Motioning us towards number 21, the address Eric had given him, he accepted his money as though it were he, not us, who was giving something up.

Left on the pavement in the chilly air I waited while Eric fumbled for keys.

“This,” he told me, “was once the Sherkansky Palace. Now it is flats.”

“Quite grand flats,” I said, looking at the marble steps and heavy doors.

“My great-aunt was a flower of the regime,” he replied, smiling. “She was an artist admired by the world. She was at the top of the housing lists.”

He had found the keys and opened the door, leading the way forward under the arch. In the interior gloom the moldings on the walls and ceiling loomed ghostly: cherubs smiling when the wind changed, trapped forever in delirious wantonness. Light streamed, muted by dirt, through large windows on both walls; and before us there was a staircase, relic of an age more elegant than our own, which led upwards graciously into darkness. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light cast by a weak and solitary bulb I saw the true state of the building: the chipped paint; the broken tiles; the cracked plaster. Then all was dark. With a muttered curse Eric groped for a light switch, found one, and another ineffective light, far away, flickered to life. Thus began our ascent. For intervals of ten seconds at a time it was possible to move up the staircase with something approaching adequate illumination; but the weight and number of our bags meant that we inevitably trod the last few steps of each flight in darkness. On the third and final floor Eric produced another key before another set of heavy doors.

“The apartment has not been opened since the funeral,” he said.

“I wonder what we’ll find.” My heart was quick with excitement as he put the key in the lock.

“I wonder myself.”

With a grind of rusty bolts the door opened and, on cue, the light in the passage went out. We pushed on in darkness and Eric fumbled once more for a light switch and once more found one and flicked it on. This time, however, we were bathed in a tremendous wave of electric light. The chandelier above our heads—as I later had leisure to count—had thirty bulbs; and it illuminated every corner of the Aladdin’s cave in which we stood.

I remember that first glow of light, the physical shock of that brightness, and I remember that my life has not been wholly without adventure.

Eric and I were standing in a long, narrow room, the stone of its floor carpeted haphazardly with Turkish rugs, its walls completely bare and painted a deep, rich red. A film of dust covered everything, hushing the colors of the carpets and the drapes, an imperial yellow, which hung tentlike from the ceilings. I sneezed and the sound broke the tension and made us laugh.

“My God,” I said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Eric’s eyes danced. “Let’s explore.”

So together we explored the apartment; and excitedly, like awed schoolboys in a museum, we went through its rooms, occasionally picking up and showing each other some of the more eccentric examples of Madame Mocsáry’s taste: a small golden elephant with sparkling red stones for eyes that sat on the piano; a cheap plastic fan of lime green and pink which lay, for decoration, on an occasional table; an ashtray of old blue crystal, heavily cut. The room we were in served as a kind of entrance hall cum sitting room—what purpose it had served in the Sherkanskys’ days I could not tell—and from it opened two doors, each set back in pillared alcoves. The first opened onto a dank little passage which led to a poky kitchen and a bathroom with a large porcelain bath and no taps. The second—which we explored only after a hopeful but disappointing examination of the kitchen equipment—was more rewarding.

“Mon Dieu
,” said Eric as he opened it. “Come and see this, James.”

So I came and together we entered the Picture Room for the first time. It was a perfectly proportioned square, its walls twelve feet apart and set at right angles to each other, a false ceiling setting their height at twelve feet too. Every inch of the four walls, saving only the door through which we had entered and two long casement windows overlooking the street, was covered with canvases. Some framed, some not, they clustered together as if for comfort in the chilly room, hiding the wall—which was a deep red like the hall—in a riot of color: fantastic, half-realistic shapes painted over many years in a progression which—as I later discovered—could be traced.

“So this is it,” Eric said quietly.

“What?”

“My great-aunt used to write to my mother about her Picture Room. She was convinced that she would not finish it before she died.” He paused and looked about him. “It has something of the grand effect, has it not?”

I nodded.

I can see that room now: the single most cohesive creation of a brilliant mind. It housed an explosive outpouring of artistic inspiration, from the first ink sketches of a young girl to the assured, experimental works of an older, more mature artist. The images were varied: some were small, some huge; some in oils, some in ink or acrylics; most were on canvas, some were on board. They coagulate in my mind though I once knew them so well. I cannot make out their individual subjects, for the passing of the years has cast a film over them which blurs their outline and their detail. It is strange that I should not remember, for I came to love those paintings and the room which housed them; they came to mean a great deal to me. Perhaps that is why I have forgotten. Who can say?