They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [169]
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure all right. He accepts everything I do, but I never get a word of thanks. To him it’s nothing more than his due, nothing out of the ordinary that I should clean for him, tidy him up when he’s dead drunk, rub his arms and his legs with that horrid black ointment he has to have for that … that trouble he caught in Szamos-Ujvar.’
Now, at last, she jumped up, full with rebellion. ‘But me? Why, he doesn’t even pat my cheek!’
Balint wanted to reassure her and said, ‘I am sure that’s only because he thinks you’re still barely more than a child, Regina. He’s probably very fond of you in his own way.’
‘Do you really think so?’ she asked eagerly as she sat down again. Then, a shy smile came into her face and she said, ‘Yes, I suppose so, in his way. To him I’m just a sort of household pet who’s useful to him. I am the only person he talks to. He tells me – oh, so much about his life … and to me it is some little reward because he tells me about such wonderful things, and in such beautiful words.’ For a moment she seemed lost in thought, and then added sadly, ‘But since he’s got so thin he doesn’t talk much any more.’
Taken by surprise Abady said: ‘He’s got very thin? Since when?’
‘Just in the last few weeks. Of course he hardly eats at all. It’s hard for him to keep it down!’
Now Balint started to question the girl as to whether Laszlo was seeing a doctor and what were his symptoms? Did he, for example, have little patches of red on his cheekbones? Regina answered all his questions quite intelligently. The doctor, she said, came every week. The Count coughed a lot, but not more than before. Those red spots? Yes, they did appear if he had drunk a lot… but otherwise? Maybe yes, at other times too.
Balint did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, ‘We ought to get him into a sanatorium. I could see that he was taken good care of… and he’d get trained nursing.’
‘Take him away? Away from here? cried Regina, distracted with fear, with terror lest they should take him away from her so that she would never see him again, never ever again. No, not that! Never that, her heart would break.
Regina now sensed that she had said too much and that she’d somehow endangered the man who had become her only reason for living. Now, at once, she had to cover up the truth for otherwise they would take Laszlo away from her; and so the words poured out of her, swiftly trying to take the sting out of anything serious she might have said: the doctor had praised her nursing and said it was quite adequate, and not only the doctor from Iklod who saw Laszlo every week, but also the chief consultant from Szamos-Ujvar who came over from time to time; also there was somebody else who saw to it that the Count was properly looked after. Dr Simay he was called, the same man who sent her father twenty florins every week for Laszlo’s food and who also paid the chemist’s bills.
‘Who is this Dr Simay?’
‘He’s a lawyer at Szamos-Ujvar. My father writes to him whenever … whenever something is needed.’
‘So he really is being properly looked after? All the time?’
‘Oh, yes! Ever since he was ill with pneumonia,’ insisted Regina.
Until then she had stuck fairly closely to the truth, but now she felt impelled to lie. Resolutely she then said, ‘All the doctors think he’s getting on very well and … and soon will be quite himself again.’
Abady was surprised.
‘But only just now you said he was losing weight and couldn’t keep his food down and you were afraid he’d soon die?’
Regina smiled.
‘Well, yes, I did say that, but I didn’t really mean it like that.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I … I … was upset that he’d gone … gone there again… for that… and so I said more than I meant. But it really isn’t as bad as that, really it isn’t.’
Young Regina played her chosen part so well that Balint believed her when she made out she had exaggerated everything out of jealousy