House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Here, Gruber, have a taste,’ said Otto, passing the beef tin brimming with champagne to the servant.

  Karl ‘Kanalrat’ Gruber sipped, the bubbles tickling his tongue. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. For nearly two years Karl had pretended that his master was an ordinary officer, and an ordinary Jew. Goldbaum – the name shone in the dark. It was a polished coin from another life. It lay gleaming in Karl’s mind, a flare in a cavern. Yet out of respect and affection for his master, he remained complicit in the pretence. Otto Goldbaum had never asked him to treat him like a prince, and sometimes Karl wondered if he himself even remembered who he had been.

  ‘L’chaim,’ said Otto, smiling.

  ‘To life,’ said Karl, raising the champagne tin.

  ‘You see, Gruber, you’re learning,’ said Otto, amused.

  On discovering that his servant was a Jew who was only recently aware of his heritage, Otto had dedicated himself to Gruber’s secular education, teaching him snatches of Yiddish and old jokes. The Yiddish Karl liked – but the jokes he rarely understood, laughing only to satisfy Otto.

  Karl presently sported an intriguing mixture of German and imperial uniform: the Austrian army was no longer able to resupply kit, and the Empire’s summer blue tunic and trousers were silently replaced with Kaiser green. To Karl’s frustration, his master refused, insisted that he was not fighting for Germany, but for Austria and the ideal of an empire of mixed peoples united under one nation and flag and Emperor. Only now the Emperor was dead, and Otto’s imperial Rittmeister uniform had worn almost to rags, however often Karl stitched it back together.

  The Russian guns fired, crimson rain fell earthwards and then darkness. A moment later there was a scuffle and commotion from the dirt road, a clatter and shouts. Instinctively Karl reached for his rifle. Their camp lay beside a bedraggled, burnt-out copse set back from the flat of the endless swamp. This had been a Russian position during the spring, and in retreat they had burned everything: trees, barns, crops and villages. He had watched, half in awe, as crimson fields blazed, blackening the skies, and fountains of earth rose from the ground under the barrage of shells. Now it was mostly hidden beneath a layer of snow, the ruined cottages with their caved-in walls desolate and dark, the windows unlit. The rattle came closer, louder.

  Otto stood, seizing his helmet. He turned to Karl. ‘Come. We must see what it is.’

  Karl saluted and fastened his coat, apprehension rising in him like heat. He followed Otto out into the snow and down towards the marshes. Shudders of white fire rose up his leg. He’d suffered frostbite last winter and his little toe had turned to blackened jelly – as long as the swelling didn’t get so bad that he had to take his boot off; if you had to go without boots, you were done for. He refused to tell Otto. The officer would send him to the field hospital, and then Otto would be allocated another servant who wouldn’t take such fine care of him. And afterwards, when Karl was sent back, who knows what sort of fellow he would be ordered to serve. The pain wasn’t so bad, nothing a little schnapps wouldn’t soften.

  They crouched at the edge of the marsh, listening. They crept low along the planks, taking care not to look to either side, grateful that the cold masked the stench of bodies. At the far edge of the marsh, Karl made out the flash of Russian guns on top of the hill, too distant to cause alarm.

  ‘Can you hear anything else, Gruber?’ asked Otto.

  ‘No, sir, nothing.’

  The two men slid back across the darkened marsh. The stars lurked behind cloud, so that the frozen faces of the dead stayed hidden in the waters. In the autumn, a Russian officer had approached with a white flag asking for permission to bury the corpses sinking amongst the reeds, but the German commandant refused: the dead served to remind both sides of the folly of fighting in the swamp.

  The rattle started again, louder this time, accompanied by voices. Karl stiffened and then, realising the voices were German, relaxed. Then, as they turned, they saw several soldiers from another company pushing a piano covered in tarpaulin up the slope towards them. It rattled a discordant tune as they shoved it along, the hammers hitting the strings as it jolted across the ruts.

  The men halted, sweaty and triumphant.

  ‘Know anyone who can play?’ asked one.

  Karl and Otto stared at them in bemusement, Karl half-wondering if Otto was about to issue a reprimand.

  ‘Schwartz, in D Company, used to play the violin at the Opera House,’ said Otto at last.

  Karl and Otto lingered apart from the others, reluctant to leave, and curious. A few minutes later, Schwartz was produced and stood staring at the solitary piano in disbelief. The men jollied him to the piano, fashioning a stool out of an ammunition box. He sat, and after a moment’s hesitation removed his gloves and started to play. He paused, a blissful childish smile spreading across his face.

  ‘It’s not bad! Almost in tune.’

  He launched into a melody, rippling up and down the keys, and as Karl listened he saw notes drifting upwards and spattering the greying snow with colour. Through a haze of champagne and pulsing feet, he watched the blackened trees festooned with pink and blue and green and the imaginings of spring. He glanced at Otto and saw that his master listened with his eyes closed, a beatific calm spread across his face.

  ‘“Clair de Lune”. This was one of my sister’s favourite pieces,’ said Otto quietly. He opened his eyes again and recited:

  ‘While singing in a minor key

  Of victorious love and an easy life

  They do not seem to believe in their happiness

  And their song mingles with the moonlight.’

  When he had joined up, Karl had expected the discomfort, the terror and even the boredom. He had not expected poetry. His reverie was punctured by a patter of distant guns.

  ‘How can they fire on New Year?’ grumbled a soldier, wiping his nose with the back of his glove.

  ‘Maybe it’s a mutiny,’ added another, hopefully.

  The pianist continued to play, and Karl felt the music roll down across the flat marshes, the sound echoing and carrying out in the distance.

  ‘It isn’t gunfire,’ exclaimed Otto with sudden understanding. ‘They’re clapping.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Schwartz serenely, with the recognition of a performer, not stopping his playing, ‘it’s definitely applause.’

  Karl studied the huddled figure seated at the piano in the open field and understood that he too must once have been something, someone else.

  TEMPLE COURT, HAMPSHIRE

  One Minute Past Midnight

  Greta had wanted to have the baby in her own house, but the pains came on quickly during coffee with her mother-in-law. Two timorous and elderly footmen carried her upstairs, despite her protestations that they should send round the car and drive her back to Fontmell. They were puffing as they reached Greta’s old suite of rooms; at nine months pregnant and resisting furiously, Greta was quite a parcel. Lady Goldbaum followed and then stayed with her daughter-in-law, attempting to comfort her and apply cooling flannels to her forehead while they waited for the midwife. Greta paced the carpet, measuring the distance between tightenings by the number of red suns she could count. Soon, the woven orbs became beacons for the agony – a fire that spread across her pelvis and lodged in the base of her spine. There was a wrongness to the pain that frightened her. It had not felt like this when she had laboured with Celia. Her back felt as if it was being stretched and split, gathering into a howl during each contraction and barely easing as it fell away.

  Anna, the midwife and Lady Goldbaum held Greta’s hands, and the more they whispered everything was going to be perfectly all right, the more she feared it would not. The hours passed, measured out only in the rush and hurry of hurting. Each time she thought she could not bear it, that she must break apart. She cried and sobbed as Anna and Adelheid rocked her between them as she shuddered and gasped, her belly tight and hard. By the afternoon Greta could no longer speak in English, able
only to murmur in her mother tongue. At dusk she could no longer speak at all, but only scream and whimper. The doctor had been summoned, but Greta had not been due for a fortnight and the best physicians were all busy tending to the wounded.

  The doctor arrived late in the evening and they laid her back on the bed, so that he could shove his hand deep inside her to rupture her waters with a crochet hook. Greta vomited on his shoes.

  ‘She’s exhausted. We must hurry it along before baby tires,’ he explained, trying to keep the anxiety from his voice.

  Greta had thought it couldn’t get worse, but the next contraction was so powerful that she fainted for a few seconds. She wanted to stay there, at a distance from the twisting and wrenching in her back. Through a fog of crimson suns she heard herself scream, and the midwife and doctor plead with her to push. I don’t want to push, I want to die, she thought. I only want this pain to stop.

  In her distraction, Lady Goldbaum had quite forgotten that it was New Year’s Eve and she had thirty guests for dinner. She sent her apologies downstairs, told her husband to host alone, and instructed the pianist in the salon to play the Debussy a little louder and, should the commotion upstairs become audible, to switch to Wagner.

  Greta sobbed, hopeless and weary. Between each contraction she fell asleep for a few seconds, only to wake with a start as the pain lit up again, slicing through her spine and the depths of her belly like an open wound.

  ‘Think of the baby. Just a little longer,’ consoled Adelheid.

  ‘Celia. Remember Celia,’ whispered Anna.

  Through the torment, Greta understood that Anna was reminding her of her duty to her daughter. She must not die, not now when Albert was in France. She did not love this baby yet, but she did love Celia. With an animal cry, she pushed. The sound filled the corridors, feral and fierce. From down below came the strains of Wagner.

  The baby arrived quickly, in a rush of blood, while Greta yelled, ignoring the doctor’s pleas to be mindful of the guests attempting to enjoy their cognac below. It gave a mournful wail, as if put out at the indignity of its arrival, and then settled against Greta. She lay on the soaked bed and clutched the baby to her breast, resisting Anna’s attempts to take it from her. The doctor listened to the noisy chiming of the clocks calling from the East Gallery.

  ‘Time of birth, just after midnight, January the first.’

  Greta closed her eyes. The clocks continued to ring. The footman who had the knack of winding on all the clocks properly, so that each timepiece rang the hour at approximately the same time, had been called up, and subsequently time in the house had become vague. She did not think it at all clear whether the baby had been born at the last moment of 1916 or the first of 1917.

  ‘May I inspect the infant?’ asked the doctor, not wishing to be accused of neglecting his duty.

  ‘Soon,’ said Greta, not bothering to open her eyes, and holding it closer.

  ‘You have a nasty tear below. Would you like chloroform while I stitch you?’ he asked.

  Greta shook her head. She did not want to take her eyes off her baby, this wondrous stranger. No discomfort could be worse than what she had endured.

  ‘I’m afraid there is a shortage of surgical silk. And what remains is reserved for military hospitals. I’m going to have to stitch you with fishing wire.’

  Lady Goldbaum grunted in outrage. ‘So there is a hierarchy of wounds. Injuries sustained by men maiming one another are ranked above those inflicted upon a woman by nature.’

  The doctor paused in threading his needle to gaze at Lady Goldbaum with reproach. ‘Those are injuries sustained by men sacrificing themselves for their country, madam.’

  ‘And a woman sacrificing her body for her family is ordinary and second-rate, I suppose, worthy only of fishing wire.’

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl, madam?’ asked Anna, attempting to defuse the impending row.

  Realising that she hadn’t checked, Greta looked.

  ‘A boy,’ she announced. ‘Benjamin Howard Eli Goldbaum.’

  After he had finished stitching, the doctor slipped from the room, gratified to be the first to announce to the party gathered below that the British Goldbaums had a male heir to the dynasty at last.

  Half an hour later, Greta and Benjamin had been bathed and dressed in clean clothes. Anna bossed the housemaids as they tidied the room, removing bloodied sheets and stoking the fire. Drowsy and warm, and inhaling the strong animal smell of Benjamin’s head, Greta wondered about her husband.

  ‘Has Albert been told?’

  ‘They’re sending a wire to Montreuil-sur-Mer, madam,’ replied Anna.

  There was a knock at the door and the nursemaids led in Celia, pink-cheeked with sleep and barefoot.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said Greta, holding out her hand. ‘Would you like to meet your brother?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Celia, lingering in the doorway, half-afraid, her mother transformed into a stranger and tucked up with some unknown creature.

  ‘Come on,’ said Greta. ‘Hop in.’

  The nursemaid lifted Celia onto the bed, where she knelt, staring suspiciously at the red and swollen face of her brother. She gave him a good prod.

  ‘He’s your baby, too,’ said Greta.

  Celia stared at him, intrigued and a little revolted.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Celia scrutinised her mother, apparently weighing the moment. ‘Don’t want brother. Want doggy.’

  ‘All right,’ said Greta. ‘Benjamin will get you a dog. It will be a present from him.’

  She closed her eyes, overcome with sudden exhaustion, and seizing the opportunity of her mother’s inattention, Celia gave Benjamin another, harder poke. He opened a damp, toothless mouth and gave a sharp, plaintive wail. Celia smiled, satisfied.

  CHTEAU DE BEAUREPAIRE, MONTREUIL-SUR-MER, FRANCE, 1ST JANUARY

  One Minute Past Midnight

  ‘Isn’t this one of yours?’ said one of the generals, holding up a bottle of Latour Goldbaum for Albert’s inspection. ‘Not bad.’

  Dutifully Albert rose and glanced at the label, where a damp stain bloomed. ‘Yes, sir. The ’eighty-nine was a good vintage. Solid. The ’eighty-eight was better. There was very little rain and most of the harvest was spoiled, but the few bottles they made were remarkable.’

  ‘A good tip,’ said the General, tapping his nose and calling for the staff sergeant to inspect the cellars for the fabled vintage.

  Albert sighed inwardly, repelled but conscious this was part of the pageantry. The brigadiers and generals had transformed the petite château into a gentlemen’s club, a weekend version of those on St James’s or Pall Mall, where chaps could drink excellent wine, play tennis and swim, untroubled by women or war. Some mornings he rode out with General Haig himself, a fine figure on a beautifully groomed white horse flanked by his escort of Lancers, all the party sporting their red hat-bands, red tabs and the blue-and-red armlet of headquarters. To Albert they looked like the spectacular male of some species of rare beetle, spotted with colour. It was all for show. Red was no longer permitted at the front, not since one of the chipper colonels with his scarlet hat and tall head was shot during a tour of the trenches.

  Albert was torn between guilt and relief at his posting to Montreuil. He kept a plane at the airfield, so that on the occasions he was granted leave he could be back in Hampshire in about an hour. It added to the oddness of the experience: breakfast in France, lunch at home. He had expected to be sent to the front, but the order had come down that Albert Goldbaum, Member of Parliament for Fontmell West, with his familial and political influence and superb French, ought not to be sacrificed upon the enemy, but found a role on the British staff. Here at the château Albert understood that he was playing at war, while one hundred kilometres away men were being shot, gassed and mutilated. Tonight in the officers’ mess they had dined on partridge and almond soufflé while the band played ragtime. In June he had been awarded a medal for his exemplary service as an aide-de
-camp in arranging the triumphant official visit of King George (and sourcing not only partridge, but grouse, pears, walnuts, Roquefort, truffles and champagne), but he was too ashamed to wear the medal upon his breast until, after a month of reminders, he was so ordered by a brigadier.

  Two privates from the Royal Highland Fusiliers began to play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on a pair of bagpipes, the sound maudlin and unpleasant. After a minute the officers joined in. Albert couldn’t bear it. The pipers started a slow and melancholic performance of ‘God Save the King’ as everyone scrambled to their feet. He stood and sang obediently with his fellow officers, a mixture of regular soldiers (old career bombardiers, exultant at this stage of life to enjoy one last jolly war) and newly commissioned non-regular officers, seconded from regular life as mild-mannered surveyors and country solicitors. Life at General Staff Headquarters was a living monument to life before the war. They were woken at six by a servant bearing a tea tray and, after a bath, worked from eight in the morning until retiring to shave again before dinner at eight-thirty. The façade of croquet and bracing swims in the frigid waters of the pool, the gin Martinis and swirling glasses of burgundy were echoes of another life, trappings of false continuity.