What changed most, though, was my attitude to God. I went on going to church because I needed Him and I felt, too, that it would be hard on Him to be left only with the virtuous who are frequently so odd. But I didn’t go to confession — how could I confess the ‘sin’ which had dragged me back to life and happiness after I gave up my child? I knew I was doomed to hellfire and of course I minded, but my preoccupation with life after death was not quite the usual one. I thought of the Last Trump, the open graves, the skeletons rising and seeking out their loved ones with whom to float upwards to eternal life.
But who would come for us, the women in the shadows, the mistresses? For on this most important day the proprieties would have to be observed, I understood that. It was the Frau Professorinen, the Frau Doktors and Frau Direktors who would be claimed by their spouses. Alice understood that it was with the musty bones of Frau Sultzer clasped in his arms that her Rudi would ascend to Paradise. And I, of course, knew that the hand of my protector, which even in life has a skeletal touch, would reach for the bones of the woman he had married: the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer who had brought him a useful forest and straightened out an untidy bulge on the borders of his estate.
But the Last Trump was not yet!
We lay in bed holding hands. Unnecessary one might have thought in view of what had passed, but not so. I asked after his wife who, even if I knew her, I would not be able to hate, for her son had died when he was five months old and her daughter, now grown up, was a plain and unattractive woman with a discontented face.
Gernot reached out to the bedside table for his cigars. The fact that I can exist in a cloud of tobacco smoke may explain the hold I have over him.
‘She’s left Baden-Baden. The waters were the wrong temperature or there wasn’t enough sulphur, I forget which. So she’s gone to Meran. There’s a splendid crook there who charges a thousand kronen to keep people sitting up to the neck in radioactive mud while eating grapes. He owns a vineyard of course.’
‘And the conference in Berlin?’
His face darkened. ‘A fiasco, naturally. Wilhelm will drag us into a war, there’s no doubt of it. A purposeless war for which we are entirely unprepared.’ He shook off his thoughts and commanded me to prattle.
My lover’s curiosity about my shop is outstanding. This complex, busy man listens like a child to nursery rhymes while I describe my customers and the life of the square. So now I told him about the new dress that Leah Cohen had ordered for the races at Freudenau: more expensive than her sister-in-law’s but able to be worn for planting oranges if the worst came to the worst, and of the Polish wraith opposite whom I’d had to show how to pat a dog. I told him about the letter Herr Schumacher’s brother had tactlessly written, urging the claims of his goldfish-slaying son even before the birth of the new baby, and of the mishap that had befallen me when I took the Countess von Metz’s Turkish dagger to the pawnbroker.
‘Poor old soul; she must be the meanest woman in creation.’
But he is surprisingly kind about the Countess for he knew her many years ago when she kept house for her brother, the Colonel of some obscure Moravian regiment in a distant garrison town.
Only when I described Frau Egger’s cloak and the strange buttons did he grow restless and frown.
‘An owl pierced with a lance… damn it, that rings a bell, it’ll come to me. God, my memory; I’m growing old!’
This, however, was a barred area. Some six years ago the Field Marshal decided to renounce me on grounds of age and decrepitude and instructed me to get married. I was still in awe of him then and for weeks I allowed myself to be taken out by an extraordinary number of men, collecting several offers of marriage and quite a few other offers before I put my foot down.
Gernot had propped himself up on one elbow, moved one of my curls to a different part of my forehead. It was probably my imagination but when he spoke I thought there was a trace of anxiety in his voice.
Did Frau Egger say anything about her husband? His activities?’
I shook my head and — unwisely perhaps — launched into an account of the Minister’s entanglement with Lily from the post office and the Nasty Little Habit. ‘And I must say, Gernot, I cannot help wondering so very much what it might be?’
Gernot’s suggestions, as I had expected, were exceedingly creative, but presently he said: ‘Susanna, have you ever thought of moving on? Getting a shop in the Kärtnerstrasse or the Graben?’
I shook my head. ‘No; the square’s just right for me. I don’t want to be in a place that’s fashionable. I like to stand out. Anyway, I could never afford the Kärtnerstrasse rents — not for a moment.’
‘My God, you obstinate, idiotic girl, how many times have I told you that I want to help you? God knows, I’m not rich but —’
‘No, Gernot. You know how it is with me.’
‘You and your damned pride!’
‘Perhaps it’s pride. I don’t know. But I have to be… someone who has asked you for nothing. The only person, perhaps.’
‘And what of me? What of my wish to render you a service?’
‘The service you do me is to exist.’ I began to elaborate this theme, one of my favourites, and presently he stopped raging and decided that it was after all not necessary for him to finish his cigar.
It is my pride to have wasted many of the Field Marshal’s best Havanas.
I have seen the dreaded tandem!
Frau Sultzer arrived on it this morning, bringing her daughter Edith to be measured for her bridesmaid’s dress.
Their arrival created a certain stir. Rip entirely lost his sang-froid and danced barking round the machine as it wobbled to a halt; Joseph in the café stood with his mouth hanging open.
Frau Sultzer dismounted from the front of the machine, her daughter Edith from the back. Two briefcases were unstrapped from the carrier…
And my admiration for Rudi Sultzer leapt to new heights. He might not have ‘approached’ his wife often, but he had ‘approached’ her.
On this wonderful May morning, Laura Sultzer wore a musty brown skirt with a swollen hem which undulated like a switchback and a knitted cardigan under which the sleeves of her blouse bulged in a way which made one wonder if she had secreted some of her rescued rats. Her nose was sharp and long, the thriving hairs which covered her chin and upper lip ranged interestingly from white to grey to dusty black and as she came towards me, I caught the musty odour one encounters when opening ancient wardrobes.
But my business was with her daughter.
Edith was shorter than her mother, with a bad skin and bewildered grey eyes behind the kind of spectacles that Schubert would have discarded as out of date. She looked anaemic, and beneath the bobble-fringed tablecloth she seemed to be wearing, I guessed at her father’s bandy legs.
I asked the ladies to sit down and offered Frau Sultzer some fashion magazines which she refused with a shudder. ‘Thank you, we have brought our own reading matter,’ she said.
The briefcases were then unpacked. Out of hers, awesomely stamped with the initials L.S., Frau Sultzer fetched a volume of Schopenhauer and a propelling pencil. Out of Edith’s — a bulging and distressed-looking object of paler hue — she took a volume of Beowulf