by Eva Ibbotson
A lie, but a good one. And that’s so odd — these lies that feel so right. Laura Sultzer never lies, so I suppose she is good and Alice and I are bad. As though we wouldn’t change it in an instant — all the glamour, the ‘romance’ of being a mistress for the humdrum and honourable job of being a wife.
I asked after Elise.
‘She’s in Aix. An oto-laryngological complaint has been diagnosed.’
I have never discovered what, if anything, ails Gernot’s frail and high-born wife. Only a slight dryness in his tone when he speaks of her wanderings betrays Gernot’s possible doubts — but as far as I am concerned she should pursue her health with the utmost rigour and determination. Let her hang from stilts in the lake at Balaton and let the jets of water play over her pale, thin legs; let her emerge from the baths at Ischl powdered in salt. May she walk up and down the pump room in Marienbad sipping her sulphur water — and may she soothe herself afterwards with waltzes and cream cakes, for when she is absent I can see Gernot.
‘And your daughter?’
‘There is hope of an engagement to a whiskery young man in the Diplomatic Corps. Myself I doubt if he’ll come up to scratch, but Elise is working on it.’
My lover’s fatherhood is a frail plant. He now indicated that he was no longer prepared to discuss his wife and daughter and we retired to bed.
Outside the wind was freshening; the scent of wet earth came to us through the open window.
How good love tastes in the country!
It was in a place very like this that I first met Gernot. Though ‘met’ is not quite the right word. I was somewhat mad, walking — sodden — through the countryside and slightly off course for the Danube.
At one level of my mind I must have known that throwing yourself into the Danube is not a good idea: the currents are unreliable, the bridges full of policemen and drunks. But it was the day I had seen my daughter playing under the walnut tree and left her and I wasn’t particular about ways and means; I just wanted to get away from the pain. So I started walking.
I never went back to the pension in Salzburg to pick up my case. Wearing only a light cloak and carrying the doll in her box, I set off down a long dusty road, across a stream, blundered along footpaths — and found myself in a neighbouring valley.
Here there was a lake and I stopped to throw the doll into the water. I watched her float and bob in her plaid travelling suit, losing her tam-o-shanter before she sank at last into the reeds. After her, I threw the red evening cape, the lace-trimmed skirts, the blouses, Alice’s pretty fragile hats.
But not myself. With the obstinacy of the deranged I had fixed my mind on the Danube and I trudged on in what I believed was the direction of the city.
By nightfall I was in a wood and it had begun to rain. I found a forester’s hut and lay there for a few hours, and then I stumbled on again. The rain had grown heavier; my hair was streaming, my cloak torn.
By midday my legs simply stopped working and I sank down against a tree. What happened next was that someone tried to shoot me. Not deliberately; he was aiming at a boar. I had collapsed in the grounds of Count Osterhofen’s shooting box in which Gernot (reluctantly because the sport was poor and the Count stupid) was staying for informal discussions on some point of foreign policy.
But I didn’t see him then. I came round to find a soldier in the rough grey of a corporal’s field uniform staring down at me. A round face, huge ears . . . and for the first time — bringing me back to consciousness — the smell of the raw onions that Corporal Hatschek loved to chew.
The dogs were called off. Huntsmen in green hats arrived. A litter was fetched. I hadn’t in fact been hit, but no one believed I could walk.
The Count, fair and moon-faced, looked concerned. ‘Such a beautiful girl to come to this,’ he kept saying. It was generally assumed that I was either dead or deaf.
Then a grim-faced, clean-shaven man, thin to the point of emaciation, appeared and took charge of the operation. He wore a loden coat but his superior rank and authority were evident at once.
I was carried into the house — a gloomy place surrounded by trees — and up to a bedroom. Warming pans were brought; the housekeeper removed my clothes.
‘She’s not a common girl, look at those underclothes,’ she said to the maid.
They brought me hot soup which I drank. Then a doctor came with a syringe. Although I was supposedly about to end my life, I minded the prick of the needle.
I woke the next morning in a clean nightgown, my hair brushed. I had a memory — or was it a dream? — of a thin, grim-faced man coming in once with a candle.
All that day they questioned me: the housekeeper, the doctor, and the fair-haired Count who owned the house, but I shook my head and would tell them nothing. I knew that if once I began to speak I couldn’t stop, and I thought, too, that if I spoke I would realize afresh what I had done: parted for ever from the only person I could really love.
On the second day I tried to get up, and looked for my clothes which they had taken. It was then that they sent for Gernot von Lindenberg.
‘You can leave when we know of your circumstances,’ he said. ‘That you have a home to go to and people to care for you.’
‘I have a place to live. And a job. At least I had.’
‘Very well. My servant goes to Vienna tomorrow with some papers. He will escort you — but first you must tell me how you came here in this condition.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
He then introduced himself formally, giving himself his full rank and title. ‘So you will be aware that anything you say to me will by treated in the strictest confidence.’
‘Please don’t make me . . . It would be of no interest . . .’
‘You are mistaken.’
He sat there some way from the bed in a hard-backed chair and waited. Just waited.
I held out a long time. The clock ticked, the wind blew and rattled the shutters and still he sat there. Midnight struck . . . Then suddenly I began to talk.
Strange, that. The strangest thing of all, almost, that to this austere, grim-looking man whom I had never set eyes on before and never expected to see again, I gave the whole story of my daughter’s birth, her loss, the agony and depressions . . . the sudden hope and joy as I realized I could care for her. I told him things I could scarcely remember myself: the woman in the next bed in the House of Refuge saying ‘Her skin is the colour of apricots.’
I told him about Sappho who had chided her daughter for anticipating grief, and how every child I’d seen for six long years had been her: every little girl bowling her hoop in the park, every waif in a painting looking out of the canvas at the world.
By now I was crying so much that I don’t know how he understood me, but he seemed to. Then I told him about what happened three days ago. How I’d seen her and she was everything I’d dreamed of . . . and how I let her go.
‘You acted rightly.’
The quiet words goaded me into a rage that almost transcended my wretchedness. ‘Do you think I care? Do you think that helps?’
He didn’t answer. Then he said something so strange that at first I thought I’d misheard. ‘I envy you.’
That stopped me. ‘What?’
His head was turned away from me towards the one candle that burnt in the room. ‘I had a son. He died when he was five months old. He died, but I did not grieve as you grieve now.’ Then in an entirely different voice: ‘Tomorrow you may go home — on one condition.’
‘What is that?’
‘You know, I’m sure. That you give me your word not to take your life.’
I gave it. I had no wish to spend my days in a hunting lodge shut in by gloomy trees.
The next day Hatschek took me back to Vienna. Even with the Count’s excellent horses it was a
long drive and Hatschek used it to inform me of the Field Marshal’s importance, position and stature. This embraced, of course, his military exploits in places of which I had never heard, and his decorations — but in Hatschek’s eyes depended also on more arduous and less spectacular feats. Going without food once for eight days, getting proper horse blankets out of the obstinate bumblers at the Ministry, telling the Archduke Franz Ferdinand where he could put his plots. The Marshal’s wife and daughter were scarcely mentioned. Hatschek’s passionate loyalty lay only with the man.
When I got back I found that von Lindenberg had done his staff work. Alice knew what had happened and was waiting with a meal. My employer had been told I would be returning to work a few days late. My suitcase had arrived from the pension in Salzburg.
So I resumed my life. The anguish went on, growling away, sometimes suppressed, sometimes getting me by the throat, but as the months passed I could attend to my work and even my pleasures, except on those sudden black days which even now I have not outgrown.
And as the months passed, beneath the anguish there was another and entirely discreditable emotion. Chagrin? Irritation? Surprise? How could the Feldherr von Lindenberg, who had sat by my bed throughout a long night, so entirely forget my presence?
For he made no attempt at all to get in touch with me. A formal inquiry, even a note acknowledging the letter of thanks I sent him would have been appropriate, but he made no reply.
Odd how they can exist side by side: anguish and pique.
Almost a year had passed when a tall, narrow-faced, angular young woman walked into Madame Hermine’s shop, and with her a man in his forties dressed in mufti: dark suit, a bowler hat, a monocle.
The young woman was Fräulein Charlotte von Lindenberg and the man her father, the Field Marshal, who (most unaccustomedly as it turned out) had decided to buy her a dress for her birthday.
He seated himself, his daughter consulted with Madame Hermine. Three dresses were brought out.
‘You had better see them on the model,’ said the Field Marshal.
I had been tidying the racks, keeping my back turned, though I had recognized him at once. Now I was told to go and change.
I came out first in the red silk with the fringed shawl. I’d learnt my job well of course and I knew how important it is to sell the dress, not only to the lady but to the gentleman who pays for it. So I passed carefully and quite close to the Field Marshal, and let him see the low-cut back, and hear the delicious frou-frou of the skirt. The next dress, too, I modelled meticulously, showing the tight-faced daughter how, if one picked up the skirt with the left hand the underskirt glowed a shade lighter, like the inner petals of a delphinium. But of course it was the third dress, the black velvet that he wanted her to have — men always want black velvet. It had a boat neckline and by leaning forward I was able to show her (and a little also to show the gentleman who was paying) how it was cut exactly to the point where you could see the swell of the breasts begin. Not that she had breasts, poor girl, but that was not my fault.
She chose the black. Madame Hermine was pleased — it was the most expensive. The next morning Hatschek came for the first time with a note inviting me to supper at the Bristol.
Did I know that first time? I don’t know . . . yes, of course I knew. Not the full extent, but . . . yes, I knew. My satisfaction at my successful seduction technique was, however, short lived.
‘I decided to give you a year,’ said the Field Marshal, walking naked to a painting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and turning it to the wall. ‘I didn’t want to take advantage of your state and so on. But then I decided nine months was enough. I’m going to buy a dress like that for you. It’s wasted on my daughter.’
‘No. I don’t want presents. Not from you.’
Later he repeated that strange thing he’d said in the shooting box. ‘You can’t imagine how I envied you when you lay there so wild and distraught and desperate.’
‘Envied me?’
He sat down beside me and pushed the hair from my face.
‘To have felt anything so intensely, so utterly. To be so open to sorrow. I’ve never felt anything like that, Susanna. It’s what we all want, to be entirely open to life.’
And under the sheet my toes curled with happiness because he’d said my name.
I have just met Rudi Sultzer and somehow I can’t get him out of my mind.
Laura’s court case came up today. She was fined five hundred kronen and ordered to keep away from the university in the future. Everyone says if it hadn’t been for her husband’s standing in the profession, the penalties would have been much more severe.
Needless to say the Group regards the outcome as a personal triumph for Laura. They were all on the steps of the courtroom as she came sweeping out, dressed to kill in a belted calico sack with which the lady who does Croatian cross-stitch had clearly had her way — and taking no notice of Rudi and the lawyers who had conductcd her defence, they bore their whiskery heroine away.
I had been to see one of my outworkers who lives round the corner from the courtroom, and drew level with the building just as Rudi and his colleagues took leave of each other and he was left alone at the bottom of the steps.
I did not expect him to recognize me. I’d met him once at Alice’s, at the beginning of their relationship, when I called in unexpectedly, not knowing yet which were his ‘days’. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, his hair rumpled, unabashed but a little shy, and the happiness he had just experienced was in his face.
Now, eight years later, I was shocked by his appearance. He was stooped, his suit seemed to be too big for him; he looked as weary as a man of eighty. Then he raised his hat, greeted me by name — and smiled.
The effect was extraordinary. The mischief, the sense of fun that Alice so loved in him were instantly there. Behind the gold-rimmed pince-nez the blue eyes were alert and amused.
The corset was successful?’ he inquired.
‘Very successful.’
‘My daughter admires you tremendously. I must thank you for your kindness to her.’
He had replaced his hat, we were about to separate when, moved by some extraordinary impulse, I laid my hand on his arm.
‘I’m so glad that Alice has you,’ I said. ‘So terribly glad!’
As soon as I had spoken I was aghast. I have always kept silence about Alice’s affairs: only perfect discretion has made our friendship possible, and now in a public place in broad daylight I had made this highly personal remark.
But Rudi Sultzer had ceased to be Atlas. His shoulders straightened and he looked at me with a quite extraordinary gratitude as though I had given him a marvellous and unexpected present.
Then very distinctly, he said: She is my only happiness.’
It was a mistake to take Sigismund across to the churchyard, I see that now. Tonight I came in late and found a bunch of flowers on my doorstep.
The bunch was small and not in its first youth, and I recognized the piece of string with which it was tied. I’d last seen it round Sigismund’s neck supporting his crucifix. I recognized the flowers too: three withered geraniums from the grave of the Family Steiner, a spray of lilies, somewhat slimy at the stem, from the urn on the grave of the Family Heinrid, an acrid-smelling aster from the wreath of a recently interred councillor and (already quite dead owing to their touching frailty) the harebells that I had pointed out to the child with a particular excitement.
Tomorrow I shall send Nini over with a new ribbon for his crucifix. I’ll have a word with Father Anselm too — that impoverished pair across the way have enough problems without a charge of grave robbing!
‘Can you smell the limes?’ I’d asked the boy when I took him across, and he’d lifted his white face obediently to the dark bole of the tree and sucked in air like someone taking medicine.
; From where inside him does he make his music, this sad, old child? Can you be a musician without being a person? Is there no one in this city who can tell me that?
On Sunday the Schumachers asked me for a five o’clock Jause. We had it in the garden under the lime tree which grows in the churchyard, but leans over the wall to shade their lawn. Mitzi, all by herself, had made vanilla kipferl and there were linzer schnitten and an iced and marbled gug’lhupf.
The little girls had changed out of the muslins they wore for church and romped in their pinafores, but however busy they were with their games the four eldest came back again and again, like members of the Imperial Guard, to surround the canopied perambulator in which the newest Schumacher lay in state.
‘Alfred is completely besotted by her,’ said Frau Schumacher, pouring chocolate for me into a rose-sprigged cup. ‘He insisted on that pram and you wouldn’t believe what it cost. It’s English — a Silver Cross.’
‘Well, she’s a bit special, you must admit,’ I said. ‘Those eyebrows!’
Helene’s face softened at my praise. ‘Yes, and she’s so funny! So dictatorial! If you take the bottle away from her she gives you such a look! But Albert really has no sense — it’s a wonder she isn’t sick the whole day long the way he jiggles her and rocks her and tickles her stomach. And he’s invited practically the whole of Vienna to the christening.’
‘When is it to be?’
‘On the twentieth of August. Albert wants to get it over before he goes to fetch his brother’s boy from Graz.’ Her voice had taken on a sombre note, for the goldfish slayer was to join the household early in September. Then she laid a hand on my arm. ‘I won’t press you again, but if you ever feel like changing your mind, there’s no one we would rather have for a godmother, you know that.’
‘Thank you . . . I’m very touched, Helene, but —’
‘That’s all right, my dear. I don’t want to pry into your feelings. I just thought I’d tell you that we still feel the same as we did when Gisi and Kati were born.’