Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘People can’t have fun all the time, Wolf.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they have responsibilities. They need to save . They need to start planning for the future.’

‘Future! Future . As if any German under thirty-five even knows what the word means ! There never was a future up until now! Being alive in the morning, that was the future. The future was your next meal. Now people are planning for old age . Investing in pensions, putting a little aside for their summer holidays. Have we learned nothing? Don’t they realize that the next drink and the next dance are the only investments worth making?’

‘Well it’s up to you, darling,’ Frieda said. ‘Do it or don’t do it but you know as well as I do that we could do with the money.’ She paused for a moment before adding, ‘You know, just until you sell a song.’

Wolfgang smiled. She meant it too. She still believed.

‘The next Mendelssohn, eh?’

‘No!’ Frieda protested. ‘The next Scott Joplin.’

Wolfgang kissed her.

‘Yuk!’ said Otto from amidst his dead soldiers.

‘Don’t be immature, Otts,’ said Paulus from his book, adding ‘Poo face’ under his breath.

‘Frieda, I’m not Joplin,’ Wolfgang said with a smile. ‘I’m just happy to live in a world where somebody is.’

Frieda smiled. ‘So what now?’

‘Well. I suppose I try and finish this advert.’

‘Oh give it here!’

And exactly a week later, on the very next Sunday morning, instead of lying in bed till noon, Wolfgang found himself dressed in his best suit pouring coffee for a prosperous-looking gentleman who sat gingerly on the edge of the Stengels’ cluttered couch next to his exquisitely turned-out six-year-old daughter.

‘And the little girl?’ Wolfgang enquired. ‘Fräulein Fischer?’

‘Dagmar,’ the gentleman said. ‘Please, you must call her Dagmar.’

‘Uhm… Will you take some refreshment, Dagmar?’

There were suppressed giggles from somewhere in the vicinity of the doorway to the kitchen. Clearly other members of the Stengel household were finding their father’s efforts at polite formality amusing. Little Silke was with them too, as mischievous as either of the boys.

Wolfgang glanced furiously over his shoulder but none of the three culprits were to be seen.

‘I should like a glass of lemonade, please, Herr Professor,’ the little girl on the couch replied in the most refined of voices, ‘with quite a lot of sugar.’

This produced a positive explosion of suppressed merriment from the kitchen followed by the sound of little boys’ laughter and then, worse, a little girl’s voice indulging in a whispered effort at mimicry.

‘ I should like a glass of lemonade please, Herr Professor. With quite a lot of sugar .’

The elegant, refined little girl sitting stiff and straight-backed beside her father could hardly help but hear the ridicule being directed at her and so put her nose in the air, her effortlessly superior expression making it clear that she was used to ignoring boys and other riff-raff.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wolfgang apologized. ‘My sons. I’d chuck them out and let them beg but I’m obliged by law to look after them. Damned Weimar Government, too soft by half, eh?’

Herr Fischer smiled.

‘Boys,’ he said indulgently. ‘I seem to recall having once been one myself.’

‘There’s a girl too,’ Dagmar said firmly. ‘I heard her most clearly. A very very horrid girl in my opinion.’

Wolfgang smiled apologetically.

‘Our maid’s daughter. But she’s all right, just high-spirited, that’s all.’

‘My mummy says that there is never any excuse to be rude or unkind. Certainly not high spirits.’

This pious observation brought forth further suppressed giggles and Wolfgang decided he’d better move things along.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have any lemonade, Dagmar. Sorry, just water actually. And I’m not a professor either.’

‘If you are to teach me then you are a professor, Herr Professor,’ the beautifully dressed little girl replied firmly, her huge, dark eyes turning unblinkingly upon him. ‘ All of my tutors are professors. It is how things are done.’

Her father, Herr Fischer, smiled indulgently, no doubt under the impression that Wolfgang must be finding his lovely, porcelain doll of a daughter as charming and clever as he did himself. In fact Wolfgang was struggling to conceal his desire to give little Dagmar a slap and get her and her father out of his apartment as quickly as possible so that he could have a cigarette and get back to his piano.

But he had to go through the motions. He had promised Frieda and they really could do with the money. Although Wolfgang was quite certain that he would be turned down. These people were not his people. Wolfgang knew who the man was, everybody did. He was Fischer of Fischer’s department store on Kurfürstendamm. And people like Herr Fischer did not entrust their daughters to people like Wolfgang who didn’t even have any lemonade in the house and wasn’t even a professor.

‘May I ask, Herr Fischer,’ Wolfgang said, ‘why you’ve come to me? I’m not exactly a society tutor and I’m new to teaching. I can’t claim much experience with children either. Particularly one as young as your daughter.’

Particularly snooty-looking little creatures like Dagmar, Wolfgang thought. A Ku’damm princess whom Daddy wanted to acquire a ‘refined’ and ‘dainty’ skill to make her more marriageable to the right sort of minor ex-royal or son of an industrial magnate.

‘Little experience with children?’ Herr Fischer laughed. ‘What were those two young maniacs who ran out of the room when we arrived, then? Hobgoblins? They sound naughty enough to be.’

The boys had in fact begun to edge their way back into the room, and were lurking in the doorway just out of Fischer’s vision, their faces contorted with exaggerated expressions of hostility and contempt. Paulus and Otto were prepared to tolerate the existence of girls at their school but in their own home they drew the line (Silke being an honorary boy). Particularly girls with perfectly placed pink ribbons in their hair, snow-white trimmed black velvet dresses and clouds of delicate lace at their necks and wrists.

‘Boys are rather different,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Besides, I only have to live with those two, I don’t have to teach them music.’

‘You mean you don’t teach them music?’ Mr Fischer enquired. ‘I would find that very surprising.’

‘Well, yes, of course I do ,’ Wolfgang said, slightly confused, ‘as a father, yes, of course. But professionally I have only ever taught adults and quite frankly I’m not even much good at that. I’m really not at all sure that I’m the sort of person you—’

‘My husband will be thrilled should you decide to place your lovely Dagmar with us as a pupil,’ Frieda said, bringing in a tray of biscuits from the kitchen.

There was a loud raspberry from behind her at this but again, when Frieda glanced round angrily, no culprit could be seen.

‘I’m Frau Stengel, Herr Fischer,’ Frieda said, offering her hand. ‘ Frau Doktor Stengel.’

‘Thanks, darling,’ Wolfgang said firmly, ‘but I think I can arrange my own clients and I really don’t think this would work out for either of us.’

‘Really?’ Fischer enquired. ‘Your advert said you were taking on pupils. Is there anything wrong with my daughter?’

‘Of course not, no!’ Wolfgang said quickly. ‘But look, Herr Fischer, I know who you are. Fischer’s is a Berlin institution. You’re a rich man, you could afford to hire the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic to teach your little girl. You don’t want me.’