Prodigies Page 4

  Harriet told her. He was a once-famous Dutch pianist, who had succumbed to a creeping paralysis as the result (so the rumour went) of syphilis contracted in the brothels of Paris in his boisterously dissolute youth.

  ‘Excellent. You couldn’t find a better teacher – not here, at any rate.’ She gazed at Harriet, at once questioning and imperious. Then she said: ‘Do you promise me to work, work, work?’

  Harriet nodded. All the nervousness that she had failed to feel when playing, she felt now.

  ‘Yes?’

  Harriet swallowed visibly. ‘ Yes.’

  The older woman appraised her. Then she said: ‘That’s a beautiful dress.’

  Harriet was humiliatingly aware, that people constantly remarked on the beauty of her dresses, never on her own beauty. She began to blush.

  The Queen, gigantic in mauve, rustled over. ‘Thank you, my dear. Perhaps one day – one day – you will be our Madame Schumann.’

  ‘There can be no second Madame Schumann,’ the Admiral, who had been standing behind Harriet, said with the decisiveness with which he would once give an order on the bridge.

  Harriet worked at her music, for four, five, or even six hours each day. When the rest of the family complained of the incessant noise – to them, even Addy, it was always noise, never music – she eventually arranged with a neighbouring family to use the piano, far inferior to the one to which she was habituated, in an empty dower-house of theirs next to their mansion. Often, as she played, she would suddenly become aware that a child of this family, a sickly-looking boy with large, famished eyes, would be standing in the doorway listening to her for many minutes on end. But if she broke off to speak to him, he would barely answer and then vanish. Later, he was himself to become a pianist of note, before his premature death in the first railway accident to occur in the country.

  Harriet’s teacher soon became ill, with recurrent losses of vision and memory and a growing inability to enunciate the criticisms and suggestions that he struggled, in a manner agonizing to her and no doubt to him, to express. With the desolation of a bereavement or a broken love-affair, she then realized that she would soon have to find a successor. Already she had decided that she wished for a professional career.

  On an impulse she wrote a letter to Clara Schumann. Would she be willing to accept her as a pupil? Harriet had not yet spoken to the Admiral about her ambition, having decided that she would defer that fight until she had received the great pianist’s reply. Weeks passed and then finally a letter arrived, from Rome. It was so formal that Harriet inevitably wondered if an amanuensis might not have written it. Madame Schumann presented her compliments to Mademoiselle Harriet Van Capellen and her family and thanked her for her letter, too long left unanswered, owing to her travels on a concert tour just completed. Unfortunately, she was now too busy to accept any pupils. She wished Mademoiselle Van Capellen good fortune in finding a teacher worthy of her gifts.

  Harriet brooded, in disappointment, on the letter for a long period. Then, on another impulse, she again wrote to Clara Schumann. Could she perhaps recommend a suitable teacher, since sadly she herself was unable to accept that task? That letter was never answered. Harriet would sometimes decide that, following Clara Schumann around on her ceaseless journeying, it had got lost; but more often she would accept, with a fatalistic melancholy, that such a great executant must be far too busy to concern herself with one of no doubt innumerable young aspirants who badgered her.

  Nonetheless, Harriet did not yet give up on her ambition. In neighbouring Amsterdam she found an elderly woman teacher, in no way famous, married, with a brood of children and grandchildren to provide incessant distractions and noise. But the two women got on so well that Harriet would often sleep in the little canal-side house for two or three days on end, not in the least caring that there was no room for her to bring her own maid, that the attic assigned to her was tiny and damp, and that all through the night noise reverberated upwards from the cobbled towpath just below the window.

  Eventually, the time came when, at Addy’s urgings, Harriet at last steeled herself to speak of her dream to the Admiral. The result was disastrous. What was so bruising for her was not merely his absolute refusal to allow her to proceed with her plan, but his failure even to take it seriously.

  ‘Oh, no, my dear!’ He laughed. ‘No, no! That’s not the life for my Harriet, not at all. Look at the sort of life that Madame Schumann lives. Wretched! No wonder her husband went mad. And what happens to those children of hers when she’s traipsing around the world? No, my dear, you don’t want that sort of life – and I certainly don’t want it for you. I want you to find a good husband, well-connected, rich. I want him to be able to look after you as your Mama and I look after you now. I want you to have lots of children, as we have – yes, even ten like us! That’s what I want for you. You don’t need to make money, not at all. Of course, you can go on playing,’ he went on. ‘Why not? At parties, for us, for your husband, your children. You have a talent, of course you have a talent. Madame Schumann said that. I remember well. But, – he gave a benevolent smile – ‘my little girl doesn’t want to have all the trouble and anxiety of making that talent public. For what? For what?’

  Harriet did not immediately give up her dream in despair. From time to time she thought of running away from home, to Paris or Vienna or Rome or Munich. But how would she pay for a teacher, since certainly her father would not do so? And how would she live? If she did run away, despite those objections, a scandal would also engulf her family, so that it might well be that her father’s post of Grand-Marshall would be compromised, as might the marriages of those her siblings who were still single. Oh, if only she had been born a man! If only!

  When Harriet’s mother, long ailing with pulmonary tuberculosis, was advised to spend the next winter in Majorca with a younger, unmarried, much put-upon sister of hers, it was Harriet who, in effect, took charge of the household. She was so brilliant an organizer that the Admiral often remarked that she would have made a superb Chief of Staff. She was also, unlike her querulous, parsimonious mother, extremely popular with the numerous servants and the tradespeople. When, after a brief return to The Hague, the Admiral’s wife died, and Harriet once again took charge of the household, there was a general feeling of relief among both staff and family, though of course the latter would never have admitted it. ‘How are we all going to manage without you?’ the Admiral, repeatedly asked when her engagement was announced, since he knew that Addy would be neither so dedicated nor so efficient and that the only other unmarried sister was far too young to shoulder the responsibility of a household so large.

  In the weeks immediately after her wedding, it was enough for Harriet to be thrilled vicariously by what she saw and heard or overheard of Philip’s resourceful and decisive administration of a commercial empire that had already extended from the West to the East Indies and was now about to encroach on the North coast of Africa. Then she began to be consumed by the desire to cease to be merely a wondering observer of his manifold activities and to become his partner in them or, at least, his lieutenant.

  Instead of merely inferring what was going on, as in the past, she now began to question him; and instead of waiting patiently for his repeatedly delayed return from some foreign city in which he was conducting his business, she now began to propose that she should accompany him. To her questions, his answers were always evasive and vague – oh, it was too complicated to explain to her, it was really all so boring, why on earth did she want to trouble her pretty head about things, when she had to make plans for that New Year’s Eve ball and she must practise the piano part to those Schubert lieder for her performance with the youngest of the princesses at the Palace? To the suggestion that she should accompany him, he only once acceded, taking her to Paris with her maid, and then in effect leaving her wholly to herself, after he had pressed her to buy anything that she wanted anywhere and to have the bills sent to his Paris office. Subsequently, he would always
say: ‘You know what it was like in Paris. We hardly saw each other. Let’s wait to go abroad together until I have a holiday. Or take Addy on a holiday with you. Why not? That would be far more entertaining for you.’

  Eventually, after Alexine’s birth, Harriet resignedly gave up, contenting herself with running her husband’s household even more efficiently than she had run her father’s, with playing the piano merely for her own pleasure, and with indefatigable work for a host of charities.

  She was constantly occupied.

  She was constantly bored.

  Chapter Five

  ALEXINE HAD COME TO THINK OF SAMMY as her brother.

  She had a way of moving soundlessly about the house, even into areas forbidden to her, and her ears were sharp. From fragments of the servants’ conversation, she began firstly to suspect that there was some secret link between her father and the newcomer, and then to decide that, yes, that must be it, the boy was his son by some woman met on his ceaseless travels. She had always wanted a brother of an age closer to her own, and here in the house, in addition to those two half-brothers, both now married and fathers, in distant Liverpool, a city that she had never visited, one had suddenly and mysteriously appeared.

  But she was ambivalent in her feelings, alternating between a joyful acceptance and an anxious resentment. Among Philip’s children, she had grown used to being always the first in his affection. Although his two sons ran the English side of his business and although, as old age began to whittle away his once unbounded energy, he was now increasingly deputing to them other duties as well, he had over the years felt more and more distant from them as he had seen them less and less. The letters between father and sons had long since become oddly formal, even stilted, not all that different from those that passed between Philip, and managers and agents in no way related to him. But his letters to Alexine were full of puns, nicknames, childish jokes and professions of love.

  Now Alexine began increasingly to suffer twinges of jealousy, like the sudden spasms that herald a fever, whenever this beloved if often absent Papa of hers showed to the boy even a small part of the love that previously had been hers alone. One late autumn evening, in the course of her restless wanderings, she was looking down from the schoolroom window, the lamp unlit since lessons for the day were over, a hand to the curtain. She was waiting, though she did not acknowledge this to herself, for the return both of her father, who had been shooting on the polder, and for Sammy, whom he had insisted should go with him. Not only Philip carried a gun but also Sammy, who had been presented with one only a few days before. Why had she not also been given one? When she had demanded that of her father, he had laughed. ‘Girls don’t shoot. I gave you that new easel and box of paints only last Tuesday. What are you complaining about?’

  Out of the misty dusk, two blurred figures at last appeared. They were extraordinarily close, one of the man’s arms around the already muscular shoulders of the boy, while the other held his gun. The boy’s gun was slung around him. As they passed under the window, the boy, body erect and chin raised, was laughing. He often laughed like that, seemingly at nothing, from no more than an excess of high spirits or pleasure in life. That closeness of the two bodies represented for Alexine an emotional closeness, from which she felt herself to be cruelly excluded.

  Now they had entered the house and a moment later she heard her father calling to her: ‘Alexine! Alexine! Where are you? Come and watch Sammy and me play billiards.’ He had never allowed her to play billiards; that was not a game for a girl, he had repeatedly told her. She had no wish to sit and watch them at an occupation as stupid as hitting balls around a table. ‘I’m busy!’ she called back. After that, she remained for a long time at the schoolroom window, looking out, with a restless melancholy, at the dusk thickening over the dreary landscape.

  Two days later, however, her mood had changed. By then Papa had left for Brussels and, in his absence and in the absence of Harriet and Aunt Addy at a luncheon party, she led Sammy into the billiard room and indicated to him, now scribbling on his slate with the piece of chalk that kept screeching like a living thing under the insistent pressure of her hand, and now making imperious gestures, that he should show her how to play. It took a long time but eventually she decided that she had mastered what was required. She had always been able to learn new skills with amazing quickness, just as in later years she was always able, like her father, to learn new languages. In the subsequent game she had no difficulty in defeating the boy, who was laughably maladroit.

  Having returned from Brussels – once more, days later than he had announced at his departure, because things, as he explained, had been so much more complicated and delicate than he had expected – Philip brought Alexine a magnificent French example of a poupée modèle, a cut-out figure with a number of gowns, with enormous sleeves, tight cuffs and elaborate hair-styles, all in the height of fashion, and a number of head-dresses. But for Sammy he brought a box of Andreas Hilpert tin soldiers in garish Prussian uniforms and shakos that towered above them far out of proportion to the size of their bodies. Had he forgotten that she had no interest in dolls, so that Nanny Rose had long since packed away a huge, neglected collection of them and placed them in an attic (‘For your own little girls,’ she had said) and that, instead, she was now building up a collection of soldiers herself? Sulkily she pushed the doll back into its box and, mouth pinched and eyes blinking back tears which she was determined not to shed, tugged at the tissue paper, until it wholly covered the gift again.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ her father asked.

  She shrugged, putting the box containing the doll down on to the table and then giving it a push.

  ‘It cost a lot of money.’

  Again she shrugged, in assumed indifference.

  ‘The trouble with you is that you’re spoiled. Thoroughly spoiled.’ It was what Nanny Rose constantly grumbled.

  The next day, Alexine came on Sammy squatting on the floor of the glazed veranda, the soldiers spread around him. Totally still, he was not playing with them, merely staring at them. She knelt down beside him. Suddenly she felt an extraordinary, thrilling kinship with him, her brother and, yes, her friend. She had never felt that kinship with the two tall men, typical Englishmen of the upper middle-class in voice, dress and manner, her half-brothers, when they paid their visits, never together and rarely with their wives, to consult with their father about something to do with the business. She put out a hand and took up one of the soldiers. She placed it before Sammy. Then she picked up another and placed it beside the first one. ‘Wait!’ She gestured imperiously and he nodded, seeming to understand. She left the veranda and raced up the stairs to the schoolroom, where, from a high shelf – she had to stand on a chair to reach it – she took down one of a number of boxes, piled one on top of the other. It contained a set of English soldiers, from the Crimean War. She returned, set out these soldiers for herself, and then the rest of the Prussian soldiers for him.

  The next day, Philip, who for once had nothing more important to occupy him, took the two children out to shop with him. In the shop where he bought cigars and snuff, Alexine and Sammy watched while he raised a cigar to his nose, twirled it and sniffed, then another, and yet another, until at last he decided, yes, he wanted a hundred of those. A new mix of snuff had just arrived from London and that too he tried, putting some of it in the hollow on the back of his left hand between thumb and forefinger and then sniffing first through one nostril and then the other. He nodded at the owner of the shop, a Silesian Jew, who always puzzled Alexine because he wore a strange, circular little hat on the back of his head, even though she had always been told that, whereas ladies wore hats in indoors, gentlemen never did so. On a whim, Philip held out his hand, on which some of the powder still remained, and indicated to Sammy that he too should take a sniff of it. Reluctantly the boy did so and was at once convulsed with not one but three sneezes in succession. Alexine was herself convulsed, but in her case with derisive lau
ghter. Philip and the tailor also laughed. Then Alexine said, ‘Me, me, Papa! Let me try!’

  ‘Oh, no, no! Girls don’t take snuff. They don’t smoke, they don’t take snuff. What an idea!’

  ‘Please! Please!’

  On another whim, he yielded, amused and even charmed, as so often, by her importunity. He would often say that she had twice the spirit of her half-brothers. He put another pinch of snuff on the back of his hand and extended it. She bent over and sniffed, sniffed again, until nothing of it was left. She made a superhuman effort not to sneeze and, despite the insane tickling at the back of her nose and then in her throat, she managed not to do so.

  Philip patted her on the shoulder in approbation. ‘You took that like a man! Bravo!’

  They next visited Philip’s tailor. In his youth, in the West Indies, he had been careless of appearance, often wearing a soiled shirt, a frayed jacket or ill-fitting trousers. But wealth and his English first wife had changed all that. He was now regarded as a dandy, bringing back an embroidered waistcoat from Budapest, a perfectly cut suit from London, a shimmering silk cravat from Lyons, or a pair of beautifully flexible calf-skin boots from Florence.

  Seated on two spindly chairs, japanned in black, the children watched in silence as the diminutive tailor, swiftly removing pins from the lapel of his jacket, went about his business. Alexine had often watched her mother having fittings, but this was the first time that she witnessed her father having one. From time to time he would turn to examine himself in one of the three panels of the mirror. He raised an arm, he shrugged a shoulder, he adjusted a sleeve, while anxiously the tailor waited. ‘H’m, h’m. Not bad. But there’s a small crease here. Just here. Don’t you see it? Here!’ Unlike Harriet, he easily became impatient with the people whom he employed to do things for him. ‘Surely you can see it, man?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir, yes, I think – yes, I see what you mean.’ Alexine hated the man’s obsequiousness. She was sure that, however poor she was and however much she depended on other people’s patronage, she would never debase herself like that.