The Swallow and the Hummingbird(169)

Finally he pulled away and traced her cheek with his fingers. There was so much he wanted to tell her but he couldn’t find the words with which to unburden his heart. He simply gazed down at her lovingly. She pressed her lips to his hand.

‘I want to grow old with you, Max. I want to walk down on the estuary, in the fog and the snow and tell you how much I love you as I should have done that Christmas when I almost lost you for ever. I want to share everything with you, your future, your past.’ Her eyes began to glisten. ‘Take me to Vienna, Max. Show me the Imperial Theatre where your mother performed for your father. Perhaps one day soon it will be yours and all the memories that lie within it.’

Max looked at her for a long moment, awaiting those familiar scents of his childhood to reach him once again from the far corners of his heart, but they did not come.

‘No,’ he said at last and his gaze was so intense that she almost had to look away. ‘The Vienna of my childhood is gone. They destroyed that long ago. Even my ghosts don’t walk those streets any more.’ Then he slipped one arm around her waist and took her hand in his. To the formal steps of a waltz he thought he’d forgotten, he held her. ‘Let’s go home Rita. We’ll build Vienna together.’