Roots of Evil(32)

But the young man with the eyes the colour of the topaz necklace Miss Nina had tossed Alice’s way (‘I don’t care for it any more, Alice – you may have it’) had hardly seemed aware of Nina.

Alice leaned back in her chair, her mind going back over the years to that astonishing night. ‘He was a famous musician, that young man – although I had never heard of him. He had been intended as Miss Nina’s husband – I didn’t know that, either – but I found out later that the engagement was to have been announced that very night. That was how people did things in those days, and in those circles. After supper, Miss Nina’s papa would have made the announcement, and everyone would have applauded, and champagne would have been served for the guests to drink to the couple’s future happiness.’

But none of it had happened, because the young man with topaz eyes had left the ballroom within ten minutes of arriving; he had ignored the claims of his betrothed-to-be and his hosts, and had walked into the servants’ hall as bold and as arrogant as a buccaneer. He had found Alice, who fortunately had been on her own, and asked her to come out to supper with him at one of the little coffee places in the middle of Vienna. Yes, he meant tonight, in fact he meant now. He could not bear to spend his evening pretending – he had pretended for too long. And he could not be bothered with being conventional, he said, especially now that he had seen Alice.

He was like no one Alice had ever encountered in her life, and she had gone with him, not bothering to seek permission, simply pulling on her warm woollen cloak and walking out of the house through the little garden door.

They had gone to a restaurant near to St Stephen’s Cathedral called the Three Hussars. To Alice it seemed very grand, and full of expensively dressed ladies and gentlemen. She had no idea what she had eaten, because very soon the young man had taken her to his rooms which were in a tall old house in the ancient part of the city, the part that was somehow sinister and where the streets seemed almost to sing with their own dark past, and where anything – anything! – might happen to one…

Anything might happen…

For a little while he had played music to her on the glossy black piano near a window, and although Alice had not known the music or who had written it, while he played, the whole room seemed to thrum with vibrancy. Quite suddenly he had flung away from the piano, and had come to where Alice was seated on a velvet sofa, and had begun to kiss her with such helpless passion and such longing that it was impossible to resist him.

Alice did not resist. She knew, as all good girls knew, that you did not allow young men to kiss you in this way, and nor did you allow them to pull impatiently at the fastenings of your dress so that they could slide their hands inside. On two or three occasions Miss Nina’s brother had cornered her in a dark corridor between the dining-room and the servants’ hall, and had fumbled with the neck of her frock, and once he had pulled her into the linen room and pressed his body against her. He said it was ridiculous and pretentious for a slut of a serving girl to pretend to virginity, but Alice had been embarrassed by the hard bulge of masculinity against her thighs, and she had pushed him away and scurried back to her own part of the house, thinking that if that was how it felt, it would be easy to remain a good girl and save one’s virginity for one’s eventual husband.

But no one had told her that a man’s hands could feel like this on her skin – soft and sinless and so exciting that it turned you dizzy – and no one had told her how it felt to lie on a soft wide bed with the night-sounds of a city below the window, and to feel the excitement building up and up until, so far from pushing him away, you thought you might die if he did not go on…

And although she had known – well, sort of known – what happened in a bed on a marriage night, she had not known that it robbed you of all resistance or that the emotions it brought were so intense and so deeply sweet that you wanted to weep for sheer joy…


‘I am sorry,’ he had said at last, raising his dark head from the pillow. He was not Austrian – Alice did not then know what nationality he was except that he was not English – but he spoke English well. ‘My poor little English sparrow,’ he said. ‘I had not thought you would be a virgin.’

‘I’m glad. I’m glad you were the first.’ She had wanted to say, And you’ll be the last, but had not quite dared.

‘You should go back to the house now. I take you. But we can be together again soon, if you wish that.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do wish that.’

‘Very good. Then we go now. You will have to walk from the carriageway around the side of the house and go in through the garden door. You can do that? You do not mind that?’

Alice did not say she would have walked through hell’s deepest caverns and back again, or that she would have entered the house by way of the sewers or the chimneys if he had asked her to. She said, ‘Yes. Yes, I can do all that. I expect it will be quite easy.’



But life is seldom easy, and it is hardly ever predictable.

The house was in an uproar when Alice got back. Most of the guests had left, although a few, more inquisitive than the rest or perhaps simply more insensitive, had remained. To give support, they were all telling one another. Poor little Nina, poor child, jilted on her betrothal night. And betrayed by her own maid, the scheming hussy! Disgraceful. And where was the sly creature, that was what they would all like to know! It was to be hoped that the slut would be dealt with suitably when – and if! – she returned to the house.