Last Nocturne

by Marjorie Eccles

  And fear, he thought. There was fear behind this, too. His mother? She was the most fearless person he had ever met. ‘You said ‘when he was abroad’ – why did you say that?’

  ‘The letters mention Vienna, time after time. I think they came from there.’ Suddenly, her voice was less assured. ‘Guy, they also mention something which happened there, some sort of scandal – which seems to have concerned Eliot.’

  ‘Let me see them, Mother.’

  ‘You cannot. I – no longer have them. They are lost, fallen into unscrupulous hands.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true.’ A great shudder went through her. ‘And I received a letter by this evening’s post demanding money for their return.’

  ‘Good God. Look here, don’t you think you had better tell me plainly what has happened, right from the very first?’

  Her anger had done her a power of good. No longer was she the frozen woman he had barely recognised when he entered the room. She was in control of herself, his mother once more, the formidable presence with whom, despite everything, he was more comfortable. She went to sit once more in her chair, drumming the fingers of one hand on its arm, while the other fiddled with the small objects on the table, moving them aimlessly with a series of small clicks across the polished marquetry surface. Photographs, a modern, bejewelled silver cigarette box, an enamelled clock, a small, copper vase looking strangled by the sinuous trails of silver curving around it…every time he walked into this room it seemed some familiar article had disappeared and some new, modern trifle had taken its place. The room both stifled and irritated him, old and new crammed together without regard for style, only acquisition. Potted ferns, heavy picture frames, Japanese prints, antique rugs, modern-style vases and lacquered cabinets. As he waited for her reply, a thousand eyes watched them from the peacock-feather design of the new draperies from Liberty’s, put up only last week at considerable expense.

  She said at last, ‘My first instinct was to burn those wretched letters when I found them.’ Knowing his mother, this was exactly what Guy would have expected. ‘I bitterly regret it now, but I didn’t, and there it is. I had a feeling, an instinct, I don’t know what, which told me to keep them. What a dangerous thing instinct can be! But at least I kept them hidden away where no one would ever find them. And then, I discovered they were gone.’

  The heavy scent from some branches of white blossom in a big, black lacquer vase in the corner, brought out by the warmth of the fire, seemed suddenly overpowering. ‘Go on.’

  ‘They were not where I’ve kept them, all this time. I thought at first someone must have – misappropriated them. Then I remembered that I took them with me when I went down to the Cornleighs in Cambridgeshire, silly as the notion sounds, under some impression they would be safer with me than left here. But if they had turned up there, in a drawer or somewhere, you know, Fanny Cornleigh would have known they were mine and would have returned them. I kept them in a little red silk purse, tied round and round with ribbon. While I was there, someone must have taken them from my room. One never knows,’ she finished with a return of her old haughtiness, ‘who one might not meet in the country – other people’s servants and so on.’

  Lady Cornleigh would surely have returned them. On the other hand, she was a notorious gossip and it would have been obvious to the meanest intelligence that something so carefully wrapped might well contain something – interesting. Might she not have been tempted by such delicious bait? The suspicion was unworthy, Guy reprimanded himself. She might have peeped, but he wouldn’t believe her capable of worse. ‘It seems more likely they could have been thrown away, by some servant who didn’t realise that a scrap of silk was important.’

  ‘My dear, you have a very idealised view of human nature if you think that. Besides, the package was quite evidently not rubbish. It looked what it was, a pretty, personal possession. It was expensive silk damask, embroidered with silver, and the velvet ribbons were neatly tied in a bow.’

  ‘Making someone curious enough to want to know what it contained, if they found it lying around?’

  ‘Guy, I repeat. I did not leave it lying around at any time. On the occasions when I couldn’t carry a bag without being too obvious, I kept those letters directly on my person.’

  Of that Edwina had at first been absolutely certain. Now she was only almost sure. Her memory was never, at the best of times, at all reliable, and Bernard had also been spending the weekend with the Cornleighs, so that she had perhaps not been as wholly concentrated as she might have been. For three days, she had been certain he was on the brink of proposing, and she had been in such a feverish state of expectation that maybe, once or twice, the letters could have slipped her mind, though surely only for a moment or two. She had meant to be so careful. Not even Manners had ever been allowed to know she had them, which had meant a good deal of vigilance and subterfuge while at the Cornleighs. She slept with them under her pillow, and during the day slipped them into whatever bag she was carrying, or when that wasn’t possible, pushed them inside her whaleboned stays, despite the discomfort, though it was a slim enough package: there had been only five letters.

  And it had all been for nothing. Bernard had not proposed after all. And the fact remained that the letters were gone

  ‘So now, what?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Now, if you please, the thief wants to sell me my own property back! I have been instructed to put two hundred pounds into an attaché case and leave it beside my chair after I’ve taken some refreshment in the ladies’ waiting room at the St Pancras station hotel. What an unheard of thing! I have never been to St Pancras. I shall send Manners.’

  ‘You will send no one if you are wise. You will tell the police.’

  ‘No! The police will not be brought into this, Guy, do you hear me? I know this is – what is the term? Blackmail? But as for telling the police…have you forgotten those references to what happened in Vienna? The child? Not for the world, my dear Guy! In any case, the despicable person who is doing this already knows what is in the letters and could make a scandal if they wished, simply by spreading rumour and gossip.’

  ‘Then what do you mean to do?’

  ‘I shall find some way, never fear.’

  He was silent for so long she thought he had not understood. ‘I mean it, Guy,’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I can see that you do.’

  PART TWO

  Vienna 1887 – 1907

  CHAPTER NINE

  There was a doctor when Isobel lived in Vienna – a mad-doctor, as Bruno had called him – a Jew named Sigmund Freud, who used the term ‘fugue’, not as a musical term, but to mean a dreamlike state of consciousness, during which a person loses his memory of his previous life and wanders away from home, possibly due to some powerful shock. It was true that the events of that winter night more than two years ago had been shocking, and deeply distressing, and that she’d left Vienna as soon as she could afterwards; but it was a conscious flight, nothing to do with wandering aimlessly. And it was certainly not true that she had forgotten – or was ever likely to forget – any of the harrowing details. But she had passionately repeated to herself, almost as an article of faith, that no purpose could be served in continually reliving them, and until now she’d been able to cling, however tenuously, to the belief that such horrors should be banished into oblivion, where they belonged.

  She only wished she could be sure that the same applied to Sophie. But after what had happened in that Mayfair street last week, she could no longer stop herself from remembering.

  They had lived a restless, peripatetic existence for Isobel’s first seventeen years, she and her mother, and familiarity with most of the great capitals of Europe had made her almost blasé, but her breath was taken away when she came for the first time to Vienna and saw the great city on the Danube. The glittering capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was everything that was romantic: cosmopolitan, ruled by i
ts emperor, its two million inhabitants drawn from every corner of the European nations the empire had annexed, or conquered: Poles, Croats, Czechs, gypsies, Jews, Roman Catholics, as well as the native Austrians and the half of the population that was Hungarian.

  It wasn’t surprising that she lost her heart completely…what, after all, could be more calculated to appeal to a young girl’s awakening senses? Fairytale buildings on the Ringstrasse encircled the medieval inner city. Outside it stood the magnificent Schönbrunn Palace where the Emperor lived in isolated formal splendour. Inside the magic ring there existed a glittering, sophisticated milieu, a top strata where Esterhazys and Metternicks rubbed shoulders with the crowned heads of Europe, with diplomats and generals.

  And even if you were not quite so well-born, life was easy, or at least for anyone who had money to spend and the leisure to enjoy it. Shops abounded where every luxury could be obtained. Well-dressed women passed the days meeting friends to gossip, drink coffee and eat mouth-watering pastries in the kaffeehauser. Prosperous men did likewise, argued politics and read the newspapers provided. For enlightenment and entertainment, there were art galleries, or the opera, or concerts – especially concerts: Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven, and the newer sounds of composers such as Mahler and Schoenberg; while the whole city danced to the lilting strains of the waltz king, Johann Strauss.

  And what would Vienna have been without the military, the dashing cavalry, the huzzars, uhlans, dragoons? Without the heels of their polished riding boots ringing on the pavements, the jingle of their spurs and the clattering hooves of their glossy mounts sounding the constant heartbeat of the city? Resplendent in the dashing scarlet, blue, bottle-green and gold-braided uniforms of the monarchy’s tip-top cavalry and infantry regiments, the acme of glamour?

  Isobel was seventeen years old, dazzled and blinded.

  Not so her mother. Vèronique had first known Vienna in her glory days, when she’d still been a professional singer and the city had fêted and adored the beautiful coloratura soprano, the little French nightingale who turned heads and broke hearts, the star who had flashed so meteorically across the European stage. For when all was said and done, that was all her career had amounted to – a brilliant, brief flash across the firmament. Just at the very peak of her fame, at a time when her star had been in its highest ascendant, she’d thrown all of it recklessly away, fallen in love with James Walsh, a handsome, penniless Englishman, and left the stage for ever to perform in real life the role of devoted wife and mother.

  But when Ralph Amberley came into their lives, Isobel’s father had been long dead, and all her mother had left were her memories.

  ‘Madame, I am honoured,’ murmured the correct, reserved Englishman when he was brought to their apartment. He could not have been more reverent had her mother been the Queen of England, bending his head over her frail hand, paying stiff British compliments which were nevertheless sincere and acted on Vèronique like the bubbles in champagne. ‘You used to be my idol.’

  Vèronique smiled, dimpled, and for a moment was young again.

  Isobel shared her delight, though for different reasons. She knew her mother had come to Vienna hoping to rekindle some spark of her old life, and she was sad for her bitter disappointment. Hers was a talent which had blossomed early, and it was inevitable that her head had been turned by the flattery and adulation that had come her way too soon, but she was at the same time too much of a professional to have deceived herself into thinking that she could step back, nearly two decades later, older and in poor health, and pick up where she’d left off. She hadn’t, however, expected such complete indifference. The sad fact was that now few remembered her at all – especially when there were younger, brighter stars for fashion to follow. Too weary to seek yet another refuge, however, she insisted on staying in the city which had once loved her, sustained by the dream time, telling and retelling stories of her adoring public and the brilliant splendours of the Staatsoper, as seen from the stage where she had sung so lyrically and afterwards been almost buried in avalanches of floral tributes; followed by the hectic gaiety of the luxurious champagne suppers with besotted admirers in the red and gold splendour of the Hotel Sacher. Heady memories, but now tinged with the melancholia that came with knowing how little time was left to her, for tuberculosis had laid its cold hand on her several years before.

  In the end it was an exhausting business, for both of them, this endless repetition, especially as sometimes events and times tended to become jumbled in Vèronique’s memory. But Ralph was by now a constant visitor and his patience amazed Isobel. ‘Remember when Prince Enzendorf sent a dozen red roses to La Vèronique—?’ he would encourage her gently.

  ‘And each with a pearl at its centre! Or was it white roses?’

  ‘And the time they drank champagne from your shoe in Paris?’

  ‘No, that was Milan, was it not, Isobel? You must remember – I’m sure I’ve told you a thousand times!’

  Isobel made what pretence she could, but something that had happened before she was born could never seem quite real, like the dim memory of the big, handsome, occasionally frightening presence who had been her father; though perhaps it was better for him to stay a shadowy, if intimidating, figure in her mind.

  Anxiously watching her mother lost in dreams of the past, she often wondered whether Vèronique had ever regretted abandoning her career for a marriage which had turned out to be virtually nothing more than a fantasy. If she had, she never gave any sign of it, or not until they were far away from the Imperial City, and then only in an oblique way, when the end was very near. But it couldn’t have taken her long to discover she’d fallen in love only with a romantic notion. James Walsh had quickly proved to be an inveterate gambler and spendthrift, whose interest in a lovely and talented young wife rapidly waned when she was no longer earning anything. By the time Isobel was eight years old, he had gambled away the last vestiges of Vèronique’s savings, after which he gradually lost interest in everything except drink and the ultimately futile search for new diversions which always palled before long. One night, in Prague, after weeks of restless ennui and depression, he did the only positive thing he had done for years and jumped off the Charles Bridge into the Vltava, leaving nothing behind to say why he’d done so. It was hard to escape the conclusion that he’d been literally bored to death with a life that could hold no more excitement.

  Afterwards, her mother had attempted to resume her singing career, but she’d left it too late: her voice had been neglected and wasn’t what it had been. More than that, the first signs of her illness had also begun to manifest themselves. The strenuous demands of endeavouring to re-emerge as an operatic diva were altogether too much for her. She and Isobel continued to live a restless, hard-up, nomadic life, where nowhere was home, drifting wherever Vèronique’s capricious whim took them, searching for something she, too, like her husband, was never to find. The febrile excitement of moving on, arriving in some new place, with new hopes, eventually lost its magic, but by now she knew no other way of life. Paris, Milan, Rome, Copenhagen, Stockholm, The Hague…their existence funded by the singing lessons she gave to eke out. When she was old enough Isobel, too, earned a little by copying out music scores, at so much a sheet.

  And so they had come to Vienna, a city on which Vèronique had pinned so many hopes, destined to be unfounded. She began to deteriorate rapidly, and with it went her vitality, the radiant spirit which had always been so much part of her attraction. Acquaintances drifted away and soon, even the singing lessons were out of the question. She had reached a nadir of despair by the time Ralph Amberley appeared on the scene, like a miracle sent from God.

  Yet, as Isobel learnt later, it wasn’t entirely by chance that he’d come into their lives. When it had reached his notice that Vèronique was back in the city – sadly depleted, too ill now even to give singing lessons, it was reported – he’d contrived an introduction. Like so many other young – and not so young – men, he had fanc
ied himself half in love with the enchanting singer whom he had in fact met once, briefly, she as the star surrounded by the admiring throng, he as part of it. She did not recall the meeting, though she pretended she did. But how could he ever have forgotten her? Especially when she had sung Mimi, a tragic foreshadowing of her own future?

  His arrival momentarily brought the sparkling past back into the dreary present for her. A well-travelled and cultured Englishman of independent means who devoted himself to music, art and literature, he was staying in Vienna for some time, where he had many friends, before going on to Salzburg. Afterwards, he would return to Vienna and hoped she would not forbid him to visit her again, he added, with that touch of gentle irony which added spice to his quiet manner.

  He did return, and stayed. And in no time at all, it seemed, he became an unobtrusive but indispensable part of their lives – as an escort, companion, provider of little luxuries and comforts. When yet another delivery of delicacies arrived – out-of-season baskets of flowers, strawberries, boxes of bonbons tied with extravagant bows of ribbon – or when he took them out for a drive in an open fiacre into the Vienerwald, the woods which surrounded Vienna, away from the stifling summer heat of the city, Vèronique would feel it incumbent upon her to make token protests, though she easily fell back into her old role and accepted his generosity, like his compliments, as if it were her due.

  ‘I believe we must move you from here,’ he remarked one day, a lifted eyebrow condemning the cramped, unbearably hot rooms where they lodged above a bread-baker’s shop in a noisy street, where Vèronique had arranged herself decoratively for him on a sofa, handkerchief at the ready for when she coughed, languidly employing a lace fan in a vain attempt to get cool. ‘And you must have a maid.’

  ‘The little servant-girl from the shop below,’ she replied, so promptly it was evident the possibility had already been in the forefront of her mind. Isobel was embarrassed; she thought her mother might have at least pretended to give it a moment’s thought, though the lack of a maid – as if they could ever have afforded one in their poverty-stricken existence! – was something she complained about continually. ‘I’m sure she’d be glad to leave those dreadful people.’