Roots of Evil(73)

Jewish blood. Conrad. For a moment the two things interlocked grimly in her mind, and as if the interlocking was a yeast ingredient that had been quietly fermenting in wine or bread, the danger and the darkness suddenly felt much closer.



Conrad had not been faithful to Alice, of course; probably he was congenitally incapable of being faithful to any woman. He was handsome and charismatic, and possessed enough charm and sexual energy to lure an abbess into bed and then take on the rest of the convent afterwards.

The first time Alice discovered that he had spent a weekend with a little Russian singer, she had hurled herself on to the bed and sobbed all night. This did nothing but give her a pounding headache and a swollen face next morning.

The second time (a wickedly gamine Parisienne mannequin), she had not hurled herself on to the bed; instead she had hurled crockery, aiming most of it at Conrad, and then stormed out of his rooms. This time he had followed her, and there had been a grand reconciliation. He had put a gramophone record of Wagner’s Tannh?user on – he adored making love to music – and they had spent a delirious afternoon in bed, staying there until the summer evening sunshine streamed into the bedroom, both of them wine-flown by then, both riotously trying to time orgasms to the swelling crescendos of the music.

So, Alice thought afterwards, tears and vapours get you nowhere. Tantrums and smashed crockery do. So much for polite behaviour and ladylike restraint.

It was a gratifying discovery, but what was even more gratifying was finding that it was perfectly possible to embark on the occasional bedroom adventure on one’s own account, and to return to Conrad afterwards. These escapades were fun, but what was even more fun was that they always made Conrad violently jealous. Alice took care to make sure he always knew where she had been on those occasions, although not who she had been with, not after the time he had challenged the other man to a duel. (‘I will meet you in the village of Klosterneuberg overlooking the city,’ hissed Conrad, with gleeful relish at such drama. ‘Be there at the break of dawn, and I will kill you and throw your body into the Vienna Woods for the bears to eat.’)

I believe, thought Alice, stepping in to prevent the duel, that I’ve turned into a vamp. Imagine that. One day my children – if I have any – might hear about all this, and perhaps they will enjoy the drama of it, as Conrad does, or perhaps they will sigh and say that Mamma was really too outrageous for words when she was young.

Children…



She had not intended that there should be any children at all, but a daughter was born just over six years after that amazing night at the State Opera House. Conrad’s, of course, people said, smiling a little slyly, and the baroness had smiled back, apparently unruffled.

One or two people wondered whether the outrageous couple might now marry – a child ought to have a proper father, after all – and one or two of them asked the question openly. Lucretia simply laughed at such a preposterous idea – boringly conventional! – and did so loudly enough to cover the fact that she would have dearly liked to be married to Conrad.

But marriage or not, Conrad was completely charmed with his small daughter. He had been immersed in ancient music at the time, and he had suggested naming the child Deborah after the Old Testament prophetess who had stirred up Barak to march against Sisera. Alice liked the name, and she liked Conrad’s description of Deborah’s song, which had been sung on the occasion of Israel’s victory, and which he said was one of the oldest Hebrew compositions. ‘But one day I shall compose a new variation of it,’ he announced, with that blend of arrogance and na?ve enthusiasm that was attractive and infuriating by turns. ‘When I have finished writing music for films, I shall compose a piece of music that will be called Deborah’s Song, and everyone will know it is for my beautiful daughter. And a little,’ he added, ‘for her even more beautiful mamma.’

Alice wondered if Deborah would grow up hearing the stories about her wanton mother and be shocked. She supposed her grandchildren – if ever she had any – would hear the stories of their grandmother’s wild and tempestuous youth, and regard her with disbelieving fascination.

Grandchildren. I shall never be old enough to have grandchildren! I shall stay like this, caught in this marvellous world of films and music and lovers – of money and good clothes and jewellery and adulation – and if I do grow old, I shall not let the world see it.

But if one day I do have to be old, I shall make sure it is a dazzling oldness, and I shall make sure it is a disgraceful and scandalous oldness as well!



By the time Deborah was born, Alice had made three films, and she had seen the acting of the real stars of the screen – people such as John Barrymore and Erich von Stroheim, Conrad Veidt and Marlene Dietrich. She knew perfectly well that despite the adulation she received she was not in their league, and she was certainly not in the same league as Dietrich, with her smouldering eyes and her remarkable ice-over-fire quality. But Alice thought that Lucretia looked all right on the screen and she thought she could convey most of the emotions, although she knew, deep down, that she was relying on personality and on her own legend rather than on acting ability.

She always gave of her best on film sets; that was her early training, of course, the training that had instilled into her that if you were paid for a service – whether it was sewing a torn hem or scrubbing a sink, or playing a part in a film – you gave your employer what he had paid for. For being ravished by a sheikh, for dying bravely and aristocratically on the scaffold, for heading armies and sacking cities and defying tyrants. For being a King in Babylon, and making profane and forbidden love to a Christian slave…