The Longest Winter (7 page)

‘Oh, dear,’ said Sophie, given to less rowdy pastimes.

James could have said he had whirled around Vienna several times with Kirsti. Instead he said, ‘Is it possible? On top of so much strudel?’

‘Oh, it’s just the thing for a visitor,’ said Sophie,
‘and although I’ve grown out of it I’ll whirl around very agreeably for your sake.’

‘Oh, yes, let’s have fun,’ said Helene.

‘We can only get arrested,’ said Carl.

‘Let’s be people,’ said Anne.

So they drove later on to the Prater and joined the people in the amusement park. They rode on the Big Wheel and from the top looked down over the panorama of Vienna as the summer evening turned into illuminated night. Ludwig shot the head off a clay pipe at a booth and won a rag doll. He did not know whether to present it to Anne or to Sophie. James took it from him and gave it to a young girl, relieving the amiable Ludwig of the worry of making a decision.

They returned to the city at play. The boulevard lamps, curtained by leafy trees, spread diffused light over the charivari of Vienna’s night life. They patronized taverns in which musicians, writers, painters, students and young would-be politicians argued away day and night. Anne suggested that as they were not dressed for formal dining they should have bread and sausage in one of the taverns. So they did.

‘Sometimes,’ said Sophie whimsically, ‘it’s good to be people.’

‘I’m just hungry,’ said Carl.

‘I’m starving,’ said Ludwig.

‘I’m eating like a horse,’ said Anne.

‘The noblest of creatures,’ said James.

‘For that you must have some of my sausage,’ said Anne and popped a piece into his mouth.

‘We’ll all get fat,’ said James.

‘Don’t keep saying that,’ said Helene.

‘I suppose we’re lucky to have the chance to get fat,’ said Sophie. ‘I’ve just finished reading a book from Papa’s library about brigands. They become brigands, most of them, because they are born in wretched conditions with not enough to eat.’

‘They’re natural-born scoundrels,’ said Carl.

‘Oh, perhaps they have a trait,’ conceded Sophie, ‘since it is a fact that in many Balkan countries brigandry is a family tradition as well as an occupation. Although they’re constantly harassed by the authorities, brigands are basically as free as the air. They conform to no conventions, only to their own customs. One magnificent adventurer called Dragovich ruled like a king in the Albanian mountains. He amassed a fortune from being a most provident scoundrel and divided it all among his followers, keeping for himself only the women he had captured.’

‘Oh, the dreadful beast,’ said Helene.

‘But generous with his fortune,’ said Anne.

‘Even if he was greedy with his women,’ said Carl.

‘Dragovich,’ said Sophie, warming imaginatively to her subject, ‘was seven feet tall, had a huge black moustache and a Russian cannon. He lived until he was eighty-six, had nine wives and forty children. James,’ she said, lights in her eyes, ‘do you know any man who enjoyed a life of more glorious abandonment than that?’

‘I’d call it worrying multiplication,’ said James.

‘James,’ said Anne, ‘do you think Sophie should be sent to Albania to look for a provident scoundrel of her own?’

‘I don’t think she’d go,’ said James. ‘Sophie, after all, has a higher intelligence than some of my pupils . . .’

‘Thank you, dear James,’ said Sophie.

‘. . . even some of my pupils know that an old goat seen on a distant mountain always appears to be a far more majestic creature than the one eating up your garden. Distance lends illusion.’

They laughed and talked on.

Three nights later they all went to the Dianabad, the incomparable home of Strauss music. They listened to the orchestra, watched the dancers and drank Moselle wine. Anne in jewelled white was, thought Sophie affectionately, lovely enough to float with angels. Sophie in shimmering jade green was, thought Anne admiringly, dressed to bewitch all men. Helene, in frilled, off-shoulder cerise, flaunted her pink-framed bosom with the archest of poses. She will catch Carl’s eye with such décolletée, thought Anne, but it won’t make him fall in love with her. Carl is very easy-going but I’m sure he will look for more than low décolletée in a woman. Is Sophie falling for James, I wonder? No, I hardly think so. She would be much more intense in her behaviour if she were. She has hidden fires, I think. It would be better for her to fall in love pleasantly, not head over heels. How nice Ludwig is, always ready to fall in with what others want to do. It’s
rather delicious that he simply cannot make up his mind whether Sophie is more of a challenge than I am. I’m not sure that the possibilities and prospects aren’t vastly intriguing, and how enjoyable it is with the six of us to consider the infinite variations. I should be in a hopeless quandary if either Ludwig or James proposed, I should simply not know what to do or say. I think that means I’m not in love, only having fun.

Sophie, her hands clasping her wine glass as delicately as if it had been summer’s first rose, mused on the lights reflected in the pale translucence of the wine. It has really been rather satisfying, she thought, showing James my Vienna. Especially as other people always seem to enjoy Vienna more than the Viennese. We take it for granted, we’re seldom fully aware of the jewel the emperors have laid at our feet. One day I shall complete a volume of poems on Vienna and have it published, and everyone will say here is an exquisite appreciation of everything we see and pass by daily without giving thanks. James is an artist, I wonder if he’d like to look at some of my poetry? No, I can’t ask him to, he must ask me. It’s a great mistake to press one’s poetry into the hands of one’s friends. It’s a self-inflicted defeat from the start. Either they’re flattered that you want their opinion and so only give you the highest praise, or they know you want their highest praise and do nothing about it, knowing they’re going to force you in the end to ask what has become of my poems you’ve had for a year? Oh, my poor Sophie, I quite forgot
all about them, do forgive me. But you can’t forgive them, your artistic soul is too wounded. So no, I shan’t ask James to look at any of my poems. He’d probably paraphrase his criticisms in motor-car terms and tell me my metre has a flat tyre and my stanzas are out of gear. What
is
out of gear?

He’s getting on very well with Anne, I think. I wonder if they would suit each other? Anne is so happy with life’s blessings and James, I fancy, has just enough of the devil in him to keep her interested, happy but not disturbed. Ludwig would make a very cheerful husband, probably, if she chose him. Myself, I’m sure I’d want more from a husband than simple cheerfulness. I’d like him to be intellectual, conversational and extremely fond of my poetry. I should wish to like him very much but not be off my head about him, as I think that is too unsettling for a wife. What is Anne saying to James now?

Anne was asking James if he had been to Oxford or Cambridge. James, held by her blue-green eyes, came out of an agreeably mesmerized state to say, ‘At Edinburgh University no one’s ever heard of Oxford or Cambridge. Would you care to dance, fairest of Vienna’s blossoms?’

‘How can I say no to that?’ said Anne.

They glided away, melting into the whirling kaleidoscope of movement and colour, prompting Ludwig to offer his arm to Sophie.

‘Thank you, Ludwig,’ she smiled, ‘how timely. Anne and James have launched themselves into perpetual motion, and we must fly after them.’

They flew. Into the gyrational gaiety of the waltz.

‘What did Sophie mean by that?’ asked Helene of Carl.

Carl, putting out his slim, gold-tipped cigarette, said, ‘Nothing painful, dear girl. May I have the pleasure?’

‘Oh, that would be nice,’ said Helene and was on her feet in an eager gush of frothy pink. She adored Carl. But then she adored most of the young men she knew. She had no brains at all but was of such a generous disposition that her mental vacuity was always forgivable. She was due to be adored herself by a senior army officer who considered brains in a woman entirely undesirable and who accordingly decided Helene would make an eminently suitable wife. And she did. But at the moment, in this summer of 1914, she was flirtatiously and archly happy in company with Carl and the others.

Anne was warmly vivacious to dance with and James, whirling around with her, was frankly captivated by the atmosphere she and all his new friends created. True, they were without serious responsibilities, they did not have to work, to toil, to labour, they only had to live, and they lived fully, gaily and extravagantly. The von Korvacs were among the leading families of Vienna, and around Sophie and Anne moved the most eligible men. They were not always at home when he and Carl were tinkering with the Benz in the evenings, they were out at summer balls.
He had no false ideas about his own eligibility. He was a friend of the family and it stopped at that. He had nothing to offer an aristocratic Austrian woman which he would not have to work for. His father would not make him more than a reasonable allowance if he got married, but would pay him well if he went back into the business. But however well that was, he could not see it keeping Anne or Sophie in the luxury they were used to. He was not even sure he would go back into the automobile industry. He had turned his back on it to be as irresponsible as his aristocratic friends for a year, and the longer he was away from it the less it appealed to him as a career. If he did go back he would set his creative sights on the development of noiseless engines and on the social desirability of turning the motor car into a vehicle with as much grace and elegance as a carriage. I’m so damned old-fashioned, he thought, that I’m almost an anachronism. Or a freak.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Anne, spinning with him, her eyes full of the joys of waltzing.

‘Horses and carts.’

‘You are funny. Horses and carts indeed. You mean a carriage and pair, that’s the gracious phrase.’

The chandeliers of bright, glittering light revolved, the swirling dresses foamed with colour and Sophie went spinning by in the arms of Ludwig. A little later, when they had all recovered their breath, James said to her, ‘Sophie, will you
engage again? Will you join the hoi polloi with me?’

‘Join it?’ Sophie’s smile was sparkling. ‘James, I
am
the hoi polloi, don’t you know that?’

He found her an elegance of poetic motion, her dark shining hair regally dressed, her gown shimmeringly clasping her slender body.

‘James, you’re very accomplished.’

‘I manage to keep up? Good,’ said James.

‘Quite truthfully, you know,’ said Sophie, ‘I haven’t been to this dance hall since I was a girl.’

‘That must have been quite three months ago,’ said James.

‘Ah,’ she said, head back, eyes brilliant, ‘you’re much more gallant than when you nearly ran us down in your two-wheeler. What a beast you were then. Your language was dreadful.’

‘So was your driving, you came round that blind bend like a racing chariot—’

‘That was Ludwig. I was an innocent passenger.’

‘You were nearly an innocent victim,’ said James. She was laughing at him, it was in her eyes, her smile. ‘What an air you have, Sophie.’

‘What kind of an air?’

‘Oh, full of the dash of the hoi polloi.’

Sophie laughed. It was true she had not been to the Dianabad for two or three years, and she was surprising herself in her enjoyment of it tonight. She observed James with interest. Ludwig always looked clean-cut and freshly shaved. James had a thinner face and a slight hint of blue shadow.
Ludwig was an entirely likeable young man. James was definitely a trifle devilish, with little glints in his eyes. A tiny suspicion darted into her mind, a suspicion that she might be more susceptible than she thought. She was perfectly happy with life, perfectly content to wait for an intellectual and sophisticated suitor to arrive on her doorstep, and she did not think James quite fell into this category. He was very adult, of course, and slightly whimsical, but the picture she carried in her mind of a prospective husband, while not sharply clear, was based on a learned, professorial figure, a university lecturer, perhaps, a man of dry, academic wit. She looked at James again as they came off the floor. He had rather a good profile but was as darkly visaged as a Corsican freebooter. She had thought him a brigand when she first saw him.

‘James,’ she said lightly as he escorted her through the retiring dancers, ‘do you have any scoundrelly ancestors?’

‘On my father’s side I think we had some clansmen hanged,’ said James, ‘and on my mother’s side we had two or three Regency highwaymen who just escaped the gallows.’

‘I expect you’ve inherited a sense of adventure, then,’ said Sophie. ‘I am not so fortunate. My family on both sides has been terribly dull and respectable.’

‘You’ll get over it,’ said James.

They danced the evening away, all of them. The Dianabad, where ‘The Blue Danube’ had first been played, gathered them into its
melodious and infectious embrace and poured them finally into the clear, cooling atmosphere of the summer night.

Carl drove the Benz home. Sophie sat between him and James. Before he was dropped off at the school James said to her, ‘Sophie, if someone told you that a good archduke is a dead one, what would you think?’

‘I’d think I was listening to an anarchist,’ said Sophie, ‘or to someone who really meant it’s a bad archduke who’s better dead. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, just curiosity.’

Night after night the Benz carried the six of them into the brightly lit playground of Vienna. They dined, they danced. James spent precious capital. No one ever asked about money, who would pay or who could not.

They went to see
The Merry Widow
. Anne said they must take James to that. It was traditional. She had seen it often but would always see it again. Sophie had seen it twice and said she really preferred Rossini. James had not seen it at all but said he quite liked Gilbert and Sullivan.

‘Who,’ said Sophie in demurest tones, ‘are Gilbert and Sullivan?’