Free The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

happen.’
    There was no equivalent ceremony to celebrate the moment when the shell of the house was finally completed that winter, no baptism or naming but only a degree of apprehension as they climbed out of the car to look at the building. It appeared like nothing more than a warehouse, a repository for agricultural machinery or building material perched there up on the hillside. They followed von Abt across bare concrete and into the construction. The empty spaces were heavy with the smell of new cement and plaster. The floor was rough and dusty, the walls plain and plastered white. Rooms were lit by single hundred-watt light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
    ‘What do you think?’
    What did they think? It was impossible to say. It was like contemplating a skeleton and trying to work out how the person would have looked. Viktor helped Liesel over a plank and they went out onto the terrace where there was bright sunshine and a gust of wind. Across the roofs of the city the Špilas fortress rode on the crest of a wave beneath a brisk sky of cumulus. ‘I can imagine Ottilie playing here,’ she said. The sandpit was already in place, an integral part of the structure. And benches and a paddling pool, all put there at her request.
    Viktor noticed a puddle of rainwater against the parapet wall. ‘That’s the problem of a flat roof, isn’t it?’ He came back to that point often, niggling at it like a tongue searching out an unfamiliar irregularity in a tooth.
    ‘It’s well sealed underneath,’ von Abt reassured him. ‘Modern materials. We’re not living in the nineteenth century. And when we lay the pavement we’ll put a slope on it. There’s nothing to worry about.’
    ‘But still …’
    They looked round the other rooms, the bare spaces that would be bathrooms and bedrooms. Their voices echoed down the stairs and into the living room, the wide and empty expanse below. Canvas hung where the glass would go, casting the space in shadow. A plank lay abandoned on the floor. There was a bucket with remains of cement in the bottom, and a sheet of newspaper, the title
Lidové Noviny
plainly visible. The three of them walked round in the twilight, trying to picture the place as it would be, the new life that would be enacted there. Instead there was this concrete space, as large as a garage.
    ‘The partition will be here,’ von Abt said, standing in the middle and holding out his arms, ‘to divide the sitting area from the library area.’
    The partition was a matter of contention. What would the material be? ‘It must be onyx,’ von Abt had insisted when they had discussed the matter in Vienna some days earlier. Onyx seemed absurd, extravagant. It was a gemstone, a meretricious material, a thing of cameo brooches and decorative boxes. But then von Abt himself seemed absurd at times, with his dramatic flourishes and his talk of space and light, of volume and thrust. ‘I have considered alabaster and travertine, but have fallen for onyx. It will be the
pièce de résistance
.’
    He stood now in the shadows of the unfinished living space, and extolled the virtues of his idea, described the complex veining of the rock, the lucidity, the delicate colour of honey and gold. ‘The colour of a young girl’s hair,’ he said, glancing at Liesel. ‘The colour of your daughter’s hair.’
    Viktor looked at the two of them, sensing that small current of sexuality that travelled like a spark between them. The evidence was there plain enough, in the widening of her eyes behind her spectacles, in the faint opening of her lips as though to admit something shameful. He wondered about it not with jealousy but with a calm consideration of the possibilities of faithfulness and betrayal.
    ‘How much would it cost, this onyx?’
    Von Abt’s eloquence stopped. ‘Ah. The cost. The cost is, I am afraid, considerable.’
    ‘Tell me.’
    ‘Approximately fifteen thousand dollars. That is about—’
    ‘It is about a small fortune!