The English Girl

by Margaret Leroy

I drift off to sleep, then jolt awake from a nightmare, a dream of suffocation – a sense of something soft and stifling in my mouth and my throat. Not all our dreams are good dreams.

  23

  There’s a footfall behind me. I pause in my playing, spin round in the seat.

  It’s Rainer. He has a slight, quizzical smile.

  ‘Stella. Could I interrupt you for a moment?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He takes out two cigarettes, hands me one. As he leans towards me to light it, the incense smell of his cologne wraps round me.

  I’d like to ask about last night’s meeting. But something stops me. I think of Marthe’s flurried gestures and the colour that came in her face when I asked her what they talked about.

  ‘So, you’ve been going to more concerts, I gather, Stella?’ he says.

  ‘Yes – it’s been wonderful.’

  ‘Excellent. And your friend, who likes Leni Riefenstahl – I’m not sure you told me her name…’

  ‘She’s called Anneliese Hartmann.’

  I feel a small stirring of guilt. He thinks I’m going out with Anneliese.

  ‘And how is Fräulein Hartmann?’ he says.

  ‘She’s very well, thank you.’

  He nods, companionable. Something is different in him today. He’s expansive, pleased with himself. He rests his elbows on the piano, smoking.

  ‘So. What do you hope to do with your life, Stella? Is it the piano above everything?’

  ‘Well…’ These are big questions. ‘One day, I’d like to get married, of course, and have children. One day – but not for a while.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you want a family. It’s important for clever young women like you to pass on all that talent … But I’m guessing that for now it’s all about the piano for you?’

  I nod.

  ‘It’s my ambition to play professionally,’ I tell him.

  ‘I admire you for that,’ he says. ‘It takes dedication. Music, as your mother said, is a hard taskmaster…’ A small smile plays on his lips. ‘But not too hard, I’m thinking. You’re looking well on it, Stella. Vienna suits you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I love it.’ I hear the ardour in my voice; I worry he will hear it too – that he will guess about Harri. I feel a little surge of discomfort, thinking how I’m keeping this hidden. But it’s just a temporary thing: soon I’ll tell them all about him, introduce him. Very soon … ‘I’m so lucky to be living here. It’s so beautiful – this apartment, Vienna, all of it…’

  ‘Vienna is certainly lovely to look at,’ he says. ‘Yet – you don’t feel there’s something complacent about this beautiful city of ours?’

  ‘Not really – but then I’m new here.’

  A small frown. He taps ash into the ashtray. The cool morning sun that spills through the long windows is thinning with winter’s coming. Where it falls on him, you can see all the angles and planes of his face. In certain lights, there’s something almost hungry-looking about him.

  ‘People here can frustrate me,’ he says. ‘They’re rather stuck in their ways. They have no vision … Sometimes I feel this about Vienna – that people with convictions don’t get on here. People with a vision for the future. It’s the plodders, the little men, who succeed. There are exceptions, of course. Important exceptions…’ He sucks in smoke. There’s warmth in his voice, and I wonder if he’s thinking of the men who came to his meeting. ‘But mostly the ones who advance here are so limited. They’re the ones who don’t take risks, who wouldn’t dare to dream.’

  I sense that he’s telling me something that’s important to him. But it all sounds so abstract.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I say vaguely.

  ‘You don’t feel there’s something a little stifling about the place? That there’s something rather restrictive about this world of comfort?’ he asks.

  But I love this world of comfort. And Vienna to me is a thrilling place, compared to my childhood home – a place of unguessable far horizons. I don’t know how to answer, how to please him.

  ‘I don’t have anything to compare it with,’ I tell him. ‘I’m only seventeen and I’ve seen so little of life…’

  He smiles a deprecating smile.

  ‘And at seventeen you’re really too young to be burdened with all my ideas. You must forgive me, Stella. It’s just that I feel you have some sense of these things.’ His winter-grey eyes are on me: approving. ‘That you understand me…’

  I’m so flattered.

  ‘I’ve certainly always felt it’s important to have an ambition,’ I say. And start to add, ‘Something you want above everything…’ He says it too: we speak the words together. This disconcerts me. We both laugh a little.

  ‘There. I knew you understood me,’ he says. ‘I admire such aspiration, Stella. To aspire to achieve something beyond the merely mundane … People will settle for so little, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘For life to have meaning, we have to be part of something bigger than ourselves. I know you feel that too.’

  I nod enthusiastically.

  ‘It’s so important to aspire, and to be firm in your opinions.’ He’s too fervent. He isn’t looking at me now; there’s a distant look in his eyes. ‘To look necessity in the face. To do what needs to be done. To face up to the logic of what you believe, however uncomfortable that may be.’

  He’s lost me now. I feel the conversation slipping away to places where I can’t follow. The moment when we seemed to be speaking the same language has passed. Something in him makes me uneasy: there’s too much eagerness in him.

  I’m relieved when he starts to rifle through the music on the piano. His cigarette rests in the ashtray, sending up blue curls of smoke. Blurring things.

  ‘So what shall it be today?’ he asks me.

  But he’s chosen already, pulling Winterreise from the pile. He doesn’t turn to ‘Die Nebensonnen’, The Mock Suns, and I don’t suggest it. We perform ‘Frühlingstraum’, A Dream of Springtime, with its cheerful, rippling accompaniment, and then ‘Gute Nacht’, the song we played before.

  For my journey I may not choose the time,

  I must find my own way in this darkness …

  He leans across me to turn the page, and I notice his hand – the knuckles as polished as river stones, the elegant fingers, rather slim for a man. Feeling that shiver of something; not wanting to feel it.

  24

  Harri is attending a lecture at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. I wait for him at the Frauenhuber. He will join me when the lecture is over, at four.

  I order coffee for both of us, then take the Wiener Zeitung from the newspaper rack. I start on a long news item, imagining that before I have finished reading it, he will be here.

  I read to the end of the article; but Harri hasn’t arrived. His coffee will be getting cold: I shouldn’t have ordered so soon. I glance at the other customers – two businessmen sharing a strudel; a girl with an older woman, the girl politely talking but looking round with restless eyes. I feel lonely, and rather self-conscious, sitting here on my own.

  The minutes drag on. I feel a small dark niggle of worry. I have to force myself not to keep glancing towards the café door. I play games. I tell myself I will count to fifty, not look at the door all that time; and when I finish counting, he will have magically appeared. I count, look up: no Harri.

  It’s half past four now. The worry has an edge of fear. I superstitiously rearrange things on the table: if I put the milk jug here, like this, then he’ll come and all will be well. I know I’m behaving like Marthe, but that doesn’t stop me.

  I do these things; he doesn’t come.

  Then I start to imagine terrible things that could have happened to him. What if he caught some appalling infection? Hospitals are dangerous places. What if there was a car crash, or a runaway horse in the street? Then, thinking these things, I convince myself that one of them has happened. I think of him horribly injured, dy
ing. How I couldn’t live without him.

  Fear moves through me. I’d run through the streets and look for him, but I wouldn’t know which way to go. All I can do is wait here.

  Rapid footsteps approach my table. He’s rushing up to me, his forehead gleaming with sweat.

  ‘Stella. I’m so sorry, my darling.’

  It’s so wonderful to see him there in front of me – solid, safe. Alive. I feast my eyes on him.

  ‘What happened? I was so worried,’ I say.

  My eyes suddenly fill with tears, with relief at having him back. I expect some elaborate account of misadventure.

  He hands his coat to the waiter, sits. He starts to drink his cold coffee.

  ‘We should order some more,’ I say.

  ‘No, it’s fine. Really, don’t worry, darling,’ he says.

  He gulps down his coffee thirstily.

  ‘Harri – what happened?’ I ask him again.

  I feel a little uneasy. It’s something glimpsed – like the long green slither of a grass-snake under a hedge.

  He makes a slight dismissive gesture.

  ‘I got held up,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh. So – held up how?’

  A slight hesitation – just for a heartbeat.

  ‘The thing was, Ulrike came to speak to me after the lecture. She had a case she was very keen to discuss. It was all rather fascinating. I got a bit carried away – I didn’t notice the time. I’m so sorry.’

  Ulrike. I think of her long slender legs, her elegant clothes, her raven hair in a twist in the nape of her neck. Her full red lips.

  ‘But I’ve been waiting here all this time.’ My voice is high and shrill. Ugly. ‘I’ve been worried sick about you.’

  Anger flares in me. I hate Ulrike. For fascinating him so much that he didn’t notice the time. For keeping him apart from me. Because he got carried away.

  My anger startles him. He backs away slightly, raises his hands in a little sketch of submission or surrender.

  ‘It was really awful. I thought you were dead or something,’ I say. I sound petulant, like a sulking child. Wanting to make him see how I’ve suffered.

  He looks downcast, penitent.

  ‘Stella, I’m so sorry. It was totally my fault. It shouldn’t have happened.’ he says.

  He reaches across the table and puts his hand on mine. I feel his warmth go through me. At once, my rage seeps away.

  ‘It was just a stupid mistake. I hope you’ll forgive me,’ he says.

  He’s truly sorry, I tell myself. I manage to push my angry thoughts from my mind.

  He pulls an envelope from his jacket pocket.

  ‘Just look at these, you beautiful thing. They’re stunning.’

  They’re the photos he took of me in the Volksgarten, by the pink and saffron flowers. I look so happy in them.

  But that night, in my bed, in the darkness, I think about Ulrike. I can’t stop myself. I think of her pale clever fingers moving over his body, in all the most intimate places, thrilling him with her touch; I think of her glossy lips on him, of her long black hair undone and brushing his thigh. In the dark of my mind, she’s like a drawing in the magazine that Kitty Carpenter stole – her body spread out, enticing, open; she’s wearing only high heels. I picture this stylishly naked Ulrike doing things I can scarcely imagine: being rather fascinating. I think of her hand, tongue, hot breath, on him; imagine him lost, ecstatic, crying out: getting carried away.

  My thoughts appal me – yet they also mesmerise me. I hate myself, I hate my thoughts – yet I can’t stop thinking these things.

  25

  One Sunday in late October, we take the tram to the Zentral Friedhof, the great cemetery on the outskirts of Vienna.

  The sky is dark as a bruise, and there’s a cool wind suddenly, all the fallen leaves on the pavements lifting into the air. We get off the tram at the main gate. There are stalls here that cater to mourners, selling candles and flowers, the candles held in glass vases to protect them from the wind. A few fat drops of rain are falling as we go in through the gate.

  Avenues lined with tall trees lead off into a blur of distance. This place is unguessably vast, a limitless silent city: there are over a million people buried here, he says. The Catholic part is crowded with elaborate funeral statuary – crosses and urns and languid angels. Harri shows me the musicians’ corner – the graves of Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms: so many great composers are buried in Vienna. The sky is grey as the monuments; the rain comes on more heavily, water streaming off the stone.

  Then he takes me two more stops on the tram to the furthest part of the place, the New Jewish Cemetery. Here, the graves are more simple, more matter-of-fact – mostly black marble, all crammed together. Jews, he tells me, cannot be buried one above the other; each has to have their separate plot of earth. We walk between dripping chestnut trees.

  He slows, stops.

  ‘My father is buried here,’ he tells me.

  He stands with his head bowed.

  I hold my umbrella over him. I sense a bleak sadness in him. Whenever I go to my father’s grave, I’ll say a prayer for his soul, and that gives me a tentative feeling of peace. But I know that Harri doesn’t believe in prayer, or God, or the soul. I don’t know how to comfort him: don’t even know if I should touch him. I just stand beside him, helpless. Rain gathers in my parting and runs down my face, like tears.

  At last, he turns to me. He says my name – as though he’s pleased, surprised, to see me, almost as though he’d forgotten I was here. I touch his face with my hand. He smiles.

  ‘We’ll have a drink. I could do with a drink. I know a place that you’ll like.’

  It’s an old hunting lodge, just across the road from the wall that runs round the cemetery. Inside, it’s shadowy, candlelit. There’s a quiet group drinking at one of the tables that might be a mourning party, though in the dimness everyone looks to be wearing mourning clothes. A man with a pale drift of hair is hunched over the piano, playing Schumann.

  Harri watches my face. He smiles.

  ‘I knew you’d like it,’ he says.

  We drink red wine that looks almost black in the gloom, and Harri talks about his father.

  ‘I was twenty-three when he died. It happened before I qualified, and I’ve always found that so sad…’

  ‘He’d have been so proud of you,’ I say.

  ‘I changed direction when he died,’ he tells me. ‘I’d always imagined I’d be a surgeon. But then I started to think about going into psychiatry. Perhaps because of the pain I felt after his death. Wanting to understand these feelings that seize us. How overwhelming they are. How they crush us…’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. Thinking of my own father’s death.

  He’s never spoken about these things so openly before. It comes to me that he’s someone who’s constantly talking – even in our most intimate moments, maybe especially then – yet he’s rather slow to reveal himself. There’s so much I don’t know about him. But that doesn’t matter, I tell myself: we are still so young, we have all the time in the world.

  The pianist plays a piece I know but can’t name. There’s a smoky, autumnal sadness in the dying fall of the chords, something elegiac.

  Harri is speaking again.

  ‘I read Mourning and Melancholia, Dr Freud’s great study of depression and grief. I was fascinated. He writes about the psychological work of mourning – how extraordinarily painful this work is, yet how this pain seems natural to us. I felt understood, when I read that.’

  I put my hand on his. We sit like that for a while.

  Then he stirs, smiles at me. There’s a lightening in his face now.

  ‘So that was part of it – how it began. Me doing the work that I do.’

  I love to hear him talking about his work. ‘I’d always wondered what it is about Dr Freud’s psychology. What it means to you…’

  Harri’s face in the candlelight is beautiful, thoughtful.

  ‘There
’s so much that’s hidden in us.’ Slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘In people, in what happens between people. I’ve always felt that. With this work, we try to uncover the hidden things,’ he says.

  I wait.

  ‘All of us sometimes behave in ways that we don’t understand,’ he says. ‘We aren’t rational. We’re driven by demons. Sometimes we sabotage ourselves. There are things that we hate in ourselves – things we can’t seem to control. Things that possess us, if you like.’

  I remember what I can feel at night, in the dark of my room. I don’t say anything.

  ‘You could say these things are like ghosts, like vampires. They don’t like the light,’ he tells me. ‘If you hold them up to the light of day, they lose their power, they scatter. Perhaps they aren’t such monsters as you thought … That’s what we try to achieve, in this work. To hold dark things up to the light.’

  I think of my fevered imaginings about him and Ulrike – so detailed, specific, appalling. If I held them up to the light, would they go, those feelings I have? All the jealousy?

  I try to find a way to move the conversation on, worried that he will read my thoughts in my face.

  ‘What you said just now – it makes me think of Marthe,’ I tell him. ‘What you said about people behaving in ways that they don’t understand.’

  He is at once intrigued.

  I tell him about her hand-washing, and how she will arrange things to be exactly in line.

  ‘There’s usually a fear underlying that kind of compulsive behaviour,’ he says. ‘A fear that can’t be allowed into consciousness. A fear that the person believes could overwhelm them entirely.’

  ‘I don’t know what she’s afraid of,’ I tell him.

  ‘No. Well, neither does she,’ he says. ‘And the purpose of the behaviour is to keep it that way.’

  I think about this for a moment.

  The pianist reaches the end of the piece. The room is quiet; the candle flames falter in a slight movement of air. The vast silence of the cemetery seems to reach out towards us.

  ‘So, that’s Marthe. What about Rainer?’ Harri asks me.