The Longest Winter by Mary Jane Staples Read Free Book Online

creamily.
    ‘Some like who fat?’
    ‘Oh, go on.’ She giggled, then waved to a young man drinking coffee at another table. He blew her a kiss. ‘That’s Frederic,’ she said.
    ‘Notorious or otherwise?’
    ‘He hires out cabs,’ said Kirsti, licking a finger, ‘he says he’ll be rich one day. One day. But what good will it do him? He’ll only put it in the bank and call on Fridays to count it. Do you know, when he kisses a girl I think he’s still counting schillings.’
    ‘A very good way,’ said James, ‘of mixing pleasure with business.’
    ‘It’s not flattering,’ she said, all buttoned up in pillar-box red, ‘being kissed by a man who’s thinking of money.’
    ‘Well, we can’t all afford to forget about it,’ said James, lankily draped in a suit of light grey, ‘and aren’t there the loveliest young things who don’t think about anything else?’
    ‘They’re thinking about your money,’ said Kirsti, ‘which is not at all the same as thinking about their own. Come on, it’s time to go and meet Rosa and Boris.’
    ‘Rosa and Boris? They sound familiar,’ said James.
    ‘But of course,’ said Kirsti, rising and brushing herself down, ‘Rosa works for the Corbière family. Marie Corbière, she attends the school. Boris is Rosa’s young man. He is very earnest.’
    ‘Is he, by God,’ said James, remembering the young man in the bohemian hat.
    They met up in a dance hall popular with the young people. The atmosphere was informal, and the orchestra played the music of Lehar, Lanner, the Strausses and others for whom there were no substitutes as far as the Viennese were concerned.
    They shared a table and James ordered champagne, which delighted Kirsti and broke the ice with Rosa and Boris. Rosa was from Galicia, her plump curves accentuated by a small waist. Boris Ferenac was a Bosnian, a dark Slav who smiled as if amusement was a secretive business. A violinist, he thought little of those in this orchestra. It was one thing to tuck a violinunder your chin, he said, it was another thing altogether to clasp it to your soul. Only Slavs could do that.
    He smiled as he made the observation. Secretively.
    Rosa gossiped with Kirsti. Both in service, they were addicted to topical titbits concerning their employers and the employers of others. Rosa said her own employers were returning to France soon and had asked her to go with them.
    ‘But, of course, I’m not sure if Boris would like that,’ she said and looked at Ferenac. He smiled again but said nothing. ‘You’d not care for me to go, would you?’
    ‘We both have our destinies,’ he said, ‘and who can say whether they will intertwine or diverge?’
    Pretentious ass, thought James. He danced with Kirsti. Ferenac remained at the table with Rosa. He could not, he said, dance to an orchestra as inferior as this. Everyone else managed it and the dance floor was a whirl of couples all evening. James took Rosa round a couple of times. He found her dull.
    Towards the end of the evening the orchestra played ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’. It sent the patrons into raptures. And when it finished with the Emperor Waltz ecstatic revellers rose to their feet to sing and to drink the health of Franz Josef and the Habsburgs.
    Ferenac, his meaningless smile now beginning to irritate James, lifted his glass, looked at Rosa and said, ‘Health!’
    ‘Health,’ said Rosa.
    ‘The dear old emperor,’ cried Kirsti.
    ‘And the good archdukes,’ smiled Ferenac, looking into his glass.
    The good? Strange, thought James, and wondered if Ferenac’s smile was so meaningless, after all. The good? What was it Marie had written?
    A good archduke is a dead one
.
    In between goodnight kisses which, probably because of the champagne, she turned into a more prolonged bombardment than usual, Kirsti said, ‘It was very nice tonight. Did you like Rosa? She asked me why you weren’t married.’
    ‘If she asks again,’ said James, ‘you can tell her that