came from a large family in Godalming. One of the seven children of a carpenter, Jessie was born in 1872 in Horspath, a village near Oxford. When she was still small, they all moved into Rose Lane, Oxford, a street whose cottages have long since been demolished to make way for university buildings. She and her brothers and sisters had three pairs of shoes to share between them, and only those whose feet happened to be the same size as the available shoes could go to school. A boy had been sent home because he was dirty, and Jessie put on an Oxfordshire accent to relate how the mother had come to rebuke the teacher, “My boy ain’t no rose, you larn him not smell him.” Poverty and lack of opportunity were part of the natural order of things. A lifetime of hard work had deformed Jessie’s feet and ankles so that she had to have specially made orthopædic shoes that she called “beetle-crushers.” In her private vocabulary, an umbrella was an umbershoot, manipulative behavior was inkle-weaving, and those she took against were arsehole-creepers. Playing with nicknames, she wrote to Poppy as Kate, and might sign her own letters as Martha. Her philosophy was summed up by an incident at a tennis tournament to which she liked to refer. Jean Borotra had been losing badly until someone in the crowd shouted, “Courage, Pépé!” and he went on to win.
Making their lives in France, she and Nanny Stainer spoke a phonetic anglicised French: rubdisham for dressing-gown, culleryfere for radiator, saldiban for bathroom. Nanny Stainer in fact read Les Liaisons dangereuses round and round. Jessie had memorized whole chunks of Shakespeare, as well as a variety of poems and songs, some serious and some comic. She had an excuse for the neuroses and tantrums in the house: you can’t expect thoroughbreds to be cart-horses.
You could race up the great stone staircase, three or four steps at a time, to finish at the top in an open space like a gallery, with a shiny floor of black and white marble flagstones. Busts of Roman emperors were set in sockets at the top of columns. In front of the window at the far end of this open space was a statue in black plaster by the nineteenth-century sculptor Bosio. I always thought this eye-catching figure balanced on one foot was Hermes, but the experts say it is a representation of love, a Cupid.
And on that floor is the bedroom I shared with my cousin Elly, daughter of Bubbles, my eldest aunt. In it hangs a life-size portrait of Poppy aged about eleven in a costume copied for a children’s fancy-dress party from the Velázquez portrait of the Infanta, a study in reds and orange. Philip, four years older than his sister Elly, has a room to one side and the nannies are on the other side. Before the war Alan and Poppy had a bedroom and dressing-room on this floor. When I was two, I put my hands into the butter on their breakfast tray and then onto the silk bed-head. The fingerprints were permanent.
We children – Philip and Elly and myself – were left to our own devices. On the lower ground floor was the library, built round a single vast weight-bearing pillar. We had this room to ourselves. The windows let in little light and the air was musty. Eugène had collected the books, and they reflected his knowledge and taste in art, literature and politics. Among the several languages he knew was Russian, taught at his mother’s knee, and after his marriage he had learnt Hungarian in order to keep up with the management of the properties. In October 1906, for instance, he visited Szabolcz, near Budapest, and could judge in conversation that the bailiff was very professional whereas the bailiff’s wife was a Hungarian peasant. Two volumes of Petőfi’s poems annotated in pencil in his hand have survived (and so has his complete edition of Heine.) On the shelves of books concerning Jews was Édouard Drumont’s La France juive, an anti-Semitic diatribe so popular that this copy is from the 200th edition. Drumont’s poisonous caricature of the Jew who becomes a Baron “and presents himself boldly in society” was aimed at the handful like Eugène whose every encounter was a test of their social standing.
The books had been catalogued with a card index, many of them had been rebound uniformly, and all of them had a bookplate with an engraving of the house. The table for Russian billiards was one distraction in the library and the gramophone another. The playing needle of this antique had to be changed frequently and the records were 78s of singers like Lotte Lehmann and Richard Tauber. “Mein Herr Marquis” from Die Fledermaus and “Di quell’amor” from La Traviata were never stale. Over a sofa covered with brown velvet was a stuffed and mounted bird, a bustard with a huge wingspan shot by Max on the Hungarian puszta. Alone most mornings at the desk in that atmospheric room, I began to teach myself to write. Starting with book-length imitations of Agatha Christie, I moved on to sentimental pastiches of Hans Christian Andersen and Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, a novel that cast a spell almost as embracing as Royaumont.
Beautiful Mitzi can never have been, gawky as a girl, dumpy as a married woman. Her expressive brown eyes had black rings round them, zwetschenknödel or plum dumplings as her eldest daughter Bubbles called them. Up on the top floor, Mitzi reserved for herself a corner room, smaller than others and out of the way. Everyone was expected to start the day by paying respects. You approached on tiptoe, you exchanged whispers with her maid Paulette to find out how well Mitzi had slept in the night. The emotional atmosphere in the house, family relationships, interpretation of the news, were in Mitzi’s gift. Still in bed with a breakfast tray, the mail and the newspapers, she might wave a hand or give you a possessive kiss, receiving you with the formal informality of a reigning monarch. The quivering of her thin lips indicated what you were in for, what you had to expect in the afternoon session with her. Notes hand-delivered by one of the servants were storm signals. One that survives reads, “May you daily have more of the Essential, realizing that no man or woman can give it you.” Another missive in the archive is just as typical: “Your injustice and ingratitude towards me have wounded and embittered me. Your words are not those of a happy or sad, good or bad child but those of a cruel woman. Your impressions are evidently almost always false but you remain amused and proud of them.”
On the same landing as her bedroom was her boudoir, a low and dark den because the immense wing of the abbey loomed close enough to shutter out daylight. Here were enacted scenes of Grand Inquisition. The future of everyone in the house depended on keeping in her good books.Where she came from, Kuss die Hand, a hand kiss, made plain who was giving, and who was receiving, favours. She never used the stairs. The lift had a cabin of some scented wood. When Mitzi stepped out of it into the hall to take possession of her realm, it was as well to be there, ready for whatever it might be. Everything seemed ordered, everything seemed protected and privileged, but all the time under the surface and unacknowledged, the fault lines that Mitzi had put in place were in operation: Not quite Jewish and not quite Christian, not quite Austrian and not quite French or English, not quite heterosexual and not quite homosexual, socially conventional but not quite secure, here were people not quite sure what their inheritance required of them.
THREE
Tivoligasse 71
ACCORDING TO THE Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, which keeps the record of these things, all Springers had acquired their surname because they had been acrobats at some royal court in Germany, a role apparently reserved for Jews. They came to Vienna either from Ansbach or from Furth in Bavaria. Like the Foulds in France, Max Springer (1807–1885) belonged to a generation of Jews increasingly free to meet everyone else on equal terms and so make what they could of their talents. Max Springer’s interests extended from finance to railways and coal mining. His wife Amalia Todesco belonged to one of the most successful Jewish families. Eduard Todesco, Amalia’s father, had built a palace facing the side of the Opera, and Max Springer built the smaller but still stately house round the corner at number 14 Kaerntnerring. The latter also founded an orphanage, the Springer Waisenhaus, for Jewish boys up to the age of fourteen. In 1872 Kaiser Franz Josef gave Max Springer and therefore his descendants the title of Freiherr, or Baron. Axel Springer, the German press tycoon, used to write to Mitzi claiming that they were relations, but she believed not.
Expropriated by the Nazis, long since bought and sold by non-Jews as investments in prime property, these great monuments in stone to past wealth have something empty and haunting about them,
