The English Girl (24 page)

‘I can do that. I can notice things,’ he tells me.

Winter comes to Vienna.

One evening, after we’ve made love, I lazily open my eyes.

‘Harri. Look! Look!’ My voice is shrill as a child’s.

Snow is falling. The flakes spill out of the dark velvet sky, spiralling down into light, where the glow of the lamp shines upward through the uncurtained windows. I watch the patterns the snowflakes weave, this fragile fabric of white. I have never seen anything lovelier.

Getting dressed, I keep looking upwards; I can’t stop looking.

Harri walks me home to Maria-Treu-Gasse. It’s falling thickly, settling on the pavement, and the shoulders and sleeves of Harri’s greatcoat are soon thickly furred. It thrills me. You don’t get much snow in Brockenhurst: it’s a damp, mild, temperate place. A snowfall is always exciting to me; I love the chill sweetness and sting of the air, the way the world is transformed. The streets are full of a silence that seems to fall from the sky with the snow.

Harri is amused by my excitement; snow is so familiar to him.

At Maria-Treu-Gasse, he kisses me goodnight, and I feel his face against mine. Everything is so vivid to me: his cold skin, warm mouth, on me; the vast hush of the streets all around.

The next morning it’s my lesson, and Marthe has to lend me some galoshes to wear.

There’s a high blue sky and the snow-light dazzles. All the fountains are frozen, hung with glittery daggers of ice. Workmen are clearing the pavements, and the snow on the roads is already trampled and grey, but the Volksgarten shimmers, immaculate, and there are bright blossoms of snow in the sycamore trees.

It feels icy in the classroom, and my fingers are like lumps of wood. Dr Zaslavsky, of course, makes no concessions to the weather: he is as demanding as ever. But he doesn’t seem quite well to me. He’s more hunched up than usual and the lines are cut deep in his face. He must be troubled by the cold; his rheumatic limbs will be hurting. But he says nothing about this, of course; he never reveals his feelings at all. I can’t imagine him complaining about anything. Except the flaws in my playing.

I play the Chopin E major Etude, and he tells me the middle section is muddy and the phrasing doesn’t flow, and my heart sinks. But then, at the end of the lesson, he sets me something new – Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition
. He opens the book at ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, the final piece of the suite, and asks me to sight-read it for him. It’s marked to be played
Maestoso
,
con grandezza
. I try to play majestically and grandly; I savour the splendid, spacious harmonies.

‘That is a start, Fraulein Whittaker,’ he says, when I’ve come to end of the piece.

I know I’ll love studying the Mussorgsky. I’m always so excited to have new music to learn.

When I leave the Academy, it’s still freezing. My thin English coat and knitted gloves aren’t suitable for this weather. I decide to walk to the city centre, to buy myself some new clothes.

In Johannesgasse, there’s a chestnut seller. A soft blue smoke lifts from his cart, and the glow of the brazier lights up his face from below; I think of the light on the shepherds’ faces in a Nativity painting. As I pass, I can smell the roasting chestnuts, their festive, Christmassy scent.

At Knize on the Graben, I equip myself for a Viennese winter. I buy a good woollen coat and some thick woollen gloves, and a rather indulgent hat of silver foxfur.

I hear that there is skating in the Stadtpark. Marthe says she will lend me her skates.

I look for Lukas. He isn’t in the nursery. As I walk back down the hallway, past the cupboard where Janika keeps her brushes and mops, I hear a small whispery voice. The cupboard door is slightly ajar and I can see inside. Lukas is sitting on an upturned bucket. He has the silver toy pistol and the magnifying glass, and he’s talking softly to himself, lost in some inner world.

‘Lukas, shall we go skating?’

He looks up, startled, then gives a vigorous shake of the head.

‘I don’t like skating. It’s too slippery.’

‘Oh. But skating is such fun, Lukas.’

‘But what if I fell down?’

‘You wouldn’t. I’d keep tight hold of your hand.’

‘No. I don’t want to. I want to stay in my cupboard and be a detective,’ he says.

I’m disappointed. I’ve never skated out-of-doors: it’s rarely safe in England. There was a girl at my school called Edie Charles who died when she fell through thin ice on a pond: she was always held up as a terrible warning to us. I’d love to skate in the open. It must be wonderful to skate in the Stadtpark in the sweet, numbing air, to feel the whole wide world fly past you.

The Rose Room has an underwater radiance, the soft snow-light reflecting from the mirrors, and held and refracted in the lustres of the chandelier. But piano practice is difficult. Janika has lit the stove in the corner, but the room is still very cold. I have to soak my hands in hot water to make the blood flow before I can play.

I’m practising scales, when Rainer comes in.

I stop at once: I’m nervous. It’s the first time I’ve been alone with him since the scene at the dinner table. I’ve wondered how it will be between us. Uneasy thoughts are snagging at the edges of my mind – questions about him. About what he might be involved in, and what he believes. Whether I’ve misread him.

I look up at his reflection in the mirror. He stands there, smiling, as charming as ever, and I feel reassured. Though maybe there’s something a little withdrawn in him, something veiled in his eyes. It could be a trick of the snow-light.

‘So, Stella, perhaps another song from
Winterreise
?’ he says.

‘I’d love that.’

‘It seems appropriate for the season,’ he says.

We perform ‘Erstarrung’:
Numbness
; where the lover searches in vain for his sweetheart’s footprints in the snow, and ‘Der Lindenbaum’,
The Linden Tree
.

When we come to the end of ‘Der Lindenbaum’, Rainer thanks me.

‘The song is so simple, yet so moving. Schubert is at his most powerful when he writes most simply,’ he says.

I murmur agreement.

As night falls, the snowy street fills up with damson shadow.

In the lighted window over the street, there’s a woman I’ve not seen before. She’s elderly, stooped, with white hair; she could be the other woman’s mother, or her mother-in-law. There’s a look of confusion in her face: I wonder if her mind is going. Then the dark-haired woman appears, and places a shawl on the old woman’s shoulders, and moves her away from the window, perhaps steering her to a chair. I wonder if the old woman, like Benjamin, has a favourite chair she always sits in.

A few moments later, the dark-haired woman comes back to the window. She’s looking out into the street at the snow that is falling again. She has an absent look that is now familiar to me: it’s as though she is ambushed by memory, full of longing for what has been lost. Behind her, the silver of the menorah glitters in the light of the lamp.

As I watch, the little girl joins her at the window. I can only just see her face above the window sill, but I can tell how happy she is, seeing the snowflakes feathering down. She says something, and her mother glances down at her and smiles. There’s a light in the woman’s face now, as though her child has rescued her, has pulled her back from some sad room in the labyrinth of her thought.

The shadow deepens in the street. The woman reaches out and pulls the curtains across.

Saturday afternoon. I read Lotte a story from my fairytale book, to help her with her English. It’s the tale of Baba Yaga the witch, how she lived in a house on chicken legs, and kept a girl as her slave.

Lotte is restless. I’m translating the difficult bits as I read, but perhaps the English is too hard for her.

‘Lotte – is something the matter?’

‘I wish you hadn’t chosen this story, Stella.’

‘Oh. I thought you’d like it.’

Lotte usually likes to hear stories of girls who do bold and dangerous things.

‘Well, I don’t. It’s too sad. I like stories that have happy endings,’ she says.

‘This one has a happy ending,’ I tell her. ‘Later, the girl gets away. Her comb turns into a forest so she can escape from the witch, and the animals she’s been kind to help her. We just haven’t got to that bit yet. But we’ll read something else if you’d rather.’

I stretch out my legs in the warmth of the stove. I’m looking forward to tonight, when Harri is taking me to the Staatsoper, to see
La Traviata
. This afternoon, he’s writing up case notes, in his attic room.

I read some more of the story, but Lotte isn’t paying attention. She chews at the bits of skin at the sides of her nails.

‘Lotte – has something happened?’ I ask again.

She sneaks a look at me. She’s wondering how much to tell me.

‘School was horrid yesterday, Stella. I don’t want to go back. I wish I could stay at home for ever.’

‘But I’d have thought you’d be having lots of fun in the snow,’ I say cheerfully. ‘Making snowmen. Having snowball fights.’

‘Well, I wasn’t,’ she says.

Her dark eyes glitter with tears. I worry that I was heartless.

‘Poor Lotte, I’m sorry.’ I wonder what happened; perhaps her teacher scolded her. ‘Some schoolteachers can be awfully strict. You mustn’t let it upset you.’

She shakes her head, and her braids fly out, and a few twisty tendrils escape. Her hair is so intensely curly – the kind of hair that people must always be making excuses to touch.

‘It wasn’t that. It wasn’t the teachers. It was Gabi,’ she says.

I think how she admired Gabi’s drawings of horses; how thrilled she was when Gabi brought a spider into school.

‘Have you two fallen out?’ I ask her.

She nods vigorously. She swallows, trying not to cry.

I put my arms around her, breathe in her scent of gingerbread, lemons, warm wool.

‘Oh Lotte. That’s sad. But it happens. At school I often fell out with my friends. But then we used to make up again.’

She frowns.

‘Were people really rude to you sometimes?’

‘Yes. I know what it’s like, Lotte, really. There were girls who used to say the most horrible things…’ Remembering the names they called me, and how they stung me with stinging nettles. I understand about being bullied. I can help her with this.

She moves away from me, chewing her fingers.

‘Gabi was
really
rude to me, Stella.’

‘Sometimes people say horrid things, when they’re quarrelling. But I’m sure she didn’t mean it, whatever she said. I’m sure you’ll make up soon,’ I tell her brightly.

She shakes her head, but I don’t know which bit of this she’s disagreeing with.

‘We had a fight. She said I’d smudged her exercise book. I hadn’t done it, but she said it was me.’

‘That’s not fair, is it? But it’s the kind of thing that happens. Getting blamed for things you didn’t do…’ I don’t know how to comfort her. I think of the sort of advice that people would give in Brockenhurst. ‘The secret is to keep cheerful and try not to mind very much.’

‘But I
do
mind. She called me a Jewish pig. Everyone laughed,’ she tells me.

I’m suddenly all at sea. I don’t know what to say.

‘They’ve done it before,’ says Lotte. ‘They used to do it sometimes. But now they do it
all the time
. And Gabi never used to say those things before.’

I remember what Frank told me.
What’s happening in Germany gives
permission…

I scrabble around for words of comfort, to take away the sting of it. I think of what my mother would say, when I was bullied at school.

‘There’s something my mother used to tell me.
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me
. I say it in English, then translate it for her. I use my brightest, most encouraging voice.

But something falters inside me. I’ve always accepted the easy wisdom of my mother’s axiom. But is it true – that words will never hurt you? Isn’t that where everything starts – with words?

‘Is it my fault, Stella?’

‘No, of course not, sweetheart. You haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘But I must have done something wrong, to make them hate me like that.’

I put my arms around her, and hold her so close I can feel the fizz of her heart.

‘It’s
them
, Lotte, not you. They’re stupid, horrible people. Trust me.’

She moves away from my grasp.

‘Is Gabi stupid and horrible?’ she asks me. ‘I really liked Gabi. She used to be my best friend.’

I see all the confusion in her face. I don’t know how to comfort her.

‘Now, when they see me,’ she says, ‘they all make these grunting noises. They say, “Here comes the Jewish pig.” Nobody talks to me…’

She’s turned a little away from me, and her face is flushed and shamed.

‘I wish my father was alive. Then he could stop them,’ she says.

I’ve never heard her mention her father before. She must have been so young when he died – too young to know or remember him. Thinking this, I feel sadness tug at my sleeve.

I feel stupid, clumsy, unsure. I wish that Eva were here. She’d know how to handle this.

‘What does your mother say, Lotte?’

‘She says I mustn’t get upset. Just not to take any notice. If I don’t make a fuss, then they’ll get bored, and pick on somebody else. But it’s
hard
, Stella.’

She’s crying openly now.

I put my hand on her arm – feeling so helpless, longing to find a way to make her happy again.

Then I think of the frozen lake in the Stadtpark.

‘Lotte. We could go out. We could go skating. Would you like that?’

She turns sharply towards me. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. I give her my handkerchief and she scrubs at her face.

‘Could we really?’ Her voice already stronger.

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘Just you and me, Stella?’ she says.

‘Yes. Just you and me. But I’ll need to go back to my flat to pick up some skates.’

‘No, you don’t. Mama’s got skates. You could borrow hers. We could go
this
minute
,’ she says.