I unrolled the package. Inside the tissue was a well-made and very serviceable corset.
‘I spoke to my father,’ said Edith, flushing, ‘and he said it was all right. So I went between lectures.’ She looked up at me appealingly. ‘My mother doesn’t know.’
I was extremely pleased and told her so. For a moment I even wondered if I could do something quite fundamental to make her into an attractive girl. If I changed her spectacles . . . if I gave her raw liver sandwiches . . .
No, not even then.
I have not dared to write this down before for fear of tempting the gods, but I have been watching my pear tree very carefully and I think I can now say that this autumn I shall have an undoubted, a long-awaited and actual pear.
Today it rained and my two least favourite clients came to the shop.
I have made Frau Egger a good cloak: brown loden cloth edged with braid in a darker tone, and frogging.
‘Horn buttons would definitely work better, Frau Egger,’ I said, laying them against the material. The others are far too heavy.’
But she still wanted the military buttons. She wanted the buttons with an owl’s head pierced by a lance and the word Aggredi repeated twelve times on her bosom, for the cloak is double-breasted.
‘We’d better postpone a decision till the final fitting,’ I said.
But the final fitting won’t, alas, be final, for Frau Egger has ordered a skirt in the same material as the cloak. I’m under no illusions that it is my brilliant dressmaking that attracts the poor woman to my shop. She is still desperate about her husband’s affair with Lily from the post office; still determined to speak to Nini and find out what is going on. And the absurd thing is that her panic is quite unnecessary. Lily, quite unprompted, has jettisoned the Minister: pomposity, meanness, Nasty Little Habit and all.
She told him it was because she didn’t want to hurt his wife,’ said Nini, ‘but it isn’t that at all. He’s just a horrible man.’
No sooner had Frau Egger left than the Countess von Metz’s creaking carriage drew up before my door and the detestable old woman alighted, unexpected and unannounced, and stumped into the shop.
‘I have sent for you twice,’ she said imperiously. ‘I desire you to make me a coat and skirt.’
‘When you pay me for the last two dresses I have made for you, I shall be pleased to attend you, Countess.’
The Countess ignored this. ‘Wasn’t that the Egger I saw coming out of your shop?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really, I don’t know why you dress that dreary middle-class sheep. Her husband is an abomination. He’s just turned poor old Baron König out of his house. Some rubbish about widening the street to improve traffic flow. A lot of drunken cab drivers and nouveaux riches in motor cars — why should they flow?’
I repressed the disquiet I always feel when the Minister’s activities are mentioned, and picked up Frau Egger’s buttons to return them to their box.
‘Good God,’ said the Countess rudely, peering at the buttons through her lorgnette. ‘The Pressburg Fusiliers! A useless lot — they were stationed near my brother’s regiment in Moravia. Disbanded in 84 and good riddance! What on earth are they doing here?’
‘A customer brought them.’
‘Well, she has no right to. Goodness knows what my brother would have said, turning army insignia into playthings.’ And as I kept silence: ‘I thought a dark green broadcloth or needlecord, perhaps? A flared skirt and a fitted jacket with a peplum — very simple but with bishop sleeves. Your sleeves are always satisfactory, I admit.’
I didn’t answer, picked up my account book.
‘A lot of people won’t wear green. After green comes black, they say. But I don’t care for that. Black came to me from the cradle. My mother died when I was two, then my sister, then my aunt. And my brother, of course, but that was later. No, I’m not afraid to wear green.’ She hit the floor with her cane. ‘You are aware that the dagger I sent you was worth far more than the grosgrain dress? It is a valuable antique.’
‘It’s a pruning knife. Ask the pawnbroker.’
‘The pawnbroker! I give you the treasures of my household and you take them to a pawnbroker! If you are unwise enough to sell, at least take them to a proper antique dealer who knows his job.’
But I wasn’t going to be provoked and went on with my accounts.
‘Well . . . perhaps I might have made a mistake about the dagger.’ Her purple nose twitched with longing for the workroom with its bales of cloth. ‘It so happens I have one or two interesting things I could let you have. My brother’s cigar box, for example.’
‘Countess, those things are no good to me. I can’t pay my bills with them. Why don’t you go to Chez Jaquetta in the Kärnterstrasse? She may be honoured to dress someone of your rank for nothing.’
‘Chez Jaquetta! Are you out of your mind? I wouldn’t dress my parrot at that place. Her workmanship’s shoddy and she has as much taste as a kitchenmaid. Good Lord, she put the Baroness Lefevre into puce satin covered in dead birds. Ortolans, hundreds of them, hanging on with their beaks. When the Baroness sits down its like a charnel house: bones breaking, feathers flying . . .’
Defeat. Total defeat. I knew it even as I felt my face crease into an entirely involuntary smile. ‘It so happens I have a length of bottle-green broadcloth; it’s the end of a roll . . . ’
It’s impossible, reprehensible . . . something must be done about the deep and unadulterated joy that courses through me when people speak ill of Chez Jaquetta.
That her activities in the university might have made life difficult for her daughter does not seem to have occurred to Laura Sultzer.
I’d been to the town hall to pay my rates and was taking a short cut through the gardens when I saw Edith Sultzer sitting on a bench. She was reading a book and eating a large raw carrot, and I was about to pass her when she looked up and showed her pale gums in a smile of such friendliness that I felt compelled to stop.
‘How sensible of you to take your lunch out of doors.’
‘Yes, I . . . I used to eat in the university canteen but since my mother, . . . since she let out the rats . . . the other students aren’t very nice. Not that I have many friends there anyway. I don’t mind. I’m too busy with my studies.’
I asked after the Plotzenheimer Prize Essay and heard that it was going well. The deadline was the end of August, but Edith thought she would get it done in time. Her topic (suggested by her mother) was: ‘Seventeenth-Century Comments on the Epic of Beowulf with Special Reference to the Contribution of Theophilus Krumm’.
‘You know, I have to confess that I’ve never really read Beowulf I said. ‘What’s the actual story?’
Edith then told it to me and it sounded good. There was a brave knight, a monster called Grendel whom he slew, and in due course another hazard in the form of Grendel’s mother who was even nastier than her son.
‘But of course we don’t read the actual poem very much,’ explained Edith. ‘We read what people have said about it.’
As I got up to go, it occurred to me that Edith might have some information on a problem that was troubling me, namely Magdalena Winter’s hair.
‘You see, it’s not easy to design clothes for a grown-up woman who has her hair hanging down her back. Do you know why she wears it like that?’
Edith nodded. ‘Yes, I do. It’s because her hair belongs to Jesus. Only she calls Him The Christ.’
‘I see. But surely it could still belong to Him even if it was coiled up and pinned?’
The Bluestocking looked troubled. ‘Magdalena has a very special relationship with God,’ she said.
‘So I observe.’
I’m afraid things are going badly for the poor little Count of Monte Cristo across the way. His uncle is out every day trying to find s
omeone to hear the child, but he is not a prepossessing figure and no one, so far, has shown the slightest interest in his Wunderkind. It is only in the evening when his uncle is back that Sigismund comes out into the square. Perhaps they are afraid that if no one is left to guard the piano it will vanish. Not so unlikely, it is only hired and their meagre stock of money is getting very low.
‘Another couple of months,’ Frau Hinkler says, ‘and then they’ll be off back where they came from, and good riddance.’
Meanwhile a new figure has entered my life. She sits on a woolly cloud staring down at me; a dark, angry-looking woman who resembles Frau Wilkolaz, the Polish lady in the paper shop who suffers with her nerves.
This gloomy angel is Sigismund’s mother and she is not pleased with me. She doesn’t think it is enough for me to say ‘Grüss Gott’ to her child of an evening when I feel like it. She wants me to take proper notice of him, to care for him and invite him to my house. True, I have shown Sigismund how to pat Rip, I have introduced him to General Madensky on his plinth and explained about the hair dye and the moustaches.
But though he stands and looks at my shop like a starveling in a fairy tale, I have not invited him into my house — and it is this that the Polish lady on her cloud does not think good enough. She wants me to bake vanilla kipferl for him in my kitchen, to stitch him a shirt and tell him stories, but she is destined to be disappointed. If I cannot have my daughter I won’t make do with substitutes — that I promised myself when I lost her all those years ago.
Tonight, as Sigismund stood by the fountain, I saw on his skinny, unwashed leg two weals as though made by a cane or ruler.
‘What are those, Sigismund? What happened?’
He looked down without much interest. ‘My uncle hit me.’ Of course; on the leg . . . Never on the precious hands, never a box on the ear.
‘Why?’
He shrugged his ancient shoulders. ‘He wants me to play the Waldstein Sonata because it looks difficult and people will think I’m clever. But the chords in the last movement are not possible.’
All Poles have to learn the language of their conquerors. Sigismund’s German is correct and formal, but he speaks in a low throaty voice so that sometimes I have to bend down to hear him.
‘You’re too young to play the Waldstein?’
He looked up and his hands came forward, stretched on an invisible keyboard.
‘I am not too young,’ he said. ‘I am too small.’
Edith was right. Magdalena’s hair does belong to The Christ. She confirmed this herself as she stood in my fitting room in her wedding dress.
Till I became steeped in mortal sin I was a good Catholic and even now I would be lost without the consolations of the church, but this annoyed me.
‘What about Herr Huber? Doesn’t it belong to him a little?’
Magdalena turned her beautiful sapphire eyes on me, more puzzled than offended, and regretting my sharpness I said:
‘You see, your headdress has been designed to be raised above your braided hair. If you’re going to wear it loose I shall have to think again. But do you really want to look like a bride in an Italian opera?’
Magdalena fingered her rosary and said she would ask. ‘That’s a good idea. Your mother would be able to advise you. Or perhaps you have other relatives?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t ask my mother. The Blessed Virgin will advise me. Or one of Them.’ She looked up at the draped ceiling of the cubicle and I remembered her tender conversation with the wax puppets under glass.
‘The saints, you mean?’
Magdalena nodded. The thought that she is a little crazy has of course occurred to me before — yet with her brothers she is said to be practical and kind, and when you can get her to fix her mind on her clothes her suggestions are often quite sensible. And after all, if more people discussed their hairstyles with the saints one might not see so many bedraggled birds’ nests or listing chignons. Even when carrying their eyes in front of them on cushions or tied to wheels, the saints always look neat and seemly.
Meanwhile Herr Huber — there is no doubt about it — has become our friend. He has sent round a kaiserwurst the size of Odin’s thigh and Alice (whom he admires inordinately as a hierophant of the sacred art of operetta) is awash in wiener wurstl.
To facilitate his courtship he has taken a room at the Astoria and only goes down to Linz two days a week to supervise his business interests there. God, who was so unenthusiastic about 167 Augustiner Strasse, has approved entirely of 14A, The Graben, which Herr Huber is turning into a temple of charcuterie. Even so he has time on his hands, for the Winters’ flat is so small that he doesn’t care to sit there too long of an evening, and he has made it clear that his car and his company are entirely at our disposal.
So old-fashioned is Magdalena’s mother, so obsessed with what she imagines to be genteel behaviour, that Magdalena is allowed out with her future bridegroom only in the presence of a chaperon. Middle-class girls in Vienna really do not any longer behave like this and I can’t help wondering if it is partly Magdalena’s own wish. Since the Winters have no maid it is Edith who has been called in to accompany Magdalena on her outings with the butcher. Laura Sultzer strongly disapproves of this arrangement: Edith should be at home studying for the Plotzenheimer Essay in Anglo-Saxon studies, not riding round in canary-yellow motors with pork butchers about whom neither Goethe nor Schopenhauer had anything to say. But Edith seems quite happy to act as duenna and waddles heroically beside the affianced couple, clutching her briefcase and engaging Herr Huber in the conversation which does not readily fall from the lovely Magdalena’s lips.
‘Is it true that the Hungarians put donkeys in their salamis?’ I heard her say, blinking anxiously at Herr Huber through her spectacles.
And the butcher’s soothing reply: ‘It is true. But it doesn’t mean that the Hungarians are wicked; only that they make good salamis.’
I have not been particularly good this week. I have visited no sickbeds, I was cross with Gretl when she knocked over the box with Frau Egger’s ridiculous buttons. And yet — and this shows how mysteriously and marvellously God goes about his business — on Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting beside Hatschek in a carriage bound for a hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods — and Gernot.
My lover had borrowed the house from a colleague who had gone to America in pursuit of a rich wife. We were to have the evening together, and the night. A whole, entire night, for which I had packed a whole and moderately entire nightdress, but I wore the rich cream dress I had worn the last time at the Bristol. So much of love has to do with remembrance.
I love driving with Hatschek. It is from him that I learn those details of Gernot’s life that he regards as trivial or uninteresting. It is from Hatschek that I hear the tributes paid to him by his men, the intrigues and dangers that he has to face. They had just returned from Serbia, as part of the delegation supposed to undo the harm we had done by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovinia — a move Gernot had consistently opposed.
‘He wouldn’t let anyone give him a bodyguard, neither. Just walked round the slums in mufti, saying he had to know what people were thinking. Well, I could tell him what they were thinking. They were thinking how to murder every Austrian they could lay hands on, the swine.’
Even more then the Ordnance Department, we hate the Serbians, Hatschek and I.
We passed Mayerling in its dark circle of trees. They’ve pulled down the hunting lodge in which the Crown Prince shot himself and his mad little mistress and built a convent, now filled with mourning nuns, but I don’t know why. Rudolf had a good life and a good death, surely, with silly, loving Mitzi by his side?
Gernot was waiting by the door. In spite of his gruelling time in Serbia he looked extremely fit.
‘Ah, I see you have decided to be beautiful.’ He kissed my hands, then the self-co
loured silken rose on my bodice, a gesture I found unsettling.
‘Do you object?’
Not exactly. As long as you keep it up. I can get accustomed to you looking like the Primavera. It’s when you suddenly think of something sad and turn into a potato-picking peasant in one of those dark Van Goghs that I get unsettled. After all, maybe I can have her for life, I think then — not everybody wants to go to bed with potato-picking peasants. And then you giggle and we’re back in the schoolroom: a Backfisch preparing for her first dance . . .’
‘I never giggle,’ I said sternly, unbuttoning my gloves.
We had supper in a panelled room, served by Hatschek and watched by the heads of about four hundred chamoix on the wall. As we finished our meal it began to rain, but my suggestion that we should now go out and smell the fragrance of the woods was badly received.
‘Your hair smells of larches,’ said Gernot, ‘I’ve told you before . . . So there’s not the slightest need to go plodding about in the rain.’
In the bedroom there were more dead chamoix, a stuffed trout under glass and a bearskin. Also a vast and marvellously solid bed.
I disappeared into the dressing room, took off my clothes, put on the nightdress.
‘Ah, delightful!’ said Gernot, surveying me through his monocle. ‘Might one ask why you have dressed again?’
‘It’s because we have a whole night. I’m establishing permanence . . . status.’
A mistake. The bleak, closed look came over his face. The furrows made by Macedonia and Serbia and the idiocies of the General Staff deepened on his brow. ‘That’s why I’ll be consigned to hell — because I didn’t force you to leave me. You could be a happily married matron with a cupboard full of nightdresses.’
‘But not like this one.’ It was high-necked, long-sleeved, exceedingly demure; it was just that the material was not very thick. I walked into his arms, fashioned my hair into a tent for us both . . . ‘You know I like it best like this; I like having to re-create our love afresh each time. I like being on my mettle.’