by Francis King
It was a bold thing to say to a man whom she hardly knew, and he was startled by its boldness. He turned his head and stared at her with those amazingly clear, pale blue eyes of his under eyebrows glistening golden, like his forearms, in the sunshine. She thought, with a brief pressure of her fingers on his arm: A golden man.
He laughed. ‘ You’re all that everyone here says that you are.’ Then he added: ‘And I like that. Yes, I like that.’
In the days and then weeks ahead, the gossip intensified. There were reports of the couple walking arm in arm, heads bowed, deep in conversation, along the canal, and even of their kissing, urmindful of whether anyone could see them or not; of their constantly riding together, early in the morning, soon after dawn, before Königsmark went to work at the Prussian embassy; even of their having been seen in a disreputable café, in a slum area of the city, known to be largely frequented by prostitutes and their clients.
Inevitably, the gossip reached Harriet, when her friends, sometimes genuinely concerned but more often affecting to be so, passed it on to her. Shouldn’t she have a word with Alexine? Of course there was no substance in what was being said, they quickly assured her, but the dear girl ought to be more careful. People could be so malicious, they could do her real harm.
Harriet was dismissive. ‘Oh, I trust her,’ she would say. Or, ‘ I’m afraid I can’t be bothered with all that kind of malicious talk. Life’s too short for it.’ So far from arousing her disapproval, Alexine’s reckless behaviour secretly excited her. The girl was behaving as she herself had always wanted to behave. It was only now, with extreme slowness, that she was herself gathering the courage to follow her example.
It was Addy, goaded by sly remarks made directly to her or in her hearing at the Palace, who eventually tackled Alexine. After a long and exhausting day, during which she had accompanied the increasingly tetchy Queen on an interminable visit first to an orphanage and then to a home for the blind, she was standing at her bedroom window in a loose peignoir, a hairbrush in her hand, gazing out with a vague dissatisfaction into the garden, where the shapes of the distant trees were beginning to blur in the gathering summer dusk. All at once she saw them. Flopsy, the mongrel favourite, scampered out of some bushes and then, from the rough path snaking through them, Alexine and Königsmark eventually emerged. The path had been so narrow that she had had to walk ahead of him. But now, out on the lawn, she waited for him and then took his arm. She said something, her overlarge head uptilted on the long neck, and both of them laughed. She put her mouth up to his in what, to Addy, was blatant invitation. He responded with ardour.
Addy watched them with reawakened anguish for her own recklessness in the past and with anger at her niece’s now. If that girl was not careful, she was going to wreck her life, as she herself had done. Königsmark might well marry her, but it was by no means certain. His parents, many of the family estates heavily mortgaged, had higher ambitions for him, according to gossip at the Court. There was even talk of a royal match, some said with a daughter of Queen Victoria and others with one of the Wittelsbach princesses. There was also said to be another heiress, daughter of an Austrian entrepreneur almost as wealthy as Philip had been, with whom Königsmark was said to have been infatuated while en poste in Vienna before his arrival at The Hague.
Harriet was playing the piano in the next room, and Alexine, kneeling on the rug before the unfit fire, was teasing at the matted hair of an English sheep-dog with a silver-mounted comb. Addy decided that now was the time to speak out.
‘May I say something to you, chérie?’
Alexine looked up. From far back in her early childhood that was always how her aunt prefaced some complaint or reproof. ‘Of course. What is it?’
‘I hope you won’t take it amiss. But I feel I must say it. For your own good.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Alexine continued to tug the comb through the matted hair. Though entirely motionless on the rug, the dog would from time to time emit a little, high-pitched whimper, whether of pleasure or pain it was impossible to say.
‘Why are you using that comb? Isn’t it one of the ones you use yourself? It’s hardly suitable for a dog.’
‘It has wide teeth,’ Alexine said. ‘Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?’
‘No, of course not.’ The notes of the piano from the other room became more and more clamorous. The old fortepiano had been so much less disturbing. Why did Harriet have to go and replace it with an instrument better suited to a concert-hall than to a drawing-room? ‘No.’ She made an effort to shut out the din. ‘You know how malicious people can be. Particularly when they’re envious.’
‘Envious?’
‘Remember that you’re the girl who always gets what she wants. That’s how they think of you. Whereas so many of them want so much and get so little. So, with their tittle-tattle, they set out to harm you. Us,’ she added. ‘Us too.’
‘I’m really not interested in tittle-tattle,’ Alexine said, as her mother had had said before her.
‘It’s all very well to say that you’re not interested in tittle-tattle. But I know – I know from my own experience – how destructive it can be. Do be careful, my dear. Try – try to be more discreet.’
Her task finished, Alexine jumped up, comb in hand, from the rug. She began to remove strands of hair from the comb and dropped them, without a thought, to the floor. Tomorrow one of the servants would sweep up the hairs – with difficulty because they would become enmeshed in the thick pile of the rug – just as they constantly picked up the clothes that she discarded on the floor. ‘I don’t care about being the things that people want me to be. What’s the point of being rich if one cannot be oneself?’
‘Oh, very well. If that’s how you feel about it.’ Addy, who had merely a small annuity, thought that to talk like that of being rich was crude and insensitive. But of course Alexine was right. It was only the rich who were able to be wholly themselves. Bitterly, she had learned that through her service at the Court, constantly adapting herself to the capricious demands of the Queen, never arguing, never expressing or even hinting at an unconventional opinion, always saying and doing precisely what was expected of her.
Chapter Two
HANS, TRUDGING DOWN THE COBBLED STREET to the cottage that he had rented for his mother and sister, after a tiring and tiresome day of dealing with John’s unnecessary instructions as to how he should conduct the negotiations to buy a firm on the verge of bankruptcy, was deep in thought. The legacy and the job had gained him some freedom, but not as much as he had expected. Although absent in Liverpool, John was a far more exacting master than Philip had ever been, since he was both unsure of his abilities, when he contrasted himself with his forceful, brilliant, reckless father, and suspicious that they might also be inferior to Hans’s. The girl whom Hans had so often put off marrying because he must stay with his mother and in any case could not afford to have two women dependent on him, had, when he had at long last proposed to her, announced that she was sorry but her affections were, as she stiltedly put it, elsewhere engaged. To add to his despondency, he was extremely hot in his tightly buttoned blue serge suit, and his new elastic-sided boots, fashionably narrow and extremely expensive, were pinching him.
Suddenly he raised his head from his examination of the cobbles and there, in front of him, the two of them were! Alexine, taller than any of her women friends, was unmistakable even when seen from the back and from so far away. Her arm was intertwined with that of the man with her, her head bending forward as they swayed along together. Who was he? The man, who had the build of an athlete and a strutting, slightly bow-legged walk, had removed his hat, so that the tardily setting sun, which was causing Hans to screw up his eyes and from time to time even to raise a palm to shield them from its glare, glinted on his thick golden hair, creating an evanescent halo. Then Hans realized: this must be that Königsmark about whose relationship with Alexine he had heard some gossip only the previous day in the office.
The couple slowed their pace. Then the man put a hand in a pocket and drew out two keys. He inserted one key in the front door of the mean little house beside which they had eventually halted and stood aside, to allow Alexine to enter first. Then, with a laugh at something that, now out of sight, she must have said, he entered.
All at once Hans’s mood of weary depression lifted. He had knowledge of something of which, in all probability, no one else had knowledge. Merely to possess it gave him a sensation of power and therefore of happiness.
As he walked on, he began to whistle to himself.
Having washed herself in the chipped enamel bidet in the alcove concealed by a tattered curtain from the rest of the room, Alexine emerged naked. She stared down at Adolph, lying out, also naked, on the bed, and then, with a sigh, crossed over to the mansard window. She looked out over the roofs, glinting in the late afternoon sunshine from the rain that had recently fallen in an abrupt, powerful downpour.
‘Oh, this place is so squalid!’
He smiled. ‘It’s not that bad. It’s good of Franz to let us have it.’
‘It would be even better of him if just occasionally he had it cleaned.’
‘You know he hasn’t got a job. And his father gives him only a tiny allowance. Even smaller than mine.’
‘That bidet was filthier than ever. I had to scrub it out before using it.’
‘Oh, please!’ He pulled a face and patted the bed beside him. ‘Come on! Come!’
Reluctantly she strolled over to the bed and clambered on to it.
He put an arm around her and tried to draw her to him, but she resisted him.
‘Oh, not again!’
‘What’s the matter with you? What’s put you in this mood?’
‘This has gone on too long. I hate these furtive meetings. In this awful, awful place.’
‘Where else can we go? It’s better than nothing – or doing it out in the open, against a tree, as we did that last time.’ He laughed and again tried to pull her towards him. ‘ You wouldn’t like to go back to that, would you?’
‘Why can’t we get married?’
‘I’ve told you why. We’ve only known each other for – what? – seven weeks. And I’ve been only a short time longer at the legation. Let’s wait until, well, the New Year. That’ll be the time for a decision.’
‘What do you mean – a decision? Aren’t we both decided?’
‘I said – everything in good time.’ He was now faintly exasperated, but his tone remained patient and reasonable. ‘I must establish myself in my job. I must get a better one. My pay is very small.’
‘You know that I have money. Lots and lots of it. Far more than I know what to do with.’
‘I don’t want to be a man who lives on the wealth of his wife – like that awful Monsieur Thierry.’ Although Alexine had never spoken to anyone about that scene in the railway carriage, it was as though Adolph, by some miracle of extrasensory perception, knew of it, so extreme was his hatred of the Frenchman. ‘As a younger son – one of so many – I have little from my family now, and I can expect even less in the future. Over the years we’ve become poorer and poorer. And it’s going to go on like that, unless my brothers and I can make some change. And that’s unlikely. No Königsmark has ever been any good at making money – only at spending it.’
‘It’s so silly to be proud about these things. I have enough money for at least a dozen husbands.’
‘I don’t think I’d like to be part of a harem. I want you to myself.’
Once again he put a hand up to her shoulder, in an attempt to pull her towards him. Once again she resisted him, this time actually thrusting him away from her.
‘And this weddirfg – your sister’s wedding.’ The following week he was going home to his family. ‘ I really can’t see why I can’t go with you.’
‘Because they haven’t met you yet. Only my sister knows of your existence.’
‘Well, tell them about me! Let me meet them!’
Back at home, Alexine brooded moodily. He was as affectionate as ever to her in public and as passionate as ever to her in private, but she was enraged by his refusal in any way to commit himself. All her behaviour was based on the assumption that eventually, more likely sooner than later, they would get engaged and then married. Harriet, Addy and everyone close to her shared that assumption. But whenever the subject of their marriage had arisen, he would either make no positive response, as just now in that filthy garconnière, or else he would veer away from it with some irrelevance or a joke.
Harriet stared down at the jostling capital letters, some tilting this way and some that, in which the anonymous note was written. Daan had just brought it to her. Out in the hall, she could hear Adolph saying his last goodbyes to Alexine before his departure. They sounded not sad but boisterous, as repeatedly their laughter rang out. Having said her own goodbyes, she had decided to leave them alone for theirs.
It was disgusting. And cowardly. If people wanted to write such things, then they should have the courage to reveal their identities. Who could be the perpetrator? At a first reading, the clumsiness of the handwriting and the crudeness of the language had made her decide that it must be some former servant, sacked for dishonesty or inefficiency, or some disgruntled tradesman. But now she had her doubts. People equating money with happiness might well envy Alexine for a happiness that they imagined to be far greater than their own, and so attempt to destroy it.
When Harriet heard the front door open and then a minute or two later close, she got to her feet. She hated the task ahead of her but it was imperative to perform it.
She opened the door. ‘Chérie!’
‘Yes!’
‘Could you come for a moment?’
‘Is it important? I’m late for Sophie.’
‘Well, yes, I’d like a word now.’
Alexine entered the room. ‘I ought to feel sad, but somehow I don’t. I really do think that when he gets back, he’ll at last decide that the time has come. But it’s such a long wait. He says that it won’t be more than two weeks at the outside but …’ She broke off, at last noticing the look of strain on her mother’s face. ‘What’s the matter? What is it?’
Harriet held out the flimsy sheet of paper. She did not know it, but it was on such sheets that the clerks in what had once been Philip’s office and was now Hans’s, jotted down notes or made rough calculations.
Alexine frowned down at the paper. Then she looked up. ‘Who wrote this?’ she demanded angrily.
‘I’ve no idea. The question is – is it true?’
Alexine hesitated, once again frowning down at the clumsy letters sprawling across the page. Then she raised her head. She held it high. ‘Yes.’
‘Oh, chérie! How could you, how could you?’
‘I love him.’
‘Yes, yes! But think of the possible scandal – the possible danger. If you’d told me – if you’d really wanted … I’d have hated it but we could have found some pretext for his coming to stay here … That area is notorious, you must know that. And to be seen going into a house there with him …’
‘Well, that’s how it was. I’m sorry. But’ – she shrugged and then stooped and placed the letter on Harriet’s desk – ‘there was nothing else for it.’
‘I don’t want you to ruin your life! I – I don’t want you to be another Addy.’
‘Aunt Addy? What has she got to do with it?’
Alexine had always sensed some mystery in her aunt’s past. It was odd that a woman so much more beautiful than her sister had never married, and that, for as long as Alexine could remember, had never once had a relationship or even a close friendship with any man.
‘Oh, sit down!’ Harriet said, in a weary, cross voice. ‘She was an idiot. But she had more excuse than you have. And ever since she’s been paying for her idiocy.’
… It was when she was only seventeen that the Admiral procured for Addy the post of lady-in-Waiting to Queen Sophia. But soon a
fter her arrival at the Court, she caught the attention of the sombre, dumpy Queen Mother, Anna Paulovna, sister of the previous Tsar, Alexander I. After months of inexorably declining health Anna Paulovna had decided, that, as she put, she was nearing the end of the road and, for the last time, wished to revisit her native Russia. Fascinated by the young girl’s beauty and vivacity, she asked her daughter-in-law if she might ‘borrow’ her for the trip. Queen Sophia was unaccommodating, as always with Anna Paulovna, whom she suspected of making trouble between herself and her estranged husband and secretly disliked. ‘But I’m just breaking her in,’ she said, as though Addy were a recently acquired filly. But Anna Paulovna persisted, until ‘Oh, very well!’ the Queen impatiently gave in. ‘But I must warn you that she’s terribly unpunctual and can come out with the most tactless things.’
Anna Paulovna laughed. ‘Well, then she resembles me!’
When the party from The Hague reached the Imperial summer palace, the German-born Tsarina and the seven children were in residence but not the Tsar. Anna Paulovna, whose condition at once deteriorated on her arrival, was increasingly obliged to take to her bed. Because the old woman’s eyesight was also failing, Addy would then be summoned to sit for hours on end reading to her. Addy did not in the least mind a task that her fellow lady-in-waiting, a spinster in her forties, hated. Fortunately for the spinster and no less fortunately for Addy, Anna Paulovna soon decided that Addy read so much better than her colleague that this duty should, for the future, be performed by her alone. The two women, one so near the close of her life and the other so near the beginning of hers, soon established a powerful and surprising intimacy. When Anna Paulovna had one of the fainting attacks, it was Addy who held the smelling-salts, always kept in readiness, to the old woman’s nose. When she took a rare bath, it was Addy, with two maids in attendance, who supervised the lengthy operation. When her feet ached intolerably, it was Addy, kneeling before her, who would massage them between her strong, capable hands.