Magic Flutes

17

At the beginning of October, Guy left for Geneva. If all went as he hoped with the loan, Austria would find herself on the road to financial stability, and his task completed. After which he would return to Pfaffenstein to finalize the plans for his wedding.

It was during his absence that Nerine’s relatives, escorted by her brother Arthur, arrived in force: Mrs Croft, Nerine’s mother, her Uncle Edgar, her Uncle Victor, her portly cousin Clarence and — preceded always by murmurs of obeisance and respect — her Aunt Dorothy, the aunt who was an Honourable.

The honour that Aunt Dorothy, the daughter of a textile manufacturer promoted to the peerage, had conferred by marrying Mrs Croft’s brother, had never dimmed. Now widowed and in her sixties, obese, opinionated and petty, she still held undisputed sway over the family.

More of Nerine’s relatives were due shortly, but even those who had arrived seemed to fill the castle. Speaking loudly in English on the assumption that foreigners were deaf, they gave orders to the servants, demanded mineral water and British newspapers and could be heard everywhere braying cheerily at their own jokes.

It was only when she was with her own kith and kin again that Nerine realized how much she had missed them, and their admiration of Pfaffenstein’s grandeur was balm to her soul. Yet her pleasure was tinged with regret, for they had brought distressing news.

Just two weeks before their departure, an English nobleman, Lord St Henry, his wife and both his young sons had been drowned in a tragic boating accident off the Isle of Wight. Mrs Croft had waited until there was no further doubt — in other words, until the bodies of all four victims had been recovered, undoubtedly dead — before writing an agitated letter of condolence to Lord Frith in his crenellated tower in the Grampians. Frith’s answer, received just before she left for Austria, had been suitably grief-stricken, but it had also been unequivocal. Yes, it was true that his elder brother, St Henry, had died, along with his two sons; the loss was one which had shattered not only himself, but his old father who had aged by ten years and was not expected to live much longer. And yes, Frith had added, it was true that he himself would now inherit his father’s title, but as she could imagine being the Duke of Aberfeldy would mean little when set against the tragic loss of his brother, his two nephews and his brother’s wife. He had ended, as always, with concerned enquiries about Nerine, whose stay abroad must surely soon be coming to an end?

‘You haven’t told him about your marriage?’

Nerine shook her head. ‘There seemed no point until afterwards.’

Mrs Croft frowned. She was in the state bedroom, inspecting her daughter’s trousseau. The full-length chinchilla, the Russian sable, the jacket of Canadian lynx were spread across the bed. The diamond necklace, the double row of pearls and a few other trinkets which Nerine had picked up in Vienna were displayed on the dressing-table.

‘And I’m getting this silver lily,’ said Nerine. ‘It’s a Pfaffenstein heirloom and absolutely priceless. Arthur found out that the Museum of Antiquities in New York offered fifty thousand dollars for it, and that was before the war!’

Mrs Croft nodded. She could not blame Nerine for her choice, but the blow dealt her by Frith’s news was hard to bear. ‘My daughter, the Duchess of Aberfeldy.’ How inevitable it sounded, how right.

‘You would have thought God could have managed it better,’ said Nerine, throwing open the wardrobe to her mother’s awed gaze. ‘Just when one’s really happy He sends along something like this to spoil it.’ She pulled out an ermine-lined theatre cape and held it against her body, watching the play of light on the gold brocade. Yes, she had made the right choice, but really life could be amazingly cruel!

If Aunt Dorothy was pleased with her first sight of Pfaffenstein, its liveried retainers and sumptuous rooms, she received a nasty shock at dinner on the first night.

‘It was a shock, Alice,’ she said to Nerine’s mother when they had retired to the blue salon. ‘I was not prepared for it, you see. Though how one could be prepared for such a thing…’

‘I can see that,’ Mrs Croft replied, and Uncle Victor, Cousin Clarence and Nerine’s brother Arthur all agreed that it had been a shock.

‘I know, but you see Guy is so fond of her,’ explained Nerine. ‘There’s really nothing I can do. He’s taken Mr Tremayne with him and the head steward makes all the seating arrangements now, but even when everybody was here it was the same.’

‘But right opposite me! At the head of the table!’ exclaimed Aunt Dorothy. ‘That accent! I could hardly understand a word she said!’

‘Nor I,’ said Uncle Edgar, who had been on Martha’s right at dinner. ‘I must say, Nerine, I think it’s most unwise of Guy to foist her on you socially. Of course, you wouldn’t expect him to forget her — that would be quite wrong. Money should be sent, and a hamper at Christmas. But I cannot help seeing it as an affront—’

No!’ Nerine was definite about that. ‘Guy thinks it’s the biggest treat in the world to sit next to Martha Hodge at dinner. He put the Austrian Foreign Minister there, specially, when he came last week.’

‘Really?’ Aunt Dorothy was increasingly disturbed by this turn of events. ‘You see, dear, it’s all right for foreigners — they probably wouldn’t notice her accent, though how one could fail to… Or her lapse with the finger bowls. But, after all, Pfaffenstein is only a stage, isn’t it? In the end, to take your place in real society, you’ll have to return to England. And if this Hodge person has become accustomed to living as one of the family you will find acceptance very hard to come by, especially in view of—’

Here she paused, unable to put into words the matter of the Fish Quay, the piece of sacking, and what she referred to as ‘All that’.

‘Yes, I see what you mean. I’ve worried about it myself, Aunt Dorothy. But if one dares to criticize her, Guy just flies off the handle.’

‘My dear, there’s no need to criticize her, that would be quite wrong. We must just make her see, without any rancour, that it would be best for everyone if—’

She broke off as a plump, homely figure appeared in the doorway. Arthur, who had instinctively risen at the sight of a woman, was frowned down by Uncle Victor and sank shamefacedly back on to the couch.

Watched in silence by everyone in the room, Martha said good evening, moved over to a low chair by the window and took out the sock she was proudly knitting with the wool hooked over the left finger as demonstrated by Frau Keller.

‘It’s a grand evening an’ all,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I never seen stars like the ones ’ere. Not that you can see much doon our way, what with all the muck blowin’ off the chimneys.’

No one answered and Martha lifted her head. For a moment her kind face puckered and a look of grief, as unalloyed as it was unmistakable, appeared in her soft, grey eyes. Then she bent again to her task.

An hour later she rolled up her wool, said good night and went to her room. Not a single word had been addressed to her all evening. The education of Martha Hodge, which was to have such far-reaching consequences, had begun.

In the days that followed the Crofts, led by Aunt Dorothy, avoided no opportunity of snubbing Martha. They stopped talking the moment she entered the room, raised their eyebrows when she joined them at table and greeted with pitying smiles her cheerful reports of events in the village.

Nerine joined dutifully in this policy of humiliation, but she found herself in a quandary, for she had discovered in this plainly dressed, working-class woman, an unexpected talent. Three days earlier, crossing the courtyard fresh from her afternoon rest, she had come upon Martha who had spent a most satisfactory afternoon teaching the innkeeper’s wife how to bake a ‘Singin’ Hinny’, and greeted her future daughter-in-law with a quick, involuntary shake of the head.

‘What is it?’ said Nerine sharply.

‘Well, love,’ said Martha, facing it out, ‘it’s the way that scarf’s knotted. The suit’s grand — that soft grey sets you off a treat — but the neckline’s too fussy with that knot right in the middle. Maybe if you was to wear it open, sort of casual like, with the scarf just folded in a bit…’

‘Yes,’ said Nerine quickly. ‘I’ve been worried myself. Come upstairs.’

There followed many absorbing sessions in Nerine’s bedroom, for Pooley, usually so jealous, took to Martha Hodge at once. Together they pored over fashion magazines, selected braids and trimmings, pondered the precise tilt of a hat. Martha’s taste was unerring, her attention inexhaustible, but she was not afraid to speak her mind and Nerine, parading up and down in her trousseau, listened to her suggestions with eager interest. If only she had been a servant, thought Nerine, how easy it would be.

As for Martha, who endured with gentle dignity the snubs and pinpricks she had to face downstairs, she found these sessions hard to bear. In her own way she understood that Nerine’s greed and self-absorption were akin to those of an artist or composer who will sacrifice everything and everyone in the service of his own gift, only Nerine’s gift was her own beauty. She also realized that since there was nothing evil or vicious in this girl which would sicken Guy and thus release him, he was doomed.

‘I go to Schalk!’ pronounced Raisa, sitting on the bed shaped like a mouth in which she would never, now, be ravished by the capitalist mill-owner. But her voice was forlorn and a tear forced itself out of her greedy almond eye and rolled down her cheek.

Disaster had struck the International Opera Company. Two weeks earlier, the owners of the theatre had given Jacob an ultimatum. In view of Herr Witzler’s unsatisfactory record in the past, they were only willing to renew the lease — at a considerably increased rent, of course — if Herr Witzler could pay them six months’ rent in advance. Failing this, they intended to offer the tenancy to Herr Kitzbuhler who, for a long time, had been looking for a theatre in which to play farce.

It was the cheque for this sum — which Tessa had insisted on writing — that had been returned three days earlier, with the information that Her Highness’s credit with the Bank of Austria was now officially exhausted.

The incident led to a spate of calamities. Two black-clad gentlemen arrived in Witzler’s office, claiming to represent the Princess of Pfaffenstein, and informed him that if there were any more attempts to obtain money from Her Highness an action would be brought against him for exerting pressure on a minor. Jacob’s creditors closed ranks and the owners of the theatre wrote and ordered him to vacate the premises on the twenty-first of October, the date scheduled for the première of Fricassée.

Now the company was assembled on the stage of the theatre in a tableau vivant of despair. Outside, the newspapermen waited like piranhas, but inside it was silent and dark. The phone, with its endless, doom-filled shrilling, had been cut off earlier in the day; the great arc lamps, lined up for a lighting rehearsal of Fricassée, were extinguished.

‘Cheer up, ’ighness,’ said one of the stage-hands, giving Tessa’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘It aint your fault. You’ve bin a bloomin’ marvel!’

‘Yes, truly,’ said the Littlest Heidi, forgetting her own troubles in order to comfort her friend. ‘You’re a heroine.’

But Tessa, perched like a disconsolate fledgling on a luggage trolley, was beyond comfort. Outwardly silent, inwardly she seethed with rage and frustration. If only she had been of age… if she had been just one year older, she could have defeated the beastly lawyers. There were still a few securities she could have sold. She could have kept going somehow till Fricassée redeemed their fortunes. As it was, she had failed art, her friends, everything…

Jacob, white with dyspepsia and guilt, paced between the scaffolding, occasionally coming to stand before his under wardrobe mistress like a whipped spaniel. Even now, the bailiffs were probably stripping his villa in Hitzing; prison was a distinct possibility, but he was used to it whereas Tessa…

The blow was shattering for everyone. Raisa knew perfectly well that she could not go to Schalk, who had his own stable of dazzling sopranos; nor would Pino be welcome at La Scala as he had frequently boasted. The stage-hands and technicians, close enough to the breadline at the best of times, faced almost certain unemployment. Yet everyone now set themselves to comfort Tessa.

‘Never will we forget your sacrifice!’ declared the Rhinemaiden. She spoke with authority on the subject, for her own pearls lay unredeemed in the pawn shop in the Dorotheagasse.

‘Here, have a piece of this,’ said Boris, handing her half his gherkin sandwich. ‘I’ve told you, you don’t eat enough.’

Bubi, who had been sitting at Tessa’s feet, now raised his head. He had commandeered Pino’s peaked porter’s cap and was engaged in an engrossing game of tram conductors with Tessa’s cheque stubs for tickets, but it had become clear to him that he had a contribution to make.

‘Bubi loves Tessa,’ he announced. ‘Bubi loves Tessa an awful lot.’ He pondered. ‘More than vanilla kipferl, Bubi loves Tessa.’

But as Tessa, managing to smile, replied in kind, there came a clarion call from Raisa.

‘Ver is beink Zoltan?’ she enquired, in a voice throbbing with portent.

‘Yes, where is Klasky?’

The conductor had stridden purposefully from the theatre at midday, promising to return quickly, but that had been many hours ago.

‘I zink per’aps ’e ’as shooted into ’imself,’ said Raisa, not without a certain satisfaction.

‘Oh, my God!’ Jacob rushed towards the phone, then remembered that it had been cut off. That Klasky had done himself some kind of injury was not impossible. To see the masterpiece he had created with such anguish brought to naught was quite enough to unhinge this sensitive genius with his wild Magyar blood.

‘Go on! Klasky couldn’t shoot a barn door from ten centimetres away,’ said the first flautist whose vendetta against the Hungarian, originating in a dispute about tempi in Meistersinger, was now in its fifth year.

‘Shall I go round to his house?’ said Tessa anxiously, slipping down from the trolley. ‘It wouldn’t take long.’

But at that moment, entering dramatically from stage left, Klasky himself appeared.

One glance at his wild hair, his burning countenance, made it clear that the composer of Fricassée had been through some ultimate and purging experience, some dark night of the soul, from which he had now emerged to pursue a high and noble task.

For Klasky had not staggered haphazardly into the theatre. He was looking for someone.

In silence, they watched as he clambered over the railway platform, skirted the signal-box, fell over a fire-bucket and then righted himself.

He was making for Tessa. He had now reached her and come to rest before her as she stood quietly looking at him, puzzlement in her auburn eyes.

‘Here,’ he said. The word seemed to have been forced out of him. ‘I’ve been to fetch it. It’s for you.’

He had put his hand into the pocket of his suit to take out a small, black box. At this point, however, emotion overtook him and he had to feel in his other pocket for a monogrammed handkerchief with which to blow his nose. Then, with a last purposeful thrust, he put the box into Tessa’s hand.

‘No!’ Tessa’s low, startled exclamation was nevertheless audible in every corner of the stage. ‘No, please… I couldn’t!’

But the Hungarian was in control again. ‘Yes,’ he said gruffly. ‘I want you to have it. To show my gratitude for what you tried to do. It’s yours.’

Now, everyone had crowded round. There were ‘Oh’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ from all sides, and the Rhinemaiden sighed like the sea.

For the gesture that Klasky had made, torn as it was from the very depths of his being, was the right gesture, the only one. Something had been said to the Princess of Pfaffenstein which could have been said in no other way.

Thus Tessa, on her last day as Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress, looked down at the object held in her trembling hand. Mottled, a little diseased-looking, frail — and valued beyond any jewel in Christendom — the waistcoat button of Ludwig van Beethoven himself.

Guy, with his entourage, reached Vienna on a misty, mid-October afternoon. His part in the negotiations had been successfully accomplished. The League had granted the Austrian Republic an enormous loan with which to stabilize her currency and put her affairs to rights. Patiently enduring the eulogies in the continental press, the banquets and fulsome speeches which followed, Guy had only felt compelled to decline, with scrupulous politeness, the Great Cross of the Order of St Stephen which the grateful Austrian government endeavoured to confer on him.

Immensely relieved to be done with it all, he stepped down from the Geneva Express.

‘Hurry the stuff out,’ he ordered David. ‘There’s a train at three, I think, that gets a connection to Pfaffenstein. Check the times — I’m going to get a paper.’

David was back in a few minutes. ‘I’ve reserved a first-class compartment, and the cases are in. We leave in ten minutes.’

No answer. Guy was reading with total concentration an article in the Wiener Presse, his face drawn into its most satanic lines. ‘Get the luggage out again,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘Take it to Sachers. Wait for me there, and Thisbe, too.’

‘Is anything—’ began David, but the only reply was the paper thrust into his hand. He read:

‘Oh, Lord!’ thought David. He looked up but Guy had already vanished, lost in the crowd making its way to the taxi rank.

Jacob was in his office, clearing his desk. The Rhine-maiden, supposedly helping him, was sniffing dolorously over old programmes and mementoes of former glory, removing them from the waste-paper basket as soon as Jacob put them in. Under the desk, in a nest of discarded newspaper cuttings, Bubi was being a mouse.

Already, even in so short a time, the theatre bore marks of desertion. The posters with their ‘Cancelled’ notices flapped dismally; the red plush seats were shrouded in tarpaulins; there was dust everywhere and it was bitterly cold.

Into this dismal scene Farne burst unannounced, exuding energy and power and sending Jacob leaping exultantly to his feet.

‘Herr Farne! Welcome, welcome! Come in! A chair for Herr Farne, liebchen!’ he cried, sweeping a pile of music on to the floor.

His squashed, despairing face was transformed. Herr Farne had heard of their plight; this famous music-lover could not bear to think of the demise of the Klostern Theatre; he had come to pay the six months’ rent; he was going to finance Fricassée. They were saved!

The illusion lasted exactly as long as Farne’s first words.

‘If you imagine I would sit down in the same room as you,’ said the Englishman, raking Jacob with his disquieting eyes, ‘you must be an even greater fool than I took you for. You deserve to burn in hell for what you did to Tessa.’

‘I… she offered… I tried to refuse, but—’

‘You don’t seem to have tried very hard. Bankrupting yourself is your own business, but bankrupting a girl of twenty happens to be another matter. It would give me the greatest pleasure to see you in jail.’

But Jacob had surfaced again. ‘Herr Farne, quite a small sum, now, could pull us round. Well, a fairly small sum. Klasky’s opera is undoubtedly a masterpiece and—’

‘Klasky’s opera doesn’t interest me in the slightest and if you think I’d lift a finger to save you after the way you’ve behaved, you must be out of your mind.’

‘But then… why have you come?’

‘I came to find Tessa. Where is she?’

Jacob’s eyes flickered. If Farne was interested in Tessa, there was hope after all. More than hope! If Farne married Tessa, then Pfaffenstein, that lost Paradise, would be most gloriously regained. But no… the date of the Englishman’s wedding to the widow had been announced. A famous couturier had given an interview about ‘The Dress’.

‘She’s not in the theatre,’ he said. ‘She came here this morning to see if she could help, but then she went to visit one of our dancers who has not been well, Heidi Schlumberger.’

Guy indicated his lack of interest in Heidi Schlumberger with a contemptuous shrug. ‘Is she coming back?’

Jacob spread out his hands. ‘There is nothing to do here, Herr Farne,’ he said wretchedly. ‘We are finished.’

‘Then give me her address.’

‘Number 15, Friedhofgasse, Apartment 4. It’s near the Central Cemetery.’

Then, prompted by some evil genius to try once more, he said, ‘Herr Farne, we did a beautiful Flute for you. Couldn’t you just lend—’

Guy had reached the door, but now he turned. ‘If you dare to come crawling to me ever again after what you’ve done, I shall personally throw you downstairs. What’s more—’

He was interrupted by a heart-rending wail, followed by a storm of sobbing.

Bubi’s peaceful existence as a mouse named Heini had been progressively eroded by the angry voices coming from above the desk. The voices of people who did not like each other, who were cross with Papa and who were going to make Mama cry. He knew all about people like that. They were people in dark suits and bowler hats who came to the house and took things away. He staggered out from beneath the desk, his blond curls awry, his small face contorted by grief.

‘Bailiffs!’ cried Bubi pitifully. ‘Bailiffs!’

‘Oh, Lord!’ The terrorizing of small children was not in Guy’s itinerary. He picked up Bubi, carried him to the desk and set him down. ‘I’m not a bailiff,’ he said. Impatient to be off, he took a short cut to solace. ‘Feel in my pocket,’ he ordered.

‘Which one?’

‘Either.’

Bubi’s starfish hand vanished and reappeared with a match-case of wax vestas, a propelling pencil and then, a most marvellous thing: a glittering, golden fish with shining eyes.

‘Fish?’ said Bubi longingly.

‘It’s a dolphin. Press the tail.’

Bubi pressed, and out of the wondrous creature’s mouth there shot a steely tongue.

‘Is it mine?’

‘Yes,’ said Guy. Abandoning without regret the gold and onyx cigar-piercer presented to him by the Brazilian President, he left.

He found the Friedhofgasse easily, but his first view of the aunts appalled him. They looked shrunken and unwell, quite changed from the autocratic ladies of Pfaffenstein. And Tessa was not there.

‘We think she may have gone to see Frau Richter,’ said the Duchess.

‘She was a little bit upset,’ said the Margravine. ‘Not Frau Richter,’ she explained, ‘for whom it is no longer possible to be upset, but Tessa. There has been a little bit of trouble at the theatre, you may have heard. And she came back unexpectedly and—’

The Margravine subsided, frowned down by a look from her sister-in-law. But it had been a wretched business, Tessa coming back without warning at midday and finding them like that — she with her skirt hitched up, washing down the bathroom, and Augustine cleaning the windows. Tessa had been rather unpleasant and wanted to know what had happened to the maid, then she had started snooping generally, asking why the stove was unlit and what they had had for lunch. And while it was true that kneeling was bad for her arthritis, there had been no need for Putzerl to make quite such a fuss.

‘Who’s Frau Richter?’ enquired Guy.

‘She is a lady of whom Putzerl is particularly fond. But dead. In the cemetery,’ explained the Margravine. She nodded at the vast graveyard, stretching away outside the windows.

We think she may have gone there because she didn’t take Quin-Quin,’ said the Duchess, motioning at the pug who, almost as homesick as the aunts, had let himself go and was wrapped in nothing more impressive than a blanket.

Compelled by the barest civility to give the old ladies the news of Pfaffenstein for which they craved, Guy did not reach the gates of the cemetery until a quarter of an hour later.

The Central Cemetery was vast, mossy and overgrown. He walked quickly between the serried gravestones of black marble and grey stone, past urns and faded wreaths, past lichened angels collapsed in grief…

The afternoon was drawing to a close. Tousled bunches of asters and marigolds glowed on the green mounds; trees of russet and gold stood out against the sombre darkness of holly and yew.

Though he traversed the paths systematically, passing Schubert’s grave and Beethoven’s sarcophagus, there seemed to be no sign of her. Then, at last, at the far end of the cemetery, he saw the small, well-remembered figure, sitting on a bench. A copper beech spread its branches over her bent head; a red squirrel played beside her on the grass. It was a scene of total silence, limned in the colours of autumn and in autumn’s essence for her sadness, like those of the sculptured angels who wept and mourned over the graves, was unmistakable.

Noting, with a dull lack of surprise, the rapid beating of his heart, Guy walked with his silent, panther gait towards her. Then his foot disturbed a pebble. She looked up, saw him and instantly, incredibly, was transformed. Everything about her: the eyes, the line of her mouth, the set of her shoulders proclaimed an uncontrollable happiness, and she rose to her feet and waited silently as he came towards her.

Guy’s face as he approached showed no answering joy but only shock. I must not touch her, I must not touch her once, he thought; not for an instant.

‘I saw what happened in the papers,’ he said. ‘It’s true, is it? You’re ruined? All the money from Pfaffenstein’s gone?’

‘Well, not quite. Not all of it… But they said I wasn’t of age and threatened all sorts of things. You know what lawyers are — everything that’s awful and always for your own good.’

‘Tessa, let me help you. That’s why I came.’

She shook her head and some of the happiness drained from her face. For a moment she had thought, wildly, that he was free and had come to claim her.

‘You were mad,’ he said harshly. ‘Mad to do it.’

‘You did it at Pfaffenstein.’

‘I have a great deal more money than you. And if I had retained Witzler I would have kept him on a very firm rein, I assure you. As a matter of fact I did think of using Pfaffenstein for what you once said — serving music. I couldn’t imagine that Nerine and I would want to live in more than a very small part of the castle, and anyway my work keeps me travelling a great deal. But when I found that Nerine didn’t care for music, it became absurd, of course.’

‘Yes.’ She was looking down at something she had been holding in her hand: a single, russet leaf from the beech tree above their heads. ‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘I used to try to stick the leaves back on the trees. I couldn’t bear autumn. I couldn’t bear them to fall.’

‘And now?’

She shrugged. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look what people have to bear.’

She led him a little way down a mossy path to a plain green grave with a simple headstone.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Guy. ‘Frau Richter? Your friend?’

Together, they looked at the inscription.

‘Yes,’ said Guy. ‘God had better have mercy, there.’

‘When things get bad,’ she said, ‘I think of Frau Richter who just went on living and living after all those children had died. Look, she lived to be seventy-five! Think of all the Bertha Richters in here… you can feel their courage, somehow, coming up through the ground.’ She turned and led him slowly back to the bench. ‘These are the people I come for when I’m down, not Beethoven or Schubert. The great people are for the times when it’s good to be alive.’

‘For God’s sake, Tessa, let me help. It would cost me nothing to reimburse you.’

‘No.’ The word was bleak, unadorned and final. ‘I have to do it myself, Guy. It’s not just the mess at the theatre — it’s the aunts too. I found out that they’ve been practically starving themselves so as not to spend the money I left in trust for them. Somehow, I have to find a way out.’

She shivered a little in her cotton blouse and Guy picked up the shawl she had left on the bench and managed to wrap it round her without once letting his fingers come into contact with her shoulders, an achievement which gave him a certain satisfaction. She thanked him. Then, forcing her voice to be casual, she asked, ‘When is the wedding?’

‘On the fourteenth of November.’

‘Oh, so soon?’ She was staring down at the leaf which was still cupped in her hand. ‘I haven’t forgotten about the Lily,’ she went on. ‘I’ll see that she gets it. I promised.’

‘There’s no reason why you should. Nerine has enough jewels to sink a battleship.’

‘No… the Lily’s not like that. It’s special. I never cared for jewels but the Lily’s different. It’s so old, you see, so incredibly old. I can’t explain, but when you look at it you know… what went into its making.’

She was like a lily herself, he thought: the pale head, the slender neck, the incorrigible elegance transcending whatever clothes she wore.

‘Is your foster-mother already at Pfaffenstein? Martha Hodge?’

‘Yes.’ Guy smiled. ‘She’s having a great time making friends in the village. Rudi eats out of her hand and grandmother Keller is teaching her some weird way of knitting socks.’

‘Oh, I’m glad! I’m so glad!’ The elfin face was suddenly alight. ‘And Nerine, of course, will have—’

Nerine doesn’t go into the village,’ he said tonelessly. ‘She’s afraid of catching an infection.’

‘An infection?’ Tessa’s hand had sprung to her throat. ‘Is their illness? Not typhus?’

No, no, nothing like that. A few cases of measles, that’s all.’ He paused. ‘Nerine is to be pitied, Tessa,’ he went on quietly.

Nerine! But she has everything!’

He shook his head. ‘She’s in love with her own beauty and with every hour that passes it fades a little. I’ve seen her, sometimes, looking in the mirror with panic in her eyes.’

‘“It is a fearful thing to love what time can touch”,’ quoted Tessa. ‘Who said that?’

‘I don’t know, but they were right. I would have done better,’ Guy went on bitterly, ‘to have spent three days getting to know Nerine rather than buying her a castle. I was in love with the past, with my own splendid fidelity. But she is not to blame. She is what she always was: a lovely, wilful child. It is I who made her into something else. And because of this,’ he said wearily, ‘I cannot now reject her.’

Tessa bowed her head. While she believed Guy to be infatuated, she could hope that he might wake. But he had already woken and still meant to keep his word, and so all hope was gone.

As they stood there, close but never touching, the red squirrel came cautiously down the tree, made as if to scamper away again, then calmed by their stillness, jumped down and settled on the grass, holding a beechnut between his paws.

‘What was that word you taught me at Pfaffenstein?’ said Guy, his voice very low. ‘For a wild strawberry place? Smultronställe, was that it?’

‘Yes.’

She did not ask why he enquired, for she saw in his face what he was saying. That this place, now, had become a smultronställe. That any place where they were together would be such a place, be it a railway station, a rainy street… ‘Here is my space’, Anthony had said to his Egyptian queen, meaning what Guy meant now.

‘Guy, when I came into the picture gallery at Pfaffenstein, when the aunts were telling you about the Lily… Nerine asked you then when you were born and you wouldn’t say. You said you didn’t know. But it was… Was it in June? Before the twenty-first? Are you a Gemini?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed, like a child reprieved from punishment. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in astrology, of course. It has to be nonsense. But all the same, I knew.’

They had been together longer than they realized. It was dusk now and a very young moon had climbed between the trees, cradling the evening star.

‘I must go — the aunts will be worried. Guy, I don’t know if we will meet again, but—’ Her voice broke and she tried again. ‘Sometimes, when you’re alone and you look up at—’ Once more, she had to stop. Then she managed, ‘If I cannot be anything else… could I be your Star Sister? Could I at least be that?’

Guy dug his nails into his palms. Everything in him rose in protest at the fey, romantic conceit. He did not want her in the heavens, linked to him by some celestial whimsy, but here and now in the flesh and after the death of the flesh, her hand in his as they rose from graves like these when the last trump sounded.

‘Yes,’ he managed to say. ‘You can be my Star Sister. You can at least be that.’

He felt something on his wrist — a breath more than a touch — and looking down saw that she was laying the beech leaf, like a most precious gift, into his hands.

Then she walked lightly away, pulling her shawl closer, and vanished like Giselle into the mist between the tombstones.

‘Did you find her, sir?’ asked David when Guy, with absolutely no recollection of the journey, reached Sachers.

‘Yes. But she won’t let me help her. God knows what will become of her. Unless—’ But the word ‘unless’ was more than he could bear. He turned away, then swung round once more to look intently into David’s eyes. ‘I never thought of that,’ he said slowly. ‘Would you have… David?’

David flushed. But when he answered it was without prevarication, his head held high.

‘No, sir. I wouldn’t even have asked her. She never had eyes for anyone but you.’