And then Tante Wilhelmina turned and fixed her suffering, other-worldly eyes on Uncle Ferdi.
With a superhuman effort, the dying woman struggled up from her pillows. My mother on one side, Steffi on the other managed to support her heaving, swaying form into an upright position. An arm in lilac crepe de Chine crept out towards her mournful, waiting husband.
It was going to be all right. She was going to forgive him. The great wrong he had done her almost thirty years ago was now expiated. In death they would be reconciled.
‘F… Fer…’ Gasping, choking, Tante Wilhelmina tried to say her husband’s name. Then with an unutterably awful cry she fell backwards on to the pillows.
A choking rattle followed. Silence.
Uncle Ferdi, grief-stricken, huddled back in his chair. The hairdresser stepped forward tentatively, a mirror in his hand…
And jumped back like a scalded cat as Tante Wilhelmina, exhausted by her labours, gave vent to yet another enormous and room-shattering snore.
‘You mean she often does it?’ I said to my mother a few days later. ‘Often has a death-bed?’
My mother was folding table linen, her square deft hands flicking the damask. Now she looked up at me and sighed. ‘Fairly often. About twice a year. You were too young before; I always sent you away.’
‘But why?’ I said. ‘Why?’
My mother frowned. ‘I think… I don’t know really… but I think perhaps she wants very much to forgive him. To make up the quarrel. Only her pride won’t let her. The death-beds are a way of… forcing her own hand. But then in the end, she can’t quite make it.’
I only partly understood. But: ‘Poor Tante Wilhelmina,’ I said, and my mother smiled and touched my hair as though I had said something to please her.
It was then that I plucked up courage to ask something I had wanted to ask for years. ‘What was the quarrel about? What was it that Uncle Ferdi did to her?’
The smile left my mother’s face. ‘Never ask me that, Karl,’ she said, turning back to the linen.
During the next few years the death-beds came thick and fast. By the time I was twelve, I could have organised one almost as well as my mother. Long before Herr Kugelheim arrived with his curling tongs, I’d have caught Wotan and Parsifal, arranged the big chair for Uncle Ferdi, helped to round up the maids, the cousins and Steffi… Always Tante Wilhelmina forgave the rest of us and always, just before she could forgive her husband, she fell back, apparently lifeless, on the pillows. ‘I SEEM TO HAVE BEEN SPARED’ she would write to him next day. And everything would go on exactly as before.
Then, when I was about thirteen, came a death-bed which I shall never forget because what happened there set the pattern for the rest of my life.
I wish I could think of better and less hackneyed words to use, but I cannot. So I only state that I fell — and it really was a falling — in love.
I knew, of course, that Steffi and Victor Goldmann had a daughter. But while I normally had the freedom of the house, when visitors or relations came my mother kept me strictly in the servants’ quarters. So it was not until she was old enough to attend her first death-bed that I saw Ruth.
It was an autumn death-bed, I remember. The chestnuts in the square outside were dropping golden fingers on to the Archduke somebody-or-other who rode out there for ever. I remember this because Ruth’s hair was the colour of those leaves and so were her eyes — her father’s wise, El Greco eyes — but hair and eyes, both, were lightened, gold-flecked, because of silly, blonde, incurably Aryan Steffi.
I don’t think anything happened, except that I had an overwhelming longing to cross the room and stand beside her on the other side of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed, but didn’t because she was ‘family’ and I was the housekeeper’s son. But after that we met secretly after school wherever and whenever we could; in the Volksgarten, on the steps of the Karls Kirche, by the Mozart memorial… And if I say I was happier then than I have ever been, I don’t want to imply some childish mock-romantic idyll. It was with absolute seriousness that Ruth and I, trailing our satchels through the streets of Vienna, discussed our future life together, planning everything from the kind of dog we would breed on our farm near Salzburg to the portion of our income we would donate to the poor.
And then came the last death-bed. The one at which death, which had been mocked so long, was mocked no longer.
It began exactly like the others. The hairdresser came, the cats were caught. Even Siegfried, temporarily sated, was present for once — and Ruth had a blue ribbon in her hair.
Tante Wilhelmina forgave the maids, the rollmops cousin, Steffi, me…
And finally struggled into a sitting position to stare, her arm extended, at Uncle Ferdi.
Uncle Ferdi had aged a lot recently. His eyes behind the gold pince-nez had lost their piercing blue; his moustache drooped; even his bald head no longer shone bravely in the lamplight and I remember praying that this time it really would happen. That this time, at last, she really would forgive him.
‘F… Fer…’ began Tante Wilhelmina. And then suddenly, her whole face crumpled into a look of agony and disbelief.
While slowly, very slowly, Uncle Ferdi slipped from his chair on to the floor and lay there, very peaceful looking and quite, quite still.
What I remember most vividly is not Tante Wilhelmina’s racking sobs, nor even Ruth Goldmann’s gold-flecked eyes as they widened to take in the shock and pain, but the baffled, bewildered look on old Kugelheim’s face as he stepped forward, clutching his curling-tongs, and stood looking down at Uncle Ferdi’s totally bald head…
After Uncle Ferdi’s death, Tante Wilhelmina went to pieces. She grieved as though their marriage had been the most fantastic idyll. She lost two stones in weight, dressed totally in black, saw no one.
I was shocked by what seemed to me to be the most appalling hypocrisy, ‘Why does she carry on like that?’ I said to my mother. ‘She can’t have loved him.’
My mother didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Later, people often looked at me as though they envied me my youth, but that day I saw my youth profoundly pitied.
It was Steffi, adopted on a whim from an orphanage, silly, undervalued Steffi who now took charge of Tante Wilhelmina, carrying the broken old woman off to Berlin where Victor had a new job in the Conservatoire, comforting her, caring. The house was sold; my mother went to work in a shop; we moved to a little flat in the suburbs. There were no more death-beds. And no more Ruth.
As though Uncle Ferdi, sitting sadly in his study, had kept the old world together, his death seemed to unleash chaos. Chaos in the outside world as Hitler seized power in Germany and the conflict and cruelty began to seep across the border to smug and sleepy Austria. Chaos within as the loss of Ruth unleashed in me all the squalor and confusion of adolescence.
Politically, my mother and I were almost simpletons. So that when a year later Ruth Goldmann wrote to me from England, I wasn’t relieved for her safety, I was appalled. England, that grey and foggy land of horsemen and ham-and-eggs; what was Ruth doing there? How would I ever get to her again?
‘It is good here,’ Ruth wrote, ‘because no one minds that Father is a Jew and they don’t spit at us in the street. When we arrived, Mother said the prayer of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the tribes of Israel, but Father said it was the prayer to make married people have children…’