Last Nocturne (16 page)

He repeated his invitation, his smile a little less wide at her hesitation. She had only once been inside the other half of the house, that time when Julian had taken her down to be introduced, and since then, some vestige of the involuntary revulsion she had felt on first seeing it from the outside kept her away. That forbidding front door opened on to a vast cavern of a hall, so huge, dark and high that the gallery running round it was lost in shadow. A bachelor establishment, kept as clean as Berta could manage single handed, it was furnished only with a few hugely cumbersome pieces which had undoubtedly been there since the beginning of time: heavy oak chairs, immovable tables, Gothic armoires, carved beds. The hall was always cold, Berta grumbled to Susan, despite the pair of tiled stoves at either end, despite the fire kept going day and night in winter, which sometimes blazed but mostly smouldered and sent choking fumes into the hall. The old house was not in good repair and the sweet smell of woodsmoke was overlaid with a mingling of soot, damp and decay. The floors in some of the rooms were unsafe. Isobel had no desire to confront its dark, dusty corners.

‘Please, say yes. We shall be outside,’ Bruno added, as if divining her thoughts.

It had been a hot and sultry day. She was tired, and the thought of a glass of wine in the evening cool of the courtyard, shaded by the chestnut tree, was inviting. It was a friendly overture and in the end she said yes, she would be happy to join them. There was also, perhaps, a spark of rebellion in her acceptance. She had congratulated herself on how quickly she was becoming a typical Viennese, if there was such a thing in this cosmopolitan city. She passed the days taking coffee or drinking chocolate with whipped cream amongst an increasing circle of friends, women like herself, who had time on their hands and money to spare for shopping for expensive clothes and falderals. She had met most of them through Julian Carrington.

A valued, if unexpected, friendship was developing between herself and Julian. He wasn’t easily understood, but she saw more to him now than the conventional man she had first met. He had an understated sense of humour which pleased her, and a capacity for devotion – to friends, beliefs, to the objet’s d’art he collected so passionately. He had subtle ways of achieving what he wanted. Isobel could see why he was successful in business.

Gently weaning her away from any tendency to ally herself with her dangerously wild neighbours, he took her to art exhibitions and sometimes arrived with tickets for the opera, a concert, invitations to dine out, and once or twice with requests to partner him to suppers and other entertainments given by his friends. It was a mature, sophisticated milieu he moved in, but compared with the Francks’
vie de Bohème
, once only too familiar to Isobel but eschewed since her marriage, it sometimes seemed a staid, middle-aged and not very stimulating existence. She didn’t often regret the youth she had never had, but suddenly, the prospect of something more light-hearted was impossible to resist.

Susan greeted the news of Isobel’s invitation to join the Francks that night with little enthusiasm. ‘The sooner we find somewhere permanent the better,’ she remarked, grumbling her way through the housework, beating a cushion into shape and throwing it into the corner of the sofa.

‘Aren’t you just a little happy here, Susan?’

She gave Isobel a sidelong look. ‘Berta tells me the police were here last night.’

‘The police?’

Among the drawbacks Julian had pointed out when she first saw the apartment, there was one he’d omitted to mention. From time to time, through her open window, she had been aware of the unmistakable clatter of a printing press issuing from the studio-workshop across the courtyard. She wasn’t mistaken; she knew only too well what a printing press sounded like, having once lived with her mother in rooms above a printer’s in Antwerp. But now she recalled what Julian Carrington had said, that the brothers Franck were always in trouble with the authorities, and it didn’t therefore seem at all improbable that the police might have been looking for subversive literature; she couldn’t imagine what else an artist and a poet would need a printing press for. Perhaps Bruno’s fiery declarations were not just empty talk. Of course, it could be that they were harmlessly printing his poems – or anything else, for that matter. She shrugged. What business of hers was it in any case – whatever was going on in that workshop, or indeed the rest of the house?

But she was reminded again that this wasn’t the old, peaceful Vienna she had known before, though perhaps she had simply been too young then to know what was going on beneath the surface. This was a modern, sophisticated capital, the hub of European politics, with diplomats representing every country residing here, consorting with the Habsburgs and the rest of the aristocracy, as well as the distinguished generals and commanders of the vast Austro-Hungarian army. The city also fizzed with the newest intellectual and avant-garde ideas current in art, in music, even in medicine, ideas which seemed to exist to foster rebellious notions among the minorities and ethnic groups overcrowding the capital, from the gypsies one encountered everywhere, begging and thieving, to the hot-headed Serbs and others who wanted to regain control of their own lands which had been annexed by the monarchy. Anti-Semitism was never far under the surface; the Bürger class saw the Jews as a threat to their own prosperity; and the Marxist socialists among them gave trouble to everyone. Demonstrations like the one she had encountered on the first day of her arrival frequently interrupted the gay, pleasure-loving life of the city.

‘At any rate, you won’t have to sit there tonight looking at that half-naked young woman,’ Susan interrupted her thoughts, ‘She’s gone.’ Isobel looked out of the window and saw that Mitzi, or Gretl, or maybe it was Anna-Marie – they were virtually indistinguishable – had finally been allowed to relinquish her pose, chilly no doubt, even though it was summer.

When she entered the courtyard that evening, Isobel found more chairs under the chestnut tree and a smaller, less raucous crowd than usual lounging about as the summer dusk fell. They were all strangers to her, then she saw with relief a familiar tall, thin figure, but when he turned she saw it wasn’t Julian, but Viktor. Planks had been set over the old well to serve as a table, and bore a haphazard selection of food: some cold Hungarian cherry soup, a gigantic bowl of salad, fresh bread, platters of golden butter and a fine array of the rich pastries the Austrians loved. An appetising smell issued from the kitchen where, despite the heat, Berta was roasting a goose.

As they ate and the wine flowed and tongues were loosened, the arguments began. Political intrigues were of no interest to Isobel, but it soon became evident that the talk that night was careless and indiscreet. Most of it was directed at the bumbling efforts of the
polizei
the previous night, who had found no proof that the printing press was used for anything but legitimate purposes. Who in his right senses would believe a man like Viktor would be so careless as to leave evidence of subversive activities lying around, demanded a man perched on the edge of the well, a loaded plate in his hand, a waving fork in the other – if that was what Viktor had been doing. She learnt later that the speaker was a well-known Jewish-Hungarian socialist agitator called Ronay who used to be employed by the very proper Nieue Frie Press until his views became unacceptable to them and who now wrote for one of the popular papers. Everyone laughed, except Viktor. ‘Keep your peace for once in your life, Tibor,’ he said.

Unusual as it was for Viktor to speak up like that, it commanded a sudden silence, and the awkward moment was only averted by the presence of Berta, bringing out the goose. Viktor began to carve.

The people gathered there that night were poets and artists, musicians and intellectuals, a mixture of different nationalities. Not a few of them were soon half-drunk, intoxicated as much with their own words as with the wine they quaffed. There was a lot of loose talk floating around about the Emperor, Franz Josef, the certainty that the old spider’s days of spinning his intrigues among the fading splendours of the Schönbrunn palace were numbered.

‘Then we shall have his nephew, with all his big ideas.’

The remark occasioned much ribald laughter. Everyone knew that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Emperor’s nephew and his heir, was a well-known joke, though an incautious one to make when it referred to one of the most hated yet powerful men in the country – hated by everyone, including the Emperor himself, who considered him uncultured and dangerous, a misfortune thrust upon him by his own childless state.

‘Not so laughable,’ warned the journalist. ‘We all know the Empire’s crumbling, but his policies when he ascends to the throne will be disastrous. His hopes of integration with the Slavs are unrealistic, for one thing. The Great Powers in the west have their own vested interests in this not happening and if he upsets them, he could plunge us into a European war.’

‘Then the toy soldiers will have something to occupy them!’

More laughter, but a little uneasy, it seemed to Isobel, until someone remarked that there was no danger of that at present, that the Emperor fully intended to live until he was ninety, and it seemed likely he would. And would Bruno open another bottle of wine, for God’s sake?

Another bottle was opened, but the arguments went on. Isobel suspected that many of the lofty ideas and fine utterances were a cover for lack of practical action, and finally gave up the attempt to keep up with the arguments as they became more heated, the idiosyncratic German used by the Viennese harder to follow. Leaning against the great girth of the chestnut tree, she was drowsy with wine and the swooning perfume of the lime-blossom. Presently candles in pewter sticks were brought out and lit. The death dances of pale moths made flickering patterns in the dusk until they were fatally lured into the flames. Over and above the voices that rose and fell around her, she could hear bat-squeaks in the gathering summer dusk, and caught their silent swoops from her eye-corners as they flew past.

‘Have some more wine,’ said Bruno, jerking her into full wakefulness, perilously waving a jug as he approached unsteadily and refilled her glass. ‘Gumpold –Gumpoldskirchener. Fragrant ‘n‘ fruity.’ He stumbled slightly over the name, raised his own glass and drained it. ‘The golden essence of Vienna. Delicious compliment to a delicious lady.’

‘You must excuse him, madame. My friend is a poet.’

She turned and smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve heard Bruno’s poems.’

Sitting himself down on the seat beside her was an extraordinarily good-looking boy with smiling eyes who introduced himself as Theo Benton; she had already noticed him mildly flirting with one of Viktor’s model girls – Liesl, Isobel thought she was called, blonde and beautiful, with a voluptuous body and no more brains than the sparrows who pecked the crumbs from her window sill each morning. He was an Englishman, an artist with paint under his nails and a smell of linseed on his clothes, staying here in Vienna for some unspecified time, actually here in the Francks’ attic, he told her, studying the new art which was sweeping across the Continent. Seeing her interest, he spoke about it at length. ‘But I’m a tyro compared with Viktor,’ he finished abruptly, seemingly embarrassed and surprised by his own enthusiasm. ‘Would you like to see some of his work? I have his permission to show you.’

He caught Viktor’s eye, who smiled thinly and adjusted his pince-nez. Isobel could feel his eyes on them as they walked to the building at the back of the courtyard and ducked under the low doorway. Igor got up and slunk after them, lithe as a panther.

It was the first time Isobel had been in the building which had intrigued her so much and she looked about her with interest. The rectangular space inside was lit by windows along the long wall facing the house and a door was set in the narrow end, presumably leading to the place where the printing press was housed. The other walls, roughly plastered and distempered, held canvases which glowed dimly from the shadows. Theo busied himself finding lamps as she tried to accustom her eyes to the dark.

‘Here they are!’ The light bloomed and she stared, mesmerised, at the outburst of gold thus revealed. Gold everywhere. A blur of deep, bright colours overlaid, enamelled and painted with gold, seeming to draw all the light from the lamps into themselves, leaving the rest in darkness. She could make nothing of them until somewhere among the writhing, whiplash forms, sinuous vegetation and clashing colours, the forms and faces of women began to emerge. Seductive, languorous women with snakelike hair, half hidden among all the sinister foliage, the same woman in every picture, or so it seemed. Gilded again, even her face and eyelids touched with gold, and her lips, her barely concealed breasts. Gold gleamed, too, on the snaky folds of her diaphanous robes, which were blown back as if she were breasting a high wind.

‘Well?’ asked Theo, as she went from one to the other of the paintings.

She shook her head, reluctant to give an opinion of these – to her – curiously repellent paintings. ‘These are really by Viktor?’ With their exuberance, their lack of restraint, the feeling of decadence they gave, it was difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile them with the cold, apparently unfeeling man who had painted them.

Theo looked disappointed, then he laughed. ‘I can see you don’t like them. Never mind, that’s the usual reaction to anything new. You’ll come to admire them, in time, you’ll see. I tell you, if I could paint like this…’ The laughter faded from his eyes and for a moment, such a look of passion and longing crossed the handsome face of this unassuming young Englishman that she was taken aback.

‘Like this?’

Her incredulity made him smile. ‘Oh, my own work is nothing of this sort – nor aspires to be. I meant, if I but had such mastery as his… Well, never mind that. And don’t worry about not liking Viktor’s work. I doubt he’ll ask for your opinion – but if he should by any chance do so, whatever you do, don’t compare him with Klimt. Nothing annoys him more – and Viktor is not a man to annoy.’