by Eva Ibbotson
‘What I said?’ repeated Tessa, completely bewildered. She put down the basket and stared at him.
‘Your remarks about being a republican. About art making everybody equal. Doesn’t your own hypocrisy ever sicken you? All that rubbish about Schönbrunn: how constrained you were, how unhappy.’
‘I didn’t . . .’ But it seemed impossible to speak. The lump in her throat was too obtrusive – and anyway Guy was far too angry to hear a word she said.
‘No doubt you will find it amusing, but I actually believed you for a while. I thought you truly wanted to escape from the limitations of your upbringing. I thought you wanted to be free – that all this clap-trap of rank and ceremony meant nothing to you.’ He laughed, and it was an amazingly unattractive sound. ‘Yes, I believed you. I was quite touched. I even believed what you told me at Sachers.’
She flushed, staggered at his bad manners in referring to her confidence. ‘What . . . have I done?’ she managed to falter. ‘Why are you like this?’
‘Oh, you’ve done nothing. All is as it should be,’ he jeered. ‘Sixteen quarterings – or is it thirty-two? An impeccable lineage, rejoicing all round.’
‘I cannot help . . . my lineage.’
‘It doesn’t happen to be your lineage that I am referring to.’
But it was necessary now to curtail this interview before his mind registered what his eyes were already seeing: a weary child leaning her head against the side of the lorry as though the weight of it was suddenly too much for her to bear. Did it matter, after all, that she had succumbed to the pressure of her relatives? Maximilian was a fool but he was neither venal nor cruel.
He shrugged. ‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy,’ he said.
Boris, coming out a few minutes later, found Tessa still leaning against the lorry. Not crying, just standing there with the wicker basket lying at her feet.
‘Jesus!’ said Boris, looking at her face, and led her away.
Installed in Boris’s cubby-hole behind the stage, Tessa dutifully swallowed the scalding tea he brewed for her on his samovar, but when he handed her a saucer of yoghurt she managed a ghost of a smile and shook her head.
‘Thank you, you are very kind,’ she said carefully. ‘But I don’t think . . . I really want to live to be very old. You eat it, Boris.’
Boris, as he took the spoon from her, continued to stare at her in consternation. What was all this? Like everyone else he had heard about the events in the rowing-boat, but when she had come up from the lake Tessa had said nothing, just begun in her usual way to throw herself into her work, and no one in the company had ventured to congratulate her, waiting for the news to be official. Then Witzler had come with his bombshell: the news of Farne’s rejection and instructions that they were to pack and leave at once. Even then, in the misery and disappointment that had followed, the tears of the Rhinemaiden, the hurt and shock on the artists’ faces, Boris had held on to the idea that Tessa, at least, would be all right. But if being engaged to the Prince of Spittau was going to make her look like that . . .
‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ he said now. ‘No one can force you.’
But Tessa had not really heard him, caught as she was in the toils of her private nightmare. A nightmare out of which she now visibly tried to lift herself, putting a hand on his arm to say, ‘It will be all right about the company, Boris, I’m sure. Herr Witzler’s so clever. He’ll work something out, you’ll see.’
‘Yes,’ said Boris to reassure her. But he knew rather more about the company’s finances than she did and his view of the future was bleak indeed. ‘I’ll never learn to yodel now,’ thought Boris, and began to eat.
An hour later, the farewell banquet was in full swing. A mood of particular elation and jollity was evident among the guests. The news of Putzerl’s engagement, along with the desire to eat and drink as much as possible before they had to depart and take up the burden of their lives again, kept them happily absorbed. Never had uniforms glittered so brightly, jokes been so deliciously risqué, flirtations so skilfully pursued.
Herr Farne, beside his lovely widow, seemed as everyone noted to be in particularly high spirits. Presently he rose to make a speech: witty, brilliant, of exactly the right length. He announced the date of his own wedding, at the end of October, thanked all those present for the pleasure of their company and with a gallant bow raised his glass to the health and happiness of ‘Absent Friends’.
‘Absent Friends!’ cried the guests, following suit, raising their glasses with meaningful glances and nudges at the two empty places on the long centre table with its priceless epergne, fluted napery and bowls of roses. For both the Prince of Spittau and the Princess of Pfaffenstein were absent from their usual places, a circumstance which the guests found both delightful and amusing.
‘Do you remember,’ whispered the Count of Winterthur to his portly wife, ‘how we crept away after we were engaged? Your Papa tried to find us but we were hiding away in the orangery?’
‘They’ll be in the woods somewhere, hand in hand,’ cooed the Archduchess Frederica, in a good mood for once.
Here she was partly correct. Maxi was in the woods, but not with Tessa. It was the Littlest Heidi who was cradled in his arms, the Littlest Heidi who soothed his hurt and promised to keep secret the news of his rejection until the guests had left and everyone was home again.
‘It’s the fuss,’ said the weary prince. ‘I just can’t face the fuss.’
‘I understand, Your Highness,’ said Heidi and did indeed keep her promise. And when she had comforted him in the only way she knew (and there is certainly no better) they spoke not of the future but of Tom Mix and Buck Jones and the incomparable Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline and Maxi, stroking the golden curls, was comforted and soothed.
For Tessa the way was harder. She had waited until everybody was at dinner before slipping into the deserted chapel, and now knelt at the altar rail with her head in her hands. In the light of the candles, the church sang with gold: gold on the haloes of the saints, gold on the ceiling, on the chalices and goblets on the altar. Gold soaring and swirling on the pillars, on the family crests decorating the pew ends, on the Virgin’s mantle, as though in the darkness someone was giving a great party for God.
‘Help me to bear it,’ prayed Tessa. With her shorn head, her smock, she might have been a lone shepherd boy come down from the hills. ‘Help me not to make a fuss. Help me not to let anyone see how I feel. Help me just to work hard – to work and to work and not to ask anything else. And please, God, keep them safe here, all of them.’
She rose and fetched three votive candles from the box. Carefully, she lit them and placed them in their holders. One for the aunts she was leaving and whom she loved. One for the people she had cared for here. And one other, the tallest, which she did not offer up even in her mind, knowing that God would understand.
There was nothing left to do now except pack a small bag, leave a note in her room and make her way to the station. There was a last train which stopped at Pfaffenstein Halt before crawling on to Neustadt. She would catch that and wait there for the milk train to Vienna. Nothing mattered now except to get away.
Thus Guy, waking next morning with a heavy head, looked out of the window at the gatehouse tower and frowned. What was it that was different? Of course – the bright flag, with its griffin, its lily, its crimson glove, was gone.
14
Guy’s guests departed with considerable reluctance. The Uhlan captain left his spare leg, in striped socks and regimental boots, leaning against the Bühl commode in his room until the last moment, as though in hope of a reprieve from banishment to his leaking hunting lodge in Styria. The Countess Waaltraut snuffled her way, with many a backwards glance, towards the embossed automobile into which her mother’s Bath chair was being lifted. The Archduke Sava thanked Guy, with tears in his eyes, for saving his bear, and promised him the best wolf-hunting in Archangelskaya as soon as the Bolsheviks had b
een deposed.
But at last they left; the castle fell silent, for the opera company too had gone and the aunts kept to the West Tower.
To Guy, the departure of his guests was nothing but a relief and he made no secret of it to David as he thanked his young secretary for what he had done.
‘You were a Trojan, David. Everything went off splendidly. Even the Archduchess Frederica was kind enough to tell me that she had enjoyed herself.’
David smiled. ‘Yes, it seems to have gone off all right. And—’ he looked sideways at his employer, ‘Mrs Hurlingham was happy? It all worked out, didn’t it?’
‘Yes. It worked out exactly as I had anticipated,’ said Guy, looking with total absorption at a buzzard wheeling above the chapel roof. ‘I’m off to Vienna on Monday; I’ve managed to persuade those lazy brutes from the Treasury to cut short their holiday and do some work, and I want to have the documents ready for the League by the end of September. I shall want you to come with me – there are enough people here to look after things and I’m not wasting you on any more of this domestic stuff. I’ve a few ideas about the Metallic Mining Consortium in Bayern, but we shall have to move fast if we’re to get ahead of those Armenian twisters . . .’
He put his arm round the young man’s shoulders and led him away, his voice carrying the familiar adventuring note as he anticipated the battles to come and David listened, immensely relieved. He had not relished the idea of staying behind to see to the wedding.
‘It’s good to be alone, isn’t it?’ said Guy to his fiancée that evening. ‘I hardly had a chance to talk to you while all those people were around.’
‘Yes. Yes, it’s lovely. Only, Guy, if you’re really off to Vienna next week, what am I going to do? I shall be awfully bored without you.’
She smiled caressingly at him, but Guy’s face as he looked at her expressed only amazement. That one could be bored in a three-hundred-room castle, surrounded by forests and mountains, beside a lake full of boats, with a stable full of horses and a vast library, had simply not occurred to him.
‘I thought you might like to get to know the tenants and learn the ropes generally. Visit the local people, perhaps? There’s a list in the factor’s office. And I imagined you’d want to make some arrangements for the wedding.’
‘Yes, I’ll do that, certainly. But visiting . . . I don’t know, Guy, I don’t think they really expect it any more. And it would be a bit silly to go into one of those stuffy little houses and risk picking up an infection. No, what I thought was, why don’t I come with you to Vienna? Mummy and Aunt Dorothy and the others won’t be coming for a while. I could stay at the Grand again with Arthur, it would be perfectly correct.’
‘Well, of course, I would be delighted. But what will you do while I’m working? I’m liable to put in a twelve-hour day.’
‘Shop!’ she said.
The following week, therefore, saw Nerine installed in the Grand Hotel and shopping for her trousseau. ‘I won’t waste your money, Guy,’ she had assured him. ‘You’ll see. You’ll be so proud of me!’ And Guy had smiled and said he was proud of her already and, more importantly, had opened accounts for her in all the better shops.
To the pursuit of her favourite activity, Nerine brought a dedication that was truly impressive. As Ithaca to the wandering Ulysses or Mecca to the Faithful, so were the fitting-rooms of couture houses – with their marvellously reliable supply of full-length mirrors – to Nerine. While shopping she was patient, dedicated, devout. Standing in lace cami-knickers did not chill her, nor did she become overheated when swathed in furs. The distractions that troubled lesser ladies as they stood captive in cubicles – the thought that outside the birds were singing, the glorious summer day passing unseen – never troubled Nerine nor forced her into a hasty choice.
Vienna had always been famous for its taste and though the war had changed many things, the city was still the centre for goods from all over the erstwhile Empire. Now, chauffeured by Morgan and accompanied by Thisbe Purse whom Guy had dragooned into the role of duenna, she bought an evening dress of panelled white satin; another, daringly bare-backed, in tiered blue chiffon, a third in pleated moonbeam taffeta. She bought a hand-painted theatre cape in silver gauze, a plaid suit with a hem a brave ten inches off the ground and (after only the briefest of hesitations) a pair of flame silk lounge pyjamas.
By now she had found women who could copy a Paris design in two days and tiny shops tucked away behind the Graben: a blouse shop which was an Aladdin’s cave of handmade lace and delicate embroidery, a shoe shop where she bought pumps in pigskin and in kid, gold-thonged sandals, lizard court shoes with matching handbags . . .
Never had Nerine been so happy. Freed from the constraints of mourning and the stinginess of the Hurlinghams, she glowed with well-being and health. As she entered the restaurant of the Grand, where Guy came each night to dine with her, every eye in the room followed her to her place.
‘You’re so good to me, darling,’ she would say to him. ‘You spoil me so.’
But Nerine did not only gush. She also freely shared her problems with Guy. One evening, for example, though attacking her schnitzel with undiminished relish, she admitted to being perplexed. That afternoon he had, she told Guy, tried on a full-length chinchilla coat whose soft blue-grey lustre took up, really quite uncannily, the colour of her eyes. She had already made up her mind to buy it when the wretched furrier had produced another coat – a high-collared Russian sable – which had quite simply taken her breath away.
‘What shall I do, Guy? Which one shall I buy? After all, I’m doing all this for you.’
Guy, detaching his mind from a complex calculation involving the land debt of Voralberg, gave the matter his consideration.
‘Buy them both,’ he said.
It was probably the most beautiful thing that anyone had ever said to Nerine, who went on to buy also a sauterne-dyed cape of Bukhara karakul and a jacket of Canadian lynx.
Arthur, meanwhile, had returned to England to escort Mama and Aunt Dorothy to Pfaffenstein for the wedding, but Nerine hardly noticed his departure for she had embarked on a new and profitable venture. Nowadays genteel ladies, mostly old and dressed in black, were often shown into her suite and after low, muffled conversations, departed without the sapphire heart pendant they had had on the day of their engagement, or the pearls their grandmothers had danced in at the Opera Ball. Sometimes she went further afield to visit shrouded villas in Hitzing or Heiligenstadt, returning with yards of priceless lace or small black boxes which she handed to the hotel manager to put in his safe.
After three weeks of chaperoning Nerine, Thisbe cracked.
‘My work’s piling up,’ she said to Guy. ‘I’ve got half a dozen reports to type. And I’m no good at this kind of thing, sir. Someone else who’s interested in clothes ought to go along. She could take her maid. And I can’t—’
But here the devoted Thisbe broke off, unable to criticize Nerine to the employer she adored. It was Morgan, threatening to resign if he was compelled to stand around outside any more fashion houses, who said bluntly, ‘And to my mind it isn’t right, sir, dunning those poor devils out of their possessions. A bargain’s a bargain, but conning an old woman out of her pearls for the price of three hot dinners isn’t right. No wonder they hate us for being British if we carry on like that.’
‘Nerine, I must insist that you ask me for exactly what you need for your purchases,’ said Guy that evening, as they drove in a fiacre down the Prater Hauptallee. ‘We shouldn’t take advantage of these people. Heaven knows, things are enough in our favour as it is. These old women don’t know what things are worth.’
The satisfied languorous look that had been on Nerine’s face ever since she came to shop, left her abruptly.
‘Guy, if your servants intend to snoop and spy on me, I think you should dismiss them. I was only trying to save you money.’
‘Well, don’t, Nerine. I have enough money,’ said Guy.
For a w
hile they drove in silence between the magnificent chestnuts. Then, ‘You mean you don’t mind me actually buying the things?’ said Nerine, peeping at him from under an enchanting cartwheel hat. ‘That isn’t what you mind?’
No, why should I? But I’m here on behalf of the British government. We have to play fair and be seen to play fair. I’ll open a personal account for you at my bank,’ said Guy, almost absently.
Relief flooded Nerine. She could go on, spend more! Looking about her animatedly, she said, ‘Look, Guy – I’m sure we’ve been here before, with Frau Edelnau. That old pavilion over there, don’t you recognize it? It was some kind of feast day.’
‘Yes, it was Easter Sunday and a most glorious day. I picked you a bunch of blue scillas and an old man came and shook his fist at me. Quite right, too. They weren’t really wild, they were planted.’
Nerine was making a tremendous effort but the past did not quite yield itself, as yet, with the clarity she hoped for.
‘What was I wearing?’ she asked.
There was a moment of silence. Then, ‘I don’t remember,’ said Guy.
‘You mean Putzerl has refused you!’ shrieked the Swan Princess. ‘I don’t believe it! I simply don’t believe it! Why, I saw with my own eyes—’
But here the princess shut her beak with a snap, for much as she might despise her son she did not care to admit that she had watched his courtship through a telescope.
Aided by the discretion of the Littlest Heidi, and by Tessa’s nocturnal departure from Pfaffenstein, Maxi had been able to postpone the announcement of his failure until his return to Spittau. Now, however, the day of reckoning had come. Standing on the causeway which alone connected Spittau to the land, the Swan Princess (though swathed almost from top to toe in mosquito netting) nevertheless managed to stare with an amazing amount of venom at her son. Around them the dogs frisked and splashed; frogs plopped incessantly in and out of the moat.
‘I did my best, Mother. I said she could breed water spaniels,’ said Maxi moodily, massaging the labrador’s stomach with his foot.