The Lily Hand and Other Stories (15 page)

She left the stage at the end of the first act as though wafted to her dressing room upon the gales of her ovation. She knew already that she was singing the Marschallin of a lifetime, which these people might as well reconcile themselves to remembering, for they would probably never hear the like of it again. She stood before the mirror gazing at herself in wonder, her breast surging, her eyes brilliant.

‘Shut the door, Morgan! I don't want to see anybody. Tell them I don't want to break the thread. Tell them to come after the performance, but I can't see anybody now.'

The flush on her cheeks might have been merely from the warmth of the room, but it felt more like a flame of exultation. The high beat of her heart might have been indignation and pain, but it had an impetus which suggested, rather, triumph.

‘Every Marschallin should be in love with her baby of an accompanist,' she said to her mirror, as she pulled out the ribbons from her hair, ‘and have a charming niece for a Sophie to fling at him! I must get myself a faithless husband before I sing the Countess in Vienna next month!'

Morgan, fending off importunate admirers in the passage, put her head in at the door to say doubtfully: ‘Mr Creed is here, Miss Barbara.'

‘Oh, good,
he
can come in!' She was kicking off her shoes when he entered, her mane of dark hair fallen over her face. She swept it back with one round white arm, and looked up at him with alert and shining eyes. ‘Well, was it good?' But she did not wait an instant for the answer she did not need. ‘Listen, can you get on to Vienna tonight? I've decided to go. Accept the Mozart parts – all three of them if they're still holding them. It's too tame to go home just when I've struck the real vein.'

Creed was smiling, a little smugly. ‘And what about Linz? Is that too much to pack in? I don't want to overwork you, but they offered two recitals.'

‘Accept them! Accept everything!' It was the only way to live, after all. She felt the strong tide of her power flowing, coming to the full.

‘You're sure you want to take them all? No need to rush until you've made up your mind.'

‘I'm sure. My mind
is
made up.' She began to shed laces like snow. Somewhere at a distance the interval bell pealed. Creed went away well pleased, leaving her to Morgan's attentive care.

The second act had been running for ten minutes, and Morgan was out of the room in search of a spirit lamp, when the door opened again, very quietly, and, looking up into the mirror, Barbara found herself staring into the eyes of Mark.

She was startled to realize that for almost half-an-hour she had scarcely given one thought to him, but at the first glimpse of him now her heart melted into piteous tenderness.

‘I know you don't want me,' he said apologetically. ‘Morgan wouldn't let us in before. I just dodged her. But I won't stay, really, I only wanted to tell you—'

Her face in the mirror wore a slight, strained smile. No doubt the note of discouragement in his voice was due to the fact that he had misinterpreted it as a sign that she was being unwillingly patient with his intrusion. All the same, he persisted, approaching until he stood behind her chair, a hesitant smile on his lips. His face was flushed with pure musical excitement, he wanted to pay her desperate, fervent compliments, and was convinced that she wanted nothing so much as to pack him off to his box and be rid of him. ‘If he only knew,' she thought, ‘how I long to put my hands up and draw him down to me!'

Her shoulders burned with the awareness of him, standing so close. She could not keep the heavy, destroying tenderness out of her eyes and wondered that he did not see it.

‘You were wonderful!' he said, letting his hand stray towards the cool coils of her hair. ‘We – I had to sneak back and tell you. We thought we'd better not both come worrying you, but – you're not angry, are you?'

‘No,' she said, her voice equable and low, ‘I'm not angry. But I think you'd better go back to her now.' She saw the thin dark hand twining its fingers into the strands of her hair and her own hand, unable to resist the longing, stole upward and closed gently upon it. His lips quivered, and swooped to her wrist and fingers. She felt him trembling, as sometimes after a long recital, when he had excelled himself in the teeth of extreme nervousness.

The shock of his touch brought her to her feet, and suddenly she was dazzingly aware that the incredible happiness was within her reach, that she had only to put out her hand and take it. He was hers if she cared to claim him, but he did not know it; he need never know it, unless she opened his eyes. She drew breath deeply; and on the threshold of the unlooked-for triumph she stood motionless, smiling at him indulgently. Now that the way was open, she knew that she could never go in.

‘Silly boy!' she said, like one talking to a credulous child. ‘It's only a story, you shouldn't get so worked up about it.'

That made him laugh, as it was meant to. ‘Theodora's worse than I am!' he said in his innocence. ‘She adores you.'

‘She's very young, and very generous. And you're supposed to be looking after her.'

‘I know!' he said guiltily. ‘I'll go back.'

‘And she's very beautiful – isn't she?'

The sudden flush of Theodora's sweet companionship burned high in his cheeks. ‘She's
so like you
!'

‘Then go and be nice to her. Don't wait for me, afterwards, you take her home and I'll see you both tomorrow.' Enraged at the calm of her own voice as she declined a kingdom, she felt a momentary frenzy of pity for herself and jealousy of the girl, and to evade it she took him by the shoulders, like an overgrown boy, and kissed him briefly and admonishingly in dismissal. She meant the kiss for his forehead, but as though the role in which she had cast him was implicit in her touch, he turned up his mouth to her like a schoolboy humouring a well-loved aunt, and received her lips upon his with perfect unselfconsciousness. The light embrace, which left him unshaken, transfixed her with painful delight. She pushed him hastily towards the door, before worse should happen to them both.

‘Now go back to her – quickly, before Morgan catches you.'

When he was gone, she smiled into the glass and did not know whether her smile was more rueful or relieved; but it appeared to her that it had at any rate the pride of rectitude. One should take only one's due, and she had never been a greedy woman.

She had the whole of the second act in which to dress, and the result was what she meant it to be, a masterpiece. She stood gleaming in the fabulous silver gown, showers of lace at breast and shoulders and elbows, her hair drawn upward into a turret of silver sparkling with stones; the great lady, the Princess von Werdenberg, in full panoply for the evening, the hoops of her skirt filling the room. Meeting her own eyes in the glass, she smiled with triumph and slowly, royally, she swept to her apotheosis.

There are victories the young cannot yet hope to win. The tension held. How could it fail, when every word, every note, came out of her life and her heart? In the anguished raptures of the trio, drawn aside from the young lovers whose happiness only she, if she pleased, could make possible, she looked up into the box where their counterparts sat. In the subdued light she could see them plainly. They were very close together, Theodora's shoulder curved tenderly within the protective hollow of Mark's, their young, entranced faces almost cheek to cheek. Theodora's hand lay on the rim of the box, and Mark's was closed comfortingly and tightly over it. They had a brief, a touching, a vulnerable beauty, a generous ardour, tears on the girl's cheeks, the boy's eyes wide and grave with emotion.

Ecstatically, devotedly, they gazed at their Marschallin, as her voice soared into the heights of renunciation. Afterwards, they would wonder how any singer could possibly simulate a passion so poignantly; now, they simply believed in it. The light glittered in Theodora's adoring tears.

All Souls' Day

Josef Slavik did not go back to the hut until the pub closed. It was not that he loved the beer or the company so much; so close was escape and renewal now that he was almost unaware of them, and sat for three-quarters of an hour over one drink, unwilling to spend even a few more coppers from what seemed to him the price of the future. It was rather that now, at the end, he could not bear the sight of the empty room, the camp bed and the box covered with white paper for a table, the borrowed crockery which must go back to the Shanes in the morning, all the bare, clean evidence of departure.

The promise was so close now that to feel it still out of reach of his hand was torture. Had he hated England, that it hurt him like a skin he must slough or die? The emptiness of the Nissen hut threatened as it reassured, and he did not want to have to sit in it with the silent women, and wait moment after moment with the fear that even now something could go wrong.

Almost over now! Before the end of next week they would be in America, where the initiative was, where the future was. Uncle Petr was waiting for them, there was a good job in the firm for Josef, a share in the house for Hilda, and surely a quiet corner for his mother, perhaps some light work, too. She was not really old; it was only because Hilda had the prior claim to be known as Mrs Slavik that the neighbours had added to Slava's name the qualifying ‘old'. She needed work of her own, something into which she could dig her strong fingers and vigorous mind; it was only for want of that that she had thinned and faded here, and receded from him into so remote and shadowy a silence. In America, where there was hope, and expansion, and power, where the core of the world had moved and fixed irrevocably since the war, everything would be different. He had waited and hoped for it so long, and now it was almost a reality, almost in his hands. Tomorrow they would return the borrowed pots and pans, and Tom Shane would fetch away the camp bed they were giving to him, and by noon they would be in the train, going south, away from this half-life for ever.

Once it had not seemed to him so bad a life. The job was all right, even if a camp hut was all they could get for a house. But after the years of war, the precarious flight into France, the frustration and corruption and indifference there, the second escape into England, and the long, waiting struggle of that army of exiles, any honest work for a fair wage was temporary heaven. Dissatisfaction came later, when things should have been levelling out to normal, and still there was no advancement and no house. In the new world everything would be different. There a man could get on. There he would not continue, after years of honest service, an alien and a stranger.

When closing time came, he walked home by the field path as slowly as he could. He did not want to see his mother sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at the sky through the curtainless windows. But when he opened the door all was as he expected it to be. Hilda put out his dinner on the white paper tablecloth with her usual placidity. She was growing rather plump and heavy since the baby's birth and death, but she was still as pretty as when he had married her in 1943. She would be better in America, too. She would have other sons, who would not, like their first unaccountably puny mite, die before their tenth day. She was too practical and too unimaginative to waste time in grieving over the lost child; all her thoughts were for the ones they would have thereafter, in the world of promise where opportunity was generated with the newly born, and grew with them until it ripened in their hands. She had not even been up to the churchyard again to look at the little grave. The living would always matter more to Hilda than the dead. She had flushed with excitement as she chattered with him about their plans, and sung as she packed the trunk they had sent ahead on its journey. Where there was room she would make a life, and never look over her shoulder at what was left behind.

She came and put her arm suddenly about his neck as he ate, and kissed him. ‘Soon now!' she said in his ear; and he said: ‘Very soon!'

‘You won't believe me, but I've been scared all along that something would happen to spoil it.'

He said sharply: ‘Hush!' for he was still afraid, and did not like to be reminded of it.

‘Oh, it's all right now! Only a few more hours, and we're off.'

They spoke in low voices, and did not look at his mother who sat on the camp bed making fast a loose button on his overcoat against the long journey. But he made a slight motion of his head towards her, and looked questioningly and yet evasively into his wife's eyes. She shook her head at him with a slight frown, and lifted her shoulders. ‘It'll be all right. When we go – when we begin to see new things—'

Hilda came of a farming family, centuries settled in the district. Once, after the war ended, he had taken her on a visit to his own country, and she had moved through its golden summer with her fixed and assured serenity, mildly entertained, as at a circus. Then he had known that she could not be transplanted, at least into that soil. It had never entered her head. Had he not been in England for five years, and wasn't he doing a good, steady job there? What should he do but stay there with his English wife, and accept the status of an adopted son? In her mind it had always been quite settled. Perhaps she would never have accepted even the idea of going to America, if the coming and passing of the child had not shaken her a little aside from her fixity for a while; but now she was as firmly in motion upon that track as she had been embedded in the English scene. It was not she who hung upon the project like a motionless and silent cloud of denial and regret.

He remembered that visit home vividly, for it was then that he had begun to understand, and to make his mother understand, that things were changed, that he had moved on, and that if she wished to keep him she must move after him. He did not want to leave her alone there; his father was dead since 1940, and his little brother Oto, his wild, gay, indestructible little brother Oto, had fallen foul of the Germans, and died obscurely in the fortress at Terezín, like so many of the young and brave. Among the hurried and shallow burials of the last few thousand dead, when there was no more oil for the crematorium, the liberating army had found and identified his slight and angry bones. There was no one left there to make a home for Slava. It was natural, it was best, that she should come to England, to her only living son and his wife, to the generations which would follow them, her grandchildren, the fruit of the future.