‘Who? Who’ll be standing there? What are you talking about?’
‘Herr Huber of course. Your bridegroom.’ It was Edith’s turn to look confused.
Magdalena, with an almost visible effort, brought herself down to earth. ‘I want you to be there, Edith,’ she said to her friend. ‘I need you to be there.’
She had spoken with certainty and kindness. Edith steadied herself and the procession continued — but to me it was as if Magdalena had proclaimed her passion to the world. For one thing was certain: the figure she’d imagined waiting at the altar as she fixed her eyes raptly on the crucifix might be her chosen bridegroom — but it was not Herr Huber from Linz.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like actually to see the Taj Mahal. I’ve read so much about it, seen pictures in the Illustrierte Zeitung. But when one got there in the moonlight would there be an anticlimax? Can it be as white and majestic as everybody says?
Well now I know, because I have seen one of Laura Sultzer’s notices. It was pinned to the door of her room just as in the legends that Alice and I have collected through the years and there was no letdown at all.
Silence! it said, Frau Sultzer is reading Grillparzer.
I stared at it entranced while the maid who had admitted me looked worried.
‘I don’t like to disturb her — she’s got them all in there, you see.’
‘The Group, you mean? She’s reading aloud?’
‘That’s right. It’ll be a good hour before they’re through.’
But I’d come myself with Edith’s completed bridesmaid’s dress instead of sending Gretl, for I have decided to keep an eye on the Bluestocking, and I had no intention of going without seeing her.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility,’ and I knocked and opened the door.
Laura sat on a high-backed chair reading aloud from Austria’s most famous (and some would say her only) poet. Round her, in poses of rapt attention, sat her acolytes. I took in a pair of hermaphrodite feet in open sandals and the bosom of the lady who does Croatian cross-stitch, heavily banded in red and black.
‘I’ve come to borrow Fräulein Edith,’ I said cheerfully, ‘I want her to try on her dress.’
Frau Sultzer put down her book and glared.
‘As you can see we are busy.’
Edith rose quickly to her feet. ‘Oh, but Frau Susanna has come herself . . .’
Accompanied by stares of outrage from the ladies, she hurried to the door.
The room that Edith took me to had to be her bedroom because it contained a bed. There was, however, nothing else even mildly feminine: no dressing table, no mirror, and the wash stand looked dangerously small. Instead there were bookcases lined with dark tomes and on the wall, framed in black, the prizes Edith had won at school.
The dress was a perfect fit, the soft green not unbecoming, but as Edith’s bespectacled face, the bewildered eyes, emerged, I had again the feeling that in designing for her I had missed some clue.
‘Have you been attending to your diet?’ I asked her, for there was a large red spot in the middle of her chin.
‘Well, I try. I remembered what Herr Huber said about red meat making good blood. Of course when I’m with the Group I can’t . . . but when I’m alone, Cook sometimes brings me a steak.’
‘That’s good. Now all you have to do is wash your hair a bit more often and your skin will soon improve. Dandruff is very bad for acne. Every three or four days with a good shampoo.’
‘Every three or four days!’ Edith looked at me with horror. ‘But my mother . . . I mean, surely that would interfere with one’s natural oils?’
‘Edith,’ I said firmly, ‘I do assure you that there is nothing that needs interfering with so much as one’s natural oils.’
As she was dressing I asked her a question I had been turning over in my mind. ‘Has Magdalena ever given you a hint of another . . . attachment? Someone she is fond of?’
‘No, never; never. If she’s got another attachment it’s to the church. To God. She’s asked Herr Huber to let her go into retreat once a month here in Vienna after their marriage; just for a few days. So you see . . .’
And I did indeed see. A few days every month to be with her lover — and for the rest, her family provided for, a generous and complaisant husband. Well, why not — many people would regard it as a sensible solution to her problems, but there was something about Herr Huber’s innocence that made me furious on his behalf.
I was preparing to leave when Edith touched my arm. ‘I’ve got something for . . . your friend. If you think she’d like it? If it wouldn’t upset her?’
She led me to her rolltop desk, opened it — and took out a package. Inside was a long-stemmed pipe with a blue dragon on the china bowl.
‘It was my father’s favourite,’ said Edith and, somewhat unnecessarily, added: ‘My mother doesn’t know.’
‘That’s very sweet of you, my dear. I think she’d love to have it.’
But I’d caught sight of something else that Edith had hidden in her desk. A book that was quite different from the scholarly volumes stacked round her walls. The cover was garish, the title, in tall red letters, stood out clearly, The Art of Pork Butchering by Hector Schlumberger.
Alice was sitting at her table playing patience with the new pack of cards she’d bought for Rudi to use during their summer idyll, and she’d lost weight.
‘Edith thought you’d like to have this.’
She took the pipe, opened the porcelain lid, closed it . . . traced the outline of the dragon with one finger.
‘It was his favourite,’ she said, as Edith had done. And then: ‘Sanna, I’ve never asked you, but I wondered . . . I mean how long does it go on hurting so much? How long was it before it stopped hurting after you came back from Salzburg? They say that Time Heals, but how much time? When did it stop, the hurt about your daughter?’
I hesitated, then told the truth. ‘Oh Alice, it’s never stopped. I don’t know what time does, but I don’t think it does that. Only, after a while . . . two years. . . three, perhaps . . . the pain becomes manageable. It becomes part of you and if someone offered to take it away . . . you wouldn’t want them to because the pain is the link with the person you’ve lost. It sounds maudlin, but I don’t mean it like that.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘I see,’
She then went to get ready for the dress rehearsal of Wienerblut, which is just as bad as everyone expected. ‘They’ve given us new outfits for once: really very smart: sprigged muslin and poke bonnets . . . but you might as well be naked when the horses are on the stage. They’ve hired a special man with a gold shovel to scoop up their droppings and that’s all the audience will be waiting for. The man with the shovel.’
I know it’s completely ridiculous, but deep down I feel a touch of resentment because Rudi left her so unprovided for. It’s five years before she’ll get her pension and even then it’s nothing much. Yet what could he have done without hurting Laura, a thing both of them spent their lives trying not to do?
After all, the gardenias, the decollete were not in vain! Sigismund has been reprieved. With luck now his piano will turn into an Arab steed on which he can gallop away to his destiny; a three masted galleon in which he can sail to glory!
I had given up all hope of Van der Velde but yesterday he came and he is going to give Sigismund a concert!
‘I’ve got an unexpected gap,’ he said, striding into my shop in his velvet-collared overcoat. ‘A soprano I booked for October has let me down, the bitch. It’s a six o’clock recital in the small salon at the Zelinka Palace so there’s not much at stake.’
‘He’s really good, then?’
Van der Velde shrugged. ‘He’s small for his age and he’s Polish; I can probably do something with that. But God,
what a hovel! Someone’ll have to clean him up,’ he said, looking meaningfully at me.
‘Are you going to give them an advance? They’re practically starving.’
‘An advance! You’re out of your mind. They’ll get twenty per cent of the takings if there are any, and that’s generous. I’ll need every kreutzer I’ve got for advertising, and even then I’m chancing my arm. I’ve never seen an uglier child — and obstinate too. He won’t play the Waldstein. Still, its mostly Chopin they’ll want.’
He hadn’t been gone for more than an hour when Jan Kraszinsky appeared in the shop and asked me to make the boy’s concert clothes.
‘I don’t do boy’s clothes, I’m afraid,’ I explained. But he didn’t go, just stood there in his fusty black suit and looked at me.
‘Sigismund expects it. It was what he said first when Herr van der Velde said we must get some clothes. “She will make me some new trousers and I will see inside her shop!”
‘I’m sorry.’
He took a step towards me. ‘Herr van der Velde said it was you who told him about Sigismund.’
‘I mentioned the boy, that’s all.’
He moved forward, tried to take my hand to kiss it, and I retreated behind my desk.
‘Sigismund must have . . . shining knickers,’ said Kraszinsky, his German not quite up to his vision. ‘And a blouse . . . with rufflets.’ He sketched a frenzied cascade of frills with his unwashed hands.
‘No! Absolutely not! Your nephew must not be dressed up like a little monkey.’ (Oh, why couldn’t I keep out of it? Why couldn’t I be quiet?)
‘But Herr van der Velde said that Sigi must look young. He must look like a very small boy so that people think he has even more talent.’
‘The child is small enough as he is; you need no tricks. Sigismund is a serious child; he must be dressed with dignity. Look, I’ll send you to a friend of mine — a man I worked for for three years. He speaks Polish too.’
I wrote down Jacob Jacobson’s address and still Kraszinsky stood there exuding his particular brand of obstinate despair. Will you make me a drawing?’
‘All right. It’s an informal concert so you don’t need velvet. Black grosgrain trousers — not shorts on any account. A white high-necked blouse — not satin: raw silk. The neck of the blouse and the sleeves piped in black.’
I sketched as I spoke. A miniature Peter-the-Great-as-Shipbuilder emerged, and did not please Kraszinsky.
‘But that is how the peasants dress in Preszowice.’
‘Yes. You want that look. You mustn’t try to turn him into a pretty Viennese boy — you can’t do it anyway. Be proud of where you come from.’
He took the sketch.
‘Will he want money now, this Herr Jacobson? Will he wait till after the concert?’
I was silent, remembering my years with Jacob, the warmth, the jokes. What if the concert was not a success, what if nobody came? Perhaps it would not be the best way to repay my debt to Jasha, to leave him with an unpaid bill.
‘Oh, all right,’ I said irritably. ‘Bring the boy in the morning and I’ll see what I can do.’
He was outside the door as I opened the shop.
‘Grüss Gott, Sigismund.’
He bowed his concert master’s bow, entered; stood in the centre of the room, looking . . . At the white daisies in the alabaster bowls, at the swathed mirrors, at the fans and ostrich feathers in a glass case. His nose wrinkled as he drank in the smells: the phlox in a silver tankard on my desk; my own scent which a little man in the Graben mixes for me, Nini’s shampoo . . . Best of all he liked the low round table covered in a floor-length cloth of yellow silk to match the curtains. In hands which bore evidence of recent energetic scrubbing, he picked up the material and looked underneath.
‘It is like a house.’
‘Yes.’
I told him about the Countess von Metz’s Pekinese who’d liked to hide there and make puddles, and took him off to be measured.
‘God, he’s thin,’ said Nini.
His legs were like sticks; a tide mark at the base of the skinny neck showed where the washing had stopped abruptly.
I showed him the design for the concert clothes. ‘That’s the silk for your blouse; and that’s the material for your trousers. It’s called grosgrain.’
He nodded and repeated ‘Grosgrain,’ frowning with concentration. ‘And what is this?’
‘That’s muslin.’
‘And what is this?’
‘That’s velvet.’
He walked beside me along the bales of cloth, asking the name of each, almost touching, but not quite. Sometimes he repeated a word. ‘Taffeta,’ he said in his husky voice, and ‘Crêpe de Chine.’
Back in the salon he lingered again by the low table covered in yellow silk. Then suddenly he crouched down, crawled underneath it, and let the cloth fall again.
‘Can you see me?’
‘No, I can’t. You’re completely hidden.’
It’s the first time I’ve seen him behave like a child, this future Paderewski. The next time he comes I’m going to put him in the bath.
The effect of Van der Velde’s visit has been extraordinary. Frau Hinkler now tells everyone that it is only her kindness and care that saved the Kraszinskys from starvation. A man came from the piano firm, extending the period of hire till after the concert and offering unlimited credit in exchange for a mention in the programme.
‘I always knew the boy would make it,’ says Joseph, who now offers Kraszinsky cups of coffee on the house.
I cannot say that I have ever heard Joseph know anything of the sort, but never mind.
The Schumachers are genuinely delighted. Mitzi and Franzi and Steffi are to be allowed to go to the concert, but not the mercurial Resi.
‘Mama thinks she would wriggle too much and fall off her chair,’ said Mitzi.
Even Augustin Heller has decided to go and hear the boy. Herr Schnee is too busy, he says. The state harness for the cavalry of the Carinthian Jaegers is to be collected the same week as the concert — but he comes out occasionally to stand on the pavement and listens to Sigismund practising.
‘He’s really getting it,’ says Herr Schnee, as Sigismund explodes into a bravura passage.
For we have become musical connoisseurs, all of a sudden, in Madensky Square. We all know Sigismund’s programme: the Moonlight Sonata, three Chopin mazurkas, polonaises, the Waltz in F Major . . . We even know his encores (if there are any): a piece by Schumann, a Brahms impromptu . . . Joseph, who can’t even hum ‘O Du Lieber Augustin’, can be heard discussing Sigismund’s interpretations with Herr Schumacher as he serves the wine. And in her attic, Nini leans out with shining eyes.
‘Listen!’ she says, ‘he’s playing the Revolutionary Prelude!’ For it is this agitating piece that Van der Velde, that astute showman, has chosen for Sigismund’s last encore.
Nearly all my clients are back, following the Kaiser who returned last week to endure his birthday celebrations. Poor man, he’s eighty-one and tries hard to enjoy the processions and garden parties and firework displays in his honour. Last year he bent down to a little girl who was presenting a bouquet and had to be righted by his aides: something had seized up in the small of his back. This year a shower of pink tissue-paper hearts descended on him from a balcony and got caught in his moustaches, but he endures it all.
Professor Starsky called in to greet me. He is a modest man, but he feels that his lecture on the ‘Epineuria of the Rainbow Snake’ was well received in Reykjavik — and the English Miss strides past again behind her lovely dog.
I’ve made it clear to everyone who comes to the shop that they must buy a ticket for Sigismund’s recital if I’m to get paid for his trousers. For Leah Cohen this is no hardship — she is musical and has promised to bring th
e whole family. Things look bad for her; her husband’s emigration papers have come through and there is nothing now between her and the Promised Land. ‘And what’s so awful is to think that Miriam is staying behind and lording it in Vienna — bringing up her children and her grandchildren here while poor little Benjamin has to grub about making holes in the desert.’
But of course poor little Benjamin is delighted.
Frau Hutte-Klopstock is back from the High Tatras. Her sister has been in Paris and says that Poiret is freeing women from the corset. All I can say is that if he was designing for the women of Vienna, he would think again. But she too has bought a ticket for the concert, for Sigismund now belongs to us all.
Only the boy himself is unchanged. He practises all day as he always did and in the evening comes out and stands by the fountain.
‘Is it necessary for me to try on my clothes again?’ he asks when I stop and talk to him.
So I increase his fittings to a number somewhat in excess of what is needed to try on a pair of trousers and a shirt. It doesn’t matter now. Soon Sigismund will ride away on his black steed of a piano and trouble me no more.
I must try to be seemly. I mustn’t stand by my bedroom window shivering with happiness when my best friend is bereaved, my assistant is pining and there is cholera in Lausanne. Only how can I help it?
Alice has gone to spend a few days with her sister. Before she left she asked me if I’d put flowers on Rudi’s grave while she was away.
‘Anything that’s friendly,’ she said — and tried to give me money.
It’s too late in the year for cornflowers, but Old Anna found me a bunch of tousled pinks which were friendliness itself and after supper I went across to lay them at Rudi’s feet.
It had been raining and the air was wonderfully fresh. Hardly aware of the gathering darkness, I wandered about, in no hurry to go back indoors. The harebells on the mound of the Family Schmidt haven’t yet recovered from Sigismund’s depredations. Next year, perhaps — but next year the child will be gone. If the concert’s a success, Van der Velde means to send him on a tour of Europe.