Some weeks ago at one of their Sunday lunchtime parties, she had met the wife of an acquaintance of Bruno’s, a dark-eyed, vivacious, woman, glamorous, whom she thought she could discuss this with. Frau Hofer was in her late twenties, perhaps thirty, only a little older than Bettina. They had been engaged in a little tête-à-tête in the far corner of the drawing room, when Frau Hofer had announced that she was seeing Professor Freud.
‘Oh?’ Anna had looked at her in something like confusion. Though she had heard the name Freud two or three times, she had no clear idea of the import Frau Hofer seemed to attribute to her statement. ‘What does he do?’
The woman had been a trifle taken aback at her naivete, but had then said with a wicked gleam in her bright eyes, ‘He makes you see what you don’t know about yourself. And believe me, my dear, there is a lot one doesn’t know, a great deal one represses.’
Anna had mentioned Frau Hofer to Bruno, saying how much she liked her, casually asking him about Professor Freud.
‘Ha!’ Bruno’s reaction had been instantaneous. ‘A charlatan. Talks smut while pretending to cure. Why one might as well go to a prostitute.’ He stopped himself, realising what he had said, coughed. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t mean to offend you, insult Frau Hofer.’
Anna for once had laughed her old buoyant laugh.
‘Anna, Anna,’ Miss Isabel was calling her from the terrace. ‘Lunch, we’ll be late.’
‘Let’s have lunch in town.’ Anna came towards her with her old impetuous manner.
‘But everything’s ready. Frau Gruber will…’
‘I’ll speak to Frau Gruber. And I’m going to invite a friend to join us.’ Anna picked up the telephone, ‘Though it’s probably too late.’
It was. Katarina Hofer was just on her way out, but she invited Anna to come to her at five, for a late tea. And then if she liked, she might join herself and a young cousin at the opera. They had a box.
‘Oh yes.’
Sitting next to Miss Isabel in the car, Anna felt she had suddenly come back to life. All her trepidation about facing the doctor melted away in the excitement of the proffered outing with the glamorous Katarina Hofer.
Poor little Anna, Miss Isabel thought, happy to see her smiling for once.
Miss Isabel had very decided views about Anna’s marriage. She was grateful to her employer, of course, who was a generous, honourable man. But she was angry at a state of things which had made her radiant, kind-hearted Anna so listless. She had caught Bruno’s frequent glances at Anna’s waistline. What madness it was to try to chain a mere child of eighteen, to yoke her into being a dynastic breeder. Miss Isabel shook her trim head. Why even at her ripe age, when she had learned the difficult virtue of patience such a way of life would seem utterly distasteful.
But for the moment, Anna was happy. So happy that she sailed through the horrid examination.
The doctor was a sweet, rather dapper old man, who kept making little clucking maternal noises as he tapped and prodded at her stomach, poked his cool instruments at her chest and with more clucking noises, into her. When he had finished and she had smoothed her skirts, he looked at her with a kind smile.
‘So what is the problem, Frau Adler?’
Anna giggled nervously. ‘Babies. There don’t seem to be any.’
‘Well,’ he stroked his beard, pronounced his verdict. ‘You are perfect. A fine young woman.’ He polished his glasses for a moment, settled them back on the tip of his nose. ‘Perhaps your husband…’ he gazed at her thoughtfully, then seemed to change the course of his question. ‘You and your husband sleep together regularly?’
She nodded, then shook her head. ‘Well, not exactly sleep.’
‘No, not exactly sleep,’ he smiled. ‘But I know the answer already from my examination.’
‘And so?’ Anna looked at him warily.
He threw up his arms. ‘And so nature must be allowed to take her course.’ He shut his black bag emphatically. ‘I will speak to Herr Adler. If I can find him. He is a man who is always in something of a hurry. As we are of the same people, he will not mind my telling him.’
Anna was tempted to embrace him. Instead, she walked him to the door herself. ‘I love Bruno very much, you know,’ she murmured. ‘It’s just that, about that…’ she shrugged.
He patted her shoulder. ‘These things take time, my child. Don’t worry too much. Sometimes the worry is what makes it all so difficult.’
He bowed to her. ‘Please telephone me yourself if I can be of any further assistance to you.’
Anna felt a vast burden lift from her shoulders. Cheerfully she surveyed the few gowns that she kept at the Vienna apartment and chose a poppy red that Bruno had found a little too flamboyant. Then she dismissed Miss Isabel, telling her that she would stay over in the apartment tonight. Karl, the chauffeur, could drive her back home after he had dropped her at Frau Hofer’s. If Bruno were to phone, she was to tell him that the doctor had said she was perfect and that she was celebrating.
Frau Hofer’s home, a beautiful hôtel particulier near the Augustinerkirche, was as bright and modern as she was herself. The furniture was the spare, simple product of the Wiener Werkstätte school; the ornaments were few. But the walls were wild with the colour of contemporary art. There were several Klimts, their jewelled surfaces sparkling as brilliantly as her hostess’s dark eyes.
‘So you recognize me,’ Katarina laughed. ‘Kurt didn’t. He’s blind. He has the Berlin blindness,’ she teased her cousin, a slender young man with a mop of curly hair. ‘But I’m teaching him.’
Kurt laughed easily, not in the least taken aback by Katarina’s tone. ‘Tell her, Frau Adler. Tell her it’s nothing like her.’
‘Anna, please. Call me Anna. Well,’ Anna inspected the painting in question, ‘to be perfectly honest.’
‘She hadn’t noticed’ Kurt finished triumphantly.
‘But I see it now,’ Anna laughed.
‘And I can see I am going to have to teach you, too.’ Katarina’s mobile face twisted into mock disapproval.
‘Please,’ Anna said softly. ‘I know that I’m dreadfully ignorant.’
‘Hush child. That’s the kind of thing husbands make you believe,’ she smiled kindly and then paced, taking on a stentorian air, as if she were the stiffest of schoolmarms. ‘You hear that Kurt. This young woman who is probably your age has been browbeaten into thinking she’s ignorant. You don’t feel you’re ignorant, do you? Not even when I point it out to you in black and white. You must take care never to do this to your women friends. Or, many many years from now, to your wife. Otherwise…’
‘You shall travel all the way to Berlin simply for the satisfaction of hitting me over the head with a rolling pin,’ he roared with laughter, fell cowering into a sofa.
‘He’s not stupid. He learns quickly.’ Katarina winked at Anna. ‘Here Martie, put the tea things here.’ She gestured at the maid who had just come in, ‘And bring us a little wine and some cold meats. Otherwise my young friends will starve through Die Fledermaus.’
Anna looked again at the splendid images on the walls. Suddenly she decided herself, ‘Do you know the work of Johannes Bahr by any chance?’
Katarina’s red lips settled themselves into a curious smile. ‘Definitely not ignorant,’ she murmured. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’ She stretched out her hand companionably. Cool soft fingers enfolded hers, led her. She opened a door.
Anna saw a study, sparsely furnished, but feminine, a pink chaise longue along one wall, above it a picture by Johannes, the very one she remembered had been poised on his easel the first time she had visited him.
‘I bought this not so long ago. I haven’t quite decided where to put it. It’s strong, isn’t it, not altogether friendly to my other pictures. Horrible woman. But I like her mouth. And that flower, as if it were growing out of her.’ Katarina looked at her reflectively. ‘So you know Bahr’s work?’
‘I met him.’ Anna stumbled. ‘He’s a friend of my
sister’s and her husband. In Munich.’
‘Not altogether an easy man, I hear. But then none of these artists are if they’re any good. So full of themselves, so prickly,’ she laughed her tinkling laugh again. ‘I guess they have to be. The world isn’t always kind to them. And then too, we demand it of them. How else would we know they had genius!’ Her animated eyes twinkled ironically. ‘A little like Jews, really. The same dynamic.’
Anna started.
Katarina laughed. ‘Don’t stare at me like that. I should know. I am one.’
Anna followed her back to the drawing room. She felt lighter, more alive than she had felt in months. She could listen to Katarina for hours, watch her.
But all too soon, it was time to leave for the opera, time, as Katarina proclaimed, to make their grand entrance amidst le tout Vienne, to wave their fans, bat their lashes demurely from the splendour of their box. ‘Bow, cousin. There’s a sweet young thing I know, making eyes at you. Come on, Anna, like this, you’re a married woman now.’
For a brief moment, Anna thought of Bruno, so far away. She wished that he could share her pleasure, wished that he took her more often to the opera. Then as the music embraced her, she forgot about him altogether.
Bruno Adler was not as far away as Anna imagined. He had finished his business in Brno early and had decided to drive back to Vienna. Once there, a mild depression tugged at him - the reports, the columns of figures, the sheaves of foreign newspapers to catch up on. Rather than carrying on home, he determined on a different trajectory. It was a familiar one.
He parked his car near St. Stefansdom and walked in leisurely fashion down the narrow cobbled streets which bordered the cathedral. Lotte. She would not mind a surprise visit, had not minded once in what was now nigh on to eight years. He had never found anyone else with her, though he knew there were others. Usually he telephoned, or sent a message, just in case. He almost stopped now to do so. But no, the very thought that there might be someone else there with her now, doing those things, whet his appetite, so that he began to hurry, his steps echoing through the narrow street.
Eight years. Soon after his first wife had died. He frowned into the night. That horrible death which had robbed him of her and his first born. He had been desolate. Desolate for months. Then one night, wandering randomly as he was wont to do in those days to eradicate his sorrow, he found himself near the Prater.
In the gaslight a young woman had approached him - a perky face, an upturned nose, button eyes, all beneath an outlandish hat from which a lank feather curled. What was it that she had said to him in that low husky voice of hers? He could still almost recall it word for word, ‘You can hit me, you can screw me. Backwards, Forwards, Upside down. I’ll sing for you, dance,’ she did a little pirouette, ‘but I’m cold and hungry and it’s starting to rain and I need a bed for the night. I’m not begging, mind.’ She had looked him straight in the eye. ‘I give value.’
He had not often been with prostitutes. The occasional shop girl, yes, a maid, here and there, like every man of his class, a dancer for a while. But this one had done something to his entrails. She wasn’t pretty. Quite the opposite. But she was so young, so pert, exuded an almost febrile energy. He had taken her to a hotel and she had been as good as her words. Better. She had a sense of humour, was a sparky little vixen. With her boldness, her hard, foul-mouthed chatter, she seemed to release him. Two weeks later he had set her up in her own apartment.
He hadn’t wanted to know too much about her; certainly not for her to know anything about him. The anonymity was what drew him: he had never even told her his real name. But gradually over the years, he had learned things about her terrible early life - the dank infested two rooms in which six of them lived, the dead older sister, the father who abused her, hating her in his drunken state, for not being her lost older sister; the mother, distraught, beaten, kind, who tried to protect her, who earned what little money they had. It was not, he knew, an untypical story, but it wrenched his heart, and he had given her money, generous sums which monthly found their way into the bank account he had opened for her, money too for her family, so she could be as benevolent to them as she wished.
There were periods over those years when he hadn’t seen her very much. But then, in the last while, since Anna, and more often since his marriage, his hunger for Lotte with her foul mouth and cocky ways had seemed to treble. It was as if confronted with one woman, his need for the other escalated. He didn’t know why. Had ceased to question it, though when he was with Anna, he was burdened with guilt. Yet he knew, and the shame of it hurt him, that without the darkness in which he could think of Lotte, he could never get hard for her. It was as if her very purity, her very innocence, overpowered him, frightened his manhood into non-existence.
But he was hard now. Bruno shuddered, turned his key in the lock, climbed the three flights, rang. She was there, her face visible behind the latch.
She opened the door, passed her tongue against her red lash of a mouth. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be with you in a tick.’ She vanished into her bedroom, but after a moment poked her face out at him. ‘Don’t be afraid to touch it, you silly old thing,’ she ordered him saucily.
Bruno smiled, took his jacket off, poured himself a glass of whiskey from the fine decanter he had given her. Then he relaxed into the sofa, looked round him at the familiar objects, the helter skelter of the space she had created, the mirrors, the feathers. Only when he had looked, sipped, did he let his hand fall to his groin, touch. A jagged breath escaped him.
She was with him in a moment, her brown hair pinned up loosely on her head, that gamine face rolling its eyes at him, her silk negligée open, falling around her. From its midst, she brought out a stockinged dancer’s leg, touched her toes to his groin, softly, and then with firmer movements.
He gasped.
‘Oh,’ she chortled. ‘So far gone there’s nothing left for me to do.’
‘Almost nothing.’ He pulled her down backwards on his lap, revelling in the waggle of those hard buttocks, placing his hands on the bare skin above her frilly black garters, stroking, stroking, while she moved against him.
‘Now, Lotte, please now.’
She rolled her eyes at him, then slowly, her fingers lingering, she unbuttoned his trousers.
‘The bear is growling tonight,’ she murmured, her mouth plunging down on his swollen penis.
Bruno buried his face in her hair, breathing in her sharp perfume. The pleasure of her tongue working against him was unutterable. He pressed his hands into her shoulders, felt for her small taut breasts, then leaned back into the sofa, feeling the pressure rise from the base of his spine, mount, mount, until he burst, groaning, ‘Lotte, Lotte, Lotte, Lotte.’
She placed herself delicately on his knee, snuggling against him, fondling his hair. ‘Still the best in town, eh? Say it, tell me.’
‘The best,’ he murmured.
She had the ability to rouse him, again and again. Her ingenuity was endless. Sometimes he wondered where she came up with those countless little tricks, those tantalizing little stories.
And now she had one of her wicked, teasing looks. ‘I want to dance. With you,’ she pulled him up, carefully buttoning his trousers, patting them straight with her nimble fingers. He felt a tremor. ‘Not yet.’ She looked at him severely. ‘I’ve learnt a new song, just for you.’
She took his hands and placed them on her buttocks. ‘Comfortable,’ she gyrated slowly against him, waited for his response, then placed her arms round his neck. She began to croon, in her cracked unmelodious voice, more speech, than song, moving all the time against him.
‘Brown-eyed Bertie
You know the one I mean
He’s keen on the ladies
particularly the ones of eighteen.’
She winked at him. He took a step away from her, not liking what he heard.
‘And what he likes best
Are the parts that are obscene
Yo
u know the very ones I mean.’
She was taunting him. Her dark button eyes took on a malicious look. Suddenly he knew what was coming and he didn’t want it. No, not tonight. All tenderness left him. He pulled her arms off his neck, felt cold.
Brown-eyed Bertie
You know the one I mean
He’s a sentimental man
He does for a woman what no other man can
Particularly the ones of eighteen.
Her voice rose emphatically.
‘So young and green
They make him steam
You know what I mean.’
Bruno reached for his jacket. She had deliberately made him think of Anna. He should never have told her about the marriage. Now, when the malice took hold of her, she would refer to his wife in one way or another. Deliberately. He knew why. He had only discovered it in these last few months. She liked to rouse him to anger, liked him to hit her. Taunted, insulted, he had done so once, a second time, and had found her molten, on fire, all the masquerade of hardness gone. But it was not what he came for, and he hated himself for doing it. He wouldn’t do it now.
‘Don’t go,’ she drew him back. ‘I’ll stop. Promise.’
He met her eyes, ‘Why do you want that, Lotte?’
She understood what he meant, shrugged her thin shoulders, seemed confused for a moment. Then she looked at him brazenly, ‘Reminds me of dear old dad, I guess.’
‘Oh Lotte,’ he put his arms round her.
Her slender fingers burrowed beneath his trousers, pressed, moved. He grew hard again, despite himself. She wound her legs round his waist, like a child, rocking herself against his hardness. ‘Take me to bed, Bertie,’ she licked his ear.
He carried her into the next room, placed her gently on the wide bed.
‘Undress Bertie. Tonight is special,’ her quick fingers worked at his shirt, his trousers. He didn’t like being naked. It made him feel unnatural, powerless, the sight of that ridiculous cock, jutting in front of him, searching for release. But he let her, let her find his skin, stroke.
Dreams of Innocence Page 12
