The Sea Cave

by Alan Scholefield

  Suddenly, she said, ‘Stop!’

  Looking anxious, he pulled up. She was pointing to a sign on a tree-lined street to their left. ‘Look! Gustav Tchermakgasse!’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s the street where Mrs. Preller lived. Tom, let’s go and look at her house.’

  ‘Do you know which one it is?’

  ‘She talked about it over and over. I’ll probably recognise it.’

  They drove slowly along the short street. There were not more than a dozen houses. They were all substantial, giving an air of wealth and opulence to the quiet neighbourhood.

  ‘This area is called the Cottāge,’ Tom said. ‘New and old money all mixed up.’

  ‘That must be it.’ She pointed to a house behind tall iron gates. An iron fence edged the large garden and she remembered Mrs. Preller telling her it was half the size of a city block.

  He stopped the car. She got out and went to the railings. The house, at the top of wide steps, was beautiful, with simple, classical lines, rather like Tom’s cottage, but on a grander scale.

  He pointed at a notice hanging on the railings. ‘It’s for sale.’

  ‘Let’s go in and look at it.’

  The gate was unlocked. A gravel path led to the back of the house, into a formal garden with cypress hedges and lime and horse-chestnut trees. In a shaded corner was the rotunda where, Kate remembered, the family had played cards. It was overlooked by the windows from which the young Augusta had observed them as she practised the piano.

  Suddenly, they heard a voice. They turned and saw an old man in a black suit. He was clearly upset and waved his arms angrily at them.

  ‘He’s telling us to clear off,’ Tom said. ‘He’s the caretaker.’

  ‘Tell him we know someone who once lived here.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Her first name is Augusta.’

  As Tom spoke, the old man stopped muttering and gesticulating. ‘Fräulein Augusta?’ he said. ‘Fräulein Augusta von Berendorf?’

  ‘Tell him I’m her daughter-in-law,’ Kate said.

  He listened, unbelievingly, then took her hand and bowed as he talked to Tom.

  ‘He used to be the gardener here. He worked for her family. His name is Vedder.’

  Tom’s German was fluent, if sometimes erratic, and he was able to piece together what the old man said. ‘He worked for them for years. Apparently he came from the family’s estate.’

  ‘Ask him if any of them are still alive. Mrs. Preller had two older sisters.’

  ‘He says he doesn’t know. He stayed on when they left. A Jewish factory owner bought the house. He died six months ago and the house has been on the market ever since.’

  As they said good-bye, the man spoke again.

  ‘He says their old governess is still alive,’ Tom said. ‘She’s English, and she still lives in Vienna.’

  ‘Does he know her address?’

  The old man disappeared into the house. When he returned, he handed Kate a slip of paper.

  The next morning, as Tom was working at his typewriter, she went shopping. When she had finished, she looked at the name, Fräulein Binns, and the address, in a part of Vienna she did not know. On impulse, she found a taxi and handed the driver the paper.

  Miss Binns lived in the bottom half of an old house built above a railway-line. As Kate knocked at the door she heard a roar and a long-drawn wail, then steam rose above the roof of the house as a train went by.

  Before the echoes had died away, the door was opened and she found herself looking down at the diminutive figure of a very old woman wearing a dark dress and a lace cap. She was no more than four foot ten inches tall.

  ‘Bitte?’ she said.

  ‘I’m looking for Fräulein Binns,’ Kate said.

  ‘I am Miss Binns.’ She might have been very old, but her voice was crisp and her eyes were bright. She reminded Kate of a bird, in much the same way that Mendel did. ‘I do not give English lessons any longer.’

  ‘No, no! I don’t want lessons,’ Kate said, and explained who she was.

  ‘You know Augusta von Berendorf?’ The old eyes shone, the wrinkled skin of her face rearranged itself into a smile of welcome. ‘Come in, my dear!’

  She led the way along a dark passage into a room which was furnished in the style of fifty years earlier, with lace anti-macassars and aspidistras and oversized pieces of mahogany furniture. A large window overlooked a narrow garden that ran down to the railway tracks. There was a chair facing the window and next to it was a low table on which was an open book containing what appeared to be rows of figures, and a small carriage clock.

  There was another roar and a locomotive passed along the end of the garden. Steam rose. The whistle sounded. When the noise faded and the coaches were rattling past, shaking the house, Miss Binns peered at the book through a magnifying glass, and Kate realised it was a railway time-table.

  ‘Number 191,’ she said. ‘St. Polten . . . Melk . . . Pochlarn . . . Austetten . . . St. Valentin . . . Linz. Three minutes late.’

  She settled herself by the window and waved Kate to another chair. ‘Do you like trains?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never thought much about them.’

  ‘I didn’t when I came here. But the house was cheap because of the noise. There’s a whistle sign just below the garden. I didn’t sleep for a week, then I dreamed the trains were in bed with me. But I realised that if I let them worry me, I would go off my head. I said to myself, “Take an interest. Learn about them.” Now I know them all. Sometimes when I lie in bed at night I say to myself, that’s the Number 2020 or Number 1073. Or that’s the Simplon-Orient going down to Constantinople. Or the Arlberg-Orient starting off for Paris. They’re friendly things.’

  Kate spent nearly two hours with her. They drank coffee and talked of trains, and of the von Berendorf family, of which Miss Binns had been part.

  ‘Of course, none of them suspected that the money was running out,’ she said. ‘The girls lived the kind of life they had been brought up to accept. There was the estate in the Waldviertel which they hardly ever visited, the holiday house in the Salzkammergut, the big house in the Cottāge. Herr von Berendorf had a box at the Staatsoper and another at the Volksoper. They always took season tickets for the Musikverein. They kept their own carriages and would go to Baden for the waters whenever they chose.’

  ‘And no one knew about the debts?’ Kate said.

  ‘Augusta’s father never discussed his financial affairs, not even with his wife. It was the way the von Berendorfs had always lived. Men never talked business with their wives. Women were not supposed to have the brains to understand.’

  Their talk was punctuated by periods of silence as trains passed. On each occasion, she checked the time. Some were up to five minutes late and she made a disapproving click with her tongue before resuming the conversation.

  ‘Well, it all came to an end. All came crashing down. People talked about it as though it were a tragedy, and I suppose it was, for the family, but then came the war and it seemed rather insignificant compared with other tragedies.’

  ‘Mrs . . . Miss Augusta, that is, told me that they lost almost everything when her father died.’

  ‘Everything. That’s why they made the bargain.’

  ‘The bargain?’

  ‘For her to go out to Africa with that man – what was his name?’

  ‘Preller.’

  ‘I always forget it. A dreadful man. Uncouth. Like a bull. He fell in love with Augusta, but she did not care for him at all. And so . . . you could say he bought her.’

  ‘Bought her!’

  ‘Not literally, I suppose. But he came to an agreement with Frau von Berendorf. So much money for her and the two other girls if Augusta married him. I remember Bella – that was one of her sisters, the other was Anna – coming to me in tears. “What can we do, Binnsie?” she said. “You can go out to work like me,” I said. “Work?” she said. It was like sug
gesting she might fly.’

  ‘So Mr. Preller supported the family?’

  ‘At the beginning. That was the bargain. There would be enough for Frau von Berendorf and the two girls to buy a small apartment and an amount invested for them to live on.’

  ‘Did the other girls ever marry?’

  ‘Never. They had no dowries. I saw them from time to time, and I wrote to Augusta when each of them passed away.’

  Kate had a vivid picture of Mrs. Preller in her isolation at Saxenburg reading of her sisters’ deaths and being forced to remember the truth of her past rather than the pretence she maintained.

  ‘She sent money for the funerals. She loved her family.’

  ‘Even though they sacrificed her?’

  ‘Sacrifice is a big word . . .’ The Zurich Express crashed along the tracks and she checked the clock, then nodded. ‘On time. Girls did that sort of thing in those days. Half the marriages in Vienna were financial arrangements. Some still are. What else could she have done? I suppose there were compensations. He was very rich. And she took a lover.’

  ‘A lover?’

  ‘Of course. That is the natural consequence of such marriages. Everyone does it. As long as the affairs are discreet, no one minds. Society does not – or at least, when there was a society it did not expect a fiscal contract to end in love. Oh no, my dear, that is how the middle classes live. To aristocrats, marriage and love were totally separate. She did what anyone of her class would have done. She used to write to me regularly in the early days, then the letters stopped. Yes, she had a lover. Perhaps more than one. I can’t remember now. I think she really was very fond of him. She used to tell me how handsome he was. I think she wrote because she needed to tell someone.’

  ‘Did she mention a name? Was he in Cape Town or in Helmsdale?’

  ‘My dear, it’s so long ago! My memory is not what it used to be. Once I could tell you where all the trains stopped, now I have to look in the time-table. No, I can’t remember a name, and I destroyed the letter.’

  In her mind Kate was rapidly rearranging the pieces of information. Mrs. Preller had once had a lover. It did not altogether surprise her. But who? It might have been someone in Cape Town. Then she recalled Dr. du Toit once saying that Smuts had loved her, and it was plain that he still did. Could it have been him? Could the brawls between him and Boss Preller have been over Augusta? She tried to visualise Smuts as a young man. She doubted if he had ever been handsome, but perhaps Mrs. Preller had been looking for something else. If Boss Preller had been uncouth and violent, would Smuts not have been acceptable by comparison? He was a rough diamond, but there was a streak of goodness in him. Or was the whole story simply a fabrication produced by unhappiness and loneliness? Had she not built a world in Saxenburg for Miss Binns as she had built for Saxenburg her story of the rich and handsome young man who had swept her off her feet in Vienna, with no mention of the family tragedy? Could the lover she described have been only a product of dreams?

  ‘After a while, she stopped writing,’ Miss Binns went on. ‘Bella died when she was quite young. Then Anna went. I wrote each time. She sent money, but no reply. Then, out of the blue, years later, she wrote, thanking me for all I had done. It was a surprise, because I had done nothing. I remember that letter better than the others because it was muddled and unlike Augusta. She said she’d had an accident a year or so before.’ That would have been the fire, Kate thought. ‘She talked about coming back to Vienna. She wanted to come, because of the scandal.’

  ‘What scandal?’

  ‘I don’t know, my dear. It had something to do with another child, or so I thought. You say there were only two boys, but I had the impression that there had been three children: two boys and a girl. I remember something about a sister.’

  ‘I’m sure there were only two children.’

  ‘I told you it was a muddled letter. I had the feeling she might have been drinking when she wrote it. And I’ve said my memory isn’t what it was. But I do remember it as being very bitter.’

  Suddenly, Saxenburg was very close. Sitting in the over-furnished room in Vienna with the trains thundering past the window, Kate felt again the dark melancholy of the big house, the secrecy, the mystery, and a mood of bleakness came over her.

  *

  It was nearly lunchtime when she got back to Potzleinsdorf. Tom was still typing under the canopy of shade in the summer house. She found a bottle of cold Gumpoldskirchen in the ice-chest and took it out. ‘Time to stop,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve missed you. Where have you been?’

  She told him. Then she brought out a rug and some wurst and black bread and they lay in the shade and had their lunch. It was a beautiful day, warm, sunny and drowsy with heat. When they had finished eating she lay beside him and put her head on his outstretched arm.

  ‘My holiday is nearly over,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. May I stay for a while?’

  ‘Of course! You realise I might have to go away?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Could be anywhere: Yugoslavia, Hungary. You’d be alone. Would you mind?’

  ‘Not if I knew you were coming back. But we have two more days. Let’s not talk about it until then.’

  She was suddenly afraid of losing him, and there was an echo in her mind of the day she had left him in Cape Town to go to Saxenburg. ‘Hold me,’ she said, and he put his other arm around her and held her tightly.

  As the afternoon began to cool, he said, ‘Let’s go to that heuriger at the top of Krottenbachstrasse. Then we can go to Anton’s in Sievering and eat roast duck. We’ll make an evening of it.’

  They were getting into his car when a post office messenger arrived with a cable.

  ‘Blast it! They can’t even let me finish my vacation,’ he said. Then he saw the address, and frowned. ‘It’s for you.’

  She slit open the envelope and pulled out the cable. It was short and had been re-routed by her bank in London. It read: Charles arrested for murder. Mrs. Preller dangerously ill. Smuts.

  Chapter Three

  Another train, another country. Kate sat in her green leather compartment in the brown, dusty coach as it rattled across the bleak windswept plains of gnarled trees and fynbos that would end in Helmsdale and Saxenburg and the sea.

  A bare two months before she had watched the Austrian mountains slip by as the Arlberg-Orient Express had rushed down the deep valleys. Then she had felt a tight excitement at what was to come; now she was hollow with apprehension.

  Unlike the soft evening heat of Vienna, this late afternoon in spring was dry and baking. If she closed thewindows she burst out in beads of perspiration; if she opened them, the south-easter blew the engine smoke into the compartment. Her head rolled from side to side to the movement of the train. She seemed to have been travelling for ever. It was nearly six weeks since the cable had reached her in Vienna. She had returned to London, but there was not a berth to South Africa to be had, for the English autumn was starting and the ships were full of migratory rich going out to winter at the Cape. Finally, she found accommodation in a Holland-Afrika liner sailing from Rotterdam, but it had taken the long, slow way via Suez and through the Red Sea, stopping at port after port.

  She visualized her journey as a line on a map, starting in middle Europe and going west, then eastward through the Mediterranean, then south and now, finally, south-east. She was tired. More than tired: she was weary to her very core, mentally exhausted by the problems she was trying to face. The ship had berthed that morning, but she had been too tired even to go and see her parents, although she’d had several hours to kill before the train left.

  The train slowed. She saw the familiar red and green and black corrugated-iron roofs of Helmsdale, and then they were coming to a halt in the station. She saw Smuts’ bantam-like figure on the platform, and waved. He came to the window. ‘Thank God you’re back,’ he said.
/>   He helped her down and they walked to the car. ‘I’ll send the lorry for the luggage,’ he said.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Better than she was, my friend, I can tell you that.’

  ‘And Charles?’

  ‘Not so bloody good.’

  People in the small car-park were staring at her. She would have to put up with that now: the wife of a man who had been arrested for murder.

  ‘Let’s go . . .’ She was about to form the word ‘home,’ but it stuck in her throat. ‘Let’s go back to Saxenburg and talk there.’

  They drove along the cliff road, past the ruined houses, and she saw that another one was being renovated. But the Berrangé place still stood in its desolation. When they reached Saxenburg she said, ‘Before I go up, I want to hear everything.’

  ‘Well, it’s sundowner time.’ She realised that he was making an effort to be his old self.

  They had a drink in his room. She told him briefly about her journey, then said, ‘If you or Mrs. Preller have written recently, I won’t have seen the letters. I haven’t heard from Charles. I’ve no idea what’s been happening.’

  ‘I saw Charles three days ago. He asked if we had heard from you. He said he couldn’t bring himself to write.’

  ‘So tell me about it, from the beginning.’

  ‘You know that Betty died?’

  ‘Yes. I had your letter about that just before I left. You didn’t say how.’

  ‘She had taken up with one of the fishermen in the village. She was drinking a lot. We had some cold weather and one night, when he was at sea, she lit an old paraffin heater. She must have been drunk, because she did not leave a window open. Maybe she went to sleep. The fumes killed her.’ He sighed. ‘That was the start of everything. Until then, things had been going along not too badly. Charles was doing his best. The season was looking good. Then Betty died. Lena was still here then. She’s gone now. You remember she was peculiar even before you left?’

  Kate recalled Lena’s growing religious mania, and nodded.