Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

‘Don’t you find it strange?’ he asked. ‘Almost insulting, I should say, according to the normal rules of politeness, not that I care much for such things; but he was one of your admirers long ago, was he not … oh, en tout honneur , of course?’ And he laughed, his long moustaches somehow seeming even longer as the chuckle rumbled in his throat.

Soon Uzdy had returned to the subject. ‘Don’t you find it odd? Yes, very odd, that’s the word for it, odd! Last year he called on us twice but since the autumn, after you had returned from Venice, he hasn’t been near us. You see why I find it odd, don’t you?’

Adrienne shuddered, her skin like goose-flesh in sudden alarm. The reference to Venice was unexpected and menacing. However she managed to answer with apparent calmness, ‘Well, I’ve hardly been here since Venice. Remember how much I’ve had to be at Mezo-Varjas!’

‘Of course, of course! True enough! I beg your pardon,’ said Uzdy, waving his arms about in agreement. Then once again he walked down the length of the room several times before finally stopping near the door. ‘I still think it’s very odd!’ he called back and though he laughed as he said it Adrienne seemed to detect a menacing glint in his slanting tartar eyes. ‘Yes, indeed. Odd!’ Then he opened the door and stepped out, very slowly, and without making a sound closed the door behind him.

Adrienne glanced at her mother-in-law. Countess Clémence was sitting bolt upright, absolutely immobile. She was looking straight ahead of her with the intense expression on her face of one who suddenly hears faint echoes of some ancient memory. It was as if she had heard nothing of what had actually been said.

All this was in Adrienne’s mind when she spoke to Balint, but she had said no more than she felt to be absolutely necessary.

She told him nothing of how worried she had been when, later, she had wondered what her husband had really meant by those sinister words. Why, she asked herself, had he mentioned the subject at all? Did he know anything of what there was, and had been, between her and Balint? Why should he, who never wanted visitors and never invited anyone to the house, suddenly want to see AB, of all people? Why just him? And the talk about Venice? Did he really suspect something or had it been just a chance remark? If he did suspect then everything he said must be part of some plan of his own, some sinister private game in which she would be used as a mere pawn to lure her lover to Almasko. Perhaps it would be wisest to prevent his coming, to keep him, at all costs, away from her husband.

For a long time Adrienne had wrestled with this dilemma. In the end she had decided that Balint should come, no matter what the outcome might be. There was no way by which she could keep them from ever meeting each other again and so it seemed best to go forward and confront what Fate had in store for them. Adrienne’s nature, so frank and full of daring, could accept no other course, no unworthy little game of marital hide-and-seek. And, after all, she reflected, they only had one death to fear and that they had already faced in Venice.

Even so, when she had said, ‘It is necessary that you come …’ Adrienne had not dared to look at Balint, lest he should read in her face something of what was in her mind.

They agreed that when Balint heard that Uzdy had returned home he would present himself at Almasko at noon on the same day.

A few days later, dressed in shooting clothes and with a shoulder bag containing a change of linen and a pair of shoes, Balint turned up at the Uzdys’.

As he arrived in the forecourt Balint again thought how sombre and gloomy it all looked. The outbuildings that flanked the main mansion were hidden behind carefully trimmed yew hedges. The lawn at the centre of the carriage sweep was circular and all the window shutters on the main were tightly closed as if no one was in residence. The very neatness of everything seemed to underline a certain unfriendliness, a lack of welcome. Nothing had been left to chance, there was no disorder, everything was carefully and meticulously under control. At the base of the walls, for example, there was no hint of moss on the carefully dressed stone of the great uniform blocks that made up the foundations. And on the surrounding gravel not a single weed was to be found, any more than there was a flower to spoil the virgin symmetry of the lawn.

Everything had the perfection of ice.

Balint stopped at the huge front door. No one was to be seen.

He wondered what he should do. In any other country house he would simply have opened the door himself and gone in search of his hosts. Somehow here that was something he could not do. It would be wiser, also, he thought, not to risk meeting Adrienne before he had greeted Uzdy or his mother.

He had been waiting for a few moments when the great oak door swung silently inwards and the elderly butler, Maier, stepped out.

‘The ladies are not in the house, your Lordship,’ said Maier after making the appropriate greetings to a visitor. ‘The Dowager Countess has gone for a drive with her grandchild and Countess Adrienne has gone for a walk to the ruins. If your Lordship would care to walk in that direction he would be sure to meet the Gracious Countess.’

‘I would prefer first to pay my respects to Count Pali if he is in the house. Would you tell him that I am here?’

Old Maier shook his head.

‘His Lordship is at home but I am afraid he is working and has given orders not to be disturbed.’

There was something so infinitely sad in the old serving-man’s voice that Balint looked up at him sharply and asked, ‘Busy with the estate accounts, I suppose?’

Maier lifted one of his powerful arms in a vague gesture which suggested the rolling of the ocean’s waves. He looked at Abady as if seeking sympathy, ‘Nowadays his Lordship is on to something else, some indexes, or something like that … a lot of indexes. Your Lordship must forgive me, I really don’t know. But please come in.’

Balint decided he would prefer to wait in the garden. He went round the house and down to that bench on that side of the mansion which faced the view. There, far away on the horizon, he could see the two butter-coloured walls of the ruined castle’s donjon with, below them, firstly the dense oak forests and then, closer to where he sat, the grassy park on the sloping mountainside below, that park which was dotted with dark green box and thuya but on which no flower was allowed to bloom.

The bench was placed between the pillars which supported the elaborate rococo balcony which led from the main drawing-room. Balint had only been sitting there for a few minutes when, from one of the windows of the strangely inappropriate Swiss chalet-like wing which projected at right angles from the otherwise classical building, came the voice of Pal Uzdy. A few seconds afterwards his face too appeared at the same window, pale and oriental-looking, framed in the darkness of the window’s small opening.

‘Well! Well! Well! So here you are. I am pleased to see you, very pleased indeed. You can’t imagine how pleased I am!’ From under his wide-spreading moustaches Uzdy’s teeth gleamed as he looked down on his visitor and let out a peal of laughter. ‘Wait there! I’ll be down straight away.’

The wooden gallery creaked under his measured steps and so did the stairway at the corner of the projecting wing.

Uzdy emerged from the stair and walked slowly towards Balint. His manner was far more amiable than it had usually been in the past; not only did he shake hands but he also patted Balint on the shoulder.