Read Online The English Girl by Margaret Leroy - Free Book Online Page A

away. Because he’s so forward. Because his touch is so sweet.
    ‘Are you…?’
    ‘Do you…?’
    We both start talking at once; then we both stop, laugh. A sudden startling happiness opens like a flower in me. Around us, I’m vaguely aware of people glancing in our direction – seeing exactly what is happening between us. Let them stare.
    ‘So – you like art? You like our Kunsthistorisches Museum?’ he says.
    He has thin, eloquent hands, which he moves a lot as he talks. There’s something quicksilver about him.
    ‘Yes. I came earlier,’ I tell him. ‘I had a good look round … The thing is, I’m only here now because I had to come back…’
    I bite my tongue. I sound so stupid.
    He looks at me quizzically – that look he has, as though he’s searching for something inside me. A rather forensic look. I want him to touch me again. More than anything.
    ‘I was looking for something I’d lost…’ Saying this embarrasses me: it sounds too weighty, too significant somehow. ‘I was looking for my umbrella…’ My voice trails off.
    ‘And I came here to meet a friend,’ he says, ‘but the friend still hasn’t arrived…’
    Is it a woman, this friend?
That’s the very first thing I think, when he says that.
Is
it a woman? Is she beautiful? Are you in love with her?
Jealous already.
    ‘So we have something in common, Fräulein Whittaker,’ he goes on. ‘We both came here looking for something that we couldn’t find,’ he says.
    He has a slightly crooked smile. There’s something left open.
    We couldn’t find what we came for, but we found one another.
    The thought hangs in the air between us – delicate as a soap bubble in the moment before it bursts; perilous. I don’t say anything.
    He takes a step away from me, as though worried he’s been too intense.
    ‘So, where are you studying, Fräulein Whittaker?’ he asks. A little more formal now, more matter-of-fact.
    ‘At the Academy of Music, on Lothringerstrasse. I have lessons on Thursdays at ten.’ I’m giving rather too much detail about where I can be found – we both know this. ‘And you?’ I say boldly. ‘What do you do?’
    ‘I’m a doctor,’ he tells me.
    ‘So…’ I don’t know what I should ask. ‘So – do you specialise in something?’
    ‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ he tells me. ‘I work at the Lower Austria Psychiatric Hospital, in Penzing.’
    I haven’t heard of it, but I nod vigorously.
    ‘And I rent a consulting room on Thurngasse. I’m in training to be a psychoanalyst,’ he says.
    I open my mouth, but I don’t know how to respond – don’t understand what the word means. He sees this.
    ‘I studied for a while with Dr Freud,’ he tells me. ‘You may have heard of him.’
    ‘Yes. A little…’
    ‘I was fortunate. But he’s very ill now, sadly, and doesn’t teach any more.’
    ‘I don’t know much about him,’ I say. ‘Only what everyone knows…’ My voice fades.
    I’m embarrassed – thinking what it is that
everyone knows
. That Dr Freud says that the sexual drive is pre-eminent: that the instinctual life is what drives us, shapes us, makes us who we are. I feel my face burn so red it must be drawing everyone’s attention.
    But he’s looking past me, glancing over my shoulder. Perhaps he’s lost interest in me, because I can’t talk about Dr Freud.
    He clears his throat.
    ‘Well, I see my friend is here…’
    I turn, look where he is looking. I see that
yes
, his friend is a woman, and
yes
, she is beautiful. She’s long-limbed, glossy, beautifully groomed. She has raven hair cleverly twisted in a knot in the nape of her neck, and her lips are gorgeous as the shiny reds in the Cranach painting of Judith. She’s wearing a foxfur jacket over a dress of black shantung silk that has the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water.
    It’s over. I’ve been so stupid. How could I ever have imagined he would be interested in
me
?
    ‘It seems I have to go already,’ he says, ‘and we have