They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [17]
‘Are you cold?’ she asked, but she did not move.
‘No! But I can’t stay for ever … and I really must put on the light.’
‘If you must; but promise me not to look around! Promise!’
‘I promise.’
Balint switched on one of the little bedside lamps and Adrienne picked out one of her wraps for him.
Although Balint had meant to keep his promise, as soon as he started to put on Adrienne’s silken kimono he could not help seeing that the little Browning revolver was lying on the table beside the bed and that on the floor nearby were a number of tiny unused cartridges, little copper bullets and the yellow cardboard box from which they had come. He realized that she must have tried to load the revolver but that she had dropped the box in her agitation and that it must have been only this chance that had saved her life. Adrienne noticed that his face had clouded over and took his head in her hands, turned it back towards her and started kissing his eyes with her wide generous mouth. She did not let go but pulled him down again as if he were her prisoner among the soft pillows and cushions on the bed. Later, when they could again look each other straight in the eyes, her expression was gently apologetic and there was something shamefaced in the little smile with which she looked up at him. They did not speak about what they both knew he had seen there.
They talked about all sorts of things and then, prosaically enough, about the fact that they were both hungry.
‘And there’s nothing in the house because we were all going to eat at Margit’s. This is awful,’ Adrienne wailed in mock dismay.
Then Balint remembered the chestnuts which, though he had hardly known what he was doing, he had bought on that long lonely bitter walk the evening before. Finding his coat among the clothes he had strewn on the floor by Adrienne’s bed, he searched in the pockets and found them and also the paper he had bought a little later.
‘I’ve got this bag of chestnuts, but they’re stone cold. Perhaps we could warm them up?’
‘That’d take far too long, the fire’s been out for ages,’ said Adrienne, laughing. ‘I’m so hungry! Let’s have them as they are! They’ll taste every bit as good.’
So as not to soil Adrienne’s sheets with the chestnut peelings they used the newspaper as a tablecloth in the centre of the bed and leaning over from each side they tackled the long-cold nuts with gusto. As they did so Balint told how he had nearly knocked over the old woman who was roasting the chestnuts and how, automatically, he had bought the paper from the news-vendor in the station square; and he related both tales as if they were unreal amusing anecdotes from a remote past which now hardly concerned them, indeed as if they had never really happened.
It was the same with all the suffering they had both endured during the past year and a half. The pain and bitterness and the torment they had both gone through all those months when Uzdy’s incipient madness was slowly growing to its climax; the ultimate catastrophe of his complete breakdown; Adrienne’s renunciation of their love and her decree that they must not see each other; and the seemingly endless days and nights of sorrow and self-recrimination that they had both suffered; all these things now vanished from their minds like the mists of early morning. Not only did they not think about it but they barely even wondered if there had ever really been any reason for the torture they had endured. They did not remember it because it no longer existed, because they were together again and at home in each other’s arms, because they belonged to each other, a real couple, male and female of the same species, and because anything which did not concern them now was as unreal as a mere phantom.
So, together on the wide bed, he in her silken wrap and she with her night-dress slightly torn and slipping down over one shoulder, they fell on the sooty chestnuts with hungry delight.
‘Wasn’t it lucky you bought them!’ said Addy.
Chapter Two
WHEN KAROLY KHUEN-HEDERVARY formed a