I climbed the first flight of the servants’ stairs and walked along one branch of the passage, trying each of the six doors there, knocking each time before attempting to enter. They were all locked. I entered the other branch and tried four more doors, including the last one, which shut off the landing leading to the rooms overlooking the rose parterre and the park. I knew that my last chance now to get into the main part of the castle was to go up to the third floor and descend from there by the iron snail—a harassingly steep iron spiral staircase, which I had hated ever since I could remember, and which still figured in my nightmares. Reluctantly, I started to climb the second flight, and came upon an Irish setter stretched across the whole width of a step. He didn’t even bother to raise his head, and as I skipped over him I began to wonder about the whereabouts of his master. I halted and said over my shoulder, "Bark, will you? Bark and raise a noise."
He still didn’t move, and I called, "Anybody there?"
I heard footsteps above me, and the closing of a door. Then silence. I called, "Anybody there?" There was the creaking of a door hinge, and further silence. I yelled, "Anybody there?" and then I saw a woman above me in the dark, shadowy passage, gripping the rail and bending over. I was choked with astonishment. What on earth is the cook doing up there, messing about in the spare rooms? I said to myself. And not properly dressed, either—slopping about in woollies and skirt and a tiny grubby apron? And since when has she had her hair waved? She does look a sight. Wait till I tell Grandmama.
"What do you want?" she said.
Startled by the indifference in her voice, I awoke from my hallucinatory state of still being Miss Edith. She was not the cook, she certainly could not be the cook; for one thing, she was about forty—much younger than I had ever known the cook to be. She was of a similar build, though, and as tall and heavy-boned. Her hair was dark, too, and the straight, thick Robespierre eyebrows were there, but tidier and more subdued-looking. She had the large-carved, gentle, sorrowing countenance of a Niobe, and lacked the cook’s peppery intelligence.
"I’d like to see the castle," I said.
"Well, you can’t," she said down the stairwell. "The curator’s gone, and I haven’t got the keys."
"But look here," I said. "I’ve come over here specially to see the castle."
"Then you must come another time, when the curator’s here," she said. "Because he’s gone and he’s got the keys."
"When will he be back?" I asked.
"Not today anymore," she said. "Didn’t you meet him on your way up from the village?"
"No," I said. "But when will he be in?"
"Can’t say," she said. "Sometimes he’s in and sometime’s he’s out."
"Charming," I said. "In that case, I suppose I’d better apply to him in writing, don’t you think? And maybe he’ll reply? That is, if he’s in the mood?"
"You could try," she said.
She really is like the cook, I thought. Completely insensitive to sarcasm. Still craning up the stairs at her, I said, "I’ve come all the way from London to see the castle."
"Have you?" she said, without a sparkle of curiosity or a glimmer of doubt. "What am I to do? You could go and walk through the park. That’s all right. You go and have a look at the park."
I knew I had lost, but forgot myself. It was like being slightly drunk, listening to myself talking, being perfectly aware of what I was saying, and yet being unable to stop myself saying it. "Blast you, woman," I said. "I’ve lived in this place on and off for years. My great-grandfather bought it, and my grandmother lived in it, and we managed without the blasted curator and his blasted keys!"
It was the worst possible thing I could have said. Everybody had told me, everybody had warned me, whatever I did, not to let on that my family had once owned the castle.
Now I watched her in dismay as she placed her hands on her hips.
"For heaven’s sake," she said.
I’d better trot off, I thought. What if she calls the police? I’ve insulted her and the curator, and she and the curator are part of the people, and the people make up the People’s Republic, which means I’ve insulted the state. I turned my back on her and descended the stairs; the dog was not there anymore.
"For heaven’s sake, where are you off to?" I heard her calling.
I stopped and looked up.
"And why couldn’t you say straightaway that you belong to the family?" she cried. "What do you imagine—how am I to recognize you, if you please, with all due respect, if I’ve been here only the last four years? Hold on, will you? I shan’t keep you waiting. I’ll only fetch the keys. I shan’t be a minute."
She joined me on the stairs, clasping the keys to her waist. "You will excuse me, won’t you?" she said. "I did hear a movement and someone calling, but I was cleaning upstairs, and I didn’t expect— We don’t want any of the people nosing around here. After all, it’s a castle, isn’t it? And there you were standing—I still don’t know exactly who you are."
"I’m Edith," I said.
"Ah!" she cried, striking her forehead. "So you are little Edith. Miss Edith. The curator’s got a photograph of madam your mother and your uncle Frederick when they were small, as lad and lassie in Austrian dress."
"I know the picture," I said. "I had it, too, and I’ve lost it. My mother holding a rake, God knows why, and Uncle Frederick with a spade, and edelweiss on his braces."
She nodded. "We’ve got a picture of the old gentry, too— your great-grandparents. But nothing of madam your grandmother. I’ve often wondered—"
"Don’t ask me," I said. We were walking now toward the last door at the end of the passage. "What’s happened to the stone poodles?" I asked.
"The poodles, yes. I never knew them, worse luck," she said. "They got smashed up before my time—willfully and nastily, you can bet. They say it was the Germans during the war, but if you ask me it was our own people. You don’t know what they’re like. They are proper fiends down in the village, and the farmyard persons are no better, either." She unlocked the door and stepped aside for me.
"My great-grandmother couldn’t stand dogs," I said. "She used to point to the poodles and say, ‘These are the only dogs I like.’ "
"I must tell this to the curator," she said.
"I remember my great-grandmother, you know," I said. "I remember kissing her hand when I was four years old, and she was sitting on the bench that went round the linden tree—on the gravel space. She had disgusting hands, yellow and crinkled, and I loathed her. What’s become of the tree? It was two hundred years old."
"I don’t know again," she said. "That was before my time."
We were now on the main landing. She unlocked the second door and flung it open. "That’s what you’ve come to see, isn’t it?" she said. "The Austrian Room."
Standing at the threshold, I saw an expanse of clean but unpolished parquet floor and, beyond it, the three windows in their glossy white frames. My heart tightened. I thought, First the poodles and then the linden tree. And now what? I drew a deep breath and went inside. My deepest longing, my heart’s desire, closed around me, enfolding me with its splendor. "Magnificent," I said.
"Yes, that’s what it is. It’s magnificent."
"It’s overwhelming," I said. "But it wasn’t like this. I didn’t remember it like this. It was ..." I paused, searching for words. The landscapes, especially the lakeside scenes, had a full shimmer, a melancholy and seductive depth, a surface serenity with an underlying hint of despair, which I had never known. "I can’t understand it," I said. "It’s so rich and so sad now. And it used to be more wishy-washy. Shallower and more gay. I suppose I used to be more wishy-washy myself, and more shallow and more gay."
"No fear," she said. "It’s not you; it’s the room. First they studied it and then they cleaned it."
"Who?"
"The professors from Prague," she said. "And they’ve written a book about it, too. About the painted rooms in the castle."
"Oh, God," I said.
"Didn’t you know?" she asked. "They still keep coming out to study it. They are crazy about Navratil."
"Who is Navratil?"
"The finest painter in Bohemia, of that time," she said. "Didn’t you know?"
"I never knew," I said.
"You were a little girl at the time," she said. "So you were not told."
"Nonsense," I said. "If I wasn’t told, it wasn’t for the lack of pestering. Nobody knew. And my grandmother, with her eternal ‘Difficult to say. It’s just a pleasant accident’—all because the two old maids, when they sold the castle, never told my great-grandfather. And the walls were plastered up, completely covered."
"That’s right," she said, nodding her head. "The two Baronesses Wagner. And they had every blessed wall in this room plastered up because it irked them."
"What on earth?"
"Everything’s been found out," she said. "They were leading a wild life, full of scandal, and never getting married, and traveling all the time, always on the move. First getting these paintings done to remind them of it, and then hiding them away to hide their past. Every panel is a real place, of course."
"Is it?" I said. "Nobody ever took it seriously."
"It’s all been studied," she said. "Let me tell you. This is the Gmunden Lake, with the town of Gmunden behind it. This is the Dachstein."
I followed her, incredulous and bewildered, listening to this stranger, this pseudocook, who was taking me on a guided tour through the Austrian Room, and who knew the answers to questions that had haunted me for a lifetime.
"This here," she said, "is the Gastein waterfall."
"Oh, God, my favorite," I said. "With the chamois on top of the rocks."
"And these here," she continued, "are the two ladies Wagner, we think." She pointed at a couple of figures crouched on a mossy border at the foot of the cascade, white-robed and strikingly graceful, like ballerinas resting in the wings.
"But these are new," I said.
"That’s right. They only came up two years ago. They had been painted out. And now, as I’m looking at you, I can see it could be you. Perhaps it is you. With madam your mother."
I thought, She really is like the cook. No sense of time— the only time she knows is when the cake is ready to be taken out of the oven. Then, growing serious at her reproachful stare, I said, "Please, go on."
"This here," she said, moving to the hilly meadows peopled with shepherds and shepherdesses, "is by the Wolfgang Lake, above St. Gilgen. Do you want a light on it? You’ve brought such dull, miserable weather with you."
"That’s all right," I said. "It’s so much bother bringing in the lamps."
"We’ve got electric light," she said.
"My grandmother could never afford it. But who is ‘we,’ anyway? Who’s got the place now?"
"The place belongs to the workers, of course," she said, "and it’s being cared for by the Academy of Arts and Sciences. We’ve got nothing to do with the estate and the farm in the yard yonder. In the beginning, the farm people cast an eye on the castle, but heaven forbid! They would have used it as a pigsty. I mean it, because they’ve gone in for pigs now—one thousand pigs—and in the summer, when the wind turns! Just imagine what it would be like to get the farmhands swarming about in here. Beauty means nothing to them. They’d demolish the place. They are hellhounds, the folk round here; they are fiends and monsters. They’d burn and tear down everything they could lay hands on. Do you know what the park suffered since the gentry’s days? What they’ve stolen and carried away in timber? You wouldn’t know at first glance, of course, because the park is so immense, and thank heaven it’s getting restored now— not that you won’t weep over it when you see it, but we’ll get it up to scratch again. We’ll tackle the rose parterre first and get the fountain going—the boy with the goose and the boy on the dolphin, one above the other, and the water coming down."
"That’s good news," I said, "as long as you don’t ask me which boy goes on top of which. Because in my time the fountain was dry, and there was complete equality, because both boys were on the ground. They were in the garden, in one of the hothouses. But I suppose the curator will solve the problem."
She nodded. "He will. But it’s got to be done slowly, because there’s only so much money to go round. We had a lucky escape some time ago, when the gents from Prague wanted to turn the place into an old people’s home. A convalescent home—I ask you! All because there’s fifty rooms standing empty here, and that’s not fair in a workers’ republic. The curator says we’ve got the workers’ revolution, and workers of the world unite—but not in the castle. We don’t want a horde of old dodderers wiping their fingers on the walls of the Austrian Room. In the end, the academy people said it was much too damp and unhealthy here—it’s true, isn’t it? There’s always the damp breathing in from the park—and sent them off to convalesce elsewhere, and I don’t care how they rot, as long as it isn’t here."
"Quite right, too," I said. "That’s what’s called a social conscience. My family was full of it, and I’m glad it’s still about."
She looked at me with approval and nodded her head. Then her expression changed. "How did you use the Austrian Room?" she asked wistfully.
"For every day," I said. "As an ordinary drawing room."
"And it was luxuriously furnished?"
"Certainly not," I said. "It had the shabbiest junk you can think of—all simple but in bad taste, the overflow from my great-grandparents’ town house. And in the bedrooms brass beds with broken knobs, and washstands with slop pails, and porcelain bowls and little pen trays that were used to hold toothbrushes."
She seemed crestfallen and gave me several probing looks, to make sure I was not making fun of her.
We went into the adjoining Saints’ Room. "And how did you use this?" she asked eagerly.
"We didn’t," I said. "It was too dingy and depressing. Only when we had visitors we weren’t keen on, they got shoved in here to cool their heels." Observing her disappointed face, I added, "Of course, it wasn’t like this. That painted ceiling was like potato soup, and you were lucky if you saw an odd arm or face sticking out."
I walked about contemplating the clean saints and angels on the ceiling, with memory and reality joining together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. For the first time, I saw that the greatest care, interest, and diversity had gone into the color and drapery of the garments; it was a celestial fashion show. "What a pity my mother never saw it like this," I said. "Who did it, do you know?"
"Navratil," she said. "Everything painted is by Navratil. He did it to show he could turn his hand to anything."
We went out onto the landing, where it formed an elbow. "Do you remember this?" she asked, leading me to the recess.
I was dumbfounded. It was like an inverted nightmare, where everything was better than it ought to be. The spiral stairs, which had been bleak, metal, mean, and ugly, were now entirely mahogany, of a superb dull finish. The spindle-turned railing was exquisitely fashioned, as though designed by Hepplewhite—a cabinetmaker’s masterpiece.
"This used to be beastly cast iron," I said.
"Fancy," she said. "The curator says they were meant for certain purposes, for slipping away unseen and nobody any the wiser, if you get my meaning, so he had them done as they must have looked in the first place. And it’s only fair, isn’t it? If you have romantic stairs, you must treat them romantic."
"How right you are," I said, thinking she was more and more like the cook. I added, "This is a castle and not a poorhouse."
She nodded approvingly.
WE WENT THROUGH the Gothic wing and the library, where she said longingly, "You must have had wonderful books. I can just imagine."
I had to disappoint her once more. "We had no books at all," I said. "Only old account ledgers and seed catalogues and out-of-date timetables."
The afternoon was drifting away. "And now," said my guide, "we’ll go down to the Garden Room and look at the parrots."
&nb
sp; "They aren’t parrots, they’re crested cockatoos," I said.
"Never mind," she said. "We both mean the same thing. Do you know, I always think Navratil must have done the Garden Room at the very end, when he was good and tired, because it’s only got three walls."
I started to laugh, but I fell silent when we arrived there, and I gazed with enchantment at this last and most frivolous of Navratil’s creations.
"What did you use this room for?" she asked me. "For splendid feasts?"
"We had afternoon coffee in it," I said.
"And looked out on the rose parterre and the park? What a glorious sight it must have been."
"We never looked out on the rose parterre," I said. "We were too busy quarreling. Or complaining."
We stepped out on the terrace, descended the stairs, and went across the dismal grass plot into the park. "There’s the opening of an underground passage at the end of the chestnut avenue," she said. "They are still working at it, digging it up. It’s four kilometers long, and connects with the former Sternborn place, in Sestajovice."
"What on earth for?" I asked.
"They went in for that sort of thing in the old days," she said. "So that the gentry could run for it if trouble was brewing."
"A good idea," I said, giving her a sidelong glance.
"Naturally," she said. "We want everything the way it was in the old days."
"That’s fine," I said. "It makes you feel the workers’ revolution wasn’t wasted, doesn’t it?"
She nodded. "The curator says if the gentry hadn’t built the castles the workers wouldn’t be able to enjoy them now."
"What do you call this now?" I asked as we passed the walled-in well. "We used to call it the Jordan."
"We call it the Jordan, too," she said, "but we still haven’t found out how deep it is, and where it goes to. Ah, this place is a marvel for mysteries. How you must have spent your days puzzling over them!"
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 12
