Stern The Matriarch

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-907970-29-0
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

A wonderfully gossipy novel that whisks readers through the glamorous worlds of turn-of-the-century Vienna, Paris, and London. The Rakonitz family - rich, cosmopolitan, and Jewish - is ruled over by the indomitable will of the matriarch, Anastasia. From her exotically furnished house in west London, Anastasia holds court over her children, grandchildren, and vast extended family. For someone must resolve the quarrels, celebrate the births, deaths, engagements, bankruptcies, artistic triumphs, and explain the only way to prepare a delicious Crème Düten. With the dawning of the twentieth century, a series of scandals and financial catastrophes strike the Rakonitzes, threatening the family ties and calling into question the legacy that binds them together. 'There is wealth here, and gaiety. There is middle European style, and food in abundance. It is very un-English, and enormously attractive.' - Julia Neuberger

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stern, G. B.

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2
1
Sophie’s pathetic longing to impress her mother, dated from when she was quite a little girl, and realised that Anastasia’s pride was all for Bertrand, Ludovic and Blaise; it reached its climax in Blaise. Sophie was in the house, like something unconsidered, which had been dropped and never picked up again. She was a morbid child, with sick, cross ways that might have alarmed Anastasia had not her attention been so fixed on Blaise. Sophie soon gave up hungering for love; her dreams took an odd turn; if only she could impress her mother! She watched Anastasia and studied her till she realised the one way in which she could be impressed; not by anything personal that a daughter did; the boy, the son, the male, was all that mattered. If Sophie were the first of her children to have a son, surely then her mother would admire her, spoil her even a little, too; talk to her as though she were present. Sophie pictured herself standing with the fierce, hot rays of her mother’s vivid realisation beating upon her, till it was a shock whenever she was drawn back into the reality of neglect. ‘What! Sophie with a little boy?’ So she imagined the news brought to her mother; ‘Sophie? But that is splendid! I must go to her at once. No, Blaise, I have no time for you. Sophie will need me. To think that the youngest of you all should give me my first grandson’ … And then, suddenly conjured into Sophie’s presence: ‘But we must take the greatest care of you, my darling. To have brought a boy into the world, yes, that was worth doing. Now, tell me exactly all you feel about him. We’ll make plans together, you and I. I have told the boys that they need not expect me home, not for months’ – Sophie’s dreams always allowed her limitless time with her mother, she who now was never granted more than a few irritated moments when she was ill, or if her new frock did not fit her. She had queer little wisdoms of her own, this Sophie, moulded out of queer little experiences. She was quite sure, for instance, that it would be no good, and a mere waste of time, making futile attempts to divert Anastasia’s favouritism away from Bertrand, Ludovic and Blaise, and focus it on herself, before she had this baby son to show for justification. She was sure of this, without trying. Another child might have plucked persistently at the vagueness which was not aware of her; might have carried things and fetched things with ostentatious readiness; traded on sickliness; thrown arms around a reluctant neck; or produced samples of diligent needlework; but this shy, unwanted Israelite child did not squander energy on delusions. The only possible fulfilment for her was fixed in her mind … till it almost lay faintly outlined in her cradling arms. She did not read much, nor play games, nor romp with her brothers. Truda was the housewife of the two sisters; and thus gained a certain amount of Anastasia’s critical companionship while baking a cinnamon cake, or polishing to a glitter the heavy embossed silver for a dinner-party. Down in the unnoticed twilight, Sophie crept about, and longed and longed for her son. It was dreadful to be only a girl if Anastasia Rakonitz were your mother; she would hate to inflict girlhood on any infant of hers. A boy … a boy … 2
Perhaps from sheer ardent desire, or perhaps because of the Oriental heritage which causes girls of her race to ripen early, Sophie at sixteen glided into sudden beauty, with the rich tender promise of an exotic flower that, grown in a too shadowy corner, has lost its colour but kept its velvet. Yet Anastasia continued perversely blind to anything that concerned Sophie. She would rather that either Blaise should have been her youngest, which is next best in position to the eldest, or that her line had gone on and on after Sophie’s birth; four more splendid boys, perhaps. Truda was indispensable for domesticity’s sake; but where was the sense, so Anastasia’s checked instincts argued, in Sophie and no more after Sophie? Truda was strong and good-looking; Sophie was plain and weakly; that was all the difference she beheld. So, indulging the boys, planning for them, building up her house and her entertainments and her friendships so that all should ultimately benefit the boys, Anastasia missed seeing the sudden help which nature had lent Sophie to fulfil her stubborn purpose. From sixteen to seventeen, for just one year, Sophie, brushed with soft flame, might have reflected glory on her mother. And with dark eyes steadily fixed on the swiftest way to make up for her cheated childhood, Sophie accepted the very first man who offered himself. There was something really sinister about this mournful intensity of hers; her ironic smile declared that she knew exactly what she was about. A dash of inconsistency, of youthful caprice, would have been so refreshing in Sophie; had she been vainer, even, of the amazing spell that she, from sixteen to seventeen, cast over Oliver Maitland and the other suitors who trooped up behind him, too late! But she took the first, steadily impatient to get on and on to the baby boy, Anastasia’s first grandchild. Why, supposing Bertrand should marry first, or Truda! Sophie was only grateful that men were so easily attracted by her look of warmth and glow half-lost in duskiness; such glimmering specks of gold as remain on a coppery vineyard in Autumn, when the afternoon light has lain across it, and left it, mysteriously quenched, yet mysteriously burning. If she did not bear a son who was also Anastasia’s first grandchild, she determined to kill herself; it would be no good going on! No, Sophie was not a normal girl; indeed, Anastasia should not have married her first cousin … And Oliver Maitland, of all men, for Sophie’s husband. Not only a stranger, and a Gentile, but, from the point of view of Rakonitz, such a ludicrous stranger! The only person, so far, whom they had failed to knit into the closely woven Rakonitz web; who raised unmagnetic substance to Anastasia’s magnetism. An Englishman, and what was known as a profligate, without any sense of family or any power of attaching himself permanently; an artist by temperament, although not overmuch by virtue of work and creation; but carrying all the suspicious attributes of an artist as they were in the late nineteenth century. It seemed to him that he had to own Sophie, could not deny himself this luxury, because for one incredible year she was so beautiful. It was very soon over. It was over before any baby son was born … and during eight years Sophie slowly lost hope; hope dripped away with a melancholy plangent sound of water from the eaves. During eight years Sophie saw herself losing her beauty, losing Oliver.… At the end of that time she sat with a lost dream, and knew she was barren, a last blessing from Anastasia’s happy marriage. Her mother apparently did not notice that Sophie was not having children. After all, Sophie lived at Plymouth, and Anastasia in London, and this was the period of the Rakonitz high prosperity. She forgot, even, to let Sophie know when her brother Bertrand married Susie Lake. They all forgot to let Sohpie know; she had so very much dropped out, and as she had never been very deeply in, this was easy. Truda corresponded with her for a year or two after her marriage, but as Anastasia entertained more and more lavishly, there was less and less time to spare from making cinnamon cake, gulas, and spiced risotto, and those special Crême-Düten, of which old Maria had handed down the secret recipe to Anastasia, in their kitchen in Vienna. 3
The Matriarch first began to assert itself in Anastasia, when she insisted that her eldest son and her eldest son’s wife – poor, pretty little Susie Lake, who had so longed for a home of her own – should, as a matter of course, dwell with her in the same house, sharing her table and controlled by her wishes. Bertrand was usually called ‘Bertie’, for this branch of the family, rapidly anglicising, had assimilated with their usual ease the slang and habits which Ludovic and Blaise brought in from their English school. He was a large, loose-limbed person, genial as his great-grandfather, Simon; inheriting, too, a dash of his Great-Uncle Eugène, that dandy of the Biedemeyer period. How easily a man of fashion leads us up and down the ladder of the periods! At one moment we know him as a ‘beau’; at another as a ‘toff’ or a ‘masher’ or a ‘nut’ … Bertrand Rakonitz was, undoubtedly, a swell. So had been Eugène; and Leopold Josef, in Vienna, Anastasia’s cousin, a hero with whom Simone had danced and Elsa had flirted; so was his son Franz, last of the Rakonitz dandies to wear Imperial Austria’s uniform of the 12th Hussars, light blue jacket, white shako, and silver buttons; so was Raoul Czelovar, of the same generation, in Budapest; yes, and his sister Haidée, too; both Simone’s children were dandies. And now the superlative dandy and grand seigneur of them all, was Maximilian, that little snivelling, weak-chested lad whom Anastasia had adopted because she knew that he so irritated their father, Sigismund. Bertie Rakonitz was too lazy to compete seriously with Maximilian; though it is possible that this personality of his was assumed, because his subconscious instinct knew that, even as a strong man, he could not stand up to his mother, and therefore it was better to have the reputation of giving in because you were too indolent for combat, than because you were worsted in combat. But to Susie, brought from the outer world of a pleasant English suburb into the very Rakonitz stronghold itself, into the house of the Matriarch,...