The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (7 page)

The problem was solved by his own genuine emotion as she stood, half turned away from him, with one hand flicking moss from the under lip of a stone urn. The Bilbao cabaret provided a precedent; there too you could not touch but you could certainly express enthusiasm and a lot of good it would do you. What he thought of her poured out of him, sounding no doubt exotically emotional since his passion had slipped into Spanish ringing with the native melancholy of unattainable desire.

It was far from unattainable. The response of arms and lips was gloriously unexpected. He hurled an unknown someone’s dinner jacket over a scattering of dry leaves and lowered on to it the red dress and its contents. Or was it a mutual collapse followed by the most artistic show of reluctance he had ever imagined? And that was saying something. Kisses interminable, evasions, returns. No and no, and finally a cry of:

‘You should help me to be faithful.’

Bernardo felt a tinge of conscience—not much, but enough to let the moment go since the future was reasonably assured. It was plain that fidelity to the Baron was a matter of six
square inches; you could do what you pleased anywhere else. Considering the storm of physical and romantic excitement which she was capable of arousing, it was improbable that all lovers had been as manageable as himself.

It was time to return to the house and be seen in public. Lajos asked if they had any further commands for him, shut the French windows and said good-night. Magda went upstairs, leaving him in the vast emptiness of the hall. He could not follow. For one thing, her maid was already curtseying to her on the landing; for another, he had no idea where her room was. This was hell. Far too many people, and unfamiliar conventions. It occurred to him for the first time that he did not even know who turned the lights out and when. One might have to explore those convenient summer houses of which Nepamuk had spoken.

As soon as his unnecessary valet had been dismissed he tip-toed out of his room and listened to the silence of the empty passages. Somewhere at the end of the long gallery on the south side of the house he heard footsteps. The rustle of petticoats suggested that it was not Magda but her maid. The maid did not reutm, and unmistakable sounds revealed that Magda was having a bath not very far away. He chose a window seat in the gallery and waited, more to catch a last glimpse of this astonishing creature than in any hope. There was a soft light for every ten yards of the gallery which had never been lit before. A Kalmody could not be allowed to search for a switch.

She came out of the bathroom and looked up the gallery. Bernardo felt slightly embarrassed at his own affinity to a tom-cat sitting patiently on a wall. She seemed to feel none at all, giving the impression that she was completely in command of a quite natural situation. She came to meet him and leaned forward, holding his hands, to give him a little-girl good-night kiss. This time he did grab. It was the bow of wide, red ribbon on top of her head which did it, making it impossible to consider her as wife, baroness or anything but
an adorable poppet in a filmy dressing gown. She clung to him as he carried her into his room, soft and tremulous in orgasm and deliciously pretending to be ashamed of it. No, he could never forget a moment of that first night, for his experience till then had been limited to purely physical enjoyment or the unsatisfactory sentimentalities of youth. She left him exhausted and unavoidably in love, running the arrival of that damned valet pretty close.

She insisted on absolute discretion in public—not too difficult since they spent more time in private—but the affair must have been obvious to the whole establishment. All behaved, however, as if Bernardo and his baroness existed on some ethereal plane, continuing like priests monotonous service without questioning what they were serving.

Old Kovacs was the most unconcerned of the lot, seeming to consider the affair as natural as the successful covering of a favourite mare. He did not of course comment, but always looked as if he were about to put an arm round each neck and walk between them to some bucket bubbling with his own strength-giving mixture of black beer and hot corn mash. Bernardo was beginning to feel he could do with it. Day and night, the park, the summer houses, bed, variations of armchairs and the drawing room floor—he had long since lost count of all but the most ingenious few which aroused ecstatic protests and therefore had to be repeated. Magda’s own original contribution was gramophone accompaniment. He had known her disconcertingly to stretch out a white arm and wind it up so that the record should not run down before Bernardo did.

Nepamuk had handed over his beaming prisoner as if there were perfect understanding between himself and Kalmody’s daughter. He never questioned any decision of hers except on one occasion when she insisted on sending out for a gipsy band to show Bernardo their Hungarian music. Her response to Nepamuk’s hesitation was startling. Bernardo’s redribboned girl was transformed into a statue which spoke
fast and tonelessly with set face. When Nepamuk raised his obsequious head, Bernardo ventured a quick glance of sympathy. It was returned by an insolent stare putting him in his place as an outsider.

He did not entirely desert the Kalmody stables. Sometimes when Magda had flickered down the gallery to her own room and the fresh morning was an invitation he would slip out of the house, take a salami sandwich—plus the inevitable tot of brandy—with the Master of the Horse and join Perico.

Their former intimacy was strained. Bernardo put this down not only to the loss of a companion but to Perico’s frank disapproval of Magda’s horsemanship. She rode flamboyantly without any consideration for her mount which she would bring back to the yard in a lather of foam and with staring eyes.

‘You should not hold it against her,’ Bernardo told him. ‘It’s that she lives in towns and has no patience.’

‘I have nothing against her, friend, except that to her we are dirt, the horses and all. I have never been in Spain. How are the grandees there?’

‘Far worse than here. They let their people starve.’

‘But speak to them as gentlemen?’

‘Of course.’

‘Listen friend! You are wasting your time and are too decent a fellow to see it.’

‘Not a word against her, Perico!’

‘Good, man, good! Take it that I have said nothing!’

Bernardo returned to the house in a Castilian mood of fury; he would have laid his hand upon the hilt of his sword if he had got one. The reasonable Englishman then took over. What offended Perico was after all very natural in a girl brought up to such splendour. But how magnificently she had declared herself a socialist! He was sure that she herself, so warm and eager, could have no idea of the effect she produced. If only they could live long together, he would help her. That ‘if only’ was, he knew, a wild bit of day dreaming on a par with the
cheerful fantasies which had occupied him on Lequeitio beach and just as full of risks. All the same he maintained stoutly to himself that this was the only woman for him if ever he could return to prosperous life.

There were still a few more days of paradise before the occasion for his help arrived. They came back from an evening ride to find Kovacs waiting in the palace courtyard to take over the horses. He was slightly flushed with liquor, and Bernardo instinctively understood why he was there in person. In an access of affection he had come to do the menial service of a groom: a parade, as it were, of his homage and loyalty. He allowed himself some too genial remark. He might have commented on the fact that the horse had hardly been ridden at all, as indeed they had not. Magda savagely reprimanded him, and he turned his back. Later on he sent down Perico instead of one of the usual boys to lead back the horses.

After dinner when Bernardo was alone with Magda in the vast, chintzed drawing-room, where he seemed to himself no bigger than the Dresden china shepherd preposterously tootling a flute on the mantelpiece, he asked what Kovacs had done.

‘He must be retired, and I told him so. He’ll be well looked after.’

‘A tragedy for him to do nothing!’

‘He does nothing anyway for half the year.’

‘But that goes for all of them.’

‘Then they are better back in their villages. Once a peasant, always a peasant, Bernardo.’

‘What about your socialism?’

‘That is politics and has nothing to do with it. If this country wants the lower classes to be contented, it must care for them properly. But that does not mean that I can’t tell Nepamuk to dismiss an impudent servant.’

‘You leave that kind of thing to Nepamuk?’

‘It’s what he is there for and he likes it, so why not?’

‘I wouldn’t turn Nepamuk loose on anyone.’

‘Peasants only respond to kicks, Bernardo. You cannot treat them as equals as you do that groom.’

‘Perico is not a peasant. He is a friend.’

‘Please forget that you are the son of a dock labourer! If I can, you can.’

What was the use of saying that a foreman shipwright was not a dock labourer? He was alarmed at the gathering storm and exclaimed that he wouldn’t care if her father was a boot-black and that with all the future in front of them....

‘Don’t worry about the future! My father will certainly set you up in some little business.’

Mr. Brown, looking back on it fifty years later, forgave her. His Magda—possibly slaughtered in her late and beautiful forties, possibly a distinguished old lady doing her best with poverty—had no doubt felt it her duty to disillusion him, but she need not have been so cruel.

‘I thought we loved each other,’ he said miserably.

‘Oh, what’s the good? What’s the good? Yes, Bernardo, you were the perfect choice.’

She left him without a kiss or another word. He hoped that in the morning some burst of tears or invective would explode the quarrel and leave peace when the smoke had cleared, but meanwhile there was plainly going to be no sharing of bed or waiting in the gallery.

Bernardo lay awake till the small hours, at first resentful then bitterly blaming himself for impertinence in daring to criticise her and folly in dragging up the social disparity between them, of which, as likely as not, she had always been more conscious than he. The silence of the great house at last soothed him into deep sleep. He never even heard the car leave; he did not know she had gone until the valet brought him a note and at once retired. It said nothing except that she was never coming back and that he should forget her. He clung to his only scrap of comfort: her cry of ‘what’s the good?’ It had no more meaning than her puzzling revelation
that he had been chosen, but her remembered emotion preserved him from the agony of utter despair.

The days of hot sun emphasised lonely monotony. Inside the house he could not mistake a change of mood, though hidden in the mist of an unintelligible language. There was obvious relief that Magda had gone and yet a shade of disappointment that no one was left to serve except the stranger. His status as the lover of Kalmody’s daughter should have been immensely enhanced. It was not. He sensed only a warm, unspoken pity.

Nepamuk was more casual than before. He no longer gave the impression of obeying the Count’s orders with regret; he was more like a prison warder patronising his favourite, and exacting conversation with that persistent whine for which in London one could feel affection but was exasperating, when isolated among the emphatic bird-song of the Magyar language, as the saw in the timber mill when the wind was the wrong way. Bernardo took refuge from it in the stables. Even there Kovacs and Perico were inclined to limit their conversation to saddlery. The week was desperately long until Sigismond Pozharski turned up with a new set of teeth and a smile more incorrigible than ever.

Melancholy was difficult in his presence. He never gave time for it, snapping up Bernardo, radiating geniality and trotting with him round house and estate as if he owned them. Even the difficult Perico admitted that Pozharski was a good fellow—too good, for if he really did own the place he’d never get much of an income out of it. Nobody would be afraid of him.

At dinner that evening, with Lajos relishing his new customer, Bernardo said he had heard that a landowner couldn’t make money unless his peasants were afraid of him, that they only responded to kicks and what did Pozharski think about it?

‘Perfectly true, dear boy, if you want to regiment them into efficiency. Look at Russia! But the worst possible way
if you want devotion. Istvan knows that. Magda doesn’t care. Your own interest in people she called slumming. Of course under the circumstances she was a bit on edge.’

‘You have seen her?’

‘Just a word in passing.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Smiled like Mona Lisa and said somebody ought to cheer you up. So I came over. What upset her?’

‘I didn’t like the way she treated Kovacs and others. It would serve her right if they talked.’

‘They won’t. They are too loyal to the family. Were you ever actually caught at it?’

Bernardo felt he ought to ask: caught at what? But Pozharski so evidently knew more than he should.

‘Er—no,’ he said, blushing slightly.

‘Want to be cured?’

‘If you mean what I think you mean, no!’

‘Europe, my dear Bernardo, is paved with the solid granite of hearts once broken by her. Dear Lajos, we are going to need some of the 1870 Tokay if you would be so good.’

‘But she is so very genuine.’

‘She can persuade herself of anything, dear boy. She could fill all the boxes of the Nemzety Theatre and have even politicians weeping the starch out of their shirt fronts.’

‘That,’ said Bernardo, ‘only shows that she is all woman.’

‘It does indeed. Now, an intimate question! Did you notice that she took no precautions?’

‘I wondered. But she isn’t fertile, the poor darling.’

‘O dear God! The theatre in tears again! Bernardo, didn’t I once tell you that my speciality was delicate missions? To my personal knowledge Magda’s ovulation would win a prize at a poultry show,’

Bernardo was tense with anger. This was all a lie—a crude attempt to make him lay off for ever a generous, emotional girl who was in love with him and could not allow herself to be. He murmured something about her marriage.