by Eva Ibbotson
Peter Konrad came to collect me. From his startled look before he began to pay the routine compliments I saw that my toilette was effective, and I was glad of it because I had work to do.
We dined first at Sachers and he told me all the gossip of the trade. Chez Jaquetta, I was happy to hear, was borrowing too much, expanding too quickly.
‘And you, my dear? You’re doing well?’
‘Yes. Modestly, but steadily, I think.’
‘I’m still annoyed that you wouldn’t come and run my dress department. The woman I’ve got is adequate but you would have made it the place to go.’
‘It’s nice of you, but I really love my shop, Peter. I don’t think I could bear to be anywhere else; it’s exactly right for me.’
He was a nice man, old enough to regard me as still young and desirable, but handsome and distinguished with his thick, greying hair and superbly cut clothes.
We entered the foyer of the Opera well pleased with each other. Looking round I saw that indeed ‘everyone’ was there. Princess Stephanie, Rudolf’s widow and the plainest woman in the Empire; Hugo von Hofmannsthal; the French Ambassador with his party. I’m good at walking up staircases — models have to be — but as I ascended, smiling at acquaintances, demurely ignoring the stares of potential admirers, I was searching for one man. And just before the bell rang for the first act I saw him.
Klaus van der Velde started life trading tobacco on the quayside in Rotterdam and now trades in sopranos, pianists and string quartets. I’d met him through Alice in the days when I worked in the shop in the Herrengasse and he’d pursued us both, along with most of the other personable females in the city. This was before I’d met Gernot and I was technically available — but not to him. He had a fierce Dutch wife who was reputed to disinfect the marriage bed every time they made love. A square-headed, thickset man; unscrupulous, even brutal — but tender-hearted men don’t often become impresarios.
The first act of Tristan is long. The tenor staggered, the soprano tottered, and I recalled Motte-Ehrlich’s bon mot: that the most important thing when singing Isolde is a comfortable pair of shoes.
But the interval came at last.
‘Peter, you know Van der Velde?’
‘The impresario?’
‘Yes. Could we bump into him, do you think?’
‘My dear, the way you look tonight we could bump into anybody!’
We struggled to the buffet. Van der Velde had already acquired a Wagnerian stein of beer and was standing with his wife beside a potted palm. As Peter went to procure champagne, he turned and stared unashamedly at the blonde woman in black with gardenias in her hair.
I smiled at him.
The discovery that he knew me pleased him. It pleased his wife rather less, but she followed him as he bent over my hand and tried to think who I was, and more importantly, whether I mattered.
‘It’s a very long time since we met,’ I said. ‘Alice and I often speak of you. She’s still at the Volksoper. What fun we had at the Landtmann with the Schoflers and all that crowd.’
He now placed me and a flicker of surprise passed over his face for our last encounter, in a fiacre in the Prater had not been particularly friendly. I don’t think I actually hit him, it is not often necessary for me to protect my virtue in so drastic a manner, but I may have used my parasol.
‘Susanna! My dear, you look radiant!’ His eyes crawled along my throat, fastened on the necklace. Had I, perhaps, become somebody who mattered?
‘I’m a very grand lady now,’ I said as Peter came back with my champagne. The respectability of my wealthy escort impressed Van der Velde even more. ‘I have my own salon in Madensky Square.’
‘Salon’ is not a word I often use, but the ambiguity was serviceable.
‘And a great success, I’m sure.’
‘Yes, a success.’ I am not a great whirrer of fans, but I thought a little whirring would not come amiss. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been expecting to see your auto any day now that we have our little prodigy opposite. I suppose Meierwitz has beaten you to it?’
‘Prodigy? What prodigy?’ His nostrils twitched with curiosity.
‘Oh, a little pianist — a child of nine or so — a waif from Poland. Hardly a Chopin, but friends of mine tell me his Waldstein is remarkable.’
Van der Velde frowned. Did you say Meierwitz has heard of him?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, but that’s the rumour. You know I’m not musical — better not take any notice of anything I say. But come to Madensky Square anyway — I’ll make you a beautiful cravat. Excuse me, I must have a word with Count Leitenhof.’
Extremely pleased with myself, I swept away on Peter’s arm — and found myself face to face with Gernot.
He was not alone. His wife, the high-born Elise, newly watered in Marienbad, walked on one side of him, his whey-faced daughter on the other. An aide-de-camp hovered . . .
Gernot’s face did not alter by one millimetre. The eyes gave no recognition, the mouth remained a tight, uncompromising line. He was in uniform, unutterably distinguished-looking and, I hazarded, extremely bored. Almost tone deaf, he attends the opera strictly in the line of duty.
As we passed each other, I heard the whey-faced daughter saying: ‘That woman in black velvet — her face seemed familiar. Didn’t she use to model in a shop in the Herrengasse?’
And the voice of the high-born Elise, who should not have been wearing magenta satin with sky-blue lace: ‘Anyone can come to the opera these days, we all know that!’
Gernot said nothing.
The second act was almost unendurable. He was here in Vienna and he had not let me know. He sat below me in his box and was as lost to me as if he was on the moon. What idiotic conceit had led me to think that I was ever part of his life? He belonged entirely to those pale haughty women to one of whom he had bequeathed his tight-lipped mouth.
Why didn’t it stop, this unbearable screeching? Why didn’t the audience storm on to the stage and put an end to this torture? And what a horrible man Wagner was: arrogant, promiscuous, a scrounger.
The second interval. More champagne, more acquaintenances, Peter’s and mine. The need to smile and be charming and make Peter proud to be with me.
‘I would give forty camels for her. Yes, forty camels,’ said a guttural foreign voice, and I turned round to see an Arab potentate in splendid robes staring directly at me through a jewelled glass.
And coming towards me, Gernot. He was alone. His wife was talking to the French Ambassador, the daughter was nowhere to be seen. Probably in the lavatory; she looked like a woman who had frequent recourse to toilets.
Only he wasn’t coming towards me. He was going to go past me to join the party of the War Minister who had beckoned to him. I simply happened to be there.
As he drew level, he bent down briefly — and straightened to hand me my non-existent handkerchief. Then he said one word — ‘Thursday’ — and was gone.
We returned to our box for the last act. And how beautiful now was the music, how it purged the soul! And how ridiculous, how utterly absurd it was to criticize the personal life of a transcendent genius like Richard Wagner!
‘I’m going to challenge him to a duel, of course,’ were Gernot’s first words to me — and my hand went to my heart as I saw him laid out under the birch trees, blood staining the rich earth. ‘It goes against the grain, mind you,’ he went on. ‘A foreigner, and without a commission. But no insult to you shall go unavenged.’
‘What insult?’
‘Forty camels, indeed! I gather it’s the top price in Arabia but it’s an insult just the same. Not four hundred, not four thousand camels would buy the smallest of your eyelashes.’
I managed to smile, but my pulse was still racing. Gernot hates duelling, is trying to get it stopped — but I kn
ow for a fact that he has fought one duel at least and I can’t even bear jokes on the subject.
It was an afternoon meeting. Elise was still in Vienna, in the wing of the old Stoffler Palace which the von Lindenbergs use when they are in town. Gernot had to attend a banquet in the evening and I knew that after today the manoeuvres would claim him so it was important to keep things light. I am, after all, a Woman of Pleasure. But it had opened some frightful door, this image of Gernot stretched out beneath the birches. In my clothes I could smile and chatter, but out of them . . .
‘What is it, my treasure? What troubles you?’
‘Nothing.’ I turned my face to that hollow above his collar bone that God designed especially for me. ‘Only, if perhaps today Love could be “Strong as Death”? Or even stronger?’
And it could . . . It was . . .
The monks of Leck swore that the Song of Songs was a paean to Mother Church, but the monks of Leck did not know Gernot!
At half past four I was allowed to sit up and drink a glass of wine.
‘Now tell me what you were doing at the opera dressed like Marguerite Gautier and unsettling so many gentlemen?’
I explained; then launched into the saga of Frau Egger and Lily from the post office which I knew would be much to his taste.
‘Oh, and I wanted to ask you about those wretched buttons of hers. Her husband swears they’re very rare and valuable — from a British regiment long before Napoleon; he practically tore them off her cloak. But the Countess von Metz said they belonged to the Pressburg Fusiliers who were disbanded in 84. Who is right, do you suppose?’
I got up and fetched the button I had secreted in my purse.
‘Aggredi,’ he said. ‘Wait, let me see.’ Wearing only his monocle he peered intently at the crest. And then: ‘Yes . . . Yes, of course.’
He was silent for some time, his face closed and brooding.
‘The Countess is right,’ he said. ‘Look, leave this with me, will you? And don’t say anything to anyone — not to anyone, please.’ He put the button away in his cigar case. Then in a voice of outrage: ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘I’m getting dressed. It’s nearly five o’clock I must go and so must you if you’re not going to be late for your banquet.’
‘I’m not going to the banquet.’
‘Please, Gernot, I don’t want you to alter your plans for me. You have your life to lead.’
‘I have my existence to lead and I lead it. Now, however, I am living my life.’ And his face creasing in a rare smile: ‘I shall send Hatschek to make my excuses on a snow-white charger like the one you picked out for me at Uferding.’
He never tires of that joke, my Field Marshal!
When I had known Gernot for two years I suddenly realized that I was going to love him for ever. This happened not, as you might expect, during any particular moment of physical ecstasy, but as we sat at luncheon in a country inn and he selected, from a fruit bowl on the table, a pear which he placed on my plate.
I had been given pears and other things by men both younger and better-looking, but as he looked at me — offering the pear, but allowing by the faint lift of his eyebrows that I might reject it if I wished — a gate shut behind me with a perceptible click. The gate led to other relationships, marriage, the whole intensely agreeable world of erotic dalliance.
I confess I was both resentful and shaken, for what can be more conventional than the situation of a personable young dressmaker and her high-born ‘protector’? Lightness, skill, good manners, laughter and compatibility are the ingredients of such an affair, and all these we had brought to bear on our relationship. And then he handed me this pear . . .
The first effect of this realization was a violent jealousy. It was not so much other women that I feared, or even his wife. What I was jealous of was quite simply Gernot’s unknown life. Perhaps jealousy isn’t the right word — I was consumed by a passionate curiosity; a desperate need to know where he lived, what paths he trod, what he saw from his windows.
It was a kind of madness and it gave me no peace. So one day when I knew the family was absent, I went in secret to Uferding.
It was a day in midsummer but misty, grey and sad. I took the train and then a cab which set me down by one of the side entrances.
The gate, splendidly carved with the von Lindenberg griffons, stood open; there was no one to be seen. I walked in, my heart thumping, passing between rows of ornate statues: of the Sabine women, their marble legs hanging from the shoulders of their seducers, of Hercules draped in pythons . . .
The path widened to accommodate a fountain of the kind I had yearned for when I first came to Madensky Square: three tiers, Poseidon with bulging pectorals, nymphs . . .
And this was only the side entrance!
Next came a series of ornamental grottos and then a group of statues which I approached with caution, and rightly, for as I passed a jet of water from the hat of a cavalier narrowly missed my shoulder. I’ve never been very amused by these jokey Wasserspiele. I’m always too aware of the work of some poor dressmaker or milliner ruined to provide a few moments of amusement for the jaded hosts.
I was approaching the east wing of the schloss now: yellow stucco, green shutters . . . and a first-floor verandah with a pergola on which I instantly saw Gernot breakfasting with the high born Elise . . . buttering her croissant, handing her a pear. My pear . . .
The sun had begun to pierce the mist. Rounding the side of the house, I came upon smooth lawns stretching away towards verdant and rather bosomy hills — and in formal flower beds, a mass of pink begonias which spelled out, unmistakably, the words: LONG LIVE THE KAISER.
I must say I was terribly surprised. It would be Elise, of course, who had given instructions to the gardener, yet I had to face the fact that my lover’s home was disconcertingly different from anything that I had imagined.
Passing an orangery with cages of singing birds and tubs of exotic lilies, I made my way up the terrace steps towards the front of the house.
And now I was accosted. A steward of some sort, responsible-looking and soberly dressed, approached and asked if I had an appointment to look over the house.
‘No, I haven’t. But if it were possible . . .?’
My hand went to my purse; his stretched discreetly in my direction.
‘Aye. The family’s away. Only the public rooms, of course.’
He led me up a flight of steps into a domed entrance hall with a painted ceiling of swirling and richly endowed muses. Everything in the house was pretty, Italianate, and held no surprises.
Upstairs there were more salons, and in the main bedroom a gigantic bed dripping with brocade, the legs carved into the shape of writhing and grimacing Turks under the heel of the Austrian conquerors.
‘Prince Eugene slept here,’ said the steward. ‘The family use it only on state occasions.’
This I could believe. But what was a state occasion? Had the midwife held up a squealing new-born child beside the carved posts of helmeted Habsburgs and said to Gernot’s parents: ‘It’s a boy!’? Would he die in this monstrosity, my austere and ironic lover?
On the way out I looked at the stables and these too surprised me. I knew nothing about horses then, but I was aware that Gernot’s life, like that of most soldiers, was largely lived on horseback.
But again I’d imagined it wrong. There were only three horses, two of them obviously carriage horses, and one which looked at me gently over the top of the door: a white horse with tender eyes. Not an Arab, I thought, nor a Lipizzaner — its back was very broad and its neck short — yet it carried Gernot and I spoke to it and stroked its nose: this quiet, domestic-looking horse who spent so much more time with my lover than I.
I said nothing to Gernot about my visit to Uferding for many months. But once when we had a whole nigh
t together, I told him that I had been to see his home.
‘Good God! When?’
‘Last summer. The syringa was in blossom.’ I smiled. ‘And the begonias.’
‘Begonias? Those little handkerchiefy things in primary colours? I didn’t know we had any.’
‘There was a whole lot of them, in writing. LONG LIVE THE KAISER, they said.’
He came and sat down beside me on the bed. The cigar was in full flight and he was grinning. Did you like it? My home?’
I don’t think I hesitated even for a second. I spoke enthusiastically of the verandah where it must be so pleasant to breakfast, and the bed with the writhing Turks in which, or so I understood, he had been born.
‘Ah, yes, the bed . . . It’s entirely honeycombed with mouse nests, the mattress. But go on; I’m really very interested in your reactions.’
I was by now a little hurt by Gernot’s evident amusement, but I went on to describe my visit to the stables, my communion with his horse.
‘My horse? Yes, of course . . . Do tell me what you thought of my horse.’
‘I thought it was very nice. Very gentle and peaceful. I suppose I was a bit surprised because — Gernot, what is the matter?’
His mirth was now so extreme that he was compelled to abandon his cigar. ‘Yes, a very gentle horse indeed. A milk float would strain the poor beast, though he sometimes carries their mother-in-law round the park. She has very bad rheumatism, poor lady.’ He bent over me, his eyes tender. ‘I’m glad you’re so stupid, my dear sweet love. When I first saw you, so wild and distraught in the forest, I was overwhelmed by your capacity for grief. Then when I met you again in the Herrengasse modelling that dress, I thought you were the loveliest, most poised creature I had ever seen. Since then you’ve given me two years of utter delight and to be honest I was getting nervous. The fates can’t mean me to have this paragon, I thought: not a scarred, flawed, ageing bloke like me. But now that I know you are superbly and overwhelmingly foolish, I feel much better.’
‘Why? Why am I stupid?’
He decided to explain. ‘Do you really imagine, my darling idiot, that I would allow anyone in my employ to write LONG LIVE THE KAISER in begonias? Or anything else, come to that? Quite apart from the fact that the poor gentleman could serve his country best by dying as quickly as possible. Or that I would house all those ludicrous statues — and I never breakfast on verandahs because of the wasps.’