1./
I woke to a quickening pulse of green light through the shade
across the sleeping compartment's window. I lay and stared at the
irregular flicker, too warmly cradled by the soft sheets and the
lullaby clatter of the train's wheels to feel any presbyterian
compulsion towards a swift rising, such as a chilly Scottish morning
would have stirred. When the guard's rap on the door announced
breakfast, I dragged back the covers and stepped to the window,
drawing up the shade to reveal that the play of emerald glints was
the refraction of sunlight off forest boughs crowding the side of the
track. I supposed we must be nearing the Austrian border.
By the time I had taken my seat in
the buffet car, we were slowing into the little station at the border
post, the officers there very decently waiting until we first class
passengers had finished dining before troubling us over passports.
My own inspection completed, I
strolled the platform, taking my first proper breath of Austrian air,
finding it piney-sweet with the lazy ripplings of the ocean of trees
on every side. I caught the tang of wood-smoke, a thin and silvery
plume unfurling amid the tree-tops banked high on the left of the
track. Behind me, past the idling chuff of the engine, I discerned
the roar of water through the gorge over which a bridge had just
carried us. From that same direction came a clang of cow-bells, but
the forest's immensest sound was the all-surrounding chatter of
crickets. I raised my face to the sun and, in the instant before the
glare forced my eyes to close, gained a vision of mountains staggered
impossibly high above the highest firs, their grey and white crags
where greens and browns could not reach melting into a paler shade of
the blue the sky wore.
I was distracted by a compartment
door's flapping wide and thumping against the wood alongside. Two of
the station's officers were steering a young man from my carriage
across the platform, his tall body hunched in its ill-fitting grey
suit. He glanced my way, forcing a smile past his lop-sided
moustache. Another officer opened the door of a little shack on the
platform and the young man was hastened through, eyes directed
forwards once again, the clench of his features reminiscent of a
pupil at Burns Street Primary School being delivered to Mr. McAllion
for a dose of the strap.
Our conductor was hurrying towards
me, urging me to get aboard. I made the condition of my return an
answer as to what was happening. "Fraulein,
Fraulein, this... this is
nothing for you to worry, " he said. "He is just... the man
is, ay, ein Slav,
ein Slavisches Kriminal, ein
Serb. Or a… a suspect, to
be sure, There is trouble, you see, with the, the politics today.
Yes? They will put him on the next train if all is well. Now, please,
we must keep time for Wien. Bitte."
I climbed aboard. We started off.
Through the window of the door that had just been slammed at my back,
I glimpsed the young man beyond the hut's window, caught by the
sunlight blazing into the first couple of feet of an otherwise dark
interior. He was taking off his jacket, an oval stain of sweat on the
rear of his white shirt. I started towards my compartment, the
conductor's portly wriggle along the corridor at my back closing off
all other avenues. He was already forcing on me the menu for
luncheon.
*
We raced on through the
Salzkammergut, the Austrian equivalent of our Lake District, although
far more richly-forested and steeper in its mountains, many of which
still bore streaks of snow and precipitous expanses of glacier. The
track snaked high above the lakes, their glassy surfaces painted the
brightest of blues by the sky’s reflection.
We wound by onion-domed churches,
schlosses, hunting lodges, lakeside hamlets, pausing at a few of the
larger spa towns. My attention was drawn south towards the
middle-distance and the jaggedness of the Dachstein alps, these
marking the border between the Salzkammergut and the more secretive
district of Styria, in which I had come to work.
Styria's proximity brought anxieties
about my new post buzzing forth, sharper than ever in their stings to
my confidence. Queen of this swarm remained the fabled Carla. Why, I
asked myself for the thousandth time, was I being hired by Mr.Barsett
as English tutor for his daughters when he already employed a
governess who, though Austrian, had been leading the girls through
their studies in English with, from the sound of things, an assured
command of the language and literature? Or were Mr.Barsett's British
agents merely being discreet when I raised the subject at my
interview for the post? Did our shared employer bear some essential
dissatisfaction with Carla's work; was he waiting merely to ensconse
me in the schoolroom before dismissing her? Was my term to commence
with the ugly scene of a colleague's being expelled? Would his
daughters cheer her going or reject me as a paternal imposition?
*
It was late afternoon when the train
reached Vienna's Westbahnhof. Gathering my three cases, I descended
to the platform. It was, of course, a faux
pas for a first-class
passenger to stumble under the burden of her own luggage and a
bull-like porter was soon wrestling the cases from my arms. He strode
ahead, leaving me to keep pace as best I could. The platform itself
was a torrent of dismounted passengers and greeters of passengers,
amid which my eyes flitted in search of an employer I had never seen
before.
The arrest of my porter just short of
the gateway onto the concourse, seized by a figure darting from the
thickest concentration of neck-craners and arm-wavers, prompted a
flutter of anticipation in my stomach. But no: this little man, small
and thin-boned in his fussy movements as one of the pigeons
fluttering overhead, the sags and wrinkles on his gaunt face
combining with the white stubble under his bowler hat to indicate the
further end of middle age, jarred unacceptably with my hypothesised
image of Mr. Kenneth Barsett.
All the same, the fellow was
submitting my porter to an interrogation under which the bulkier man
tilted and nodded like a tree given brisk chops halfway through its
trunk. As I drew close, the little man faced me. "You are,
excuse me," he asked, his accent the softest shade of German,
"Miss Isobel MacMurdo?"
"Yes, yes, I - " I had
begun, when a broad arm, jacketed in dark blue, stretched between us,
its powerful hand, a hint of dark hair on the back, passing a
half-smoked cigar to the bowler-hatted man, who took it not to smoke
but to cradle, dutifully.
"Of couse you are," rumbled
a voice to make me think of a bear taking its honey-fatted ease
against a sun-warmed rock. The distinctly English intonation, a hint
of the rural south-west buried, perhaps, beneath generations of
refinement, made me turn with a shiver of certainty as to whom I
should meet.
Mr.Barsett, dwarfing my
anticipations, doffed his Homburg hat from a head of dark brown hair
thinly templed with grey.
"One catches instantly the
accents of Caledonia," he was saying. Although in early
middle-age, he retained a hint of youthful muscularity, his
square-boned face boasting a full but smoothly-trimmed moustache, its
dark brown showing hints of the darkest reds.
"I'm Kenneth Barsett," he
said, “your affectionate correspondent.” His warm paw of a hand
closed about the slip of skin and bone I sent to meet it, his deep
brown eyes staring into my waterier specimens as if he were taking a
professional interest in the precise shade of their blue.
"Shall we trot?" he
continued. He signalled the other man, who nodded and completed a
muttering of instructions to the porter before sending the fellow
before us, the little man then passing the cigar back to his master
and facing me with a nod and a doffing of his bowler.
"This is my man Clemens,"
Mr.Barsett explained. "Valet, majordomo, guardian angel."
"Miss," nodded Clemens
before popping the hat back on his head and scampering after the
porter, whom he appeared to correct upon the holding of one of my
bags at an inappropriate angle. With the slightest touch at my elbow,
Mr.Barsett signalled that we should follow.
"How was your journey?" he
asked. "You certainly had a pleasant day for hurtling the width
of Austria."
"Yes, yes, it was beautiful,
very... very beautiful," I replied, struggling to keep pace with
his stride. "I look forward to seeing Styria tomorrow. Oh...
will it be tomorrow?"
"What? Oh... oh, yes. I
apologise for this roundabout route, but when your arrival coincided
with my bringing Anabella here, well, I thought it might be as well
for you to make the trip to Scharlachklippe with us. And it does
afford you the chance for at least a glance around the capitol.
Before we hasten you to less civilised parts."
"And tell me, your daughter...
has the doctor here been able to help?"
"Oh, he's looked into this and
that without, you know these experts, commiting himself to a
straight answer. Nonetheless, she's perked up since we've been here.
I suppose Anabella’s at that stage of young womanhood where they’re
susceptible to all sorts of... influences. Perhaps it was just in her
mind. We did get rather cooped up out there this last winter. At any
rate, we can be off after breakfast tomorrow."
We had reached the doorway of the
station and an onward view, over the cluster of motor cabs and
horse-drawn carriages by the foot of the steps, to where sunlit
streets streamed together from several directions, rumbling on into a
broad main street, this leading towards the centre of the city, the
richly ornamented facades of the buildings gleaming above the traffic
like foam-bows.
A further touch at my elbow steered
me down the steps and towards one motor cab in particular, Clemens
shepherding both porter and driver through a geometrically precise
loading of my cases. Mr.Barsett ushered me into the cab's back seat,
squeezing his larger form through to join me as soon as he had
clinked change into the porter's hand. Clemens and the cabbie climbed
into the front seats, the former muttering what sounded like not
merely the name of our destination but instructions as to the
avoidance of every intervening bump in the road.
We roared from the kerb, swerving
into that great shop-lined street, the cab weaving through a dense
fabric of motor cars, wagons, carriages, hansoms and electric trams,
the bright wood, metal and glass of all these dazzling in their play
with the late afternoon sunshine. I glimpsed curvaceous rooftops with
gilded slates; palatial shop-fronts with extravagant window displays;
blue-robed madonnas and pinkish-plump cherubs painted immensely on
church-fronts, the heavenly figures seeming to float on the
intervening telegraph wires as surely as on their painted clouds,
these jostled by the scarcely less numinous goddesses of artful, but
somewhat immodest, advertising hoardings. Accustomed to the dour
Protestant architecture of my native Glasgow, I felt as if I had
stumbled into an operetta with a whole city for its stage.
Our path crossed the Ringstrasse
enclosing the city’s medieval heart, the sky-impaling steeple and
zig-zag patterned roof of St.Stephen's Cathedral rearing above the
chocolate box facades like a Dies Irae disrupting a performance of
Die Fledermaus.
As our car turned by the Opera House - achitecturally, more fist in
imperious gauntlet than gilded temple of frivolity - and swerved
along narrower streets, the cathedral’s soot-dark sonorities kept
reasserting themselves between the gaily-coloured shopfronts.
Our final swerve and halt swept away
all intervening architecture, leaving me, as Mr. Barsett helped me
climb out, peering up from close quarters at the cathedral’s rowdy
gargoyles and grimy sculptings of saviours and angels and Our Ladies,
my gaze reeling all the way to a roof and steeple seen from the
perspective of a beetle in a giraffe’s shadow.
So thoroughly did the building seize
the attention that I thought for a moment Mr. Barsett's influence must
have allowed him to gain accomodation for us under that towering
roof. It was only with another touch at my elbow that he drew my
attention to the other buildings in this cramped corner of the plaza.
The nearest of them, a short flight of marble steps climbing to a
gilt-edged doorway in its butter-yellow facade, was our hotel.
