I had booked into a pension in Salzburg. Now as I alighted from the bus I was suddenly terribly afraid. Not that I couldn’t bring her back with me — I knew I could do that — but that she would be less than I had hoped, strange to me. Other…
Oh God!
I walked down the lane and found the house. Low, yellow stucco, in a big tree-shaded garden. There was a wooden table under a walnut tree and a swing in the branches of a cherry.
And she was in the garden.
It is becoming very hard to write but I had better finish now.
She was exactly as I had known she would be. Her face, wide-mouthed, sweet and funny was the face from which all others departed at their peril. She was fair, plump and golden-skinned; her thick hair was braided, but loosely so that the ends curled into fat tendrils the colour of corn. She wore a blue dirndl with a crisp white blouse and a dusty pink apron; her socks were white as snow and the ribbons which fastened her pigtails matched exactly the colour of her dirndl.
It was like looking into the mirror, like being six years old again but better. She was prettier than I had been, for her eyes were brown. I could see that from where I stood, half concealed by the trunk of an acacia — and I thanked Karli, my long-forgotten lieutenant, for this gift. They were quite lovely, the brown eyes in the fair and golden child.
I had come as she was preparing for a party. Three stuffed animals were propped against cushions on the ground — a bear, a donkey and an elephant, and everything needed for their adornment lay to hand: bird cherries for earrings, necklaces of threaded berries, rings she had woven from the stems of grass.
‘You must be patient,’ she said to the animals, lowering a necklace over the donkey’s head. ‘It takes time to make things fit.’
Her voice was sweet and clear, with a trace of the local accent which would go, as mine had done, in the city.
After the necklaces came the earrings, causing problems with the elephant.
‘You’ll be pleased to look so smart when you get to the King and Queen,’ she told him. ‘You’ll be glad you didn’t wriggle. And remember, I have to get dressed too.’
I watched and watched. I looked at the child, into her, through her. She was gold, pure gold. Then slowly I dragged my gaze away and looked at the house. Neat white curtains, an espalier peach against the wall; petunias and begonias in the window boxes; bantams strutting in a wire enclosure.
My eyes roamed, searching and searching for something that jarred; something I disliked.
Nothing. My prettily dressed yet untrammelled daughter played in perfect contentment in a country garden with her well-loved toys. So I would have dressed her, so I would have wanted her to play. From my child there emanated above all that strange, unspectacular, almost never-encountered thing: a quiet, self contained and peaceful happiness. An ordinariness which is in fact so extraordinary, so unbelievably rare.
Then a woman came out with a glass of milk on a tray and a plate of biscuits and my daughter looked up and smiled.
The child had not noticed me, but the woman saw me. The resemblance must have been very striking for she knew me at once. She didn’t scream, she didn’t faint — she walked very carefully, slowly to the table and put down the child’s milk. Then she grasped the side of the tabie and held on. Just held on.
It doesn’t matter what she looked like. I try not to remember her, but her face went with the house… with the garden… with what she had made of the child.
So I turned and walked away. I was being good, you see — and as a matter of fact, it nearly killed me.
After all, I did not keep watch with Helene. Suddenly exhausted, I went back to bed just before dawn and was woken by Nini shaking my shoulders, worried because I was late for the shop.
‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ she said.
I sat up quickly. ‘Helene Schumacher? Something’s wrong.’ ‘Yes. It’s the black apron not the white towel. Another girl.’ ‘If that’s your idea of bad news I’m sorry for you,’ I said furiously.I ran and bought a dozen red roses from Old Anna, and sent them round with Gretl.
‘Lisl’s been crying,’ she said when she returned. ‘Her eyes are all red. And the little girls looked like corpses, going off to school.’
‘Herr Schumacher, no doubt, is in mourning,’ I said grimly. ‘He went off first thing, even before breakfast. Just stamped out of the house with his umbrella.’
As the black apron collected more and more sympathizers my ill temper increased. I snubbed Joseph in the café when he referred to Herr Schumacher’s ‘misfortune’ and was rude even to poor Professor Starsky when he paused outside my shop to shake a commiserating head.
Reports of Herr Schumacher’s progress through the day did nothing for my state of mind. He had been seen in the Golden Hind at lunchtime, already considerably inebriated. There was a second sighting on the terrace of the Hotel Meissner. By early evening he was said to be in the Central having been assisted there by his dentist and his bank manager who’d stayed to join in the grief and lamentation.
I was unpinning my hair, ready to go to bed, when there was a knock at the door of the flat and Lisl, the Schumachers’ maid, stood there with swollen eyes.
‘The Gnädige Frau begs if you’ll come and see her for just a moment.’
‘Now? Tonight? Surely she’s too tired?’
‘No — she particularly said tonight if you could manage. Herr Schumacher is still away.’
‘I’ll come at once.’ And then: ‘The baby’s healthy, I understand?’
‘Yes.’
I put up my hair again, fetched a shawl and followed her.
Frau Schumacher lay alone in the big brass bed. Her kind, plump face was grey with fatigue and swollen with tears. In a bassinet in the corner of the room lay the baby in its muslin tent.
I went straight to the bed, took her hands, kissed her. I’d stitched a little bonnet for the baby weeks ago and laid it on the counterpane.
‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘A healthy baby, Lisl tells me.’
‘Yes.’ Then the tears began to flow. She felt for her handkerchief, dabbed, mopped. ‘I don’t mind having another girl. I like girls. I would have seventeen daughters and it wouldn’t bother me. Why should it matter whether they have that silly thing between their legs? It only causes trouble. Either they have to have somewhere to put it and if they can’t find anywhere they start their stupid wars.’
I had never heard Helene talk like this, but I pressed her hands warmly to show how entirely I agreed.
‘And the baby’s beautiful. I love her. I tell you, Frau Susanna, as soon as I held her, I felt such love. She has violet eyes and the most perfect arched eyebrows. She’s a real personality. The girls love her too. But my husband… well, as soon as he heard it was a girl he just went out and Lisl tells me he was at the Meissner by lunchtime, quite drunk, and all his cronies commiserating. It’s his pride, of course, that’s all it is. He never took any notice of the last two — he never held them once or wanted to be near them. So what’s going to happen now?’
‘Well, she’ll just grow up with the others, surely, in the best possible home. Your husband doesn’t have to trouble with her if he doesn’t want to. She’ll have enough love from you and the girls.’
Frau Schumacher shook her head and lay back on the pillow. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she murmured. ‘The doctor explained that. It’s not my fault and it’s not his; it’s just a thing that happens, but Albert’ll never see that.’ And she began to sob again.
I went over to the bassinet and pulled aside the curtains. The baby lay deep in sleep. She had a beautifully shaped head, a warm peach-coloured skin, a retroussé nose.