Last Nocturne Page 12

  ‘Thinks himself irresistible to women, that one. You watch your step,’ Susan had remarked, disapproval marring her cheerful face as she observed Isobel’s smiles after she’d spent half an hour in Bruno’s company one day. They had met at her side entrance and he’d taken her further along the narrow alley to a hitherto unsuspected wicket gate which led into the courtyard. They’d sat under the chestnut, drinking coffee, while Bruno flirted and went on to talk a lot of nonsense, scandalous gossip interspersed with more serious talk about Marxist revolutions and the inevitability of a European war in the unspecified future.

  Did Susan imagine that in the kind of life Isobel had shared with her mother, she hadn’t been fending off men like Bruno before she was fourteen? ‘I haven’t noticed you being averse to his flirting,’ she suggested, smiling.

  ‘Never mind me. Mind you don’t get hurt, that’s all.’

  Susan constantly declared she didn’t have much time for men at all these days, a statement not necessarily believed by Isobel. ‘Twice bitten, thrice shy,’ she declared. Still buxom, bonny and blonde, she was the type much admired by the Viennese, and especially the garishly uniformed young men of the military, but experience had taught her to be wary. Returning to Vienna with Isobel, she hadn’t, as she’d at first feared, encountered her faithless soldier-boy – a boy no longer, of course. After so long it was unlikely she would even recognise him if she did bump into him – and for all she knew he might still be garrisoned in the godforsaken depths of Herzegovinia, Hungary or deepest Silesia. But knowing from bitter experience how susceptible she was, she stayed away from anywhere where she might meet him, or any other soldiers with tight white breeches and a gleam in their eye, left them to waltz with other women in the amusement parks and dance halls. These were indiscretions of the past, looked on now with a determinedly righteous eye that belied her susceptible nature.

  And Isobel had to admit her remarks about the brothers Franck were probably not without foundation, in view of the constant succession of draggle-tailed girls usually to be seen floating between the house and the studio in various stages of dress and undress. Presumably they acted as models for Viktor; they shared the brothers’ outdoor meals and possibly more, since they seemed to hang around all day, giggling and chattering and sometimes quarrelling with each other – and didn’t always appear to leave at nights. On one particular day when Isobel left the house for an afternoon’s shopping, one of the models had already been sitting outside in the courtyard for five hours wearing nothing but a yard or two of diaphanous material which concealed nothing, while Viktor set up his easel in the corner and put her onto canvas.

  Viktor Franck: taller and thinner than his more heavily built brother, prim-faced and sallow, who dressed like a bank clerk and looked over his wire-rimmed spectacles with an air of disapproval, his hair parted in the middle and glossier than his well polished boots, and was like no one’s preconceived perception of an artist. Who acknowledged introductions with a cold handshake and an unsmiling downward jerk of the head. Yet there must have been some passion in this bloodless man. According to Julian Carrington, his work was much sought after by the cognoscenti. Unlike his brother, Viktor barely spoke. Dour and taciturn, he nevertheless kept a close eye on Bruno, no doubt to prevent him from going too far, ready to pull his irons from the fire. His silences frightened Isobel more than Bruno’s quasi-revolutionary talk. She knew which brother she would rather cross swords with.

  As she walked languidly home after her shopping, having purchased nothing but a box of sugared almonds for Susan, who had a sweet tooth, she came across Bruno, lounging on the plinth of a pretty Baroque fountain in a quiet square, writing, with a sheaf of papers propped against this knees. He had with him his wolfhound, a huge shaggy grey animal with slavering jaws called Igor, tied to the leg of a bronze Neptune by its leash and officially muzzled like all other Viennese dogs when in public, she was relieved to see. She had been reassured several times that the dog had a beautiful nature, but it wasn’t a statement she was inclined to put to the test.

  Bruno sprang to his feet when he saw her, papers scattered in all directions, in danger of being blown into the water by the breeze. ‘Please,’ he said after the papers had been retrieved, gesturing with no sense of inappropriateness to the steps which formed the plinth, ‘Keep me company for a little while.’ Igor gave a growl deep in his throat and Isobel settled herself gingerly on a step as far away from him as possible and handed Bruno the papers she’d rescued. ‘Thank you.’ He sighed gustily. ‘What it is when a man must seek out a public monument to sit and find peace to compose a poem!’

  There was so much coming and going in that household it was no wonder he couldn’t find the breathing space to write poetry, but perhaps it was here he came, or places like this, and not to waste time, as Berta said, in the coffee houses, reading the newspapers and arguing politics and for all anyone knew plotting to overthrow anyone from the Hapsburgs to the detested mayor, Karl Leuger, and start a revolution which would have them all killed in their beds.

  ‘Your house is always busy, I’ve noticed.’

  ‘That’s so,’ he admitted, and for a moment his look was enigmatic.

  Then he directed his buccaneer smile at her, shuffled the disarranged sheets together and began to talk about his poetry, reading out a few lines here and there to her. He had a deep, mellifluous voice and would, she suspected, be ready to read out each new poem to anyone at the drop of a hat. (This she later found to be true, though whether he was a good poet or not, she wasn’t in any position to judge. She spoke most of the chief European languages more or less fluently, especially French and English, the languages of her parents, but understanding poetry in the original German was another matter). His work seemed to be published only in obscure magazines, but this didn’t seem to trouble him. He smiled and basked in the praises of anyone ready to bestow them.

  The first slight frisson of – excitement, anticipation? – she had experienced when he had swept his hat off to her in the courtyard, had soon faded. There was really little more to Bruno than his looks, his surface charm and his belief that he was God’s gift to women. But she listened while he talked a great deal of outrageous nonsense and let him go on because he made her laugh. He was full of high-flown rhetoric on all sorts of issues which, though not in retrospect making much sense, at the time seemed perfectly plausible and was in any case amusing to listen to. She learnt from Susan – via Berta, as usual – that he had a temper when thwarted, though she’d added that it didn’t often erupt and was soon forgotten.

  After he’d discussed his poetry, Bruno’s muse seemed to have deserted him for the day. At any rate, he scooped his papers together and escorted her home. When they reached the house, he swept off his hat with his usual histrionic gesture to say farewell, and then issued an invitation for that evening – a formal gesture, Isobel suspected, which did not often occur in that household of casual arrivals and departures. ‘Come down and have some food and a glass of wine with us, meet my friends,’ said he. ‘Tonight?’ His bright blue eyes gazed into hers. ‘Please, do grace us with your presence.’ He took hold of her hand and pressed his fingers into her palm in a practised way which she ignored. He should know perfectly well by now that she didn’t take him seriously and was immune to his flattery, yet he continued in a most ungentlemanly way to stroke her palm, and smile, until she firmly regained control of her hand.

  He repeated his invitation, his smile a little less wide at her hesitation. She had only once been inside the other half of the house, that time when Julian had taken her down to be introduced, and since then, some vestige of the involuntary revulsion she had felt on first seeing it from the outside kept her away. That forbidding front door opened on to a vast cavern of a hall, so huge, dark and high that the gallery running round it was lost in shadow. A bachelor establishment, kept as clean as Berta could manage single handed, it was furnished only with a few hugely cumbersome pieces which had undoubtedly been there
since the beginning of time: heavy oak chairs, immovable tables, Gothic armoires, carved beds. The hall was always cold, Berta grumbled to Susan, despite the pair of tiled stoves at either end, despite the fire kept going day and night in winter, which sometimes blazed but mostly smouldered and sent choking fumes into the hall. The old house was not in good repair and the sweet smell of woodsmoke was overlaid with a mingling of soot, damp and decay. The floors in some of the rooms were unsafe. Isobel had no desire to confront its dark, dusty corners.

  ‘Please, say yes. We shall be outside,’ Bruno added, as if divining her thoughts.

  It had been a hot and sultry day. She was tired, and the thought of a glass of wine in the evening cool of the courtyard, shaded by the chestnut tree, was inviting. It was a friendly overture and in the end she said yes, she would be happy to join them. There was also, perhaps, a spark of rebellion in her acceptance. She had congratulated herself on how quickly she was becoming a typical Viennese, if there was such a thing in this cosmopolitan city. She passed the days taking coffee or drinking chocolate with whipped cream amongst an increasing circle of friends, women like herself, who had time on their hands and money to spare for shopping for expensive clothes and falderals. She had met most of them through Julian Carrington.

  A valued, if unexpected, friendship was developing between herself and Julian. He wasn’t easily understood, but she saw more to him now than the conventional man she had first met. He had an understated sense of humour which pleased her, and a capacity for devotion – to friends, beliefs, to the objet’s d’art he collected so passionately. He had subtle ways of achieving what he wanted. Isobel could see why he was successful in business.

  Gently weaning her away from any tendency to ally herself with her dangerously wild neighbours, he took her to art exhibitions and sometimes arrived with tickets for the opera, a concert, invitations to dine out, and once or twice with requests to partner him to suppers and other entertainments given by his friends. It was a mature, sophisticated milieu he moved in, but compared with the Francks’ vie de Bohème, once only too familiar to Isobel but eschewed since her marriage, it sometimes seemed a staid, middle-aged and not very stimulating existence. She didn’t often regret the youth she had never had, but suddenly, the prospect of something more light-hearted was impossible to resist.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Susan greeted the news of Isobel’s invitation to join the Francks that night with little enthusiasm. ‘The sooner we find somewhere permanent the better,’ she remarked, grumbling her way through the housework, beating a cushion into shape and throwing it into the corner of the sofa.

  ‘Aren’t you just a little happy here, Susan?’

  She gave Isobel a sidelong look. ‘Berta tells me the police were here last night.’

  ‘The police?’

  Among the drawbacks Julian had pointed out when she first saw the apartment, there was one he’d omitted to mention. From time to time, through her open window, she had been aware of the unmistakable clatter of a printing press issuing from the studio-workshop across the courtyard. She wasn’t mistaken; she knew only too well what a printing press sounded like, having once lived with her mother in rooms above a printer’s in Antwerp. But now she recalled what Julian Carrington had said, that the brothers Franck were always in trouble with the authorities, and it didn’t therefore seem at all improbable that the police might have been looking for subversive literature; she couldn’t imagine what else an artist and a poet would need a printing press for. Perhaps Bruno’s fiery declarations were not just empty talk. Of course, it could be that they were harmlessly printing his poems – or anything else, for that matter. She shrugged. What business of hers was it in any case – whatever was going on in that workshop, or indeed the rest of the house?

  But she was reminded again that this wasn’t the old, peaceful Vienna she had known before, though perhaps she had simply been too young then to know what was going on beneath the surface. This was a modern, sophisticated capital, the hub of European politics, with diplomats representing every country residing here, consorting with the Habsburgs and the rest of the aristocracy, as well as the distinguished generals and commanders of the vast Austro-Hungarian army. The city also fizzed with the newest intellectual and avant-garde ideas current in art, in music, even in medicine, ideas which seemed to exist to foster rebellious notions among the minorities and ethnic groups overcrowding the capital, from the gypsies one encountered everywhere, begging and thieving, to the hot-headed Serbs and others who wanted to regain control of their own lands which had been annexed by the monarchy. Anti-Semitism was never far under the surface; the Bürger class saw the Jews as a threat to their own prosperity; and the Marxist socialists among them gave trouble to everyone. Demonstrations like the one she had encountered on the first day of her arrival frequently interrupted the gay, pleasure-loving life of the city.

  ‘At any rate, you won’t have to sit there tonight looking at that half-naked young woman,’ Susan interrupted her thoughts, ‘She’s gone.’ Isobel looked out of the window and saw that Mitzi, or Gretl, or maybe it was Anna-Marie – they were virtually indistinguishable – had finally been allowed to relinquish her pose, chilly no doubt, even though it was summer.

  When she entered the courtyard that evening, Isobel found more chairs under the chestnut tree and a smaller, less raucous crowd than usual lounging about as the summer dusk fell. They were all strangers to her, then she saw with relief a familiar tall, thin figure, but when he turned she saw it wasn’t Julian, but Viktor. Planks had been set over the old well to serve as a table, and bore a haphazard selection of food: some cold Hungarian cherry soup, a gigantic bowl of salad, fresh bread, platters of golden butter and a fine array of the rich pastries the Austrians loved. An appetising smell issued from the kitchen where, despite the heat, Berta was roasting a goose.

  As they ate and the wine flowed and tongues were loosened, the arguments began. Political intrigues were of no interest to Isobel, but it soon became evident that the talk that night was careless and indiscreet. Most of it was directed at the bumbling efforts of the polizei the previous night, who had found no proof that the printing press was used for anything but legitimate purposes. Who in his right senses would believe a man like Viktor would be so careless as to leave evidence of subversive activities lying around, demanded a man perched on the edge of the well, a loaded plate in his hand, a waving fork in the other – if that was what Viktor had been doing. She learnt later that the speaker was a well-known Jewish-Hungarian socialist agitator called Ronay who used to be employed by the very proper Nieue Frie Press until his views became unacceptable to them and who now wrote for one of the popular papers. Everyone laughed, except Viktor. ‘Keep your peace for once in your life, Tibor,’ he said.

  Unusual as it was for Viktor to speak up like that, it commanded a sudden silence, and the awkward moment was only averted by the presence of Berta, bringing out the goose. Viktor began to carve.

  The people gathered there that night were poets and artists, musicians and intellectuals, a mixture of different nationalities. Not a few of them were soon half-drunk, intoxicated as much with their own words as with the wine they quaffed. There was a lot of loose talk floating around about the Emperor, Franz Josef, the certainty that the old spider’s days of spinning his intrigues among the fading splendours of the Schönbrunn palace were numbered.

  ‘Then we shall have his nephew, with all his big ideas.’

  The remark occasioned much ribald laughter. Everyone knew that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Emperor’s nephew and his heir, was a well-known joke, though an incautious one to make when it referred to one of the most hated yet powerful men in the country – hated by everyone, including the Emperor himself, who considered him uncultured and dangerous, a misfortune thrust upon him by his own childless state.

  ‘Not so laughable,’ warned the journalist. ‘We all know the Empire’s crumbling, but his policies when he ascends to the throne will be disastrous.
His hopes of integration with the Slavs are unrealistic, for one thing. The Great Powers in the west have their own vested interests in this not happening and if he upsets them, he could plunge us into a European war.’

  ‘Then the toy soldiers will have something to occupy them!’

  More laughter, but a little uneasy, it seemed to Isobel, until someone remarked that there was no danger of that at present, that the Emperor fully intended to live until he was ninety, and it seemed likely he would. And would Bruno open another bottle of wine, for God’s sake?

  Another bottle was opened, but the arguments went on. Isobel suspected that many of the lofty ideas and fine utterances were a cover for lack of practical action, and finally gave up the attempt to keep up with the arguments as they became more heated, the idiosyncratic German used by the Viennese harder to follow. Leaning against the great girth of the chestnut tree, she was drowsy with wine and the swooning perfume of the lime-blossom. Presently candles in pewter sticks were brought out and lit. The death dances of pale moths made flickering patterns in the dusk until they were fatally lured into the flames. Over and above the voices that rose and fell around her, she could hear bat-squeaks in the gathering summer dusk, and caught their silent swoops from her eye-corners as they flew past.

  ‘Have some more wine,’ said Bruno, jerking her into full wakefulness, perilously waving a jug as he approached unsteadily and refilled her glass. ‘Gumpold –Gumpoldskirchener. Fragrant ‘n‘ fruity.’ He stumbled slightly over the name, raised his own glass and drained it. ‘The golden essence of Vienna. Delicious compliment to a delicious lady.’