Last Nocturne (12 page)

She only wished she could be sure that the same applied to Sophie. But after what had happened in that Mayfair street last week, she could no longer stop herself from remembering.

They had lived a restless, peripatetic existence for Isobel’s first seventeen years, she and her mother, and familiarity with most of the great capitals of Europe had made her almost blasé, but her breath was taken away when she came for the first time to Vienna and saw the great city on the Danube. The glittering capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was everything that was romantic: cosmopolitan, ruled by its emperor, its two million inhabitants drawn from every corner of the European nations the empire had annexed, or conquered: Poles, Croats, Czechs, gypsies, Jews, Roman Catholics, as well as the native Austrians and the half of the population that was Hungarian.

It wasn’t surprising that she lost her heart completely…what, after all, could be more calculated to appeal to a young girl’s awakening senses? Fairytale buildings on the Ringstrasse encircled the medieval inner city. Outside it stood the magnificent Schönbrunn Palace where the Emperor lived in isolated formal splendour. Inside the magic ring there existed a glittering, sophisticated milieu, a top strata where Esterhazys and Metternicks rubbed shoulders with the crowned heads of Europe, with diplomats and generals.

And even if you were not quite so well-born, life was easy, or at least for anyone who had money to spend and the leisure to enjoy it. Shops abounded where every luxury could be obtained. Well-dressed women passed the days meeting friends to gossip, drink coffee and eat mouth-watering pastries in the
kaffeehauser
. Prosperous men did likewise, argued politics and read the newspapers provided. For enlightenment and entertainment, there were art galleries, or the opera, or concerts – especially concerts: Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven, and the newer sounds of composers such as Mahler and Schoenberg; while the whole city danced to the lilting strains of the waltz king, Johann Strauss.

And what would Vienna have been without the military, the dashing cavalry, the huzzars, uhlans, dragoons? Without the heels of their polished riding boots ringing on the pavements, the jingle of their spurs and the clattering hooves of their glossy mounts sounding the constant heartbeat of the city? Resplendent in the dashing scarlet, blue, bottle-green and gold-braided uniforms of the monarchy’s tip-top cavalry and infantry regiments, the acme of glamour?

Isobel was seventeen years old, dazzled and blinded.

Not so her mother. Vèronique had first known Vienna in her glory days, when she’d still been a professional singer and the city had fêted and adored the beautiful coloratura soprano, the little French nightingale who turned heads and broke hearts, the star who had flashed so meteorically across the European stage. For when all was said and done, that was all her career had amounted to – a brilliant, brief flash across the firmament. Just at the very peak of her fame, at a time when her star had been in its highest ascendant, she’d thrown all of it recklessly away, fallen in love with James Walsh, a handsome, penniless Englishman, and left the stage for ever to perform in real life the role of devoted wife and mother.

But when Ralph Amberley came into their lives, Isobel’s father had been long dead, and all her mother had left were her memories.

‘Madame, I am honoured,’ murmured the correct, reserved Englishman when he was brought to their apartment. He could not have been more reverent had her mother been the Queen of England, bending his head over her frail hand, paying stiff British compliments which were nevertheless sincere and acted on Vèronique like the bubbles in champagne. ‘You used to be my idol.’

Vèronique smiled, dimpled, and for a moment was young again.

Isobel shared her delight, though for different reasons. She knew her mother had come to Vienna hoping to rekindle some spark of her old life, and she was sad for her bitter disappointment. Hers was a talent which had blossomed early, and it was inevitable that her head had been turned by the flattery and adulation that had come her way too soon, but she was at the same time too much of a professional to have deceived herself into thinking that she could step back, nearly two decades later, older and in poor health, and pick up where she’d left off. She hadn’t, however, expected such complete indifference. The sad fact was that now few remembered her at all – especially when there were younger, brighter stars for fashion to follow. Too weary to seek yet another refuge, however, she insisted on staying in the city which had once loved her, sustained by the dream time, telling and retelling stories of her adoring public and the brilliant splendours of the Staatsoper, as seen from the stage where she had sung so lyrically and afterwards been almost buried in avalanches of floral tributes; followed by the hectic gaiety of the luxurious champagne suppers with besotted admirers in the red and gold splendour of the Hotel Sacher. Heady memories, but now tinged with the melancholia that came with knowing how little time was left to her, for tuberculosis had laid its cold hand on her several years before.

In the end it was an exhausting business, for both of them, this endless repetition, especially as sometimes events and times tended to become jumbled in Vèronique’s memory. But Ralph was by now a constant visitor and his patience amazed Isobel. ‘Remember when Prince Enzendorf sent a dozen red roses to La Vèronique—?’ he would encourage her gently.

‘And each with a pearl at its centre! Or was it white roses?’

‘And the time they drank champagne from your shoe in Paris?’

‘No, that was Milan, was it not, Isobel? You must remember – I’m sure I’ve told you a thousand times!’

Isobel made what pretence she could, but something that had happened before she was born could never seem quite real, like the dim memory of the big, handsome, occasionally frightening presence who had been her father; though perhaps it was better for him to stay a shadowy, if intimidating, figure in her mind.

Anxiously watching her mother lost in dreams of the past, she often wondered whether Vèronique had ever regretted abandoning her career for a marriage which had turned out to be virtually nothing more than a fantasy. If she had, she never gave any sign of it, or not until they were far away from the Imperial City, and then only in an oblique way, when the end was very near. But it couldn’t have taken her long to discover she’d fallen in love only with a romantic notion. James Walsh had quickly proved to be an inveterate gambler and spendthrift, whose interest in a lovely and talented young wife rapidly waned when she was no longer earning anything. By the time Isobel was eight years old, he had gambled away the last vestiges of Vèronique’s savings, after which he gradually lost interest in everything except drink and the ultimately futile search for new diversions which always palled before long. One night, in Prague, after weeks of restless ennui and depression, he did the only positive thing he had done for years and jumped off the Charles Bridge into the Vltava, leaving nothing behind to say why he’d done so. It was hard to escape the conclusion that he’d been literally bored to death with a life that could hold no more excitement.

Afterwards, her mother had attempted to resume her singing career, but she’d left it too late: her voice had been neglected and wasn’t what it had been. More than that, the first signs of her illness had also begun to manifest themselves. The strenuous demands of endeavouring to re-emerge as an operatic diva were altogether too much for her. She and Isobel continued to live a restless, hard-up, nomadic life, where nowhere was home, drifting wherever Vèronique’s capricious whim took them, searching for something she, too, like her husband, was never to find. The febrile excitement of moving on, arriving in some new place, with new hopes, eventually lost its magic, but by now she knew no other way of life. Paris, Milan, Rome, Copenhagen, Stockholm, The Hague…their existence funded by the singing lessons she gave to eke out. When she was old enough Isobel, too, earned a little by copying out music scores, at so much a sheet.

And so they had come to Vienna, a city on which Vèronique had pinned so many hopes, destined to be unfounded. She began to deteriorate rapidly, and with it went her vitality, the radiant spirit which had always been so much part of her attraction. Acquaintances drifted away and soon, even the singing lessons were out of the question. She had reached a nadir of despair by the time Ralph Amberley appeared on the scene, like a miracle sent from God.

Yet, as Isobel learnt later, it wasn’t entirely by chance that he’d come into their lives. When it had reached his notice that Vèronique was back in the city – sadly depleted, too ill now even to give singing lessons, it was reported – he’d contrived an introduction. Like so many other young – and not so young – men, he had fancied himself half in love with the enchanting singer whom he had in fact met once, briefly, she as the star surrounded by the admiring throng, he as part of it. She did not recall the meeting, though she pretended she did. But how could he ever have forgotten her? Especially when she had sung Mimi, a tragic foreshadowing of her own future?

His arrival momentarily brought the sparkling past back into the dreary present for her. A well-travelled and cultured Englishman of independent means who devoted himself to music, art and literature, he was staying in Vienna for some time, where he had many friends, before going on to Salzburg. Afterwards, he would return to Vienna and hoped she would not forbid him to visit her again, he added, with that touch of gentle irony which added spice to his quiet manner.

He did return, and stayed. And in no time at all, it seemed, he became an unobtrusive but indispensable part of their lives – as an escort, companion, provider of little luxuries and comforts. When yet another delivery of delicacies arrived – out-of-season baskets of flowers, strawberries, boxes of bonbons tied with extravagant bows of ribbon – or when he took them out for a drive in an open
fiacre
into the Vienerwald, the woods which surrounded Vienna, away from the stifling summer heat of the city, Vèronique would feel it incumbent upon her to make token protests, though she easily fell back into her old role and accepted his generosity, like his compliments, as if it were her due.

‘I believe we must move you from here,’ he remarked one day, a lifted eyebrow condemning the cramped, unbearably hot rooms where they lodged above a bread-baker’s shop in a noisy street, where Vèronique had arranged herself decoratively for him on a sofa, handkerchief at the ready for when she coughed, languidly employing a lace fan in a vain attempt to get cool. ‘And you must have a maid.’

‘The little servant-girl from the shop below,’ she replied, so promptly it was evident the possibility had already been in the forefront of her mind. Isobel was embarrassed; she thought her mother might have at least pretended to give it a moment’s thought, though the lack of a maid – as if they could ever have afforded one in their poverty-stricken existence! – was something she complained about continually. ‘I’m sure she’d be glad to leave those dreadful people.’

And so, with so little ceremony had Susan come into their lives. A robustly pretty English country girl with a roses and cream complexion, a pert nose and a blunt tongue, her native commonsense and spirit were quite unbroken by the circumstances which had led to her present life of drudgery, thousands of miles away from home. She’d been a silly girl, too trusting by half, she told Isobel with a wry shrug, taken in and then abandoned by a young English lordling who had lured her from her native Dorset with promises he failed to keep. Penniless and alone, she had ended up as a skivvy in the bakery at the mercy of Frau Fischer, a vast virago of a woman with arms like hams. But at least she was warm and not hungry, even if it was only left-overs, a
strudel
or two or a stale
schnitte
, a slice of bread, that kept her alive until she could find something better. She was warned she would have to sleep in the kitchen if she moved in with them. She laughed. That would be no hardship after sleeping on the floor under the shop counter! She had been with Isobel ever since, her opinions and lifestyle uncompromisingly English, her devotion complete.

Susan’s arrival hardly improved the cramped condition in the apartment, but it was a situation which Ralph had obviously never intended to continue for long. ‘I have a house in France, in Fontainebleau, in the woods not far from the chateau,’ he suggested, a few days after Susan had been installed, flinging open the window over the narrow street below, then quickly shutting it against the noise that came in. ‘It’s quiet, and cool. Why don’t you come and stay with me there, for a few weeks at least?’

Even had she wished, Vèronique was too ill by now to demur, but she would never have refused an offer like that. Vienna had been a mistake. ‘Why not?’ she said carelessly. ‘Vienna has no use for me now – nor I for Vienna. One needs a gaiety of spirit to live here.’

Isobel couldn’t blame her. No one knew better than she what bitter medicine to swallow had been the contrast with her mother’s present life here and what it had once been. France, her own country, where she had been born, Fontainebleau, with its softer airs and its quieter pace, must have sounded very much like Heaven.