The Longest Winter (2 page)

‘Then let him marry Elizabeth Schaeffer,’ said the baron, ‘she’s as mature as he is.’

‘Elizabeth Schaeffer is all of forty,’ protested the baroness.

‘So is he,’ said the baron.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ smiled the baroness.

‘Thank you, Mama,’ said Sophie in her winning way.

Sophie supposed she would fall in love one day. But she was less worried about it than her mother. She did not want to marry simply for the sake of it. Life was lovely, exciting, and there must be a man somewhere in this colourful world waiting for her. She was quite happy to wait for him. There was so much poetry to write until destiny brought them together.

The baroness looked up from her fashion plates as her daughters came in. As usual, Anne entered all animation and colour. As usual,
Sophie followed unhurriedly. Anne was as fair as her mother, her hair the colour of harvest gold, her eyes a warm green. Life for her was an exuberance. She adored shops, weddings, men, Strauss, Lehar and Austria. She was kind to everyone, even cab drivers, and considered the ageing, aloof emperor a monarch of benign fatherliness.

Sophie was vividly brunette, with richly dark chestnut hair, taking after her father. An inch taller than Anne, she carried herself with superb elegance, dressing her hair in Edwardian crown style and enhancing her height. Her face was classically oval, her brilliant brown eyes and beautifully white teeth giving her looks a striking quality, particularly when she was amused.

Anne dressed with apparently careless rapture and always looked delicious. Sophie rarely departed from long sweeping green or blue velvets in winter and the simplest of silk pastels in summer, and winter or summer she looked elegantly superior to fashion’s frills and flounces. Sophie loved life. Anne found it breathless. Anne asked that men should be gallant, dashing, attentive and amusing. Sophie did not ask anything quite so specific of them, only that they shared her appreciation of the world and its wonders.

Neither sister lacked admirers. Anne was a flirtatious delight, Sophie with her smile was captivating. One young man who admired them both was Ludwig Lundt-Hausen, son of the police superintendent. Sophie assured him that if he
preferred Anne she would not take the slightest offence. Ludwig earnestly assured her that if he came to prefer either of them he would press his suit vigorously. Meanwhile he hoped neither of them minded that he considered them equally charming. They did not mind a bit. Ludwig was rather a charmer himself.

The baroness regarded her daughters with a smile. Anne looked as if the sun had kissed her. Sophie looked exquisite. They had been out in the four-wheeler, jaunting gaily with a variety of other carriages along the Hauptallee in the Prater.

‘Did you enjoy yourselves?’ asked the baroness.

‘It was lovely,’ said Anne, to whom the most unimportant of outings was an excursion into the excitements of life. ‘Just everyone was there.’

‘Although riding out in a carriage isn’t quite the last word in cultural bliss,’ said Sophie, ‘it can be very stimulating. Horses are so rhythmic, aren’t they? I was inspired to begin the composition of an adorable poem. I shall finish it in my mind in a moment. Then I shall recite it.’

‘Sometimes, Mama,’ said Anne, ‘do you have the feeling that even in the bosom of our family we’re spared nothing?’

‘Do you also have the feeling, Mama, that my sister is a philistine?’ said Sophie, removing her little white tip-on hat.

There were questions from daughters that wise mothers passed by. The baroness in her wisdom said, ‘Did you meet Ludwig?’ She entertained hopes for Sophie there.

‘Yes, I think we exchanged a word or two with Ludwig,’ said Anne. ‘Oh, and we saw Carl. He wishes you to excuse him lunch.’ Her father came in then. She put her arm through his and he kissed her. He had spent this Saturday morning at his office in the Ballhausplatz. He was tall, thin and had a mass of iron-grey hair. He greeted his wife, who lifted her face for his kiss.

‘How nice you are home in good time, Ernst,’ she said. ‘Anne, what was that about Carl?’

‘Oh, you’ll excuse him lunch, won’t you?’ said Anne. ‘He and Ludwig are looking at motor cars. Ludwig is almost the expert, you know, now that he has one of his own.’

‘You’ll have to buy a motor car for us, Papa,’ said Sophie, walking about in thoughtful pursuit of metre and rhyme, ‘Carl insists we’re incomplete without one.’

‘We are not incomplete,’ said the baroness, ‘but we are certainly quieter.’

‘Hm,’ said the baron non-committally.

‘With a motor car, you know,’ said Sophie, ‘we could drive all the way to Ilidze next month. It would be very adventurous.’

‘Never,’ said her mother, ‘not while there are trains. I should shudder every metre of the way in a motor car. You will not even think about it, Ernst. I beg you will not.’

‘Naturally,’ said the baron, ‘I’d not allow thoughts of the finest motor car to promote disharmony, my dear, nor would I make you ride to Ilidze in one.’

The family owned a house in Ilidze, a small attractive inland resort in Bosnia. The baron was fond of shooting and fishing, and both sports could be enjoyed to the full in the area around Ilidze. The family always spent a few weeks there in June.

‘Mama,’ said Anne, ‘I hope it isn’t disharmonious to tell you Ludwig is taking Sophie and me out in his new car this afternoon.’

‘Oh,’ said the baroness, torn between her dislike of automobiles and her hopes for Sophie.

‘I promise you, Mama,’ smiled Sophie, ‘that if it’s a truly shuddering experience I’ll confess it so. Now, while there’s still time before lunch, I wish you to hear my new poem. Papa, don’t you dare sneak out.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ smiled the baron. He listened, together with his wife and Anne, as Sophie recited.

‘
Oh, fragrant Prater’s tree-lined courses

Are daily thronged by trotting horses
,

Horses large and horses small

Horses fat and horses tall
.

Some trot proudly, four wheels running
,

Some trot idly, using cunning
,

Saving wind and limb and grace

For tomorrow’s same old race
.

Whips flick whistling, hats are dancing
,

Single horses run on prancing

Leaving those who came on later

To the windfalls of the Prater
.’

‘That is as far as I’ve got with it,’ said Sophie, ‘but it’s my declared intention to have it trip merrily to a finish. Please express your feelings about its possibilities.’

‘Ah,’ said the baron.

‘Ah,’ said Anne.

‘Ah?’ said Sophie. ‘Ah what? Isn’t it just a little bit delicious?’

‘It’s delightful, darling,’ said the baroness.

‘Piquant,’ said the baron, smiling. Both his daughters were an entertainment to him.

At the Ecole Internationale in Vienna the pupils bent their heads over watercolours. James William Fraser bent his head over the essays he had set them the day before. Marie Corbière looked at him from under her lashes. His thick black hair, inclined to escape all too easily from the frictional prison imposed by the brush, hung over his forehead. She would bet a sou, even a franc, that he was asleep. It was warm in the classroom. She put out a hand to nudge her neighbour.

‘Marie?’ It was a cautionary murmur from her teacher.

He had not lifted his head, his hair was still in his eyes, but he was not asleep. Eleven-year-old Marie blushed. That Monsieur Fraser, he was a martinet by instinct. He could see even when he wasn’t looking. However, he was a quite nice martinet on the whole, a change from Fräulein Coutts who was so fussy with one.

James was a temporary replacement for Fräulein Coutts who, in fright at a persistent cough, was spending some months in a Swiss
sanatorium. The principal of the school was Maude Harrison, widow of a British diplomat who had been drowned when his yacht capsized in the Adriatic. Maude, an active and resourceful person, did not want to become a distressed gentlewoman. Using what money she had been left she bought a suitable house in Vienna and turned it into a school for the children of foreigners, particularly the children of diplomats.

She had met James in the middle of nowhere, in a wild valley at the foot of the Austrian Alps last September. She liked to tramp around the mountain valleys, and was inclined to laugh at friends who thought it inadvisable. In her fifties, Maude considered she was long past the stage where she might meet a fate worse than death.

James, an Anglo-Scot, shared sandwiches and fruit with her that day. And conversation. He was an automobile engineer and designer. So was his father, Sir William Fraser, who had been knighted for his services to industry. James had some of his father’s talents and some of his own. He painted moderately in colour, expressively in black and white, he took honours at Edinburgh in French and scraped home with his German. His father thought German would be useful, for as engineers the Germans were as good as any nation and one ought to be able to talk with them.

James accepted the job his father wanted him to have in the Midland works. He told Maude he felt he owed the old boy the gesture of going
into the family business. But after a couple of years he decided that although they had their fascination, internal combustion machines constituted the most antisocial device man had ever inflicted on his fellows. He spoke frankly to his father, confessing his growing aversion to the motor car and voicing his doubt about whether it would prove to be the blessing people expected.

‘And to cap it all,’ he finished, ‘I can’t stand the racket.’

‘Good God, Jamie, what are you saying?’ Sir William Fraser, a vigorous and leonine Scot, was warm-hearted but single-minded. He lived and breathed automobiles. ‘That racket,’ he pointed out, listening to the vibrations of a new engine in its test bed, ‘is the most beautiful sound man in his puniness has ever created.’

‘I must be honest, guv’nor,’ said James, ‘it’s just a noise to me.’ He was as tall as his father, but sparer and darker. He lived with a five o’clock shadow.

‘With the greatest of respect to her,’ said Sir William, ‘that comes from your Sassenach mother. She puts her fingers in her ears if a teacup rattles.’

‘Not quite,’ said James, ‘but God bless her for her sensitivity.’

‘Praise the Lord,’ said Sir William fervently. ‘Jamie, are you going to be a disappointment to me?’

‘Knowing you,’ said James, ‘I’m sure you’d rather I was a disappointment to you than to myself. The fact is, guv’nor, you’re a modern and
progressive person, and I’m afraid I’m an old-fashioned one.’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Sir William with mild sarcasm. ‘Man, will you throw the Lord’s gifts away? Your eye for design is almost as good as mine. You earn your salary. How can that be a disappointment to you? What is the principle of life? You put something into God’s world, you take something out. That’s more than a principle, that’s as near to happiness as any man or woman can get.’

‘I agree,’ said James, ‘but all the same I thought I’d take the Lord’s other gifts around Europe for a while. My paints and my sketchbook and my eyes.’

‘It doesn’t make too much sense to me,’ said Sir William, ‘and I’m not sure whether it will to your mother, either. I think she’d prefer you to show up with an estimable young lady rather than with ideas about going off to paint the Eiffel Tower. It’s a small point, no doubt, but what d’you expect to live on?’

‘I’ve some money of my own, but if I do run short I thought I could benefit from a generous arrangement with you,’ said James affably. ‘I’m not proud and you’ve never been parsimonious.’

‘D’you know what I was doing at your age?’ said Sir William.

‘Yes, building infernal machines,’ said James, ‘and bringing it all into the house.’

Sir William, in grey waistcoat, black trousers, stiff wing collar and grey tie, looked, as he always did when he was down to his shirtsleeves, as if
he were ready for industrial battle on a high but practical plane.

‘Jamie,’ he said crisply, ‘I don’t believe in forcing any young man, especially my own son, to work at something that’s gone sour on him. But I’ll bargain. You take a year off and I’ll no’ argue. I’ll give you that, a year. But if you don’t come back after a year I’ll sue you.’

‘Sue me?’

‘You’re under contract,’ said Sir William.

‘Am I, by God.’

‘You are, by God.’

‘Damn me,’ said James, mildly thunderstruck by the uncompromising nature of parental astuteness.

Maude liked the young man with the dark, almost gypsy look. The Alps soared above them, freezing the sky. Birds floated on still wings and the grandeur of space was beyond imagination. When she told him about her school and that she was starting the forthcoming winter term short of a teacher, James gave it only a second’s thought before offering himself as a temporary replacement. Maude, happy about his French, the language of the school, and his Edinburgh University background, never dilly-dallied herself.

‘I’ll call your bluff,’ she said, ‘I’ll accept you.’

‘No bluff,’ said James, ‘I want to see Vienna, live it, not wander through it.’

He proved a find. He exercised a firm but benevolent masculine authority and the more impressionable girls sometimes brought him
flowers and a blush. His salary was not very much. But he lived in a room at the top of the house and enjoyed free and very good board. He explored Vienna during his spare time and carried his sketchbook about.

‘Marie?’

Marie Corbière pinked again. James smiled and beckoned her. She went to his desk. He had her essay in front of him. He had asked them to write three hundred words on a day in their life.

‘M’sieu?’

‘I like your essay, Marie. It’s very natural. A day in your life is a day with your family, yes?’

‘Yes, m’sieu.’ His dark eyes made her shy.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why did you end with this line?’ He turned the work towards her and pointed. She bent to look and blushed again.

The last line of her essay read, ‘A good archduke is a dead one.’