CB and I got a little train to the top of the Zugspitze, Garmisch's highest peak. About a hundred yards or so from the top, the train actually went inside the mountain, giving the whole journey a sort of James Bond-type feel. The view from the peak was magical: snow-capped Alps as far as the eye could see, bright sunshine and no wind. We sat with our mugs of hot chocolate on the viewing deck and marveled.
Later, sitting in the train back to Munich, CB suddenly got up and sat on the opposite side of the carriage. She insisted she was fine, but I knew something was wrong. A few of my friends at work had warned me about her past, but I insisted, with the assurance of a man in love, that she'd changed, she was over it (whatever it was) and that she was different, now, to which one of them said "Right, the way she was different every other time it happened". Their words came back to me in the train that evening and I started to feel unsettled.
Back in Koblenz, we still saw each other, still slept with each other, but not as often, and not with the same passion as before. Our nights together became fewer, her behavious ever more distant on those occasions we were together. This was only going one way, and I had no game plan to protect myself. When it came, I put a brave face on it, comforted by her declaring she "didn't want any kind of relationship, and probably wouldn't for a long time". Two days later, she was cuddling up to one of the actors in full view of everyone. Their relationship blosommed, they got married and she eventually had a child, which she promptly abandoned, running back to England and leaving the little thing with its father. This happened a couple of years later, but I saw CB when she came to audition in Hamburg for the show I was conducting. She behaved as if nothing had ever happened since we split: no mention of her abandoned actor husband or the fact she was a mother. All very strange.
Needless to say, I cursed her after she broke up with me. I had to see her every day at work, play the piano while she danced, and it was torture. Time did heal the wounds, but not until I'd left town the following summer. CB was my last romantic encounter in Koblenz; I had neither the stomach for another nor sufficient respect for the species to even have a one-night stand. My feelings went on hold and I turned all my efforts towards getting another job, as far away as possible. I'd already handed in my ten-month notice (yup, that's how long you have to give in certain theatres) so I knew I wasn't going to be there for another season, but things started dovetailing rather nicely in June, 1989. We never normally had any days off in the ballet, but this month we had five, all in a row. I'd just heard about them when my American neighbour, C, came in to tell me she'd been offered an audition for the Viennese production of The Phantom of the Opera and would I like to go down there with her? Incredibly, the audition fell in the middle of those five days, so I didn't hesitate. If there was ever a sign, then this was it. A few days later, we were back in her Peugeot 206, heading for the Austrian capital.
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