The Novel in the Viola (2 page)

‘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.

Dear Fraulein Landau,

Mr Rivers has instructed me to write to you and tell you that the position of house parlour maid at Tyneford House is yours if you want it. He has agreed to sign the necessary visa application statements, providing that you stay at Tyneford for a minimum of a twelve-month. If you wish to accept the post, please write or wire by return. On your arrival in London, proceed to the Mayfair Agency in Audley St. W1 where ongoing travel arrangements to Tyneford will be made.

Yours sincerely,

Florence Ellsworth

Housekeeper, Tyneford House

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 faeces from the gutter with her mink stole. I overheard her confession to Anna; she had 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 round 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 or 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 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 spoilt 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 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, 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 which 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 me 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 . . .

‘And sit, drink some water.’

Anna thrust a glass in front of me while Julian slid a wooden chair behind me. Even Hildegard looked rattled.

‘You have to go,’ said Anna.

‘I know,’ I said, realising as I did so that my luxuriant and prolonged childhood was at an end. I stared at Anna with a shivering sense of time pivoting up and down like a seesaw. I memorised every detail: the tiny crease in the centre of her forehead that appeared when she was worried; Julian beside her, his hand resting on her shoulder; the grey silk of her blouse. The blue tiles behind the sink. Hildegard wringing the dishcloth.

That Elise, the girl I was then, would declare me old, but she is wrong. I am still she. I am still standing in the kitchen holding the letter, watching the others – and waiting – and knowing that everything must change.

CHAPTER TWO

In the bathtub, singing

Memories do not exist along a timeline. In my mind everything happens at once. Anna kisses me good night and tucks me into my high-sided cot, while my hair is brushed for Margot’s wedding, which now takes place on the lawn at Tyneford, my feet bare upon the grass. I am in Vienna as I wait for their letters to arrive in Dorset. The chronology laid out upon these pages is not without effort.

I am young in my dreams. The face in the mirror always surprises me. I observe the smart grey hair, nicely set of course, and the tiredness beneath the eyes that never goes away. I know that it is my face, and yet the next time I glance in the mirror I am surprised all over again. Oh, I think, I forgot that this is me. In those blissful days living in the bel-étage, I was the baby of the family. They all indulged me, Margot, Julian and Anna most of all. I was their pet, their
liebling,
to be cosseted and adored. I didn’t have remarkable gifts like the rest of them. I couldn’t sing. I could play the piano and viola a little but nothing like Margot, who had inherited all our mother’s talent. Her husband Robert had fallen in love before he had even spoken to her, when he listened to her perform viola in Schumann’s
Fairytale Pictures
. He said that her music painted lightning storms, wheat fields rippling in the rain and girls with sea-blue hair. He said he’d never seen through someone else’s eyes before. Margot decided to love him back and they were married within six weeks. It was all quite sickening and I should have been unbearably jealous if it hadn’t been for the fact that Robert had no sense of humour. He never once laughed at any of my jokes – not even the one about the rabbi and the dining room chair and the walnut – so clearly he was deficient. The possibility of a man ever being besotted with my musical gifts was highly improbable but I did need him to laugh.

I entertained the idea of becoming a writer like Julian, but unlike him I’d never written anything other than a list of boys I fancied. Once, watching Hildegard stuff seasoned sausage meat into cabbage leaves with her thick red fingers, I’d decided that this would be a fine subject for a poem. But I’d not progressed any further than this insight. I was plump while the others were slender. I had thick ankles and they were fine boned and high cheeked, and the only beauty I’d inherited was Julian’s black hair, which hung in a python plait all the way down to my knickers. But they loved me anyway. Anna indulged my babyish ways and I was allowed to sulk and storm off to my room and sob over fairy-stories that I was far too old for. My never-ending childhood made Anna feel young. With a girl-child like me she did not admit her forty-five years, even to herself.

All that changed with the letter. I must go off into the world alone, and I must finally grow up. The others treated me just as before, but there was self-consciousness in their actions, as if they knew I was sick but were being meticulous in giving nothing away in their behaviour. Anna continued to smile benevolently upon my sullen moods, and slip me the fattest slice of cake and run my bath with her best lavender-scented salts. Margot picked fights and borrowed books without asking but I knew it was just for show. Her heart wasn’t in the rowing, and she took books she knew I’d already read. Only Hildegard was different. She stopped chiding me, and even when it was probably most urgent, she no longer pressed Mrs Beeton upon me. She called me ‘Fraulein Elise’, when I’d been simple ‘Elise’ or ‘pain of my existence’ since I was two. This sudden formality was not out of respect at some newfound dignity on my part. It was pity. I suspected Hildegard wanted to give me every mark of rank and social status during those last weeks, knowing how I must feel the humiliation in the months to come, but I wished she would call me Elise, box my ears and threaten to pour salt on my supper once more. I left biscuit crumbs on my nightstand in clear contravention of her no-biscuits-in-the-bedroom policy, but she said nothing, only gave me a tiny curtsy (how I crawled inside) and retired into her kitchen with a wounded expression.

The days slid by. I felt them pass faster and faster like painted horses on a carousel. I willed time to slow, concentrating on the tick-tick of the hall clock, trying to draw out the silence between the relentless beats of the second hand. Of course it did not work. My visa arrived in the post. The clock ticked. Anna took me to receive my passport. Tick. Julian went to another office to pay my departure tax and on his return disappeared into his study without a word and with the burgundy decanter. Tick. I packed my travel-trunks with wads of silk stockings, while Hildegard stitched hidden pockets into all of my dresses to secrete forbidden valuables, sewing fine gold chains along the seams. Anna and Margot accompanied me on coffee-drinking excursions to the aunts, so we could eat honey-cakes and say goodbye and we’ll meet again soon when-all-this-is-over-whenever-that-will-be. Tick. I tried to stay awake all night so that morning would come slower and I would have more precious moments in Vienna. I fell asleep. Tick-tick-tick and another day gone. I took the pictures down from my bedroom wall and slid a knife under the mounting paper, slipping into the lid of my trunk the print of the Belvedere Palace, the signed programmes from the Opera Ball and my photographs of Margot’s wedding; me in my muslin dress with the leaf embroidery, Julian in white tie and tails, and Anna in shapeless black so she wouldn’t upstage the bride and still looking prettier than any of us. Tick. My bags lay in the hall. Tick-tick. My last night in Vienna. The hall clock chimed: six o’clock and time to dress for the party.

Rather than going to my bedroom, I drifted into Julian’s study. He was at his desk scribbling away, pen clasped in his left hand. I didn’t know what he was writing; no one in Austria would publish his novels anymore. I wondered if he would write his next novel in American.

‘Papa?’

‘Yes, Bean.’

‘Promise you will send for me the minute you arrive.’

Julian stopped writing and drew back his chair. He pulled me onto his lap, as though I was nine rather than nineteen, and clutched me to him, burying his face in my hair. I could smell the clean scent of his shaving soap and the cigar smoke that always lingered on his skin. As I rested my chin on his shoulder, I saw that the burgundy decanter was on the desk, empty once again.

‘I won’t forget you, Bean,’ he said, his voice muffled by the tangle of my hair. He clutched me so tightly that my ribs creaked and then with a small sigh, he released me. ‘I need you to do something for me, my darling.’

I slid off his lap and watched as he crossed to the corner of the room where a viola case rested, propped against the far wall. He picked it up and set it down on the desk, opening it with a click.

‘You remember this viola?’

‘Yes, of course.’

I had taken my first music lessons upon this rosewood viola, learning to play before Margot. She took lessons upon the grand piano in the drawing room while I stood in this room (a treat to encourage me to practise) and the viola squealed and scraped. I even enjoyed playing, until the day Margot stole into Julian’s study and picked it up. She drew the bow across the strings and it trembled into life. The rosewood sang for the first time, music rippling from the strings as effortless as the wind skimming the Danube. We all drew in to listen, hearing the viola like a siren’s song; Anna clutching Julian’s arm, eyes wet and bright, Hildegard dabbing her eyes with her duster and me lurking in the doorway, awed by my sister and so jealous I felt sick. In a month all the best music masters in Vienna were summoned to teach my sister. I never played again.