Free Restitution by Eliza Graham Page B

to Eva? ‘Viktor comes round some afternoons if we haven’t got
rehearsals.’ She realized with a shock that the reason she didn’t want to talk about the relationship was that she didn’t like thinking about Eva and Viktor as a couple. Silly
really, there’d never been any possibility of Viktor looking at her. He’d made it clear at that first meeting in the Heuriger in the forest that he preferred Eva.
He’d stared at her with those sleepy eyes of his while he sipped his wine. Men generally considered Eva more attractive than Marie, more unusual, more exotic. It wasn’t surprising
Viktor would prefer her. And yet that didn’t stop Marie taking tea with the pair of them, enjoying his teasing and his accounts of his travels. Viktor had seen the world and could talk to
them about Paris, Rome and London.
    He liked their apartment, which belonged to a distant cousin of Eva’s. ‘Such porcelain,’ he’d say, holding the cup so that his tipless finger stuck up incongruously.
‘And everything so fashionable and neat.’ He spoke in that slightly clipped German of his which made people say he was Hungarian. Or perhaps Slovakian. Or was it Ruthenian? People were
like rivers, Viktor always said when pressed about his nationality; they assumed, temporarily perhaps, the territory through which they flowed. Calling them German or Austrian was reductive.
    Eva had thrown one of the butter-yellow cushions at him. ‘How dare you imply my apartment is bourgeois!’ He caught the cushion with one hand, easy and graceful. Did Viktor ever
appear off-balance?
    The concierge’s cat had wandered in again – Eva always forgot to close the door – and strolled into the room with a proprietorial air. Marie and Eva each put down a hand and
made encouraging noises with their tongues. The cat ignored them both and leaped onto Viktor’s lap, rubbing her black head against his jacket. Eva watched the animal, perhaps wondering what
it would be like to be so close to him.
    He stroked it in a single long movement from its ears to the tip of its tail, his face losing its easy expression for a second and showing pleasure. Eva had told Marie that Viktor liked visiting
the Zoo. And he’d once kept a monkey in his apartment. The cat on his lap curled up and purred. ‘When I was a lad I used to help my father with the cats and dogs he looked after,’
he said.
    It was unusual for Viktor to volunteer information about his childhood.
    ‘Was your father a veterinary surgeon?’ Marie asked.
    He nodded and continued to murmur nonsense at the cat.
    ‘What rubbish are you muttering to that animal?’ Eva asked.
    ‘Not rubbish at all. It’s a bit of English poetry, exclaiming at feline beauty.’
    Eva looked confused. Her English wasn’t good. Marie’s lips twitched. Viktor looked at her with approval. Perhaps there was still a chance that he and Eva weren’t. . . ? That he
might yet prefer her ?
    Anton was saying something to her across the table.
    ‘I’m sorry.’ She blinked.
    ‘Be careful, Maria.’
    She forced herself back to the present, her napkin crumpled on the table, her half-full wineglass.
    ‘Vargá moves among disreputable people. Your career is just beginning, you can’t afford to be associated with the wrong sort.’
    ‘I’ll be careful.’ But mention of the ‘wrong sort’ of people had made her recall Viktor’s impersonation of a Communist concierge forced to hold open a door
for a countess and her poodle. ‘But don’t worry about Vargá,’ she added. ‘He’s harmless.’ She shivered suddenly, recalling how Viktor had gazed at Eva
when she’d come into the sitting room wearing a backless gown on her way out to a restaurant. His casual air had disappeared and he’d looked like a wolf, longing to consume Eva.
She’d seen him often enough waiting for women by the Goethe statue in the Burggarten. Always a different girl, some of them fellow students from the Academy. But come to think of it, she