Last Nocturne

by Marjorie Eccles

  Life changed for everyone when Miriam Koppel arrived at the house in Silbergasse.

  The girl models disappeared overnight. Isobel missed the sound of their chatter, their giggling and the sight of them drifting in and out of Viktor’s studio. Berta’s token grumblings and mutterings, and the dark predictions which had accompanied everything she did, like a litany, changed to a sullen silence. Miriam was restless, easily bored, alternately in high spirits and then becoming quite out of temper, sparking off irritation and quarrelsomeness in Bruno, too. Sometimes this seemed quite deliberate, as if it were simply a response to boredom. She and Viktor were at odds from the start so that he was more morose and silent than usual, if that were possible. Miriam went on smiling maliciously and brought something of the winter chill into the house. Everyone withdrew into themselves, wrapping up tightly against the cold.

  Isobel learnt that Miriam had been born and bred in Vienna, the wayward daughter of elderly parents, Isaac Koppel, a bookseller, and his wife, who lived in the Ruprechtskirche Jewish quarter. But Miriam was not born to be a dutiful Jewish daughter and her wild and unorthodox way of life had taken her far from her traditional background, and kept her separated for long stretches at a time from her disappointed parents. Yet despite her behaviour and her rejection of their life and faith, they loved their only child too much to sever all connections with her and were delighted when Sophie was occasionally left to stay with them whenever it suited Miriam, rather than seeing her dragged along in her mother’s footloose existence.

  Isobel very soon found that Miriam’s commitment to motherhood was as slight as her commitment to anything else, and that for as long as she condescended to stay she had no intentions of allowing it to curtail her freedom in the least. It wasn’t long before she was bringing a reluctant Sophie to Isobel’s door and begging, ‘You will look after her for me, won’t you, while I visit my mother?’ Isobel didn’t like the wheedling note in her voice, but she could scarcely refuse; the sickroom of Miriam’s mother seemed no place for a child. Then Miriam had to sit for Viktor, or see someone who could offer her work, though what this was remained a mystery Isobel didn’t want to examine. She never enquired too closely into Miriam’s concerns, who she associated with, where she found the money to live on, much preferring to remain in ignorance.

  Sophie knew she was being dumped on Isobel. ‘See she does as you tell her,’ Miriam said once, leaving the child with her. ‘And you – be a good girl or the gypsies will take you.’ It was said with a laugh, but Sophie shrank and Isobel wanted to slap Miriam for her thoughtlessness. She should be more careful, especially with her child, but also, Isobel thought, with Viktor. Despite his use of her as a model, there was no mistaking the bad feeling which existed between them. She wondered perhaps if he were jealous of Miriam’s appropriation of Bruno, although the brothers appeared to remain on good terms. But there were hidden depths to Viktor – dark depths that should not on any account be probed too deeply. Here be dragons.

  At first, the times Sophie spent with her were a trial – to Isobel, and no doubt to Sophie, too, poor child, she thought. She was quiet to the point of sullenness sometimes, her plain little face screwed up into a mask of resentment – at what, Isobel could only guess – but at least she was obedient and didn’t misbehave. Indeed, she hardly ever did anything else except read her battered copy of Struwwelpeter. This hideous book was a sinister and nightmarish collection of cautionary poems, with horrific illustrations, featuring a dirty boy with wild, turbulent hair and nails like talons, who bounded across the pages and inflicted terrible punishments on children who failed to do as they were told, such as cutting off their thumbs with one snip of the scissors because they sucked them, or dipping their heads in ink. Quite often, innocent children were summarily despatched for their supposed misdemeanours. Sophie turned the pages, her eyes flickering and frightened, yet nothing would prise her from it. She was the most uncommunicative child Isobel had ever met.

  ‘Why, bless you, the little mite’s only a bit shy. She doesn’t know us yet, do you, my lamb?’ And Susan took her into the kitchen, and fed her with glasses of milk and English rock cakes which, despite their name, were light as a feather. Sophie ate and drank obediently, but it was going to take more than rock cakes and Susan’s homely kindness to break through that tough carapace she had surrounded herself with.

  Poor little girl. Isobel knew how it was, being dragged from city to city, feeling you never belonged anywhere; she knew what it did to you to be forced to move along, almost always just when you were making friends of your own age. The difference in their situations came from the fact that never was there any doubt that Vèronique had loved her daughter, that Isobel had adored her beautiful mother, and in the end nothing else mattered. How much or how little this was true of Sophie and her mother, she could only guess.

  Apparently, like some bird of passage, Miriam never alighted anywhere for long; she was, after all, a New Woman, a free spirit. She had to remain unshackled, free to come and go as the fancy took her – the same impulse which motivated her to arrive and depart without warning or explanation into Bruno’s life, as she had done for years, said Berta, mouth turned down, though what it was that bound them together was not obviously apparent to anyone, since they seemed to spend a great deal of their time quarrelling with one another. This time it appeared she had indeed come to stay, and Isobel didn’t think she was the only one who wished she had not.

  The lovely summer had gone now and instead of laughter and the silly chatter and singing of the Gretls and Mitzis more often came the noise of voices raised in one of the stormy exchanges that seemed to be a fixed feature of their relationship. To be more precise, Bruno’s voice. Isobel imagined Miriam rousing him to impotent fury with that maddening smile of hers, leaving him smouldering and silent in the aftermath of his rage. An hour later, they would be walking off, arm-in-arm, laughing and talking as if nothing had ever happened. Sophie’s white little face after these happenings made Isobel feel less guilty about the time the child spent with her: quite apart from the quarrels, being with Miriam must have been like treading on eggs, her moods were so unpredictable. Sophie never knew what to expect, whether she would be smothered with caresses, coldly ignored – or worse, told to go away and stay out of her mother’s sight. Isobel sometimes wondered if Miriam were not slightly deranged.

  At the same time, she had to confess that she was often at her wits’ end to think of ways of occupying Sophie. They went for walks into the parks and bought ices in the Volksgarten, she took her to the Volksprater for rides on the carousels; they rode together on the Riesenrad and saw the city spread out from its great height, but for the most part Sophie remained as unresponsive and dully obedient as ever. One day, to divert her from the demon boy in her book, Isobel looked out a wooden jigsaw puzzle, a childhood treasure of her own which had been as inseparable from her as the book was from Sophie, kept in a polished wooden box with a sliding lid, on which was pasted a map of Europe as a guide. The pieces were large and thick and simple to fit together, and the game had been to see how quickly she could finish it without looking at the picture – though she knew the shapes by heart: Great Britain (where her father was born and where she had always longed to visit but doubted she ever would) was a polite little dog, sitting up waiting for a biscuit; Norway and Sweden a sleeping bear; Italy a long-legged boot kicking Sicily into the sea, and the Bay of Biscay was easy because it had a piece the size of a pea broken off it – but the interest of the puzzle for her had lain in the picture it formed of her life, literally a map of their peregrinations from one city to another.

  ‘This is where I used to live,’ said Sophie, fitting Budapest right into the centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. ‘And then we went there! And we lived there – and there.’

  ‘So did I,’ Isobel told her. ‘Like you, with my mother.’ Sophie stared, then almost smiled. The simple toy was forming the same function for her as it had for Isobel, making sense of some
thing which never had made sense to a child. But soon, getting the hang of the puzzle, she tired of it and went back to Struwwelpeter. Still, the ice had been broken. They had begun to talk. Isobel hoped they’d taken the first step to becoming friends.

  The air began to have a bite to it. The sky became leaden. The first snowflakes fell, the ice on the Danube was several inches thick and skaters waltzed along it to the music of frozen-fingered gipsy fiddlers on the bank. Christmas was approaching and one morning the young artist, Theo, who seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the attic next door, appeared and suggested he and Isobel should take Sophie to the Christinglmarkt which filled the city streets at this time. He had all the patience in the world with the child, and often accompanied them on their walks in the Hofgarten or to the Prater. Sophie had become very fond of Theo and the droll sense of humour he displayed when he wasn’t preoccupied with the current work in progress. Then he could be moody and abstracted, and was better left alone.

  A new fall of snow had occurred overnight and the air was bitter. The cold brought colour to Sophie’s cheeks, almost as bright a red as the cloak Susan had made for her, with a little fur cap and a matching muff. She was speechless at such hitherto unknown luxury and stroked the rabbit fur so often it was in danger of becoming bald.

  The little wooden market stalls had spread outward from the Am Hof square where Isobel had met Bruno writing his poetry that day, all of them crammed to overflowing with carved wooden dolls, pull-along toys, trains, drums and whistles, Noah’s arks and Krippen, or nativity scenes. Music and the rich aromas of food and wine greeted them. Sophie gazed at a small carousel which had been set up in one corner, at the brightly painted horses with flowing manes and flaring nostrils, alarmingly realistic, moving up and down in time to the music, but could not be persuaded to take a ride. They bought gilded gingerbread to eat, spicy and warm, and burnt their fingers with hot roast chestnuts. Theo and Isobel drank mulled gluehwein and Sophie had hot chocolate. Then Theo gave Sophie a coin to roll at one of the catch-penny stalls, where miraculously it landed on a square indicating a prize. The dark-visaged stall-keeper, coins dangling from her scarf, showed her bad teeth in a smile as she handed over the prize to give to the lucky little mädchen, a crude wooden doll about six inches long dressed in a dirndl, with false flaxen hair stuck onto the wooden knob glued on to serve as a head, a garish face painted on it. Sophie was transformed. The cheap little fairing might have been the most precious jewel in the universe. She kept it cradled inside her muff all the way home.

  A doll. Why hadn’t Isobel thought of that before? But Sophie wasn’t a child one would have expected to take to dolls. She found a shoe box for a temporary crib and cloth to line it, and Sophie laid the doll down tenderly, pulling a scrap of silk up to its chin. ‘Shall I call you Klara? No, Mitzi suits you better. Nod your head if you agree.’ Taking hold of the knobby head she moved it back and forth. It came off in her hand. For a moment she stared at it, her distress so intense that one might have thought it was a human baby whose head had been chopped off by Struwwelpeter.

  ‘Sophie, it can be mended,’ Theo said.

  Isobel tried to comfort her but she wriggled away into a corner of the sofa where she sat with her thumb in her mouth (despite those grisly warnings), refusing to speak. Sophie, Sophie! Life, already hard, was going to be even harder for her, Isobel thought as Theo left to glue the doll’s head on.

  She opened the piano lid and began to play, picking out pieces at random, though she rarely played except when alone, or perhaps upset, since she was conscious of her lack of expertise. At the first notes of ‘Für Elise’, Sophie raised her head, then after a while came to stand by her, watching as her fingers moved over the keys. Isobel moved up and patted the stool. ‘Would you like to try?’

  Sophie hesitated then sat gingerly down beside her.

  Isobel was not especially musical. As Vèronique’s daughter, she’d learnt early to play the piano, to read a score and copy it; listening to music was a pure joy, but she had no special skill with any instrument. From the moment she placed Sophie’s small finger on middle C, however, she could see she was a natural. After that, she gradually taught her the rudiments, which Sophie picked up immediately, and Isobel guessed she would very soon be ahead of her, and that one day she might turn out to be very accomplished. But even if she didn’t, to learn an appreciation of great music was a gift that would be a solace to her all her life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The piano soon became more than a diversion, a novelty, a new toy to be played with. Whenever she was allowed, Sophie sat at the keyboard and never had to be coerced into practising her scales. Miriam carelessly agreed to let her come to Isobel every day for her lessons, glad enough to get her off her hands, Isobel suspected. Soon she was spending a good deal of each day with her, and after a little while, sometimes the night, too. There was a spare cubby-hole of a room in the apartment, where they made up a makeshift bed. It was only then that Isobel discovered what a nightmare-ridden little creature Sophie was, waking up during the night engulfed with nameless terrors. Even, on occasions, being prone to sleepwalking.

  ‘Isobel, my dear, excuse me for interfering, but are you not a little in danger of becoming too wrapped up in that child?’ Julian Carrington suggested quietly one day after she’d declined to accompany him to a concert because Sophie was in her care while Miriam had disappeared on one of her nameless pursuits. ‘I understand you feel a certain responsibility for her in the circumstances but,’ he reminded her gently, ‘she’s not really your concern.’

  Isobel couldn’t find an answer to this. She didn’t see Sophie as a ‘responsibility’. God, or Fate, or whoever it is that rules our lives, had not seen fit to grant her a child. She’d given up hope for one of her own. But now, here was Sophie.

  ‘Julian, I enjoy having her near me. We’re company for one another.’

  ‘What is her mother thinking of? Has she no sense of duty?’

  Julian made no secret of the fact that he disliked Miriam, an unmarried woman with a child, with no obvious means of support and no degree of commitment to a stable way of life. One, moreover, who took her duties as a mother so lightly she might be said to have abrogated them altogether. While Miriam, in her turn, thought Julian so far removed from her sphere of understanding that she could barely bring herself to acknowledge his presence when they met, which was fortunately not very often.

  ‘Duty? Miriam? I doubt she knows the meaning of the word, but does that mean Sophie should be neglected?’

  ‘There are degrees,’ Julian replied gravely. ‘My dear, you do have your own life to lead.’

  Isobel appreciated his concern. It was against his principles to speak his mind and give opinions which were not always wanted. He wasn’t by any manner of means a selfish person, and he was as fond of Sophie as any bachelor could be, set in his ways and not used to the encumbrances of a child, but he could have no idea what it meant to a woman to be denied the child she longed for, to have a child slip a confiding hand into hers. True, Isobel had yet to experience anything of this nature with Sophie, but when she could be coaxed into it, she’d discovered that the child had a radiant smile that lit up her plain little face and she’d begun to look for ways of making it appear.

  ‘I shall speak to Fraulein Koppel myself,’ Julian said after some deliberation.

  Isobel was horrified and begged him not to. ‘You’ll only make things worse. She might stop sending Sophie here and leave her to be looked after by Berta. Who’s all very well, but she’s a superstitious old woman and far too obsessed with trying to make Sophie into a perfect angel.’ Berta, who was from Transylvania, believed in ghosts and werewolves and the undead, as well as in Satan and retribution. ‘Sophie says Miriam gave her that awful book, but I suspect it was at Berta’s instigation.’

  To please her Julian agreed not to approach Miriam. But their exchange had made her think. Was she in danger of growing too fond of Sophie – and
expecting a return? Sophie was often reluctant to go back to her mother after she’d been with her and Isobel’s feelings were very mixed about that. Yet how quickly the child had responded to a little kindness and interest! Well, she had better accustom herself to the thought that Sophie was not and never could be hers. Moreover, Miriam’s way of life left little hope that she would remain in Vienna. Isobel’s throat ached at the thought of separation, yet even if distance kept them apart, there were ways she could always look after Sophie. For one thing, that musical talent of hers should be encouraged. She ought to be taught properly. And there at least Isobel could help, by providing the money which would be needed. If not her mother, she could at least be her guardian angel.

  After their little exchange, Julian had leant back quietly in his chair. Some time later he asked, unexpectedly, ‘Are you lonely, living here, Isobel?’

  ‘Goodness, how can you think that, with Susan – and all my friends – you – and Theo.’

  ‘And the little girl, as you said. But Benton is going away soon, is he not?’

  Only the week before, Theo had told her he must soon think of going home, back to England. She wasn’t altogether surprised, considering how unsettled he had been lately. He was an amiable sort of fellow, but there was a streak of restlessness and dissatisfaction in his make-up, at least where his work was concerned, almost a savagery sometimes. Isobel had dared to ask him once why he kept on with it if it depressed him so much. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said, ‘I must.’ And then added, in a rare moment of confidence, that he sometimes felt as if he were standing on the edge of an abyss above deep waters into which he was compelled sooner or later to plunge, with a noose around his neck which would tighten if he did jump. He laughed afterwards but she knew he had been serious. She would never understand the artistic temperament.