Only the boy himself is unchanged. He practises all day as he always did and in the evening comes out and stands by the fountain.
‘Is it necessary for me to try on my clothes again?’ he asks when I stop and talk to him.
So I increase his fittings to a number somewhat in excess of what is needed to try on a pair of trousers and a shirt. It doesn’t matter now. Soon Sigismund will ride away on his black steed of a piano and trouble me no more.
I must try to be seemly. I mustn’t stand by my bedroom window shivering with happiness when my best friend is bereaved, my assistant is pining and there is cholera in Lausanne. Only how can I help it?
Alice has gone to spend a few days with her sister. Before she left she asked me if I’d put flowers on Rudi’s grave while she was away.
‘Anything that’s friendly,’ she said — and tried to give me money.
It’s too late in the year for cornflowers, but Old Anna found me a bunch of tousled pinks which were friendliness itself and after supper I went across to lay them at Rudi’s feet.
It had been raining and the air was wonderfully fresh. Hardly aware of the gathering darkness, I wandered about, in no hurry to go back indoors. The harebells on the mound of the Family Schmidt haven’t yet recovered from Sigismund’s depredations. Next year, perhaps — but next year the child will be gone. If the concert’s a success, Van der Velde means to send him on a tour of Europe.
The cathedral clock struck ten, and a minute and a quarter later, our St Florian’s. It’s the scents that are so marvellous at this time of night. Stocks and tobacco flowers from the sacristy garden; syringa on the Schumachers’ wall… and close by, stabbingly sweet, a dark red rambler, L’étoile d’Hollande, flowering for a second time.
I heard Rip bark once and someone hushing him. Then silence, and I resumed my litany of smells. Lilies from the urns of the Family Heinrid, a sprig of cupressus rubbed between my fingers…
And one more smell… a smell that I couldn’t believe, that had to be a mirage, a dream, it was so lovely!
Only it wasn’t. It was here, it was real — the scent for which I’d trade all others in the world.
I picked up my skirts and hurried towards the light of the porch. A pebble was dislodged; the smell of onions grew stronger.
‘Hatschek! Oh, Hatschek!’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’
‘Oh God, I’m so pleased to see you. It’s so long, the summer. But he isn’t in Vienna? He can’t be?’
He shook his head. ‘He’s still away and working himself into the ground. I came with dispatches. But he sent a letter.’
A letter. We don’t write to each other, Gernot and I. It’s too uncertain, too dangerous. In heaven I shall be able to write to him, but not here.
Then suddenly the night became ice cold. Why a letter now? Because he has decided to be faithful for ever to the high-born Elise and accompany her to the sulphurous springs of Baden Baden? Because the Kaiser has sent him to govern Mexico…?
I broke the seal, took out a single sheet of paper.
‘On the sixth of October I’m going to Trieste to meet the Colonel of the Southern Division. It’s only a brief meeting — no inspections — no reviews — and after that I’ll be free for three days. This is what I want you to do. Take the night train — the 18.35 from the Sudbahnhol I shall be in the front of the train with my aides, but don’t look for me. When you get to Trieste go to the Hotel Europa; you’ll be booked in there and as soon as I’ve finished I’ll come for you. We shall go on to Miramare where, at long last, I shall keep my promise. I may die unshriven but you shall — I swear it — see the sea.’
I looked up. ‘Oh Hatschek! I’m going to see the sea!’
‘Aye. And about time too. All these years he’s been meaning to take you and there wasn’t ever a proper chance. It’s funny you not having seen it; an educated lady like you.’
I shook my head. But I’m not allowed to mention my peasant origin to Hatschek. For he approves of me, he really does. I’m not like Serbia or Macedonia. I’m good for his master.
‘I know you want me to chew up this letter and swallow it,’ I said challengingly. ‘But I’m not going to. When I’ve read it a few times I’ll swallow it, but not now.’
He grinned. ‘I’m to tell him “yes” then?’
‘Yes, Hatschek. You’re to tell him “yes”.’
He took a packet out of his tunic. ‘It’s all there — the tickets, the sleeper reservations, the address of the hotel. He says, not to miss the train whatever you do. It’s the last one out over the weekend.’
‘I won’t miss the train.’
No need to inform Hatschek that I shall be sitting on the platform three hours before the train is due. Let me keep my dignity. Not that I fool him. Hatschek knows perfectly well how dementedly I love his master.
The sea, people assure me, is not at all like a very large lake. It is not like the Bodensee, where Alice once sang Fledermaus on an enormous floating raft. You cannot see across to the other side of the Bodensee, but the sea is not like that. It is not like a whole row of Attersees laid end to end, nor like the lake into which I threw my daughter’s doll, though that lake was very, very deep.
The sea is different… other… it is something else. Everyone agrees on this. There is salt in the air that one breathes, and always a little wind — and the birds that wheel above the waves are serious birds which don’t sing, but mew and shriek and cry. The sea makes a hem for itself, a strand on which flowers are not allowed to grow: it belongs to the world of the water, this hem, a golden boundary. So important is the sea that it makes the sky above it different too; the clouds move faster — and suddenly when one looks up, there is a ship. Not a paddle steamer or a barge. A ship.
I fetched the Baedeker and looked up Miramare. Population 2,100. A botanical garden with interesting palm trees. The Hotel Post, the Hotel Bella Vista, numerous pensions…
Sappho lived by the sea. They say that when she died she flew away over a cliff and became a swan, but I shan’t do that. I shall take the ocean from my lover’s hands, and I shall live.
September
‘But you can’t,’ said Nini when I told her that I was going away for three days on October the sixth and she would have to look after the shop. ‘It’s the day of Sigismund’s concert.’
I had forgotten this. I had simply forgotten.
‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘Someone will be glad of my ticket.’
‘He’ll be so upset.’
‘No, he won’t. He won’t even notice, so many people are going.’
Nini snorted and I glared at her, but she can’t be reprimanded too severely at the moment because she is still very unhappy about the American boy who ‘betrayed’ her on the Grundlsee. Far from relaxing her Anarchist views, Nini is throwing herself with an even more fanatical intensity into her work for the cause, and next to the poster above her bed which says Property is Theft she has stuck another saying Blood Shed for the Revolution is Blood Shed for Humanity under which, I suspect, she cries herself to sleep.
Today I met Frau Egger coming out of a shop in the Fleischmarkt. I cannot say that she is my favourite client, but it is my habit to greet all my customers with politeness, so that I was amazed when she flushed bright red and scuttled away, still in the loden cloak I had made for her. Is she perhaps becoming unhinged from the strain of receiving the Hof Minister’s attentions every Tuesday and Friday afternoon? Certainly there seem to be far fewer barrel organs about these days.
I love September; even as a child I think it was my favourite month. The little Schumacher girls are making corn dollies and wreaths of Michaelmas daisies for the church just as I made them with my mother when I was a child. And of course it’s the most exciting time of the year for the shop: you can see the whole panorama of the coming season in the orders I receive. Frau Hutte-Klopstock has been reading a life of Pocahontas and thinks it would be nice to go to the races in something fringed and the Baroness Lefevre must have got tired of sitting on ortolans, for she has forsaken Chez Jaquetta and ordered a skating costume lined with fur.