Free The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge Page A

attended alone, though that big beautiful English girl whom she liked so much would be there—evidently a great friend of Mr. Atherley’s. Bowling smoothly up the Tagus estuary, her thoughts were occupied with this new world of hers. She had asked Monsignor Subercaseaux, at confession, about going to lunch with young men, and had received full sanction; later he had been to see her at the hotel when her mother was out, and spent an hour with her. He was kind, genial even, and clearly anxious to help her and to smooth her path in this unfamiliar life; but she did not like his kind of help, and she did not like him. The fact was that Hetta Páloczy found herself rather up against the western world as presented to her at Estoril in many of its aspects, of which the social ease, the urbane worldly wisdom of her mother’s confessor was most definitely one. The richly-dressed congregation at Mass on Sundays, with shiny cars waiting outside, the interior richness of the churches themselves, with all their treasures displayed, not hidden away in the deep reed thatch of some peasant’shouse for security—the very safety of it all jarred on her, after the passionate devotion of the people at home, holding with such stubborn intensity to the practice of their religion in the face of persecution and danger. She remembered the skilful, wary sermons preached—only very rarely—by Father Antal, when he knew full well that there would be several ‘Spitzel’ (Communist spies) posted among the congregation, waiting to lay information against him if anything he said could possibly be twisted into an anti-Communist utterance. Here, priests were safe, and could preach as they pleased—and then go on to eat of delicate dishes at luncheon, bow to rich ladies, and make graceful little jokes.
‘Pfui!’
said Hetta (who spoke German as well as she did French, English, and Hungarian) to herself.
    Of course she was unjust. The young often are, and with less reason than Hetta, who had grown up in an unusually hard school; born courageous and tough, she had become intolerant. But as the car pulled up outside Atherley’s little white house she forgot her criticisms in a warm feeling of happy anticipation.
    A pretty smiling maid in a frilly apron and white cotton gloves led her up the narrow staircase and ushered her into the long narrow drawing-room; Atherley turned from the window at the far end as she entered, came over and kissed her hand.
    â€˜Here you are—how nice. Your chauffeur found his way to my slum all right?’
    â€˜How do you do. Please, what is slum?’ she asked.
    â€˜Slums are where poor people live; I am not so very poor, but I live in one because I like it. Come and see my neighbours’—and he led her to the window, below which the family life and daily activities of the inhabitants of the ravine were spread out like a diagram, or a child’s toy farm on the floor. Hetta studied them all, thoughtfully.
    â€˜This looks nice,’ she said at length. ‘So we lived in the Alfold, cooking and washing out of doors when it was warm weather. But this is “slum”?’ She pronounced the word with full Hungarian plumminess.
    â€˜No, it isn’t really a slum at all,’ Richard said, forced into accuracy by her literalness. ‘I was being affected.Slums are degraded places in big cities, like London or New York, where people have no gardens, and no chance to live with decency or dignity. If there are gardens there is never degradation, and therefore no slums. That is Dr. Salazar’s idea too,’ he went on—‘When he lays out a new working-class suburb he insists that each house shall have a
bout de terre
, a small garden-plot where the husband can grow onions and saladings to bring in to his wife, instead of wasting his evenings and his money in drinking. He says that sociologically this is a fundamental principle, and he’s