by Francis King
‘No doubt.’ Now it was he who was cold and calm. ‘But how can you know? How can you possibly know? Even your mother couldn’t know. I bet your father often said that he was going to the club or to a business meeting when in fact –’
‘Stop it!’ She got to her feet, her chin trembling. ‘ That’s enough.’ She went over to the bell-pull and gave it a vigorous tug. ‘ Daan will see you out.’ She faced him. ‘ Goodbye, Adolph.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t wish to see you again. That’s what I mean.’
With a rustle of her voluminous skirts, she swept out of the room.
‘Oh, forget about it!’ Harriet said.
‘How can one forget about such things? He betrayed me. And
I’m sure that she left the butterfly and the card out on purpose.
She must have done.’
‘Oh, no. No! Why should she do that? She probably doesn’t even know that you and he –’
‘She knows. She knows all right. She hears all the gossip from her clients. She knows everything.’
‘I’m sure he was telling you the truth. She means nothing to him. That sort of woman – ready for anything with any man willing and able to be generous to her – is little more than a prostitute. That’s how he looked on her. Every wife has to face the fact – there are times when a man would rather go with a prostitute than with a decent woman.’
‘It’s disgusting!’
‘Life is often disgusting. But that isn’t a reason to break with him. You love him, don’t you? Forget all about Madame Molnar! Forget her! It’s not worth wrecking your life for her.’
‘I’m not wrecking my life. I have all sorts of plans. All sorts.’ She got up and went to the window, looking out on to the snow dithering down out of a leaden sky. ‘Oh, if only this winter were over. I want sun, sun!’
‘Be sensible. Forgive him. Forget.’
Alexine turned. ‘ No. Never. Never!’
Flowers arrived, bunches and bunches of them. Nanny Rose said that Adolph must be spending a fortune. Where did the money come from? He wasn’t rich, she said. Alexine shrugged and proffered her the latest bunch of flowers. ‘You can have these for your room. If there are any over, put them in the drawing-room.’ Letters also arrived, full of apologies, excuses, self-castigation and extravagant endearments. He had not seen Madame Molnar again, he would never see her. He belonged to Alexine, to Alexine only. Alexine eventually tore up all the letters that she had so far received, stuffed them into an envelope and sent them back to him not at his rooms but at the Prussian Embassy Two or three more letters followed, shorter, less ardent in tone. Then there was silence.
Word went round that he had broken with her. It was hardly surprising, people said, when she behaved so wildly and peculiarly. Harriet and Addy were furious – how could anyone think that it was she who had been abandoned? But Alexine said that she did not care, let them think what they wanted. It didn’t matter.
Secretly, howeyer, in the recesses of her heart, it did matter. She would go up to her bedroom, open the top drawer of her dressing-table, and take out the butterfly. She would pull on the string, to agitate its iridescent wings in what seemed to be its death throes. Pull, pull, pull. The wings fluttered more and more frenetically. She would think with a passionate longing and despair of that tumultuous love-making in that horrible little attic under the eaves. Pull, pull, pull. The string would bite into thumb and forefinger, leaving a red and raw indentation in the flesh. Pull, pull, pull.
Then, one early morning – she had not been able to sleep for thinking of him – the string snapped off and the butterfly was still.
Later one of the maids found it in the wastepaper basket. Though it was broken, she took it up to her attic room. She might be able to mend it, she thought. But she never got round to attempting to do so, and eventually she too threw it away.
Addy walked over to the piano and, having untied her bonnet, threw it across its closed, shimmering lid. She sighed. Harriet, who had broken off in the middle of a Chopin Étude, looked up. ‘A bad day?’
‘Bad? The end. I mean, I really mean, the end. I’m finished.’
‘What is all this?’ Harriet rose to her feet.
‘I’ve just spent my last day at the palace.’
‘What?’
‘It’s over. It’s all over. Twenty-three, no, twenty-four years, and now it’s over.’
‘What happened?’
‘She’s been giving me the cold shoulder for months and months. I told you that.’ Addy always referred to the Queen as ‘she’. When she did so, Harriet always knew whom she meant. ‘Juliana is now the favoured one. She’s the one who gets all the confidences – and the plums.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Addy snapped irritably. ‘That’s the way things have been going for a long, long time. She’s bored with me, she’s been bored with me for an age. She gives herself all those intellectual and spiritual airs and graces and she thinks that I’m not up to them. No wonder the King has so little to do with her. Well, my relationship with her has come to resemble his. The partners hardly speak to each other, but each lacks the courage – or energy – to do anything decisive about it. So today I decided to do something. I told her.’ Suddenly her voice, previously so low and weary, took on a triumphant ring.
‘Told her what?’
‘That I wanted it to come to an end. That I’d had enough. That I wanted my freedom.’
‘Oh, Addy! No!’
‘Yes, Harriet! Yes! It’s the best thing I’ve done for a long, long time. I’m free. At last I’m free.’
‘But what are you going to do with yourself?’
‘Read. To begin with, the whole of the Comédie Humaine. All of it, from beginning to end. Then … Then I’ll have to think what to do next.’
‘You can’t spend your whole life reading!’ Harriet, who rarely read, anything other than letters and the newspapers, was appalled.
‘Why not? What happens in books is usually far more interesting than what happens in life.’
Addy leaned across the piano and picked up her bonnet. She began to dust it off on one of the billowing sleeves of her dress. She was smiling, not across at her sister but, head lowered, to herself.
Chapter Three
‘AREN’T YOU WELL?’
Addy had not appeared at breakfast, merely sending one of the maids to bring her a cup of coffee. The curtains of her bedroom were closed, and she lay curled up in one corner of her four-poster bed, knees almost to chin and a hand under a cheek. There was a frowsty, vinegary smell in the air, familiar to Harriet from those days when, often accompanied by Alexine or Nanny Rose, she visited some slum tenement on one of her numerous charitable errands. She did not expect to smell that smell in her own house, where, under her exacting supervision, the staff were constantly sweeping, scrubbing and polishing.
When there was no answer, not even a lifting of the head from the bolster in which it was half-buried, Harriet repeated her question. ‘Aren’t you well?’
The voice emerged dull and muffled. ‘No. I’m sick.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Harriet now approached the bed and, after a moment of hesitation, lowered her by now substantial body down on to it. The bed shuddered and creaked. An inarticulate sound of exasperation emerged from Addy.
‘I’ve told you, I’m sick.’ Suddenly Addy raised herself on an elbow. Her hair, falling around her gaunt shoulder, was as dull as her voice. ‘Sick of life. Of everything.’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly. What you need is to do something. Your problem is that you’ve nothing to occupy you.’
Rarely ill herself, Harriet was always impatient with illness in others. Addy’s mental collapse left her baffled and exasperated. Of course, she had been through a terrible time in the past, with first that lost child and then that horrendous operation, no one could deny that; but it was poindess to continue to brood on such things when all that was necessa
ry was to ask Alexine or even herself for the money to do anything – travel, buy clothes, buy books, entertain – that she wanted. If she would accompany Harriet on even one of her charitable errands, she would at once see how fortunate she was.
‘I have plenty to occupy me. My thoughts. And they’re far from pleasant.’
The self-pity of it! Harriet had to restrain herself from showing her anger. ‘Why not pay another visit to Paris?’
‘To Paris? What for?’
‘You could have another consultation with that man. He did you so much good. Didn’t he?’
‘Yes, yes, those drops were fine. For a while. But then they began to make me feel confused … constantly tired … nauseous. Oh, you know all that!’
‘Well, their effect was probably wearing off. But he might have some other ideas. Doesn’t he also use mesmerism with his patients? That might help.’
‘Oh, do stop talking about him!’
‘I’m only trying to help. I could go with you to Paris. I need some new clothes. Everything I have is getting so shabby. Fashions change so fast these days.’ Harriet no longer went to Madame Molnar for clothes, and she had found no one as good to replace her in The Hague.
‘We’re too old to worry ourselves about fashion,’ Addy retorted morosely.
‘Too old! I’ll be worrying about fashion until my dying day. Come on! Get out of bed! It’s a beautiful day!’
Harriet crossed over to the windows and decisively pulled back the curtains. Addy let out a inarticulate wail and put the back of her right hand across her eyes. The sunshine, bright and hot, flooded in. Harriet experienced an upsurge of joy as she felt it on her face. Like Alexine, she loved glare and heat, often saying, ‘The thought of hell-fire doesn’t frighten me in the least. Now if one froze in hell, that would be another matter.’
‘Close them! Close them!’
Harriet shook her head. ‘Get out of bed!’ she ordered. She might have been speaking to a disobedient child. ‘A parcel of books has arrived for you,’ she added, hoping that that would tempt her. ‘From England. It must be those two Dickens novels you asked John to send you. Addy!’
But, with a groan, Addy had turned away, drawn up her knees, and once again half-buried her face in the bolster.
‘You’re impossible,’ Harriet said.
Later that day, Harriet wrote one of her fluent, businesslike letters to the Russian doctor. Her sister was too ill to visit him in Paris, she told him, and she did not trust any of the Dutch doctors whom they had consulted. She was clearly suffering from some form of neurasthenia; but she refused any of the treatments – rustication by the sea or in the mountains, diet, exercise in a variety of forms, sedatives and tonics – that had been prescribed. It was almost, she wrote, as though she wanted to be ill. But who would want that?
A few days later an answer arrived, not from the Russian himself but from his nephew. The nephew wrote that his uncle had retired after marrying a French widow with an estate in Provence. The implication was clear to Harriet – the widow, whom the nephew named and who had a title, was so rich that there was no longer any need for the doctor to work. The nephew, himself a doctor, had taken over his uncle’s practice, and was now forwarding, along with his letter, some sachets which the patient might find helpful. Ideally, of course, he would have preferred her to come to Paris for a consultation first; but, since she was not prepared to do that, this was the best that he could do.
The sachets, which were extremely expensive, were of different colours – pale pink for the morning, pale blue for the evening. Addy’s daily dose was one of each, its powder dissolved in water. When Harriet first took them in to her, Addy made a wry joke: ‘Well, those colours seem appropriate. I am usually in the pink in the morning and blue by the time that evening conies.’
Soon there was some improvement. From time to time Addy would now accompany Harriet or Alexine on a stroll along the canal, her pace so lethargic that it would fill them with ill-concealed exasperation; on one of their frequent and wildly extravagant shopping expeditions; or to a restaurant or café. But there were still many occasions when one or other of them would come on her seated in a chair, no longer reading, the book on her knees or even on the floor beside her, while she stared out ahead of her with puzzled, woebegone eyes, or even cried silently to herself, a handkerchief pressed to her lips, while the large tears rolled down her sunken cheeks.
‘Do you really think that medicine is doing her any good?’ Alexine asked.
‘Yes, of course it is.’
Harriet had the superstitious dread that, if one doubted for even a moment that Addy was improving, then she would at once relapse into her previous state of unrefieved despair.
A Viennese newspaper, left behind by a dog-breeder with whom Alexine was negotiating to buy a mastiff, suddenly and amazingly galvanized Addy. She had laid aside her knitting with a sigh, picked up the crumpled sheets off the table beside her, and begun to leaf through them in desultory fashion. Then something caught her attention. Her eyes narrowed and she jerked up in her chair. She read the item once, at speed, and then a second time, slowly.
A seventeen-year-old niece of the Austrian emperor had returned from a visit to a sanatorium run by a Swiss doctor in a remote corner of Slovenia, totally cured of the decfine in which she had seemed to be sliding inexorably to her death. She had recovered her appetite, she had returned to her normal weight, and every one of her symptoms had vanished. The doctor described himself as a ‘naturian’, since he believed that, if only patients could achieve a total harmony with nature, then they had within them the power to cure themselves, without any drugs. His one imperative was that all his patients must show total obedience to his commands, however irrational or disagreeable they might seem. If they could not undertake to do this, then it was pointless for them to come to his sanatorium.
‘Read this!’ Addy told Alexine, who had happened to come into the drawing-room in search of a lead for one of the dogs. She thrust the paper out at her. ‘Go on!’ It was months since she had displayed such peremptoriness. ‘What do you think?’
Alexine sat down on the settee opposite Addy’s chair, and tilted the paper upwards so that the flare of the recently installed gas lamp fully illuminated it.
‘What do you think?’
‘Wait just a moment. I haven’t had time to read it.’
Impatiently, her hollow eyes fixed on Alexine, Addy waited. ‘Well?’ she could not resist asking after a few moments.
‘Wait! Please!’
At last Alexine had finished her reading. She lowered the paper.
‘Well?’
‘He sounds like a crackpot to me. Or a crook. Both probably.’
‘The Emperor would hardly have allowed his niece to be treated by a crackpot or crook.’
‘Every court contains innumerable crackpots and crooks,’ Alexine retorted drily. ‘You must know that from your own experience. So – it’s not so odd to opt for a crackpot and crook as doctor.’
‘He cured her – cured her completely. It says that.’
Alexine nodded. She brooded for a while. ‘ What’s interesting is that ‘‘imperative’’ of his. People like imperatives. For some people they’re essential, if they’re to he happy. Or, at least, contented.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘People like ourselves have too much freedom. Money and position give us that. We’re constantly telling others what to do. It may be that secretly we want ourselves to be told what to do.’
‘I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do,’ Addy objected. But there was a note of uncertainty in her voice.
‘No?’
‘No.’
Within a few days, the three women were setting off for Lake Bled, with an entourage of Nanny Rose, three maids and old Daan.
‘This really is a fool’s errand,’ Harriet told Alexine.
‘Don’t tell Aunt Addy that. If she thinks that, then the cure won’t work.’
Chapter Four
HARRIET REMARKED that he looked vulgar.
Nanny Rose said that, if one saw him in the street, one might mistake him for a prosperous bookie.
Harriet laughed: ‘Perhaps he is a bookie.’
In the restaurant, the three women had been allocated the best table, in the bow of a tall window overlooking the lake, just as they had also been allocated the best accommodation, a series of suites on the first floor. Away from home, Nanny Rose was now more of a companion than an employee, and ate all her meals with Alexine and Harriet.
The middle-aged man, with the luxuriant moustache that cascaded over either end of the thin, rigid line of his mouth, sat alone at a small table in an alcove by the entrance. If theirs was the best table, his was the worst. It was his clothes that first drew their attention to him. His tight-fitting black trousers, jacket, elastic-sided boots and close-cropped hair all had a uniform gloss; his neckerchief was gaudily coloured; there was a large hot-house red carnation in his button-hole, arid a thick, ornate gold ring on his little finger. He devoured his food as though faced with some chore that he was eager to complete as quickly and efficiently as possible, never looking around him and so never noticing that the three women, fascinated by his air of strength, purpose and force, were spending so much of their time surreptitiously glancing at him. Eventually, having risen to his feet, wiped his lips on his napkin and then thrown the napkin down on to his chair, he hurried out.
While awaiting their next course, Alexine became aware that, shoulders hunched and hands clasped behind his back, he was striding restlessly up and down the terrace beyond the dining-room, a huge cigar clamped between his nicotine-stained teeth. The lamps on the terrace, swaying in the wind that so often roused itself at that hour, made his shadow leap hither and thither, now in front of him and now behind him. He struck her as much taller than when she had seen him at the table. His air of crude, brutal vigour both repelled and fascinated her.