Unusual Uses for Olive Oil (11 page)

She would, she said. And so the arrangement was made; they would meet at a French restaurant that von
Igelfeld had heard was very good and in line for the imminent award of a Michelin star. ‘Stars are best appreciated before they come out,’ he said.

Frau Benz looked thoughtful. ‘That is a very engaging utterance,’ she said. ‘I shall have to think about its meaning. I suspect that it has many layers.’

‘Like some Viennese cakes,’ said von Igelfeld quickly.

They both laughed. The conversation had been brilliant, and it was entirely fitting that it should end on such a sparkling note.

He rose to leave. He had taken his jacket off – for the heat – and Frau Benz noticed that the sleeves of his shirt were curiously jagged. Perhaps it is the fashion, she thought; one of her nephews had rips in the knees of his jeans and she had been astonished to learn that the trousers had been bought that way and were often more expensive than those that did not have such tears. And here was Professor von Igelfeld, although no teenager, with shirt sleeves that looked as if they had been roughly cut with a pair of blunt scissors. Strange, she thought; very strange.

‘Your driver will be waiting?’ she asked.

Von Igelfeld was momentarily nonplussed. He had given no consideration to the question of how he would get home, having dismissed the taxi without making any arrangements for its return. ‘My driver …’ he muttered.

‘I can ask mine to run you back,’ said Frau Benz. ‘I think he’s still around somewhere. I’ll call him.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ said von Igelfeld hurriedly. ‘Mine will be parked outside the gate, I believe.’ He paused. ‘Under a tree.’

‘Very wise,’ said Frau Benz. ‘Cars get so hot in the summer, don’t they? Even good cars, like Mercedes-Benzes.’

Frau Benz smiled as she spoke, and von Igelfeld felt puzzled. There was something humorous, almost teasing, in what she said; but what was it?

‘I do not particularly care for Mercedes-Benzes,’ he said offhandedly. ‘There are many other German cars that are every bit as good – and less flashy, if I might say so.’

Frau Benz stood quite still. For a few moments she said nothing. Then she opened her mouth and said, ‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ said von Igelfeld, searching his mind for something witty to say. ‘I prefer a car that is less overstated. A Mercedes-Benz is fine for
nouveau riche
people, but for others, well, something less … less
shiny
is more appropriate. Or to have no car at all. That is the most fashionable choice, I believe.’

Frau Benz was silent, but had von Igelfeld looked at her, he would have noticed a slight quivering of the chin.

‘No,’ he continued expansively. ‘I have no time for Mercedes-Benzes. None at all.’

Frau Benz moved very slowly towards the door. ‘It was so kind of you to come, Professor von Igelfeld,’ she said.

‘Please: Moritz-Maria, Kitty.’

She appeared not to have heard. ‘And I much appreciated your kind remarks about the ceiling, Professor von Igelfeld.’

Von Igelfeld felt his neck becoming warm. He wondered whether he had done something to offend his hostess; he must have – but what could it be? He looked down at his arms, at the shirt he had converted to short sleeves. Could it be that this amounted to some awful social solecism?

Frau Benz was opening the door.

‘I look forward to our dinner,’ said von Igelfeld, a note of anxiety creeping into his voice. ‘I have read some very promising reviews of that restaurant.’

Frau Benz looked at him. ‘Dinner? Oh, yes. I’m terribly sorry but I’ve just remembered that I have a dental appointment. We shall have to have dinner some other time. I’m so sorry.’

Von Igelfeld frowned. ‘A dental appointment? But dentists don’t work at night.’

Frau Benz looked away. ‘We should never be too dogmatic,’ she said quietly. ‘About the hours that dentists work, or … or about other things.’

He stepped out. Behind him the door clanged shut,
a sound so final as to drive away all thoughts of living in a
Schloss
; of having a wife; of pursuing a life of quiet scholarship in a private library; of not having to listen to Herr Huber going on and on; of being somehow free in a world where freedom was a prize that most of us would never achieve, given that we were ourselves, and usually, if not always, had to remain ourselves for all our days, such as they were.

He frowned once again. Had he spoken out of turn about something? Women were unfathomable beings – even somebody as charming and pleasant as Frau Benz. She had seemed to be very taken with his witticisms – which had flowed quickly and easily for the entire visit – and then it was as if she had suddenly developed a headache. That was it: a headache. He would telephone her the next day and he was sure that he would discover that her good humour had completely returned. They would go out for dinner and then he would come back here for lunch, and all would be back to normal again. There was no need to worry.

He walked down the driveway towards the gate. It was not far from the nearest village and he could ask the people at the local inn to call a car for him. The exercise would do him good, he thought, after that excellent lunch.

There was a path off to the right – a short path that culminated in a paved stone circle on which a sundial
had been erected. It was a most unusual sundial, von Igelfeld thought – a metal circle trisected into triangles: a strangely familiar symbol, but quite unexpected in such a setting.

Odd, he thought. Very odd.

A lesser man – one who, unlike von Igelfeld, had not written a twelve-hundred-page treatise on Portuguese irregular verbs – might have been cast down by such a rebuff as he received at the hands of Frau Benz. A lesser man, not having the history of the von Igelfeld family behind him – a history of insouciance in the face of adversity – might have become dispirited and might have thought that perhaps this social failure was his own doing. Not von Igelfeld: it was true that he felt a momentary disappointment at the frustration of his plans to marry Frau Benz and become the owner of the Schloss Dunkelberg, but this disappointment was moderated by the conviction that what the entire experience demonstrated was the unpredictability and
inconstancy of women. And if that was the way that Frau Benz behaved, then he decided that he had had a narrow escape from marriage to such a difficult woman. It would have been all very well having the library at the Schloss Dunkelberg at his disposal, but what pleasure would it have been had he had to worry about what his wife would think and do next? There would be no peace in that, he thought; how much better to remain a bachelor and live in what was, after all, a perfectly comfortable flat with a view that, even if it was not of fertile acres of land which pertained to it, none the less encompassed a perfectly respectable public park. Frau Benz! Who had heard of the Benzes, whoever they were? Where were they in the sixteenth century? And as for the owl in their escutcheon – what a ridiculous device when compared with the hedgehog, whose role as an embodiment of wisdom was well known to anybody with even the slightest knowledge of iconography. And as for the apotheosis of Herr Benz – what an assumption to make that such a person, a mere manufacturer of whatever it was that he made, would be welcomed by luminaries of the voltage of Goethe and Wagner! It was quite preposterous, really, and he felt that he had shown considerable forbearance in not pointing this out to his hostess.

It was unfortunate, though, that Prinzel forgot all about von Igelfeld’s request not to make much of the
Benz episode and asked a question that could only lead to embarrassment.

‘How did your visit go?’ he asked over coffee the following day. ‘Plenty to talk about? Good look round – the Schloss that is?’

Herr Huber, who had just sat down, looked up sharply. ‘Oh yes! Yesterday, wasn’t it? And it was such a nice day for it. I said to myself: look at the sun, and just think that Professor von Igelfeld will be walking around the gardens at the Schloss, and will have them all to himself because the Schloss is closed on Sundays, to ordinary members of the public, that is. I thought that, you know, and then I thought that perhaps …’

Prinzel glanced at the Librarian. ‘Very interesting, Herr Huber. But perhaps we should allow Professor von Igelfeld to tell us himself how his visit went.’

They looked at von Igelfeld, who was studying the rim of his coffee cup with sudden intensity.

‘I had lunch at the Schloss,’ he said. ‘It was very pleasant being there without … without the public traipsing about.’ He looked up as he mentioned the public and the implication could not have been clearer: Unterholzer, the Librarian, and even Prinzel were the very public whose absence was so welcome.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Unterholzer. ‘A return to the days of exclusiveness. Perhaps there are those who believe
that the public is best excluded from … from the Louvre, for example.’

‘It would be a matter of great regret if that were to happen,’ said Herr Huber. ‘And I’m sure Professor von Igelfeld would not want people like us to be barred from the Louvre. But there is all the difference in the world, surely, between the Louvre and the Schloss Dunkelberg.’

‘I don’t see that at all,’ snapped Unterholzer. ‘Both are part of our artistic patrimony. They should not be just for the privileged. It’s a matter of principle, no less.’

‘Excuse me, Herr Unterholzer,’ said the Librarian. ‘But would you have turned down such an invitation?’

It was an unusually bold remark for Herr Huber, and for a few moments nobody said anything. Then Prinzel spoke. ‘I don’t think we should criticise Herr von Igelfeld unduly. What I’m interested in is the details of the visit. Was the conversation good? What did he see? What about the ceiling depicting the apotheosis of the late Herr Benz? These are the things that interest me.’

‘I was shown the painted ceilings,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘Then we sat out on the terrace.’

Prinzel smiled. ‘How very agreeable, I must say.’ He paused. ‘And will you be seeing Frau Benz again in the near future?’

Before von Igelfeld had the chance to answer, the Librarian chipped in brightly. ‘I wonder if she drove you back in one of her cars,’ he said. ‘She must have a large fleet of them, I’d say.’

Von Igelfeld seized the opportunity to divert the conversation. ‘Why on earth would she have a large fleet of cars, Herr Huber?’

‘Mercedes-Benz,’ said Unterholzer slowly. ‘Benz.’

Von Igelfeld was silent. ‘With a
z
?’ he asked at last, his voice so quiet as to be virtually inaudible. ‘I thought …’

‘You thought it was spelled with an
s
?’ asked the Librarian. ‘Bens? That is unusual, but there was a nurse in my aunt’s nursing home who married a Herr Bens. He came from Leipzig, I think. Yes he did, come to think of it, because I met him when they had a party for the staff and the nurse brought him along. He told me about Leipzig. They didn’t invite everybody, of course, but they had a few relatives of patients, and they very kindly included me. People are so kind, you know, in these little ways …’

Von Igelfeld was not listening. He remembered his remarks about Mercedes-Benzes, and the way that what he said had seemed to impress Frau Benz into silence. Or perhaps impress was not the right word …

‘And then afterwards,’ continued the Librarian, ‘a number of us went for a walk. I pride myself on taking
a reasonable amount of exercise, you know. People say that you should get about an hour or so every day. A lot of people find it difficult, and I can understand how they do. People in desk jobs, for example. Librarians, of course, get a lot of exercise – more than one might imagine. I find that. Putting books back on the shelves – that keeps me fit, even if I don’t manage to get out and walk in the country. Picking up books and taking them to the shelves involves a lot of …’

‘But you don’t have many books to put back each day,’ said Unterholzer. ‘Two or three perhaps, because we’re the only people who use the library, are we not? So if each of us takes a book once a day, this means that you have three books to put back. Forgive me for saying it, but I don’t call that exercise.’