‘It’s a very long time since we met,’ I said. ‘Alice and I often speak of you. She’s still at the Volksoper. What fun we had at the Landtmann with the Schoflers and all that crowd.’
He now placed me and a flicker of surprise passed over his face for our last encounter, in a fiacre in the Prater had not been particularly friendly. I don’t think I actually hit him, it is not often necessary for me to protect my virtue in so drastic a manner, but I may have used my parasol.
‘Susanna! My dear, you look radiant!’ His eyes crawled along my throat, fastened on the necklace. Had I, perhaps, become somebody who mattered?
‘I’m a very grand lady now,’ I said as Peter came back with my champagne. The respectability of my wealthy escort impressed Van der Velde even more. ‘I have my own salon in Madensky Square.’
‘Salon’ is not a word I often use, but the ambiguity was serviceable.
‘And a great success, I’m sure.’
‘Yes, a success.’ I am not a great whirrer of fans, but I thought a little whirring would not come amiss. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been expecting to see your auto any day now that we have our little prodigy opposite. I suppose Meierwitz has beaten you to it?’
‘Prodigy? What prodigy?’ His nostrils twitched with curiosity.
‘Oh, a little pianist — a child of nine or so — a waif from Poland. Hardly a Chopin, but friends of mine tell me his Waldstein is remarkable.’
Van der Velde frowned. Did you say Meierwitz has heard of him?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, but that’s the rumour. You know I’m not musical — better not take any notice of anything I say. But come to Madensky Square anyway — I’ll make you a beautiful cravat. Excuse me, I must have a word with Count Leitenhof.’
Extremely pleased with myself, I swept away on Peter’s arm — and found myself face to face with Gernot.
He was not alone. His wife, the high-born Elise, newly watered in Marienbad, walked on one side of him, his whey-faced daughter on the other. An aide-de-camp hovered…
Gernot’s face did not alter by one millimetre. The eyes gave no recognition, the mouth remained a tight, uncompromising line. He was in uniform, unutterably distinguished-looking and, I hazarded, extremely bored. Almost tone deaf, he attends the opera strictly in the line of duty.
As we passed each other, I heard the whey-faced daughter saying: ‘That woman in black velvet — her face seemed familiar. Didn’t she use to model in a shop in the Herrengasse?’
And the voice of the high-born Elise, who should not have been wearing magenta satin with sky-blue lace: ‘Anyone can come to the opera these days, we all know that!’
Gernot said nothing.
The second act was almost unendurable. He was here in Vienna and he had not let me know. He sat below me in his box and was as lost to me as if he was on the moon. What idiotic conceit had led me to think that I was ever part of his life? He belonged entirely to those pale haughty women to one of whom he had bequeathed his tight-lipped mouth.
Why didn’t it stop, this unbearable screeching? Why didn’t the audience storm on to the stage and put an end to this torture? And what a horrible man Wagner was: arrogant, promiscuous, a scrounger.
The second interval. More champagne, more acquaintenances, Peter’s and mine. The need to smile and be charming and make Peter proud to be with me.
‘I would give forty camels for her. Yes, forty camels,’ said a guttural foreign voice, and I turned round to see an Arab potentate in splendid robes staring directly at me through a jewelled glass.
And coming towards me, Gernot. He was alone. His wife was talking to the French Ambassador, the daughter was nowhere to be seen. Probably in the lavatory; she looked like a woman who had frequent recourse to toilets.
Only he wasn’t coming towards me. He was going to go past me to join the party of the War Minister who had beckoned to him. I simply happened to be there.
As he drew level, he bent down briefly — and straightened to hand me my non-existent handkerchief. Then he said one word — ‘Thursday’ — and was gone.
We returned to our box for the last act. And how beautiful now was the music, how it purged the soul! And how ridiculous, how utterly absurd it was to criticize the personal life of a transcendent genius like Richard Wagner!
‘I’m going to challenge him to a duel, of course,’ were Gernot’s first words to me — and my hand went to my heart as I saw him laid out under the birch trees, blood staining the rich earth. ‘It goes against the grain, mind you,’ he went on. ‘A foreigner, and without a commission. But no insult to you shall go unavenged.’
‘What insult?’
‘Forty camels, indeed! I gather it’s the top price in Arabia but it’s an insult just the same. Not four hundred, not four thousand camels would buy the smallest of your eyelashes.’
I managed to smile, but my pulse was still racing. Gernot hates duelling, is trying to get it stopped — but I know for a fact that he has fought one duel at least and I can’t even bear jokes on the subject.
It was an afternoon meeting. Elise was still in Vienna, in the wing of the old Stoffler Palace which the von Lindenbergs use when they are in town. Gernot had to attend a banquet in the evening and I knew that after today the manoeuvres would claim him so it was important to keep things light. I am, after all, a Woman of Pleasure. But it had opened some frightful door, this image of Gernot stretched out beneath the birches. In my clothes I could smile and chatter, but out of them…
‘What is it, my treasure? What troubles you?’
‘Nothing.’ I turned my face to that hollow above his collar bone that God designed especially for me. ‘Only, if perhaps today Love could be “Strong as Death”? Or even stronger?’
And it could… It was…
The monks of Leck swore that the Song of Songs was a paean to Mother Church, but the monks of Leck did not know Gernot!
At half past four I was allowed to sit up and drink a glass of wine.
‘Now tell me what you were doing at the opera dressed like Marguerite Gautier and unsettling so many gentlemen?’
I explained; then launched into the saga of Frau Egger and Lily from the post office which I knew would be much to his taste.
‘Oh, and I wanted to ask you about those wretched buttons of hers. Her husband swears they’re very rare and valuable — from a British regiment long before Napoleon; he practically tore them off her cloak. But the Countess von Metz said they belonged to the Pressburg Fusiliers who were disbanded in 84. Who is right, do you suppose?’
I got up and fetched the button I had secreted in my purse.
‘Aggredi,’ he said. ‘Wait, let me see.’ Wearing only his monocle he peered intently at the crest. And then: ‘Yes… Yes, of course.’
He was silent for some time, his face closed and brooding.
‘The Countess is right,’ he said. ‘Look, leave this with me, will you? And don’t say anything to anyone — not to anyone, please.’ He put the button away in his cigar case. Then in a voice of outrage: ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘I’m getting dressed. It’s nearly five o’clock I must go and so must you if you’re not going to be late for your banquet.’
‘I’m not going to the banquet.’
‘Please, Gernot, I don’t want you to alter your plans for me. You have your life to lead.’
‘I have my existence to lead and I lead it. Now, however, I am living my life.’ And his face creasing in a rare smile: ‘I shall send Hatschek to make my excuses on a snow-white charger like the one you picked out for me at Uferding.’
He never tires of that joke, my Field Marshal!
When I had known Gernot for two years I suddenly realized that I was going to love him for ever. This happened not, as you might expect, during any particular moment of physical ecstasy, but as we sat at luncheon in a country inn and he selected, from a fruit bowl on the table, a pear which he placed on my plate.