Theirs Was The Kingdom (60 page)

He was a tiresome invalid, however, and insisted on smoking his pipe, so that the pungent smell of his tobacco hung over the upper floor night and day, and Frau Körner was forever voicing fears that he would set the house on fire when they were all asleep. Then he had another slight seizure, and the family took turns to watch with him, George, Gisela, and Frau Körner sitting by his bedside in two-hour spells throughout the night. He slept fitfully and when he awoke to find George there he would mutter endlessly about things he should have done, or ought not to have done, concerning recent adaptations to Maximus. George had not the heart to discourage him, even though he seemed to get excited when he saw, or thought he saw, a way of improving the steering, the braking power, the transmission, or the variable speed mechanism. He asked George to duplicate a full report on their progress to date, to be sent to Benz and Daimler, including scale diagrams of all their recent modifications. Grumbling to Gisela that this kind of activity was only reducing his chance of recovery, George was puzzled by her defence of the old man’s whims. “Let him have his way. That engine was always more important to him than we after my father died. It is his dream. You cannot prevent a dying man from dreaming, Herr Swann.”

After that he made no further protest, but let the old man run on. George carried out all his commissions concerning the engine, on which he worked from time to time through the sultry weeks of September, when an unnatural stillness had settled on the once-riotous household.

He had gone to bed tired and depressed after a spell of watching one night to find the brilliant moonlight prevented sleep and the room very stuffy, despite the breeze from the river. He was restless now, and hopelessly at odds with himself, and he stood a long time at the window, looking out across the moonlit countryside until he heard the whirring notes of the Essling church clock strike two. That meant Gisela would be relieved by the family help, Marta, who had been fitted into the schedule in order to give the exhausted Frau Körner some rest.

He was turning away from the window when he heard the door latch click and suddenly there was Gisela in bedgown, her hair unplaited and her feet bare. He said, urgently, “Max? Another spell!” but she laid a finger to her lips and came in, closing the door and standing with her back to it in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural for him to cross to her, saying nothing, and take her in his arms, as though her appearance here had been prearranged.

When he kissed her lips, however, she shivered, so that he would have released her but she clung to him fiercely, as in the grove on Lobau, and he said, gently, “Why then, Gisela? Why did you come?” and she replied, with an improbable catch of laughter in her voice, “Because I love my grandfather, Herr Swann. He knows I am here.” And then, still with a suggestion of laughter, “No, no, perhaps not. But he would approve, I am sure, for he talks of no one but you.”

“He said you should come? At night? Like this?” and when she nodded eagerly, “Ah, but
you
, Gisela, that’s a matter for you, not him! You must understand that?”

“Yes,” she said, in her familiar level tone, “I understand it. I am not quite a fool. Neither am I a wanton, like Gilda, who sets out to tease every man who looks at her. I would not be here if I had not wished it myself more than anything in the world. I would have pretended I did not understand grandfather’s talk concerning you. I would have dismissed it as an old man’s nonsense.” Then, calmly, “You wish for me to leave, Herr Swann?”

“No, by God!” he blurted out and threw his arms about her again, but she said, taking control of the situation, as she had on Lobau, “Wait, then. And do not talk. My mother is asleep but perhaps one of my sisters is not. You would not wish my presence here discussed by them, I think.”

“Of course I wouldn’t, but…”

“Then be silent.”

She slipped out of her flannel gown and he saw she was not wearing a nightdress or a shift of the kind the Körner girls wore in bed, and gazed at her rapturously. He had only seen one other woman without clothes and this one was in great contrast to Rosa, who had conveyed to him an impression of strength and majestic symmetry. Gisela was well-formed, with full breasts and well-covered thighs, but her small waist and stature added a daintiness to her figure that he found at one with her essential stillness and femininity. In the bright moonlight he could see her quite clearly, and said, as she made a move towards the bed, “No, Gisela, over there by the window… I want to look at you. You’re beautiful, Gisela. You’re so much more beautiful than I imagined!”

She took a step towards the window and stood quite still in the broad beam of moonlight, her chin high, her hands at her sides in a pose that was somehow submissive, but she looked, he thought, like some lovely vision who had materialised out of Danube water-meadows. In that soft light her form appeared quite perfect so that it amazed him that he had ever thought of her as less graceful than her sister Sophie, or less prepossessing than Valerie or Gilda. Then he remembered that she, alone among the Körner girls, wore corsets that gave her a bulkiness, for the corsets the Viennese wore were ridged with heavy wire, of the kind Max used to bind joints on his machine.

When he embraced her again she was warm and very supple but seemed, in some way, to have herself in hand. Perhaps she was only here because Max had all but proposed it to her, or perhaps, most of her life, she had been at the disposal of others and it was therefore natural that she should do him this small service.

He said, breathlessly, “You must be sure, Gisela. Quite sure,” and she said briskly, “Please to go to bed,” and gave him a push in that direction.

Once there and holding her, he had no further misgivings concerning the motives that had brought her there. Pleasing grandfather must have been incidental.

It was possible, when he opened his eyes soon after dawn, to look at her and think about her as though he was seeing her for the first time.

For perhaps ten minutes he lay very still, his face turned towards her, studying the clear, unblemished skin of her cheek framed in a skein of golden hair that had always been severely disciplined in carefully arranged plaits but now spread itself clear across his pillow in the wildest disorder. He found that he could relish every part of her individually, like a man who has stumbled upon a treasure and has yet to count it and come to terms with his luck. A single finespun hair, venturing from somewhere behind the rounded lobe of her ear, caught the first gleam of morning sun so that light seemed to travel down it, over the heavy-lidded eye, down the length of the short, straight nose to the upper lip. It caught the shoulder of a tooth and stayed a moment before passing on over the little chin to the neck and losing itself in the cleavage of her fine young breasts, over which the coverlet was drawn taut, pinned by his weight.

She was quite perfect. Fairy-tale perfect. An amalgam of every quality he had ever looked for in women. For, as he watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing and the tiny flutter of the errant hair where it cut the corner of her mouth, he saw her as all the women who had touched his life and his dreams, so that it was as though he had conjured her out of his conscious and subconscious mind and breathed life into her for his own exclusive comfort. She was Laura Broadbent, infinitely caring, infinitely maternal; Rosa Ledermann, joyous and positive in the act of loving a man; herself, whom he had watched unknowingly all this time, pouring her concern into the affairs of everyone about this house. But, in addition to all this, which had reality and substance, she was something else, the princess-waif of nursery days; the fragile, stoic heroine; a little figure symbolising everything that was wholesome, challenging the dark forces of the fairy-tale world and triumphing after many dangers and hardships. She was Gisela Körner and now, God be praised, she was his and there came to him a triumphant awareness of what it meant to be unequivocally in love and to know that love was returned in full measure.

Physically, in retrospect that is, it was profitless to compare her to Rosa, the only other woman he had held in his arms for more than a few breathless seconds. Rosa’s responses, if they could be called that and not regarded as storming advances, had been calculated, conditioned by her experience and her assertive energy. With Gisela, everything had to be reversed, he supposed, and yet, thinking back, this was not the whole truth. Her very lack of experience, expressed in her expectancy and desire to please, had communicated itself to every nerve in his body, convincing him that he was the bestower. And some strange alchemy of emotions, stemming from this, made it implicit, that this single act of love had integrated her into his life and that, by possessing her body, he had possessed himself of her entire being. And this, following some strange logic, was the essence of everything he had experienced in this stone house by the river.

Outside, in the windblown lilac trees, finches squabbled, a sound that had often awakened him as it now awakened her, but slowly, so that he could watch awareness stir in her as she turned her head from the light and opened her eyes, acknowledging him with a small, shy smile. An incongruous smile he might have said, given the circumstances, and yet it was not, for it had within it a distillation of her personality. Restraint, infinite patience, infinite courtesy.

He said, as though it had been in his mind months rather than minutes, “We must be married, Gisela. Soon, you understand? We must marry before Max is too sick and confused to understand what has happened. Would that be possible, since I am not a Catholic?”

She said nothing for a moment and continued to smile but then, the smile slipping away, she turned her head back to its sleeping position and seemed to be contemplating the high, arched ceiling.

He said, “Would it? Would your priest marry us very soon?” and she replied, without looking at him, “I did not seek that when I came to you. You should understand that.”

He raised himself on his elbow and stared at her. “Listen, Gisela, I don’t care what brought you here or what you or Max had in mind. I’m in love with you, very much in love with you. I want you and I need you and I mean to have you as soon as it can be managed. Is it that you couldn’t bear to leave Austria and your family and come away as my wife to England? Because if so I wouldn’t expect that right away, not so long as we were married. We could stay… where are you going?” for suddenly and effortlessly she had slipped away and was standing by the window, shrugging herself into her flannel bedgown, her hands tugging the girdle into a knot.

“I shall go now,” she said, very quietly, “before anyone stirs. I will not have you made the subject of jokes in this house, you understand?”

He said, in a hoarse and urgent whisper, “Don’t go, Gisela. Not until you’ve promised, not until I’m sure…”

“Ach, I will come to you again. Or we can talk of it at a distance from the house. But not here and at this moment, for I will not be judged as one of my sisters…” He was alarmed and confused now and lunged the length of the bed, catching her round the waist before she could reach the door. “Listen, Gisela… yes, yes, I’ll keep my voice down, but you must tell me. I must know before you leave here. I love you, Gisela. Understand that, please. I love you and I want very much to marry you. You love me, don’t you?”

She said, gravely, “I do not think you need to ask that question.”

“But of course I do. Any man would, wouldn’t he?”

She seemed to consider this, standing looking down at him gravely and fidgeting with the knot of her girdle. He had the advantage now, holding her tightly by the waist, and was in no mood to surrender it, saying, “If necessary I’ll rouse everybody in the house and make it public this instant. I love you, Gisela, and I mean to marry you. All I want from you is yes or no.”

She smiled at that and this was all the answer he needed, that and the note of laughter in her voice as she said, judiciously, “I will consider it. Very carefully. I will consult my grandfather and follow his advice. But now I must go and nothing is to be said of this without my consent, you hear me?” and she bent swiftly from the waist and kissed him on the forehead.

He released her then and she left the room as silently as she had entered. He crossed to the window, sniffing the dawn and watching the pinkish light spread across the river, as though the grey sky in the west had been punctured and day came as a transfusion to the woods and meadows on the far bank. The sense of peace and certainty that possessed him was almost tangible, but he plumbed it guardedly, wondering at the strength of the hold it had upon him and thinking, “All this time and distance… and she was here, right under my nose…” And in a curious way she fused with the recollection of Laura Broadbent, who had embraced him swiftly on his last night in Bowdon, and Rosa Ledermann, who, he supposed, had done more to mature him than all his travels and experiences.

They were married in mid-November, when the first snow was driving in from the Tyrol. The trees along the river, and over on the island of Lobau, were hung in sheets of beaten gold that gleamed dully in shafts of sunshine that came between halfhearted snow showers.

It seemed to him a very short, incomprehensible service, and afterwards they all trooped back to the house. He and Gisela presented themselves to Maximilien, who beamed at them from his bed and said that, apart from his “handful of crowns,” he had no patrimony other than Maximus, already dismantled and packed into crates in the grain store where it had stood on blocks for so long.