Their relationship had not undergone any dramatic change since his initiation. She continued to address him as Herr Swann and behave towards him in the same manner as she behaved towards all the other lodgers who came and went, and all her regular callers who dropped in from time to time, men like the beaming, broad shouldered policeman, Kurt, and Ebert, the walleyed postman, whom George thought of as Kurt's most dangerous rival, for he was said to have money in State bonds.
To George, weekly and sometimes bi-weekly access to Rosa was an unlooked-for privilege, but Rosa did not regard it as such. Her ability to divorce body and soul would have been unflattering to a man more experienced in these matters, but George did not quarrel with it. In some way it absolved him from responsibility.
He found, after that first occasion, that he could look upon Rosa with a surprising degree of objectivity, as though a close study of her charms was part of his curriculum as a footloose student. In this way, for a matter of seven blissful months, he contrived to have the best of both worlds, up to the night she told him, with a nonchalance that he found almost shocking, that she was pregnant and expected her child in August.
Up to that moment it had been a rewarding occasion, for although he had grown accustomed to Rosa indulging him as she might a venturesome, likeable schoolboy, on this particular evening she had shown signs that he was able to rouse her to some extent, and Rosa Ledermann, even half-roused, was capable of invoking a sense of considerable gratification in a man. She was so big, so powerful, so direct and possessed of so much positive energy, that her body seemed equipped to solace every man in the world. Her limbs had a way of enveloping a lover to the point of all but extinguishing him.
It was in the still moment that followed this shattering experience that she said, in a tone that he recognised as valedictory, “So, mein süsses Kind… You are a man now that any woman would wish to please, and it is time you went in search of her, gelt? It is not part of your father's plans, I think, that you should remain in München for one year more.”
It made him uneasy to hear her say that, and in such a matter-of-fact tone, particularly at a moment like this, when he was savouring a sense of profound fulfilment. He said, raising himself on his elbow and looking down at her broad, placid features, “You wish me to stop coming here unless I am invited?”
“Ach, no,” she said, impatiently, “it has been a pleasure, mein Schatz. You do not need to be told that, I think. But it would not do for you to live here when I marry.”
He had completely forgotten until then that she might wish to remarry, and for a moment he was too amazed to comment. Then he said, “Marry? Marry who, Rosa?”
“Kurt,” she said thoughtfully, as if not finally decided. “Yes, I will take Kurt. He is not so thrifty as Ebert but he is younger. Besides, I am with child, and Kurt is fond of children.”
If the announcement that she was contemplating remarriage astonished him, the fact that she was pregnant threw him into such a turmoil that he leaped from bed with a cry of dismay.
“A child?… You’re expecting a child? And you can talk of it in that way?” But then the full significance of her announcement caught up with him. “A child! Why it might… Is it…? I never thought! Oh, my God, Rosa!”
She looked up at him mildly. It seemed to her that he was making very heavy weather of so small a storm, but then, she reflected, he was young and, until she had taken him in hand, touchingly innocent, like most Englishmen who had passed this way.
She said, “Ach, put it from your mind, Hertzliebchen. I should not have told you. It is likely that the child is Kurt's. But if it were not, then there is no occasion to fuss. I too am fond of children, and it is time I had another. I am thirty-six. The years are flying.”
Despite the numerous occasions he had surrendered to those white, muscular arms, he had not yet adjusted to her philosophy that enabled her to regard the birth of a child, of whose father she was unsure, as a day's work that had been neglected and should be attended to before the light failed. He said, with a kind of despair, “But good God, Rosa! It might… it almost surely is mine.”
“Ja, es mag sein—it is possible,” she conceded, equably. “But I think not. It is likely to be Kurt's and that is why I told him I will marry him and that he may live here if he continues with the police until he has his pension. He has nine years to serve,” she added, smiling.
He said, pulling on his clothes as though she had despatched him for the midwife, “What… what do you think I should do, Rosa? I’m sorry, God knows. If it is me, that is, but I never thought… well, it always seemed to me that you… what I mean is, you’ve been married and had children… I took it for granted you…”
She took pity on his frightful confusion at that point and hoisted herself up, smiling at him indulgently.
“Ach, I did not bother. Cease to blame yourself. The thing is done and it does not distress me. Why should it? I have a good home and money in the bank. I have good health and Kurt has been anxious to be the father of my children since two years. One more will not concern him. He will be made happy by the news.”
He continued to gape at her as she swung her legs to the floor and then, heaving herself across to the mirror, began to pin up her abundant blonde hair.
On previous occasions he had enjoyed watching her perform this office, stark naked and with a mouthful of hairpins. It gave him a cosy, proprietary feeling, and a sense of being one up on all the gentlemen abed in England. But now there was no particle of complacency left in him. He said, dismally, “You’ve been so decent… such a sport, Rosa!” She turned her head sharply but only, it appeared, to add to her proud collection of English idioms. “‘Sport?’ That is a word we do not associate with love. But the English, perhaps, yes?”
It was just too much for George's damped-down but resilient sense of humour. He chuckled, then tried to stifle the chuckle and began to cough and splutter so violently that his eyes misted as he said, “In a sense, I suppose. Certainly as applied to you, Liebling. What I meant was you’re such a… well… generous person, someone who gives and gives and never seems to expect anything in return,” and he buttoned his shirt collar and went over to her, bending to kiss her neck and her shoulders.
For her, however, his dilemma needed immediate attention. Ignoring the gesture, she removed six pins from her mouth and laid them in a row, like six grenadiers.
“You asked me what you should do, Herr Swann. It is clear what you must do. You are twenty-one, yes? You have a rich and indulgent papa, yes? You came here, on a letter of credit. Is that the correct phrase?”
“Introduction.”
“Ja, introduction. And you have others, yes?”
“Three, and I could always get more. I have one for Stockholm, one for Berlin, and one for a big coach-building firm near Vienna.”
“Then I will decide for you. Stockholm is grey and cold most of the year. And its people, I am told, do not laugh much. Berlin is full of Prussians. You would not like it there. Vienna, that is the place for a young man with money in his pocket. The wine is good. The women are very pretty. The waltz is a foolish dance but you cannot have everything. My advice, Engelchen, is go to Vienna. Go at once. Time does not wait upon the young, although they think it does.” She lapsed into German, smiling her broad, maternal smile; “Du bist ein Bienchen das am Sommertag Honig suchen sollte.”
“What does that mean, Rosa?”
“It is difficult.” She thought for a moment, hand on hip, looking like a muscular nymph in a painting he had seen somewhere on his travels, a nymph painted by an artist who liked his models round, ripe and full of promise. “You are a little bee who should be seeking honey on a summer's day. For you, Hertzliebchen, there will always be plenty of honey.”
2
He thought of that when he left her at the station a week or two later, and for some reason it reminded him of the poem Venus and Adonis, favourite reading among the more sophisticated of the Fifth at school and easier to memoris
e, he recalled, than excerpts from The Merchant of Venice or Macbeth. The lines returned to him now, doing service, possibly, as a requiem for Rosa, whom he sensed he would never see again but would never forget:
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or on dale.
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
It seemed extraordinarily apt, although he had never seen himself as a candidate for anyone so churlish as Shakespeare's Adonis. It made the poem live for a moment, giving it a relevance that it must have had for many adolescents down the centuries. Rosa had indeed performed the office of a park, and a very verdant park at that, and now that it came to the moment of parting he was choked by the strength of his affection for her. He made a gesture then that had the power to touch her, crossing to an aged flower-seller sitting at the station entrance, dropping a handful of loose change into the woman's lap and gathering up an armful of flowers, daffodils, freesias, and narcissi. Their scent and colour were redolent of all the gaiety he had experienced in her company and her city.
He thrust them towards her and hurried away, blushing, to catch his train, and she watched him go, her arms full of flowers, a rare expression of indecision on her broad, pink face. Then she sighed, so gustily that the flower-seller stared at her curiously, watching her stride away, carrying her flowers and her regrets, if she had any, into the swirl of traffic.
3
The firm of Hoffman and Sina, renowned for the quality of their heavy-goods waggons and excellence of the riverboats they built in a recent extension to their premises opposite the wooded island of Lobau, was a much larger concern than he had anticipated.
All told it covered about twenty acres, stretching eastward from the left bank of the river and the setting, like so many semi-industrial patches on the outskirts of Vienna, had remained rural, so that it could have been mistaken at a distance for a huge farm composed of innumerable barns, sheds, and outbuildings. The clamour that prevailed there, however, reminded George of a factory.
His letter of introduction seemed to carry more weight here than in any of the industrial centres he had visited so far, perhaps because it had been underwritten by Blunderstone, the famous London coachbuilder, from whom his father bought all his vehicles. Blunderstone was apparently well-known here as a craftsman who employed coachbuilders able to hold their own with the best engaged by Hoffman, the founder, or Sina, his son-in-law and successor, names synonymous with high quality products throughout the empire.
At his previous ports of call he had presented himself as a courtesy student, content to hang around watching and occasionally contributing to the output, but without a salary. Here he soon found himself on a very different footing and regarded as the emissary of a well-known British haulier travelling under the patronage of an internationally respected coachbuilder, so that he was accorded, from the very first day, a status he had not enjoyed in Paris and Munich.
After the inevitable tour, accompanied by an English-speaking director, he was placed in the charge of one Maximilien Körner, a tall, spare, rather forthright man in his late sixties, who was not only his guide but also his landlord. George took an instant liking to Max, whom he thought of as the equivalent of a senior foreman in an English waggon yard, and as a craftsman of great repute, who had worked for a number of important German coachbuilders before returning to Vienna on the death of his son and accepting responsibility for his widow and children.
Max was a man of moderate means. The house he and his family occupied, in the neighbouring village of Essling, had once been a granary, a large stone building that had been used, so Körner said, as a strongpoint by Napoleon's troops during the Danubian campaign of 1809. It was commodious and well-appointed, and besides Frau Körner, sheltered seven children, whose ages ranged from the fifteen-year-old apprentice Rudi, born after his father's death at the battle of Sadowa against the Prussians, to twenty-three-year-old Gisela, eldest of four pretty daughters of Körner Junior.
There was something inevitable, George told himself, about his gravitation to lodgings spilling over with women. There had been the Broadbent family in the Polygon. There had been the household of Madame Drouet and her daughters in Paris. And more recently, the delectable Rosa Ledermann, who had headed him this way, to be lodged alongside four granddaughters of the patriarchal Maximilien Körner, who lost no time in instructing the family to accord him the honours due to a distinguished stranger.
Perhaps George was still excessively naïve in at least one respect. It never occured to him that, on the strength of his spending habits alone, he would be likely to be regarded a good catch by any observant mamma. He had been taken unawares by Broadbent's efforts to embroil him with Lizzie, and slow to awaken to Madame Drouet's efforts to secure him as a son-in-law in Paris, but he could be forgiven for taking the welcome given him by the Körners at face value, for the Viennese seemed to him exceptionally happy-go-lucky people disinclined to take anything seriously, unless it was their cuisine and the beauty of the lovely Wienerwald, a sacrosanct girdle of woodland and meadow where they spent their Sundays and holidays.
The area, George thought, remembering the urban sprawl of Lancashire and London, was like a garland, reaching from the river and the Nussdorf vineyards to the forested slopes of the Kahlenberg. On one of the first of the Körner picnics he was taken here and on to the adjacent Leopoldsberg, where there were any number of enchanting little taverns selling the local wine and he could look down, from flower-decked gardens, on a magnificent view of the Danube, with smoke-plumed steamers chugging upstream and down and spring sunshine flooding the baroque splendours of the old city. The tempo of life here was very different from that of Britain, France, or even Bavaria, inasmuch as the Viennese were the first people he had ever lived among who could laugh at themselves as well as their social betters, represented by the fusty aristocracy of the top-heavy empire, already, so Körner told him, well-advanced on the road to dissolution and decay. Everyone seemed to live for the moment and the Körner household was fully representative of the prevailing Viennese mood. To George it seemed to sparkle and crackle in a way that was unique in his experience, although Tryst had been a lively, outward-looking home in his childhood and boyhood. Even at Tryst, however, an awareness of belonging to a master race, dedicated to commerce and high moral values, was inescapable, and George never recalled his brothers, sisters, or associates making light of their tribal destiny in a way that happened here whenever the conversation broke from the magic circle of food, wine, music, dancing, family outings, and dressmaking—the one art, perhaps, that the Körner girls pursued with any degree of diligence.
From the moment he was introduced to them by the ageing Max (the one serious-minded member of the family) he told himself he had never met so many handsome, congenial people under a single roof, and his arrival seemed to begin a nonstop firework display of teasing mischief on the part of the girls, who were given free rein by the placid, ever-smiling Frau Körner. Once home, George noticed, Maximilien the dedicated craftsman tended to efface himself completely, generally disappearing into one of the old granary buildings where, so the girls told him, he had a private workshop dedicated to a mysterious “engine” he was inventing. The one prohibition existing in the Körner household concerned this patch of privacy. Everyone was enjoined not to enter, not because Grandfather Max would resent intrusion but because what he had there was said to be dangerous to anyone but an expert.
George's extreme curiosity concerning the nature of Max's invention remained unsatisfied for several months, the old man ignoring his veiled questions regarding what he was inventing. He was free with other information, however, notably the history of the locality and the various projects in train at the yard of Hoffman and Sina.
George had always been interested in the mechanics of the haulier's trade and spent long periods in the coachbuilders’ yard, the boatshed,
and wheelwrights’ sheds, where it seemed to him they used old-fashioned tools and very traditional apparatus, but he had to admit they produced magnificent vehicles, capable of bearing heavy loads over all the unpaved roads of the empire, where gradients, particularly south and west, would have presented insoluble problems to men like Blunderstone.
Everything that emerged from the yards of Hoffman and Sina was built for strength and durability and looked as if it was, and when George commented on this Maximilien told him that the Austrian railways had been slow to adapt to the local terrain, particularly in the dependent states of the Dual Monarchy. Habsburg industrialisation, he said, was decades behind that of Britain, Germany, and even America.
“ We left it too late,” he explained, “and now, with only Russia at our heels, we are last but one in the queue. Our economy is still predominantly agricultural. Sometimes I think we are all waiting for something of great significance that will change the lives of all of us. By that I mean not solely we Austrians, and those arrogant devils over in Hungary, but all our subject races—Czechs, Slovenes, Croats, Ruthenians and other minorities. One day they will all go their own way, and thumb their noses at the Hofburg and that dry old stick of an Emperor, who sits there working his fourteen-hour stint on a diet of cabbage soup so they tell me. He will be the last Emperor. No one expects much of Rudolph, his son, who devotes himself to debauchery, like his cousins. As to the Empress, she is not often here but roving about Europe, trying to stay beautiful and find a horse she cannot master. One day she will, no doubt, and it will break her back. That is where our trouble lies, to my way of thinking. Old Franz should never have married a Wittelsbach. All the Wittelsbachs are mad and since that rascal Bismarck hitched us to the Prussian war-chariot we have given up trying and live, as you see, for the moment only.”
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 47