Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

In an instant he was at her side.

‘Tomorrow. Room 23 … the King Istvan Hotel … four o’clock.’ It was an order issued so quickly that he barely heard it, her voice barely more than a whisper, feverish and desperate. It was hardly out of her mouth before she had turned and rejoined the others. Balint returned to his own table, his heart racing so hard he thought it would pound its way out of his chest.

Abady found his way to the little old-fashioned hotel where only people from the country stayed, and promptly at four o’clock he knocked on her door and went in.

Addy came forward to meet him, her expression unusually solemn and serious. She did not let him put his arms round her or kiss her cheek but pushed him away with a single imperious finger. She did not even use the familiar form when addressing him. They sat down in two chairs near the window.

‘I wanted to see you for just a moment. We haven’t got long. The girls have gone shopping with Mlle Morin and they’ll be back soon. Did you know? We are going to Venice. We are all very worried about Judith. Since … well, you know all about that. Since then she’s been like someone in a trance, like a sleepwalker. And sometimes she gets so muddled, not often and luckily only those who know her well seem to notice. The doctors told us to try a change of scene, to get her away from all the places that remind her of what’s happened. My mother’s still away ill and Father cannot get away for long as there’s the whole place to run. That is why I am going with them. It wasn’t easy to arrange, I can tell you, but in the end I managed it!’

They were silent for a few minutes. Balint trembled with expectancy. He was sure that something else was coming, something that Adrienne had not yet allowed herself to say, but which was fully thought-out, definite and serious. When she spoke at last her voice was cool, with no trace of excitement.

‘We are planning to stay at least four weeks, possibly five. At Almasko they have agreed to that …’ Adrienne’s onyx-coloured eyes opened very wide. She looked straight into Balint’s face and very slowly she said: ‘So we have one month. That’s all, one month, a whole month … if you would care to join me …?’

‘Addy! My darling Addy!’

Even now she did not allow him to come any closer to her.

‘Not now! No! Later, in Venice. We’ll have four weeks together. It’s not much, I know, but four whole weeks … and after that — well, after that it’s over!’

‘What do you mean, over? Surely you don’t mean what you said up there … that you would …?’

‘What does that matter to you? Why should you care?’ Addy laughed a new laugh he had never heard, like the deep cooing of doves, a laugh that sprang from some deep, unknown joy. ‘Why should you care? Four weeks together … why should you care what comes after that?’

She rose from her chair, moving her fingers in the air in front of her face as if she were counting.

‘You’d better go now. The others will be back any minute and it wouldn’t be good if Judith saw you.’ He put his arms round her to say goodbye, and she gave him a swift, absent-minded kiss her, thoughts obviously far away. Then she pushed him out of the door.

Abady arrived in Venice in the early afternoon. The sun was shining brightly when he stepped into a gondola and gave the directions of a little-known hotel behind the San Marco Square which few foreigners ever discovered. At seven o’clock the same evening he went to the Ponte Canonica, just as they had planned in their letters. It was easy for Adrienne to find her way there through the little backstreets where no one would see and recognize her. She was staying in the Danieli Hotel in the old Palazzo Dandolo on the Riva, though she was the only one of her party to do so. Her sisters and Mlle Morin were installed in one of the huge palace hotels on the Lido where Adrienne joined them each day, bathing with them, eating her meals with them, and then returning to Venice in the late afternoon or evening. ‘It’ll be better like that,’ she had said to Margit. ‘I can’t sleep out here with the roaring of the sea in my ears. Anyhow it’s better for Judith if I’m not always before her eyes.’

She wondered afterwards if it might not have been better to have given only one reason — two was perhaps protesting too much — but Margit, cleverer and brighter than the others, had merely replied unconcernedly: ‘You’re right! I’ve noticed that she’s still rather resentful of you. Far better not to be around all the time.’ However, when Adrienne moved out of their hotel and had boarded the launch that would take her to the Danieli, Margit walked slowly back from the quay. As she did so little secret smile played round the corners of her mouth.

The Ponte Canonica is only just behind St Mark’s and can be reached either through the basilica itself or by way of a narrow street behind the hotel. It is a bridge of white marble, arched in the centre, with shallow flights of steps leading down to the canal. Balint had his gondola tied up on the side by the little church so that he would be able from afar to see Adrienne as she came to their rendezvous.

The seven o’clock chimes from the nearby Campanile had just sounded when she appeared in the distance, her distinctive walk as elegant as ever. The lines of Adrienne’s long legs were clearly etched beneath the thin green silk of her spring dress. Balint did not wait to greet her but returned swiftly to his gondola. In a few minutes she had joined him.

Their gondolier, one Riccardo Lobetti, did not have to be told that Balint and Adrienne’s meeting was a romantic tryst. He knew it instinctively and so off he went only asking where he should go when they were well away from the meeting place and were gliding down a lonely stretch of canal bordered by high walls.

‘To the Lagoon!’ ordered Balint.

The slight splash made by the single oar made a slow gentle rhythm behind them and the long craft swayed slightly at each movement. They glided through deserted canals where the low tide had revealed festoons of river moss that covered the foundations of the tall houses on each side. All around it was quiet with no sound other than the soft swishing of Riccardo’s long oar just behind their little curtain-hung cabin. Only sometimes, as they approached the junction with another canal did they hear the long-drawn-out call of the gondolier ‘ Saa … aa … i.i.i …!’ and from around a corner the answering cry from another as yet unseen boatsman. Their gondola glided on, so skilfully handled by their own invisible oarsman that they never even touched another boat, or the sides of the canals, not even when the passageway was at its narrowest and they met huge heavily-laden barges. No sound, no touch; everything passed as silently as in a dream. To Balint and Adrienne, seated side by side under the flimsy canvas tent of the gondola’s tiny cabin, it was like a God-given dream of unexpected ecstasy.

They leant back on the soft cushions, their hands clasped, not speaking, not moving, almost in a trance, as slowly their little craft emerged from the haunted shadows of the canal into the shining radiance of the lagoon itself where the horizon seemed to be at an infinite distance, the late afternoon sun glistening in a thousand reflections on the smooth waters over which they floated. Everything was marvellously pale, in iridescent shades of grey and pearl, with only the faintest hints of the softer shades of the rainbow. The sky was greyish-blue and the waters bluishgrey, so alike that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. Everything melted into everything else, fusing all they could see into one uncertain, vaporous abstraction. Far in the distance there was what might have been the outlines of an island with, in front of it, other smaller islands identifiable only by the unexpectedly dramatic vertical lines of black cypress trees which looked like distant exclamation marks on a faded parchment.