The English Girl

by Margaret Leroy

‘Rainer’s right, you see, Stella. He’s telling you this for your own good. It’s as well to be a bit aware of these things.’

  Her turn of phrase makes me uneasy. It makes me think of Anneliese, in the Ladies’ Room at the Landtmann.

  ‘Now, I know you’re feeling shaken,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you go and get some rest? I’ll have Janika bring some soup along to your room.’

  I’m grateful for her kindness. And at once I feel bad about everything.

  I apologise, and excuse myself.

  42

  Schönbrunn Zoo is enchanting in the winter afternoon light. The railings and cages are all green or white or sherbet-coloured, and there’s an octagonal pavilion that looks just like a cake, with intricate white carvings of undulating ribbons and flowers, like sugar icing. The place is full of mothers and nannies, and children, shrieking and thrilled. You can smell the hot smells of the animals.

  ‘Look, Fräulein Stella!’

  Lukas has spotted a baby giraffe. We watch as it tries to sit down – clumsy, its legs too long for its body, finally folding up like a deckchair, making both of us laugh. I’m happy here with Lukas. I try not to think about the scene at dinner on Saturday night.

  We walk on. A golden cheetah sits serenely amid a fall of gold leaves. Some little boys shout at the lions. There’s a cage with a jaguar in, but you can’t see him. Something – perhaps the hidden jaguar – is making a guttural sound, between a grunt and a roar, repeated, getting louder, as though building up to some brutal act of predation. It’s rather sinister and wild.

  ‘What’s that sound?’ Lukas asks me.

  ‘I’m not sure, Lukas. It might be the jaguar.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ he says.

  ‘No, I know what you mean. But there’s nothing to be worried about. The animals are all safe in their cages. The jaguar couldn’t get out.’

  There’s a cage of gibbons, with blond fur and black faces. I sit on a bench to watch them, enjoying their liquid movements as they swing around the cage. Lukas sits beside me.

  ‘I heard something in the night,’ he tells me.

  He sounds anxious. Perhaps the roar of the jaguar upset him more than I thought.

  ‘Did you, Lukas?’

  ‘I did, I heard something.’ A little defiantly. Perhaps he sensed some scepticism in my voice. ‘I was lying awake in my bed. There were footsteps. Somebody was walking outside my room.’

  ‘Lukas – I really don’t think—’

  ‘I went to my door, and I opened it. Just the tiniest crack. Like this.’ He shows me how tiny, with his finger and thumb. ‘There wasn’t a person. The person had gone. But I could still hear the feet…’

  His eyes are wide, remembering. His voice is a little thin shred.

  He probably just imagined it, or misunderstood something he heard. I try to reassure him.

  ‘It was probably just somebody on their way to the bathroom. Everything sounds louder in the middle of the night. When the whole flat is quiet.’

  It’s cold sitting here, in spite of the sunlight. In the shadows where the sun doesn’t reach, the grass has a white crust of frost. Lukas shivers.

  ‘What if a bad man came into my home?’ he asks me.

  I think of the apartment on Maria-Treu-Gasse: its warmth, its fat satin cushions, its familiar ordered routines. Its safety.

  ‘No one will come in, Lukas. No one will hurt you in your home. No one could come in the flat that your mama and papa don’t want to be there.’

  I see the doubt that swims like a minnow in the pool of his eye.

  ‘But what if they didn’t notice? What if they let the wrong person come in?’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that, Lukas—’

  ‘But you said you can’t tell by looking. Bad people can look quite ordinary. Just like you or me. That’s what you said,’ he tells me.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did.’

  I’m cross with myself that I said that. I spoke without thinking it through. It may be true enough – but it makes the whole world seem frightening to him.

  This conversation worries me – the way Lukas seems so afraid. How he doesn’t feel safe even in his own home; or maybe especially there.

  On Tuesday, I’m outside the toy shop while Harri hunts for his key, when I notice something in the window – a shiny burgundy box, opened up to show its contents. There’s a silver toy pistol, a whistle, a notebook with pale calfskin covers, a very grown-up-looking magnifying glass. It’s a toy detective kit. I think how Lukas has sometimes said that he’d like to be a policeman. He can pretend to be a detective, and perhaps that will make him feel strong.

  I tell Eva I want to buy the kit for Lukas; though she insists on giving it to me.

  The next day, at the end of my lesson with Lukas, I take out the burgundy box.

  ‘This is for you, Lukas.’

  His eyes widen.

  He takes the lid off the box, studies all the things inside. His face is luminous. He takes out the whistle, blows it. He beams.

  ‘I’m a real policeman now, aren’t I, Fräulein Stella? I can catch all the people who do bad things,’ he says.

  His voice is strong and confident. I feel very pleased with myself.

  ‘Yes, absolutely, you can.’

  ‘How do you do it? How do you catch them?’

  I think of the books by Agatha Christie, which my mother likes to read.

  ‘You have to see the things that other people might not see. You’d be looking for something out of place. Something that shouldn’t be there. It might be just a little clue.’

  ‘I’d rather find a big clue,’ he says.

  ‘But a tiny thing can change everything. That’s what the magnifying glass is for. So you can see things so small that other people couldn’t see them. A tiny thing can show that something’s happened that shouldn’t have happened,’ I say.

  There’s a frown pencilled in on his forehead.

  ‘What tiny thing?’ he asks me.

  ‘Perhaps there’s a window left open. Or a hair that shouldn’t be there. Or a fingerprint left by a burglar…’ I make my voice mysterious.

  He’s excited.

  ‘There might be feet in the night,’ he says.

  ‘Yes. I suppose there might be.’

  A shadow moves over his face. He’s very serious suddenly.

  He pulls my head towards him. I feel his soft breath on my skin.

  ‘You might hear somebody crying, because somebody hurt them,’ he says.

  I don’t want him to think about Verity. I need to suggest something else, to distract him. But my mind is suddenly blank.

  ‘The thing is – you have to notice things,’ I finish lamely.

  I was feeling so pleased with myself. But maybe this detective kit wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  He takes out the magnifying glass, holds it up, peers at me through it. His eye is strangely distorted, huge and bulbous, through the lens.

  ‘I can do that. I can notice things,’ he tells me.

  43

  Winter comes to Vienna.

  One evening, after we’ve made love, I lazily open my eyes.

  ‘Harri. Look! Look!’ My voice is shrill as a child’s.

  Snow is falling. The flakes spill out of the dark velvet sky, spiralling down into light, where the glow of the lamp shines upward through the uncurtained windows. I watch the patterns the snowflakes weave, this fragile fabric of white. I have never seen anything lovelier.

  Getting dressed, I keep looking upwards; I can’t stop looking.

  Harri walks me home to Maria-Treu-Gasse. It’s falling thickly, settling on the pavement, and the shoulders and sleeves of Harri’s greatcoat are soon thickly furred. It thrills me. You don’t get much snow in Brockenhurst: it’s a damp, mild, temperate place. A snowfall is always exciting to me; I love the chill sweetness and sting of the air, the way the world is transformed. The streets are full of a silence that seems to fall from the sky with the snow.

&nbs
p; Harri is amused by my excitement; snow is so familiar to him.

  At Maria-Treu-Gasse, he kisses me goodnight, and I feel his face against mine. Everything is so vivid to me: his cold skin, warm mouth, on me; the vast hush of the streets all around.

  The next morning it’s my lesson, and Marthe has to lend me some galoshes to wear.

  There’s a high blue sky and the snow-light dazzles. All the fountains are frozen, hung with glittery daggers of ice. Workmen are clearing the pavements, and the snow on the roads is already trampled and grey, but the Volksgarten shimmers, immaculate, and there are bright blossoms of snow in the sycamore trees.

  It feels icy in the classroom, and my fingers are like lumps of wood. Dr Zaslavsky, of course, makes no concessions to the weather: he is as demanding as ever. But he doesn’t seem quite well to me. He’s more hunched up than usual and the lines are cut deep in his face. He must be troubled by the cold; his rheumatic limbs will be hurting. But he says nothing about this, of course; he never reveals his feelings at all. I can’t imagine him complaining about anything. Except the flaws in my playing.

  I play the Chopin E major Etude, and he tells me the middle section is muddy and the phrasing doesn’t flow, and my heart sinks. But then, at the end of the lesson, he sets me something new – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He opens the book at ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, the final piece of the suite, and asks me to sight-read it for him. It’s marked to be played Maestoso, con grandezza. I try to play majestically and grandly; I savour the splendid, spacious harmonies.

  ‘That is a start, Fraulein Whittaker,’ he says, when I’ve come to end of the piece.

  I know I’ll love studying the Mussorgsky. I’m always so excited to have new music to learn.

  When I leave the Academy, it’s still freezing. My thin English coat and knitted gloves aren’t suitable for this weather. I decide to walk to the city centre, to buy myself some new clothes.

  In Johannesgasse, there’s a chestnut seller. A soft blue smoke lifts from his cart, and the glow of the brazier lights up his face from below; I think of the light on the shepherds’ faces in a Nativity painting. As I pass, I can smell the roasting chestnuts, their festive, Christmassy scent.

  At Knize on the Graben, I equip myself for a Viennese winter. I buy a good woollen coat and some thick woollen gloves, and a rather indulgent hat of silver foxfur.

  I hear that there is skating in the Stadtpark. Marthe says she will lend me her skates.

  I look for Lukas. He isn’t in the nursery. As I walk back down the hallway, past the cupboard where Janika keeps her brushes and mops, I hear a small whispery voice. The cupboard door is slightly ajar and I can see inside. Lukas is sitting on an upturned bucket. He has the silver toy pistol and the magnifying glass, and he’s talking softly to himself, lost in some inner world.

  ‘Lukas, shall we go skating?’

  He looks up, startled, then gives a vigorous shake of the head.

  ‘I don’t like skating. It’s too slippery.’

  ‘Oh. But skating is such fun, Lukas.’

  ‘But what if I fell down?’

  ‘You wouldn’t. I’d keep tight hold of your hand.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to. I want to stay in my cupboard and be a detective,’ he says.

  I’m disappointed. I’ve never skated out-of-doors: it’s rarely safe in England. There was a girl at my school called Edie Charles who died when she fell through thin ice on a pond: she was always held up as a terrible warning to us. I’d love to skate in the open. It must be wonderful to skate in the Stadtpark in the sweet, numbing air, to feel the whole wide world fly past you.

  The Rose Room has an underwater radiance, the soft snow-light reflecting from the mirrors, and held and refracted in the lustres of the chandelier. But piano practice is difficult. Janika has lit the stove in the corner, but the room is still very cold. I have to soak my hands in hot water to make the blood flow before I can play.

  I’m practising scales, when Rainer comes in.

  I stop at once: I’m nervous. It’s the first time I’ve been alone with him since the scene at the dinner table. I’ve wondered how it will be between us. Uneasy thoughts are snagging at the edges of my mind – questions about him. About what he might be involved in, and what he believes. Whether I’ve misread him.

  I look up at his reflection in the mirror. He stands there, smiling, as charming as ever, and I feel reassured. Though maybe there’s something a little withdrawn in him, something veiled in his eyes. It could be a trick of the snow-light.

  ‘So, Stella, perhaps another song from Winterreise?’ he says.

  ‘I’d love that.’

  ‘It seems appropriate for the season,’ he says.

  We perform ‘Erstarrung’: Numbness; where the lover searches in vain for his sweetheart’s footprints in the snow, and ‘Der Lindenbaum’, The Linden Tree.

  When we come to the end of ‘Der Lindenbaum’, Rainer thanks me.

  ‘The song is so simple, yet so moving. Schubert is at his most powerful when he writes most simply,’ he says.

  I murmur agreement.

  As night falls, the snowy street fills up with damson shadow.

  In the lighted window over the street, there’s a woman I’ve not seen before. She’s elderly, stooped, with white hair; she could be the other woman’s mother, or her mother-in-law. There’s a look of confusion in her face: I wonder if her mind is going. Then the dark-haired woman appears, and places a shawl on the old woman’s shoulders, and moves her away from the window, perhaps steering her to a chair. I wonder if the old woman, like Benjamin, has a favourite chair she always sits in.

  A few moments later, the dark-haired woman comes back to the window. She’s looking out into the street at the snow that is falling again. She has an absent look that is now familiar to me: it’s as though she is ambushed by memory, full of longing for what has been lost. Behind her, the silver of the menorah glitters in the light of the lamp.

  As I watch, the little girl joins her at the window. I can only just see her face above the window sill, but I can tell how happy she is, seeing the snowflakes feathering down. She says something, and her mother glances down at her and smiles. There’s a light in the woman’s face now, as though her child has rescued her, has pulled her back from some sad room in the labyrinth of her thought.

  The shadow deepens in the street. The woman reaches out and pulls the curtains across.

  44

  Saturday afternoon. I read Lotte a story from my fairytale book, to help her with her English. It’s the tale of Baba Yaga the witch, how she lived in a house on chicken legs, and kept a girl as her slave.

  Lotte is restless. I’m translating the difficult bits as I read, but perhaps the English is too hard for her.

  ‘Lotte – is something the matter?’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t chosen this story, Stella.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you’d like it.’

  Lotte usually likes to hear stories of girls who do bold and dangerous things.

  ‘Well, I don’t. It’s too sad. I like stories that have happy endings,’ she says.

  ‘This one has a happy ending,’ I tell her. ‘Later, the girl gets away. Her comb turns into a forest so she can escape from the witch, and the animals she’s been kind to help her. We just haven’t got to that bit yet. But we’ll read something else if you’d rather.’

  I stretch out my legs in the warmth of the stove. I’m looking forward to tonight, when Harri is taking me to the Staatsoper, to see La Traviata. This afternoon, he’s writing up case notes, in his attic room.

  I read some more of the story, but Lotte isn’t paying attention. She chews at the bits of skin at the sides of her nails.

  ‘Lotte – has something happened?’ I ask again.

  She sneaks a look at me. She’s wondering how much to tell me.

  ‘School was horrid yesterday, Stella. I don’t want to go back. I wish I could stay at home for ever.’

  ‘But I�
�d have thought you’d be having lots of fun in the snow,’ I say cheerfully. ‘Making snowmen. Having snowball fights.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t,’ she says.

  Her dark eyes glitter with tears. I worry that I was heartless.

  ‘Poor Lotte, I’m sorry.’ I wonder what happened; perhaps her teacher scolded her. ‘Some schoolteachers can be awfully strict. You mustn’t let it upset you.’

  She shakes her head, and her braids fly out, and a few twisty tendrils escape. Her hair is so intensely curly – the kind of hair that people must always be making excuses to touch.

  ‘It wasn’t that. It wasn’t the teachers. It was Gabi,’ she says.

  I think how she admired Gabi’s drawings of horses; how thrilled she was when Gabi brought a spider into school.

  ‘Have you two fallen out?’ I ask her.

  She nods vigorously. She swallows, trying not to cry.

  I put my arms around her, breathe in her scent of gingerbread, lemons, warm wool.

  ‘Oh Lotte. That’s sad. But it happens. At school I often fell out with my friends. But then we used to make up again.’

  She frowns.

  ‘Were people really rude to you sometimes?’

  ‘Yes. I know what it’s like, Lotte, really. There were girls who used to say the most horrible things…’ Remembering the names they called me, and how they stung me with stinging nettles. I understand about being bullied. I can help her with this.

  She moves away from me, chewing her fingers.

  ‘Gabi was really rude to me, Stella.’

  ‘Sometimes people say horrid things, when they’re quarrelling. But I’m sure she didn’t mean it, whatever she said. I’m sure you’ll make up soon,’ I tell her brightly.

  She shakes her head, but I don’t know which bit of this she’s disagreeing with.

  ‘We had a fight. She said I’d smudged her exercise book. I hadn’t done it, but she said it was me.’

  ‘That’s not fair, is it? But it’s the kind of thing that happens. Getting blamed for things you didn’t do…’ I don’t know how to comfort her. I think of the sort of advice that people would give in Brockenhurst. ‘The secret is to keep cheerful and try not to mind very much.’