by Eva Ibbotson
‘No, I don’t,’ came the voice of poor Mitzi, the eldest of the six Schumacher girls. ‘When I die I want to have baked the best gug’lhupf in Vienna.’
The salon of my shop is yellow and white like the inside of a daisy. The drapes in the windows and the curtains framing the long mirrors are the colour of newly picked lemons (that yellow isn’t even remotely egg-like) and the walls are ivory and match the alabaster bowls in which I keep fresh flowers. My carpet is grey, the chairs and sofas are upholstered in oyster velvet, and on the low tables I don’t just keep fashion magazines but also ashtrays so that the gentlemen who come and trace the imagined contours of their wives and mistresses in the air will feel at home.
The workroom is a different matter. I’m short of space and it hums like the engine room of a ship. The two machines at which the girls work are by the french windows which lead out into the courtyard, the cutting-out table takes up one wall, the wardrobe the other. The racks which hold the bales of cloth stretch tier upon tier almost to the ceiling, and every pincushion and box of tailor’s chalk and measuring rod has its place.
Between the workroom and the salon are two fitting rooms: very calm, very private, but sumptuous and canopied like the tents of Suleiman the Great.
This morning all was well. The salon streamed with light. In one window was a brown velvet street dress with black frogging which looked back to winter; in the other, a green-sprigged muslin with which I’d wooed the spring. Nice dresses both of them, but nothing to the dress that had overcome me in my sleep — the rich cream dress with the self-coloured rose which soon now would bring the traffic to a standstill as besotted women came and pressed their noses against the glass.
I was just unlocking the door when Old Anna, the flower seller, came across the square towards me.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, putting down her basket. ‘Kept them specially . . .’
She had violets from Parma, jonquils and daffodils from the southern slopes of the Dolomites — and a bunch of tiny flowers not much longer than my thumb which she put into my hands.
‘Knew you’d want these,’ she said, flashing her golden tooth.
Wild cyclamen. I picked them with my mother in the woods above the Danube, in the Wachau where I was born. To me, as a child, they were almost people: the petals like the pricked ears of leprechauns, the sturdy, silver-dappled leaves like shields.
I can remember so well how Vienna looked to me then, when I was Sanna, the barefoot daughter of the village carpenter. The Kaiserstadt, the Imperial City, heart of the Empire. How it beckoned and shone, how clearly I saw it all: the Kaiser in his golden uniform, waving a white-gloved hand as he drove in his golden-wheeled carriage from the Hofburg to his Summer Palace of Schönbrunn . . . The elegant people parading down the Prater Hauptallee, the marble hall at the opera with its glittering candelabra . . . And now that Vienna is a real place with clattering dustbin lids and foolish dogs, I love it even more. It was a hard road that led me to this shop, this square. I let no one help me, not even the man I love, but since I came here I have woken each morning thinking: I am here where I want to be. This is my place.
I don’t believe the rumours that Joseph in the café across the road occasionally retails: that there are plans to widen the Walterstrasse and pull down part of the square. Not even Herr Willibald Egger, the Minister in charge of ‘City Development’ would be as crass as that. Yet as I was arranging the cyclamen in a bowl on my desk, I felt a sudden longing to record . . . to retain . . . my everyday life here in Madensky Square. I shall remember my tragedies, my follies and my joys — everyone remembers those. But what of the ordinary things, the little happenings? What of the ‘dailiness’ — who has a care for that?
So now at the end of this first day of spring I sit at my window and begin my journal. I shall try to keep it for a year and I shall write it to remind myself . . . but also I shall write it so that perhaps one day the person for whom I live — no, at whom I live since you can’t live for someone you will never see — might find it and say, ‘Ah yes, I understand. That’s what it was like in a dress shop in the Inner City. That’s what it was like at Susanna’s . . .’
April
If there is one man I really and truly hate it is the Russian impresario, Serge Diaghilev. Why couldn’t he have kept his glamorous ballerinas and exotic designers in St Petersburg? Why bring them to Europe to torture poor hardworking dressmakers like me?
At ten o’clock this morning, Frau Hutte-Klopstock, the wife of the City Parks Superintendent, handed me a magazine and said she wanted to look like Karsavina in The Firebird.
‘Something diaphanous, I thought,’ she said. ‘Shimmering . . . in flame or orange.’
Frau Hutte-Klopstock is healthy, she is muscular; she is sportif and athletic. A small glacier in the High Tatras has been named after her and of this one must be glad. But, Oh God! Karsavina!
I led her into the fitting room where her double, a wire dummy padded by Nini with three whole packets of wadding, confronted her, but without dimming her ardour.
‘My sister saw them in Paris — the Ballets Russes. She says they were unbelievable — the exoticism, the colour! So she said why don’t you ask Frau Susanna to make you something like that and here I am.’
It’s the most difficult thing we do, as dressmakers: take a client’s fantasies and bring them slowly, patiently, to the point where they cease to be absurd. It took me half an hour to turn the diaphanous flame into a soft shell pink, to suggest that her husband, the Park Superintendent, would feel more comfortable if the flowing silk georgette was draped on an underskirt because the problems of the ballet are not quite the same as those of eminent ladies attending functions in the town hall. Not that it makes much difference; next month she’ll be back wanting to look like Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon.
My next customer was easier to please. Leah Cohen’s requirements are simple. Any dress I make for her must be expensive, it must be seen to be expensive, and it must be more expensive than anything that could possibly be worn by her sister-in-law, Miriam.
I had conceded seed pearls on the collar and cuffs and a trellis of silver embroidery on the bodice. Now, however, she begged for sequins.
‘No, absolutely, no,’ I said, pinning the sleeves of the emerald moire. I have dressed Leah for seven years and we are friends. ‘I have my reputation to think of.’
‘But it’s a bar mitzvah — my cousin’s boy, I told you.’
‘I don’t care if it’s the circumcision feast of the Shah of Persia, no one leaves my shop looking like a parakeet. I’ll frame the bill if you like and you can wear it as a brooch to show Miriam, but sequins, no!’
She laughed then, but almost at once, most disconcertingly, her eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh dear. I don’t know what I shall do without you,’ she said, groping for her handkerchief
‘He’s still thinking of going, then?’
Leah nodded. ‘I’ll never forgive that Theodor Herzl. Ever since Heini read his book he’s been insane. Who on earth wants a Jewish state? What am I supposed to do in Palestine with all those dreadful people?’
‘They say the Arabs are very courteous and friendly.’
‘Oh, it’s not the Arabs — I don’t suppose they’ll take any notice of us. It’s the other Jews . . . awful ghetto people from the slums of Poland.’
I tried not to smile. ‘Perhaps it won’t happen. It’s not so easy to pull up one’s roots and your husband will miss his patients.’
She shrugged. ‘I know; he’s mad. The best doctor in Vienna and he wants to grow oranges. Oranges! You should see the fuss when I serve fresh fruit at table. He has to have an extra napkin because of the juice, and a special silver knife and finger bowls all over the place — and even then he spends ten minutes in the cloakroom afterwards scrubbing his hands.’ She dabbed
her eyes and sniffed. It’s bad enough having to die and go to heaven without starting on the Promised Land.’
I shut the shop between two and four. Gretl, who only lives ten minutes’ walk away, goes home to lunch but Nini (and I don’t quite know how this happened) has lunch with me.
Today, however, we sat in silence while my assistant glared at me over her goulash. I was about to take a cab to the von Metz palace and deliver the grey grosgrain day dress I had made for the old Countess — and of the Countess von Metz, Nini does not approve.
I remember so well the first time the Countess’s carriage drew up in front of my shop. Nini wasn’t with me yet so no muttered la lanterne from the workroom spoiled the excited, not to say servile, welcome of Gretl, holding open the door. The carriage was ancient, the manservant who let down the steps seemed scarcely able to walk and the Pekinese he deposited on the ground was both incontinent and blind, but the quarterings on the carriage door professed a lineage which went back to Charlemagne.
If I had known then what I know now I would have shut the door resolutely in the face of the disagreeable old woman who followed her dog into the shop. The Countess von Metz is short and squat with a face like an imperious muffin and a purple nose. That first time she stayed for an hour and made me take down every single roll of material I possessed while her Pekinese, cowering under one of my draped tables, made a puddle. When I had finished the dress she’d ordered, she quibbled for six months about the bill and eventually sent her manservant with half the sum she owed me and what she declared was a valuable Chinese vase.
Since then she has never once paid me a fair price for my work and in the last year has sent in a collection of bric-à-brac by way of payment for which the pawnbroker in the Dorotheergasse, shaking his head, scarcely gives me the price of the cloth. And yet I continue to dress this unpleasant, pathologically mean and ugly old lady. Why? It’s not easy to explain . . .
The von Metz palace is one of the smallest in Vienna, ancient and dark. It’s in a suburb overtaken by industry; the north side abuts on to a warehouse and in most of the rooms one needs a light on at midday. The Countess has sold or pawned everything of value: only the white and gold stoves, of which in winter far too few are lit, are still beautiful. She herself is served by a handful of decrepit retainers who are too old (not, I think, too faithful) to leave. She has no husband, no known lover in her past and her only brother, an army colonel, has long been dead. In this gloomy palace this ancient, none too clean lady lives entirely alone, her only ‘treat’ a monthly summons to a meal at Schönbrunn where the Emperor, Franz Joseph, is known to keep the worst table in Europe.
But the Countess von Metz loves clothes. She loves them pointlessly, passionately, for their own sake. Today as I walked through the fusty dark salon towards her boudoir she was waiting with glittering eyes and as I unwrapped the dress her swollen, mottled hands passed in benediction across the ribbed silk.
‘I wish to try it on,’ she said imperiously.
‘Of course, Countess.’
Her creaking maid arrived; the Countess waddled to an embroidered screen and presently emerged. The maid was dismissed and the old lady stood in silence before the cheval glass. In all the rooms of the palace there was no soul who cared for this old woman; no one whose glance would linger on her for an instant; even her dog was dead. Yet as she peered and turned and stared into the mirror, she might have been a girl of nineteen preparing for the ball that was to seal her fate.
‘There is one bow too many,’ she announced at last.
I had seen it already. We had arranged for a row of small grey velvet bows to run down the underskirt from waist to hem. There were twenty-four of these: the arrangement was expected and symmetrical, but the last bow did just crowd the eye a little.
I bent down, snicked the thread, removed the bow.
She nodded as I removed it — the tiny bow on the underskirt of a dress which no one would ever see in a house to which no one ever came. Then she sighed with satisfaction and turned once more to gaze at herself with rapt attention in the glass. And that, I suppose, is why I continue to dress the Countess von Metz.
After my visit to the Countess I felt in need of consolation so when the shop was shut I cleared the table in the workroom and began to cut out the cream silk dress which had come to me in my sleep. It’s a beautiful moment when the material spills out of its bale, voluptuous yet orderly, and one sees in its folds, as in a mirror, the finished form. I’d bought it from an old merchant whose grandfather had travelled the ancient silk route from Antioch through Merv to Samarkand, and on across the desert into China.
He’d told of the women running back and forth in their padded trousers with baskets of fresh-picked mulberry leaves for the worm princelings which spin the priceless silk. For they are the most delicate of creatures, these caterpillars; they cannot abide the smell of meat or fish, loud noise distresses them and they must be protected rigorously from draughts. Even the Empress of China is not too proud to work in the silkworm sheds.
The stories the old merchant had told were all there in the material — and indeed in its price! This will be the most beautiful dress I have ever made but it may just be the most expensive!
Ah, but how fortunate she is, the unknown woman out there, kissing her children goodnight, perhaps, or pulling on her gloves to go out to dinner and not knowing that soon, now, she will be impelled by an irresistible force towards my shop — and the dress that will set a seal on her happiness.
I worked for a couple of hours. Then suddenly I was tired and fetched a jar of apricot preserve out of my store cupboard and went across to visit Frau Schumacher.
Lisl admitted me and, knowing me well, took me first to the room where the little girls lay in their brass beds, ready for the night.
The four youngest in the first room were already asleep. Their nightdresses were white and their coverlets were white and they gave off a sublime smell of talcum powder and Pear’s soap. I walked slowly along the row, feasting my eyes.
Gisi, the baby, whose bed still had bars, her mouth greedily fastened round her comforter . . . Kati, her hair just grown long enough to plait, turned even in sleep towards the baby who by day she pushed and pulled and carried with ruthless maternalism . . . The quicksilver Resi, always in motion, falling out of trees, getting jammed in railings — and now twitching like a greyhound even in sleep . . . and Steffi — the family beauty, lying immaculate on her back. All the little girls are blonde and blue eyed, but Steffi has turned the basic Schumacher ingredients into something that turns heads.
In the next room the two older girls were still awake. Franzi was lying on her side, chewing her pigtail, and though I smiled at her I went quickly past her bed because I knew she was telling herself a story. She is the nervous one who lives in her head; not quite as pretty as the others but the most imaginative.
Mitzi, the eldest, was sitting up in bed holding a heavy book and looking worried.
‘What is it, Mitzi?’ I whispered. ‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s about Patagonia.’ Her sweet, plump face was puckered as she peered at a swirling map of mountains and Fjords. ‘Maia lent it to me.’
‘I thought she wanted to go to Madagascar?’
‘That was last week,’ said Mitzi. She sighed, and my heart went out to her. If there ever was a domestic soul, a Spirit of the Hearth, it was Mitzi Schumacher who begged to be allowed into her mother’s kitchen as other children begged to go to the Prater, but Maia held her entirely in thrall.
Frau Schumacher was on the day bed in her room, crocheting a shawl for the expected son; as welcoming as always, but looking very tired.
‘My dear, how lovely to see you! You always do me good . . . just to look at you! How that blue brings out your eyes!’
‘Ah, but you should see the dress I’m making!’ I launched into a descriptio
n of the rich cream dress. ‘I’m just hoping nothing’ll go wrong on the stock exchange — it’ll take a millionaire to buy it!’
We spoke lightly for a while, but when the baby suddenly kicked, almost causing Frau Schumacher to drop her crochet hook, our eyes met in a look of serious speculation. Was this the kick of the future head of A. Schumacher Timber Merchant and Importer — or was it not?
‘Have you decided on the names yet?’
Frau Schumacher nodded. ‘Ferdinand Anton Viktor,’ she said, rolling the names off her tongue.
‘And if it’s a girl?’
‘Oh please, Frau Susanna, don’t even mention it. I don’t know what I’d do. Last time Albert was away all night and so drunk they had to bring him home in a laundry basket . . . well, you know. And you couldn’t have had a sweeter baby than Gisi.’
‘She’s adorable. They all are.’
‘Well, I promise you, if it’s another girl he’ll go quite mad. He hardly takes any notice of the two youngest even now. I doubt if he’s picked them up since they were born.’
I must have looked fiercer than I intended, being uniquely ill-fitted to regard the birth of a daughter as a misfortune, because Frau Schumacher now felt constrained to defend her husband.
‘It’s the business, you see. The doctor told him again that I mustn’t have any more and if this one’s not a boy, Albert’ll have to take in his brother’s boy from Graz.’
We fell silent considering Herr Schumacher’s deeply masculine world. The yard with its mechanical saws, the carts rumbling across the cobbles, the sheds piled high with planks of beech and sycamore and elm . . .
‘He’s not a very nice child, his brother’s boy. The last time he came he emptied all the water out of the girls’ aquarium and stamped on the goldfish. But the midwife says I’m carrying high — that’s a good sign, isn’t it?’
I put my arms around her, laid my cheek against hers. ‘It’ll be all right, Helene. Whatever happens, it’ll be all right; you’ll see.’