They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [30]
‘They tell me it’s a most dramatic piece. What part did you find the most exciting, the most touching? How was the entr’acte before the last act?’ Having read the newspaper articles – which Balint had missed – it was soon obvious to her that she knew more about the tragic love of Cio-Cio-San for Lieutenant Pinkerton than did her son, who did not seem at all familiar with anything except the long first act love duet, for it was to that that he always returned whatever she might ask him about the rest of the work. And then he started to peel an apple and seemed so absorbed in so doing that it seemed to her better to let the subject drop.
Knowing her son so well Countess Roza thought it would be better not to insist any more. One more question, however, she did ask. She wanted to know if he had seen any of their friends at the theatre, and so learned that Margit Miloth and her husband had been in the Gyalakuthy box next to the Abadys’ and, though Balint said nothing about Adrienne, his manner was suddenly so awkward and constrained that his mother quickly decided to change the subject, not bringing the matter up again, and then only with great circumspection, until they were seated at dinner that evening.
She reached the subject in the most roundabout manner, as was her way. First of all she talked about the hunting at Zsuk. Then she asked which families had brought out debutante girls that season, and asked if the autumn social life in Kolozsvar was as lively and amusing as it usually was when the hunt season began. She wanted to know who had opened their town houses and who was going to give balls and dinners; and in this way she eventually arrived at her destination, which was to ask about the Prefect’s supper party. Now she discovered her first important fact: Balint had had a headache and had not attended. He had been sorry to miss the occasion for he would have liked to have met the diva and seen so many of their friends, but it had been a rotten sort of migraine and he hadn’t felt up to it, admitting for the first time that he hadn’t even stayed until the end of the performance. Perhaps, he said, thinking no doubt that it was quite an adequate excuse, he had been rather vague about it when they had discussed his doings over tea that afternoon.
In fact the inadequacy of the excuse was just what Countess Roza wanted to hear, for it immediately gave her a clue as to what had really happened. It was clear to her now that her son had met someone at the theatre, and it was for this person’s sake that he had left early and for whom he had failed to go to the party. It could only have been Adrienne; and Countess Roza knew it as surely as if he had spelled it out.
For a moment her old anger flared up once again. That woman! That accursed woman! But then her wrath dissolved again almost as quickly as it had appeared.
For twelve long, miserable months after she had forbidden Balint to come home to Denestornya, Countess Abady had sat alone in her great house; and even after her son had been allowed back he had been so gloomy, so distracted, so totally uninterested in everything in which he had formerly taken such pleasure and so listless, that it had been like living with a ghost. Every time that she had looked at her son’s weary face her heart had constricted and, though she never for a moment thought that she had acted in anything but his best interests – and, of course, to preserve the family’s prestige and honour – it had been a daily sorrow to see him so heartbroken. Only now, this very day, had he been his old self again, young and cheerful and filled with hope and the joy of