The Exiles Return (30 page)

All this he explained circumstantially to Resi, who smiled at him and allowed him to take her hand and kiss it each time he came to see her, each time filling her aunt’s drawing room and her own room with flowers. This was all very pleasant, and gradually, from day to day, a sense of happiness grew in Resi, she began to feel that everything was going well with her, doubts and anxieties were put to rest, she was floating again in that effortless dream world in which she had been so happy at Wald. She began to feel some true affection for Theophil Kanakis, who was giving her all this and demanding so little. He came every day and she began to look forward to his coming. She liked the deep sound of his voice, and when her aunt remarked on his manly presence, and on the excellence of his clothes and his authoritative manner, all of which impressed the old lady who had not seen the like of it in many a long year of widowhood, Resi also took notice and was herself impressed. That such a man should love her – her aunt said, looking as blissful as if it were she who was being loved – that such a man should love
me
, Resi thought over and over again; and she remembered that evening at the opera and the story of Tatiana who, rejected by Onegin, accepted the devotion of the General and was escorted into the ballroom to the admiration of all present, glittering in diamonds on the arm of her elderly husband.

Twenty-seven

Bimbo had again come to see Kanakis. ‘Theophil, I have a new candidate for your inner circle to propose to you, a very unusual one.’

‘And who is he? Or should I say she?’

‘No, it is a man. Father Ignatius Jahoda SJ.’

‘One-time chaplain to the Princely House of Grein-Lauterbach?’

‘And now in the Secretariat of the Cardinal Archbishop and a very important man indeed.’

‘I shall be honoured to make his acquaintance.’

‘He very much wants to make yours.’

‘He is, I suppose, still your Father Confessor, and he is worried about your association with me?’

‘Not worried, just interested. He is very much a man of the world, as are most members of his order.’

‘A man of the world – but still with certain prejudices – or should I say principles. Concerning the Cities of the Plain, I presume.’

‘He would say Commandments. Yes, I suppose that is at the back of his mind.’

‘At the
back
of his mind? Hasn’t he asked you any direct questions?’

‘None that I could not answer truthfully. If he had, he would not be anxious to make your acquaintance. He will make himself very pleasant.’

‘I’m sure he will, and so shall I – where shall we meet? I don’t suggest you bring him to my house. My little weekly gatherings are coming to an end anyway, now that summer is approaching. We had better meet in town. And then I’ll ask him to come and spend a few days at the Buchenhof, for the sake of his health, and the ease of getting to know each other better in the country. I’ll ask him to come when my Marie-Theres and her aunt move out there. The Baroness Simovic is bound to find his company very much to her taste, and his being my guest will be another feather in my cap to qualify my being a desirable husband for her niece. Dear, beautiful Marie-Theres! I do hate to have to rely solely on money.’

‘What a wonder you are, Theophil. I’ll tell Father Jahoda. When will you take possession of Buchenhof?’

‘I have already done so. I have rented the place for six months with the option of renewal. Dr Traümuller has surpassed himself – it is exactly what I wanted, nothing grand, a shooting box for you and your friends. Unlike my little pavilion in town, which had to be practically rebuilt, Buchenhof is fully furnished and the servants have all agreed to stay, gardeners and gamekeepers included. Of course I have doubled their wages. The owners won’t like that when they come back and find out, but meanwhile they have gone abroad, pleased with the rent that has allowed them to do so. You must come with me next week and have a look round. And you can decide which of your friends will be best qualified to go out with a gun. The gamekeepers tell me there is a lot of game, both deer and woodcock.’

‘I’m a good shot myself.’

‘Well, all the better. That’s something to look forward to when the season opens. You can ask Franz Lensveldt and Georg Corvinus. I shall be glad to be on good terms with the Lensveldts and to have all three Altmannsdorf sisters at my wedding when I marry Marie-Theres. The High Commissioner has agreed to perform the ceremony, as both Marie-Theres and I are Americans. We shall keep it an entirely American affair: no need to get entangled in any Austrian requirements. Extraterritorial, one might say, extraterritorial.’

*   *   *

All through that spring the pattern of Resi’s daily life was unchanged. She still went to her lectures at the University, and she still met Lucas when he waylaid her as she came out of the lecture room. But she became more and more withdrawn, more and more aloof towards him, while he became more and more persistent. She would go for a short stroll, but refused to go to the coffee house. She was tired and she wanted to go home. He felt she wanted to get rid of him, but when he challenged her – ‘what have I done to offend you? Why don’t you like being with me any more?’ – she would deny it and tell him to go on talking and to teach her more real history, as he called it, all about the inevitability of a future classless society and the withering away of the state.

Lucas, however, felt sure she was not listening, that she was thinking of something else while he was talking, or rather of somebody else, Bimbo Grein, of course, with whom she had gone off at the Ball. His heart burst with jealousy, but after a while he argued himself into a reluctant acceptance. Grein was not a serious rival, he was a playboy, he had certainly no intention of marrying her, she would soon discover that and there would be a rebound, and then he, Lucas, would have his chance. Resi had, indeed, discovered it, but the rebound was not in favour of Lucas; it was bewilderment and near despair until so unexpectedly, in so extraordinary a manner, Kanakis had come to the rescue.

Then Resi told him that she was going away, going to the country; she would not tell him where, only that she was going with her aunt and would probably not be seeing him for a long time. While he was trying to find out where she had gone, his mother told him, and she had heard it at the inn in Wald, where all the gossip concerning the Lensveldt family was bandied about, that it had come to her knowledge that Resi was engaged to be married. And to whom do you think? Well, you will never guess, to a Mr Kanakis, a man twice her age, a man mostly surrounded by a group of young men, the most conspicuous of whom was young Grein-Lauterbach, but a man of untold wealth. His parties in his house in Vienna were the talk of the town, and only recently he had bought, or rented, a Schloss in the Forest district of Lower Austria.

‘My dear boy,’ Frau Anreither told her son, ‘that American girl you are so crazy about, your unworldly, innocent angel, is actually staying there now. She has been seen in the village wearing a magnificent ring of rubies and diamonds on her left hand. So you may be sure she
is
going to marry him, and that should be the end of your infatuation. I shall be most thankful. That girl was no use to you from the moment you met her. Your grandfather never approved of the old Prince’s youngest daughter marrying that Danish man – if it was a proper marriage, he being a Protestant – and going off with him to America, and this girl their daughter. So what could you expect? She probably isn’t even a Christian.’ Lucas had been right when he told Resi his parents were ‘Black’, meaning strictly Catholic in their morals and their politics, his father a little more open-minded than his mother, to whom, however, his father obediently deferred.

Lucas was now faced with a desperate situation. He had been jealous of Bimbo Grein, but he had been able to persuade himself that he could bear it and live in the hope of winning Resi after all when she had become disillusioned. But this, this engagement to Kanakis, was intolerable. Not only, if she married him, would she be irretrievably lost to him but, even worse than that, her acceptance of Kanakis was a desecration of her whole person and being. She could not possibly love him, she was selling herself for his money. It was the most degrading of bargains. Thus Lucas, in his disgust and desperation, thought he could see through Kanakis’s motives: he was buying himself a screen for his unorthodox tastes, he had chosen a girl who would know little or nothing of such things, and had dazzled her with promises of pleasures and luxury which would warp her mind and defile her character.

Lucas couldn’t believe that Resi, the Resi he knew and adored, could have acted of her own free will. Her family must have talked her into it. He couldn’t allow it to happen. He must rescue her. He must open her eyes to what she was letting herself be used for. He must tell her, crudely, brutally if necessary, even if afterwards, when he had made her see, she should then hate him for a while and not want to speak to him for a long time, but he would have saved her, he would have kept her integrity intact. It would be a very bitter satisfaction to him, but satisfaction it would be, and if he didn’t do it, he would not be able to live with himself for the rest of his life.

But how would he be able to see her, to talk to her? To talk to her alone? She was a guest in a house to which he could not gain admittance, to which he would never be invited. Night after night he lay awake, planning and contriving like a conspirator. Should he write to her? Should he put his arguments on paper? That was impossible; he would only provoke a scandal, for Resi was bound to show the letter to her aunt, or even to Kanakis himself. He must take his chance of seeing her in the village near the Schloss or try to induce her to meet him somewhere they would not be seen.

He travelled to the neighbourhood, took a room at the village inn and explored the surroundings. It was going to be difficult, for the Schloss stood within a park which he could not enter in daylight without being seen by a gardener or servant and told he was trespassing on private property. But there was a home farm belonging to the house where, after a day or two, he was able to strike up an acquaintance with one of the dairymaids, and induce her to pass a note to her sister who worked as a housemaid in the Schloss and who would be willing to give the note secretly to Fräulein Larsen. A little courtship, a little money, and a romantic story of a mutual love affair, brought to a cruel and untimely end by family intrigues, persuaded the two girls to lend their assistance to a secret rendezvous. ‘Resi,’ Lucas wrote, ‘dearest, dearest Resi, please, please let me see you just once more, even if it’s only to say goodbye. I
must
see you, I must talk to you, because there is something very important I have to tell you, something you have to know. Please come to the little summer house at the corner of the rose garden when your aunt has retired for the evening. Your maid Leni will let you out and keep the door open for you. I shall not keep you long. I will wait for you all night if necessary, but come, come, come – take a match and burn this note.’ Resi was puzzled, but she came. ‘The poor young man,’ the maid had whispered to her conspiratorially, ‘he looked so unhappy, he is so much in love, it will be a sad meeting, but the Fräulein cannot be so unfeeling as to deny it to him. I am sure she will regret it all her life if she does not see him this one last time. The Fräulein is going to be such a great lady and will forget her poor lover, but he, poor young man, will remember her and this last goodbye for ever and ever.’

And so Resi went to see Lucas and to her destruction.

Twenty-eight

It was a moonless night, only the stars flickered overhead, the garden was all shadows. Resi could hardly have found the path to the summer house had she not seen a pinpoint of light from the small torch Lucas held in his hand. But he saw her coming.

‘Resi, Resi, thank God you have come! Oh Resi, I love you, I love you so much I must save you. I must open your eyes and make you see!’ He put out his hand and tried to take hold of one of hers, to draw her close so that he could speak in whispers, but she resisted him. He was trembling with suppressed excitement, his voice hoarse, sounding unnatural as he tried to control its passion. ‘Resi, Resi!’ She stood away from him.

‘What is the matter, Lucas? You should not have asked me to come out here tonight. What do you want to say? Be quick, I can’t stay long. They might notice I am not in my room. I turned out the light.’

‘Resi, my dearest, my beloved, I have come to save you, to save you!’

‘To save me from what, Lucas? You know you should not speak to me like this, not any more. I am not your beloved, I never have been, and you know it. You must stop trying to see me. I don’t know what you wanted to tell me, but I have come out only to tell you this: that we can’t meet again, that you must leave me alone. I am going to marry Mr Kanakis. I am sure you knew that. So please go away now, I am going in.’ And she turned to leave the summer house, but this time he had caught hold of her arm and held her tight.

‘Resi, wait, you can’t marry Kanakis. That is what I came to tell you, that is what I came to save you from! You don’t know what you are doing. You can’t marry a man like that!’

‘What do you mean: a man like that? Of course he is much older than me, if that is what you mean, but he loves me, and he is good and kind and, and, I love him.’

‘Oh Resi, that is not true. You don’t love him, and he doesn’t love you. He can’t love you, he is only using you – as a screen. Tell me the truth: are they
making
you marry him, your aunts, I mean – are they
forcing
you to marry him, for his money?’

‘No one is forcing me, or even trying to. Don’t be stupid, Lucas. And what do you mean by my being used? Go away now, I am going back to the house.’

But he had caught hold of her arm again. ‘Resi, I shall have to tell you why he doesn’t really love you. He only pretends to. He is a homosexual. Do you know what that is?’

‘I have heard the word. I don’t know what it means.’