[71] Time as the crushing new dimension

When I tell him that Charlotte has found me, he smiles: ‘Good old Charlotte …’ How do we learn to love? By now I know how he did. We’re not jealous of each other about anything (he won’t touch another woman – I know because I’m always watching how he looks at the other ones). Except for that one moment in the loft, he hasn’t told me anything about himself, as if the past is a shadow he escaped too dark to signify. It’s obvious by now that in bed and everywhere else, but mostly in bed, he’s been forever what he is to me now. He doesn’t care what I know about him or what I hear as long he gets to straighten the distortions as they come our way. He trusts me to understand him as much as I have to.

The little palace – he pointed it out to me that first summer, though he didn’t knock, knowing she was across the river for the season. Well, it’s little compared to the Mighty one around the corner. You know the kind – on a lane, not a street, in the more hiddenmost depths of the Inner World, built just after the Turks were turned back. Alleys and blocks encircle it where its gardens used to be. I walk through a gated archway into a courtyard and up twelve steps that have just been swept of snow, and when I step on the eleventh, a stone-faced footman opens the door, and in the centre of the main hall, Charlotte is waiting for me in jewelled silk slippers and loose silk pantaloons tied with ribbons at the ankles and waist and a long, mismatched silk jacket. An outfit like that, nothing is supposed to match, which chalks one point for her. She’s pinned her hair into a loose chignon and gashed her narrow mouth with crimson lipstick and her eyes flame at the sight of me the way I’ve already sensed they always will.

‘Five minutes late, how fashionable.’ And she steps forward and kisses me on both cheeks, smelling of musk oil, catchlights glittering. ‘Did you tell Paul you were coming?’

‘I told you I’d tell him.’ If she’s anything like him, I have nothing to fear here, but I don’t know that yet, which is the most hideous place in the world, when you’re my head.

‘A tour?’ she asks. ‘A cup of tea? Or are you already hungry? I bet you are. Well, come, Emma.’

‘A cup of tea.’

‘I’ll send for it … Marianna, prepare the tent room. Ha.’ She grins at her maid, the little dark-haired one from the hunting lodge, in the same grey cotton smock. While she listens to Charlotte’s order for pastries from the Diplomat, she’s glaring at me from head to foot.

‘Come come come, you. Look at all this,’ she says while she leads me from the great hall into the ballroom behind it. Through the next pair of doors is a formal dining room permanently set for fifty. We blink at the monstrous silver and stare at the white linen for what’s yet to be written on it. Ancestral giants frown down on us while they march down trick-of-the-eye walls, the line of chandeliers like a shark’s upper jaw threatens to chomp. ‘So crowded with stuff …,’ she says. ‘Freddie’s grandpapa’s tastes, this storey. Bought by the cartload, back when. My own kit’s upstairs. Sometimes I wish I could chuck it all, but then I’d only have to buy more. I’m not greedy for these things, anyway. When luck is something you were born to, it’s easy to forget you have it. Wealth, power, riches, knowledge, they don’t make me come any harder but the bed’s softer when I’ve been finished with. If there’s a heaven, it can only be a really big endless orgasm, you know the kind? I’m sure. That’s all I can imagine it being.’

She walks me through the formal parlour beyond the dining room. These walls are covered with landscapes, but vaguely empty except for that. Most of the furniture is Spanish mahogany, half-circling a marble hearth big enough to pen an ox. Above us, two other maids in the same blue smocks are at the top of a ladder lighting a chandelier.

‘A Ninth Quarter princess, aren’t you? So you know all about grand apartments, but you won’t have been in a palace where people actually live. Not that I’m here much. And here, the conservatory. This is where Freddie starts to disappear.’ She leads me through two glass doors, then down an arched-glass passage to the greenhouse, which is warm with the smell of newly damp earth. Giant ferns climb the glass to the singing dome, while below, fruit trees reach out for us.

‘My favourite place,’ she says. ‘Here I tell myself I can hide if I ever have to. I’m always playing the lady out there.’ She points toward the doors. On a small glass-topped table under the dome, which is leaking sunlight through an arch of palm fronds, is a half-empty bottle of red and a crimson-stained glass. ‘There was nothing here until I planted all of this five years ago. I’ll have a crop of pomegranates in another month or two, and the oranges are going to come next year. I spoke too quickly just then, Emma – I do love playing the lady. In fact, there’s nothing else I’d rather do. It’s when I stop and their eyes go pop that I’m so glad I know how to pretend in front of Freddie’s crowd. The moment they realize I’m not, you should see their faces. Almost as grim as his face.’ She yanks a kumquat from a tall bush and rolls it in her palms. ‘Still too firm,’ she says. ‘Too bad. Down to the River Market tomorrow morning for some Turkish ones. That’s one of my favourite things, when I’m at home in town – disguising myself first thing and sneaking out to the market with the working mob.

‘The Mighty Palace is three hundred metres that way, in case you’re lost. Women have no sense of direction. Freddie has a bigger place in Buda, he can stay there all he likes. Really, we only see each other at the hunting lodges, the one you saw or the one in Örmüllö. You need to remember: I loathe him, yeeecch. I can’t bear the sight of him, the thought of a simpering peanut-hung thug like him touching me anywhere is enough to make me shudder out of my skin. But it’s mutual, you know? So it works out.’

We continue our march. ‘It’s always better to know how cruel people can be. He hasn’t taken you to L.–––, has he. Up on the Galician border? That’s where he and I grew up. Uncle could have lived on a hill over the town, in the clean air, forest surrounding, Tatra panoramic and so on. But no – there were steel foundries for two kilometres in every direction, and this sooty stone mansion right in the middle of all them. The smoke, I tell you … I still dream about the stench of liquid steel. Come, my real parlour’s upstairs. This storey is for everyone else.’

She lets me walk ahead of her up a loosely spiralled staircase and along a skylit corridor. When we reach the end, a maid is placing a dinner service on a table in a circular room lined with folds of blue silk. On the side board, steaming, are terrines, salvers, folded napkins, heavy silver. On a long shelf behind what is obviously her chair is a row of eleven crystal chalices in steel bases, matches to the one that Paul has always carried with him, the one he used to pour three fingers of brandy into each night until he let me start pouring it for him.

‘This is better,’ I tell her.

‘Thought so,’ she says. ‘I really can’t endure … Maybe the gods can live downstairs, like that, but I can’t for long. When I’m alone downstairs I can almost hear them berating me. I can’t bear being judged. That was Paul’s original sin, do you know? Talking back at the voices downstairs. That’s what the affair of the horse was about. No, he refused to listen, he just wouldn’t bargain the way I could because they’re afraid of powerful women. Get used to it, beanpole. I’m saying worry about that, for his sake. Got away once, he did, and they’re going to remember to look him up again some day. Gustav, when I talked to him about doing my portrait, told me that without a pencil in his hand Paul would be exactly what he least wanted to be. His work is what saved him from what this would have done to him.

‘You don’t keep kosher, of course not, do you. Ninth Quarter, that’s for the Jews who remember to act like they’ve forgotten. Not that I care, but if you spend any time within hearing of Freddie’s gang, the way they go on … A gang of poisonous fools, really, Emma. You should be afraid of people like them. Listen, you have to understand. I love my brother very much, even if I don’t see him much. Don’t ever forget it, even when you can’t see it. So I’m going to be nice to him by being nice to you, the lucky guy, since he won’t let me be generous to him any other way. I’ve always been nice to all of Paul’s women friends, until he throws them to me.’ She stares at me, smiles with half her mouth. ‘So, I’ve warned you, who knows why. You’re the one, imagine that. So tough it up, girl – nobody’s going to bite you here without you wanting it. You’re not the shy type or Paul wouldn’t have you. The things I won’t sacrifice for him, I tell you.’ She smiles with the other half. ‘Ha. You’re not a girl any more. Paul makes sure of things like that.’

She pours me a cup of tea, offers me a lemon slice with silver tongs. I take a tiny spoon and scoop from the silver bowl, but before I can dunk it in my tea, she grabs my hand. She raises the sugar to my nose.

‘That’s the wrong way,’ she says. ‘Sniff that, little one. Once, hard. Now the other one.’

‘Oh my …’

‘How’s that for a trick?’ she says. ‘That’s the sugar.’ She points to a matching bowl. The whiteness glitters like Arctic sand, the silver glows until I blink. Oh my, now I see her joke. Everything is suddenly clearer and more full of itself, and her next words make me shiver with their profundity.

‘Fish soup today,’ she says. ‘Then sirloin tip. That’s the purest you can get, by the way, if you haven’t used it before this. There’s a laboratory outside Paris.’ She orders the maid to go away and serves me the soup herself, a fish broth laced with red pepper.

She sighs to herself, and smiles without laughing.

‘It’s perch,’ she says. ‘The pike wasn’t fresh enough. I like dressing down and walking through the River Market. My secret life, one of them. Some mornings when Freddie’s not here I do that. If you’re not born into the thousand, you get tired of all the pride about nothing … The Karsches, they were always commoners. Daddy and Uncle were both offered titles, turned them down. What a scandal that was. They truly didn’t care. I almost forgot. But for me? Uncle said he’d leave me everything if I married up to the … well …’

She reaches for the side table and decants a glass of red for me. It pours like syrup and glows like a blood moon, and the first sip expands through my body in a warm silent torrent.

‘Élite Tokay,’ she says, ‘from Freddie’s estate. There’s something he’s good for. My fencing master is coming this evening, so no more for me till afterwards.’ She begins to serve the second course from pewter chafing dishes. ‘Look at all this. Ha. Sirloin, grated potato cakes, beets, walnut salad. Too much is always better, if you remember to burn it off. So,’ and she sighs brightly and gives me a leaned-forward stare with her fingers laced in her lap, ‘Sex with Paul – what’s it like?’