Last Nocturne (31 page)

‘I have something to tell you, Isobel.’

Julian then astonished her by informing her that he, too, was leaving Vienna. The senior man at the bank, his uncle, was retiring at last and it would be necessary for him to return to England to take charge of Carrington’s in London.

Isobel’s dismay must have been very evident, for he reminded her, gently, ‘But you must have known I would go back sooner or later. I’ve spoken of it many times. I’ve already outstayed my time here, and now I have responsibilities at home.’

Home. England. Yes, Vienna wasn’t Julian’s home, after all. Despite the years he’d spent here, he was English to the core.

‘Oh, Julian, how I shall miss you!’

He looked as though he were about to say something more, but then his habitual reserve took over and made him think better of it, and he turned his face away a little. In the light of the lamp his pale profile was as clear-cut as a cameo, as stern and patrician as a Roman emperor, and not for the first time she wondered if she knew Julian as well as she thought.

His move was made very quickly; within weeks he had left. She hadn’t until then realised how much she’d come to rely on the presence of this quiet, undemanding man in her life. It wasn’t as though they’d ever spent so very much time together – but he’d always found time for little occasions, despite always being busy, occupied with the important business of running his bank. Added to this, outside of business hours he had his own concerns, not least the relentless tracking down of pictures and so on to add to his considerable store of art treasures. When Julian wanted something he was quietly but alarmingly determined, she’d discovered.

‘I will write, of course I will,’ he’d promised. ‘And you must do so, too. And I shall be back from time to time, you may be sure – I shall still need to see to certain concerns of the bank here. In any case, I wouldn’t wish to cut myself off entirely from Vienna – nor from my friends,’ he added, resting a kindly look on her.

One evening, when she took Sophie back, Isobel found Bruno with his head in his hands. She sent Sophie into the kitchen to Berta before she asked him what was wrong.

‘She’s gone.’

Isobel didn’t need to ask who. ‘And left Sophie?’

‘Sophie?’ He looked as though he didn’t know who Sophie was.

‘I hit her with Berta’s iron skillet.’

‘What?’ Physical violence was not something one associated with Bruno. Angry words, sulks and unpredictable moods, yes, but not violence.

‘Or I would have done had she not ducked.’ He laughed, without humour. ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be back, as always. If someone doesn’t kill her first.’ He looked up and she saw something dark and deep in his eyes she had never seen there before, pain and longing and impotence. ‘I don’t know what it is with Miriam.’

Nor did Isobel, but she did know there was something more destructive and dangerous about her than there was about Bruno. She was sorry for him, but she couldn’t help her own, perhaps selfish, stab of joy that Miriam hadn’t taken Sophie with her.

Sophie’s education, like Isobel’s, had been grabbed wherever she happened to be. Her knowledge of history, formal geography and the like was nil, but she could read, write and reckon, and when she ran errands for Susan, the survival skills she had necessarily acquired meant that she often came back from the market with a bargain, or an extra strudel slipped into the paper bag by the baker in pity for her waif-like looks.

Attempting to teach her a little filled Isobel’s empty days, gave her something to do now that Julian was gone. The silences which she’d found so distressing now lay restfully between them, punctuated by conversation. There were occasional smiles beneath the ducked head.

‘Before I leave, I’d like to try to paint Sophie,’ Theo said, always diffident where his work was concerned. He had talked so much of going home, an event which never materialised, Isobel had ceased to believe it ever would, but now it seemed imminent. ‘I’ve never tried my hand at portraiture, but who knows, that may be what I’m cut out for, after all,’ he added with that trace of bitterness, so odd in Theo, that he could never quite hide when he spoke of his work, though that was rare enough. He was secretive about what he wanted to do, about his ambitions, he let no one into his attic room to see his work, except perhaps Viktor. Isobel knew by now that it went very deep, this search for something new, and that never far from the surface was a sense of failure, the untenable thought that he might never find it.

He wanted to paint Sophie in the blue stuff dress and the pinafore and canvas boots she wore every day, with her lovely hair loose around her shoulders. Sophie looked at Isobel, pleading. Isobel knew what she wanted, but she wanted her to say it herself.

‘Can’t I wear my new dress?’ she said at last.

‘Oh, but—’ Theo looked at Isobel, and she spread her hands. Sophie hadn’t yet reached the stage of asking her, as little girls do, if she could try on her jewellery or totter about in her grown-up shoes, but it wouldn’t be long before she did, Isobel thought, knowing how she loved dressing up in her red cloak and fur hat and muff. Sophie was going to be a woman interested in how she looked.

‘Well, you’re the sitter. Why not?’ Theo said good-humouredly.

So she wore the new velvet-trimmed dress with the lace collar Isobel had bought her, her shiny button boots and the little string of corals Bruno had carelessly thrown into her lap one day, and had her hair dressed with a bow. Theo rolled his eyes comically. He pretended to be overcome when she appeared, shyly dressed in all her finery. ‘What! Am I to paint a princess then?’

Isobel saw the portrait when it was halfway completed and she liked it. Sophie had consented to hold the new doll he had given her, one with real hair and jointed arms and legs, better than the little wooden fairing whose head he had glued back on, though she rarely touched either. His portrait had caught that small, elusive, occasional smile which turned up one corner of her mouth – but then, when it was nowhere near finished, he stopped abruptly, saying it was too pretty. ‘I’m sorry, Sophie.’

Isobel was sorry too, sorry and angry with Theo. This was taking his dissatisfaction with his work too far. Surely, he knew how much it mattered to the child? She thought he did. His anger was with himself, but he wouldn’t compromise. ‘Never mind, Sophie,’ he said at last, ‘Viktor’s agreed to finish it.’

Sophie’s mouth turned down, intimidated by the thought of sitting still for hours under Viktor’s cold gaze while he painted her. Isobel herself was astonished at his offer, when he had previously shown neither liking, nor any interest whatsoever in Sophie. But an artist didn’t necessarily have to
like
his subjects, she thought, reminding herself of the relationship between Viktor and Miriam.

‘He’ll make me look all gold, like Mama. I don’t want to look like her.’

Recalling those sensuous, gilded women he painted, Isobel hoped he would not. Theo smiled and said no, this would be quite different, but Sophie wasn’t any happier, until Isobel told her she would keep her company during the sittings, if it wouldn’t disturb Viktor.

Viktor shrugged. It was a matter of indifference to him who sat with Sophie. And indeed, it seemed that nothing could make his concentration falter, although occasionally he would interject a remark into their low conversation which showed he’d been listening.

‘My mother’s name was Sofia, too. She was Hungarian, a beauty,’ he threw out one day, laying a firm stroke of umber on the canvas with a loaded brush after one of his long appraisals of Sophie.

‘And your father, too?’ Isobel asked, glad to encourage any utterance from him.

‘Our father was a painter, like me. And a romantic, like my brother. In love with the gypsy way of life. He painted nothing but gypsies.’

‘Mama says
she’s
a gypsy,’ Sophie ventured, addressing Isobel, ‘But
Sabba
says she’s a Jewess, so she can’t be.’

Viktor laughed shortly. ‘Your grandfather is right – but she’s a gypsy in spirit. Born to a wandering life.’
That
Sofia had been a beauty, too, he abruptly.

Yes, one day, perhaps, Isobel thought, seeing Sophie anew.

While the work was in progress, Viktor refused to let them see it, but when it was done, it took Isobel’s breath away. She saw immediately what Theo had meant about his own portrait being too pretty. This was Sophie – timid, scared, looking at the world with distrustful eyes. This portrait was not ‘pretty’. But it was real. It was true.

They never saw it again. Perhaps Viktor had sold it. Perhaps Theo had taken it to London with him when he eventually left, though this was not to be for some time.

Julian did write from England, but letter writing was evidently not one of his accomplishments. His letters were no substitute for his conversation, more like laundry lists. He was busy at the bank, and also adding to his stock of porcelain, he wrote, buying more pictures and furniture, and looking for a house suitable for displaying his treasures…an art dealer friend was helping him find the pictures… London was foggy, he’d forgotten the pea-soupers. No wonder everyone looked so miserable.

Later, he wrote that he had found a house. It was not in the centre of London as he’d intended, but on the Thames at Chiswick. A small but charming eighteenth-century residence, a tall narrow Queen Anne house built of warm red brick. At present, it was being redecorated. The garden had been sadly neglected but he was looking to have it restored. He hoped the house would be ready for occupation by the spring, and perhaps, when the tulips were out, Isobel might consider coming over for a visit? The great botanical gardens at Kew were nearby, as was Hampton Court, and London itself was something to be seen. Of course, it was nothing in the least like Vienna. There was much he missed of that city – and her company, he added, unusually expansive.

She took his protestations about Vienna with a pinch of salt. Reading between the lines of his letters – dry, precise and full of facts, rather like Julian himself – she thought she had been correct in her surmise: he was more in his natural element in his native London than ever he had been in the Imperial city.

One freezing cold night, just before Christmas, she was alone in her apartment, Susan having gone with Berta to an Advent service in the cathedral, when there was a knock on her door. She ran down the steps and when she opened it saw a tall, dark man standing outside, holding Sophie by the hand. The moment she opened the door, Sophie pulled her hand from his and ran forward, burying her head in Isobel’s skirts.

‘Mrs Amberley?’ the Englishman enquired, raising his hat. (Despite being warmly dressed in a fur-collared coat, in the manner of well-to-do Viennese men in winter, he was unmistakably English.) ‘You won’t remember me, but we did once meet, briefly. My name is Martagon. I found this child alone downstairs and she told me—’

He need not have reminded her of his name. She did remember him, the quiet Englishman, tall, dark, distinguished, who had joined them that summer evening in the courtyard which had ended so abruptly. ‘May I introduce myself properly?’ he went on, holding out a hand. ‘Eliot Martagon. Friend of Julian Carrington. He sent me to see Viktor Franck, but there appears to be no one about. This child answered the door, and I only hope I didn’t frighten her too much. She was alone, frozen, without a fire,’ he added in a disbelieving tone. ‘I asked where everyone was and she said they’d all gone to skate on the lake in Stadtpark. She told me you would look after her.’

‘Won’t you come in, Mr Martagon?’

Isobel was furiously angry. How dare they all go off on their own concerns and leave the child alone, not even tucked up in bed, as if they’d forgotten her very existence? Though perhaps – more charitably – each believed someone else was being responsible for her. Isobel had intended to join the party herself, but she was recovering from a little cold and the comfort indoors and the promise of her warm bed was just then more appealing than even the delightful prospect of joining the whirling skaters on the black frozen lake, under the lights strung up in the trees. A magic moment in time it always was, with the gay music, and the women, freed of the decorum imposed on them during the day, dipping and flying like swallows over the ice with their skirts billowing behind them, the men showing off and executing daring manoeuvres with reckless speed.

‘I thought Sophie was with them,’ she said, walking upstairs, hampered by the clinging, speechless child who refused to let go of her. Inside, on the sofa by the warm stove, she wrapped a blanket around her, fed her bread and milk. Her head cradled against Isobel’s shoulder, she soon fell asleep. ‘I’ll take her to bed.’

‘You are very kind,’ observed Eliot Martagon, who had watched in silence while all this was going on. He had thickly lashed grey eyes of an almost silvery colour that crinkled at the corners when he smiled. ‘May I?’ he asked, and took Sophie from her arms as she stood up. ‘Poor mite,’ he said, looking down with tenderness at her sleeping face. ‘They are so vulnerable, are they not? I have a daughter of my own at home.’

When Sophie was settled, Isobel poured glasses of kümmel. It was cold at the window end of the room on a night like this, despite the two layers of glass and the thick drawn curtains, so they were deprived of the chief attraction of the apartment, the magnificent view. But they sat in the lamplight by the warmth of the stove, talking – and talking, as the night wore on. He was an art dealer, he told her, here principally to buy from some rich Jew who was selling a beautiful art collection, pictures, prints, drawings and a few bronzes. And to see something of the work of Viktor Franck, he added with a smile. He was a connoisseur as well as a dealer. They talked into the small hours and he didn’t offer to go to the house next door when they heard sounds of their return. She had rarely felt so much at ease with anyone at first meeting.

The intimate details of a love affair are incomprehensible, at the very least boring, to anyone else, Isobel knew. Real love, that is, not simply sexual attraction. That first look, the meeting of eyes, hearts and minds; the heightened perceptions. The sexual intensity, of course. But also the ease and rightness of simply being together, without the need for words. The unspoken promise in safe, clasped hands. The knowing that here, here is the one.