The Glimmer Palace (16 page)

“You’re new,” he said. “What happened to the last girl?”

“She’s gone,” Lilly replied.

He paused.

“Obviously,” he said. “What do they call you?”

“Lilly.”

“Well, Lilly, I eat breakfast at six, so I should like you to bring some coffee and a roll to my room. I also like a morning paper, so if you could arrange that, if it’s not too much trouble. . . . And I know it’s inconvenient, but I like a bath every night, so if you could just leave a clean set of towels on my bed . . .”

He sighed.

“And I only drink tea from porcelain. Can you remember that?”

She turned around.What did he think she was, an idiot?

“Yes,” she said. “I can remember that.”

He sat back and seemed to take her in: the hateful uniform and her ugly brown shoes. But although she thought otherwise, he did not even notice what she was wearing. Instead, with the cold, acquisitive eye of a proprietor, he measured the tone of her voice, the angles of her face, the flash of her eyes. She was a white page, perfectly grained and artfully cut. And he imagined running his hands along the soft skin of her inner thighs.

“Good.What’s that?” he asked. “In your pocket?”

Lilly’s heart dipped. He would sack her. She had almost enough money saved, but not quite. She pulled out a book of poetry and placed it on the table. He raised his eyebrow and looked as if about to speak.Then he picked it up and opened it at random.

“You like Rilke?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

He flicked back to the fly page. She knew his name was written there in violet ink.

“Was it your book?” Lilly asked. “I haven’t stolen it. I found it in the library. . . . I suppose I shouldn’t have taken it, but . . .”

“By all means. Read poetry . . . keep it,” he said, tossing the book onto the table. “Does the job bore you?”

She turned back to the sink and started to run the cold tap. He waited for an answer.

She didn’t reply. He should never have asked. Her shoulders heaved as she tried to concentrate on scrubbing the white enamel. She was suddenly aware that the penniless poet had come up behind her. She turned and he was there, too close, far too close.

“Porcelain,” she said. “Porcelain cups.”

“Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed.”

From the moment the penniless poet arrived, the house felt different. Although most of the shutters were closed and remained that way, windows were thrown wide open behind them, and the air, now edged with the chill of autumn, seemed sharper, cleaner. When it was fair, he went for morning walks or sat outside in the overgrown garden and smoked his pipe. Otherwise, he worked in his study or read in the library.

Lilly could always tell when he was at home. Apart from the smell of his tobacco, there was a change in the atmosphere, a thickening, a quickening, which was occasionally punctuated by small, sudden acts of violence: a fly was crushed, a door slammed too hard, some coffee dashed into a cup.

“I’m writing again,” he would tell her if he passed her in the corridor. “I’ll make you renounce your Rilke.”

But when she tidied his desk every morning, all she found were white pieces of paper covered with hundreds of small stabs of the point of his fountain pen.

She wasn’t exactly sure when she became aware that he spent much of the day watching her. He would come into the pantry for a glass of water while she was pressing laundry. He would stand by her while she spat onto the iron. And then he would ask her for a cuff link, a spare collar, a lost suspender. And while she looked for it, his eyes would travel from her ankle to the nape of her neck, up and down and up and down again as the iron cooled. After so many months of being invisible, she now felt dangerously exposed. He wanted to know her, her body, her face, even her mind. And although her face flushed and her hands trembled, it was as if she had just stepped from the darkness into the light.

“Here you are,” she would say when she found what he had asked her for. But even though he smiled and thanked her graciously, there was always a tiny grain of disappointment in his voice.

Pig swill,” the poet shouted at the cook. “This is muck. Absolute muck.”

In the kitchen a dish of pork and cabbage steamed gently on the table. The cook, her chest heaving, stared at the food in between them. Her face was pink and her ears were puce.

“Your soup is like liquefied cardboard, your dumplings are as heavy as bricks, and as for your bread, it’s positively prehistoric.”

Lilly had come in from the garden with a bucket of coal.The poet winked at her. He was clearly enjoying himself.

“It’s the cooker, sir,” the cook replied. “It’s electric.”

“So what are you suggesting?” he replied. “We go back to using a wood-fired range?”

The cook stared defiantly at the plate on the table.

“After much thought,” he continued, “and since my wife is convalescing, I have come to a decision.You’re let go. Dismissed. Go on. Go. Go!”

The cook, whom Lilly had only ever heard mutter the shortest of words, pulled herself together and cursed him and his spineless wife for the rest of their fucking miserable lives before pulling her coat over her flour-dashed skirt and walking out.

Lilly and the penniless poet looked at each other. And then he started to laugh. Lilly smiled.

“Can you cook?” he asked her.

“Only porridge,” she replied.

“Well, I suppose that leaves me,” he said.

Lilly was sent to market. On his instructions, she bought Havel River trout with blood still in its eyes and a rainbow gilt on its scales. She chose squeaky winter cabbages and wild mushrooms fresh from the Tegeler Forest. The penniless poet came back from his morning walks with a handful of crayfish wrapped in newspaper or a chunk of meat seeping blood through its white paper wrapping. And in the afternoons, he rolled up his sleeves and chopped onions or reduced red wine; he seared fish and stewed veal and left huge vats of stock to simmer for hours. There were a few culinary disasters, for—just as the cook had suggested—the new electric cooker would either undercook or burn things, but the poet devised a system where the hot plates were always heating up or cooling down and pans could be shifted from plate to plate.

The kitchen was now always a mess. Dishes filled the sink and the stove was splattered with gravy. And so Lilly worked around him, washing and stirring and moving pans around the hob.

“Stop for a moment,” he told Lilly. “And try.”

She put down the dishcloth and turned to him. He was holding a spoon filled with soup.

“Go on . . .” he said. “I need a second opinion.”

She was aware of his eyes on her lips, but he did not raise the spoon and she did not reach for it. There was a fraction of a second when neither of them moved. A bell rang. The Countess wanted her. He blew on the soup to cool it and then fed it to her as if to an ailing child.

“Well?” he asked.

“It’s fine . . . except . . .”

“Except?” he asked.

“It needs a little salt,” she said as she hurried toward the stairs.

He frowned and then threw a large pinch of sea salt into the boiling vat.

“Good girl,” he said.

The poet, whose pen name was Marek Klein, had been taught to cook by his mother. She had made herself learn when her family had lost its fortune in the depression of 1870.When her husband, and the father of her son, left her within a week of this misfortune, she had been forced to find employment and took a position as a housekeeper to a reclusive prince with a small castle in the Black Forest. And so Marek had grown up in a castle, which he would never inherit, with a mother who taught him how to cook and how to suffer. No wonder he had become a poet.

Marek Klein had written his best poetry in his teens, when he was full of giddy anticipation and unfulfilled longing. He had a letter from Rainer Rilke stating that in his opinion the young poet could be “on the brink of greatness.” He may have been on the brink, but he never exactly took the plunge. His poetry became less great over the years, and by the time Lilly met him in the Countess’s kitchen he had written just one mediocre piece after spending twelve months alone in a hotel on the Baltic coast.

Of course, his failure was never his fault. At the slightest prompt, he would launch into a tirade against publishers and editors, journalists, and other, more successful writers whose status had been attained by nepotism, usually, and good fortune, occasionally. He rarely submitted any of his poems anywhere anymore, suggesting that they were too sophisticated for the readers of the day, and claiming himself to be invested with a special gift, a gift that had to be nurtured, pampered, and protected at all costs from the twin blades of indifference and rejection.

The only thing he really knew with any certainty that he was good at, apart from poetry, was seduction. Like many young men of his generation, the poet had learned his seduction techniques from Tolstoy’s Vronsky. Alice, the widow of a man twenty years her senior whose addiction to Turkish delight had been the end of him, was fair game. After jumping from the stone balcony of a villa in Wilmersdorf to escape a dull party and persuading her to follow him, Marek had taken her for breakfast in a cheap café. And then over coffee and peasant bread, he had talked and she had listened. He looked down on both the bourgeoisie and the working classes. He laughed at the military and the kaiser and their ridiculous pomp. He was drawn to the free-spirited, to the unconventional, to the nonmaterialistic, to the beautiful people. None of the opinions he expressed, except the latter, came from his own head. He had read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Marx, and he quoted them inaccurately and without credit.

And as he talked, his hands began to wander, first a light touch on the arm, then a nudge on the shoulder, and eventually a lingering caress on the leg. Their breath had quickened, their eyes had brightened, and they had left the café and taken a taxi to a cheap hotel. He had signed them in with a flourish while she paid, in cash, in advance.

It was sex that had been the deciding factor in his wooing of the Countess, sex that had oiled the wheels of her rusted-up heart, and sex that had made her feel adored, desired, and liberated. No wonder she fell in love and married him within the month. And yet the euphoria did not last; the emotion was not reciprocated. In the first few weeks after their nuptials his kisses became infrequent, his touch became a grip, his gaze lost all suggestion of tenderness.When he ordered her to strip and stand beside him in front of the bedroom mirror, it was not at her naked image that he gazed but at his own still fully dressed self. And later, when, still wearing shoes, he turned her this way and that way, backward and forward, up and down, it occurred to her that the dexterity of his sexual routine was not one that aimed to possess her in every way, as she first supposed, but more likely an act born out of multiple copulations with multiple partners.

In fact, he was a man who, when lying on his deathbed in a small musky apartment in the Fourteenth Arrondissement of Paris, France, finally realized that his gift had been his undoing. While succumbing to natural causes at the age of ninety-two, he had one of those flashes of clarity the dying are said to experience. And as he struggled to take his last few breaths, he wondered: If he had loved anyone else as fiercely, as passionately, as he had loved himself, would he have ended up alone, uncared for, and posthumously unmissed?

He had married the Countess because he believed that life as a poet would be easier if he were rich. It wasn’t. In his cold-headed plan, he failed to predict the spite his act would provoke when the Countess became postnuptially depressed. He also failed to predict how he would feel when he discovered his new wife’s health problems were all-consuming and taken far more seriously than his own occasional low-level hypochondria.

“I need to talk to you,” he whispered to Dr. Storck. “My head feels stuffy and sometimes I feel as if I’m suffocating.”

The doctor, his eyebrow arched, suggested peppermint oil.

He had not come down with any new symptoms, however, since he had arrived back from the Baltic Coast. He had a new sickness, he wrote down in his journal, a malady called maid fever.

One day, the Countess was resting and Lilly was spring cleaning, running up and down the stairs with polishing cloths and firewood. The poet was hovering on the stairs examining a picture, and he would have to move up or down, depending, every time she passed.

“You have a smudge on your cheek,” he said.

She rubbed her face with the back of her hand.

“No, there . . .” he said.

She tried again.

“Let me show you,” he said.

And before she could stop him, he had licked his thumb.

“Got it,” he said. “Soot, I think.”

She averted her eyes. In the kitchen, the kettle began to whistle.

“Would you like your tea in the drawing room . . . sir?”

He drew back.

“Yes,” he said. “That would be fine . . . Lilly.”

His voice cracked a little when he said her name. It sounded like a confession, like a secret. And although she knew that it meant nothing, that it had to mean nothing, he met her gaze and held it until she looked away.