‘… Shipwrecked!’ he said, laughing. ‘Yes, cast up on these shores. I can’t tell you!’ Licht in his agitation could hardly understand what he was saying. He fell back a pace, mouthing helplessly and nodding. Felix’s sharp glance flickered all around the hall. ‘What a charming place,’ he said softly, and threw back his head and smiled foxily, showing a broken eye-tooth. He had a disjointed, improvised air, as if he had been put together in haste from disparate bits and pieces of other people. He seemed full of suppressed laughter, nursing a secret joke. With that fixed grin and those glossy, avid eyes he makes me think of a ventriloquist’s dummy; in his case, though, it would be he who would do the talking, while his master’s mouth flapped open and shut like a broken trap. ‘Yes, charming, charming,’ he said. ‘Why, I feel almost at home already.’
Afterwards Licht was never absolutely sure all this had happened, or had happened in the way that he remembered it, at least. All he recalled for certain was the sense of being suddenly surrounded by something bright and overwhelming. It was not just Felix before whom he fell back, but the troupe of possibilities that seemed to come crowding in behind him, tumbling and leaping invisibly about the hall. He saw himself in a dazzle of light, heroic and absurd, and the hallway might have been the pass at Roncesvalles. I should not sneer: I too in secret have always fancied myself a hero, dying with my face to Spain, though I suspect no ministering angel or exaltation of saints will come to carry me off as I cough out my heart’s last drops of blood.
Felix was describing how the boat had run aground. Daintily with finger and thumb he hoisted skirt-like the legs of his trousers to show a pair of skinny, bare, blue-white ankles and his shoes dark with wet. Head on one side, and that comical, self-disparaging grin.
‘Professor Kreutznaer,’ Licht said in a sort of hapless desperation, ‘Professor Kreutznaer is … busy.’
Felix was regarding him keenly with an eyebrow lifted.
‘Busy, eh?’ he said softly. ‘Well then, we shall not disturb him, shall we.’
The others had shuffled across the bridge by now, dragged forward reluctantly in the wake of Felix’s rapid ascent to the house, as if they were attached to him at a distance somehow; they loitered, waiting for a sign. Sophie sat down on a rock and kneaded the foot she had twisted. Hatch was clutching his stomach and rolling his eyes in a dumbshow demonstration of hunger, while Pound snickered and Alice smiled doubtfully. Have we met Alice? She is eleven. She wears her hair in a shiny, fat, brown braid. She is not pretty. Sophie considered the elfin Hatch without enthusiasm, his narrow, white face and red slash of a mouth; there is one clown in every company.
‘After the war,’ she said to him, ‘when I was younger than you are now, we had no food. Every day for months, for months, I was hungry. My mother rubbed the top of the stove with candle grease —’ with one hand she smoothed large, slow circles on the air ‘— and fried potatoes in it, and when the potatoes were eaten she fried the peelings and we ate those, too.’
Hatch with a tragic look embraced himself and did a dying fall on to the grass and lay there twitching.
‘Oh, leave them alone, Countess,’ Croke said waggishly, wagging his head at her. ‘This is not old Vienna.’
She eyed him coolly. When he grinned he showed a large set of yellowed, horsey teeth, and the skin over his cheekbones tightened and the skull under the taut skin seemed to grin as well, but in a different way. Countess: he had started calling her that last night in the hotel bar when he was tipsy, winking at her and trying to get her drunk; she suspected gloomily it would stick.
‘So funny you are,’ she said. ‘All of you, so funny.’
The boys laughed — how quickly the grown-ups could irritate each other today! — but they were uneasy, too. Sophie already was an object of deep and secret speculation to them, this moody woman in black who was as old as a mother would be but unlike any mother they had ever known, the hungry way she smoked cigarettes, the way she sat with her knees apart, like a man, not caring (Hatch on the ground was trying to look up her skirt), the fascinating tang of sweat she left behind her on the air when she passed by.
Croke, still leering at her toothily, sang under his breath, in a quavery voice:
Wien, Wien, nur du allein!
When he laughed he coughed, a string of phlegm twanging in his throat, and Alice glared at him. She disapproved of Croke, because of his coarseness, and because he was old.
‘I am not even Viennese,’ Sophie said ruefully, frowning at her foot.
‘But you should be, Countess,’ Croke said, with what he thought was gallantry. ‘You should be.’
Flora had moved away carefully with her eyes lowered. Sophie watched her narrowly. Flora was wearing an affected, far-off look, as if she thought there might be unpleasantness that she would have to pretend not to notice. How beautiful she was, like one of Modigliani’s girls, with that heavy black hair, those tilted eyes, that hesitant, slightly awkward, pigeon-toed grace. Sophie suspected she had been with Felix last night. Sanctimonious little twat.
Vienna. God! She lit a cigarette. Her foot was callused and the nail on the little toe had almost disappeared into the flesh. She closed her eyes. She was sick of herself. Why had she said that nonsense about the potato peelings? For whom was she playing this part that she had to keep on making up as she went along? A comedy, of course, all a horrible comedy. Out there in the flocculent, moth-laden darkness an invisible audience was splitting its sides at her. She rose, suddenly angry, at herself and everything else, and, carrying her shoes and stepping warily, set off up the pathway to the house, where Felix had reappeared and was waiting for them on the porch with a proprietorial air, his hands like a brahmin’s joined before him, a man brimming with secrets, smiling.
He might have been master of the house so warmly did he welcome them, touching an elbow here, patting a shoulder-blade there, winking gaily at the boys, who had carried up his black bag between them. And to their surprise as he ushered them in they all, even Sophie, felt a rush of gratitude for his ministering presence; they remembered the awful, sickening lurch when the boat had keeled over, things falling and a big crate sliding off the deck into the water and the drunken skipper cursing, and it came to them that after all they were survivors, in a way, despite the festive look that everything insisted on wearing, and suddenly they were full of tenderness for themselves and pity for their plight. Licht hovered in the dimness of the doorway, smiling helplessly, nodding to them and mouthing wordless greetings as they entered.
‘Hello, Harpo,’ Hatch said brightly, and Pound behind him spluttered.
The hall was wide and paved unevenly with black and white tiles. There was a pockmarked mirror in a gilt frame and an umbrella stand with an assortment of walking canes and a broken shooting-stick. The walls up to the dado were clad with embossed wallpaper to which repeated layers of varnish had imparted a thick, clammy, toffee-coloured texture, while above the rail stretched shadowy grey expanses that had once, long ago, been white. There was a smell of apples just starting to rot. And an air now of polite shock, of a hand put to mouth in amazement at all this noise, this intrusion. Licht was beside himself.
They stood uneasily in a huddle and did not know what to do next.
And then something happened, I am not sure what it was. They were all crowded together there, uncertain whether to advance or wait, and this uncertainty produced a ripple among them, a restless stirring, as when the day darkens suddenly and a gust of wind from nowhere blows through the trees, shaking them. Nice touch of the Virgilian, that. Croke, squinting up at something on the ceiling, stepped backwards and trod on Sophie’s foot, the one that she had twisted. She shrieked, and her shriek brought an immediate and solemn silence and everyone went as still as a statue. I could leave them there, I could walk away now and leave them there forever. The silence lasted for the space of half a dozen heartbeats and then slowly, as if she were slowly falling, Alice began to cry.