I heard the undertone. At that moment I felt what real friends they were – there wasn’t a trace of jealousy there; we three genuinely liked each other.
Now the path started to look familiar to me, there was the fence and there was the children’s home.
Billie had walked slowly on, and we reached the door. No bell. They probably had no use for visitors here. We knocked.
After a long time, we heard footsteps approaching, and a maid opened the door.
‘Kan Ni tala tyska?’ I asked.
‘Hello . . . yes, yes . . . what do you want?’ she asked, smiling. She was obviously pleased to be able to speak German with us.
‘We’d like to see Frau Adriani,’ I said.
‘Yes . . . I don’t know if she has time. Frau Adriani is just taking roll call, that is . . . she’s inspecting the children’s belongings. I’ll just . . . one moment please . . .’
We stood in a grey, whitewashed hall, the windows were divided by wooden slats into little rectangles; like bars, I thought. A few portraits of Swedish monarchs hung on the wall. Someone came down the stairs. Her.
‘Good afternoon,’ we said.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, quietly.
‘We’re here on behalf of Frau Collin in Zurich, and would like to talk to you about her daughter.’
‘Do you have . . . a letter?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Yes we do.’
‘All right.’
She went on ahead and led us into a large room, a kind of hall, where the girls probably had their meals. There were long tables and an awful lot of chairs. In one corner stood a smaller table, where we sat down. We told her our names. She looked at us questioningly and coldly.
‘Frau Collin asked us to keep an eye on her child – she is unfortunately not able to come to Sweden herself this summer, but would like someone to visit her from time to time.’
‘I see to the child,’ said Frau Adriani. ‘Are you . . . acquainted with Frau Collin?’
‘It would probably be best if we could speak directly with the little girl; her mother wants us to give her her regards, and there is a message to deliver.’
‘What sort of message?’
‘It concerns the little girl – of course I’ll deliver it in your presence. May we speak to her?’
Frau Adriani stood up, shouted something in Swedish through the door, and came back.
‘I find your behaviour more than a little strange, I must say. I find you conspiring with the child, interfering in my educational practices . . . What are you up to? Who are you anyway?’
‘We have told you our names. By the way . . .’
‘Frau Adriani,’ said the Princess, ‘no one wants to check up on you, or interfere with your work. You must take a lot of trouble over the children – I can tell. But we want to keep her mother informed of anything . . .’
‘I can do that,’ said Frau Adriani.
‘Of course. We want to be able to tell her that we have seen her daughter happy and well . . . and how she’s getting on . . . ah, here she is.’
Shyly the child approached the table at which we were sitting; she walked a little uncertainly, and stopped some way short of us. We looked at her; she looked at us.
‘Well, Ada,’ said the Princess, ‘how are you?’
We heard Adriani’s voice urge, ‘Say hello now!’ The child cringed, and stammered something like hello.
‘How are you getting on?’ Frau Adriani didn’t take her eye off the child. She spoke as though from behind a wall.
‘Fine . . . Thank you . . .’
‘Your mother sends you her love,’ said the Princess. ‘She sends her love and then she asks you in this letter,’ the Princess rummaged in her handbag, ‘if Will’s grave is being looked after? That must be your little brother?’
The child wanted to say yes, but she didn’t manage it.
‘The grave is well kept-up,’ said Frau Adriani. ‘I see to that. We visit the churchyard every fortnight, to do our duty. And the grave is well tended, I supervise that, I’m responsible.’
‘That’s fine . . .’ said the Princess. ‘And I’ve brought something along for you as well, a doll! There! And do you play nicely with the other girls?’
The child looked up anxiously and took the doll; her eyes darkened, she swallowed, swallowed again, then suddenly let her head drop and began to cry. It was heart-rending. Her crying transformed everything. Frau Adriani leapt up and took her by the hand.
‘You’d better go back upstairs now . . . you’ve had enough of this! Your mother’s sent you her love, and . . .’
‘Just a minute!’ I said, ‘Ada, if you ever have something important you want to tell your Mummy, remember, we’re staying at Castle Gripsholm!’
‘Nobody’s telling anybody anything important here,’ said Frau Adriani loudly, and went with the girl to the door. ‘Come on you – get a move on! – what needs telling will be told by me – and just you remember that . . .’ She carried on talking outside, we heard her scolding, but we couldn’t make out any more of it.
‘Shall I . . .’
‘Don’t row with her,’ said the Princess, ‘the child would only suffer as a result. We’ll telephone Zurich, and then we’ll see!’ We got up.
Frau Adriani came back, very red in the face.
‘Now let me tell you something,’ she shouted. ‘If you dare to show your faces round here again, I’ll call the police! It’s none of your business, you understand! It’s outrageous! Get out of my house this instant! Don’t ever darken my door again! And don’t try snooping around here either – I’ll . . . I’ll have to get a dog,’ she said, as though to herself. ‘I’ll write and tell Frau Collin what sort of people she’s got herself – where’s that letter anyway?’
I motioned to the Princess with my eyes, nobody answered, and we walked slowly towards the front door. I sensed the woman becoming ever so slightly unsure of herself.
‘Where . . . where’s that letter?’
We didn’t speak, we didn’t say goodbye, she had taken care of that already, we went out without saying anything. Threats? Making threats is a sign of weakness. We hadn’t talked to Zurich yet.
When the woman saw that we were already at the front door, she started screeching uninhibitedly; we heard some hurried footsteps on the stone floor of the cellar below, the maids had assembled to listen.
‘I forbid you . . . I forbid you to come here ever again! Get out of here! And don’t you ever come back! Who are you anyway . . . two separate names! Why don’t you get married!’ she yelled at the top of her voice. And there we were outside. The door banged shut. Crash! There we stood.
‘Hm!’ I muttered. ‘A great triumph.’
‘Can’t be helped, Poppa. She’s just a bitch – what have we achieved?’
‘We’ve got a pale No, as we say in Sweden. So we will telephone.’
‘Just as soon as we got home. But if you don’t tell Frau Collin properly what’s going on here . . . the way the little mite looked! So fragile . . . and beaten! The way that woman kept on screaming at us . . . She’s got steel hair. God, she deserves to be boiled in oil!’
I thought that was a bit wasteful.
We walked towards the wood where Billie would be waiting, and cursed Frau Adriani horribly. We looked for Billie. ‘Billie! Billie!’ No answer, not a trace.
‘Do you suppose that red-haired devil is happy?’
‘You do ask funny questions, Poppa! If she’s happy . . .! The little girl’s miserable! Damn it! What do we do? We help her! We can’t stand around and watch! Damn it! Billie!’
We almost tripped over her.
She was behind a little mossy rise, in a hollow; she was lying on her front, with her long legs stretched out, knocking her feet together from time to time.
‘Ah! Well, what did you say . . . what happened?’
We told her, both talking at the same time, and by now Frau Adriani had metamorphosed into a fire-spitting volcano, a veritable hell of devils, t
he head of a so-called school and quite simply a monster. Yes, she was a formidable woman.
I watched the two as they talked. How different they were! The Princess was deeply involved; the girl’s sufferings had got to her, and her heart was shooting sparks. Billie felt sorry for the child, but she was like a stranger on the underground saying ‘Sorry!’ She pitied her in a decent, well-brought-up, quite impartial way. Perhaps because she hadn’t witnessed it all as we had . . . The indifference of so many people comes from a lack of imagination.
‘Let’s go for a little walkas,’ said the Princess.
‘Where to?’
‘Are you coming . . .? I’d like to see the grave. What a monster . . .’
The storm of outrage against the red-haired creature was slow to blow over. We went, making a wide detour round the children’s home.
‘When we get back – the very minute we do,’ said the Princess, ‘we’ll book a call to Zurich. We’ve got to, got to get the girl out! Frau Adriani isn’t without a certain charm!’
Billie was whistling quietly to herself. I stared at a dark group of trees, and read their leaves. I had wanted Billie; I felt I wouldn’t get her, and now I had a moral reason for putting Lydia first. Billie didn’t have a heart. It wasn’t her heart you were in love with, you liar! Those long legs . . . Yes, but she’s got no heart.
We walked slowly through the wood, the two had been chatting, and now they were rabbling. ‘Rabbling’ is a word for gossiping, running someone down. It was so fast, I was unable to follow it. Hopphopphopp . . . a pity we can’t be around when other people are talking about us, because then we’d hear a more or less true opinion of ourselves. Because no one really believes it’s possible to label people as briskly and unceremoniously as it’s actually done. Or maybe one can label other people – but ourselves?
Billie was saying, ‘. . . he promised her nothing, and when the time came . . .’
‘More fool her,’ said Lydia. ‘Payment on receipt, my father always said. Trust! Trust! There’s only one sure way, and that’s to use a man-trap. Don’t you agree?’
Strange, I wonder where she got it from. Her own experience hadn’t been that bitter . . .
Billie walked like a dancer: everything about her was graceful. She wore strange material – I didn’t know the name of it, but it was colourful, coarsely woven stuff. Today, for instance, she looked like an Indian who had made herself a skirt from her wedding-tent . . . and so many bracelets! Any minute, I thought, and she’ll throw her arms in the air, the beautiful savage, and, with a cry of love, plunge into the woods to join the others . . . A pity she doesn’t have a heart.
‘You see, there’s the churchyard, over there! Yes, we’ll get there before supper – come on!’ We walked faster. A light wind had got up, then the gusts grew stronger, and a very soft rain started to fall. Sometimes the wind from the Baltic brought the smell of the sea with it.
We had reached the graveyard. There was a little wooden gate, and old trees towered over the low stone wall.
It was an old graveyard; you could tell by the weather-worn, somewhat dilapidated graves on one side. On the other side, however, the graves stood very tidily, in rank and file . . . well tended. It was very quiet; we were the only people to visit the dead this afternoon – to visit whom? You only go to the dead to visit yourself.
‘Which row . . .? Wait a minute, she wrote it down in the letter. Eighteenth . . . no, fourteenth . . . one, two . . . four, five . . .’ We looked for it.
‘Here,’ said Billie.
There was the grave. Such a small grave.
WILHELM COLLIN
BORN . . . DIED . . .
And a few wind-tossed flowers. We stood. No one spoke. Whether it was the scene earlier or the fact that it was such a tiny little grave, the contrast between the inscription ‘Wilhelm Collin’ and the little mound – it hadn’t been a real Wilhelm at all, just a defenceless little bundle that should have been protected. There was one tear I couldn’t stop, and it rolled down my cheek.
‘Don’t cry,’ said the Princess, who was blinking. ‘Don’t cry! It’s far too serious for crying!’
I felt ashamed in front of Billie, who was watching us sympathetically. Her eyes were warm. Quietly she said something to the Princess, and as they both looked across to me, I felt it must have been something friendly. I forgot that I had desired Billie, and took comfort from the Princess.
At Gripsholm, we booked a call to Zurich.
3
‘It’s a conflict between ethics and public morals, so to speak,’ said the Princess, and we were still laughing as we sat down at the big table in our room. The lady of the castle had explained to Billie that it wasn’t true that ‘all Swedes always bathed naked’, as one so often heard. Sometimes, of course, when they were bathing in tiny inlets, among friends . . . but on the whole, they were quite ordinary people, without any propensity for wildness, except that they liked spending money if there was someone else there to see it.
Outside, the rain fell in strings of pearls.
‘What a happy rain,’ said Billie.
And it was. It gurgled strongly, and up in the sky the brown-black clouds moved rapidly, or perhaps it was we who were so happy in spite of it all. It was good to be sitting in the dry and talking. What was Billie’s perfume?
‘What perfume is that, Billie?’
The Princess sniffed. ‘One of her own concoctions,’ she said.
Was it my imagination – or did Billie blush a little?
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I brewed up something. I always mix up my own . . .’ But she didn’t say what it was called.
‘Billie, can you help me? Have a look!’ Since yesterday, the Princess had been working on a difficult crossword-puzzle. ‘There’s: Upland in Asia . . . Oh, I’ve got that one. But here: Oriental Man’s Name . . . Wendriner? No, that can’t be – Katzenellenbogen . . .? Nope . . . Fritzchen! Say something!’
‘What is he really called?’ asked Billie in indignation. ‘Sometimes you call him Peter, and then it’s Poppa, and now Fritzchen . . .!’
‘His name’s Kurt,’ said the Princess, ‘Coo-ert . . . That’s not a name – if only he was called Ferdinand or Ulrich or something decent like that!’
Contempt all along the line. But now Billie’s cultural self-esteem had been aroused: both heads bent over the newspaper. I sat by lazily and watched. And there, in front of the pair of them . . . Cock-a-doodle-doo – went a voice inside me, very quietly, Cock-a-doodle-doo . . . They whispered and curled up with laughter. I pulled at my new pipe, which was already partly broken in, and sat there with an expression that was meant to suggest good-humoured male superiority. Just then Billie said something which a reasonably wild imagination could interpret as very ambiguous, and the Princess sent a look darting in my direction: it was a tacit understanding among conspirators. Nocturnal conspirators . . . In the day time, we hardly ever spoke about the night – but there was some night time in the day, and some day time at night. ‘Do you love me?’ it says in the old stories. Only then – only then!
They gave up the crossword. ‘We can try again after supper,’ said Billie. ‘By the way, do you fall asleep easily here? At home I usually have to read myself to sleep – but it’s so easy here . . .’
‘You should do it like Baroness Firks,’ said the Princess. ‘The Baroness came from Courland, of course, and the Courlanders are the apothecaries of Europe: they’re all a little bit dotty. When the old lady couldn’t get to sleep at night, she would sit on her rocking-horse and rock until . . . Yes? What is it?’ A knock. A head poked round the door.
‘Telephone? Zurich!’ All three of us went.
A struggle for the telephone. ‘Let me . . . can’t you get off . . . for God’s sake . . . Let me do it!’
Me. ‘Hello!’ Nothing. As always with long-distance calls, nothing at all to begin with. I heard a quiet buzzing in the earpiece. These noises vary, depending on which country you are calling; in France, for instance, t
here is a sweet, silvery trickling sound in the wires, and you become terribly nostalgic for Paris . . . Here it was buzzing. They had probably put in new copper wires to Switzerland, with all the political conferences . . . ‘Mariefred? Please . . .!’ And then quietly but clearly, a plaintive voice. Frau Collin.
‘This is Frau Collin here. You wrote to me? How is Ada?’
‘I don’t want to alarm you – but you must be take her away.’
‘Why? For God’s . . .’
‘No, the child’s health is fine. But I’ll write you a letter this evening, and tell you everything. This Frau Adriani is impossible. The child seems to be in terror . . .’ And then I spoke out. I got everything off my chest, all my rage and pity, and my thirst for revenge after the defeat this afternoon and my loathing for domineering females . . . everything. And the Princess waved her fists in the air to encourage me. For a moment Frau Collin was silent.
‘Hello?’
‘Well, what should we do . . .?’
The Princess prodded me and whispered something. I shook my head: leave me alone.
‘I suggest you write us a letter which will authorise us to take the girl away. And also send a cheque for whatever amount you may still be owing . . . if it turns out to be more, I’ll be glad to make it up. And don’t send it to the woman, because she wouldn’t release the child straight away, but will go on tormenting her instead – so write to us. Frau Adriani knows your handwriting. All right?’
An undecided pause. I gave a reference in Berlin.
‘Well, if you think . . . Ah . . . but what will I do with the child then?’
‘I’ve got some business in Switzerland – I can bring Ada to you, and we’ll find somewhere else for her; but she can’t stay here. Really – it’s not on. All right?’
The voice complained, but sounded a little firmer. ‘It’s very nice of you to help me. You don’t know me at all!’
‘But I saw what was happening there . . . It really wasn’t on. So you agree?’
‘Yes. We’ll do just as you say.’ After a few further civilities we rang off. Done it. The other two did a wild dance right round the room. I held the receiver in my hand a moment longer.
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