The Gustav Sonata (27 page)

Gustav knew why. He recognised that he had been in denial about it for some time, but now he had to face up to it: the place was becoming shabby. The dining-room walls were dirty. A smell of stale gravy clung to them. The carpet in the lounge was stained. And guests had begun to complain that it was ‘no longer acceptable in the mid-nineties' to have to walk to a lavatory and bathroom along a corridor. All the rooms should be given bathrooms en suite.

Gustav saw that the cost of the redecorating could be easily borne, but that the building alterations to install new bathrooms would constitute a heavy expense. More than this, in some cases, no bathroom could be fitted into the existing room; in three cases, he would have to suppress adjoining bedrooms and knock through into them in order to accommodate the ‘en suite'. This would leave the hotel with nine bedrooms instead of twelve, thereby reducing his potential profits by almost one-third. Worse still, he could see that to carry out the work properly, he would be forced to close the hotel altogether for a while; he couldn't subject his guests to the perpetual noise of hammers and drills.

Gustav worked until late on the accounts. At the moment, it was summer and the hotel was full. He decided that he would have to consult with his builders and then, if he could get some reasonable price from them for the work, consider closing the hotel for the winter months. It then occurred to him that in order to retain Lunardi, he would have to give him paid leave. And he could see that if he did this for him, then the other staff, even Vincenzo, would expect him to do this for them too. He saw that he was destined for a long period of financial loss.

He didn't sleep well that night, but the following day, which dawned very bright and clear, he drove out of Matzlingen into the long valley that curved along the River Emme. He parked his car and walked up towards a forested hill and looked down upon the town.

He sat on the warm grass. At the edge of the forest he recognised the familiar leaves and bright buds of a clump of wild strawberries. He turned away from these and stared down at the untidy conglomeration of apartment houses, offices and places of commerce that was Matzlingen. That all his life had been passed in this ordinary town now struck him suddenly as a sorry reflection on the person he was – so devoid of the spirit of adventure, so afraid to find himself in some other place, where he would feel lost, that he'd never looked – nor even wanted to look – beyond the streets and squares that were familiar to him.

Aside from Bern, Burgdorf, Basel and Davos, he'd been nowhere; he had never left Switzerland. Now and then, travel brochures had come his way through the post and he'd looked at shining photographs of Rome and Barcelona and the islands of the Aegean. But Gustav Perle had never felt any inclination to get on a plane and attempt to go to these places. Indeed, the thought of arriving in them, alone and lost in another language, filled him with nothing but terror. In common with many of his countrymen, he believed that Switzerland was almost certainly the best place on earth. He had the notion that travel would only make him suffer in ways which he couldn't quite imagine, but which nevertheless lay in wait for him.

Yet now that he was looking down on Matzlingen, sitting smugly in its green valley, a small, unlovely place where visitors were few, where no famous men or women had been born (aside from the young pianist Mathias Zimmerli), a place which only came near to rejoicing in itself through the ancient Schwingfests, where men drank beer and wrestled with each other in linen shorts, while the girls looked on in amusement – in other words, a place which could have been erased from the map with little or no lamentation – it made him ashamed to think that he had been trapped here for fifty-four years.

Feeling suddenly thirsty, Gustav got up and walked to where the strawberries grew and began picking them and cramming them into his mouth. As the beautiful tiny fruits began assuaging his thirst, he made a decision. It was not one he'd expected himself to make, but it seemed, at least, to contain no terror. Once he'd installed his builders in October, he would leave Matzlingen for two months, returning only in time for Christmas, when he knew Anton might come back to visit Armin and Adriana. He would go to Paris.

Gustav didn't want to travel alone. He decided he would take Lottie Erdman with him. He knew how much a trip to Paris would mean to her – how, indeed, it was beyond anything she could have dreamed of in what remained of her life. And the idea that Lottie Erdman was owed some
gift
, for the love that she had given his father, felt correct to Gustav.

And there was another consideration: dreading to find Paris dark and crowded and not much to his liking, he preferred to try to experience it through Lottie's eyes, to discover in it at least some fleeting wonder. He had the feeling that he would be unmoved by the colossal reach of the Eiffel Tower, by the broken limbs of the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, by the formal grandeur of the Jardins des Tuileries, but that Lottie would not be unmoved by these things. Her delft eyes, peering in rapture at all that he guided her to, would shine with grateful tears. She would clutch his arm or take his hand. She would say, ‘Gustav, you can't imagine what this means to me. You can never imagine.'

Before leaving, he had to go over plans for bathrooms with his builders. He told them, ‘I want these new bathrooms to be stylish and modern and warm. I want marble tiles on the floor and showers that are spacious and simple to operate. I want the Hotel Perle to become renowned for its luxury in this important area.'

The cost was daunting. Over the years, Gustav had managed to save money, but he now saw that a big slice of this would have to be put towards the refurbishments. And part of him wondered, is the Hotel Perle, of which I've been so ridiculously proud for so long (but inhabiting as it does an undistinguished street in a very undistinguished town) really worth all this terrifying expense? Will I ever be able to recuperate it?

He couldn't know the answer to this. All he knew was that he had to keep moving forwards in his life, not stay still to pine over Anton's absence, and that moving forwards sometimes entailed spending money. He thought frequently about his grandmother's store cupboard full of sauerkraut and the notes Emilie and he had found in the ancient jar. And it struck him as sad that Irma Albrecht had never moved forward, but had lived out her entire life in a broken-down house on a wild hill near Basel, amassing a treasure, note by note, in a grimy larder, but taking no pleasure from it, only the pleasure of depriving small tradesmen of what she owed them.

The evening before Gustav left for Paris, with the hotel already emptied of its staff, except for his
maître d'hôtel
, Leonnard, who had agreed to remain as a caretaker, there was a ring at the door.

There was already a notice on the front door explaining that the hotel was closed for refurbishments, so Gustav was surprised that anybody should ring the bell.

The early-October night was cold, so he came down quickly to see who was outside, and at once recognised a face that was dear to him, peering in through the grille. It was Colonel Ashley-Norton.

He ushered in the elderly man and shook his hand, which was freezing. A battered waterproof hat had been pressed onto his brilliantined white hair. From his nose, an icy droplet threatened to fall onto his nail-brush moustache. Gustav felt wretched that there were no fires in any of the downstairs rooms.

‘Colonel,' he said, ‘I'm so sorry. I'm closing the hotel for some restoration work. I leave tomorrow for Paris …'

‘Yes,' said Ashley-Norton, ‘I saw your notice. Bad timing, eh? I wanted to come back here in the summer and take up my marvellous valley walks, but I was trapped in England by illness. Too bad, too bad. I'm recovered now and I was hoping we could resume the rummy games this autumn.'

Gustav led the colonel up to his apartment, the only warm space in the building, and sat him by the fire. He'd eaten no dinner, so Gustav made him up a plate of cold cuts from his own small fridge and poured him a large glass of brandy.

‘Capital,' he said. ‘First rate.'

‘I'm so sorry,' Gustav said again. ‘I can't tell you how often I've thought about you and the cards and hoped you'd come back. Everything you said about the game being consoling and “stilling the heart” I found to be right. I taught my friend Anton how to play. You remember Anton Zwiebel? He's gone away now.'

‘Oh, gone away where?'

‘He lives in Geneva.'

‘Geneva, eh? Nice city. Elegant in every particular. But Matzlingen … for some reason, I found this town to be very congenial. Not too smart. And just about the right size for me.'

He made up a room for Colonel Ashley-Norton. He told him that the water was still hot so he could take a bath or a shower before bed, if he liked. He then telephoned the only other hotel in Matzlingen, the Hotel Friedrich, and booked him in for the following night.

‘The Hotel Friedrich,' said the colonel, shaking his white head. ‘Am I going to be all right there?'

‘I hope so. It's the best I can do.'

‘I bet their chef doesn't make chocolate truffles, eh?'

‘I fear he may not.'

‘Most delicious thing I've ever tasted, those truffles. And the other thing that happened here, Herr Perle,' he said. ‘I always slept well. Always slept as though I was an innocent – almost as though I had no past I had to be ashamed of. Why? you will ask. Comfortable beds, I suppose, and that gentle clink-clank of the trams, but most importantly, the childish feeling that you were watching over me.'

LONG BEFORE GUSTAV
and Lottie Erdman reached Paris, Lottie began to comment on the marvellousness of things.

Walking along the concourse at Bern airport, wearing a smart white woollen travelling coat and suede ankle boots, she kept pausing to wonder at the shops selling chocolate bears, Emmental cheese, Swiss sausage and aprons imprinted with the national flag. Then, on the plane, when Gustav ordered her a drink, she laughed with pleasure at the miniature bottle of whisky she was given. When she looked out of the window and saw the shadow of the plane borne across the clouds, she said, ‘Look, Gustav! We're a cargo of angels!'

Gustav glanced at her profile, lit by the sunlight coming through the plane's window. She had had lilac streaks put into her grey hair, which she had swept into a neat chignon, and set off with gold earrings, and these things gave to her the shine of a rich woman. Gustav felt suddenly proud to be with her. He imagined how moved and amazed his father would have been if he had been able to take his beloved Lottie to Paris. He would have bought her new dresses and new French underwear. He would have spent hours in cafés, holding her hand.

Soon after arriving in Paris, Gustav saw clearly that the best time to visit an unknown city was in the autumn. He understood that everything which gives to a foreign metropolis its outward expression of hostility – the grey contours of buildings from which you feel you might be forever excluded, the pavements with their freight of hurrying strangers – was softened and made human by leaves falling and dancing in the wind. He felt that there was a sweet melancholy in an October rain, and on fine days, the cries of children kicking their way along the strewn sidewalks or across the gravelled walkways of the parks, searching for conkers and sweet chestnuts, sounded pure and lovely in the clear air.

He'd expected to feel lost in Paris, to experience the feelings of shame and stupidity of those who haven't worked out how to negotiate a place for themselves in a world they don't understand. But walking there with Lottie, both of them surprised at every turn by the great vistas the city suddenly revealed, gazing up like babies at the Arc de Triomphe on its hill of light, dawdling along the banks of the grey-green river, what gradually stole upon him was a feeling of lightness, as though he had been imprisoned in a tiny cell for a long while and was now suddenly released.

The flat he'd rented was in the rue Washington, about one hundred paces from the crowded sweep of the Champs-Elysées. The apartment was on the second floor. To reach it, you went up a wide staircase which at first reminded him of the staircase in Emilie's old apartment, except that that stone was carpeted – so that no melancholy echo sounded as you ascended or descended.

The rue Washington itself was undistinguished: a bar, a pharmacy, an optometrist's tiny shop. But the back of the apartment looked out over a cobbled courtyard, sun-filled in the afternoons, and in their first week, Lottie and Gustav spent long, spellbound moments gazing down in wonder at this. The courtyard, planted up with bay trees and box and tubs of geraniums going brown in the sharp winds of October, didn't belong to them, but nobody stopped them looking at it; it was there for all the residents of the building to enjoy.

‘What I feel,' said Lottie one evening, as they watched the courtyard fill with shadow and the light in the sky turn an electric blue, ‘is that we're outside time, Gustav. This bit of our lives is an interlude; it doesn't count in the measurement of days or hours. When we leave we'll be exactly the age we were when we arrived.'

Gustav thought about this for a long time. He saw how his life in Matzlingen – a life he would have said was far from unhappy until Anton left for Geneva – had had about it a low hum of
weltschmerz
which he had not been inclined to hear. He thus deliberately set about changing certain habits. He let the apartment become untidy and forced himself not to mind when Lottie left her clothes strewn about the rooms. And he quickly became reckless about spending money. He knew that this was ridiculous, a bit infantile, but he wanted to buy for Lottie the things his father would have bought her, if they had only had the time and the means.

They went to beautiful little boutiques in St-Germain-des-Prés and Gustav sat among shoes and rails of brassieres while Lottie disappeared behind curtains to emerge, like an opera diva, dressed in velvet skirts and sparkling low-cut blouses, her large breasts held up and her waist held in by a bit of female armoury she called a
bustier.
With her lilac hair, with her blue eyes ablaze with joy, Lottie appeared far younger than she'd looked when he'd first met her, and her great curvy body, he saw, was a source of admiration among the thin salesgirls who helped choose her outfits.