Madensky Square

May

The first of May means different things to Nini and myself. For me it means lilies of the valley sold on every street corner in the city, and the certainty of summer to come.

For Nini it means Labour Day. Though Anarchists are not supposed to join organizations, being committed to spontaneity and freedom, she is so anxious for the revolution that she condescends to march with the Marxists. Today this caused a problem.

‘They’ve given me a red flag to carry — quite a big one, but it’s a proper scarlet: well, you know. I was going to wear my rose-pink muslin because it’s so warm, but red and pink… I suppose one can make it work, but it’s tricky. It’ll have to be my damask skirt, I suppose, and the broderie anglaise blouse.’ Her Magyar eyes slid in my direction. ‘I was wondering about your cameo brooch…?’

She never goes off on these jaunts without my feeling a distinct pang. Sometimes the police are idle and quiescent — at other times they suddenly turn fierce.

The newspaper Rip carries each morning to his owner has been full of information about which one tries to be excited: that they have abolished pigtails in China, that Kaiser Wilhelm is displeased with the British, angry with the Russians and not exactly delighted even with us. That the Giant Wheel in the Prater has got stuck again…

But the candles on our five chestnut trees are showing white, the English Miss has left off her tweeds and strides past in smocked Liberty lawn — and the rich cream dress is finished! It’s in my window and it’s a triumph. Sister Bonaventura in the convent made the silken self-coloured rose herself as though she knew the task was too important to be given to a novice, and the luscious cascades of lace foam down the skirt just as they did in my dreams.

Leah Cohen came yesterday and admired it so much that I was afraid she was going to buy it. It is shatteringly expensive, but her husband’s medical practice is flourishing and with the threat of a glorious new life in the Promised Land hanging over her head, she deserves it. I could have sold it to her in a minute, but I didn’t. There’s no one I like better than Leah, but she isn’t the right person for that dress.

The Countess von Metz has sent me a rusty implement which she says is a valuable dagger from the Turkish siege and the pawnbroker says is an outmoded tool for pruning fruit trees. It was accompanied by a note summoning me to her palace to bespeak a new two-piece which I shall ignore. Enough is enough.

We have found out who is playing the piano!

Nini returned safely from her march but with a flea. One of the few skills that her father, the Hungarian hussar who abandoned her and her mother in the slums of Budapest, had time to bequeath his daughter was an ancient method for hunting fleas. One strips naked and stands on something large and white — a tablecloth, a quilt cover — holding a cake of moistened washing soap. The flea becomes confused or perhaps a little chilled and hops down on to the white surface — whereupon one whacks him with the soap, impaling him on the sticky surface.

We had finished supper. I was sitting by the window, drinking my coffee. Upstairs in the attic, thumpings and poundings indicated the progress of the hunt. Then there was a shriek, the sound of running footsteps, and Nini appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a towel.

‘Oh, quick, Frau Susanna. Quick, quick — bring your opera glasses and come upstairs!’

I fetched the glasses and followed her.

Nini’s attic is almost level with the top floor opposite. They must have moved the piano: the shutters were open, the lamp had been lit.

I put the glasses to my eyes.

I’ll never forget what I saw, framed in the circle of the lenses as if on a lighted stage. The piano, bare, black, with the lid propped up, two candles in the sconces… No other furniture that I could see: no pictures on the wall, the gas mantle uncovered on its bracket.

My eyes travelled across the piano and down… further down than one would expect, to take in the thinnest, the most pathetic-looking creature you could imagine. A boy, scarcely ten years old, perched on two battered books. His black hair fell across his face, his skinny legs hung down towards the pedals that were out of sight. And all the time as I watched, this miniature creature’s hands moved with undiminished vigour across the keys.

I handed the glasses to Nini. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. That explains it. That’s why he suddenly breaks off. There are places where he just can’t reach.’

‘It’s a shame!’ said Nini indignantly. It’s exploitation. It’s worse than sending children down mines, shutting him up like that all day.’

‘Can one make someone do that? From the outside?’

But I too turned from the window with a frown. It was too vivid, that image: the meagre undernourished child carrying like a hump his arbitrary talent.

Long after Nini had gone to bed I went on adding imagined details to what I had seen… The child’s frail neck rubbed by the rough collar of his blouse; the dusty neglected room; the sad man with the sideburns, shouting, correcting… The pressure, the obsession… the total absence of a woman in their lives.

A child should grow up slowly, peacefully, in an unemphasized happiness. Poor little Count of Monte Cristo. His seemed a desperately unenviable fate.

After this, the waters closed over my head.

I don’t know the name for these attacks: depression, despair, panic… I only know that there’s nothing to be done; they just have to be lived through. I used to curl up under my quilt, trying not to exist, but now I walk. I walk all day through the city and out of it and by the evening the worst of it is over.

Nini knows by now. She looked at me sitting on the edge of my bed and said: ‘I’ll cancel the Baroness Leitner. The others I can deal with’ — and I nodded, and put my clothes on and went.

Where I go seems to be arbitrary for I’m hardly aware of what I’m doing yet I never find myself in the old city passing beautiful churches or lovely parks. Nearly always I cross the Danube Canal and then the Danube itself, tramping on through the ugly industrial suburbs, and turn to the east.

Everything that was bad for the city came across this desolate Eastern Plain. The Huns came to pillage and slaughter, and the Turks to pitch their tents before the city walls. The wind here blows straight from the pusztas of Hungary; there are no romantic taverns as there are in the Wienerwald; no packs of cheerful hikers tramping through the beeches. The people here are poor and incurious, harvesting their maize, keeping their geese. I could have walked to Budapest, wringing my hands, and no one would have turned his head.

‘You should get help,’ Alice said to me when she found me once curled up in a darkened room. ‘There are so many doctors who understand these things. Vienna is full of them.’

That’s true but I don’t want any help. My attacks are not mysterious or causeless afflictions like Job’s boils. I deserve them. They are entirely just.

I was born in the Wachau, in the shadow — or rather in the sunshine of the rococo monastery of Leck. Glorious Leck with its famous library, its green and gilt and strawberry pink church, its serene arcaded courtyards; its devout and scholarly monks.

My Leck though was different. A small cluster of ochre houses shaded by linden trees; little gardens in front, a hayfield behind. The people who lived there were servants of the monastery: the groundsmen and masons and gravediggers whose wives and daughters, when the monks had visitors, were called up to polish the inlaid floors or work in the kitchens.

It was a stable community and a contented one. My father was a master carpenter: the monks thought highly of him; he earned good money and my mother could stay at home and tend the garden and the goats and hens. We had a trellis on the front of the house with apricots and peaches, then came the little garden: zinnias and sunflowers grew in ours, and raspberries and neat vegetables in careful rows. The garden ended in a green kept grazed and springy by the geese, with a small stream crossed by wooden planks — and when you looked up there was the splendid, curling, glittering building like a magic mountain built for God.

My father was stern, fair; very much a man concerned with his work and the work of other men up at the abbey. But my mother…!

My mother believed in God and I believed in my mother. She was fat and fair and smelled of beeswax and vanilla, and she was the only person I can remember who thought it was absolutely all right to be happy.

‘There now, look at that!’ she would say of the speckles on a bird’s egg, the splendid swirling pattern made by the apricot jam as we poured it over the nuts and breadcrumbs to make our strudels. When she washed my hair, rubbing egg yolk into the scalp and drying it off in the sun, she would brush the tendrils round my fingers so that I could feel the spring in the curls and tell me how lucky she was to have such a pretty daughter and that I would certainly grow up to be good because being pretty and good went hand in hand.

(Up at the monastery an old lay brother who worked in the library told me once about Sappho who long ago lived on the island of Lesbos in a valley filled with hyacinths and roses, and made up songs. She had a daughter, Kleis, with hair as yellow as torchlight.

I wouldn’t change her for all the gold in Lydia, Sappho wrote about her, and she tried to find her an embroidered head band from Sardis, and chided her when she felt sad. He was an innocent monk and I was an innocent child and it seemed to me that he was describing my mother and myself. And also — I promise there is no hindsight here — that he was describing the daughter that I would one day have and love in just this way.)

Well, I had a long time really. Almost twelve years of baking bread and picking fruit and sewing by lamplight. And of laughing — goodness how we laughed at our idiotic jokes, my mother and I.

She died suddenly of a stroke. I came in from school and the doctor was there and she was dead.

It sounds strange but after the first months of shattering grief I managed quite well. She’d endowed me so richly, you see. I knew how to cook and bake and care for the animals; the monks sent gifts, I was proud to look after my father.

Then Aunt Lina came from Geneva to look after us.

She was my father’s half-sister and she was a Calvinist. I’ve met people of the same faith since and many of them were gentle and kind, but she was a fanatic. My mother lived with God: she baked lebkuchen for Him at Christmas and wove pine branches into Advent rings. She dressed me in my prettiest dress on His birthday and when He rose from the dead, we filled the house with flowers and roasted our best goose.

Aunt Lina dealt with God’s shadow. With Lucifer, with sin… There were many aspects of sin: sloth and waste and pride. But the worst of course was lust… sex… and this she saw personified in me aged thirteen. How that woman battled! She scraped back my hair and it burst from its skinned pigtails into its uncontrollable curls. She dressed me in black calico and heavy boots and tried to flatten my breasts — but it was no use. She couldn’t blacken my teeth or dim my eyes and the boys still came and whistled outside in the field on summer evenings.

I was a good pupil at school; there was talk of my staying on and training to be a teacher, but I didn’t want that for I already had a vocation. I was going to go to Vienna and make beautiful clothes. It beckoned more and more with every wretched year that passed: the Kaiserstadt, the Imperial City — but I was seventeen before I got away and then I went like a foolish girl in an operetta, eloping with a young lieutenant stationed in the little town to which I went each day to work as a sewing maid in an orphanage.

He was good-looking and friendly and undemanding. Simply being alive, that was enough for Karli. He didn’t persuade me to run away: he just said, ‘I’m going to Vienna; they’re sending me on a course.’ Then he held out his nice, strong brown hands and said, ‘Come with me?’ and I came, just like that, in the clothes I stood up in.

We spent a month together in an attic behind the fruit market. Leaning out of the window we could see the green dome of St Charles’ Church and the fashionable people driving across the square to concerts at the Musikverein. I was in love with the city and a little with him.

‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want, Sanna,’ Karli said, the first day. ‘You’re so young.’

But by then I did want to… I wanted to know, to be part of the mystery. I was grateful to him too for setting me free. The loss of my virtue, that cataclysmic event, took place pleasantly on a Sunday afternoon with the market women outside, crying their wares. An important day, but in line with the other important days of my childhood: the day we killed the pig; the day the crib was brought out for Christmas.

Then Karli’s course finished and he was transferred to a garrison in Moravia. He left me all the money he had and hugged me and said he’d be back. Perhaps he did come back, I don’t know. When I found I was pregnant, I moved to the cheapest room I could find, above a draper’s shop in Leopoldstadt. Even so the money barely lasted three months.

My daughter was born in the House of Refuge on the seventh of April 1893. I was just eighteen years old and penniless, and the nuns who nursed me through the puerperal fever that followed her birth arranged for her adoption.

If I hadn’t been so ill I think I would have retained my sanity and fought for her. For in the moment of her birth I knew beyond any doubt that I was the right and proper person to bring her up. But then the fever came and through it the quiet voices of the nuns, endlessly repeating what they believed to be right. I must be sensible; I must think of the child. They had already found for her a home that anyone would envy.

‘You must make the sacrifice,’ they said.

So I made it. I turned my back on the legacy of courage and Lebensmut bequeathed by my mother; I broke the chain.

And this is why even now I sometimes walk like a madwoman out of the city. Why, too, I don’t seek out kind doctors who might help me. I gave away my daughter. Let them cure me of that!

Today Alice’s pork butcher, Herr Huber from Linz, came to the shop. He ordered a full trousseau: a wedding dress, two evening gowns, day dresses, a travelling cloak… ‘And perhaps a negligee and such things; you will know, Gnädige Frau,’ he said shyly.

We settled down to business and spent a very useful half hour. I asked for something on account and an idea of his price limits, and it was clear that however hard-headed he might be about charcuterie, where Magdalena Winter was concerned he was generosity itself. The only stipulation he made was that her trousseau should be completed a week before the wedding, which was to take place in the Capuchin Church on the fifteenth of October.

I must say I liked Herr Huber. True he was gargantuan, his thighs spread like tree trunks across the chair, his stomach bulged like a tympani under his waistcoat. But the contrast between his ginger hair and crimson face was somehow endearing, the small brown eyes were bright and alert, and the pride he clearly took in being well turned out was touching. The butcher’s brown and white checked suit was immaculate, his spats gleamed, and the handkerchief with which he periodically wiped his perspiring face was of the best linen and spotless.

‘Will Fräulein Winter help you with the business?’ I asked.

‘No, no! Absolutely not!’ Herr Huber’s eyes widened with dismay at the thought. He was buying for her a villa — well away from the contamination of his factory — which he now described to me: pepperpot towers, gables — and in the garden a wooden shrine to the Virgin carved in oak.

‘She is very devout, you see. An angel…’

It now became evident that Herr Huber was going to tell me the story of his life so I went to the workroom to tell Gretl to bring coffee and to fetch Frau Hutte-Klopstock’s dress which still lacked button loops. When I have some sewing in my hand I can listen to anything.

Herr Huber had been born into charcuterie. He remembered the animals coming into the yard behind his father’s shop in a village on the Hungarian border.

‘He was the best butcher in the province. One stroke and it was all over; no animal ever suffered at his hands; and he taught me. It’s very good for the muscles, slaughtering.’ Herr Huber paused to sprinkle Hungary water on to his handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘The business was quite small but everyone knew him. My father’s gyulai had just so much paprika in them; not a spot more, not a spot less, and people came from miles away for his jagwurst. Then he got gallstones and the operation went wrong. I was fifteen; I had my mother to think of, and two sisters. So I took over. And I had a talent, Frau Susanna. You’ll know I’m not being conceited because it’s clear you have one too.’

The young Ludwig Huber became a connoisseur of charcuterie. He travelled by post bus to Italy to study the richer, more voluptuous sausages of the south.

‘I can’t tell you how I felt when I saw my first mortadella. It was in Turin, in a little shop by the Duomo. The marble white splodges of fat… so round and unashamed, and then the brilliant green of the peppercorns against the pink…’

By the time he was twenty-one he had moved to Linz, acquired his own slaughterhouse, and soon afterwards a second shop across the Danube. He pioneered a newer, creamier leberwurst…

‘People often seem to smile when I tell them my profession,’ said Herr Huber. ‘To titter, as though wurst was funny. But I can’t explain to you how interesting I find it. The endless variations in a salami…’

He looked at me anxiously, wondering if I too was going to jeer.

‘We are both artists, Herr Huber,’ I said firmly. ‘You begin with an animal and make it into a beautiful sausage. I take a piece of cloth and make it into a beautiful dress. God may have meant animals to live unslaughtered and women to go unclothed, but life hasn’t turned out like that and you and I must do our best.’

‘Ah, Frau Susanna you understand,’ he said.

And I did. I was also relieved — for a man who can stand transfixed by the beauty of a mortadella is not going to be indifferent to the sensuous qualities of velvet or the fall of a hem. Fräulein Winter would choose, but Herr Huber would pay — and when a man pays I like to please him.

By the time his wife died, Herr Huber had his own slaughter-house, a factory working entirely to his specifications, a pleasant house with a balcony overlooking the Danube, and seven shops. Frau Huber had not seen the poetry of charcuterie, but she kept the books and enjoyed their prosperity and consequence, and her death left him very lonely.

Then last autumn he’d come to Vienna thinking he might rent a shop in the Inner City. It was a big step, but he felt he still had it in him, being on the right side of forty. He’d seen a property that looked promising, but there were certain problems.

When in doubt Herr Huber, like the rest of us, turned to God. He’d gone into the Capuchin church in the Neuermarkt and asked God whether he should rent 167 Augustinergasse and God had said no. The access at the back was poor and the drainage doubtful.

Then just as he was about to rise to his feet, Herr Huber had beheld a vision.

‘A vision,’ he repeated. ‘There is no other word for it, Frau Susanna: a vision.’

Magdalena Winter was in white, she was in a state of rapt devotion and as she walked down the aisle past Herr Huber in the almost empty church, she smiled.

‘At the Lord Jesus of course, not at me. At her thoughts… But I cannot tell you…’

Herr Huber, however, did tell me. Of his involuntary pursuit. Of the days spent hovering outside the apartment where she lived. Of at last making himself known to her mother. Of the unbelievable bliss, the incredulity when he discovered, after months of patient courtship that, given certain conditions, she would marry him.

I happened to be looking up from my sewing as Herr Huber, in his slow dialect, pronounced the words ‘certain conditions’ and I did not like what I saw. His red face had flushed to an even deeper crimson and a feverish exaltation glittered in his round, brown eyes. What kind of ‘conditions’ did a penniless girl lay down for marriage to a rich man in his prime?

To conceal my disquiet I asked about the bridesmaid and her mother. Had Herr Huber met the Sultzers?

Herr Huber had. ‘Frau Sultzer is a most intelligent woman. She has an amazing mind.’

‘And Edith?’

Fräulein Sultzer is very clever too. She is studying Anglo-Saxon at the university. The epic of Beowulf in particular.’

‘Could you describe her at all?’

There was a long pause while Herr Huber once more had recourse to the toilet water and the handkerchief. His brow was furrowed and I could see him straining to supply me with an encouraging fact.

Then his frown cleared. ‘She doesn’t have whiskers,’ he pronounced. A last dab with the handkerchief, and then he added, ‘Yet.’

I have just made a complete fool of myself. I went to see Alice to tell her about Herr Huber’s visit and on the way back I thought I saw across the width of the Kärtner Ring a figure that I recognized.

Yes, I was sure that I knew that soldier in the uniform of the Bohemian Dragoons with his slow gait and clumsy boots. I even thought I could smell across the heads of the fashionable crowd who promenaded there, the whiff of the raw onions that nothing can prevent Corporal Hatschek from chewing when he is off duty. And my heart raced, excitement coursed through me — and I lifted my skirts ready to hurry across the road.

But the Ringstrasse is wide, the hansom cabs are never in a hurry. By the time I’d reached the other side there was no sign of him.

I’d imagined him then. Conjured him up out of my deepest need. It’s not the first time that I’ve run across the road like a homesick child towards this onion-chewing corporal and found he was a mirage. Well, so be it. There is only one cure for what ails me, and thank heaven I have it in abundance. Work.

They’ve let him out, the little Count of Monte Cristo, the walled-up piano-playing child. It was early evening and I had just shut the shop when Nini called to me:

‘Look, Frau Susanna. He’s down in the square!’

A small dark-suited figure, a Goya dwarf, had appeared, framed in the doorway of the apartment house. There was an air of bewilderment about him: he was like the prisoners in Fidelio who blink at the sudden light.

Then he moved stiffly out into the square, now golden in the last rays of the setting sun. There was no one else with him and he had nothing in his hand: no ball or spinning top or hoop. When he reached the fountain in the centre he stopped, but he didn’t bend his head to search for fish or touch the water or run his fingers along the decorations on the rim. He simply stood there, and I realized that he had absolutely no idea of how to play.

This was not a child; it was an unnaturally compressed adult. One sees them sometimes in Flemish paintings: tiny burgermaster’s daughters, their heads caught in vice-like ruffs; their small plain faces unutterably grave. Velasquez painted them at the Spanish court; knee-high infantas, imprisoned in silk.

I watched for a few minutes from the window. Then I went out into the square.

Close to, it was worse still: the white face, the dark clothes, the air of ‘otherness’ which clung to this non-child. His black hair under the cap was long and greasy; the meagre neck unwashed.

No use putting one’s arm round such an old, old soul. I felt that if I asked his name he would stamp his skinny legs and vanish into the ground. So I gave him only the greeting we’d used, passing each other, in the country when I was a child.

‘Grüss Gott.’

The child that was not a child did not reply. He only looked at me: at the blue ribbon threaded through the flounce on my skirt, at the forget-me-nots tucked into my belt, at my white blouse… His black and eastern eyes, too small, too melancholy, stayed on my face as I looked down on him.

Then he laid one arm across his narrow chest; the other vanished behind his back. His feet in their dusty shoes came together — and in silence he gave me a perfect concert master’s bow.

The Baroness Leitner came to order a travelling suit. Her husband is going to America on a diplomatic mission and she is to accompany him. She insisted on trying on the rich cream dress, and it fitted her too. I thought it only fair to warn her, though, that it was not a very practical dress to take on a journey — very crushable and not at all easy to clean.

After she left, saying she would think it over, I saw the girls look at each other in puzzlement. It’s true that I need to get the money back that the dress cost me. True, too, that the Baroness only slightly resembles Frederick the Great. But I know that out there, somewhere, is a woman whose life will be transfigured by this dress and until she comes I have to wait.

Meanwhile I have a new client. We were having lunch when the phone rang down in the workroom.

‘It’s the Hof Minister’s wife — Frau Egger. She wants to come this afternoon.’

‘Tell her five o’clock.’

I wasn’t as gratified as I should have been. Hof Minister Willibald Egger, who has crawled and schemed his way to the top of the Civil Service, is a most unpleasant man who delights in pulling down beautiful old buildings to improve ‘mobility’ and ‘traffic flow’. Nobody believes that he is greatly concerned with the problems of the Viennese cab driver. What he wants is to achieve ennoblement or have a street named after him. So far a Willibald Egger-gasse has eluded him, but the rumours that cause poor Joseph such distress all emanate from Egger’s department of ‘Development’.

‘You shouldn’t dress his wife,’ raged Nini. ‘He’s an absolute swine. Do you know what he does? If the lunch isn’t ready the second he comes in from the ministry, he picks up a great cow bell and rings it and rings it till the poor girl rushes in with the soup. The maids have to line up every Saturday to have their fingernails inspected and he bullies his coachmen so much that they’ve had five in a year. Not to mention the Nasty Little Habit.’

The news that Herr Egger had a Nasty Little Habit reached us in a roundabout way via a girl called Lily who works in the post office and is currently enjoying his favours. Or rather she is receiving them; she doesn’t seem to be enjoying them very much. Unfortunately while she told Nini that the Habit existed, she did not tell her what it was, and this I must admit I found unfair.

Frau Egger, when she came, wanted me to make her a military cloak. I did not at this point groan aloud because dressmakers who groan when they feel like it do not stay long in business, but my spirits sank. No week passes but some Hausfrau who has attended a passing out parade or a bandmasters’ rally arrives, convinced that a sweeping arc of cloth with epaulettes will turn her into a figure of glamour and romance. No use explaining that hussars do not have bosoms, that the rakish swirl of their cloaks depends on a virtual absence of behinds…?

‘Perhaps a modified version,’ I suggested to Frau Egger, but I did not expect to get my way too easily. With her long, pale face and tombstone teeth, the Minister’s wife uncannily resembled those breeding ewes which get stuck in ditches, resisting with mindless obstinacy all efforts to set them free.

I went through to the workroom to fetch some loden cloth and give the bad news to the girls. When I returned Frau Egger was laying a set of buttons down on my desk: brass buttons, big ones, with a curious design — an owl, its head transfixed by a lance and a motto consisting of a single word: Aggredi. I have reason to know something about Austrian military uniforms, but these I had never seen.

‘I found them in a box in the attic,’ said Frau Egger. ‘They’re not my husband’s — he’s never been in the army though he behaves as if… ’ She broke off shaking her head. But I thought they’d look ever so nice on the cloak. Realistic.’

‘Frau Egger, these are genuine army buttons. To clean them you need a button stick and brass polish and a special brush. Even an experienced batman can take an hour to polish buttons.’

But they’re so pretty, aren’t they? I looked up Aggredi in the Latin dictionary. It means “Charge!” Like in “Charge!” or “Attack!” or “Advance!” ‘

About this something would have to be done. I have my reputation to think of, and cannot have my clients wandering down the Kärtnerstrasse with pierced birds on the bosom, and labelled ‘Charge!’

I began to sketch a design for a cloak that Frau Egger would regard as military, but would in fact be nothing of the sort. She nodded and at first seemed pleased, but soon she grew restless. Her eyes roamed to the door of the workroom, she kneaded her gloves, picked up an ashtray. And when Nini came with samples of braid to show her, she stared at her fiercely.

‘Is that the girl who throws bombs?’ she said when Nini had gone again.

I raised my eyebrows, a thing I’m rather good at.

‘I mean, is she the Anarchist? The one who wants to murder us all in our beds? Because I wonder if I could have a word with her in private? I think she knows a girl who’s a friend of my husband’s.’ Here the poor woman flushed crimson. ‘A girl he’s taken an interest in. Lily, she’s called.’

My heart sank. Wronged wives can never quite believe that one is powerless to help them. ‘If you’d just have a word with her, Frau Susanna,’ they say. ‘If you’d just tell her what it’s doing to me and the children.’ There is no one to whom a woman in that state will not turn to: a window cleaner, a dustman… anyone connected with the hussy who ruined their lives. I understood now why Frau Egger, whose clothes showed all the signs of home dressmaking at its most dire, had come to me.

‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid that’s impossible; Nini is just going out on an errand. Now about the collar… I would suggest a contrasting fabric in a darker tone. How about velveteen — or would you like to use fur?’

‘Why did she look at me like that?’ said Nini later, putting away the unfortunate buttons.

I told her.

‘Poor soul. But honestly I don’t think she’s got too much to worry about. Lily really doesn’t like him very much — it’s not just the Nasty Little Habit — it’s that he’s so horribly mean.’

They let the little Count of Monte Cristo out most evenings now. He always walks slowly down the steps while Rip looks on, and goes to stand by the fountain. He still has no toys and he still doesn’t play with the water or go anywhere else.

I try not to get involved. I don’t really understand what is happening in those bare rooms across the square and I’m afraid of becoming indignant at what is being done to him; the endless hours of practising, the unhealthy, imprisoned life. But I’m not musical enough to understand if it’s justified. Perhaps this pathetic shrimp is touched by greatness, but it’s hard to believe.

All the same, some evenings I can’t bear the sight of the lonely black speck by the fountain and I go across and have a few words with him.

His name is Sigismund and I smiled when I heard that, for they were the mightiest kings of all the kings of Poland, the Sigismunds, ruling over the country when her borders stretched from the Black Sea to the Baltic. The sad man with the side whiskers is his uncle, and they walked almost all the way from Galicia with enough money for the hire of a piano and six months in Vienna for the child.

‘And after six months they go,’ said the detestable concierge. ‘Though mind you, they’re not Jews like I thought. There’s a crucifix in his room and the boy’s got one round his neck. Not that Poles are much better.’

I’d noticed that too: the wooden cross hanging on a frayed piece of string between the lapels of his grubby shirt.

His mother is dead, but I didn’t need the concierge to tell me that.

‘There’s someone in the shop asking to see you personally. A corporal. A man of the people,’ said Nini approvingly. ‘He smells of onions and he won’t see anyone but you. Shall I ask him to go away? He can’t possibly be going to buy a dress.’

I couldn’t speak for a moment. I’d been right then. It was Hatschek. He was back in Vienna.

Nini was looking at me with her head on one side. She was saying something. Asking me if I was all right. ‘I’ll tell him to go. It’s just that he’s been here before, I think. His face seemed familiar.’

‘No, don’t tell him to go. Send him up here.’ And as she continued to look at me curiously, I said curtly: ‘You heard me. Send him up.’

But I didn’t want him to come too quickly. I wanted to spin it out, the moment till I saw Hatschek with his broad, stupid face, his dogged blue eyes, his cauliflower ears. I wanted a respite before I smelled the onion, felt the rough red hands. And I rose quickly and went to the mirror to make sure that my curls fell as I wanted over my forehead, that the bow which fastened the neck of my blouse was perfectly tied, for how I look to this illiterate Bohemian peasant matters more than I can say.

‘Frau Susanna!’ He had entered, clicked his clumsy boots together, tried to salute — but this I do not permit, and moving forwards I took his hands in mine.

‘Hatschek!’ Not kissing Hatschek on both cheeks is always difficult but I managed it. ‘I thought I saw you on the Kärnter Ring last week, but when I crossed the street you’d gone. Was it you?’

‘Aye. We’ve been in town these ten days past,’ he said in his thick Bohemian accent. ‘But we weren’t alone. Only this morning we were alone again.’

As he spoke I feasted my eyes on him. For Hatschek, you see, is Mercury, the Winged One, the Messenger of the Gods. If they wanted to fetch me up to Paradise it would be no good sending the Archangel Gabriel. Nothing in white with wings, nothing gold-limned in sandals would interest me. It would have to be Hatschek or nothing, for he alone has the key to the only heaven I care about.

I offered him a cup of coffee which he refused. He said how smart the shop was looking and I said yes, business was good.

Only then did I ask: ‘How is he, Hatschek? Is he well?’

‘Aye, he’s well enough in himself but they plague him at the War Office. He’s been there the past week shut up with those obstinate old duffers in the Ordnance Department, but it’s all talk — no one will equip the men properly. If they had their way we’d still be fighting with broadswords.’

How we hated the Ordnance Department, Hatschek and I. The promises, the lies, the evasions. The graft which stopped supplies reaching the field regiments when at last they materialized. There were two deep furrows etched into my lover’s forehead, put there by the Ordnance Department.

‘He said, tonight, if you can.’

‘If I can.’ It is a polite fiction which we like to maintain: that one day I would be too busy to visit the Field Marshal Gernot von Lindenberg when he comes to Vienna.

‘He’s at the Bristol?’

Hatschek nodded. From his tunic he took a slip of paper with a room number. Then he clicked his heels again and left.

I was never really an adolescent, a Backfisch, prinking and dreaming before the mirror; my Aunt Lina saw to that.

But when I go to the Hotel Bristol I go a little mad. I take out every dress I own, I put it on, I take it off. I wash my scrupulously washed petticoats and dry them (but they are never quite dry in time) and press each and every invisible bow again and again. No one else is allowed to do this, but my strange behaviour (for I am not a woman who normally fusses about clothes) now attracted the attention of Nini who observed that I appeared to be going out.

But I can’t snub her. I can’t snub anyone on days like these. If I met the detestable Herr Egger, the Minister of Development with his Nasty Habit, I would throw my arms round him and call him Little Brother like people do in Russian books.

When I had tried on everything in my cupboard, I went down to the salon and took the rich cream dress out of the window. I swear to God that I had not intended this and even now at the eleventh hour I struggled. But not for long. It was inevitable, inescapable — the conviction that the woman whose life was going to be transfigured by this dress was… me.

Ah, but it was a marvellous dress! It fell exactly into the folds I had dreamed of that April morning; it knew exactly where to cling and where to let go. The silken ruffles brushed my throat, the hem whispered under its lightly held burden of point de Venise

‘My goodness, Frau Susanna — you look…’ Nini, about to embark on one of her customary compliments, broke off. Then suddenly she reached for my hand and kissed it.

She is growing too perceptive, this mad Hungarian child; she begins to share too much.

I shall never forget my drives to the Hotel Bristol. In winter there are violets pinned to my muff; the snowflakes drift past and I think of Anna Karenina, but I am luckier than she because her happiness was paid for by others whereas any pain this liaison causes me is my own. In the autumn the chestnuts lining the Ringstrasse send down their bronze and russet leaves… But now, in May, the slanting sun turned the laburnums into a shower of gold — and it was all for me, the beauty of the evening: my Royal Triumph.

The Triumph lasted till I alighted at the Bristol, walked across the richly carpeted foyer, smelled the cigars from the Smoking Room — and then there was a moment of panic, for after all any kind of disaster could have overtaken the Feldherr von Lindenberg since the early hours of today.

But it was all right. I gave the name I always gave, the porter handed me a key. No smile of complicity, no recognition though I was here less than two months ago. The Bristol isn’t intimate like Sachers; no naked archdukes come whooping out of the Salles Privées. Here is complete discretion, anonymity. No wonder the nice fat English King Edward liked it best of all the hotels in the city.

My room was perfect. I could see over the roofs to a garden with a swing and pond with pin-sized children who should have been in bed. I took off my hat and put it on the hatstand. I sat down on the bed.

There is no waiting like this waiting.

Then came the knock on the door.

‘Enter!’

He entered.

Why him? Why this one man of all the men who have courted me? He is fourteen years older than I am and God knows I am not young. He looks like a weatherbeaten eagle, tight-lipped, uncompromising, no softness anywhere in the clean-shaven face. Why a soldier when the whole paraphernalia of army life is repellent to me, why a landowner when I secretly share Nini’s dislike of the ruling class?

And why a man who can never marry me and whose wife, the delicate and largely absent Elise, is the object of our continuing concern?

Field Marshals of the Austrian Army are usually princely, glamorous or in their dotage. Gernot von Lindenberg was none of these. Rumour had it that the Kaiser had insisted on his promotion so that he could send him to interminable disarmament conferences and diplomatic missions which were doomed before the entourage ever left Vienna. To the bumbling, ancient Emperor, Gernot was wholly loyal while privately groaning at his narrow-mindedness. If the Crown Prince had lived, my lover might have taken pleasure in his work: he and Rudolf had been friends. As it was he endured the frustration and monotony of the conference table and escaped when he could to manoeuvres in obscure and lonely places or the work on his estate. Yet he had not chosen the army, any more than he had chosen the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer whose family estate bounded his.

‘Why, Gernot?’ I asked him once. ‘Why always duty, duty, duty?’

‘Perhaps because I don’t think it matters. Duty… inclination… whatever you start with there are years of grinding work to be filled in before you die.’

From what he didn’t say rather than what he did, I sensed his despairing pessimism, his conviction that the corruption, the inefficiency and bumbledom that pervaded the army and the court would land us like an overripe plum in the lap of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, whom he loathed more than any man on earth.

Now he came towards me. He doesn’t smile much, my protector. When he does one side of his mouth flicks upwards briefly, more in sardonic comment on the idiocy of the world than in amusement, but he has a way of doing something to his eyes which even after twelve years of intensive study I have not identified. We took each other’s hands, didn’t kiss… looked. I thought I saw further ravages played by his foul profession on his face. Then: ‘Do you like my dress?’ I inquired conversationally.

His steel blue eyes roamed over the creamy folds of silk, lingered in the places where I had arranged for the eye to linger. He stepped back to study me more carefully as I turned slowly round, came face to face with him again.

‘Yes, I like it.’

Then he said that lovely thing — the thing that women the world over see as the fulfilment of their labours; their just reward.

‘Take it off,’ said Field Marshal von Lindenberg. ‘At once, please. Take it off!’

When I became Gernot’s mistress I changed. I’d been a babbler, but I had to learn discretion and I kept the secret of our liaison from everyone I knew. Alice guessed, I think, but her own affair with Rudi Sultzer was conducted so quietly and modestly that I knew she could be trusted. I learnt to wait — it was often weeks between one meeting and the next, and the best part of summer he was away on manoeuvres. Oh, those manoeuvres which took place in some unspeakable corner of the Empire: Ruthenia, Moldavia… on a forlorn and dusty plain. Some of the soldiers’ girlfriends followed them there, but not I. Gernot was fanatical about the need of officers to conduct their lives with decorum. It was not Elise who imposed on us the iron secrecy in which we moved — she was in any case involved in a constant pilgrimage round the spas of Europe — it was his obligation to his men.

What changed most, though, was my attitude to God. I went on going to church because I needed Him and I felt, too, that it would be hard on Him to be left only with the virtuous who are frequently so odd. But I didn’t go to confession — how could I confess the ‘sin’ which had dragged me back to life and happiness after I gave up my child? I knew I was doomed to hellfire and of course I minded, but my preoccupation with life after death was not quite the usual one. I thought of the Last Trump, the open graves, the skeletons rising and seeking out their loved ones with whom to float upwards to eternal life.

But who would come for us, the women in the shadows, the mistresses? For on this most important day the proprieties would have to be observed, I understood that. It was the Frau Professorinen, the Frau Doktors and Frau Direktors who would be claimed by their spouses. Alice understood that it was with the musty bones of Frau Sultzer clasped in his arms that her Rudi would ascend to Paradise. And I, of course, knew that the hand of my protector, which even in life has a skeletal touch, would reach for the bones of the woman he had married: the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer who had brought him a useful forest and straightened out an untidy bulge on the borders of his estate.

But the Last Trump was not yet!

We lay in bed holding hands. Unnecessary one might have thought in view of what had passed, but not so. I asked after his wife who, even if I knew her, I would not be able to hate, for her son had died when he was five months old and her daughter, now grown up, was a plain and unattractive woman with a discontented face.

Gernot reached out to the bedside table for his cigars. The fact that I can exist in a cloud of tobacco smoke may explain the hold I have over him.

‘She’s left Baden-Baden. The waters were the wrong temperature or there wasn’t enough sulphur, I forget which. So she’s gone to Meran. There’s a splendid crook there who charges a thousand kronen to keep people sitting up to the neck in radioactive mud while eating grapes. He owns a vineyard of course.’

‘And the conference in Berlin?’

His face darkened. ‘A fiasco, naturally. Wilhelm will drag us into a war, there’s no doubt of it. A purposeless war for which we are entirely unprepared.’ He shook off his thoughts and commanded me to prattle.

My lover’s curiosity about my shop is outstanding. This complex, busy man listens like a child to nursery rhymes while I describe my customers and the life of the square. So now I told him about the new dress that Leah Cohen had ordered for the races at Freudenau: more expensive than her sister-in-law’s but able to be worn for planting oranges if the worst came to the worst, and of the Polish wraith opposite whom I’d had to show how to pat a dog. I told him about the letter Herr Schumacher’s brother had tactlessly written, urging the claims of his goldfish-slaying son even before the birth of the new baby, and of the mishap that had befallen me when I took the Countess von Metz’s Turkish dagger to the pawnbroker.

‘Poor old soul; she must be the meanest woman in creation.’

But he is surprisingly kind about the Countess for he knew her many years ago when she kept house for her brother, the Colonel of some obscure Moravian regiment in a distant garrison town.

Only when I described Frau Egger’s cloak and the strange buttons did he grow restless and frown.

‘An owl pierced with a lance… damn it, that rings a bell, it’ll come to me. God, my memory; I’m growing old!’

This, however, was a barred area. Some six years ago the Field Marshal decided to renounce me on grounds of age and decrepitude and instructed me to get married. I was still in awe of him then and for weeks I allowed myself to be taken out by an extraordinary number of men, collecting several offers of marriage and quite a few other offers before I put my foot down.

Gernot had propped himself up on one elbow, moved one of my curls to a different part of my forehead. It was probably my imagination but when he spoke I thought there was a trace of anxiety in his voice.

Did Frau Egger say anything about her husband? His activities?’

I shook my head and — unwisely perhaps — launched into an account of the Minister’s entanglement with Lily from the post office and the Nasty Little Habit. ‘And I must say, Gernot, I cannot help wondering so very much what it might be?’

Gernot’s suggestions, as I had expected, were exceedingly creative, but presently he said: ‘Susanna, have you ever thought of moving on? Getting a shop in the Kärtnerstrasse or the Graben?’

I shook my head. ‘No; the square’s just right for me. I don’t want to be in a place that’s fashionable. I like to stand out. Anyway, I could never afford the Kärtnerstrasse rents — not for a moment.’

‘My God, you obstinate, idiotic girl, how many times have I told you that I want to help you? God knows, I’m not rich but —’

‘No, Gernot. You know how it is with me.’

‘You and your damned pride!’

‘Perhaps it’s pride. I don’t know. But I have to be… someone who has asked you for nothing. The only person, perhaps.’

‘And what of me? What of my wish to render you a service?’

‘The service you do me is to exist.’ I began to elaborate this theme, one of my favourites, and presently he stopped raging and decided that it was after all not necessary for him to finish his cigar.

It is my pride to have wasted many of the Field Marshal’s best Havanas.

I have seen the dreaded tandem!

Frau Sultzer arrived on it this morning, bringing her daughter Edith to be measured for her bridesmaid’s dress.

Their arrival created a certain stir. Rip entirely lost his sang-froid and danced barking round the machine as it wobbled to a halt; Joseph in the café stood with his mouth hanging open.

Frau Sultzer dismounted from the front of the machine, her daughter Edith from the back. Two briefcases were unstrapped from the carrier…

And my admiration for Rudi Sultzer leapt to new heights. He might not have ‘approached’ his wife often, but he had ‘approached’ her.

On this wonderful May morning, Laura Sultzer wore a musty brown skirt with a swollen hem which undulated like a switchback and a knitted cardigan under which the sleeves of her blouse bulged in a way which made one wonder if she had secreted some of her rescued rats. Her nose was sharp and long, the thriving hairs which covered her chin and upper lip ranged interestingly from white to grey to dusty black and as she came towards me, I caught the musty odour one encounters when opening ancient wardrobes.

But my business was with her daughter.

Edith was shorter than her mother, with a bad skin and bewildered grey eyes behind the kind of spectacles that Schubert would have discarded as out of date. She looked anaemic, and beneath the bobble-fringed tablecloth she seemed to be wearing, I guessed at her father’s bandy legs.

I asked the ladies to sit down and offered Frau Sultzer some fashion magazines which she refused with a shudder. ‘Thank you, we have brought our own reading matter,’ she said.

The briefcases were then unpacked. Out of hers, awesomely stamped with the initials L.S., Frau Sultzer fetched a volume of Schopenhauer and a propelling pencil. Out of Edith’s — a bulging and distressed-looking object of paler hue — she took a volume of Beowulf

‘I feel I should inform you that my daughter is entered for the Plotzenheimer Essay Prize in Anglo-Saxon studies,’ she continued, `so I would be grateful if you would keep her fittings as brief as possible. It is imperative that she wastes no time.’

‘Her fittings will be exactly as long as necessary, Frau Sultzer,’ I said.

I then led Edith away, removing Beowulf from her nervous clasp, and while Nini measured her, I tried to think what I could do to make this unprepossessing lump into a pretty bridesmaid.

The first step was obvious.

‘Fräulein Edith, if I am to dress you properly, one thing is essential. A proper corset.’

She stared at me, her short-sighted eyes widening behind her spectacles. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t! Mama would never permit it. She doesn’t approve of them. My underclothes are made by a lady who comes to mother’s Goethe readings.’

‘Yes, I can see that. But I really cannot sew for someone whose bosom has to be looked for every time they come. It needn’t be anything very tight or constricting. I’ll give you the name of an excellent woman in the Graben: she’s not expensive.’ I wrote a name on a piece of paper and handed it to Edith. ‘After all, there’s no need to trouble your mother; just mention to your father that I insisted on a foundation garment. I’m sure he’s aware of the existence of such things.’

Edith shook her head despairingly. Her light brown hair was full of dandruff, but I refrained from suggesting a good shampoo and raw liver sandwiches for it was clear that the Bluestocking, at the moment, could take no more.

‘Anyway, no one will look at me,’ she said, ‘not with Magdalena as a bride.’

‘Anyone I dress gets looked at,’ I said firmly, but I was curious about Magdalena Winter and Edith answered my questions freely enough.

Magdalena and Edith had attended the same school since they were seven years old. From the first it seemed Magdalena had been spared the traditional disasters of childhood: chicken pox, acne, braces on her teeth. Not only was she beautiful, she was exceedingly devout.

‘She always said she wanted to be a nun. Always. But of course when you look like that… All the same, we were very surprised when she accepted Herr Huber.’ Edith broke off, flushing. ‘I don’t mean… I mean, Herr Huber is very kind. He called on us and brought us a salami, but we’re vegetarians and Mother gave it to the poor. Only, Magdalena had a lot of offers and some of them were very grand — and she’d refused them all.’

I tried to visualize this paragon. ‘Is she dark or fair?’

‘Fair. Almost white. In the nativity play she was always the Virgin Mary and her hair sort of rippled out over her blue mantle. People just gasped.’

‘And you?’ I asked the Bluestocking, ‘what were you in the nativity play?’

‘Oh, I was a sheep,’ said Edith. ‘I was always a sheep.’

Back in the salon, Frau Sultzer was still bent over her Schopenhauer, occasionally pencilling a Yes! or an Indeed! into the margin.

How sad for poor Schopenhauer to have died before he knew how absolutely Laura Sultzer agreed with him.

I had intended to see the bride and the bridesmaid together but Herr Huber had sent a message to say that Fräulein Winter was unwell. She had a chest infection and the doctor had advised her to stay indoors. Since there was a great deal of work to be done on her trousseau I’d suggested that Nini and I go round to her house with some samples, and as soon as lunch was over, the butcher appeared in his new canary-yellow motor to drive us to where she lived.

Magdalena’s mother was the daughter of an army officer who had fought at Königgratz; her father was a taxidermist at the Naturhistorisches Museum who suffered from chronic asthma and had been retired early on a shockingly inadequate pension.

‘The elephant seal at the top of the main staircase is his work,’ said Herr Huber, steering his motor down the Wipplingerstrasse. ‘A very able man.’

Magdalena had two younger brothers, twins of ten who were destined for the army. They had fallen behind at school and now had to be coached for the Cadet Corps.

‘I’m taking care of all that, of course,’ said the butcher. ‘I regard it as a sacred trust.’

He left us at the entrance to the Kreuzer Hof and we made our way through an archway into a sunless courtyard and up an outside staircase to the third floor. The smell of sauerkraut and drains accompanied us; on the dank, arcaded passage that ran right round the building, aproned women with crying children filled buckets at the communal taps.

Frau Winter opened the door to us, mumuring a brave lie about it being the maid’s day off. The tiny parlour was spotless and every surface was covered with crocheted doilies or antimacassars or lace-fringed cloths. There were pictures of the Kaiser, of the murdered Empress Elisabeth — and one portrait of an army officer whose insignia I fortunately recognized.

‘Ah, the 3rd Light Cavalry! The corps that fought so magnificently at Königgratz.’

Frau Winter’s pale eyes lit up. ‘Yes. That’s my father. The boys are going to join his old regiment. They have to!’ In her voice I sensed her desperation, the endless fight against the poverty and squalor by which she was surrounded. No wonder Magdalena had felt obliged to marry a wealthy man.

The twins now appeared, clicked their heels, bowed. With their cropped flaxen hair, light blue eyes and sturdy physique they were every recruiting officer’s dream.

‘Go and tell your sister that the ladies are here,’ Frau Winter ordered — and to the faint, unheeded sounds of inquiry from the taxidermist behind a door, we were led to Magdalena’s room.

It was an extraordinary place. All the rooms were dark, for Frau Winter had placed the thickest netting between herself and the communal passage outside, but Magdalena’s room, which had only a small high window, was crepuscular. One felt as if one were in an aquarium or deep below the sea.

‘Oh!’ Nini beside me had given a little squeak, her hand touched mine for reassurance — and no wonder.

All round the room — on the shelf above the bed, on the chest of drawers, on the small table, there stood glass jars and inside each of them something white and sinister appeared to float. Curled up embryos? Pickled organs? Had we strayed into some kind of mortuary?

Then our eyes grew used to the gloom and we could see that they were figures made from wax: little doll-like models of martyrs and saints.

‘Do you like them?’ came a voice from the bed. ‘I made them myself.’

Magdalena rose and stood before us in her dressing gown and I forgot the waxen puppets and simply stared. Both Herr Huber and Edith Sultzer had described Magdalena as beautiful, but nothing had prepared me for what I saw. The girl was tall and slender; her loose hair rippled to her knees, her curving eyes were the colour of lapis lazuli.

‘The ivory brocade you bought from Seligmann?’ whispered Nini.

But I was ahead of Nini. I had already cut the brocade into panels floating down from the shoulders, drawn the back ones into a train… had wired the top of the bodice so that Magdalena’s throat came out of the cloth like a lily from the stem.

‘I’ll show them to you,’ said Magdalena, and moving gracefully over to the chest of drawers, she took down one of the glass bottles and handed it to me. ‘That’s Saint Lucy; she’s one of my favourites.’

The doll in her waxen grotto was holding in her pink-tipped hands a velvet cushion on which rested her gouged-out eyes.

‘This one’s Saint Nepoumak,’ she went on. ‘He’s got the rope round his neck, ready to be thrown in the river. And the one next to him is Saint Katherine. She was broken on the wheel, that’s why she’s in two parts like that. Though she joined up later.’

It was impossible to stop Magdalena as she moved tenderly among her friends: Saint Eulogius holding his severed head, Saint Agatha covering her cut-off breasts; Saint Cecilia smothered in her bath… I think she would have spent all afternoon showing us her treasures, but I now said firmly that it was time we got down to work.

At once the life, the animation, went out of the extraordinary girl. She replaced Saint Futurosa in his hair shirt and sat down obediently on the bed like a child getting ready to listen to a tiresome teacher.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so disconcerted. Magdalena nodded politely while I sketched what was possibly going to be the most beautiful wedding dress ever made, she acquiesced in my design for a Renaissance evening gown in cloth of gold; she agreed that a cloak of midnight-blue street velvet would become her.

But she was bored. Unmistakably, unconcealably bored.

Walking back to the shop, taking deep breaths of fresh air, Nini and I tried to make sense of what we had seen. For it seemed that Edith was right. Magdalena had indeed turned down a number of offers from men who’d been quite as prepared as Herr Huber to help the family. There’d been a handsome army captain who wanted to take the boys down to his estate in Styria, a young banker with a house in Paris…

‘Of course we’re grateful to Herr Huber,’ Frau Winter had said as she showed us out, ‘though I’m glad my father’s not alive to see her marry into trade.’

If it was pressure from her family that had made Magdalena agree to a rich marriage, her choice of suitor, clearly, was all her own.

Alice continues to be worried about Rudi.

‘He still looks so wretchedly tired,’ she said when I met her at the Landtmann. ‘That awful wife of his has got this gaggle of females called the Group. They come to the house and listen to her rabbiting on about Goethe, and the maids spend hours putting things on pumpernickel — you know how literary groups love to eat — and when Rudi comes in they just lift their heads and look at him like cows. I must say, Sanna, it seems to me so wrong that a man should have to endure all that just because he sat next to someone the day he’d finished his dead mother’s raspberry jam.’

I agreed. It’s always struck me as grossly unfair that men have to carry lifelong burdens on account of some brief and arbitrary accident, and I told Alice about my bank manager, Herr Dreiss.

‘He went to Budapest to see his brother and they went to a café where the gypsies were playing. Proper ones, you know, with all those czembaloms and things. And there was this girl from Wiener Neustadt at the next table: the most boring girl with buck teeth — he’d never have looked at her ordinarily — and by the next morning they were engaged. Just because of the gypsies. She has a baby every year and she’s brought her mother and her aunt to live. You’d think he could so easily have gone to some other café. Even in Budapest there must be a café where you don’t get yowled at by gypsies.’

At this point we got so depressed that we decided to boost our spritzers with a couple of schnapps, and I asked Alice about Magdalena’s headdress.

‘I want to use freshwater pearls braided into her hair and then take them up into a circlet to hold the veil. Only I’m not sure how to do it without getting that ridiculous pill box effect.’

Alice nodded and took the pencil from me. ‘You need that very soft wire they use for aigrettes. Yvonne has some — I’ll get it for you. Then you twist it like this…’

She drew exactly what I wanted and I thanked her. ‘You’re wasted on operetta, I’ve told you before. God meant you for a milliner.’

She sighed. ‘He certainly didn’t mean me for an ageing village maiden yowling in a dirndl for forty kronen a week.’

The schnapps came. We drank it and felt better, and Alice inquired about Edith.

‘Actually I don’t quite know what to do about her. It seems an extraordinary choice, to have her as an only bridesmaid. I can put her into moss green crêpe, a princess line and all that. Play safe… But I’d like to do better for the poor Bluestocking. Always a sheep in the nativity play and that dreadful briefcase full of Beowulf…’

For a moment I shut my eyes and tried to shake my mind free of all preconceived notions about Edith Sultzer. I can do that sometimes and get a kind of instant cameo of a person’s essence. It doesn’t last long, but it gives me a clue and I design to that.

I had forgotten about the schnapps. What flashed before my closed eyes was a bedroom with a french window leading out on to a verandah which overlooked a wide grey river. Inside the room was a large and tumbled bed and on it a plump Edith Sultzer in black lace underwear bounced up and down.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alice.

I stopped giggling and shook my head. ‘Nothing,’ I said, and explained. ‘It’ll just have to be the moss-green crêpe.’