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shoes, shoes that seemed too small for the legs above them, and said: ‘In the last war there were many scarcities. I remember my father paid for me two thousand lei for shoes of felt. I wear them to school the one day only, and when I return, no soles left. And food! How terrible if Rumania were short of food!’
    Guy turned, laughing, towards the alcove. ‘Could Rumania be short of food?’
    ‘No? You think not?’ She paused and glanced at her husband. ‘It is true,’ she said, ‘we have much food.’ The husband shrugged and smiled again.
    At last Guy was released. Harriet, who had been watching the activity of the restaurant, said: ‘There are no free tables.’
    ‘Oh yes, there are.’ Firmly, short-sightedly, Guy led her to a table marked ‘ Rezervat ’.
    ‘ Nu nu, domnule .’ The head waiter pointed them to a vacant table beside the orchestra.
    Harriet shook her head: ‘The noise would be intolerable.’ The man grumbled.
    ‘He says,’ said Guy, ‘we are fortunate to find any table in a time of war.’
    ‘Tell him it’s our war, not his. We must have a better table.’
    The head waiter flung out his hands in a distracted way and called to an assistant to take charge of the Pringles. The assistant, dodging like a rugger player through the hazards of the garden, led them to a platform where half-a-dozen privileged tables were raised above the rest. He whipped a ‘reserved’ notice from one and presented it like a conjurer completing a trick. Guy handed him a bundle of small notes.
    Now, seated as on a headland, the Pringles gazed across the surge at a wrought-iron cage, lighted with ‘fairy’ lights and hung with green branches and gilded oranges, where the orchestra laboured to be heard above the general din. Squeaking and pompomming at an insane pitch, the instruments produced an effect not so much of high spirits as of tearing rage.
    Guy tilted forward his glasses and tried to focus the spectaclebefore him. He was, Harriet knew, happy to be in this advantageous position even though he would not have demanded it for himself. In appreciation, he stretched his hand to her across the table. As she touched it, she saw they were being observed from the next table by a man who, meeting her glance, smiled and looked away.
    ‘Who is that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘Does he know us?’
    ‘Everyone knows us. We are the English. We are at war.’
    ‘But who is he?’
    ‘Ionescu, the Minister of Information. He’s always here.’
    ‘How odd to live in such a small capital!’
    ‘There are advantages. Whatever happens here, one is in the midst of it.’
    Ionescu was not alone at his table. He had with him five women of different ages, all plain, staid and subdued in appearance, from whom he sat apart. He gazed fixedly at the orchestra stand and picked his teeth with a golden pick.
    ‘Who are the women?’
    ‘His wife and her relatives. The wife is the one nearest him.’
    ‘She looks down-trodden.’
    ‘She probably is. Everyone knows he comes here only to see the singer Florica. He’s her latest affaire .’
    Harriet watched a man below, who, newly served, guarded his plate with one hand against the waiters and passers-by while with the other he forked-in his food, eyes oblique, as though fearing to have it snatched from him. She was hungry herself.
    ‘Will they ever bring the menu?’ she asked.
    Guy said: ‘Sooner or later someone will remember us. There’s Inchcape.’ He pointed to a man in late middle-age, thickly built and very upright, who had paused with an ironically humorous courtesy while a group pushed fiercely past him searching for a table. As Guy rose and waved, Inchcape nodded up to him, then, when free to move, did so with the same air of amused irony, giving, for all his lack of height, the impression of towering over those about him. He had, Harriet remembered, once been headmaster of a minor public school.
    As he advanced, she noticed someone was following him– a taller,