Free The Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson Page A

emerged. A minute or so later, the loudspeaker boomed an announcement and I found myself flowing nervelessly across the tarmac.
    In four hours I was in Prague.
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    When you have left a town at the age of six and return eighteen years later, there is a certain quality of enchantment. The streets, the monuments, the church spires, set up a whispering in the mind. You know, with dream-like certainty, what is coming round the next corner, and the sensation of finding you are right is inexpressibly poignant.
    All this was totally unexpected, and despite the terror in which I had stepped out of the aircraft and negotiated PassportControl and Customs, I arrived at my hotel, the Slovenska, in a mood of swollen, if highly unstable, elation.
    The Hotel Slovenska stands three-quarters of the way up the Vaclavske Namesti – Wenceslas Square. This thoroughfare, despite its name, is not a square but a broad avenue. At one end is a large grey Victorian museum standing in its own gardens. At the other end, crossing it like the top bar of a T, run the town’s main business streets, the Narodni Trida to the left, the Prikopy to the right.
    I stood outside the hotel and gazed about me, remembering it all. It was a scene of vitality in the hot sun, the pavements crowded, the little one-decker trams clanging up and down the wide cobbled street. At the far end, Wenceslas, beloved figure of my childhood, glittered from his iron horse in the middle of the road. Even the hotel itself, I thought, was familiar, and after a moment realized why. Here, under another name, was the Wartski’s where my mother used to take tea, the big sash windows open now to the pavement in the heat.
    I was grinning at all this in a somewhat loose-jawed way, recollecting intimately the plushy darkness of the interior, the racks of newspapers, the heavy velvet curtains, the old ladies dabbing their mouths with little handkerchiefs. It was inconceivable that I should be back.
    There were, however, no old ladies present when I went inside. The place was abustle with open-shirted men in sandals. At the reception desk a centre-parted woman, not at all unlike Bunface, was engaged in some intense calculation over a ledger. I waited two minutes and said in English, ‘I have a reservation.’
    She looked up sharply and flicked quickly through a pile of cards.
    ‘Pan Whistler, Nicolas?’
    ‘That’s it.’
    ‘There is a letter for you. Your room is quite ready. One-forty,’ she said in Czech to the porter who had come to stand by my bag.
    I took the letter and followed the porter into the lift. He was a bent little ancient with an immense adam’s apple and aprominent stud in his collarless shirt. He gazed at me with in terest, grinning and shaking his head.
    ‘The pane has been to Praha before?’ he asked in Czech.
    ‘Not for a long time.’
    ‘Many changes,’ he said, and hawked politely behind his hand. ‘Once we used to be full of business men. Not so many now.’
    ‘No, well. Times have changed.’
    He hawked again. ‘Still, Praha is the same city, very beautiful. I’ll bet you haven’t seen many cities as beautiful as Praha.’
    I was no longer listening to him. I had been examining the envelope and, as we came out into the corridor, had seen the small inscription, State Glass Board . It was evidendy my programme. My stomach turned rapidly to water again, and I was thus not able at first glimpse to appreciate the magnificence of room one-forty.
    When the porter had deposited my bag, however, and departed, grinning, I stood in the middle of the room and gazed about me. It was, no doubt about it, a handsome apartment. It was tricked out in green and gold. A large bed, curtained all round, stood in an alcove. There was an adjoining bathroom with a shower compartment There were easy chairs and a chaise longue and a writing desk. Double french windows stood open to a broad balcony. Cunliffe was doing me proud.
    I sat down on the chaise longue and opened the