‘Yes. I’d like that,’ said Annika. ‘I know a lot of stories because my friend Pauline works in a bookshop, and we act them.’
‘Ah, acting. Do you like that?’
‘Yes, very much. I don’t know that it’s proper acting though; we only do it for ourselves.’
‘Of course . . . Of course . . .’
Annika waited, sitting on the chair with folded hands. ‘Will you start?’ she said.
‘All right then . . . Once upon a time . . . there was a girl who lived in a very pompous, silly family in a very pompous, silly town. Her mother and father were stuffy and her brothers and sisters were stuffy – they used to take two hours to finish their breakfast and then it was time to start laying the table again for lunch: salt cellars, pepper-mills, mustard pots . . . on and on and on.’
Annika nodded. She knew about meals that went on and on.
‘The girl wanted to see the world – and she wanted to dance and act and sing, properly – in a theatre. But no one in her family danced or sang – dear me, no. Dancing was not respectable. So they looked about for a husband for her and they found an alderman with a big stomach and a watch chain across it, and when the girl saw him she decided to run away.’
‘Properly?’ breathed Annika. ‘With a ladder and knotted sheets?’
The old lady nodded. ‘More or less. She escaped at night and she had a little bit of money saved and she went to Paris. You know about Paris? So free . . . so beautiful . . . She found someone who ran a theatre and she begged him for work – any work, so that she could learn and watch – but he only laughed at her. He said he had a hundred girls who wanted to dance and sing, for every place he had.
‘So the girl became very poor and very hungry; she scrubbed floors and worked as a waitress, but she didn’t give up. Then one day she found a theatre manager who said she could stand at the back of the stage and pretend to milk a cow – it was a musical comedy set on a farm. So for many months she milked cows and sang songs about springtime, but all the time she watched and practised and learned.
‘And then one day something happened. A new designer came and he had made a swing that rose up very, very high above the stage, and swayed back and forwards, and on the swing was a great basket of flowers – and they wanted a girl to go up on the swing and strew the flowers.’
Annika thought she knew what came next.
‘And everybody was frightened except this girl?’
‘That’s right. Mind you, they were right to be frightened – it was a dangerous contraption. But the girl said she would do it. She was not afraid of heights and she liked the idea of strewing flowers – even paper flowers. She liked it very much. So they combed out her hair – she had lots of hair; pretty hair like yours – and they hauled her up and up and up, and she strewed and smiled and everyone clapped and cheered. And that was the beginning . . .’
The old lady’s voice died away.
But Annika wanted to be sure. She put her hand over the wrinkled one lying on the counterpane.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? The girl on the swing was you?’
The lids fluttered; the blue eyes opened. She smiled.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was me.’
When Annika got back she found Pauline hunched in the wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen. She was eating a cheese straw, which Ellie had given her before she went to the shops, and she looked angry and most unusually clean. Pauline’s hair had been washed and stood up in a frizzy mass round her head, her fringe had been ruthlessly cut and she wore a starched dress with a glaringly white collar.
‘Your mother’s come?’ asked Annika.
‘Yes. For a whole week. She’s scrubbing her way round the shop at the moment. Grandfather’s gone to bed with a book about the Galapagos Islands, but it won’t help him. She’s going to turn out the bedrooms next. Really, Annika, I don’t know why you’re so interested in mothers.’
Pauline’s mother wasn’t just a nurse, she was a very high-ranking one, and the way Pauline and her grandfather lived filled her with despair. Whenever she had a holiday from her hospital she came from Berlin and washed and scoured and scrubbed and polished, while they tried to keep out of her way and became cleaner and gloomier by the minute.
‘The trouble is, by the time she goes, I’ve sort of got used to her and I almost miss her. You really can’t win with mothers.’
But of course her mother wouldn’t be like that at all, thought Annika. She would step out of her carriage in her lovely clothes, smelling of French perfume and hold out her arms. Scrubbing and cleaning simply wouldn’t come into it.
The next time Annika went to visit the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie let her go up alone. There seemed to be nobody about and she was glad of it, because she had brought a sprig of jasmine from the bush growing against the courtyard wall.
‘And Ellie baked some honey cakes, but we didn’t know if—’
The old lady shook her head. ‘I don’t get hungry. But the jasmine . . .’ She put it to her nose. ‘I can still smell it. Just.’
She was drowsy today, but she had not forgotten that it was Annika’s turn to tell a story.
‘But not “Gunga Din” or Stanley and Livingstone. Your story. How you were found.’
So Annika told her about the church in the mountains and about Ellie and Sigrid, who had taken her in and brought her up.
‘Ellie is soft and comfortable like a mother and Sigrid is strong and busy like an aunt – and the professors are good to me. But sometimes . . . I dream about my real mother coming. Often I dream it – that she’s looked and looked for me and at last she’s found me. Do you think it’s wrong to keep dreaming that?’
‘How could it be wrong?’
‘Well, when Ellie and Sigrid look after me so well.’
‘Dreams don’t work like that, Annika.’
She was still holding the spray of jasmine to her face and her eyes were shut, but Annika didn’t go away. She wanted the rest of the story.
‘Last time you said it was the beginning,’ she said. ‘Being on the swing.’
‘Yes. I was a success. People called me La Rondine – it means a swallow in Italian – and they put me on to clouds and into hot-air balloons and gondolas, but always high, high over the stage and always I strewed something. Flowers mostly; but sometimes autumn leaves or golden coins or gingerbread hearts . . . And once, in Russia, I strewed snow!’
‘Snow! But how . . . ?’
‘Well, of course it was tissue-paper snow, but it looked wonderful. We were touring Moscow and St Petersburg and I was the Spirit of Winter. The Russians stamped and shouted and cheered. They love it when it begins to snow – it makes the streets so quiet, the horses’ hoofs are muffled and there are sledges everywhere. A count who lived in a wooden palace in the middle of a forest gave a great banquet for us. He was mad but so generous – he gave me an emerald pendant, which had belonged to his grandmother. The Star of Kazan, it was called.’
‘Were there wolves?’
‘We didn’t see any, but we heard them – and when we arrived it was dusk and there was a whole line of the count’s servants with lighted flares to lead us up the drive and welcome us.’
Her eyes closed. She began to snore, and her mouth went slack, but it didn’t matter any more. Annika was looking at a friend.
Then she woke as suddenly as she had slept.
‘The world was so beautiful in those days, Annika. The music, the flowers, the scent of the pines . . .’
‘It still is,’ said Annika. ‘Honestly, it still is.’
CHAPTER SIX
THE STAR OF KAZAN
Summer was now well under way. The geraniums in Ellie’s window boxes had to be watered twice a day, the cats lay in the shade of the cafe awning, and were shooed away, and came back . . .
At the opera, the season was nearly over, and Annika was sent out to buy the roses that Uncle Emil always sent, at the last performence, to a lady in the chorus called Cornelia
Otter, whom he had admired for many years.
Professor Julius was relabelling the collection of rocks in his study, helped by Sigrid, who stood beside him with a duster looking sour, because it is not at all easy to dust rocks. Professor Gertrude was having trouble with her harp sonata and kept to her room, dabbing lavender water on to her temples to help her think.
But when she went to visit the Eggharts’ great-aunt in her stuffy attic, Annika was in a different world.
‘I was La Rondine for several years. The Little Swallow. There were pictures of me everywhere and people gave me such presents . . . Once a posy of flowers was brought on to the stage for me, and when I took it it seemed to be covered with drops of dew. But they weren’t drops of dew, they were diamonds . . . A banker sent them, just to say thank you. And a marquis gave me a priceless brooch in the shape of a butterfly. People were like that in those days; so generous – and so rich. My jewels were famous. I could have bought horses and carriages and mansions if I’d sold them, but they were friends, I loved them.’ She turned her head. ‘It’s true what I’m telling you,’ she said anxiously.
‘Of course it’s true.’
‘Anyway I was too busy – with my work . . .’
‘With strewing,’ said Annika, who liked that word particularly.
‘Yes. Not only, of course. I danced and sang too, but every time at the end of the show there had to be a number where I was hoisted up high and scattered things. The stage hands used to get quite cross, sweeping up roses, sweeping up daffodils, but the audience insisted. We toured all the big cities . . . we even went to London.’ She paused and stretched out her hand for the glass of water and Annika helped her to drink.
‘And then something happened,’ she went on.
Annika put her hand over her mouth. ‘You fell?’
‘I fell all right, but not off the swing. I fell in love. Oh my goodness how I fell! He was a wonderful man . . . a painter . . . and when he smiled . . . Ah well, you’ll know one day.’
‘Did you get married?’
‘No. But I gave up the stage. I gave up everything and went to live with him in the most beautiful place in the world.’
‘Where’s that?
‘It’s called Merano. It’s a village in the South Tyrol, in the Dolomites; it’s where the mountains come down to shelter the valley. There are vineyards everywhere and flowers, and orchards full of fruit – and when you look up there are the great peaks, which turn to rose when the sun sets.’
‘Yes, I know about that. It’s called Alpengluhen.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. His house was a little yellow villa halfway up the mountain, smothered in wisteria and jasmine, with a blue balcony where we had our meals. You must go there one day. You’ll know it because it has a tiny clock tower with a weathervane shaped like a crowing cock.’
She groped for her handkerchief, then shook her head impatiently. ‘I’m not sad. It’s good to remember. We lived there for ten years and I was so happy. Not famous now . . . but my goodness, so happy! Then he was killed in a climbing accident. He was trying to help someone who was trapped on an ice ledge.’
She stopped and Annika got up from her chair.
‘You’ll want to rest now.’
‘No, not yet. Then the vampires came. Six huge vampires. Harpies with fangs and claws. His relatives. Two sisters, an aunt, three cousins . . . They turned me out of the house – they wanted to sell it at once and get the money. So I went back to Paris. I tried to get back to work, but ten years is too long to be away from the theatre and I wasn’t so young and pretty any more. It was a difficult time. But I still had my jewels – the harpies couldn’t take them away from me. I’ll tell you about my . . . jewels when you . . . come again.’
And almost at once she was asleep.
The weather now became very hot and all the important people left Vienna to go on their summer holidays.
The most important person of course was the emperor, who put away his military uniforms and the helmets he wore to attend to his duties and went off to his villa in the mountains, where he put on lederhosen and embroidered braces and pretended to be a peasant.
Ellie was always pleased when he went away.
‘The poor old man: all those parades and processions and him with his bad back.’
When the emperor left Vienna, so did the courtiers and the civil servants and the bankers and the opera singers.
And so did the Lipizzaners – who were most certainly important – who went off to the high pastures to rest and grow strong on the rich grass. Their grooms led them through the quiet streets at daybreak, to the special train that was kept for them, and the Viennese heard them and smiled because it meant that the holidays had begun.
The professors too went away. They always went to the same place, a quiet hotel in Switzerland, where they swam up and down a dark-green lake and read their books. Though the holiday was not a complicated one, getting them off safely was hard work. Annika’s job was to search their long woollen bathing costumes for moth holes, through which somebody might see pieces of their skin, while Ellie oiled their boots and Sigrid ironed Professor Gertrude’s dirndls, which were of the stately kind, with black aprons and many pleats.
And the Eggharts left in their canary-yellow motor car, which was quite a performance because Loremarie and her mother had to wrap their heads in layers of veiling to protect them from the dust, and Herr Egghart had to find his gauntlets and his goggles and his leather driving coat, and poop the horn loudly to make sure everyone would get out of the way before he even got in. They had rented a house in Bad Haxenfeld, a famous spa in Germany where sulphurous water gushed out of the rocks and people sat in mud baths up to their necks and were massaged and pummelled and put on diets.
‘I feel absolutely exhausted, having that old woman in my house,’ Frau Egghart told her friends before they left. Actually all she had done was to go up to the attic once a week and stand by the door with her handkerchief over her mouth as though old age was catching – but her friends were very sympathetic.
Because they had rented a house, the Eggharts took all their servants except the youngest of the maids, who was left in sole charge of their great-aunt. The people in the square were shocked by this, but for Annika it was a relief. She could go over when she liked and stay as long as she wanted. Loremarie had not left any money for the holidays, but Annika had almost forgotten that she was ever paid.
Ellie had taken a pot of her scented geraniums and some fruit to the old lady, and she tried to warn Annika.
‘You mustn’t be sad when she goes,’ Ellie told her. ‘She’s very tired and she’ll be glad to slip away.’
‘No, she won’t,’ said Annika furiously. ‘She’s only tired because the weather’s so hot. When it gets cooler she’ll be better again; she’s NOT going to die!’
And Ellie shook her head because it was impossible to convince Annika that she was not in charge of the world.
Meanwhile, in her attic, the old lady was coming near the end of her story.
‘I went to live in a little room on the Left Bank and I was all right. I bought a dog.’
‘What kind of dog?’ asked Annika eagerly.
‘A little schnauzer. I would have liked a big one, but not in the middle of town.’
‘Yes, schnauzers are good,’ said Annika and sighed, for her quest for a dog of her own was not making any progress.
‘So I was all right. I still had my jewels you see. I still had the Star of Kazan and the butterfly brooch and the diamond tiara and the rings . . . I used to look at them, when I was alone. They were so beautiful. And while I had them I was still rich – very, very rich. But of course one by one I had to sell them to buy food and pay the rent.’
‘Were you very sad?’
‘Yes, I was. But I had a friend – such a good friend. He was really a saint, that man; he was a hunchback and he was a brilliant jeweller – he built up one of the most famous jewellery businesses in Paris: Fabrice, he wa
s called. He remembered me from when I was famous and he helped me. Whenever I needed money, I would take him a piece of jewellery and he would sell it for me at the best possible price. But – this is what was so special – every time he sold a piece for me he had it copied in glass or paste so that it looked almost exactly like the original. He sold my Star of Kazan and copied it, and my butterfly brooch and my cluster rings . . . and after a while I got just as fond of the copies as the originals. I thought they were just as beautiful even though they weren’t worth anything at all. Wasn’t that kind of him?’
‘Yes, it was. It was very kind.’
‘And so I managed for twenty years. I suppose I could have saved some money, but I didn’t and there were other people as badly off as me whom I wanted to help. Perhaps I had got into the habit of strewing. Then the day came when I didn’t have anything left to sell, and just about this time my jeweller friend died.’
Annika leaned forward. ‘What did you do?’
‘What everybody does when their luck runs out. I was old by then. I got what work I could, cleaning the streets . . . scrubbing . . . There were quite a few of us – people who’d been on the stage or in the music world. And there were soup kitchens . . . I managed. Then I decided to come home to Austria. I suppose I wanted to die here, or perhaps I thought my family would . . . and you see in the end they did take me in, though I don’t know why.’
Annika did know why. It was because Herr Egghart wanted to become a statue and you can’t become a statue if you leave your aunt to die in an asylym – but of course she said nothing.
‘Anyway I’m glad I did,’ the old lady went on, ‘because I made a new friend and not many people make friends at ninety-four.’ And she stretched out her hand and laid it for a moment on Annika’s arm.
Ellie was right about the Eggharts’ great-aunt. She was getting very weak. Sometimes now when Annika came she would do no more than smile at her before she drifted off to sleep, and when she spoke it might be just a few words, which did not always make sense.