Magic Flutes

by Eva Ibbotson

  She nodded and pulled the blue velvet cloak with its gathered hood more closely round her. ‘From Act Three, you know, where she waits for Rudolfo in the snow and coughs.’ She gazed wistfully out at him like a dormouse in a yurt. ‘It’s a little big, perhaps?’

  ‘Well, a little,’ said Guy, as she attempted to pull still tighter the voluminous folds of the cloak designed for Raisa’s ample Rumanian form. ‘But not noticeably so. The muff is from Bohème too?’

  ‘Yes. But the gloves are from Traviata. Where she is back to being a courtesan and enormously elegant.’ She stretched out a small hand, quite drowned in a sea of stylishly wrinkled kid. ‘No one can see my hair now – no one can see anything – so perhaps I won’t disgrace you?’

  ‘There is no possible way that you could disgrace me,’ said Guy gently. ‘But I should like to know your name.’

  ‘Tessa,’ she said.

  ‘Just Tessa?’

  She nodded and let him lead her in silence from the theatre. But at the car, parked under a lamp-post across the street, she gasped with admiration. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘How beautiful! Are you perhaps extremely rich?’

  ‘Well, fairly extremely. I’m glad you like it. Get in.’

  Morgan, Guy’s chauffeur, was holding open the door. Impeccable and correct, he would never at any time have allowed himself to betray so extreme an emotion as surprise. But though it had been his habit to conduct females of all kinds from stage doors to whatever abode his master considered suitable – a chambre séparée at Maxims, a suite at the Ritz – he had never seen anything like this strange, dusty and submerged little creature.

  But as she climbed into the car and he tucked the rug round her knees, she smiled and said with unexpected dignity, ‘Thank you, you are very kind.’

  Guy spun round, for she had spoken in English. And if there are two words in the English language that test the pronunciation of the foreigner, they are ‘Thank you’. Words which this minion from the nether regions of a minor opera house had spoken in an English both unaccented and educated.

  He changed also to his native tongue. ‘How is it that you speak English?’

  ‘I had an English grandmother and I spent a lot of time with her when I was small. She was a marvellous woman. I loved her most dearly.’

  Guy had given Morgan his instructions and the car set off. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘She came from the very north of England where there are lots of sheep. More sheep, she said, than people, and moors with purple heather. She lived in Carinthia with my grandfather but she was always homesick, I think.’

  Only a very slight increase in care, an almost imperceptible stress on certain words, betrayed the fact that she no longer spoke her native tongue.

  ‘And she’s dead now?’

  ‘Yes. At the end of the war. She had lived in the same village all her married life and done so much good. But the peasants – of course it’s no good blaming them, but they started saying that the English . . . that they boiled corpses to make oil and . . . well, you know.’

  ‘Yes, indeed I do know,’ said Guy bitterly. ‘Our side produced exactly the same kind of pernicious rubbish.’

  ‘They say people can’t really die of a broken heart,’ she continued, ‘and of course that’s true. But they can just wait for an excuse. And with her it was the flu epidemic three years ago. It killed my mother too.’

  ‘And your father?’

  She shrugged. ‘He was killed in 1914 at Tannenberg.’ Then, conscious of her duty to this distinguished-looking foreigner, ‘Have you been in Vienna before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She glanced up quickly, caught by something in his voice, but when she spoke it was to say, ‘In that case, you know that we are just passing the house where Mozart’s sister-in-law first saw the score of Don Giovanni.’

  Guy, aware that he was about to get a view of Vienna hitherto denied him, said he had not known that and Tessa obligingly pointed out in the lamplit streets the place where Anton Bruckner bought his manuscript paper, the café where Schönberg got his idea for ‘Verk-larte Nacht’ and – as they turned into the Kärntnerstrasse – the shop where the prima donna of the State Opera got her underwear.

  ‘Oh, it’s good to see the lamplight again. Everything is beginning, don’t you feel it?’ Her voice had changed, she had forgotten her hair. This was the Murillo urchin who got the cherries, who played the mandolin. ‘There will be no more wars and art will make everybody equal and free,’ said the wardrobe mistress, her eyes shining. ‘And to be allowed to work! I cannot tell you how marvellous that is.’

  Wondering what sort of childhood made it a privilege to work as a drudge to the International Opera Company, Guy listened to her prattle and was suddenly astonished when she said quietly, ‘Were you very happy, then, the last time you were in Vienna?’

  There was a pause. Then, ‘Yes,’ said Guy. ‘Happier than I’ve ever been in my life.’

  She nodded, well pleased with this tribute to her city, and was off again.

  ‘People always tell you that this is where they keep the hearts of the Habsburgs, the ones that are buried in the Kapuziner crypt,’ she said, waving a hand drowned in its wrinkled kid at the moonlit spire of the Augustinerkirche, ‘but what is really interesting, I think, is that Brahms’s housekeeper used to come here every day to light a candle when Brahms had a liver complaint. Every single day she came!’

  They drove on through small squares, as quiet and enclosed as rooms, down narrow cobbled streets, taking in apparently the place where William Gluck’s little dog had almost been run over by a hansom cab and the house of the hairdresser whose father had dyed Johann Strauss’s moustache.

  But the biggest treat was still to come.

  ‘Do you think we could stop for just a moment?’ she said as they drove across the Michaelerplatz. ‘In that little street on the left, about half-way down?’

  Guy gave instructions and the car drew to a halt. They were opposite a small and fusty-looking café from which a dim, pink light shone out on to the pavement. Beside him, Guy felt Tessa tense in a momentary anxiety; then she relaxed and said, ‘Yes, there she is. Look, in that corner by the aspidistra. Can you see her?’

  Sitting alone, an ancient lady dressed in black was consuming with apparent dedication a large slab of yellow cake.

  ‘She comes here every night and has a cup of coffee and a piece of gugelhupf. Even in the war when food was so difficult, the proprietor always kept one for her.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Tessa sighed with fulfilment and with awe. ‘Schubert’s great-niece,’ she said rapturously. ‘In the flesh.’

  To his surprise, Guy was sorry when the car drew up in front of the house where she lived. As she got out and turned to thank him, her hood fell back and instinctively she reached up to pull it back over her savaged hair.

  ‘No!’ Guy’s hand came down over hers, pulling it away. He turned her head so as to catch the lamplight and stood for a moment, studying the narrow, fine-boned little face. Then he nodded. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. It will be a triumph when it’s cut, you’ll see.’

  ‘Cut! But surely I must grow it again?’

  ‘On no account,’ said Guy. He opened the door for her – and was gone.

  Left alone in the lobby, Tessa stood for a moment, frowning and bewildered. She knew about phantom limbs: that the place where they had been went on aching even after they had been cut off. Her cheek, where the Englishman’s fingers had been, did not exactly ache . . . but very strangely, most curiously . . . it felt.

  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 h
e 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 . . .