My sweet! Klara knew that phrase of old: the princess always used it when she was angry about something. Could she have guessed that she had turned down Montorio?
‘Why, of course, Mama! Let’s go,’ she replied good-humouredly, for her conscience was not clear. They descended the stairs and put on their wraps without speaking. Both maintained the silence as they sat together in the carriage.
As the majestic équipage wended its way slowly back to the Kollonich Palais all the fragmentary thoughts that had tormented the princess in the brightly-lit rooms of the Park Club returned with redoubled force. Clip-clop! Clip-clop! the horses’ hoofs resounded on the uneven surface of the streets like hammer-blows on the coffin of her ambitions. Clip-clop! Clip-clop! The sound was unendurable. It seemed as if they would never reach home.
The princess’s thoughts went back to her youth when the Gyeroffy sisters, Agnes and her younger sister, Elise, first moved to Budapest from Transylvania. Their father, Count Tamas Gyeroffy, had just been elected a member of Parliament. The girls were chaperoned by their mother. Both were beautiful, well-educated — they even spoke English, which was rare in those days — and excellent dancers; yet they were not popular, not at all the success they had been so sure would be theirs when they came to the capital.
In Transylvania they had been among the first wherever they went, but here they were treated as unwelcome intruders of no importance, almost as ‘foreigners’. The Budapest dowagers, if they spoke to them at all, did so condescendingly with a patronizing air they did nothing to hide. It had been a deeply humiliating experience and it had lasted the whole of their first Carnival season. Later came a stroke of good luck. At Balatonfured Agnes had met Louis Kollonich, who was still in mourning for his first wife. The ‘good Louis’ had fallen in love with her, abandoned his mourning and proposed to her four days later. She had accepted him. And why not? Of course she had not been in love with the chubby-faced widower, but she could not resist the opportunity of becoming the Princess Kollonich and queening it over all those snooty girls in Budapest who had looked down their noses at her when she first arrived. She imagined that this marriage, like a magic wand, would waft her instantly to the highest peaks. But, and this was Agnes’s second great disappointment, somehow the magic wand had not worked. Although she became Princess Kollonich — after quite a short engagement — many of the dowagers and their daughters still continued to hold aloof and regard her de haut en bas. Some even went so far as to make sly and spiteful allusions to her Transylvanian birth. ‘Lots of bears where you come from, aren’t there? Anything else? Really?’
They made great play in finding it difficult to pronounce her name, even though it was of ancient Hungarian origin. ‘Was ist das füreinName — What sort of a name is that?’ They had been horrid, and she had never forgotten it. She knew that the fault was partly her own. She had developed such an inferiority complex, such a deep conviction that these Hungarian aristocrats really were her superiors, and that she herself was inferior and second-rate, that she antagonized everyone by her air of grandeur. She had adopted quite consciously a proud and disdainful manner, her head held high, one or two fingers held out when they came to greet her; but inside she was quaking with terror and lack of confidence, unsure of herself, praying that someone would be nice to her, and she would be exaggeratedly pleased if anyone was.
This had been the real reason why her acceptance had come so slowly, for it was not until more than ten years had passed — ten years of struggle, hard work and humiliation — that she had begun to feel secure. During these years the Princess Agnes had thought of little but the battle for social recognition and, because she felt that she had been judged and disliked without valid reason, her whole conception of life — and especially society life — had been soured and coloured by the conviction that nothing, nothing in the world, mattered so much as social success. And at last success came, and she realized that the battle had been won. But, as with mountain-climbers, one reaches one peak only to discover that there is another, even higher, behind it. For the Princess Agnes, though she might have become the uncrowned queen of Budapest society, there was now an even greater obstacle to be surmounted. The next step was to be accepted at court.
If once she obtained social recognition by the ‘Olympus’ in Vienna she would be fully revenged on the ladies who had caused her such misery in Budapest: for then it would be they who could be treated as provincial upstarts! This would be her ultimate trump-card, and once played she would take precedence over them all in the most exclusive, rank-conscious group in the whole world. She, the despised Transylvanian, would be so far above them that she would at long last be able to relax knowing that all her ambitions had been achieved. And she could have done it! The Montorio marriage would have been the master-key to all those doors that had been shut to her for so long.
And now it was all over, finished! Why? Because her two-faced nephew Laci, that devious little nobody, had come sniffing round Klara and turned her head. He was a cunning little trouble-maker; that was the word for him — trouble-maker. He had taken advantage of the hospitality and the protection she had offered the unprotected orphan; and this is how he had repaid her endless kindness. Why, she had treated little Laci as if he had been her own son ever since, at the age of eighteen months, he had been abandoned by his mother, Julie Ladossa, the depraved woman who had left her brother and run off with an adventurer.
Clip-clop! Clip-clop! All her painful memories surged upwards until she felt her head would burst.
Julie! That scheming whore, Julie Ladossa! As the name came into her head the whole sad, disreputable scandal — the one great tragedy of her family — came back to her.
One day Julie had driven away from Szamos-Kozard in her pony-trap, with God knows who, and three days later they had found her husband, Agnes’s brother, poor Mihaly Gyeroffy, dead in the woods, shot by his own gun after carefully arranging it to look like an accident. That at least had had style, and that had been Agnes’s only consolation. Now the Princess reflected that Laci, the son of that shameless creature, took entirely after his mother. He looked like her, with those strange eyebrows which nearly met in the middle; and it was from her that he inherited his talent for music for had it not been her hated sister-in-law’s artistic tendencies that had fanned her wickedness and irresponsibility? The Princess thought only of Laci’s eyebrows as recalling his mother’s looks, as indeed they did, but the truth was that no one could mistake him for anything but a Gyeroffy. If he resembled anyone it was his aunts Agnes and Elise and, indeed, he was far more like herself than her own sons by the ‘good Louis’. But at this moment she only felt that she hated him, that he was ungrateful and disrespectful. He had carried off her little Klara, her own Klara, when she would willingly have arranged for him a good marriage with a substantial dowry that would have kept him in comfort!
Perhaps, after all, everything was not lost. Perhaps it was nothing more than a passing fancy on Klara’s part. Perhaps things could still be fixed and there had only been some minor little disagreement between Klara and the prince? Though deep down she did not believe this, Princess Agnes decided she would do what she could to retrieve the situation. In the morning she would send for Klara and have it out with her.
The carriage arrived at the covered portico of the Kollonich Palais. After the footman had opened the carriage doors and let down the steps, he had first to remove the long basket of flowers that lay on the carriage floor at the ladies’ feet — this was Klara’s cotillion prize, and it was filled with multi-coloured little bouquets that represented the homage of the young men to their partners. On top, larger and showier than all the others, lay Laszlo’s bunch of saffron-coloured carnations from which Klara, at the ball, had picked a flower to pin on her corsage as a sign for all to see of her bondage to Laci. At the sight of it Princess Agnes could easily have lost her temper and exploded with rage. Mercifully, there were many steps to mount before arriving at the door and so she had time to control herself sufficiently to say goodnight calmly and dispassionately to her errant stepdaughter. She even kissed her on the forehead, as she always did at this moment, before turning away and moving slowly in the direction of her apartments. She was careful not to say anything about the next day lest something in her voice should betray her anger.