The English Girl (13 page)

Afterwards, he says, ‘Did you enjoy that, darling? I think you enjoyed it…’

I murmur something. I can’t quite speak yet.

I lie with my head against him, feeling the slowing beat of his heart, as though his heart is my heart. Above us, just the night sky. Tonight, we don’t talk about Dr Freud; we don’t talk at all for a while. It’s cold, the sky is clear; the stars seem nearer, so big and so bright. My life astonishes me; that I am here in Vienna, here with my love, in this bed beneath the high windows, with above us all the constellations sliding through the sky. The ‘Ode to Joy’ sings on in me, and I have the sensation that this room is floating away, like a cloud; that we’re not tethered to the world here. As though all the bad things in the world – the wars, the rumours of wars – all those things are way beneath us. As though those things can’t reach us here.

We hear Harri’s family coming home.

Later, when we go down, there’s a little girl at the dining table. The table-lamp is lit, and she sits in a pool of tangerine light. She’s drawing with wax crayons.

Harri goes to the kitchen to talk to Eva. The little girl looks up; her face is bright with curiosity.

‘Are you Stella?’ she says.

She has soft black hair, the kind of hair that makes corkscrew curls in the wet, and her eyes are dark, like Harri’s. Her gaze is very direct.

‘Yes. And you must be Lotte.’

‘They let me stay up late, so I could meet you,’ she says.

‘Well, I’m glad.’

‘You’re going out with my brother,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

I sit beside her, to look at her drawing. It’s exactly the kind of picture I used to do at her age – girls in elaborate clothes, with complicated hairstyles.

‘That’s a very good drawing,’ I tell her. ‘Especially this lady. Look at her fancy shoes.’

Lotte considers her picture.

‘They’re all right, I suppose. But they’re not as good as Gabi’s. Gabi can draw much better shoes than me. And horses. Gabi draws brilliant horses,’ she says.

‘Is Gabi your very best friend?’

Lotte nods.

‘Gabi can do cartwheels. And once she brought a spider to school in a jar, to frighten the boys.’ Her voice is full of admiration.

‘Did it work? Were they frightened?’

She has an enchanting smile, like Harri’s.

‘She took the spider out and they all ran away.’

‘Did she get in trouble?’ I ask.

‘She got the cane but she didn’t cry.
And
she wrote a bad word on the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room…’ Lotte’s voice fattens with pride.

‘Gabi sounds good fun,’ I tell her.

I feel a rush of affection for this luminous little girl, who looks so like my lover. Tonight, everything delights me.

She gives me a quizzical look.

‘Does my brother love you?’ she asks me.

I don’t know how to answer.

‘You’ve gone all red,’ she tells me.

‘Oh dear.’ I put my hand to my face.

‘Don’t worry. I think he does. I think he does love you,’ she says.

‘Well…’

‘I’m sure he does. Why wouldn’t he? You’re much nicer than his last girlfriend was,’ she tells me limpidly.

All the questions I could ask her are rushing into my mind.
Who was she? What did she look like? How much did Harri love her?
But I try to push them away from me. I don’t know if I’d like Lotte’s answers. I refuse to think about something so troubling, on this perfect day.

I work so hard at my piano-playing. And I know my playing is improving, that now I play more expressively – as if being in love with Harri has freed me in some way. Though Dr Zaslavsky gives me scarcely any encouragement.

I am always nervous going to my lesson. I will play what I have prepared; he’ll listen, immaculate in his formal, old-fashioned clothes, his body crooked with arthritis, and hunched, as though he feels all the weight of his years.

Afterwards, he’ll be silent for a moment, his frown deepening. My heart will thud, as I wait for his judgement.

Then he’ll tell me what I did wrong.

‘The melodic line here is lumpy, Fräulein Whittaker. The notes sound like separate things.’

I’m upset. I don’t want to be
lumpy
.

‘The notes must meld together, must all be one,’ he says.

He reaches out to the keyboard, plays a short phrase. I know this action must hurt him. But his phrasing is ravishing – the way he lingers over the music, as though he’s caressing the notes.

He leans back, slightly breathless. In the clear light through the window of the studio, I can see all the lines on his face, where life has eroded him and worn him away, like a river washing over stones. And his eyes, darkly gleaming.

‘This is the mystery of what we do,’ he tells me. ‘A piano is nothing but an assemblage of hammers. Yet we take this percussive instrument, and make it
sing
,’ he says.

Another time, he tells me, ‘The phrasing is lazy here, Fräulein Whittaker.’

How can he call me
lazy
, when I’ve worked so hard on this piece, practising for hours in the Rose Room?

‘People think because it is Chopin, they can distort the phrasing and pull it around anyhow. They think they can be
lax
. But there must still be precision. Passion can never be expressed with sloppy phrasing,’ he tells me.

I’m curious, when he talks about passion; I wonder what passion he has known. He never talks about anything but music: his students are everything to him. Are there other people in his life – perhaps a wife, a child? Did he bring a woman from Odessa with him? I think not. There’s something so self-possessed about him – he seems at heart a solitary man.

Sometimes I’m angry with him. Can’t he give me just a little praise? But at least he’s setting me wonderful music, not just the Czerny studies. I learn lots of Chopin – the F minor Fantaisie, the A flat Impromptu, and some Mazurkas; the ‘Suite Bergamasque’ by Debussy; the mellifluous Liszt Etude that is called ‘Un Sospiro’,
A Sigh
.

I learn the Chopin ‘Berceuse’, that tenderest of cradle-songs. The left-hand part is so simple, the same in every bar; it has the lilt of a cradle, gently rocking. While the right-hand part is all ornament, like water that shimmers and ripples on a night of full moon, an exquisite glimmery surface over depth on depth of dark.

I practise conscientiously; and in my lesson, I’m so sure I’ve played it well.

He frowns.

‘There’s something lacking, Fräulein Whittaker,’ he says.

Well, of course there would be.

‘You see – perhaps this piece is hard to play, when you are young,’ he says. ‘There has to be stillness in it. Young people cannot be still. You have to find that stillness inside yourself.’

I feel like a child, when he says this. I try to understand it, but I don’t really know what he means.

I play the Chopin Fantaisie, and he gives me a little cautious praise.

‘This playing was technically much improved, Fräulein Whittaker.’

I have a moment of guarded satisfaction.

But of course it’s still not good enough.

‘You need a sense of the architecture of the piece, to hold its shape in your mind. Music is one of the temporal arts. And as with all art that exists in time, nothing matters more than the ending. The piece must feel like a whole, so the ending will come at just the right time.’

But this is too difficult for me.

Every weekend, Harri takes me out.

‘I’m going to show you my city,’ he says.

We take the tram to Schönbrunn Palace, and wander in its grounds, across immaculate lawns, between clipped formal hedges. There’s a little zoo, and a Palm House. Harri shows me the spring of water from which the place takes its name, watched over by a marble nymph; she has a demure expression, but her clothes are falling from her.

He takes me into the Palm House, which smells of sweet pollens and wet rotting things. There are orchids, their blooms like gaping mouths, and fleshy arum lilies. Parrots whistle in an aviary, and water drips into a pool. It’s like entering a different country. It makes me think of the Cranach painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum – the Garden of Eden with all its lavish fruits and birds.

On a narrow path that winds through a tangle of tropical trees, he pulls me to him. He kisses me; then he starts to unbutton my blouse.

‘Harri – someone might see…’

‘There’s nobody else around,’ he says. ‘We could do anything here.’

A thin heat moves over my skin.

There, where the orchids open their purple throats, he slides his hands inside my clothes. I move my hand against his erection, thinking how daring we are. Then not thinking any more.

I hadn’t known that a woman could feel a hunger like this.

Another day, he takes me to a cemetery off Leberstrasse. This is an essential pilgrimage for a musician, he says: the place of Mozart’s burial. We walk between crumbling headstones, which are overgrown with lilac bushes. In spring, when the lilacs blossom, the air must be swollen with scent.

He shows me the site of the paupers’ grave where Mozart’s body was thrown. It’s twilight, and a nightingale is singing, loud in the stillness; you can hear all the effortless loveliness of the music that pours from its throat.

‘It’s so sad,’ I say, ‘to think of Mozart thrown in an unmarked grave. You feel – I don’t know – that the death should be fitting, that it should reflect the life. That there should be a sense of completion. But often there isn’t, I suppose.’

‘Mostly there isn’t,’ he says. ‘We want to make a life into a story. But often it isn’t like that…’

He looks sad. I wonder if he is thinking of his father.

There are many crypts and cemeteries in Vienna, he tells me, as we travel home. Some of them lie directly beneath the city itself; this whole splendid city is built above the dwellings of the dead – crypts, plague pits, burial vaults. The Habsburgs, he tells me, are buried beneath the Kapuzinerkirche – well, parts of them are there, at least: their hearts are in silver containers in the Augustinerkirche, and their intestines in copper urns beneath the Stephansdom. This sounds rather gruesome to me. And under the Michaelerkirche, he tells me, there are corpses in half-open coffins; you can still see their jewelled rings and the rich, dull embroidery on their clothes; and the floor level there has been raised by the dust from other mouldering bodies.

I shiver. ‘That sounds so creepy.’

He grins. I can tell he enjoys this – making me shudder.

I think of all the things that lie beneath Vienna – the catacombs, crypts, sewers. A world that’s kept concealed by just a foot of earth and stones. Such a thin membrane between the daylight world and what’s hidden – the airy streets where we walk, and the things that lie beneath: bones, excrement, dead people. All the things we strive to keep buried.

The weather is still gorgeous – summer clinging to autumn’s skirts – and the roses are still blooming in the Volksgarten. Their colours dazzle – red as the mouth of a glamorous woman, and salmon pink, and saffron. He takes photos of me on his Leica camera, standing in front of the flowers. He gives me lots of instructions.

‘Turn your head a little – look over there, at the fountain … There, that’s perfect … You look wonderful just like that – the way the sun catches your hair…’

Afterwards, we have coffee at the Café Frauenhuber.

A woman comes rapidly up to our table. She’s wearing a clingy dress of shantung silk that is really very low-cut. She’s flushed, a little agitated.

Harri gets to his feet politely.

‘Please excuse me…’ The woman speaks in heavily accented German: I think she’s probably French. She has a smell like a sweet shop. ‘I may have left my handbag here. May I…?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he says.

As she bends, leans forward, to look beneath our table, you can see the deep valley between her breasts. I think of the marble nymph at Schönbrunn, who looked so demure but whose nipples were pushing through the white folds of her clothes, hard and clear as pebbles. Harri is staring.

The woman’s handbag isn’t there. She straightens up.

‘I’m so sorry to have disturbed you,’ she says.

‘Not at all,’ says Harri.

I see how his eyes follow her as she walks away.

I know what any clever woman would say.
Goodness, she was lovely. And what a wonderful figure she had
… Defusing it. But I can’t.

‘You liked her.’ My voice is ugly, accusing.

He shakes his head.

‘No, Stella.’

I bite my lip. I try to make myself stop.

‘Yes, you did. I could tell.’

He shrugs slightly.

‘Well, maybe – just a little bit. Stella, you know how men are. We look at women. That’s how we’re made,’ he tells me.

‘You could at least try to control that when you’re with me,’ I say.

My voice is harsh. I sound stern, schoolmistressy.

‘It’s just a transient thing. It’s not important.’ He sounds a little exasperated. ‘I’d have completely forgotten by now – if only we weren’t having this conversation,’ he says.

I clamp my lips together. If I said something, it would be horrible. I swallow down the dangerous words that rise in me like bile.

I finish my coffee, which suddenly tastes bitter.

As we leave the café, he wraps his arm around me. I’m trying to hold myself rigid, but I feel how my body responds to him, as always – softening, warm, fluid.

He ruffles my hair.

‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ he says. ‘It’s you I love, Stella. You know that, how much I love you. You really don’t need to torment yourself with these thoughts.’

It’s the way he says
torment
. Almost as though he knows the things I can think in the dark of my room. The way they torture me.

My jealousy starts to seep away.

‘I can get so possessive,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry.’

He pushes the hair from my face.

‘You don’t need to say sorry for being possessive,’ he says. ‘I love being possessed by you. But I hate to think of you being troubled by these thoughts, when there’s no need to be…’

We pass a florist’s, which has buckets of flowers out on the pavement. There are dahlias, asters, velvet-faced sunflowers, their colours so dense you feel, if you touched them, the stain might come off on your hand.