Last Nocturne (15 page)

Carrington gave a short, dry laugh as he joined her at the window. ‘No, that’s Bruno, the younger brother. He imagines himself a poet.’

At that moment, the object of their inspection looked up, caught them looking at him, stopped and removed his cigarette, bowed and swept off his hat. The red hair flew in all directions. His white teeth flashed in a slightly vulpine smile and she saw that, despite the grizzled hair, his face was still young. Not a face you would trust, she thought, intrigued all the same. He remained where he was slightly longer than was necessary, holding her glance, and it was she who turned away after acknowledging his greeting with a smile, a bow and a flutter of her fingers. She turned back to the room and found Julian Carrington regarding her with raised eyebrows, disapproval emanating from every pore. ‘If we are to be neighbours,’ she remarked gently, ‘we must get off on the right footing.’

‘Well, if you are really sure this apartment is what you want… But shouldn’t you think twice before committing yourself, Mrs Amberley?’

She shook her head and he said no more, seeing it was no use trying to dissuade her further, but she couldn’t help feeling he was ardently wishing he’d never brought her here and had probably astonished himself by making such an impetuous decision.

‘Mr Carrington, I’ve lived in more different places than I can count during the course of my life, and I can assure you this one already feels like home. I don’t need to think twice. When can I move in? Though I must see about some furniture first. Will you not help me choose some pictures?’

‘I shall be honoured.’

He was courteous, though resigned, but she knew she was right in her decision to take the apartment. With a prescience that was not a characteristic of hers, she felt sure that something she had been looking for all her life was waiting for her here.

It wasn’t easy for Isobel, after she had been settled in the apartment for some time, to accept that Julian Carrington might have been right, and that she might have made too hasty a decision. After all, although Susan was not entirely reconciled to it, the move had gone as she had planned, and the rooms were by now comfortably furnished. She was pleased with the way it looked, the way the black piano now gleamed with polish and formed the focal point of one end of her sitting room, while the big window formed the other. Her life with Ralph had accustomed her to living in comfort – indeed, luxury – and expensive accoutrements with which to enhance a home were nowhere more readily available than in the Viennese shops. But little gilt chairs, slippery satin upholstery and spindly tables which might have graced other, more fashionable houses would have looked out of place here, and she’d gone for one or two conventional Biedermeier pieces, their plain solidity showing off the few pictures, mirrors and rugs she’d allowed herself. She set great vases of flowers everywhere and agreed with Susan that it would all do very well as a temporary expedient. And yet…

She had been so sure she would find the beginnings of a new life here, so why then did she feel this sense of incompleteness, this feeling of strangeness and disconnection, of being in limbo? Had she expected the move here immediately to change her life – or was she to find, like her mother before her, that nothing ever really changed, that the past was a shadow that followed you always? Was the rest of her life always to be like this, growing old and lonely, with no one except Susan, dear friend and companion though she had become?

These were disagreeable thoughts, not to be tolerated, and of course she knew it was entirely possible that she wouldn’t have felt this way at all had she not seen how much her new existence here contrasted with the sociable, casual way the brothers who lived in the other half of the house appeared to live their exceedingly open and extrovert lives, the carefree, apparently aimless sort of existence that she hadn’t herself experienced for many years. Her husband had liked an ordered and structured way of living which she, too, had grown accustomed to.

‘Artists!’ muttered Susan darkly. ‘If that doesn’t spell trouble, I don’t know what does. No knowing what sort of goings-on we shall have to put up with. You should hear what that Berta has to say about it!’

In the absence of anyone else to chinwag with, Susan had struck up an unlikely friendship with Berta, the Francks’ maid of all work, a broad-backed peasant woman whose obsession with religion and going to Mass at the cathedral just around the corner every day didn’t prevent her tongue running away with her.

‘There’s no reason why we should have anything to do with them, if they prove tiresome,’ Isobel said. Naturally, they would be as friendly as common courtesy demanded, but the entrance to the apartment was at the side of the house, and aloft in her eyrie Isobel was quite certain she would be able to ignore what was no business of hers for the short time she meant to be here.

All the same, she couldn’t help being intrigued by the Francks and their friends, a half-reluctant spectator to what went on in the courtyard below. A
voyeuse
, she thought, annoyed with herself, and withdrew before there was a chance of being seen. However, unless she abandoned altogether the wonderful view from the wide window – one of the main reasons she had taken the apartment – and kept the curtains of her bedroom window on the floor below closed, she could hardly remain unaware of what was going on. The Francks evidently kept an open house and people came and went all day long – some of them noisy, raffish, positively disreputable, lounging on the wooden seat that encircled the enormous trunk of the chestnut tree, always with a jug of wine in evidence; others purposeful and hurried, scurrying between the house and the studio, whose lights often burnt far into the night. In the evenings, too, there was laughter and rowdiness issuing from the open downstairs windows of the house, light which spilt out into the darkness, sometimes making sleep impossible. Perhaps Susan wasn’t so far wrong, after all.

At first the Francks made no friendly overtures and for that matter, neither did Isobel. She shrank from coming too close, too soon, and trod carefully. Experience had taught her to let friendships ripen slowly, rather than to encourage a forced, rapid, hot-house blossoming which might be ruined by the first frost of a disagreement. The distance between them, however, was destined not to be kept up for long. Julian Carrington, in his dutifully correct way, made it his business to introduce her formally to her new neighbours. She was offered a glass of wine. They made a little conversation and she left after the requisite time. But the ice had been broken, and after that it was difficult to exist in isolation, impossible to avoid encounters of one kind or another.

‘Thinks himself irresistible to women, that one. You watch your step,’ Susan had remarked, disapproval marring her cheerful face as she observed Isobel’s smiles after she’d spent half an hour in Bruno’s company one day. They had met at her side entrance and he’d taken her further along the narrow alley to a hitherto unsuspected wicket gate which led into the courtyard. They’d sat under the chestnut, drinking coffee, while Bruno flirted and went on to talk a lot of nonsense, scandalous gossip interspersed with more serious talk about Marxist revolutions and the inevitability of a European war in the unspecified future.

Did Susan imagine that in the kind of life Isobel had shared with her mother, she hadn’t been fending off men like Bruno before she was fourteen? ‘I haven’t noticed you being averse to his flirting,’ she suggested, smiling.

‘Never mind me. Mind you don’t get hurt, that’s all.’

Susan constantly declared she didn’t have much time for men at all these days, a statement not necessarily believed by Isobel. ‘Twice bitten, thrice shy,’ she declared. Still buxom, bonny and blonde, she was the type much admired by the Viennese, and especially the garishly uniformed young men of the military, but experience had taught her to be wary. Returning to Vienna with Isobel, she hadn’t, as she’d at first feared, encountered her faithless soldier-boy – a boy no longer, of course. After so long it was unlikely she would even recognise him if she did bump into him – and for all she knew he might still be garrisoned in the godforsaken depths of Herzegovinia, Hungary or deepest Silesia. But knowing from bitter experience how susceptible she was, she stayed away from anywhere where she might meet him, or any other soldiers with tight white breeches and a gleam in their eye, left them to waltz with other women in the amusement parks and dance halls. These were indiscretions of the past, looked on now with a determinedly righteous eye that belied her susceptible nature.

And Isobel had to admit her remarks about the brothers Franck were probably not without foundation, in view of the constant succession of draggle-tailed girls usually to be seen floating between the house and the studio in various stages of dress and undress. Presumably they acted as models for Viktor; they shared the brothers’ outdoor meals and possibly more, since they seemed to hang around all day, giggling and chattering and sometimes quarrelling with each other – and didn’t always appear to leave at nights. On one particular day when Isobel left the house for an afternoon’s shopping, one of the models had already been sitting outside in the courtyard for five hours wearing nothing but a yard or two of diaphanous material which concealed nothing, while Viktor set up his easel in the corner and put her onto canvas.

Viktor Franck: taller and thinner than his more heavily built brother, prim-faced and sallow, who dressed like a bank clerk and looked over his wire-rimmed spectacles with an air of disapproval, his hair parted in the middle and glossier than his well polished boots, and was like no one’s preconceived perception of an artist. Who acknowledged introductions with a cold handshake and an unsmiling downward jerk of the head. Yet there must have been some passion in this bloodless man. According to Julian Carrington, his work was much sought after by the cognoscenti. Unlike his brother, Viktor barely spoke. Dour and taciturn, he nevertheless kept a close eye on Bruno, no doubt to prevent him from going too far, ready to pull his irons from the fire. His silences frightened Isobel more than Bruno’s quasi-revolutionary talk. She knew which brother she would rather cross swords with.

As she walked languidly home after her shopping, having purchased nothing but a box of sugared almonds for Susan, who had a sweet tooth, she came across Bruno, lounging on the plinth of a pretty Baroque fountain in a quiet square, writing, with a sheaf of papers propped against this knees. He had with him his wolfhound, a huge shaggy grey animal with slavering jaws called Igor, tied to the leg of a bronze Neptune by its leash and officially muzzled like all other Viennese dogs when in public, she was relieved to see. She had been reassured several times that the dog had a beautiful nature, but it wasn’t a statement she was inclined to put to the test.

Bruno sprang to his feet when he saw her, papers scattered in all directions, in danger of being blown into the water by the breeze. ‘Please,’ he said after the papers had been retrieved, gesturing with no sense of inappropriateness to the steps which formed the plinth, ‘Keep me company for a little while.’ Igor gave a growl deep in his throat and Isobel settled herself gingerly on a step as far away from him as possible and handed Bruno the papers she’d rescued. ‘Thank you.’ He sighed gustily. ‘What it is when a man must seek out a public monument to sit and find peace to compose a poem!’

There was so much coming and going in that household it was no wonder he couldn’t find the breathing space to write poetry, but perhaps it was here he came, or places like this, and not to waste time, as Berta said, in the coffee houses, reading the newspapers and arguing politics and for all anyone knew plotting to overthrow anyone from the Hapsburgs to the detested mayor, Karl Leuger, and start a revolution which would have them all killed in their beds.

‘Your house is always busy, I’ve noticed.’

‘That’s so,’ he admitted, and for a moment his look was enigmatic.

Then he directed his buccaneer smile at her, shuffled the disarranged sheets together and began to talk about his poetry, reading out a few lines here and there to her. He had a deep, mellifluous voice and would, she suspected, be ready to read out each new poem to anyone at the drop of a hat. (This she later found to be true, though whether he was a good poet or not, she wasn’t in any position to judge. She spoke most of the chief European languages more or less fluently, especially French and English, the languages of her parents, but understanding poetry in the original German was another matter). His work seemed to be published only in obscure magazines, but this didn’t seem to trouble him. He smiled and basked in the praises of anyone ready to bestow them.

The first slight frisson of – excitement, anticipation? – she had experienced when he had swept his hat off to her in the courtyard, had soon faded. There was really little more to Bruno than his looks, his surface charm and his belief that he was God’s gift to women. But she listened while he talked a great deal of outrageous nonsense and let him go on because he made her laugh. He was full of high-flown rhetoric on all sorts of issues which, though not in retrospect making much sense, at the time seemed perfectly plausible and was in any case amusing to listen to. She learnt from Susan – via Berta, as usual – that he had a temper when thwarted, though she’d added that it didn’t often erupt and was soon forgotten.

After he’d discussed his poetry, Bruno’s muse seemed to have deserted him for the day. At any rate, he scooped his papers together and escorted her home. When they reached the house, he swept off his hat with his usual histrionic gesture to say farewell, and then issued an invitation for that evening – a formal gesture, Isobel suspected, which did not often occur in that household of casual arrivals and departures. ‘Come down and have some food and a glass of wine with us, meet my friends,’ said he. ‘Tonight?’ His bright blue eyes gazed into hers. ‘Please, do grace us with your presence.’ He took hold of her hand and pressed his fingers into her palm in a practised way which she ignored. He should know perfectly well by now that she didn’t take him seriously and was immune to his flattery, yet he continued in a most ungentlemanly way to stroke her palm, and smile, until she firmly regained control of her hand.