Roots of Evil(55)

‘But no one did recognize you, did they? No one did demand that you were thrown out?’

The fire had burned low in the hearth, and the shadows had stolen across the English garden outside, but somehow the two people in the room had been transported to another country and another time. They had gone back to a long-ago night when a dark-haired female in a silk gown and sable-lined cloak had walked into the glittering Vienna Opera House and surveyed the assembly with cool indifference.

The smile that was so incongruous on the ageing English lady came again.

‘No. No one recognized me. Three of the Opera House staff came up to me and two of them escorted me to my seat. There were stairs to descend – I had no idea where we were going, of course – but I went down that staircase so extremely slowly that it caused a hold-up for everyone else. People murmured in annoyance at that, but I pretended not to hear. I looked neither to right nor left as I walked, but I could feel them all watching me.’ Her eyes narrowed with remembered amusement. ‘But you know all this. You know a little of what comes next in the story as well.’

‘Yes, but tell the story anyway.’ Because it was like the pronouncing of a spell to hear her say it; it was like an incantation that would set a particular magic working – a magic that would unlock the doors of that long-ago enchanted world and bring the people and the adventures all tumbling out. It was a spell that would conjure up that other person that Alice had been all those years ago – the mysterious beautiful lady.

With an air of entering into the game, and of pronouncing the spell, Alice said, ‘On that night, late in 1928, a young English lady’s maid called Alice Vera Wilson left a sparse lodging in the Old Quarter of Vienna…

‘And the Baroness Lucretia von Wolff walked into the famous Opera House and took the seat that had cost her her last few schillings in all the world.’





CHAPTER SIXTEEN




Alice had not paid much attention to the poster displaying the evening’s concert, or to the printed ticket she had bought. She had been concentrating her whole mind on being Lucretia: on being this imperious, disdainful baroness she had so carefully created; this lady whose nationality might be anything at all, who spoke with a sultry accent, and who was sexily beautiful and expensively garbed. She had supposed vaguely that there would be a programme of Mozart or Schubert – it was nearly always Mozart or Schubert, or perhaps Strauss – and she had assumed she would listen to it with about a tenth of her mind, because she would be waiting for the intervals so that she could mingle with the people.

But the programme was not Mozart or Schubert. It was a concert by a man called Conrad Kline. And the instant he stepped on to the stage and took his seat at the great gleaming concert grand, Alice recognized him and from then on she heard almost nothing of the marvellous music he poured into the brightly lit auditorium.

Conrad Kline. The man with golden-brown eyes.



He had recognized her almost straight away, and when the concert ended he had swept her back to the tall old house that she had thought never to see again. ‘You ruined the slow movement of the Tchaikovsky,’ he had said with a kind of loving severity. ‘For that was when I looked up and saw you. After that I was aware of no one else.’

The slow movement of the Tchaikovsky had not been ruined at all, of course, and he had certainly been aware of every other person there. His performance had been greeted with deafening applause and cheering, and he had responded to the shouts of ‘Encore’ by promptly sitting down again to play something that Alice had not recognized, but that was exciting and intense and full of rippling cascades of beautiful sound. ‘The Appassionata,’ he said, lying next to her on the silken-sheeted bed. ‘Beethoven. And I play it entirely for you, because although you are a small English sparrow, also you are passionate and beautiful.’


Even then, dizzy with delight and love, caught in the sheer sexual glamour that he seemed almost to wear like a cloak, Alice had known perfectly well that he had not played the Beethoven piece entirely for her; he had played it because the audience had wanted him to, and because he loved all his audiences with an intensity that transcended everything else. She suspected he had planned beforehand what he would play for the encore; a long time afterwards she found that she had been right. Conrad unfailingly planned his encores and spent hours practising them.

When he said, ‘I think I am in love with you,’ Alice had regarded him thoughtfully, and said, ‘What about Nina?’

‘Oh, pouf, Nina.’ He made a gesture as if to sweep aside some small inconvenience. ‘It was a matter of business. An arrangement her father wanted to make, and that I agreed to in a moment of absent-mindedness. Also,’ said Conrad with one of his disconcerting bursts of candour, ‘I had not, then, met you.’

He was entranced by what he called Alice’s masquerade, and wove dozens of stories about the fictional baroness. Most of his stories were wildly improbable and quite a lot of them were scandalous, and one or two were just about credible.

The Baroness von Wolff should be Hungarian, said Conrad, weighing the possibilities with serious eyes. Or perhaps Russian would be better. Yes – Russian. Revolutions and russalkas and hypnotic Siberian monks. And she should be mysterious and exotic, just as Alice had already made her, but also there could be a hint of something shocking in her ancestry – that was a good idea, yes? An idea to develop, although it would be necessary to be subtle over the details. Subtlety was a fine thing, declared Conrad, who was flamboyant and extravagant and adored grand gestures, and who had never been subtle in his life.