by Eva Ibbotson
He was getting nowhere. To his infantile showing-off she accorded only the lovely, quiet attention that was her hallmark.
‘I wish you could see it,’ he said.
Ah, that was better. She had made a small movement of the head. Was she not going to see it, then?
‘You are happy in the Amazon, Paul? You like it?’
He was silent. Then, forgetting his role, he began to quote the lines that the great Cervantes had written about the new world that was South America: ‘… the refuge of all the poor devils of Spain, the sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers, the promised land for ladies of easy virtue, a lure and disillusionment for the many … and an incomparable remedy for the few.’
Nina had closed her eyes. ‘And you?’ she said softly. ‘Have you found it to be that? An incomparable remedy?’
Paul did not reply. For him there had always been only one ‘incomparable remedy’. This woman to whom he had committed himself wholly at their first meeting and whose absence had left him with a lifelong, ever undiminished sense of loss.
So now on with the slaughter, for he saw that like himself she had kept faith. He had only to reach out and she would give it all up – the fame and adulation, the homage of the students who had pulled her carriage through the Prater after her first Bohème, the bouquets glittering with diamond drops which besotted Habsburg counts threw for her on stage … If he mishandled the next few moments he would doom her to squalor and poverty, waiting for him to come out of prison if the trial went against him, friendless in this vile climate, in danger of every dread disease.
‘You gave an incredible performance tonight.’
She waved a hand. ‘No … no! It was a mistake, Paul. I am—’
He interrupted her. ‘But I wondered why you wore a white rose? One would expect Carmen to wear red flowers, don’t you think?’
There. He had done it. He had also, apparently, crushed the stem of his wine-glass.
Nina looked down at her plate. Not to make a fuss, that was what mattered. Women lost their only sons in battle. Children starved. Paul had not loved her. Blindly she groped for her fork, speared a dark, unfocused object and conveyed it, with infinite care, to her mouth.
Even now perhaps she could do it. If she admitted to him that her voice was finished. He was so chivalrous, so kind.
Oh, God, no!
Paul’s glass had been replaced; the next course brought. His bleeding hand, wrapped in a napkin, was concealed beneath the table. Now to finish it off.
‘Have some more wine, Nina. It will give me an excuse to have some. Steffi always fusses when I get drunk.’
‘Steffi? Your … wife?’
He shrugged. ‘We’re not actually married – one doesn’t bother out here. But she’s been with me for a long time.’
‘What is she like?’ said Nina. She was speaking with great care now, like a small child reciting poetry.
Paul’s mind juddered to a halt. What indeed was she like? Had he ever, among the string of girls with whom he had tried to forget Nina, even known a Steffi?
‘Well, she’s French … dark curls … a real minx but…’
He rambled on, creating an ‘ooh-la-la’ soubrette from a fifth-rate operetta. (‘You cannot believe me, Nina. You cannot. Tell me I’m lying; see through this idiot game.’)
But she believed him. The modesty and selflessness he’d so much loved in her finished the job he had begun. It was over.
What followed was the worst. Nina lifted her chin and took up, almost visibly, the mantle of prima donna and woman of the world. For exactly the time that politeness demanded she made conversation, speaking amusingly of her travels, telling him bizarre and interesting stories of the stage. Then she rose, gave him her hand to kiss, sent her regards to Steffi.
‘Steffi?’ said Paul wildly, nearly ruining it all.
But the pain was beginning to take over now; she noticed nothing and holding herself very erect she walked down the gangway to where the hansom cab still waited – and was gone.
The next day, Nina fell ill. Jacob, who knew nothing of what had passed, was convinced that she was dying. He had read about swans who sing gloriously before dying and Nina, lying mute in her hotel room, managing to shiver although the temperature was 95° in the shade, seemed a good candidate for death. He found an understudy, placated the manager of the Opera House, brought a Portuguese doctor who offered him a choice of lethal tropical diseases and suggested he cut the diva’s waist-length, still golden hair.
Jacob refused, sat with her for three days and nights and remembered for the first time in ages that he had a wife in Linz who ran his leather goods business and made the best blintzies in Lower Austria.
Nina, however, did not die. On the fourth day she got up, apologised, kissed Jacob and prepared for the journey home. Neither of them mentioned her voice, for both knew that she would never sing again.
So now she stood again by the rail of the steamer, erect and careful but with a new gesture, her arms folded across the bodice of her dress as if to stop the pain escaping and troubling others with its unmannerly intensity. They reached the ‘Wedding of the Waters’, began to steam down the ‘River Sea’…
After a while Jacob came over to stand beside her. He must make her speak, listen, anything.
‘You never asked where I found your white rose,’ he said.
She flinched, but as always answered gently. ‘No. Where did you get it?’
‘It was quite an adventure,’ said Jacob proudly. ‘I think perhaps it was the only white rose in Amazonia. I tried everywhere and then I met an Indian who had been employed as a gardener on one of the great estates. The man who owned it had left – he’s gone bankrupt and faces a prison charge too, poor devil. But the Indian swore there was a special place there, where the owner used to grow a white rose. Apparently he made a great fuss about doing it – it’s very difficult to grow roses here.’
Nina’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘What was it called, this place?’
‘Roccella. An Italian built it after some palazzo in—’
He broke off for Nina had clasped his shoulders. She was looking at him as if he were wreathed in unutterable majesty and her eyes were the eyes of a young girl.
‘Again, Jacob, please. Tell me again what happened there. Everything.’
Not all great loves, faithfully kept, end in tragedy. Nina returned, found Paul hunched and despairing by the riverside, saw his face as he watched her come towards him … and knew why she had been born. His prison sentence was minimal. She waited. They returned to Roccella to begin again. Nor had they been in any way mistaken: each found in the other, and was to do so always, the ‘incomparable remedy’ they had sought.
No, if there was a tragedy, it was that of Jacob Kindinsky who had adored Nina and now returned to Linz. But a passerby, seeing him on his verandah above the Danube, spooning sour cream on to his blintzies and listening to the clink of the till as his wife chatted to the customers in the shop below, might think that as a tragedy it was … well, endurable. Soon, too, he is going to write a book that will take the operatic world by storm. He has the title ready: The Diva with a Rose.
A LITTLE DISAGREEMENT
BECAUSE I have been married with great content (and to the same woman) for twenty years, I am often asked questions. Questions which imply that there is some formula for married happiness; a recipe for success. And when this happens and I am forced into an answer, I tell the questioner a story. The story of Tante Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer and her husband Uncle Ferdi, in Vienna, before the war.
And I begin at the end. With Tante Wilhelmina’s death-bed, to be exact, which took place on a Tuesday evening during that socially grey period when the Opera Ball is over for another year, the holy statues wear their Lenten shrouds and a wind straight from the plains of Hungary bites eastward into the city.
On a dull, cold Tuesday in early March, then, Tante Wilhelmina (who actually was no relation to me at
all; I was the housekeeper’s son and still a child) clutched her heart, shrieked, turned purple – and sent for the hairdresser.
In life, Tante Wilhelmina, prematurely retired from the chorus of the Opera, took little interest in her appearance. Death, however, was a different matter. Now, as she lay gasping on her pillows in a nightdress of lilac crêpe de Chine, she nevertheless managed to give precise instructions to Herr Kugelheim.
‘You will, of course, make absolutely certain that I am dead. You know how to do this?’
Herr Kugelheim, ancient, bandy-legged and servile, clutched his curling-tongs and muttered something about mirrors.
‘Then two low curls on the forehead. Low, and a plaited chignon in the nape. Have you got that?’
I, meanwhile, had been sent to fetch the cats. Wotan and Parsifal presented no problems. Huge, neutered tom-cats, they were perfectly prepared to finish their cream at the foot of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed. Siegfried, however, was another matter. Siegfried’s operation had not been a success and he was absent on the tiles.
By the time I had returned from an unsuccessful search, most of the relatives sent for by my mother had arrived, and in hushed whispers were assembling in the bedroom. It is naturally with hindsight that I see the grouping as having the weight and dignity of a Delacroix or Titian. In the centre, of course, lay Tante Wilhelmina, the lamp falling on her ravaged features and heaving breast. Behind her, the hairdresser; across her feet, the cats. At the back of the room, in shadow, a respectfully doleful row of servants. Leaning against the wardrobe, a creaking cousin, male, from Plotz …
Kneeling by the bed itself, hiccuping with grief, was Tante Wilhelmina’s adopted daughter, Steffi; a blonde, kind, silly woman, her trusting sea-cow eyes brimming with tears. By the window Steffi’s husband, Victor Goldmann, a Jewish violinist from the Philharmonic, surveyed the scene like a flayed, El Greco martyr.
Tante Wilhelmina stirred and groaned. Silence fell. A waiting silence.
As though on a cue that only she could hear, my mother now stepped forward.
‘Gnädige Frau‚’ she said, leaning over Tante Wilhelmina, ‘if you will forgive the impertinence, I think the Herr Professor should be sent for. I think your husband should be here.’
Then: ‘ If you … insist,’ said Tante Wilhelmina, speaking with great difficulty. ‘ I … don’t wish it … personally. But if … you insist.’
A sigh of relief seemed to pass round the room. Tante Wilhelmina stretched out a failing arm and reached for the note-pad on her bedside table. ‘I AM DYING,’ she wrote in indelible pencil and underlined each word.
My mother tore off the paper and handed the message to me. At a nod from her, I ran downstairs and knocked on the door of Uncle Ferdi’s study.
Uncle Ferdi had been sitting there quietly, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight. Now he peered at the note through gold pince-nez, blew softly through his moustache, sighed, nodded – and followed me upstairs …
And if all this seems a little odd, the explanation is very simple. Tante Wilhelmina and Uncle Ferdi had been married for thirty years. And for twenty-nine of these, they had not exchanged a single word.
No one knew what Uncle Ferdi had done, only that it was very, very bad. That somehow he had hurt and humiliated Tante Wilhelmina to such an extent that she had never been able to forgive him. There had been no scandal, no break-up. They lived under the same roof and when she wanted anything she sent him notes, first through Steffi (adopted from an orphanage mainly for the purpose), later through me. But from that day to this no word had passed between them.
And now, with Uncle Ferdi sitting sadly in the big carved chair which had been placed in readiness for him, the deathbed could begin.
I was ten years old and very nervous. A bit ghoulish, too, as I leant against my mother’s skirts. What would happen? Would she scream or gasp or … rattle? Would there be blood?
Well, what happened was that Tante Wilhelmina forgave people.
She forgave everybody. She forgave the maids for not dusting behind the piano and she forgave the creaky cousin for doing her out of a barrel of rollmops during the First World War. She forgave her sister-in-law for filching her recipe for lungenbeuschel and she forgave my mother for not appreciating Wagner. She even (and this took some time) forgave me.
After that came Steffi.
What she forgave Steffi for was not marrying a Jew, for in those days Hitler was just a faint, foul cloud on the horizon. What she forgave Steffi for was getting it all so wrong. And it is true that the intricacies of Jewish orthodoxy seemed to be quite beyond poor Steffi, who cooked gefilte fish on days of strictest fasting and was once seen trying to remove her husband’s hat on the way to synagogue.
And then Tante Wilhelmina turned and fixed her suffering, other-worldly eyes on Uncle Ferdi.
With a superhuman effort, the dying woman struggled up from her pillows. My mother on one side, Steffi on the other managed to support her heaving, swaying form into an upright position. An arm in lilac crêpe de Chine crept out towards her mournful, waiting husband.
It was going to be all right. She was going to forgive him. The great wrong he had done her almost thirty years ago was now expiated. In death they would be reconciled.
‘F … Fer…’ Gasping, choking, Tante Wilhelmina tried to say her husband’s name. Then with an unutterably awful cry she fell backwards on to the pillows.
A choking rattle followed. Silence.
Uncle Ferdi, grief-stricken, huddled back in his chair. The hairdresser stepped forward tentatively, a mirror in his hand …
And jumped back like a scalded cat as Tante Wilhelmina, exhausted by her labours, gave vent to yet another enormous and room-shattering snore.
‘You mean she often does it?’ I said to my mother a few, days later. ‘Often has a death-bed?’
My mother was folding table linen, her square deft hands flicking the damask. Now she looked up at me and sighed. ‘Fairly often. About twice a year. You were too young before; I always sent you away.’
‘But why?’ I said. ‘Why?
My mother frowned. ‘I think… I don’t know really … but I think perhaps she wants very much to forgive him. To make up the quarrel. Only her pride won’t let her. The death-beds are a way of … forcing her own hand. But then in the end, she can’t quite make it.’
I only partly understood. But: ‘Poor Tante Wilhelmina,’ I said, and my mother smiled and touched my hair as though I had said something to please her.
It was then that I plucked up courage to ask something I had wanted to ask for years. ‘What was the quarrel about? What was it that Uncle Ferdi did to her?’
The smile left my mother’s face. ‘Never ask me that, Karl,’ she said, turning back to the linen.
During the next few years the death-beds came thick and fast. By the time I was twelve, I could have organised one almost as well as my mother. Long before Herr Kugelheim arrived with his curling tongs, I’d have caught Wotan and Parsifal,arranged the big chair for Uncle Ferdi, helped to round up the maids, the cousins and Steffi … Always Tante Wilhelmina forgave the rest of us and always, just before she could forgive her husband, she fell back, apparently lifeless, on the pillows. ‘I SEEM TO HAVE BEEN SPARED’ she would write to him next day. And everything would go on exactly as before.
Then, when I was about thirteen, came a death-bed which I shall never forget because what happened there set the pattern for the rest of my life.
I wish I could think of better and less hackneyed words to use, but I cannot. So I only state that I fell – and it really was a falling – in love.
I knew, of course, that Steffi and Victor Goldmann had a daughter. But while I normally had the freedom of the house, when visitors or relations came my mother kept me strictly in the servants’ quarters. So it was not until she was old enough to attend her first death-bed that I saw Ruth.
It was an autumn death-bed, I remember. The chestnuts in the square outside were dropping golden finge
rs on to the Archduke somebody-or-other who rode out there for ever. I remember this because Ruth’s hair was the colour of those leaves and so were her eyes – her father’s wise, El Greco eyes – but hair and eyes, both, were lightened, gold-flecked, because of silly, blonde, incurably Aryan Steffi.
I don’t think anything happened, except that I had an overwhelming longing to cross the room and stand beside her on the other side of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed, but didn’t because she was ‘family’ and I was the housekeeper’s son. But after that we met secretly after school wherever and whenever we could; in the Volksgarten, on the steps of the Karls Kirche, by the Mozart memorial … And if I say I was happier then than I have ever been, I don’t want to imply some childish mock-romantic idyll. It was with absolute seriousness that Ruth and I, trailing our satchels through the streets of Vienna, discussed our future life together, planning everything from the kind of dog we would breed on our farm near Salzburg to the portion of our income we would donate to the poor.
And then came the last death-bed. The one at which death, which had been mocked so long, was mocked no longer.
It began exactly like the others. The hairdresser came, the cats were caught. Even Siegfried, temporarily sated, was present for once – and Ruth had a blue ribbon in her hair. Tante Wilhelmina forgave the maids, the rollmops cousin, Steffi, me …
And finally struggled into a sitting position to stare, her arm extended, at Uncle Ferdi.
Uncle Ferdi had aged a lot recently. His eyes behind the gold pince-nez had lost their piercing blue; his moustache drooped; even his bald head no longer shone bravely in the lamplight and I remember praying that this time it really would happen. That this time, at last, she really would forgive him.
‘F… Fer…’ began Tante Wilhelmina. And then suddenly, her whole face crumpled into a look of agony and disbelief.
While slowly, very slowly, Uncle Ferdi slipped from his chair on to the floor and lay there, very peaceful looking and quite, quite still.
