The Stories of William Sansom

by William Sansom

  ‘You forget the ski-run.’

  ‘Ah yes—I’m afraid I do forget that. And when I don’t forget, I regret it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Our country teems with ski-resorts. A good thing, among other things we need visitors. But it’s out of character with this old place, it spoils the—the atmosphere.’

  She jutted her lower lip—he could see where the lip rouge ended and wetter pink of the real lip began. She gave a small toss of her orange hair—he noticed that it was really orange, not dyed. She grudged at him:

  ‘Atmosphere! It’s very little use having atmosphere if you haven’t any money. Think of the townsfolk.’

  ‘And vice versa. What’s the use of money if there’s no one to play music?’

  ‘Music?’

  ‘Music. Poetry. I mean again atmosphere. The music of this curious fin de siècle, these hideous hotels, these rustic promenades, this engineering of the waters—everything that with the years … is growing so much charm!’

  ‘You do not find it oppressive?’

  ‘No. Let me explain….’

  And he explained. And for an hour they talked. They agreed to walk together the next morning, he would show her something of the quality of his beloved Gastein. So the meeting was consummated, the first act was done, the game was on—with honour on both sides. Both discreet—she the withdrawer seducing, he the seducer withdrawn.

  *

  These two, then, met at Gastein in Austria—Bad Gastein to the woman, who took things as they were; and Wildbad Gastein to de Broda, who spent much melancholy time sensing things as they had been.

  Wildbad was the old name, Wild Bath, and indeed the old mountain spa must have looked ferocious in earlier days. But still today, for added reasons, it is none the less disquieting. Still the wild rocky torrent falls five hundred feet from the plateau above the basin beneath. It steams and bubbles and whirls perpendicular between the dark stone cliffs of a horrendous ravine, stone cliffs that echo and magnify the awful rush of the waters with a resonance as black as the walls themselves and the sombre mountain firs that rise wet and shadowy up each side. A wild and giddying place—and now two bridges have been built over the narrow ravine, each staring straight down on to the roaring water and the long-drop deadly flat pool beneath, each with a balustrade that feels too shallow to hold a man back.

  But that is not all. For part of the water jets from inside the rock itself, and this water is hot, it steams, its white radioactive steam clouds up with the spray of the cold torrent to mist an inferno of iron winches, lock-gates, great timbers and writhing waist-thick iron pipes that climb all about the gorge—such atrocious emblems appear and vanish in the hot mist like heavy instruments of torture. Meanwhile, man came to look on. And man built up and down the walls of the cliff-sides a range of violent hotels, monster edifices whose thousand windows skyscraper not only upwards but downwards too—for their main floors open behind on to mountain streets that strike about their middles. It is as though the walls of New York were placed at a vertiginous angle above no street but a hollow staircase of water: or as if the giddy buildings of Monte Carlo were transported, paler but still unsteady, high into the mountain snows. The hotels bear such names as Grand Hôtel de l’Europe, Elizabethpark Hotel, Germania—an aristocratic fusion from the fin de siècle playgrounds. It is from the gilded interiors of such engines of enchanting taste that men look out on to the chasm and its torturous mists.

  De Broda loved the place. He was now forty years of age, a bachelor whose parents were dead, alone in a world that had greatly changed since his youth. He had himself never known the splendours of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but remnants of the Double Eagle were impressed on his heart and he was never far from a melancholy sense sweet enough, and of a strange anticipatory nature, of those things past. He was well enough supplied with money—he had inherited houses in Vienna and land in green Styria—and he had time to spare to stay now and then in one of the older hotels at Gastein.

  Recently a new experience had befallen him—he had found himself saying his name over a shop-counter and feeling the name belonged to someone else. That is, he himself had no name, and his name made the vague shape of a person in his mind—someone he had known, and rather despised, who had been close to him but nevertheless remained a stranger, something of a shadowed enemy. He tried the name again, running it over his lips—but it had obviously nothing whatever to do with the flesh and bone and mind and blood that tried to believe it fitted. He thought then of the names of friends, of people he admired—each one of them, with the concrete personalities they evoked, he could imagine bearing his own name. So I am a stranger to myself, he concluded. And then: ‘Of course, this is a common experience. At one time or another, we all wake up to our names. They represent the past figure of ourselves, a sort of shadowy film actor we never quite liked, of whose acting we were rather ashamed. They represent the worst in ourselves, our knowing nasty second selves.’

  But though he reasoned thus, de Broda was left with the unreasonable feeling that really—though really, too, he knew this was nonsense—he had no longer a name. Everyone else but he had a name. And this feeling, illogical but nevertheless lingering strong, emphasized for him his lack of a bloodmark in the world—his parentless, childless state wandering in winter the nearly empty halls of this summer spa. He felt spectral.

  For the previous three years he had had it on his mind to marry: that is to say, to make a sensible effort to find a woman who would measure up to his melancholy and upon whom in return he longed to lavish all the affection frustrated and stored inside him. Such a lady he found difficult to find. Some were too frivolous, some were too severe: some liked him too much, many did not like him at all. He discounted the possibility of falling in love, it seemed too late: although he saw it was possible, it was impossible to foresee. But with masculine conceit and male vigour he did not discount the possibility that a quite young girl might find him attractive—and lately he had conceived the notion that, given youth and a fair intelligence, such a young person might be malleable in his sensitive fingers, she could be moulded in time into the form of a perfect consort. An ambitious plan, one with risks—but possible. And the prettier the woman, de Broda said to himself as he planned his dream, the better.

  So he had kept his eyes open. And now they had noticed with interest and some intention the figure of this good-looking young woman with the orange hair, the pensive grace. She could not have been more than twenty-five years old.

  *

  For her part, Fräulein Laure Perfuss also had hopes for a profitable holiday. She was just twenty-six years old; and though she had felt on her twenty-fifth birthday a sense of having arrived at a never-to-be-experienced-again barrier of the years—the decimal system is engraved deeply in our hearts—now that she was twenty-six a different foreboding, almost a panic momentum towards the terrible age of thirty, had seized her. To be thirty—and unmarried! Laure was on the look-out for a husband: or, let us be fair, she was inclined to observe the gentlemen she met with a more deeply considerative, a more long-range eye.

  And there were other reasons for this. Unlike de Broda, but like most Austrians of upper caste she had come down in the world. Her family had lost money and their home: now she herself lived in one room high up in a cold old mansion high up the Mariahilfer Strasse—her mother had long ago returned to their native Tyrol. She herself was too much now of a Viennese to leave. She worked in a high-class Konditorei—and though her wages were small, this was the one reliable pleasure of her life. Although she stood on the service side of a counter piled with trays of cakes and cellophaned sweets, it still meant for her a real connection with the old life. To that same shop she had been brought as a child by her mother. She remembered the silk blinds, tasselled, and the colour of pale creamed coffee; silver trays of sweets flashing their softness and sugar—montelimar, dragees, pralines, a hundred cellophaned marvels; most of all the polished wooden order of the yellow parqu
et floor and the great brass-trimmed counter and the tables with their smooth cane chairs—no gilt or plush nor coloured fabrication here, only the smooth polished woods everywhere and the cakes and the silver-trayed sweets. Now, when Fräulein Laure served her customers in the middle of the morning, when the smell of coffee, and scents of fur and perfume excited the air, when noise and a brisk draught of the street entered with the glass door’s opening—she remembered autumns long past, when fresh from treading the yellow leaves outside, her own buttoned gaiters had swung under those same tables: and she remembered with pleasure, with no regret. Although she was on the wrong side of the counter, she could still smell the actuality of the sweet smells, she still walked among the elegancies of the room.

  But—though one of the happiest states of life is to like one’s work—she knew this could not go on. She was a woman, she feared the shelf. She had fallen in and out of love. Several times she had been near to marriage: but a certain hope had always held her back. Her young men, also poor, might have made excellent husbands. But they would not have provided excellent homes. Laure was simply holding on for her prince on his white steed. However, he had not come. And now she was twenty-six and already in the mirror of her mind heading hard for thirty.

  In the circumstances, Bad Gastein was not the best choice for a holiday. The great old spa was threequarters empty, the hotel the same—but the short holiday was a gift from an aunt with romantic memories of the grand days, and Gastein had been almost a condition. As it was, this man whose card she now had in her bag, Herr de Broda, was the only unattached, the only nearly young man staying in the hotel. She assessed him carefully. He was handsome. She saw a white-skinned, dark-haired man—there was a bloom on his skin like polished bone. His hair grew thickly, it was tough and its wave oiled down, it was shaved low at the back of his neck, even beneath his collar. His dark eyebrows met to make less a satanic than a thoughtful appearance—for his eyes were large, soft, southern. Jewish or half Italian—his family had been shipowners in Fiume. He was reserved and spoke with a laboured weariness. The ‘poetic type,’ she decided. In his way he was charming, really quite charming. And well mannered. And well-off.

  That evening she sat at her dressing-table and thoughtfully ran the sharp edge of his card against the flesh of her middle finger. She looked down at her clear-varnished nails holding the white card: then up at her face in the mirror. She tossed her orange hair and stared. Sometimes she had idled—a little fearfully—with the idea of a rich protector. Since the war several girls she knew had affianced themselves thus—and it had not seemed to make much change in them. She stared in the mirror at her face, beautiful and saddened by such thoughts. Her face! How tragic that it should be given away! Tragic. Yes, even in marriage.

  *

  The next day they walked together in the snow. It was fine January weather. The U-shaped valley lay before them many miles below, and they set out for the winding König Karol Promenade, skirting the side of the mountain along the right-hand side of the U. Above, firs rose in tiers. Their herring-bone branches glittered like marquisite. Far below, with coloured villages mapped on what seemed a flat white play-board, the valley: on foggy days from these promenades, when the valley was hidden, one felt one was looking out to sea.

  But now no sea—everywhere soft snow. And soundless—their footsteps soft, the sudden shush sound of a passing sleigh, bells from below muffled, and in the immense false spring sky, blue as spring, a wide smiling sense that all occasional cries were welcomed upwards and like birds embraced in the sunlit echo of the upper air.

  De Broda was well-slept, bathed, fresh, clean. Into the warmth of his big fur coat he took deep breaths of cold magical air. He felt fine. But he felt no ‘countryman’ feeling: he felt no temptation to become rougher, more rustic in the way of his walk. He felt, exquisitely, that he was a townsman sipping the weather, the scenery: he was a metropolitan tasting from within his warm elegance the country air. And beside him, in her green cape and her white fur hat, walked this pleasing graceful girl from Vienna. Her orange hair cut sharply against the white snow. What was it like? He wondered—then laughed deep inside his coat, for it was like nothing else but a patch of horse-urine in the snow. Or, should he try to say, the orange-iron mark of a mountain spring?

  He said instead: ‘And in Vienna, Fräulein Perfuss—do you live still with your family? Or have you your own—but these are hard days to find a flat….’

  ‘I live alone.’

  ‘A career girl? What times we move in!’

  ‘I work a little.’

  ‘Let me guess—the arts? No? Then I have it—you design dresses! That cloak….!’

  ‘Wrong again.’

  She laughed—it was a carefully light careless laugh—and put her hand up to shade her eyes pretending to look out over the valley. She could tell him about that job much later.

  ‘You’re very inquisitive,’ she laughed.

  He spread his hands: ‘Inquisitive? No. Interested—yes! Perhaps because I hope we are going to be very good friends—it’s most natural to be interested.’

  ‘In that case I shall listen to you first. Talk to me about yourself. Tell me about the things you like.’

  He was only too glad. Her education could commence immediately.

  He halted abruptly in the snowy track and pointed. ‘I like that,’ he said.

  They were just below the great façade of the Germania, golden-buff in the snow. Its terraces descended to the path, the bark-balustraded woodland promenade on which they stood. Over the near hedge of snow, on the nearest terrace, rose a small wrought-iron kiosk. Icicles hung from its summer roof. It looked like a prettily iced cake. ‘You can smell the lilac,’ he said.

  She looked up at him and sniffed: ‘Lilac?’ she asked. Her eyes narrowed, peering for the joke.

  ‘I mean, you can feel the gardens as they are in summer. But—winter has stolen the scent of lilac, time the scent of patchouli.’

  ‘It looks pretty draughty to me,’ she said.

  He laughed. But he continued. His voice lingered about the ironwork, then rose up to the great hotel above. He spoke of the dresses of the ladies in the Emperor’s day, of the carriages, all the wealth of leisurely fashion before the Wars. She listened, staring at the little kiosk with its eagle emblem. She found him dull. But he was careful to picture in the scene the things she might like—muffs, gloves, fans, jewellery—and once or twice she caught his mood, she felt a pleasing sorrowful pang.

  They stood and looked back over the valley to where the hub of the spa bridged its ravine like a many-windowed Bridge of Sighs. There had been a heavy fall of snow; all around, on each separate object—a small bush, a balustrade, a rustic fence—the fall had moulded a strange snow-shape, fat and round and always benevolent. De Broda went on to tell his Fräulein Perfuss of the many famous figures of the near past who had visited the spa, and who by virtue of merely their uniforms and their figuration in a more ample age, had become figures of distant charm. He told her of Bismarck. He told her how the Emperor himself had come to open the small mountain-railway station—there was a plaque there commemorating the event.

  By now Laure gave him all her attention. She was interested—at the way he spoke and possibly by what he said. For his part, de Broda felt his usual satisfaction on speaking of these things. When he spoke of them his imagination widened and they came even closer. But usually he discussed them—now he found he was teaching, he was feeding words and scenes to the upturned and—yes!—interested face by his side. He felt himself grow physically bigger.

  They walked slowly back. The crisp air, the altitude, the wintry sunlight enlivened them. The very orderliness of the place, within the soft disorder of snow, was pleasing. They passed a Kurhaus, a Pediküre-salon—this was a spa for the aged, well conducted, comfortable and safe. Down past the old Straubinger Hotel, grey-green and cream against the snow: past Stone and Blyth, the English tailors: past false pink marble, past a stucco Greek mask an
d grapes, past a stone stag’s head—each framed by the white snow: past the entrance of the old Wandelbahn, the long glazed gallery—how thoughtful!—for walking in wet weather: and suddenly de Broda stopped. By the entrance of a hotel he had found a new treasure—something he had never seen before. Excitedly, he drew Laure’s attention to it.

  It was a miniature copper Chinese pavilion screwed to the wall. In the tarnished copper frame of the pavilion old and dusty charts were set, and dials and needles. It was called, in retrained lettering, Lambrecht’s Wettertelegraf and Thermo-Hygroscop. What slow mystery was enacted here! What an air of the diligent, hush-voiced laboratory! De Broda was delighted. Again simply the sense of something of an older decade—irrespective of aesthetic worth—claimed him. He began to speak at length thrilledly. He invented a myth to suit its solemn inauguration on that wall years ago, he described with wit the wonder, almost the terror this strange little pavilion had evoked among an ailing aristocracy of the time. ‘That’s progress!’ ‘But what is the pen writing, what then is it writing?’ ‘Chinese, madam,’ the General had answered.

  He suddenly found he was talking to himself. Laure had moved a foot or two aside and was peering, as decently as she could, at a group of film photographs advertising the nearby cinema.

  *

  Separately, at six o’clock, they lay in their thermal baths, thinking.

  ‘Not so good,’ de Broda thought. ‘A waste of time. Films!’ He gave a vicious whisk to the black hoselength lurking like an eel with him in the grave-deep bath.

  Along the quiet corridor, up some stairs, and down another corridor, Laure too lay naked in deep warm water.

  ‘Wettertelegraf!’ she pouted to her legs floating white, dead, detached. ‘Really!’ She patted the china tassel of the bellrope with a pettish groan. ‘What does he expect a girl to …’

  ‘She ought to understand,’ he said aloud, ‘that there are other interests in life than, than …’ He heard his voice echoing round the tiles. It sounded like someone else intoning at him. Instinct drifted his hand across the most intimate nakedness.