Here's the opening chapters from my novel DANCES SACRED & PROFANE. Of all the things I've ever written, this is the piece I'm proudest of - and you can get this bleeding chunk of my heart and soul right here...
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
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
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.
2./ Raised, by electric lift, to one of the hotel's topmost
floors, Mr.Barsett left me at the door of my room before retiring through the
next door along. "You're doubtless tired," he said. "I’ll leave
you to get settled before introducing you to Anabella. She can be somewhat
exhausting, even in a state of convalescence. We'll have dinner in her suite
at, what, seven?"
My room, all gilt and marble and darkly
varnished wood, deep carpet and mirrored glass, proved of a proportion
equivalent to a good couple of rooms in the MacMurdo household. At the far end,
french windows looked out onto gargoylings halfway up the cathedral wall, that
end of the room's left hand wall dominated by the gilded framework and summer flower
counterpane of a bed in which a lone sleeper could happily lose herself. By the
opposite wall stood a long dressing table, its mirror of webbed venetian glass,
a vase of dark blue flowers placed there, the moist petals flavouring the air
with a scent suggestive of summer twilights, of the sated rest of lively
things.
I opened the french windows, letting
in a taste of warm air cooling with evening’s approach, then stepped onto the
balcony, looking up at the late afternoon sunshine’s shimmerings along the
green and gold tiles of the cathedral's roof, then down at the deepening of
shadows amid the statuary.
"Don't worry - they won't
bite."
The voice seemed to come from the
air itself. I looked to the pavement below, but none of the tiny specks
strolling there, for all the lengthening of their shadows, could have reached
me with such clarity of voice.
"The gargoyles, I mean!"
The voice came again, its English words
carrying a distinctly English tone. I looked to my right, but saw only the tall
caryatid of white stone which stood there, one of two marking either end of my
balcony. The figure - one of the goddesses of paganism, I presumed - looked
across at its usurpers on the cathedral wall with an Olympian indifference to
my presence.
"Only me!"
A white garbed figure sprang into view
on the caryatid's far side, catching at the stony folds of the goddesses's robe
and stepping up, bare-footed, onto the stone rail of the next balcony along.
"No - Anabella...!" I
cried. She watched me lunge to the brink of my own balcony, the soft pink of
her lips broadening into a smile, their hue spreading across a strawberry-plump
little face that had seemed, a moment before, scarcely less pale than that of
the statue, particularly in contrast to the great unbrushed bundle of darkest
red hair surrounding it. She wore a wisp of short-sleeved nightgown, its
drapings and low cut at the breast making scant secret of a premature
womanliness.
"Don't worry, I'm told Artemis
here looks after reckless girls," she cooed.
"Well," I said, "as
your new tutor, I'm assuming some of her responsibilities in the matter and
insisting you get down from-"
"Anabella-!"
Her father’s bellow from the room at
her back carried such force that it almost shocked Anabella into the fall from
whose brink it sought to rescue her. I stretched my arm before the statue's
bulk, fingertips brushing the fabric above the knee of her outermost leg, the
drop to the plaza whirling at the corner of my eye.
But then the leg was gone: at first,
I thought, through a slippage over the top of my hand. But the words,
"Alright, Pa, just playing around," from the statue's far side
announced her landing on the safer side of the balustrade.
I drew back. Out of sight, beyond
the statue, I heard Mr.Barsett's voice as he reached the balcony.
"What did you think you
were-"
"I was - "
"Scaring the life out of me!
Don't you realise, Annie, what I’ve been through these last... what you've put
me... put us all through?"
"Oh, honestly Pa, I was quite
safe."
"You don't know where your
safety lies, that's the problem."
"Please, Pa, not this
again."
"Did she teach you it was safe to flutter about like that on a top
floor-"
"Oh, of course n-...."
"And to think I'm taking you
back there tomorrow, to think I haven't had the nerve to - "
"I was simply introducing
myself to Miss MacMurdo."
"What?"
"There. I had to see round that
blessed statue. I assume it is Miss
MacMurdo."
The little face popped back into
view.
"You are, aren't you, the Miss MacMur-Doh?" she asked in
her sing-song voice, and now I could hear in the too-perfect elongation of her
vowels the imprint of her Austrian upbringing.
"I'm sure I must be," I
replied.
Mr.Barsett's head appeared above his
daughter's, his own smile more triumph of engineering than true show of spirit.
"And this, I’m afraid," he
said, "is part of the burden I’m placing in your hands."
"I’m sure you won't be a
burden," I said to the lower face.
"Well," she replied, her
smile receding into a frown of more ambiguous amusement, "I’ll do my best.
You coming through for dinner?”
“Shortly dear, yes.”
"Got a rope with you?" she
enquired. "You could swing over, like Anne Bonnie, the lady
buccaneer."
"We've had enough buccaneering
for one day, don't you think?" muttered her father.
"You'd
hardly expect your father to employ a lady pirate as your tutor," I said.
"No, but we all have hidden
talents, don't we, hidden to ourselves even, that only need a helping hand out
into the light. That's what Carla says."
The repetition of that name and the
affection in the shaping of its two short syllables left me feeling, as her
father steered Anabella back out of view, something like a sting of jealousy.
*
Bathed and changed, I stepped into
the corridor in time to see Clemens waylaying the waiter with our dinner trolley,
raising the silver lid from every dish and giving the richly scented repast a
disinterested sniff. The meat under the largest of the dishes met with a mild
frown, prompting him to pull a tiny cruet set out of the inside pocket of his
jacket, delivering a sprinkle of pepper so precise it looked as if he was
counting the grains. A fresh sniff was succeeded by the trolley’s being waved
through. Clemens gave me a polite nod and walked by, en route, I assumed, to a meal with far less care lavished over its
preparation.
I followed the trolley through into
a room as spacious and richly furnished as my own, but with the addition of an
oval dining table in front of its french windows, the latter being closed by
Mr.Barsett as I came in. Anabella was pulling a robe of pink silk over her
nightgown but, upon seeing me, hurried across with it flapping wide, gathering
my hands in a rather cool grasp and holding them up for a warm-lipped kiss.
"I’m so glad you've come," she said. "We're all going to be such
girls together."
"Miss MacMurdo is not a girl, my
dear," her father interjected. "We have enough of those in the house
already. Now fasten your robe, there's a waiter present."
"Oh, you're such a fuss-pot,
" chided Anabella as she let go my hands.
"When you are older, you will appreciate
how much parental fussing a daughter such as yourself makes necessary. Observe,
Miss MacMurdo - I bring my ailing daughter to Vienna
"Hardly precocious,"
countered Anabella. "She was fourteen herself. Or so I’m told. Wasn't she,
Miss MacMurdo?"
"Yes. Yes, she was," I
replied, suddenly possessed of a fuller sense of what the bard might have been
getting at in giving his heroine that age.
"Well," conceded her
father, "I suppose so long as you can justify bad conduct on those
grounds, there is hope for your
education. What do you say, Miss MacMurdo?"
"I’m looking forward, more than
ever, to having your daughter for a pupil."
"Excellent. Just keep her away
from high balconies. Especially when the House of God is opposite. The Lord
belongs to that category of bachelors who don't appreciate seeing young ladies in
their bed attire. Oh… no offence, Miss MacMurdo?
"None taken."
"A relief! Shall we eat?"
I followed him and his daughter to
the table, noting the bed’s tangle of recently vacated sheets and heaped
pillows; I spotted, too, an array of little bottles of coloured medicine upon
the dressing table. A scent hung in the air that might have been the camphorous
flavour of these medicines, but which made me think more of the flowers in my
own room, although no such flowers were present that I could see.
Our meal consisted of a thin,
flavoursome broth with dumplings, beef spicily cooked and served with roast
potatoes, spinach, horse radish and sprinklings of some rich herb, this
followed by a fruit salad with yoghurt, our palattes lubricated with an earthy
red wine that I sipped upon, as offspring of a temperance household, with the
guiltiest relish, goaded to it by the sight of Mr.Barsett and his daughter
drinking the stuff with continental ease. I had wondered how Austrian, how
un-British, the Barsetts - all but the head of the household born in this other
country - might prove. The sight of the youngest daughter soberly drinking red
wine and chatting like an equal to her father and her new tutor suggested they
were not very British at all; the thought proved treasonably reassuring.
We chatted of matters less than
pressing: of my journey from Glasgow, of Vienna and then of Scharlachklippe and
Mr.Barsett's glassworks and of how much I looked forward to meeting Julia and
Marianne, who, I was informed, were matchingly eager to make my acquaintance.
"As is Carla," added
Anabella, with what I thought was a flit of mischief across her features, a
mischief directed at her father.
Mischief or not, this brought upon
our conversation its sole uncomfortable pause, Mr.Barsett suffering a sidelong
slump of the lower half of his face, as if the last morsel of his meal had been
as sour as every predecessor had been delicious.
A gulp of wine stirred him to a shift
of conversation and an invitation for me to stroll with him around the old town
afterwards. "After all," he said, "with us leaving first thing,
you won't have much chance to get a look around, not on this trip, anyway. And Vienna
"Gosh," said Anabella,
"you can see, can't you, how he's gained a reputation for leading young
ladies astray."
"My daughter," he
countered, "is something of a fantasist and I, alas, as a too tolerant
father, am a pliant subject for her distortions. I assure you, Miss MacMurdo,
you will be steered as close to the straight and narrow as the Ringstrasse allows."
"Besides," added Anabella,
"I bet she's got some beefy Scotchman at home who'd sail over and biff you
on the snout at first report of a flirtation. I bet you do, Miss M."
"I’m happy to be called
Isobel," I replied, "and I’m in no doubt as to how trustworthy a gentleman
your father is."
"That's been said before,"
she grinned, "and look what-"
"Annie!" her father
growled.
"But is there someone? There
must be!" she said. "Some poor fellow left on the dockside, kilt
blowing in the wind, tootling an elegy on the bagpipes as you sailed for your
new life."
"I left behind nothing but a
life outlived," I answered, feeling strangely relaxed in the fulness of my
statement, a phenomenon likely attributable to my unfamiliar pleasure in the
wine.
"Oh, that sounds intriguing!"
"Anabella..."
"It's quite alright," I
went on. "There was someone, yes. A fiance,
no less. His name was, is, Hughie."
"Oh dear."
"Anabella-!"
"Sorry, Pa.
"You've been nosy enough
already, dear."
"No. It's no secret. It was my
fault. I withdrew from the engagement."
"Good on you."
"Annie-..."
"Why? Was he a brute? Or was it
just the thought of being a Mrs.Hughie?"
"The thought, I suppose, of
being no more than the wife of a battleship designer in a Glaswegian suburb. I’d
spent enough of my life with my head in a book to be aware of a world beyond
such things. Painfully so, since I thought myself unlikely to ever see any of
it. Until, that is, I chanced upon your father's advertisement."
"I hope it wasn't that,"
said Mr.Barsett, "which provoked the break-up."
"No, sir," I replied,
looking his concern as tenderly in the eye as I dared, "I had commited
myself to answering your advertisement long before chancing across it. If that
doesn't sound too fanciful."
"It sounds, rather, as if I’ve
found a teacher with more to offer my daughters than such qualifications and
experience as I had the right to request," he mused, his great brown eyes
meeting mine with more directness than I had dared attempt. I diverted my own
gaze to a stirring of my coffee.
"Here's to making something of
our wildest fancies," declared Anabella, raising her glass in a toast.
"Here's to learning sound
lessons from them, at any rate," said Mr. Barsett, doing likewise.
"Here's to life," I
blurted, blushing as I clinked my coffee cup against their wine glasses.
3./ I returned to my room to prepare for my stroll, Anabella given
parental consent to accompany me. Lying across my bed, leaning on her elbows,
head propped on one palm, she watched me refresh my make-up, change slippers
for boots and then select one of my lighter coats, chattering with, or rather
at, me like a schoolfriend with a rich fund of schoolyard gossip.
Certainly I heard more than could be
fair about her sisters, Julia - "watch she doesn't do her Folies Bergere act on you; any hint of a
receptive audience and she'll turn cartwheels to win your heart and wriggle out
of her homework" - and Marianne - "Marianne's like a book in a foreign
language the author's too highbrow to allow to be translated. I’m her baby
sister and I’ve never been able to get past the first couple of chapters. Even
Carla's charms took a while to tease her down from that tree-top of
bluestocking aloofness she roosts in."
"How, I wonder," I
ventured, "am I to compete with a teacherly achievement of such
magnitude?"
"Oh, it'll hardly be a case of
competition, will it?"
"No?"
"I mean, you and Carla,
you're..."
"Yes?"
"You have such different things
to offer."
"You think so?"
"The moment you meet Carla,
you'll know the difference I’m talking about. Even if you're still struggling
for a name for it a year from now."
"All the same, I trust Carla
and I won’t wind up treading on one another's toes. Educationally, that is."
"Your toes, certainly, are
safe. Educationally and otherwise. You'll find Carla a very considerate, a very
loving, person."
"If I can win her professional
respect, that'll be consideration enough."
"Not for Carla, it won't. She
approaches nothing professionally, least of all her teaching."
"If that's a recommendation,
you'd better not let your father hear it. He might... "
I drew my tongue's tip clear of the
remainder of that statement, worried it might sound like a wish. But as I
stared guiltily at my reflection in the dressing table mirror, Anabella breezed
on with her tribute.
"What I mean is, everything
Carla does is... is an act of... well, love, sort-of. And what pursuit's more
amateur than love? I do know my
latin!"
"But what is it love for, I wonder?"
"For being alive."
"That covers a lot of
ground."
"Carla certainly does."
I swivelled on the stool.
"You're beginning to make this
mere professional feel inadequate."
"Carla won't. Carla makes
everyone feel good about everything. Except Pa, but that's just a
misunderstanding. It'll get sorted out. Carla'll win him over."
"You're sure she isn't an angel
in disguise?" I pondered.
"No," smiled Anabella,
"I don't think she's that."
I began brushing my hair. Anabella
scampered across.
"Oh, let me have a tug!"
she chirped, snatching the brush and setting to work on a vigorous fluffing of
my hair.
"What lovely fair curls,” she
said. "Just wait till our Styrian sun shines on them. You’ll never want to
go home."
"Anabella...?" I asked.
"Yes?"
"Your illness."
"Mm-hmm?"
"What sort of illness was
it?"
"Pa must've told you."
"Not much."
'Oh, it was-"
"I hope you don't think I’m -
"
"Oh no-"
"Prying..."
"No. It was... nothing really.
Pa's such a worrier. I got a little tired sometimes, and then some other times
I was so full of life I exhausted everyone else. I’d have dreams more real than
my waking hours and wake, suddenly, and get the two all jumbled ."
"What sort of dreams?'
"Oh, I hardly recall. It was
more the feeling they provoked."
"And that feeling was...?"
"Oh, a lot of things, running
together.”
“What things?”
“Oh… Warmth, softness, dancing,
drowning, smothering, dark, light… a light in the dark, blue or green like...
like under the sea or in a forest at night. Dreams full of that foresty smell,
like... like pines , you know? Peppery sweet. And water, I think, somewhere, shimmery,
like in moonlight. And eyes. Eyes all black and gleaming like… like some beast
breathing on me in the dark. Warm… And a face."
"A beast’s face?"
“Oh no… No. I don’t think so.”
“Whose face, then?”
"I don't know. The face would
kiss me. The kiss had a taste, the sweetest taste of... oh, who knows? Anyway, I
sometimes slept right through the day, made up for it by roaming about all night.
All over the place. Around the house. Out into the garden. The forest,
even."
"I’m not surprised your father
was worried."
"Everyone was worried. They
thought I was sleepwalking, because I didn't talk to them when they tracked me
down. But actually I was quite awake."
"Why wouldn't you talk?"
"Too busy with my own
thoughts."
"What sort of thoughts?"
She shrugged, gave a lop-sided
smile.
"Poems."
"Poems?"
"Poems I made up inside my
head."
"Have you written them
down?"
She shook her head and grinned.
"Why not?" I enquired.
"I didn't, I suppose, reckon
they could be put on paper. They'd
soak through. Like water. Or blood from a cut finger."
"You could speak them. To a
sympathetic listener."
"I have. To Carla."
Again, that jealous pang.
"And what did she think?"
"Oh, you know Carla... oh, you
don't, of course..."
"No."
She gave a thoughtful half-smile.
"Carla is very indulgent of her
girls. – There, what do you think?"
Her reflection stepped back from the
simulacrum of Viennese sophistication into which she had brushed and pinned the
roadside furze of my Glaswegian crop.
"I only worry about the
capacity of the rest of me to live up to it," I replied.
"Have no fear," she
grinned. "I never heard of Pa failing to help a pretty young woman feel
like a lady."
I rose and drew my chalk-blue jacket
over a tingle of ludicrously disproportionate anticipation. Anabella,
meanwhile, had taken one of the dark blue flowers from the vase on the central
table, sniffed inside the V-shaped cup of its petals, then snapped off the
greater part of the stem, approaching me with the flower-head.
"Here," she said, slipping the remnant of the stem through my lapel’s
buttonhole, "a final touch. Perfect match for the moonlight, don't you
think?"
"Thank you,' I said.
"Goes with your jacket,"
she said.
"Yes," I replied.
"Must be fate."
"Fate?"
"The hotel placing that shade
of flowers here," I explained.
"What... oh, they didn't,"
she said. "I put them here."
"I see. I thought I smelled
them in your room. That was kind."
Anabella shrugged.
"Carla gave them to me. When I
left Scharlachklippe. Picked them herself. No one knows the forests like her.
Thought I’d pass them on to you. The smell kept me awake at night, thinking of
home."
There came a rhythmic knock on the
door. Anabella darted across, granting access to her father, who had slipped on
a light overcoat. He looked my way and nodded.
"Very nice," he said.
"You've done, haven't you, something, um, your hair, isn't it?"
"Your daughter must take the
credit."
"Why shouldn't she?" he
said. "She claims all else I have to offer."
"I only wonder," suggested
Anabella, "if she can be entrusted to you without a chaperone."
"Well, you're in no condition
to volunteer. Just as well, since the sole risk to the harmony of Miss
MacMurdo's evening stroll would come from the nonsense you might spout. Now, if
you'll return to your room and get a good night's sleep like the innocent lamb
you are, we grown ups can be on our way."
"Oh Pa, it's so Victorian of
you to attach a moral dimension to unconsciousness. I reckon it's in my dreams
that I’m least innocent."
"Then it's to be hoped Miss
MacMurdo's good works will seed that pretty head with a healthier crop of fancies."
"Unlike Carla, you mean!"
she giggled, darting out of the room. Her father sighed. "These past few
months, it's either been like that, or... I worry if I take her to task, she...
she'll break in my hands."
"But with spirit like that, she
must be on the mend."
"Heaven knows, I hope so,"
he muttered, looking less than convinced.
4./ Vienna was, as he had promised, a different city at night, though
still busy with pedestrians and carriages, motor cars and trams, the sparks
from the steel arms the latter extended to their overhead rails like spillings
over of the city’s nocturnal energy. Coffee houses and restaurants, their doors
and windows thrown wide to the warm night air, likewise spilled their chatter,
laughter and song across the pavements, accompanied by music ranged from piano
janglings and hurdy gurdy trundlings to the sentimentalisings of solo violins
and the revelry of gypsy bands, all the way up – via the occasional sardonic
note from a cabaret - to the strains of "Tannhauser", the melodies of
the Venusberg audible through the Court Opera’s half-open windows. The city's
domes and spires and voluptuous statuary stood gilded by the street-lamps
against the sky’s slow drift of dark blue clouds across an ocean of stars.
By the tram terminal alongside the
Danube canal, Mr. Barsett bought a bag of roasted chestnuts and we moved to eat
them by the rail overlooking the water, both nuts and bag too hot for me to get
a proper hold, a problem he remedied by boldly popping a couple in my mouth. I
accepted the tongue-pinching smoky richness with the appropriate blushes, masking
my deeper pleasure in the pampering. A barge puttered by below, undulating
reflections of the city's lights.
"Those books you requested
arrived last week," he said. "If there's anything else you need,
don't hesitate to ask."
"I will, thank you."
"An interesting
selection."
"You approve?"
"Oh yes, yes. What I’m looking
for, as you've plainly appreciated, is an education appropriate to young women
rather than children, and young women of this new century, at that. I may not
want to be bullied under my own roof by a horde of bluestockinged suffragetes,
but there’s a certain spirit in my girls and I’d be loathe to see it diluted
entirely into frilly-minded mediocrity. I’m a father comfortable with a degree
of, shall we say, disciplined liberality in the schooling of his daughters.”
“I trust I’m the tutor to satisfy
both halves of that equation, sir.”
“Mm.” He looked more solemn. “It's
the disciplinary half of the equation I’ve recently suspected to be lacking at
Scharlachklippe."
He turned, strode off, leaving me to
match his pace. I followed him along the next stretch of the Ringstrasse, this
taking us alongside the Stadtpark, at the bottom end of which a café orchestra
serenaded a terraceful of diners with an extract from Cosi Fan Tutte. Beyond the park’s railings, pale sculptures of the
city’s great composers haunted the pathways amid the dark greens of the foliage.
"How do you feel about
Carla?" Mr. Barsett asked.
"Carla? Well, I... I haven't
met her...."
"No, I mean the idea of Carla,
of working in tandem with her."
"I’m sure we can arrange an
appropriate division of duties."
"It must seem odd,
nonetheless."
"Odd?"
"My taking on a second tutor
when there's one already with her feet under the table."
"I supposed you thought it more
suitable to entrust the teaching of English to someone who knows it as a
native."
"That wasn't entirely it. Hardly
it at all. It was more a question of... of character."
"Character?"
"Hers. Carla's. And its
influence on my daughters. She has a... a vivid character. What I’ve seen of
it."
"You must, by this time, have
seen most of what there is to see."
He paused, facing me. Even on that
brightly lit street, his face seemed weighted with shadows.
"I doubt I’ve seen the half of
it."
He gestured that we should cross the
road. "I've come to suspect our Carla," he went on, "holds
richer depths of character than she displays to me, currents she invites only a
selected few to swim, that run into such rapids as could, I fear, drown the unwary."
"You mean your daughters?"
"Who else?"
"But if you think there's...
danger..." I stuttered, lost as to how figurative his language was
intended to be.
"I’m not sure it's the sort of
danger that would count as a dismissable offence," he said.
“No?”
“Not so far as I can see. But, as I
say, I doubt I’ve been allowed to see very far. Besides, I suspect my daughters
long ago accepted her invitation to plunge in and be carried past my reach."
"You must know, sir, how
concerning this sounds," I said, to which he further unsettled me with a
broad smile.
"And yet, when you meet
her," he replied, "you'll mutter that their poor Pa’s gone off his
head. Perhaps that's the reassurance I’m looking for. But wait. See if
suspicions don't grow, like weeds, in the chinks of that wall of charm between
you and what she's truly up to. Be on the lookout for a sense of things
concealed behind that wall, things you find no evidence of by the time you
skirt around it. See if the absence of such evidence doesn't strike you as
questionable in itself."
"Surely, sir, when there's no
evidence of secrets, the question is whether there are secrets at all."
"Yet the odd hint can hardly
help but escape.”
“Hints, sir?”
“Oh… whispers on the breeze,
gestures at the corner of your eye, glimpsed through doors almost closed. Laughter
through the wall, feet, bare feet, scampering in the passageways, long walks,
brief disappearances, tiny darts of figures, far off, between the trees, doors
eased through muffled clicks, an occasional slam - snap! you're awake in the
middle of the night. Scribblings flashed back and forth in the schoolroom, witticisms
from the girls the impertinence of which you can only see after the fact. And
then, of course, Carla herself. The smile, the charm, the look, the... the so
on. That sense, always, of a deeper laughter - at me?”
He paused at the corner of a street
leading into the old town, dragging out a handkerchief and mopping beneath the
brim of his hat.
"You..." I ventured,
"...you've spoken to her about these things?"
“To Carla? I haven't the faintest
notion what I’d say. She is, at the most conspicuous level, an excellent
governess. The girls are devoted to her. To the extent, I have no doubt, where
they'd never forgive their old Pa if he were to dismiss her on anything less
than the most damning evidence."
"Then what, without evidence,
do you intend to do?"
"Precisely what I have done. I’ve
employed a second tutor, a dependable, straightforward, Scotch sort of tutor,
so that at least one half of their education will be conducted in an orthodox
and trustworthy manner."
"You make me sound so terribly
boring."
"It's easy," he said,
"to romanticise anarchy when you haven't had it trailing muddy footprints
across your carpet. You seem to me a conscientious professional. That may sound
less exciting than Carla-ish shenanigans, but recent experience has left this
employer inclined to welcome sobriety."
"And what if," I ventured,
"Carla perceives the criticism of her own approach?"
"That might be no bad thing.
She might realise my girls aren't her playthings."
"It would... discomfit me to
think I was being hired as some sort of… agent
provocateur."
"Well…” he smiled and sighed,
"…perhaps your real task here might be to provoke a little common sense in
all our heads, feverish as they’ve occasionally grown this last month or two.
Help us see things with that fresh eye of yours. Help this old fool, certainly."
"The first impression of my
fresh eye," I said, "is of a man who loves his children and would
give his all to know them safe. I don't think that could be accounted foolish."
"Certainly, I suspect I had one
clear-sighted moment, at least, when I chose you for this post."
"I hope I can live up to your
first impression of me."
"You will," he grinned,
taking my elbow once again, guiding me to where the pinnacles of St.Stephen's
loomed. "I just had another of those clear-sighted moments."
On the way along the corridor to our
respective hotel rooms, he suggested we look in on Anabella. We found her bed
empty.
5./ Mr.Barsett rushed to the bed, ripping off sheet after sheet,
as if expecting to find her buried in a hollow in the matress. As he looked
under the bed, I called Anabella's name and stepped towards the bathroom. This
too was empty. I returned to the bedroom to find Mr.Barsett in the centre of
the floor, staring at the thin blue curtains across the french windows. "Is
that window open?" he murmured.
Tiny inward shifts of the left hand
curtain confirmed this. The cathedral's bulk obstructed the direct fall of
moonlight upon the fabric and we were too high above the street lamps for their
light to throw any distinct shadows onto the curtains, but indistinct shadows
were there aplenty. Mr.Barsett grabbed the curtains, tore them open.
Anabella, segmented within the
panels of the left-hand french window, which was open by the merest sliver,
stood with her back to us, leaning over the balcony's stone rail, clad only in
her white nightgown, her bare feet, soles grey-edged with dirt, poising her on
tip-toe.
"For God's sake, girl-!"
growled Mr.Barsett, tugging the french window wide, almost giving me a black
eye with its edge. He seized his daughter, tugging her round, shaking her.
Anabella's head swayed amid a billow of dark red hair, her pale little face holding
the dreamy, quizzical look of one surveying the assault from a considerable
distance.
The shaking petered out, Mr.Barsett
looking more unsettled by its violence than did his daughter. A serene smile stirred
her face. Her father stared into that smile, then tugged her to his chest in an
embrace rougher than the shaking. He whispered into her ear and then slackened
the bear-hug, guiding her into the bedroom.
I lingered outside by the balcony
rail. Something flapped behind me. I turned to see a flicker of white wings
trace a long, shallow arc from the wall immediately below me to the far corner
of the cathedral's sooty bulk, losing itself amid the overhanging angels and
devils.
My gaze traced an arc of its own to
the plaza below, snagging, for no obvious reason, on a couple of silhouetted
figures walking the lamp-lit paving stones between hotel and cathedral, the
hint of an initial jerk to their movements making me wonder if they hadn't been
looking up at this balcony, turning away only on seeing my gaze about to meet
theirs, the long shadows they trailed reluctant, even now, to quit the scene.
They were, distinctly, the figures of a man and woman, both dressed in black,
the woman caped and crowned with trimmings and tall hat of feathers and fur,
the two-handed grip the man had about her elbow and the fraction of a step she
kept ahead of him suggestive to me, in a clench of intuition, of the man's
being blind.
"Oh Pa, you're such an old
worry-wart," Anabella was giggling. I stepped into the bedroom to see her
sprawling across her bed, walking her feet playfully up the stomach and chest
of her father. He caught the feet by their ankles, swinging them under the
sheets, tucking the covers about her.
"If you've caught a
chill," he was saying, "and you probably have, you've defeated the
purpose of our coming to Vienna
Anabella laughed, stretching her
arms in a feline yawn. "Honestly, Pops, I’ve never felt healthier. Touch
of night air does the world of good. Any sawbones would say so."
"I think the average sawbones
would abandon his calling confronted with too many patients like my
daughter," he retorted. "I suggest, Miss MacMurdo, that we take our
leave of this little mistress of the vanishing act before we inspire her to
another performance."
I kissed her good night, her skin
still cooled by the night air. "I’m so glad you've come," she said,
her smile suddenly drowsy. "We'll have a time together, won't we?"
"I’m sure."
"You'll find my sisters a
chore, but Carla... Carla will make everything seem..."
Her eyes moistened, her smile
dwindled. She looked past me to her father.
"Sorry, Pa," she said.
"That's alright," he said,
settling himself on the edge of her bed. "Just don't frighten your old Pa
again, hmm?"
"I will try," she said.
"That's all I ask," he
responded, settling the most delicate of kisses on her cheek. She curled onto her
side, pulling the covers about her face and closing her eyelids, a tiny
creature of immense vulnerability.
Her father remained at her side
until she was asleep. Then he rose and signalled that we should leave. He paused
at the door, took another look at her before switching off the light, then
followed me into the corridor, easing the door closed.
"She's on the mend, I’m
sure," I ventured.
"She seems fond of you
already," he said, eyes still on the door.
"A definite advantage to the
performance of my duties."
"Not only an advantage in that
regard," he said, turning to face me. "I want you to feel a member of
our little family, not merely its employee."
"If I take to your other two
daughters as I’ve taken to Anabella, I’m sure I will."
"They'll take to you, I don’t
doubt. But that meeting lies some distance away and you've done a deal of
journeying today, so I’ll let you retire."
"Good night, then."
"Wait -…" he said. He
extended his hand for the flower Anabella had attached to my buttonhole,
tenderly drawing it free, drinking in the scent that clung to it.
"This was a nice idea," he
murmured.
"Your daughter's idea."
"It wouldn't have occured to
her," he smiled, "if you weren't someone it suited. I’ll keep this,
if I may. As souvenir of our Viennese stroll."
"The flowers were..." I
blurted, in a spasm of honesty, "...they were a gift, I understand,
from... from Car...Carla...." The short word made an awkward passage
across my tongue, a sharp-edged jewel caught in my mouth.
Mr.Barsett's smile dwindled. "Oh
yes, of course," he sighed, staring at the flower, "I remember
now."
He turned and walked to his room,
taking the flower with him, yielding me not another glance.
