The House at Tyneford Read Online Free PDF Page A

I saw all those parties flickering before me, and an endless train of people walking past me, like a circular frieze going around and around the room, never stopping. They chattered loudly, faces pink with alcohol, all obeying Anna’s dictate of gaiety.
    My family was not religious in the slightest. When we were children, Anna wanted Margot and me to understand a little of our heritage and at bedtime told us stories from the Torah alongside tales of “Peter and the Wolf” and “Mozart and Constanze.” In Anna’s hands, Eve was imbued with the glamour of Greta Garbo, and we pictured her lounging in the Garden of Eden, a snake draped tantalisingly around her neck, a besotted Adam (played by Clark Gable) kneeling at her feet. The Bible stories had the wild and unlikely plots of operas, and Margot and I devoured them with enthusiasm, mingling the genres seamlessly in our imaginations. Eve tempted Adam with Carmen’s arias and the voice of God sounded very much like the Barber of Seville. If anyone had asked Anna to choose between God and music there would have been no contest, and I suspected that Julian was an atheist. We never went to the handsome brick synagogue on Leopoldstadt; we ate schnitzel in nonkosher restaurants, celebrated Christmas rather than Chanukah and were proud to be among the new class of bourgeois Austrians. We were Viennese Jews but, up till now, the Viennese part always came first. Even this year, when Anna decided we would celebrate Passover, it had to be a party with Margot in her wedding sapphires and me wearing Anna’s pearls.
    The long dining table was covered with a white monogrammed cloth, the plates were gold-edged Meissen and Hildegard had polished the remaining family silver to a gleam. Candles flickered on every surface, a black rose and narcissus posy (rose for love, black for sorrow and narcissus for hope) rested on each lady’s side plate and a silver yarmulke lay on each gentleman’s. Anna insisted that the large electric lamp be left off and candles provide the only light. I knew that it was only partly for the atmosphere of enchantment that candle glow casts, and more practically to hide the gaps on the dining room walls where the good paintings used to hang. The family portraits remained: the one of me aged eleven in my flimsy muslin dress, hair close-cropped, and the images of the sour-faced, thin-lipped great-grandparents with their lace caps, as well as Great-great-aunt Sophie oddly pictured among green fields and a wide blue sky—Sophie had been agoraphobic, infamously refusing to leave her rancid apartment for forty years, but the portrait lied, recasting her as some sort of nature-loving cloud spotter. My favourite was the painting of Anna as Verdi’s Violetta in the moments before her death, barefoot and clad in a translucent nightgown (which had fascinated and outraged the critics in equal measure), her eyes beseeching you wherever you went. I used to hide beneath the dining room table to escape her gaze, but when I emerged after an hour or more, she was always waiting, reproaching me. The other paintings had gone, but they left reminders—the sun-bleached wallpaper marked with rectangular stains. I shrugged—it shouldn’t matter now whether the paintings were here, since I would not see them. But when leaving home one always likes to think of it as it ought to be, and as it was before, perfect and unchanging. Now when I think of our apartment, I restore each picture to its proper place: Violetta opposite the painting of breakfast on the balcony (purchased by Julian as a present for Anna on their honeymoon). I have to remind myself that the pictures had vanished before that last night, and then, with a blink, the walls are empty once again.
    The chairs scraped on the parquet floor as the men helped the ladies into their places, gowns catching on chair legs and under feet, so that the hum of chatter rippled with apologies. We all peered around the table with interest,