Read Online Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson - Free Book Online

they wanted to fetch me up to Paradise it would be no good sending the Archangel Gabriel. Nothing in white with wings, nothing gold-limned in sandals would interest me. It would have to be Hatschek or nothing, for he alone has the key to the only heaven I care about.
    I offered him a cup of coffee which he refused. He said how smart the shop was looking and I said yes, business was good.
    Only then did I ask: ‘How is he, Hatschek? Is he well?’
    ‘Aye, he’s well enough in himself but they plague him at the War Office. He’s been there the past week shut up with those obstinate old duffers in the Ordnance Department, but it’s all talk – no one will equip the men properly. If they had their way we’d still be fighting with broadswords.’
    How we hated the Ordnance Department, Hatschek and I. The promises, the lies, the evasions. The graft which stopped supplies reaching the field regiments when at last they materialized. There were two deep furrows etched into my lover’s forehead, put there by the Ordnance Department.
    ‘He said, tonight, if you can.’
    ‘If I can.’ It is a polite fiction which we like to maintain: that one day I would be too busy to visit the Field Marshal Gernot von Lindenberg when he comes to Vienna.
    ‘He’s at the Bristol?’
    Hatschek nodded. From his tunic he took a slip of paper with a room number. Then he clicked his heels again and left.

    I was never really an adolescent, a
Backfisch
, prinking and dreaming before the mirror; my Aunt Lina saw to that.
    But when I go to the Hotel Bristol I go a little mad. I take out every dress I own, I put it on, I take it off. I wash my scrupulously washed petticoats and dry them (but they are never quite dry in time) and press each and every invisible bow again and again. No one else is allowed to do this, but my strange behaviour (for I am not a woman who normally fusses about clothes) now attracted the attention of Nini who observed that I appeared to be going out.
    But I can’t snub her. I can’t snub anyone on days like these. If I met the detestable Herr Egger, the Minister of Development with his Nasty Habit, I would throw my arms round him and call him Little Brother like people do in Russian books.
    When I had tried on everything in my cupboard, I went down to the salon and took the rich cream dress out of the window. I swear to God that I had not intended this and even now at the eleventh hour I struggled. But not for long. It was inevitable, inescapable – the conviction that the woman whose life was going to be transfigured by this dress was… me.
    Ah, but it was a marvellous dress! It fell exactly into the folds I had dreamed of that April morning; it knew exactly where to cling and where to let go. The silken ruffles brushed my throat, the hem whispered under its lightly held burden
of point de Venise
…
    ‘My goodness, Frau Susanna – you look…’ Nini, about to embark on one of her customary compliments, broke off. Then suddenly she reached for my hand and kissed it.
    She is growing too perceptive, this mad Hungarian child; she begins to share too much.
    I shall never forget my drives to the Hotel Bristol. In winter there are violets pinned to my muff; the snowflakes drift past and I think of Anna Karenina, but I am luckier than she because her happiness was paid for by others whereas any pain this liaison causes me is my own. In the autumn the chestnuts lining the Ringstrasse send down their bronze and russet leaves… But now, in May, the slanting sun turned the laburnums into a shower of gold – and it was all for me, the beauty of the evening: my Royal Triumph.
    The Triumph lasted till I alighted at the Bristol, walked across the richly carpeted foyer, smelled the cigars from the Smoking Room – and then there was a moment of panic, for after all any kind of disaster could have overtaken the Feldherr von Lindenberg since the early hours of today.
    But it was all right. I gave the name I always gave, the porter