The Florian Signet

by John Burke

  Occasionally I took him at his word, but as a rule waited for my mother to join us at breakfast, fizzing with anticipation of the new day ahead. Father was restricted to one cup of coffee and a roll, after which he escaped to the Kurhaus and spent the rest of the morning reading the papers. Later he would go for his hour in a hot peat bath, and in due course we would all three meet for the socially rather than medically obligatory Four O’Clock Stroll to the end of the Kiesweg and under the dusky avenue of poplars. There were old men and their wives, old men in groups, middle-aged ladies accompanied by spinster daughters, and a fair number of army officers in black jackets frogged with gold, white breeches and high boots. Some, even more resplendent, would often march at a brisker pace as if on their way to a reception in some temple with high windows, the glass blurred by reflections and rays from scintillating chandeliers within.

  ‘I don’t know what their fighting qualities may be,’ observed my father as we passed a splendid array of red, green and gold, ‘but they’re a joy to behold.’

  The regularity of the programme made me, in a way, begin to feel like an invalid myself, though without any particularly distressing symptoms – unless sentimentality and moods of maudlin reminiscence are symptoms of some particular ailment. Perhaps if I took plenty of exercise and could meet a few interesting people I would eventually become convalescent, and well on the way to a complete cure.

  Mother was only too ready to introduce me to people; but they were mainly women of her own age, including two old friends who had greeted her rapturously on our arrival and with whom she discussed at great length, in German for whose rustiness she kept apologizing, even older friends and acquaintances who were no longer in this world or had vanished from society for any number of reasons. They came together in a rustle of bombazine and lace, feathered bonnets bobbing and pecking like agitated hens, clucking and chirruping to drown the birds in the lime trees.

  One morning she beckoned excitedly as my father and I returned from the Kurhaus and climbed the steps to the terrace café of the hotel.

  ‘Edgar, see who’s here! Hilde – you remember Hilde?’

  Father looked blank, then said ‘Of course’ and bowed awkwardly over the plump, pink hand extended to him.

  Mother pouted archly in my direction. ‘Your father has always regretted proposing to me instead of to Hilde.’

  A lavender veil billowed in a gust of giggling. I thought it unlikely that my father would ever have preferred this lady; but the joke would entertain all three of them during the rest of their stay here.

  Mother began to work out her own timetable. There were certain cafés she favoured, where at certain times she could be sure of meeting her chosen friends – some accompanying their husbands, some taking the cure themselves, and some here simply for the social season. Among her new acquaintances were two ladies, a trifle younger than the others, who made repeated efforts to speak in Czech, which caused, I observed, a certain amount of embarrassment. My own German, acquired from my mother, was adequate for everyday matters but not up to the standard needed for local or national political discussion; and Czech was beyond me, and I grasped no more than a few baffling intimations of why some wished to use the language and some did not.

  ‘A language for peasants,’ said one of my mother’s older friends in the absence of these more recent intimates. But she smiled effusively when the other two returned.

  I caught an occasional sour joke with nuances I did not understand: a glance over the shoulder, a defiant yet apprehensive shrug.

  One evening when there were just the three of us sauntering under the chestnut trees in the agreeably cool twilight, I asked my mother what all this tangle of Bohemian, Austrian and Hungarian ideas and gossip really meant.

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ She threw up her hands. ‘What a question! Since Sadowa half of them don’t seem to know what they mean.’

  Father tried mildly to tell me about the way the Prussians had inflicted a humiliating military defeat on Austria, and how the Hungarians had then seized the chance of demanding equality within the Empire; but my mother did not care to have her own country’s history taken out of her hands, and commandeered the narrative for herself. As a result, I heard a lot of disjointed slogans, some baffling references to the Bohemian crown and the lands of St Wenceslas, and a scornful dismissal of ambitions which I did not understand in the first place.

  ‘We had no time for that sort of nonsense in my day,’ my mother concluded. ‘And as for all this business of Bohemian independence, and the Old Czechs and the Young Czechs and . . . oh, and this Pan-Slavismus . . .’ She blew it contemptuously away like a fly from the top of a sugar bun.

  Politics impinged on her gossip only when the life or loves of some old friend were affected. Unlike some of her clique, she did not ostentatiously cross the road or make a wide arc round the occasional groups of young Prussian officers who lounged at café tables or strode through the town as if they owned it.

  ‘There have always been Germans here. Who else will run the hotels, and the restaurants, and the cab ranks?’ She appealed to my father, who had long since withdrawn from the conversation. ‘Nothing has changed. It is silly, all this agitation. We Bohemians do not want too much of the Prussians. But two hundred and fifty years ago we did not want the Habsburgs, yet we got them and what are we now but Austrian? And it is not too bad, I think.’

  Seven or eight weeks would be too short a time for any deep study of the complexities and conflicts of the Habsburg lands, and I was glad of the excuse not to persevere. I contented myself with morning band concerts, recitals in the Kurhaus, visits to the theatre with my parents, and long walks in the sunny afternoons.

  All the park and hillside paths were graded according to distance and steepness. Each patient was allotted a specific route day by day, gradually extending until he was well enough to venture up paths to the most ambitious summits. Father was not yet allowed too rigorous a walk, and my mother had never been one for strenuous exercise. Some days we all three went on carefully timed and measured perambulations; sometimes my father had just me for company; and sometimes he would tell me to go off and spend some time by myself.

  On such occasions, and on many an afternoon when he was resting or reading, I would set off up the hillside to Findlater’s obelisk with its magnificent view down the wooded valley, or past the bronze statue of a chamois to the rocks of the Hirschensprung.

  I sent Caroline a view card of this panorama and, after a few moments’ hesitation, one of the Freundschaftsaal to Dominic.

  As soon as they had been posted I had a disquieting vision of Caroline meeting Dominic – by chance in the street, then in our house, then perhaps in his – and comparing her card with his and making some slyly derogatory remark about poor, naïve Nora.

  As the weeks went by I conjured up more pictures of them together. First a few scattered meetings, then more and more time spent in each other’s company: drawing closer, while I retreated further and further from their minds. If, that is, they had given me as much as a thought in the first place.

  Yet why should Caroline choose to spend time with Dominic, after what she had said of the Warringtons?

  The same Warringtons who drove my father to ruin . . .

  I could think of few things less likely, knowing the family as I did. But perhaps by now Caroline, too, was learning to know them and learning what an absurd mistake she had made.

  It was hard to know what to hope for. Much safer if, no matter how mistakenly, she hated Dominic. But she had shown no sign of that when they actually met.

  Worrying would do no good. And I had no right to worry. No intentions on either side: wasn’t that what I had told Caroline? And it was true.

  No matter how long a walk I took, no matter how beautiful the landscape, my thoughts were still keyed to far echoes from the fens.

  *

  My three brothers had all married and gone away by the time I was six years of age. I was quite a few years y
ounger than the youngest and was regarded by my father as a pleasant bonus, by some of his more austere fellow clerics as a frivolity about which he ought to be diffident rather than boastful. For much of my childhood Dominic Warrington played the part of affectionate, protective older brother to me. Although the family business was in Wisbech and the family lived just outside it, the Warringtons had interests in the Ely boat-yards and ran as busy a traffic on the River Ouse as on the Nene. Dominic’s father had founded the firm in 1840, starting in a small way as a wine importer and then building up a seed and produce trade with Holland and Scandinavia. As the firm expanded he had his own craft built for him in Sunderland, Ely and Wisbech itself, and brought such prosperity to the region that he was unanimously elected the youngest Mayor of Wisbech ever known.

  Dominic came to school in Ely. Later, working his way up in the firm, he spent a year in the Ely office and warehouses, and some time in the boat-yards.

  That was when I saw most of him; and I suppose it was the time of my life when I was most happy.

  Often he dropped in for a meal with us, or simply in order to chat. He would ask for me on arrival, and my mother would then put on a performance of sending for me with the news that my beau was here and impatient to see me. During one blissful week in my sixteenth year, plans were afoot for him to move in with us. His lodgings on Fore Hill were to be demolished to make way for a provisions emporium, and my father offered him rooms on our top floor. In bantering mood Dominic debated the matter with me.

  ‘Do you think you could endure so much of my company, Leonora?’

  ‘It hasn’t been too unendurable so far.’

  ‘But day in, day out – you’d grow weary of me if I were forever on the premises. And that’s the last thing I wish.’

  ‘Why should I grow weary?’ I was not very subtle at flirtation, and everything came out too starkly.

  ‘I want to entice you, and keep you mystified, until I’m ready to pounce. To pounce . . . when it’s too late for you to run away.’

  I was on the verge of asking where he had got the idea that I would want to run away; but knew this would never do. Instead I drew myself up and made a great effort to be cool and off handed. ‘Perhaps you’d be the one to learn too much.’

  ‘Oho. A realist like myself, I perceive. Afraid we’d get too used to each other, too soon?’

  I feared that he was already too used to me, far too accustomed to seeing me as an honorary younger sister. For myself, I could never take his presence for granted: never take anything about him for granted.

  I said: ‘How many marriages would there be if people knew what tempers and . . . and boredom lay in store?’

  It was just the sort of harsh, clumsy remark my mother would rightly condemn.

  ‘Still men risk it,’ he said seriously.

  ‘You’ve steered away from it,’ I said, ‘so far.’

  He had the clear, unwavering look you find among seafarers and men of the waterways, especially in a helmsman: eyes slightly narrowed so that little wrinkles clustered in the corners, but straight and sure and unblinking for long stretches of time.

  ‘I’ve told you before, Little Leonora, I’m waiting for you.’

  ‘That’s been a joke between us for a long time,’ I said, stiffly. ‘It doesn’t seem funny any more.’

  ‘I never thought of it as being exactly funny.’

  His hand touched mine fleetingly, but now I was sure – or told myself I was sure – that he was amusing himself at my expense, and I jerked away.

  ‘Will you risk my presence in your home?’ he asked.

  In the end the matter was not put to the test. Mr Warrington and his eldest son went to London to open a new office, extending business in the port and opening up routes with four new steam vessels to New Zealand and Australia. Dominic was recalled from Ely to take over the Wisbech branch.

  When I first heard of this I was proud and pleased on his behalf, then told myself not to be childish. And I was less pleased when I discovered that the move meant I would see less of him. He no longer came so often to Ely, and I rarely had reason to visit Wisbech.

  It could have been only a short time later that things went wrong with Uncle Henry’s business ventures. I knew little about them before or after the crash, other than that they kept him and his wife and daughter in comfort in their dignified house on the verge of Tempest Fen. It was in a dyke marking the boundary of the fen that his body was found.

  There was a lot of family activity, a lot of scurrying to and fro, and a lot of talk behind closed doors. Mr Warrington hurried back from London to confer with my father, who then went despondently off to Wisbech for several days. Mother parried my own questions with non-committal generalizations and unfinished sentences. ‘A dreadful accident, it’s best not to talk about it . . . such a tragedy . . . Poor Aunt Aurelia. And that girl. Really, there are so many things to be tidied up. Least said, like the English proverb, soonest mended . . .’ But she was a poor one at keeping secrets and it was only her own confusion about details, rather than her tact, which left me, too, with a confused picture. Veiled hints indicated that something had gone wrong with Henry Talbot’s business ventures, that the house would have to be sold to meet his debts, that the Warringtons were being wonderful, and that Aunt Aurelia and Caroline were now the poor relations.

  Mother had tried to help by encouraging Caroline to leave England for a while. In different surroundings it would be easier to get over the blow of her father’s death. Through a network of old friends a post was found for Caroline as governess with a well-to-do Austrian family in Kremsier. Caroline remained abroad for two years, but at some stage must have found her duties too irksome. I remember various head-shakings, with my mother holding forth in her most exuberantly despondent way about the girl’s behaviour and her future chances, and my father uttering the soothing monosyllables he found useful at such times. I gathered the vague impression that Caroline had flounced off somewhere in a huff and returned to Aunt Aurelia only after considerable delay.

  ‘One must hope she’s learnt her lesson,’ commented my mother at a late stage in the gossip and speculation.

  Since nobody seemed to know precisely what Caroline had done or not done, it was difficult to judge what lesson she could have learnt.

  *

  The same Warringtons who drove my father to ruin . . .

  Had Caroline fled from her position as governess to be alone for a while and brood – building up bitter resentments against someone far away, needing someone to blame for her poverty and exile?

  Perhaps I ought to sympathize with her. That, at least, we had in common. For here in Carlsbad I was jealously wondering what Caroline herself was up to in my absence. Far from home, I continued to be haunted by those visions of her with Dominic.

  I tried to dismiss them. In vain. There was nothing to be done about the situation from this distance. Possibly there would have been nothing if I had actually stayed on in Ely. But that did not make it any better.

  Dominic had asked me to write to him. Had he really meant it, or was it just one of those polite remarks which he would have forgotten by now?

  I settled down to write a letter. It took ages, and when I re-read it I thought it was awful. Descriptions of scenery and plodding accounts of our daily routine – it was all so dull and pedantic. But what else was there to write about? I could hardly make a bold declaration of my feelings for him.

  My feelings for him: what were they, truly, and what hope was there of his ever returning them?

  I told myself that I was a gauche, moonstruck fool.

  What I needed was for some gallant knight to emerge from these dark forests, to sweep me off my feet, to carry me away and blot out the memories of such an unsatisfactory, unworthy man as . . .

  It was no use. Dominic still strode unconquerable through my mind.

  When I got home, things must be done differently. I would find a way of showing him that . . . well, what? If I could not writ
e declarations of love, most certainly I could not speak them aloud. It would be outrageous. I blushed at the mere idea. So was I to learn a thousand new wiles, practise flaunting myself before him until he discovered I was not merely marriageable but desirable?

  Somehow he must be made to see me anew.

  When such deplorable ideas came to plague me, I stepped out more briskly in my hitched-up walking dress and chose especially steep paths so that I would soon be out of breath, unable to concentrate on anything but the task of getting to the top.

  It was on my return from one such foray that I found my father and mother in the little salon opening off the hotel foyer, heads together over a newly opened letter, muttering in furious undertones. It was unlike my mother to keep her voice so subdued. They both glanced up and were immediately silent as I stopped between the barley-sugar pillars of the entrance.

  Although the hotel was a small one, it tried gallantly in some of its public rooms to emulate the larger, grander establishments. The foyer, dining-room and salon were rich with dark plum-coloured brocade and immense mirrors. Heavy plush curtains of old gold were drawn back from the windows, and the deep ledges were inlaid with mother of pearl. The table at which my mother and father sat was covered by a velvet cloth; and on that lay an envelope with an English stamp.

  I was about to go down the two thickly carpeted steps into the room when my mother hurriedly rose and said:

  ‘You’re looking very flushed, Leonora. You shouldn’t hurry so. And your hair is coming down over your ear. Do go and wash, and tidy yourself up.’

  ‘Yes, Mama.’

  ‘And then your father has something to tell you.’

  Father’s gaze remained fixed on the table, or perhaps on the envelope. His head did not turn as I moved away.

  Something to tell me? That could mean anything. I was alarmed by the tone of voice. Had my father been recommended a change of treatment, perhaps at another spa, so that we would have to pack and make swift rearrangements? Or was it worse than that – some unexpected relapse, some trouble worse than had been diagnosed?