Magic Flutes

4

In the breakfast room of Schloss Spittau, watched from the banks of the moat by a pair of moulting swans, Dorothea, Princess of Spittau, was reading a letter.

From the turreted windows of the room, as from all the windows of the castle, one looked out on water. Spittau’s long, low, yellow-stuccoed main front, with its flanking pepper-pot towers, was lapped by the waters of the Neusiedler See, a large, reedy and melancholy lake stretching away to the Hungarian border. The north, west and south sides of the ancient Wasserburg were surrounded by a wide and scummy moat. Only a single causeway connected the castle with the swampy, pool-infested marsh, which in that desolate, aqueous region had to pass for land.

‘Pfaffenstein is sold!’ said the princess now, looking across the table at her son. ‘And well sold. To a foreigner. A millionaire!’

Prince Maximilian of Spittau, thus addressed, momentarily stopped chewing and said, ‘Putzerl will be pleased.’

‘Not only pleased,’ said his mother, ‘but rich. There is no longer anything to wait for. You must act, Maxi. Act!’

Maxi’s blue, poached eyes bulged with a certain apprehension; his vestigial forehead creased into furrows. He was in fact a man of action, having shot a large number of people during the war, and, with the cessation of hostilities, an infinitely larger number of snipe, mallard, teal, godwall, pochard and geese which he pursued virtually from dawn to dusk in punts, rowing boats and waders. Even now his feet, under the table, rested on a huddle of soaking wet pointers, retrievers and setters who had been out with him since sunrise.

But action as understood by his mother was a different thing.

That the prince had been dropped on his head as a baby was unlikely. Kaiser Wilhelm II had attended his christening; a series of starched and iron-willed nurses had handed him from room to room in the gargantuan palace in Schleswig-Holstein, now confiscated by the Allies, in which he had been born. His lack of cerebral matter seemed rather to be inborn, the price he had paid for being related to both Joan the Mad who brought Castile and Aragon to the House of Austria, and to the Emperor Charles II whose Habsburg chin and Bourbon nose had locked in a manner that made the ingestion of food almost impossible. But though his intellectual activity was limited to weekly visits to the village hall in Neusiedl where they showed the latest films from Hollywood, there was nothing unattractive about Maxi. True, his duelling scar had gone awry a little, but enough of it was visible above his left eye to give him a slightly rakish look; his blond moustache waved pleasantly and except when he was dealing with his mother, his expression was amiable and relaxed.

‘I have been very patient with you, Maxi,’ continued his mother, whose nickname ‘The Swan Princess’ referred rather to her beady eye and savage beak than to any grace or beauty, ‘and so have Putzerl’s aunts. But enough is enough. There is going to be a house party at Pfaffenstein in June. Putzerl is sure to be there for that, so you must propose to her formally then and announce your engagement on the spot.’

‘But, Mother, I have proposed to Putzerl three times. When you told me to, on her eighteenth birthday, and then again that spring. And only three months ago, when I was in Vienna, I invited her out for lunch and proposed again. Without you telling me! She doesn’t,’ said Maxi, a trace of pardonable puzzlement in his voice, ‘love me.’

‘Don’t talk like a waiter,’ snapped the princess. ‘Putzerl knows perfectly well that she must marry you. I must say she isn’t quite what I had hoped for from the point of view of character, but her lineage is impeccable, and with the money she brings in from Pfaffenstein we will be able to shore up the east wing and mend the roof. Anyway, no one not bred to the life would fit in at Spittau.’

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 who 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 left 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.

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.