The House at Tyneford (5 page)

“No, Mama, they’re yours. I have the gold chains if I need money.”

I reached for Anna’s hand, wishing that she would be quiet. Lights glinted in the apartments across the street, and where the curtains were not drawn we watched a marionette show of silhouettes perform rituals of daily life: maids drew baths or cleared away supper trays, an elderly lady took three tries to climb into her raised bed, a dog sat in a chair by an open window and a man all alone and naked except for his hat paced to and fro, hands clasped behind his back. This vantage point had been my and Margot’s favourite for many years, and we had glimpsed countless dramas play out across the street. When we were children we would squabble and scratch at one another’s faces, but dusk produced an inevitable truce, and we would creep out onto the balcony and sit beside one another in companionable silence and watch the show. It seemed almost inconceivable that it could continue without me. I looked down at my beautiful red-painted toes for comfort.

“The pearls are yours,” said Anna. “I gave the sapphires to Margot as a wedding gift and it is right that you should have the pearls.”

“Stop it,” I snapped. “Give them to me in New York.”

Anna fiddled with the hem of her gown and said nothing.

“Why do you want me to have them now?” I asked. “You’re not going to forget to send for me, are you? How can you forget me? You promised, Anna. You promised.”

“Darling! Calm, please.” She laughed at my outburst. “Of course I won’t forget you. Of all the silliest things.”

“Elise, you’re not easily forgotten,” said Margot. “You’re her daughter, not a pair of gloves.”

I folded my arms across my chest, shivering in the crisp night air, and struggled against the urge to cry. My family did not understand. They might be leaving, but they had each other. Only I was alone. I fretted that they would forget about me or, worse, discover that they liked it better without me.

From my position on the cushions I edged closer to Margot, greedy for her warmth.

“Oh, look,” she said, pointing at a balcony on the top floor, where a prim, uniformed maid held a curly-haired poodle over the edge of the parapet so it could tinkle. A yellow arc rained down on the pavement below.

Anna hissed her disapproval. “
Ach
, have you ever seen such laziness!”

“I think it’s highly original, and as such I applaud it,” I said.

“God help the family you end up with,” said Margot.

My retort was cut short, as Julian called us to come inside: “Darlings, the photographer is here.”

I can’t help wondering if perhaps I remember that last night so vividly because of the photograph. We all gathered in the drawing room, the tables pushed back against the wall, chairs laid out in hig-gledy rows. Lily Roth used her feather fascinator as a pointer to organise us into position and barked at the gentlemen to extinguish their cigars and cigarettes. Margot and I allowed ourselves to be directed to low stools near Julian and Anna. I still wasn’t wearing any shoes and hid my bare feet under my long dress. Margot and I huddled conspiratorially, giggling as the elderly ladies fussed and fidgeted and insisted that they be seated with their husbands or sons or nearer the back where their wobbling jowls would be less on display.

Photographs are so strange; they are always in the present tense, everyone captured in a moment that will never come again. We take them for posterity, and as the shutter blinks we think of the future versions of ourselves, looking back at this event. The photograph I have of the party is one snapped while we were waiting for the official picture to be taken. The flash exploded in a burst of light and caught us unawares. Margot and I sit whispering together, paying scant attention to the others, perhaps laughing at Lily conducting the crowd with her feather or the unnoticed gravy stain on Herr Finkelstein’s white shirt. I only realised when I looked at the picture how alike Margot and I were. Her hair is pale, and mine dark, but our eyes are the same, and except for a slight babyish roundness to my face, we are mirror sisters.

Jan Tibor watches us from the edge of the crowd. Anna and Julian are side by side, close and yet not quite touching, both watching some forgotten drama that is taking place outside of the frame. Anna wears her arctic fox jacket fastened with a diamond clasp, snow-white fur brushing her throat, silk gown spilling out from underneath. Her brown eyes are uneasy and her brow slightly furrowed. Julian leans toward her, handsome, unsmiling. His legs are crossed, and his left trouser has ridden up, showing a flash of unseemly sock, which I remember as virulent yellow. He disliked wearing black tie or tails, so always sported some small rebellion. By some trick of the photographer, only Anna and Julian are in sharp focus; the rest of us cluster around them, mortals at the feet of the white queen and her black-haired, cross-gartered prince.

I couldn’t sleep. I knew the moment I closed my eyes it would be morning and time to leave. I kicked off the bedcovers, climbed out of bed and crept into the silent hall. A pair of stray brandy glasses lay discarded on the windowsill at the far end, catching the light as dawn sneaked into the east, peeking between the gaps in the terraces. “Busy old fool, go back to bed,” I grumbled at the sun and padded into the kitchen, closing the door. Hildegard’s kitchen faced west, so it was comfortingly dark and nighttime still. It was a cramped room, built without regard to the convenience of the chef, but Hildegard was a sorceress when it came to cooking, and an endless stream of delicacies flowed from her lair. She had cleaned away the debris from the party, the wooden tops were scrubbed and leftovers carefully removed to the pantry. I decided upon a midnight—or rather five in the morning—snack and slipped into the larder.

On the top shelf, a large bowl of creamy custard rested under a glass dome, and beside it lay a tray of herbed potatoes. I decided that these would do very well and, unfolding the creaking steps, climbed up to retrieve my prize. I carried them back to the kitchen table and settled down with a large spoon. I was less than halfway through the custard, and hadn’t even begun upon the potatoes, when the door creaked open and Hildegard appeared in her flannel nightie and cap. She drew up a chair and sat with me as I licked the back of the spoon. She did not chide me for my nocturnal raid (I’d had my ears boxed for less) and instead seemed to consider that this was the last time she’d need to worry about her pigtailed thief.

She surveyed me from under hooded lids. “I’ve some marzipan. You want it on toast?”

I nodded and pushed the custard bowl aside. She heaved herself to her feet, unwrapped a loaf of bread, sawed off a thin slice and lit the grill.

“You’re to take Mrs. Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
with you,” she said, with her back to me. “I’ve circled my favourite passages.”

“But it’s huge.”

“The English are different from us. Mrs. Beeton will help you.”

I knew that this was not an argument I could win. I might refuse to take the book. I might refuse to pack it. I might even padlock my trunk. But I knew, with the same certainty I had that it would take two bowls of creamy custard before I was sick, that when I opened my trunk in London, the red-bound Mrs. Beeton would be nestled among my knickers.

“Fine. I’ll take it.”

There was a thud and the book landed on the table next to the bowl. I toyed with the idea of dropping yellow cream on it, but the truth was I knew it would take more than this to defeat Hildegard. I was too tired to read, but as I turned the pages a musty stench seeped into the kitchen. I suspected this was also the smell of old English houses. Sandwiched between two leaves was a thin piece of worn paper. I pulled it out and read the English inscription:
To Mrs. Roberts and her Sweetheart and House-band from a sincere and hearty well-wisher. May there be just sufficient clouds in one’s life to make a spectacular sunset.

I closed the book in disgust, hiding the paper. Hildegard was right: the English were different. On the occasion of a wedding, they wished one another unhappiness. And to talk about sunsets at the beginning of a marriage—it was all very distasteful. I was certain that such behaviour broke all sorts of rules of etiquette. Hildegard slapped in front of me a plate of toast with melting butter, thin slivers of marzipan sliced on top. I took a large bite and closed my eyes in contentment. Anna and Julian were asleep across the hall; the water pipes whined and groaned. I wanted to stay here forever, eating toast while my parents slept.

I have thought about that last night a hundred, no, a thousand times since, but I have never written it down before. And I find I like the permanence of the words upon the page. Julian and Anna are cradled safely in my words, caught up in paper dreams. I could leave memory aside and slide into fiction. There is nothing to prevent me from writing them a whole other story, the one I wished for them. But I don’t and I steal away, returning to the clamour of the present, the gardener asking about the geraniums, the postman arriving with a package, and I leave my parents asleep on a cool spring morning on Dorotheegasse long ago.

L
ondon was cold. A rancid layer of coal fog encased the whole of the city, bathing it in yellow dark; a perpetual half-light, neither dawn nor dusk. To my eyes, the people were grey and covered in a film of smog. They hurried everywhere, eyes downcast in the streets, never pausing to take in the beauty of a morning like they did in Vienna, but scurrying about their business, eager to escape into their houses.

I don’t recall much about the hostel where I spent my first night in England, except that it was in Great Portland Street, beside the synagogue, and filled with frightened girls from Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne. We’d all been terrified into speaking only English, but since we could not, we were silent. The mute girls watched me as I darted from the hallway to the shared toilet, eyes following me like Anna’s portrait at home. The hostel was funded by some Jewish philanthropists and provided free bed and board to girls newly arrived from Europe. We were permitted to take no valuables or money with us when we left, so we arrived on the doorstep of the hostel with nothing but our clothes and bags stuffed with books and letters and stockings—a lifetime of mementos of things left behind. The landlady insisted that my trunk be locked in a store on the ground floor, complaining that it was far too heavy to lug up to the top of the house. At least, that was what I’d understood when she’d surveyed my battered trunk and suitcases and hissed words at me in a torrent as harsh and baffling as the squawk of an angry goose. I didn’t have the English to argue, so I clasped my satchel and the viola case and shuffled up the stairs to bed.

After breakfast (weak tea, stale bread, orange-coloured jam) I walked to Mayfair. I clutched the letter from Mrs. Ellsworth in my hand; I had read and reread it a dozen times, but could glean nothing about the writer. Her instructions were quite clear: I must go to Audley Street. I did not know how far it was and I did not know how to ask for a ticket for one of the trams or omnibuses that clanked up and down the streets. I had visions of either being ejected from a moving vehicle for having paid the wrong fare, and landing on the ground in a crack of broken bones, or being whisked away to another part of the city, where I would be lost forever, unable to find my way back to Great Portland Street. I buttoned up my coat and adjusted my favourite emerald silk scarf (the one that Anna told me brought out the colour in my brown-green eyes) and made sure that I had on a clean pair of gloves.

I lingered outside the black door on Audley Street. It was freshly painted and a brass knocker gleamed, the front steps still wet from having been newly scrubbed. I closed my eyes and thought of how Anna had to play all different kinds of women, and resolved that I would do the same. Yes, I should be Violetta, the courtesan/whore adored by men, indifferent to the undignified flurries of public opinion—and also my favourite heroine of all time. Thus, imagining myself to be a debonair nineteenth-century harlot, I entered the Mayfair Private Service Agency.