Madensky Square

December

I suppose I should have known. Nini wasn’t just wearing her assassination shoes when she went out, she’d made herself a new velveteen jacket and her eyes were shining with excitement.

But they do so often. With her fervour, her belief in ‘The Propaganda of the Deed’ whatever that may mean, she often goes to her meetings looking like that.

It was her half day so she left in the afternoon.

‘I’ll be late,’ she said — but she is often late, and I went on with my stocktaking. Peter Konrad has found someone who’ll take my cloth at valuation.

In the evening I went out to buy a newspaper. On the front page was a picture of what looked like a moustachioed slug, but was apparently Herr Engelbert Knapp, the German arms manufacturer and steel magnate who was arriving in Vienna as a guest of the Austrian Ministry of Trade.

Even then I felt no disquiet. I had heard Nini rage about Knapp, who is said to treat his workers abominably and recently called in the army to put down a strike in his factory at Essen — but who have I not heard Nini rage about: archdukes, cabinet ministers, financiers?

There had been some threats to his life by subversive bodies; an extra contingent of police had been detailed to guard his route from the station to the Hotel Imperial…

I don’t wait up for Nini. When I first took her in I set myself the task of leaving her free, so I went to bed at the usual time, but when I woke I knew at once that she wasn’t there. Her bed had not been slept in; her room was bare and tidy. Between the two Anarchist posters, she’d pinned a picture of a candy-striped pinafore cut from a fashion magazine.

I told myself that she’d found a boy she liked and spent the night with him — not unlikely in view of her determination to forget Daniel Frankenheimer. But for all her wildness Nini is considerate. She’s come in in the small hours, but never as late as this.

So by the time the pounding on my door started, I was prepared. But it wasn’t the police; it was Lily from the post office, tear-stained and frantic. Her father’s a revolutionary, that’s how she and Nini met.

‘They’ve got her, Frau Susanna! They’ve got Nini! They’ve rounded up everybody in the group — as soon as Knapp died they went to the cellar and took everyone.’

‘What happened to Knapp?’

‘Someone threw a bomb at his car as he was coming down the Ring.’

I took the paper from her. Assassination Horror screamed the headline. A young man dressed like a student had stepped out from behind a tree as the car slowed down to take a bend, and thrown a bomb. Herr Knapp died instantly, as did his chauffeur. His secretary was seriously injured and so were a number of by-standers. The assassin made no attempt to escape. ‘Long live the poor and the oppressed,’ he’d cried, and biting on a cap of fulminate of mercury which he had in his mouth, he fell lifeless to the ground.

‘You must tell me exactly how far Nini was involved,’ I said to Lily. ‘That’s the only way I can help her.’

‘I don’t know exactly, Frau Susanna. Honestly I don’t. I know she had to go to a hat shop in the Neuermarkt at three and pick up a message. It was part of a chain of messages, I think. But she couldn’t have been there when the bomb was thrown because she was in Ottakring when the police came and that was miles away. They were all there.’

Oh yes, I thought wearily. Naturally. They would all assemble afterwards so as to save the police the trouble of rounding them up one by one.

‘Where have they taken her, Lily? Have you any idea?’ Lily’s face was grim. ‘She’s at Pechau. They’ve taken her to Pechau.’

It’s the worst of all the gaols in the city: ancient, rat-infested, notorious. I packed a shawl, some washing things, a basket of food — quite without hope that they would let me see her.

It takes an hour to drive to Pechau and you can tell that you’re approaching it because even the surrounding streets are dank and squalid and the muffled people who walk in them seem blighted by the proximity of that awful place.

I had dressed carefully, I spoke carefully, I smiled. This got me past the outer office and into an inner one with a desk and a chair — and an official of the kind I remembered from the days when I had pleaded for particulars about my daughter. A stone-waller, a no-sayer, a cipher whose bumbledom was itself an act of cruelty.

‘I have come about my assistant. A dressmaker. A girl I have adopted. I think she was arrested last night in Ottakring.’

He drew a dossier towards him.

‘Name?’

I gave Nini’s name which is long and very Hungarian. He consulted his papers.

‘There is no one of this name here.’

Oh God, Nini — did you have to give a false name as well as everything else?

‘Herr Lieutenant,’ I said, elevating the oaf to officer status, ‘the girl is just twenty years old. She is a minor. Would you allow me to see the prisoners you took last night? That’s all I ask. Justice must be done, I entirely see that; she must take her punishment. But I am, in effect… her mother. I only ask to know where she is.’

I made no attempt to bribe him. The sums involved, the procedure, the donations to the Prison Officers’ Welfare Fund, were out of my reach. I could only entreat.

‘You may look at the female prisoners taken last night. Three minutes only. And leave the basket here.’

I followed a janitor into the basement.

It’s the smells that tell you first that you are in a place without hope. Unwashed bodies, urine, vomit… Then the sounds; moaning, keening, a raucous laughter that is worse than the wails… A monotonous, endless banging of something against iron… And the cold.

We had passed through a steel door into the women’s quarters. A series of cages, each the size of the lion’s cage in Schönbrunn Zoo, but filled with women. Some stood by the bars, hanging on with their hands as Alice had stood at Rudi’s funeral; some lay huddled on the ground, rolled up as if to make themselves as small as possible and minimize their wretchedness. A few sat with their backs to the wall, gossiping, not ashamed. These, I supposed, were the prostitutes who were picked up and released at the whim of the police. Nini was not in the first cage, nor in the second, on the floor of which lay a woman so old that it was impossible to believe she was still capable of wrongdoing. In the third cage I saw her at once. She had lost her jacket and her blouse was torn, one spiky shoulder protruded from it. There was a bruise on her forehead and a patch of dried blood. She still wore her assassination shoes.

‘Nini.’

She lifted her head, came towards me. Best not to remember her look as she saw me; I have done nothing to merit that. ‘Oh, Frau Susanna! How did you know?’

‘Lily told me. Don’t worry, Nini. I’ll find some way of helping you.’

She shook her head. ‘The others are all in the same boat. They’re all my companions. I mustn’t get anything they don’t get.’ She pushed her hair out of her eyes — prisoners are not allowed hair pins. ‘But we did it,’ she whispered, ‘we killed the swine!’

‘Yes. And a number of other people too. Listen, Nini, you know you mustn’t admit to anything — not even taking messages. Nothing. Not for your sake — you wouldn’t mind being martyred — but because you’ll make trouble for someone else.’

‘I know. Don’t worry, they can cut out my tongue.’ Then suddenly her eyes filled with tears. ‘They don’t let us go to the lavatory,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect that. We have to go in a bucket in here. With everyone watching. I expected the beatings, but not that.’

‘I’ll get help, Nini; we’ll get you out.’

But the janitor had had enough. ‘Time’s up. No more talking.’

I was led back to the office. ‘The sanitation in this prison’s a disgrace,’ I said furiously. ‘I’m going to see that questions are raised in Parliament.’

He shrugged. ‘No one’ll spend the money. Did you find the girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, they’ll be charged next week. Nothing to be done till then.’

‘I’ll be back with a solicitor,’ I said, and left.

I drove straight to the lawyer who had helped me when I rented my shop. He did not deal in criminal cases, but recommended a colleague in the Borse Platz. The colleague kept me waiting an hour and said he would find it very difficult, on ethical grounds, to defend an Anarchist. Even if he could overcome his scruples, the fee would be very high.

‘How high?’ I asked, and blenched as he told me.

‘Don’t you have a friend in Important Places?’ he asked, leering at me. ‘They’re worth all of us poor lawyers put together, these important friends.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

Not any more. Not now.

Then I drove to the main post office and found Lily behind her grille, and she helped me to send a cable to New York.

Somehow I’ve crawled through the last three days. I’ve left it to Gretl to explain to my clients what has happened and most of them have been patient and understanding. The Baroness Lefevre even offered to ask her husband to plead for Nini, but when it came to the point the Baron didn’t feel able to intervene on behalf of a girl who wanted to destroy the fabric of society.

Meanwhile I’ve gone backwards and forwards between the prison and the offices of anyone I thought might possibly help me: lawyers, welfare workers, priests, but nothing has happened — nothing.

And there’s been no answer to my cable. I hadn’t really expected it.

I’ve been allowed to see Nini for a few minutes each day. She still holds her head proudly, she still, even in her rags, keeps that extraordinary style, and she’s admitted nothing. There hasn’t been much actual cruelty on the part of the prison staff — it isn’t necessary. The filth, the horrendous sanitary arrangements, the haphazard mingling of sick and deluded women with young girls does its own work. There are bruises on Nini’s face which were not there when she was admitted, but when I asked her how she came by them she only shook her head.

I’ve decided to swallow my pride and beg that slimy lawyer in the Borse Platz to defend Nini. If I hadn’t been so distraught I’d have realized at once that I only had to sell The Necklace to get his fees. But when I called there this afternoon, he had left for the assizes in Graz.

This morning I went to the prison early and for the first time found Nini looking frightened. At the back of the cage sat three women, huddled and weeping, with white cloths round their heads — and on one of the cloths, bloodstains.

‘It’s typhus,’ she whispered. ‘They’ve found a case of typhus and they’re shaving everybody’s head. They came and did them this morning and the rest of us are going to be done in batches. You should see the wardresses — they have these cut-throat razors and they just shave you to the scalp. They love doing it because it’s what the women mind most of all.’

It is that that Nini fears: losing her hair — but I know about typhus. I saw our neighbours’ little daughter die of it at Leck.

Upstairs, the prison officer told me to stay away. The women are now in quarantine.

I drove back, utterly sick at heart, as near defeated as I remember being. As the fiacre stopped at the corner of the square, I looked out, amazed. It has been snowing for days; the fountain is frozen, there are icicles on St Florian’s head. People hurry across, their footsteps muffled. No one lingers.

But the square was full of children. I’d heard their shouts before the cab turned in through the chestnut trees and now I saw them in their mufflers and fur hats, bright spots of colour on the whiteness of the snow. They were running and calling out to each other, some were crouched low beside piles of snowballs — one, a ragged little boy I don’t ever remember seeing before had climbed on to St Florian’s shoulders as a lookout and, even as I watched, was brought down by the arrow of an attacker.

For it was a battle that was being fought — but a battle with rules. The fountain was the stockade in which the besieged American pioneers bound for the Golden West defended their kith and kin. The children’s toboggans had been piled up like covered wagons and from behind them the intrepid settlers fired on their attackers.

But the Indians were brave too. Screaming their uncouth war calls, they leapt from General Madensky’s plinth, charged from between the chestnut trees… Maia’s imagined horse was shot from under her and a Red Indian chorister from the presbytery pulled her on to the back of his saddle and galloped on. Among the settlers I saw — but could scarcely believe my eyes — Ernst Bischof allowing little Steffi to provide him with bullets of snow.

The door of the Schumachers’ house opened and Helene called the girls in to lunch.

She might have saved her breath. Mitzi, inside the stockade, was tending the wounded; Resi, who had strayed from the safety of the wagons, was being dragged off to be scalped.

A prosperous-looking couple crossed the Walterstrasse with a fat little boy in ear muffs.

‘Can I play?’ he shouted — and ignoring the protests of his parents, he ran to Madensky’s statue and instantly became an Indian brave.

I had never seen a game like this. There were scarcely any props: the Indians had no feathers, the settlers no guns — yet so engrossed was each and every child in his part that I could have told exactly what they were doing.

But now a boy, older than the rest, in a corduroy cap and outsize muffler appeared from behind the statue of St Florian. He must have died earlier, perhaps the better to mastermind the game — and taking heed perhaps of Frau Schumacher’s pleas, he suggested to the settlers a heroic demise, en bloc, and to the Indians a triumphant ride off into the hills.

Not a boy, I realized as I looked more carefully: a young man. At the same time Nini’s voice sounded distinctly in my head: ‘It was the children that made me notice him.’

Impossible. I had sent the cable only three days ago. Then he bent down, beat the snow from his trousers… and pulled up his socks.

He had never had my cable. His mother was travelling to Paris on business and he came with her for talks with the European branches of the bank, and because he wanted to see Nini. ‘I’ve bought her a Christmas present,’ he said, stamping his boots clean in my hall.

I couldn’t believe it. I began to tremble, so great was the relief.

‘What is it?’ he asked as he followed me upstairs. ‘There’s something wrong. She’s had an accident? She’s ill?’

I told him.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see. That was to be expected, I suppose.’

‘Can you help, Daniel? I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried everything.’

He put an arm round my shoulder. Nini had described him exactly. He was small, he had a snub nose, his eyes were no particular colour and sock suspenders seemed to be foreign to his nature, yet I felt instantly comforted.

‘I think we’ll have some lunch,’ he said. ‘I’m staying at the Bristol — they’re supposed to keep a good table. Will you come?’

‘No… if you don’t mind, not the Bristol. I could make us something here. An omelette?’

‘Yes, I’d like that.’

I was upset that he wanted to have lunch. I wanted him to start at once doing whatever can be done. But when I came to eat I realized that I had been very close to collapse, and perhaps he realized it too, for he watched me closely and made me open a bottle of wine though he himself drank little.

Not till we had had our coffee did he push back his chair and say: ‘Right. I’d better get going. There’s just one favour I’d like to ask of you. I’d like to see Nini’s room. You see, even if I can get her out, I think she’ll turn against me. She’ll say it was just privilege, the rotten system and so on. So I’d like to be able to imagine her when I’ve gone.’

‘I’ll show you. But you won’t be able to imagine her for long. The shop is being pulled down, you see, and most of the square.’

‘My God!’

I took him upstairs. He walked over to the poster which said Property is Theft and the one that said Blood Shed for the Revolution is Blood Shed for Humanity. He touched briefly the lace-edged pillow and the picture of the candy-striped pinafore she’d cut out of Damenmode. He looked at the pile of leaflets urging the textile workers of Ottakring to strike and picked up the silver-backed brush I’d given her last Christmas.

‘She’s very tidy,’ he said. ‘Somehow I didn’t expect that.’

Then he wound himself in to his strange muffler, ready to go to the Bristol. At the door he turned and took both my hands. ‘I promise I’ll refer back to you as often as I can, but this is something that has to be traced out step by step. And it can’t be hurried. Everything has to be just so. If the bribe is too big they get suspicious, if it’s too small they get insulted. If you offer membership of the Jockey Club to someone who wants a permanent box at the Opera you’ve wasted a whole round of talks. And bribes alone are no good — there has to be pressure as well. It can take days… weeks…’

‘How will you start?’

‘With the American Ambassador. Thank God he’s in town — and what’s more, he knows my father.’

‘But how can you interest a man like that in a girl who wants to blow everyone up? An avowed Anarchist?’

‘I’m not going to interest him in an avowed Anarchist. I’m going to interest him in my intended. For I intend to marry Nini, you know. What she intends is nobody’s business.’

I didn’t tell him about the typhus. He doesn’t have to have all my nightmares.

Daniel has been at the Bristol for five days. The ship on which he was due to return sailed from Genoa and he let it go. Each day he comes and tells me what he has done. He never gets ruffled and if he gets discouraged he keeps it to himself, but it seems to me that his nondescript eyes, the freckles on his nose, are growing darker.

The children are a trouble. When they see him coming they run out of their houses, pursued by the irate voice of Father Anselm from the presbytery, of Helene Schumacher forbidding her girls to go out inadequately dressed into the snow. Daniel only speaks to them for a few minutes and then they are off. Once they became vile slavers on the Gold Coast, dragging the captive Africans to their ships, only to be overcome in their turn by pirates and forced to walk the plank. Once they set off in canoes to find the source of the Rio Negro, beating off crocodiles, piranha fish and savages, and claimed new territory for the Austrian flag. I never saw children play together as they played with Daniel Frankenheimer in the doomed square. I think Maia would have gone through fire for him.

When he could stay a while we talked and I learnt about his family. He was proud of his father’s achievements, but impatient of some of his attitudes to his workers. ‘He’s too paternalistic; he won’t see that times have changed. Unions are here to stay — people want things by right, now, not by the gift of their employers. But he’s got the most terrific flair.’

‘And your mother?’

Daniel grinned. ‘She’s an obsessive. Little and mad; looks like a wolverine — and acts like one too when she’s after something.’

‘What’s she obsessive about?’

‘Well, the family partly — Dad and me and my older sister. But mostly her music school. She was trained as a pianist, you see. And I must say she’s made a marvellous job of it. People are auditioning to come there now from all over the world.’

‘It’s for exceptionally talented children, isn’t that right?’

Daniel nodded. ‘Her people came from Russia originally and she’s based it on the ideas of the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg. Incredibly hard work, the top teachers, but a chance for the children to perform as they go along and be part of the world they’re going to join. When Gustav Mahler was in New York he came to see it and he wrote my mother a letter saying he wished he’d been trained there instead of the Vienna Conservatoire!’ Daniel laughed and cut himself another slice of Herr Huber’s latest leberwurst. ‘Last month the fire alarm went off in our house in Fifth Avenue. My father pulled all the documents out of the safe and the maids rescued my mother’s jewels — but my mother came down in her nightdress and all she was holding was her letter from Gustav Mahler!

Then he went off to the next round of meetings and dinners with recalcitrant and obstinate officials. As he crossed the square, the little ragged boy I’d seen first climbing on St Florian’s shoulder, stepped out from behind a chestnut tree and took his hand.

He has done it! Daniel has performed the miracle! Nini is out; she is free!

I had no warning. I was fitting a customer when a black limousine with a flag on the bonnet drew up outside. The chauffeur got out, opened the door, handed Nini out — and drove away without a word.

She wore the clothes she’d been arrested in and there was a blood-stained bandage round her head.

‘Oh, Nini!’ I said, embracing her. And then: ‘It doesn’t matter about your hair — nothing matters except that you’re safe.’

She winked. Yes, really; this half-starved, exhausted girl winked at me. Then she pulled off her bandage and her hair, uncut, abundant and filthy tumbled round her shoulders.

‘Good God, Nini! How?’

‘I tricked them. I borrowed the bandages from one of the women who’d been shaved and when they came to me I said I’d already been done. They were in such a muddle most of the time, and drunk into the bargain.’

She went to the bathroom and spent an hour there, and then she slept. She slept till early evening and only then, sitting in her dressing gown drinking the broth I’d made for her, did she ask: ‘How did you do it, Frau Susanna? How did you manage to get me out?’

‘I didn’t, Nini. I tried and tried, but I failed. It was Daniel Frankenheimer who got you out.’

She put down her spoon. ‘Daniel? But how? How could he, in New York?’

‘He isn’t in New York, he’s here.’ And I told her the full story. ‘He’s at the Bristol and he’d be glad to see you when you’re rested, but not before.’

‘I am rested,’ said Nini. ‘Actually.’

She then went upstairs to attend to her toilette, which took some time for she chose to regard her bruises as a fashion point needing to be offset by an olive green silk scarf (mine) knotted just so, and this in turn caused other problems.

Which she solved, I do assure you…

Did I look like that when I drove off to the Bristol — my eyes so bright, my hands touching my hair almost as though they were the hands of someone else, the man who soon now…

Yes, I suppose that’s how I looked, but it doesn’t matter. She left an hour ago and I think — yes, really, I think — it’s going to be all right.

No, I was wrong.

Is it because she doesn’t believe in God that she’s so savage with herself and the world? So obstinate and stupid? Can the woman in Salzburg be going through what I’m going through now: the anger, the frustration at seeing happiness thrown away? Surely my daughter can’t be such a fool?

Daniel lost his temper. I don’t blame him; it’s foolish to imagine that the power he exerts can’t have a darker side. I can see why he acted as he did, but he has lost her. He knows this. He left yesterday to catch the Lusitania in Cherbourg.

Nini stayed all night at the Bristol. Perhaps it was the happiness I saw in her face when she returned that set her off. I’ve never known anyone so convinced that happiness is not for her. I could see it all begin — the guilt, the questions.

Daniel came to lunch. He wanted to make the practical arrangements for her to join him in the States, but she began almost at once, bragging about Knapp’s assassination, about the blow struck for the proletariat. It was twenty-four hours since she’d come out of prison, but she seemed already to have forgotten what it was like.

‘I shouldn’t have come out,’ she said. ‘I should have insisted on waiting till everyone was released. It’s only because the system’s so rotten that you could get me out. It’s not till all the swine like Knapp are dead that the People will be free.’

‘Ah, yes, the People.’ Daniel put down his knife and fork. ‘You don’t think it might be possible to help the people without blowing them up? In some more modest way, perhaps? By using democratic means? By working for the eight-hour day and better housing and paid holidays, without bloodshed and carnage. Or is that not dramatic enough?’

‘No, it’s not. You have to make the world see. Kropotkin said blood shed for the revolution is blood shed for humanity, and he’s right. If you’re mealy-mouthed and afraid nothing gets done. You have to be strong and not have scruples, and destroy the Enemies of the People without hesitation.’

I saw the exact moment when Daniel lost his temper; there was this apparent darkening of the eyes and skin which is his response to trouble.

‘I’ve got something to show you, Nini,’ he said. ‘Now. Come with me.’ He pulled her out of her chair. ‘Get your coat.’ And to me, without any of the respect he’d shown me up to now, ‘You’d better come too. Perhaps you can make her see sense.’

He bundled Nini downstairs, waited, glowering, whilst she put on her coat. We strode out into the snow and down the Walterstrasse. God knows what it is about that boy in his extraordinary muffler that makes the cab drivers stop for him, but he only flicked his fingers as we crossed the road and the driver turned and reigned in beside him.

‘Get in,’ he said, and gave the cabby his instructions.

I hadn’t been in the Municipal Hospital since Rudi died. The same corridors, the same smell of lysol as we followed Daniel. Nini was very pale now, but he didn’t even look over his shoulder.

No one stopped us this time; it was visiting hour. The corridors grew a little lighter, a little less sombre, and we entered a ward with pictures on the wall and a rack of well-worn toys.

And so neat, so clean, so small in their iron beds — the children.

Nini faltered and turned away, but Daniel took her arm and led her to one particular bed over which two nurses were bending.

They straightened, recognized Daniel.

‘Ah, Herr Frankenheimer.’ The sister lowered her voice. ‘He seems a little better. He liked the engine you sent, but of course he doesn’t really know much yet; we have to keep him so heavily drugged.’

The boy turned his head on the pillow. Seven years old, perhaps. A grey-white face, fair hair darkened by perspiration. For a brief moment he opened his eyes.

‘Would you like to see?’ whispered the nurse. ‘The surgeon’s made a beautiful job of the operation; there’s a good chance that he’ll pull through now.’

She drew back the bedclothes. The child moaned once. There wasn’t anything to see, actually. Only that he had no legs.

Daniel lifted his head.

‘Meet an Enemy of the People, Nini,’ he said quietly. ‘His name is Heini Fischer. His mother took him to town to look at the shops. They didn’t buy anything because his father’s unemployed, but they like to look in the windows. When Herr Knapp drove by, she pushed him forward so that he could see the important gentleman in his fine car.’

Nini showed no emotion. She didn’t gasp or turn faint. She just walked away down the ward, down the corridor, out of the hospital. I followed her, but she said nothing, and when we got home she went to her attic and I heard her pull the chest of drawers across so as to block the door.

She came down in the morning to do her work, but still she wouldn’t speak and when Daniel came she went upstairs again and refused to see him.

It has been her life since she could think at all: the revolution, the movement, the cause. It was what sustained her in the slums of Budapest and the tenements of Vienna: the danger, the romance, the ideology. I think it has all gone, banished by those small, blood-soaked stumps in Heini Fischer’s bed.

But of course in destroying her beliefs, Daniel has destroyed the part of her he loved the most: the wild, brave, passionate girl who wanted anything except to live an everyday, unthinking, uncommitted life.

He knew at once, even in the hospital, what he had done, but he waited for a few days in case she would see him. Before he left he gave me a card.

‘It’s the name of our agent in Vienna. If ever she changes her mind he’ll fix everything up for her: passports, tickets, money.’

I embraced him, and there were tears in my eyes. At the door he said something unexpected. ‘Of course if he’s dead, it’s different. But if it’s not that, if he’s alive still, I’d have thought it would come right. I’d have thought you were almost impossible to leave.’

Then I let him out at the back because the children were waiting for him in the front, and he had to catch his train.

Herr Schnee has gone. The van came two days ago and his belongings were piled into it.

‘No point in hanging round,’ he said gruffly, coming to shake my hand.

I’ll miss him; already the empty shop next door makes my rooms seem colder; it’s incredible how quickly a place looks neglected and forlorn. I think it has shaken everybody, his departure — we can see that it’s true now, that it’s going to happen, the destruction of the square.

Poor Augustin Heller is ill; he sits in his dressing gown and coughs. It may be the dust as he moves piles of books that have been undisturbed for years, but I think it’s exhaustion and fear of the future. I’d feel afraid if I was going to live with Maia’s mother in Wiener Neustadt.

‘He’s so messy in his habits,’ she complained when I took him some soup, not knowing she was there, and Maia scowled. She loves her grandfather, I think.

I’ve decided to accept Peter Konrad’s offer. I looked at two more shops, but they were dark and gloomy places without any accommodation, and the only one that was at all possible was ludicrously expensive. Peter and I understand each other, it should be all right, and at least Nini will be looked after; he’s offered to employ her as a vendeuse — though personally I’d rather be served by a cougar than Nini in her present state. Fortunately there’s so much work to do now, finishing orders, clearing the stock, packing, that she goes to bed thoroughly exhausted. What she does when she gets there is another matter. Much what I do, I suppose.

It now becomes necessary to celebrate Christmas.

I shall do my best. I’ve ordered my carp from the fishmonger and asked Old Anna to keep me the smallest Christmas tree that she can find. Usually I decorate the shop, but we are at the packing case stage now and there would be no point.

What has not been easy to endure have been the visits of all the people who work in the square: the dustmen and lamplighters and window cleaners who come for their Christmas bottle of wine and their tip.

‘It’s a crying shame what’s being done to this place,’ they said one by one, ‘it’s a sin,’ — and the roadsweeper became so lachrymose that we had to have recourse to Gretl’s uncle’s eau de vie.

In the café too there is little rejoicing. Joseph’s mother has shown no inclination to leave her bed; she used to start baking her poppyseed beiglis in the first week of December and the smell was always part of Christmas for me. And Father Anselm’s Adam’s apple seems more prominent than ever as he sets out the crib in the vestry and pins up the notice of the services for Holy Night. The new presbytery to which he’ll move the boys at the end of January is a gaunt red-brick building without a garden, and far too far from his beloved church.

But there’s one household where this loveliest of festivals is secure. The Schumacher girls each have their advent ring, their gingerbread house (Donatella has already eaten the cotton wool smoke from her chimney). Their painted clogs went out punctually on St Nicholas’ Day so that the saint could bestow his silver coins, and their tree has arrived on a dray from the timber yard; the tallest, loveliest tree in Vienna.

Herr Egger may have blighted the rest of us, but not Mitzi and Franzi, not Steffi and Resi or Kati and Gisi — and certainly not Donatella — as they prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ!

Well, I did it! Christmas is over and until midnight, at least, nobody actually cried!

It’s no good pretending that Alice and I were in the best of spirits as we lunched on my excellently roasted carp. Christmas is never the easiest time for Other Women, but in previous years there was the hope that January would bring the men we loved back in to our lives. Nor was Nini, gloomily chasing her food around her plate, exactly a social asset. But I had invited Professor Starsky to join us and there was plenty of wine. There are times when a well-informed dissertation on aphagia in the reptiles of South America can be of real benefit, and Christmas Eve in the year 1911 seemed to be one of them.

We had scarcely finished the meal when Herr Schumacher called and asked me to go for a drive.

‘Now?’ I said, amazed. Alice and I were going over later to see the lighting of the tree and the children opening their presents.

‘Please,’ said Herr Schumacher, unaccustomedly humble. ‘Helene said you might be so kind. There is something on my mind.’

It was a strange drive I took with him, almost in silence, through the deserted streets, past windows where families still sat at table, past wreaths and ribbons hung on the doors. Then we turned in at the timber yard.

I shivered as I stepped out into the slush and picked my way past the piles of timber and the scaffolding on the stable block. The place was far bigger than I had realized.

‘I wanted you to see for yourself,’ he said, and in spite of myself, as he began to show me round, I became interested. On every other subject Herr Schumacher’s conversation is to be avoided, but as he explained the function of each of the machines, ran his thumb along a particularly finely seasoned plank, or outlined his plans for expansion, he spoke with energy and sense.

‘My father was a carpenter,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the first smells I remember, the lovely smell of wood.’

The tour ended in his office and here at last, Herr Schumacher came to the point.

‘Frau Susanna, I asked you to come because I know you have run your own business for a number of years. And very successfully.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are a woman.’

To this also I agreed.

‘Now what I want to know,’ he said, leaning towards me, ‘is this. Have you ever found yourself at a disadvantage on account of your sex? When a rep comes, for example?’

‘No. Never.’

‘And your accounts? Have you had difficulty with them?’ ‘Certainly not. Why should I? I can add and subtract and multiply. On good days I can even divide.’

Herr Schumacher put up a hand to indicate that he had intended no disrespect. He paced to the noticeboard, rearranged the position of the calendar, turned.

‘You see, I have been in great trouble over the inheritance,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘It’s natural for a man to want everything he’s built up to go to his own kind.’

I pulled up the collar of my coat. The office was unheated and the topic not one that excited me as it should.

‘And then I thought… it came to me in a flash,’ said Herr Schumacher, his eyes glittering. ‘Yes, in a flash! It isn’t only Gustav who has the blood, I thought. Someone else has it. Someone else has the Blood, Frau Susanna! My daughter, Donatella!’

‘All your daughters have the Blood, Herr Schumacher. Mitzi and Franzi and Steffi… all of them.’

‘Yes, but they’ll marry. Whereas Donatella…’

‘I should think she’ll marry too,’ I said. ‘With that personality and those eyebrows no one will worry about her cheek.’

I had said the wrong thing.

‘No no, I shouldn’t think she’ll marry. I should think she’ll want to stay with her father. So I thought, why don’t I train her up to succeed me? But the question is, can she do it? And that’s what I want to ask you, Frau Susanna. Do you think a girl could manage all this?’ He swept a hand towards the window and his domain. ‘Could she?’

‘Of course she could. Without the slightest difficulty, if she wanted to.’

I appeared to have conferred an invaluable gift on Herr Schumacher. He became wreathed in smiles, he pumped my hand. He opened his cigar case to offer me a cigar, recalled himself, and closed it.

‘Thank you, Frau Susanna. Thank you. You’ve taken a weight off my mind. That’s what I’ll do then. She can start quite young. Lisl can bring her round sometimes just to get the feel of the place. Oh, yes — it won’t take me long… she can already tell sycamore from oak, you know. There’s not the slightest doubt about it.’

Two hours later I was in the presence of the timber heiress herself as she sat on a white damask cloth beneath the glittering Christmas tree, obstinately ignoring her presents and passionately consuming a piece of wrapping paper.

Nothing can really describe the Schumachers’ drawing room on Christmas Eve: the candlelight, the blissful little girls and Helene’s eyes as she watched them. I’d stitched a lace-edged bed jacket for each of them and they came one by one and thanked me and curtseyed — but the spontaneous shrieks of appreciation were reserved for an afterthought I’d brought along in a pudding basin: a dozen muscular-looking water snails which Professor Starsky had got for me, promising that they would keep the aquarium free from slime.

Alice and I stayed to supper and went with the Schumachers to Midnight Mass, so it was one in the morning before I let myself into the house — to find the salon ablaze with light, and standing in the centre of the room, revolving slowly before the gilt-edged mirrors, Nini.

She wore her nightdress and over it, unbuttoned, a fur coat.

I’m not a person who goes in to ecstasies over valuable furs; I’ve seen far too many priceless pelts ruined by indifferent tailoring. But this coat was a miracle. It might have been made for Catherine the Great, or Anna Karenina… or Nini.

‘Daniel’s Christmas present?’ I asked.

She barely nodded. She was too busy revolving, looking, touching… turning the high collar up to frame her face, watching the fall of the hem as it caressed her bare feet.

And all the time, steadily, the tears ran down her cheeks. But it didn’t matter of course. You can cry on a Russian sable. There’s nothing you can’t do to a coat like that.

Edith has won the Plotzenheimer Essay Prize in Anglo-Saxon studies. I saw the announcement in the paper and meant to write her a note of congratulation, but as it happened I saw her the next day. Professor Starsky had persuaded me to come to a lecture in the university given by an eminent philosopher, and I was taking my seat among his colleagues, pathologists and physiologists mostly, when I felt a kind of tremor pass along the row, heard a few muttered oaths — and looked up to see that Laura Sultzer had swept into the room.

The intrepid rescuer of rats looked whiskery and well, but poor Edith, trailing behind her, was a doleful sight. Her face, beneath the dead-cat beret that she wore, was paler than ever, her shoulders were hunched in weariness.

When the lecture was over I excused myself from the Professor and went to speak to her as she stood in the foyer, guarding her mother’s briefcase and waiting for the tandem.

‘I heard about the prize, Edith; that’s wonderful! You must be very pleased.’

‘Yes,’ said Edith listlessly. ‘My mother is pleased. She’s arranging for me to stay on and take my doctorate. I’m to investigate the ideas of Theophilus Krumm in greater depth.’

‘And you? Do you like the idea?’

Edith shrugged. ‘I suppose it will be all right. I’m very busy really. I’m secretary to the Group now and I have to take notes at all the meetings.’

‘You haven’t seen Magdalena again?’

‘No, but she’s very happy, I think. Her brothers have passed their exams for cadet college.’

‘And Herr Huber? Are you in touch with him?’

Edith shook her head, found an ink-stained handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘I don’t have any reason to see him — he’s hardly ever in Vienna now.’ Then suddenly she turned to me and said: ‘Frau Susanna… it isn’t true, is it… what they say about clothes? I mean, that they can transform people? That they can turn an ugly duckling into a swan? Or make the wrong person into the right one?’

‘No, Edith,’ I said sadly. ‘They can’t do that. It’s more likely to be the other way round. They’re more likely to turn a swan into an ugly duckling.’

Then the tandem came and Edith mounted, getting oil on her skirt, and wobbled away.

But that night I had an idea.

First I consulted Alice. She was doubtful, she thought it would be too difficult technically. All the same, she wanted to be involved — Edith, after all, is Rudi’s daughter.

‘I’ll help behind the scenes,’ she said. ‘You might be glad of some sort of headgear.’

Nini too thought it wouldn’t work, but she can never resist a challenge and soon she was busy with calico and pins, looking out discarded materials and almost her old self as she prepared for the charade.

‘We could use the oi-yoi-yoi dresses,’ she said. ‘They’re still in the storeroom.’

The oi-yoi-yoi dresses were brought to me by a poor widow years ago to sell and I was always meaning to throw them away. (They’re called that because oi-yoi-yoi is what Leah Cohen said when she first saw them.) Then we made a list of Edith’s good points (her waist, her ankles) and her bad points (practically everything else) and settled down to our task.

Next I telephoned the Bluestocking and told her that I had some beautiful dresses which I was selling off cheap.

‘I’d like you to come and try them on; they’re just right for you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, my mother…’

‘Edith, I’m not talking about your mother, I’m talking about you. Your father left you an allowance, didn’t he? You’d be doing me a favour. I have to clear my stock.’

‘I see?… Yes… Well, in that case…’

‘Come to lunch first and be prepared to spend some time. I’m going to invite Herr Huber.’

I then contacted Herr Huber and said I needed his advice about suitable removal firms and we arranged for him to come on Wednesday when he was in town.

The luncheon party was a success. Edith had washed her hair, asked warmly after Herr Huber’s sisters in Linz, and made intelligent suggestions about the franchise for supplying charcuterie on the boats of the Danube Steamship Company.

When the meal was over, I took the butcher aside.

‘I wonder if you’d do me a favour, Herr Huber? You see, I have some clothes I want Fraulein Edith to try on and I remember what excellent taste you have. Could you possibly stay and give us the benefit of your advice? She has great confidence in your judgement and her mother isn’t quite…’

‘Really? Well, of course. Certainly. It will be a pleasure. Such a well-informed girl, such an excellent brain.’

Not a propitious beginning, but I was determined to proceed.

We put him down in the oyster velvet chair and I took Edith to the fitting room where I removed her spectacles, loosened her hair and instructed her to change into a broderie Anglaise slip I had brought down. ‘Some of the dresses are very close fitting,’ I said, firmly confiscating the Croatian petticoat which smelled faintly of camomile tea.

Poor Edith. She looked at me with such trust.

Then Nini brought the first of the dresses.

It was an oi-yoi-yoi dress of brown moiré, but we had improved it, slashing the neckline so that Edith’s salt-cellar collar bones jutted out above the zig-zag edging, and turning the puffed sleeves round to form two listing protuberances on her shoulders.

I led her out to where Herr Huber sat.

‘What do you think?’ I asked the butcher.

‘If you forgive me, Frau Susanna, I think it is not at all a good choice. That brown is quite wrong. Fraulein Edith has quite nice grey eyes.’

I shrugged. ‘I know,’ I said as Edith scuttled back into the cubicle, ‘but I have to think what would be acceptable to her mother. Frau Sultzer is not noted for her taste.’

We removed the mud-coloured moiré and substituted a half-stitched frock of emerald satin, and Nini grinned for it had been her idea to add a bustle which started half way up Edith’s back and ended disastrously on the most prominent part of her behind.

Once again we pushed her out and revolved her in front of Herr Huber who shook his great head from side to side, wondering, I suppose, if I had taken leave of my senses. An oi-yoi-yoi coat and skirt which Nini had dyed an unspeakable shade of puce came next.

‘Oh, please, Frau Susanna, please don’t make me try that one. I know it won’t suit me.’

‘Now, Edith, don’t fuss,’ I said briskly, bundling her into it. ‘You can’t tell till you’ve tried it on,’ and I jammed Alice’s contribution, a frilled lampshade of the same vile material, over one eye.

Herr Huber this time was in anguish. ‘No no! Fräulein Edith must have soft colours and gentle curves. That is all wrong!’

The last dress Nini and I had tacked together the night before and it was our masterpiece. Red and purple spotted silk left over from an order for a fancy dress party, straining over Edith’s hips, hugging every bulge on her stomach. Not only that, but the twelve hooks and eyes which fastened it at the back were almost impossible to undo. I tumbled her hair over her bodice and made sure that her spectacles were out of reach.

‘Well, if you really don’t like it,’ I said, managing to sound offended, ‘you can take it off. Nini and I’ll go upstairs and see what else we can find.’

Then we left her. But we didn’t go upstairs; we stayed behind the door in the workroom and eavesdropped.

‘Oh God!’ Edith was becoming increasingly desperate as she pulled and tugged, trying to free herself. The humiliation of being seen in those awful clothes, the disappointment, was bringing her close to tears.

‘What is it?’ we heard the butcher ask in worried tones. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I can’t get out of this horrible dress. I’m stuck, I’m completely stuck. I want to get out of here! I want to go home!’

She was really crying now as she struggled with the recalcitrant hooks. It was hard not to go to her aid, but we waited, peering through the crack in the door.

‘Oh God, why was I born!’ sobbed Edith. ‘I never wanted to be clever and give my toys to the poor; all I ever wanted was to be ordinary and now I have to be mocked and made a fool of. I’ll never get out of this dress, never!’

Herr Huber rose, took a few steps towards the fitting booth, flushed and retreated.

‘Can’t someone help me, please?’

Herr Huber rose once more, looked at the door behind which we were hiding. ‘They seem to have gone,’ he said. He approached the cubicle again, hesitated. Then: ‘If you will allow me,’ he said, and disappeared inside.

For a few moments we heard only low murmuring — then a sudden and violent tearing of cloth as Herr Huber lost patience.

‘Oh dear! It’s torn. They’ll be so angry!’

‘Nonsense! Such a dress needs to be torn. Now we’ll just take the nasty thing right off and then you’ll soon be more comfortable. There, that’s better, isn’t it? Now don’t distress yourself, my poor girl, let me wipe your pretty eyes.’

Edith was still crying, but the sobs were muffled. She was crying into something.

‘I’m spoiling your coat.’

‘No, no… not at all. I have plenty of coats. Only don’t be sad, my little one. See how pretty you look in your petticoat. And see how soft your hair is… Look how it likes to fall over my hand…’

The truth is, I’m a genius, and clairvoyant too. But when the happy pair had left arm in arm and I told my helpers about the vision I’d had of Edith bouncing on a bed beside a wide grey river, they were not impressed.

‘Obviously Herr Huber had already described his house by the Danube,’ said Alice. ‘All you did was to sense that they would make an excellent couple.’

But as I pointed out, there was nothing ‘all’ about sensing that!