The Longest Winter (28 page)

‘My very dear Anne,’ said James in the end, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘But you have to go,’ said Anne at breaking point, ‘there’s your country, your family.’

‘Yes,’ said James,’ and you have yours.’

‘I am heartbroken,’ said Anne, tears spilling. ‘Oh, James, you’d not fight
us, would you? You couldn’t – you—’ Sobbing, she flung her arms around his neck, kissed him distraughtly, then ran out. James sighed.

‘You’re not to blame,’ said the baroness quietly. ‘No one thought it would come to this, and who could have wanted it to? It is so sad, so shattering. We are going to miss you. You made our summer very eventful and you took great care of Sophie and Anne. We shall not forget that.’

‘Baroness,’ he said, ‘I’ve had the most memorable summer. Vienna has been beautiful. But I shouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I have without you and your family. Please remember me to the baron.’

‘He understands, I assure you.

‘I know. Thank you for letting me come to say goodbye. I’m to meet Maude Harrison, our train goes in forty minutes, but I shall come back to Vienna one day.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She had told him Sophie felt unable to see him, for he had been in some hope when he arrived. His disappointment had been almost despairing but he made no fuss. She could not refrain from saying now, ‘And Sophie?’

‘I’d like to have seen her,’ he said. His eyes, for a moment, seemed to look into a summer that was still here but for him had gone. It was a summer full of pictures of Sophie, vibrant with life, warm with laughter. ‘I shall always remember Sophie.’

‘She is not herself, James, do forgive her for not coming down.’

‘Give her my dearest love,’ said James. ‘Will
you do that? Tell her I’ll think of her and love her.’

As soon as he had gone the baroness made her way upstairs. Sophie was in her room, sitting at her dressing table. She was palpably shivering.

‘Mama?’ Her voice was husky.

‘Yes, he’s gone now,’ said her mother, ‘he’s suffering as much as we are.’

‘Are we suffering?’ Sophie stared blindly into the mirror. ‘I think you’ll find most of us are in the streets cheering and waving flags. Perhaps when James gets home he will cheer and wave a flag. He’ll get over us quite quickly, Mama.’

‘He asked me to give you his dearest love, he asked me to tell you he will think of you and love you. I don’t think he’ll get over us quickly at all.’

Sophie paled to whiteness and put a hand to her throat.

‘Mama?’ she whispered.

‘Oh, you have made yourself so miserable,’ said the baroness, ‘that you’ve been unable to think. That is what this is all about, isn’t it, that you think he doesn’t love you enough. He does, he’s never been able to help himself, even I’ve seen that. He so much wanted to see you—’

‘Oh, Mama,’ said Sophie wildly, ‘I’ve made the most dreadful mistake.’ She turned, she jumped up. ‘Mama, where has he gone?’

‘To pick up Frau Harrison—’

‘I must catch him, I must!’

‘They are—’

But Sophie was away, rushing out and flying
along the corridor and down the winding staircase. She flew from the house, down the steps, over the drive and out of the gates. Frantically she ran, her green dress whipping, people staring. She stopped, looked around for a cab. They were all full, all hired. She ran on again. She darted across the busy thoroughfare in front of cabs and automobiles. A cabbie paled and reined back his horse. A motor car hooted and swerved. She ran. She saw an empty cab and desperately hailed it. She asked the cabbie to take her to the Ecole Internationale, and all the way she rocked to and fro and begged the man to hurry, hurry.

The traffic was an impeding nightmare, she wanted to cry out in despair at every hold-up. Oh, James, James, please don’t go yet, please wait. It took an eternity to reach the school. It was closed down, but a young housemaid was still there, making preparations for her own departure before locking the place up. Sophie spoke distractedly to her. Kirsti shook her head. No, Herr Fraser had gone, he was meeting Frau Harrison at the station, they were catching a train, going to England—

Oh, of course, of course! She should have thought of that, asked her mother before rushing out. She turned and ran while Kirsti was still speaking. The cabbie was waiting. He drove her to the station and she almost wept because the hold-ups were worse. Vienna was in patriotic exuberance, a city heady with the excitement of war, the streets full of people, the avenues thronged with vehicles.

And the station, when she got there, was a seething mass of soldiers and civilians. She did not know which platform to go to, which train he might be on, but discovered after frenzied enquiries that the last peacetime train with a connection at the border for Paris had left five minutes ago.

And that, her despairing heart told her, was the one he was on.

She searched the crowds, the faces, the standing trains, but she knew he had gone.

Life with its challenge, its excitements and its beautiful promise stopped for Sophie in that station. Out of high summer had come impossible war. Under the hammer of Mars dreams lay smashed. And James, her saviour, had run away, had turned his back on Austria, had turned his back on her.

It froze her anguished love.

There were disasters, tragedies, defeats. With few victories to offset the note of depression, Vienna gradually lost something that was never to return: belief in the invincibility and ordained purpose of her empire. In 1916 she also lost Franz Josef. He went to sleep one night and did not wake up. Perhaps he did not want to. He had served his time and more. He was eighty-six when he slipped peacefully away. He had been the resolute heart of the empire’s ungainly body. When he had gone the empire had little heart left.

Baroness von Korvacs went into deep mourning. She had bravely withstood all the disappointments, all the defeats, but she wept on the death of old and imperial Franz Josef. Ernst was there to comfort her, so were Anne and Sophie.

Anne, married to Ludwig in 1915, when he was dashing and cavalier in uniform, lost him to the Russians in Galicia before she had scarcely begun to know him as a husband. He was wounded and taken prisoner, and Anne returned to live with
her parents. Carl had survived so far, but was engaged in unimaginably hazardous warfare with the Italians in the Tyrolean mountains.

They all helped with war work. Sophie visited hospitals and convalescent establishments and frequently assisted with chores that did not require a young lady to have nursing qualifications. She faced up to this kind of work and to every other activity with an energy that was feverish. She also danced, because there were still men, officers and soldiers, who wanted Vienna to be a playground for them when they were on leave from the front. She danced as feverishly as she worked. She knew if she worked hard enough and danced long enough she would wake up one morning and find herself concerned only with Austria and the war, that the past no longer haunted her. She lost weight as she burned the midnight candles. She had the most eligible officers at her feet. She was tender to those who declared themselves in love with her but she could give none of them love herself. Her heart was frozen and would not thaw out. Never, before James, had she been remotely in love. Never had she thought love could be so ravaging, that it could take hold of heart and mind and common sense and reduce them to a state that lacked all reason.

At times she longed and ached for James, the enemy. And James was probably very busy killing her countrymen or her allies. From the way things were going it would not be long before he decimated Austria of all its young men. Then
there would be no one left to dance with, no one to help her forget.

Of course, there was the reverse side of the coin. He might be killed himself.

What would be left then?

She received a proposal from a Captain Hans Doerffer early in 1917. He was dark, good-looking and amusing, and like so many of the fighting men talked about everything except the war. He made such a touching impression on Sophie that when he proposed to her in the cab on the way home from the theatre she had a moment of extraordinary aberration.

‘Hans, I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m already engaged.’

‘Already engaged?’ Captain Doerffer was puzzled. She had never mentioned it before and she wore no engagement ring. ‘Already engaged, Sophie?’

In the dimness of the cab Sophie said, ‘Yes, but I’ve lost him. To the war.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’ve been an idiot.’

‘No, one can’t escape reminders,’ said Sophie, ‘please don’t worry.’

He studied her misty profile. There were no street lights to illuminate her. The lamps went out early these days. The darkness did give her this misty quality.

‘Sophie, may I call on you? When I’m next in Vienna?’

Sophie knew how much most of them needed to fully escape when they were on leave, how much they were aware they could not escape.
They could only enjoy brief remissions, when they sedulously embarked on every carousing pursuit known to man. It was they, not the harassed citizens, who kept Vienna’s gaiety alive, they who periodically descended on the capital and demanded not welcoming speeches, not propaganda, not reminders, but amusement. And it was an ungenerous citizen who begrudged them this, who said times were too bad or too serious for anyone, even soldiers, to dance instead of going quietly to bed. It was Vienna which called to the unattached men, for in Vienna there were so many beautiful girls and women, all beckoning like bright fireflies of the night. They, robbed of so many men, were ardent to please those who were left, those who still came when they had precious leave.

To Sophie, Captain Doerffer was a young man. He could have told her he felt old, but Sophie might have capped that by telling him she had lived a lifetime in a few years. They were, in fact, the same age.

She could not discourage his hope, or the chance of her own salvation. He was very likeable, he could in time be the one to unfreeze her.

‘Yes, call on me, please do,’ she said.

‘With luck I should be here again before the year is out,’ he said.

‘I’ll be here. I can’t desert Vienna, though others have.’

‘I’ll take you dancing, Sophie.’

Dancing, she thought. Is James dancing? Yes,
if he’s still alive. He’ll be dancing with them all in Paris, perhaps. What else is left but that? Europe is a huge corpse and we who are left must dance around the coffin. I will dance. With anyone.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And I shall probably propose again,’ smiled Captain Doerffer.

‘Be careful, be warned. Next time I may accept.’

She said goodbye to him. At home she stood before her bedroom window, her body cold and aching beneath her nightdress. Detached longing had become a very real one. It was like that so often. At times she thought the years of war were healing her wound, only for something to reopen it.

The night did not look as if millions of men were blasting each other into infinity. The sky was a silence, the stars fixations of impervious light in the vast canopy of indigo blue.

‘Where are you, mighty Mars? Are you hurling thunderbolts? Are you destroying greater men than Avriarches? Or are you dallying in Paris, tormenting another woman into loving you? Or are you dead? No, never, for who could destroy you?’

She shivered as ice entered her body. The stars became tiny frozen diamonds.

‘James, dear James. Do you remember Sophie von Korvacs? She is so lonely.’

She received a letter from Major Moeller in November. He was Colonel Moeller now. In
January his request for a return to active service was granted, and at the age of fifty-eight he had command of an artillery regiment on the Western Front. He wrote often to the von Korvacs, usually addressing his letters to the baron and baroness. This one he addressed to Sophie. He came to the reason why.

‘The strangest news yesterday. I was at Divisional HQ. Can’t tell you why, you’ll understand. There were other regimental commanders present. One of them. Colonel Huebner, buttonholed me, told me my name had been dropped in his ear last week. One of his batteries shot down a British plane. It landed behind our lines and the battery was cockahoop. Richthofen doesn’t leave the gunners many to bag in this sector. Some of the men were able to pull the pilot clear before the machine went up in flames. He had a badly burned arm but was otherwise all right. Colonel Huebner went down to congratulate his men and to look at what they’d bagged. Burned out by then, but he saw the pilot. Despite his scorched arm the fellow was commendably cheerful. Would you like to know what he said to Huebner? “It’s damned cold and damp on our side, Colonel, so I thought I’d drop in for some of your schnapps, if you’ve any to spare. I’ve an acquired partiality for it.”

‘Damned if it wasn’t our friend James. What do you think of that?’

Sophie stared glazedly at words leaping from the paper. Her hand shook and the words spun. Mars had taken to the air and was unleashing his
thunderbolts from the heavens. Oh, Olympus! Oh, dear and precious enemy!

She felt in giddy wonder. He was not dead. Her German allies had him safe and sound, and out of the war.

She read on, hungrily, dizzily.

‘Like to have been there myself. Colonel Huebner thought him a cool devil. Remembering Bosnia I wasn’t surprised. How do I know it was James? Well, it’s an idiot’s game, war, and a funny one. Colonel Huebner took him up to the regimental mess and gave him some schnapps, then asked him how he got his liking for it. And James said, “I shared a very fine bottle once with a friend of mine, Major Frederic Moeller. Don’t know him, do you?” Huebner did, of course, and said so. So James said, “Give him my regards and a message, will you? Tell him that Sophie was right, it was nobody’s business but the emperor’s. Tell him to give her my love, if he can.”’

The giddiness buzzed in her ears and she sat heavily down. It took a few moments before her swimming eyes could focus again.

‘They’d cut away the scorched sleeves of his flying jacket and uniform and given his burns a light dressing. Huebner sent him to the casualty station for better medication and damned if he didn’t walk off as calm as you like while waiting to be sent to a clearing centre. It was dark at that stage and no one picked him up. If I know James he got back to his own lines during the night.’