Last Nocturne (13 page)

‘And what of you, Isobel?’ asked Ralph. She felt him waiting for her answer with peculiar concentration. She knew him by now to be at all times a thoughtful and considerate man. For the first time in her life she had had someone male to respect, one moreover with whom she could share her worries about her mother. She had talked freely to him and listened to the good advice he had to give. ‘Well, Isobel?’

She was aware of her mother glancing from one to the other. Much as Isobel loved her, she was aware that as well as being warm and affectionate, Vèronique couldn’t help being self-absorbed, vain, frivolous and a little silly. As a child she had adored her mother unquestioningly. She was so pretty, she always smelt delicious when she put her arms around Isobel and kissed her. She spoilt her with sweeties and pretty ribbons for her hair (when they could afford them) and was fiercely protective of her, sheltering her from the less romantic aspects of what they encountered in their peregrinations. Only as she grew older did Isobel begin to realise that hers was to be the role of protector. Vèronique was not created to face adversity.

There was no question that her child’s well-being was the one thing guaranteed to override her own concerns, but Isobel was never left in any doubt that it had to be earned. Now she gave a sad, calculated little sigh. ‘Of course, if Isobel does not wish.’

Isobel did not wish, and she knew that Ralph knew this very well, knew how sorry she would be to leave Vienna; that she desired above all things to stay in a city she had come to love, where she might even begin to put down roots and make friends of her own age. She was also aware that he knew duty to her mother came first with her, that she could not, and would not, object.

With scarcely a sigh, she answered, ‘Fontainebleau? It sounds delightful,
Maman
.’

Vèronique was all smiles again. ‘Ralph, you are too good—’ she murmured, brokenly.

‘My reward will be to see you – both of you – looking so much better.’ His grave, serious glance met Isobel’s, and he gave a slight, approving nod.

Ralph spent a good deal of his time with them at the large, airy white house with the blue shutters, grey roofs and pepperpot towers in Fontainebleau. He had a splendid motorcar, a de Dion Bouton, to take them out on drives around the park and the surrounding countryside. It was impossible now for Vèronique to sing for him as she would have liked, but he sat by her couch and encouraged her to reminisce about the days when she had been fêted like a princess, until she grew too weary even for that. Sometimes, he would go to the piano and play for her the music to which she had sung across Europe while she drifted peacefully off to sleep. He was her dearest friend, she told Ralph often.

‘You must marry him,’ she said, having made the effort to draw a fine lace shawl around her shoulders and dab
violette de parme
on her wrists and the quick pulse at her throat, even though the small actions had exhausted her and Isobel was the only audience. Ralph had gone to London on pressing business and they were temporarily alone. Isobel’s incomprehension must have shown on her face, for she added gently, ‘I’m speaking of Ralph.’

‘Ralph?’ Isobel laughed. ‘Me? You can’t be serious. He’s in love with you.’

Vèronique managed a faint smile, though tears of weakness stood in her eyes. ‘Isobel,
mignonne
, Ralph Amberley is not the man to yearn for the inaccessible. He knows as well as I do that will never be possible. I doubt even whether I will still be here when he gets back.’

‘
Maman!
’ It was the first time the truth of their situation had been so openly acknowledged between them. Always, until then, it had been, ‘when you’re better’.

‘In any case, it is not me he wants, Isobel, it’s you. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’

‘Oh, how can you,
Maman?
It’s you he loves! And besides – he’s old!’

‘Tiens!
He’s only forty-three.’

Ralph was a good-looking, active man, with charming manners, considerate and with a generous heart. But he was twenty-five years older than Isobel. A quarter of a century. It was not to be thought of. Yet there was no doubt that her mother, wearing the badge of consumption, the hectic spots of colour, the feverish eyes, lips unnaturally red against her white skin, was sincere. Isobel choked and could not speak.

‘He will never let you down. He is dependable, and kind. And also, do not forget, very rich. No, no, listen to me, Isobel. Marry him. Don’t condemn yourself, as I did, to the life we’ve led. It’s only when you have too much of it that you can say money doesn’t matter.’

But that was not why she married Ralph when he did indeed ask her, after Vèronique died. She would have retired to a convent or gone on the streets (the only alternatives that seemed open to a girl in her position, she had thought with passionate despair), rather than marry him, had she not come to have the highest regard for him. Their relationship was affectionate; in her mind Ralph was beginning to replace the memory of the father she sometimes wished she could remember more, though more often she was glad she could not. He did not press her for a quick answer, but at last, when the grief over the loss of her mother had subsided somewhat, she told him her mind was made up.

He was everything Vèronique had promised, thoughtful and generous. But from the first he made it quite clear, gently but firmly, that she was his wife and must act as one. There was to be no nonsense in that direction. He treated her with patience and tenderness which eventually aroused feelings in her she had not known she could possess, feelings which verged on the edge of passion, though later, as she came to know, only on the edge.

Nevertheless, their life together was deeply happy and satisfying. She blossomed. Moving from one place to another as she’d done all her life, she had been shockingly under-educated, and as the years went by Ralph used his own not inconsiderable talents to remedy this, and to mould and inform the tastes of his young wife, trying to develop her into the cool, sophisticated woman he wished her to be. They spent seventeen happy years together until her world was utterly overturned once again when he, too, died, suddenly, of a heart attack.

For nearly twelve months she mourned, bereft, lost – utterly devastated – then gradually she began to feel able to face the new situation in which she found herself. She would soon be thirty-six, a widow alone in the world except for Susan. Her life now had no centre, ultimately no meaning. To her deepest sorrow, she was childless and likely to remain so, unless she married again: opportunities were there for a still fairly young, wealthy widow, but though her empty arms and heart longed and ached to hold a child of her own, she doubted whether she would ever marry again, not even for that. Not simply for that. The thought was abhorrent. We were not put into this world to have everything we want and she had, after all, been given so much, much more than ever she could have expected.

On Ralph’s death, the source of his wealth had passed to another branch of his family. He had, however, owned the Fontainebleau house and this he had left to her, plus a more than adequate personal income. Much as she loved it, the house was too large; she could not live in it alone with her memories. She must sell it. And then, what?

The rest of her life stretched empty before her. A saying Ralph had used when her mother died came back to her: ‘Every end is the opportunity for another beginning.’ And then, Vèronique’s voice: ‘It’s time,
chèrie
, to move on again.’

‘I’ve a notion to revisit Vienna,’ she told Susan, after thinking about this and what it would mean for some time. Susan looked wary. ‘I’ll go alone, if it would disturb you to go back, while you take a holiday. I know you don’t have happy memories of the place.’

‘Not of old Frau Fischer, that’s for sure.’

But as for anything else…well. Susan’s rosy cheeks momentarily acquired an even rosier hue, her still pretty mouth drooped. Isobel knew there had been a young soldier in a green and scarlet coat, white breeches and polished boots; and a brass band in a dance hall off the
Wurstelprater
, where they’d waltzed and danced the polka…he’d asked her to be his
liebchen
, his sweetheart, and then he’d gone off for service with his unit to Sarajevo or Silesia or some other far distant, godforsaken part of the monarchy, promising to write, but of course he never had. She’d been a fool, Susan said, to imagine he would. Some things never changed. Some people never learnt. She sighed. ‘No, it won’t upset me. I expect we shall find the place pretty much the same.’

Like her mother before her, Isobel was disappointed, though in a different way, on her return to Vienna after Ralph’s death, an initial disappointment at least. It wasn’t the same city she’d left nearly two decades ago. To begin with, their train steamed into the station on a day when an angry protest march was taking place, a nasty moment to arrive. The driver of the
fiacre
which was eventually found – with difficulty – to take them to their hotel, when asked what the march was about, began a long grumbling tirade about strikes and something called the Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party and more about the anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Leuger, but this was delivered in such guttural Hungarian they were little the wiser. The protest had generated a great deal of disturbance. At first sight, most of the cosmopolitan city’s two million inhabitants seemed to be out on the streets and the police on their big grey horses moved amongst the crowds, looking for pickpockets and troublemakers – Serbs, Poles, Croats, gypsies, peasants from the Hungarian plains. Detachments of the army were standing by.

But the marchers were eventually dispersed peacefully enough, and its inconvenience was soon forgotten. Vienna shrugged and went on with its business. The coffee house tills rang again, the military bands in the parks resumed their playing and the waltzing continued as usual. The Riesenrad, the great Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park, had never stopped.

The traffic had been as heavy as ever, which their
fiacre
driver made several unsuccessful diversions to avoid. Competition was still as fierce and loud as Isobel remembered between the horse-drawn traffic, noisy omnibuses and motor taxis, and now trams. A new transportation system had been installed, and the twin pavilions of the Karlsplatz transportation station shone splendidly in plain white marble topped with foliated golden globes, looking – if one didn’t take the artistic view – like giant, gilded cabbages. This was only part of the strange new architecture which was doing its best to change the face of the city, she later discovered. The patrician houses and palaces on the Ring which she had once so admired were now fifty years old and a new generation of architects were scornfully rejecting their Neo-Baroque splendours and going instead for simplicity and elegance of line, enhanced by fantastic decoration. But nothing had changed in the inner city: pedestrians still had to scramble onto the narrow pavements for safety from the clattering wheels of their
fiacre
as the driver shouted and whipped up the horses to ever more dangerous speeds along the cobbled streets and quiet old squares. The same grey old houses were still standing in their grey old squares.

And the city still had Isobel under its spell, never mind that its fairytale magic seemed ever so slightly tarnished by the realities of the present. The impulse that had brought her to Vienna for what was intended to be a short visit kept her there, persuaded her to extend her stay. And after that it was not long before the possibility of making her permanent home there planted itself and took root. Once the decision was made, and Susan had resigned herself to the idea, she was impatient to start things moving quickly, and to circumvent the tedious bureaucracy she knew to be prevalent in every part of the top-heavy Hapsburg administration, and which would certainly slow up negotiations for buying a house. She decided the simplest way would be to make contact with the Vienna branch of the London-based family bank who had always conducted Ralph’s affairs, and who now oversaw her own, and arranged to see the man in charge on the following day.

If she wanted to make a good impression, Susan insisted, she must wear the silk organza frock, the colour of dark smoke, which Ralph had ordered to be made for her in Paris, the one with the lace shoulders and boned collar. Isobel took her advice, and submitted to having silk roses set amidst the matching swathes of tulle on the frills of her elaborate hat. They were in
poudre-de-rose
, the same delicate colour that was reflected in the sheen of Ralph’s fabulous pink pearls at her throat and ears. Susan dabbed her generously with
chypre
. She looked in the mirror and felt like an English duchess. ‘If I don’t make a good impression now, I never will!’

‘Go on, you look beautiful.’

Beautiful she had never been, but at any rate, she left the hotel looking and feeling as cool and chic as was possible in the unusually early heat of a Middle-European spring day.

She was given a chair facing Julian Carrington across the desk of the bank’s august premises in the Graben. He looked like the English gentleman-banker he was, tall, thin and elegant, approaching his middle fifties, his brown hair threaded with silver, a pleasant, cultured and affable man with a natural polish, perfect manners and tailoring to match.