Cheyney Fox (30 page)

Kurt’s mother’s birthday. A grand dinner and a ball in their town house in Vienna. In the previous months Cheyney had come to accept more and more the idea of marrying Kurt. He never pressed her with the question of when they would marry. He didn’t have to, he had made it clear that he didn’t want her
until she was ready for a lifetime commitment to him. It therefore came as a surprise to Kurt when, in bed one night after an extravagant display of sexual intimacy, she said she would like — if he would — to consider themselves engaged to be married. Leaving open the time and place of the ceremony, of course …

One of the things that prompted Cheyney to take that next step in their relationship was that, having been beside Kurt in many places and at a number of large public functions, she had recognized that Kurt Walbrook, for all his celebrity, knew how to retain his privacy. Having to live with him constantly in the public eye would have been for her death by a thousand camera cuts.

He did, after all, keep several different lives going at the same time. Several different images as well: playboy-jet setter, society bachelor, dilettante, patron of the arts, owner of the Walbrook Collection, philanthropist on a rather large scale. Some of which made the gossip columns around the world, but not too often. Cheyney envied his ability to keep his profile low in the midst of such celebrity. Or was his old money less interesting in the sixties than Pop money? Or was it his judiciously chosen friends who managed to keep his activities up front in the glossies, while fading out his personality? Cheyney herself had been aware of him and his collections, yet had not known the face behind the columnists’ legends.

They agreed to announce the news at his mother’s birthday ball.

Kurt did try to prepare Cheyney for the celebrations. He explained to her that all his relations and his father’s friends were devoted to the baroness. They would be flying in from all over the world for the event. “It will be a formal affair, with a good many of my mother’s generation looking back on a world long lost to them. So you mustn’t mind too much their sentimentality. It will be an occasion for reminiscences. They may bore you, but they need not bother you. They are their reminiscences, not ours. We have yet to create our own.”

The birthday ball was the first time she visited the family house in Vienna. It was a turn-of-the-century mansion, set behind iron gates and in a three-acre garden. By then Cheyney had learned never to be surprised by anything to do with the
Walbrooks. The more she saw and learned, the more fascinating they became as a dynasty of the Austrian elite. However, on the very night of the ball, Cheyney was less dazzled by Kurt Walbrook’s world than she would have liked. For the first time she recognized what that sinister undertone was that she found in the admirers of the Baroness Walbrook. It was, after all, not that difficult when confronted by men in evening dress, the Iron Cross worn on a ribbon around the throat, Third Reich campaign ribbons across the breasts of their jackets. The women in elegant gowns and jewels of a splendor to match those of the best royal households. For the most part they seemed to have been spared the Nazi regime’s highest decorations. The baroness herself delighted her party guests and shocked Cheyney by wearing a sash of red, white, and black across the bodice of her silver-lamé gown. Fetchingly pinned to it was an iron cross framed in diamonds. She wore other magnificent diamonds in her hair. Around her throat a necklace of blinding beauty and brilliance. She sported bracelets and rings of huge diamonds in sophisticated art-deco settings. She presented herself to her guests for the first toast of champagne by sweeping down the curved staircase into the hall where they were all assembled. A woman standing next to Cheyney dressed splendidly in black, and wearing emeralds, leaned over and whispered, “You know, our leader believed her to be the most intelligent and clever woman in Germany. They say he was in love with her. I was there when he presented her with the cross she wears tonight. He adored her and her family.” The woman had tears in her eyes. Riveted as she was by the spectacle, Cheyney dutifully felt sick and left the hall.

Someone entered the library. Cheyney heard the click of a lock. She recognized Kurt’s step as he walked toward her. She turned from the window where she had been standing to watch a light snowfall. Faint sounds of an orchestra in the ballroom above them. Spry Viennese waltzes. He looked very handsome as he came toward her. He wore no wartime decorations. She had known that, but now she found herself checking his appearance for them anyway. It was the sort of occasion when one might have materialized. She simply could not bring herself to mention how revolted she was by them. The deadly glamour of it all precluded anything so conventional.

“Now I understand why all the security men in the gardens and all over the house. Nothing so up-to-the-minute as a drug raid you worry about. Not burglars to haul off your guests’ jewels. It’s for secrecy. To make sure they can celebrate their slice of history without getting caught doing it. How can they wear those decorations, Kurt? It is grotesque. And you? My God, don’t tell me you were a Nazi. I can never believe that.”

To let her bitterness settle, Kurt took his time fitting a cigarette into his amber holder. Then he lit it and savored a few puffs. He took Cheyney by the hand, led her to a chair, and asked her to be seated.

“Is it any more grotesque than the Americans, the Allies, the Russians even, wearing their decorations? No, Cheyney, don’t interrupt me. Hear me out.” There was no soft slurring of her name as he spoke to her this time. “The men and women of Germany and Austria fought and lost a war. There were those such as my mother who believed passionately, however misguidedly, in the new Germany and Hitler, those like my father who did not. Men like myself, who left Germany and chose to remain neutral, but never — and I do mean never — deserted my family because of their beliefs. Could you possibly have believed that every Nazi sympathizer, even after the debacle of 1945, would forget his glory days? The men in that room are some of what is left of Hitler’s most competent high-ranking officers. They may be respectable citizens in their own country, living constructive, affluent lives. But in their fat old hearts, though they know they will never march again, they remain as devoted as ever to what they fought for. They’re human. It’s not twenty-five years since Germany was defeated. That may be enough time to come to terms with their defeat. But it’s not long enough for the men who designed and fought in that war to forget it. It was the time of their lives. Each life only gets one such time. History supplied Hitler to give them theirs. Most of the people in that ballroom do not admit, even to themselves, the atrocities their war unleashed on humanity. For them it is over. All they have left is simply what they find in their memory. They have run with their spoils of war. When they dare, as they do this evening or in their splendid houses behind bolted doors, they display the medals of a dream lost forever. You can see it as the fag end of a nightmare, dwindled
to fancy dress. It means little. It is their business and has nothing to do with us. I have been deeply involved with some of these people all of my life and will always remain so. I refuse to be judgmental on this issue. I cannot stop you from being so. We have discussed this now for the first and last time. The subject is not open for discussion. Not now, not ever. Now, if that is clear and you are still unhappy about being here, you can go up to our room. I will join you there as soon as I can.”

There was nothing in Kurt’s tone to lead her to believe that he was angry or disappointed with her. He was stating the facts and letting her know quite emphatically the stance he had taken and intended to maintain. For him, the parade was no more menacing than a fancy-dress ball for his aged mother.

He reached out his hands to Cheyney, and she took them. She felt his warmth and his love in those hands. It coursed through her body. Their eyes met. She sensed him internalize what he saw. She was dressed in a black silk damask gown that was simplicity itself. Slender shoestring straps on the shoulders and cut to the waist in the back, a tight bodice that accentuated the shape of the breasts, the narrowness of the waist, and gently flared over the hips into its bias-cut skirt and train that voluptuously trailed on the floor behind her. At her neck a slender ribbon of diamonds and a single white camellia pinned to one side of it. Her long black hair done in an elaborate twist at the nape of her neck.

He closed his eyes. She caught the emotion in his voice as he said, “Sheyney,” and drew her toward him. “I love you. Nothing, no matter what our differences may be, now or in the future, can ever change that.” He opened his eyes and she was, as before, mesmerized by the strange sensual power and love that drew her to him. “We will be happy together for always, you wait and see. Please.” Then, reaching in his jacket pocket, he produced a square-cut diamond, larger than Cheyney had ever seen; a gem of such splendid fire and beauty as to make her catch her breath. “Accept this ring, it’s my engagement present to you. Wear it for me, for us. But I think it best we don’t announce our engagement here at the ball. This is supposed to be the beginning of the happiest time of our lives, and you don’t look happy about being here. So only you and
I will share this special time. We’ll be selfish and keep it for ourselves. Is that fair?”

“Fair enough,” she echoed equivocally.

As so often, he had handled her in a manner that smoothed the roughnesses between them. Cheyney accepted the ring. Not having to share that special moment with the others in the house brought relief. She relished the beauty of her ring and told him she loved him. He showed her his feelings. He slipped the straps carefully off her shoulders and lowered the bodice of her dress to caress her naked breasts with hands and kisses. On the sofa he lifted her skirts and continued his kisses. They returned to the ball, he with the taste of her pleasure still on his tongue, and she that little bit more in love with Kurt Walbrook. Then why did she still ache for the loss of that something special she only felt in the arms of Grant Madigan?

In the months that followed, Cheyney and Kurt saw less of each other than they had expected. She returned to Athens and remained there. The trip to New York to buy her third painting from the Acton Pace estate was canceled. She arranged the transaction by telephone. A trip to London to see the paintings of Acton she was lending to the Tate Gallery and to meet several people in the contemporary art world there was about the only journey she made abroad. On her return she began thinking seriously of what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

Where was Grant? Would he ever be there for her, just her? She would happily settle for that. But she knew the answer almost before she formed the question. She had to come to terms with the fact that as much as he was her magnificent love obsession, there would never be a life together to build on. It takes two for that and he was still running away from love.

By this time Cheyney knew that her life was bound up with Kurt’s. There were bonds there that might never be broken. A kind of love and sexual interdependence that bound her to Kurt Walbrook. The dark side of his sexual life was fast becoming the dark side of their sexual life, and one she, in spite of herself, enjoyed enormously. She was not unaware of just how much she had slipped under his Svengali spell. But there was, too, a desire in both for them not to be merely enslaved by each
other. They had become a formidable couple, with more than most going for them.

It was actually his love for her, his obsessional desire to make a fulfilling life and home for them, that ate into the very fabric of Cheyney’s independence. But never in a negative way. There again, it was thanks to the ever-sensitive Kurt, who always tempered his desires until she was ready to share in them. Cheyney conceded that there might never be any other man for her to make a life with. Not so long as Kurt was alive. She had to dismiss the nagging memory of Grant Madigan. His restless spirit was in his work.

The alternative: to stay as she was with Kurt? Move to a city where she could open a small gallery? That certainly held no interest for her. The very thought brought back too many bad memories. Keep working with Lala and Roberto on the odd job? As a wealthy woman in her own right, thanks to her investment in Acton Pace paintings, she had options. What seemed to beckon most alluringly was that of sharing a life with Kurt Walbrook. There was something else — what it was becoming fashionable to call her biological clock. It was running down, and Kurt was not a young man. There were only a few years in which to have a child before she turned forty.

They had their usual very private and early Christmas together in Athens and celebrated their first New Year’s Eve together. Nineteen seventy-one was rung in on the promise of a wedding before spring. Two things delayed their plans.

On the ides of March, Kurt’s mother, the baroness, was found dead in the house in Vienna. A heart attack, said the obituaries. Years later, Cheyney would discover that, her hair dressed beautifully, her makeup applied to perfection, she had dressed herself in the silver-lamé gown she had worn to her birthday ball, and wearing her sash of honor and no other jewelry except her wedding band of gold, she had lain down on her bed and injected an overdose of morphine, her favorite drug, introduced into her life by another of her admirers, Herman Göring. The papers in Austria omitted such detail, recording rather her wealth, her generosity to children in need, and her having been among Europe’s greatest female patrons of the arts. A statutory period of mourning and time to settle her will: then a date was set for their wedding.

One bright April morning, seated outside in the sun, reading the
International Herald Tribune
and drinking a coffee at Zonar’s, Cheyney looked up from her paper to see Grant Madigan with a beautiful Chinese nymphet clinging to his arm and another man. The three had stopped to greet someone and then the party of four wound between the tables in search of a place to sit. Grant spotted her. She gaped, stunned that he should just pop up like that on the pavement.