Magic Flutes

5

Guy was mistaken in thinking that Nerine was unaware of his wealth. Ever since her brother Arthur, an avid reader of the Financial Times, had suggested that the Farne who appeared so frequently and impressively in its columns might be the young man who had had the effrontery to propose to her all those years ago, Nerine had never rested. Arthur was despatched to make enquiries in the City and returned with the information that in addition to the enterprises which bore his name, Guy Farne was chairman of Ouro Preto Inc., had a controlling interest in nine other companies, and was regarded as one of the richest as well as the most brilliant men in Europe.

‘He’s in for a knighthood too, they say,’ he added, ‘despite the fact that he’s so young.’

‘A knighthood!’ Nerine was shaken. It looked as though her family had been hopelessly wrong in their assessment of her youthful suitor.

Her meeting with Guy outside the Associated Investment building was thus most carefully contrived, for Nerine’s first attempt at a brilliant marriage had been a disastrous failure. That her parents had forced her to marry Charles Hurlingham was not strictly true. Mrs Croft in particular, whose snobbery was so intense as to amount almost to a religious vocation, had been resolute in advising Nerine to wait for bigger prey. But it so happened that in the space of three weeks, the French girl who had been Nerine’s friend in Vienna wrote that she was marrying a marquis and the freckle-faced American sent ten pages of rapture about her engagement to a young industrialist. To be beaten to the altar by two girls who were, in every possible way, grossly her inferiors was not to Nerine’s taste. Charles was heir to a baronetcy and a famous estate in Wiltshire; she accepted him and had to endure the four years’ martyrdom that followed his injury in Flanders. Unspeakable years, walled up in the country with Charles who seemed to expect her to stay with him constantly though he had excellent nurses, and who followed her with his devoted, doggy eyes whenever she left the room. Oh, God, the waste of those years, the boredom, the frustration!

Well, that was over. Charles was dead and Guy — she had seen this within minutes of meeting him again — was hers for the asking.

‘I suppose you know what you’re doing,’ said Mrs Croft plaintively, ‘but I cannot approve. Not only found under a piece of sacking, but a piece of sacking in Newcastle upon Tyne! I’m sure you would do better to accept Lord Frith.’

The drawing-room of the villa in Twickenham had scarcely altered since Guy had all but broken the arm of the footman instructed to eject him. The same draped piano legs, the same over-stuffed cushions and looped, mauve curtains; the same brown portraits of dead and portly Crofts…

‘Compared with Guy, Frith is a pauper,’ said Nerine, who was making a list of the clothes she would need for Austria. But she had not finally refused the young Scottish nobleman pining for her so flatteringly in his crenellated tower in the Grampians, for this journey to Vienna was only a way of testing the ground. If Guy, in spite of his wealth, proved to be tight-fisted or attempted to make her mix with the company of her inferiors, there was still time to change her mind. Her period of mourning, about which she had purposefully been a little vague, had come in very useful there.

‘And that dreadful foster-mother,’ continued Mrs Croft. ‘You don’t mean to visit her, surely?’

‘No, of course not. Guy only hinted at it. I shall send her a nice note when the engagement is announced. If it is announced.’ Nerine’s exquisitely arched eyebrows drew together, but briefly, for never frowning had helped her to keep her marvellously youthful skin. Guy’s fondness for Mrs Hodge, who seemed to be some kind of washerwoman, was certainly a drawback but she did not believe that he would foist the company of such a person on his future wife.

‘I only hope that Farne knows what he’s doing,’ said Arthur. ‘They say he lived like a labourer in Brazil. I shall take some Keatings powder. And some Andrews Liver Salts. One cannot be too careful.’

Guy had written to say that he had engaged a suite for them at the Grand Hotel, making it clear that he himself would remain at Sachers. So far, so good — but after that they were to go into the country to join some kind of house party and it was this part of the programme that Arthur regarded with particular apprehension.

Nerine’s brother was the kind of young man intended from birth to be middle-aged. Though only two years older than his sister, he was already going bald; his fleshy cheeks, pendulous stomach and the flat feet that had kept him out of the army, represented a complete rout of those genes which had given substance to the glorious being which was his sister.

‘You must not expect to meet distinguished people while you are there,’ pursued Mrs Croft, for it was her brother who, by marrying the daughter of a baron, had acquired the aunt who was an Honourable. ‘No one well-connected is likely to receive a man with Farne’s origins and European high society is very exclusive. But once they know who you are…’

‘Don’t worry, Mother. Just leave it to me.’

‘I can’t say that I’m looking forward to this adventure,’ said Arthur. ‘I’m not at all sure that I shall be able to get the Financial Times abroad.’

‘There’s no need for you to come, Arthur, I’ve told you. I’m taking my maid — I shall be perfectly all right.’

But in the abacus that served Arthur for a brain there was room for a correct and protective attitude towards his sister. That he should let her travel without escort to a country full of people who were not only foreigners but practically Huns, and join an adventurer who was most unlikely to know how to behave was out of the question.

Nerine had put down her pencil and was looking into the shell-encrusted mirror opposite, her gaze settling on her own reflection with the sense of homecoming experienced by a great pianist as he lowers his hands on to the keyboard of a perfectly tuned Stein-way. She was seldom out of sight of a looking-glass, for she knew that her beauty was a gift bestowed by the gods, a kind of divine trust, and that to grudge any time of expense in caring for it would be selfishness indeed.

But all was well. The three dusky curls that she had trained to tumble from her high-piled hair on to her forehead still held their spring; her upper lashes — each one a burnished, raven scimitar — still soared away from her sapphire eyes. Her nose was matt, her mouth crimsoned and glossy, even without the bite on each lip which she now bestowed with her pearly teeth.

How she would reward Guy if he proved generous! Nothing would be too much trouble, nothing! Even now, uncomplainingly, she was preparing to spend every farthing she had wrested from the awful, stingy Hurlinghams on clothes for the journey, and then…! In Paris, in Vienna and all the capitals of Europe she would endure, patient and uncomplaining, the endless fittings at couture houses, the painstaking selection of suitable jewels and accessories which would make Guy, in possessing her, the envy of the fashionable world.

‘I think I’ll take some Jeyes Fluid too,’ said Arthur, who had been pursuing his own reflections. ‘You can never trust foreigners when it comes to drains.’

Two weeks after the première of Pelleas, Miss Thisbe Purse appeared in Jacob’s office and was greeted by him with sighs of relief. Guy Farne, materializing out of the night like the Prince of Darkness, might have been a dream conjured out of Jacob’s own need, but no one could have dreamed up Miss Thisbe Purse.

At the hands of this gaunt and comically English spinster, Jacob now received the contract between the International Opera Company and a syndicate entitled ‘Associated Investments Ltd’. He received also the measurements of the theatre in which they were to perform, a preliminary cheque which brought tears of emotion to his eyes — and an envelope containing a single sheet of paper which informed him that an appointment had been made for one of his employees, by name Tessa, at Anita’s in the Kärntnerstrasse at 3 p.m. that afternoon to have her hair styled. The fee had been taken care of. Mr Farne’s name was not to appear in the matter.

Jacob was left staring in puzzlement at these somewhat autocratically worded instructions when Miss Purse had gone. Tessa? How had Herr Farne even seen Tessa? Could she be the explanation of the Englishman’s interest in the company? Impossible, surely? But if so… if she had that kind of potential, something must be done. Could he, perhaps, put her in a ballet?

Tessa, when he finally found her in the workshop, was painting the ballcock and chain of a derelict lavatory cistern with silver paint and as he gazed at her, Jacob’s bewilderment increased. Since the première of Pelleas she had taken to wearing a blue beret and now resembled both Jackie Coogan in The Kid and the smaller kind of French railway porter. Surely it was not conceivable that this foreign multi-millionaire with his power and sexuality intended to make her the object of his attentions?

‘Anita!’ shrieked Tessa when she heard what was to befall her. ‘I can’t afford Anita! And anyway, I have to finish this ball and chain for Cavaradossi and then I must go and get some manuscript paper for Herr Klasky and fetch the velvet samples from the warehouse because Frau Pollack has a migraine.’

Jacob frowned. The senior wardrobe mistress had been in a state of almost constant prostration since she had eaten — or very nearly eaten — the ashes of her great-uncle Sandor which had arrived from Budapest for burial and been supposed by her to be an ersatz meat powder of the kind much used in the last years of the war. ‘It’s an order,’ he said to Tessa. ‘The company is paying. Three o’clock.’

Three o’clock accordingly saw Tessa, dressed in a blue skirt and embroidered blouse from Pagliacci and carrying, for some reason, a large biscuit tin, enter the sacred portals of what was arguably the most expensive hairdresser in Europe.

‘Impossible!’ declared Anita, a platinum-blonde Berliner with a contempt for the easy-going Viennese. ‘It is out of the question that I can do anything with you. The hair has not been cut; it has been butchered. I am not a magician. It is too short.’

‘I know, I’m sorry,’ said Tessa. ‘They made me come, but I’ll go.’ She tried to get out of the chair. ‘I’ll grow it again.’

‘Grow it!’ sneered Anita, pushing her down. ‘Are you mad? Do you want to look like an Austrian strudel girl with earphones?’ She gestured to an assistant. ‘A fringe I must have to emphasize the eyes but my God, the back… And of course a Nestlé’s out of the question with that face.’

She began savagely to comb, to slash, to complain…

An hour later Tessa crept out of the shop. The biscuit tin was still clutched under her arm but there was a bewildered look in her eyes. ‘The simplicity which costs no less than everything’ is a phrase much beloved of saints and mystics who use it to describe the pursuit of a spiritual life. This simplicity Anita had brought to Tessa’s hair. The minutely calculated sweep of the silken fringe above the eyes, the curving fronds lapping the pointed ears, the soft strands nestling into the hollow at the back of the neck suggested now a very different kind of urchin: a winged messenger, the young Mercury perhaps, or Ariel.

‘You look charming.’

It had not been Guy’s intention to pursue his acquaintance with Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress. But leaving the Treasury on a personal errand he had recalled his instructions to Thisbe and, on an impulse, crossed the road to Anita’s. Now he too was startled. Tessa had been not so much transformed as revealed. The vulnerable little face, the delicate bones, the strange air of puzzlement as she tried to comprehend what the mirror had shown her moved Guy strangely. He had the absurd feeling that as one can see in young babies the throbbing of their pulse beneath the fontanelle, so he could put his hand on the bronze and shining head and feel the beating of her soul.

‘She is not ready,’ thought Guy. ‘Poor child, what have I done?’ And lightly he said, ‘May I relieve you of your burden?’ For the tin she was carrying, adorned with a painting of the former Empress Elizabeth in a tiara, was large.

‘Oh no, thank you. I’m just going to the Stadtpark to release the mice.’

‘The mice?’ said Guy, nevertheless taking the tin.

Tessa nodded. ‘You see, when I first came to work in the theatre they had those traps that break their backs, only sometimes… they… didn’t. So I borrowed some of those where the mice go in through those bristle tunnels that point backwards, you know, and then they can’t get out. Only then, of course, you have the mice.’

Guy, steering her across the road with a light hand under her elbow, said he saw this.

‘So I let them out in the Stadtpark,’ she said, ‘when I can get away. But please… I’m sure I’m delaying you?’

‘Not at all. I was only going to buy a birthday present for my foster-mother in England.’

They had entered the park where lilacs mingled their heavy, fragrant clusters with the golden tresses of the laburnums, little girls bowled their hoops and a troop of firemen in Ruritanian uniforms were marching towards the bandstand.

‘Are they musical mice?’ Guy enquired. ‘I mean, are we making for the Johann Strauss statue? Or the Schubert Memorial?’

Tessa smiled and shook her head. ‘I usually try to get down to the banks of the river — it’s steep there, a sort of cutting and not many people go. It’s the river Wien, did you know? Mostly it flows underground but here it comes to the surface for a little.’

‘Yes.’ Guy did know. He had come here with his poems to Nerine and floated them down the sluggish, sleepy little river which was nevertheless more truly Vienna’s own than the Danube, for the city had been named for it.

‘Here?’ he asked.

Tessa nodded and Guy opened the box.

‘I don’t want you to think I’m sentimental,’ she said as six damp and not noticeably grateful mice lurched away over the gravel. ‘If it were possible to eat them, I wouldn’t mind killing them. But I don’t think it is?’

‘No,’ said Guy gravely, as the last of the thumb-sized rodents vanished behind the stones. ‘I don’t see them as a really useful source of meat.’ But he wondered, suddenly, if the girl was ever actually hungry. Well, at least for a week at Pfaffenstein he would see that she was decently housed and fed.

As they scrambled up the bank, the band began to play. A waltz, of course… And drawn by the music, smiling at the firemen perspiring in their uniforms, they came to a halt before the bandstand at which Strauss himself had played.

‘I know the words in English,’ said Tessa proudly. And in a small, true voice she sang the self-congratulatory, foolish refrain.

‘Oh, what a piece of Heaven is this!

Vienna is bliss, Vienna is bliss!’

She smiled up at him. ‘Not very poetical, is it?’

No… all the same.’ He looked down at the small, sleek head striking fire from the sun. ‘Is it like that for you? A piece of heaven, this city?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it is like that for me. Heaven in springtime. Heaven in C major. Yes, sometimes it is like that for me.’

The next moment her dreamy pensive look had gone. An ex-serviceman on crutches had come up to beg and as he saw the note Guy put in his hand he exploded into fulsome gratitude.

‘Thank you, Herr Baron. God bless the Herr Baron. May the Herr Baron know nothing but happiness.’

‘Oh!’ said Tessa, her eyes kindling, when the man had hobbled away. ‘You shouldn’t let him do that!’

‘Do what?’

‘Grovel like that! Call you Herr Baron. This is a republic. Titles were abolished officially two years ago.’

‘I don’t think you will change human nature with political decrees,’ said Guy, who had always been rather amused by the Viennese habit of conferring titles on anyone they wished to flatter. ‘People will always be snobs.’

‘No, they won’t! They can be educated. When I am the first woman director of the Burg Theatre I’m going to put on plays which—’ she broke off. ‘I’m sorry, that was rude. Only, I am a very deep republican. You were on your way to buy a present?’

Guy accepted the change of topic. He nodded and they began to stroll towards the gate. ‘For my foster-mother. The woman who brought me up.’ He frowned. Guy had sent sables and mink and diamonds in a spate to the little house in Byker to which Martha stuck with quiet obstinacy. She received these with every protestation of delight, but he knew full well that they went into a cupboard in the back room until some friend or neighbour needed them for a wedding or a funeral. ‘I’ve sent her all the usual things: fur coats, jewels, but she just puts everything away.’

‘What is she like?’

Guy hesitated. ‘Sandy hair. Grey eyes. Plump. Talks broad Tyneside, smells of green soap…’ His voice grew warmer as he began to describe the woman who was Martha Hodge.

Tessa was silent when he had finished. ‘And she brought you up?’ she said at last. ‘You were really and truly an orphan?’

Guy laughed at the palpable longing in her voice.

‘Really and truly.’ He described his origins. ‘And I feel bound to tell you that it is most unlikely that I shall turn out to be a nobleman in disguise. Lost princes are extremely thin on the ground in Tyneside.’

But Tessa’s sense of humour had temporarily deserted her. ‘You’re so fortunate! To make your own life… always to have been free.’ Her dark eyes were shadowed with longing. ‘As for your Mrs Hodge, I know exactly what she would like. But you must think only about pleasing her.’

‘What?’

Tessa told him.

‘Good God,’ said Guy, outraged. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

Tessa shrugged. ‘Very well. Get her another mink.’

The little packet arrived at 12 Front Street, Byker, a fortnight later. ‘I am advised,’ said the covering note in Guy’s looped hand, ‘that you would like this, so have endeavoured to overcome my scruples.’

Martha, removing the layers of tissue, found a delicate filigree locket containing what she had begged for vainly every time he came: his photograph.

‘I am advised.’ Only a girl could thus have advised him. He had found her, then: the girl in Vienna who had sent him off to South America looking the way he had looked when she first saw him in the orphanage — closed and defensive and hurt beyond belief. Guy had never spoken of her, but Martha had guessed and been wicked enough to hate her for what she had done to him.

Well, she had been wrong. Guy had gone back and found her and she was the right one; she understood.

With hands that trembled a little, she fastened the locket around her neck. She was to wear it until the day she died.

At Burg Pfaffenstein, David Tremayne was achieving the miracles that Guy expected and for which he paid him. The rooms in the arcaded Fountain Courtyard were refurbished, the stonework cleaned, new lighting and new stoves were installed. Girls with their dirndl aprons hitched over their knees scrubbed and chattered their way through the great rooms. The one hundred and thirty-seven clocks were wound, the three hundred and eighteen mirrors polished. The leaking boats which belonged to the castle were repaired and repainted for the pleasure of the expected guests. Chefs were summoned, horses hired.

The Duchess and the Margravine viewed these preparations with benevolence. Though minutely concerned with the seating precedence of the hundred or so expected visitors, they would appear suddenly on an upturned crate sharing a sandwich with one of the stonemasons or be found bandaging a labourer’s cut hand. As for David, he was soon a favourite with them and bidden to call them Tante Augustine and Tante Tilda.

Since Guy, determined to completely surprise Nerine, still kept his identity a secret, it was inevitable that quite a mythology sprang up round Pfaffenstein’s new owner, glimpsed only as a Mephistophelean figure in a chariot of tulip wood. That he was foreign was regrettable but the villagers, seeing the castle brought back to its former glory, were very willing to don their green and crimson liveries and show him how things should be done.

‘Though they’re all very sad that it will mean saying goodbye to the Princess,’ said David, reporting to his employer as he did once a week at Sachers.

Guy leaned back on the red plush sofa, his fingers laced behind his head.

‘Ah, yes, the ubiquitous Putzerl. Is she to honour us with her presence then?’

The Princess of Pfaffenstein had promptly signed the documents she had been sent but had shown no further sign of life.

‘I don’t know. I imagine so, surely? Her aunts certainly hope that she will come. It’s her birthday on the eighteenth — the day of the ball.’

Guy’s eyebrows rose in faint surprise. Martha celebrated the nineteenth as his birthday, but that was the day he had been found.

David sighed. He was a susceptible and romantic young man who had been much moved by the way the people of Pfaffenstein spoke of the princess. ‘She sounds a most taking little thing. It isn’t just her aunts — everyone seems to tell me of some good thing she has done. Not taking soup to the poor and all that stuff, but real things.’

He broke off, recalling the vignettes that the villagers had conjured up for him in the dialect he was just beginning to understand. The tiny, six-year-old princess, in a white frilled nightdress, eluding her nurse to walk barefoot at night down the crazy, tortuous footpath which wound round the crag on the far side of the drawbridge, in order to bring the innkeeper’s daughter — ill with scarlet fever — one of her own dolls. The suddenly halted carriage, containing a screeching archduchess and a prostrate governess, from which the child had leapt in order to wade into the lake and rescue a kitten some boys were trying to drown. And a later, graver image: the princess at thirteen, walking through the great hall of the castle where the wounded officers lay, cared for by coiffed and nobly born nurses, ceaselessly asking, ‘But where are the men? Who’s nursing the men?

‘She sounds as though there’s not an ounce of snootiness in her. And full of pluck!’

‘Come, David. You’re not trying to cut out the vacuous prince, surely?’

David flushed. ‘No. Though that’s one of the things they most regret, that they won’t see her wedding.’

With five weeks to go, the invitations to the house party began to home like gold-limned doves into the homes of Austria’s high nobility and were everywhere received with pleasure and excitement. If Pfaffenstein could be sold to a millionaire reputed, varyingly, to be an American shipping magnate, an Armenian oil tycoon and a banker from Basle, why not Schloss Landsberg whose marble hall of mirrors was fast sinking on to the terrace below, or Malk, along whose famous topiary allée an ever-diminishing posse of gardeners clipped their way from dawn to dusk. The Countess of Wittenfurt, known as the meanest woman in Europe, bought a new dress; the ninety-two-year-old Prince Monteforelli had himself injected with fresh monkey gland. Even the appalling Archduchess Frederica, tottering through her ruined palace on Spanish heels and demanding that the bailiffs leave her presence backwards, pronounced herself willing to attend — and the Archduke Sava, exiled to Graz, asked if he could bring his bear.

‘Putzerl will be pleased.’ The comment first uttered by her intended husband, Maxi, was repeated continually as octogenarians examined their emblazoned carriages, landgravines looked out their lace and the nobility everywhere prepared to converge on Pfaffenstein for a week of good living at someone else’s expense.

It says much for the esprit de corps which made up the old Empire’s crème de la crème that not one of them grudged the young Princess of Pfaffenstein her good fortune; nor did even one of the mothers of marginally eligible sons so much as consider trying to secure the newly rich princess for their own offspring. For the fact that Putzerl was destined — and soon now — for Maxi and his moated Wasserburg had been known to every one of them since the day she had been carried, screaming and empurpled, to the christening font in Schönbrunn Palace and the Emperor had smiled and said he hoped she would not grow too hot to handle.

‘You must simply assume that Putzerl is going to marry you,’ said the Princess of Spittau, on the day the invitation reached her. ‘It mustn’t be a question of whether but simply of when.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Prince Maximilian.

Late spring was always a trying time at the Wasserburg. The ice cracked and more people than usual fell into the water. Frost-damaged tiles slid off the roof. The longer days gave strength to the germs which had been frozen during the winter months: people who had mere colds developed influenza; those who had been suffering from influenza got bronchitis or pneumonia. The Prince’s housemaids became pregnant, also his bitches. Frogspawn covered the moat.

The old princess looked at her son. How to make him take a more manly role, that was the question. Because he had to marry Putzerl. With the money she brought from Pfaffenstein they could keep going for a while. There would be children, too, the line would be preserved, thought the Swan Princess, making a note that something would have to be done about the nursery block, a kind of fortress in an inner courtyard in which the Spittau babies were immured till old enough to swim.

‘Which uniforms are you going to take to Pfaffenstein?’ she asked her son.

Maxi brightened. ‘I thought the Tyrolean Rifles for the banquet and the Hussars for the opera. And for the reception and the opening ball, the Artillery. That’s Putzerl’s favourite.’

‘An infantry regiment for the banquet?’ said his mother, shocked. ‘Still, that’s not until the last day. If you haven’t got hold of Putzerl by then, God help us all. Let’s go and have a look.’

But when the arthritic old princess, leaning heavily on her son, reached the huge, painted cupboard in which Maxi’s uniforms were kept, disaster awaited them. Mildew had mottled the splendid silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles; some biologically interesting but unsavoury fungi had colonized the pink breeches of the Hussars…

Furiously, the princess tugged at the bell-rope and the prince’s valet appeared.

‘The prince’s uniforms must be taken to the drying room at once,’ she ordered. ‘How dare you let them get into such a state!’

The valet pointed to the walls, running with moisture, and shrugged. ‘What can you do, Highness?’ he said, and gathered up the offending garments, forebearing to point out that the drying room was now unheated.

‘The Artillery’s all right,’ said Maxi, relieved, fingering the sumptuous, braided uniform with its beguiling slender lines in the style of the Crown Prince Rudolf, which had won first prize at the Paris World Fair as the most beautiful uniform on earth. Yes, he would propose to Putzerl in that. It was not as though she was the sort of girl who would expect him to go down on his knees, something which the tightness of the trousers rendered quite impossible.

Or would it after all be better done in mufti? In some private spot in the forest? With, of course, the dogs…?

‘As for me,’ declared the princess, ‘it doesn’t matter what I wear, because I still have my pearls.’

But almost immediately she frowned. For if Maxi did not get hold of Putzerl, the pearls would have to go.

‘I always stab the air with my left hand,’ said Pino Mastrini, greatly offended at being asked to extend his acting range. ‘Always. I stab — so — and then I drop down on my left knee, so. Always.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m complaining about,’ said Jacob, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.

‘In zis bodice I cannot zink! I cannot zink even ’igh C, and ’igh F you can forget absolutely it,’ complained Raisa, erupting from the wings, followed by an infuriated Frau Pollack with her mouth full of pins.

‘The starcloth will have to be cut down, Herr Witzler. It’s half a metre too long.’

The International Opera Company was preparing for its mysterious assignment in June. Jacob had kept Farne’s secret, and no one knew who their patron was or whither they were bound. But underlying the speculation and the rumours was a growing sense of excitement, as though this was the chance that they had all been waiting for.

And so they worked. The Magic Flute had been in the repertory for years, but now they prepared to study Mozart’s immortal singspiel as though it had at that moment just been composed.

Jacob himself was in a white heat of expectation. He had seen pictures of Pfaffenstein rearing romantically on its crag above the lake, heard descriptions of the enchanting theatre. Now he dreamed of the Perfect Performance in the Perfect Setting in the presence of the Perfect Patron who would lead the company from financial darkness into light. In the cafés, among his acquaintances, Jacob showed off and swaggered; he ran up new bills and defaulted on his creditors, but over his opera he dreamed true. And because of this, though they might complain and argue, nobody failed him.

‘Where’s Bubi?’ cried the Rhinemaiden, who had come along to help.

‘I have him, Frau Witzler.’

Tessa appeared briefly in the pit carrying the Witz-ler’s three-year-old son on one arm and a plate piled high with sandwiches in the other. She emerged in the rehearsal room where Klasky — cursing the violins in Hungarian, the cellos in Czech and the woodwind in Serbo-Croat — appeared to be preparing Mozart’s score for an audience of ranking cherubim.

‘Thank you. Put them over there,’ said Klasky, glaring at the orchestra who, having rehearsed for five hours without a break, now foolishly assumed that they could eat. He passed a moist hand absently over Bubi’s blond curls and smiled at Tessa. She was a nice little thing, always willing to help. Perfect pitch, too… Pity there was never any time. Still, perhaps it was just as well. Like Chopin, who believed that to approach George Sands in love was to deprive the world of an étude, Klasky was convinced that women drained away a man’s creativity and it would never do to dissipate his energy. For in spite of the recent spate of rehearsals, Klasky had made a real breakthrough with his own opera. By changing the wronged husband from a policeman to a railway porter, he had unblocked his imagination in a most amazing way. A chorus for platelayers and signalmen had come to him in a single flash of inspiration; a soliloquy for an engine-greaser, a kind of Holy Fool who would speak for the oppressed proletariat, virtually wrote itself.

And sighing, for the girl was charming, he picked up his baton once again. ‘From the letter D, gentlemen. And remember that sostenuto means sostenuto. Even for Herr Katzenbirger it means sostenuto.’

As the time drew nearer for their departure, the company’s preparations grew more frantic.

‘I am not a canary,’ announced Raisa, arriving for a morning rehearsal. ‘I cannot zink at ten o’clock,’ but she sang. The coloratura Jacob had filched from Dresden to play the Queen of the Night fell off her stepladder, twisted an ankle, and climbed up again to sing ‘O Zittere Nicht’ in a way that had the orchestra banging on their music stands. Boris stayed up until 3 a.m. creating exotic head-dresses for Sarastro’s priest. Even Frau Pollack, presented with new fabrics after years of making do, forgot her almost-eaten great-uncle and trod the treadle of her sewing-machine like a Valkyrie.

As for Tessa, she was everywhere: prompting, copying, sewing, ironing and only once, very quietly and unnoticed, fainting in the laundry room when she had missed a little more food, a little more sleep than her small frame could endure.

On a Saturday evening, just five days before they were due to leave, Jacob received a phone call in his office which sent him hurrying in search of his under wardrobe mistress.

‘I’ve just had a call from Herr Klasky, Tessa. He’s conducting at the Musiksverein at eight-thirty and he’s forgotten The Button!’

‘Oh no!’ Tessa’s eyes were wide with concern. ‘Is it a première?’

Jacob nodded. ‘Berg’s Concerto. We must get it to him. It would be a disaster if he got upset now, so soon before the tour.’

All performing artists are superstitious and Klasky, though technically sane, could only conduct a première while in possession of a small, mottled object suggesting, with its faint air of decay and transparency, the shed milk tooth of an undernourished child, but authenticated without a doubt as the waistcoat button of Ludwig van Beethoven himself.

‘He’s rung his housekeeper,’ Jacob continued. ‘He wants you to run round quickly and fetch it and leave it at Sachers at the reception desk. He’s dining there now on his way to the hall. Can you manage that?’

A faint shadow had crossed Tessa’s face at the mention of Austria’s most famous hotel, once the favourite haunt of the aristocracy, which the terrifying Frau Sacher still ran with a complete disregard for recent changes. But she only said, ‘Yes, Herr Witzler,’ and was presently found by the Littlest Heidi, rummaging hastily in a wicker skip for something to replace her paint-encrusted smock.

Heidi Schlumberger was not only the smallest but the prettiest and sweetest of the Three Heidis, her blue eyes permanently widened in admiration of the world.

‘I’ve got a Sylphides dress that’s spotless,’ she said now, taking Tessa by the hand. ‘Come along, I’ll show you.’

‘Is it suitable, do you think?’ said Tessa, when she had slipped it on and stood looking at herself, white, gauzy and rose-embroidered in the mirror of the chorus dressing-room.

But what was suitable for the delivery of Beethoven’s waistcoat button to Sachers? — and anyway, there was no more time. Thanking Heidi profusely, Tessa ran out into the street.

Guy had spent the day before Nerine’s arrival in a kind of Odyssey, revisiting the places where he had been with her. The old hunting pavilion in the Prater where he had picked her a bunch of early scillas like little sapphire stars… the chesnut tree by the gates of the Academy where he had watched for her light at dawn… the room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its famed and fabulous Breughels in which Nerine — hiding from the other girls — had stood beside him to gaze enraptured at the master’s complete and all-embracing world.

Now, strolling back through the Inner City past scalloped fountains, equestrian statues and the quiet facades of palaces warm in the golden light of evening, he could almost believe that the city, like himself, was waiting for his love.

He crossed the Albertina Platz, exchanged bows with the Minister of Trade who was assisting his portly wife into a fiacre, turned down the Philharmonikerstrasse and entered his hotel.

The foyer was almost deserted, for they had begun to serve the evening meal. But at the far side, between two Venetian mirrors, he glimpsed a small figure in white backed against the red-damask covered wall. A figure imprisoned by the fat, spread-eagled arms of a bald gentleman in evening clothes, his back to Guy, who was bending over her.

Guy approached and as he did so, the anguished face of Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress appeared briefly from behind the bulk of her captor, lit up in recognition of Guy and vanished once again.

A certain melancholy settled on Guy. The man endeavouring to pin her to the wall was old, unsteady on his feet and probably quite genuinely under a misapprehension for the glimpse of Tessa, her throat and bare shoulders rising from a cloud of white, hardly suggested a respectable Viennese hausfrau waiting for her spouse. Which was a pity — for Guy, penned for weeks in the Treasury, was in the mood to do justice to a prolonged, well-matched and bloody fight.

Now he merely seized the man by the shoulder, spun him round and in tones as polite as they were menacing, said, ‘This lady is with me.’

Rubbing his shoulder and muttering angrily, the old gentleman tottered away. Guy, left looking down at Tessa’s fragile, serious little face, transcending the absurd romanticism of the costume, was more than ever inclined to exonerate her tormentor.

‘How old are you?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Twenty. Well, almost.’

Guy, who had been toying with the ‘I am old enough to be your father’ approach, abandoned it. At eleven he had not really been prepared for parenthood.

‘You shouldn’t be here alone,’ he said, his voice still harsh. ‘It’s most unsuitable, you must know that.’

‘Yes… I’m sorry.’ Only the ghost of a sniff, a finger pressed against the corner of one eye as if to hold back an impending tear, betrayed her recent strain. ‘I had to deliver something for Herr Witzler.’

Guy’s thick brows drew together in a frown. What did Witzler mean by exposing her to this? Was the child never supposed to eat or sleep?

‘You had better stay and have some supper. My secretary’s probably waiting in the dining-room. She’s a formidable lady, but she’s got a heart of gold. Come and join us.’

Tessa shook her head. ‘No, really, I couldn’t.’

But at that moment a service door opened somewhere at the back and lifting her head, her nostrils flaring in the manner of Baudelaire when he smelled the fleurs du mal, she said raptly, ‘Rindfleisch suppe!’

It was too much, and abandoning further protest she let herself be led to the double doors of the dining-room.

Inside, however, a reverse awaited them. The terrifying Frau Sacher, black-clad and omnipresent, came towards them, stared at Tessa and hissed angrily to Guy, ‘You cannot bring her into the public dining room!’

Fury gripped Guy. Surely the woman could see that Tessa, though dressed like a dancing-girl, was not of their kind? But anxious above all not to subject the child to a scene, he allowed himself to be led upstairs and within moments the door was opened on an image from one of Tessa’s most fervent dreams.

‘Oh!’ she breathed. ‘All my life I have wanted to dine in a chambre séparée.’

Entranced, she looked at the red plush walls, the snowy damask, the alcove with its discreetly looped curtains of gold-tasselled brocade. This was life as she had conceived it: Sarah Bernhardt, the Duse, were now sisters under the skin.

But when she had sat for a while in a chair that Guy had pulled out for her, she fell silent. A cloud passed over her face.

‘Is anything the matter?’

‘No… Only… would you mind very much if we changed places?’ Guy, following her gaze, found that Tessa was confronting the portrait of an obese and haughty lady whose plump bosom was bisected by the Order of St Boniface. Narrowing his eyes to read the title, he learned that he was in the presence of Her Imperial Highness, the Archduchess Frederica.

‘Certainly.’ Guy rose and the change was effected. ‘Your republicanism again?’ he enquired politely.

Tessa nodded. She was now staring with every appearance of pleasure at a painting of Leda welcoming with unmistakable concupiscence the attentions of the swan.

‘Yes, but this lady at least is enjoying herself,’ she said, answering Guy’s grin.

It was an agreeable meal. Someone, somewhere, had taught this waif the art of conversation. Tessa touched him with her ardent belief in art as the passport to man’s freedom and happiness, but she could be very funny about the International Opera Company’s preparations for their exciting and mysterious assignment. And she could listen. Guy, telling her about his travels in Brazil, saw her almost visibly drinking in his descriptions of that fabled, exotic land.

But as the meal drew towards its close, he noticed her small face slewing round more and more to the object only partially concealed by the half-drawn curtains in the alcove: an object which, without blazoning it to the world, was not really a couch or a sofa — was, by its width, the humped softness of its pillows… was, in short… a bed.

The waiter brought coffee and a liqueur for Guy, and closed the door with finality. Requesting permission to smoke, Guy watched, concealing his amusement, as the highly expressive face of the little wardrobe mistress registered in rapid succession a series of emotions: apprehension, followed by resolution, followed again by a flicker of despair.

‘Do people often bother you like that?’ he said, deciding to force the issue. ‘Like that old man just now?’

‘Well, a bit. It’s worse since Anita cut my hair.’ Her eyes slid back to the bed. It was awful not knowing how to behave, what was correct. That so handsome and wealthy a man — a man who clearly could have any woman he wished — should have any real interest in her seemed most unlikely. On the other hand, that so handsome a man — any man — should buy her a dinner, a three-course dinner with rindfleisch suppe and kalbsbraten which nowadays cost a week’s wages, and want nothing in return, seemed equally unlikely. Caught thus between Scylla and Charybdis, Tessa reached for her wineglass, gulped and plunged.

‘It is very difficult. You see, I believe that one must be completely generous. One must be like Sonia in Crime and Punishment when she went to Siberia with Raskalnikov, and like Isadora Duncan. I mean, not dancing in bare feet but giving. And like Madame Walewska with Napoleon. Everything must be given freely — money, property… oneself. But though I believe this absolutely when anyone… the second double-bass player or the electrician… or anyone wishes to,’ she went on, looking suddenly extremely miserable and somewhat wringing Guy’s withers, ‘I can’t, I absolutely can’t.’

Overcome by failure, she bent her head. Silky lashes curtained downcast eyes, and in the whispered murmur which now escaped her Guy, hair-raisingly, caught the name of Professor Freud.

With some regret, for it was burning beautifully, Guy now extinguished his cigar. Then he leaned over and laid his strong, chiselled fingers briefly on Tessa’s clenched knuckles, whitened by confession and strain.

‘Tessa, I promise you that one day it will not be like that. One day somebody will come — not the second double-bass player or the electrician, but somebody. And you won’t have to think about being like Isadora Duncan or going to Siberia and you certainly won’t have to trouble poor Professor Freud. When that person comes, whoever he is, all the fear and doubt will go and you’ll know.’

‘Will I?’ Her face, wistful yet trusting, was turned to his. ‘Are you sure?’ Yet even as she spoke she felt, with a strange kind of puzzlement, that the question already belonged to the past.

‘I’m sure,’ said Guy. And meaning only to reassure her, he added, ‘as for me, my dear, I promise I mean you no harm. In fact, I am waiting for someone to join me here in Vienna — someone I love and hope soon to marry.’ He paused and Tessa drew in her breath, seeing what Martha had first seen in the child of six: the lightening of his eyes to a lyrical and tender blue. Then he rose and pulled the red curtains firmly across the alcove. ‘So you see, you are perfectly safe!’

Tessa smiled. ‘I’m glad,’ she said, and took one of the crystallized plums from the box he held out to her.

She was glad. She was very glad. She was happy. Nothing was going to happen, not ever. He loved someone else.

Odd, though, that happiness should feel so much like a weight pressing against her chest; odd that the room looked suddenly a little misty.

Odd, too, that when she so much liked Karlsbad plums, the one she was eating should taste as if it had been dug out of an Egyptian tomb.