Eva Ibbotson - Madensky Square

‘Aye. We’ve been in town these ten days past,’ he said in his thick Bohemian accent. ‘But we weren’t alone. Only this morning we were alone again.’

As he spoke I feasted my eyes on him. For Hatschek, you see, is Mercury, the Winged One, the Messenger of the Gods. If they wanted to fetch me up to Paradise it would be no good sending the Archangel Gabriel. Nothing in white with wings, nothing gold-limned in sandals would interest me. It would have to be Hatschek or nothing, for he alone has the key to the only heaven I care about.

I offered him a cup of coffee which he refused. He said how smart the shop was looking and I said yes, business was good.

Only then did I ask: ‘How is he, Hatschek? Is he well?’

‘Aye, he’s well enough in himself but they plague him at the War Office. He’s been there the past week shut up with those obstinate old duffers in the Ordnance Department, but it’s all talk — no one will equip the men properly. If they had their way we’d still be fighting with broadswords.’

How we hated the Ordnance Department, Hatschek and I. The promises, the lies, the evasions. The graft which stopped supplies reaching the field regiments when at last they materialized. There were two deep furrows etched into my lover’s forehead, put there by the Ordnance Department.

‘He said, tonight, if you can.’

‘If I can.’ It is a polite fiction which we like to maintain: that one day I would be too busy to visit the Field Marshal Gernot von Lindenberg when he comes to Vienna.

‘He’s at the Bristol?’

Hatschek nodded. From his tunic he took a slip of paper with a room number. Then he clicked his heels again and left.

I was never really an adolescent, a Backfisch, prinking and dreaming before the mirror; my Aunt Lina saw to that.

But when I go to the Hotel Bristol I go a little mad. I take out every dress I own, I put it on, I take it off. I wash my scrupulously washed petticoats and dry them (but they are never quite dry in time) and press each and every invisible bow again and again. No one else is allowed to do this, but my strange behaviour (for I am not a woman who normally fusses about clothes) now attracted the attention of Nini who observed that I appeared to be going out.

But I can’t snub her. I can’t snub anyone on days like these. If I met the detestable Herr Egger, the Minister of Development with his Nasty Habit, I would throw my arms round him and call him Little Brother like people do in Russian books.

When I had tried on everything in my cupboard, I went down to the salon and took the rich cream dress out of the window. I swear to God that I had not intended this and even now at the eleventh hour I struggled. But not for long. It was inevitable, inescapable — the conviction that the woman whose life was going to be transfigured by this dress was… me.

Ah, but it was a marvellous dress! It fell exactly into the folds I had dreamed of that April morning; it knew exactly where to cling and where to let go. The silken ruffles brushed my throat, the hem whispered under its lightly held burden of point de Venise

‘My goodness, Frau Susanna — you look…’ Nini, about to embark on one of her customary compliments, broke off. Then suddenly she reached for my hand and kissed it.

She is growing too perceptive, this mad Hungarian child; she begins to share too much.

I shall never forget my drives to the Hotel Bristol. In winter there are violets pinned to my muff; the snowflakes drift past and I think of Anna Karenina, but I am luckier than she because her happiness was paid for by others whereas any pain this liaison causes me is my own. In the autumn the chestnuts lining the Ringstrasse send down their bronze and russet leaves… But now, in May, the slanting sun turned the laburnums into a shower of gold — and it was all for me, the beauty of the evening: my Royal Triumph.

The Triumph lasted till I alighted at the Bristol, walked across the richly carpeted foyer, smelled the cigars from the Smoking Room — and then there was a moment of panic, for after all any kind of disaster could have overtaken the Feldherr von Lindenberg since the early hours of today.

But it was all right. I gave the name I always gave, the porter handed me a key. No smile of complicity, no recognition though I was here less than two months ago. The Bristol isn’t intimate like Sachers; no naked archdukes come whooping out of the Salles Privées. Here is complete discretion, anonymity. No wonder the nice fat English King Edward liked it best of all the hotels in the city.

My room was perfect. I could see over the roofs to a garden with a swing and pond with pin-sized children who should have been in bed. I took off my hat and put it on the hatstand. I sat down on the bed.

There is no waiting like this waiting.

Then came the knock on the door.

‘Enter!’

He entered.

Why him? Why this one man of all the men who have courted me? He is fourteen years older than I am and God knows I am not young. He looks like a weatherbeaten eagle, tight-lipped, uncompromising, no softness anywhere in the clean-shaven face. Why a soldier when the whole paraphernalia of army life is repellent to me, why a landowner when I secretly share Nini’s dislike of the ruling class?

And why a man who can never marry me and whose wife, the delicate and largely absent Elise, is the object of our continuing concern?

Field Marshals of the Austrian Army are usually princely, glamorous or in their dotage. Gernot von Lindenberg was none of these. Rumour had it that the Kaiser had insisted on his promotion so that he could send him to interminable disarmament conferences and diplomatic missions which were doomed before the entourage ever left Vienna. To the bumbling, ancient Emperor, Gernot was wholly loyal while privately groaning at his narrow-mindedness. If the Crown Prince had lived, my lover might have taken pleasure in his work: he and Rudolf had been friends. As it was he endured the frustration and monotony of the conference table and escaped when he could to manoeuvres in obscure and lonely places or the work on his estate. Yet he had not chosen the army, any more than he had chosen the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer whose family estate bounded his.

‘Why, Gernot?’ I asked him once. ‘Why always duty, duty, duty?’

‘Perhaps because I don’t think it matters. Duty… inclination… whatever you start with there are years of grinding work to be filled in before you die.’

From what he didn’t say rather than what he did, I sensed his despairing pessimism, his conviction that the corruption, the inefficiency and bumbledom that pervaded the army and the court would land us like an overripe plum in the lap of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, whom he loathed more than any man on earth.

Now he came towards me. He doesn’t smile much, my protector. When he does one side of his mouth flicks upwards briefly, more in sardonic comment on the idiocy of the world than in amusement, but he has a way of doing something to his eyes which even after twelve years of intensive study I have not identified. We took each other’s hands, didn’t kiss… looked. I thought I saw further ravages played by his foul profession on his face. Then: ‘Do you like my dress?’ I inquired conversationally.

His steel blue eyes roamed over the creamy folds of silk, lingered in the places where I had arranged for the eye to linger. He stepped back to study me more carefully as I turned slowly round, came face to face with him again.

‘Yes, I like it.’

Then he said that lovely thing — the thing that women the world over see as the fulfilment of their labours; their just reward.

‘Take it off,’ said Field Marshal von Lindenberg. ‘At once, please. Take it off!’