A week later Louise gave an impromptu ‘ball’ in the villa. Ostensibly held to celebrate Mattachich’s safe return from Vienna, it was also intended to demonstrate her contempt for the notice Philipp had put in the newspapers. Her servants were sent scurrying around town with handwritten invitations addressed to people she had met during her stay in Nice or whom she knew to be visiting the resort. The set of glassed-in double-doors between the terrace and the saloon to the side of the villa were folded back, concertina style, to take advantage of the suddenly mild weather, and in this bald, brightly lit-up space, and among the theatrically shadowy trees and shrubs in the garden below, her guests gathered with glasses of champagne in their hands and expressions of fox-like curiosity on their faces.
Gleeful, prurient, eager to attack, ready to flee, they knew why they had found Louise’s invitation impossible to resist. Scandal! Bankruptcy! Excitement! The servants who attended them were affected too: some were subdued, even weepy; some just perfunctory in performing their duties, preferring to stand about in groups discussing their fate. Two or three were obviously drunk, while those posted at the gates and along the stone wall that encircled the property allowed various undesirables to enter – journalists, shopkeepers, holiday-making idlers – and turned away much grander guests whom Louise had especially hoped to impress with her sang-froid. Inside the house the guests took liberties they would not have ordinarily allowed themselves: they asked the servants when her highness and the count planned to leave, fingered the curtains and cutlery, scuffed up the pile of the carpets to test their quality, wondered aloud whether the pictures on the walls had been rented with the house, crept upstairs to peer into the private rooms and to construe the sleeping arrangements there.
Their hostess and her lover they avoided, preferring to study them from a distance, while drinking as much as they could of their champagne and eating the haphazardly arranged comestibles. The dancing had barely started when the band – which had unsuccessfully demanded to be paid in advance – went on strike, forcing Mattachich and Ozegovich to take its leader into the darkest corner of the garden and give him a few slaps around the head to remind him of his obligations. A public row began when one of the shopkeepers (uninvited, and drunk as well) broke loose and demanded of Louise that she settle the bill she had run up with him. There and then. A small, plump, red-faced man with a bald but deeply wrinkled scalp, as if the wrinkles that should have appeared on his forehead had migrated northward, he stuck his hand into the inside pocket of his coat, pulled out a businesslike piece of paper and brandished it in her face. ‘When? When? When?’ he shouted; and several of the uninvited guests who had been shamefacedly avoiding Louise, as if she were the creditor and they the debtors, also surged towards her, shouting things like ‘He’s not the only one!’ and ‘What about me?’ and ‘You take us for fools?’
The man who led the charge was later said to be a butcher; others claimed he was a wine dealer enraged at seeing his expensive and unpaid-for champagnes disappearing down the throats of beautifully dressed women who snubbed him when he tried to make conversation with them. In any case, whoever he was, he brought the princess’s ball to an early end. A loyal servant moved to throw him out; two or three of his new allies fought back; women shrieked; men swore; glass was broken and collars torn; the bandsmen packed their instruments and fled; most of the guests were left to make their getaway as best they could. This was not easy, for the servants supposedly on duty at the gate barely tried to control the vehicles waiting outside. The result was more shouting, shoving, the occasional blow, horses’ hooves slithering on the roadway, wheels and shafts grinding together, the sullen buffeting of one coach against another. It was a wonder nobody went home that night with anything worse than bruises and grazes.
However, even those guests who most relished the whole fiasco (retrospectively) had to agree that Louise had been ‘magnificent’ throughout. Got up in long gloves that came almost up to her armpits, a trailing, ivory-coloured skirt patterned with leaves, a golden bodice carrying bunches of gauze at each shoulder, like truncated wings, with double rows of tiny, bell-shaped silver objects suspended from waist and bust, a many-stranded pearl choker and wristlet, and, in her left hand, an ostrich-feather fan – got up in this fashion, as if for a coronation ball at one of Europe’s courts rather than for a public humiliation in a hired house, she shed no tears, made no grimaces, did not raise her voice. At the end she inclined her head to the guests who took the trouble to say goodbye to her, stared expressionlessly at others who were being hustled out by Mattachich and Ozegovich, gave instructions to those servants who seemed ready to listen to them, and went upstairs only after the last of the visitors had left the house.
She was accompanied by a maid and the Baroness Fugger, her lady-in-waiting, but did not allow either woman to undress her. Instead she sent them away immediately she reached her bedroom. Alone at last, she took off her gloves and her satin shoes, which no one had seen all evening because of the length of her skirt, removed the belts of pearls from her neck and wrist, placing them flat on the dressing-table, and stretched herself out on the bed, still in her heavy skirt and stiff bodice, stockings and underclothes. Every time she moved the little silver ornaments on her outfit gave a soft tinkle. She heard some of the uproar from outside the house, where the disentangling of the coaches was still going on, but saw none of it.
Eventually, when everything was silent, when the last footsteps of those who lived in the villa had died away and the last of the empty bottles and scraps of uneaten food had been thrown into wooden barrels behind the house, Mattachich came into the room. He found her lying prone, with the back of her hand over her eyes. He leaned over and took the hand lying beside her on the bed into his own.
She let him. Then in a tone more sombre than any he had heard from her before, she said something that sounded so strange, so implausible, he had to ask her to say it again.
‘Je m’appelle Louise, et toutes les Louises sont malheureuses.’*
He was to hear the sentence many times again in the agitated weeks that followed; and to hear it once more, years later, when they were reunited after their protracted, enforced separation. Now, speaking solemnly, childishly, tearlessly, she told him that the meaning of her name had been explained to her during her childhood by one of the servants in the palace of Laeken: an evil woman with staring eyes who hated her and whom she feared, and whose gypsy blood gave her the power to see into the future. It was a curse or spell this woman had cast on her, she told Mattachich: something she had never dared to repeat before, not even to her mother, for she feared that the woman would be sent away and in revenge would call down an even worse punishment on her. Nor had she spoken of it subsequently, though the evil female had left the palace of her own accord just a year or two later. The witch left knowing what she had done. She knew her victim would carry the curse in her heart for ever.
The back of her hand still over her eyes, only her lips moving, with the palm of her hand and the underside of the rings she was wearing exposed, she ended the tale by ordering Mattachich to go. To leave her. At once. Tonight. Her name was Louise and misery was her fate. For her there was no escape. But he was free. He could separate his destiny from hers and go now, choosing to live elsewhere on his own terms, like any other human being. She had thought that he of all people might save her from the curse, but not even he could help her. No matter how much she loved him.
‘Go!’ she said, suddenly turning over to grasp his hand in both of hers. She brought it to her cheek. ‘Go!’ He saw her pale cheek, the white flash of her eye, her disordered hair, and sank on his knees beside the bed.
‘Princess,’ he said. ‘Never.’
That was the beginning of the collapse of the fantasy structure Louise and Mattachich had built around themselves – which took longer to disintegrate than you might expect. Its momentum was not that of a frenzied danse macabre; rather, it was more like a lesson in old-fashioned ballroom dancing – slow-slow, fast-fast, slow-slow again. With occasional intervals when nothing happened. Then it would start up again, sometimes in several locations simultaneously. The people witnessing or taking part in it ranged from monarchs like Franz Joseph and Queen Victoria to three former servants of the couple (an under-butler, supported by two of Louise’s dressers), who tried to sue her for unpaid wages and found themselves accused in turn of fraud and perjury. They claimed they had been taken on to work in the princess’s household by her chamberlain, a certain ‘Count Keglevich’ – but a lawyer hired by Mattachich pointed out in court that there was no such person in her entourage and indeed no such ‘Count’ in existence anywhere!*
Over the following weeks many other servants found themselves jobless, out of pocket and far from wherever they had originally been hired. Some made a nuisance of themselves by pleading, writing letters, weeping. In lieu of wages others simply took whatever they could smuggle away from the household – shoes, dresses, fans, cutlery, bits of jewellery, the silver-buttoned livery issued to them, even tackle from the stable – and disappeared. Several local businessmen who had been supplying the household with necessities would have done the same if they could have. Inevitably it was the humblest providers who came off worst, for the staples they had delivered to the villa (firewood, milk, fish, bread, etc.) had long since been consumed, turned into dung and ash, while the wealthier merchants could send in local toughs to try to pick up movables (plate, furniture, even horses) that had not been paid for. Richer or poorer, all were angry and ashamed of themselves for having allowed the social and financial lustre of these customers to dazzle them into extending credit too generously. So they felt all the more vindictive towards them as a result.
The task of dealing with such people – and with bigger creditors yet, from more distant places – was left to Mattachich. He was the one who had to wheedle, placate, promise, find new suppliers wherever he could, fork out money (‘on account’) when he could not. Louise was docile and depressed, except when she thought of Philipp; then she became incoherent. Searching for some possible source of funding that hadn’t been tapped, Mattachich made her go through lists of more and more remote members of her mother’s family and her father’s, and even of Philipp’s, before he finally gave up on the idea that hidden in some remote Schloss there was bound to be a forgotten great-uncle or second cousin who would come to their aid. Another recurring fantasy which he struggled with – in silence – was that of following the advice Louise had given him on the night of the party, and simply clearing off. Leaving the house with his passport in his pocket and a briefcase in his hand, as if he were going to Nice or Monte Carlo on business, and from there taking the train to Marseilles or Hamburg or Brest, and then boarding the first available steamer to America, north or south, who cared where?
He cared. That was the trouble.
He cared for Louise. He cared for himself as her consort. He cared for the life they had lived together. It was by far the most important series of events that had happened to him. He could not imagine anything so remarkable occurring again. The only remotely comparable transformation he could recall – and how transient and childish it now seemed – was the experience of ceasing to be a cadet and finally receiving his commission; and expecting everyone in the garrison-town who saw him on that day, and for weeks afterwards, to envy him for the star on his shoulder, his youth, his uniform, his shiny boots, the future that lay before him.
Now here he was, living through that young man’s future, which had turned out to be richer and more dreamlike than he would then have dared to envisage. Only, as dreams do, it had suddenly revealed its evil underside; it was charged with a menace he himself had provoked. Long before his duel with Philipp, when he and Louise were still living in Karlsbad, doing as they pleased, confident of their immunity from the rules and obligations governing others, he had committed a criminal act – idly, vaguely, blithely, without consulting Louise beforehand or telling her about it subsequently. He had thought of it then as not much more than a kind of joke, a scornful gesture, a quick fix (as you might say).
But how differently it looked now that Philipp had struck back at them!
What he had done, this hidden deed, sprang directly from an invitation Louise had received to spend a long weekend with the parents of Dora’s fiancé, Günther. The invitation, which reached her in Karlsbad, was the first of its kind since her expulsion from Vienna, and it encouraged her to hope that she had not, after all, been irrevocably cast out of the ranks of Europe’s highest society. As it happened the day after receiving the invitation she heard that one of Germany’s most famous jewellers, a certain Herr Ludwig Koch of Frankfurt, was visiting Karlsbad to do business with various notable visitors. The coincidence was impossible for her to resist. She sent for Herr Koch, who got into his carriage and came over immediately. From the wares he brought with him she chose something for Dora; then something for Günther, the oversized groom-to-be; then something for his immobile, big-chested, thick-necked, waistless parents. (‘They’re like sea-lions,’ she told Mattachich, expanding her chest and weaving her head to and fro.) Finally, inevitably, she chose something for herself: a brooch so thick with rubies it looked from a yard away like a clotted wound – a fatal one, you might think, when worn as intended in the hollow just below her left shoulder.
The cost of these items made even Mattachich blink. The obliging Herr Koch left them with her, pending a promised ‘release of funds’. Then, taking her gifts, she went off to visit her in-laws-to-be, the duke and duchess of Schleswig-Holstein, leaving Mattachich in Karlsbad to sort matters out. Which he did by instructing Louise’s lawyer in Vienna, Dr Barber, to borrow from Messrs Spitzer and Reicher the sum of 475,000 guilders, for a period of a year, with interest to be paid quarterly.* This time, however, Barber found the moneylenders reluctant to advance further large sums to Louise. Too many stories had reached them about the debts she was running up elsewhere. But since they wanted to keep her custom they suggested she should find a suitable, additional guarantor for these new loans. Mattachich responded by asking if the Princess Stephanie would do? Oh, certainly, came the reply, of course, indeed, they would consider it a great honour if her royal highness the archduchess would be so kind as to condescend…
On her return Louise found the promissory notes covering the entire sum waiting for her. She put her signature to them with barely a glance at what she was signing and gave them to Mattachich to post on to Barber. (Which, after a short delay, he did.) By then Louise was sorry she had spent so much money on the Holsteins: she had not enjoyed her visit with them and had come back convinced they were interested in her daughter chiefly in order to ‘replenish their coffers’.† A month or two later Mattachich sent the lawyer in Vienna back to Spitzer and Reicher to negotiate two further loans totalling a further 125,000 guilders, on the same terms as before and with the same co-guarantor. The moneylenders agreed; the documents were forwarded to Karlsbad; in due course they came back to Barber in Vienna with the signatures of both royal sisters inscribed on them.
Once the money was received, Ozegovich was dispatched to Nice to finalize the lease of the Villa Paradiso, ‘one of the most beautiful properties on the French Riviera’ (whose owner was inconsiderately asking to be paid in advance for a six months’ lease); and Louise, Mattachich and Dora got ready to follow him.*
So, for the time being, all appeared to be in order. The only trouble was that the second signature on the promissory notes returned to Spitzer and Reicher was fraudulent. Louise’s signatures were genuine; but Stephanie knew nothing about the guarantees she had supposedly offered in order to help her sister. The counter-signature had been added by Mattachich, no one else, inscribing himself in each case as ‘The Crown Princess Stephanie, Archduchess of Austria’.
It had been done on an impulse: for the money, of course, but also for the thrill of transgression. The first time, anyway; the second time less confidently. But superstition forbade him going back on what he had already done: to show fear now might in itself bring down on him the retribution he feared. Stephanie was Louise’s devoted sister and (he believed) his friend; someone who perhaps wished to be more to him than just a friend. There was no likelihood of her being asked to pay up should the quarterly payments of interest fail or when the period of the loan expired. Philipp had already disgorged bigger sums to keep his wife’s name out of the papers, and would no doubt do it this time too. It was only money, after all. No real harm could come to them in that connection. Or from that direction. For Mattachich, Louise was padded in money, wadded in money; it sprang up from her footsteps like flowers at the feet of Primavera; it showered on her from above in a golden rain, as it did on that other mythical woman whose name Mattachich had forgotten, but the paintings of whom he had seen all over the place. The endlessly put-upon Philipp would manage somehow; or the Midas-monster who served her as a father would do the business; or the fools who were ready to advance her goods and services and cash simply because she was who she was. Or indeed Stephanie herself would be indulgent, if the matter ever came to her notice and they begged her pardon humbly enough. In this case especially – Mattachich felt, with some moral unction – Philipp would be in no position to complain, since so much of the borrowed money had been spent on buttering up his only daughter’s parents-in-law-to-be.
Then came the wholly unexpected challenge from Philipp, the duel, and immediately after it Philipp’s ‘betrayal’ of them – which was how both Mattachich and Louise instinctively thought of the notice he had put in the papers. To Louise the notice came as a vile shock and a humiliation; to Mattachich it was something worse. His self-confidence, the sense of invulnerability that Louise’s presence had conferred on him, suddenly guttered away. All Vienna knew that Philipp had abruptly disowned his wife and her debts, and suspected that without his resources and those of Louise’s family the runaways were nothing. She was a pauper effectively – and what was he? How could he possibly go to her now and confess what he had done? Or go to Vienna and make the same confession to Stephanie, and, while he was about it, ask her kindly to let the signatures stand until…when? Until Philipp announced publicly that he would continue to meet Louise’s debts? Until Spitzer and Reicher agreed to overlook the ‘mistake’ he had made? Until Louise went on a penitential pilgrimage to Brussels and talked her father into helping out? Or would she do better to travel instead to Spa, Belgium, where her mother, Marie Henriette, lived in seclusion – or to the Château de Bocottes where her great-aunt Charlotte, the insane ex-empress of Mexico, was even more rigorously confined – in the hope that one or the other of them would agree to rescue her jumped-up Croatian ‘friend’ from the consequences of his own folly?
No, no, no. They were all mad, one way or another, in that family, but not that mad. They were cunning too. Not once since Louise had left Vienna to travel around Europe with her so-called chamberlain had any of them (Stephanie included) sent her a line of greeting or inquiry, let alone an invitation to pay a visit. Just the kind of people, then, who would stand by their outcast sister and her lover in a moment of self-inflicted crisis.
Morning after morning he got out of bed early, before dawn, and walked along the seafront, looking at the incoming tide constantly folding and spreading its white linen like a distraught washerwoman, or he gazed further out to where great weights of water silently slid and heaved against one another in the dimness, while the same substance in another guise chuckled idiotically among rocks at his feet – and tried to see himself walking straight into it until he could walk no further. Then swimming out deeper until that too became more than he could manage. And then? What followed was always the same: days or weeks later he would be dragged out of it, dead, sodden, bloated, barely recognizable.
Ach, that was always the problem. It was not fear or horror that held him back, or so he believed; it was that he was incapable of excluding himself from the scene. He had to be a participant still: to know what was going to happen, to be there, looking, listening, responding when it happened. Not out of it! Not yet! He had to struggle on, trying to make the best of the situation they were in. It sickened him to be preoccupied with such stuff: he was a soldier, a lover, a man of action, not a pettifogging businessman, a Jew-boy moneylender, a bankrupt greengrocer with bills and invoices constantly on his mind. Yet their debts, all of them so lightly assumed, had been transformed into an inert, congested, horribly uncomfortable mass somewhere inside him, like a packed intestine, with the forged promissory notes as the final bung up his arse. And to think he had spared that Fatso’s life when he could have finished him off!
Very well, then, something had to be done and he was the one who had to do it. Jewels were obviously the most valuable of Louise’s possessions, as well as the most portable or pawnable. First they had to establish which of the rings, brooches, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, aigrettes and the like, which she kept in all those fancy cases and little kid-leather bags – some in the bank, some in the villa – had been fully paid for, and how much was still owed on the others, and to whom. To do that they had to relate the individual items in those receptacles to the bundles of letters, invoices and receipts in their possession. Then they had to find out how much cash they could realize from them. That was the programme, anyway, and it depended largely on his capacity to persuade Louise that this act of stocktaking and inventory-making was not a malign game he had invented in order to torment her but an absolute necessity. Which would be a struggle, he knew. In particular she could not understand why he was so insistent about their need to meet the next instalment of interest due to Spitzer and Reicher. What was so special about the money they were owed, anyway?
But on that subject he was dumb. Dumb.
Still, by the end of three or four days of argument and tears on her side and restrained rage on his, he had brought her to accept that cash, cash, cash was what they needed above all. By then too they had prepared a rough-and-ready list of items that it would be best or most convenient or at any rate least anguishing for her to release. But when he swallowed his pride and went out like a travelling salesman to raise the cash, cash, cash he had spoken of, he ran into another difficulty. Their plight was known up and down the Riviera and beyond it, and every purchaser or pawnbroker he approached was determined to secure the maximum advantage he could from the weakness of their position. The buyers knew they had nothing to lose by holding off, keeping him waiting, turning their mouths down and declaring that this kind of setting or that kind of stone had gone out of favour and would never come back. Suddenly these previously fawning and smiling creepers, forever giving their hands a dry wash while they listened with bent heads to them, as if he were the wisest man and Louise the most beautiful woman on earth, had become experts at pulling long faces and declaring how little time they had to spare for him and how short of cash they were, alas, just at the moment.
In other words he and Louise were too poor to sell! After several such encounters Mattachich decided that the most valuable items would have to be sold or pawned incognito and piecemeal and as far from the Riviera as possible. For this he needed third parties he could rely on. So he decided to let Ozegovich go to Vienna and do his best, since he was in himself too insignificant for his friendship with Mattachich to be known there; and to let Mattachich’s new friend, Maximilian Jean Fuchs, a French-German Alsacien, a hotel manager by trade, go on the same mission to London.
Both men readily accepted the proposal, which naturally included payment of their expenses and the promise of a commission on whatever deals they secured.
With Fuchs, Mattachich went further. Depressed, sorry for himself and longing to find someone else to feel sorry for him – also half hoping to hear of a solution to his problem which he had somehow overlooked – he took Fuchs into his confidence. He told him everything.
No, not Ozegovich, who was too close to him, too dependent, too heimisch to be entrusted with his secret. For Mattachich, Fuchs had the perverse advantage of being a newcomer. Nor was that all. There was something else about him that Mattachich found attractive, even irresistible. When the two of them first met, he had wondered if this stranger weren’t perhaps a Hapsburg spy, sent down to Nice to keep an eye on him and Louise. But he soon decided that was nonsense. What most attracted Mattachich to Fuchs was precisely and perversely the fact that the latter did not take him seriously. Not as a knightly defender of a forsaken princess, anyway. Not as a man hounded by the emperor of Austria-Hungary. Not as a soldier who had thrown away his career in the imperial army for the sake of a great passion. He spoke of Mattachich’s grand amour as if it were the moral equivalent of the big killing that he, Fuchs, had made in the casino in Monte Carlo a few months before – a killing so big it had enabled him not merely to look like a gentleman (of an unconventional kind) but to live like one. On the strength of it he had given up his job as an under-manager in one of the big hotels on the seafront and had not looked for another appointment since.
The two men had met by chance, in a bar; and chance – or ‘luck’ as Fuchs preferred to call it – was one of his big subjects. ‘Luck’ was one of the qualities they had in common, Fuchs said firmly the second time they met, when Mattachich told him something of his story. ‘The other thing we share is that we’re not apologetic about our luck. We grab it. We use it. We love it. Lots of people can’t bear being lucky, it makes them nervous, they punish themselves for any luck that comes their way, because they think if they don’t dish out that kind of punishment to themselves, then someone or something worse will come along and do it to them. Or they run away from it because they don’t “deserve” it, they feel they’re not good enough for it. As if goodness has anything to do with luck! As if only the virtuous have to be rewarded. And you know what happens to them as a result? They stop being lucky. Then you ask yourself: what did they really want? To be lucky, or to feel badly done by? For people like you and me, though, luck is no burden. We’re just grateful for it.’
‘We have to work for it too.’
‘Of course. Nothing for nothing. We take risks. You had to take risks and you took them. So did I. Risk-taking is our kind of work. You and me, both.’
Mattachich protested from time to time against this kind of talk but always returned for more. In Fuchs’s company he could come to terms with the additional, secret, cynical self lurking within him, the inseparable twin brother of the one who wished only to be admired. With Fuchs he did not have to make the effort constantly to see himself as an austerely passionate hero, nor did he have to meet the sly, envious scorn that he so often felt to be just beneath the surface of the friendliness in others he encountered. Even with Louise he had to keep up a sturdy, reassuring front: not because he feared her judgement but because she was so prone to misgiving and self-reproach; he had to be on guard for her sake rather than for his own.
With Fuchs none of this was necessary and Mattachich warmed to him, even became enamoured of him, as a result. He felt about him as if he were an understanding stranger met on an overnight journey and never to be seen again, from whom no secrets needed to be kept. A man of about Mattachich’s age and height, Fuchs was from a humble background – that was as much as he ever said about it – but his years in the hotel business, he claimed, had made a gentleman of him long before he had actually ‘come into the money’. He had never done military service of any kind, and admitted to Mattachich that he felt diminished in consequence. The army doctors had discovered he had ‘a heart’, he said, meaningfully pointing a finger at his left breast. ‘Since then,’ he added, with calm self-satisfaction, ‘I’ve done my best to manage without one.’
He wore pale linen suits which, in a raffish style of his own invention, he had married to one of the newly fashionable, black homburgs, complete with broad flat brim and indented crown. He was the first person Mattachich had met who wore such a hat. Something direct and insouciant in his manner, as well as his dark hair and sallow skin, the droop of his eyelids over his wide, ocean-green eyes, the set of his never entirely straight lips, which were pale and yet had an almost purplish tint to them, the small, assured movements of his wrists and fingers, the smoothness of his voice and his fluency in each of the several languages he spoke – all this endowed him with a singular glamour in Mattachich’s eyes. It also helped to make plausible his claim that the only thing he missed about his former job was the ever changing supply of women that had gone with it. Chambermaids, kitchen staff, lady-guests, their daughters, their companions, whatever came up. Or lay down.
This was the man that Mattachich was unable to restrain himself from confiding in. Who else did he have? Did not this Fuchs already know him better, in some ways, than someone like Ozegovich ever would? But after Philipp’s ‘betrayal’ had been made public in the papers, that was exactly why he avoided the places where he and Fuchs used to meet, and thanked God that Fuchs had not responded to the invitation to Louise’s disordered, humiliating ‘ball’. Now that Mattachich’s luck had left him, how could they meet as equals?
Yet they were bound to bump into one another sooner or later, and it came almost as a relief to Mattachich when they finally met on the seafront. Each exclaimed the other’s name as they shook hands; then both fell silent. It was for moments only that they had nothing to say, but it seemed much longer.
Fuchs was the first to speak. ‘I hear you’ve fought a duel.’
That was all. Not a word about the notice in the newspaper, none about those disgusting scenes at the villa, of which he must have been told; nothing about the bullying, buzzing creditors. The man’s tact tore something like a sob out of Mattachich’s throat. He heard the sound and it astonished him, as if it had come from someone else. It also undid him. It revealed his distress so plainly there was now no point in struggling to deny what he was going through. Without a word, with just a gesture of the shoulder by way of invitation, he continued walking eastwards, as if he had some specific destination in mind. Fuchs fell in beside him. To the right, intermittently cut off by buildings, lay a calm, blue sea, like a platter warming under the dome of the sky. There were a few boats out there; otherwise no life; only the sheen and shiver of light. Nearer, around them, were palms, hotels, terraces, horse-drawn vehicles, even the occasional ungainly motor car, stared at by passers-by as if it were a creature escaped from a zoo. Looking straight ahead of them as they walked, Mattachich spoke of how heavily Louise was in debt and admitted that he and she had always relied, ultimately, on Philipp bailing her out, no matter how belatedly and ungraciously he did it.
And now he had let her down! He had deliberately called for that idiotic duel, knowing that Mattachich would treat him kindly, and always intending, the fat bastard, the coward that he was, to kick his wife in the teeth once his ‘honour’ had been restored.
‘Honourably, you understand. Honourably…’
So they were in trouble now, up to their eyes in trouble, and everyone in Nice knew it. (Still staring in front of him.) The world knew. Fuchs knew. And that wasn’t the worst of it. By no means. Months ago, when they’d still been in Karlsbad, he, Mattachich, had done something ‘unbelievably stupid’. (A phrase he illustrated by a one-handed gesture, as if throwing an object behind him.) Fuchs must swear never to breathe a word of it to anyone. It wasn’t just money trouble he was in but something worse; something that had happened because of their money troubles, months before, but that now threatened him with utter disgrace and ruin…and God alone knew what else.
‘It didn’t mean anything to me at the time! Truly! I didn’t intend to harm anyone! It was just a little thing! A trick to save bother, that’s all…’
His hand flew upwards again, in an abrupt, oath-taking gesture. He spoke with great intensity, as if the casualness of his intention then was far more important, morally speaking, than any consequences his ‘trick’ might now have.
‘But who’ll believe it – ?’ The words came out despairingly. So did the broken sentences and exclamations that followed. ‘They’ll have me by the neck…They’ve been waiting for this…The princess knows nothing…How could I?…I must have been mad…But you know, it’s difficult…’ And pointing to the sea, ‘You won’t believe how often I’ve thought of simply…It’s there, it’s waiting, so why not…take advantage…?’
Finally he fell silent. They walked on. Still Fuchs said nothing. Not even ‘Well?’ or ‘What?’ or ‘I’m sorry.’ Mattachich stared ahead of him. He had not once looked at his companion since they had set out on this walk; his friend had been no more than a silent presence alongside him, footsteps, a body, movements keeping time with his own. Company enough.
Minutes passed in this way. Suddenly Fuchs slowed his pace, trailed briefly behind Mattachich, halted, brought his hand to his mouth in a gesture of recollection. Then he hauled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, swore calmly and said he’d forgotten he had an appointment he simply had to keep. They shook hands and Mattachich stood where he was, his eyes following the other as he crossed the roadway, making towards the town-centre.
‘Fuchs!’ Mattachich called out. He felt shaky, conscious of a kind of trembling in his breast. Then louder, as Fuchs plainly had not heard the call above the sound of the traffic. ‘Fuchs!’ This time he halted. Mattachich waved him to return. Which he did, attentive and unsmiling as before.
Fuchs, then, became the specially chosen friend, the sole confidant, the person who knew something about Mattachich known to no one else, the one sent to London with some particularly valuable items of jewellery worth tens of thousands of guilders apiece. And Fuchs was the son-of-a-bitch who returned from London three weeks later with a sum that fell so miserably short of Mattachich’s expectations that the two men’s friendship – always a showy affair, starting out of nothing like a cactus flower – was destroyed in minutes. It was replaced by anger, suspicion, accusation, mutual contempt. Mattachich was convinced that Fuchs had done deals on the side with the people he had sold the goods to; the signed and stamped receipts from London he had brought with him meant nothing, since both sides would benefit by not revealing the true sums involved in the transactions. In other words, Fuchs was a thief. To this accusation Fuchs – his sallow skin gone yellow, his teeth appearing at unfamiliar angles in his lower jaw, the veins in his eyes suddenly showing – replied that of course a forger would be bound to see everyone else as a crook and a confidence man.
‘That’s it!’ Mattachich said, keeping his voice as low as his rage permitted. ‘I see what you’re up to. Because I trusted you, you think you can do what you like with me. You think, oh, he’s finished, he won’t dare to complain, he’ll take whatever I bring him.’
It was the morning after Fuchs’s return from London. They had met in one of the rooms downstairs in the villa. The doors and windows had been closed and the curtains drawn, so that no one could look in or hear what they were saying. On the table between them were a few receipts and piles of banknotes tied in bundles. Their eyes gleamed in the half-light. Only their unsteady breathing could be heard in the room, until a chatter of birds suddenly erupted from the garden – some of them twittering, one larger bird angrily rattling the wooden beads it seemed to carry in its throat. Fuchs stood up, took the bundle of notes nearest to him and put it into a small portmanteau that had been at his feet. He began to move towards the door. In the same moment it opened of its own accord. Louise stood there. She was wearing a long, pale garment with a frilled collar and carried a handkerchief in her hand.
‘Herr Fuchs,’ she said.
He responded with the briefest inclination of his neck. He still held the portmanteau in his right hand. ‘Your highness.’
He and Louise barely knew one another; the men’s friendship had flourished outside the house, in bars, restaurants, pavement cafés, gaming rooms.
‘You’re talking business, I see.’
‘We were, yes.’
‘When did you get back from London?’
‘Last night.’
‘And did you accomplish what you set out to do?’
‘No!’ Mattachich said. ‘He didn’t. He’s betrayed us. He’s come back with nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Louise asked ironically, with a faint gesture towards the money lying on the table.
‘Nothing. Nothing,’ Mattachich repeated. ‘Nothing but insults.’
Coming forward into the room, she said calmly to Fuchs, ‘You must forgive the count. We’re going through a difficult time.’
‘Madam,’ Fuchs said, struggling to speak calmly too, though his voice shook, ‘let me warn you. This…friend of yours is leading you into great trouble. What he’s told me –’
He got no further. Mattachich jumped from his chair and made a rush at him. He grabbed at his neck with one hand and at the portmanteau with the other. Fuchs tried to parry him but was sent sprawling to the floor. Mattachich held the portmanteau up in the air, like a trophy. Or a weapon he was about to smash down on his opponent’s head.
‘Bastard! Blackmailer!’ he said. ‘I know your game.’ Then he simply flung the bag at the man, who lay panting on the floor. It struck him on the shoulder. ‘Get out!’
Louise had given a cry when the struggle began; now, silent, pale, looking nowhere, she sat down at the table. Mattachich stood back. Breathing heavily, he covered his face with weary hands. Fuchs remained on the floor, his shoulders moving with every breath. Eventually, in silence, he scrambled to his feet and looked down at the portmanteau, as if not knowing what to do with it. Before stooping to pick it up he glanced apprehensively at Mattachich, afraid he might attack him again, even kick him on the backside. But Mattachich stood where he was, his hands now fallen to his sides. Fuchs put the portmanteau under his arm and left the room without another word. His homburg, which Mattachich had envied and despised, remained on one of the chairs.
The fortnight before Fuchs’s return from London had been a bad period for the couple, even within the general rout. Ozegovich had returned from Vienna with less cash than they had expected (though he had done better with the goods entrusted to him than Fuchs). Creditors they barely remembered continued to appear from unexpected quarters. They had failed in their attempt to raise money by means of the simple ruse of pawning locally the heavyweight agglomeration of silverware hired from the owner of the villa. Throughout, gnawing privately at Mattachich, as an additionally painful part of his larger secret, was the conviction that he had made a stupid error in sharing his secret with Fuchs. Just minutes after he had spoken, minutes after they had parted on the seafront, it had been plain to him. Why had he done it, for God’s sake? What good could come of it? How much harm?
Hence the contraction of hope, the sense of utter desertion, he had felt when Fuchs told him what his trip to London had netted. How familiar the conviction of failure and folly, the self-sickness, that seized him then. There it was again: just as it had been in childhood, always waiting within him for its opportunity to strike him down. At such moments everything essential to his well-being died instantly. He was done for, judged, charred.
This particular ‘moment’ lasted longer than usual. Depleted, useless, he left it to Louise to do the best she could over the next few weeks. She dealt with the remaining servants, read the letters that came in from angry creditors or their lawyers and responded to them with promises, evasions and lies, denied entrance to those who turned up at the gates of the villa (now kept permanently locked) and speculated about possible sources of help she might yet turn to. All Mattachich could think of was that she should go to London and seek assistance from Queen Victoria, her distant cousin by both blood and marriage; but this sounded so implausible to Louise she dismissed it out of hand. Instead, hoping to gain time and to spread confusion among her creditors, she went in for a little creative forgery of her own by sending a cable – ostensibly from a ‘Count Bechtolsheim’ in the Austrian-Hungarian embassy in Paris – to the press agency Agence Havas, declaring that Philipp’s formal repudiation of his wife’s debts had been issued in error, and that the agency’s outlets should print a withdrawal of it.* She had no idea how tempted her lover was, when he heard of this relatively trivial forgery, to tell her about his own. But he simply could not do it.
Slowly Mattachich began to recover his will and energy. The example she had just set encouraged him to compose two further communications that used no pseudonyms or forged signatures but were fraudulent nevertheless. The first was a letter, signed by Louise, which was addressed to King Leopold but never posted to him, since it was drafted solely for Barber to show to the dreaded Spitzer and Reicher, in the hope of calming them down.† The second was a telegram sent by Louise to Stephanie that read, mystifyingly, ‘If you love me, say nothing before you receive my letter. Everything will be made clear in it. However things may appear, I am innocent; the fault is Philipp’s. It will be greatly to my advantage if you say “Yes”. Wait for my letter, Louise.’*
Not surprisingly, both these miserable initiatives misfired. The immediate effect of Louise’s letter supposedly addressed to her father was to frighten Barber into laying down his mandate as Louise’s legal representative in Vienna. Feeling himself being drawn more and more dangerously into a web of deceits, he decided to disentangle himself from the whole affair – and to let ‘the other side’ (i.e., Philipp) know that he had done so, and why. As for the telegram sent to Stephanie, it simply never reached her, for a few days before its dispatch she had been admitted to hospital with a life-threatening case of pneumonia. So the incomprehensible message from Louise went to her chamberlain, Graf Choloniewski, a man as ponderous as his name, who took it straight to Philipp.
All that was damaging enough to the couple’s attempt to escape the circle being drawn around them; worse still were the two letters Philipp received from the infuriated Fuchs. If Mattachich were to come to Vienna, Fuchs wrote, Philipp should take steps to have him arrested immediately. ‘This starveling who tries to pass himself off as a grand lord,’ Fuchs wrote, ‘is nothing more than a fraudster and a scoundrel.’ His next letter, which arrived on the following day, was even more dramatic in tone: ‘Things are looking darker than ever! The princess has bought on credit jewellery from a Monte Carlo firm…and sent a certain Ozegovich to Vienna to pawn them so that she’ll have cash in hand for her flight…The moneylenders want to take her to court for perjury and theft…The whole business has been cooked up by Mattachich.’†
Ten days later a meeting took place in the ‘portrait room’ of the Coburg palace. It was attended by Prince Philipp, Spitzer, Reicher, Philipp’s aide Gablenz, Graf Choloniewski and the indispensable Dr Bachrach. Under the cracked, dusty eyeballs of a score of bearded, high-booted, gold-braided, bemedalled, besashed and bestarred eighteenth-century Coburg males, most of them intermittently lit up by sunshine coming in through tall windows, the promissory notes purportedly signed by both Louise and Stephanie were produced for inspection. Choloniewski took one look at them and declared Stephanie’s ‘signatures’ to be fakes. He explained that she would never have signed any formal document of any kind as ‘Crown Princess Stephanie, Archduchess of Austria’. Her official title was ‘Crown Princess-Widow [Kronprinzessin-Witwe] Stephanie’, and except in letters to the closest members of her family that was how she invariably wrote her name.*