by Eva Ibbotson
‘Yesterday he ate thirteen zwetschken knödel,’ said Mitzi, sitting up in bed. ‘Honestly, Frau Susanna. Thirteen!’
‘And he never looks at Baby. He just goes past with his head turned away.’
‘He and Ernst Bischof go out at night with a catapult and kill cats. They don’t just scare them; they kill them.’
I’d gone over to help Helene who has become embroiled with a complicated piece of smocking on a dress for Donatella.
Is it as bad as the girls make out?’ I asked her when I’d said goodnight to the children and joined her in the drawing room.
‘Well, it’s fairly bad. There was nearly a nasty accident last week when the men were loading. Gustav doesn’t exactly have a way with horses. But Albert is determined to succeed with him because the business has to go to someone with the Schumacher blood.’ She poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. ‘It must be nice to be so pleased with your blood, don’t you think?’
We sat for a while over our work; then the study door was opened and we heard the irate voice of Albert Schumacher.
‘No, no no! How many times do I have to tell you — that’s sycamore! Sycamore, you blockhead!’
‘Albert’s been trying to teach him how to distinguish the different kinds of wood,’ said Helene. ‘But he doesn’t seem able to take it in.’
This certainly seemed to be the case. There was some more shouting, then Gustav shambled past down the corridor and Herr Schumacher in his smoking jacket appeared in the doorway, mopping his brow.
‘Where is she?’ he demanded of his wife.
‘She’s asleep, Albert; don’t wake her.’
‘She always wakes up about nine, you know that. It’ll do her good to be awake before her bottle.’
He made his way upstairs to the nursery, returned with Donatella in his arms — and disappeared into his study.
Helene endured it for a few minutes; then we rose and followed him.
The baby, freed from the constraints of her shawl, was propped in an armchair. Herr Schumacher had taken a circular piece of wood from the baskets of offcuts he’d brought home from the yard and was holding it up to her face.
‘There you are, my pretty. Look at that! That’s oak. See how dense it is? See how it is figured?’
Donatella saw. She kicked; she crowed — bubbles of froth formed on her lips.
‘And this is sycamore, my treasure. You wouldn’t mix it up with oak, would you? You can see that it’s lighter, can’t you; you can see the silkiness?’
She could indeed. Made ecstatic by so much conversation after the uninspiring confinement of her cot, Donatella waved her arms with such enthusiasm that she keeled over and had to be righted.
In no way disconcerted by our appearance, Herr Schumacher extracted another sample.
‘Now this one’s really special, sweetheart. This is rosewood. There’s nothing quite like it.’ He waved the block above her head and growing quite cross-eyed with pleasure, she bared her gums in a seraphic smile.
‘You see,’ he said, turning to us. ‘She knows already. She’s got more sense now in one finger than that oaf has in the whole of his body. In one finger . . .
My mother taught me to cook and she taught me well. So when Nini, at supper, pushed my excellent Kaiserschmarr’n round and round her plate with a fork and sighed, I suddenly cracked.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now I’d like to know what’s the matter with you? What went wrong at the Grundlsee?’
‘Nothing went wrong. Why should it?’
‘I don’t know why, but it did. I suppose you fell in love?’ Nini glared at me, attempting outrage. Then she put down her fork and groped for a handkerchief.
‘It was so unfair! I can’t tell you how ridiculous he looked — well, not ridiculous, but absolutely like someone you couldn’t possibly be in the slightest danger from. Hardly taller than me, with floppy hair all over his eyes, and socks that kept coming down — and a snub nose. He didn’t even have eyes that were a proper colour. Not blue or brown or black . . . just bits of colours with flecks in them.’
Was he working in the children’s camp?’
‘Yes, he was. I didn’t notice him at the beginning. There was a tall, good-looking Frenchman that I was rather interested in. Whereas Daniel came from America and that was against him — a hotbed of capitalism — and then they said he was a bank clerk. Both his parents were Austrian, but their families emigrated separately and they met in New York. So Daniel was a second-generation immigrant, but his German was perfect of course. Only as I say I didn’t notice him at first. It was the children that made me notice him.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, there were a lot of counsellors — about eight of them, and some had diplomas in Psychology and all that, but the kids were always round Daniel. Only, he wasn’t really doing anything. I mean, not therapy or ploys . . . he was just looking at things. Almost being them . . . You know what I’m like about Nature — there wasn’t any Nature where I was born, just people packed together and the smell of drains and sweat. But Daniel has this passion for pebbles . . . I mean, pebbles. He’d sit crouched down on this path and just look at them and it’s perfectly true, they are all different and some of them have quartz in them and some have pale veins like jade and some — oh, God, listen to me! But the children would all crouch down too and suddenly it was incredible to be alive in a world of pebbles. He’d do it with trees, too. The other counsellors organized botany expeditions and brought little bits of branches in and the children learnt the names and drew them — but Daniel just lay under an oak tree and sort of became an oak.’
‘He sounds unusual. Very much so.’
‘Oh, he was unusual. Mad, really. His clothes . . . he looked as though he’d slept in them and his hair was across his face and he was quite small. I don’t like small men. Mind you, he wasn’t just a sort of fey Pied Piper, he was witty too. It was the children laughing you heard as often as you saw them staring at a stone. Once on a rainy day there was a meeting about the children’s behaviour problems and there was a great dossier about their backgrounds and a Counsellor’s Report. I wasn’t really part of it, I was just a washer up. Then I realized Daniel wasn’t there — he should have been but he wasn’t, and I slipped out. And I found him half way up the hill with all the children in his group and some of the others, and they’d collected twenty-seven salamanders — you know how they come out in the rain — and there they were, making a grotto for them out of moss and stones, and the kid who was cradling one of the salamanders very, very carefully in his hands was the one they were doing a Case History on down in the camp. Disturbed father, alcoholic mother, two convictions for petty thieving . . . I think for Daniel the children’s past didn’t really exist: he saw them as though they had just been born.’
She blew her nose and now that the Kaiserschmarr’n was beyond redemption, she speared up a forkful and put it in her mouth.
‘Anyway, I just joined in. There were fourteen children in his group and I became the fifteenth, I suppose, tagging along when I wasn’t doing the chores. He was nice to me but nothing more and I got fond of the kids. And honestly I felt quite safe because of the way his socks kept coming down and him having a snub nose and being so small.’ She paused and glared balefully at her plate. ‘I should have known there was something wrong about him. I should have known.’
Everything would have been all right, Nini went on, except that three days before she was due to come home there was an accident.
‘There was a counsellor there — a woman — who was terribly precise and fussy, always walking about with files and bits of paper trying to assess the children and write reports. Her children played her up like anything and whenever they could, they slipped off to join Daniel. Anyway on Sunday we all went rowing on the lake and one of the boys in her boat stood up and st
arted fooling about and she got her oar caught and the kid fell in. It’s terribly deep, the Grundlsee, and we were half way across and the child couldn’t swim. The woman just shrieked and yelled and completely lost her nerve. I was in another boat with Daniel and he just dived in with all his clothes on and swam over to the boy. It was awful, Susanna; the most frightening thing I’ve seen. The other boats were a long way off and this idiotic woman just shrieked and shrieked. I rowed up as close as I could, but the boy in the water was in a complete panic and he clung on to Daniel’s neck and I thought he was going to choke him to death. They went down three times and they say that after three times . . .’
Nini’s voice broke. She retreated behind her handkerchief and I was silent, noting that for the first time she’d called me simply ‘Susanna’ without the ‘Frau’. However unhappy the outcome of this love affair, Nini was growing up and would soon leave me, and I registered the pang this caused me without the least surprise.
‘He had to half throttle the boy before he could tow him in and then when we were trying to get them into the boat, the boy came round and tried to pull Daniel under again. I thought we’d never do it . . . never.’
But the other boats had arrived by then; both of them were saved.
‘They took the boy to hospital, but Daniel wouldn’t go. They carried him to his room and he looked awful — he’d swallowed so much water and there were great bruises round his throat. Of course everyone was making the most awful fuss of him by then — he was a hero — so I kept away. But my room was opposite his and just before I went to bed I put my head round the door to see if he was all right. It was very late — and he said my name, and I went over to the bed.’
She broke off in a confusion I had never seen in her.
‘It’s so unfair,’ she said, returning yet again to this theme. ‘He was half drowned and there was something caught in his hair, some kind of water weed I suppose. And he didn’t ask or anything, he just stretched out his arm as though I was a glass of water and he needed a drink.’ Nini paused. Her black eyes were unfocused as she remembered. ‘I meant just to be kind — he’d done this brave thing. And after all, since I was fourteen I’ve had to . . . sometimes it was the only way we could eat. But oh God . . .’
Nini is almost never still. Now she sat unmoving as the bust of Nefertiti and as sad.
‘So then in the morning he said we must be married. He didn’t ask me, he just said it as though it was completely obvious, and the incredible thing was, I simply said yes. I mean, marriage — that awful bourgeois thing, so respectable and hampering, but I said yes without thinking at all. Only then we began to talk. I should have known but I didn’t. I should have seen there would be this awful betrayal, but I didn’t think he had it in him to be so deceitful and devious and cruel. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know how I felt about things: I’d told him often enough.’
‘But what was it? Was he married already? Had he committed a crime? What was the betrayal?’
Nini blew her nose. ‘Have you ever heard of the Frankenheimer Merchant Bank?’
‘Just about. It’s an American bank like J. P. Morgan or Rothschilds, isn’t, that it?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Well, Daniel owns it. Or rather his father does, but Daniel’s the only son and he’s all set to take over. There isn’t just the bank; they own some other vile capitalist consortium. I wormed it all out of Daniel — at first he didn’t seem to think it mattered. They have a house on Fifth Avenue and another on that island where all these swinish people go — the Vanderbilts and all that crowd. His mother’s the patroness of some music school in New York. He thought I’d like her. God, a patroness . . . can’t you see her with her great bosom full of jewels getting out of her limousine and all the poor little children bowing and scraping on their violins and being patted on the head? And Daniel spends a month every year doing something like this: working with children, or last year he worked in an old people’s home in France — and the rest of the year he’s in the bank grinding the faces of the poor and making millions.’
‘And what did he say when you told him how you felt?’
‘He didn’t think it mattered. He said I could be an Anarchist just as well in New York. He said Marx said the revolution would begin in America and if it came it meant that people wanted it and he’d hand over the bank or go bravely to the guillotine — well, he’d go to the guillotine whether bravely or not — but till then he thought there was no point in upsetting his father who’d slaved to start the bank, and anyway he said he liked figures — he liked the way they worked. And he just kept saying . . . we . . . we belonged together and it was to do with my soul and my eyebrows and when you met someone like that and let them go, it was a bad deed . . . it was wrong, a sin. But it’s a lot wronger to own a bank and grind the faces of the poor, I think. And we argued and argued and I couldn’t make him see. So I just packed my bags and went. There were plenty of people to do the washing up; a whole new lot had come from Germany. And I’m really perfectly all right. Absolutely fine. Only I would very much like to be busy, if you don’t mind, so if you didn’t send Magdalena’s tea gown to be embroidered but gave it to me, we could save a lot of money . . .’
Magdalena’s wedding dress is really far too magnificent for a small private wedding with only one bridesmaid in attendance. In designing it I had responded to her beauty and Herr Huber’s wishes, rather than the occasion.
But it is not too magnificent for the church.
Outwardly the Capuchin Church is a narrow, faded building, squeezed in between others on the west side of the Neuermarkt. Inside, too, it is austere with only the dark brown of the marquetry work behind the altar for decoration.
But to walk down the aisle of the Capuchin Church is to walk on the whole history of the Empire, for below in the crypt lie the bodies of all the Habsburgs who have ruled over Austria. Maria Theresia lies there in a vast sarcophagus, entwined in statuary with her husband, and Leopold I who saved us from the Turks. Crown Prince Rudolf sleeps in the crypt, wept over by parties of tourists; and Napoleon’s sad little son, the King of Rome whose cradle they adorned with a thousand golden bees to bring him luck and happiness, but to no avail.
Somehow it seemed to me suitable that the eerie Magdalena with her mad religiosity and her extraordinary beauty should walk to her bridegroom over the buried bodies of more than a hundred Habsburg kings.
Since the ceremony was to be small and private, a rehearsal hardly seemed necessary but when Herr Huber suggested it, I agreed with alacrity. Anything to banish the spectre of the tall, dark man who had bent over Magdalena with such unmistakable tenderness beneath the acacia in St Oswald’s garden.
For once, Frau Winter, overcoming her scruples about Herr Huber being in trade, attended with her twin boys, for there was to be a luncheon afterwards provided by the butcher. And Frau Sultzer arrived with Edith. She came on the tandem, and it was nice of her for Rudi has not been dead a month and I’m not so foolish as to imagine that in her own way she does not grieve. As usual her arrival caused a certain consternation; as usual she unstrapped her briefcase from the carrier so that Schopenhauer could be assured of her attention, even in church.
But only one briefcase . . . Edith, as she followed her mother, had a naked and vulnerable look.
‘Is it finished then? The essay?’
‘Yes, I handed it in last week.’
The Bluestocking looked tireder and plainer than ever: a different girl from the one who had chatted so happily to Herr Huber’s sisters in Linz.
Magdalena, wearing white, seemed thoroughly at home in the sombre church, talking animatedly to the priest about music for the service, lighting candles at the side altar, dropping on to her knees to pray. If only I hadn’t seen what I had seen at St Oswald’s, it would have convinced me thoroughly, this piety of hers.
I’d brought Nini along and the measureme
nts for Magdalena’s train. There would be no problem with the dress; there were very few steps; a girl with Magdalena’s grace would manage without help.
‘You’ll have to stay about eight paces behind Magdalena,’ I said to Edith. ‘There’s no need to lift the train — it’ll fall into its own lines — just see, that it’s clear as you come through the door and then when you get to the altar, arrange it on the steps before you stand aside.’
Herr Huber, of course, should not have been present at all. But one can hardly expect a man to pay for the trousseau and take on the care of the bride’s family, and have nothing to do with the arrangements. Now he sat squeezed into one of the side pews and followed Magdalena’s every movement with his eyes.
It hadn’t seemed necessary to rehearse the procession, but it so happened that the organist was in the church, and at a word from the priest he went up to the organ loft and started to play the Bach passacaglia which Magdalena had chosen for her entry.
It was strangely exciting, the sudden music; it made it real. Magdalena felt it too, I think, for she lifted her head and began to walk up the aisle in perfect time to the music.
And counting carefully, making sure she kept the right distance, Edith, with her pigeon-toed gait, fell in behind her.
Herr Huber, I’m sure, made no sort of gesture; he saw nothing but his bride, but after a few paces, Edith suddenly stopped.
‘No,’ I heard her say in a frenzied whisper. ‘No, I can’t, Magdalena. You mustn’t have me as a bridesmaid. You mustn’t.’
Magdalena turned.
‘You mustn’t,’ Edith repeated. ‘Don’t you see, it’ll be a farce. You’ll spoil it for him. He’ll see you come and then me behind you. He’ll be sick. Everyone’ll be sick.’
I moved quickly towards her, expecting hysterics. But Magdalena was looking at her friend with the bewildered look of someone woken too suddenly from a dream.