House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  Later, she slipped into the observation car and sat alone with a hot chocolate that she did not drink and a magazine she did not read. She stared out of the window so lost in thought that she didn’t hear Sir Fairfax enter the carriage and speak to her. He cleared his throat and spoke again.

  ‘Where are we travelling through now, Fräulein Goldbaum?’

  She started and then smiled at him. ‘Near Dijon. We should arrive in Paris before lunchtime. I expect you’ll be relieved to be free of us.’

  ‘Not in the least. And I hope we shall see one another again in England. I’m an old friend of your fiancé. Well, of his father’s, I should say. I have known Albert since he was a boy.’

  Greta turned eagerly to look at the Ambassador, like a sunflower swivelling to face the sun.

  ‘Really you have? What is he like?’

  Sir Fairfax sat down on a low sofa opposite her and frowned, considering.

  ‘He’s not a talker. He doesn’t rattle away, like some young men. I suppose he’s what we English call “reserved”. He’s a naturalist. Always collecting things. Traipsing off through the countryside with his butterfly net. He makes remarkable drawings. And of course he has cabinet upon cabinet of the things.’

  ‘Butterflies?’

  ‘And moths. Beetles. Silkworms. Quite remarkable.’

  Greta tried to appear intrigued rather than repulsed. She imagined herself mounted and pinned in his collection amongst the butterflies.

  ‘Is he handsome?’

  The Ambassador chuckled. ‘I’m afraid you’re asking an old man these questions. I’m not entirely qualified to answer.’

  Greta sighed and the Ambassador relented.

  ‘I understand ladies consider his person attractive. He’s a little taller than average and usually – this dratted cold aside – in excellent health from all his—’

  ‘Striding about with butterfly nets.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the ticket.’

  Greta lounged back in her chair and stared out of the window, trying to concentrate on the combed vineyards and the shoals of cloud shadows trawling the low hills.

  ‘His mother is a wonderful woman. Lady Goldbaum is an excellent hostess and a talented gardener.’

  ‘A gardener?’

  ‘Yes, the gardens at Temple Court are something to behold. She’s established the largest collection of rhododendrons in Europe and the… ’

  At this point Greta stopped listening. It struck her that she’d spent a good deal of time considering Albert, and she’d created an affectionate, if fictional portrait of him in her mind, while having barely considered the other members of her new family at all. They were to live for the first year with Albert’s parents at Temple Court, before moving into their own house on the estate. Lady Goldbaum had written a very obliging letter to Greta, suggesting that she would wish to furnish and oversee the rebuilding of the house herself, in her own and Albert’s taste (as though they already shared a harmonious matrimonial view, despite not having met); and until it was ready they would be most welcome – no, joyfully embraced – in the family home. Greta shifted uneasily, unwilling to acknowledge that her initial happiness was as dependent on her relationship with her mother-in-law as on that with her husband. After all, when the honeymoon was over, Albert would spend the week in London and would only return to Temple Court with his father at weekends. There would be long days to while away with Lady Goldbaum and her remarkable rhododendrons. Greta began to dread that they would be very long days indeed.

  ‘What is Albert’s brother like?’ she asked, interrupting and then colouring at her own rudeness.

  ‘Clement?’ asked Sir Fairfax, hesitantly.

  Greta nodded. Albert was the younger brother and it was unusual amongst the Goldbaums for the younger son to be married first. No suitable Goldbaum bride had yet been found for Clement.

  ‘I like him,’ said Sir Fairfax, carefully.

  ‘But some do not?’

  ‘No, no. If Albert is somewhat reserved, I’m afraid that Clement is desperately shy.’

  And fat, thought Greta. This was the only thing she knew with any certainty about the future Lord Goldbaum. When the Baroness had first told her she was to marry an English Goldbaum, she’d presumed her mother was speaking of Clement, famed throughout the family for his astonishing girth. When she’d realised it was to be the younger brother, she’d been so relieved that she’d had to sit down on the Baroness’s dressing-room floor with her head between her knees.

  ‘Clement plays chess,’ said Sir Fairfax after a pause. He whispered it as though confiding some great deviancy.

  ‘Chess?’ said Greta in the same low tone. ‘That is not so very bad, is it?’

  It was an unusually inexpensive pursuit for a Goldbaum.

  ‘Anything done to the exclusion of all else is not healthy,’ said Sir Fairfax, choosing his words with such delicacy that Greta remained unable to grasp the problem. She considered the prospect of her new family with little relish: one a lover of plants, one a lover of insects, and another with an apparently unhealthy passion for chess. She wondered whether she could disappear in Paris.

  PARIS, MAY

  The French and Austrian branches of the family sat together on the south-west terrace of the Esther Chateau, the ladies wrapped in blankets with hot-water bottles at their feet, the men warmed by Bordeaux, discussing old friends and foes with equal affection and pleasure, and all the while Henri’s laughter mingled with the fluted notes of a blackbird. Greta had always liked Henri; as a boy he’d possessed a sharper nose for trouble than Greta herself.

  Early summer had snuck into the parterre below. The planting was rigorous and absolute. Beds of white begonias alternated with marigolds planted in precise rows, like spots in a children’s dot-to-dot book – looking at them gave Greta the same feeling as when Anna combed her hair back so tightly that it stretched her skin and made her head ache. To her delight, she noted a single stray red begonia sailing amidst a flotilla of white ones. She smiled at its solitary rebellion. It made her think of Henri.

  He sat between Greta and Otto and, on hearing of Albert’s absence from the bridal ball, and Greta’s subsequent midnight walk in the pond, was seized with such glee that he had a coughing fit and she had to give him a sip of water from her glass.

  ‘Why didn’t Albert come?’ he asked.

  ‘He had a cold.’

  ‘Oh dear. Poor fellow. To be kept in London by a sniffle.’

  Greta silently agreed. It was a tremendous pity that she wasn’t here to marry Henri. Marriage to him, she imagined, might be rather fun. She wondered why their parents had never considered it. After all, she’d known Henri all her life, and she liked him. Every July the Goldbaum Trans-European Express had taken Baroness Emmeline and her children first to Paris and then, after a week or more at the chateau, had carried them – along with Henri – to summer on Lake Geneva. Even the Baroness’s severity had been punctured by Henri’s charm. She’d been known to sip Madeira wine in the evenings with a sprig of jasmine tucked behind her ear. In recent years Henri and Otto had only joined them for the last fortnight in August. Those two weeks were heavenly days, and the only ones when Greta remembered laughing. She was not in love with Henri, but, as she remembered her father’s advice, she knew she would never have had to pretend to laugh at Henri’s jokes.

  ‘Have you met Albert? What’s he like?’ she asked him.

  Henri looked at his cousin with surprise. ‘How extraordinary! You’ve really never met. How delightfully medieval.’

  ‘For you, perhaps,’ said Greta quietly.

  ‘I have met him,’ he continued. ‘Only a few times, but we have conducted a good deal of business together. He is honest and polite and punctual.’

  Greta reached for her wine glass. She knew Henri well. These were not compliments.

  ‘And I hear congratulations are in order, Otto,’ said Henri, turning to his other cousin and slapping him roundly on the shoulders.

&nbs
p; ‘Whatever for?’ asked Greta, looking at her brother in some surprise.

  ‘He’s been elected to the Berlin Academy of Science.’

  ‘Oh, mazel tov, Otto, but why didn’t you tell us?’ asked Greta, her pride muted by hurt.

  Otto shifted uneasily and set down his spoon. ‘I can’t take it up. I expect this year shall be my last at the Observatory.’

  He sounded so miserable that Greta and Henri fell silent for a moment. ‘Well, which particular triumph made them decide to elect you?’ asked Greta, trying to tease him back into good humour.

  ‘No triumph. They simply liked a paper I wrote.’

  ‘A paper?’

  ‘Concerning the use of coarse grating in front of a telescope lens.’

  Greta smiled encouragingly and without comprehension. Otto gave a tiny sigh. ‘The grating enables one to measure star colour.’

  ‘Oh really? I thought all stars were the same colour. Twinkly’, said Greta, daring him not to smile.

  ‘You may find that you take to the business more than you think,’ said Henri kindly. ‘There is a satisfaction to be found in it.’

  He said this while scraping the last morsel of soufflé from his dish with a tiny spoon and licking it with relish.

  ‘Yes, but you’re good at it. You like the risk of it all.’

  Henri snorted. ‘Well, it’s as close to danger as we get nowadays. Risking a little here or there. Unless, of course, I take up steeplechasing.’

  ‘Non. Absolutely non,’ called Baron Jacques from across the table.

  Henri laughed, but Greta had the impression this was not the first time Henri’s father had heard this joke.

  ‘And,’ continued Baron Jacques, ‘it is not about taking risk. It is about risk mitigation. It is harder by far to hold onto a fortune than… ’

  ‘… it is to make one,’ chimed Henri and Otto.

  Baron Jacques cleared his throat with doleful disapproval. ‘Ah, you young men, you think you know everything. That you are the first to discover the world. The first to taste wine, and the first to smell the morning. The first to make a franc. But it is more than words. All of this could be gone in a moment.’ At this Baron Jacques clicked his fingers and a footman appeared instantly at his elbow, which rather spoilt his point.

  Greta surreptitiously slid off her shoes under the table and tucked up her feet under her blanket, suspecting that a parable in family history was about to begin. Sure enough, as the maids set down at each place a plate with a parcel of river trout poached in almonds and champagne, Barons Jacques and Peter grew loquacious in their nostalgia.

  ‘I remember the old house in the Frankfurt ghetto,’ said Baron Jacques. ‘Great-grandmother Esther Hannah Babette never left it. She wouldn’t live anywhere else. Her sons, your grandfathers, tried to make the house beautiful around her, but apart from a portrait of her grandchildren, she sent away all the furniture and paintings. She died in the same bed that Great-grandfather Moses had bought her for their marriage more than seventy years before, and where she’d birthed all ten children. And all living into adulthood. Now that was something. Esther Hannah Babette was a proud woman, and rightly so – it was no small thing that she did. Moses might have made us rich, but Esther knew that without his five sons he couldn’t have managed it. And those sons were all because of her. The Goldbaums weren’t even allowed to own their house on Jew Street, but had to rent it. You can’t understand what it was like, never to be permitted to own the home where you had lived for eighty years, even though your sons and grandsons could have bought it for you a thousand times over!’

  Here Baron Peter interjected. ‘And in France you don’t know how pleasant it is. The easy times you’ve had. Your grandfather was able to build himself this mansion in the heart of the city. In Vienna my parents were still not allowed to purchase the house where I was born. Can you believe it? The Viennese House of Goldbaum bought more government bonds than all the other banks in Austria put together, yet still they were forbidden to own property. The outrage! We may do business with princes, chancellors and kings, but to them we are only Jews. Rich Jews. Powerful Jews perhaps, but they do not quite trust us. And we know that only family can be trusted. And understanding that is a great gift. We did not succeed despite being Jews, despite being Goldbaums. We succeeded because we are Goldbaums and because we are Jews.’

  Baron Peter reached for his napkin to wipe a stray fleck of spittle from his beard. Greta sat quietly, watching her brother and cousin. These family stories had taken the place of the Brothers Grimm and Aesop in their nurseries. The only fables that had any bearing, for them as children, were ones featuring Goldbaums: how great-grandfather spun his four antique coins into a sea of gold at the court of a benevolent Prince; how Gerta Goldbaum disobeyed her father and married for love a poor stockbroker and was cast off. How old Moses Goldbaum had sent out the five brothers – Dov, Moses, Robert, Jakob and Salomon – to the financial capitals of Europe to found Goldbaum banks. Each brother was given a sycamore seedpod cast in silver (chosen for its symbolic resilience and its ability to prosper on the hardest of ground), a letter of introduction from his father’s prince and the promise to draw on his father’s line of credit. Greta had always thought this story would have been more satisfying if the brothers had been presented with a bag of gold rather than a mere letter of credit, but Baron Peter had patiently explained that lengthy credit is more valuable than any weight of gold. It cannot be stolen by thieves or lost in transit, and it can be used in a hundred ways at the same time, while a piece of gold may only be spent or loaned once. Five Goldbaum brothers: five goldfinches on the branch of the sycamore tree on the family coat of arms.

  Greta remembered that, as a boy, Otto’s favourite story had always been the one about the horsemen. Every day a courier arrived at each of the banks carrying sealed documents from the other banks. He did not wear blue-and-gold livery – that would have made him too conspicuous. The Goldbaum couriers were discernible only by the swiftness of their horses and the taciturn disposition of their riders who, it was rumoured, were themselves often third or fourth cousins of the Goldbaums. Six days a week these couriers rushed across Europe, criss-crossing between the Houses, bringing the family the most current news. The Goldbaums liked to learn everything first, and in private. The letters between partners at the bank were, by tradition, written in Yiddish. It kept missives safe from prying eyes and served as a reminder of their humble roots – something to be celebrated, for they were proud to have risen so high from such a beginning.

  ‘You see,’ said Greta quietly, with a smile, ‘it’s not all bad, Otto. When you start at the bank you will be able to send the couriers out across Europe. The horsemen will arrive at your offices every day.’

  Otto sighed. ‘I’m afraid their appeal lessens with age. Also, I can’t understand why the Houses can’t simply use the telephone, or at least send a damn wire.’

  ‘You’re a scientist. Always dazzled by the newest thing. But it’s our traditions that have made us what we are,’ reminded his father.

  ‘Stuck in the 1890s,’ murmured Otto.

  ‘Excuse me, Otto? If you wish to speak, say it for us all to hear,’ said Baron Peter sharply.

  ‘I said, sir, that the telephone is hardly new.’

  ‘And we have one installed in the outer office.’

  ‘And you use it once a day to telephone my mother and inform her that you will be home in approximately eight minutes.’

  ‘A call she is very grateful to receive.’

  ‘And was there a garden in Jew Street?’ Greta asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  Everyone turned to her in some relief. Otto scrutinised his wine glass. These excursions through family history were always the same, they rose and fell like the four questions at Passover. Until all the stories were told, it was unfinished, the ritual incomplete.

  ‘There was no garden in Jew Street. None of the houses had gardens, there simply wasn’t room,’ said Baron Jacques.
‘And the Jewish children were forbidden from playing in the city parks. The Goldbaum children played on the ghetto street with the others. Your great-great-grandmother, Esther, dreamed of a garden with lawns and linden trees and pools of golden irises. We thought we could tempt her away from the ghetto with the promise of a garden, but no. She tended pots of herbs and flowers on the balcony and in the small courtyard, and called those her garden. She wouldn’t stay away too long when visiting any of her thirty-seven grandchildren, as she always insisted that she must return home to water her garden.’

  ‘Lady Adelheid has a famous garden at Temple Court,’ said Greta, half to herself. ‘She grows triumphant rhododendrons.’

  Her family stared at her in puzzlement. The servants cleared away the fish course.

  Over the following days the Baroness took Greta to final fittings with the couturiers for her wedding dress and trousseau. The Baroness liked to be driven along the wide open Boulevards in Paris. She declared it to be the most civilised of cities with its rows of fastidiously pollarded trees, silhouettes as neat as any of the ladies emerging from the dressmakers along the Champs Elysee. The new city was marvellously hygienic, explained the Baroness, who could still remember the stink of the old. But it was neither the civility nor hygiene of Paris that appealed to Greta. Paris had a glint in its eye that Vienna did not. If Vienna was the aged aunt in her crinoline chaperoning the Empire, then Paris was the cousin slipping a glass of champagne into her hand. She escaped from her mother the moment she could and fled back to Otto and to Henri, who, it seemed, preferred not to work in the afternoons.

  ‘You should see me in the mornings. I’m a whirlwind of authority and decisions. So in the afternoons I rest,’ Henri declared, while stretched out on a vast sofa, a cigarette dangling unlit between his fingers.

  ‘Oh,’ declared Greta, disappointed, perching herself on an armchair opposite. Watching Henri snooze in the Blue Salon had not been her plan at all.