seems he was talking to this bloke at a party about a week ago, and mentioned that our thing was coming up—quite an event, apparently—and the bloke asked if he could sit in on it. He’s pretty senior, and Gruber felt he couldn’t just tell him to get lost. I don’t mind. It’s quite flattering, really. You don’t mind, do you Mickey? I should have asked you, really, since you’re the only other surviving relative. Not that we’re relatives at all, except by marriage, still . . . Poor old Wolf. Do you mind?”
“Oh no, I suppose not. I don’t really feel it’s much to do with me.”
“Nonsense. It’s as much your business as mine, in a way. I don’t suppose Wolf counted on there being any legatee to receive the stuff. After all, in those days the prospects for a young man reaching my age didn’t look too bright, what with all the modern military hardware. Things haven’t changed much, have they? I told Gruber to expect us about eleven-thirty. No point in getting up at the crack.”
Mickey nodded absently, thinking hard. He had been looking forward to the revelations of his great uncle’s estate no more than to the rest of the trip, but now he was suddenly curious. He was almost excited.
As he waited for his wife to dress herself for the afternoon, he brooded about the hidden history of Vienna. There was something here, something that had been here, that made the place far more important to his father than he had been letting on. Now they were here together, and it seemed impossible that Mickey could go home again without finding that something, and knowing what it meant. Maybe he was making too much of it, maybe not. In any event, he realised that he had, as it were, closed the file on the riddle of his father’s character long since, and that it had now been reopened. The riddle might actually be solved, through the catalyst of some dusty package giving up its secrets in a lawyer’s office. The notion was irresistible.
“Hey, you OK? I’m ready to go now.”
“Yes, Pet, I’m ready.”
“So what’s eating you?”
“Oh. . . Dad. He wouldn’t talk about what happened to him here. I thought I’d heard everything, at one time or another, but not this. And he wouldn’t talk about it. It’s not like him at all. He’ll always talk about things. He doesn’t make much of them, it’s true, but you get the facts. I’ve never seen him do that.”
“He’s just tired, honey. He’ll tell us later. Tomorrow maybe.”
“Maybe. Maybe tomorrow will tell. Come on. Let’s find a cab.”
5
Before Frances was fully awake, before she had established where she was, either in the world or in the course of her life, she knew that Herbert was not with her. Was he fighting in the Far East? Would she open the door to a strange officer, and hear the news she dreaded? She opened her eyes and forgot her dreams.
It was seldom, these days, that she slept without him, but on the rare occasions when some trivial circumstance separated them, waking always took her back to the early years of their marriage. It had been bad enough during the war against Hitler, but thrilling, too, as the man she had loved as a schoolgirl became a hero not only to her, but to his country as well. Sleeping alone, then, would have been the natural condition of engagement, war or no war. She had been able only to guess at its piquancy. She had thought that their wedding, late in Victory year, would unite them for life; but then Malaya and Korea had brought years of solitary waking, and loneliness in foreign countries. Where was he now?
She looked at her watch, and found that she had been asleep for two hours. Presumably, then, he had gone off to get some lunch and left her to rest. He would be back soon. She picked up the pocket-sized guide book she had bought in London, and turned to the map of the city. The centre of Vienna appeared as a wavy cartwheel with a cathedral at its hub, the sort of place that would be quite easy to walk around without getting lost; but she could not work out where the hotel stood in relation to everything else, so the plan conveyed very little. There was not a great deal of point, in any case, in getting her bearings, for the days when she could comfortably walk all afternoon were long gone.
She turned the pages of the book, and found a picture of an open horse-drawn carriage in which a driver quaintly dressed in an ornamental waistcoat and bowler hat would conduct private guided tours around the sights, albeit for a price. That was for her. It was the sort of excursion, she knew, that would appeal little to the others of her family. She would have it all to herself, a private luxury, riding around the city like a princess with a bag of those famous chocolates in her lap. Bliss.
Frances got up and washed her face, being careful to avoid looking at it in the mirror. She knew that her face grew lazy in sleep, every muscle and wrinkle smeared downward to a bottom-heavy mask. She must smile and yawn and talk a while before she would look fully alive again. She wondered how long Herbert was going to be. It was probable that one day she would have to begin another stretch of years of waking up without him, when it would be a matter not of waiting for him to return, but of waiting for the end of waiting. She never wondered how she would cope with that time. Already so much of the joy in her life was in her memory, the pleasures of the present largely to be found in old, familiar things that didn’t change. She would simply go on trouping.
She opened the doors of the balcony, became a little more awake as the fresh air blew gently in, and heard the bells of the city faintly tolling, with the resonance of many centuries, tolling three. She yawned, and felt better. He would be back soon.
6
They were already inside the building, and standing uncertainly behind the rows of chairs arranged in front of a television screen, when Mickey said;
“Oh Pet, we are a couple of fools. It’s all in German.”
The exhibition was not crowded. A young couple with twin toddlers sat in the third row, arms folded, attending to the video lecture with an air of sullen duty. Isolated twos and threes of people could be heard shuffling through the labyrinth of boards and curtains to the left. The place had the time-marking feel of a Thursday matinee. Elspeth looked up, and gave her husband a sheepish smile.
“I guess we can just look,” she said.
“We’d better, now we’re here. What do you say we skip the video?”
The first section of exhibits was devoted to reconstructions of pre-war shop-fronts, all dark polished wood and hand-painted gothic lettering. One window contained a less than life-like dummy, dressed in the winter fashion of 1933/4. Was she a model of a Viennese woman, or of a Viennese dummy, of fifty years ago? In any case both she and her setting, of miscellaneous goods and posted advertisements, seemed unremarkable to Mickey, and quite unworthy of the time and wonderment Elspeth was devoting to them.
He felt himself becoming very bored. It was an automatic reaction that had been part of his make-up for many years, for as a boy he had always sensed in this sort of exhibition a history-without-tears subtext that directly threatened his natural academic advantage. It had been a point of honour to learn nothing from such a source. Even to his adult mind there was an oppressive pointlessness to this tacky celebration of what was, after all, rather recent history. There was not yet any shortage of living people who had been part of what was represented here, nor, as his father had said, of streets and shops that had changed less than those people. The exhibition was outside, in a city where reconstruction eclipsed innovation, where there was still very little even of the neon light with which some capitals had been ablaze for more than half a century. It occurred to him that there might, after all, be a novel twist to this dreary display of the unsurprising. For it was not the continuity
