David dropped the blind and lay back in his bunk, trembling and with his heart thumping. He’d never before seen a naked girl. No, that wasn’t quite true. He remembered a girl cousin, straight from her bath and with her dressing-gown hanging open, smiling at him from the top of a staircase. But she’d been about three, and he hadn’t been much older. So here was yet another measure of inexperience. He was astounded by the instantaneity and pitch of his excitement. It was quite a long time before he went to sleep again.
III
Tim, through what might be called diplomatic channels, had found them accommodation. It was in a large apartment-block in the Ötzeltgasse, not a particularly august locality. The proprietrix, Frau Weber, had received numerous young Englishmen in her time: polite boys proposing a little to improve their German before undertaking to serve their country in embassies and legations in one or another part of Central Europe. Lately she had been finding such agreeable and remunerative boarders hard to come by, and she was quite as hard up as almost everybody else in Vienna. So she had put considerable cordiality into her welcome.
‘Alles, alles was Sie wünschen!’ she had exclaimed to the first two arrivals, and had accompanied the words with an expansive gesture comprehending indifferently her enormous Dresden stoves, her equally enormous feather quilts, and her two ill-favoured and not precisely young daughters.
‘Thank you very much indeed,’ Olly said formally – and then remembered that he was in a foreign country. So he made a kind of stage bow to the daughters. ‘Es freut mich sehr’ — he said to them firmly and as if imperfectly remembering something from a phrase-book—’ Sie kennen lernen zu dürfen.’
This, whether or not it was idiomatic or even grammatical, went down quite well. But with it ended, for the time being, any further attempt at communication in an alien tongue. Frau Weber explained in English that she provided only Frühstück, but that Herr Naumann ran an excellent restaurant in a cellar in the next street. And when a look of some dubiety betrayed itself on Olly’s face she informed him with asperity that a very good society dined regularly at Herr Naumann’s. It was evident that, despite her abject need of money, Frau Weber was a woman who stood no nonsense. Tim smoothed things over by venturing to inquire whether her late husband (she was understood to be a widow) had belonged to the same family as the musician. As the Webers had been officers and gentlemen as well as fiddlers and so forth, Frau Weber’s reply was gratified as well as affirmative. Baron Franz Anton von Weber, she reminded Tim, had never declined to acknowledge his cousinship with the much humbler family of the Mozarts. After this cultivated exchange the Weber ladies withdrew, and the new boarders considered their situation.
Olly was not very favourably impressed by it.
‘It’s all going to be bloody stuffy,’ he said.
‘It had better be, with nothing to warm us but those great porcelain mausoleums, and the outside temperature heaven knows how many degrees below zero. A good fug will be our only hope.’ Tim didn’t seem in too good spirits. Every now and then, Olly reflected, Tim looked like a man remembering some defeat he’d rather forget. Olly never fished for this. Although by nature unscrupulous, he observed the taboos in which young men of his sort believe.
‘I mean figuratively stuffy,’ Olly said. ‘That old woman will think it her business to keep an eye on us. And all the hochbürgerlich proprieties will have to be toadied to.’
‘I don’t think there’s such a word as hochbürgerlich.’
‘There is now. You ought to have found us something more in the Bohemian line. Students with their wenches and sausages and puddles of beer. That sort of thing. Particularly wenches.’
‘I thought the woman was practically offering us her daughters.’
‘It would be useless to offer them to a goat or a tom-cat. Do you realise that apartments like this are as good as gaols?’
‘A pretty spacious gaol. The Webers must have about a dozen rooms. And apparently several of the attics as well.’
‘Yes, of course. But don’t you know that not a soul in a single one of these flats is so much as allowed a latch-key? You may have lived in one of them for twenty years. But when you come home you still have to ring a bell and be scrutinised by a nasty old woman in a glass box in the hall. It’s rather like returning to an Oxford college at night. Except that a good simple kick at the door wouldn’t be too well regarded.’
‘It does sound a bit over the odds.’ Tim plainly hadn’t thought of this aspect of the matter. ‘I expect it goes back to the paternalism of dear old Francis Joseph. Liked to feel every Wiener and Wienerin was tucked up and accounted for.’
‘Better decide how to tuck up ourselves,’ Olly said. They had been allotted two bedrooms, which faced each other across a broad corridor at its far end. They made their way to them now. ‘Reasonably secluded,’ Olly pronounced. ‘And well away, one hopes, from Sin and Death.’ It appeared that the Weber daughters were to be thus referred to. ‘But we’ll have to draw lots, I suppose.’
Each of the rooms held one very large double bed. They poked around the first of them.
‘A Nachttopf each,’ Tim reported. ‘That’s quite refined. But drawing lots it will have to be – unless, of course, the passions are involved.’
‘I don’t know about you and David. But, as for me, I’d rather have Sin herself than either of you.’ Olly didn’t pause on this obligatory pleasantry. He was preparing three slips of paper. ‘Longest is me,’ he said. ‘The second is you, and the shortest is David. First out of the scrum gets solitary.’ They devised a method ofdrawing the slips with meticulous fairness. David got solitary.
‘Just what he’d like,’ Olly said. ‘David’s not sociable in what you might call a Nachttopf way. I sing of a maiden that is makeless, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Don’t be disgustingly profane, Olly.’ It sounded as if Tim was actually serious in this rebuke. ‘Look, the other room has a glimpse of the Stephans-Dom. Let’s bag it and leave this one for our wandering boy. No reason why he should make all the going.’
‘We’ll let him do that with S. and D.’ Olly said. ‘And now we’ll unpack.’
IV
Almost David’s first act was to ration the Sin and Death joke. His authority didn’t extend to banning it, but he could cut down Olly’s producing it to a maximum of once a day. It was a curious fact of their relationship that, when the chips were down, the rather diffident and misdoubting David had the confident and extravert Olly substantially under his thumb. On the other hand with Tim (who, as has been recorded, was akin to David in some ways) David’s authority was nil. This seemed to be because Tim was in some mysterious fashion grown-up and David was not. Not that Tim’s adult condition seemed to be much good to him; he was often tiresomely withdrawn and occasionally hard and cynical. In fact he was no longer quite the Oxford Tim.
David’s point about Sin and Death was quite clear. They were decent girls – or women rather – and evident non-starters in the highly competitive Viennese marriage-market which their wretched mother probably insisted on as their only hope. It was apparent that family pretensions of some sort had precluded their being brought up to earn a living in a telephone exchange or as dentists’ receptionists or something like that, and you could take a bet that their future was entirely drear. It wasn’t necessary to look at them too often if the effort was over-taxing in an aesthetico-erotic way. But God’s creatures they were, and Sin’s name was Lotte and Death’s – incredible though it seemed – was Pfiffi. So there.
Olly accepted this homily and Tim humoured it, so they all three fell to saying Pfiffi and Lotte like mad. The Webers seemed a little surprised, and Tim expressed misgivings. Wouldn’t it be more proper just to say Fräulein every time? That wasn’t in the least like addressing a young English gentlewoman as ‘Miss’ – a usage undeniably underbred. But David said that Lotte and Pfiffi liked a little warmth, and responded to it. This was undeniably true. Quite soon Frau Weber’s daughters were adoring their th
ree guests. They would have liked to run for their slippers; that sort of thing. Olly, Tim and David didn’t quite tumble to the depth of the enamourment they were occasioning. But by Frau Weber herself it was doubtless remarked.
The young men weren’t much bothering about the Webers at all. They quickly had a great many activities in hand. Tim presented his introductions and was admitted with gratifying ease to certain archives of minor importance. David went to see a Professor of Anglistik with the idea of favouring him in the role of a superior research student. But not being instantly received (as an Oxford tutor would have received him) as a fellow-scholar and social equal, he was puzzled and offended, and abandoned his inquiries in that direction. Olly hired a bank clerk to teach him what he insisted must be ‘conversational’ German. He was a nervous little man, miserably undernourished, but proud of his own ‘conversational’ English, and saying ‘Please take place’, when he meant ‘Do sit down’. Olly made fun of him, grew ashamed of doing so, and resolved the matter by sacking him. Olly had discovered that the thing to have was the sort of girl that American students called a sleeping dictionary. They must each of them find a sleeping dictionary, and all would be well. But the hunt for this compendious convenience hung fire, partly because it wasn’t easy to see how three sleeping dictionaries could come and go unchallenged by the Pförtnerin in the glass box, and partly because of the competing claims of skating and riding; the outdoor skating-rink was enormous, and in the Prater there were whole avenues so lavishly laid with frost-resistant bark that you could ride and jump however hard the ground. Olly had found a retired NCO, with very grand officer’s airs, who was teaching him an Austrian cavalry seat with which one could cut quite a figure at home.
They also did a great deal of simple tourist’s sightseeing, but engaged in all the proper cultural exercises as well, frequenting the galleries, the Oper, the Burgtheater, the Theater an der Wien, the Volkstheater, and the Spanish Riding School – and indeed everything else they could get to hear of. Impecunious Russian painters – all of them, oddly enough, aristocratic émigrés as well – got wind of them and sold them pictures. Bouvard and Pécuchet, liberated by that legacy into whole new worlds of experience, were pale shadows to them. They changed ten pounds each into an absurd currency expressed in pengos, and did a stupendous weekend in Budapest on the proceeds.
Social life – or the first social life to which they attained – proved, although at first intriguing, not quite so satisfactory. Tim had been written about to a Gräfin Somebody, actually an Englishwoman whose family manufactured torpedoes, who was understood to represent in Vienna the exiled Court. An invitation arrived, and they all went to tea. The Gräfin (like a female Arion, Olly said, straddled securely on one of those naval projectiles above the dark waters of Viennese penury) owned an apartment about six times the size of Frau Weber’s. But even this miniature palace seemed a little run-down, and its menservants, although no doubt to be thought of as feudally devoted to a fallen nobility, looked as sullen as if they were minded to cut your throat or hang you heels-up from the nearest lamp-post.
The young men did quite well, and were in consequence accorded the regular entrée. The corps diplomatique wasn’t supposed to frequent the Gräfin’s salon with any obtrusiveness, but some of them were always there and their hostess insisted on everything being en règle. It didn’t matter when you arrived, but you could take your leave only in strict order of precedence. This was awkward for Olly, Tim and David, who would have preferred to be allowed to take French leave in the original sense of the term; as it was, they were condemned always to be in the dusty rear. Most of the guests were old women of the Gräfin’s sort, toting round daughters or granddaughters who they hoped might catch the fancy of some eligible young attaché from the American Embassy or the British Legation. Because of this ambition, the girls, although frequently in the next thing to rags, were exquisitely groomed, their mothers’ assuredly starveling maids having made sure that not a hair was out of place. They were extremely pretty; they sat without moving hand or foot; their conversation was limited to asking whether you knew A, B, or C – which invariably you did not. For a time they quite amused Olly and David, who passed them little cakes and imagined taking their clothes off. Olly was always in hopes that one or two of them would prove to be married already, and to unfaithful husbands, since in that case they would be licensed to take lovers galore, as in the world of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
On Tim, however, the fillies from this stable had a quite different and rather perplexing effect. He ought to have been easier with them than the others were, since his family had been in the diplomatic line of business for several generations and he acknowledged that occasional hob-nobbings of this sort had made part of his holiday and vacation life almost since he was a kid. In addition to which he possessed excellent French, a language which these aristocratic Viennese liked to talk almost as if they were Russians in Turgenev or Tolstoy. But every now and then Tim would fix his regard on one or another of the doll-like creatures in an intent and strained way. It was clear that he wasn’t just wondering whether the clothes came off and there was something anatomically complete underneath; it was part of Tim’s annoying maturity that it wasn’t like that at all. When he and his friends came away he would put on his withdrawn and brooding turn. This was coming to annoy Olly excessively and almost as if he were jealous of it. David felt that he ought to tackle Tim and in some way lend a hand. Only he didn’t know how to begin.
Superficially at least, they all did better in less assuming circles. In one way and another they got to know quite a number of Viennese girls who were gay and friendly and pleasure-loving – and also (one had to guess) good Catholics and virginal as well. The young men skated with them and took them to cafés and restaurants and concerts and cinemas – places of diversion in which they wouldn’t have had a penny to pay their way themselves. They were frank about their families’ post-war poverty, treating it as a kind of game in which they had become involved, and which looked like lasting for an indefinite time ahead. In Austria, unlike Germany, there wasn’t much Umbau going on. Vienna was a great capital city suddenly bereft of any economic hinterland.
The three Englishmen didn’t much like this aspect of their situation, and Olly even said that it got in the way of making love to these young women as they deserved. Offer one of them so much as a cup of coffee with a lot of whipped cream slobbed on top of it, and you felt like an Edwardian rake seducing a chorus-girl with a pair of diamond ear-rings. This seemed a surprising delicacy of feeling in one who believed in low pleasures as a kind of contractual duty, but his friends knew what Olly meant. Deep in their hearts these feather-headed but courageous girls dreamed of marrying you. It was either you or – and even this would require luck – somebody like the little man who said ‘Please take place’. It was difficult for them not to be designing in a way that wounded their pride. David, whose lucidity sometimes got the better of his modesty, said it wasn’t as bad as if he and Olly and Tim were a trio positively unattractive in themselves. At times when shaving he had happened to notice that he himself wasn’t at all bad looking, and that went for Tim and Olly too. And didn’t they all have nice manners? At least a girl needn’t suppose that she was trying to sell herself in exchange for a wedding ring from a pig.
These observations, although defensively offered on an ironic note, were basically true. But they didn’t mean that David took any un-alarmed pleasure at the thought of one of these girls being after him. A girl after him, rather than he after a girl, would be a most uncomfortable thing. And he wasn’t after a girl. Some of the girls undoubtedly excited him, and all sorts of amorous visions came and went in his head. But he was pretty sure that the mother-refuge thing still operated. He looked forward with anxiety to every letter from home, in case it should bring the news that his mother had been run over by a bus, since he’d then have felt like an Australian aborigine who had successfully pointed a bone at somebody. Fortunately Mrs Read rem
ained in excellent health.
V
It will be seen that problems of sexual comportment were gaining on the boarders in the Ötzeltgasse. There would be occasion for surprise had it been otherwise since, despite a daily flurry of activities, they were leading thoroughly idle lives. Skating and riding, and long snowy walks in the Wiener Wald scarcely stopped their putting on weight to an extent that might have impaired David’s estimate of their personableness. When they felt hard up they dined at Herr Naumann’s as Frau Weber had advised. More often they went to the Rathaus Keller, where enormous quantities of food were served in dining-rooms severally appropriated to different classes of society. Sometimes they went to more expensive restaurants, including one in which you could point to a fish swimming happily amid its fellows in a tank, and be eating it ten minutes later. This was a refinement of polite life they’d none of them happened to meet before, and they permitted it to amuse them very much. But sometimes they felt rather silly, just arsing agreeably around. Even Tim felt this, although managing a short bout with his archives every now and then. Of course it was their Wanderjahr, which was – or had used to be – a perfectly respectable idea for young men with passably industrious Lehrjahre immediately behind them. Nevertheless they were conscious of being in a bit of a muddle. They were quite genuinely active and high-spirited and pleased with themselves; but at the same time they acknowledged (although barely to one another) that elsewhere there was heat and dust and a race going on, and that they had rather feebly dropped out of it. But they weren’t exactly ready to pack up, and the advancing Viennese spring was very delightful. Perhaps they could at least end up with a bang rather than a whimper? And oughtn’t it to be a bang in an incoming sense of the word? A mood of irresponsibility was seeping into all three of them. And all this meant that, in their several ways, they were in a mood for Elsa when she turned up.
The Bridge at Arta Page 21