‘Oh, but I couldn’t! I couldn’t bring… how could I? My mother would never -‘
‘This has nothing to do with your mother. Nor with you, really, Edith. You only have to mention to the doctor or the ward sister that your father has a relative who lives in the country and would like to say goodbye. It would all be over in a few moments.’
‘No, I can’t do that. I can’t. My mother…’ ‘Very well.’
I rose and opened the door for her. ‘You do understand?’ The Bluestocking turned to me, mottled but obstinate. ‘Yes, yes.’
I had already forgotten Edith.
It took me an hour to walk round the hospital, question the porter, get my bearings. Then I went to the waiting room.
Alice was still sitting upright on the wooden bench, shivering in her pretty dress.
‘Sanna! Oh God, Sanna. What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m going to take you to Rudi.’
‘You can’t,’ she said wearily. ‘No one is allowed in except relatives. And they always come, both of them. It’s only right; they’re family. Only…’ Her lips began to tremble. ‘I thought if I could see him just once more. Just to… thank him… that then I could bear it.’
‘Well, you’re going to see him. I told you. Now. Get up,’ I said firmly, as if to a child.
She rose, shaking her head, and picked up the bunch of cornflowers that lay beside her. ‘I brought them because when we first met…’ But this did not seem to be a sentence that one finished.
I led her through an archway into the main corridor, green-painted and deserted but for an orderly pushing a patient on a trolley. Beneath the grey blanket shrouding the figure, one foot protruded. Now to the left, up the first flight of stairs; I’d done my homework; there was no need to ask the way.
Another long corridor, past doors open to sights I prefer not to remember. The smell of chloroform, of lysol… Alice, I think, was aware of nothing, her only terror that we would be stopped before she reached her love. ‘Excuse me, but visitors are not allowed at this hour.’ A starched sister, all bristles and authority. I smiled. ‘We’re not visiting a patient, sister. We’re visiting Professor Mittelheimer.’
My smile, that of a third-class houri in the red-light district of a minor provincial town, was an accident brought on by nerves, but it disconcerted the Sister so much that she let us pass. With the reputation of the poor Professor (whose name I had got off a notice board) in ruins, we went up a second flight of stairs.
We had reached the private room. (Please God let it work! Let her see him just once more.)
‘I’m sorry, but nobody is allowed past -‘
Beside me, Alice faltered, missed her step. It was too cruel when we were almost at Rudi’s door.
And then a second nurse, senior to the first, coming out of her office. ‘Unless one of you is Herr Doktor Sultzer’s sister from Prague?’
I gestured to Alice.
‘That’s all right then. The Herr Doktor’s daughter telephoned us to expect you. Only a few minutes though. He is very ill.’
(Oh Edith, how I wronged you. I will be your friend for life.)
She led us to the room where Rudi lay. I stepped aside and Alice went forward to the bed. When she bent over him and saw the unmistakable signs of death, the colour drained from her face and I moved towards her, afraid that she would faint.
Then somehow – I don’t know how she did this – she reassembled from the terrified stricken woman she had become, her charm, her beauty. Alice put up her hand to flick back the wisp of veiling on her hat. She laid the cornflowers on the counterpane. She smiled. Properly, I mean. Naturally. Then she said: ‘Rudi?’
Not in a desperate way; not calling him back from limbo. She said it as you say it when someone you love lies beside you on the pillow and it amuses you to say his name.
So he came back. For lamentations and guilt he had not returned, nor had the ministrations of the doctors brought him back, but Alice called him lightly, cheerfully, and he came. Not at once… slowly. His eyes opened… focused. And when he realized that she was there, really in the flesh and not a mirage, and looked at her, she must have had all the reward that women like us can ever hope to have.
So far we could still have been watching a man taking leave of a beloved sister. The smile on the dying man’s face could have been the tender smile of a fond older brother remembering childhood games. The silly pet name he now spoke softly into Alice’s ear as she bent over him might have belonged to their nursery games, though it would have been an unusual nursery. But now Rudi Sultzer very slightly turned his head and as Alice brought her mouth towards him and kissed him gently on the lips, the Herr Doktor’s hand moved up from the coverlet… sought something… found it.
Not her soft hair beneath the hat, nor her sweet mouth. Something that represented a more lasting sanctuary, a memory of all that was good on this earth: her breast.
‘Ah,’ said Rudi with infinite content.
It was only when I heard the hiss of outrage behind me that I realized that Edith Sultzer had come into the room.
Rudi never regained consciousness after Alice’s visit. He died quietly in the early hours of the morning and in the evening Alice was on stage in a gold bolero and red velvet skirt singing of love and lilac blossom in
Waltzertraum
.
She was in the second row as usual. She’d put on a lot of make-up and she sang nicely and I don’t know if anyone noticed anything, but I did. Something had happened to her mouth; something that can happen gradually with age or overnight with grief.
Herr Huber was beside me. He’d driven us to the theatre and been a tower of strength. It wasn’t till I caught the scent of his Hungary water and saw that he had laid his snow-white handkerchief in my lap, that I realized tears were running down my face.
I hadn’t cried till then. It was my business to help Alice, not to cry. But it was too much, suddenly; the glimpse I’d had of the future. My sweet and pretty friend in the back row among the village elders with her spinning wheel, singing year in year out about the spring…
In the last few days I’ve cancelled all but my most important clients and left the shop to Nini so that I could be with Alice.
This secret mourning is very hard. In the Garnisongasse, Frau Sultzer mourns loudly and in public. Her husband’s colleagues come to commiserate, relatives appear. No doubt the Group, who thought so little of Rudi in his life, are busy writing poems in his praise or trailing dark sprays of ivy through the flat. Does Laura put up notices saying:
Silence! Frau Sultzer is remembering her husband}
I don’t know. There has been no sign of Edith since she hissed away in fury down the hospital corridor.
Alice puts up no notices, that’s certain. She sits quietly in the flat she had prepared for Rudi and does exactly what she’s told. If you say ‘Eat, Alice!’ she eats; if you say ‘Lie down and rest’, she stretches out obediently on the bed. Sometimes, in the puzzled voice of a child, she asks a question.
‘What do you suppose they
mean
when they say we shall meet again in heaven?
What
shall we meet? If I went right along the rows of angels would I find one with bandy legs and pince-nez? You never seem to hear about angels like that.’
And she is mystified by the behaviour of the British in India.
‘They’re trying to abolish
suttee
, did you know, Sanna? Why are they trying to do that?
Everyone’s
allowed to throw themselves on the funeral pyre in
suttee
– not just the wives and relatives. Everyone who belonged to the man that’s died.’
Then came the reading of Rudi’s will. His investments were secure; his life had been heavily insured. With a little care, Laura would be able to live much as before. Nothing, of course, had been left to Alice; there was no mention of her in the will; she had not for a moment expected it. With the will, however, there was a letter, the contents of which knocked Alice out of her dangerous docility and brought on a storm of such dreadful weeping that at last it brought her sleep.
Rudi had asked to be buried at St Florian’s.
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Laura Sultzer, arriving in my shop on her way to interview Father Anselm. ‘I naturally assumed that Rudi would be cremated – we were both free thinkers. I wasn’t even aware that my husband knew this church existed.’
I, however, was aware, for it was in the churchyard of St Florian’s that Alice and Rudi had met. It was just after I’d moved to the square. I was in bed with flu when Alice came to see me and I think I must have been running quite a high temperature because I became very agitated about the untended grave of the Family Schmidt which I had adopted. (This was before the harebells had seeded themselves.) Alice immediately offered to take some flowers and ran over to Old Anna to buy a bunch of cornflowers.
Rudi Sultzer had been visiting a client in the Walterstrasse and taken a short cut across the square. Like so many people he’d lived in Vienna all his life and never been in St Florian’s, and now he paused and wandered into the churchyard. Where he saw a woman with gentle eyes laying a bunch of cornflowers on a grave…
‘I shall of course do my duty,’ said Laura and she did it. Rudi now lies in our churchyard. The hole they dug for him was small, but oh, it was deep!
‘My husband had very few friends,’ Frau Sultzer had told the priest. ‘Hardly anyone came to the house.’
She was mistaken. There was scarcely room in St Florian’s for all the people who wanted to pay their respects to Rudi’s memory. He must have helped countless people of whose existence his wife was not even aware.
Father Anselm had arranged for a full choral service. Not less than twelve carriages with their black horses and nodding plumes disgorged the mourners, and the hearse was piled high with wreaths.
There was only one oversight. No one had seen fit to alter the notice on the churchyard gate. It still said: dogs not admitted. They had forgotten to amend it to: dogs and
MISTRESSES…
By this notice, Alice stood for the length of the service. Erect, exquisitely elegant, her veil down over the black hat she had tried on that day at Yvonne’s and bought now to bid her love goodbye, she waited, her hands grasping the spiked railings – the only mishap a split in the finger of one glove as the pallbearers passed with the coffin.
Rip waited with her and so did I. We heard the responses, and Ernst Bischof singing the
De Profundis
. When the bells began their dreadful tolling Rip lifted his head and howled and I bent down to caress him, but Alice saw nothing, heard nothing, that did not touch her remembered life with Rudi.
Only when the congregation came out and they took the coffin to the grave did she begin to tremble so much that I was afraid.
‘Come, let me take you home.’
But her hands only fastened tighter round the railings. ‘I can’t… not till…’
Laura was pushed forward and laid a handful of earth on the coffin, followed by Edith. And then it began, that dreadful, relentless shovelling of the obliterating earth.
It was over. Frau Sultzer still lingered in the porch, but Edith now set off down the path towards the line of waiting carriages.
Grim-faced, alone, plainer than ever, the Bluestocking marched towards us, her hideous, thick-soled shoes crunching the gravel. Any hope that she might fail to recognize her father’s mistress in her polka-dot veiling vanished as she stopped, scowling, beside Alice – and remembering the scene in the hospital I prepared to throw myself between them, quite ready to murder anyone who tried to hurt my friend.
Her face still contorted, Edith stumbled forward. Her arms went out stiffly like the arms of a puppet… and closed round Alice’s shoulders in a clumsy, pitifully unpractised embrace.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very sorry.’
They clung together, Alice released by this undreamt of gesture into torrents of tears. ‘But at least you didn’t miss him,’ said Edith Sultzer. ‘I did. I missed the whole of his life.’
Then she walked on and got into the first of the carriages and sat there, scowling again, and waiting for her mother, who had noticed nothing.
Nini departed this morning for the Grundlsee. She wore her assassination shoes – high-heeled kid with grosgrain rosettes – which were so expensive that she meant to keep them for a really important event in the Anarchist calendar, and a bronze silk faille suit with a Winterhalter blouse. A perfect outfit for washing up the dishes of a hundred disturbed children and sweeping floors.
‘I still don’t see why I have to go,’ she said mulishly. ‘You know how much work there is to do on the Huber trousseau.’
I took her to the station and saw her into her compartment, where a young man with a violently waxed moustache rose to receive her suitcase with alacrity. Poor fellow: it hurt me to see his look of expectancy. Nini’s been fending for herself since she was fourteen. Long before I found her in Ungerer’s atelier she’d had more experience than women three times her age -and no one can wield a hatpin like my assistant.
The flat seems appallingly silent without her. I asked Alice if she’d like to come and stay; this is the time when Rudi would have come to her and I hate her to be alone, but she needs to be in her own place, she says, and I understand that. At least the Volksoper is closed. Herr Huber has been kindness itself driving her to the theatre, seeing she has a meal afterwards.
‘Na, na,’ he says in his slow, rumbling voice when I thank [him. ‘You know what an honour it is for me to have the friendship of two such gifted women.’
If Vienna now belongs to the poor, the industrious and the bereaved, the Countess of Metz certainly fits in this category. She stays in her palace with the shutters closed and writes me petulant notes. She would like her bottle-green suit and she would like it quickly. She doesn’t know what is delaying me, and to give wings to my endeavour she has sent me a pair of battered candlesticks of the kind old ladies hit burglars on the head with and a Louis Quatorze spittoon.
The choirboys have gone home for the holidays and the Schumachers are still away so the square is as silent as the ; house. It is very hot now; the mornings are misty and vaporous; you know where the sun is rather than see it, and the flowers have stopped being blue and yellow as in spring; they’re mostly red now: dahlias and tall gladioli, and in the window boxes a mass of scarlet geraniums that seem to shout their colour into the muted light. Rip is in an aquatic and sportif mood, clambering up the side of the fountain and very seriously dunking of jumping in, but there is the problem of his back legs. He’s much more cheerful without the setter of the English