Tim, through what might be called diplomatic channels, had found them accommodation. It was in a large apartment-block in the Ötzeltgasse, not a particularly august locality. The proprietrix, Frau Weber, had received numerous young Englishmen in her time: polite boys proposing a little to improve their German before undertaking to serve their country in embassies and legations in one or another part of Central Europe. Lately she had been finding such agreeable and remunerative boarders hard to come by, and she was quite as hard up as almost everybody else in Vienna. So she had put considerable cordiality into her welcome.
‘Alles, alles was Sie wünschen!’ she had exclaimed to the first two arrivals, and had accompanied the words with an expansive gesture comprehending indifferently her enormous Dresden stoves, her equally enormous feather quilts, and her two ill-favoured and not precisely young daughters.
‘Thank you very much indeed,’ Olly said formally – and then remembered that he was in a foreign country. So he made a kind of stage bow to the daughters. ‘Es freut mich sehr’ — he said to them firmly and as if imperfectly remembering something from a phrase-book—’ Sie kennen lernen zu dürfen.’
This, whether or not it was idiomatic or even grammatical, went down quite well. But with it ended, for the time being, any further attempt at communication in an alien tongue. Frau Weber explained in English that she provided only Frühstück, but that Herr Naumann ran an excellent restaurant in a cellar in the next street. And when a look of some dubiety betrayed itself on Olly’s face she informed him with asperity that a very good society dined regularly at Herr Naumann’s. It was evident that, despite her abject need of money, Frau Weber was a woman who stood no nonsense. Tim smoothed things over by venturing to inquire whether her late husband (she was understood to be a widow) had belonged to the same family as the musician. As the Webers had been officers and gentlemen as well as fiddlers and so forth, Frau Weber’s reply was gratified as well as affirmative. Baron Franz Anton von Weber, she reminded Tim, had never declined to acknowledge his cousinship with the much humbler family of the Mozarts. After this cultivated exchange the Weber ladies withdrew, and the new boarders considered their situation.
Olly was not very favourably impressed by it.
‘It’s all going to be bloody stuffy,’ he said.
‘It had better be, with nothing to warm us but those great porcelain mausoleums, and the outside temperature heaven knows how many degrees below zero. A good fug will be our only hope.’ Tim didn’t seem in too good spirits. Every now and then, Olly reflected, Tim looked like a man remembering some defeat he’d rather forget. Olly never fished for this. Although by nature unscrupulous, he observed the taboos in which young men of his sort believe.
‘I mean figuratively stuffy,’ Olly said. ‘That old woman will think it her business to keep an eye on us. And all the hochbürgerlich proprieties will have to be toadied to.’
‘I don’t think there’s such a word as hochbürgerlich.’
‘There is now. You ought to have found us something more in the Bohemian line. Students with their wenches and sausages and puddles of beer. That sort of thing. Particularly wenches.’
‘I thought the woman was practically offering us her daughters.’
‘It would be useless to offer them to a goat or a tom-cat. Do you realise that apartments like this are as good as gaols?’
‘A pretty spacious gaol. The Webers must have about a dozen rooms. And apparently several of the attics as well.’
‘Yes, of course. But don’t you know that not a soul in a single one of these flats is so much as allowed a latch-key? You may have lived in one of them for twenty years. But when you come home you still have to ring a bell and be scrutinised by a nasty old woman in a glass box in the hall. It’s rather like returning to an Oxford college at night. Except that a good simple kick at the door wouldn’t be too well regarded.’
‘It does sound a bit over the odds.’ Tim plainly hadn’t thought of this aspect of the matter. ‘I expect it goes back to the paternalism of dear old Francis Joseph. Liked to feel every Wiener and Wienerin was tucked up and accounted for.’
‘Better decide how to tuck up ourselves,’ Olly said. They had been allotted two bedrooms, which faced each other across a broad corridor at its far end. They made their way to them now. ‘Reasonably secluded,’ Olly pronounced. ‘And well away, one hopes, from Sin and Death.’ It appeared that the Weber daughters were to be thus referred to. ‘But we’ll have to draw lots, I suppose.’
Each of the rooms held one very large double bed. They poked around the first of them.
‘A Nachttopf each,’ Tim reported. ‘That’s quite refined. But drawing lots it will have to be – unless, of course, the passions are involved.’
‘I don’t know about you and David. But, as for me, I’d rather have Sin herself than either of you.’ Olly didn’t pause on this obligatory pleasantry. He was preparing three slips of paper. ‘Longest is me,’ he said. ‘The second is you, and the shortest is David. First out of the scrum gets solitary.’ They devised a method ofdrawing the slips with meticulous fairness. David got solitary.
‘Just what he’d like,’ Olly said. ‘David’s not sociable in what you might call a Nachttopf way. I sing of a maiden that is makeless, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Don’t be disgustingly profane, Olly.’ It sounded as if Tim was actually serious in this rebuke. ‘Look, the other room has a glimpse of the Stephans-Dom. Let’s bag it and leave this one for our wandering boy. No reason why he should make all the going.’
‘We’ll let him do that with S. and D.’ Olly said. ‘And now we’ll unpack.’