House of Gold Read online

  Greta found it was too hot and too loud, the chatter and shouts of laughter pushing against the notes of the orchestra, which played louder and faster to compete with the noise. She noticed Johanna in a pink silk dress sitting with a few of their friends, picking at plates of cold chicken and plum dumplings. They waved at her to join them, but it seemed to her as if she’d already left and their voices were floating to her across the sea.

  ‘I’m going to get some air,’ she said, rising and hurrying from the dining room before any of them could follow.

  She slipped into the crowded chamber behind the ballroom and then through a door into the gardens. She could see a scattering of dancers in the ballroom through the great arched windows, silently turning and turning. It was cool outside and a feathering of frost edged the lawn. She sat down on a stone step and took off her shoes and, with considerable relish, flung them into a rose bush.

  ‘Not your best plan,’ said a voice behind her.

  Greta turned and saw Otto. She smiled and shrugged. ‘On the contrary. If I can’t find them, I can’t possibly put them back on.’

  She rubbed her toes and prodded a round blister on her heel. She did not ask Otto why he was out here alone. He’d always loathed parties. He didn’t object to dinners with friends (fellow scientists), but dances with endless acquaintances bored him. Otto, unlike Greta, was rarely compelled to partake in things he did not enjoy. He produced a hip flask from his pocket and handed it to her. She took a swig, spilling cognac down her chin.

  ‘You will come and see me, won’t you?’ she asked, trying to keep the trill of desperation from her voice.

  ‘Well, I’m terribly busy and you’re terribly tiresome, but yes. I might even be in Cambridge before the end of the year.’

  ‘And that’s in England?’ asked Greta, teasing.

  Otto flicked a leaf at her.

  She grabbed his hand and half-cajoled, half-dragged him to the lowest part of the garden, running barefoot across the gravel, the stones cold and sharp beneath her feet. The night was yellow and full, and Greta imagined she could hear the hum of the stars. Somewhere to the east was the Danube and, breathing deeply, she could almost smell it, a spool of black coiling and uncoiling in the dark. At the stone edge of a pond they paused, observing a tiny moon tremble on the surface. A white statue of Venus watched them mournfully, clasping her sopping dress to her marble bosom. Greta let go of Otto’s hand, hitched up her skirts and climbed in. The water was deeper than she remembered, reaching almost to her knees.

  ‘Oh, come in, don’t be a sissy,’ she cried.

  Otto sighed and unfastened his shoes and socks, attempted to roll up his trousers and stepped in. He gave a shout at the cold.

  ‘Isn’t this better than the party?’ Greta asked happily.

  Otto reached into his jacket for the cognac. ‘I’m standing in a freezing pond in wet trousers. And, yes, it is infinitely better.’

  Above them they heard the scuffle of doors opening and the sound of voices on the terrace. Johanna’s voice hissed across the garden, ‘Greta? Where are you?’

  Greta waited for a moment before calling out, ‘Down here!’

  A minute later Johanna appeared with a footman bearing a lantern. His face did not falter as he observed Greta and Otto in the pond.

  ‘Baroness Emmeline is asking for you,’ said Johanna breathlessly. ‘You’ve missed the whole kerfuffle. There was nearly an international incident. The wife of the British Ambassador was dancing with the Foreign Minister, and then the Russian Ambassador cut in and started to dance with her and the Foreign Minister was furious!’

  ‘So there’s going to be a duel?’ asked Greta, suddenly interested.

  ‘No such luck,’ said Johanna. ‘The British Ambassador stepped in and smoothed things over. Oh yes, and now you’re supposed to dance with him. The British Ambassador. Not any of the others.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Otto drily.

  Greta sighed. ‘Well, I suppose it is a little cold out here.’

  She climbed out of the water and let go of her skirts, unpeeling them as they stuck to her wet legs. She trailed after Johanna back to the house. Otto, as he followed a few minutes later, noticed the line of wet footprints straggling across the hall. As he walked into the ballroom and watched Greta dance a two-step with a slight, elderly English gentleman, he wondered whether anyone else would notice that beneath her floor-length gown she danced barefoot, with dirty feet.

  Behind the Goldbaum Palace a seemingly endless stream of Kanaltrotters emerged from a round tunnel entrance near the river’s edge and joined an orderly queue, as if waiting patiently for the morning tram to bear them to offices along the Ringstrasse on a Monday morning. Karl was amongst the last of them. He was in no hurry. The stars were unfathomably bright, after the darkness underground. Somewhere music played. The Goldbaums always distributed leftovers after a party. Seasoned Kanaltrotters watched for the orchestra arriving at the palace: the more numerous the musicians, the grander the party and the more plentiful the leftovers. Today someone had counted twenty violin cases and a vast bell-shaped instrument in a case like a coffin, dragged along the pavement on a set of wheels. Karl had high hopes. He slunk forward, keeping his backpack close. Men slipped past, hands and mouths full, pockets bulging as they scattered into the dark; some vanishing down the tunnels and others sliding away into the city streets, as smooth as shadows.

  A row of half a dozen servants from the Goldbaum Palace stood behind a long table. One of the serving women was young and pretty. As he shuffled closer he saw that the dark hair pinned above her neck was as smooth and polished as the surface of a nut. He wanted to reach out and touch it with his finger. She handed out large hunks of bread as the stout woman beside her ladled food into the outstretched mugs and bowls of the men. Karl rummaged amongst the treasures in his backpack for his tin mug. Tonight he would sleep with a full belly. He must be careful and make himself eat it slowly or the cramps might make him sick, and that would be a waste. He watched the woman with the lovely hair. The woman glanced down at her basket of bread and, seeing it was nearly empty, muttered something to the large woman beside her and hurried back to the palace, basket on her hip. Another servant took her place and handed out chunks of black bread from a different basket.

  Karl reached the front, but lingered, letting others shove their way in. He wanted his bread from the pretty girl.

  A pair of older men pushed past him. One smiled toothlessly at him. ‘Kanalrat,’ he said, with a nod. Karl grunted in reply.

  The large woman at the front noticed Karl hanging back.

  ‘You – you’re not hungry?’ she called.

  Karl shrugged. He was no hungrier than usual.

  ‘Let the little one through,’ she said to the older men in front.

  Karl shook his head. ‘I’m waiting for the pretty one. The one with the nice hair. I want my supper from her.’

  The woman laughed, so that her significant bosom shook. ‘Beggars with requests. Would you like to see a menu, while you’re at it?’

  Karl ignored her. The smell of the food made his belly grumble and churn. He began to regret his decision. What did it matter if he was handed his bread from a girl with shining hair? Men shuffled in front of him. He began to feel dizzy, his legs spongy. She was coming back, basket perched on her hip, heavy now.

  ‘Anna, you’ve an admirer here,’ called the woman with the bosom. ‘Won’t have his bread from anyone but you.’

  Karl elbowed his way to the front.

  Anna had a snow-dust of flour on her cheek from the bread. She didn’t smile and did not meet his eye, only held out the bread, passing him his portion.

  ‘Thank you, Anna,’ he said.

  She made no reply, but as Karl walked away, his mug full of food, he saw that she’d pressed two pieces of bread into his palm.

  GOLDBAUM TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS, JURA, MAY

  Up till now Otto had relished journeys on the family train. The Goldbaum Trans-Euro
pe Express had borne them to summers at their villa on Lake Geneva every July, to the opera in Paris and to visit cousins in Frankfurt or Berlin. Otto had even ridden the train to the Russian border with his colleagues from university (at the Baroness’s insistence – she wouldn’t hear of him travelling on an ordinary passenger train, even in a private saloon carriage). He never slept so well as in his bedroom on the train, picturing himself shrunk very small and fitting into a toy train speeding across an open atlas of Europe. He always instructed his valet to leave the blinds undrawn, so that he could lie in bed looking out at the stars through the mist of steam and watch the moon rise and sink, a bubble in the dark. This trip was different. He wanted it to be slower, but it seemed faster.

  Greta’s melancholy was catching. It spread through the few passengers like the measles. Otto understood that she was uneasy about her forthcoming marriage, and he was sympathetic, but her predicament also served to remind him of his own fate. For the present he was left to pursue his own course, a degree in physics and astronomy at the university in Vienna, a semester at the department in Berlin and a heavenly summer of research at the Observatory on the easternmost reaches of the Empire. But he knew that this respite from his fate was temporary. Sooner or later – and Otto had a sense of foreboding that it would be sooner – he must leave his love and enter the bank. He hated it; he hated the smell of the cedar panelling and the whispering of the clerks, the scratching of their pens and the yellow electric light, and the stultifying luncheons with all fifteen partners. Yet he knew it must come. He couldn’t exactly plead that he didn’t have a head for numbers.

  He wondered what it would be like to be a regular man. He did not fool himself that he wanted to be poor, merely ordinarily wealthy. He would step off the train at the next station and become simple Herr Schmitt and live in a pleasant hotel. He rebuked himself: the thought was absurd.

  The only passenger who appeared unaffected by the general air of dejection was the British Ambassador. Sir Fairfax Leighton Cartwright was travelling as the Goldbaums’ guest to Paris, and Otto found himself seeking out the older man’s company. Sir Fairfax was a gentleman, author and diplomat in late middle age, with a splendid moustache and fabulous tales of the East. Otto considered there was something terribly English about appointing a novelist as Ambassador. But then part of his role was to promote better relations between nations; and perhaps his imagination was so powerful that, by thinking it, he could make it so. Sir Fairfax marvelled over everything with boyish pleasure: the specially adapted chandeliers, with rubber plugs separating the crystals so that they rang out only when the train travelled at the very highest speeds; the Lalique glass panels in the saloon showing sylvan ladies dancing with tropical birds. Most of all, the Ambassador was transfixed by the vast panorama painting that depicted the route of the Goldbaum Trans-Europe Express – all two thousand kilometres of it compressed into a painting one kilometre in length. The painting was displayed in a wooden case with a large glass panel and was kept inside the observation car, with only three or four metres of it being visible at a time. Every hour one of the attendants would fit a handle into a mechanism at the side of the box and wind the painting on another few metres, so that it always reflected scenes through which the train was about to pass: the lights of the Royal Palace in Budapest, wheat fields pricked by bloody poppies or steamers on blue lakes. On the hour the Ambassador would be standing beside the cabinet, gleeful as a schoolboy, waiting to see the panorama unfold.

  In the evening they all sat together in the dining saloon, a miniature version of the exquisite dining room of the chateau at Saint-Pierre. The dining chairs were upholstered in Moroccan leather and the table was polished walnut, although it was only able to seat twelve, being narrower and smaller than the original at the chateau, which could seat forty-five. At first it was a subdued party. They drank burgundy from the family vineyard and spooned up veal consommé, as clear as glass, swimming with tiny white noodles. The galley was cramped and, despite all the modern conveniences, oppressively hot. The knives on the rack rattled like an army of sabres around every bend. The family knew none of this, though. It wouldn’t have occurred to any of them – even the liberal-minded Otto – to consider something like a kitchen. Food appeared magically, perfectly hot, perfectly prepared, and the attendants were so skilled that not a drop of consommé sullied the perfectly starched tablecloth while they served the diners, even as the train roared along at its incredible top speed of one hundred and thirty-three kilometres an hour.

  The Baroness roused herself to enquire after the Ambassador’s wife and children. Otto knew that she wasn’t the least bit interested but liked to ensure that standards, even of conversation, were strictly observed.

  Greta ate little and barely stirred herself, even to annoy her mother. As they finished the final course – plates of Bohemian apricot liwanzen pancakes – the ladies withdrew to the parlour to take coffee, while the men remained to drink port and Madeira. Sir Fairfax declined a cigar, leaning forward with an unhappy sigh.

  ‘Perhaps now is the time to discuss a little business, Baron?’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  ‘The Empire wishes to modernise its army. It desires once and for all to heave itself into the twentieth century. On this matter at least the Emperor and the Crown Prince are in agreement.’ Sir Fairfax spoke carefully, his boyish demeanour suddenly serious, the sixth-former promoted to head prefect.

  The Baron nodded. ‘Yes, so I understand. There was some discussion as to whether the navy needed dreadnoughts. Both cannot be financed.’

  ‘The army is to have its way.’

  Otto glanced at the Ambassador in surprise. The Goldbaums prided themselves on always having the best information. Knowledge was as valuable a commodity as money, and the Goldbaums’ trade depended upon it. Information was the seed planted across Europe so that the money trees could grow and bear fruit. Presenting the Baron with intelligence that he had not already discovered for himself was unusual. Otto wondered whether his father merely feigned ignorance. In either case, he did not seem put out, and demurred to the Ambassador.

  ‘It is a very large sum of money that is required. I’m not willing to provide all the capital. The loan is also being discussed in Prussia. But,’ he paused with a smile, ‘you, Ambassador, do not want Germany to lend money to Austria. You wish me to talk to my French cousins.’

  ‘I do. This loan should not come from Germany, but from France. I want to further the good relations between France and your magnificent nation.’

  The Baron laughed at the flattery. ‘You do not want Austria–Hungary indebted to Germany. It is better for you if we are beholden to France. But why stop at France? You should see if the British government will lend the funds. Then your nation and ours will be firm friends. We cannot do what the Germans tell us if you have paid for our army.’

  Sir Fairfax shook his head. ‘I regret they will not. However, the French government will consider the loan, if it is shared with the House of Goldbaum.’

  ‘I shall discuss the matter with the Paris House,’ agreed the Baron. ‘But we are perfectly autonomous. Baron Jacques and Henri will make their own decisions.’

  ‘I would ask you to urge it in the most positive terms. In Britain we have stopped considering the French as our natural enemy. It’s German ambition that keeps me up at night. The English and the Austrians, the King and the Emperor and the Archduke, all want the same thing: peace. War is grotesquely expensive, in every sense.’

  ‘No one is talking about war, Ambassador.’

  ‘Let us all do our bit to keep it that way.’

  The Baron then made a remark about the vintage of the dessert wine, and Sir Fairfax, the ideal diplomat, immediately recollected the terrific late-August hail of 1890 and its regrettable effect upon Burgundian vineyards. They spoke no more of politics, money or war.

  The train paused long enough on the Swiss border for passports to be stamped and then continued on its way, hurtling
through the mottled foothills of the Jura. Here and there the higher peaks had their tops sliced off by cloud, like boiled eggs. Greta did not join the others for breakfast. She asked Anna to prepare her a bath. She waited as the maid filled the large enamel tub with hot water, ladled in perfumed bath salts, set out armfuls of linen towels pressed with lavender and then left her alone. But instead of climbing in, Greta opened the lace curtains, strictly against the Baroness’s orders, and stood naked at the window and watched France stream past: the empty fields, the raked soil drenched in the pink glow of morning, shoots of vivid green pricking the surface. Here and there dark pine forests or a silver river trailed the railway companionably for a while, before veering away. They roared past a farmer at a level crossing, trying to mend the wheel on his wagon, his small son perched on a hay bale, staring open-mouthed in wonder at the train. Greta doubted he’d even noticed the naked girl standing at the window.