The Longest Winter by Mary Jane Staples Page A

Outside were a few round, marble-topped tables, their wrought-iron pedestals pitted with rust marks. There were no customers.
    ‘So quiet, so lovely,’ said Anne, ‘now we can have coffee.’
    They stopped. Sophie regarded the village, its hilly, rutted street, and then the harshness of the sunlit view on their right.
    ‘Is this God’s own end of the world? I always think so,’ she said.
    ‘I always think that in this part of Bosnia there must be brigands,’ said Anne.
    ‘Oh, Dragovich and his kind grow corn and keep goats now,’ said Sophie.
    James wished he had a bold, imaginative talent with oils. It was colour, rasping and brazen, which these vistas demanded. The village, built on thehillside above the river, was a dream vantage point for any artist. Here, by the tavern, one might sit and commit the primitive grandeur to memory, while sketching outlines.
    As he stood in absorbed contemplation of light and shade, Anne and Sophie delicately inspected the chairs around one of the tables. James put his sketchbook on the table, took out his handkerchief and dusted the chairs.
    ‘James, that is so nice of you,’ said Sophie, ‘and although there’s a certain masculine superiority about some men which I fail to understand, considering the invaluable contribution women make to the continuation of life, I do enjoy the little courtesies which most men accord us. I confess—’
    ‘Won’t you sit down?’ said James gravely.
    ‘Thank you, James,’ she smiled. She and Anne seated themselves. James joined them. The baronesses awaited the next move in sun-mellowed graciousness. The village seemed even quieter, as if the advent of strangers had made all life retreat behind curtains. No one came out of the café to serve the arrivals. James got up to see who was dead and who was only sleeping, and the proprietor emerged. He was white-aproned, bushily moustached and fatly amiable.
    James asked for coffee in German. Croatian or Serbian was beyond him, but German was the second language in this Austrian province of Bosnia. The proprietor smiled, showing gleaming white teeth, and polished the tabletopwith the hem of his apron. He beamed at the summery baronesses.
    ‘Beautiful,’ he said in German.
    ‘Yes, quite the loveliest day,’ smiled Anne.
    He chuckled and waddled back into the tavern.
    ‘I don’t think he meant the day,’ said James.
    ‘Well, everything is beautiful,’ said Anne, ‘or at least impressive.’
    ‘Striking,’ said James.
    ‘What is?’ asked Sophie, willing to simply sit for the moment and wonder about the world in summer, and why her nerves were becoming so sensitively on edge at times.
    ‘Both of you,’ said James.
    ‘James, this is very sudden,’ said Anne and laughed. Sophie thought how the summer always made her sister look radiant.
    ‘Oh, after this last month or so,’ said James, ‘I count myself an old friend of the family. Or at least of the Benz.’
    ‘You are our very good friend,’ said Sophie, ‘and I should hope you will always be.’
    If Anne was the kind the sun made radiant, Sophie in summer looked exquisitely impervious to its heat. Except that now, as James smiled at her, a faint flush invaded her coolness. Anne saw the flush. She smiled. She got up and wandered across the dusty street to stand on the dry grassy verge that dipped a little way beyond her to merge with the bracken-strewn slope leading down to the river. She stood there in the sun, the skirt of her dress fluttering.
    At the table James said, ‘Another thing. Your poetry, Sophie. Loved it, I assure you. Well, as much as I could in German. You’re far better with words than I am with paints.’
    ‘You are serious? You really liked it?’ said Sophie.
    ‘Really,’ said James.
    ‘You are very kind,’ said Sophie. ‘Of course, people are kind to one about such things and sometimes they are too kind. Sometimes it’s better not to be kind at all but frank, so that one knows, as everybody else does,