Tonight, with all the casual cruelty of a caliph, Basil Zaharoff violated me. He debased me, stripped off every shred of self-respect and then offered to buy me like a brood mare at auction.
He did more. He barbarised something that was beautiful to me. He marched through my private Eden, trampling down the illusion of my childhood, the cherished images of Papa and Lily. He heaped mockery on us all. I wish to God I could have given him the lie; but I could not. So, from now to eternity, he can blackmail me with what he knows about my origins, suspects about my marriage, its prelude and its aftermath – and what every madam in the business will be happy to report to him on my sexual needs and aberrations.
On the way back to the Crillon, I felt physically sick. I wanted to stop the car and vomit in the gutter; but I would not make Zaharoff’s chauffeur the witness of my humiliation. I fought down the nausea until I was locked in my room; then I voided Basil Zaharoff’s fine food and classic vintages into the toilet. Afterwards, still in my evening clothes I flung myself on the bed and stared unseeing at the painted pastoral on the ceiling.
Whoever had contrived the pattern of my life, the life of Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld, was a master of all the ironies. I, who had ridden so high, was tumbled in the dust. I, the lion tamer, was subdued by a single flick of the whip. I, who knew every trick of the tart’s trade, was more bruised than any country virgin at her first encounter with the brothel-master.
The strange thing was that I couldn’t blame Zahar off. I could even envy the cool genius of his contrivance. He knew that I would not be shocked by anything he might ask of me. I had done it all before – often in less than the Zaharoff style. I was, in a sense, the perfect partner for him. We were King and Queen from the same suit of cards. So long as I served the King’s interest, he would maintain me in my proper status.
If we lasted together – no estrangement, no divorce, no treachery of rivals – we might even become friends of a sort. There is a kind of comfort in low-life society, where everyone knows how to spell the same dirty words! But – this was the fear I gagged on! – from the moment I made a pact with Basil Zaharoff, I would never again own any part of myself. The terms would be non-negotiable and eternal: no rebate of interest, no remission of the final debt. When Mephis-topheles came to collect payment, Faust – or Fausta now! – must surrender her soul.
But why worry? Papa had assured me I had no soul. I, too, had probed for one in vain in the dissecting rooms of a dozen hospitals. So why hesitate? The money was good, the working conditions first rate, the insurance total. What was this precious self that I was, suddenly, so unwilling to surrender?
The room began to spin and I was sick again. After the spasm and the vomiting I stripped off my soiled clothes, soaked a long time in a hot bath, then curled up in bed with the companion of my solitary nights: a rag doll called Humpty Dumpty. Lily had made him for me – God, how many years ago! She had sewed black threads across his face to make him look like a cracked egg. She had taught me the nursery rhyme that English children sang about him.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I felt myself sliding into darkness. I heard myself whispering in a child’s voice: “Lily, where are you? Lily!” Then I heard the baying of hounds and the thunder of galloping hooves, and once again I was back in the nightmare.
I am riding to hounds with the old crowd. It is spring; the whole countryside is in flower. We have flushed a fox, he is heading for the hills. The hounds are after him in full cry. I am leading the hunt, just behind the pack. The fox leads us into a defile between high black cliffs. I gallop ahead; but when I come out on the other side I am alone. There are no hounds, no huntsmen, only the small bloodied carcass of the fox. The land has changed. All around me is a flat wilderness of red sand, above which the sun glows like a great crimson eye. My horse rears and throws me. When I look up he has disappeared. I am alone in the wilderness. I am naked and my head is shaven like a nun’s. I am imprisoned in a big ball of glass which rolls over and over displaying all my private parts, while the red eye stares at me and a terrible silence mocks me.
When I woke, I was curled up in the foetal position, clutching my Humpty Dumpty between my legs as if I, still unborn, had just given birth to him. I had to force myself to straighten out in the bed and look at my watch. It was still only three in the morning; but I felt an urge to write down the dream, its prelude and its aftermath.
It was almost as if Papa were talking to me, repeating his old refrain: “Write every case history, girl! Get the symptoms clear. Make sure you’ve set down the whole clinical sequence, or if you haven’t, that you know at least where the gaps are. Then you can look at the logic. That’s what diagnosis is: logic and probabilities. But if your first record is unorganised, you confuse yourself and put your patient at risk. Write it down; write it.”
So, still obedient to the first man I ever loved, I propped Humpty Dumpty in front of me and began, disjointedly at first, then with greater fluency, to write my own case history, thus:
My earliest memories are of woman smell and milk taste and the big smooth breasts of my wet nurse. I recall kitchen things: roasting meat, baked parsnips, nutmeg, cinnamon, stewed apples, floury hands pounding the dough for country bread.
I hear women’s voices, singing, laughter, chattering; men’s voices greeting and growling. Heavy boots clomp on stone tiles. Friendly fellows who smell of cows and cut grass and sour beer and tobacco snatch me up and toss me towards the ceiling. Afterwards they hold me in their laps and feed me warm strudel with whipped cream.
There is a whole kaleidoscope of other images: rooks cawing in the elm trees along the drive, cattle with heavy udders ambling slowly home at milking time, Lily and I dancing through a meadow golden with dandelions and buttercups. There is a geography to all this, but it makes small matter beside the fact that these were happy times and places. For the first two years of my childhood we lived, Lily and I, on a farming estate just south of Stuttgart. Papa was working at the Klinik in Tubingen and doing two days a week private practice in Stuttgart. Sometimes he joined us at weekends; sometimes he didn’t. When he did come, his pockets were full of gifts and he laughed a lot and smelt of lavender water.
Later, when I was four or five, we moved to Silbersee in Land Salzburg. Papa had sold his estates in Hungary and bought a small baroque castle with a dependency of tenant farmers who raised dairy cattle and pigs and bred farm horses and cut timber on the upland slopes. The castle also drew revenue from the lease of a guest house and a Stüberl in the local village.
At this time Papa was senior surgeon at the charity hospital in Salzburg and had as well a large private practice in that city. He took what he called his “social diversions” in Vienna, where also he was occasionally asked to operate. Zaharoff’s portrait of him as a wealthy womaniser with small interest in his profession is a patent falsehood. His visits to Schloss Silbersee tended to be sporadic. Sometimes we did not see him for three or four weeks at a stretch. His factor ran the estate. Lily ran my life: traditional governess, little mother, big sister to a child who could have been intolerably lonely but was, for those few years at least, blissfully happy.
How can I describe this Lily Mostyn whom I loved so much? By contrast with the peasant women of our household, blonde, big busted, broad of back and buttocks, Lily looked like a Dresden doll. But under all the sober trimmings, the modest blouse, the bombazine and the petticoats, there was the body of an athlete.
She could run, skip, stand on her head, do hand springs and cartwheels, swim like a seal. When I asked her how she had learned all these things she cocked her head like a quizzical parrot and told me in a broad Lancashire accent:
“When you get bigger, luv, and your bones firm up, I’ll show you. We’ll do exercises in our room and find a quiet meadow where these Salzburg bum-slappers can’t see us. That’s another secret we’ll have.”
Everything was a secret with Lily. She taught me English “so we can say what we like in front of the servants”. She made Papa teach us both Hungarian “because, lassie, when he’s in bed, he prefers to talk in his native tongue. Every man does; but he can’t talk to the wall, can he? Besides, if I can talk the bloody language, maybe folk will take me for the Countess Kardoss – which I wouldn’t mind being; but I’ll never get the offer.”
I asked her why not. She squatted in front of me and explained with a cheerful grin:
“Because your Papa’s never going to marry anyone. I don’t blame him after his experience with your mother. Besides, you know the old saying, the more women you’ve known, the less you want to settle for one. As for me, even if I did marry, how could I get a better bargain than this one? Me, daughter of a country parson in Lancashire! I live in a castle. I’m paid three times as much as I could earn in England. I’ve got a baby to love – which is you, my sweet lassie. I’ve got a man to love me – which your Papa doesn’t do often enough because he’s off chasing expensive tarts and wealthy widows in Vienna. But when he’s here it’s wonderful and he makes sure I don’t get pregnant – and he doesn’t bring home the clap. At home, I’d be sighing my heart out to marry a bank clerk or a schoolmaster. Now, let’s get undressed and we’ll have a hot bath together and then take supper in our dressing gowns.”
Of course I didn’t understand half the things she said to me; but then, I didn’t have to; it was enough that she talked, touched, kissed and cherished me. This is my tenderest memory of Lily and my father. They were wholly sensuous. They embraced the world through every sense. They touched it, tasted it, heard it like music, inhaled it like a perfume. When Lily brushed my hair, and plaited it, she communicated pleasure. It was as if she were handling filaments of gold. When she offered me a flower to smell, she cupped her hands round it so that no whiff of the perfume would escape. When she taught me a song, she would say, “Listen to this, it’s beautiful!” Or, “It’s so dancy!” When she bathed me, every touch in every place was a caress and an awakening.
This was, I think, what made my father such a good surgeon – and so desirable a lover! He handled human skin as if it were the most precious fabric in the world. His constant complaint about his colleagues was: “They hack into tissue like pork butchers. They stitch it like cobblers, leaving traumas everywhere.” To see him cleansing and binding a cut in a farmboy’s hand was a lesson in fastidious care and a quite gratuitous gentleness. Every time he came home, he would examine me with clinical care from top to toe and the experience was like being kissed by butterflies. He liked food, he liked drink; but he never guzzled. He savoured every mouthful. To watch Lily and Papa, curled up on the big ottoman in front of the fire, was like watching a pair of beautiful sleek cats and being proud to be the kitten of such a pair.
The three of us had no shame with each other – and no fear of intrusion. Our quarters in the Schloss – my nursery, Lily’s bedroom, our bathroom, the big living room and Papa’s quarters beyond – could be entered only through a single ante-chamber, past which no servant was permitted without a summons.
Once inside the suite, however, one could pass freely from room to room. We could stand naked at the window and watch the sunset-glow over the far peaks of the Tauern Alps; or we could draw the drapes and huddle into the sensuous security of a fairy tale kingdom. What happened in that kingdom was the biggest and most jealously guarded secret of all.
When Papa was at home, he belonged completely to us. We entertained guests – at dinners and to feasts and hunts; but no outsider, man or woman, ever lodged at the Schloss. Equally, I have to admit that neither Lily nor I ever saw the inside of Papa’s lodgings in Salzburg or Vienna. I do not know how many other lives he led; but in Silbersee he had only one and we were the centre of it.
We were, in all but legality, a family. Papa slept with Lily. When he was away she moved back into her own room next to my nursery. I snuggled with them, like any child with any parents. Lily was my first teacher – my only one until I was old enough to be sent to a boarding academy for girls. She taught me reading, writing, mathematics, languages and the rudiments of music and the pianoforte.
Papa always examined me quite carefully on the work I had done since his last visit. He insisted also that I learned to ride; so the studmaster schooled both Lily and me in the elements of horsemanship. All this was normal enough for the girl child of a wealthy physician – a nobleman and a Hungarian to boot! – but the rest of my education was decidedly unorthodox. It was, I suppose, what the French used to call “une éducation sentimentale”. Later, much too late indeed, I began to understand it as Papa’s effort to complete, by fantasy, the shortcomings of his own sentimental career. I believe, for instance, that he was madly in love with my mother, that he truly wanted to marry her and found a family with her. Certainly he wanted a son. What he got instead was a girl child born on the wrong side of the blanket and a wound from which his male pride never recovered.
In spite of the fact that women doctors were rare, and regarded, if not as witches, most certainly as eccentrics, he manipulated me carefully to choose medicine as a career. He encouraged me to ask questions about his work. He told me colourful tales of medical history: of Cos, the healing island, of the arts of the old Egyptians and the magical herbs like digitalis and hellebore. Slowly he turned my attention to his text-books. He used his own body and Lily’s and mine to teach me physiology and anatomy and the glandular functions. Patiently, over many years, he sought out those schools of medicine which accepted women, and established friendships with important members of their faculties. It was only after he died, when I was going through his correspondence, that I realised how much time and labour he had spent to find a school to accept me.
He was obsessed in other odd ways with continuity. When I was quite small I remember his explaining that when a woman married she took her husband’s name. Then he added, “But of course the woman can keep her own name as well. That’s what I want you to do: always keep a Kardoss in the name. You’ll promise me that, won’t you?”
I swore my biggest, most sacred promise. I told him that I would one day give him a grandson. In that, finally, I failed him. But he failed me, too. No! It was not failure. It was something else: misdirection, malfeasance, a lie fed into my childish life. He and Lily changed the signposts; and by the time I was able to read them, I was already far down a one-way street with no exit at the other end. Strange, isn’t it? Zaharoff told me the same thing in other words; but I hated him for it.
It’s very late and I am very tired, but I must try to set down this thought. It has been with me too long, coiled like a black snake just at the threshold of dreaming. Papa was trying to contrive an impossible creature: a son who would continue his name and his imprint on the planet and a daughter in whom he could possess the woman who had deserted him, enjoy her and, in strange and subtle fashion, exact revenge on her.
He accomplished his end not by cruelty but by indulgence. My sentimental education was carried out in the isolation of a hothouse. I was coaxed into sexual life, as I am told the Orientals coax their child whores, by serene seduction. Papa was too good a doctor to submit me to trauma, but every year he drew me more intimately to himself, brought me closer to the moment when he would initiate me – tenderly and beautifully, oh yes! oh yes! – and bind me to him more closely than any young lover could possibly do. My whole life gives testimony to how well he succeeded.
And Lily? My Lily whom I still love and miss at times so terribly? She was my first madam! Why did she do it? At first I think she saw little harm. She was a healthy lusty girl, to whom a tumble in bed was as natural as dancing. But later, when I began to replace her as Papa’s bedfellow, she had to know what she had done. She had tried to use me to hold him. In the end she lost him and we all lost each other.
Now I find myself at the end of that one-way street, with my nose rammed hard up against a brick wall. I cannot go forward. If I turn back, I walk straight into the arms of Basil Zaharoff. Perhaps the only solution is to jump right over the wall.
There now! The thought is out, written in my own physician’s hand. I have released others from life’s prison-house. It would not be too hard to contrive a tidy and painless exit for myself. What say you, Papa? Lily, what say you?