The Longest Winter (46 page)

‘Oh, he was bearing up very well the last time we heard, about five weeks ago,’ said Anne. ‘James, could you do something about my poor Ludwig? Could you, please?’

‘Everything I can, but it’s going to be a lot more difficult.’

‘I know,’ said Anne, ‘but I’m going to pester you about it, I’m not going to be at all proud. I mean, you’re still our friend, there’s only been a long nightmare in between, hasn’t there?’

‘Yes, Anne. Which is why something positive must be done about Ludwig as well as Carl.’

Ludwig at this moment was nearing Bratislava in Hungary. He had a right leg as stiff as a board, his stout crutch having become a close friend. He was in company with a thousand other Austrian scarecrows, who had been marching for months across revolutionary Russia.

‘James,’ said Anne, ‘you are going to be a great
surprise to Sophie, you know. And you will have to wear a thinking head on your shoulders.’

‘Is it possible to see her?’ asked James and looked at the silent baron. The baron said nothing. The baroness left it to Anne, who had no reservations.

She said, ‘If you want to see her now, she’s at Sacher’s. She went there, she said, to celebrate honest misery with sorry friends. Perhaps you’ll be in time to save her from actual lamentations, James, and to bring her home. She said she would not be late. We are staying home to be privately miserable, although now you’re here to help us, I don’t think we’re quite as miserable as we were.’

‘I think I’ll go to Sacher’s,’ said James and looked at the baron again. The baron smiled wryly.

‘I advise patience and understanding,’ he said.

‘I advise love, James, unqualified and unconditional,’ said Anne.

‘Go to Sacher’s, James,’ said the baroness softly, ‘and thank you for remembering us.’

Sophie, keeping a promise to her convalescent friends, was celebrating catastrophe with them in the red and brown bar of Sacher’s Hotel. The bar was full and therefore warm. It was one of the few places still retaining an air of gracious living, Frau Sacher still dispensing service, though not from the same bountiful cellars, with old-world charm. The portrait of Franz Josef was still on the wall. Perhaps it would soon come down.
Perhaps in the new order of things it would have to. British and French officers were present. Serving on the Commissions, they had begun to frequent Sacher’s. Sophie took absolutely no notice of them. She would not look at them. Especially she would not look at the British. She wondered how any of them could come among a starving populace with their well-fed robustness. There were Viennese women with them, women who were defiant of disapproval because they were lonely and hungry and hoped that some time during the evening their escorts would lead them to food.

Sophie sat at a table with her friends. She was tautly thin but just as striking, her features almost aquiline from privation so that her eyes looked hugely luminous in her pale face. Other eyes, discerning eyes, might have perceived the blank emptiness behind the luminosity.

With her wounded companions she drank wine. Frau Sacher saw to it that she got the best of what was available, for the men were her guests and Baroness Sophie von Korvacs would not be disposed to accept less than that for any of her friends. With these friends she shared the wine, with them she toasted their battles, their wounds and their future, although they knew and she knew that there was no future. She was vivacious, amusing, fascinating, beautiful. They all loved her. How were they to know she felt even emptier than they did? Their eyes were on her, smiling at her, admiring her, and the words fell from her lips in brittle streams.

‘So, you see, my courageous ones, what is there to worry about for any of us? We are as far down as we can go, aren’t we? We have nothing. We have even lost Hungary, which fed so well at our imperial table. Therefore, this must be our last night of sorrow, for from now on there is only one way to go and that is up. The mightiest ship can capsize but it can sink no further than the seabed. How is that for a solace to take back with you tonight? It should be good enough to put you to sound, happy sleep, don’t you agree? I shall sleep without a care in the world and when I next come to see you I hope you’ll be dancing.’

‘Will hopping do?’ smiled a man with a smashed kneecap.

‘I will hop with you,’ said Sophie and smiled in return, though she wanted to weep, to weep for all of them, all the crippled, unsung heroes of Austria. But she had kept every tear at bay for four years. And James would not be shedding any, not that man of iron. If he were still alive he would be ablaze with medals, and in triumphant London the women would be around him like dazzled moths, reaching for him, kissing him. Let them, let them! Vienna was an empty shell, holding nothing to draw him back. But perhaps, when the city was at its darkest and coldest, his ghost would stand on her doorstep. Only his ghost. Austria, whom he had rejected, whom he had helped to crush, would never allow his living body to enter her borders. For four years he had been in desertion of Austria and of her too. He had left her to eat her heart out. She
had no heart now. No love could survive years as interminable and as bitter as these. There were no emotions, no vibrations, only a terrible, desolating sense of unending winter. She smiled again, looking at the bottles. They were empty too, except one. ‘There, you see, that is the last of the wine. Drink it, my very good friends. Do not drink to the emperor. We have no emperor. But if you must drink to one Habsburg, drink to Franz Josef, the old and august one, for he polished our jewel very brightly for us.’

But they drank to her. And Sophie smiled brilliantly for them.

She rose to her feet. Despite an empire lost, despite her frozen heart, she looked in her dark, glossy-feathered hat and pre-war fur coat, and in her starved, slender beauty, as if she alone personified the memory of proud and imperial Vienna. Every Allied officer there raised his eyes to her. She saw none of them, she looked through all of them. She smiled again at her convalescents and said goodnight to them.

She turned to go and looked into the face of James.

Her cold blood rushed. A sensation, almost of eerie fright, struck. His was the dark, drawn face of ravaged but triumphant Mars. Richthofen had not got him, then? No. It was Richthofen who had fallen from the sky.

‘Sophie?’ A quiet appeal for reconciliation. ‘May I take you home?’

Strange fire touched her ice. But there was so much pride in her, so much bitterness, so much
defeat. And he had come back in the arrogance of the uniformed victor. She looked at him out of huge, blank eyes.

‘Sophie?’

Sophie walked straight by him and out into the cold night and wondered wildly what she was doing. It was James, James, and she had cut him dead. Had it been James? So intense, so real, so alive? Ludwig seemed to have gone from the living, and Carl, according to a desperate Italian girl, was dying on his feet. James alone was unconquerable. She walked, her heart beginning to hammer, every sense in wild confusion. The wind was icy, but strangely, madly, her blood was hot. But the bitterness made her walk on and her pride made her walk with her head up. And the wine engaged light-headedly with her hungry body.

James? She had seen him? Then what had she done? Walked out on him. He would not dare to follow, not after that.

But she heard him behind her, his footsteps insistent. And her blood pumped crazily into her heart. He caught her up and walked by her side. He said nothing. She flung her head higher, her teeth clenched, the bitter wind stinging her taut face. She walked faster. He kept pace with her, kept close to her.

‘I’m not going to leave you,’ he said.

Not going to leave her? Did he know what he was saying? He had left her on that station all those years ago, he had left her to go to war with her. She walked on, head high, and every dead
emotion came to life and the wine chased her thoughts into a giddy whirlpool. Vienna was so dark, so icy with winter, the lamps empty of light, the night as bitter as death. The dead leaves blew out of unseen heaps and skittered and rustled over the cold ground. Those without homes, and there were thousands, huddled together for warmth in every protected corner of the old, narrow slums. But the streets through which Sophie walked, with James dark and obdurate beside her, were empty and hollow. When had Vienna ever been so dead? James and his English and his Scots and all his other allies had turned the birthplace of emperors into the graveyard of Austria. She could not look at him, speak to him, forgive him, yet what was making her heart hammer so wildly if not the coursing blood of renewed life? She felt the purpose of his presence. He meant to corner her, defeat her and add her to his triumphs. Her lungs began to fight for air and she could not contain the surging vibrations of her newborn blood. It pumped through her starved body and fed brilliant light into her brain.

He heard her sigh. It was like a faint breeze dying in the face of paralysing cold. She fell. He caught her, held her. Stricken, he saw how white her face was, how heavy her lids lay. He lifted her and she hung like one lifeless in his arms. He began to carry her home.

Summer came again for Sophie. The light was so bright, the sun so warm. She was running, swooping, not in fear but in pursuit of life. And
life received her as James opened his arms to her.

Her eyelids trembled, lifted. There was no light, no warmth, only a sensation of weakness. Except where arms were around her.

James felt her stirring.

‘Sophie?’

She spoke at last, in a whisper.

‘Who are you?’

‘Years ago, Sophie, we knew each other.’

‘Yes. Many years ago. You may put me down, please.’

‘Put you down? I will not. Are you mad?’ He was almost grim. ‘My God, you’re starved, you weigh nothing, you should not be out. What have you been doing? Drinking wine without food inside you? Venturing into the realms of fantasy? Don’t you know there’s been a war, that even in Vienna it’s not safe to be out by yourself at night?’

Sophie, in a state of physical weakness and indignity, felt outrage swamping her senses. What was he saying, what was he talking about, did he think that after all this time, after all her heartbreak, she only wanted to listen to a lecture?

‘Put me down,’ she said wildly.

‘I will not. If I put you down what will keep you standing up?’ He was shocked, horrified, placing the necessity of getting her home far above everything else, even his desperate wish to reclaim her. But she had not forgiven him. He had to give her time, or in her pride she would freeze
every word he spoke. He was going to have to start from the beginning again with Sophie. But he would have her. He would not give her to any other man. ‘Sophie, I’m taking you home. Please make up your mind about that. I’ll put you down when we get there, not before.’ He tried to sound kind. Sophie did not answer. But she turned in his arms and weakly her arms stole around his neck. She hid her face against his coat. He felt her shiver. Her teeth were clenched again, her heart hammering again. He carried her quickly down the deserted silence of the Salesianergasse and turned into the drive of the house. He carried her up the steps to the door. There he set her gently down on her feet. He knew what it might do to her pride if he attempted to carry her into the house. Sophie swayed. He reached again for her. She fell into his arms, shuddering violently. James felt racked.

‘Sophie? Are you all right? Sophie?’

And suddenly Sophie was weeping, weeping the tears that had frozen on the day he left her. To James it seemed as if the long conflict had been mankind’s worst obscenity. He rang the bell urgently, then put both arms around her again.

‘Sophie, my darling Sophie, what have we done to you?’

‘Nothing, nothing – I am only dying – that is all.’ She was sobbing on his chest. ‘Oh, I thought Richthofen would get you – and I prayed for you – I should have been praying for Austria.’

‘Sophie, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t
thought about you. But I know what you must feel. I do understand. You’re all right now, you’re home. I won’t distress you. I’ll leave you now, but I’ll—’

‘Leave me?’ Her voice gasped its way through strangling sobs. ‘Oh, dear God, you would leave me again?’

‘Sophie?’

‘Oh, love me, James, please love me,’ said Sophie.

It was Anne who opened the door, who stepped aside as James, lifting Sophie into his arms again, carried her into the house and out of her long cold winter.

Mary Jane Staples was born, bred and educated in Walworth, and is the author of many bestselling novels including the ever-popular cockney sagas featuring the Adams family.