The Glass Room (27 page)

‘He has become like a father to her,’ Katalin confided to Liesel. Her face was flushed and her eyes shining, happiness and cold conspiring to make her seem so young. ‘You don’t know how much we owe to him.’

But Liesel did know. There were signs, of course there were signs, small hints, like the first indications of age in a someone’s face, changes that you don’t notice if you are living together until you wake up one day and there they are: the greying hair, the crow’s feet round the eyes, small creases of disapproval at the corners of the mouth. In retrospect she realised that she had noticed them even before they had left Mĕsto. It wasn’t the way that Viktor and Katalin looked at each other, it was the way they didn’t look. It wasn’t the notes, it was the silences between the notes. Some music is the very enemy of silence, keeping the sounds coming so that the listener has no time to reflect. But other music, the music she played for herself, was different. In that music — the music of Janáček, for example — the silences matter. They are silences of foreboding, anticipatory echoes of the sounds that are yet to come.

Viktor bought a sailing boat and taught himself to sail on the lake. Once or twice Liesel went with him but she didn’t enjoy the experience. Absurdly — it seemed absurd in such a small craft — it made her feel sick. So it was Katalin who crewed for him, with one of the children as a passenger. They couldn’t take more than one passenger, there just wasn’t room. And sometimes they just went on their own and Liesel looked after the children. She wasn’t a fool. She saw the laughter in Katalin’s eyes when they came back, and something else as well, a hint of shame.

Then one night when she couldn’t sleep because of a headache Liesel opened the door to Viktor’s room. She was in search of aspirin and there was none in the bathroom and she knew he kept a bottle at his bedside, so she crept into the bedroom like a shadow, determined not to wake him. But in the event there was no risk of that happening because he was not in his bed.

She whispered his name, ridiculously she whispered his name. ‘Viktor? Viktor?’ Whom was she hoping not to disturb? Anyway, there was no reply. The bed had been occupied, but not for a while. The sheets were cold. She waited but he did not appear. So she left the room and crept, breathless and fearful like a child, up the stairs to the attic floor. The corridor was silent, illuminated only by a night light at the far end where the children’s rooms were. The first door was Katalin’s. For long minutes Liesel stood with her ear against the door, listening. What she heard was the breath of slumber, the mutter of sleep-talk, the moan of nightmare and then a voice crying out in despair or pain, Katalin’s voice crying
Oh
,
oh
,
oh
in short, staccato bursts, as though her very life were being shaken out of her. And then a quietness that held within its embrace a low mutter of contentment.

Liesel turned and went back down to her bed. She slept fitfully for the remainder of the night, her sleep disturbed by dreams in which they were back home in the house on Blackfield Road, and she was standing outside on the terrace looking in through the windows into the Glass Room and seeing Viktor making love. The object of his love was Katalin, was Hana, was herself, the three women metamorphosing one into the other, then becoming one, a chimera, and the man becoming Hana, Hana with a penis, Viktor with a vulva, the act of love transformed into something that people watched, crowds of people packed into the space between the onyx wall and the windows, an audience that laughed and applauded as the protagonists performed, giving and receiving sperm that was like rice thrown at a wedding.

She woke to a pale dawn and the grey lake beyond the garden, and a misery that remained ill-defined until she remembered what she had discovered during the night. She sat in her room listening to the familiar sounds — footsteps on the floor above as Katalin got the children up, the running of a bath in her and Viktor’s bathroom, the door opening downstairs as the maid let herself in, all this domestic familiarity standing as sharp contrast to the silence of the night and the dark shadows of suspicion.

Over breakfast she watched Viktor and Katalin for signs. There were none. No glance exchanged, no secret contact. Life, domestic life, went on as normal.

Viktor glanced up at her from his paper. ‘Are you feeling all right, my dear?’

‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘I just didn’t get much sleep last night.’

He smiled and nodded and went back to his reading. The
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
was the usual catalogue of disaster — Jewish refugees being held on the border, questions being asked in the assembly of the League of Nations, people being arrested in Prague, German forces massing on the Polish border this time, nobody doing anything effective. The meal continued, the cook hovering, wanting to ask about lunch, Viktor reading, Katalin talking to the children, explaining to Martin how he should eat a good breakfast, how it would set him up for the day. ‘What’s “setting up” mean?’ the boy asked in the manner of children, who will ask a question even when they know the answer.

‘Can I have a word with you, Viktor?’ Liesel asked. She felt like a supplicant, bereft of the natural authority that she should feel in her own household. What would Hana have done in such a situation? How would she have behaved?

He looked at her over his paper. ‘Really?’

‘If you don’t mind. In the study, perhaps.’

The idea of leaving the breakfast room for a private discussion seemed both surprising and amusing. He folded his paper open at the place he was reading and got up from his chair. ‘If you wish. I have to catch my train in twenty minutes. I have a meeting in Lausanne.’

‘Perhaps it won’t take long.’

Katalin watched as they left the room. The children were arguing about the meaning of ‘setting up’. ‘Setting down’ they knew. ‘Setting up’ was surely the opposite. ‘“Settling up” is when you pay your bills,’ said Ottilie, who knew more than the others.

‘Tell me,’ Viktor said as he closed the study door. The study had become his territory ever since they moved into the villa. When Liesel wanted to write letters she went to her room looking out over the lake. Here, on the other side of the house, with a view of the front garden and the road, it was a male refuge, all heavy oak panelling and leather-upholstered armchair and a wide desk with a leather skiver.

‘It’s about Katalin.’

‘About Katalin?’

Carefully, she paused. ‘Is she happy?’

He seemed surprised by the possibility of happiness. ‘Happy? I don’t really know. I think so. You speak to her more than I do. What do
you
think? Goodness, she has enough to be thankful for. I mean, what would have happened to her if she’d stayed behind?’

‘Of course there’s that. But what kind of future does she have here?’

‘With us, do you mean?’

‘I suppose with us. She doesn’t have anyone else, does she? And no way of supporting herself.’

He looked puzzled. ‘What are you driving at, Liesel?’

She shrugged. She didn’t really know the answer to his question. What
was
she driving at? The expression implied intention, a target, an aim, and in truth she had none. There was just the dull notes of accusation. ‘What do you think of her?’ she asked. ‘Do you find her attractive?’

‘Certainly she’s attractive.’ It was impossible to read his expression. Just a faint smile, as though the question revealed more about her than it did about him. ‘Eliška, I do believe you are jealous.’

He never called her Eliška, not these days. ‘Do I have reason to be?’

‘Of course you don’t.’ He paused, considering. There was nothing in his expression, no guilt, no shame. So much so that a small part of her wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing last night, whether it was all part of her dream. ‘We can be honest with each other, can’t we?’ he asked.

‘Can we?’

‘I think we can. I think we ought to be.’ He seemed to be thinking about the form of words he might use, like a chess player wondering how his move would affect his opponent, how that move would affect the next, how the single first step would reverberate on throughout the game. But it wasn’t a game, was it? There were no boundaries and no rules. ‘Nothing that is due to you is compromised by Kata being here,’ he said. ‘Whatever is mine is yours, you know that. And if you were to say that Kata must leave, then she would have to go. Is that what you want? Is it?’

‘I don’t know what I want.’ She turned away and looked out of the window. She needed a cigarette. She rarely smoked so early in the morning but she felt the need now. Her hands were trembling as she dealt with cigarette packet and lighter. She drew on the cigarette and felt the smoke in her lungs, consoling her. Out there beyond the window, beyond the limits of the garden and the boundaries of this country everything was happening: politicians were ranting, troops were massing on borders, people were being shipped off to camps, the whole world was coming apart. And here there was this intestine, undeclared conflict.

His voice came from behind her. ‘You can tell me that she must go and there will just be the two of us. If that’s what you want. Look, I’ll miss my train. We’ll talk this over when I come back. Is that all right? Until then I suggest you say nothing to her. Will you do that for me?’

She nodded at the window. Perhaps she nodded. Anyway, she felt that she nodded, and then he was gone: the door had opened and he had gone. She could hear the children, and Katalin hurrying them up to get ready for school. And soon she saw him walking up the drive with his briefcase in his hand. What would Hana have said? What would Hana have done? She felt that strange longing for the familiar and the unexpected, those demon things that she had known with Hana. Nothing more perfect. A completeness of body and soul.

Dearest, darling Hana
, she wrote,
I have no one else to confide in here, and of course you are the one person I would tell if we were still at home
…

It was fruitless, of course. The letter wouldn’t get there for more than a week, and it would be more days before the reply came back. But she could talk to the page, and talking would make things clear.
I know what you’ll say. You’ll say I told you so. You’ll say, men are like that. You’ll say all those things that you warned me of. As you make your bed, so you must lie on it. Literally, I suppose. And now I have to lie on it without my Hanička by my side
…

She didn’t come down from her room until the middle of the morning. Out in the garden there was a fresh breeze from across the lake, a feeling of open sky and air. Sunlight glittered. There were sailing boats on the water, a small regatta like something in a painting by Raoul Dufy, all bright colours and cheerfulness. She walked down to the water’s edge where there was the landing stage and Viktor’s little sailing dinghy moored, and Katalin, standing there.

‘I think we need to talk,’ she said.

The girl didn’t turn. Was it absurd to think of her as a girl? Young woman, then. She was watching the boats and her profile was presented to Liesel, the curved nose, the childish forehead, the prominent lips. Very lovely, of course. Alluring. And those eyes, their startling pale blue, paler by far than the sky. She spoke to the lake. ‘You know, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘It’s stupid, isn’t it? After all you’ve done for me, to let this happen.’

‘But it has happened and now we’ve got to decide what we do about it. It had better be us to decide, don’t you think? We are the vulnerable ones. Viktor’s going to be all right whatever happens so the question is not what is
he
going to do, but what are
we
going to do?’

Katalin shook her head. ‘Do you mean which of us wins and which loses? I’ll lose. How can I do anything but lose?’

‘I’m not talking of winning or losing. I’m trying to suggest a resolution. Viktor always has a plan. Maybe he’s even got one now. But I’ve been thinking as well. I’ve been writing letters and I’ve been thinking. All the possibilities. For example, I could just leave, return home. I’m not a Jew. My family isn’t threatened.’

‘The children?’

‘I could take them with me.’ She paused. Ducks had appeared on the water before them, three pairs of mallard. They lived in the reed bed just along the shore and when anyone appeared at the water’s edge they congregated, expecting food. There was the soft chuckle of their laughter, as though the humans on the bank were performers in some comedy of the absurd. She wished now that she had brought some bread for them. Uxorious birds, she thought, content in their couples. ‘Or I could leave them with you and Viktor.’

‘But you’re not going to do that, are you?’

‘It’s tempting. Even with all that’s happening at home, it’s tempting. But I think you are right. I don’t think I’ll run away.’

‘And where does that leave me?’

The ducks chuckled softly. ‘I should have brought something to give them,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. She was smoking too much. Her fingers were tinged yellow. ‘When did you first meet Viktor?’

The girl looked round. ‘In your house, of course. That meeting. It was awful, really. Like being something in the zoo with all those people watching.’

‘I don’t think that’s quite right, is it? That wasn’t the first time. I’ve only just put everything together. I think he recognised you the moment that you appeared in the Glass Room.’

The girl hesitated, looking for a way out of this confrontation and finding none. ‘It was in Vienna,’ she admitted. ‘I used to … go walking in the Prater. You know the Prater? The gardens, the cafés, the big wheel, all that stuff …’

‘Of course I know the Prater.’ Liesel drew on her cigarette. The sensation of shock was as much physical as emotional: a lightness of head, a sensation of nausea, almost the feeling that she had had in that aircraft as they took off from Mĕsto. It was strange how the emotional could manifest itself so clearly in the organic. That connection between mind and matter. But she was going to keep calm. She was going to embody reason and balance. ‘So you were walking in the Prater and Viktor picked you up? Is that it? Or did you pick him up? Did he pay you?’