Sophie and the Sibyl Read online

  Behold the onset of modernity! The Sibyl witnessed the inventions of Alexander Bell and saw the last years of gas light before the advent of electricity. And one thing supported her magnificent advance into the world of celebrity and the ranks of those writers who gained great wealth through their intelligence and genius. An increasing mass within the population could now read. No mysteries here. The Education Acts of the 1870s began with the creation of ‘school boards’ to construct and manage schools where they were needed, to build upon the work of philanthropic charities, religious foundations and working-men’s associations. The 1876 Royal Commission on the Factory Acts recommended that education be made compulsory in order to stop child labour. And the 1880 Education Act did exactly that. Thou shalt attend school between the ages of five and ten. But of course the reforms took time to enforce. Most children worked outside school hours and their families could not live without that income. Revolution follows literacy with giant strides; if the people can read then they must be carefully influenced by the right opinions. They must also be brainwashed into making extensive purchases. The front and back pages of the newspapers were given over to advertisements for hoses, corsets, dental fixtures and tennis lessons. Look at the first printed versions of Middlemarch. The frontispiece and back flaps were surrounded with adverts for the very tonics, purges, vitamin tablets and chest expanders against which Lydgate inveighed with such fruitless zeal.

  And here comes the age of cheap editions: pocket editions, abridged editions, one-guinea editions, with illustrations, and magnificent collected editions in embossed covers. Buy the lot for a knockdown price. Cheap wood-pulp paper and one-penny-a-week subscription libraries nourished a universal desire for self-improvement. Reading is good for the bowels and enlarges the soul. The self-help message proved unbeatable.

  But what of the young Countess, Sophie von Hahn, whose vivid sexual energy enticed Max into a sequence of sentimental fantasies, which went no further than undoing her plaits and allowing his fingertips to brush her flushed and angry cheeks, as he rocked home in his brother’s carriage? Sophie von Hahn was born in the Year of Our Lord 1854, the same year in which the self-styled Mr. and Mrs. G.H. Lewes first visited Frankfurt, Weimar and Berlin. Lewes achieved fame in Germany as the biographer of Goethe. He interviewed many friends and acquaintances of the Great Man. The Sibyl aided his researches. She had yet to write a word of fiction. The couple arrived in Berlin in November 1854, delighted with the city, when Sophie was barely a month old. Her father, driving home at speed, anxious to see his beloved wife and tiny daughter, actually passed before their very door, where they were reading The Merchant of Venice aloud to one another. Lewes took the part of Shylock, which, given his love of theatre, he performed with resonating gusto and exaggerated affectation.

  Sophie and the Sibyl belonged to two very different generations of Victorian women. Thirty-five unbridgeable years lay between them. They were born in different countries, grew up in different social classes, and learned to think in different languages. The Sibyl earned her wealth; Sophie inherited cash and lands in plenty. The Sibyl taught herself languages and philosophy; Sophie studied at home, surrounded by tutors of every nation. One woman assumed her right to wealth and privilege, the other clawed her way back into Victorian respectability by denying her fictional women the satisfied ambitions and desires that she claimed for herself. Cautious, conservative, of uncertain health and confidence, the Sibyl peddled a sententious wisdom that proved utterly seductive. Her novels sold and sold and sold and sold.

  And Countess Sophie von Hahn, bewitched by the writer’s omniscient authority, lost in adulation and illusions, continued to be one of her most enthusiastic readers.

  END OF CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  in which Our Hero strives to redeem himself.

  Wolfgang Duncker lurched to and fro between his desk and his father’s towering bookshelves, fuming with wrath against his younger brother. The rage achieved parental dimensions. Too many piled books and boxes of manuscript cluttered the floor to allow the infuriated publisher an unencumbered free passage round his office. But his fury required movement. And so he blundered between the curved oak steps, which enabled him to reach the upper levels of the shelves, and the fireplace, which contained nothing but a few charred sticks. He kicked the coal scuttle, sending a little puff of black dust into the air. Max, cowering on the low chair in the corner, tucked his boots beneath him, and attempted to remain invisible.

  ‘You live off this firm, Max. And I think you might try to contribute something useful rather than bringing us all to ruin.’

  Wolfgang thumped the desk.

  ‘Think of everything our father put into this house. All his time, all his savings. I don’t think he ever set foot in Hettie’s Keller. In fact I’m quite sure he didn’t.’

  Max agreed. His father didn’t need to do so. He kept a mistress in some style, even purchased a new apartment in Leipzig for her. Rumour had it that she was still alive, furnished with an adequate pension, that she paid visits to and received them from respectable ladies of means, and worshipped her benefactor’s portrait in the evenings. But Wolfgang had now reached his climax of righteousness.

  ‘Where do you think I am going to dig up the ready cash to pay off these debts? The end of the rainbow? The terms you agreed with Graf von Hahn are far too generous. This is the third edition, Max. The third! Everybody who wanted to do so has already read it. It will sell, but slowly, and we have to cover our costs.’

  Wolfgang began rubbing his tonsure and swallowing hard. The office closed in around him, small, hot, stifling. And the clerk, lying low in the first room off the entrance hall, which also served as a warehouse, was listening hard to every thundered denunciation of the spendthrift brother. Wolfgang thought about his original reasons for sending Max out to the Jagdschloss and the charming letter he had received from the old Countess, urging him to visit them all again very soon, and be sure to bring Max. Sophie will be delighted to see him. All going well in that quarter, at least. He glared at Max, and then lowered his head like a belligerent bull. Max saw the tonsure approaching at speed.

  ‘And when you marry? Even if she does come with a handsome settlement? What are you going to do?’ Wolfgang’s hot breath billowed against his cheek. ‘Get through it all at the card tables and let your wife live in the street?’

  Max shrank deeper into his chair. Gambling, he assumed, flourished as a pleasure among bachelors and military men, one of the many delectable things he must forgo, when he entered that realm of enchantment, which surrounded the vivid, shimmering person of the young Countess, Sophie von Hahn. The loss of the card tables would be a small price to pay for the treasures gained. The brothers gazed at one another. That profligate sum for the continuing rights and expanded edition of Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse: Lebensweg eines Liberalen might well prove to be a prudent financial investment. And they both knew it. Wolfgang shrugged, bit his lip and prowled back and forth.

  The promissory note for Max’s gambling debts had fallen due and must be honoured. They had not yet settled terms with Mrs. Lewes and that canny, grasping not-quite-husband of hers. He managed her like a racehorse, well groomed and stabled and only brought out for races where the first prize was above one thousand guineas. Middlemarch had been sold for something like that sum to Osgood, Ticknor and Co. in America, who originally intended to bring out the novel in weekly instalments in a paper called Every Saturday – handsomely illustrated. But his spies informed him that the copyright must have been sold on, for the Great Work was even now appearing in Harper’s Weekly. Lewes, impervious to irony, published the bimonthly English version surrounded by advertisements for cordials, tinctures and surgical corsets. He actually sold space to cures for every disease of the eye by Ede’s patent American Eye Liquid! Hedging his bets, that crafty little ape of a man! The Sibyl loomed before Wolfgang, a great Atlantic ship, her funnels gusting steam, while Lewes leaped around the engine room, shovellin
g coal and pumping the bellows. What on earth could he offer for the Continental reprint? Before Tauchnitz sprang in ahead of him?

  He inspected his brother through narrowed eyes. Max was folding and refolding his gloves. Max. Once more the Sibyl had asked for Max. He had a secret weapon tucked away in his office, which he wasn’t yet using to his best advantage. The Sibyl manifested many little weaknesses, and one of them, which seemed bizarre to Wolfgang, who calculated her sales figures on a regular basis, was her craving for admiration and praise. She needed a young man, a handsome young man, attentive at her elbow, holding her shawl, and confirming her charismatic magnetism with every devoted glance. But could Max be trusted? Wolfgang glowered at the warm red rug and a hole bored by an escaped coal. Max must be sent on a mission and made to realise that this was his chance, his one chance, to redeem himself.

  ‘All right,’ snapped Wolfgang, ‘I’ll write you a cheque and you can pay your debts. But you’ll have to earn the money. You’re going to Homburg, either tonight or on the morning train. The Leweses are already there, drinking the waters and wallowing in the baths. They’ve rented the first floor at Obere Promenade 14. Here’s the address. I heard from her today. They’re besieged by the English, but you can deal with the adoring crowds. Her new work is all but finished, and we must have it, both the Continental reprint and the translation rights. I’ll give you a margin and an upper limit. Never negotiate with Lewes if she’s not there. He’ll hound you into a corner. If he pushes you up, withdraw; say you need to speak to me. You can’t shake hands on any deal without my consent. Is that clear? On the other hand we must secure the rights. She wants to come back to us. Loyalty means something to her; she has a sentimental streak. But he doesn’t. And he’s the business brain. He’ll talk her up. Remember, they’re rich now. And everybody wants to know them.’

  Wolfgang fingered his first editions of her works, which were all still conspicuously displayed on green velvet, in anticipation of her last visit.

  ‘And Max –’

  His brother had risen to go, disguising the guilty sweat on his palms. He stiffened, expecting another onslaught.

  ‘If I find out that you have so much as touched a card or rested an elbow on the black and red squares in the Kursaal I shall halve your allowance, confine you to the country house, whatever the weather, and write to the Countess von Hahn giving her the honest reasons for my decisions. Is that clear?’

  Max went white. The twelve years between the brothers suddenly expanded into thirty, and he faced the balding patriarch his father had once been, stuttering explanations as to what he had done with the eggs. In the Duncker household there was a daily accounting. And it did not do to be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

  When Max arrived in the not quite fashionable portion of the street where the Leweses had taken lodgings the couple were not at home. The housekeeper explained that they walked every afternoon in the parks and woods. She then added that the sure signs of their homecoming, clods of mud and leaves, littered her staircase every day. The town streets appeared quite dry, even the horse shit crumbled in the gutters, leaving the crossing sweepers with very little work to do. But the Leweses avoided the crowded promenade, headed off past the bandstand and plucked their way through brambles and woodland to the river. They even visited the outlying villages and returned bearing sprigs of late-flowering briar roses, all thorns and no scent, with which they decorated their rooms above. Max and the ruddy housekeeper inspected her freshly swept wooden staircase like a pair of private detectives, and concluded that Mr. and Mrs. Lewes were still at large. Max wrote his hotel address, the Grand Continental, exceedingly fashionable and littered with English tourists, on the back of his card and placed it carefully in the pottery bowl on a dresser in the hallway. He flicked through the other cards left by Lady Castletown, Mrs. Wingfield, and a folded message from a painter called Hans Meyrick. Could it be the same man he had met in the Neues Museum in Berlin, picked out by Wolfgang as a possible illustrator? He had discovered Meyrick carefully reproducing the statues of classical antiquity in a giant sketchbook; a jolly good fellow, according to his friends, often to be found in Hettie’s Keller, and up for a laugh. Max unfolded the note and attempted to decipher the script, but gave up when the housekeeper peered suspiciously over his shoulder.

  ‘Tell Mr. and Mrs. Lewes that I will call again tomorrow.’ He strolled away down the steps and mingled with the passing crowds.

  September turned out to be a popular month for the English in Homburg. The Casino overflowed in the warm nights; the throng in the Assembly Rooms crowded the dancers. Max paused in a quiet square before the Synagogue and watched the men and women separating at the entrance. He determined to resist the Kursaal and its gaming tables, for Wolfgang never delivered empty threats, but he now found himself at a loss, not hungry enough for supper and very bored. The hotel dining room gaped like an abyss, packed with vague acquaintances whose names he could not accurately remember, and aged military types, armed with manuscript memoirs, anxious to be as successfully published and as extensively discussed in the press as the now notorious Count von Hahn. Duncker und Duncker dealt in the very latest celebrities. Max decided that he had pandered long enough to the rich and famous.

  He consulted his small guide to the spa, borrowed from his brother. The rudimentary map only showed the main sights: Thermal Baths, Konditorei, Gymnasium, Kursaal, Lawn Tennis, Theatre, Assembly Rooms, Royal Schloss with Gardens and Fountains, Churches (various), Synagogue, Concert Hall, Grand Continental Hotel, Pension (various), Parks, Open-air Bandstand, Freilichtbühne, Belvedere. He passed the street sellers hawking flowers, apples, plums in sugar, and the very first brazier, roasting nuts, that he had seen that autumn, all gathered round the market entrance. Even the smaller hotels bulged with visitors. He heard children playing on the swings, beyond the high brick wall of Frau Heide’s Very Superior Pension. Should I go this way? Or this way? He halted at a crossroads and watched an empty cart lurching slowly over the cobbles and onward beneath the yellowing trees.

  Dusk had settled on the little town as Max coasted carefully into the darker eddies, where carriages passed infrequently and gentlemen walking alone were honoured and anticipated. Even in the rural suburbs, remote from the main baths, the streets gleamed clean, the dust damped down and recently swept. Max began to doubt his informant’s directions. He lit a match and consulted a handwritten address: Königgasse 8. Be assured of a royal welcome! Yes, here it is – the knocker on the door is a snarling lion, beautifully polished, and shining in the gloaming. Courage, comrades, joy awaits us! Max felt an erection rising against the buttons of his slightly-too-tight trousers.

  The opening door revealed a huge expectant smile, and the warm smell of a female body, recently perfumed, gusted into his face. She barricaded the doorway, large, big-breasted, her teeth even and clean. Her arse blotted out the light. He brushed against her as he entered.

  ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.’ Max set the tone and bowed low.

  She giggled.

  ‘Come in, sir, come in.’

  The first rendezvous of the evening, but the fizzing Sekt was a little too warm and the rooms, in heavy patterned red silk, close and airless. The Hausmutter accepted his cluster of coins with a cordial nod and waddled away into her private chamber to count them. The overflowing bosom that had welcomed him into the bower of bliss oozed against his shoulder. She smelt of musk.

  ‘My sister would like to dance for you. Shall I call her in?’

  I’ll have to pay off the dancer too, Max calculated, wondering what he would say if Wolfgang forced him to account for every last thaler.

  ‘Perhaps we could get to know each other better first?’ he suggested, chivalric even in a situation where the imminent transaction was utterly clear, the price already named and paid.

  But the maiden presented little information beyond the fact that she had grown up in the country, loved her mother’s farm and sent money home every week. Her mother bel
ieved that she was still in service at one of the big houses in Homburg; unfortunately she was obliged to quit her favourable situation, when her figure, seen to advantage while she was bending over a grate, attracted her master’s unwelcome attentions. She explained the regrettable incident with great good cheer, from which Max deduced that she earned more as a prostitute than she had done as a housemaid, and had better working conditions.

  The lady looked anxiously at the clock under its glass dome on the dresser and Max suspected that the second engagement might even now be approaching. The tariff rose alarmingly after the first hour. He gulped down his draught of warm bubbles and followed her into a dark closet. The bed was covered in russet shawls, the blinds drawn, the shutters closed. The air felt thrice breathed. He stumbled over a row of little boots. The girl’s white thighs gleamed in the obscurity as she raised her skirts. Max gently lowered them again, patting her cheek. He decided not to take the risk of venturing into unknown canyons and gorges, only to find that many nations had already planted their flags. Instead, he settled himself on her mattress and deliberately undid the buttons of his trousers. She tucked her breasts between his thighs as she knelt before him. The bed shuddered a little as she began to suck and push, kneading his stomach like a hungry cat. But they lurched off together, rocking in rhythm, a brave little ship leaving harbour and catching the first wind.