The Foreigner

by P. G. Glynn

  Ludwig said he could not hear them. But she was not imagining them telling her to kill Marie at the first opportunity and take the baby. It was Ludwig’s hearing at fault, not Lenka’s sanity.

  She was not going mad. Why, when she looked in the mirror she saw the beauty she had always seen! So everything was as it should be, except that she had still not killed Marie, still not claimed Carla as her daughter.

  “Claim her now!”

  The voices were insistent and they were shouting. Lenka held her head, wishing they would not shout so loudly. How could she think, with them never giving her any rest? But they were right. Carla would obviously not stop crying until her real mother arrived.

  “It is time!”

  Lenka obediently left her bed and set off. What a pity it was that the cow had not died last night while the family were dining! Marie had come close to choking to death after Lenka mentioned that the legs she was eating in her goulash had been torn from live frogs. Otto had rushed to her rescue, though, and once again his substitute-wife had survived. She would not survive this time … and there would be extra pleasure in killing the bitch in front of her over-attentive husband …

  +++++

  Eva was feeling almost as agitated as the baby, who kept refusing the bottle’s teat. Carla was making it painfully clear that it was her mother’s nipple she wanted – but there was no knowing where her mother was. It was unheard of for Frau Otto not to be here, hovering and trying to tell Eva how to do her job, so where could she have gone? If in Schloss Berger she would surely have heard Carla by now and would without doubt have come on the trot. So had she left the Schloss? It was beyond imagining that she had, at such an unearthly hour, and yet she must have. Eva would persevere with the teat … while beseeching the Holy Mother to bring the mistress quickly back.

  When she finally heard someone arriving she breathed a sigh of relief and called through Carla’s screams: “Is that you, Frau Otto?”

  “It’s me,” Lenka said, suddenly appearing in the nursery doorway. “Where is she?”

  Shocked to see that Frau Ludwig was naked, Eva quickly looked away from the bronzed body and returned her attention to the child in her arms. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Then give Carla to me,” Lenka said, crossing the room eagerly, her arms outstretched. “She can suckle at my breasts.”

  “No, she can’t!” Eva now saw the expression in Frau Ludwig’s eyes and realised that she needed to tread carefully. “I mean, you won’t have milk for Carla. Frau Otto will be along in a bit to feed her daughter.”

  “Frau Otto’s neglecting her and I … I’ve plenty of milk. So do as I tell you and hand my little darling over.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Whatever do you mean? Unless you hand her over instantly I’ll see that you’re dismissed and that you never again work with babies. Do you hear me?”

  Eva heard her and also saw that Frau Ludwig had drawn close enough to snatch Carla, which seemed to be her intention. What was wrong with her? It was rumoured below stairs that she had a few screws loose. “Yes,” Eva said, “except that she’s … she’s my responsibility and I have instructions from her mother not to … ”

  “I am her mother. She was stolen from me.” Lenka was breathing heavily and speaking with emphasis. “So give her back or you’ll wish you had.”

  Terrified, Eva – who had been retreating from Lenka – now found herself up against a wall. Still clutching Carla to her she tried one last tack: “If you can express milk from your breasts,” she said, trembling, “I’ll know you’re who you say you are … and will hand Carla over.”

  +++++

  Mama Berger had tried hard not to interfere. But there was only so much crying a grandmother could stand before having to take action. Why, it might even be that if between them her mother and nanny could not quieten her, Carla was crying for her Omama!

  So Marta headed purposefully for the Rosenzimmer wing. She would not apologise to Marie for going to see what was wrong. Something must be, for Carla to be making such a din.

  Children didn’t cry without reason and Mama had never heard her cry like this. As a rule she was placid – and, at three months, entrancing with her violet eyes and the sweetest of smiles. Those eyes, Mama was sure, had seen the world before. So knowing they were, and so wise, that Carla’s was unmistakably an old soul. She was back here again with her memories of heaven still fresh. But these would have faded by the time she could tell of them. So God’s secrets were preserved, with humans believing their life had begun at birth!

  Reaching the Rosenzimmer landing, Marta found Emil pacing up and down in his pyjamas muttering to himself. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” he said. “Only, you see, Lenka’s in there. I don’t know where Otto and Marie are.”

  “They aren’t with Carla?”

  “I don’t think so. I saw them from my window, a long time ago.”

  If he had seen them from his window they weren’t in the castle, which was odd to say the least with Carla needing feeding. Marie normally fed her almost before she needed it and never previously had Mama known her not to be safeguarding the baby and keeping everyone – especially Lenka – at bay. No doubt there was some explanation for her absence, but heaven help them all if Mama hadn’t banished Lenka and calmed Carla before Marie’s return!

  Opening the Rosenzimmer door she saw that Eva was with Lenka on the balcony … and that Lenka was holding the screaming baby. She heard Eva say: “Give her back to me. You had no business grabbing her like that. Your breasts are empty, just as I said they would be.”

  “Stop saying it, you pathetic creature! My breasts are so big that they must have milk.” Lenka forced her nipple into Carla’s unwilling mouth, quietening the child for a split second. Then the yells began again, with flailing fists accompanying them. “And you can stop it, too, little devil! On top of everything else, you smell.”

  Lenka held Carla away from her. Sensing danger, Mama knew better than to startle her daughter-in-law, who was still unaware of her presence. “Let me have her, then,” she suggested gently. “You can have her back when we’ve changed her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  As Lenka swung round to look at her blankly, Mama said: “Her nappies need ... ”

  “You’re trying to trick me – but you won’t succeed! They’ll stop your trickery.”

  “They?” Mama asked, playing for time, while Lenka looked around wild-eyed as if seeing people Marta and Eva could not see.

  “My … friends. They’re telling me … that she … isn’t fit to live.”

  “But she is! Don’t listen to them. Don’t … ”

  Before a shocked Mama or Eva could make a move to stop her, Lenka had taken two paces to the edge of the balcony … and dropped Carla over.

  30

  Almost the worst thing for Marta had been Lenka’s blood-curdling scream immediately upon dropping the baby. And after screaming she had seemed to disintegrate, talking gibberish before shrivelling into someone unrecognisable as Ludwig’s wife. With her eyes rolling, she had cringed in a corner of the balcony, her arms clasping her abdomen, her lovely features contorting in an instant into hideousness.

  It was all too obvious that she was lost to them. The poor child was truly out of her mind. Why, Lenka had not even heard Carla’s cry – the cry that said she was still alive! Rudi Patzak had, providentially, been on hand to catch the baby. An under-gardener, Rudi was walking out with Eva and had been in the vicinity in the hope of seeing her. So he had witnessed the drama on the balcony and been able to save Carla’s precious life. Mama had since rewarded both servants for their ordeal … and had sworn them to silence on the subject of Lenka.

  There had seemed no sense in bothering the young parents unnecessarily. No lasting harm had been occasioned to Carla and, after all, Lenka had not meant to harm her. She had obviously gone beyond rationality - and was also gone from Schloss Berger before Otto and Marie returned, glowing, from their morning walk
. Marta had never seen Marie glow like that before and, despite all the trauma, it had not been lost on her that love on the hilltop might be the cause. If Otto and she were now bonded together as they had certainly not been before, it would be an act of sheer folly to give Marie a watertight reason for leaving Bohemia. Better by far to give her reasons for staying here … or at least to keep certain problems from her.

  Emil and Anna had seen the logic in this and it was made easier by Marie’s preference for speaking English. The secret could be kept, Marta was fairly sure, and she only hoped God would forgive her. She believed He would, given that she had acted in her family’s best interests. Thanks be to the Holy Mother that there had not been a major tragedy!

  It was tragic, of course, that Lenka was temporarily classified as mad, but Marta had heard from Ludwig that she was responding well to treatment and, after all, it was surely no worse to be sick in one’s mind than in one’s body. Mental abnormalities just seemed worse because they were frightening to see, and Marta blamed herself for not seeing sooner that Lenka’s behaviour pointed to her needing treatment. Ludwig must have seen, and must have been anticipating some kind of breakdown, since he knew at once where to take her and seemingly she was in the best possible hands in Berlin. The clinic would rid her of the demons possessing her and Marta was confident that she would one day return home restored to the old Lenka. Meanwhile Marta remembered her in prayer, confident that the Blessed Virgin was listening and that at the right time there would come an answer.

  +++++

  Otto doubted there were many greater delights than strolling in the garden with Marie at the height of summer, knowing that she was now truly his wife. She had been his ever since their idyll on the hill and this knowledge thrilled him. He was quite the luckiest of men, with Charles just a distant memory.

  Or so he told himself as, arm-in-arm, he walked with Marie past the little stream where he used to catch minnows as a boy. Yes, he was well blessed and to top everything else he was shot of Lenka and Ludwig! From the sound of things they wouldn’t be back in a hurry from Berlin. Having long suspected that Lenka had bats in her belfry, he had not been too surprised to learn from Rudolf that his suspicions were correct. With them out of the way ‘on holiday’, the atmosphere in Schloss Berger had improved a hundred per cent.

  Pausing to inhale the heavily scented air, Otto suggested: “Let’s sit for a bit and admire the scenery.”

  After selecting a spot shaded by a weeping willow tree and settling there quite comfortably, Marie said to him: “You’re certainly a man who knows exactly how to get his own way.”

  “I am? You wanted to sit somewhere else?”

  She grinned. “I wasn’t referring to where we are – more to where we were.”

  He liked it when she talked in riddles. “When were we there?”

  “Oh, at a guess I’d say it was a couple of months ago.”

  “As long as that? Then I’ll really have to put on my thinking cap. Have I told you that I love you in blue … in and out of it?”

  “You might have.” Marie glanced down at the dress she was wearing. Chiffon, in a blue the colour of forget-me-nots, Otto had bought it for her in Arnau yesterday, along with a new lace negligee. He was forever buying her things. “I can’t remember … although I can remember being undressed at the time in question.”

  “Let me see, then,” he said, softly stroking her neck. “We must either have been in bed … or high on a hill, finding each other at daybreak. Is that where we were, Liebchen?”

  She was trembling again, as she had trembled then. She could not look back on that morning without feeling as she had felt. What had happened to her, up there, she wondered. Had she begun to fall in love with her husband? “Yes.”

  “And you remember the occasion as one when I got my own way?”

  “In a sense.”

  “Not in every sense, then?”

  “No.” She smiled provocatively at him from under her lashes. “I have other memories as well.”

  “Thank heaven!” A hope was growing in him – one to which he hardly dared give expression. “I’d hate it if your recollections differed entirely from mine. We were happy, weren’t we … and have been happy since?”

  Marie could barely credit that here, so far from Charles and the theatre, she was experiencing something that resembled happiness. At a loss to understand, she refused to dwell on the matter. “We were busy,” she told him.

  “Busy?”

  “Yes … fulfilling your wish. Although of course there’s no guarantee that we won’t be giving Carla a sister.”

  Such joy was surging in him that he doubted he could contain it. “We made a baby, Marie?”

  “Dr Novak has just confirmed we did … and, knowing your luck, the baby’s bound to be a son. Whatever it is, I absolutely insist on giving birth this time in Britain.”

  Otto was so cock-a-hoop he would have promised her anything. Clasping his beloved to him, he told her: “You’ve no need to insist, my darling. If you are giving me a son – or a daughter – you can give him or her to me in any country of your choosing.”

  +++++

  “But why,” a bewildered Mama asked Marie, “why, when you seem to have settled contentedly here, are you so intent on going ‘home’? I had hoped that you now regarded Schloss Berger as your home and that you would want to bring your children up in this environment. It is, after all, their father’s birthright … and I doubt there could be a better setting in which to rear a family.”

  “For you maybe,” Marie said, “but not for me.” She was tiring of these discussions, which Mama was initiating more and more frequently. “I’m British and, more than that, I’m an actress. Away from the theatre I’m a fish out of water. Otto knew the position when he married me and agreed that we’d live in Britain, so stop trying to make me feel guilty.”

  Marta would try anything, do anything, to keep her son and his children in Bohemia. But so far she simply didn’t seem to be making much headway. “You regard acting as of more importance than being a wife to your husband and a mother to your babies?”

  “My priorities are not your concern and … and Otto has no complaints.”

  “He’s too head-over-heels in love to see beyond the nose on his face. So I’m trying to help you see it’s a wife’s duty to do right by her family, even if that involves certain sacrifices.”

  “You have your definition of ‘duty’ and I have mine.”

  “Look at her, Marie – look at your daughter and tell me you’re doing the right thing by her in returning to the theatre.”

  Carla, at six months, was quite the most angelic, appealing child on earth and Marie did have pangs at the prospect of partings from her. But childhood did not last forever, whereas acting was something that lasted and that was so much in Marie’s blood she could not think of an existence other than one in which she acted. As if on cue Carla, who was on her knee, looked up at her and said: “Mama?”

  They were sitting with Anna on the little lawn near the apiaries and had been having a picnic. Otto was busy elsewhere, making the final travel arrangements. Marie could hardly believe that she would be in London again by the end of next week. “You’re being unfair,” she told Mama, as Anna looked on, smiling and nodding. “My love for Carla isn’t in question. I shall never do the wrong thing by her if I can possibly help it. She is so special that I’d die for her if necessary. But what you seem unable to comprehend is that I’d be as good as dead if anything, or anyone, kept me from my profession. Acting is my life in a way that’s impossible to explain. I need the stage just as others need food and drink. Otto understands that and always has. I think you’re being selfish, trying to keep us here when we’re committed to being elsewhere.”

  “You think I’m being selfish? I’m trying to be realistic … trying to get it across to you that you’re putting yourself first and everyone else second. Why should your whole family have to be uprooted from a place of such beauty because one of
its members is too blinkered to see that she’s chasing a dream? This is reality, Marie,” Marta gestured with one arm, “our darling Carla, the brother or sister who’s due next year, and the husband who needs a full-time wife, not a part-time one. No role has ever been written for the stage, nor ever will be, that can – or should – take precedence over your role in life’s production. Tell me, my dear, you will at least consider what I’ve said. It’s meant to be helpful. I just don’t want to see you making a mistake you might live to regret.”

  “I have considered, and I’m not making a mistake,” Marie said.

  +++++

  They were leaving the day after tomorrow and yesterday Marie had received a letter from Nell, telling of the night when Dolly got the bird and mentioning ‘C.B isn’t the man he was and if you ask me has gone to pot. Yes I’ve told him of your little daughter and that’s the only time I’ve seen him smile since your departure, but I shouldn’t be bothering you with any of this seeing there’s nothing you can do about it … ’

  The fact that Marie could do nothing about it made it in certain respects all the more disturbing. Even after arriving in London she could hardly run to Charles offering to save his show for a second time. First there was Carla, then Marie’s pregnancy, and finally there were Otto’s feelings to consider. He virtually worshipped her and could not be expected to stand back and watch as she returned to the Tavistock and to Charles’s arms. That would be too much to expect of anyone, besides which affection seemed to be growing in her for him. She could never love him like she loved Charles. That was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. But by and large he was proving a good husband, which she must acknowledge by being as good a wife as possible. How would it feel, though, to be back in London and not run to Charles? Knowing that it would feel all wrong, and reflecting on how it seared her to think of his having ‘gone to pot’, Marie only hoped and prayed Mama could not have been right in maintaining that she was chasing a dream and that her reality now lay here in Bohemia …