The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel (38 page)

General Observations on Quadrupeds

W
hen I close my eyes I see Tyneford House. In the darkness as I lay down to sleep, I see the Purbeck stone frontage in the glow of late afternoon. The sunlight glints off the upper windows, and the air is heavy with the scents of magnolia and salt. Ivy clings to the porch archway, and a magpie pecks at the lichen coating a limestone roof tile. Smoke seeps from one of the great chimneystacks, and the leaves on the unfelled lime avenue are May green and cast mottled patterns on the driveway. There are no weeds yet tearing through the lavender and thyme borders, and the lawn is velvet cropped and rolled in verdant stripes. No bullet holes pockmark the ancient garden wall and the drawing room windows are thrown open, the glass not shattered by shellfire. I see the house as it was then, on that first afternoon.

Everyone is just out of sight. I can hear the ring of the drinks tray being prepared; on the terrace a bowl of pink camellias rests on the table. And in the bay, the fishing boats bounce upon the tide, nets cast wide, the slap of water against wood. We have not yet been exiled. The cottages do not lie in pebbled ruins across the strand, with hazel and blackthorn growing through the flagstones of the village houses. We have not surrendered Tyneford to guns and tanks and birds and ghosts.

I find I forget more and more nowadays. Nothing very important, as yet. I was talking to somebody just now on the telephone, and as soon as I had replaced the receiver I realised I’d forgotten who it was and what we said. I shall probably remember later when I’m lying in the bath. I’ve forgotten other things too: the names of the birds are no longer on the tip of my tongue and I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember where I planted the daffodil bulbs for spring. And yet, as the years wash everything else away, Tyneford remains—a smooth pebble of a memory. Tyneford. Tyneford. As though if I say the name enough, I can go back again. Those summers were long and blue and hot. I remember it all, or think I do. It doesn’t seem long ago to me. I have replayed each moment so often in my mind that I hear my own voice in every part. Now, as I write them, they appear fixed, absolute. On the page we live again, young and unknowing, everything yet to happen.

When I received the letter that brought me to Tyneford, I knew nothing about England, except that I wouldn’t like it. That morning I perched on my usual spot beside the draining board in the kitchen as Hildegard bustled around, flour up to her elbows and one eyebrow snowy white. I laughed and she flicked her tea towel at me, knocking the crust out of my hand and onto the floor.

“
Gut.
Bit less bread and butter won’t do you any harm.”

I scowled and flicked crumbs onto the linoleum. I wished I could be more like my mother, Anna. Worry had made Anna even thinner. Her eyes were huge against her pale skin, so that she looked more than ever like the operatic heroines she played. When she married my father, Anna was already a star—a black-eyed beauty with a voice like cherries and chocolate. She was the real thing; when she opened her mouth and began to sing, time paused just a little and everyone listened, bathing in the sound, unsure if what they heard was real or some perfect imagining. When the trouble began, letters started to arrive from Venice and Paris, from tenors and conductors. There was even one from a double bass. They were all the same:
Darling Anna, leave Vienna and come to Paris/London/New York and I shall keep you safe . . .
Of course she would not leave without my father. Or me. Or Margot. I would have gone in a flash, packed my ball gowns (if I’d had any) and escaped to sip champagne in the Champs Elysées. But no letters came for me. Not even a note from a second violin. So I ate bread rolls with butter, while Hildegard sewed little pieces of elastic into my waistbands.

“Come.” Hildegard chivvied me off the counter and steered me into the middle of the kitchen, where a large book dusted with flour rested on the table. “You must practise. What shall we make?”

Anna had picked it up at a secondhand bookstore and presented it to me with a flush of pride. Mrs. Beeton’s
Book of Household Management—
a whole kilo of book to teach me how to cook and clean and behave. This was to be my unglamorous fate.

Chewing on my plait, I prodded the tome so that it fell open at the index. “‘General Observations on Quadrupeds . . . Mock Turtle Soup . . . Eel Pie.’”I shuddered. “Here.” I pointed to an entry halfway down the page. “Goose. I should know how to cook goose. I said I knew.”

A month previously, Anna had walked with me to the telegraph offices so that I could wire a “Refugee Advertisement” to the London
Times
. I’d dragged my feet along the pavement, kicking at the wet piles of blossoms littering the ground.

“I don’t want to go to England. I’ll come to America with you and Papa.”

My parents hoped to escape to New York, where the Metropolitan Opera would help them with a visa, if only Anna would sing.

Anna picked up her pace. “And you will come. But we cannot get an American visa for you now.”

She stopped in the middle of the street and took my face in her hands. “I promise you that before I even take a peek at the shoes in Bergdorf Goodmans, I will see a lawyer about bringing you to New York.”

“Before you see the shoes at Bergdorf’s?”

“I promise.”

Anna had tiny feet and a massive appetite for shoes. Music may have been her first love, but shoes were definitely her second. Her wardrobe was lined with row upon row of dainty high heels in pink, grey, patent leather, calfskin and suede. She made fun of herself to mollify me.

“Please let me at least check your advertisement,” Anna pleaded. Before she’d met my father Anna had sung a season at Covent Garden and her English was almost perfect.

“No.” I snatched the paper away from her. “If my English is so terrible that I can only get a place at a flophouse, then it’s my own fault.”

Anna tried not to laugh. “Darling, do you even know what a flophouse is?”

Of course I had no idea, but I couldn’t tell Anna that. I had visions of refugees like myself, alternately fainting upon overstuffed sofas. Full of indignation at her teasing, I made Anna wait outside the office while I sent the telegram:

Hildegard fixed me with a hard stare. “Elise Rosa Landau, I do not happen to have a goose in my larder this morning, so will you please select something else.”

I was about to choose Parrot Pie, purely to infuriate Hildegard, when Anna and Julian entered the kitchen. He held out a letter. My father, Julian, was a tall man, standing six feet in his socks, with thick black hair with only a splash of grey around his temples, and eyes as blue as a summer sea. My parents proved that beautiful people don’t necessarily produce beautiful children. My mother, with her fragile blond loveliness, and Julian so handsome that he always wore his wire-rimmed spectacles to lessen the effect of those too-blue eyes (I’d tried them on when he was bathing, and discovered that the lenses were so weak as to be almost clear glass). Yet somehow this couple had produced me. For years the great-aunts had cooed, “
Ach
, just you wait till she blossoms! Twelve years old, mark my words, and she’ll be the spit of her mother.” I could spit, but I was nothing like my mother. Twelve came and went. They held out for sixteen. Still no blossoming. By nineteen even Gabrielle, the most optimistic of the great-aunts, had given up hope. The best they could manage was: “She has her own charm. And character.” Whether this character was good or bad, they never said.

Anna lurked behind Julian, blinking and running a pink tongue-tip across her bottom lip. I stood up straight and concentrated on the letter in Julian’s hand.

“It’s from England,” he said, holding it out to me.

I took it from him and with deliberate slowness, well aware they were all watching me, slid a butter knife under the seal. I drew out a creamy sheet of watermarked paper, unfolded it and smoothed the creases. I read in slow silence. The others bore with me for a minute and then Julian interrupted.

“For God’s sake, Elise. What does it say?”

I fixed him with a glare. I glared a lot back then. He ignored me, and I read aloud.

I lowered the letter.

“But twelve months is too long. I’m to be in New York before then, Papa.”

Julian and Anna exchanged a glance, and it was she who answered.

“Darling Bean, I hope you will be in New York in six months. But for now, you must go where it is safe.”

Julian tugged my plait in a gesture of playful affection. “We can’t go to New York unless we know you’re out of harm’s way. The minute we arrive at the Metropolitan we’ll send for you.”

“I suppose it’s too late for me to take singing lessons?”

Anna only smiled. So it was true, then. I was to leave them. Until this moment it had not been real. I had written the telegram, even sent the wire to London, but it had seemed a game. I knew things were bad for us in Vienna. I heard the stories of old women being pulled out of shops by their hair and forced to scrub the pavements. Frau Goldschmidt had been made to scrape dog feces from the gutter with her mink stole. I overheard her confession to Anna; she had sat hunched on the sofa in the parlour, her porcelain cup clattering in her hands, as she confided her ordeal: “The joke is, I never liked that fur. It was a gift from Herman, and I wore it to please him. It was much too hot and it was his mother’s colour, not mine. He never would learn . . . But to spoil it like that . . .” She’d seemed more upset by the waste than the humiliation. Before she left, I saw Anna quietly stuff an arctic rabbit muffler inside her shopping bag.

The evidence of difficult times was all around our apartment. There were scratch marks on the floor in the large sitting room where Anna’s baby grand used to sit. It was worth nearly two thousand schillings—a gift from one of the conductors at La Scala. It had arrived one spring before Margot and I were born, but we all knew that Julian didn’t like having this former lover’s token cluttering up his home. It had been lifted up on a pulley through the dining room windows, the glass of which had to be specially removed—how Margot and I used to wish that we’d glimpsed the great flying piano spectacle. Occasionally, when Julian and Anna had one of their rare disagreements, he’d mutter, “Why can’t you have a box of love letters or a photograph album like any other woman? Why a bloody great grand piano? A man shouldn’t have to stub his toe on his rival’s passion.” Anna, so gentle in nearly all things, was immovable on matters of music. She would fold her arms and stand up straight, reaching all of five feet nothing, and announce, “Unless you wish to spend two thousand schillings on another piano and demolish the dining room again, it stays.” And stay it did, until one day, when I arrived home from running a spurious errand for Anna to discover it missing. There were gouges all along the parquet floor, and from a neighbouring apartment I could hear the painful clatter of a talentless beginner learning to play. Anna had sold her beloved piano to a woman across the hall, for a fraction of its value. In the evenings at six o’clock, we could hear the rattle of endless clumsy scales as our neighbour’s acne-ridden son was forced to practise. I imagined the piano wanting to sing a lament at its ill treatment and pining for Anna’s touch, but crippled into ugliness. Its rich, dark tones once mingled with Anna’s voice like cream into coffee. After the banishment of the piano, at six every evening Anna always had a reason for leaving the apartment—she’d forgotten to buy potatoes (though the larder was packed with them), there was a letter to post, she’d promised to dress Frau Finkelstein’s corns.

Despite the vanished piano, the spoiled furs, the pictures missing from the walls, Margot’s expulsion from the conservatoire on racial grounds and the slow disappearance of all the younger maids, so that only old Hildegard remained, until this moment I had never really thought that I would have to leave Vienna. I loved the city. She was as much a part of my family as Anna or great-aunts Gretta, Gerda and Gabrielle. It was true, strange things kept happening, but at age nineteen nothing really terrible had ever happened to me before and, blessed with the outlook of the soul-deep optimist, I had truly believed that all would be well. Standing in the kitchen as I looked up into Julian’s face and met his sad half smile, I knew for the first time in my life that everything was not going to be all right, that things would not turn out for the best. I must leave Austria and Anna and the apartment on Dorotheegasse with its tall sash windows looking out onto the poplars that glowed pink fire as the sun crept up behind them and the grocer’s boy who came every Tuesday yelling
“Eis! Eis!”
And the damask curtains in my bedroom that I never closed so I could see the yellow glow from the streetlamps and the twin lights from the tramcars below. I must leave the crimson tulips in the park in April, and the whirling white dresses at the Opera Ball, and the gloves clapping as Anna sang and Julian wiped away proud tears with his embroidered handkerchief, and midnight ice cream on the balcony on August nights, and Margot and I sunbathing on striped deckchairs in the park as we listened to trumpets on the bandstand, and Margot burning supper, and Robert laughing and saying it doesn’t matter and us eating apples and toasted cheese instead, and Anna showing me how to put on silk stockings without tearing them by wearing kid gloves, and . . . and . . .