The Voyage Read Online Free PDF Page B

you to be nice. Thank you. If you don’t mind, stop now. I prefer here to the Sacher, I do not know why. I seem to have grown up in the Sacher. We become hostages to habit—who was it said that? There is another place I could have taken you to. They specialize in chocolates. You know nothing about Vienna, I keep forgetting.” Once again people at various tables recognized her, Amalia Marie von Schalla, and gave little waves. The simultaneous eye, finger and silent mouth movements are deployed by women in public to bridge a gap, while actually keeping the person at a distance, a function of some importance, apparently, for it has not been diminished at all by natural selection, if anything it has been strengthened. It surprised Frank Delage to see how it was followed by comments only partly disguised by the backs of hands, or out of the corners of mouths twisted by lipstick. Gradually, Amalia von Schalla began listening again, aware that the artists and composers, no doubt the inventors as well, rarely came from her aristocracy, but were thrown up by the restless, ever-hopeful middle classes, and deserved respect of some sort; he began looking at Elisabeth openly, following her contented movements as the ship went forward, it pushed ahead at a constant speed, the resistance, she could feel, strolling about in his cabin, casual, chatting away, naked. From an overnightposition of losing interest in Frank Delage, beginning with his insistent physical presence (a practical eye-shifting alertness, sometimes it made him appear canny, although she didn’t believe he was), along with the repeated specifications and superiority of his new piano—he’d invented and built with his own two hands—“necessary breakthrough” not piano, he preferred, which of course had no hope of making an impression in Vienna, the most musical of cities, not in a thousand years, “necessary breakthrough” or not, Amalia von Schalla could see, now passing her hands back and forth from her cheeks into her already handsome blond hair, repeatedly like a carpenter shaving curls of Huon pine, she returned to taking an interest in him, when she certainly didn’t have to, in his energies which began in his face, precise, alert, at the same time an almost careless set of energies as if it was all in his neck and arms. She listened closely as he launched an attack on the senility of Vienna, of the hidebound, dreary musical establishment, all parts permeated by the fossilization of old Europe, all the old countries, the old states, “and England is no better,” the Tudor cladding, complacent, head-in-sand, tedious places, and still the superior airs, still laying down the law, what a joke; Europe wasn’t aware it had lost it, slipping down and farther down over the years, “historical has-beens,” and actually made worse by music, in particular the violins, the blurry cellos, not to mention the never-ending ballroom waltzes, or “schmaltzes” as he called them, giving a layer of honey over the ordinary present, Vienna the worst. There was quite a build-up of pressure out there. Mild-mannered pianists havebeen known to lose it and bang their foreheads on the lid or break their big toes kicking the legs, he said in an approving way. “That would not happen in Vienna.” “Why not? It’s not too late to be modern,” he told her. And although Delage had been perplexed by her change of mood he returned the fork to the plate with a slight rattle (“F sharp?”), and invited her to see and hear the only Delage piano in Europe, “worn out, over-decorated Europe,” a fresh piano sound to be demonstrated to her, only her, Amalia von Schalla.
    “My mother is a handful at the best of times. She is not a mother out of the textbook. When I think about it, she was hardly a mother at all. I do not know what she was thinking. She would have no more children, she said to me. I was more than enough for her. She always had to be somewhere. If it were not for