by Eva Ibbotson
The Triumph lasted till I alighted at the Bristol, walked across the richly carpeted foyer, smelled the cigars from the Smoking Room — and then there was a moment of panic, for after all any kind of disaster could have overtaken the Feldherr von Lindenberg since the early hours of today.
But it was all right. I gave the name I always gave, the porter handed me a key. No smile of complicity, no recognition though I was here less than two months ago. The Bristol isn’t intimate like Sachers; no naked archdukes come whooping out of the Salles Privées. Here is complete discretion, anonymity. No wonder the nice fat English King Edward liked it best of all the hotels in the city.
My room was perfect. I could see over the roofs to a garden with a swing and pond with pin-sized children who should have been in bed. I took off my hat and put it on the hatstand. I sat down on the bed.
There is no waiting like this waiting.
Then came the knock on the door.
‘Enter!’
He entered.
Why him? Why this one man of all the men who have courted me? He is fourteen years older than I am and God knows I am not young. He looks like a weatherbeaten eagle, tight-lipped, uncompromising, no softness anywhere in the clean-shaven face. Why a soldier when the whole paraphernalia of army life is repellent to me, why a landowner when I secretly share Nini’s dislike of the ruling class?
And why a man who can never marry me and whose wife, the delicate and largely absent Elise, is the object of our continuing concern?
Field Marshals of the Austrian Army are usually princely, glamorous or in their dotage. Gernot von Lindenberg was none of these. Rumour had it that the Kaiser had insisted on his promotion so that he could send him to interminable disarmament conferences and diplomatic missions which were doomed before the entourage ever left Vienna. To the bumbling, ancient Emperor, Gernot was wholly loyal while privately groaning at his narrow-mindedness. If the Crown Prince had lived, my lover might have taken pleasure in his work: he and Rudolf had been friends. As it was he endured the frustration and monotony of the conference table and escaped when he could to manoeuvres in obscure and lonely places or the work on his estate. Yet he had not chosen the army, any more than he had chosen the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer whose family estate bounded his.
‘Why, Gernot?’ I asked him once. ‘Why always duty, duty, duty?’
‘Perhaps because I don’t think it matters. Duty . . . inclination . . . whatever you start with there are years of grinding work to be filled in before you die.’
From what he didn’t say rather than what he did, I sensed his despairing pessimism, his conviction that the corruption, the inefficiency and bumbledom that pervaded the army and the court would land us like an overripe plum in the lap of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, whom he loathed more than any man on earth.
Now he came towards me. He doesn’t smile much, my protector. When he does one side of his mouth flicks upwards briefly, more in sardonic comment on the idiocy of the world than in amusement, but he has a way of doing something to his eyes which even after twelve years of intensive study I have not identified. We took each other’s hands, didn’t kiss . . . looked. I thought I saw further ravages played by his foul profession on his face. Then: ‘Do you like my dress?’ I inquired conversationally.
His steel blue eyes roamed over the creamy folds of silk, lingered in the places where I had arranged for the eye to linger. He stepped back to study me more carefully as I turned slowly round, came face to face with him again.
‘Yes, I like it.’
Then he said that lovely thing — the thing that women the world over see as the fulfilment of their labours; their just reward.
‘Take it off,’ said Field Marshal von Lindenberg. ‘At once, please. Take it off!’
When I became Gernot’s mistress I changed. I’d been a babbler, but I had to learn discretion and I kept the secret of our liaison from everyone I knew. Alice guessed, I think, but her own affair with Rudi Sultzer was conducted so quietly and modestly that I knew she could be trusted. I learnt to wait — it was often weeks between one meeting and the next, and the best part of summer he was away on manoeuvres. Oh, those manoeuvres which took place in some unspeakable corner of the Empire: Ruthenia, Moldavia . . . on a forlorn and dusty plain. Some of the soldiers’ girlfriends followed them there, but not I. Gernot was fanatical about the need of officers to conduct their lives with decorum. It was not Elise who imposed on us the iron secrecy in which we moved — she was in any case involved in a constant pilgrimage round the spas of Europe — it was his obligation to his men.
What changed most, though, was my attitude to God. I went on going to church because I needed Him and I felt, too, that it would be hard on Him to be left only with the virtuous who are frequently so odd. But I didn’t go to confession — how could I confess the ‘sin’ which had dragged me back to life and happiness after I gave up my child? I knew I was doomed to hellfire and of course I minded, but my preoccupation with life after death was not quite the usual one. I thought of the Last Trump, the open graves, the skeletons rising and seeking out their loved ones with whom to float upwards to eternal life.
But who would come for us, the women in the shadows, the mistresses? For on this most important day the proprieties would have to be observed, I understood that. It was the Frau Professorinen, the Frau Doktors and Frau Direktors who would be claimed by their spouses. Alice understood that it was with the musty bones of Frau Sultzer clasped in his arms that her Rudi would ascend to Paradise. And I, of course, knew that the hand of my protector, which even in life has a skeletal touch, would reach for the bones of the woman he had married: the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer who had brought him a useful forest and straightened out an untidy bulge on the borders of his estate.
But the Last Trump was not yet!
We lay in bed holding hands. Unnecessary one might have thought in view of what had passed, but not so. I asked after his wife who, even if I knew her, I would not be able to hate, for her son had died when he was five months old and her daughter, now grown up, was a plain and unattractive woman with a discontented face.
Gernot reached out to the bedside table for his cigars. The fact that I can exist in a cloud of tobacco smoke may explain the hold I have over him.
‘She’s left Baden-Baden. The waters were the wrong temperature or there wasn’t enough sulphur, I forget which. So she’s gone to Meran. There’s a splendid crook there who charges a thousand kronen to keep people sitting up to the neck in radioactive mud while eating grapes. He owns a vineyard of course.’
‘And the conference in Berlin?’
His face darkened. ‘A fiasco, naturally. Wilhelm will drag us into a war, there’s no doubt of it. A purposeless war for which we are entirely unprepared.’ He shook off his thoughts and commanded me to prattle.
My lover’s curiosity about my shop is outstanding. This complex, busy man listens like a child to nursery rhymes while I describe my customers and the life of the square. So now I told him about the new dress that Leah Cohen had ordered for the races at Freudenau: more expensive than her sister-in-law’s but able to be worn for planting oranges if the worst came to the worst, and of the Polish wraith opposite whom I’d had to show how to pat a dog. I told him about the letter Herr Schumacher’s brother had tactlessly written, urging the claims of his goldfish-slaying son even before the birth of the new baby, and of the mishap that had befallen me when I took the Countess von Metz’s Turkish dagger to the pawnbroker.
‘Poor old soul; she must be the meanest woman in creation.’
But he is surprisingly kind about the Countess for he knew her many years ago when she kept house for her brother, the Colonel of some obscure Moravian regiment in a distant garrison town.
Only when I described Frau Egger’s cloak and the strange buttons did he grow restless and frown.
‘An owl pierced with a lance . . . damn it, that rings a bell, it’ll come to me. God, my memory; I’m growing old!’
This, however, was a barred area. Some six years ago the Field Marshal decided to renounce me on grounds of age and decrepitude and instructed me to get married. I was still in awe of him then and for weeks I allowed myself to be taken out by an extraordinary number of men, collecting several offers of marriage and quite a few other offers before I put my foot down.
Gernot had propped himself up on one elbow, moved one of my curls to a different part of my forehead. It was probably my imagination but when he spoke I thought there was a trace of anxiety in his voice.
Did Frau Egger say anything about her husband? His activities?’
I shook my head and — unwisely perhaps — launched into an account of the Minister’s entanglement with Lily from the post office and the Nasty Little Habit. ‘And I must say, Gernot, I cannot help wondering so very much what it might be?’
Gernot’s suggestions, as I had expected, were exceedingly creative, but presently he said: ‘Susanna, have you ever thought of moving on? Getting a shop in the Kärtnerstrasse or the Graben?’
I shook my head. ‘No; the square’s just right for me. I don’t want to be in a place that’s fashionable. I like to stand out. Anyway, I could never afford the Kärtnerstrasse rents — not for a moment.’
‘My God, you obstinate, idiotic girl, how many times have I told you that I want to help you? God knows, I’m not rich but —’
‘No, Gernot. You know how it is with me.’
‘You and your damned pride!’
‘Perhaps it’s pride. I don’t know. But I have to be . . . someone who has asked you for nothing. The only person, perhaps.’
‘And what of me? What of my wish to render you a service?’
‘The service you do me is to exist.’ I began to elaborate this theme, one of my favourites, and presently he stopped raging and decided that it was after all not necessary for him to finish his cigar.
It is my pride to have wasted many of the Field Marshal’s best Havanas.
I have seen the dreaded tandem!
Frau Sultzer arrived on it this morning, bringing her daughter Edith to be measured for her bridesmaid’s dress.
Their arrival created a certain stir. Rip entirely lost his sang-froid and danced barking round the machine as it wobbled to a halt; Joseph in the café stood with his mouth hanging open.
Frau Sultzer dismounted from the front of the machine, her daughter Edith from the back. Two briefcases were unstrapped from the carrier . . .
And my admiration for Rudi Sultzer leapt to new heights. He might not have ‘approached’ his wife often, but he had ‘approached’ her.
On this wonderful May morning, Laura Sultzer wore a musty brown skirt with a swollen hem which undulated like a switchback and a knitted cardigan under which the sleeves of her blouse bulged in a way which made one wonder if she had secreted some of her rescued rats. Her nose was sharp and long, the thriving hairs which covered her chin and upper lip ranged interestingly from white to grey to dusty black and as she came towards me, I caught the musty odour one encounters when opening ancient wardrobes.
But my business was with her daughter.
Edith was shorter than her mother, with a bad skin and bewildered grey eyes behind the kind of spectacles that Schubert would have discarded as out of date. She looked anaemic, and beneath the bobble-fringed tablecloth she seemed to be wearing, I guessed at her father’s bandy legs.
I asked the ladies to sit down and offered Frau Sultzer some fashion magazines which she refused with a shudder. ‘Thank you, we have brought our own reading matter,’ she said.
The briefcases were then unpacked. Out of hers, awesomely stamped with the initials L.S., Frau Sultzer fetched a volume of Schopenhauer and a propelling pencil. Out of Edith’s — a bulging and distressed-looking object of paler hue — she took a volume of Beowulf
‘I feel I should inform you that my daughter is entered for the Plotzenheimer Essay Prize in Anglo-Saxon studies,’ she continued, `so I would be grateful if you would keep her fittings as brief as possible. It is imperative that she wastes no time.’
‘Her fittings will be exactly as long as necessary, Frau Sultzer,’ I said.
I then led Edith away, removing Beowulf from her nervous clasp, and while Nini measured her, I tried to think what I could do to make this unprepossessing lump into a pretty bridesmaid.
The first step was obvious.
‘Fräulein Edith, if I am to dress you properly, one thing is essential. A proper corset.’
She stared at me, her short-sighted eyes widening behind her spectacles. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t! Mama would never permit it. She doesn’t approve of them. My underclothes are made by a lady who comes to mother’s Goethe readings.’
‘Yes, I can see that. But I really cannot sew for someone whose bosom has to be looked for every time they come. It needn’t be anything very tight or constricting. I’ll give you the name of an excellent woman in the Graben: she’s not expensive.’ I wrote a name on a piece of paper and handed it to Edith. ‘After all, there’s no need to trouble your mother; just mention to your father that I insisted on a foundation garment. I’m sure he’s aware of the existence of such things.’
Edith shook her head despairingly. Her light brown hair was full of dandruff, but I refrained from suggesting a good shampoo and raw liver sandwiches for it was clear that the Bluestocking, at the moment, could take no more.
‘Anyway, no one will look at me,’ she said, ‘not with Magdalena as a bride.’
‘Anyone I dress gets looked at,’ I said firmly, but I was curious about Magdalena Winter and Edith answered my questions freely enough.
Magdalena and Edith had attended the same school since they were seven years old. From the first it seemed Magdalena had been spared the traditional disasters of childhood: chicken pox, acne, braces on her teeth. Not only was she beautiful, she was exceedingly devout.
‘She always said she wanted to be a nun. Always. But of course when you look like that . . . All the same, we were very surprised when she accepted Herr Huber.’ Edith broke off, flushing. ‘I don’t mean . . . I mean, Herr Huber is very kind. He called on us and brought us a salami, but we’re vegetarians and Mother gave it to the poor. Only, Magdalena had a lot of offers and some of them were very grand — and she’d refused them all.’
I tried to visualize this paragon. ‘Is she dark or fair?’
‘Fair. Almost white. In the nativity play she was always the Virgin Mary and her hair sort of rippled out over her blue mantle. People just gasped.’
‘And you?’ I asked the Bluestocking, ‘what were you in the nativity play?’
‘Oh, I was a sheep,’ said Edith. ‘I was always a sheep.’
Back in the salon, Frau Sultzer was still bent over her Schopenhauer, occasionally pencilling a Yes! or an Indeed! into the margin.
How sad for poor Schopenhauer to have died before he knew how absolutely Laura Sultzer agreed with him.
I had intended to see the bride and the bridesmaid together but Herr Huber had sent a message to say that Fräulein Winter was unwell. She had a chest infection and the doctor had advised her to stay indoors. Since there was a great deal of work to be done on her trousseau I’d suggested that Nini and I go round to her house with some samples, and as soon as lunch was over, the butcher appeared in his new canary-yellow motor to drive us to where she lived.
Magdalena’s mother was the daughter of an army officer who had fought at Königgratz; her father was a taxidermist at the Naturhistorisches Museum who suffered from chronic asthma and had been retired early on a shockingly inadequate pension.
‘The elephant seal at the top of the main staircase is his work,’ said Herr Huber, steering his motor down the Wipplingerstr
asse. ‘A very able man.’
Magdalena had two younger brothers, twins of ten who were destined for the army. They had fallen behind at school and now had to be coached for the Cadet Corps.
‘I’m taking care of all that, of course,’ said the butcher. ‘I regard it as a sacred trust.’
He left us at the entrance to the Kreuzer Hof and we made our way through an archway into a sunless courtyard and up an outside staircase to the third floor. The smell of sauerkraut and drains accompanied us; on the dank, arcaded passage that ran right round the building, aproned women with crying children filled buckets at the communal taps.
Frau Winter opened the door to us, mumuring a brave lie about it being the maid’s day off. The tiny parlour was spotless and every surface was covered with crocheted doilies or antimacassars or lace-fringed cloths. There were pictures of the Kaiser, of the murdered Empress Elisabeth — and one portrait of an army officer whose insignia I fortunately recognized.
‘Ah, the 3rd Light Cavalry! The corps that fought so magnificently at Königgratz.’
Frau Winter’s pale eyes lit up. ‘Yes. That’s my father. The boys are going to join his old regiment. They have to!’ In her voice I sensed her desperation, the endless fight against the poverty and squalor by which she was surrounded. No wonder Magdalena had felt obliged to marry a wealthy man.
The twins now appeared, clicked their heels, bowed. With their cropped flaxen hair, light blue eyes and sturdy physique they were every recruiting officer’s dream.
‘Go and tell your sister that the ladies are here,’ Frau Winter ordered — and to the faint, unheeded sounds of inquiry from the taxidermist behind a door, we were led to Magdalena’s room.
It was an extraordinary place. All the rooms were dark, for Frau Winter had placed the thickest netting between herself and the communal passage outside, but Magdalena’s room, which had only a small high window, was crepuscular. One felt as if one were in an aquarium or deep below the sea.
‘Oh!’ Nini beside me had given a little squeak, her hand touched mine for reassurance — and no wonder.