Sophie and the Sibyl (10 page)

‘I feel so peaceful here,’ remarked the Sibyl, scraping mud from her boot on a dead branch. The earth peeled off in one piece like the shavings from an orange. ‘We never meet anyone.’

Max bowed, terrified of small talk. He felt sure she had already notched him off as insincere and stupid.

‘I came out here to meditate the Finale to
Middlemarch
.’

Now he had to say something.

‘Your readers will be both grateful and distraught, Madame. For every ending is both a resolution and a parting. Especially for those who have followed you through this long and enthralling year. Your characters have become living people to so many of your readers, who fear for their final destinies.’

He thought of Sophie’s putative endings, and remembered that she found none satisfactory. Suddenly the end of the story mattered more than anything else. He longed to hand his bride both the pawned necklace and a happy ending. But the Sibyl stepped ahead of him.

‘Conclusions are the weak point of most authors, but some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation.’

Max did not understand her. He adopted an exceedingly grave expression, and navigated a wrinkle in the mud with exaggerated care for his pale grey trousers. She drew him after her into the forest. The Sibyl looked up at the whispering trees; sycamore, ash, birch, oak, giving way to an eternal, darkening green. They stood side by side, listening to the soughing pines. Their onward steps made no sound, cushioned by pine needles, and they drew closer together as the path narrowed. Immediately, they both lowered their voices, as if entering a church.

‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending,’ murmured the Sibyl, her head tilted, as if listening to the rhythm of her own words. ‘Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in after years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept –’

She stopped and looked directly at him, her great face sombre and worn. Max felt judged.

He had flourished and bloomed, grown tall and strong, his father’s favourite son, the Benjamin of the family, that wonderful miracle – a healthy child, after several tragic infant deaths. His sister fled away into the shades, carried off by scarlet fever, and his mother had despaired of ever giving Wolfgang a sibling. But here stood beautiful, joyous Max, with his dark eyes and powerful bounding limbs! He saw himself, galloping fearless on his first pony, speaking both English and French fluently at seven years, rattling along beside his stringy, austere tutor, reciting the names of all the plants, as if the earth belonged to him. He remembered eating too much cake at his tenth birthday party and being violently sick all over his rocking horse; carrying a giant cone of sweets to his master on the first day of school, sitting for his portrait in his cadet’s uniform at fifteen, that painting still hanging in the hall. Had he lived up to the golden promises of those first days? He had not only wasted his brother’s money, he had disappointed Wolfgang by refusing to finish anything. If any project proved difficult or irritating, Max instantly manufactured an excuse to abandon the field of endeavour. He stood surrounded by attempts and beginnings, rather than achievements, all his beauty and charm fraudulent and spoiled. Even Hans Meyrick, with his effeminate curls and effusive desire to impress, had won the prize: he had painted more fairies into one canvas than any other artist.

The Sibyl sensed his discomfort. Her antennae flickered like a praying mantis registering a disturbance in the air. The luminous grey gaze swept across his face, conciliatory, generous and forgiving. He could hide nothing from her.

‘I sometimes feel –’ Max commenced his confession, then ran out of words, as well as feelings. The forest breathed quietly about them; sunlight spattered across the Sibyl’s bonnet and shawl.

‘You see, Mrs. Lewes,’ he gathered speed and began to gibber, ‘I am like your Tito Melema. Or at least I am in danger of becoming like him.
Romola
is your book, that is, the one book that meant most to me, or at least so far –’ Max was not prepared to admit that he had not read one single word of
Middlemarch
.

‘You see, Tito Melema wasn’t an evil man. He simply didn’t like rows, unpleasantness or decisions. I recognise that. He liked everything to be as pleasant and as beautiful as he was himself. And he procrastinated. He did intend to save his father from slavery and to purchase his freedom. Just as soon as he had set himself up properly in Florence, and got a bit of influence. He didn’t mean to forget the man to whom he owed everything. And he really did love Tessa, the little
contadina
, not because she was undemanding and naïve, but because she believed in him, unquestioning. He just didn’t possess a strong enough character to comprehend Romola’s finer moral sense, or indeed to be worthy of her love –’ Max petered out, sensing that his situation had degenerated into the ridiculous. Here he was in the middle of a forest, describing a fictional character he had recognised as an awful personal warning, to the very woman who once created him. Tito, the laughing Greek, loomed merry and menacing, amidst the sharp shadows of the pines, and Max stood, hesitant, between this phantom of himself and the traitor’s only begetter.

‘I know Tito,’ he blurted out. ‘I know all his weaknesses. I found it appalling that I knew him at once, and so well.’

The Sibyl smiled slightly, without uncovering her fearful teeth, and offered her arm to Max. They stepped onwards down the forest trail, whose edges now appeared fluid and nebulous among the dead needles.

‘I am very moved and honoured that my work should speak to you so clearly, and that you read Tito with so unerring an eye. You are right. He is not a criminal; he simply wishes to follow a path through life that is always littered with adoration and roses. But the moral life, that best part of our own souls, is neither so rosy, nor so simple.’ She paused, looking up at the earth’s breath, which stirred the pine tops. ‘That book is indeed dear to me. I was a young woman when I began, but an old woman by the time it was finished.’

‘You were unflinching in your justice.’ Max contemplated Tito’s end, and the grim fate that awaited all those incapable of rising to the awful demands of the moral life. ‘The traitor died by his own adopted father’s hand.’

The writer nodded, her face sombre.

‘But revenge, however just or apparently noble, is persuasive only in fiction, Max.’ She used his Christian name with warmth and intimacy, her hand on his arm pressed him gently onwards. ‘In our human world, revenge leaves nothing but the taste of ashes in its wake. My first source for that part of the intrigue in
Romola
came from General Pfuhl, nearly eighteen years ago. We met at Fräulein Solmar’s salon in Berlin. He told me of a wealthy nobleman, who was cheated out of all his property by a villainous adopted son. The man killed the thief he had taken to his bosom – killed him on the spot. He was imprisoned, tried and condemned for the murder. It is said that on the eve of his execution he refused to accept a confessor, and cried, “I wish to go to Hell, for
he
is there, and I want to follow out my revenge.”’

‘Was killing the traitor not enough?’

And here Max was graced with the Sibyl’s disconcerting yellow smile with the red gaps, gleaming at uneven intervals.

‘It seems not. Revenge, you see, binds the avenger irrevocably to the person who has wronged him. They are doomed to seek one another for ever through the shades of Hades. Baldassare never freed himself from Tito. His hatred grew, commensurate with his former love.’

Max suspected that the Sibyl, who spoke of Hell and Hades with such eloquence, did not actually believe in the existence of either place. A fresh puzzle presented itself to him for the first time. Why, if she walked the earth without faith in Providence or the Beyond, did she praise religious fervour with such discriminating conviction? Was it possible to live openly with a married man and still preach morality and righteousness from the pulpit of her fiction? Wolfgang assured him that all her first readers, when her identity was so well concealed that not even her publisher knew who the mysterious friend of Lewes was, remained convinced that the author of
Adam Bede
must be a clergyman, in charge of a rural parish in the Midlands. The Sibyl raised her extraordinary eyes to Max, paused, and then pronounced her absolution.

‘Reflect for a moment, Max, upon your interpretation of Tito. You have recognised his nature as a dangerous one. You have seen where that kind of moral laziness may lead. You are not Tito and you need never duplicate his ways. You have a choice.’

And now, in her priest-like presence, Max felt himself illuminated, reassured. He was being given a second chance, but he did not know how, or even why. The arched cathedral of the forest and the Sibyl’s grave authority, that uncanny sensation of having been not only heard, but chosen, conspired to meddle with the fragile roots of his complacency. Something intangible in her company lifted him from the swamps of his own selfishness. He vowed never to visit a prostitute or gamble at the tables again.

But Max was led into temptation before that day was out.

They returned home to a pile of visiting cards and Mr. Lewes, peacefully prostrate upon the sofa. Lady Castletown had besieged him with Irish bronchial remedies, and sent meat broth and soft, steamed vegetables from her own kitchens. Furthermore, she insisted that my dear Mrs. Lewes and her charming German publisher, that handsome young man who has such a sweet German accent, should join them for dinner, with a view to visiting the Kursaal later on to watch the gambling. The mercurial little showman was laid low and the great lady novelist must not only be amused, she must nurse him in as remote a fashion as possible, for that cough is certainly contagious, and she was sending her very own private physician, with his efficacious assistant, to ensure the dear man’s speedy recovery. At first the Sibyl refused. She would not leave her husband’s side. But Lewes added his persuasive croak to the general clamour.

‘We’ll dine here together, Polly. But you must go out a bit or you’ll succumb to morbid thoughts. I’m feeling better already, and a long peaceful night will set me straight.’

He closed his eyes. Max pressed the Sibyl’s hand gently and nodded his farewell, then crept out of the room. On the stairway he remembered Wolfgang’s revised publication deals. Renewed negotiations were out of the question at present, he had bought himself a little time. But suddenly another memory intervened: a torrent of opals, rubies and diamonds poured across the Jew’s counter. Both of these peremptory thoughts framed themselves into commands to act, and disconcerted his new-found composure. He burst into the autumn sunshine, clutching his hat.

Back at the Grand Continental Hotel a row of messages fluttered towards him from the reception clerk. Count August von Hahn and his daughter longed to see him, after a session in the baths for arthritis (the Count), and a gallop in the meadows (the Countess), come and visit us in our suite, my dear Max, when you have sufficiently buttered up the famous lady and closed the deal. My little Sophie is quite rabid with desire to meet her, and thinks that she’ll get round her doting father while her mother’s still at home. I’m counting on you not to bend a whisker, Max, or to engineer an introduction. It would all come out at the dinner table, and I’d be in for a hell-fire lecture.

The Count and his daughter occupied five adjoining rooms on the second floor, with views overlooking the royal castle and the park. The maid flashed past him, bearing two jugs of hot water for the Countess to refresh her toilette, after her fiery ride out to the hunting lodge, surrounded by an escort of admirers. But here she was, the young lady herself, still in her riding habit, with her veil thrown back, her bright cheeks flushed and her eyes dancing.

‘Why didn’t you come before?’ she demanded. ‘I wanted to see you and tell you lots of things.’

‘You were galloping around the countryside, and I am engaged upon my brother’s business,’ smiled Max, beguiled. She grabbed his arm and dragged him into a gorgeous expanse of gilt mirrors and chandeliers, with four French windows and a long balcony, from which he glimpsed the fountains and the gardens.

‘Come in quick! Father! He’s here!’

What things does she have to tell me, thought Max. Certainly nothing about Jews and jewels. He decided not to probe the mystery. Or at least, not yet. Sophie flung off her jacket and swung on the bell rope so that all the tassels shivered, her enthusiasm unbounded and unfeigned.

‘I’ve ordered chocolate. My fingers are freezing. You must take a glass with us.’

Could she have negotiated a price on that necklace for someone else? The soft smell of wealth perfumed the rooms. How could the Countess be in debt? At eighteen? Sophie offered him a cigarette and hauled the double windows open.

‘Blow it out on to the balcony. That’s what Father does. Mother makes him smoke outside at home, or in the winter garden. And we call that the Fumarium.’

The autumn air, rushing into the warm salon, smelled of bonfires. But here is the Count himself, dressed in a blue silk waistcoat, festooned with medals and ribbons, explaining that he is due to address a small political society, nothing subversive, you understand, just a group of like-minded chaps. And here is the waiter, wearing white gloves, armed with a pot of chocolate, extra cream, orange biscuits, tall delicate glasses in the Russian style, embedded in silver frames, standing perched on the threshold. No one heard him knocking. Max subsides into luxury, gazing at the smooth, translucent countenance, tiny earlobes and glossy pearl earrings of Sophie von Hahn. She is all movement and vivacity. She cannot sit still. She flickers past him, corn blonde and blue, like a ripe field. She flings herself into a chair so that the flower-filled vase on the rosewood table shivers and wobbles. Then she raises one boot towards her father for him to unbuckle and unlace, then the other. Max observes this cheerful domestic intimacy, and steals a glance at her white-stockinged toes. He is quite unprepared for the smooth curve of her instep, the gentle rise of her ankle, the intricate twitch of her calf muscles as she stretches and flexes her foot. All her youth and beauty, suggestive, glimmering, floods into the long stretch of her body, as she leans back in her chair and yawns. Max ostentatiously presses against the cold stone of the balcony and blows smoke into the crisped chestnut leaves of the nearest tree. He manages to mask his erection.