Magic Flutes

16

At No. 12, King Street, Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne, Martha Hodge was having a farewell party. Living beside the shipyard as they did, Martha’s friends and neighbours (and she was a woman whose neighbours were all her friends) were not parochial. The hooting of ships down the Tyne was as familiar to them as breathing and many of them had men at sea.

Still, Martha was going to Vienna, and then further still, and she was going to the wedding of her foster-son whom they all remembered rampaging round the streets like a fiend incarnate, and who had turned out so well; so the beer was flowing freely and they had got to ‘Cushy Butterfield’ and ‘Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny’ well before ten o’clock.

Martha, busy by the range warming sausage rolls and cutting more sandwiches, was in two minds about going. She did not like the look of old Mrs Hookey at No. 3; there had been a blue look round her mouth that morning and if she died while Martha was in Austria, Martha would never forgive herself. And she felt bad about the Ridley twins: she had offered to mind them while Daisy went to her mam in Middlesborough and that would now have to wait. There was the cat, too: a stray which lived wild on the dump behind the shipyard. Martha had kept her in scraps while she nursed her kittens and though Minnie in the corner shop had promised to see to her, Martha could not help worrying a bit.

But Guy had said he would not be married without her, and he wanted her to come for a bit of a visit so as to get to know Nerine, so that was that. She would have gone to the North Pole to see Guy wed, and probably it would not be too bad even if it was a castle. People, Martha had found, were people, wherever you went.

‘But why won’t you leave here, Martha?’ Guy had said when he first began to make all that money. ‘Why won’t you let me buy you a nice bungalow? Nothing pretentious, just a bit of garden and a bright kitchen. You wouldn’t have to go far away.’

‘I like it here,’ was all Martha had found to say. ‘I just like it.’

And that was how it was. Others might grumble about the smell of the glue factory, but not Martha. Others might fret at the view of a sooty wall surmounted by barbed wire, but Martha looked above it to the tracery of the tall cranes and the red hulls of the new ships. Martha liked the children playing hopscotch on the cobbles, she liked the lean dogs. She liked Betty at No. 5 who never stopped talking and she liked Gladys next door who never talked at all.

‘And I like to be by the river,’ she had said to Guy, looking lovingly at the garbage, the rotting sheds and the mud of the Tyne.

But there was another reason. It was to this house that Jim had brought her when they were married. If his spirit wandered, it would come here to this place where he had found work and comradeship and laughter, and he should not find her gone.

So it was hard to leave, even for a few weeks, but as she moved about in her quiet, comfortable way, serving sandwiches and cake, topping up drinks, she was filled with happiness. For Guy was going to be married; he had found the girl he loved in Vienna. Everything had come right for this foster-son whom she loved more than life itself.

The following morning she dressed very carefully, for she must not disgrace Guy. A plain two-piece she had bought in Newcastle, a neat cloche hat and the fox fur Guy had given her fastened with a diamond brooch because she knew she was a bit of a disappointment to him over his presents.

‘Not that they’d take me for a lady,’ she said to the neighbours who assembled to watch her get into the taxi. ‘I’ve only got to open me mouth.’

But when the train had steamed out over the Tyne bridge, and Martha had settled herself comfortably in the corner of her first-class compartment, she pulled out the locket she wore round her neck to gaze yet again at the photograph of Guy. How handsome he was, how happy he looked! Nerine must have been with him when he had his picture taken.

Martha would have been determined, in any case, to love the girl that Guy had chosen, but there would be no need for determination. That she had suggested this most wonderful of presents already made her Martha’s friend.

‘That’s the first thing I’ll do when I see her,’ said Martha to herself, closing the locket. ‘Thank her for making Guy give me this.’

She had staunchly refused to be escorted on her journey, only permitting Guy to send one of his employees to take her across London and put her on the boat-train. And thirty hours later, having learned the life history of the lady in the next sleeper and received a proposal of marriage from an inebriated Swiss banker she had helped out of the dining-car, she arrived in Vienna.

The time of her arrival happened to coincide with an all-important meeting between the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Minister and an envoy from Geneva — all of whom were informed by a polite but clearly immovable Herr Farne that at that particular hour he would be at the Westbanhof fetching his foster-mother.

The meeting was changed and Martha now saw him come towards her, his keen eyes picking her out at once. He was looking tanned and fit and wonderfully elegant in a new dark suit.

‘Martha!’ He was hugging her, half-lifting her, substantial as she was, off her feet.

Guy was not a person who did things by halves. It was a full three minutes before she could put enough distance between herself and her foster-son to look properly at his face.

‘Oh, Lord!’ thought Martha, gripped by sudden panic. ‘Now, what’s all this?’

She had seen the colour of his eyes.

The first glimpse of Pfaffenstein, which had so amused Guy and so awed Nerine, quite simply appalled Martha Hodge. The conviction that Guy had taken leave of his senses was the main thought in her mind as she was driven round the zigzag road up the crag, across the drawbridge and into the main courtyard in which one could have comfortably housed a battalion of the Tyneside Fusiliers.

Her misgivings continued as she was marched through the state rooms and up the grand staircase. All those statues and some of them not even decent; all those carved chests collecting the dust! But when they went through an old oak door and into the West Tower, she looked about with more pleasure, liking the plain, whitewashed walls and scrubbed stone steps, and when Guy opened the door to a round room seemingly afloat in the sky, her face lit up and she said, ‘Ee, love, now that’s a real, nice room.’

‘I thought you’d like it. It used to belong to the Princess of Pfaffenstein. She preferred it to the grander rooms in the main facade and I thought you’d feel the same.’

But Martha, as she moved admiringly among the room’s simple furnishings, was suddenly alert. She knew every intonation of Guy’s voice, knew through her very skin what he was feeling. He had never been a child who lied, preferring to fight his way out of disaster, but there was a flat ‘keep out’ note in his voice when he was suppressing something.

‘One of the castle servants is still next door, an old nurse, so you won’t be alone. She’ll get you anything you want.’

‘Funny, you’d think this was just a lass’s room,’ said Martha casually. ‘But she’ll be quite old, I suppose? The princess, I mean.’

‘Twenty last birthday,’ said Guy. ‘Now, I’ll send one of the maids up to you. Nerine’s still in her bath or she would have come herself.’

Martha gave him a look. ‘You’ll do no such thing, Guy Farne. I’ll wash me own face, thank you, and I’ll find me own way down.’

Nerine was waiting in the blue salon to greet Guy’s foster-mother. It was a room she had made particularly her own. She loved the rich peacock-blue of the walls hung with Gobelin tapestries, the sumptuous embroidered sofas, the deep pile of the Aubusson carpet with its pattern of birds of Paradise. And she loved the mirrors: eighteen of them, arranged in reassuring symmetry down both sides of the room.

Though she was welcoming a woman only of the working-class, Nerine had taken no less trouble than usual with her appearance. Already dressed for dinner, she wore a softly flowing dress of moss green lace, Guy’s diamonds were at her throat and Martha, walking across the Aubusson towards her, had literally to stop and catch her breath.

No wonder, thought Martha; no wonder Guy had gone off his head when he lost her! No wonder he had waited ten years until he met up with her again!

‘Welcome to Pfaffenstein, Mrs Hodge,’ said Nerine. ‘I trust your journey was not too exhausting?’

She spoke clearly, articulating her words with care to make sure that the homely woman with the sandy hair understood what she said, and extended her hand. Martha, who had meant to kiss her, shook it.

‘Why, no, lass,’ she said comfortably, ‘the journey was nowt. And I’d a done it on me ’ands and knees to see Guy wed.’

Nerine replied suitably, but her eyes were anxious. The woman’s appearance was less dreadful than Nerine had expected. She was quietly dressed and her manner was neither obsequious nor impertinent. But the accent! A Scottish accent — especially a Highland one — could be passed off; an Irish one, too. But this… Here in Austria it might not matter much, but after all Pfaffenstein was a temporary measure. In the end, Guy must buy her a suitable place in England and if he then insisted on having Mrs Hodge around… And in less than a fortnight, her relatives were arriving. What would Mama think if she had to sit next to a woman whose speech made their lowest servants sound educated? And more important even than Mama, Aunt Dorothy!

But there was nothing to be done at the moment, with Guy standing there smiling that slightly mocking smile of his and watching her. They went in to dinner and she made no demur when Martha was seated at Guy’s left hand, nor was she surprised when young David Tremayne (though he had been at Eton) began at once to make a great fuss of the woman. Young Tremayne would do anything to get on the right side of Guy.

It was after dinner, when they were drinking coffee beside the great porcelain stove in the blue salon, that Martha found the opportunity she had been looking for.

‘I’ve had it in my mind ever since Guy wrote,’ she said, ‘to thank you for making ’im send me this. It’s the best present I ever ’ad in the whole of me life,’ said Martha, pulling out the locket. She undid the chain and pressed the catch, to reveal Guy’s photograph. ‘It’s good of him, isn’t it? Real canny.’

Nerine glanced incuriously at the portrait. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But I didn’t make him give you this. I should have thought he could have got you something more valuable, actually,’ she said, dismissing the delicate filigree setting.

Martha said no more. But as she closed the locket, she was frowning. If not Nerine, then who? Had it not been a girl who had ‘advised’ him? Was she, perhaps, making the whole thing up?

No, thought Martha. It was a girl, all right. But what girl? And where?

During the days that followed, Martha’s disquiet increased. Guy spoke to his fiancée with perfect courtesy, but it seemed to her that he took considerable trouble not to be with her alone, and to welcome every opportunity that took him back to his papers in the library. Since Nerine, without actually drawing her skirt aside when Martha passed, continued to address her as if she were a deaf mute, Martha could find little to enjoy in the magnificent drawing-rooms of the castle.

But soon she found a world in which she was wholly at home. On the third day, she penetrated the kitchens and subsequently the bakery, the dairy and the farm. Here she could do nothing but marvel and approve. The people who worked there were skilled, frugal and friendly. They knew their job and the foster-mother of the English milord was a welcome guest.

‘The things they do with red cabbage, Guy,’ she marvelled. ‘You wouldn’t credit it! With apples and caraway seeds and heaven knows what! The cook’s going to give me the recipe. But mind, Guy, you ought to be sending a hamper down to the second forester’s house — ’im that’s next to the inn. He’s got his two eldest lads down with measles and his wife’s broken her wrist, poor soul, slipping downstairs. And would Nerine mind if I went to see old Mrs Keller — her that lives right in the forest — and took her some grapes or summat? They say she’s pining after the young princess — well, it stands to reason, don’t it?’

‘Nerine would be only too glad, I’m sure. She prefers not to go into the village herself,’ said Guy tonelessly. Then, his face creasing into a smile, ‘Martha, how do you know that the forester’s two children have measles? How do you know Frau Keller misses the princess? You can’t speak a word of German, can you? And it wouldn’t help much, anyway, with the dialect they use.’

‘No, you know I can’t. But… well, I divn’t know, love, but there’s no call to know German to know things like that. There’s all sorts o’ ways,’ said Martha, and she continued to spend busy days learning the ways of Pfaffenstein, culminating in an afternoon of triumph when she baked a gugelhupf. ‘Though whether they’d eat it back in Byker’s another matter,’ she confided to Guy. ‘You know, I thought you’d gone clean out of your mind when you bought this place, but I’m not so sure now. There’s some fine people working here, people as know their jobs,’ said Martha.

It was inevitable that Martha should hear a great deal about the Princess of Pfaffenstein, who was so universally missed, and she soon found in David Tremayne someone more than willing to answer her queries.

‘She sounds a real canny wee thing. Would she be pretty?’

‘No… I don’t know. Her eyes are beautiful. But she’s so little and thin and she moves so quietly that at first you don’t think… she’s so unadorned, you see…’ David shook his head, caught in the bewilderment of those who try to describe a personal enchantment. ‘All I know is, Martha, when she comes into a room, it’s as though a lamp’s been brought in… or flowers.’

Martha looked at him with kindness, but without pity, for he was exactly the right age for a romantic love.

‘But she’s a bit of a snob, maybe? Well, bound to be, with princes courtin’ ’er and all? A bit toffee-nosed?’

‘No! She’s the least snobbish person I’ve ever met. She’d marry a blacksmith if she loved him,’ said David hotly.

Martha, who was learning to knit in the continental manner as shown to her by grandmother Keller, bent absorbedly over her sock.

‘Guy will have got to know her, like, in Vienna?’ she enquired casually. ‘When ’e hired that opera company? Before ’e got up here?’

David frowned. ‘I believe so. But he never speaks of it. He never mentions her at all, if he can help it.’

‘Aye,’ said Martha quietly. ‘I’ve noticed that.’

Greatly to his surprise, for speed had not hitherto been a characteristic of Austrian legal life, Maxi heard almost at once from Herr Rattinger in the Borseplatz. The solicitor said he had been in touch with the Strasbourg office of the Land Compensation Board and put the prince’s claim, and though it was not possible as yet to be certain of the outcome, a cautious optimism would not be out of place. Herr Rattinger went on to recommend that the prince withdraw Spittau from the market, for the time being at any rate, since greater force would be given at the hearing if it could be shown that his last remaining dwelling could be made habitable only in the event of a successful outcome to his petition.

The news put Maxi into high good humour and even brought a wavering smile to the face of the Swan Princess, who had been in a vile mood since Tessa’s refusal and was given to stalking round Spittau’s nursery block like a prophet of doom bemoaning the death of the line.

The Wasserburg was at its best in autumn; the mosquitoes gone, the sunsets magnificent, the sky trailing skeins of geese, duck, snipe and pochard which it was once more possible to shoot, and it was with real emotion that Maxi surveyed his reprieved domain.

The day after receiving Herr Rattinger’s letter, he went to Vienna and withdrew Spittau from the market. Then he went round to the Klostern Theatre to give the good news to Tessa and ask her out to lunch.

The backstage world of the theatre had become familiar to Maxi, but nothing could reconcile him to Fricassée and it was with a grimace of distaste that he clambered over the railway platform, made his way round the bed shaped like a mouth — and found Tessa in the scene dock painting the signal from which Raisa, in Act Two, was supposed to hang herself.

She was pleased to see him and overjoyed about the reprieve of Spittau. ‘Oh, Maxi, I’m so terribly glad.’ To her surprise, she had continued to see quite a lot of Maxi, who had clearly taken his rejection in good part and often came to the theatre. ‘It makes me feel less guilty about things. At least it makes me feel less awful about us not being married,’ said Tessa, who felt that morning just about as awful about everything else as it was possible to feel. ‘But what a miracle it all is! How did you hear about this Strasbourg Commission?’

‘Herr Farne put me on to it.’

‘Guy!’ Tessa had spun round, her brush dribbling red paint on to the floor.

‘Yes. I met him outside the agent’s and he told me what to do. And I’m sure it’s only because of him that they pushed it through like that. He rang up Rattinger himself. Farne seems to be like God with all these people; you would think he’d saved Rattinger’s kid from drowning. Well, maybe he did, I wouldn’t put it past him. They answered in two weeks, believe it or not.’ He looked intently at Tessa. ‘Are you all right, Putzerl? You look a bit odd.’

‘Yes. I’m all right. Fine.’ Tessa pushed her fringe aside with the back of her hand and began to mop at the spilt paint with a rag dabbed in turpentine. One day, she thought bitterly, in two or three thousand years, perhaps, she would be able to hear Guy’s name without feeling as though she had been put through a wringer.

‘Well, anyway, what I wanted to say, Putzerl, was that if you ever feel like changing your mind, I’d still be terribly pleased. I mean, Spittau’s there and it wouldn’t matter about the money now. Of course, we wouldn’t have much but we could manage. You wouldn’t be able to have any fuss — but if you decided, after all, we could ask down Father Rinaldo (the one who used to make such a pet of you when he was chaplain at Schönbrunn) and just a handful of people. I won’t keep asking you, but… well, if you thought it might work after all, just let me know.’

‘Thank you, Maxi, you’re very sweet.’ Tessa was genuinely touched. Her childhood friend seemed to have become nicer and more perceptive in the last weeks, and amidst the perpetual grime and dust of the theatre, Spittau, with its wide skies and fresh winds, seemed far from unattractive. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen… you’ve probably heard that things aren’t very good here. I mean, I’ve spent a terrifying amount of money and the bank manager was really unctuous and beastly. And I don’t know… I mean, I’m not quite as musical as the others and sometimes I don’t feel absolutely sure that Fricassée is—’ She broke off. ‘But that’s silly. I have to go on. I promised.’

‘That’s all right. I just want you to know there’s somewhere to go. What about some lunch?’

‘Maxi, I can’t. We’ve got a costume fitting at one and then the publicity people are coming.’

‘Well, if you can’t,’ said Maxi, flushing slightly, ‘do you think your little friend would come? Heidi Schlum-berger?’

‘Oh, yes! What a good idea. You’ll find her in the chorus dressing-room. It will do her good to have a treat; she’s been looking a bit peaky lately.’

An hour later, therefore, Maxi sat opposite the Littlest Heidi at a white-painted table beneath a golden lime tree in the Prater. Not, however, the Hauptprater, with its fashionable chestnut allées and formally tended beds, but the Wurscht’lprater — that lusty, noisy, bustling fun-fair with its shooting booths and roundabouts and the famous giant wheel which Maxi particularly adored. How he had yearned to ride up there when he was a little boy, compelled to sit stiffly between his parents in their embossed, gold-wheeled carriage as it rolled relentlessly away from the high hedge behind which the ‘hoi polloi’ disported themselves.

The late September day was gentle: a golden leaf floated down and landed on Heidi’s adorable blonde head adorned by a pink satin bow which matched her blouse. Heidi, like Tessa, had been delighted by Maxi’s news, and now said shyly that she was sure Tessa would soon change her mind and become mistress of Spittau. ‘She must do… I mean, one couldn’t not…’ she said, looking worshipfully at Maxi out of her huge blue eyes.

Maxi patted her hand. ‘Have some more sauerbra-ten,’ he suggested.

But Heidi, who usually loved her food, made a little moué and said, ‘No, thank you, you’re very kind, but I couldn’t. And no more wine either, thank you.’

But though she felt so queasy, Heidi did not feel in the least like cutting short the meal. While they sat here quietly in the open air, she could manage without disgracing herself. True, the smell of hot engine-oil coming from the roundabouts was bad, as were the occasional disgusting whiffs of frying faschingskrapfen which once, incredibly, had been her favourite food. But here, under the trees, there was also a fresher, reviving breeze which came from the adjoining park and carried only the scent of moist earth and autumn leaves.

For the reprieve would not be for long. That Maxi would want to take her on the giant wheel was inevitable. He was in a festive mood and had already won her a fluffy blue rabbit in a shooting booth. Gentlemen always wanted to go on the giant wheel and Heidi knew just how to make it enjoyable for them: when to say, ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’; when to be so frightened (about three jerks before their carriage got to the very top) that they had to put their arms round her. And at the moment when the wheel seemed to be stuck, on the way down, she had learned to give a little, terrified scream — though everyone knew, of course, that the man who worked the wheel did it on purpose and that they were not really stuck at all. It had given great pleasure, that scream; Heidi would have been foolish not to be aware of that.

Looking down at the amber wine which she could not have drunk for a year’s wages, Heidi Schlumberger thought of all the satisfied gentlemen in whose arms she had gazed at the blue and golden panorama of her native city. Aldermen and councillors, industrialists and officers — ever since she was fifteen years old, she had not been without protectors. And now, all that was in the past. Since she had met Maxi at Pfaffenstein, she had not felt able to oblige a single gentleman. It was madness, of course, for there was the future to think of and the rent to pay.

But the future was best not thought of at the moment. Even the most obscure of the cleaning ladies knew that the writing was on the wall for Witzler’s company. Tessa’s small finger might be resolutely plugging the dyke, but the waves were breaking over the top. ‘And anyway,’ thought Heidi, managing at the same time to smile enchantingly at one of Maxi’s jokes, ‘who would go on employing me now?’

The moment had come. Maxi had summoned the waiter and was paying the bill.

‘I thought we’d go on the giant wheel, eh?’ he said happily. ‘It’s just the day for it, nice and clear and not too many people.’

‘Yes.’ She gathered up her blue rabbit, her handbag.

‘You want to, katzerl, don’t you?’ asked Maxi anxiously, caught by something listless and apathetic in Heidi’s usually quick movements.

‘Of course I want to. Of course!’

She took Maxi’s arm and together they walked towards the carriages of the great wheel, now swaying ominously in the freshening breeze.

Oh, Saint Theresa of the Little Flowers, Protector of the Poor and the Sorrowful, please don’t let me be sick, prayed the Littlest Heidi — discovering as the Princess of Pfaffenstein had done before her, how really awful love can be.