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-coloured 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.’
A lie, but a good one. And that’s so odd — these lies that feel so right. Laura Sultzer never lies, so I suppose she is good and Alice and I are bad. As though we wouldn’t change it in an instant — all the glamour, the ‘romance’ of being a mistress for the humdrum and honourable job of being a wife.
I asked after Elise.
‘She’s in Aix. An oto-laryngological complaint has been diagnosed.’
I have never discovered what, if anything, ails Gernot’s frail and high-born wife. Only a slight dryness in his tone when he speaks of her wanderings betrays Gernot’s possible doubts — but as far as I am concerned she should pursue her health with the utmost rigour and determination. Let her hang from stilts in the lake at Balaton and let the jets of water play over her pale, thin legs; let her emerge from the baths at Ischl powdered in salt. May she walk up and down the pump room in Marienbad sipping her sulphur water — and may she soothe herself afterwards with waltzes and cream cakes, for when she is absent I can see Gernot.
‘And your daughter?’
‘There is hope of an engagement to a whiskery young man in the Diplomatic Corps. Myself I doubt if he’ll come up to scratch, but Elise is working on it.’
My lover’s fatherhood is a frail plant. He now indicated that he was no longer prepared to discuss his wife and daughter and we retired to bed.
Outside the wind was freshening; the scent of wet earth came to us through the open window.
How good love tastes in the country!
It was in a place very like this that I first met Gernot. Though ‘met’ is not quite the right word. I was somewhat mad, walking — sodden — through the countryside and slightly off course for the Danube.
At one level of my mind I must have known that throwing yourself into the Danube is not a good idea: the currents are unreliable, the bridges full of policemen and drunks. But it was the day I had seen my daughter playing under the walnut tree and left her and I wasn’t particular about ways and means; I just wanted to get away from the pain. So I started walking.