The English Girl (7 page)

He’s amused now. The skin crinkles at the corners of his eyes. I feel I’ve sounded so young again.

‘No – let’s do it. It’s beautiful,’ I say.

‘If you’re sure…’

I play the introduction. He starts to sing.

There’s an unearthly stillness to the music, that always chills me.

Afterwards, when I look up, the memory of the music held in the silence of the room, I see our faces together in the mirror, our eyes meeting. There’s something unnerving about the way he looks at me. It’s a little like the way men look at you when they want you; yet it’s not that exactly. Both more and less than that.

I lower my eyes; but not before I see how he turns away rapidly too. The room feels colder.

‘Thank you so much, Stella.’ Easy, casual, charming. ‘Schubert can be so dark even in major keys,’ he says. ‘Well, I mustn’t interrupt your practice any more.’

He goes, and I start to work on the Czerny studies. But the wintry melancholy of Schubert’s songs stays with me. For hours and hours, I can’t get the chill of them out of my mind.

Saturday. Sunlight fills up my bedroom curtains as wind will fill up a sail.

‘Should I take Lukas out?’ I ask Marthe at breakfast. ‘It’s such a beautiful day. We could go and play ball in the Prater.’

I don’t know what my weekend duties will be; don’t know what is expected of me.

Marthe wipes an invisible smear from her coffee cup with her napkin. She raises the cup, and takes a fastidious sip.

‘Thank you for offering, Stella, but Lukas will need to stay at home. I’ve got family coming this afternoon – my cousin Elfi from Frankfurt.’

‘Oh. That’s nice…’

But I don’t know what this means for me. Will my presence be expected? I still don’t have a sense of how I fit into this household.

Marthe sees my uncertainty.

‘There’s no need for you to stay in at the weekends, Stella. Why don’t you begin exploring this lovely city of ours?’

‘Yes, I’d like that.’

‘You should start with the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That’s where you can see all our finest art.’

She tells me how to get there – the tram to Schottentor, then just four stops round the Ring.

There’s an easy Saturday feeling in the dining room. I decide it’s the perfect moment for the question I’m longing to ask.

‘Marthe – I wanted to talk about Lukas. He seems so very unhappy that Verity had to leave. And I don’t know how to comfort him…’

Marthe glances across at me. She seems suddenly fragile and hollow, like the dried seed-cases that hang from the plane trees in Beethovenplatz.

‘I had to ask her to leave, Stella.’ Her voice is thin as a trail of smoke. ‘Perhaps Janika told you.’

‘Yes. Yes, she did mention it.’

Marthe starts to rearrange the crockery on the table. A miserable mottled flush rises over her face.

‘Verity was upset, and said things that she shouldn’t have said,’ she tells me. ‘So I thought it was best if she didn’t see Lukas again.’

‘So – she didn’t say goodbye to him?’

‘I felt it was better to keep them apart. He’s such a sensitive child.’

I’m startled – that Verity and Lukas weren’t allowed to say goodbye, when she’d been looking after him ever since he was small. I can’t help feeling Marthe mishandled this.

I want to ask more. Though, even as I frame the question, I know this may be unwise.

‘I was wondering what the reason was – why Verity had to leave?’

‘It was a decision we came to,’ Marthe says briskly. She gets to her feet, still brushing the crumbs from her hands. ‘Well, I shouldn’t stay here talking, Stella, when there’s so much to be done.’

She bustles out of the room, and I’m embarrassed. I feel I’ve transgressed: I know I shouldn’t have asked.

After lunch, I prepare for my outing. I put on my best grey flannel suit, my low-heeled, lace-up shoes. I stare at myself in my mirror and don’t much like what I see. With my pink and white skin that flushes so readily, my modest sensible clothes, I still look like a schoolgirl. I think of Anneliese in her blouse of eau de Nil silk.

The day is darkening, after all the loveliness of the morning, the sky smeared over like a dirty windowpane. I take my umbrella with me.

I find the place without difficulty. There are two imposing palaces facing one another: one houses the art gallery, the other the Naturhistorisches Museum. Between the buildings there are formal gardens, everything groomed and ordered, with dark topiary and fountains and sleek, immaculate lawns. It’s all so different from English gardens: no flowers, no colour, just all these patterns and symmetries, the sculpted box hedging, the play of water and light.

I’d like to linger in the gardens. But there’s a sudden coolness: the first raindrops crackle the air.

The entrance hall of the art gallery is a gloomy, opulent space, with a domed marble ceiling, so high that looking up gives me vertigo. It’s crowded. People surge around me: solid men with waxed moustaches, elegant women with powdered faces and pearls.

I walk through hushed, echoey galleries. There are velvet sofas to rest on, and the ceilings are gilded and high. I pass through a room of paintings by Rubens, of bulging, languorous women. This art is all so different from the only art I know – my mother’s Margaret Tarrant devotional prints with their pastel, domestic angels; and the ballerina pictures on my bedroom wall.

There’s a room of German painting – Dürer, Cranach. A big religious painting dominates the room – Dürer’s
Landauer Altarpiece
. It shows crowds of angels and saints, with above them, the Crucifixion. Jesus’s face is fine-boned, pensive, turned to one side as though he’s listening. All the rich colours fill you up, the reds and greens and golds.

I stare for a long moment, then move on round the room, past
Judith and Holofernes
, which has Judith very stylishly dressed and looking rather pleased, and all the horrible detail of Holofernes’ severed neck – the bones and arteries shiny as redcurrants.

I come to a painting called
Paradise
, which shows the different episodes of the story of the Fall. Adam and Eve in the garden; Satan writhing down from the Tree, with a knowing smile and the sinuous tail of a snake; Adam and Eve being driven out of Paradise by a ferocious angel in a billowing coral robe. God is stern and dressed in red, and has a long forked beard. The detail of the painting is wonderful. There are trees hung with fruit like jewels – apricots, greengages, pears; there are unicorns, horses, white birds, all delicate as dancers. But it’s the bodies of Adam and Eve that keep on drawing my eye. They’re hairless, pale as buttermilk, the flesh so even and luminous. They seem at once disturbingly naked, and utterly unreal.

I sit on a sofa in front of
Paradise
for a while, absorbing all the detail of the picture.

But I start to feel a little lonely, sitting there. People mill around me – all with partners, friends, companions; nobody else is alone here. I feel a surge of homesickness. All this magnificence is too much for me, all the lavish gilt and marble. I long for something familiar, for English voices, for haphazard cottage gardens: for the restraint, the smaller scale, of home.

Outside, it’s raining steadily. I realise I have left my umbrella behind, in the Cranach gallery. I’m cross with myself. But I can’t quite face going back.

The rain comes on heavier, sheeting down, so my hair and my shoulders are drenched. I know I’m being stupid. I turn, retrace my steps. When the doorman sees my ticket, he lets me back inside.

The Cranach room is still crowded. But at least there’s no one sitting on the sofa where I sat. I can’t see the umbrella. Perhaps I put it down on the floor; perhaps it slid under the sofa. I feel disproportionately upset: lost, homesick, and shivery; unsure where to catch the tram that will take me back to Schottentor. I have such a yearning for Brockenhurst, for my mother.

I kneel, peer under the sofa, feeling very self-conscious. People will think I’m crazy. The umbrella isn’t there.

I straighten. The room spins: I take a step backwards to steady myself. I feel myself bump into someone; briefly, I feel all the warmth of the body I bumped against pressing into my back.

‘Oh.’

I’m intensely embarrassed. I spin round.

‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ I say.

A man – perhaps ten years older than me; tall, thin, dark-haired, with rather studious wire-rimmed glasses. Startled.

‘Oh. Are you?’ His face falls, rather comically. ‘I don’t think I am,’ he says.

He’s standing so close I can see the gold flecks in his eyes. He has pale skin and a pensive look, his head slightly turned to one side, like the listening Jesus in the
Landauer
Altarpiece
. He’s beautiful.

He takes a step back, to establish a more appropriate distance between us.

‘But perhaps we should start again? With a slightly more formal introduction?’ he says.

He has a complex expression – surprise, interest; something else, something more perilous.

I nod. I can’t take my eyes off him.

‘I’m Harri,’ he says. ‘Harri Reznik.’

‘I’m Stella Whittaker,’ I say.

It’s as though I can still feel the warmth of his body going through me.

‘You’re English?’ he says.

I’m appalled that he can tell so easily.

‘Is my accent really that bad?’

He laughs a little.

‘No, it’s very good indeed. But Stella Whittaker is an English name, I think?’

I have a sudden doubt. Should I be speaking to him like this – to a stranger, a man I don’t know, and so openly, in a public place? I push my doubt from my mind. I’m intensely aware of the scent of cedar that hangs about him. I have a strange sensation; it’s as though I’m suspended in some high place, perhaps on the Ferris wheel in the Prater, with below me, a great glimmering fall of bright air.

‘I came here to study. I’m a music student,’ I say.

‘What kind of music?’ he asks. ‘No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.’

He studies me – that look he has, pensive, his head on one side. I feel the flare of a blush in my face.

‘You’re not a singer, I suspect,’ he tells me. ‘Singers tend to be rather flamboyant…’

I feel a sag of disappointment. I wish I was flamboyant. I would like to be Anneliese, with a damson-coloured fedora and the highest, spindliest heels.

‘Show me your hands,’ he asks me.

I hold out my hands. They are shaking slightly. I know he notices this. He smiles, as though my hands please him.

‘A pianist,’ he says, very definitely.

This is dazzlingly clever. I think briefly of the gypsy woman at the Westbahnhof – how she scared me.

‘How on earth can you tell?’

‘Long fingers,’ he says. ‘And a pianist has to be solitary – you have to spend a lot of time on your own.’ His voice seems to resonate in my body. ‘Pianists are often quite retiring. And I think you’re a little reserved? Perhaps a little shy? Except when you go round bumping into perfect strangers, of course…’

We stand there for a moment, looking at one another. My hair is drenched; a wet strand falls into my eyes. He reaches out and pushes the hair from my face; his finger just grazes my skin, but I can feel the warmth in him. My breath is taken away. Because he’s so forward. Because his touch is so sweet.

‘Are you…?’

‘Do you…?’

We both start talking at once; then we both stop, laugh. A sudden startling happiness opens like a flower in me. Around us, I’m vaguely aware of people glancing in our direction – seeing exactly what is happening between us. Let them stare.

‘So – you like art? You like our Kunsthistorisches Museum?’ he says.

He has thin, eloquent hands, which he moves a lot as he talks. There’s something quicksilver about him.

‘Yes. I came earlier,’ I tell him. ‘I had a good look round … The thing is, I’m only here now because I had to come back…’

I bite my tongue. I sound so stupid.

He looks at me quizzically – that look he has, as though he’s searching for something inside me. A rather forensic look. I want him to touch me again. More than anything.

‘I was looking for something I’d lost…’ Saying this embarrasses me: it sounds too weighty, too significant somehow. ‘I was looking for my umbrella…’ My voice trails off.

‘And I came here to meet a friend,’ he says, ‘but the friend still hasn’t arrived…’

Is it a woman, this friend?
That’s the very first thing I think, when he says that.
Is
it a woman? Is she beautiful? Are you in love with her?
Jealous already.

‘So we have something in common, Fräulein Whittaker,’ he goes on. ‘We both came here looking for something that we couldn’t find,’ he says.

He has a slightly crooked smile. There’s something left open.

We couldn’t find what we came for, but we found one another.

The thought hangs in the air between us – delicate as a soap bubble in the moment before it bursts; perilous. I don’t say anything.

He takes a step away from me, as though worried he’s been too intense.

‘So, where are you studying, Fräulein Whittaker?’ he asks. A little more formal now, more matter-of-fact.

‘At the Academy of Music, on Lothringerstrasse. I have lessons on Thursdays at ten.’ I’m giving rather too much detail about where I can be found – we both know this. ‘And you?’ I say boldly. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a doctor,’ he tells me.

‘So…’ I don’t know what I should ask. ‘So – do you specialise in something?’

‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ he tells me. ‘I work at the Lower Austria Psychiatric Hospital, in Penzing.’

I haven’t heard of it, but I nod vigorously.

‘And I rent a consulting room on Thurngasse. I’m in training to be a psychoanalyst,’ he says.

I open my mouth, but I don’t know how to respond – don’t understand what the word means. He sees this.

‘I studied for a while with Dr Freud,’ he tells me. ‘You may have heard of him.’