Madensky Square

June

I thought it was the full moon that woke me; I’d left the shutters open, for today was the first day of summer heat. It was two o’clock in the morning and even in the busy Walterstrasse the traffic was stilled; yet something had disturbed me.

I slipped on my kimono and went through into the kitchen to warm some milk. The moonlight was very bright: Saint Florian with his bucket was white as alabaster.

Then I heard the stamping of horses and saw a carriage standing by the Schumachers’ front door. The doctor. Some time tonight, then, the child would be born — and I leant out on the sill and prayed that the baby would be strong and well.

My baby was well. She was perfect. They shouldn’t have given her to me to hold, but she was born at night when the sister who was in charge of the ward was absent — and the young novice gave her to me.

So I held her.

As soon as she lay in my arms I knew for certain that I was going to keep her and I told her so. I felt well and strong and entirely without doubts and I spoke to her calmly and sensibly, for my joy was so overwhelming it needed the discipline of extreme politeness.

‘There is, for example, the question of your Christian name,’ I said to her as she lay and snuffled in the crook of my arm. ‘You see, Sappho called her daughter Kleis and I would very much like to call you that. Only I don’t think it would go well in German? So I wondered if you’d care to have my mother’s name? Would you like to be called Elisabeth?’ I asked my baby. ‘Would you care for that?’

And she opened her eyes.

We talked most of the night, my daughter and I, and in the shadowed ward the young novice who had brought her to me moved about her work.

The next day the sister came back and was furious. Babies destined for adoption should never be given to the mother to hold. By this time my temperature had begun to rise, and it rose and rose in the next days while half-comprehended figures in black habits sponged my forehead, felt my pulse and mouthed again and again their terrible, sincerely held beliefs. I must be sensible… I must sign the papers… I must let go.

I had puerperal fever. Most of the time I was delirious, but when I became aware of my surroundings they gave me laudanum because I screamed for my baby and upset the other patients.

Some time during those days, my daughter vanished.

I was ill for a long time. Puerperal fever kills more often than not, but I was eighteen and had been healthy all my life. I got better and they sent me down to their convalescent home in Klagenfurt where I sat in the sun with the other Fallen Women and stared at the Worthersee. After a month the doctor said I was fit for work and the nuns found me a job in domestic service in Vienna.

My employers had a big apartment behind the stock exchange. I slept in a windowless cupboard, rose at five-thirty and worked without a pause till nine at night. But it wasn’t the work that was the problem. I was prepared for that. It was my employers’ detestable sons, Alphonse and Franz, young men-about-town with incipient moustaches and ridiculous dandified clothes who regarded the maids as entirely available and thought they were honouring me with their favours.

I bit and scratched my way through my three months there. Then one morning I found my employers’ newspaper and in it an advertisement for a seamstress in the teeming textile quarter north of the Hohermarkt.

I worked for Jasha Jacobson for three years. He came from Russian Poland and ran a typical sweat shop — overcrowded, noisy, ill-ventilated. I knew nothing about Jews: their religion, their habits — being there was as strange to me as if I’d gone to work in an Arabian souk. We worked unbelievably long hours and my pay was low, but I’ve never ceased to be grateful for my time there. I learnt everything there was to know about tailoring: choosing the cloth, cutting, repairing the ancient, rattling machines. At first I was a freak — a schickse set down in the midst of this close knit immigrant community — but gradually, I became a kind of mascot. People passing smiled and waved at the blonde girl sitting in the window beside the cross-legged men sewing their button holes. And I was never molested — I might have been a girl of their own faith by the care they took of me.

When Jasha realized that I was serious about wanting my own shop, he began to take me about with him. I met an old Tunisian who did goldwork and his crippled wife who showed me how to handle sequins and beads. Lacemakers, leatherworkers, pedlars from Flanders and Normandy… I got to know them all and know them still.

After three years I asked Jasha for a reference and left. There were tears in his eyes when we said goodbye, but he was glad to see me go because his nephew, Izzy, his heir and the apple of his eye, wanted to marry me. Izzy had been rotted by education and lent me books by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky which I fell asleep over after a twelve-hour day. Jasha knew I had no intention of accepting the boy but it hurt him to have a member of his family who would consider marrying out of the faith.

With the reference Jasha wrote for me I got a job in a fashionable dress shop in the Herrengasse. I started in the sewing room, but soon I was modelling and helping with the designs, and at the end of two years the proprietress hinted at the possibility of a partnership, for she was getting on in years. Some of the customers befriended me and they had brothers, cousins — even fathers — who were very willing to take me out. I began to go to the theatre, to the opera; to meet writers and painters. Listening to their talk in the cafés, I became almost educated. And I learnt how to behave like a beautiful woman, which is not the same as — but more important than — being beautiful.

By this time I was sharing a flat with Alice: three rooms and a kitchen in a pretty, arcaded courtyard behind the Votiv Church. We’d met at Yvonne’s, both staring at the same hat: a green straw with parrot tulips and a navy-blue ribbon which we both decided not to buy! We got on well from the start — I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much as I did with Alice, nor seen so many operettas!

So within five years of leaving the House of Refuge, a penniless girl without a future, I had an excellent job, a home, a circle of friends.

I don’t know when I stopped daydreaming and decided to act. But one day at breakfast I said:

‘Alice, I’m going to get her back. I’m going to find my daughter. Can she come here?’

And Alice, who alone in the world knew my secret, jumped up and put her arms round me and said, ‘Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes!’

At four a.m. the doctor’s carriage was still outside the Schumachers’ house and the windows blazed with light.

Oh, let it go well for her, I prayed — she’s so tired, poor Helene — and let that pompous husband be good to her whatever the outcome.

Should it take so long, a seventh child?

It was one thing to decide to bring my daughter home, another to find her.

The sister who had been in charge at the House of Refuge had been transferred; the other nuns would tell me nothing. The deed was done, the child had a good home. As I beseeched and pleaded, they suggested I go to confession and purge myself of impure desires.

I went to the Ministry of Home Affairs and was transferred from room to room. At last I found the place where the adoption records were kept — and was met with a blank refusal. The files were confidential; there was no question of my seeing them.

‘I’m afraid it’s impossible, Gnädige Frau. It’s the regulations. There’s nothing we can do.’

They went on doing nothing, a thing that Austrian civil servants are very good at, for week after week. I kept going to see if a different clerk might be on duty; I implored, I wept — and still, implacably, they answered ‘no’.

And yet I didn’t lose hope. Now when I drove out with one of my escorts, I looked at Vienna with new eyes, noting fountains which would amuse her, alleys where she could bowl her hoop. I found myself staring at a poster of the Danube Steamship Company, searching the timetable for river trips which would not keep her from her bed too late. Once, quite by myself, I went to the Prater. Sometimes I think that of all the days of my life, that’s the one that I’d most like to have back: the day I tested the dappled horses of the carousels, travelled the magic Grottenbahn, sailed high over the city on the ferris wheel with my imagined daughter.

And I began to dress a doll. There has never, I do assure you, been a doll like the one I dressed for my daughter. Alice made her hats, but the rest — the evening gowns of faille and lace, the sailor suit, the nightgowns and bed jackets and capes, I stitched in the evening. The doll was my flag nailed to the mast. While I dressed her, I still had faith.

Then one day in July my luck turned. Going yet again to the records office I found a new clerk: an unattractive young man, spotty, with a big Adam’s apple, too much hair cream.

I began again, pleading, asking to see this one entry — the one referring to the adoption of a daughter born to Susanna Weber on the seventh of April 1893.

He listened, looked round to make sure that we were not overheard, asked what I would be prepared to give.

All the money I had, I said, also whispering. Everything I possessed — and I almost tore from my throat, then and there, the necklace that I wore.

But of course that wasn’t what he wanted.

It was a long night, the night I spent with him in a cheap hotel behind the Graben — oh Lord, it was long. But he played fair. The next day he brought me a copy of the entry I had asked for. A baby girl born on the seventh of April 1893 to Susanna Weber, spinster, had been adopted on April the twenty-third by Erich and Sidonie Toller of 3, Nussbaumgasse, Hintersdorf, Salzburg. Herr Toller’s occupation was given as ‘water engineer’ and I remember being cross about that. Surely they could have done better for my daughter than a water engineer?

So now I was ready. I had been saving up my annual holiday, and on a perfect late summer’s day, with the doll packed in a special box, I set off for Salzburg.

Everyone knows what Salzburg is like. Very pretty, a little absurd. The Mirabelle Gardens, the Fischer von Erlach churches, the castle high on its hill. And Mozart of course. Mozart whom the inhabitants ignored and who now brings the tourists flocking.

But if you drive round behind the castle you come to a green and pleasant landscape which has nothing to do with the fashionable shops and the crowds. Here there are fields of clover, little streams and prosperous villages in which people who work in the town have built pretty villas with well-kept gardens.

Hintersdorf was one of these. There was a main street, a few quiet side streets running out towards the fields.

I had booked into a pension in Salzburg. Now as I alighted from the bus I was suddenly terribly afraid. Not that I couldn’t bring her back with me — I knew I could do that — but that she would be less than I had hoped, strange to me. Other…

Oh God!

I walked down the lane and found the house. Low, yellow stucco, in a big tree-shaded garden. There was a wooden table under a walnut tree and a swing in the branches of a cherry.

And she was in the garden.

It is becoming very hard to write but I had better finish now.

She was exactly as I had known she would be. Her face, wide-mouthed, sweet and funny was the face from which all others departed at their peril. She was fair, plump and golden-skinned; her thick hair was braided, but loosely so that the ends curled into fat tendrils the colour of corn. She wore a blue dirndl with a crisp white blouse and a dusty pink apron; her socks were white as snow and the ribbons which fastened her pigtails matched exactly the colour of her dirndl.

It was like looking into the mirror, like being six years old again but better. She was prettier than I had been, for her eyes were brown. I could see that from where I stood, half concealed by the trunk of an acacia — and I thanked Karli, my long-forgotten lieutenant, for this gift. They were quite lovely, the brown eyes in the fair and golden child.

I had come as she was preparing for a party. Three stuffed animals were propped against cushions on the ground — a bear, a donkey and an elephant, and everything needed for their adornment lay to hand: bird cherries for earrings, necklaces of threaded berries, rings she had woven from the stems of grass.

‘You must be patient,’ she said to the animals, lowering a necklace over the donkey’s head. ‘It takes time to make things fit.’

Her voice was sweet and clear, with a trace of the local accent which would go, as mine had done, in the city.

After the necklaces came the earrings, causing problems with the elephant.

‘You’ll be pleased to look so smart when you get to the King and Queen,’ she told him. ‘You’ll be glad you didn’t wriggle. And remember, I have to get dressed too.’

I watched and watched. I looked at the child, into her, through her. She was gold, pure gold. Then slowly I dragged my gaze away and looked at the house. Neat white curtains, an espalier peach against the wall; petunias and begonias in the window boxes; bantams strutting in a wire enclosure.

My eyes roamed, searching and searching for something that jarred; something I disliked.

Nothing. My prettily dressed yet untrammelled daughter played in perfect contentment in a country garden with her well-loved toys. So I would have dressed her, so I would have wanted her to play. From my child there emanated above all that strange, unspectacular, almost never-encountered thing: a quiet, self contained and peaceful happiness. An ordinariness which is in fact so extraordinary, so unbelievably rare.

Then a woman came out with a glass of milk on a tray and a plate of biscuits and my daughter looked up and smiled.

The child had not noticed me, but the woman saw me. The resemblance must have been very striking for she knew me at once. She didn’t scream, she didn’t faint — she walked very carefully, slowly to the table and put down the child’s milk. Then she grasped the side of the tabie and held on. Just held on.

It doesn’t matter what she looked like. I try not to remember her, but her face went with the house… with the garden… with what she had made of the child.

So I turned and walked away. I was being good, you see — and as a matter of fact, it nearly killed me.

After all, I did not keep watch with Helene. Suddenly exhausted, I went back to bed just before dawn and was woken by Nini shaking my shoulders, worried because I was late for the shop.

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ she said.

I sat up quickly. ‘Helene Schumacher? Something’s wrong.’ ‘Yes. It’s the black apron not the white towel. Another girl.’ ‘If that’s your idea of bad news I’m sorry for you,’ I said furiously.I ran and bought a dozen red roses from Old Anna, and sent them round with Gretl.

‘Lisl’s been crying,’ she said when she returned. ‘Her eyes are all red. And the little girls looked like corpses, going off to school.’

‘Herr Schumacher, no doubt, is in mourning,’ I said grimly. ‘He went off first thing, even before breakfast. Just stamped out of the house with his umbrella.’

As the black apron collected more and more sympathizers my ill temper increased. I snubbed Joseph in the café when he referred to Herr Schumacher’s ‘misfortune’ and was rude even to poor Professor Starsky when he paused outside my shop to shake a commiserating head.

Reports of Herr Schumacher’s progress through the day did nothing for my state of mind. He had been seen in the Golden Hind at lunchtime, already considerably inebriated. There was a second sighting on the terrace of the Hotel Meissner. By early evening he was said to be in the Central having been assisted there by his dentist and his bank manager who’d stayed to join in the grief and lamentation.

I was unpinning my hair, ready to go to bed, when there was a knock at the door of the flat and Lisl, the Schumachers’ maid, stood there with swollen eyes.

‘The Gnädige Frau begs if you’ll come and see her for just a moment.’

‘Now? Tonight? Surely she’s too tired?’

‘No — she particularly said tonight if you could manage. Herr Schumacher is still away.’

‘I’ll come at once.’ And then: ‘The baby’s healthy, I understand?’

‘Yes.’

I put up my hair again, fetched a shawl and followed her.

Frau Schumacher lay alone in the big brass bed. Her kind, plump face was grey with fatigue and swollen with tears. In a bassinet in the corner of the room lay the baby in its muslin tent.

I went straight to the bed, took her hands, kissed her. I’d stitched a little bonnet for the baby weeks ago and laid it on the counterpane.

‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘A healthy baby, Lisl tells me.’

‘Yes.’ Then the tears began to flow. She felt for her handkerchief, dabbed, mopped. ‘I don’t mind having another girl. I like girls. I would have seventeen daughters and it wouldn’t bother me. Why should it matter whether they have that silly thing between their legs? It only causes trouble. Either they have to have somewhere to put it and if they can’t find anywhere they start their stupid wars.’

I had never heard Helene talk like this, but I pressed her hands warmly to show how entirely I agreed.

‘And the baby’s beautiful. I love her. I tell you, Frau Susanna, as soon as I held her, I felt such love. She has violet eyes and the most perfect arched eyebrows. She’s a real personality. The girls love her too. But my husband… well, as soon as he heard it was a girl he just went out and Lisl tells me he was at the Meissner by lunchtime, quite drunk, and all his cronies commiserating. It’s his pride, of course, that’s all it is. He never took any notice of the last two — he never held them once or wanted to be near them. So what’s going to happen now?’

‘Well, she’ll just grow up with the others, surely, in the best possible home. Your husband doesn’t have to trouble with her if he doesn’t want to. She’ll have enough love from you and the girls.’

Frau Schumacher shook her head and lay back on the pillow. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she murmured. ‘The doctor explained that. It’s not my fault and it’s not his; it’s just a thing that happens, but Albert’ll never see that.’ And she began to sob again.

I went over to the bassinet and pulled aside the curtains. The baby lay deep in sleep. She had a beautifully shaped head, a warm peach-coloured skin, a retroussé nose.

Then she turned her head a little and I saw that one cheek was entirely covered by a livid crimson birthmark.

I let the curtain fall and returned to the bed.

‘Your husband doesn’t know?’

She shook her head. ‘He just marched out of the house as soon as he heard it was a girl. I wouldn’t let the doctor tell him — I wanted to do it myself. But now I can’t… ’ She began to cry again. ‘It’s awful how much I love this child already and I cannot bear it if he… if…’

‘You must tell him as soon as he comes in.’

‘Frau Susanna.’ She raised herself up on the pillow. ‘Would you tell him? That’s why I asked you to come. He admires you so much. “If Frau Susanna wasn’t a virtuous woman you’d have to look to your laurels,” he keeps on saying. It’s that first moment when he turns away from her or rages and says God is punishing him. I didn’t mind with the others, but I cannot bear it for this child.’

Do you know where he is?’

‘No I don’t, not for certain. He was at the Central about seven because someone saw him, but he may have moved on.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll find him, and I’ll tell him. Just rest now; just sleep.’

Herr Schumacher was not in the Central. He had been there and the proprietor remembered him well, and the party of sympathizers with which he’d been surrounded.

‘Seven daughters, poor gentleman,’ he said — and recoiled from my basilisk glare.

He was not in the Blue Boar either, but in the Regina the trail grew warm again. An inebriated gentleman, supported by two friends, had lurched past half an hour earlier, asking the passers-by what he had done to deserve his fate.

‘He went on about goldfish, too. Someone had killed his goldfish,’ said the landlord. ‘He went off towards the Graben. You could try the Three Hussars.’

And in that ancient hostelry full of antlers and oak panelling I found him. He was sitting between his faithful henchmen, the bank manager and the dentist, the centre of a veritable Pieta. Herr Schumacher’s moustaches were limp with grief, glasses and a half empty bottle of wine littered the table. The dentist’s heavy hand lay on the stricken father’s arm; the bank manager’s pince-nez glittered as he shook a commiserating head.

‘Good evening.’

‘Frau… Susanna!’ Herr Schumacher recognized me, tried to rise.

‘Herr Schumacher, I have just come from your house.’

‘Eh… what?’ Tipsily he pulled out a chair which I ignored. ‘Is there anything wrong? My wife’s all right?’

‘Physically she’s all right. Emotionally she’s not. She is very much upset.’

‘Well, yes; anyone would be. I’m very much upset… my friends are too.’ He waved his arm at his companions, knocking over a glass. ‘I’ll have to take in my brother’s boy from Graz now. It’s a disaster; its —’

I now lost my temper.

‘Herr Schumacher, you make me ashamed to be a human being. Your daughter has a large birthmark on her right cheek. It is a serious and permanent blemish with which she will have to live. Your wife is exhausted and wretched — and you sit here like a sot; drooling with self-pity and drinking with your so-called friends.’

‘What…? What did you say?’ He sat down heavily. ‘A birthmark? A big one, you say.’

‘Yes.’

The dentist had now grasped the nature of the calamity. ‘Hey, that’s terrible, Schumacher. Terrible! Not just a girl but disfigured!’

‘Dreadful, quite dreadful,’ murmured the bank manager. ‘You’ll have her on your hands all your life.’

Herr Schumacher shook his head, trying to surface from his drunkenness. ‘You say she’s healthy?’ he demanded. ‘The baby?’

‘Yes, she’s perfectly healthy. In fact she’s a very sweet baby otherwise. She has the most distinguished eyebrows.’

‘Still, if she’s got a strawberry mark no one’ll look at her. Or rather everyone’ll look at her!’ The dentist, still bent on consolation, tried to put an arm round Herr Schumacher’s shoulders.

The arm was removed. Herr Schumacher rose and managed to stay upright. ‘Idiot!’ he spat at the dentist. ‘Half-wit!’ He opened his mouth very wide and jabbed a finger at one of his back molars. ‘Do you see that tooth? You filled it a month ago and since then I’ve had nothing but trouble! Every time I drink something hot it’s like a dagger!’

‘Come, come Schumacher,’ said the bank manager. ‘He was only trying to —’

Herr Schumacher swung round to confront his comforter.

‘And you shut up too or I’ll knock you down. I’m surprised you’ve got the nerve to look me in the face! Two per cent on a simple loan with collaterals! Two per cent!’

He threw some money down on the table, staggered to the coat rack, jammed his hat on his head.

I had kept the cab waiting. The night air revived Herr Schumacher, but only partially, as he alternated between threats to knock down the bank manager and the dentist, and inquiries about his daughter’s health.

I had intended to leave him by the front door but Lisl looked at me so beseechingly that I accompanied him upstairs.

‘Where is she?’ demanded the new father, blundering into the bedroom.

‘There, Albert.’

Herr Schumacher strode over to the cot.

‘Lift her out!’ he bade me — and I took the swaddled bundle and carried it over to the light.

‘Give her to me!’ he commanded.

Frau Schumacher and I exchanged glances. He was still not entirely steady on his feet. I motioned him to a chair, laid the baby across his lap, and stood by in case of accidents.

Herr Schumacher stared intently at his daughter’s face. I had placed her deliberately full in the light and the livid mark showed up very clearly.

Then he began to talk to her: ‘Well, well, my pretty, that’s nothing to worry about! No, no, that’s nothing to bother you and me. You just wait till you’re riding with your father in a great carriage through the Prater.’ He bent down, laid one finger on the blemished cheek and began to make the foolish, clucking noises that drooling women make to little children. ‘We’ll have such times together, you’ll see! We’ll take a sailboat down the river and I’ll show you how to catch fish. And on Sundays we’ll go out to tea at Demels — just the two of us!’

And while he inexpertly joggled and tickled his youngest daughter, the blessed baby just lay there without a murmur, accepting it all — and presently Herr Schumacher informed us that she had little fingernails, his mother’s nose — and eyebrows.

Frau Sultzer’s court case is coming up next week. The university is suing her for trespass and damage to property — and indeed the rats she has released all over the building look damaged. Those that have been seen, appearing from time to time in the Academic Board Room or the cloakrooms, have that wet look which is never a good sign in rodents, and their pink eyes are glazed and dull.

Unfortunately, her notoriety has gone to Frau Sultzer’s head. Notices saying Silence! Frau Sultzer is reading Schopenhauer have been replaced by notices saying Silence! Frau Sultzer is preparing her defence. Actually, the person who is preparing her defence is poor Rudi, along with the lawyer he has called in and to whom he is paying a lot of money, but the Group is very much excited by the whole business and the lady who accompanied Laura on the back of the tandem on the historic ride to the University is much grieved that she is not appearing in court also.

But Alice, when we met in Yvonne’s hat shop, was radiant. True, Rudi still comes home to rooms full of women with salad hanging out of the corners of their mouths; true, too, that the lady who makes Edith’s underclothes has started on that Croatian cross-stitch in black and red that high-minded women go in for, so that he has to hide his pyjamas. But at the end of July Frau Sultzer is taking Edith and the Group to St Polten where they will go for walks and listen to her Appreciating Nature, and Rudi has pleaded pressure of work and will stay behind.

‘I’ve been so worried about him,’ said Alice, at the same time lowering a dazzlingly beautiful black tulle hat clouded in polka dot veiling on to her curls. ‘Last time he came he was so exhausted I thought perhaps we shouldn’t make love. In fact I suggested it.’

‘I expect he thought that was a bad idea?’

Alice turned her head away in the hope that the hat would be less becoming from the side, but it was not. ‘He thought it was a perfectly terrible idea,’ she said and smiled into the mirror. ‘But now everything will be all right. I’ll soon get him completely well again, you’ll see. Can’t life be absolutely marvellous suddenly!’

She then took the exquisite hat to Yvonne, a shrivelled old charlatan who is nevertheless the best hatmaker in Vienna, and returned shaking her head.

‘Thirty kronen for a handful of tulle — she’s mad!’

‘Let me lend you the money, Alice; please. It looks so marvellous on you.’

‘No, Sanna, it’s sweet of you but I’d rather not. Anyway, who needs a black hat in the middle of summer?’

Magdalena is better. Herr Huber brought her for a fitting in his canary-yellow motor, and with the kind thought of saving Edith from the back of the tandem he picked her up at her house and brought her too.

The contrast between the two girls was almost painful. Magdalena drifted in, a rosary dripping from her fingers; slender, willowy, dressed in white. Behind her came Edith with her bad skin, her dandruff-covered hair, her extraordinary spectacles.

But what upset me was the way Herr Huber looked at his fiancée. Naturally I had expected him to be very much in love, but the adoration, the humble yet frenzied worship, worried me. I wish I understood this marriage.

Of course Magdalena is very beautiful though I admit I felt a little disconcerted as I welcomed her. Not because of the rosary, though I do not have many clients who bring rosaries to their fittings, nor by the absent look in her deep blue eyes, but by the fact that at eleven in the morning in a dress shop in the Inner City, she was wearing her lovely, rippling hair loose almost to the knees. You can of course design for these Ophelia-like girls who model themselves on the English pre-Raphaelites, but it had been my intention also to consider occasions like the Meat Retailers’ Outing, or afternoon tea with Herr Huber’s sister in Linz.

I left Edith in the second cubicle while I draped Magdalena in Seligman’s brocade. By the time I reached the Bluestocking with the toile for the moss-green crêpe, she had been waiting for some time in her unfortunate underclothes and I had no right to be irritated by her bulging briefcase lying on the velvet stool, but I was.

‘You could leave your case outside, Fraulein Sultzer. It would be quite safe.’

A sort of gulp issued from the Bluestocking and her pale lips twitched into a nervous smile. Then she snatched the briefcase and began to empty out the contents. A black and tattered copy of Beowulf an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, two note books… and something rolled in tissue paper which she put into my hands.

I unrolled the package. Inside the tissue was a well-made and very serviceable corset.

‘I spoke to my father,’ said Edith, flushing, ‘and he said it was all right. So I went between lectures.’ She looked up at me appealingly. ‘My mother doesn’t know.’

I was extremely pleased and told her so. For a moment I even wondered if I could do something quite fundamental to make her into an attractive girl. If I changed her spectacles… if I gave her raw liver sandwiches…

No, not even then.

I have not dared to write this down before for fear of tempting the gods, but I have been watching my pear tree very carefully and I think I can now say that this autumn I shall have an undoubted, a long-awaited and actual pear.

Today it rained and my two least favourite clients came to the shop.

I have made Frau Egger a good cloak: brown loden cloth edged with braid in a darker tone, and frogging.

‘Horn buttons would definitely work better, Frau Egger,’ I said, laying them against the material. The others are far too heavy.’

But she still wanted the military buttons. She wanted the buttons with an owl’s head pierced by a lance and the word Aggredi repeated twelve times on her bosom, for the cloak is double-breasted.

‘We’d better postpone a decision till the final fitting,’ I said.

But the final fitting won’t, alas, be final, for Frau Egger has ordered a skirt in the same material as the cloak. I’m under no illusions that it is my brilliant dressmaking that attracts the poor woman to my shop. She is still desperate about her husband’s affair with Lily from the post office; still determined to speak to Nini and find out what is going on. And the absurd thing is that her panic is quite unnecessary. Lily, quite unprompted, has jettisoned the Minister: pomposity, meanness, Nasty Little Habit and all.

She told him it was because she didn’t want to hurt his wife,’ said Nini, ‘but it isn’t that at all. He’s just a horrible man.’

No sooner had Frau Egger left than the Countess von Metz’s creaking carriage drew up before my door and the detestable old woman alighted, unexpected and unannounced, and stumped into the shop.

‘I have sent for you twice,’ she said imperiously. ‘I desire you to make me a coat and skirt.’

‘When you pay me for the last two dresses I have made for you, I shall be pleased to attend you, Countess.’

The Countess ignored this. ‘Wasn’t that the Egger I saw coming out of your shop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really, I don’t know why you dress that dreary middle-class sheep. Her husband is an abomination. He’s just turned poor old Baron König out of his house. Some rubbish about widening the street to improve traffic flow. A lot of drunken cab drivers and nouveaux riches in motor cars — why should they flow?’

I repressed the disquiet I always feel when the Minister’s activities are mentioned, and picked up Frau Egger’s buttons to return them to their box.

‘Good God,’ said the Countess rudely, peering at the buttons through her lorgnette. ‘The Pressburg Fusiliers! A useless lot — they were stationed near my brother’s regiment in Moravia. Disbanded in 84 and good riddance! What on earth are they doing here?’

‘A customer brought them.’

‘Well, she has no right to. Goodness knows what my brother would have said, turning army insignia into playthings.’ And as I kept silence: ‘I thought a dark green broadcloth or needlecord, perhaps? A flared skirt and a fitted jacket with a peplum — very simple but with bishop sleeves. Your sleeves are always satisfactory, I admit.’

I didn’t answer, picked up my account book.

‘A lot of people won’t wear green. After green comes black, they say. But I don’t care for that. Black came to me from the cradle. My mother died when I was two, then my sister, then my aunt. And my brother, of course, but that was later. No, I’m not afraid to wear green.’ She hit the floor with her cane. ‘You are aware that the dagger I sent you was worth far more than the grosgrain dress? It is a valuable antique.’

‘It’s a pruning knife. Ask the pawnbroker.’

‘The pawnbroker! I give you the treasures of my household and you take them to a pawnbroker! If you are unwise enough to sell, at least take them to a proper antique dealer who knows his job.’

But I wasn’t going to be provoked and went on with my accounts.

‘Well… perhaps I might have made a mistake about the dagger.’ Her purple nose twitched with longing for the workroom with its bales of cloth. ‘It so happens I have one or two interesting things I could let you have. My brother’s cigar box, for example.’

‘Countess, those things are no good to me. I can’t pay my bills with them. Why don’t you go to Chez Jaquetta in the Kärnterstrasse? She may be honoured to dress someone of your rank for nothing.’

‘Chez Jaquetta! Are you out of your mind? I wouldn’t dress my parrot at that place. Her workmanship’s shoddy and she has as much taste as a kitchenmaid. Good Lord, she put the Baroness Lefevre into puce satin covered in dead birds. Ortolans, hundreds of them, hanging on with their beaks. When the Baroness sits down its like a charnel house: bones breaking, feathers flying…’

Defeat. Total defeat. I knew it even as I felt my face crease into an entirely involuntary smile. ‘It so happens I have a length of bottle-green broadcloth; it’s the end of a roll… ’

It’s impossible, reprehensible… something must be done about the deep and unadulterated joy that courses through me when people speak ill of Chez Jaquetta.

That her activities in the university might have made life difficult for her daughter does not seem to have occurred to Laura Sultzer.

I’d been to the town hall to pay my rates and was taking a short cut through the gardens when I saw Edith Sultzer sitting on a bench. She was reading a book and eating a large raw carrot, and I was about to pass her when she looked up and showed her pale gums in a smile of such friendliness that I felt compelled to stop.

‘How sensible of you to take your lunch out of doors.’

‘Yes, I… I used to eat in the university canteen but since my mother, . since she let out the rats… the other students aren’t very nice. Not that I have many friends there anyway. I don’t mind. I’m too busy with my studies.’

I asked after the Plotzenheimer Prize Essay and heard that it was going well. The deadline was the end of August, but Edith thought she would get it done in time. Her topic (suggested by her mother) was: ‘Seventeenth-Century Comments on the Epic of Beowulf with Special Reference to the Contribution of Theophilus Krumm’.

‘You know, I have to confess that I’ve never really read Beowulf I said. ‘What’s the actual story?’

Edith then told it to me and it sounded good. There was a brave knight, a monster called Grendel whom he slew, and in due course another hazard in the form of Grendel’s mother who was even nastier than her son.

‘But of course we don’t read the actual poem very much,’ explained Edith. ‘We read what people have said about it.’

As I got up to go, it occurred to me that Edith might have some information on a problem that was troubling me, namely Magdalena Winter’s hair.

‘You see, it’s not easy to design clothes for a grown-up woman who has her hair hanging down her back. Do you know why she wears it like that?’

Edith nodded. ‘Yes, I do. It’s because her hair belongs to Jesus. Only she calls Him The Christ.’

‘I see. But surely it could still belong to Him even if it was coiled up and pinned?’

The Bluestocking looked troubled. ‘Magdalena has a very special relationship with God,’ she said.

‘So I observe.’

I’m afraid things are going badly for the poor little Count of Monte Cristo across the way. His uncle is out every day trying to find someone to hear the child, but he is not a prepossessing figure and no one, so far, has shown the slightest interest in his Wunderkind. It is only in the evening when his uncle is back that Sigismund comes out into the square. Perhaps they are afraid that if no one is left to guard the piano it will vanish. Not so unlikely, it is only hired and their meagre stock of money is getting very low.

‘Another couple of months,’ Frau Hinkler says, ‘and then they’ll be off back where they came from, and good riddance.’

Meanwhile a new figure has entered my life. She sits on a woolly cloud staring down at me; a dark, angry-looking woman who resembles Frau Wilkolaz, the Polish lady in the paper shop who suffers with her nerves.

This gloomy angel is Sigismund’s mother and she is not pleased with me. She doesn’t think it is enough for me to say ‘Grüss Gott’ to her child of an evening when I feel like it. She wants me to take proper notice of him, to care for him and invite him to my house. True, I have shown Sigismund how to pat Rip, I have introduced him to General Madensky on his plinth and explained about the hair dye and the moustaches.

But though he stands and looks at my shop like a starveling in a fairy tale, I have not invited him into my house — and it is this that the Polish lady on her cloud does not think good enough. She wants me to bake vanilla kipferl for him in my kitchen, to stitch him a shirt and tell him stories, but she is destined to be disappointed. If I cannot have my daughter I won’t make do with substitutes — that I promised myself when I lost her all those years ago.

Tonight, as Sigismund stood by the fountain, I saw on his skinny, unwashed leg two weals as though made by a cane or ruler.

‘What are those, Sigismund? What happened?’

He looked down without much interest. ‘My uncle hit me.’ Of course; on the leg… Never on the precious hands, never a box on the ear.

‘Why?’

He shrugged his ancient shoulders. ‘He wants me to play the Waldstein Sonata because it looks difficult and people will think I’m clever. But the chords in the last movement are not possible.’

All Poles have to learn the language of their conquerors. Sigismund’s German is correct and formal, but he speaks in a low throaty voice so that sometimes I have to bend down to hear him.

‘You’re too young to play the Waldstein?’

He looked up and his hands came forward, stretched on an invisible keyboard.

‘I am not too young,’ he said. ‘I am too small.’

Edith was right. Magdalena’s hair does belong to The Christ. She confirmed this herself as she stood in my fitting room in her wedding dress.

Till I became steeped in mortal sin I was a good Catholic and even now I would be lost without the consolations of the church, but this annoyed me.

‘What about Herr Huber? Doesn’t it belong to him a little?’

Magdalena turned her beautiful sapphire eyes on me, more puzzled than offended, and regretting my sharpness I said:

‘You see, your headdress has been designed to be raised above your braided hair. If you’re going to wear it loose I shall have to think again. But do you really want to look like a bride in an Italian opera?’

Magdalena fingered her rosary and said she would ask. ‘That’s a good idea. Your mother would be able to advise you. Or perhaps you have other relatives?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t ask my mother. The Blessed Virgin will advise me. Or one of Them.’ She looked up at the draped ceiling of the cubicle and I remembered her tender conversation with the wax puppets under glass.

‘The saints, you mean?’

Magdalena nodded. The thought that she is a little crazy has of course occurred to me before — yet with her brothers she is said to be practical and kind, and when you can get her to fix her mind on her clothes her suggestions are often quite sensible. And after all, if more people discussed their hairstyles with the saints one might not see so many bedraggled birds’ nests or listing chignons. Even when carrying their eyes in front of them on cushions or tied to wheels, the saints always look neat and seemly.

Meanwhile Herr Huber — there is no doubt about it — has become our friend. He has sent round a kaiserwurst the size of Odin’s thigh and Alice (whom he admires inordinately as a hierophant of the sacred art of operetta) is awash in wiener wurstl.

To facilitate his courtship he has taken a room at the Astoria and only goes down to Linz two days a week to supervise his business interests there. God, who was so unenthusiastic about 167 Augustiner Strasse, has approved entirely of 14A, The Graben, which Herr Huber is turning into a temple of charcuterie. Even so he has time on his hands, for the Winters’ flat is so small that he doesn’t care to sit there too long of an evening, and he has made it clear that his car and his company are entirely at our disposal.

So old-fashioned is Magdalena’s mother, so obsessed with what she imagines to be genteel behaviour, that Magdalena is allowed out with her future bridegroom only in the presence of a chaperon. Middle-class girls in Vienna really do not any longer behave like this and I can’t help wondering if it is partly Magdalena’s own wish. Since the Winters have no maid it is Edith who has been called in to accompany Magdalena on her outings with the butcher. Laura Sultzer strongly disapproves of this arrangement: Edith should be at home studying for the Plotzenheimer Essay in Anglo-Saxon studies, not riding round in canary-yellow motors with pork butchers about whom neither Goethe nor Schopenhauer had anything to say. But Edith seems quite happy to act as duenna and waddles heroically beside the affianced couple, clutching her briefcase and engaging Herr Huber in the conversation which does not readily fall from the lovely Magdalena’s lips.

‘Is it true that the Hungarians put donkeys in their salamis?’ I heard her say, blinking anxiously at Herr Huber through her spectacles.

And the butcher’s soothing reply: ‘It is true. But it doesn’t mean that the Hungarians are wicked; only that they make good salamis.’

I have not been particularly good this week. I have visited no sickbeds, I was cross with Gretl when she knocked over the box with Frau Egger’s ridiculous buttons. And yet — and this shows how mysteriously and marvellously God goes about his business — on Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting beside Hatschek in a carriage bound for a hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods — and Gernot.

My lover had borrowed the house from a colleague who had gone to America in pursuit of a rich wife. We were to have the evening together, and the night. A whole, entire night, for which I had packed a whole and moderately entire nightdress, but I wore the rich cream dress I had worn the last time at the Bristol. So much of love has to do with remembrance.

I love driving with Hatschek. It is from him that I learn those details of Gernot’s life that he regards as trivial or uninteresting. It is from Hatschek that I hear the tributes paid to him by his men, the intrigues and dangers that he has to face. They had just returned from Serbia, as part of the delegation supposed to undo the harm we had done by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovinia — a move Gernot had consistently opposed.

‘He wouldn’t let anyone give him a bodyguard, neither. Just walked round the slums in mufti, saying he had to know what people were thinking. Well, I could tell him what they were thinking. They were thinking how to murder every Austrian they could lay hands on, the swine.’

Even more then the Ordnance Department, we hate the Serbians, Hatschek and I.

We passed Mayerling in its dark circle of trees. They’ve pulled down the hunting lodge in which the Crown Prince shot himself and his mad little mistress and built a convent, now filled with mourning nuns, but I don’t know why. Rudolf had a good life and a good death, surely, with silly, loving Mitzi by his side?

Gernot was waiting by the door. In spite of his gruelling time in Serbia he looked extremely fit.

‘Ah, I see you have decided to be beautiful.’ He kissed my hands, then the self-coloured silken rose on my bodice, a gesture I found unsettling.

‘Do you object?’

Not exactly. As long as you keep it up. I can get accustomed to you looking like the Primavera. It’s when you suddenly think of something sad and turn into a potato-picking peasant in one of those dark Van Goghs that I get unsettled. After all, maybe I can have her for life, I think then — not everybody wants to go to bed with potato-picking peasants. And then you giggle and we’re back in the schoolroom: a Backfisch preparing for her first dance…’

‘I never giggle,’ I said sternly, unbuttoning my gloves.

We had supper in a panelled room, served by Hatschek and watched by the heads of about four hundred chamoix on the wall. As we finished our meal it began to rain, but my suggestion that we should now go out and smell the fragrance of the woods was badly received.

‘Your hair smells of larches,’ said Gernot, ‘I’ve told you before… So there’s not the slightest need to go plodding about in the rain.’

In the bedroom there were more dead chamoix, a stuffed trout under glass and a bearskin. Also a vast and marvellously solid bed.

I disappeared into the dressing room, took off my clothes, put on the nightdress.

‘Ah, delightful!’ said Gernot, surveying me through his monocle. ‘Might one ask why you have dressed again?’

‘It’s because we have a whole night. I’m establishing permanence… status.’

A mistake. The bleak, closed look came over his face. The furrows made by Macedonia and Serbia and the idiocies of the General Staff deepened on his brow. ‘That’s why I’ll be consigned to hell — because I didn’t force you to leave me. You could be a happily married matron with a cupboard full of nightdresses.’

‘But not like this one.’ It was high-necked, long-sleeved, exceedingly demure; it was just that the material was not very thick. I walked into his arms, fashioned my hair into a tent for us both… ‘You know I like it best like this; I like having to re-create our love afresh each time. I like being on my mettle.’

A lie, but a good one. And that’s so odd — these lies that feel so right. Laura Sultzer never lies, so I suppose she is good and Alice and I are bad. As though we wouldn’t change it in an instant — all the glamour, the ‘romance’ of being a mistress for the humdrum and honourable job of being a wife.

I asked after Elise.

‘She’s in Aix. An oto-laryngological complaint has been diagnosed.’

I have never discovered what, if anything, ails Gernot’s frail and high-born wife. Only a slight dryness in his tone when he speaks of her wanderings betrays Gernot’s possible doubts — but as far as I am concerned she should pursue her health with the utmost rigour and determination. Let her hang from stilts in the lake at Balaton and let the jets of water play over her pale, thin legs; let her emerge from the baths at Ischl powdered in salt. May she walk up and down the pump room in Marienbad sipping her sulphur water — and may she soothe herself afterwards with waltzes and cream cakes, for when she is absent I can see Gernot.

‘And your daughter?’

‘There is hope of an engagement to a whiskery young man in the Diplomatic Corps. Myself I doubt if he’ll come up to scratch, but Elise is working on it.’

My lover’s fatherhood is a frail plant. He now indicated that he was no longer prepared to discuss his wife and daughter and we retired to bed.

Outside the wind was freshening; the scent of wet earth came to us through the open window.

How good love tastes in the country!

It was in a place very like this that I first met Gernot. Though ‘met’ is not quite the right word. I was somewhat mad, walking — sodden — through the countryside and slightly off course for the Danube.

At one level of my mind I must have known that throwing yourself into the Danube is not a good idea: the currents are unreliable, the bridges full of policemen and drunks. But it was the day I had seen my daughter playing under the walnut tree and left her and I wasn’t particular about ways and means; I just wanted to get away from the pain. So I started walking.

I never went back to the pension in Salzburg to pick up my case. Wearing only a light cloak and carrying the doll in her box, I set off down a long dusty road, across a stream, blundered along footpaths — and found myself in a neighbouring valley.

Here there was a lake and I stopped to throw the doll into the water. I watched her float and bob in her plaid travelling suit, losing her tam-o-shanter before she sank at last into the reeds. After her, I threw the red evening cape, the lace-trimmed skirts, the blouses, Alice’s pretty fragile hats.

But not myself. With the obstinacy of the deranged I had fixed my mind on the Danube and I trudged on in what I believed was the direction of the city.

By nightfall I was in a wood and it had begun to rain. I found a forester’s hut and lay there for a few hours, and then I stumbled on again. The rain had grown heavier; my hair was streaming, my cloak torn.

By midday my legs simply stopped working and I sank down against a tree. What happened next was that someone tried to shoot me. Not deliberately; he was aiming at a boar. I had collapsed in the grounds of Count Osterhofen’s shooting box in which Gernot (reluctantly because the sport was poor and the Count stupid) was staying for informal discussions on some point of foreign policy.

But I didn’t see him then. I came round to find a soldier in the rough grey of a corporal’s field uniform staring down at me. A round face, huge ears… and for the first time — bringing me back to consciousness — the smell of the raw onions that Corporal Hatschek loved to chew.

The dogs were called off. Huntsmen in green hats arrived. A litter was fetched. I hadn’t in fact been hit, but no one believed I could walk.

The Count, fair and moon-faced, looked concerned. ‘Such a beautiful girl to come to this,’ he kept saying. It was generally assumed that I was either dead or deaf.

Then a grim-faced, clean-shaven man, thin to the point of emaciation, appeared and took charge of the operation. He wore a loden coat but his superior rank and authority were evident at once.

I was carried into the house — a gloomy place surrounded by trees — and up to a bedroom. Warming pans were brought; the housekeeper removed my clothes.

‘She’s not a common girl, look at those underclothes,’ she said to the maid.

They brought me hot soup which I drank. Then a doctor came with a syringe. Although I was supposedly about to end my life, I minded the prick of the needle.

I woke the next morning in a clean nightgown, my hair brushed. I had a memory — or was it a dream? — of a thin, grim-faced man coming in once with a candle.

All that day they questioned me: the housekeeper, the doctor, and the fair-haired Count who owned the house, but I shook my head and would tell them nothing. I knew that if once I began to speak I couldn’t stop, and I thought, too, that if I spoke I would realize afresh what I had done: parted for ever from the only person I could really love.

On the second day I tried to get up, and looked for my clothes which they had taken. It was then that they sent for Gernot von Lindenberg.

‘You can leave when we know of your circumstances,’ he said. ‘That you have a home to go to and people to care for you.’

‘I have a place to live. And a job. At least I had.’

‘Very well. My servant goes to Vienna tomorrow with some papers. He will escort you — but first you must tell me how you came here in this condition.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

He then introduced himself formally, giving himself his full rank and title. ‘So you will be aware that anything you say to me will by treated in the strictest confidence.’

‘Please don’t make me… It would be of no interest…’

‘You are mistaken.’

He sat there some way from the bed in a hard-backed chair and waited. Just waited.

I held out a long time. The clock ticked, the wind blew and rattled the shutters and still he sat there. Midnight struck… Then suddenly I began to talk.

Strange, that. The strangest thing of all, almost, that to this austere, grim-looking man whom I had never set eyes on before and never expected to see again, I gave the whole story of my daughter’s birth, her loss, the agony and depressions… the sudden hope and joy as I realized I could care for her. I told him things I could scarcely remember myself: the woman in the next bed in the House of Refuge saying ‘Her skin is the colour of apricots.’

I told him about Sappho who had chided her daughter for anticipating grief, and how every child I’d seen for six long years had been her: every little girl bowling her hoop in the park, every waif in a painting looking out of the canvas at the world.

By now I was crying so much that I don’t know how he understood me, but he seemed to. Then I told him about what happened three days ago. How I’d seen her and she was everything I’d dreamed of… and how I let her go.

‘You acted rightly.’

The quiet words goaded me into a rage that almost transcended my wretchedness. ‘Do you think I care? Do you think that helps?’

He didn’t answer. Then he said something so strange that at first I thought I’d misheard. ‘I envy you.’

That stopped me. ‘What?’

His head was turned away from me towards the one candle that burnt in the room. ‘I had a son. He died when he was five months old. He died, but I did not grieve as you grieve now.’ Then in an entirely different voice: ‘Tomorrow you may go home — on one condition.’

‘What is that?’

‘You know, I’m sure. That you give me your word not to take your life.’

I gave it. I had no wish to spend my days in a hunting lodge shut in by gloomy trees.

The next day Hatschek took me back to Vienna. Even with the Count’s excellent horses it was a long drive and Hatschek used it to inform me of the Field Marshal’s importance, position and stature. This embraced, of course, his military exploits in places of which I had never heard, and his decorations — but in Hatschek’s eyes depended also on more arduous and less spectacular feats. Going without food once for eight days, getting proper horse blankets out of the obstinate bumblers at the Ministry, telling the Archduke Franz Ferdinand where he could put his plots. The Marshal’s wife and daughter were scarcely mentioned. Hatschek’s passionate loyalty lay only with the man.

When I got back I found that von Lindenberg had done his staff work. Alice knew what had happened and was waiting with a meal. My employer had been told I would be returning to work a few days late. My suitcase had arrived from the pension in Salzburg.

So I resumed my life. The anguish went on, growling away, sometimes suppressed, sometimes getting me by the throat, but as the months passed I could attend to my work and even my pleasures, except on those sudden black days which even now I have not outgrown.

And as the months passed, beneath the anguish there was another and entirely discreditable emotion. Chagrin? Irritation? Surprise? How could the Feldherr von Lindenberg, who had sat by my bed throughout a long night, so entirely forget my presence?

For he made no attempt at all to get in touch with me. A formal inquiry, even a note acknowledging the letter of thanks I sent him would have been appropriate, but he made no reply.

Odd how they can exist side by side: anguish and pique.

Almost a year had passed when a tall, narrow-faced, angular young woman walked into Madame Hermine’s shop, and with her a man in his forties dressed in mufti: dark suit, a bowler hat, a monocle.

The young woman was Fräulein Charlotte von Lindenberg and the man her father, the Field Marshal, who (most unaccustomedly as it turned out) had decided to buy her a dress for her birthday.

He seated himself, his daughter consulted with Madame Hermine. Three dresses were brought out.

‘You had better see them on the model,’ said the Field Marshal.

I had been tidying the racks, keeping my back turned, though I had recognized him at once. Now I was told to go and change.

I came out first in the red silk with the fringed shawl. I’d learnt my job well of course and I knew how important it is to sell the dress, not only to the lady but to the gentleman who pays for it. So I passed carefully and quite close to the Field Marshal, and let him see the low-cut back, and hear the delicious frou-frou of the skirt. The next dress, too, I modelled meticulously, showing the tight-faced daughter how, if one picked up the skirt with the left hand the underskirt glowed a shade lighter, like the inner petals of a delphinium. But of course it was the third dress, the black velvet that he wanted her to have — men always want black velvet. It had a boat neckline and by leaning forward I was able to show her (and a little also to show the gentleman who was paying) how it was cut exactly to the point where you could see the swell of the breasts begin. Not that she had breasts, poor girl, but that was not my fault.

She chose the black. Madame Hermine was pleased — it was the most expensive. The next morning Hatschek came for the first time with a note inviting me to supper at the Bristol.

Did I know that first time? I don’t know… yes, of course I knew. Not the full extent, but… yes, I knew. My satisfaction at my successful seduction technique was, however, short lived.

‘I decided to give you a year,’ said the Field Marshal, walking naked to a painting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and turning it to the wall. ‘I didn’t want to take advantage of your state and so on. But then I decided nine months was enough. I’m going to buy a dress like that for you. It’s wasted on my daughter.’

‘No. I don’t want presents. Not from you.’

Later he repeated that strange thing he’d said in the shooting box. ‘You can’t imagine how I envied you when you lay there so wild and distraught and desperate.’

‘Envied me?’

He sat down beside me and pushed the hair from my face.

‘To have felt anything so intensely, so utterly. To be so open to sorrow. I’ve never felt anything like that, Susanna. It’s what we all want, to be entirely open to life.’

And under the sheet my toes curled with happiness because he’d said my name.

I have just met Rudi Sultzer and somehow I can’t get him out of my mind.

Laura’s court case came up today. She was fined five hundred kronen and ordered to keep away from the university in the future. Everyone says if it hadn’t been for her husband’s standing in the profession, the penalties would have been much more severe.

Needless to say the Group regards the outcome as a personal triumph for Laura. They were all on the steps of the courtroom as she came sweeping out, dressed to kill in a belted calico sack with which the lady who does Croatian cross-stitch had clearly had her way — and taking no notice of Rudi and the lawyers who had conductcd her defence, they bore their whiskery heroine away.

I had been to see one of my outworkers who lives round the corner from the courtroom, and drew level with the building just as Rudi and his colleagues took leave of each other and he was left alone at the bottom of the steps.

I did not expect him to recognize me. I’d met him once at Alice’s, at the beginning of their relationship, when I called in unexpectedly, not knowing yet which were his ‘days’. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, his hair rumpled, unabashed but a little shy, and the happiness he had just experienced was in his face.

Now, eight years later, I was shocked by his appearance. He was stooped, his suit seemed to be too big for him; he looked as weary as a man of eighty. Then he raised his hat, greeted me by name — and smiled.

The effect was extraordinary. The mischief, the sense of fun that Alice so loved in him were instantly there. Behind the gold-rimmed pince-nez the blue eyes were alert and amused.

The corset was successful?’ he inquired.

‘Very successful.’

‘My daughter admires you tremendously. I must thank you for your kindness to her.’

He had replaced his hat, we were about to separate when, moved by some extraordinary impulse, I laid my hand on his arm.

‘I’m so glad that Alice has you,’ I said. ‘So terribly glad!’

As soon as I had spoken I was aghast. I have always kept silence about Alice’s affairs: only perfect discretion has made our friendship possible, and now in a public place in broad daylight I had made this highly personal remark.

But Rudi Sultzer had ceased to be Atlas. His shoulders straightened and he looked at me with a quite extraordinary gratitude as though I had given him a marvellous and unexpected present.

Then very distinctly, he said: She is my only happiness.’

It was a mistake to take Sigismund across to the churchyard, I see that now. Tonight I came in late and found a bunch of flowers on my doorstep.

The bunch was small and not in its first youth, and I recognized the piece of string with which it was tied. I’d last seen it round Sigismund’s neck supporting his crucifix. I recognized the flowers too: three withered geraniums from the grave of the Family Steiner, a spray of lilies, somewhat slimy at the stem, from the urn on the grave of the Family Heinrid, an acrid-smelling aster from the wreath of a recently interred councillor and (already quite dead owing to their touching frailty) the harebells that I had pointed out to the child with a particular excitement.

Tomorrow I shall send Nini over with a new ribbon for his crucifix. I’ll have a word with Father Anselm too — that impoverished pair across the way have enough problems without a charge of grave robbing!

‘Can you smell the limes?’ I’d asked the boy when I took him across, and he’d lifted his white face obediently to the dark bole of the tree and sucked in air like someone taking medicine.

From where inside him does he make his music, this sad, old child? Can you be a musician without being a person? Is there no one in this city who can tell me that?

On Sunday the Schumachers asked me for a five o’clock Jause. We had it in the garden under the lime tree which grows in the churchyard, but leans over the wall to shade their lawn. Mitzi, all by herself, had made vanilla kipferl and there were linzer schnitten and an iced and marbled gug’lhupf.

The little girls had changed out of the muslins they wore for church and romped in their pinafores, but however busy they were with their games the four eldest came back again and again, like members of the Imperial Guard, to surround the canopied perambulator in which the newest Schumacher lay in state.

‘Alfred is completely besotted by her,’ said Frau Schumacher, pouring chocolate for me into a rose-sprigged cup. ‘He insisted on that pram and you wouldn’t believe what it cost. It’s English — a Silver Cross.’

‘Well, she’s a bit special, you must admit,’ I said. ‘Those eyebrows!’

Helene’s face softened at my praise. ‘Yes, and she’s so funny! So dictatorial! If you take the bottle away from her she gives you such a look! But Albert really has no sense — it’s a wonder she isn’t sick the whole day long the way he jiggles her and rocks her and tickles her stomach. And he’s invited practically the whole of Vienna to the christening.’

‘When is it to be?’

‘On the twentieth of August. Albert wants to get it over before he goes to fetch his brother’s boy from Graz.’ Her voice had taken on a sombre note, for the goldfish slayer was to join the household early in September. Then she laid a hand on my arm. ‘I won’t press you again, but if you ever feel like changing your mind, there’s no one we would rather have for a godmother, you know that.’

‘Thank you… I’m very touched, Helene, but —’

‘That’s all right, my dear. I don’t want to pry into your feelings. I just thought I’d tell you that we still feel the same as we did when Gisi and Kati were born.’

Oh, why can’t I? Why not for this baby who surely will have enough to bear? My daughter is eighteen years old: if I had ever ‘had’ her I would now be learning to let her go. And yet I still can’t, even in this formal and ritualized way, be a mother to anybody else.

‘What is she to be called?’ I asked. ‘Have you decided?’

Helene smiled as at an excellent joke she was about to share. Then she called to her girls: ‘Mitzi! Franzi! Steffi! Resi! Come here!’

The four eldest came at once.

‘Tell Frau Susanna what names Papa likes for the baby.’ Her plainly named Viennese daughters began to giggle.

‘Donatella,’ said Mitzi.

‘Galatea,’ said Franzi.

‘Leonarda,’ whispered the shy and ravishing Steffi.

‘Graziella,’ said Resi.

‘But which?’ I asked. ‘Which one is she to have?’

‘All of them!’ cried the children in chorus. ‘Every single one!’

‘He went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum with a notebook,’ said Frau Schumacher, shaking her head. ‘He spent all Sunday there looking for inspiration.’

‘Well, he certainly seems to have found it,’ I said.

Later I took Frau Schumacher to the shop to choose material for a summer dress. Mitzi had gone to play with Maia who was spending Sunday with her grandfather, and it wasn’t long before we heard Maia’s bossy voice coming over the courtyard wall.

‘We’re going to make a yurt. We’re in the middle of the Gobi desert on our camels and we’ve missed the oasis so we have to camp here.’

‘Can we make a fire and cook something nice?’ begged Mitzi.

‘No, of course we can’t! We have to crouch inside and chew raw yak meat. There’s going to be a terrible sandstorm — a fire would blow out straight away.’

‘That Maia!’ snorted Helene. ‘Last week she wanted Mitzi to be an Inca and sacrifice a llama. She’s a real bully, that girl.’

A bully, yes, but a visionary too. At Mitzi’s age I too would have made yurts.

I have just had the most extraordinary interview with Frau Egger, the wife of the Minister of Planning.

Her cloak is almost finished. She came this afternoon for a final fitting and it looked very nice, but she still wanted the military buttons with the owl’s head, the lance and the motto saying Aggredi. I can see that in the sight of God it really cannot matter if one of my clients parades down the Ringstrasse labelled Charge, but it matters to me, and I was about to argue when, to my horror, she clutched my arm and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Please, Frau Susanna… could I speak to you for a moment? In private?’

I tried to refuse. Nini was out at the lacemaker’s, but I was in no doubt that it was Lily from the post office that was on Frau Egger’s mind.

‘I know you’re busy,’ she went on, ‘but I won’t keep you and I’m desperate. I’m simply desperate!’

With considerable reluctance I took her up to my sitting room and fetched the bottle of eau de vie I keep for special customers.

‘I shouldn’t, I know,’ she said, draining her glass at a gulp. ‘I don’t usually drink spirits, but I’m so unhappy and I thought if I can’t speak to the Anarchist girl myself perhaps you’d ask her to give a message to Lily?’

‘Frau Egger, I honestly don’t think you have anything to worry about. I’m sure that —’

‘Oh, but I do, I do. You don’t understand, I have everything to worry about.’

She held out her glass with a trembling hand and I filled it again, but with misgivings. My eau de vie is made by Gretl’s uncle who owns an orchard in Bregenz, and consists of almost neat spirit through which an apricot or two has briefly passed.

Frau Egger was really crying now, grinding her handkerchief into her eyes.

‘It’s dreadful, quite dreadful. I’m in despair.’

I made another attempt to console her. ‘Nini assures me that Lily is no longer interested in your husband. She has given him up.’

‘I know! I know she’s given him up, that’s what’s so terrible! My cook’s sister-in-law works as a chambermaid in the Hotel Post where my husband used to take Lily. The walls are very thin and she heard Lily tell my husband that she didn’t want to see him any more because I was a good woman. “Your wife is a good woman,” she heard Lily say, “she takes soup to the poor and I don’t want to hurt her any more.” But I’m not a good woman, Frau Susanna. I only take soup to the poor because the cook always makes too much and really there’s not a lot you can do with soup. If your girl told Lily that, would she take my husband back, do you think?’

‘Frau Egger, I don’t honestly think Nini could tell her that.’

‘Oh, but she must! She must! She must implore Lily not to give him up. And if she could tell Lily that he expects all sorts of advancements after the November elections. Ennoblement is not out of the question.’

She gulped down her second glass of spirits and, fumbling about in her reticule, pulled out a very pretty gold-link chain.

‘My husband is not very generous,’ she said. ‘Men don’t often think of these things but if the bomb-throwing girl could give this to Lily… just to show her that I really don’t mind. That all I desire is my husband’s happiness. There’s a bracelet that goes with it if she wanted it.’

I was by now extremely harrowed, but it seemed necessary to bring the poor woman down to earth.

‘I really don’t think it would work.’

‘Oh, but it must work. It must!’ Before I could stop her she had reached for the bottle and poured out a third glass of brandy and tipped it down her throat. ‘Of course if it’s not that… if it’s not me being good, and the soup… I mean, if it’s my husband’s Little Habit, then she must tell Lily that one gets used to it. Really. Well, almost.’

I removed the bottle and put it away in the cupboard, but it was too late. Frau Egger was now definitely drunk and the marital despair of a lifetime poured from her.

‘You see, it’s all right for you, Frau Susanna. You’re beautiful and I don’t suppose you’ve ever had to… not year in, year out, with someone you don’t like. And of course my parents said I was lucky when Egger asked me. He appeared from nowhere and Father helped him get a job as a clerk in the Ministry — and I was on the shelf. But I didn’t realize how it would go on and on… Every Tuesday and Friday after lunch it has to be. His doctor told him twice a week is the right amount and everything Willibald does is as regular as clockwork. While I thought there might be children I could bear it but now I don’t know what to do. If I say “Let’s do it in the dark,” he says, “Come, Adelheid, you’re not as ugly as that —” but of course that’s not what I mean. It used to be easier because we had such an excellent organ grinder down in the street. A real musician. I used to pay him to come and play under the window in the afternoons when Willibald was home. Strauss waltzes mostly. I could manage while he played Strauss. Johann, of course… and Josef too. Not Eduard so much; Eduard’s waltzes are too sad. But of course the neighbours didn’t like it and then the organ grinder went away.’

Frau Egger blew her nose and looked round for more brandy, but in vain.

‘Then he took up with Lily… Oh, it was wonderful; you can’t believe it, Frau Susanna! For months he didn’t come near me and he was almost good-tempered. It was like being born again. I started embroidering a footstool cover in petit point. I used to love embroidery when I was a girl, but after my marriage I couldn’t seem to settle down to it. And now it’s all over and there he is again with his white stomach and his Habit. I should have known,’ she wailed, beginning to cry again, ‘I should have known that nothing good could ever happen to me.’

As a result of this conversation I have decided to be noble. Frau Egger shall have her buttons. Let no one say that I put my professional reputation before compassion to a deeply stricken soul.