The Exiles Return (10 page)

‘But the first wave of arrests carried out by the Gestapo included a few of the most prominent and most wealthy Jews and they were held for ransom rather than for political reasons. It was aimed at the Nazis’ political opponents, all those who might have formed the core of an active opposition in the country, who were known to be hostile and whose hostility carried weight. Prominent among these were the Prince and Princess Grein-Lauterbach. She was born an Italian princess whose family, too, was anti-Fascist. They were arrested in their beds the first night and, as far as I know, were never heard of again. The two children, a very small boy and a girl, ten or twelve years older than he, were smuggled out of the palace by the family chaplain, a Jesuit priest who also went into hiding, and a devoted old maid. Where they spent the war years I don’t know, but I understand that the girl, who was barely grown up, went out to work in some menial job in a laboratory – for she had no qualifications – in order to earn her keep. ‘Bimbo’ – his mother’s pet name for him, and his friends still call him that – was brought up by Father Jahoda and this sister who mothered him. He is still rather in awe of her, by the way he talks, but has long since escaped her authority. I have never met her.

‘His fortune? It was confiscated, and very little of it has been recovered. He is practically penniless. There is a huge old rambling castle in Lower Austria which has been restored to him and his sister, the habitable parts swarming with homeless families who have been housed there by some authority or who have simply settled there themselves. They only pay nominal rents, a fraction of what is needed even for running repairs, so he tells me, and the great ornate staterooms have been ruined by neglect. It’s a thousand pities! I believe his one aim in life is to retrieve it, and the only means of doing so is a rich marriage, a
very
rich marriage. Meanwhile, what does he do for a living? Anything he can pick up – a commission on selling an old piece of furniture or a bibelot, acting as a guide to rich tourists who are beginning to come into the country, seeking out customers for a wine merchant – anything that doesn’t involve too much work! After all, he has two very valuable assets: his title and his charm.’

Eight

‘Poldo, I’ve had a letter from Valery, a very long letter, about her eldest, Marie-Theres.’

And the Countess Lensveldt picked up several sheets of slightly crumpled, thin airmail paper and tried to hand them across the table to her husband, who had just finished peeling an apple at the end of his luncheon. The scene was the dining room in the Lensveldts’ castle of Wald in Upper Austria.

‘Marie-Theres seems to be a difficult girl,’ the Countess continued, ‘a
problem
girl is what Valery calls her on one page, on the next she says that she is absolutely normal and very sweet-natured. That is meant to reassure us. I can’t make head or tail of what she means. Will you read the letter?’

‘Certainly not,’ the Count replied, ‘you know I don’t like reading complicated letters, and I can’t read Valery’s handwriting.’ The Countess put the sheets down next to her plate with a sigh. ‘Not that she has treated us to much of it,’ the Count continued, ‘as she might have done since postal communications have been re-established.’

‘Valery has always been out of touch with us,’ the Countess said thoughtfully.

‘Well, what does she say now? What does she want? I suppose she wants something, or she wouldn’t have written. And why do you say we need reassurance?’

‘Yes, the gist of it is that she wants to send Marie-Theres over here and she asks whether we would have her here at Wald – for a few months.’

‘For a few months! A difficult child! For you to cope with!’ the Count exploded.

‘Well, Valery says the difficulty does not lie so much in the girl herself, but that American life does not seem to suit her. She thinks a change of surroundings and
our
way of living here in the country would do her a great deal of good.’

‘Oh, she does, does she! But she doesn’t suggest coming over herself, after all these years, to see us, to see you and Fini. That would have been normal. But she always was eccentric, marrying a total stranger, going off to America with him, and now she’s got a problem daughter. I suppose the girl has got herself into a scrape with some young man. It can’t just be “surroundings”.’

‘Well, there does seem to be a boy in the background, but he’s not involved in the way you would think. I shall have to write and try to find out what all this is about. What she says is very confusing, for instance that Marie-Theres doesn’t like boys, and that her schoolteacher thinks that’s unnatural and has made Peter very angry by saying so. Anyway, here are some pictures of her.’

Count Lensveldt looked at the photos one after the other and then looked more closely. ‘She seems to be very pretty. How old is she?’

‘Let me see, she was, I think, two years old when Valery and Peter went to America. She must be about eighteen.’

The Count was studying the snapshots. They were in colour, a development which was not yet in use in Austria. ‘She’s certainly extremely pretty, more than pretty – beautiful. I can imagine all kinds of complications with those looks.’

The Countess smiled. ‘So you would agree to have her? By the way, Valery says that Peter will pay for her keep.’

‘Will he indeed! She’s your
niece.
We’re not paupers yet. When we have to take paying guests, we’ll have paying
guests
, not family. They must just let her have pocket money. Tell your sister
that.
’ The Count picked up the photographs and put them in his pocket.

*   *   *

As the Countess Lensveldt sat down to write to Valery, she thought about her sister’s strange marriage and the circumstances leading up to it. For it had not been predictable that Valery Altmannsdorf and Peter Larsen would get married, but the very unlikelihood of their meeting confirmed Valery in her unshakeable conviction that she had been meant to marry Peter. This was a source of great strength to her and coloured her whole outlook on life, which was positive and unquestioning, but it also closed her mind to the doubts and difficulties of others. She had no time and no sympathy for other people’s misgivings and uncertainties, which she was inclined to regard as nonsense, and that estranged her especially – and unhappily – from her eldest daughter.

Valery Larsen was the youngest of three sisters – Francisca who was writing to her was the middle one – who were the daughters of the late Prince Altmannsdorf. He had once owned vast estates in Bohemia, but he had never lived in any of his different castles, except during the shooting season, as he much preferred town life in the Palais Altmannsdorf in Vienna. He had left the administration of his estates to a cousin, who might have expected to become his heir since he himself had no son; the only positive interest he had taken in what he owned was in his forests and his game. Among his employees, he only knew his gamekeepers, and his head forester, whom he valued and trusted, was the only one with whom he had a personal relationship. Between seasons this man often came to Vienna to talk things over, bringing with him a smell of wood smoke and pipe tobacco even in his town clothes, and a sense of wind and open spaces on his weather-beaten, bearded face. ‘Old Anreither’ the young princesses called him; he was almost one of the family and they loved him.

When, in 1918, the Austrian Empire fell apart, the cousin was left to take on citizenship of the new state of Czechoslovakia and to wrestle with its decrees concerning the large estates within its borders, and Prince Altmannsdorf in Vienna was, for a while at least, cut off from the source of his revenues. Valery, his youngest child, was four years old at the time. Born during the war, she had from the start been a sickly baby, and the lack of adequate food during the last disastrous year had reduced her to such a featherweight scrap that her parents decided to swallow their pride and apply for her to be included in the parties of children which generous people in Holland and the Scandinavian countries were offering to receive into their homes to save them from starvation. Valery had been taken to Denmark and had spent two years with the family of a farmer, living with his numerous children. They had loved her and she had loved them and, young as they were, a very tender friendship had developed between her and a little boy of her own age. When at last she went home, strong and healthy and speaking nothing but Danish, little Jens pined to have her back again in the summer holidays. She had been so happy and the Altmannsdorfs were so grateful that they could not refuse to send her. Gradually it came to be accepted by both families that Valery would spend a couple of months with the Larsens every other year during her childhood and adolescence, while Jens or one of his sisters occasionally came to Vienna.

Then suddenly, as such things happen, Peter, the eldest of the Larsen sons, fell in love with her and she with him. He was an exceptionally brilliant young man who had taken a first-class degree in chemistry in Berlin and had come on to do postgraduate work in Vienna under a well-known professor. The two of them became engaged, but as he refused to convert to Catholicism, being as firmly wedded to his agnostic views as any devoutly religious man to the tenets of his faith, they were, after a great deal of bitterness, eventually married from Peter’s home in Denmark, at the local town hall, and received their matrimonial blessing in the adjacent Lutheran church. Valery insisted on this ceremony, feeling, rather inconsistently, that a heretical ceremony was better than none at all or, perhaps, that unless she had been inside some kind of church she would not be properly married. Her mother and sisters did not attend the wedding. Her father had died and her mother refused to recognise the marriage, until the prospect of Valery’s emigration to America, and her own failing health, made her fear that she might not see her secretly most beloved daughter again.

For Peter Larsen’s years of study in Germany, which coincided with the rise of Hitler’s party and his coming to power, had convinced him that a major war in Europe was becoming unavoidable. In the mid-thirties he started making enquiries in the United States, and having been offered, on the strength of the papers he had published in scientific journals, a research post in one of the major chemical companies, he decided to take his wife and small daughter across the Atlantic. However, before leaving Europe, Valery went to Vienna for a month to see her mother and sisters and to show them her little girl, whom she had christened Marie-Theres. It was her mother’s name. She had chosen it as a token of love for her, as a gesture of asking forgiveness, of a hope of reconciliation. As such, the old Princess had accepted it and had once again received her errant daughter into her heart and home. But to Valery herself the name had meant more than filial piety. It embodied everything she wished to remember of the old Austria, of her country’s and her family’s greatness, as a tiny phial of concentrated scent may preserve and penetrate for years to come alien fabrics and alien habitations with the faint but unmistakable memory of its odour.

Yet those last weeks in Vienna had been far from happy. They had been full of discordant thoughts and emotions, heightened by a sense of finality, with the accent alternating between escape and regret. Escape, however, predominated. Valery was already estranged from the views and opinions of her relations and former friends. She no longer had any desire to live amongst them. Her life with Peter had changed her. She saw them now as he saw them, as narrow-minded and blind to the realities of the world. It was all she could do to keep her temper when her sisters and their husbands ridiculed the ‘panic’ which had seized Peter Larsen and impelled him to ‘take refuge’ in America. They shrugged off the notion that Nazism would spread to Austria, and some of their friends even thought that it would not be such a bad thing if it did, so little did they understand its sinister implications. Nor did any of them believe in the danger of war. They were quite out of sympathy with the apocalyptic vision, as they called it, which she had acquired from Peter, and they teased her for going around, as they said, in a mood of gloom and foreboding, looking at everything as if she were seeing it for the last time. Only the certainty that she was going away with Peter, that wherever he and she were together all would be well with her, prevented the outbreak of another and final quarrel to spoil the underlying tenderness of leave-taking.

The leave-taking she did indulge in, and indulged in all the more consciously because she was already determinedly looking forward to her new life, was the parting from places rather than from people. As the last days before her departure went by, gathering speed as the final moment approached, she endeavoured to avoid the repetition of discussions which only tended to become acrimonious, and equally the effusions of emotion which were losing their sincerity and beginning to cloy. Instead she went out for walks with Marie-Theres, spending her afternoons in the gardens and parks where she herself had been taken as a child, only wishing that her little girl were old enough to glean some impressions to remember. It was here that Valery said goodbye to Vienna before turning her face resolutely to the New World.

In America, both Peter and Valery Larsen were almost immediately a complete success, because they were both absolutely single-minded. Peter was single-minded about his work, which dominated all his thoughts, and Valery was single-minded about her husband, who dominated all her emotions. The rock of their marriage was so secure that the problems which bedevilled other people’s lives seemed to her extraneous and insignificant. Peter’s career progressed rapidly. He was a man of brilliant gifts, wholly dedicated to his work; in a very few years he was head of the research department of his firm and was offered a visiting lectureship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Valery had from the first embraced American life wholeheartedly and with zest. In the beginning they had moved with their few possessions from house to house and from district to district, until Peter’s increased income had led to their settling in a ranch-style house in Eden Rise.