The Wedding Party Page 3

  ‘It is quite all right.’

  ‘It was very clumsy of me. I do apologise. I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

  ‘There is no need. I wasn’t looking where I was going either.’

  He stood awkward and embarrassed. He hoped she would smile but she gave, for the second time, no hint of a smile.

  ‘Please,’ he said and suddenly stood aside to let her pass. ‘I’m sorry. You want to get to your party.’

  This time she did smile, but with the merest twist of her lips.

  ‘Why should you think I want to get to the party?’

  ‘I simply – don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not really? After someone has taken so much trouble?’

  ‘Oh! yes, someone has taken a great deal of trouble.’

  All this time he had been struck by the excellence of her English and now said:

  ‘Your English is exceptionally good. Have you been to England?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have hardly any accent at all.’

  ‘My education was a very expensive one.’

  He stood aside to let another couple pass upstairs. The man gave a short formal bow but the girl in the green and purple dress made no movement in answer.

  At this moment he had half a mind to beg her to excuse him and take his leave, but she said:

  ‘And where were you going in such a great hurry?’

  He explained about the bar. ‘And then the menagerie—’ The word slipped out before he could stop it.

  ‘The what? Oh! yes the menagerie. The wild animals. That’s good.’

  Now she lifted her head slightly, in an attitude of listening, the twist of her lips very slightly cynical, and it might have been that she was listening to the sound of the menagerie for the first time. Then she said:

  ‘If it was a drink you wanted the Stube behind the hotel is nice. It’s very quiet there.’

  ‘I know. I go there sometimes for a change. They have a very good Niersteiner there.’

  ‘Ah! you like Niersteiner?’ She smiled again, but pleasantly now. ‘I like Niersteiner too.’

  A few minutes later they were sitting on the bare, simple wooden settles of the Stube.

  ‘And who is being married today?’

  At first she didn’t answer. For fully half a minute she sat staring into her glass. The wine, frosty, pale green, had arrived in big deep glasses, almost goblets, and she might have been staring into the depths of a well. At last she said:

  ‘My sister. The youngest one. Trüdi.’

  He was about to ask the troublesome question as to why she didn’t want to go to the party when he suddenly remembered that sometimes girls, driven by resentment, jealousy, or mere pique, act in the strangest fashion on their sisters’ wedding days. It might even have been, he thought, that she was wearing the dark green dress out of sheer obstinacy or perhaps the desire for a little limelight too.

  Instead of speaking he sipped at his wine and looked at her, first at her bare arms, then at her face. Her skin was shining, golden and incredibly smooth. The arms were quite hairless. Her very light yellow hair was very smooth too and she wore it piled up, the effect being to make her seem taller than she really was. Her eyes were an extraordinarily pale transparent blue and reminded him very much of a big-belled campanula he had seen growing high up between the lake and the snows.

  Suddenly she said, rather absently:

  ‘What is that sound I can hear all the time?’

  ‘Oh! that? The waterfalls. There are nine or ten of them.’

  ‘Oh! yes, of course. I remember now.’

  ‘Do you know the valley up there? I walk up there every day. It’s a favourite walk of mine. For a time it’s all crash and bang and excitement with the water rushing down and then gradually it’s wonderfully quiet. Absolutely still. Nothing but trees and masses of meadow flowers and crowds of butterflies.’

  She laughed. ‘Just like getting away from the menagerie.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  She drank rather deeply at her wine, said how good she thought it was and then asked:

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Ten days.’

  ‘And after this? Back to England?’

  He said no, he didn’t think so. He thought of going first to Salzburg, then Vienna and then, at the very last, to Venice.

  ‘Venice.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘All that expensive education but no Venice.’

  ‘It was a very dull education.’ She again gave him that brief, rather twisted smile. ‘Excitements like Venice were not in the curriculum.’

  ‘Yes, it’s exciting, Venice.’

  ‘I always wanted to go there.’

  By now it was getting dark. Already lights were on in the Stube and now they also began to come on in the street outside. Little chains of them began to break out on the hillsides.

  He then noticed that her glass was almost empty. He at once said he would order more wine – that was unless she felt she should get back to the party now?

  ‘Are you so anxious I should get back to the party?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t that. It was just that I thought they might think it odd—’

  ‘They know how I feel.’

  He ordered more wine. It came again in the big goblet-like glasses. He picked up his, raised it, looking straight at her, and said:

  ‘Well, since you are not going to the party may I at least toast the bride and bridegroom?’

  ‘The bride, but not the bridegroom.’

  So this, he said, was the reason for it all?

  ‘Partly. But it isn’t quite so simple as that.’

  He now recalled the image of the bridegroom: the gay, gross, champagne-waving German of stentorian voice, part of the coarse triplet brotherhood on the bridge of the steamer.

  ‘So it’s him you don’t like? I could understand that—’

  ‘Like him? Heinrich? That monster? God above, I hate him.’ A flurry of anger rushed through her face; the restless eyes actually seemed to darken a shade or two, quite bruised. ‘Oh! for Heaven’s sake don’t let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about something decent. Those butterflies or something. Are you very fond of that sort of thing? – butterflies – flowers—’

  ‘I’m sorry I spoke about the bridegroom. I apologise. I didn’t intend to upset you.’

  ‘Oh! please don’t keep apologising.’

  He sipped, in silence, at his wine. He suddenly felt the intrusion on her privacy, painful as it was, to be far more of an embarrassment to himself than to her. He felt caught in a deadlock, wretched, completely at a loss for anything to say, but a moment later she gave the most embalming of smiles, quite without bitterness, and said:

  ‘“Never speak to strange men,” my English governess used to say. No good can ever come of it. But it isn’t always quite true, is it? It’s been a great comfort to talk to you.’

  He laughed and sipped at his wine. ‘When I came out of that bar I didn’t exactly see myself in the role of comforter.’

  ‘Well, here you are anyway.’

  As she said this she leaned forward, put her arms on the table and looked him quietly full in the face. For a second or two he caught sight of the shadow between her breasts. Against the dark green-and-purple of her dress the skin of the upper curves of them looked paler than ever.

  For some time after that they sat without talking, simply sipping wine and looking at each other. All the time he felt a gentle tension building up inside himself, whereas she, by contrast, seemed to grow a little more calm, the cynical restlessness dropping away.

  It was she who broke the silence at last by saying:

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a man before who was interested in butterflies.’

  ‘Oh! I just like them, that’s all.’

  ‘I think you’re a sensitive person. By the way, what is your name?’

  H
e told her. ‘Mike. And you?’

  ‘Heidi.’

  A quick spasm of hunger, kindled by the wine, suddenly rippled through him.

  ‘Would you care to have something to eat?’ he said. ‘They serve a few things here. Or couldn’t you face it after that feast on the steamer?’

  ‘I didn’t eat much. Yes: perhaps a sandwich would be nice.’

  ‘I’ll call the girl.’

  Then she said: ‘And afterwards perhaps we might walk a little way and listen to the waterfalls?’

  ‘I hate to bring up the subject of the party again,’ he said, ‘but are you really not going back?’

  ‘Really not.’

  ‘In that case I’ve got a better idea. We’ll ask the girl to pack the sandwiches and I’ll buy a bottle of Niersteiner and borrow some glasses. It’s such a warm evening. There’s a hut up there.’

  For some distance up the path going up by the waterfall there were lights at intervals but beyond the last of the houses and the wooden cattle barns the steep little valley was all darkness except for a great spread of summer stars and the candescent flash of the thundering falls.

  As the sound of the falls finally died away a great silence clenched itself on the hillside, broken only by an occasional plop! of water falling from a bough in woods still drenched with rain. In that profound singing silence he stopped once and said:

  ‘Do you notice anything strange?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. What?’

  ‘You can’t hear the water any more. You see, the stream comes out of the mountainside.’

  The hut was no more than an open wooden shelter. The air was damp and warm and sharp with the odour of pines. The sandwiches, of ham and Leberwurst, were laid on thick open panels of half-dark bread.

  ‘Venice. Tell me about Venice.’

  He talked for a time about Venice. It was always about to change, everyone was always telling you, but really it never did. Since the war he had been there half a dozen times and really it hardly changed at all. He told her of an island, across the lagoon, where a big old trattoria, cool as a cellar, sat in a garden of vines, oleanders and pomegranate trees. You could eat in the shade of great walnut trees and drink ice-cold wine with peaches floating in it.

  ‘That sounds exciting.’

  ‘It is. Why don’t you go and see it for yourself?’

  ‘I!—’

  ‘With me, I mean. I’d go tomorrow if—’

  She gave a positive crow of laughter.

  ‘We meet on the hotel staircase. Total strangers. You English, I German. And in ten minutes you are asking me to run away with you.’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘Eat your sandwich. You said how hungry you were. And do be sensible.’

  ‘I am very, very, sensible.’

  Below them lights ringed the lake in a series of irregular necklaces. The air had cleared itself of cloud. On the summit of the sugar-cone mountain a light burned like a crimson-yellow star.

  ‘I wish now we’d brought two bottles of wine,’ he said. ‘It’s so good.’

  Again she gave that high crow of laughter.

  ‘There you go again. One bottle takes us to Venice,’ she said and once again she laughed, ‘and where do we go with two? Heavens, how right my governess was—’

  He was about to say that he liked to hear her laugh when suddenly, for some reason, it struck him that she was laughing too much and that the laughter, perhaps, wasn’t as joyful as it seemed.

  ‘Oh! there are plenty of places – Good God!’ He suddenly leapt to his feet. ‘Look! – your steamer’s sailing. It’s going without you. Now what do you do?’

  ‘Oh! yes, I know.’ She was quite unmoved. ‘It’s going home to bed. There will be cars to pick us up in the morning.’

  He sat down again, watching the lights of the steamer as she drifted down the lake and remembering at the same time that impossible, gargantuan feast of food.

  ‘I suppose the day has been a little expensive for your father.’

  Immediately she became very quiet. It was too dark in the hut to see the expression on her face but suddenly he sensed some new and deeper disturbance in the air. It was fully a minute before she said simply:

  ‘My father is dead.’

  For an awkward moment or two he could think of nothing to say. Below, the steamer seemed abruptly to be cut in half, partially concealed by some promontory of rock on the shore, and then disappeared altogether.

  ‘Would you have gone to the party if your father had been here?’

  ‘Oh! that would have been quite different.’ The tone of her words, not merely sad but aching, made him sense that his guess about the laughter had been right after all. ‘But then if my father had been here there wouldn’t have been any wedding.’

  He said quietly that he didn’t understand her. She laid the remaining half of her sandwich on the bench, clearly not wanting it, and simply sat with her glass in her hands.

  ‘You saw Heinrich?’ Yes, he remembered Heinrich, of the coarse stentorian brotherhood. ‘One of the other men is his brother. Hermann. He is married to my elder sister.’

  He sipped slowly at his wine, merely listening, and then was abruptly shocked to hear her say in a low voice entirely without vehemence but infinitely more startling than if she had yelled the words:

  ‘They killed my father, the two of them.’

  And then as if this statement were not brutal enough in itself she added, with the same devastating quietness:

  ‘And yesterday I was all prepared to kill Heinrich.’

  Her laughter and all his gay thoughts of Venice seemed suddenly an ashen mockery. He was gripped by two sudden fears: first that she was unbalanced, then that she was the victim of some monstrous delusion that would trap her, before she was aware of it, into some irretrievable ghastly folly.

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that. I don’t believe it anyway.’

  ‘I don’t care if you don’t believe it. It happens to be true.’

  In that moment he had half a mind to insist that she pulled herself together, stopped talking outrageous stupidities and went straight back to the party. But in his mind it all sounded like some fatuous piece of preaching and instead he put one arm round her, his hand on the cool bare rim of her upper shoulder.

  At once he felt the gentle tension in himself build up again. Suddenly he wanted to kiss her but he knew it was no moment to kiss her and she startled him again by the most bewildering of statements:

  ‘My mother and my sister are weak. My father had a vineyard—’

  She went on to say that of course the vineyard was merely a sort of toy. It had nothing to do with the serious business of manufacturing soap and all that sort of thing. Her father had a vast enterprise. In the German way he worked like a ruthless demon to build and keep it up. He had about him young and energetic men like Hermann and Heinrich and he expected them to behave like ruthless demons too and, in time, under his guidance, they did. But the vineyard was always there too, a toy, a safety valve.

  He was very fond of the vineyard. He liked to go there, especially in autumn, and climb up to the highest of the terraces and sit quietly shut away from the pressure of affairs and contemplate the grapes and the valley below. The grapes in that particular valley were allowed to hang on the vines until very late in the year, sometimes until almost December, and then were picked with infinite care, one by one.

  He didn’t care for driving cars very much and one early November day Hermann and Heinrich drove him in a big Mercedes up to the vineyard. It was a coldish day and the grapes were still hanging on the vines, golden-green, not yet ready for picking. Hermann at that time was already married to the elder sister and Heinrich had a shrewd and calculating eye on the younger.

  ‘Have you ever gone around with the idea of killing somebody on your mind?’

  ‘Good God, I should hope not.’

  ‘It’s a terrible, terrible thing.’

  In a sudden fit of anguish she
turned and impulsively pressed her face against him. Without a word he held her head in both hands, his lips pressed against her hair. Then in a second agonised moment she turned and pressed her mouth very close to his and begged him piteously not to let her do anything mad. Yesterday she almost had. Yesterday she’d driven a crazy, tormented hundred miles or more, utterly alone with the tortured notion that she might murder someone and then kill herself too.

  Now did he see why she didn’t want to go to the party? It was hardly a time for gay celebration. Up in the vineyard, that cold afternoon, her father had had a heart attack: not very desperate, at first, it seemed. He was conscious and begged the boys to drive him home.

  ‘Instead Heinrich had the bright idea of driving ten miles to get a doctor. The calculating devil must have seen a kingdom falling into their laps. By the time they got back, nearly an hour later, he’d had a second attack. He died in the car, on the way home.’

  Impulsively he kissed her on the lips.

  It was more a gesture of comfort than anything else and she hardly seemed aware of it. When she spoke again it was as if she were finally attempting to purge herself of bitterness:

  ‘I suppose it’s really not Heinrich I hate most. It’s my mother I can’t forgive. She can see no wrong in them. They’ve got their kingdom now. They’re the bosses. They’ve got what they wanted.’

  She then kissed him of her own accord. She thanked him and said something about how she hadn’t been able to talk to a single soul about all this and how it had been far easier to talk to a stranger, except that now he didn’t seem so much like a stranger.

  ‘You probably know me better than I know myself now.’

  He folded her completely against him, putting his hand against one of her breasts. He was glad that she didn’t push it away. He was glad too that she didn’t start weeping, as he half-feared she would. All she said was:

  ‘It’s very nice being here with you.’

  A moment later he saw the light on the sugar-cone go suddenly out. He contemplated the dark mountain for a few moments in silence and then said:

  ‘Would you come to Venice tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh! I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have things to do.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh! many – all kinds—’