Beatriz Williams - The Golden Hour

Closer and closer she creeps, and still his face evades her. They’re pointed the same direction, toward the sun, and Elfriede sees only his profile, his closed left eye. He must be asleep, recovering from his illness. His color’s good, pale but not ghostly, no sign of fever, a few freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. His left hand, lying upon the gray wool blanket, is long-fingered and elegant; the right hand remains out of view.

Elfriede stretches out her leg to slide a few centimeters closer, and without opening his eyes, the Englishman speaks, clear and just loud enough. “You might as well come on over here and introduce yourself.”

“Oh! I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did.” Now he opens his eyes and turns his head to face her, squinting a little and smiling a broad, electric smile that will come, in the fullness of time, to dominate her imagination, her consciousness and her unconsciousness, her blood and bones and hair and breath. “My God,” he says, in a more subdued voice, almost inaudible over the distance between them, “you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here? You don’t look sick.” He glances cheerfully at her midsection. “Not up the duff, are you?”

He says those words— up the duff —in English, and Elfriede doesn’t understand them, so she just shakes her head. “A nervous disorder,” she calls back.

“You don’t look nervous.” He smiles at her confusion. “Never mind. I was only joking. I’m the family jester, I can’t help it. My name’s Thorpe. Wilfred Thorpe. I’d offer my hand, but I’m supposed to be keeping my germs to myself, at the present time.”

“Herr Thorpe. I’m Frau von Kleist.”

“Frau, is it? You look awfully young to be married.”

She hesitates. “I’m twenty-two.”

“As old as that?”

“And I have a little boy as well,” Elfriede adds, for no reason at all.

“Do you? Well, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” He turns his head back to the sun and closes his eyes. “Fine day, isn’t it? Won’t you come sit by me? I’ll promise not to cough on you.”

“I don’t know if it’s allowed.”

“Bugger that.” (In English again.) “I’ll take the blame, I promise. I’ll say I had a coughing fit, and you came to my aid in your selfless way.”

She laughs rustily and rises to her feet. In the course of her creeping, she’s come to within ten or twelve meters of the low stone wall that marks the perimeter of the garden, and it seems so silly and artificial to be holding a conversation in this manner, calling back and forth across the gulf, that Elfriede goes willingly to the brick wall and perches atop it, a meter or so from Herr Thorpe’s left shoulder, crossing her legs at the ankle.

“That’s better,” he says. “Easier on my lungs, anyway. You smell like wildflowers.”

“I’ve been sitting on them. You speak German very well.”

“So do you.”

She laughs again— so out of practice at laughing, but she can’t seem to help herself. “But it’s my native tongue, and you—you’re an Englishman, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am. I learned my German in school, from a fearsome and very fluent master. Used to beat me with a cane whenever I slipped accidentally into the informal address.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It’s supposed to build character.” He opens his eyes and squints into the sun. He looks nothing like her husband, not just because he’s smaller and his head is shaved and his bones stick out from his skin, not just because he’s in a wheelchair while her husband is as huge and hale and hearty as a woodsman. Herr Thorpe is terribly plain, wide-faced and thick-lipped, freckled and ginger-haired, and the electricity of his smile can’t disguise his current state of febrile emaciation. She holds her breath in disbelief at the sharpness of his protruding bones, at the length of his pale eyelashes. He’s positively lanky inside his blue pajamas, and then there’s this enormous pumpkin head stuck on top of him.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Pneumonia can be so dangerous.”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

“You wouldn’t have come here if you weren’t quite sick.”

“I couldn’t have come here at all if I’d been really sick. It’s a damned long journey from Vienna, you know. No, I came through the crisis all right, but the doctors were worried about my lungs, so they sent me here for recuperation. And my parents agreed because—well.”

“Because why?”

“A personal matter.”

“Some girl?” Elfriede asks boldly.

“Yes,” he says. “Some girl, I’m afraid. But it all seems rather long ago now. What about you?”

“A personal matter.”

“Let me guess. Coerced to marry some doddering old bastard against your will, and you’ve gone mad to escape him?”

“Nothing like that,” she says.

“Crossed in love?”

“No.”

“Some terrible grief, perhaps?”

“Nothing too terrible.”

The man drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “Have you been here long?”

“Long enough.”

“Ah. Then perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity on a small matter. You see, late in the evenings, when I’m meant to be sleeping, I sometimes hear the most extraordinary music floating into my chamber. Piano. Goes on for hours. I can’t decide whether it’s coming from outside the window or down the corridor. At first I thought I was dreaming. Do you hear it at all?”

“I—well, I …” She stops herself on the brink of a lie. “I’m afraid it’s me.”

“You? Ah. Ah.”

“I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize anyone could hear me. I’ll stop—”

“No! No. Don’t stop on my account.”

“If I’m keeping you awake—”

“I don’t mind at all, I assure you. It’s enchanting. Last night, the Chopin … I had the strangest feeling …”

“What?”

“Nothing. Enchanted, that’s all. Absolutely enchanted. And it was you , all along? All the more enchanting, then.”

From another man, this compliment might have sounded unctuous. But Mr. Thorpe speaks the word enchanting with such easy intimacy, Elfriede laughs instead, and laughter feels so good in her chest, in her head. She looks down at her feet, crossed at the ankles, and only then does she realize she’s blushing. She asks hastily, “What were you doing in Vienna?”

“What does anybody do in Vienna? Art, culture, philosophy. Opera and cafés and whatever amusement comes one’s way. I suppose I was attempting what they used to call a grand tour, except I kept getting stuck in places.” He pauses. “Delaying the inevitable.”

“What’s so inevitable?”

“Returning home. My father’s found a place for me in chambers.”

“What does this mean, ‘chambers’?”

“Law. I’m meant to become a lawyer.”

“How—how—”

“Grown up,” he says. “Grown up and rather dull. Pretty soon I shall get married, grow a beard, and start a brood of rascals of my own, and the whole cycle will start over again.” He looks as if he might say something else, but starts to cough instead. The sound is wet and wretched, cracking off the walls of the garden and the stone infirmary building across the grass.

“Are you all right?” Elfriede asks anxiously. “Shall I call the orderly?”

He waves the idea away. The fit dies down, and he leans his head back against the chair. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s gotten much better, believe it or not.”

“You must have been at death’s door, then.”

“Yes, I rather think I was. It’s a real indignity, to catch pneumonia in the summertime. My mother says it was all the dissipation.”