by Eva Ibbotson
‘You know what this is,’ said the Swan Princess. ‘This is the end. Even if I sell my pearls it is the end.’
‘She offered me some money. To repair the roof.’
‘And?’ enquired the Swan Princess sharply.
‘I refused, of course,’ said Maxi, flushing at the memory of this insult to his masculinity.
‘Foolish, obstinate girl. I blame Tilda and Augustine. Letting her run wild in Vienna. All that rubbish about art and music’
‘I could marry someone else,’ suggested Maxi, pulling a burr out of the wolfhound’s ear.
Beneath the netting, his mother screwed up her ravaged countenance. ‘Waaltraut might be acceptable as regards lineage, I suppose. But there’s no money. And she is almost certainly too old to breed.’
‘I thought maybe an American,’ said Maxi, who had turned pale at the mention of the oil-stained countess. ‘An heiress, of course.’ he added hastily.
‘Never!’ declared the Swan Princess. ‘Never a commoner. Never, never, never!’ She stood looking out over the vast, grey, melancholy lake. ‘We shall have to sell,’ she pronounced in failing accents. ‘After nine hundred years there will be no more Spittaus at Spittau.’
‘If we were very careful, couldn’t we manage . . .’
Not without a roof,’ snapped the princess. ‘And I must say, Maxi, I think it was remiss of you not to accept Tessa’s offer. With the roof mended we might have hung on, but as it is . . .’
Maxi looked bravely at the long, ochre, water-lapped pile: the last of the castles which his illustrious family still owned. So Spittau would go the same way as Hammerfelden with its four hundred rooms; the Pomeranian fortress on the River Oder; the palace in Vienna . . .
‘Well, if I have the misfortune to have given birth to a milksop who cannot get a girl without beauty or distinction to marry him, I shall just have to suffer,’ said the Swan Princess. ‘Do it, then. Put Spittau up for sale.’
So Maxi wrote to the agents in Vienna, who sent down a man to take pictures, and Spittau was added to the many palaces and castles and pleasure domes whose fading photographs were displayed in the window of their office in the Schubertring. And that, for the time being, was that.
Witzler was back in his dog kennel at the Klostern Theatre, throwing into the waste-paper basket the usual pile of bills, threatening letters and abusive notices which constituted his morning mail.
He was, in fact, in rather more serious trouble than he cared to contemplate. On the strength of his commission from Guy, and certain hints he had put out as to the future of the company under the millionaire’s protection, Witzler had borrowed extensively and the wolves were closing in on him. Not only that, but in October the lease of the theatre expired. The owners would undoubtedly increase the rent by a substantial amount and he had enemies who would be only too glad to deprive him of his theatre.
He crumpled up another bill and contemplated the next three months. Bohème, Traviata and Fledermaus: one couldn’t get more popular than that. He would have to try to keep open all through the summer, however poor the houses; he didn’t dare risk a break now.
Sighing, he drew towards him for the fifth time that morning the score which Klasky had laid before him the day they had returned to Vienna. Fricassée, scored for fifteen mandolins, strings and thirty-seven percussion instruments was a modest work by contemporary standards. Klasky had not demanded typewriters in the orchestra, nor steam trains. Yet even so, this undoubted masterpiece would cost infinitely more to put on than Jacob could possibly raise.
He put his head in his hands, then reached for another dyspepsia pill. Fricassée was his responsibility, his dream-child. For seven long years, he had badgered Klasky to finish it and at Pfaffenstein, that Paradise for ever lost to them, the Hungarian had finally given birth. And what could he, Jacob, do? Nothing . . . nothing. He could not even afford the tubular steel scaffolding (expressing the rigidity of capitalist society) on which the action took place.
It was at this point that there was a shy and familiar knock on the door.
‘Come in!’ called Witzler, looking up eagerly.
Yes, it was Tessa! A feeling of relief flooded through him. There had been no sign of his under wardrobe mistress since their return to Vienna, and believing her to be preparing for her wedding Jacob had not been surprised, but her absence had added to the feeling of let-down and increased the apprehensions which had lately gnawed at him.
‘May I speak to you?’ said Tessa, entering the room. ‘Have you got time?’
‘Of course. Sit down.’
The Princess of Pfaffenstein, he noted, was dressed in an unaccustomed manner; in other words, conventionally and correctly in a brown skirt and crisp white blouse.
‘It’s about Herr Klasky’s opera,’ she said, pulling out a stool. ‘Is it true . . . that there is not a great deal of money and that . . . Herr Farne is not going to engage the company again?’
‘It is true,’ said Witzler heavily.
‘Well, I was wondering if you would let me help?’ She parted her fringe, now badly in need of a trim, and looked out at him as though expecting a rebuff. ‘To put on Herr Klasky’s opera, I mean? I have some money now, you see. Not vast amounts because of my father’s debts, but quite a bit. That’s why I wasn’t here last week; I was opening a bank account and sorting things out with my lawyers.’
‘You wish to finance Klasky’s opera?’ repeated Jacob. The room reeled. Providence; an angel from heaven; the hand of God! Then his heart smote him. The child sat before him, defenceless, innocent and young. So had he once been – and prosperous into the bargain, able to walk past his bank manager with his head held high. The leather goods business had gone in the first three years – then the tannery he had inherited from his cousin – that went on a full cycle of Wagner’s Ring. The life insurance had gone on a modern-dress Turandot – what a flop that had been! And when, for once, a production made some money, the profits were immediately swallowed up in the next one or the next.
‘What does the prince feel about it?’ he enquired. ‘Would he be willing?’
‘The prince?’ said Tessa, bewildered.
‘The Prince of Spittau. Your fiancé.’
‘Good Lord, he’s not my fiancé. I am not going to marry Maxi.’
‘But everyone . . . it is generally assumed . . .’ stammered Jacob.
He stared at Tessa. Her small hand was ringless, her expression, it had to be admitted, was not that of someone contemplating nuptial bliss.
Tessa sighed. ‘Well, I’m not going to marry him. Or anyone else. I’m perfectly free to spend my money as I wish.’
Desperately, Jacob struggled for integrity – and lost.
He himself was ruined, yes; his wife slept on her pearls, one of his son’s first words had been ‘Bailiffs’. Yet he would do it all again, all of it. For The Magic Flute at Pfaffenstein, for the young Raisa’s radiant, unearthly monologue in Rosenkavalier on the night that war was declared . . . So why deny Tessa the right to do as he had done?
‘I am anxious,’ Tessa now explained carefully, ‘to involve myself. To be busy. I think people are best . . . when they don’t have any free time at all.’
Jacob shot her a glance from under his bushy brows. But all he said was, ‘I’m meeting Klasky tonight at the Griechenbeisl. You’d better come too and we’ll talk things over.’
But the party that gathered on the pavement terrace of the famous restaurant needed four tables pushed together to accommodate it, for the news that Klasky’s opera was to be financed by Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress had spread like wildfire through the theatre and out into the musical circles of Vienna. Raisa was there with her new lover, a pallid young man with a brown coal mine in the Herzgebiet, as were Pino, the man who had produced Pelleas and the critic Mendelov. The Rhinemaiden was there and Bubi, enveloped in a gigantic table napkin and consuming a mound of kartoffel puffer, also a young journalist from the Wiener Presse who planned to write a piece o
n The Patroness Princess . . .
And Klasky, burning-eyed, palpitating with gratitude, and presently rising to make a speech. The Viennese, said Klasky, could forgive anything but greatness. ‘Not three streets from here,’ said the Hungarian, waving his arm, ‘Mozart starved, Beethoven was humiliated and Hugo Wolf went mad. This, too, would have been my own fate as a genius,’ he continued modestly, ‘were it not for the heaven sent appearance of this young girl in whose slender body there burns the heart of a Razumovsky, an Esterhazy, a Frederick the Great.’
Much applause greeted him, including that from some of the passers-by who now decided to join the party. Tessa was unable to rise because Bubi, overcome by potato croquettes and the lateness of the hour, had climbed into her lap and fallen asleep, but she replied in kind, adding that she had seen herself more in the role of Madame von Meck, the lady who had supported Tchaikovsky for many years, but at a distance and without interfering in any way. At which the more musically informed people present exchanged glances of slight unease. Madame von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s patroness, had been an ample, fierce-eyed, queenly widow, much sustained financially by a quantity of railway lines, paper mills and other business interests. Tessa, who had added a blue kerchief from The Gypsy Baron to her white blouse, did not really look like Madame von Meck.
But Tessa herself was delighted with the evening. This was La Vie Bohème as she had always dreamed of it. She had not thought of Guy for at least a quarter of an hour . . . well, ten minutes. And at the end of the evening she had the honour of signing, with a flourish, the bill for five kasenockerl mit sauerkraut, three plates of kartoffel puffer, four helpings of risibisi, six bottles of gumpoldskirchener, and a bottle of Vichy water which the waiter, appraised of her new status, placed before her.
It was an honour with which she was to become increasingly familiar.
Rehearsals for the new opera began immediately, despite the fact that they were playing their full repertory each night. Enthusiasm ran high for what was undoubtedly a work of genius but, as always, there were those who scoffed. Notably Frau Pollack, asking testily, ‘What is a fricassée, anyway?’
‘It’s a sort of stew . . . meat chopped up very small in a white sauce,’ said Tessa, cutting the legs off a boiler suit intended for the Littlest Heidi. Though promoted to the role of patroness, she continued to work exactly as before. ‘It’s sort of symbolic, too, because it’s about the disintegration of capitalist society.’
‘I don’t fancy all this chopping up babies and eating them,’ said Boris, shaking The Mother who had not cared for the return to Vienna and was going through a Blue Period.
‘But the baby doesn’t really get chopped up,’ explained Tessa. ‘The porter means to kill it but then the chief engine-greaser – that’s the one who’s a kind of Holy Fool – has this fit and one of the cleaning ladies saves it. The mill-owner thinks he’s eaten it, which is why he jumps out of the window, but he hasn’t.’
‘Thinking’s bad enough,’ said Frau Pollack darkly, remembering the episode of her great-uncle Sandor’s ashes, and continued to refer to the opera gloomily as ‘Stew’.
Any doubts that Raisa might have had about tackling an atonal role were set aside by Jacob, who said that if she did not feel up to the part of the railway porter’s wife, he was sure that the young soprano who had done so well as Papagena would be willing to try. As for Pino, nothing on earth would have induced him to relinquish a role in which he was on stage, alone, for fifteen minutes, going mad to the sound of thirty-seven percussion instruments.
Nevertheless, there were difficulties. The Oldest Heidi fell off the tubular steel scaffolding, turning her ankle, and when her protector (an influential geheimrat) threatened to sue Jacob, the entire set was scrapped. Klasky proved extremely cooperative about the débâcle and said he was perfectly prepared to have a more realistic set, provided it was designed by Rayner-Meierhof and no one else. The famous constructivist was summoned from Düsseldorf and built a set on five different levels, using significant skeletal structures which could become railway platforms, signal boxes, decadent mill-owner’s apartments or lunatic asylums, always supposing they did not jam the turntable or get stuck in the lifts.
Through the whole of July and August, while houses fell disasterously in the summer heat and there were ten empty rows even for Fledermaus, work on Fricassee continued at fever pitch. And the pivot, the centre of this turning world, was an object which took on an increasing and almost mystical significance to the members of Witzler’s company: Tessa’s cheque book.
It lived, tattered, paint-spattered and lightly smeared with chocolate (for Bubi regarded it as especially his own) in the pocket of her smock. Often mislaid, for she was liable to pencil measurements on its covers, it was rushed back to her, much as an unweaned baby kangaroo might be hurried back to the maternal pouch. And several times a week, Tessa would repair upstairs to be settled solemnly at a table in Jacob’s office and sign cheques.
She signed a cheque for the steel scaffolding and for the wages of the men who subsequently took it away for scrap. She signed a cheque for nine hundred yards of denim, for twenty singers engaged to augment the plate-layers’ chorus, for a gigantic kettle-drum (two outsize Tyrolean cows having given their lives for the cause). She signed a cheque for Rayner-Meierhof’s awe-inspiring fee and for the bonus he had demanded for kindly casting his eye over the old sets for Traviata and pronouncing them disgusting. Sometimes, too, she was allowed to help a little with other productions, signing a cheque for Raisa’s claque – who had reorganized along trade union lines – and for new costumes for the ball scene in Fledermaus in the hope (unrealized) that these would improve attendances.
And as each cheque book was reduced to a battered collection of stubs, Tessa, her head held high, went out to the bank to fetch another and another and another.
That something ailed their patroness and under wardrobe mistress was first put to the company by Boris and listened to with attention, for he was regarded as something of an expert on the Princess of Pfaffenstein.
‘I tell you, there’s something the matter with her,’ he said. Tessa had gone out to negotiate for three dozen luggage trolleys from Austrian Railways and some of the company were in the fitting-rooms, kitting out the principals.
‘Yes, I think you are right,’ said Pino, pulling a pair of dungarees over his portly stomach. ‘During Fricassee rehearsals she is all right, but last night when she was in the wings waiting to blow out Mimi’s candle she looked like my grandmother has looked when they have told her that my grandfather was buried in the earthquake.’
Raisa nodded. ‘And in Traviata, in Act Two, when I am up-giffing Alfredo, and she waits to make ze noise for ze ’orses – she ’as been crying zen, I tink.’
‘And in “Addio del passato”,’ put in the tenor, his head vanishing under a peaked porter’s cap, ‘where you are dying and think you will see me no more; I am waiting to go on then and though you are a quarter-tone flat, she has looked terrible.’
Witzler and Klasky, who had come to supervise the fittings, frowned.
‘She’s as thin as a cat, too,’ said Boris. ‘I tell you, she’ll crack up if we aren’t careful.’
‘Is she ill, do you think?’ Jacob demanded.
‘No!’ Raisa’s eyes flashed. ‘It is badder zan zat, my friends. She is in lof!’
There was a stunned silence. Then, as her listeners pieced together their own vignettes of Tessa since the company’s return from Pfaffenstein, Klasky’s black, dishevelled head, Jacob’s bald one and Boris’s yellow skull nodded agreement.
‘Mein Gott!’ Jacob was shaken. Having failed to marry the nice Jewish girl selected by his mother, Jacob, though riddled with guilt, had found plenty of rewards with his Rhinemaiden. But this was something else.
‘We must protect her,’ said Boris. Years and years ago, when he was a small boy in Sofia, he had fallen over and grazed his knee. A small blonde girl in white knee socks had come up to him and said
‘Does it hurt?’ looking at him with wide, sad eyes. It had been a devastating experience, quite shattering, and in no way connected with the life he now shared with a typist in a flat in Ottakring.
Klasky’s exopthalmic eyes bulged even more violently than usual. That his patroness should be taken in this way was deplorable. Screwing up his Magyar countenance, he remembered suddenly a girl with chestnut pigtails who had sat next to him at the Academy of Music in Budapest. Klasky had been precocious and attended the harmony class while still in shorts. The impact of the fronded end of Ildi’s pigtail on his bare thigh had been quite terrible, and he had suffered agonies of love for a whole year. Nothing so painful had ever happened to him again.
‘I vill make zo zat lazy porkling, Zia, bring to me my wrapping robe,’ said Raisa, referring to her lethargic dresser. ‘Zen Tessa must not ’ear me zink “Adio del pas-sato” – in vich I am never flat!’
‘I’ll keep her down in the laundry room in Act One of Bohème,’ said Frau Pollack. ‘One of the stage-hands can blow out Mimi’s candle.’
But even as they prepared to protect Tessa from the pangs of music, the question that Klasky now asked was in all their minds.
‘But with whom is she in love? It can’t be the Prince of Spittau. Everyone knows he spent the whole time trying to propose to her.’
The deepest of gloom had spread over Jacob’s face. He was remembering the matter of Anita’s . . . his own idea of putting Tessa in a ballet.
‘I think I know,’ he said ponderously. ‘But if I’m right, it’s a bad business. A very bad business indeed.’
And he told them . . .
15
On a particularly hot and stuffy day towards the end of July, Guy, leaving the Treasury early for once and strolling down the Schubertring, was halted by the sight of a large photograph in a house agent’s window.
He passed this way frequently and was familiar with the picture of Malk, towering dramatically over the Danube and bearing, underneath, a wholly imaginary account of its amenities prepared by Countess Waal-traut’s mother. He had noticed the yellowing portrait of the Archduchess Frederica’s leaning palace at Potzerhofen, and registered that no purchaser had yet been found for Schloss Landsberg, near Graz, which was as well since the Archduke Sava was holed up in its coachhouse with his bear.
