by Eva Ibbotson
This was certainly true. Schloss Spittau, almost afloat on water, was not for the faint-hearted. In winter, mist enshrouded it; frozen birds honked drearily on the ice. The coughing of retainers bent double with rheumatism mingled, as spring advanced, with the plopping of evil-eyed pike in the moat. Pieces of stucco fell suddenly into the lake, and in the summer enormous, muscular mosquitoes moved in like the Grande Armée.
Maxi continued to look depressed. He was perfectly aware of the advantages of marrying Putzerl. He liked her. When you took Putzerl out on to the lake there was no need to take a call duck. She could imitate, like no one he had ever met, the cry of a mallard ready to mate. There was no girl who was a better sport than the Princess of Pfaffenstein. But all this proposing got at a man’s pride . . .
Then suddenly he brightened and pulled at the soft ears of the dog nearest to him, a German pointer with beseeching amber eyes. ‘If I could take the dogs to Pfaffenstein?’ he suggested. ‘To the house party? Don’t you think Putzerl might agree to marry me then? You know how she is about the dogs.’
The princess looked at the five dogs now thumping their wet tails on the floor and trembling with anticipation. She opened her mouth to tell Maxi not to be silly – and closed it again.
For it seemed to her that, for once, Maxi had a point. Whatever her feelings about her intended bridegroom, the Princess of Pfaffenstein really did love the dogs.
‘I cannot zink in French!’ declared Raisa Romola the morning after Jacob’s announcement.
‘There are no tunes in Debussy,’ declared Pino. ‘It is not what my public expects.’
‘I shall go to Schalk!’ stated Raisa – and Jacob blenched. Schalk was the director of Vienna’s most prestigious institution, the heavily subsidized State Opera. Saying ‘Schalk’ to Jacob was like saying ‘Boots’ to a struggling British retail chemist.
Rallying, he launched into an impassioned speech in praise of Debussy’s subtle, impressionistic score, its contrapuntal texture, its throbbing beauty . . .
The idea of throbbing beautifully had a slightly calming effect on Raisa, who narrowed her greedy almond eyes and said that if Jacob was prepared to consider a bonus, ‘zinking’ in French might just be possible.
To all this Tessa, busy repainting a flat for Tosca in the wings, listened with eager interest. True, there were strange things in Pelleas and Melisande. One never knew, for example, who exactly Melisande was. Was she a mortal or a being from another world? Had she in fact deceived her husband, Gollaud, with his handsome younger brother Pelleas? And why did she keep losing quite so many things down wells – her crown, her golden ball, her wedding ring? But the whole opera, played largely behind a gauze and subtly and romantically lit, was the very stuff of poetry – and modern too.
She was therefore a little disappointed when Boris, spooning yoghurt on to his plate at lunchtime, said gloomily, ‘You know what Pelleas means, don’t you? It means hair. And hair, right now, spells trouble.’
Boris was right. For the outstanding feature of Melisande which makes her mysterious, haunting beauty unforgettable, is her knee-length shimmering, streaming, golden hair. With this hair, as she lets it fall from her window, the lovesick Pelleas besottedly toys; with this hair Gollaud, her jealous husband, humiliates her, pulling her by it back and forth across the stage. The same hair surrounds her, an incandescent aureole, as she lies dying.
Hair for wigs comes traditionally from nuns. Italian nuns, mostly, since the Italians are noted for being both hirsute and religious, and postulants by the hundred are shorn to become brides of Christ. But her Italian possessions had been wrested from Austria, as had Moravia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and all the other countries which had once humbly supplied the capital with everything from paprika to the tresses of their young girls. Of late, Boris had been driven to do business with the local convents, which had been anything but easy – with the fall of the monarchy and the urgings of the new republic, the religious vocation of Vienna’s jeunes filles had declined disastrously.
Any hope that they would get away with horsehair dipped in peroxide, or an old wig from Meistersinger, was dispelled at the first rehearsal. Max Regensburg, the young director called in for the production, was a realist through and through. ‘This Melisande must be flesh and blood,’ he declared, and the company, envisaging Raisa’s bulk, felt he had a point.
On a cold morning during the second week of rehearsals, Tessa accordingly set off on the long tram ride which took her to the lower slopes of the Leopolds-berg and trudged up a steep, tree-lined avenue to the Convent of the Sacred Heart – only to be met at the gate by a distraught Mother Superior.
‘My dear, I’m so sorry but I’m afraid the girl I spoke of has turned out to be quite unfit to take her final vows!’ She lowered her voice. ‘We found her with the carpenter who came to fix one of the prie-dieux. Such a scandal! We had to send her straight home!’
Two days later Tessa arrived at the Convent of the Annunciation in the working-class district of Ottakring, only to find that she had been beaten by a Swiss merchant who had appeared the day before and bought up the entire crop of hair.
‘He paid in Swiss currency, you see,’ the Mistress of Postulants apologized, ‘and our Order is very poor.’
The Convent of the Blessed Virgin was in quarantine for typhus. The Convent of the Resurrection yielded a single, meagre hank of hair at which Boris looked in disgust.
‘I can fudge the colour, but I’ve got to have the length,’ he said gloomily.
With a week to go to the dress rehearsal, Boris grew frantic. The making of a wig is a most delicate business, for some four thousand strands of hair have to be knotted painstakingly into the lace.
‘What am I going to do?’ he enquired. ‘Jesus Maria, what am I going to do?’
Tessa, who was sewing silver stars on to Melisande’s cloak, lifted her head and rather sadly told him.
At Pfaffenstein, everything was going ahead as Guy had planned. The absent Putzerl had given her consent to the sale; the workmen, much impressed by the dollars with which they were paid, had promised to carry out the necessary repairs in the minimum of time and David, left in charge at the Pfaffenstein Arms, was following his employer’s orders to spare no expense in preparing for the house party in June.
Guy meanwhile had returned to Vienna and immersed himself once more in the gruelling work connected with the loan, and it was not until he had finished his report on the first stage of the negotiations that he felt free to turn his attention to the matter of the opera.
That music was to play a main part in the entertainment of his guests went without saying: there would be an orchestra to play for the ball and to accompany the fireworks; there would be chamber music at night for those who cared for it. But for the climax of his house party, Guy intended to do no less than stage, in the theatre at Pfaffenstein, the opera at which he had first seen Nerine.
At the beginning of every love affair there is a moment when the timeless essence of the beloved is somehow encapsulated, crystallized and fixed in the mind for ever. It may be no more than the way she bends to a flower or touches the head of a passing child, yet in that instant the lover will perceive the uniqueness and wonder of her whole life. For Guy, this moment had come when Nerine gave that first, small, anticipatory sigh as the curtain rose on the dream landscape of Mozart’s Magic Flute. To share with her once more the music of a composer he worshipped above all others, to meet her eyes again over Pamino’s avowal of undying love – that would be to set the seal, like nothing else he could imagine, on the joy and miracle of their reunion.
Now, in his suite at Sachers, he rang for Thisbe Purse.
The woman who arrived in response to his summons was a grim-faced spinster with a greying bun of hair and steel-rimmed spectacles. The prize pupil in her year at Mr Pitman’s Academy for typing and shorthand, she travelled everywhere with Guy – forming with Morgan, his chauffeur-valet, and David Tremayne, the trio of indispensables w
ho enjoyed Guy’s confidence and trust.
‘I want tickets for the opera, Thisbe, please. For tonight.’
‘Yes, Mr Farne,’ said Thisbe, who lived in constant hope of an earthquake, flood or fire from which – with her teeth if necessary – she could rescue her employer. ‘For the State Opera or the Volksoper?’
‘Neither. There’s a company called the International Opera Company, I believe?’
‘Yes, sir. They’re in the Klostern Theatre, in the Braungasse.’ Her employer’s passion for music was such that she made it her habit to investigate all musical events in any city in which they arrived. ‘I’ll go and look in the paper.’
‘It’s Pellas and Melisande,’ she said, returning with the Wiener Presse. ‘By Debussy. A première.’
Guy’s eyebrows rose in surprise. From a small and unsubsidized company he had expected rather another Waltz Dream or Merry Widow.
‘All right. That will do. Get me a ticket, please.’
‘Not a box, sir?’
No, I’m going alone. One ticket. Centre stalls.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Thisbe Purse. That there might not be a ticket for a première occurred to her but she did not mention it. If Mr Farne wanted a ticket, he got it. No one who worked for him was left in doubt of that.
The theatre, with its baroque insouciance, pleased Guy. Still in his opera cloak, for public buildings were still very poorly heated, he skimmed the programme and joined in the applause for the conductor whose tormented eyes, as he acknowledged it, seemed to imply a dreadful martyrdom ahead.
The introduction began and Guy relaxed. The orchestra was good; the interpretation sensitive and precise. The curtain rose . . .
Melisande crouched, lost and frightened, by the moonlit well. ‘Ne me touchez pas, ne me touchez pas,’ cried Raisa, managing after all to ‘zink’ in French. But Gollaud did touch her, married her, took her back to his gloomy castle to be loved and destroyed by Pelleas. Of the tenor, Pino Mastrini, even the producer had not demanded that he act, only that he should sing the actual notes which had been written. The glorious voice that God had seen fit to place in the throat of this Milanese bullock did the rest.
The production interested Guy. The scene where Melisande lowered her hair from the window and Pel-leas toyed with it came over remarkably well. Lovely hair, it was, but real – not the excessive, overdone Rapunzel stuff he had seen in some productions. With its soft, blown look it made the love scene very moving, and even Pino Mastrini knew how to toy. Long before the curtain came down on Melisande’s death bed, Guy knew that the International Opera Company would do.
At the stage door he parted the waiting crowd of students and admirers, presented his card and asked to see the director. But once inside the theatre he did not hurry to follow the directions that the doorman (rendered obsequious by Guy’s air of authority) had given him, but wandered along enjoying the notices on the call board and the rueful graffiti pencilled on the bleak, tiled walls. Some of Guy’s happiest moments had been spent in freezing theatre corridors like this: waiting for the delectable Claudine from the Paris Opera Ballet when he was on leave in France, for a Spanish chanteuse from the Teatra Amazonas in Manaus, for a Russian girl from the Ballets Russes who had been his mistress for a year in London.
Avoiding the babble from Raisa Romola’s dressing-room, he turned left, then right and down a flight of curving, rickety stairs.
And stopped suddenly.
The sound he had heard, though soft, was unmistakable and in these dungeon-like depths below the level of the street, curiously unnerving. Someone, behind the peeling, dark green door he had just passed, was crying.
He turned, threw open the door and went in.
The room, lit by a single, naked bulb, was entirely crammed with wigs on stands, trays of moustaches, switches of hair, hat boxes piled on shelves. There was an ironing-board, a sink, a table littered with scissors, glue, rolls of ribbon . . . On the draining-board stood a jar of sour milk and a battered samovar and everywhere on the floor were wicker baskets overflowing with clothes.
However, it was only gradually that Guy took in this clutter, for his eyes were immediately drawn to the only occupant of the room: a girl who could scarcely have been out of her teens. A girl in a rumpled, paint-stained smock, crouched on the lid of an enormous hamper, who, as he entered, put down the mirror she had been holding and looked up to reveal a small, startled face somewhat dramatically streaked with dust and tears. A face with huge eyes the colour of a Stradivarius, eyes which might have been put in by the thumb of Titian himself when he grew too old for detail and was concerned only with the extreme condition of the human soul.
‘Oh! I’m sorry!’ She started up, trying to rub away the tears with fingers so dusty that they merely accentuated the anguished mottling of her cheeks. ‘I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. Miss Romola’s dressing-room is upstairs. Or did you want one of The Heidis?’
Guy, standing debonair and faultlessly attired in the doorway, continued to stare in a most uncharacteristic way. Not at the girl’s great smudged eyes, not at her hands – the hands of an Altendorfer Madonna on a painting spree – nor at her ragamuffin clothes. No, what held him riveted was her hair – or rather, the place where normally one would have expected hair to be. For this miniature Countess of Monte Cristo, immured in the depths of one of Vienna’s most ancient edifices, seemed to have no hair. Above her anguished, lemur eyes and high forehead were only tufts such as certain capuchin monkeys achieve in their maturity, and her ears, which had the pricked look one finds in ferns and cyclamen, rested on an area of ravaged stubble. A stubble whose colouring – a warm beige shading to bronze – nevertheless seemed curiously familiar to Guy. And suddenly understanding, he said, ‘My God! That was your hair that Melisande was wearing. But why?’
Quickly, stammeringly, Tessa explained. ‘I was glad to do it, honestly. After all, Cosima cut off all her hair when Wagner died and put it in his grave so it was the least I could do. Only . . . just now I looked in the mirror – I didn’t really have time before, you know how it is before a première – and I suddenly realized . . . I mean, it isn’t as though I have anything else.’
She sketched with small and extraordinarily expressive hands the longed-for curves, the Amazonian bosom which her maker had so relentlessly withheld.
Guy studied her. In a sense she spoke the truth, but only in a sense. The dirty ragamuffin with her butchered hair did in fact have something, but it was not something to which at this late hour he could easily put a name. Style? No, it was something more intimate that Guy now chased through the painters he most loved. An image of innocence with the sad eyes of experience; of someone very young acquiescing in their fate. And moving from the tiny, rigid Infantas of Velasquez enduring their silken bandages of pomp to the grave, coiffed girls of Holbein, he came to rest on a Murillo urchin: the one who stands always in the shadows watching the others eat the cherries, the slice of water melon, the hunk of bread.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked abruptly, for the child looked utterly exhausted.
‘In the Wipplingerstrasse.’
‘And who is taking you home?’
‘Taking me? Goodness, no one takes me! It’s only half an hour’s walk. I’ve just got to sweep up and take Miss Romola’s dachshund out and set the mousetraps and then I’m going.’
‘My car is outside,’ said Guy. ‘I’ll give you twenty minutes while I talk to your director. Then I’ll take you back.’
‘Oh no, I really couldn’t!’ Tessa was aghast at the idea of depriving this stylish and powerful-looking foreigner, with his winged eyebrows and inky, velvet-collared cloak, of his scheduled night of pleasure.
Guy smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry; I haven’t any designs on you, I promise.’
What she said next moved him absurdly.
‘As though you could have,’ she said, brushing her fingers over her butchered hair. ‘Now.’
Guy’s interview with the director le
ft Jacob in a state of jubilation bordering on delirium. It had happened! At last, at last, materializing out of the night as mysteriously as the stranger who had commissioned Mozart’s Requiem, the rich patron had come. Parodying Jacob’s wildest dreams he had offered to engage the company for a week in summer, to house and feed them and to finance the new production of an opera! And what an opera! Not some schmaltzy operetta or fashionable salon piece but The Magic Flute! Surprised in his bed by the Angel of Death and told he could bring one work with him to Paradise, Jacob in his nightshirt might have hovered between Figaro, Don Giovanni or The Flute, but it would have been with a score by Mozart in his palsied hand that he would have sought to meet his maker.
Great things would come of this commission, Jacob was sure of it. What the Esterhazys had been to Haydn, the mysterious Madam von Meck to Tchaikovsky, Herr Farne would be to the International Opera Company. So the man was English and had probably bayoneted babies . . . so he wished the company’s destination and his own part in the transaction to remain a secret which would make everything devilishly complicated . . . So! For the money Herr Farne was offering, Jacob would have secreted the Golden Horde.
The theatre at Pfaffenstein, said to be the loveliest in Austria with acoustics which were a legend! And in June, when attendances always fell off disastrously and just the week he would have had to send the Rhine-maiden to Baden-Baden! Was it Raisa who had wrought this miracle? He had been worried about her determination to play Melisande barefoot, but clearly the diva’s bunions had not cooled the ardour of the Englishman. Or was it to a Heidi’s tip-tilted profile that they owed this munificence?
Joyfully squeezing himself into his galoshes, Jacob prepared to go home and tell his Rhinemaiden that it would not be necessary, now, for her to pawn her pearls.
Returning to the wig room Guy found her waiting, her face scrubbed to a shining cleanliness – and seeing her attire, his sardonic eyebrows lifted appreciately.
‘La Bohème?’ he enquired.
