by P. G. Glynn
In company with other Sunday strollers, all dressed in their best and the ladies mostly holding parasols, they made their way along Broad Walk and came to a lake on the far side of which a pale, ornate temple rose as if from Greek myth.
“Where better,” Otto Berger said, looking across at it, “than the Temple of Arethusa to eat our picnic?”
“Our picnic?” echoed Marie disbelievingly.
“Of course! Now that I have helped carry it I am sure that Nell at least will expect my help in eating it. Or am I wrong?”
“No, you are not!” Nell answered him, shaking her head vigorously. “Otto is welcome to join us, isn’t he, Marie?”
10
Nell hoped there would be enough food to go round. Maggie, who was deaf and dumb, had prepared a picnic for two dainty young ladies. When cutting wafer-thin slices of bread and removing the crusts before making sandwiches with egg and cress she was not catering for a man’s hearty appetite. Nor could her queen cakes be described as particularly filling but knowing this – and that they were their favourites – she had given the girls six. If Nell ate next to nothing, maybe nobody would notice and maybe Otto would not feel as hungry at the end of the picnic as he had felt at the start of it.
“You’d better eat faster,” Marie told her, “or else you’ll starve.”
“Or I could eat more slowly,” said Otto Berger knowingly with a flash of his gold teeth.
“That would be another solution,” Marie agreed, much to Nell’s chagrin. “When Maggie made this meal she, strangely enough, wasn’t catering for three.”
“Maggie is … ?” he asked interestedly.
“My mother’s maid,” answered Nell before her friend could put her foot in things again. It was beyond her why Marie was being so hostile to Otto, who had just been telling them how Arethusa was a nymph who had been turned into a spring so that she could avoid the attentions of the river god Alpheus. He was such a very knowledgeable gentleman that it was a pleasure to listen to him. He seemed to know something about absolutely everything. “I can’t imagine a more perfect spot for a picnic … and doubt Marie and I would have found it but for you pointing it out, Mr Berger.”
“Unless you remember to call me Otto, I shall have to resort to calling you Miss Sedgwick,” he said, “and that seems rather formal, doesn’t it, now that we’re friends?”
“Yes,” Nell agreed, blushing a little. “Yes, it does … Otto.”
“Crikey,” cried Marie, “pardon me for playing gooseberry! Just let me know if you want me to leave.”
“Of course we don’t want you to, dear!” exclaimed Nell in horror. “Whatever could have given you that idea?”
“It seems to me,” Otto Berger said, perfectly at ease on the plaid rug they had spread on the grass at the edge of the lake, just in front of the temple, “that, given the choice, Marie would have preferred a sting from the bee to being saddled with my company.”
“I wouldn’t have been stung, necessarily. The thing about bees,” Marie told him with a glare, “is that if ignored they just disappear sooner or later.” She paused, then added: “There’s something to be said for knowing when to make an exit.”
“Ah yes,” he readily agreed, “there is! And I learned from Nell earlier that you are a master – or should I say ‘mistress’? – of the art. I am regretting more and more that I shall be leaving London in the morning. Were I only not leaving, I’d make with all haste for the Tavistock Theatre.”
“It should be some consolation, then, to know that you’d have had a wasted journey,” said Marie, brightening at the reminder that he would be gone by this time tomorrow. “Unless you were prepared to queue for hours and put up with the pit or the gods, you’d have no hope of obtaining a ticket.”
He smiled benignly. “I don’t queue … and am used to obtaining the unobtainable.”
“You are?” asked Nell.
“Yes.” Then he said, sounding perplexed: “My sense of timing is usually better than this. Now that we three have met I feel considerably less enthusiastic about going home than I did. But it will be good to see Mama again after so long.”
Nell ventured to ask: “Does she also live in the … the Schloss?”
“She does,” he told her. “Would you care to see a picture of our little home?”
Otto extracted a photograph from his pocketbook and handed it to her. “But this isn’t little,” she gasped, “it’s a castle! Look, Marie … just look at where Mr Ber…, I mean Otto, lives!”
With the photo thrust in front of her Marie had no choice but to look. She saw a white castle set against a pine-clad hill. Its vast width accommodated countless tall windows and several doors, the main one opening on to a paved courtyard where stood a carriage and pair complete with coachman. There was a clock tower to one end rising above battlements beneath which was a long row of small circular windows rather like portholes on a boat.
“What,” Otto asked her, “do you think of my home in the Giant Mountains?”
She could hardly answer. His home was strangely familiar and his mention of the Giant Mountains struck some unaccountable chord in her. There was a sudden coldness around her heart … a sudden sense of having lived this moment in advance. Marie shuddered. “I think,” she said at last, glad to be handing the picture back to him, “that if he bought this your father must be extremely rich. How does he earn his living?”
“Papi doesn’t earn it,” Otto grinned. “He does nothing but lie in his coffin.”
Nell gasped: “He lies in his what?”
Conscious of her shock and of Marie’s seeming nonchalance he said: “Don’t worry, Nell! Papi isn’t a vampire: he’s dead. Before dying he ran our brewery, bleach works and linen factory that collectively make the money I spend – an arrangement very much to my liking. It was my grandfather, Johann Adam, who founded our family fortune in the latter half of the eighteenth century.”
“So you live off the fat of the land thanks to others’ endeavours, not your own,” Marie said in a derisory tone. “Have you no qualms about being so … so indolent?”
“None!” he confirmed cheerfully, taking a toothpick from an inlaid mother-of-pearl case and extracting food particles from between his teeth. “Are you suggesting, Marie, by any chance that I should have qualms?”
She thought his habits were disgusting and would have liked to say so but remembering her manners, or trying to, she simply said: “Yes – I make no apology for being opposed to inherited wealth.”
“Would you still be opposed to it if you were the inheritor?”
“Of course I would!” she retorted hotly. “I don’t have one rule for me and another for everyone else.”
“You don’t?”
“No. If I were an heiress I’d still want to work for a living. It is work that gives a person backbone, besides which I love working.”
“Do you have a particular reason for this … quirk?”
She had the oddest sensation. He was looking at her almost as if he knew about her and Charles, although he obviously could not possibly know. Marie said defensively: “I don’t have to have a reason for loving my work. Acting doesn’t seem like work to me, actually. It seems more like … ”
“ … a real-life flirtation with Charles Brodie?” he smiled. “I’d often wondered what went on between actors and their leading ladies.”
“How dare you!” She was angry and needed someone to blame for his surfeit of information. Marie rounded on Nell: “Have you been talking about me?”
“No, dear, of course I haven’t. You should know me better than that.”
“Well, if you haven’t, who has?” Marie realised too late that she had fallen into a trap. “Not,” she added, “that there’d be anything to say, especially.”
“Wouldn’t there?” asked Otto Berger. “I obtained a different impression, earlier.”
“Earlier?” Marie questioned before comprehending. She indignantly accused him: “You were listening in! Giddy godfathers
, when Nell and I were talking on the boat, you were listening.”
He said, unperturbed: “As I remember it, you did most of the talking.”
“Oh … oh,” Marie had such a strong urge to hit him that it took all her self-discipline not to, “you are insufferable … and are certainly no gentleman!”
“While you, I take it, are a lady?”
Nell, doubting the wisdom of letting Marie respond, rushed in saying the first thing that entered her head: “I can see nothing wrong in inheriting … things, if they’re there to be inherited. For me work is just a means to an end, whereas for Marie it is more in the nature of a … calling, which is one reason why her name is in lights while mine is at the bottom of the bill.”
“I’m sure that you’re too modest, Nell,” Otto said, helping himself to the last queen cake. “Once again I find myself wishing I could stay and see you both on-stage. Perhaps I am anti-work because my efforts in that department have never met with too much success.”
Marie asked with heavy sarcasm: “You have attempted dirtying your hands, then?”
“Yes – in Yorkshire, where they wanted agricultural workers. But my axe slipped as I was felling trees and I almost felled my foot instead. So I went to hospital for treatment and a lengthy convalescence and since then have accepted that I should not attempt to earn what is mine by birth. Besides,” he ended with a smile, thinking of the nurse who had assisted in his convalescing, “living takes up all my time!”
“You should be ashamed of yourself for being so idle!”
“Should I?” he asked Marie. “Why?”
“Because life was never meant to be so … so easy.”
“Was it not? I’ve never come across any dictum that says it should be hard. Where did you obtain your information?”
“Giddy godfathers, you’re impossible!”
“At least you aren’t indifferent to me. Your indifference would wound me deeply, whereas I’m encouraged by your fury. Incidentally, I’ve been meaning to ask who they are.”
“Who who are?” Marie could not credit the thickness of his skin. “And if you see my anger as remotely encouraging, then you’re even more arrogant than I originally thought you were!”
Ignoring her comment, Otto answered her question: “Your giddy godfathers. You’ve made several mentions of them. Are they real people or imaginary ones you draw on when incensed?”
“At least you’re aware of your incensing capacities!”
“Are you complimenting me?” Marie’s glare was answer enough, so before she could speak Otto suggested: “What he needs is a dose of jealousy.”
“What who needs?”
“Why, Charles Brodie! The way to bring a man to heel is by making him jealous – but I imagine you’re already well aware of that.”
Marie was flabbergasted. “There are no words with which to describe a person who eavesdrops on private conversations and then, as well as being proud of his dirty work, assumes his interpretation of what he has heard is the correct one. And as if the eavesdropping and assumption weren’t bad enough you’re now compounding things with silly advice.”
“Is it so silly, though? If Charles has not treated you as you perhaps deserve to be treated, wouldn’t it serve your purpose were we to … ?”
“We?” Marie interrupted him incredulously. “I trust you aren’t expecting me to take any suggestion of yours seriously.”
“I was merely suggesting dinner for the three of us,” he said. “With me leaving tomorrow there isn’t time for an affair.”
“If you think for one second that I’d ever have an affair with you, you’ve taken leave of your senses – assuming, probably wrongly, you ever had any sense.” Remembering his first sentence Marie then said: “Dinner for three – do you mean you, Charles and me?”
“Hardly,” he answered, “although such a potential ménage a trois would certainly have interesting possibilities. I was in fact envisaging inviting you and Nell to dine with me tonight.”
“Crikey!” Marie was surprised and guilt-stricken to realise she had virtually forgotten Nell was there. So antagonised was she by Otto Berger that it was almost as if her friend had momentarily ceased to exist. “Of course you meant Nell! I’m letting you tie me up in knots, which is quite uncharacteristic.”
“It might console you to know that I’m not entirely unaffected by you, either.”
“Oh … fiddle-faddle!”
“It’s a new experience for me to meet with such hostility. Theoretically I would have expected to prefer pleasing ladies to antagonising them, but I’m finding a certain,” he searched in vain for the right word, “je ne sais quoi in your inimitable reaction to me. Could it be that we are meant for each other but have yet to establish that fact?”
“If I thought for one moment we were,” said Marie, “I’d shoot myself.”
+++++
Strolling later, with Nell and Otto carrying a lighter picnic hamper, it occurred to Marie as she watched a family of coots strutting through a sunlit glade to the lake that making Charles jealous was not such a silly suggestion. To see him consumed by jealousy would help her feel better. But, after a day with him, could she endure an evening with Otto Berger?
As she mulled this over she heard Nell observe: “These Gardens seem to go on forever.”
“They don’t go as far, I gather, as our gardens in Bohemia.”
“Do you mean,” asked Nell, “botanical gardens there, or the land surrounding your castle?”
“Berger lands,” Otto confirmed. “They’ve been reduced by post-war land reforms but I understand that they still extend to five thousand hectares. Shall we head toward the Pagoda? Along with the temple where we picnicked and two others, not to mention the Ruined Arch, it was designed for Princess Augusta by Sir William Chambers in the 1760s. He kept himself busy, didn’t he?”
“He certainly did!” Nell agreed. “It should be me telling you all this, seeing that London is where I live – but I never knew it.”
“Then it’s best if I do the telling,” Otto said with a broad grin, “don’t you think?”
“It is,” Nell answered, laughing. “To know as much as you do, you obviously don’t spend all your time pleasure-seeking. Some must also be spent studying.”
“I just pick things up as I go along,” he said modestly. “I wouldn’t call it study, exactly.”
Nell wondered whether Mr Berger (she couldn’t think of him as Otto) could possibly have meant for Marie and her to join him tonight at Claridge’s for dinner. He could not have intended entertaining them there, could he? No; only the nobs set foot in such grand establishments – not the likes of Nell Sedgwick. Anyway, she would never know now because Marie had turned him down. And Nell could not in any event have accepted his invitation because she had promised to help this evening at a party Mother was giving for all the residents. She also possessed nothing suitable to wear for dinner in a posh hotel. So it was just as well that Marie had done as she did, although she could have done it more politely in Nell’s opinion. Not that Mr Berger seemed to mind Marie’s impoliteness. He seemed amused by it – or maybe bemused would be a better description. He had clearly never met a girl like her before, but then how could he have met a girl like Marie when she was the only one of her kind in existence? And of course the fact that her heart was breaking had to be taken into consideration. If she was rude it was probably because she was missing Charles Brodie and wishing herself with him rather than here for a picnic with Nell and an uninvited third party.
Odd how that bee had chanced along and brought Otto Berger into their lives so unexpectedly! Not that he would be in their lives for long. Once he was back in Bohemia he would soon forget having met Nell, even if it would take him a lot longer to forget meeting Marie. Fancy him listening in to their conversation on the NELL GWYN! Of course Marie was right in saying he shouldn’t have done that, unless there were different rules for aristocrats. But he was so very charming that one could forgive him anything.
Well, Nell could, except that it wasn’t up to her to do the forgiving. It was Marie’s heart, not hers, laid bare for Mr Berger. They had perhaps been unwise, speaking so intimately aboard a boat where they could be overheard but wisdom was not an issue for Marie at present. She was so upset about losing Charles Brodie that she was like a shadow of her former self. Oh, she could put on a convincing front for everyone at the Tavistock, Mr Brodie included, proving what a superb actress she was. But beneath the act it was obvious to Nell that she was lost. Marie had clearly given Charles more than her body. It had begun to seem as if she had also given him her soul.
After admiring the tiered and fluted Pagoda they walked along Cedar Vista through a woodland area and past the Water-lily Pond to Boathouse Walk, which ran the length of the four-acre Lake.
“My feet are killing me,” Marie complained as a moorhen suddenly sank beneath the water, leaving only its bill visible above the surface. “Yours must be killing you too, Nell, in those shoes except that you’re too taken with your new beau to notice. I pictured us having a leisurely stroll, not a lengthy hike. Either we rest awhile or I’ll die!”
“Otto is not my beau,” Nell protested, reddening.
“More’s the pity!” Otto said gallantly, indicating a bench where they could sit. Once they were sitting, with him positioned between Marie and Nell, he said: “I don’t seem to have had an answer yet.”
“To which question?” asked a still embarrassed Nell.
“It was less a question than an invitation – to dinner tonight at my Hotel. Would you both do me the honour of joining me, so that on my last evening in your beautiful city I might repay your kind hospitality?”
