Madensky Square

August

Sigismund’s uncle fainted today on the stairs. Frau Hinkler told me this in her usual pleasant manner. ‘He’s starving himself to keep up the instalments on the piano. I didn’t get a doctor; what’s the use? He can’t pay.’

I’ve never been inside Sigismund’s attic; the glimpse through the window that first night was enough for me, but in the evening I put some fruit and a jar of soup into a basket and went across.

Frau Hinkler let me in with a bad grace. She longs to evict the Kraszinskys and any sign that they’re not friendless infuriates her.

Oh God, that wretched room! The piano stands in the centre and I see it now as a black monster devouring the lives of those two miserable exiles; endlessly consuming the money that they need to live. It alone had been wiped clean: everywhere else, on the bare boards, on the window sill, the dust lay clotted. Sheets of music and a few tattered books were piled on newspaper on the floor — and on a trestle bed against the wall lay Kraszinsky, still wearing his rusty black clothes, with his arms by his sides like someone waiting for the undertaker.

‘I’ve brought you some soup. Is there somewhere I can heat it up? Do you have a kitchen?’

Sigismund, who had appeared silently by my side, led me into a scullery with a dirty sink, one dripping tap, a paraffin stove. His crucifix, I noted, was once again tied with a grubby piece of string. I scrubbed out the only saucepan, disposed of a cockroach, rinsed the grease from two tin bowls.

‘We are going back,’ said Kraszinsky as I returned to his bedside. ‘We are finished. I have written to Preszowice.’

‘You’d like that?’

He shrugged. Tor myself, yes. Perhaps I can get my old job back. But there is nothing there for the child — nothing. I dream about my sister.’

As I was leaving, Sigismund beckoned to me from the doorway beside the scullery. It led to a windowless slit of a room with a skylight so begrimed that it let in almost no light. This, clearly, was where Sigismund slept — only what was it that he wished to show me? The rancid smelling mattress on the floor? The one cane chair with a broken seat?

No… something else. Against the wall, on what must have been the wooden box in which he’d brought his few possessions, Sigismund had set up an icon corner such as all pious households have in the east.

In the centre was a picture of a young woman in a leather frame. Kraszinsky was right — his sister had been beautiful. The oval face was tranquil, the mouth full. Beside the picture was a bracelet made of woven hair, now faded but still retaining the reddish tint it had had in life. Had they cut the tresses from Ilona’s head as she lay murdered in the forest? It was hard to hold it and admire it as the boy put it into my hand.

The third object on Sigismund’s shrine was an old cigar box and as I bent down to look at it he made a protective gesture, covering it with his fingers.

‘You don’t want me to open it?’

He hesitated; colour flooded his narrow face; then suddenly he turned back the lid.

Oh God! Inside was the lace-edged handkerchief I’d dropped the night I took him to the churchyard to smell the limes… the gold ribbon I had sent over for his crucifix, carefully coiled as sailors coil a rope… two shrivelled forget-me-nots from the bunch I had worn in my belt the first day I said ‘Grüss Gott’ to him by the fountain. And most macabre of all, cut from an ancient newspaper which some earlier tenants must have left behind, an advertisment for my shop in the days when I still had to advertise.

Crossing the square to go home, I took deep breaths of air, trying to shut out what I had seen. Even before I reached my door, it had begun again: calm, orderly, serene — Sigismund’s music. I was right about the piece. It is by Mozart. The Rondo in A.

The Schumachers are back. They invited me over as soon as they’d unpacked and the girls showed me their treasures: the skeleton of a fish from Lake Locarno, a thistle head the size of a plate… Gisi, now that she is no longer the youngest, has been taken out of nappies. She has a surprised and slightly anxious look as though she finds this sudden adulthood uncertain and draughty.

Then on Sunday we had the christening.

The godmother Helene had chosen for the baby was ill so I held the comical creature whose blemish I no longer ‘see’. Even before I gave her to the priest she was not entirely pleased with events. A terrible frown appeared between her autocratic eyebrows, and she wrinkled her nose. And when Father Anselm sprinkled her with holy water and pronounced her string of resplendent Christian names, Donatella’s yells of rage would have displaced a whole regiment of devils from the depths of hell.

Afterwards there was a party in the Schumachers’ pretty Biedermeier drawing room and today Herr Schumacher has gone to Graz to fetch his nephew.

I was present at Gisi’s christening too, and at Kati’s and at that of the quicksilver Resi… I could recite all the Christian names of all the little Schumacher girls.

But I don’t know what my own daughter is called. I don’t know what names the people in Salzburg chose for her. Somehow I can never get over that. That I don’t know my daughter’s name.

Oh dear! I expect it will be all right but it has to be admitted that the goldfish slayer is not a pretty sight. The carriage in which Herr Schumacher brought him from the station turned in between the chestnut trees as I was crossing the square, and he ordered the coachman to stop, and introduced the boy.

‘This is my nephew, Frau Susanna. Gustav, bow to the lady.’

I was surprised at this instruction. At fourteen, I thought Gustav might be able to bow without being told, but I was wrong. Over the boy’s somewhat vacant face, with its flat nose and faint tracings of a moustache, spread a look that was both bovine and puzzled.

‘Take off your cap!’

This at least Gustav seemed able to do. He inclined his head and murmured something which could have been a greeting.

‘We’ll soon get him trained up, eh Gustav? You’re going to be a great help to me, aren’t you, boy?’

Gustav said something which sounded like ‘Ugh’, or maybe ‘Agh’ and put on his cap again. I don’t think I have ever seen a boy with such enormous ears.

The girls’ aquarium has been moved to the attic where Lisl can keep an eye on it.

Nini has been back three days and she spends a great deal of time telling me that she is all right.

She does not look all right. There are dark rings under her eyes and she is ill-tempered and twitchy. She also works the kind of hours which would make her absolutely furious if they were demanded of a textile worker in Ottakring, and there is a tendency to stare at roses. Roses, where Nini was concerned, belonged behind one ear or copied in silk to go on a bodice. Now she stares at them, and since the ones that are easily available to us are the pink ramblers separating my courtyard from Herr Schnee’s, which are currently at the brown dishclothy stage, I am not particularly pleased.

I shall put up with this for a few more days, but if it doesn’t improve I’m going to have it out with her.

The Schumacher girls are awed by Gustav. He is awful in an archetypal way like the monsters and ogres in fairy tales: large, slow-moving and stupid. Most of all they are awed by his appetite.

‘Yesterday he ate thirteen zwetschken knödel,’ said Mitzi, sitting up in bed. ‘Honestly, Frau Susanna. Thirteen!’

‘And he never looks at Baby. He just goes past with his head turned away.’

‘He and Ernst Bischof go out at night with a catapult and kill cats. They don’t just scare them; they kill them.’

I’d gone over to help Helene who has become embroiled with a complicated piece of smocking on a dress for Donatella.

Is it as bad as the girls make out?’ I asked her when I’d said goodnight to the children and joined her in the drawing room.

‘Well, it’s fairly bad. There was nearly a nasty accident last week when the men were loading. Gustav doesn’t exactly have a way with horses. But Albert is determined to succeed with him because the business has to go to someone with the Schumacher blood.’ She poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. ‘It must be nice to be so pleased with your blood, don’t you think?’

We sat for a while over our work; then the study door was opened and we heard the irate voice of Albert Schumacher.

‘No, no no! How many times do I have to tell you — that’s sycamore! Sycamore, you blockhead!’

‘Albert’s been trying to teach him how to distinguish the different kinds of wood,’ said Helene. ‘But he doesn’t seem able to take it in.’

This certainly seemed to be the case. There was some more shouting, then Gustav shambled past down the corridor and Herr Schumacher in his smoking jacket appeared in the doorway, mopping his brow.

‘Where is she?’ he demanded of his wife.

‘She’s asleep, Albert; don’t wake her.’

‘She always wakes up about nine, you know that. It’ll do her good to be awake before her bottle.’

He made his way upstairs to the nursery, returned with Donatella in his arms — and disappeared into his study.

Helene endured it for a few minutes; then we rose and followed him.

The baby, freed from the constraints of her shawl, was propped in an armchair. Herr Schumacher had taken a circular piece of wood from the baskets of offcuts he’d brought home from the yard and was holding it up to her face.

‘There you are, my pretty. Look at that! That’s oak. See how dense it is? See how it is figured?’

Donatella saw. She kicked; she crowed — bubbles of froth formed on her lips.

‘And this is sycamore, my treasure. You wouldn’t mix it up with oak, would you? You can see that it’s lighter, can’t you; you can see the silkiness?’

She could indeed. Made ecstatic by so much conversation after the uninspiring confinement of her cot, Donatella waved her arms with such enthusiasm that she keeled over and had to be righted.

In no way disconcerted by our appearance, Herr Schumacher extracted another sample.

‘Now this one’s really special, sweetheart. This is rosewood. There’s nothing quite like it.’ He waved the block above her head and growing quite cross-eyed with pleasure, she bared her gums in a seraphic smile.

‘You see,’ he said, turning to us. ‘She knows already. She’s got more sense now in one finger than that oaf has in the whole of his body. In one finger…

My mother taught me to cook and she taught me well. So when Nini, at supper, pushed my excellent Kaiserschmarr’n round and round her plate with a fork and sighed, I suddenly cracked.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now I’d like to know what’s the matter with you? What went wrong at the Grundlsee?’

‘Nothing went wrong. Why should it?’

‘I don’t know why, but it did. I suppose you fell in love?’ Nini glared at me, attempting outrage. Then she put down her fork and groped for a handkerchief.

‘It was so unfair! I can’t tell you how ridiculous he looked — well, not ridiculous, but absolutely like someone you couldn’t possibly be in the slightest danger from. Hardly taller than me, with floppy hair all over his eyes, and socks that kept coming down — and a snub nose. He didn’t even have eyes that were a proper colour. Not blue or brown or black… just bits of colours with flecks in them.’

Was he working in the children’s camp?’

‘Yes, he was. I didn’t notice him at the beginning. There was a tall, good-looking Frenchman that I was rather interested in. Whereas Daniel came from America and that was against him — a hotbed of capitalism — and then they said he was a bank clerk. Both his parents were Austrian, but their families emigrated separately and they met in New York. So Daniel was a second-generation immigrant, but his German was perfect of course. Only as I say I didn’t notice him at first. It was the children that made me notice him.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, there were a lot of counsellors — about eight of them, and some had diplomas in Psychology and all that, but the kids were always round Daniel. Only, he wasn’t really doing anything. I mean, not therapy or ploys… he was just looking at things. Almost being them… You know what I’m like about Nature — there wasn’t any Nature where I was born, just people packed together and the smell of drains and sweat. But Daniel has this passion for pebbles… I mean, pebbles. He’d sit crouched down on this path and just look at them and it’s perfectly true, they are all different and some of them have quartz in them and some have pale veins like jade and some — oh, God, listen to me! But the children would all crouch down too and suddenly it was incredible to be alive in a world of pebbles. He’d do it with trees, too. The other counsellors organized botany expeditions and brought little bits of branches in and the children learnt the names and drew them — but Daniel just lay under an oak tree and sort of became an oak.’

‘He sounds unusual. Very much so.’

‘Oh, he was unusual. Mad, really. His clothes… he looked as though he’d slept in them and his hair was across his face and he was quite small. I don’t like small men. Mind you, he wasn’t just a sort of fey Pied Piper, he was witty too. It was the children laughing you heard as often as you saw them staring at a stone. Once on a rainy day there was a meeting about the children’s behaviour problems and there was a great dossier about their backgrounds and a Counsellor’s Report. I wasn’t really part of it, I was just a washer up. Then I realized Daniel wasn’t there — he should have been but he wasn’t, and I slipped out. And I found him half way up the hill with all the children in his group and some of the others, and they’d collected twenty-seven salamanders — you know how they come out in the rain — and there they were, making a grotto for them out of moss and stones, and the kid who was cradling one of the salamanders very, very carefully in his hands was the one they were doing a Case History on down in the camp. Disturbed father, alcoholic mother, two convictions for petty thieving… I think for Daniel the children’s past didn’t really exist: he saw them as though they had just been born.’

She blew her nose and now that the Kaiserschmarr’n was beyond redemption, she speared up a forkful and put it in her mouth.

‘Anyway, I just joined in. There were fourteen children in his group and I became the fifteenth, I suppose, tagging along when I wasn’t doing the chores. He was nice to me but nothing more and I got fond of the kids. And honestly I felt quite safe because of the way his socks kept coming down and him having a snub nose and being so small.’ She paused and glared balefully at her plate. ‘I should have known there was something wrong about him. I should have known.’

Everything would have been all right, Nini went on, except that three days before she was due to come home there was an accident.

‘There was a counsellor there — a woman — who was terribly precise and fussy, always walking about with files and bits of paper trying to assess the children and write reports. Her children played her up like anything and whenever they could, they slipped off to join Daniel. Anyway on Sunday we all went rowing on the lake and one of the boys in her boat stood up and started fooling about and she got her oar caught and the kid fell in. It’s terribly deep, the Grundlsee, and we were half way across and the child couldn’t swim. The woman just shrieked and yelled and completely lost her nerve. I was in another boat with Daniel and he just dived in with all his clothes on and swam over to the boy. It was awful, Susanna; the most frightening thing I’ve seen. The other boats were a long way off and this idiotic woman just shrieked and shrieked. I rowed up as close as I could, but the boy in the water was in a complete panic and he clung on to Daniel’s neck and I thought he was going to choke him to death. They went down three times and they say that after three times…’

Nini’s voice broke. She retreated behind her handkerchief and I was silent, noting that for the first time she’d called me simply ‘Susanna’ without the ‘Frau’. However unhappy the outcome of this love affair, Nini was growing up and would soon leave me, and I registered the pang this caused me without the least surprise.

‘He had to half throttle the boy before he could tow him in and then when we were trying to get them into the boat, the boy came round and tried to pull Daniel under again. I thought we’d never do it… never.’

But the other boats had arrived by then; both of them were saved.

‘They took the boy to hospital, but Daniel wouldn’t go. They carried him to his room and he looked awful — he’d swallowed so much water and there were great bruises round his throat. Of course everyone was making the most awful fuss of him by then — he was a hero — so I kept away. But my room was opposite his and just before I went to bed I put my head round the door to see if he was all right. It was very late — and he said my name, and I went over to the bed.’

She broke off in a confusion I had never seen in her.

‘It’s so unfair,’ she said, returning yet again to this theme. ‘He was half drowned and there was something caught in his hair, some kind of water weed I suppose. And he didn’t ask or anything, he just stretched out his arm as though I was a glass of water and he needed a drink.’ Nini paused. Her black eyes were unfocused as she remembered. ‘I meant just to be kind — he’d done this brave thing. And after all, since I was fourteen I’ve had to… sometimes it was the only way we could eat. But oh God…’

Nini is almost never still. Now she sat unmoving as the bust of Nefertiti and as sad.

‘So then in the morning he said we must be married. He didn’t ask me, he just said it as though it was completely obvious, and the incredible thing was, I simply said yes. I mean, marriage — that awful bourgeois thing, so respectable and hampering, but I said yes without thinking at all. Only then we began to talk. I should have known but I didn’t. I should have seen there would be this awful betrayal, but I didn’t think he had it in him to be so deceitful and devious and cruel. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know how I felt about things: I’d told him often enough.’

‘But what was it? Was he married already? Had he committed a crime? What was the betrayal?’

Nini blew her nose. ‘Have you ever heard of the Frankenheimer Merchant Bank?’

‘Just about. It’s an American bank like J. P. Morgan or Rothschilds, isn’t, that it?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Well, Daniel owns it. Or rather his father does, but Daniel’s the only son and he’s all set to take over. There isn’t just the bank; they own some other vile capitalist consortium. I wormed it all out of Daniel — at first he didn’t seem to think it mattered. They have a house on Fifth Avenue and another on that island where all these swinish people go — the Vanderbilts and all that crowd. His mother’s the patroness of some music school in New York. He thought I’d like her. God, a patroness … can’t you see her with her great bosom full of jewels getting out of her limousine and all the poor little children bowing and scraping on their violins and being patted on the head? And Daniel spends a month every year doing something like this: working with children, or last year he worked in an old people’s home in France — and the rest of the year he’s in the bank grinding the faces of the poor and making millions.’

‘And what did he say when you told him how you felt?’

‘He didn’t think it mattered. He said I could be an Anarchist just as well in New York. He said Marx said the revolution would begin in America and if it came it meant that people wanted it and he’d hand over the bank or go bravely to the guillotine — well, he’d go to the guillotine whether bravely or not — but till then he thought there was no point in upsetting his father who’d slaved to start the bank, and anyway he said he liked figures — he liked the way they worked. And he just kept saying… we… we belonged together and it was to do with my soul and my eyebrows and when you met someone like that and let them go, it was a bad deed… it was wrong, a sin. But it’s a lot wronger to own a bank and grind the faces of the poor, I think. And we argued and argued and I couldn’t make him see. So I just packed my bags and went. There were plenty of people to do the washing up; a whole new lot had come from Germany. And I’m really perfectly all right. Absolutely fine. Only I would very much like to be busy, if you don’t mind, so if you didn’t send Magdalena’s tea gown to be embroidered but gave it to me, we could save a lot of money…’

Magdalena’s wedding dress is really far too magnificent for a small private wedding with only one bridesmaid in attendance. In designing it I had responded to her beauty and Herr Huber’s wishes, rather than the occasion.

But it is not too magnificent for the church.

Outwardly the Capuchin Church is a narrow, faded building, squeezed in between others on the west side of the Neuermarkt. Inside, too, it is austere with only the dark brown of the marquetry work behind the altar for decoration.

But to walk down the aisle of the Capuchin Church is to walk on the whole history of the Empire, for below in the crypt lie the bodies of all the Habsburgs who have ruled over Austria. Maria Theresia lies there in a vast sarcophagus, entwined in statuary with her husband, and Leopold I who saved us from the Turks. Crown Prince Rudolf sleeps in the crypt, wept over by parties of tourists; and Napoleon’s sad little son, the King of Rome whose cradle they adorned with a thousand golden bees to bring him luck and happiness, but to no avail.

Somehow it seemed to me suitable that the eerie Magdalena with her mad religiosity and her extraordinary beauty should walk to her bridegroom over the buried bodies of more than a hundred Habsburg kings.

Since the ceremony was to be small and private, a rehearsal hardly seemed necessary but when Herr Huber suggested it, I agreed with alacrity. Anything to banish the spectre of the tall, dark man who had bent over Magdalena with such unmistakable tenderness beneath the acacia in St Oswald’s garden.

For once, Frau Winter, overcoming her scruples about Herr Huber being in trade, attended with her twin boys, for there was to be a luncheon afterwards provided by the butcher. And Frau Sultzer arrived with Edith. She came on the tandem, and it was nice of her for Rudi has not been dead a month and I’m not so foolish as to imagine that in her own way she does not grieve. As usual her arrival caused a certain consternation; as usual she unstrapped her briefcase from the carrier so that Schopenhauer could be assured of her attention, even in church.

But only one briefcase… Edith, as she followed her mother, had a naked and vulnerable look.

‘Is it finished then? The essay?’

‘Yes, I handed it in last week.’

The Bluestocking looked tireder and plainer than ever: a different girl from the one who had chatted so happily to Herr Huber’s sisters in Linz.

Magdalena, wearing white, seemed thoroughly at home in the sombre church, talking animatedly to the priest about music for the service, lighting candles at the side altar, dropping on to her knees to pray. If only I hadn’t seen what I had seen at St Oswald’s, it would have convinced me thoroughly, this piety of hers.

I’d brought Nini along and the measurements for Magdalena’s train. There would be no problem with the dress; there were very few steps; a girl with Magdalena’s grace would manage without help.

‘You’ll have to stay about eight paces behind Magdalena,’ I said to Edith. ‘There’s no need to lift the train — it’ll fall into its own lines — just see, that it’s clear as you come through the door and then when you get to the altar, arrange it on the steps before you stand aside.’

Herr Huber, of course, should not have been present at all. But one can hardly expect a man to pay for the trousseau and take on the care of the bride’s family, and have nothing to do with the arrangements. Now he sat squeezed into one of the side pews and followed Magdalena’s every movement with his eyes.

It hadn’t seemed necessary to rehearse the procession, but it so happened that the organist was in the church, and at a word from the priest he went up to the organ loft and started to play the Bach passacaglia which Magdalena had chosen for her entry.

It was strangely exciting, the sudden music; it made it real. Magdalena felt it too, I think, for she lifted her head and began to walk up the aisle in perfect time to the music.

And counting carefully, making sure she kept the right distance, Edith, with her pigeon-toed gait, fell in behind her.

Herr Huber, I’m sure, made no sort of gesture; he saw nothing but his bride, but after a few paces, Edith suddenly stopped.

‘No,’ I heard her say in a frenzied whisper. ‘No, I can’t, Magdalena. You mustn’t have me as a bridesmaid. You mustn’t.’

Magdalena turned.

‘You mustn’t,’ Edith repeated. ‘Don’t you see, it’ll be a farce. You’ll spoil it for him. He’ll see you come and then me behind you. He’ll be sick. Everyone’ll be sick.’

I moved quickly towards her, expecting hysterics. But Magdalena was looking at her friend with the bewildered look of someone woken too suddenly from a dream.

‘Who? Who’ll be standing there? What are you talking about?’

‘Herr Huber of course. Your bridegroom.’ It was Edith’s turn to look confused.

Magdalena, with an almost visible effort, brought herself down to earth. ‘I want you to be there, Edith,’ she said to her friend. ‘I need you to be there.’

She had spoken with certainty and kindness. Edith steadied herself and the procession continued — but to me it was as if Magdalena had proclaimed her passion to the world. For one thing was certain: the figure she’d imagined waiting at the altar as she fixed her eyes raptly on the crucifix might be her chosen bridegroom — but it was not Herr Huber from Linz.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like actually to see the Taj Mahal. I’ve read so much about it, seen pictures in the Illustrierte Zeitung. But when one got there in the moonlight would there be an anticlimax? Can it be as white and majestic as everybody says?

Well now I know, because I have seen one of Laura Sultzer’s notices. It was pinned to the door of her room just as in the legends that Alice and I have collected through the years and there was no letdown at all.

Silence! it said, Frau Sultzer is reading Grillparzer.

I stared at it entranced while the maid who had admitted me looked worried.

‘I don’t like to disturb her — she’s got them all in there, you see.’

‘The Group, you mean? She’s reading aloud?’

‘That’s right. It’ll be a good hour before they’re through.’

But I’d come myself with Edith’s completed bridesmaid’s dress instead of sending Gretl, for I have decided to keep an eye on the Bluestocking, and I had no intention of going without seeing her.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility,’ and I knocked and opened the door.

Laura sat on a high-backed chair reading aloud from Austria’s most famous (and some would say her only) poet. Round her, in poses of rapt attention, sat her acolytes. I took in a pair of hermaphrodite feet in open sandals and the bosom of the lady who does Croatian cross-stitch, heavily banded in red and black.

‘I’ve come to borrow Fräulein Edith,’ I said cheerfully, ‘I want her to try on her dress.’

Frau Sultzer put down her book and glared.

‘As you can see we are busy.’

Edith rose quickly to her feet. ‘Oh, but Frau Susanna has come herself…’

Accompanied by stares of outrage from the ladies, she hurried to the door.

The room that Edith took me to had to be her bedroom because it contained a bed. There was, however, nothing else even mildly feminine: no dressing table, no mirror, and the wash stand looked dangerously small. Instead there were bookcases lined with dark tomes and on the wall, framed in black, the prizes Edith had won at school.

The dress was a perfect fit, the soft green not unbecoming, but as Edith’s bespectacled face, the bewildered eyes, emerged, I had again the feeling that in designing for her I had missed some clue.

‘Have you been attending to your diet?’ I asked her, for there was a large red spot in the middle of her chin.

‘Well, I try. I remembered what Herr Huber said about red meat making good blood. Of course when I’m with the Group I can’t… but when I’m alone, Cook sometimes brings me a steak.’

‘That’s good. Now all you have to do is wash your hair a bit more often and your skin will soon improve. Dandruff is very bad for acne. Every three or four days with a good shampoo.’

‘Every three or four days!’ Edith looked at me with horror. ‘But my mother… I mean, surely that would interfere with one’s natural oils?’

‘Edith,’ I said firmly, ‘I do assure you that there is nothing that needs interfering with so much as one’s natural oils.’

As she was dressing I asked her a question I had been turning over in my mind. ‘Has Magdalena ever given you a hint of another… attachment? Someone she is fond of?’

‘No, never; never. If she’s got another attachment it’s to the church. To God. She’s asked Herr Huber to let her go into retreat once a month here in Vienna after their marriage; just for a few days. So you see…’

And I did indeed see. A few days every month to be with her lover — and for the rest, her family provided for, a generous and complaisant husband. Well, why not — many people would regard it as a sensible solution to her problems, but there was something about Herr Huber’s innocence that made me furious on his behalf.

I was preparing to leave when Edith touched my arm. ‘I’ve got something for… your friend. If you think she’d like it? If it wouldn’t upset her?’

She led me to her rolltop desk, opened it — and took out a package. Inside was a long-stemmed pipe with a blue dragon on the china bowl.

‘It was my father’s favourite,’ said Edith and, somewhat unnecessarily, added: ‘My mother doesn’t know.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, my dear. I think she’d love to have it.’

But I’d caught sight of something else that Edith had hidden in her desk. A book that was quite different from the scholarly volumes stacked round her walls. The cover was garish, the title, in tall red letters, stood out clearly, The Art of Pork Butchering by Hector Schlumberger.

Alice was sitting at her table playing patience with the new pack of cards she’d bought for Rudi to use during their summer idyll, and she’d lost weight.

‘Edith thought you’d like to have this.’

She took the pipe, opened the porcelain lid, closed it… traced the outline of the dragon with one finger.

‘It was his favourite,’ she said, as Edith had done. And then: ‘Sanna, I’ve never asked you, but I wondered… I mean how long does it go on hurting so much? How long was it before it stopped hurting after you came back from Salzburg? They say that Time Heals, but how much time? When did it stop, the hurt about your daughter?’

I hesitated, then told the truth. ‘Oh Alice, it’s never stopped. I don’t know what time does, but I don’t think it does that. Only, after a while… two years… three, perhaps… the pain becomes manageable. It becomes part of you and if someone offered to take it away… you wouldn’t want them to because the pain is the link with the person you’ve lost. It sounds maudlin, but I don’t mean it like that.’

‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘I see,’

She then went to get ready for the dress rehearsal of Wienerblut, which is just as bad as everyone expected. ‘They’ve given us new outfits for once: really very smart: sprigged muslin and poke bonnets… but you might as well be naked when the horses are on the stage. They’ve hired a special man with a gold shovel to scoop up their droppings and that’s all the audience will be waiting for. The man with the shovel.’

I know it’s completely ridiculous, but deep down I feel a touch of resentment because Rudi left her so unprovided for. It’s five years before she’ll get her pension and even then it’s nothing much. Yet what could he have done without hurting Laura, a thing both of them spent their lives trying not to do?

After all, the gardenias, the decollete were not in vain! Sigismund has been reprieved. With luck now his piano will turn into an Arab steed on which he can gallop away to his destiny; a three masted galleon in which he can sail to glory!

I had given up all hope of Van der Velde but yesterday he came and he is going to give Sigismund a concert!

‘I’ve got an unexpected gap,’ he said, striding into my shop in his velvet-collared overcoat. ‘A soprano I booked for October has let me down, the bitch. It’s a six o’clock recital in the small salon at the Zelinka Palace so there’s not much at stake.’

‘He’s really good, then?’

Van der Velde shrugged. ‘He’s small for his age and he’s Polish; I can probably do something with that. But God, what a hovel! Someone’ll have to clean him up,’ he said, looking meaningfully at me.

‘Are you going to give them an advance? They’re practically starving.’

‘An advance! You’re out of your mind. They’ll get twenty per cent of the takings if there are any, and that’s generous. I’ll need every kreutzer I’ve got for advertising, and even then I’m chancing my arm. I’ve never seen an uglier child — and obstinate too. He won’t play the Waldstein. Still, its mostly Chopin they’ll want.’

He hadn’t been gone for more than an hour when Jan Kraszinsky appeared in the shop and asked me to make the boy’s concert clothes.

‘I don’t do boy’s clothes, I’m afraid,’ I explained. But he didn’t go, just stood there in his fusty black suit and looked at me.

‘Sigismund expects it. It was what he said first when Herr van der Velde said we must get some clothes. “She will make me some new trousers and I will see inside her shop!”

‘I’m sorry.’

He took a step towards me. ‘Herr van der Velde said it was you who told him about Sigismund.’

‘I mentioned the boy, that’s all.’

He moved forward, tried to take my hand to kiss it, and I retreated behind my desk.

‘Sigismund must have… shining knickers,’ said Kraszinsky, his German not quite up to his vision. ‘And a blouse… with rufflets.’ He sketched a frenzied cascade of frills with his unwashed hands.

‘No! Absolutely not! Your nephew must not be dressed up like a little monkey.’ (Oh, why couldn’t I keep out of it? Why couldn’t I be quiet?)

‘But Herr van der Velde said that Sigi must look young. He must look like a very small boy so that people think he has even more talent.’

‘The child is small enough as he is; you need no tricks. Sigismund is a serious child; he must be dressed with dignity. Look, I’ll send you to a friend of mine — a man I worked for for three years. He speaks Polish too.’

I wrote down Jacob Jacobson’s address and still Kraszinsky stood there exuding his particular brand of obstinate despair. Will you make me a drawing?’

‘All right. It’s an informal concert so you don’t need velvet. Black grosgrain trousers — not shorts on any account. A white high-necked blouse — not satin: raw silk. The neck of the blouse and the sleeves piped in black.’

I sketched as I spoke. A miniature Peter-the-Great-as-Shipbuilder emerged, and did not please Kraszinsky.

‘But that is how the peasants dress in Preszowice.’

‘Yes. You want that look. You mustn’t try to turn him into a pretty Viennese boy — you can’t do it anyway. Be proud of where you come from.’

He took the sketch.

‘Will he want money now, this Herr Jacobson? Will he wait till after the concert?’

I was silent, remembering my years with Jacob, the warmth, the jokes. What if the concert was not a success, what if nobody came? Perhaps it would not be the best way to repay my debt to Jasha, to leave him with an unpaid bill.

‘Oh, all right,’ I said irritably. ‘Bring the boy in the morning and I’ll see what I can do.’

He was outside the door as I opened the shop.

‘Grüss Gott, Sigismund.’

He bowed his concert master’s bow, entered; stood in the centre of the room, looking… At the white daisies in the alabaster bowls, at the swathed mirrors, at the fans and ostrich feathers in a glass case. His nose wrinkled as he drank in the smells: the phlox in a silver tankard on my desk; my own scent which a little man in the Graben mixes for me, Nini’s shampoo… Best of all he liked the low round table covered in a floor-length cloth of yellow silk to match the curtains. In hands which bore evidence of recent energetic scrubbing, he picked up the material and looked underneath.

‘It is like a house.’

‘Yes.’

I told him about the Countess von Metz’s Pekinese who’d liked to hide there and make puddles, and took him off to be measured.

‘God, he’s thin,’ said Nini.

His legs were like sticks; a tide mark at the base of the skinny neck showed where the washing had stopped abruptly.

I showed him the design for the concert clothes. ‘That’s the silk for your blouse; and that’s the material for your trousers. It’s called grosgrain.’

He nodded and repeated ‘Grosgrain,’ frowning with concentration. ‘And what is this?’

‘That’s muslin.’

‘And what is this?’

‘That’s velvet.’

He walked beside me along the bales of cloth, asking the name of each, almost touching, but not quite. Sometimes he repeated a word. ‘Taffeta,’ he said in his husky voice, and ‘Crêpe de Chine.’

Back in the salon he lingered again by the low table covered in yellow silk. Then suddenly he crouched down, crawled underneath it, and let the cloth fall again.

‘Can you see me?’

‘No, I can’t. You’re completely hidden.’

It’s the first time I’ve seen him behave like a child, this future Paderewski. The next time he comes I’m going to put him in the bath.

The effect of Van der Velde’s visit has been extraordinary. Frau Hinkler now tells everyone that it is only her kindness and care that saved the Kraszinskys from starvation. A man came from the piano firm, extending the period of hire till after the concert and offering unlimited credit in exchange for a mention in the programme.

‘I always knew the boy would make it,’ says Joseph, who now offers Kraszinsky cups of coffee on the house.

I cannot say that I have ever heard Joseph know anything of the sort, but never mind.

The Schumachers are genuinely delighted. Mitzi and Franzi and Steffi are to be allowed to go to the concert, but not the mercurial Resi.

‘Mama thinks she would wriggle too much and fall off her chair,’ said Mitzi.

Even Augustin Heller has decided to go and hear the boy. Herr Schnee is too busy, he says. The state harness for the cavalry of the Carinthian Jaegers is to be collected the same week as the concert — but he comes out occasionally to stand on the pavement and listens to Sigismund practising.

‘He’s really getting it,’ says Herr Schnee, as Sigismund explodes into a bravura passage.

For we have become musical connoisseurs, all of a sudden, in Madensky Square. We all know Sigismund’s programme: the Moonlight Sonata, three Chopin mazurkas, polonaises, the Waltz in F Major… We even know his encores (if there are any): a piece by Schumann, a Brahms impromptu… Joseph, who can’t even hum ‘O Du Lieber Augustin’, can be heard discussing Sigismund’s interpretations with Herr Schumacher as he serves the wine. And in her attic, Nini leans out with shining eyes.

‘Listen!’ she says, ‘he’s playing the Revolutionary Prelude!’ For it is this agitating piece that Van der Velde, that astute showman, has chosen for Sigismund’s last encore.

Nearly all my clients are back, following the Kaiser who returned last week to endure his birthday celebrations. Poor man, he’s eighty-one and tries hard to enjoy the processions and garden parties and firework displays in his honour. Last year he bent down to a little girl who was presenting a bouquet and had to be righted by his aides: something had seized up in the small of his back. This year a shower of pink tissue-paper hearts descended on him from a balcony and got caught in his moustaches, but he endures it all.

Professor Starsky called in to greet me. He is a modest man, but he feels that his lecture on the ‘Epineuria of the Rainbow Snake’ was well received in Reykjavik — and the English Miss strides past again behind her lovely dog.

I’ve made it clear to everyone who comes to the shop that they must buy a ticket for Sigismund’s recital if I’m to get paid for his trousers. For Leah Cohen this is no hardship — she is musical and has promised to bring the whole family. Things look bad for her; her husband’s emigration papers have come through and there is nothing now between her and the Promised Land. ‘And what’s so awful is to think that Miriam is staying behind and lording it in Vienna — bringing up her children and her grandchildren here while poor little Benjamin has to grub about making holes in the desert.’

But of course poor little Benjamin is delighted.

Frau Hutte-Klopstock is back from the High Tatras. Her sister has been in Paris and says that Poiret is freeing women from the corset. All I can say is that if he was designing for the women of Vienna, he would think again. But she too has bought a ticket for the concert, for Sigismund now belongs to us all.

Only the boy himself is unchanged. He practises all day as he always did and in the evening comes out and stands by the fountain.

‘Is it necessary for me to try on my clothes again?’ he asks when I stop and talk to him.

So I increase his fittings to a number somewhat in excess of what is needed to try on a pair of trousers and a shirt. It doesn’t matter now. Soon Sigismund will ride away on his black steed of a piano and trouble me no more.

I must try to be seemly. I mustn’t stand by my bedroom window shivering with happiness when my best friend is bereaved, my assistant is pining and there is cholera in Lausanne. Only how can I help it?

Alice has gone to spend a few days with her sister. Before she left she asked me if I’d put flowers on Rudi’s grave while she was away.

‘Anything that’s friendly,’ she said — and tried to give me money.

It’s too late in the year for cornflowers, but Old Anna found me a bunch of tousled pinks which were friendliness itself and after supper I went across to lay them at Rudi’s feet.

It had been raining and the air was wonderfully fresh. Hardly aware of the gathering darkness, I wandered about, in no hurry to go back indoors. The harebells on the mound of the Family Schmidt haven’t yet recovered from Sigismund’s depredations. Next year, perhaps — but next year the child will be gone. If the concert’s a success, Van der Velde means to send him on a tour of Europe.

The cathedral clock struck ten, and a minute and a quarter later, our St Florian’s. It’s the scents that are so marvellous at this time of night. Stocks and tobacco flowers from the sacristy garden; syringa on the Schumachers’ wall… and close by, stabbingly sweet, a dark red rambler, L’étoile d’Hollande, flowering for a second time.

I heard Rip bark once and someone hushing him. Then silence, and I resumed my litany of smells. Lilies from the urns of the Family Heinrid, a sprig of cupressus rubbed between my fingers…

And one more smell… a smell that I couldn’t believe, that had to be a mirage, a dream, it was so lovely!

Only it wasn’t. It was here, it was real — the scent for which I’d trade all others in the world.

I picked up my skirts and hurried towards the light of the porch. A pebble was dislodged; the smell of onions grew stronger.

‘Hatschek! Oh, Hatschek!’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’

‘Oh God, I’m so pleased to see you. It’s so long, the summer. But he isn’t in Vienna? He can’t be?’

He shook his head. ‘He’s still away and working himself into the ground. I came with dispatches. But he sent a letter.’

A letter. We don’t write to each other, Gernot and I. It’s too uncertain, too dangerous. In heaven I shall be able to write to him, but not here.

Then suddenly the night became ice cold. Why a letter now? Because he has decided to be faithful for ever to the high-born Elise and accompany her to the sulphurous springs of Baden Baden? Because the Kaiser has sent him to govern Mexico…?

I broke the seal, took out a single sheet of paper.

‘On the sixth of October I’m going to Trieste to meet the Colonel of the Southern Division. It’s only a brief meeting — no inspections — no reviews — and after that I’ll be free for three days. This is what I want you to do. Take the night train — the 18.35 from the Sudbahnhol I shall be in the front of the train with my aides, but don’t look for me. When you get to Trieste go to the Hotel Europa; you’ll be booked in there and as soon as I’ve finished I’ll come for you. We shall go on to Miramare where, at long last, I shall keep my promise. I may die unshriven but you shall — I swear it — see the sea.’

I looked up. ‘Oh Hatschek! I’m going to see the sea!’

‘Aye. And about time too. All these years he’s been meaning to take you and there wasn’t ever a proper chance. It’s funny you not having seen it; an educated lady like you.’

I shook my head. But I’m not allowed to mention my peasant origin to Hatschek. For he approves of me, he really does. I’m not like Serbia or Macedonia. I’m good for his master.

‘I know you want me to chew up this letter and swallow it,’ I said challengingly. ‘But I’m not going to. When I’ve read it a few times I’ll swallow it, but not now.’

He grinned. ‘I’m to tell him “yes” then?’

‘Yes, Hatschek. You’re to tell him “yes”.’

He took a packet out of his tunic. ‘It’s all there — the tickets, the sleeper reservations, the address of the hotel. He says, not to miss the train whatever you do. It’s the last one out over the weekend.’

‘I won’t miss the train.’

No need to inform Hatschek that I shall be sitting on the platform three hours before the train is due. Let me keep my dignity. Not that I fool him. Hatschek knows perfectly well how dementedly I love his master.

The sea, people assure me, is not at all like a very large lake. It is not like the Bodensee, where Alice once sang Fledermaus on an enormous floating raft. You cannot see across to the other side of the Bodensee, but the sea is not like that. It is not like a whole row of Attersees laid end to end, nor like the lake into which I threw my daughter’s doll, though that lake was very, very deep.

The sea is different… other… it is something else. Everyone agrees on this. There is salt in the air that one breathes, and always a little wind — and the birds that wheel above the waves are serious birds which don’t sing, but mew and shriek and cry. The sea makes a hem for itself, a strand on which flowers are not allowed to grow: it belongs to the world of the water, this hem, a golden boundary. So important is the sea that it makes the sky above it different too; the clouds move faster — and suddenly when one looks up, there is a ship. Not a paddle steamer or a barge. A ship.

I fetched the Baedeker and looked up Miramare. Population 2,100. A botanical garden with interesting palm trees. The Hotel Post, the Hotel Bella Vista, numerous pensions…

Sappho lived by the sea. They say that when she died she flew away over a cliff and became a swan, but I shan’t do that. I shall take the ocean from my lover’s hands, and I shall live.