The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  As we walked in the water meadow where he’d first taught me to fish, he saw a short-toed lark and stopped to note it in his journal. I told him, somewhat boastfully, of my unlikely acquaintance with the countess and of the extraordinary proposal she had made me. To my disappointment, he said nothing, only asked if I agreed that there had been fewer corncrakes that year. When I again mentioned the countess, he hushed me, not wishing to startle a redwing that we were following to its nest in an elm. It was my job to carry the long pole that we used to steal nests, and in my distraction, I caught the net in some brambles, causing him to glance at me with uncustomary impatience.

  On the way home, he was unusually silent. I knew that he would eventually tell me his mind—I only had to be patient. He motioned to me to wait as he lit his pipe, then put away his matchbox, and we continued across the field. He wished to check the duck decoys that he kept in the mere, as they attracted large colonies of gadwall and grebe each fall (a deception that always left me melancholy). As we walked, he said that men who had reason to know were fearful that a war with Germany was coming, and he hoped that I was giving the countess’s invitation some thought. Despite Mr. Knox’s attempts to educate me, all of my history came from novels—I knew nothing of a coming war. Even if such a war were imminent, I did not see how it could affect me. I was the citizen of a free state.

  He tapped his pipe on the heel of his boot and ground the embers into the dirt. “Who will read to me?” he asked.

  I said that it was thanks to him, to his teaching and to the books that he had encouraged, even pressed me to read, that I had such a yearning for the world and that surely he, of all people, would not deny me the chance to indulge it. I said that it was unlikely that I would ever have such an opportunity again. He agreed somewhat wryly, and I realized from his tone that he would forgive me for leaving him. When we reached the rectory, he gave me his blessing and kissed me on the head. I promised that I would write to him.

  The following morning, I announced to my parents that I was leaving Ballycarra to sew lace for a family in Berlin. My mother promptly declared that I was suffering one of my attacks of grandeur and refused to believe me, even after I asked my bewildered father to loan me a cardboard suitcase from the store’s stock. I told them that the countess, who was arranging for my passport (Lord Vaughan’s brother was in Dublin Castle), would meet me at the train station in two days’ time.

  The night before I left, as I packed and packed again my few belongings (my books of lace), my father came up the stairs to the attic. “I don’t know where you come by it,” he said, sitting at the end of my bed. “Your mother says it was the books that did it.” He could not bring himself to look at me. He’d made me a present of a new pair of brogues, and I was having trouble fitting them into the small case.

  I stopped my fussing. “The books saved me,” I said. “And the lace.”

  I sat next to him on the bed and took his hand. I was not accustomed to touching him, and I was embarrassed—I could smell turf smoke on his jacket, and there was a trace of ash on his shirt. “I haven’t much to give you,” he said, tucking a pound into my pocket. “Nothing to get you out of trouble when it comes. Your mother will never forgive you.”

  “Think of it as an apprenticeship, Father. I’m going out to work.”

  “I have a sinking feeling that woman’s a Papist,” he said with a sigh. He rose stiffly and made his way cautiously down the narrow stairs, his head level with the floor when he stopped to say good night.

  My mother would not walk with us to the station in the morning, but Mr. Knox was waiting on the platform with a book for me, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, which he’d inscribed To Maeve, in the hope that she will learn to fly, September 1938. My father, suddenly tearful, kissed me on the cheek (he nodded shakily to the countess, and she gave him a chilly smile), handing me a letter as I boarded the train.

  When I showed the countess Mr. Knox’s present, she asked why my old schoolmaster had inscribed it to someone named Maeve. “I am Maeve,” I said. “That’s my real name.” The countess looked puzzled, although not sufficiently interested to question me further. She opened a magazine and, somewhat to my relief, soon fell asleep.

  I watched from the window as the familiar river slipped past, low and dark behind the rowan trees. My initial excitement had begun to fade, particularly after saying good-bye to Mr. Knox, and I had a stomachache. I was traveling to a strange country whose language I did not speak, with a strange woman whom I had known for eight days, to work for people whom I did not know at all. I wondered what in the world I’d been thinking (I knew exactly what I’d been thinking).

  When I could no longer see the river, I read the letter that my father had slipped into my hand. My mother wrote that as I had left the bosom of your loving family for foreign shores, she hoped that my new friends would be willing to provide the home that I had so eagerly forsaken, as she no longer felt obliged to do so. I folded the letter and looked for a place to put it—I had no handbag, and I tucked it into Mr. Knox’s book. My mother’s coldness, although familiar to me, caused me pain, and I was grateful that the countess was not awake to see me cry.

  Over the five days of our journey to Berlin, my misgivings began to disappear. Countess Hartenfels (who more and more reminded me of Trollope’s Madame Goesler, tall, dark, and thin, and adept with her eyes in a way unknown to any Englishwoman) explained that her maid was in Munich awaiting her arrival, and asked if I would be able to assist her with her hair and clothes, a request that thrilled me. When I noticed her staring at me (it was then that I realized she could not be embarrassed), she said that while my hair was a bit thin, it was not a bad shade of brown. And, gracias a Dios, I was not a redhead.

  I had my own berth on the train from Calais, meeting Countess Hartenfels for meals in the dining car or in her private compartment, where I helped her to dress (pinning, fastening, combing, admiring). Her elegance left me feeling both threadbare and inspired, and by the time that we reached Belgium, I’d vowed to model my personal habits on those of the countess, even if my scant means (I had nothing) would be something of a constraint. At home, I wore my best dress to church and to the rare wedding or funeral. I wore tweed skirts and cardigans in the shop, with wool stockings and brogues. In summer, a cotton dress with lisle stockings and brogues. I had two flannel nightdresses, a shawl, a brown tweed coat, knit gloves, and a gray felt cloche that I wore to church. Rubber boots, of course. I did not own a party frock or a pair of high-heeled shoes. The countess dressed as if she were going to a party every day, wearing a suit (tailleur, she said, not “suit”), silk stockings, hat, and gloves. In the evening, she wore a chiffon tea gown, with satin shoes in shades of pale blue, gray, or rose. She carried a little gold bag in which she kept a compact, a lipstick, a lighter, and a cigarette case. She wore jewelry in the day (diamonds only after dark) and lipstick all of the time, even when she went to bed.

  One night when she went to the dining car, leaving me to put away her clothes, I opened her red leather traveling case to dot some perfume—it was called Cuir de Russie and smelled like oranges and birch bark—behind my ears and on my wrists, and to brush some powder on my cheeks. I had just settled a black grosgrain hat on my head, tilting it so that the feather swept the side of my face as I had seen her do, when the door of the compartment opened. Startled, I knocked the box of powder to the floor.

  She stood in the doorway, not particularly surprised at the sight of me in her hat (if I’d known any better, I’d have seen that she glinted). She came inside and closed the door, stepping around the spilled powder so as not to dirty her pretty shoes. “That color is a bit pale for you,” she said. “Your skin is too yellow.” I lifted the hat carefully from my head and put it in its box. I returned the empty box of powder and the scent bottle to her case. As she found the gold lighter she’d forgotten, she said, “They have Saint-Vaást oysters tonight.” She opened the door and looked at me over her shoulder. “Are you coming?” I
said that I’d be there in a moment, after I cleaned the powder from the floor.

  As we crossed the German border, the countess, wearing a black silk peignoir (another new word for me, and one with unsettling connotations), suggested that she hold my passport for the rest of the journey, not wishing me to be further troubled by tiresome customs officers. Later, I threw my coat over my nightdress and made my way through the train to retrieve a book of lace I’d left in her compartment. As I moved from car to car, I felt that I had never been so happy in my life. My new independence, and my equally false sense that I could look after myself—the elation at having left Ballycarra behind—were so strong that I even walked differently (the countess’s own walk may have contributed to this). When I reached her door, I was surprised to hear laughter and a man’s voice. I hurried back to my berth, my coat clutched around me, no longer quite so elated. I wondered if the countess had changed compartments and forgotten to tell me.

  On the last night of our journey, as the countess smoked a cigarette after dinner in the dining car, she confided that she owed everything in the world to Herr Metzenburg. He’d taken her, Inéz Cabral, a young girl of fifteen, straight from Cuba, where he’d found her, and groomed and dressed her. Herr Metzenburg’s house was the meeting place for the most fascinating men and women in Europe—not only politicians and diplomats, but writers and musicians and film stars—and he’d introduced her to a world that would otherwise have been closed, if not unknown to her. She confessed that her new manners and all the couture in Paris would not have amounted to anything in the end had Herr Metzenburg not stood behind her—and even then, she added mysteriously, there had been difficulties. After an arrangement of several years (living contentedly, she said, as slave and master), Felix invited his friend Count Hartenfels to a week’s house party to introduce him to her. Three months later, she and the count were married in the private chapel of the Hartenfels castle near Munich. Felix, she said, showed his customary good taste by choosing not to give her away in marriage.

  As my experience of arrangements was limited to the feeding of Mr. Knox’s gull when he was in Dublin, I was understandably confused. I’d learned during my brief time with the countess, however, not to ask too many questions. She was a character in a fairy tale—Cinderella’s fairy godmother, or the Snow Queen, perhaps—and I, who’d been properly bewitched, was accompanying her to a distant kingdom where I would live in an enchanted forest and spin flax into gold.

  We arrived in Berlin in the late afternoon, traveling directly to the Metzenburgs’ house on Fasanenstrasse. I thought at first that it was a hotel, but the countess said sharply that she had never stayed in a hotel in her life. She seemed puzzled when no one came to the door, and even more puzzled when Herr Metzenburg opened the door himself.

  I could see that Herr Metzenburg must have forgotten that Countess Hartenfels was coming to stay. He kissed her hand with an amused, slightly mocking smile and led us to a pink drawing room, the look of surprise already disappearing from his face. I’d read about such things, of course, but I had it wrong—the man does not actually kiss the woman’s hand but takes her hand in his own and, with a little bow, lowers his face to her fingers. The countess introduced me, explaining that I was a present for the Metzenburgs, which startled me. “You must allow me these little cadeaux,” I heard her say as she took a cigarette from his case.

  Herr Metzenburg may have forgotten that Countess Inéz was coming to stay, but I was clearly a surprise. He turned to me smoothly, however, and said that he hoped that my journey had not been unnecessarily stressful, even if I was entering Germany, rather than leaving it, which tended to be more troublesome. Although Herr Metzenburg walked with a slight limp, he had a confident and easy way about him. I was so tongue-tied that I could only nod.

  Behind him, a fair-haired, slender woman who could only be Dorothea Metzenburg floated noiselessly into the room, followed by an old man with a mustache and one eye, wearing white gloves and an apron, who immediately disappeared. Delicate and distracted, Frau Metzenburg did not have much to say, although she, too, seemed surprised to see us. Herr Metzenburg said something to her that I couldn’t hear, but I thought I heard her say, “Ah, my very own lace maker.”

  The old man, without the apron but with a black monocle over his empty eye socket, returned with a tray of tea and cakes and dropped it onto a low mother-of-pearl table with a grunt. My idea of elegant manners had been taken from books and ladies’ magazines, and I was surprised, especially when Herr Metzenburg waved away the fretful old man to pour the tea himself.

  The countess had told me that after university in Heidelberg, Herr Metzenburg had been sent abroad by the German ministry as ambassador, first to London and then to Madrid. She also said that his grandfather had built all of the railroads in South America. “While it’s not the most ancient of fortunes, it’s perfectly lovely. He was so attractive that money hardly mattered. Madame de la Roche once slid over a small cliff for love of him.” Although I was disappointed to discover that the Metzenburgs were not royal (and their house, although grand, was not a palace), both the excessive luxury and the excessive simplicity of the rooms, so unlike the dark and fussy rooms I’d conjured from magazines and books, made me wonder about all of the other things I’d imagined over the years. I’d always understood that if I were ever to have the things that I desired I would have to leave Ballycarra—I just hadn’t known how much there was to desire.

  As the old man showed us to our rooms (I heard Frau Metzenburg tell him to put me in a guest bedroom as the servants’ rooms were filled with packing crates), the countess whispered that everything in my room was mine to use—bath towels, writing paper, soap, even the hot water (the last a bit unkind, I thought)—but it was an hour before I dared even pour myself a glass of water. The old man had made no mention of dinner, and by seven o’clock, I was hungry, despite the tea cakes. I heard footsteps in the passage and the sound of a bell, but no one came to my room, and I wondered if they’d forgotten me. Fortunately, a tin on a table next to the bed contained ginger biscuits, and I ate a few, then a few more, until the biscuits, to my dismay, were gone—it wasn’t that I was still hungry, although I was, that worried me, but the fear that I shouldn’t have eaten all of them. I fell asleep on top of the covers, my feet in a pair of silk slippers I found in the closet, waking in the middle of the night when I grew cold. I thought at first that I was in my own bed until the light from the streetlamp in Fasanenstrasse, shining through the open curtains (I’d been unsure about closing them), reminded me that I was far from home.

  The next morning, I had already bathed and dressed, made the bed (twice), and folded and refolded my towel and facecloth when the old man, whose name was Kreck, came to my room to tell me that Herr Metzenburg wished to see me in the library. I followed him downstairs, certain that I was to be sent home. What most distressed me—even more than the thought of my mother’s triumph—was the loss of my new bed with its silk sheets and satin quilt (and, yes, the hot water).

  Herr Metzenburg appeared upset, looking for a moment as if he didn’t remember me or why he wished to see me, before pointing to a chair and wishing me good morning. I thought at first that we could not possibly be in a library—red lacquer cabinets lined the walls, tall china pagodas between them—but then I noticed the books; there were hundreds of them.

  There was the unfamiliar smell of coffee. A tray on the desk held two cups and saucers and a silver pot with an ivory handle. I was very hungry, and I glanced at the tray to see if there might be a scone or a piece of fruit, but there was nothing. Without asking if I wanted coffee, Herr Metzenburg made a sign to Kreck to pour me a cup.

  When I felt that it was safe to look at him, the cup and saucer rattling in my hands (I wasn’t used to drinking coffee, and I was nervous), I saw that he was staring out the window. There was a crowd in the street, running back and forth and shouting, and he asked Kreck to close the shutters. Like many people who command your attention, his he
ad was a bit large for his body. He wore his dark hair combed back from his face. His gray eyes reflected light in a way that made me uneasy—I felt that to look directly into his eyes was to risk revealing my most secret thoughts, had I any. He was close in age to my father. They were both about forty years old, but my father looked much older.

  He turned to me and said that I was welcome to accompany him and Frau Metzenburg when they moved to their estate thirty miles south of Berlin. He said that a few days before my arrival he’d been offered his old position as ambassador in Madrid, which he had resigned in 1933, but he had refused the post, angering the foreign minister, who had immediately requisitioned the Metzenburgs’ house (my pretty room!) and conscripted all of the servants under the age of fifty. He and Frau Metzenburg had been given ten days to empty the house. A circumstance of which the countess had perhaps been unaware when she left Ireland.

  Although I was free to leave (he would, of course, arrange my passage), he had, upon thinking about it, realized that I might be of help to them in the weeks to come, especially as there were no longer any servants other than Kreck and the cook. He could offer me in return a small salary. He apologized that, given the events of the last few days, he could not warrant his protection, as it clearly amounted to very little. He feared that it was only a matter of time before there was a war between Germany, France, and England.

  As I listened to him, I kept thinking that I had missed something. Something I couldn’t see. I looked at the old man, but he was absorbed in arranging the silver on the tray. It was only when he signaled with an impatient shake of his head that I was keeping Herr Metzenburg that I was able to give him my answer.

  Over the next few days, I noticed that people came to the house at all hours, even through the night. I thought at first that someone was ill—Kreck labored ceaselessly up and down the stairs, cursing under his breath as he carried trays of coffee and brandy, and newspapers and telegrams. Among the visitors were grave-looking men in uniform, dispatch cases under their arms. There were men in fur hats and dark coats, and I wondered if they might be Jews. I’d never seen a Jew, and I felt both excited and afraid.