by Sarah Rayne
‘Yes.’ The idea of a set of rules to work to was unexpectedly comforting. It gave the feeling of knowing where you were and what you could and could not do.
‘One of the rules,’ Alice said, ‘will be that if it’s half-past twelve or one o’clock and I’m not around, you can sort out some food for yourself. There’ll always be soup in the larder that can be heated, and cheese and fruit in the fridge. Have what you want, and wash up afterwards. You can do that, can’t you?’
‘Oh yes.’
The evening meal was usually eaten together, at the gateleg table in the room overlooking the garden. It might be one of Alice’s delicious casseroles, or a chicken or fish cooked in unfamiliar ways.
‘I quite enjoy cooking,’ Alice said. ‘I learned all those years ago when I was a lady’s maid. Your mother told you about that, didn’t she? About my having been a maid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Miss Nina – the young lady I was maid to – liked me to cook for her when the family was out.’
This was another of the incomprehensible things about Alice’s life. In Pedlar’s Yard it had been assumed that all women could cook, and the men had expected to be waited on by their wives and daughters. The concept of a woman who could not cook, and who expected to be waited on, was unfamiliar.
‘Couldn’t she cook for herself, that Nina?’
‘Nowadays you’d think so,’ said Alice. ‘But this was a very long time ago – the nineteen-twenties – and they were a very rich family. It would never have occurred to Miss Nina to so much as make a cup of tea. It would never have occurred to anyone else that she should even have to do so.’
It was exciting listening to Alice talk about Mother’s stories, and to know she was talking from inside them. She was the stories. She was the seventeen-year-old girl with whom the handsome young man had fallen in love, but because she had been a servant, they had had to part. It was not quite possible to ask about this – although it might be possible one day – but there seemed no reason not to ask about Vienna.
‘You lived there?’
‘Yes. It’s a beautiful city. You’ll go there one day, and you’ll love it.’
‘Will I?’
‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’
Evenings in the Priest’s House, after the supper things had been cleared away and homework diligently dealt with, were best of all. Often they watched television, but sometimes Alice played records – wonderful music by Bach and Schubert and Mozart. ‘I like music,’ she said. When the real winter came and darkness had enveloped the fens by the middle of the afternoon, the curtains were drawn and the fires glowed in the hearths, and it was a time when other stories could be told.
‘Tell about the first time Miss Nina’s lover came to the house and saw you.’
‘In the exact same words as always?’
It was a joke between them by this time.
‘Stories always have to be in the exact same words.’
‘Or you might find they’ve changed when you come to tell them again?’
‘Yes. Yes.’ This was one of the good things about Alice; she understood about stories having to stay absolutely the same, just as Mother had understood.
‘What a fussy little owl you are. Well, then—’ She leaned back in the rocking-chair with the vivid cushions behind her – rather unexpectedly she liked vivid jewel colours in her house – and began to speak.
And even though it was a wholly unfamiliar world, Alice made it so real that it sometimes felt as if her words were weaving themselves into a magic carpet that could fly back to those long-ago days. The music-filled city of Vienna fifty years ago, and the gaiety and the colour and the dazzling palaces…The way the big houses were lit when a grand ball was given, even with lamps hung from the trees lining the carriageways…The sound of an orchestra striking up for waltzes and polkas, or of a single musician bringing music rippling and cascading from a piano or a violin…The palaces and the coffee houses…The swish of silk gowns and the drift of expensive perfume, and the taste of Viennese chocolate and Viennese sachertorte…
‘Miss Nina’s parents were important and wealthy,’ Alice said, her eyes inward-looking, her head leaning back against the cushions in her chair. ‘And she had a great many beaux.’
This was a new word. ‘“Bow”?’
‘No, a French word.’ Alice wrote it down, the singular and then the plural. ‘In those days it meant suitors. Boyfriends. Young men wanting to marry her – it might have been the money that attracted a lot of them, of course, although she was very pretty. The master held a great many receptions for her; dinners and soirees – that’s a musical evening. There was always so much music in Vienna in those days. Famous singers and musicians came to the house to give recitals or concerts.’
‘But the night he came—? That wasn’t a musical night, was it? It was a grand ball, that night, wasn’t it?’
‘It was a very special night indeed. The ball was to begin at ten, but I helped Miss Nina to dress much earlier. She was wearing white, spangled with hundreds of tiny stars, with a gauze stole around her shoulders—’
‘Gross.’
‘Yes, I know it sounds gross to you, but it was what young ladies wore in those days, and it was very beautiful. Miss Nina looked beautiful that night – at least, at the beginning of the night she did. A little plump thing she was, but with a tiny, tiny waist, and masses of fair fluffy hair. I remember we threaded thin silver strands through her hair, with tiny seed pearls. Real pearls, they were, of course.
‘And when she was ready I went to the top of the stairs with her, to watch her go downstairs to help greet the guests. Can you visualize it? There was a great sweeping stairway with gilt banisters on both sides, and banks of flowers in huge tubs everywhere, and a chandelier overhead, all sparkling and glistening. Big double doors at one end, opening on to the ballroom: the musicians were already in there, and they were playing something – Strauss, it was. It was always Strauss in Vienna.’ She smiled as if at a private joke. ‘And I was only just seventeen, and I had never seen anything like it. I thought I had fallen into fairyland.’ For a moment, it was not an ageing lady with silver hair and creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth who sat there; it was a young girl, wide-eyed with awe.
‘Miss Nina went down the stairs just as the guests were arriving,’ said Alice. ‘She was deliberately late, which was naughty of her, because as the daughter of the house she should have been with her parents in time to welcome everyone. But she used to do things like that, to attract people’s attention.’
‘And you saw all the people coming to the ball.’
‘Yes, I saw them all. Richly dressed ladies, and men in formal evening wear. Some army officers – Germans, very smart and correct.’ She paused, and for a moment something crept into her voice that was no longer the soft story-spinning tone. ‘Members of the Reichstag were there as well, because Miss Nina’s father had important government connections.’
‘The Reichstag?’ The word was unknown but it was an uncomfortable one; it seemed to have brought a sudden fear into the warm comfortable sitting-room. Like when your stomach flutters and you know you’re going to be sick. Like when your skin prickles because there’s something unpleasant in the room with you – a scuttly spider that you’re afraid to rout out…(Or like when you lie under the sheets, pretending not to be there, praying not to hear the angry voices downstairs, or the menacing footstep on the stair…)
But this word, this Reichstag, was something even bigger and more important than that. It was something to do with those old snatches of television newsreels, with the black and white images. Something that happened before I was born…
Alice only said, ‘The Reichstag was the German equivalent of the English parliament,’ but the hardness was still in her voice. ‘But also among the guests that night was a young man with dark hair and golden-brown eyes.’ The softness came back into her tone so that it was possible to relax again. ‘He was wearin
g a white tie and tails – all the men wore that, in those days; I expect I can find a photograph somewhere to show you what it looked like – and he was the most handsome man I had ever seen. I thought he must be a prince, or a duke at the very least.’
She paused, but it was unthinkable to interrupt at this point, even though this was clearly the young man Mother had talked about: the young man who had not been allowed to marry Alice. Had they clung together and sobbed, like people in films or on TV did? Had they vowed that one day they would find a way to be together? But it did not seem as if they ever had, because Alice lived on her own out here.
Alice said, ‘The footman took his cloak and he was about to go into the ballroom with his friends. But then he turned and looked up the stairs. Miss Nina was still only halfway down, and at first I thought he was looking at her.’
‘But he wasn’t, was he? He was looking at you?’
The smile slid out, slightly mischievous. ‘Yes. He was looking at me.’
It was impossible to explain – even to this odd, extraordinarily intuitive child who had become so very dear – how one had felt in that moment, or to describe the mingled emotions of excitement and soaring joy and triumph, because the unknown young man had not even seemed to see the rich, beautiful Nina; he had looked straight at the little servant-girl, the drab-haired, drab-garbed little sparrow who had been standing quietly and rather humbly in the shadows. Alice had been humble in those days, because she had been trained to be.
But the young man with the eyes the colour of the topaz necklace Miss Nina had tossed Alice’s way (‘I don’t care for it any more, Alice – you may have it’) had hardly seemed aware of Nina.
Alice leaned back in her chair, her mind going back over the years to that astonishing night. ‘He was a famous musician, that young man – although I had never heard of him. He had been intended as Miss Nina’s husband – I didn’t know that, either – but I found out later that the engagement was to have been announced that very night. That was how people did things in those days, and in those circles. After supper, Miss Nina’s papa would have made the announcement, and everyone would have applauded, and champagne would have been served for the guests to drink to the couple’s future happiness.’
But none of it had happened, because the young man with topaz eyes had left the ballroom within ten minutes of arriving; he had ignored the claims of his betrothed-to-be and his hosts, and had walked into the servants’ hall as bold and as arrogant as a buccaneer. He had found Alice, who fortunately had been on her own, and asked her to come out to supper with him at one of the little coffee places in the middle of Vienna. Yes, he meant tonight, in fact he meant now. He could not bear to spend his evening pretending – he had pretended for too long. And he could not be bothered with being conventional, he said, especially now that he had seen Alice.
He was like no one Alice had ever encountered in her life, and she had gone with him, not bothering to seek permission, simply pulling on her warm woollen cloak and walking out of the house through the little garden door.
They had gone to a restaurant near to St Stephen’s Cathedral called the Three Hussars. To Alice it seemed very grand, and full of expensively dressed ladies and gentlemen. She had no idea what she had eaten, because very soon the young man had taken her to his rooms which were in a tall old house in the ancient part of the city, the part that was somehow sinister and where the streets seemed almost to sing with their own dark past, and where anything – anything! – might happen to one…
Anything might happen…
For a little while he had played music to her on the glossy black piano near a window, and although Alice had not known the music or who had written it, while he played, the whole room seemed to thrum with vibrancy. Quite suddenly he had flung away from the piano, and had come to where Alice was seated on a velvet sofa, and had begun to kiss her with such helpless passion and such longing that it was impossible to resist him.
Alice did not resist. She knew, as all good girls knew, that you did not allow young men to kiss you in this way, and nor did you allow them to pull impatiently at the fastenings of your dress so that they could slide their hands inside. On two or three occasions Miss Nina’s brother had cornered her in a dark corridor between the dining-room and the servants’ hall, and had fumbled with the neck of her frock, and once he had pulled her into the linen room and pressed his body against her. He said it was ridiculous and pretentious for a slut of a serving girl to pretend to virginity, but Alice had been embarrassed by the hard bulge of masculinity against her thighs, and she had pushed him away and scurried back to her own part of the house, thinking that if that was how it felt, it would be easy to remain a good girl and save one’s virginity for one’s eventual husband.
But no one had told her that a man’s hands could feel like this on her skin – soft and sinless and so exciting that it turned you dizzy – and no one had told her how it felt to lie on a soft wide bed with the night-sounds of a city below the window, and to feel the excitement building up and up until, so far from pushing him away, you thought you might die if he did not go on…
And although she had known – well, sort of known – what happened in a bed on a marriage night, she had not known that it robbed you of all resistance or that the emotions it brought were so intense and so deeply sweet that you wanted to weep for sheer joy…
‘I am sorry,’ he had said at last, raising his dark head from the pillow. He was not Austrian – Alice did not then know what nationality he was except that he was not English – but he spoke English well. ‘My poor little English sparrow,’ he said. ‘I had not thought you would be a virgin.’
‘I’m glad. I’m glad you were the first.’ She had wanted to say, And you’ll be the last, but had not quite dared.
‘You should go back to the house now. I take you. But we can be together again soon, if you wish that.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do wish that.’
‘Very good. Then we go now. You will have to walk from the carriageway around the side of the house and go in through the garden door. You can do that? You do not mind that?’
Alice did not say she would have walked through hell’s deepest caverns and back again, or that she would have entered the house by way of the sewers or the chimneys if he had asked her to. She said, ‘Yes. Yes, I can do all that. I expect it will be quite easy.’
But life is seldom easy, and it is hardly ever predictable.
The house was in an uproar when Alice got back. Most of the guests had left, although a few, more inquisitive than the rest or perhaps simply more insensitive, had remained. To give support, they were all telling one another. Poor little Nina, poor child, jilted on her betrothal night. And betrayed by her own maid, the scheming hussy! Disgraceful. And where was the sly creature, that was what they would all like to know! It was to be hoped that the slut would be dealt with suitably when – and if! – she returned to the house.
At the centre of it all was Nina herself, lying on a chaise-longue in the upstairs drawing-room, sobbing and fretfully pushing away all the offers of laudanum or bromide in warm water, her hair in a snarl, and the delicate gloves and silk sandals she had been wearing tossed petulantly to the floor. Her mother sat at one end of the chaise-longue, wringing her hands ineffectually, saying that no one had ever been able to soothe Nina when she got into one of her nervous states, and oh dear, what were they to do, and think of the scandal…In front of the fireplace her papa and her brother were conversing in low voices.
Alice had hoped to creep unobtrusively to her room, but she was pounced upon, hauled into the drawing-room, and offered to the assembled company to be suitably dealt with. As she looked round, the thought that came uppermost in her mind was not her own plight, but that in Miss Nina’s situation she hoped she would have had more self-control than to indulge in a spoilt-child tantrum before everyone.
They fell silent as soon as they saw her; even Miss Nina sat up straight, and forgot about crying. The words sh
ameful and guttersnipe hissed round the room; Alice had learned a little German by this time – she had, in fact, learned rather more than a little – and she could recognize those words very well indeed.
In the end, it had been Miss Nina’s brother who had ordered her from the house, his eyes meeting Alice’s in sly triumph. He adopted a prim shocked tone which Alice thought the greatest absurdity of the whole situation, and said she was to go immediately, they could not have such a creature under their roof. And then, possibly mindful of the need to appear considerate before guests, despite the circumstances, amended this to first light. She was to go at first light: she would be allowed to take her belongings with her – they were not thieves in this family, he added righteously. But after tomorrow they did not want ever to see or hear from her again. He glanced at his parents as he said this, and apparently receiving tacit approval, added, in a final burst of spite, that one day he hoped to see her reduced to begging in the streets for what she had done to his sister.
Alice said loudly, ‘Well, it is no worse than what you have done to some of your mother’s maids,’ and saw his face flush with embarrassment. He glanced uneasily at the listening people, and in a burst of bravado Alice added, ‘You tried to do it to me as well, but I fought you off.’
