Magic Flutes

10

The firework display was going splendidly. A dozen barrels of wine sent down by Guy at the beginning of the evening had secured the enthusiastic cooperation of the villagers, now assembled on a strip of beach below the road. From the three islands in the middle of the lake, there erupted a succession of rockets, Roman candles and exotic set-pieces which trailed a blazing path across the sky, dimming the stars themselves. Chinese lanterns were strung between the trees, braziers with roasting chestnuts glowed on the shingle, and on a platform constructed near the bathing huts the orchestra played Handel.

‘My dear, you must have spent a fortune,’ said Nerine, standing with Guy and a group of guests, still in their evening clothes, beside the water’s edge. Like most of the younger members of the house party, she had come down to the lakeside after dinner, leaving the older people to watch from the comfort of the terrace.

Guy shrugged. ‘It is no good being stingy with fireworks,’ he said, watching with approval the coordination between David, Morgan and the head forester, who were each in charge on a different island.

Tessa, standing at the other end of the beach close to the wooden jetty which ran out across the darkness of the water, was watching with parted lips, her republican principles not noticeably outraged by this wanton display of extravagance. That she was looking extremely pretty was not her fault, for it had been her intention to miss dinner and slip down later, still in her working clothes. In this she had been foiled by her old nurse, who had never been interested in the question of whether Tessa was or was not grown-up, and had dragged her upstairs, immersed her in a bath, and released her in a long, full-skirted dress of cream taffeta, with satin pumps on her feet and a rose on a velvet ribbon around her throat.

‘Putzerl,’ said Maxi, who had been glued to her side all evening. ‘Tessa…’ The orchestra had come to the end of its piece and there was a lull in the pyrotechnics. Now was the moment. He took her arm. ‘I’ve been absolutely longing to talk to you alone—’

‘Hush! Listen, Maxi!’ Tessa had turned away from him, her gaze on the row of trees fringing the shore. ‘Don’t you hear it?’

Maxi did. A strange, coughing noise, then a low growl… And then a dark shape shambling out of the trees… pausing… the great head swaying in confusion and fright.

‘Oh, Lord, it’s Mishka!’ Tessa’s voice was breathless with concern. ‘He must have broken down the door. And Uncle Sava’s not here, he’s taken Frau Romola for a drive! They were going to watch the fireworks from High Pfaffenstein.’

‘The devil!’ Maxi was well aware of the danger. The Archduke’s bear had been found as a cub in a fair in Novgorod with a firecracker tied to his tail. Normally he was docile enough, but now…

A piece of frayed rope dangling from his collar, the bear slithered down on to the shingle and a group of children ran screaming in the direction of the bathing huts. For a moment he paused uncertainly, his eyes glowing red in the light of the braziers. But ahead of him was darkness and quiet, and now he lumbered on to the jetty and moved down to the end, sniffing the water.

Only the dark and the quietness were deceptive. The fireworks were starting up again and as a burst of rockets went up from the nearest island, he turned with a roar of terror and stood, growling and swaying, facing the shore.

‘Oh, poor thing, he’s so frightened!’

‘There’s nothing you can do, Tessa. Look, those men have gone for—’

But Tessa was no longer by his side. She had picked up her skirts, was running towards the jetty, had reached it and now slowed down, moving quietly along the planking, holding out her hand. ‘It’s all right, Mishka: don’t be frightened. It’s all right—’

The next moment her arms were seized from behind, she was viciously jerked backwards and a furious voice said, ‘Are you mad? Come back at once!’

Guy. Only it couldn’t be Guy. She had just seen him standing on the far side of the beach. No one could have run as fast as that.

‘Let me go!’ Desperately she tried to wriggle free, bracing herself against him, kicking out with her satin slippers.

The attempt of this freshly bathed and bird-boned infant to get the better of him might have amused Guy at some other time, but it did not amuse him now. His hold tightened. ‘You will move slowly round behind me and get back to the shore.’ Keeping his eye steadily on the bear, taking care to make no further sudden movements, the anger that possessed him was concentrated wholly in his voice.

‘No, I will not.’ A strand of her hair had caught in the stud of his dress shirt. Savagely, she wrenched it free. ‘He knows me, he won’t hurt me! It’s you he’ll go for — you’re a stranger.’

‘A terrified animal knows no one.’

As if in echo to his words, there came a fresh shower of rockets from the lake and the bear, roaring in renewed terror, reared up on his hind legs.

For a moment, confronted by the animal’s appalling height and his vicious canines, hearing the screams from the shore, Tessa went limp and Guy appeared to loosen his hold. At once she rallied and seeing her chance, began to move forward again.

This was a mistake. Guy had merely been adjusting his grasp. Now he gripped her elbows as if in a vice, lifted her up into the air and threw her, without the slightest sign of effort, far out into the lake.

The shock of the icy water, the struggle to surface in her voluminous dress, gave Tessa a few moments of immunity. Then she kicked off her shoes, trod water and opened her eyes to see… Maxi wading with idiotic chivalry into the lake towards her… some men approaching with a muzzle and chains… and then — because in the end she had to look — the bear on all fours and Guy, holding the rope, leading it quietly back towards the shore.

At which point, the Princess of Pfaffenstein drew breath, gave vent to a volley of Serbo-Croatian oaths learned from her father’s groom, swallowed a large quantity of water — and sank.

As might be expected, the incident was wholly to the liking of the villagers, few of whom went sober to their beds. In throwing their beloved princess fully clothed into the waters of the lake and calming (in English) a savage bear, Herr Farne had shown himself a fitting successor to the seventh prince who had decapitated a card-sharp in the Turkish bath at Vilna, and the fifth prince who had been inseparable from his camel.

That the Swan Princess, the following morning, should view the matter in the same light was not to be expected.

‘You realize that there are only four days left?’ she said, whacking at the wolfhound who was dribbling on her shoe. Though seated most pleasantly between a fig tree and a statue of Aphrodite and facing, from the terrace, one of the loveliest views in Austria, her expression as always was grim. ‘It really is quite amazing, Maxi, how inept and ineffectual you can be.’

She was growing desperate. It was not just the money or Putzerl’s lineage, it was the succession. She had been old when she had Maxi, and Maxi was the only son. There had to be babies, there had to be! It was unthinkable that the seed of Barbarossa should run into the ground. At the thought of the nursery block full of tumbling babies, the beady eye of the Swan Princess softened for a moment. Whether Maxi’s mother did or did not have a single redeeming feature was a point which had been much argued among the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire. If she did, it was probably her genuine and deep-seated love of babies. Even those who looked like uncooked buns or emerged from lace shawls like hirsute marmosets peering through balls of oakum, could bring a smile to that testy and cantankerous old face.

‘I went over this morning,’ said Maxi, conscious of deep injustice, for Casanova himself could not have proposed to Putzerl as she emerged shivering and spitting like a kitten from the lake. ‘As soon as I’d let out the dogs, but the theatre was shut with notices all over it saying ‘Silence’ and ‘Keep Out’ and what-have-you. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been any good digging her out; she’s absolutely besotted about this opera.’

The Swan Princess scowled. ‘I don’t know what Tilda and Augustine are doing, letting her carry on like that. Associating with those people! Running errands.’

Maxi shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose they could stop her. You know what Putzerl’s like. Say a sharp word to her or show her a bird that’s fallen out of a nest and she just shrivels. But when she’s decided to do something she thinks is right…’

‘All the Pfaffensteins are pig-headed,’ said the Swan Princess gloomily. ‘It’s the blood of Charlemagne.’

‘I’ll try again tonight,’ promised Maxi. ‘There’s a lieder recital after dinner,’ he added, a look of misery passing over his kind, long face. ‘I’ll go to that.’ It was the ultimate sacrifice, but he would make it.

‘Well, make sure you do, Maximilian. Just make sure you do,’ said the Swan Princess, and she stabbed her cane at the fig tree, which unaccountably continued to be covered in fruit.

‘Ah, the nature, how she is beautiful!’ cried Raisa, crashing barefoot across a flower-studded alm behind the castle. Attired in a Central European sack massively embroidered in cross-stitch, her piggy eyes glowed with well-being and her vast, freckled arms, thrown out in Rumanian ecstacy, narrowly missed Pino Mastrini’s butterfly-net as the little tenor, his thighs bulging like delicious Parma hams beneath his linen shorts, pursued a Camberwell Beauty.

Never had Witzler’s troupe been so happy, so cared-for and so well-fed, as in these last few days at Pfaffenstein. The beauty of the castle, the sunshine, the endless supply of delicious food brought forth a steady chorus of praise. Some of the lower-paid members of the company still experienced, in Vienna, real poverty and hardship. Now there was a surfeit and release. With The Mother growing sleek and fat on a window-sill in the dairy, Boris, his longevity assured, was taking yodelling lessons from one of the grooms. Bubi, who now slept in the room next to Tessa with her old nurse, paid monseigneurial visits to his parents and could be seen, his blond curls just clearing the feathered grass-heads, being taught the names of the flowers by the country-bred Rhinemaiden. And on the battlements, leaning against the railings on which thirty of his countrymen had been impaled, Klasky composed his opera.

It was as well that the company was in such a state of contentment because Jacob, in rehearsals, was really going a little mad. The discovery that Tessa was safe, her dramatic return, had seemed to Witzler yet another sign from heaven. There was nothing now to prevent this from being the performance of a lifetime. Again and again he hounded the principals back into the theatre to go over parts they believed note perfect; again and again he repeated scene changes, altered little bits of business; again and again he demanded another ounce, another effort.

‘You want to eat?’ he could be heard yelling at the unfortunate coloratura, the sheep-like hausfrau he had kidnapped from Dresden. ‘Sleep? What do you want to sleep for?’ he demanded, at two in the morning, of the venerable bass who sang Sarastro. And in a voice of outrage to a member of the chorus, ‘The lavatory! In the middle of Isis and Osiris you want to go to the lavatory!’

But they were nearly there. All of them were artists to their finger-tips — the money-grubbing Raisa, ridiculous Pino with his eggs — and they knew it. That indefinable something was in the air, like electricity, like the beating of wings. Barring an unexpected disaster, it would come.

‘I thought you would like to know, Your Highness,’ said Maxi’s valet, easing the skin-tight trousers of the Hussar uniform over his master’s calves. ‘Eight-thirty in the village hall.’

Maxi, standing passive in his corset, turned mournful eyes on his servant. ‘Yes, you did quite right to tell me, Franz. All the same, it’s a devilish business. I have to go to this concert.’

Melancholy gripped him by the throat. If there was one thing that really got him down it was a lieder recital. Those awful, pigeon-chested women in purple satin or green silk with trailing scarves and an idiotic, wispy handkerchief dribbling from their clasped hands. The way they closed their eyes and felt the music… the arch way they translated the stuff if it was in a foreign language. And then, just when one thought it was over, the torture of those interminable encores.

Well, he would endure it for Putzerl’s sake. He would sit beside her until she was softened up and then they would slip away and let the dogs out for their evening run and he would propose. But did God really have to arrange things so that on the very same evening, down in the village, they were showing Broken Blossoms with Lilian Gish?

He stretched out his arm for the frogged tunic whose buttons had kept Franz busy for the best part of the afternoon. ‘You’re going, I suppose?’ he enquired of his valet. ‘Yes, Your Highness.’

Maxi’s brows drew together, indicating thought. There was a quotation that fitted here. Something Latin and classy which the gladiators had said when they were about to go in among the lions and wished to salute those who were going to have a nice time and stay alive. But he could not quite remember how it went, and anyway it was way above Franz’s head. Arranging a strand of his perfectly pomaded hair to frame his duelling scar, Maxi went down to dinner.

Two hours later he sat in the picture gallery, keeping a vacant place beside him for Putzerl. Though the room was crowded, no one attempted to commandeer the chair, for the romance between the Prince of Spittau and the Princess of Pfaffenstein was most dear to everybody’s heart.

‘Ah, keeping a chair for Putzerl, are you?’ said Monteforelli approvingly, hobbling past, and even the Archduchess Frederica deigned to smile at him.

But a hush had fallen and the concert was about to begin. Where on earth was Tessa? The Rumanian diva came in — dressed in purple satin as Maxi had foreseen — and behind her the Magyar, reasonably shaved for once. And then… good God, it was unbelievable! Tessa, carrying a pile of music and seating herself beside the Magyar at the piano. She was going to turn over for him! She was going to be there all evening, miles away, out of reach!

It was too much. There were sacrifices that one made and sacrifices that were just plain silly. The first notes of Strauss’s ‘Morgen’ were just floating over the audience when Maxi reached the door and fled.

Fifteen minutes later, having run down the Narrenweg — which, with its thirteen wayside shrines, wound round the pinnacle of rock on the far side of the drawbridge — and hurried along the road which skirted the lake, Maxi entered the Pfaffenstein village hall.

The place was packed but the white screen at the far end was still mercifully blank. Old women he had known since childhood called greetings, the men saluted — but without servility, for this was a meeting of acolytes in which rank, for a while, was set aside.

Maxi walked down the aisle looking for an empty seat. Near the middle of the hall, he stopped. Could it be? It was! In a rose-pink dirndl with a snowy apron and blouse, sat Heidi Schlumberger.

‘Will you permit me to sit with you, Fräulein?’

Heidi lifted a rapt countenance. The Prince was in his Hussar uniform, the whole image overwhelming.

‘Oh, yes, Your Highness. Please.’

Maxi slipped into his seat.

‘Have you seen it before?’ she enquired shyly. ‘Broken Blossoms, I mean?’

‘Five times,’ said Maxi, waving a careless hand.

Heidi nodded. It was right that a man of such magnificence should have beaten her. ‘I’ve only seen it four times,’ she said meekly. ‘I’ve brought an extra handkerchief. That part where she looks up and sees the Angel of Death…’

‘And where she puts her hand on her heart like this,’ said the Prince, suiting the action to the words.

‘Yes.’ They fell silent, in tribute to the miracle that was Lilian Gish. Then, ‘What about Intolerance, have you seen that, too?’ asked Heidi.

‘Seven times,’ said Maxi proudly. ‘At Spittau I made them show it every night.’

‘Oh! You can do that?’

Maxi nodded. ‘We had Less Than The Dust for two whole weeks,’ he boasted.

‘Ah, Mary Pickford!’ The Littlest Heidi sighed. ‘I’ve seen Pollyanna eight times. I went every afternoon in Vienna, sometimes twice.’

Should he tell her how much she resembled the famous heroine? No, not yet. ‘And The Little Princess?’ Maxi enquired.

‘I like that even better, I think.’

‘Yes, that’s the very best of all.’

Maxi cleared his throat. ‘You don’t… by any chance… like cowboy films?’

‘But I do! I absolutely adore Tom Mix. When he rises in his stirrups like this,’ said the Littlest Heidi, lifting her entrancing bottom marginally from the seat, ‘and then shades his eyes with his hand — so… And in Child of the Prairie, where that Indian crawls out from behind the rock and he doesn’t even look but just whips out his gun!’

Maxi stared at her. A twin soul! It was incredible. But now the lights were going out. The lady at the piano began a stirring march. Not only Broken Blossoms but a Chaplin two-reeler first! He glanced down at Heidi’s hand nestling like a plump, delicious fledgling in the folds of her apron. Could he? Dared he?

Diffidently, flutteringly, in the dusk of the hall, the small hand crept closer. With the questing tentative grace that distinguishes the born cocotte, it raised itself a soupçon. Maxi grasped it. Then the screen flashed to life. The little man in the baggy trousers came marching down the street — and in the village hall of Pfaffenstein they were no longer prince and ballet girl and peasant but only a rapt and adoring audience, welded by laughter into one whole.

Tessa rose very early on the following day. There was a visit she wished to pay before she left, and while the rest of the company still slept she was approaching a small wooden house in a clearing in the forest, a mile or so behind the castle.

She knocked and entered. The room was small but spotless: a stove with a bench round it, a limewood table, a spinning wheel — and in the carved bed in the corner an old lady, as old as time itself. Her filmed eyes seemed almost sightless but she knew her visitor at once.

‘Your Highness!’ The smile transformed the wrinkled face. ‘You’re back, then. It’s true what they said.’

‘Yes.’ Tessa sat down on the bed, took the brown, transparent hand into her own. ‘Yes, I’m back, Grossmutterle, and I’ve brought you some nice things to eat so don’t turn into a wolf and eat me up.’

The toothless smile came first, then the whole body shook with laughter. Laughter which turned suddenly into a grimace of grief.

‘You’re going then, Your Highness? The castle is really sold?’

‘Yes, but it is sold to such a nice man, Grossmutterle. You’ll like him very much.’

‘Foreign, they say?’

‘Yes, but he speaks German like a native. He’ll be a good master, you’ll see.’

The bent shoulders rose in a faint shrug. ‘Maybe. But without you… without Your Highness…’ She was crying now, the easy, utterly justified tears of old age. ‘Well, I’m glad to have seen you once again. Let me kiss your hand.’

But the old lady did not get a hand to kiss. Tessa’s arm came round her, she was hugging her. ‘Don’t cry, Grossmutterle! Ah, please don’t cry!’ begged Tessa.

When she came out, her own eyes too were wet and she did not for a moment recognize the figure on horseback coming along the bridle path. When she did, she drew back, but it was too late. Guy had seen her and turned his horse aside.

‘Good morning.’

She looked up at him, sitting easily but entirely without the sartorial trappings of horsemanship, astride the tall, black mare. It was the first time she had seen him since the incident of the bear and at the memory of the things she had called him — albeit in Serbo-Croat — a blush came to her cheek. Trying to conceal it, she said quickly, ‘I didn’t know you rode.’

The wrong remark again. His brows rose. ‘Oh yes, even bastards ride sometimes. I found it a useful way of getting about when I was abroad. And you? Have you been paying visits?’

‘Yes, I’ve been to see my father’s old nurse.’

‘To say goodbye?’ He was close enough now to see the tear stains on her face and, dismounting, he began to walk beside her.

She nodded. ‘There are a lot of people like that, Guy… people who’ve lived here all their lives.’

He looked up quickly. He had used her Christian name from the start, but this was the first time she had called him Guy.

Now she had begun to talk about Nerine, saying how glad she was that Nerine would be there to take over the visiting. ‘It’s the people who live in the isolated places: there’s an old woodcutter in the next valley who is completely paralyzed — a most marvellous man, so wise. The factor knows them all, of course; she has only to ask him.’ And as Guy was silent she flushed and said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interfere.’

‘You’re not interfering.’ They walked on for a moment along the cone-strewn path. ‘Will you come back?’ he asked after a while.

‘No.’

She left the word bleak and unadorned and Guy was silent, accepting her decision. If Nerine was to take her rightful place as mistress of Pfaffenstein, Tessa had to stay away. Guy had not failed to notice that wherever Tessa appeared, engaged in however menial a task for Witzler, she was greeted not only by the salutes and curtsies due to her rank, but by smiles which lingered long after she had gone. It was not only the inmates of the castle, it was the whole village, all her people, that the Princess of Pfaffenstein held in the hollow of her hand.

‘Perhaps it’s as well,’ he said now. ‘Because I mean to make considerable changes.’

She turned her head enquiringly. ‘What sort of changes?’

‘I can’t stand toys,’ said Guy. His face had the taut, absorbed look that David and Thisbe Purse knew all too well. ‘This place must pay if we’re to live here even for part of the year; it must work.’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘But how, the forests are not very productive and—’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘No, no! Forestry and agriculture will help, of course, but that’s not enough. But there’s tungsten in the rock, did you know? In the Stielbach valley. I had the geological report yesterday and I’ve just been over to look. I intend to mine for it.’ He waited for her protest, but apart from a quick intake of breath Tessa was silent. ‘The main deposits are on the far side of the spur so you won’t see it from the castle. But, yes, though I shall make tree-breaks and site the workings carefully, there will be a gash in the hill. Yes, I shall spoil the beauty of the countryside. I happen to think that it would be better for your people to have independent jobs instead of bowing and scraping to the owners of the castle, but I’d do it anyway because I can make it pay. So you see, it’s a good job you won’t be here.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s a good job I’ll be out of the way. But not because of that. I think you’re right: jobs must be made that are not to do with feudalism or the land. My father would never see it, but if I had known how to set about it, I would have done it too.’

They had reached a fork in the path. The wider track led back to the castle; the narrower, mossy and overgrown, plunged back into the woods. Tessa paused, hesitating, seeming to make up her mind.

‘Have you got a few moments more?’ she said shyly. ‘There’s a place I’d like to show you.’

Guy smiled. ‘Yes, indeed. Nerine gets up late and frankly I can wait to be reunited with some of my guests.’

‘We’ll leave her here, then,’ said Tessa, patting the mare, and they hitched the bridle to a tree and took the narrow path back into the heart of the woods. The forest was denser here; boulders covered with moss like green velvet seemed to swim in the darkness; sudden shafts of light turned the bright toadstools into exotic jewels and from a great, jagged pine, a cuckoo called.

‘You know what the Jesuits say,’ said Tessa, ‘that if you give them a child for the first seven years of its life, you can have it for the rest of the time because it will already be theirs?’ And as Guy nodded, ‘Well, I think it’s like that with landscape. What you know and love when you’re a small child is always the way a landscape should be. For me, it will be the woods if I live to be ninety. But my grandmother was always homesick for the sea. The proper sea, with tides and wind and rain. She didn’t count the Mediterranean or the Baltic — no tides, no waves.’

‘Who was she?’

‘Her father was the Duke of Bewick. She lived near the Scottish border on the coast.’

‘Yes, I know it.’ A great, gaunt, wind-lashed pile, Bewick Castle, the lair of king-makers and Mercian rogues. He had visited it from school once, as a child. ‘It’s the same with me. My first outings with Martha were all to the Northumbrian coast and you can keep the mimosa and the lemon trees.’

‘It’s where one would go back to die, I suppose,’ said Tessa.

The path had been growing ever narrower and more overgrown. Now they pushed through the last of the encroaching trees and with a sigh of satisfaction, Tessa stopped.

They had come out in a clearing of unsurpassed and Arcadian loveliness. The golden light of morning streamed over the emerald grass and lit the clusters of gentians and starry white anemones. Dragonflies skimmed over a stream that danced over iridescent stones and paused to make a still, deep pool on which the leaves of water-lilies quietly swung. A single, ancient crab-apple trailed a golden tangle of honeysuckle through the candelabra of its branches.

But Tessa was looking for something, searching the ground. Kneeling, now, to part a clump of tiny trifoliate leaves, so exquisitely wrought that the peers of England have taken them for their coronets.

‘Yes,’ she said happily. ‘It’s a bit early but some are ripe.’ And carefully, absorbed like a child, she picked the small, flecked barely scarlet berries and held them out to him. Wild strawberries — the most prized, most fragrant and heart-stirring fruit in the world.

‘In Sweden,’ she said, rising to stand beside him and speaking very seriously, ‘they have a word for a place like this. It’s called a “smultronställe”. A “wild strawberry place.” A place like that is special, it’s the most special place there is.’

Guy looked down at the berries she had tipped into his hand. Their scent, subtle yet piercing, seemed to overwhelm him with its sweetness.

‘Only it isn’t just literally a wild strawberry place,’ Tessa went on. ‘A smultronställe is any place that’s absolutely private and special and your own. A place where life is… an epiphany. Like that very quiet room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum where the Vermeers are. Or that marvellous bit where the flute plays that golden music at the beginning of L’Après-midi d’un faune.’

‘The nave of King’s College chapel at Evensong,’ said Guy.

‘The place in the Prater behind the hunting lodge where the first scillas come in spring.’

‘The garden act of Figaro.’

‘The Lippizzaners doing a capriole, in the winter, when there’s no one there.’

It was very quiet in the clearing, the murmuring of the stream the only sound.

‘You must bring your children here,’ said Tessa. ‘But never, never anyone you don’t love.’ Unaware of the implications of her words, she bent her head and touched one of the berries he still held cupped in his hand. ‘Eat!’ she admonished him.

But Guy, suddenly, was in another smultronställe. Martha Hodge’s small, dark kitchen in Newcastle — the smell of gingerbread in the oven, the kettle on the hob. A place where the obstinate, confused boy he had been had tasted his first wisdom and goodness and certainty.

‘Oh, God!’ thought Guy, overcome by longing for that uncomplicated world — and ate.