Madensky Square

July

Last Sunday Herr Huber took us on an outing to Linz to show us the villa he is buying for Magdalena, and to introduce his fiancée to his two sisters, maiden ladies who have an apartment on the ground floor of his old house beside the Danube.

I have always been fond of Linz: a splendidly solid town where the walls always seem thicker than anywhere else, the beds more solid, the pretzels on the café tables larger. It seemed to me absolutely right that Herr Huber’s empire should have its centre there.

‘I would be most grateful for your company,’ Herr Huber had said to me. ‘You have such excellent taste and Fraulein Winter is so young. There are decisions to be made about the furnishings and I don’t want to burden her.’

Alice too had been invited, but a mentally defective producer had decided to put four live Lipizzaners into Wienerblut, which meant extra rehearsals, and it was Magdalena, Edith and myself who set off at daybreak in the butcher’s car.

Magdalena, disdaining a motoring veil, sat beside her fiancé, her hair a considerable driving hazard, but there was one most encouraging sign. On her lap she held a large brown parcel securely tied with string.

‘It’s a present for the house,’ she volunteered — and at her words a look of the purest joy passed over the butcher’s face.

We stopped for the Gabelfrühstuck without which Herr Huber would not have expected to get through the morning, and by midday had reached the villa, twelve miles out of Linz, which was to be Magdalena’s home.

It stood alone in a copse of evergreens. Built by a master builder for his own use, it was adorned by no less than three pepper-pot towers, any number of gables, a porch and a conservatory. In the garden which was of the romantic kind containing nothing that is edible, we could make out, between two dark cypresses, a bird table with fretwork eaves and elaborately carved legs.

The house had just been vacated by the workmen; ladders still stood about; there was a smell of new paint.

‘Well, my dear, do you like it?’ said Herr Huber. He never touches his fiancée, but the tenderness in his voice is overwhelming.

‘Very nice,’ said Magdalena.

She thought the Bohemian chandelier he had installed in the hallway was ‘very nice’ too, and that he should do exactly as he liked about bringing the drawing room carpet from his house in Linz. Her knee-length hair in ravishing disarray after the drive, still clutching the parcel which she made no attempt to unpack, Magdalena wandered through the empty rooms, as patently uninterested in her new home as she had been in her wedding clothes.

In the dining room I took pity on Herr Huber. The notebook he had brought to write down his bride’s suggestions remained empty; the lines on his forehead increasingly resembled those of a bloodhound who has lost the scent.

‘I must say, I think a French chintz in maize or dark honey would look lovely in those windows. Swagged, and with a fan edging… and the material repeated in the upholstery of the chairs. With a pale grass-cloth on the walls you’d bring the sunshine right into the room.’

I babbled my way through into the study, offering wine-coloured velvet to offset the mahogany panelling, and we went upstairs, Magdalena still carrying the parcel about whose contents I became increasingly curious. A favourite vase? A clock inherited from the army officer? And what was delaying her? Surely a housewarming present should be unpacked at once?

In the first of the spare bedrooms I became quite carried away, suggesting a Dutch look to match the blue and white tiles on the stove; in the second I effortlessly conjured up an Indian bower with parrots on the wall and curtains of printed cotton from Rajasthan.

In the master bedroom, however, with its window looking out on to the lawn and the bird table framed in dark trees, my inspiration faltered. It was possible to imagine anything except the Hubers’ bridal night.

But my sudden silence didn’t matter, for it now became evident that Magdalena was nowhere to be seen.

‘She’s gone outside,’ said the Bluestocking with a nervous gulp.

‘I expect it was the smell of the paint,’ I said quickly, seeing Herr Huber’s face. ‘New paint often makes people feel unwell.’

We followed her out into the garden.

‘Look, she’s over there by the bird table,’ said Edith. ‘And she’s taken the parcel.’

Not knowing whether Magdalena wanted to be alone, we hesitated, but at that moment she turned, her hair rippling in the light, and beckoned to us with a friendly, almost welcoming gesture, and we set off across the lawn.

I should have known, of course. It wasn’t a bird table, it was a religious shrine, a crucifix hanging from the fretwork eaves. And Magdalena had unpacked her parcel.

‘Look!’ she said, and pointed to the figure she had released from its wrappings and placed between two candlesticks. Not Saint Lucy with her gouged-out eyes, not the breastless Saint Agatha… Quite a cheerful-looking saint and one that was new to me. The bald Saint Proscutea who had shaved off her hair to avoid marriage to a heathen, and wore on her waxen pate a slightly rakish wreath of thorns.

In her own way Magdalena had taken possession of her future home, and I was very much relieved.

Herr Huber’s old house in Linz was a very different affair. Solid, old-fashioned, with a verandah that ran the length of the first floor, it stood right on the towpath, square to the river, with a garden full of fruit trees and vegetables at the back. As he led us upstairs and out on to the balcony we could lean out and almost touch the horses as they pulled the heavy barges along, watch the tugs hoot on the wide grey river, or look across to the vineyards and gently rolling hills on the other shore.

‘Oh, but it’s beautiful, Herr Huber,’ said Edith — and proceeded to quote from Goethe. I had, of course, expected this — it was not to be hoped that the Master had failed to pen some lines on the significance of running water and its effect on memory, loss and time. But the ode was short, and when I took her out to look at the garden so as to give Herr Huber some time alone with his fiancée, I found the Bluestocking’s thoughts surprisingly similar to mine.

‘I was wondering whether Magdalena wouldn’t be happier here than in the villa,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s so friendly here and there’s always something to look at… the river and the towpath, and the town all around one. So safe… ’

‘Yes, I wondered the same thing, especially as he can’t sell the house anyway because of his sisters. But Herr Huber thinks that Magdalena shouldn’t be so close to his factory — those are the chimneys over there. And the slaughterhouse is just across the road on the other side of the landing stage.’

‘Well, of course, slaughterhouses are wicked,’ said Laura Sultzer’s daughter dutifully. ‘But it does mean he would be able to get home in the middle of the day; she’d see him more.’

‘If that’s what she wants.’

Edith threw me a startled look. ‘Oh, surely; he’s so terribly kind.’

We returned to the house to get ready for lunch which we were to take with Herr Huber’s sisters in their apartments on the ground floor.

‘I wanted to order a meal for us all at the Ferry Hotel — they keep an excellent table, but I couldn’t disappoint my sisters,’ said Herr Huber.

And indeed the man who could have disappointed the Fräulein Hubers would have had to be made of steel. Much older than their brother, frail, and beautifully dressed in the bonnets and shawls of forty years ago, they welcomed us with twitters of intense friendliness. Fräulein Marianne, the elder of the two, was very deaf and carried an ivory ear trumpet; Fräulein Louisa, who was only slightly deaf, acted as her sister’s conduit to the world.

While Marianne made sure that no draughts, on this hot summer’s day, had pierced the double walls of their drawing room to trouble us, that the chairs we sat in were to our liking, Louisa ran back and forth from the kitchen to confer with the cook — and presently we were led to the table.

Sunday lunch in Linz is a serious matter. It was clear that this occasion had been the topic of conversation for weeks past. The lace tablecloth was exquisite, the gold-rimmed Meissen dinner service a family heirloom.

Grace was said and the first course passed without incident. An erbsen suppe made with fresh garden peas, in which griess knockerl floated, served with croutons of bread deep fried in butter.

Then came the entrée.

‘We did think of a roast goose — we have one just ready to be killed and beautifully plump,’ said Fräulein Louisa, ‘but then we thought coming from Vienna you’d like something that’s special to Linz.’

The cook now arrived with a gigantic, steaming platter. As it was set down the sisters looked anxiously at Herr Huber who scrutinized its contents, gave a nod of approval, and tucked his napkin more securely into his collar.

This hurdle safely over, the ladies beamed at us.

‘A Linzerschmankerl!’ said Fräulein Louisa. ‘You won’t find it anywhere else.’

I found this easy to believe. In the centre of the dish was a piled-up circle of rindfiletspitzen, the marbled flesh enveloped, but not obscured by a rich dark sauce. Then came a ring of kidneys, each embedded in its halo of perfectly roasted fat. Moving outwards one came to the rolled-up slivers of ox tongue, alternating with sawn-off segments of thigh bone filled with dollops of creamy marrowfat — and after that stretching away in concentric circles, the roast potatoes, the semmel knodel, the rings of onion fried to the colour of caramel.

Each one of us was now served. Horse radish was handed separately, as was the red currant jelly, the spinach, the crusty bread…

‘Oh, dear!’ The exclamation, quiet and desperate, came from Edith Sultzer.

I had quite forgotten; so had Herr Huber. Both of us were speechless, and it was Magdalena who lifted her head and said calmly:

‘Edith never eats meat. She is a vegetarian.’

An assassin leaping through the window with a revolver could not have caused more distress! By the doorway, the cook covered her face with a plump hand and as Fräulein Louisa yelled the dreadful information into Fräulein Marianne’s ear trumpet, the ladies fell into a litany of self reproach.

‘How foolish of us!’

‘We should have asked!’

‘We’re so out of touch here, you see.’

‘I could make an eierspeise,’ said the cook.

But at the thought of feeding a valued guest on scrambled eggs, the ladies plunged into even deeper distress. Topfen Palatschinken were mooted, a spinach roll…

I now decided to intervene.

‘Fräulein Sultzer,’ I said, laying a hand on Edith’s arm, ‘I have long been meaning to speak to you on the subject of your diet. In my view you are seriously anaemic; I’m experienced in such things and I assure you that there are signs. If you could force yourself to swallow just a few mouthfuls of meat — if you could overcome your disgust — I’m absolutely certain that you would feel the benefit.’

The butcher, who had risen to console his sisters, sat down again. ‘It is true, you know,’ he said in his deep, comfortable voice. ‘It is red meat that makes good blood.’

‘Oh, but I couldn’t… My mother…’

‘Your mother’s vegetarianism is noble,’ I said firmly. ‘We honour her for it. But sometimes a principle has to yield to expediency. After all, you have your work to think of. The Plotzenheimer prize and Beowulf. You have no right to let yourself get run down.’

‘Perhaps just a mouthful of the Filetspitz?’ suggested Herr Huber. ‘There’s nothing to distress you in a filet; it’s a very calm meat, that. You needn’t finish it.’

Edith’s anxious, myopic eyes went back and forth between us.

‘Well, perhaps… if you think… if it’s for my work.’

She took up her knife and fork, cut off a piece of filet, put it in her mouth. Herr Huber was right; there wasn’t anything to distress her, and she swallowed it, speared another piece, and swallowed that also. When the filet had gone she looked surprised and began on the kidney, and this too proved undistressing for she finished it, embedding fat and all. Her spectacles steamed up, a flush appeared on her face, and she turned her attention to the rolled-up slivers of ox tongue…

There is nothing like a narrowly averted disaster for making a party go with a swing. As Edith began to scoop the marrow from the bones, the ladies laughed and clapped their hands, enchanted to have saved a soul from the perils of inanition; Herr Huber told stories of his early days; the wine flowed…

We returned to Vienna by train. When Herr Huber, who had business to attend to in Linz, dropped us on the station platform, loaded with baskets of flowers and fruit which the sisters had insisted on picking for us, Edith thanked him with such warmth that he was quite embarrassed.

‘Na, na,’ he said. ‘Linz isn’t like Vienna. No one’s intellectual here. My sisters almost never read a book.’

‘But they were so kind,’ said Edith. ‘So terribly kind. I liked them so much.’

As the train drew away, it was the Bluestocking who leant out of the window and waved, while the lovely Magdalena sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.

Alice has great plans for her summer idyll with Rudi. She is cleaning the flat from top to toe and has made an extra-thick cover to put over her canary so that Rudi can sleep in the day if he wants to — and she is going to cook.

‘Seriously, I mean, Sanna. Proper health-giving things. Egg custard… and brawn and things like that to build him up.’

We decided to go to a new department store which stays open in the lunch hour to buy saucepans.

‘Those double ones with water underneath because I do find it difficult to remember what’s on the stove when I’m with him.’

And we did indeed set off, but unfortunately we entered the store through the lingerie department where Alice came face to face with a French slip in pale blue lace which was so obviously the thing to wear while cooking egg custard that it would have been absurd not to buy it.

‘Oh dear, I do feel guilty,’ she said as we came out. ‘But he really likes me in blue and I can always put a bowl over an ordinary saucepan, can’t I?’

I left her at the turning to the Kohlmarkt and went on down the Graben — where I ran straight into Frau Egger. She was wearing the cloak I had made for her — and the horn buttons I had originally suggested!

‘Oh that’s much better, Frau Egger. But why did you change them?’

She looked furtively about her. ‘It was my husband,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘He was so angry, you wouldn’t believe it! It seems the buttons I found were very rare; they’re from an early British regiment before the Napoleonic wars, even. They ought to be in a museum, he said.’

‘I didn’t know he was an expert in such things.’

‘No, I didn’t either. But then, there’s not much one knows about men, is there? He particularly asked if I’d got all the buttons back from you. But I did, didn’t I?’

I nodded and took my leave. As a matter of fact one of the buttons had rolled under Gretl’s machine when she knocked over the box and we’d found it two days ago. But I didn’t feel I deserved another visit from the poor sheep and anyway I was curious. Who was right: the Countess von Metz or Herr Egger?

Gernot could have found out for me — but the summer manoeuvres are upon us and heaven knows when I shall see him.

Tonight Sigismund came out into the square and stood by the fountain as usual. I waved from the window, but I had a lot to do and I didn’t go down. Usually he stands there for a quarter of an hour or so, but tonight he was still there after half an hour, after three quarters of an hour, just looking up at the window. At nine o’clock he still stood there, and at nine thirty…

I was angry by the time I reached him, but not for long. In the hot summer night he was shivering as if frozen to the marrow.

I knelt down beside him. He’s nearly eleven years old, but a head shorter than an Austrian child of that age. ‘What is it, Sigismund? Are you ill?’

He shook his head.

‘Come, tell me. Are you frightened?’

A half nod. I wondered if his uncle had been beating him again. But it wasn’t that: his uncle was missing. He hadn’t returned home.

‘It’s not so late, my dear. He’ll come.’

The child shook his head — a slow movement to and fro, like an ancient soothsayer’s. Then in that husky, scarcely audible voice, he murmured something that I didn’t catch.

‘What, Sigismund? What did you say?’

He moistened his lips and repeated the word.

‘Cossacks,’ he whispered. ‘The Cossacks have got him.’ Oh, God, what was this?

‘Nonsense,’ I said briskly. ‘There aren’t any Cossacks in Vienna. I tell you what, we’ll go and sit on Joseph’s terrace and have a cup of hot chocolate. Then you can watch out for him and before we’ve finished, there he’ll be.’

I took his hand which grasped mine like a vice. On the crowded terrace where people were enjoying the warm dusk there was one free table.

‘Would you like a cake? A piece of strudel or an Indianerkrapfen?’

He repeated ‘Indianerkrapfen’ though I’m not sure he knew what it was but when I ordered only one he frowned. ‘Will you eat a cake?’

‘No, Sigismund. I’ll just have chocolate.’

‘Then I will not have a cake either.’

I don’t know where he got his idea of etiquette from but it was very deep. I ordered two eclairs and he ate his without skill, getting cream on his face — but always watching, watching… My face, then the street for his uncle, then my face again.

‘Where did your uncle go, Sigismund?’

‘To find someone who will give me a concert. If I can play in a recital then I can make some money for the rent and perhaps have some lessons. My uncle can’t teach me any more.’

It seemed a forlorn hope that anyone in this city of aspiring prodigies would offer a concert to this ill-kept child.

‘He goes every day, but no one will hear me.’

I don’t know what I would have done if his uncle hadn’t come. Would I have taken the boy home, bringing at last a smile to the face of the irritable angel on her cloud? Probably not. I’d have knocked up the loathsome concierge and told her to mind the child while I went for the police.

At all events he came just as we had finished: a pathetic, dusty figure, his gaunt face creased with exhaustion.

I cut short his thanks and asked Joseph to bring him a glass of wine and an omelette — and when he had eaten he sent Sigismund to bed and told me his story.

Sitting opposite me with his melancholy side whiskers and unwholesome breath, Jan Kraszinsky was not an appealing character, yet as he spoke I felt pity for him for he had been forced by others — by his sister’s idealism, his nephew’s talent — to leave his native land, his job, the security he craved.

It began in Preszowice. Sigismund’s uncle pronounced the name of this obscure place on the borders of Russian Poland with a deep hunger: a straggling row of houses on a white dust road, a church… a school.

His parents worked a smallholding outside the little town, but Jan wanted to get away from the bleakness of the land, the frost-bitten turnips… He wanted a white-collar job, safety — and after his parents’ death he found it as caretaker of the Preszowice school.

‘It was a good position. I had my own little brick house in the schoolyard and a woman came to cook my meals.’

Jan had a younger sister, Ilona, whose ambitions were very different.

‘She was beautiful. You wouldn’t think it to look at the boy, but she was. She had red hair and a fine singing voice.’

Ilona went to Warsaw. Soon she was working in cabaret, and carried along on the tide of the Polish Freedom movement.

‘How I hate all those words,’ said Kraszinsky, sipping his wine. ‘Freedom, Unity, Liberation… To me they mean only one thing: people lying in their blood, corpses hanging on gibbets… death.’

At a concert (‘Chopin, of course,’ said Kraszinsky bitterly) Ilona met a young music student who was deeply involved in Pilsudski’s plans for an uprising against the Russians. They fell in love, went to live together, and Sigismund was born. But Ilona’s lover couldn’t keep out of politics. Twice he was arrested and released. Then in 1905 came Pilsudski’s revolution, its failure — and the dreadful retribution of the Russians.

With her lover, two other Polish patriots and the four-year-old Sigismund, Ilona fled back over the border to Galicia. One night she arrived with the child and asked Kraszinsky to hide the insurgents in Preszowice.

Sigismund’s uncle shrugged with the ingrained despair of the Slays. ‘Where do you hide someone in Preszowice? To cross a road is to meet three people who ask you where you are going.’

Ilona had left her lover and his friends in the forest. Now as her brother remonstrated with her she said: ‘Take the boy, then; I beg of you. Take him and I’ll come back for him as soon as we’ve found somewhere to go.’

‘What could I do?’ asked Kraszinsky now. ‘She was my sister.’ He paused to dab his eyes with a dirty handkerchief. She put the child down and went out through the back of the school, through the maize fields to find the others who were hiding. But the boy followed her. Later I found him gone. He was so small — as small as a beetle — but he followed her.’ He looked down at his glass. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. The Russians had no right to cross in to Austrian territory, but it’s all forest to the east of Preszowice, and who is going to tell the Cossacks that they can’t ride where they choose? There weren’t any shots — they used their sabres — so we didn’t know for a while; not till we found the bodies. The boy was sitting by his mother with his knees drawn up — not crying, just waiting. Waiting for her to wake up…’

‘Oh, God!’ It was my turn now to shiver in the heat.

‘We don’t know how much he saw, but he didn’t speak for a year.’

Then the local landowner sent down a piano for the school and Sigismund climbed on to the piano stool…

‘I tried to give him a violin, I could have helped him better with that, but it was the piano he wanted. When he was away from it he still didn’t speak much, but when he was playing he was all right.’

So for the next five years Sigismund sat on the Encyclopedia of World Art and played. The villagers brought him sheet music from the market; the schoolmaster taught him a little, and an old Professor from the Lvov Academy of Music gave him some lessons till he fell ill and died. Then last year the people of Preszowice decided to raise what money they could and send the child to Vienna. It was clear from the way Kraszinsky spoke that they, like he, felt no particular pride or pleasure in the child’s talent. It was simply something that had to be dealt with, like a multiple birth or a freak harvest.

‘And I came with him,’ he said now. ‘What else could I do?’

I ordered another glass of wine for him. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. And tonight? What kept you so late?’

‘I was trying to get an interview with Van der Velde.’ ‘The impresario?’

Kraszinsky nodded. ‘Meierwitz refused to see me, so did Niklaus. The Dutchman was my last chance. I went to his office but they said he wasn’t in, so I went out to his villa in Hitzing. A beautiful place… a long drive and high gates with stone pillars. The maid wouldn’t let me in — she said he was away from town. But I waited… I waited all day by the gates. I thought I would throw myself down on the gravel in front of his automobile, I was so desperate. It was evening before he came and then the chauffeur got out and said he would call the police if I didn’t go away.’

‘Is that what you want for Sigismund? A concert? Is he ready?’

Kraszinsky shrugged. ‘I tried all the music academies at the beginning. Probably it would be best for the boy to be with good teachers and postpone his debut… I don’t know. But no one would see me there either. If the doorman didn’t throw me out it was one of the secretaries. They only see a poor Pole with a foreign accent and funny clothes.’ He stretched an arm across the table in a gesture of despair. ‘I only want them to hear Sigi. Is it such a crime to want that? Is it so wicked of me to ask it?’

Yes, of course it’s wicked. To be talented and still alive in Vienna is unforgivable. Ask Mozart, ask Hugo Wolf… Ask Gustav Mahler who died six weeks ago to the unctuous lamentations of the men who hounded him.

But my mind was on something else. On Van der Velde, to be exact. Meierwitz and Niklaus I only knew by their less than savoury reputations, but Van der Velde I had met. Van der Velde I had, in fact, once known quite well.

I decided to go to the Opera.

This was nice of me: a sacrifice. It was Tristan and Isolde; the last night of the season and the last appearance of the veteran soprano Motte-Ehrlich before her retirement, so all Vienna would be there. Not just the fashionable world, but critics and agents and impresarios.

But if I felt daunted at the prospect of all that darkness and sadness on ramps, there was someone who was pleased. Up there on her cloud, the Polish wraith (now red-haired and not resembling at all Frau Wilkolaz in the paper shop) looked down at me and smiled.

Of the families who had offered me, whenever I cared for it, a place in their box, I selected Peter Konrad and his wife. Konrad owns a large department store in the Mariahilferstrasse with a flourishing dress department. He’s always been helpful to me in my work and I thought a little professional gossip in the interval wouldn’t come amiss.

‘Of course, dearest Susanna,’ said Konrad when I telephoned him. ‘I’ll be enchanted. In fact you’ve saved my life — Marie has gone on to the Attersee with the children; they’ve all had chicken pox and needed the mountain air. Being envied by all the men in Vienna will make up for four hours of High Germanic screeching.’

There are not many Wagnerians in the rag trade.

I decided to wear black velvet, cut very low, with a small train, and gardenias in my hair.

‘Ah, you mean dressing against the season,’ said Nini appreciatively. ‘While everyone else is all frothy in muslins and organza.’ She paused, eyeing me tentatively. ‘And The Necklace?’

I nodded. It was The Necklace which would turn this somewhat banal outfit into a triumph, but the topic is taboo between us. I have told Nini that my diamond necklace is a fake and she has raised her iconoclastic Magyar eyebrows and disbelieved me.

I never wanted presents from Gernot. I don’t know why this is — I took them readily enough from my earlier admirers, but when I found out what being in love really meant, I became difficult. I wouldn’t let him buy me jewellery or lend me money to start my own shop, and I made my own clothes.

‘I don’t want any wages of sin,’ I said, teasing him, ‘I like sin and no one is to pay me for it.’

Not quite true, but my struggles in the confessional were not his business.

‘And what of me?’ he said furiously. ‘Would it hurt you to consider my feelings in the matter?’

But seeing how serious I was he acquiesced. For five years he only bought me flowers. Then one snowy December day a week before Christmas, a messenger arrived with a box from Cartier’s in Paris. ‘You will accept this,’ said the accompanying dictatorial note. ‘You will not, please, make me any scenes.’

It was a bad moment. Gernot is not rich; I envisaged a small forest sold, a farm sacrificed. Each time I wear this necklace I am transformed.

Peter Konrad came to collect me. From his startled look before he began to pay the routine compliments I saw that my toilette was effective, and I was glad of it because I had work to do.

We dined first at Sachers and he told me all the gossip of the trade. Chez Jaquetta, I was happy to hear, was borrowing too much, expanding too quickly.

‘And you, my dear? You’re doing well?’

‘Yes. Modestly, but steadily, I think.’

‘I’m still annoyed that you wouldn’t come and run my dress department. The woman I’ve got is adequate but you would have made it the place to go.’

‘It’s nice of you, but I really love my shop, Peter. I don’t think I could bear to be anywhere else; it’s exactly right for me.’

He was a nice man, old enough to regard me as still young and desirable, but handsome and distinguished with his thick, greying hair and superbly cut clothes.

We entered the foyer of the Opera well pleased with each other. Looking round I saw that indeed ‘everyone’ was there. Princess Stephanie, Rudolf’s widow and the plainest woman in the Empire; Hugo von Hofmannsthal; the French Ambassador with his party. I’m good at walking up staircases — models have to be — but as I ascended, smiling at acquaintances, demurely ignoring the stares of potential admirers, I was searching for one man. And just before the bell rang for the first act I saw him.

Klaus van der Velde started life trading tobacco on the quayside in Rotterdam and now trades in sopranos, pianists and string quartets. I’d met him through Alice in the days when I worked in the shop in the Herrengasse and he’d pursued us both, along with most of the other personable females in the city. This was before I’d met Gernot and I was technically available — but not to him. He had a fierce Dutch wife who was reputed to disinfect the marriage bed every time they made love. A square-headed, thickset man; unscrupulous, even brutal — but tender-hearted men don’t often become impresarios.

The first act of Tristan is long. The tenor staggered, the soprano tottered, and I recalled Motte-Ehrlich’s bon mot: that the most important thing when singing Isolde is a comfortable pair of shoes.

But the interval came at last.

‘Peter, you know Van der Velde?’

‘The impresario?’

‘Yes. Could we bump into him, do you think?’

‘My dear, the way you look tonight we could bump into anybody!’

We struggled to the buffet. Van der Velde had already acquired a Wagnerian stein of beer and was standing with his wife beside a potted palm. As Peter went to procure champagne, he turned and stared unashamedly at the blonde woman in black with gardenias in her hair.

I smiled at him.

The discovery that he knew me pleased him. It pleased his wife rather less, but she followed him as he bent over my hand and tried to think who I was, and more importantly, whether I mattered.

‘It’s a very long time since we met,’ I said. ‘Alice and I often speak of you. She’s still at the Volksoper. What fun we had at the Landtmann with the Schoflers and all that crowd.’

He now placed me and a flicker of surprise passed over his face for our last encounter, in a fiacre in the Prater had not been particularly friendly. I don’t think I actually hit him, it is not often necessary for me to protect my virtue in so drastic a manner, but I may have used my parasol.

‘Susanna! My dear, you look radiant!’ His eyes crawled along my throat, fastened on the necklace. Had I, perhaps, become somebody who mattered?

‘I’m a very grand lady now,’ I said as Peter came back with my champagne. The respectability of my wealthy escort impressed Van der Velde even more. ‘I have my own salon in Madensky Square.’

‘Salon’ is not a word I often use, but the ambiguity was serviceable.

‘And a great success, I’m sure.’

‘Yes, a success.’ I am not a great whirrer of fans, but I thought a little whirring would not come amiss. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been expecting to see your auto any day now that we have our little prodigy opposite. I suppose Meierwitz has beaten you to it?’

‘Prodigy? What prodigy?’ His nostrils twitched with curiosity.

‘Oh, a little pianist — a child of nine or so — a waif from Poland. Hardly a Chopin, but friends of mine tell me his Waldstein is remarkable.’

Van der Velde frowned. Did you say Meierwitz has heard of him?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, but that’s the rumour. You know I’m not musical — better not take any notice of anything I say. But come to Madensky Square anyway — I’ll make you a beautiful cravat. Excuse me, I must have a word with Count Leitenhof.’

Extremely pleased with myself, I swept away on Peter’s arm — and found myself face to face with Gernot.

He was not alone. His wife, the high-born Elise, newly watered in Marienbad, walked on one side of him, his whey-faced daughter on the other. An aide-de-camp hovered…

Gernot’s face did not alter by one millimetre. The eyes gave no recognition, the mouth remained a tight, uncompromising line. He was in uniform, unutterably distinguished-looking and, I hazarded, extremely bored. Almost tone deaf, he attends the opera strictly in the line of duty.

As we passed each other, I heard the whey-faced daughter saying: ‘That woman in black velvet — her face seemed familiar. Didn’t she use to model in a shop in the Herrengasse?’

And the voice of the high-born Elise, who should not have been wearing magenta satin with sky-blue lace: ‘Anyone can come to the opera these days, we all know that!’

Gernot said nothing.

The second act was almost unendurable. He was here in Vienna and he had not let me know. He sat below me in his box and was as lost to me as if he was on the moon. What idiotic conceit had led me to think that I was ever part of his life? He belonged entirely to those pale haughty women to one of whom he had bequeathed his tight-lipped mouth.

Why didn’t it stop, this unbearable screeching? Why didn’t the audience storm on to the stage and put an end to this torture? And what a horrible man Wagner was: arrogant, promiscuous, a scrounger.

The second interval. More champagne, more acquaintenances, Peter’s and mine. The need to smile and be charming and make Peter proud to be with me.

‘I would give forty camels for her. Yes, forty camels,’ said a guttural foreign voice, and I turned round to see an Arab potentate in splendid robes staring directly at me through a jewelled glass.

And coming towards me, Gernot. He was alone. His wife was talking to the French Ambassador, the daughter was nowhere to be seen. Probably in the lavatory; she looked like a woman who had frequent recourse to toilets.

Only he wasn’t coming towards me. He was going to go past me to join the party of the War Minister who had beckoned to him. I simply happened to be there.

As he drew level, he bent down briefly — and straightened to hand me my non-existent handkerchief. Then he said one word — ‘Thursday’ — and was gone.

We returned to our box for the last act. And how beautiful now was the music, how it purged the soul! And how ridiculous, how utterly absurd it was to criticize the personal life of a transcendent genius like Richard Wagner!

‘I’m going to challenge him to a duel, of course,’ were Gernot’s first words to me — and my hand went to my heart as I saw him laid out under the birch trees, blood staining the rich earth. ‘It goes against the grain, mind you,’ he went on. ‘A foreigner, and without a commission. But no insult to you shall go unavenged.’

‘What insult?’

‘Forty camels, indeed! I gather it’s the top price in Arabia but it’s an insult just the same. Not four hundred, not four thousand camels would buy the smallest of your eyelashes.’

I managed to smile, but my pulse was still racing. Gernot hates duelling, is trying to get it stopped — but I know for a fact that he has fought one duel at least and I can’t even bear jokes on the subject.

It was an afternoon meeting. Elise was still in Vienna, in the wing of the old Stoffler Palace which the von Lindenbergs use when they are in town. Gernot had to attend a banquet in the evening and I knew that after today the manoeuvres would claim him so it was important to keep things light. I am, after all, a Woman of Pleasure. But it had opened some frightful door, this image of Gernot stretched out beneath the birches. In my clothes I could smile and chatter, but out of them…

‘What is it, my treasure? What troubles you?’

‘Nothing.’ I turned my face to that hollow above his collar bone that God designed especially for me. ‘Only, if perhaps today Love could be “Strong as Death”? Or even stronger?’

And it could… It was…

The monks of Leck swore that the Song of Songs was a paean to Mother Church, but the monks of Leck did not know Gernot!

At half past four I was allowed to sit up and drink a glass of wine.

‘Now tell me what you were doing at the opera dressed like Marguerite Gautier and unsettling so many gentlemen?’

I explained; then launched into the saga of Frau Egger and Lily from the post office which I knew would be much to his taste.

‘Oh, and I wanted to ask you about those wretched buttons of hers. Her husband swears they’re very rare and valuable — from a British regiment long before Napoleon; he practically tore them off her cloak. But the Countess von Metz said they belonged to the Pressburg Fusiliers who were disbanded in 84. Who is right, do you suppose?’

I got up and fetched the button I had secreted in my purse.

‘Aggredi,’ he said. ‘Wait, let me see.’ Wearing only his monocle he peered intently at the crest. And then: ‘Yes… Yes, of course.’

He was silent for some time, his face closed and brooding.

‘The Countess is right,’ he said. ‘Look, leave this with me, will you? And don’t say anything to anyone — not to anyone, please.’ He put the button away in his cigar case. Then in a voice of outrage: ‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘I’m getting dressed. It’s nearly five o’clock I must go and so must you if you’re not going to be late for your banquet.’

‘I’m not going to the banquet.’

‘Please, Gernot, I don’t want you to alter your plans for me. You have your life to lead.’

‘I have my existence to lead and I lead it. Now, however, I am living my life.’ And his face creasing in a rare smile: ‘I shall send Hatschek to make my excuses on a snow-white charger like the one you picked out for me at Uferding.’

He never tires of that joke, my Field Marshal!

When I had known Gernot for two years I suddenly realized that I was going to love him for ever. This happened not, as you might expect, during any particular moment of physical ecstasy, but as we sat at luncheon in a country inn and he selected, from a fruit bowl on the table, a pear which he placed on my plate.

I had been given pears and other things by men both younger and better-looking, but as he looked at me — offering the pear, but allowing by the faint lift of his eyebrows that I might reject it if I wished — a gate shut behind me with a perceptible click. The gate led to other relationships, marriage, the whole intensely agreeable world of erotic dalliance.

I confess I was both resentful and shaken, for what can be more conventional than the situation of a personable young dressmaker and her high-born ‘protector’? Lightness, skill, good manners, laughter and compatibility are the ingredients of such an affair, and all these we had brought to bear on our relationship. And then he handed me this pear…

The first effect of this realization was a violent jealousy. It was not so much other women that I feared, or even his wife. What I was jealous of was quite simply Gernot’s unknown life. Perhaps jealousy isn’t the right word — I was consumed by a passionate curiosity; a desperate need to know where he lived, what paths he trod, what he saw from his windows.

It was a kind of madness and it gave me no peace. So one day when I knew the family was absent, I went in secret to Uferding.

It was a day in midsummer but misty, grey and sad. I took the train and then a cab which set me down by one of the side entrances.

The gate, splendidly carved with the von Lindenberg griffons, stood open; there was no one to be seen. I walked in, my heart thumping, passing between rows of ornate statues: of the Sabine women, their marble legs hanging from the shoulders of their seducers, of Hercules draped in pythons…

The path widened to accommodate a fountain of the kind I had yearned for when I first came to Madensky Square: three tiers, Poseidon with bulging pectorals, nymphs…

And this was only the side entrance!

Next came a series of ornamental grottos and then a group of statues which I approached with caution, and rightly, for as I passed a jet of water from the hat of a cavalier narrowly missed my shoulder. I’ve never been very amused by these jokey Wasserspiele. I’m always too aware of the work of some poor dressmaker or milliner ruined to provide a few moments of amusement for the jaded hosts.

I was approaching the east wing of the schloss now: yellow stucco, green shutters… and a first-floor verandah with a pergola on which I instantly saw Gernot breakfasting with the high born Elise… buttering her croissant, handing her a pear. My pear…

The sun had begun to pierce the mist. Rounding the side of the house, I came upon smooth lawns stretching away towards verdant and rather bosomy hills — and in formal flower beds, a mass of pink begonias which spelled out, unmistakably, the words: LONG LIVE THE KAISER.

I must say I was terribly surprised. It would be Elise, of course, who had given instructions to the gardener, yet I had to face the fact that my lover’s home was disconcertingly different from anything that I had imagined.

Passing an orangery with cages of singing birds and tubs of exotic lilies, I made my way up the terrace steps towards the front of the house.

And now I was accosted. A steward of some sort, responsible-looking and soberly dressed, approached and asked if I had an appointment to look over the house.

‘No, I haven’t. But if it were possible…?’

My hand went to my purse; his stretched discreetly in my direction.

‘Aye. The family’s away. Only the public rooms, of course.’

He led me up a flight of steps into a domed entrance hall with a painted ceiling of swirling and richly endowed muses. Everything in the house was pretty, Italianate, and held no surprises.

Upstairs there were more salons, and in the main bedroom a gigantic bed dripping with brocade, the legs carved into the shape of writhing and grimacing Turks under the heel of the Austrian conquerors.

‘Prince Eugene slept here,’ said the steward. ‘The family use it only on state occasions.’

This I could believe. But what was a state occasion? Had the midwife held up a squealing new-born child beside the carved posts of helmeted Habsburgs and said to Gernot’s parents: ‘It’s a boy!’? Would he die in this monstrosity, my austere and ironic lover?

On the way out I looked at the stables and these too surprised me. I knew nothing about horses then, but I was aware that Gernot’s life, like that of most soldiers, was largely lived on horseback.

But again I’d imagined it wrong. There were only three horses, two of them obviously carriage horses, and one which looked at me gently over the top of the door: a white horse with tender eyes. Not an Arab, I thought, nor a Lipizzaner — its back was very broad and its neck short — yet it carried Gernot and I spoke to it and stroked its nose: this quiet, domestic-looking horse who spent so much more time with my lover than I.

I said nothing to Gernot about my visit to Uferding for many months. But once when we had a whole night together, I told him that I had been to see his home.

‘Good God! When?’

‘Last summer. The syringa was in blossom.’ I smiled. ‘And the begonias.’

‘Begonias? Those little handkerchiefy things in primary colours? I didn’t know we had any.’

‘There was a whole lot of them, in writing. LONG LIVE THE KAISER, they said.’

He came and sat down beside me on the bed. The cigar was in full flight and he was grinning. Did you like it? My home?’

I don’t think I hesitated even for a second. I spoke enthusiastically of the verandah where it must be so pleasant to breakfast, and the bed with the writhing Turks in which, or so I understood, he had been born.

‘Ah, yes, the bed… It’s entirely honeycombed with mouse nests, the mattress. But go on; I’m really very interested in your reactions.’

I was by now a little hurt by Gernot’s evident amusement, but I went on to describe my visit to the stables, my communion with his horse.

‘My horse? Yes, of course… Do tell me what you thought of my horse.’

‘I thought it was very nice. Very gentle and peaceful. I suppose I was a bit surprised because — Gernot, what is the matter?’

His mirth was now so extreme that he was compelled to abandon his cigar. ‘Yes, a very gentle horse indeed. A milk float would strain the poor beast, though he sometimes carries their mother-in-law round the park. She has very bad rheumatism, poor lady.’ He bent over me, his eyes tender. ‘I’m glad you’re so stupid, my dear sweet love. When I first saw you, so wild and distraught in the forest, I was overwhelmed by your capacity for grief. Then when I met you again in the Herrengasse modelling that dress, I thought you were the loveliest, most poised creature I had ever seen. Since then you’ve given me two years of utter delight and to be honest I was getting nervous. The fates can’t mean me to have this paragon, I thought: not a scarred, flawed, ageing bloke like me. But now that I know you are superbly and overwhelmingly foolish, I feel much better.’

‘Why? Why am I stupid?’

He decided to explain. ‘Do you really imagine, my darling idiot, that I would allow anyone in my employ to write LONG LIVE THE KAISER in begonias? Or anything else, come to that? Quite apart from the fact that the poor gentleman could serve his country best by dying as quickly as possible. Or that I would house all those ludicrous statues — and I never breakfast on verandahs because of the wasps.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You went to Schloss Uferding. It belongs to my cousin and he’s let it to a man from Wiener Neustadt who makes saucepans. A very good fellow — and patriotic, as you see. The horse is for his mother-in-law: an undemanding animal. I’m so glad you didn’t like the place. It’s a sort of joke; quite well done, I suppose, and we liked the funny fountains when we were children. I haven’t been there for years. It’s Burg Uferding that is my home.’

My lover continued to be so entertained by his supposed birth in the state bed of Prince Eugene and his wild rides, ventre a terre, on the gelding of the saucepan manufacturer’s mother-in-law, that the love we made that night was distinctly on the rococo side. Afterwards I said: ‘I promise I won’t go there, I’m through with sentimental journeys. But what is the Burg like? The place where you do live?’

He rolled on to his back. ‘Quite small. High up. There’s a single tower… wooden… a courtyard. The rooms are a bit cramped… there’s a smell of leather and wood.’ He wound one of my curls round his finger. ‘The stables are almost as big as the house,’ he said, and grinned.

I was satisfied. In such a place I could see him and — just as important — I could see Hatschek.

The Kaiser has departed for his villa in Bad Ischl, and God help the poor chamoix which, for the next month, he will pursue relentlessly in lederhosen. They say he has run out of wall on which to stick their horns. Well, all of us have problems.

His departure is always the signal for the city to empty for the summer. Most of my clients have houses in the mountains or by a lake. Frau Hutte-Klopstock is going back to the High Tatras. The glacier named after her proved to be so small that it melted, and she and her husband are going to try and find glory by pioneering a different route.

Leah Cohen spends the summer on the Bodensee. She came to invite me to go with her, but though I shall close the shop for two weeks at the end of the month, I shan’t go away. There’s a lot of work to be done on the Huber trousseau, and I love these weeks of high summer: the dark trees trembling in the breeze that you can scarcely feel down below; the quietness.

‘How is the psychoanalysis?’ I asked her. ‘Does it help?’

Leah has been getting so depressed and having such bad dreams, that her husband has sent her to Professor Freud in the Berggasse for treatment.

‘Well, it doesn’t help my depression — but then I know why I’m depressed. It’s because I don’t want to go to the Promised Land and dig holes for orange trees. But I must say it’s simply marvellous for the feet! You know how my ankles kept swelling after Benjamin, and an hour on the couch is simply bliss!’

Professor Starsky is going to a conference on Herpetology in Reykjavik, and the English Miss will spend August on the moors near the Scottish border where her people live. A friend is going to take the setter bitch into the country while she is away which will give Rip a chance to pull himself together. Inflamed by the heat, his passion has broken all bounds. As soon as the bitch appears, he pounds across the square and weaves hysterically in and out of her legs. To see the stomach of your beloved arching high above you, as unreachable as it is desired, cannot be easy, and it is no wonder that as he lies panting in the shade of the chestnut trees, he is inclined to be short-tempered.

Herr Heller never goes away. His dusty shop is like the shell of one of Professor Starsky’s reptiles. Even when he leaves his books just to go and stand outside on the pavement, he somehow looks unprotected and a little lost. He’s going to have a hard time with his granddaughter, though. The Schumachers left yesterday with forty-five pieces of luggage for a fortnight in Ascona, so Maia won’t have anyone to bully into making yurts.

My neighbour on the other side, Herr Schnee, has had a splendid piece of luck! The tackroom and workshops of the stables housing the horses of the Carinthian Jaegers has been destroyed by fire and he has a big order for new harness in time for a state parade in October. His nephew is a cornet in this crack regiment which puts the Cossacks to shame for style and ostentation: shakos with golden plumes, dolmanyis, breeches of white kid, and he’s threatening to line up his horses outside his uncle’s shop for a fitting!

‘On my fiftieth birthday, this is to be —’ said Herr Schnee, drawn out of his usual crustiness by this event. ‘He’s a wild lad; I wouldn’t be surprised if he meant what he said!’

Tomorrow I’m going to do battle with Nini!

My God — you’d think I was proposing to crucify the girl. Of course I realize that no one with Hungarian blood in them can be regarded as normal but my suggestion that Nini should go away to the country and have a holiday while I closed the shop was received as if I’d threatened to do her a frightful injury.

‘Why? Why should I go away?’

‘Because you need a break; because you’ve been working very hard; because the heat is impossible.’

‘I don’t want to go to the country. I don’t like the country. I never know what to do when I’m there. Walking up a mountain, walking down again, what’s the point? Anyway why should I have a holiday when there are families living six to a room who can’t even afford the tram fare to the Prater? I don’t see what I’ve done to be sent away.’

For heaven’s sake, Nini, I’m offering you exactly the conditions you’re fighting so hard for for the poor and the oppressed. The Cohens have offered to have you, so have the Schumachers — or I’ll pay for a room for you in a pension.’

‘What about Gretl? Why doesn’t she have to have a holiday?’

‘Gretl doesn’t spend her nights in stuffy cellars planning to blow up the bourgeoisie. Anyway she’s having the fortnight off to prepare for her wedding.’

‘Ha!’ said Nini. I saw her point; Gretl very much likes being engaged — the ring, the status — but she doesn’t show the slightest hurry to name the day. ‘And anyway,’ Nini went on, ‘something very interesting is coming up in Ottakring.’

This, unfortunately, I knew to be true and it was one of the reasons I was determined to send her away.

‘Nini, I’m not prepared to argue. I’m closing on the twenty-second and you’re going away.’

She flounced off in a temper, wearing white pique, to paste slogans on a railway bridge. When she returned, however, she was in an accommodating mood.

‘One of the men told me about a summer camp for workers’ children on the Grundlsee. It’s run by an international welfare organization. Children come from all over the world, and doctors and students and counsellors look after them. They want people to wash up and do the chores, I wouldn’t mind that.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s settled.’

I haven’t said anything to Jan Kraszinsky about my efforts on Sigismund’s behalf which is as well because there’s been no sign of Van der Velde.

‘We have money for six more weeks,’ he said when I met him in the paper shop.

The child is practising something which seems to smoothe out everything inside one very gently, yet at the same time makes one feel as though there are bubbles inside one’s nose, so I suppose it is by Mozart.

Oh God, I don’t know how to write this…

I felt it the last time I lay in Gernot’s arms; I knew it was there, the ultimate horror waiting to strike. Only it isn’t I that have been struck down; not this time. It is Alice.

Two days ago, Rudi Sultzer collapsed in his office. They thought it was the heat and he was taken home to the Garnisongasse to rest. Laura gave him vegetable juice and read to him from Faust and said it was nothing serious, but the doctor, when he came, disagreed with her. Rudi’s heart was tired and he needed absolute rest. Then yesterday morning he had a second attack and this time an ambulance took him to the Municipal Hospital. His heart was not just tired, it was failing, and he lay propped on pillows, blue-lipped and scarcely conscious, fighting for his life.

‘He looks so small, Frau Susanna,’ said Edith, who had hurried in on the way home from the hospital to cancel her fitting. And almost no hair. I hadn’t realized how much hair he’d lost. It’s a terrible place, that hospital. Nothing prepares you.’

No, nothing. And certainly not Laura Sultzer or Beowulf.

‘What do they say about his chances?’

She shook her head. ‘They don’t say much — but they don’t expect him to recover, I know.’

‘Is he in a public ward?’

‘No, he’s in a room on the second floor overlooking a dark courtyard. Oh God, it is an awful place to die, that hospital!’

I let her cry, patted her shoulder, but my mind was fixed on one thing only: how to help Alice.

For all of yesterday, all of today, Alice has sat on a wooden bench in the hospital waiting room, waiting for the moment when she could rise with the other visitors, summoned by the bell, and go to bid her love goodbye.

It never came, this moment, nor would it. Two visitors per person is the iron rule in that barrack and in case of serious illness, only relatives. Alice knew this as well as anyone, she expected no miracles, but it was impossible for her to leave the building in which he lay.

‘Does he seem at peace, your father?’

Edith frowned. ‘I don’t know… it’s so difficult for him to breathe. He said something to my mother… something about not having been worthy of her. But he didn’t finish it properly… he seemed to lose interest as he said it… as though it was too difficult, or not important. Then once or twice I thought he was looking for someone. Not my mother or me. Someone else. Perhaps I was imagining it.’ She picked up a pincushion and began to denude it of pins. ‘No, I wasn’t imagining it.’

I waited, afraid even to move.

Edith gulped and went on quickly. ‘I saw a woman in the waiting room in the hospital. She was sitting there in a white dress with a flowery hat. I thought I’d seen her before once, when Father had pneumonia. She was standing down below in the street and it was raining. She just stood there — she’d forgotten her umbrella and the rain completely ruined her hat. I remembered it because it was a pretty hat, like… ’ She broke off, flushing, and turned away.

I made up my mind.

‘Fraulein Edith, you love your father, I think?’

‘Yes. When I was little we used to do a lot of things together, but my mother felt that… I mean, my father was not very spiritual,’ said Edith, her voice trailing away.

‘Well, listen; you have a chance to do something for your father. It’s not something any young girl could do, but you have been brought up to be broad-minded and aware of… ’ Here I faltered, unable to imagine that Edith had been brought up to be aware of anything as simple as the relationship which existed between Alice and her father. ‘I think that the person your father was looking for is the woman you mentioned. She is someone he has known a long time and been fond of, and I think he’d like to say goodbye to her.’

‘Oh, but I couldn’t! I couldn’t bring… how could I? My mother would never —’

‘This has nothing to do with your mother. Nor with you, really, Edith. You only have to mention to the doctor or the ward sister that your father has a relative who lives in the country and would like to say goodbye. It would all be over in a few moments.’

‘No, I can’t do that. I can’t. My mother…’

‘Very well.’

I rose and opened the door for her.

‘You do understand?’ The Bluestocking turned to me, mottled but obstinate.

‘Yes, yes.’

I had already forgotten Edith.

It took me an hour to walk round the hospital, question the porter, get my bearings. Then I went to the waiting room.

Alice was still sitting upright on the wooden bench, shivering in her pretty dress.

‘Sanna! Oh God, Sanna. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m going to take you to Rudi.’

‘You can’t,’ she said wearily. ‘No one is allowed in except relatives. And they always come, both of them. It’s only right; they’re family. Only… ’ Her lips began to tremble. ‘I thought if I could see him just once more. Just to… thank him… that then I could bear it.’

‘Well, you’re going to see him. I told you. Now. Get up,’ I said firmly, as if to a child.

She rose, shaking her head, and picked up the bunch of cornflowers that lay beside her. ‘I brought them because when we first met… ’But this did not seem to be a sentence that one finished.

I led her through an archway into the main corridor, green-painted and deserted but for an orderly pushing a patient on a trolley. Beneath the grey blanket shrouding the figure, one foot protruded. Now to the left, up the first flight of stairs; I’d done my homework; there was no need to ask the way.

Another long corridor, past doors open to sights I prefer not to remember. The smell of chloroform, of lysol… Alice, I think, was aware of nothing, her only terror that we would be stopped before she reached her love.

‘Excuse me, but visitors are not allowed at this hour.’ A starched sister, all bristles and authority.

I smiled. ‘We’re not visiting a patient, sister. We’re visiting Professor Mittelheimer.’

My smile, that of a third-class houri in the red-light district of a minor provincial town, was an accident brought on by nerves, but it disconcerted the Sister so much that she let us pass. With the reputation of the poor Professor (whose name I had got off a notice board) in ruins, we went up a second flight of stairs.

We had reached the private room. (Please God let it work! Let her see him just once more.)

‘I’m sorry, but nobody is allowed past —’

Beside me, Alice faltered, missed her step. It was too cruel when we were almost at Rudi’s door.

And then a second nurse, senior to the first, coming out of her office. ‘Unless one of you is Herr Doktor Sultzer’s sister from Prague?’

I gestured to Alice.

‘That’s all right then. The Herr Doktor’s daughter telephoned us to expect you. Only a few minutes though. He is very ill.’

(Oh Edith, how I wronged you. I will be your friend for life.)

She led us to the room where Rudi lay. I stepped aside and Alice went forward to the bed. When she bent over him and saw the unmistakable signs of death, the colour drained from her face and I moved towards her, afraid that she would faint.

Then somehow — I don’t know how she did this — she reassembled from the terrified stricken woman she had become, her charm, her beauty. Alice put up her hand to flick back the wisp of veiling on her hat. She laid the cornflowers on the counterpane. She smiled. Properly, I mean. Naturally. Then she said: ‘Rudi?’

Not in a desperate way; not calling him back from limbo. She said it as you say it when someone you love lies beside you on the pillow and it amuses you to say his name.

So he came back. For lamentations and guilt he had not returned, nor had the ministrations of the doctors brought him back, but Alice called him lightly, cheerfully, and he came. Not at once… slowly. His eyes opened… focused. And when he realized that she was there, really in the flesh and not a mirage, and looked at her, she must have had all the reward that women like us can ever hope to have.

So far we could still have been watching a man taking leave of a beloved sister. The smile on the dying man’s face could have been the tender smile of a fond older brother remembering childhood games. The silly pet name he now spoke softly into Alice’s ear as she bent over him might have belonged to their nursery games, though it would have been an unusual nursery. But now Rudi Sultzer very slightly turned his head and as Alice brought her mouth towards him and kissed him gently on the lips, the Herr Doktor’s hand moved up from the coverlet… sought something… found it.

Not her soft hair beneath the hat, nor her sweet mouth. Something that represented a more lasting sanctuary, a memory of all that was good on this earth: her breast.

‘Ah,’ said Rudi with infinite content.

It was only when I heard the hiss of outrage behind me that I realized that Edith Sultzer had come into the room.

Rudi never regained consciousness after Alice’s visit. He died quietly in the early hours of the morning and in the evening Alice was on stage in a gold bolero and red velvet skirt singing of love and lilac blossom in Waltzertraum.

She was in the second row as usual. She’d put on a lot of make-up and she sang nicely and I don’t know if anyone noticed anything, but I did. Something had happened to her mouth; something that can happen gradually with age or overnight with grief.

Herr Huber was beside me. He’d driven us to the theatre and been a tower of strength. It wasn’t till I caught the scent of his Hungary water and saw that he had laid his snow-white handkerchief in my lap, that I realized tears were running down my face.

I hadn’t cried till then. It was my business to help Alice, not to cry. But it was too much, suddenly; the glimpse I’d had of the future. My sweet and pretty friend in the back row among the village elders with her spinning wheel, singing year in year out about the spring…

In the last few days I’ve cancelled all but my most important clients and left the shop to Nini so that I could be with Alice.

This secret mourning is very hard. In the Garnisongasse, Frau Sultzer mourns loudly and in public. Her husband’s colleagues come to commiserate, relatives appear. No doubt the Group, who thought so little of Rudi in his life, are busy writing poems in his praise or trailing dark sprays of ivy through the flat. Does Laura put up notices saying: Silence! Frau Sultzer is remembering her husband? I don’t know. There has been no sign of Edith since she hissed away in fury down the hospital corridor.

Alice puts up no notices, that’s certain. She sits quietly in the flat she had prepared for Rudi and does exactly what she’s told. If you say ‘Eat, Alice!’ she eats; if you say ‘Lie down and rest’, she stretches out obediently on the bed. Sometimes, in the puzzled voice of a child, she asks a question.

‘What do you suppose they mean when they say we shall meet again in heaven? What shall we meet? If I went right along the rows of angels would I find one with bandy legs and pince-nez? You never seem to hear about angels like that.’

And she is mystified by the behaviour of the British in India.

‘They’re trying to abolish suttee, did you know, Sanna? Why are they trying to do that? Everyone’s allowed to throw themselves on the funeral pyre in suttee — not just the wives and relatives. Everyone who belonged to the man that’s died.’

Then came the reading of Rudi’s will. His investments were secure; his life had been heavily insured. With a little care, Laura would be able to live much as before. Nothing, of course, had been left to Alice; there was no mention of her in the will; she had not for a moment expected it. With the will, however, there was a letter, the contents of which knocked Alice out of her dangerous docility and brought on a storm of such dreadful weeping that at last it brought her sleep.

Rudi had asked to be buried at St Florian’s.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Laura Sultzer, arriving in my shop on her way to interview Father Anselm. ‘I naturally assumed that Rudi would be cremated — we were both free thinkers. I wasn’t even aware that my husband knew this church existed.’

I, however, was aware, for it was in the churchyard of St Florian’s that Alice and Rudi had met. It was just after I’d moved to the square. I was in bed with flu when Alice came to see me and I think I must have been running quite a high temperature because I became very agitated about the untended grave of the Family Schmidt which I had adopted. (This was before the harebells had seeded themselves.) Alice immediately offered to take some flowers and ran over to Old Anna to buy a bunch of cornflowers.

Rudi Sultzer had been visiting a client in the Walterstrasse and taken a short cut across the square. Like so many people he’d lived in Vienna all his life and never been in St Florian’s, and now he paused and wandered into the churchyard. Where he saw a woman with gentle eyes laying a bunch of cornflowers on a grave…

‘I shall of course do my duty,’ said Laura and she did it. Rudi now lies in our churchyard. The hole they dug for him was small, but oh, it was deep!

‘My husband had very few friends,’ Frau Sultzer had told the priest. ‘Hardly anyone came to the house.’

She was mistaken. There was scarcely room in St Florian’s for all the people who wanted to pay their respects to Rudi’s memory. He must have helped countless people of whose existence his wife was not even aware.

Father Anselm had arranged for a full choral service. Not less than twelve carriages with their black horses and nodding plumes disgorged the mourners, and the hearse was piled high with wreaths.

There was only one oversight. No one had seen fit to alter the notice on the churchyard gate. It still said: DOGS NOT ADMITTED. They had forgotten to amend it to: DOGS AND MISTRESSES…

By this notice, Alice stood for the length of the service. Erect, exquisitely elegant, her veil down over the black hat she had tried on that day at Yvonne’s and bought now to bid her love goodbye, she waited, her hands grasping the spiked railings — the only mishap a split in the finger of one glove as the pallbearers passed with the coffin.

Rip waited with her and so did I. We heard the responses, and Ernst Bischof singing the De Profundis. When the bells began their dreadful tolling Rip lifted his head and howled and I bent down to caress him, but Alice saw nothing, heard nothing, that did not touch her remembered life with Rudi.

Only when the congregation came out and they took the coffin to the grave did she begin to tremble so much that I was afraid.

‘Come, let me take you home.’

But her hands only fastened tighter round the railings. ‘I can’t… not till…’

Laura was pushed forward and laid a handful of earth on the coffin, followed by Edith. And then it began, that dreadful, relentless shovelling of the obliterating earth.

It was over. Frau Sultzer still lingered in the porch, but Edith now set off down the path towards the line of waiting carriages.

Grim-faced, alone, plainer than ever, the Bluestocking marched towards us, her hideous, thick-soled shoes crunching the gravel. Any hope that she might foil to recognize her father’s mistress in her polka-dot veiling vanished as she stopped, scowling, beside Alice — and remembering the scene in the hospital I prepared to throw myself between them, quite ready to murder anyone who tried to hurt my friend.

Her face still contorted, Edith stumbled forward. Her arms went out stiffly like the arms of a puppet… and closed round Alice’s shoulders in a clumsy, pitifully unpractised embrace.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very sorry.’

They clung together, Alice released by this undreamt of gesture into torrents of tears. ‘But at least you didn’t miss him,’ said Edith Sultzer. ‘I did. I missed the whole of his life.’

Then she walked on and got into the first of the carriages and sat there, scowling again, and waiting for her mother, who had noticed nothing.

Nini departed this morning for the Grundlsee. She wore her assassination shoes — high-heeled kid with grosgrain rosettes — which were so expensive that she meant to keep them for a really important event in the Anarchist calendar, and a bronze silk faille suit with a Winterhalter blouse. A perfect outfit for washing up the dishes of a hundred disturbed children and sweeping floors.

‘I still don’t see why I have to go,’ she said mulishly. ‘You know how much work there is to do on the Huber trousseau.’

I took her to the station and saw her into her compartment, where a young man with a violently waxed moustache rose to receive her suitcase with alacrity. Poor fellow: it hurt me to see his look of expectancy. Nini’s been fending for herself since she was fourteen. Long before I found her in Ungerer’s atelier she’d had more experience than women three times her age — and no one can wield a hatpin like my assistant.

The flat seems appallingly silent without her. I asked Alice if she’d like to come and stay; this is the time when Rudi would have come to her and I hate her to be alone, but she needs to be in her own place, she says, and I understand that. At least the Volksoper is closed. Herr Huber has been kindness itself driving her to the theatre, seeing she has a meal afterwards.

‘Na, na,’ he says in his slow, rumbling voice when I thank him. ‘You know what an honour it is for me to have the friendship of two such gifted women.’

If Vienna now belongs to the poor, the industrious and the bereaved, the Countess of Metz certainly fits in this category. She stays in her palace with the shutters closed and writes me petulant notes. She would like her bottle-green suit and she would like it quickly. She doesn’t know what is delaying me, and to give wings to my endeavour she has sent me a pair of battered candlesticks of the kind old ladies hit burglars on the head with and a Louis Quatorze spittoon.

The choirboys have gone home for the holidays and the Schumachers are still away so the square is as silent as the house. It is very hot now; the mornings are misty and vaporous; you know where the sun is rather than see it, and the flowers have stopped being blue and yellow as in spring; they’re mostly red now: dahlias and tall gladioli, and in the window boxes a mass of scarlet geraniums that seem to shout their colour into the muted light. Rip is in an aquatic and sportif mood, clambering up the side of the fountain and very seriously thinking of jumping in, but there is the problem of his back legs. He’s much more cheerful without the setter of the English Miss. Passion isn’t at all good for the character; I’ve always known that.

My pear is well. Not exactly enormous — toe-sized one could say — but it’s a late-maturing variety and I have absolute faith in its ability to swell.

Tomorrow I shall shut the shop. Nothing happens in these dusty summer days and I’m glad of that. I’m not sure that I really like ‘events’.

No, I was wrong. Something has happened that has upset me very much.

Magdalena’s wedding dress has gone off to be sewn with seed pearls, her blue velvet cloak is being embroidered with silver acanthus leaves. I have made her a day dress of linen the colour of sandalwood and another of pearl-grey faille striped with rose…

But Magdalena herself remains an enigma. She is utterly beautiful, graceful, remote… always polite to her fiancé whom, however, she almost never addresses directly. Certainly her engagement has achieved the result she hoped for. Herr Huber has had the twins coached for cadet college, medical treatment has been arranged for the taxidermist and he is negotiating for a better apartment for the family. But I’ve only seen her animated when she’s in company, real or imagined, with her saints.

At least until tonight. I’d taken pity on the Countess von Metz and delivered her two-piece, and as the evening was so beautiful I walked back, taking a short cut through that enclave behind St Oswald’s Church where the Jesuits have their priory. There’s a little garden there that is used by lovers and old people. It’s pretty and quiet, with the priory on one side and the old Krotsky Palace on the other, and the roses are famous.

It was already dusk; and I half averted my eyes from the two people standing very close together under an acacia. The man was tall and dressed in a black cloak like a student. The girl too wore a dark cloak? — but what stood out even from a distance was the intensity of their involvement. She was looking up at him, entreaty in every line of her body; he bent over her with an unmistakable tenderness and love.

Then they drew apart, and as the girl walked away past the flower beds her hood fell back and I saw, quite clearly, Magdalena’s face and the long white-blonde hair.

There’s nothing I can do about this, nothing I can say — but oh, that poor, kind, unsuspecting man! Is it all a sham, this religiosity of hers? For it seems clear now that she chose the butcher from her other rich suitors for the ease with which she will be able to deceive him. There was nothing of farewell in that meeting under the acacia tree.

One thing is certain: in thinking Magdalena Winter incapable of passion, I was a fool.