David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Michael had hired a car and they were driving down to the Grundelsee to visit two middle-aged women who had been friends of Michael's father before the war. It was, on Michael's part, a duty visit made on his father's behalf, but also to fulfil a promise he had given, when just a child, to the elder of the two women with whom he had had a schoolboy correspondence. Gordon and Cassie were along because Anick had invited them. She hadn't wanted to spend a whole day alone with Michael. Michael resented this and they felt uncomfortable, but had accepted for the sake of the trip, though Cassie, who took on new loyalties very easily, and stuck to them, included Anick in her reasons for going; she was offering female support. She rather despised Michael and found his mooning over Anick disgusting, whereas Gordon, intent on the landscape and excited by the prospect of adding yet another baroque abbey to his list — and such a remote one — was merely indifferent.

“Another Kaisersaal!” Gordon exulted. (Being impressed by a Kai-sersaal rather than a cabin made him different from Michael. Superior.) "Another Kindertotentorte,” Cassie thought, making up with this minor disloyalty for her slavish adoption of all Gordon's vagaries of taste.

An ill-assorted party.

“What are these ladies?” Anick demanded, preparing to find them dull.

“They were my father's closest friends in Vienna before the war,” Michael told them solemnly. “In the days of Dollfuss, you know. Elsa.

Fischer and my father were going to be married, I guess. The other one, Sophie, is sort of my father's cousin. They were all in the same political group. My father was a Socialist — practically even a Communist — and they spent seven years — I mean Elsa and Sophie did — in camps. You know — concentration camps. They had a really terrible time. Boy! You should hear some of the things that happened to them. But they survived. And now they live together and have this little summer place on the lake.”

Cassie was frowning. She had tried to keep up with it, to let it enter her imagination as well as her head, but Michael went too fast. His narrative made all events sound the same, and outside the sun was flashing.

“And your father?” she demanded, grabbing at a comprehensible fact.

“Oh, he escaped. He got away to America just before the Nazis came. It was a very close thing. He's told me all about it, it's a real adventure story. And of course he married my mother. But you know— he used to talk a lot about the old days, and after the war, when he and Elsa and Sophie made contact again, I used to write to Elsa — I was just a schoolkid — and well — now that I'm here it's the least I can do, to go and say hello.”

The silence was filled with intensely dark fir trees, and above them the hard, unchanging whiteness of the Alps.

“They sound fascinating, these old women,” said Anick.

Michael failed to catch her tone. “Well,” he said, after a pause, "they're sort of special — you know what I mean?” He added a more specific recommendation: "They've suffered ‘a lot.”

It was a warm day. They had thrown their jackets aside, the two young men, and the girls were stockingless and in open sandals. They had already stopped once and eaten the most delicious cheesecake with cream on top, heaped Schlagobers that were absolutely continuous, Gordon assured them, with the confectionary clouds of local altars. The villages they passed were all very festive-looking, with boxes of bright red geraniums in the windows and in baskets on some of the wooden bridges, and the Alps were permanently, dazzlingly white along the skyline: so that Cassie wondered why she felt so depressed.

They were all four young and their whole lives were before them.

The big car waltzed and Michael took the mountain road at speed. They hoped to be at the Grundelsee before lunch.

The lake was tiny — you could walk around it in under an hour — and glassily blue, with fir trees in dark clumps making wedge shapes and rhomboids on the slopes, and very green meadows. The summer places, scattered in groups, were all made of the same stained timber and had the same painted shutters, each with a heart cut out of it, and the same shingle roofs. A cow here and there made the scene look pastoral, productive, but bathers along the shore, and a yellow canoe out in the middle of the lake, pulling a long thread in its picture of blue mountain-peaks, certified that this was a pleasure park and that the slightly sinister atmosphere that hung over it was a matter of weather, the oppressive proximity of so much heaped sublimity.

Perfect Mahler, Gordon would have said.

What Cassie thought was: perfect Grimm.

The one piece of history the place boasted was the elopement, nearly a century before, of the postmaster's daughter and an archduke. A local inn commemorated the occurrence with a painted sign. There were portraits of the couple on all the fluttering racks on the news kiosks — she young and pretty, he an old buffer with side-whiskers— and within minutes of their arrival the two ladies had first asked if they knew the story and then recited, in tandem, its romantic facts, promising to show them later the exact spot where the lovers first met and the old post-house where the girl's parents had lived. Everything had been preserved, of course, and was properly kept up. People came from all over to visit, and apart from the beauty of the views it was the postmaster's daughter, Anna Plhl, and the Archduke Johann who drew them. That gay fragment of not-too-recent history was what they came to savour and record.

The ladies were rather surprised by their ignorance but delighted that what they had come for was simply and entirely them. They hadn't been expected, of course — or not so many — but never mind, they were welcome anyway.

The more impressive of the two was definitely Elsa Fischer, a tall woman with a streak of steel-grey across her head. She was still handsome, and still preserved the assurance of what must once have been a remarkable beauty; but one felt she had long since dismissed that as a trivial gift and valued only the insights it had brought her. In learning to exploit her beauty she had learned how to deal with power; the one lasted after the other had become no more than good posture, good bones, and a little repertoire of gestures that still suggested availability — the promise of great sad occasions and moments of abandon. If she continued to play the game it was because men recognised in her a woman who knew the rules, and liked to experience, now that there was none, the sense of risk.

It was Cassie who saw all this. In her ugly-duckling way she valued beauty, had pondered the subject deeply, and was made aware of Elsa Fischer's great measure of that ambiguous gift in the effect it was having on Gordon. He had ceased to be plumply bored and was giving this sixty-year-old woman the sort of attention he reserved for churches, some paintings, and everything to do with himself.

Cassie was in anguish. She wanted her life, she wanted it at all costs. But she despised the means she had to use, and had been using, to get it — the humiliations, the pretence that she had no passion, no ambition of her own, no sense of honour. Most of all she was afraid that if it came to the point she might not be willing to suffer. She writhed in a dark and stolid silence.

The other woman, who was smaller in every way than Elsa Fischer, had red hair rather inexpertly coloured, red-rimmed eyes and a drooping nose, and seemed quite incapable of being still. She had wept when Michael greeted her and clung to his neck: he was so much like his father.

“Isn't he just like Arnold?” she had said.

Elsa Fischer, who kissed him on the forehead and was not tearful, looked at him with her wide blue eyes.