Magic Flutes

by Eva Ibbotson

  It was the cheque for this sum – which Tessa had insisted on writing – that had been returned three days earlier, with the information that Her Highness’s credit with the Bank of Austria was now officially exhausted.

  The incident led to a spate of calamities. Two black-clad gentlemen arrived in Witzler’s office, claiming to represent the Princess of Pfaffenstein, and informed him that if there were any more attempts to obtain money from Her Highness an action would be brought against him for exerting pressure on a minor. Jacob’s creditors closed ranks and the owners of the theatre wrote and ordered him to vacate the premises on the twenty-first of October, the date scheduled for the première of Fricassée.

  Now the company was assembled on the stage of the theatre in a tableau vivant of despair. Outside, the newspapermen waited like piranhas, but inside it was silent and dark. The phone, with its endless, doom-filled shrilling, had been cut off earlier in the day; the great arc lamps, lined up for a lighting rehearsal of Fricassée, were extinguished.

  ‘Cheer up, ’ighness,’ said one of the stage-hands, giving Tessa’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘It aint your fault. You’ve bin a bloomin’ marvel!’

  ‘Yes, truly,’ said the Littlest Heidi, forgetting her own troubles in order to comfort her friend. ‘You’re a heroine.’

  But Tessa, perched like a disconsolate fledgling on a luggage trolley, was beyond comfort. Outwardly silent, inwardly she seethed with rage and frustration. If only she had been of age . . . if she had been just one year older, she could have defeated the beastly lawyers. There were still a few securities she could have sold. She could have kept going somehow till Fricassée redeemed their fortunes. As it was, she had failed art, her friends, everything . . .

  Jacob, white with dyspepsia and guilt, paced between the scaffolding, occasionally coming to stand before his under wardrobe mistress like a whipped spaniel. Even now, the bailiffs were probably stripping his villa in Hitzing; prison was a distinct possibility, but he was used to it whereas Tessa . . .

  The blow was shattering for everyone. Raisa knew perfectly well that she could not go to Schalk, who had his own stable of dazzling sopranos; nor would Pino be welcome at La Scala as he had frequently boasted. The stage-hands and technicians, close enough to the breadline at the best of times, faced almost certain unemployment. Yet everyone now set themselves to comfort Tessa.

  ‘Never will we forget your sacrifice!’ declared the Rhinemaiden. She spoke with authority on the subject, for her own pearls lay unredeemed in the pawn shop in the Dorotheagasse.

  ‘Here, have a piece of this,’ said Boris, handing her half his gherkin sandwich. ‘I’ve told you, you don’t eat enough.’

  Bubi, who had been sitting at Tessa’s feet, now raised his head. He had commandeered Pino’s peaked porter’s cap and was engaged in an engrossing game of tram conductors with Tessa’s cheque stubs for tickets, but it had become clear to him that he had a contribution to make.

  ‘Bubi loves Tessa,’ he announced. ‘Bubi loves Tessa an awful lot.’ He pondered. ‘More than vanilla kipferl, Bubi loves Tessa.’

  But as Tessa, managing to smile, replied in kind, there came a clarion call from Raisa.

  ‘Ver is beink Zoltan?’ she enquired, in a voice throbbing with portent.

  ‘Yes, where is Klasky?’

  The conductor had stridden purposefully from the theatre at midday, promising to return quickly, but that had been many hours ago.

  ‘I zink per’aps ’e ’as shooted into ’imself,’ said Raisa, not without a certain satisfaction.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Jacob rushed towards the phone, then remembered that it had been cut off. That Klasky had done himself some kind of injury was not impossible. To see the masterpiece he had created with such anguish brought to naught was quite enough to unhinge this sensitive genius with his wild Magyar blood.

  ‘Go on! Klasky couldn’t shoot a barn door from ten centimetres away,’ said the first flautist whose vendetta against the Hungarian, originating in a dispute about tempi in Meistersinger, was now in its fifth year.

  ‘Shall I go round to his house?’ said Tessa anxiously, slipping down from the trolley. ‘It wouldn’t take long.’

  But at that moment, entering dramatically from stage left, Klasky himself appeared.

  One glance at his wild hair, his burning countenance, made it clear that the composer of Fricassée had been through some ultimate and purging experience, some dark night of the soul, from which he had now emerged to pursue a high and noble task.

  For Klasky had not staggered haphazardly into the theatre. He was looking for someone.

  In silence, they watched as he clambered over the railway platform, skirted the signal-box, fell over a fire-bucket and then righted himself.

  He was making for Tessa. He had now reached her and come to rest before her as she stood quietly looking at him, puzzlement in her auburn eyes.

  ‘Here,’ he said. The word seemed to have been forced out of him. ‘I’ve been to fetch it. It’s for you.’

  He had put his hand into the pocket of his suit to take out a small, black box. At this point, however, emotion overtook him and he had to feel in his other pocket for a monogrammed handkerchief with which to blow his nose. Then, with a last purposeful thrust, he put the box into Tessa’s hand.

  ‘No!’ Tessa’s low, startled exclamation was nevertheless audible in every corner of the stage. ‘No, please . . . I couldn’t!’

  But the Hungarian was in control again. ‘Yes,’ he said gruffly. ‘I want you to have it. To show my gratitude for what you tried to do. It’s yours.’

  Now, everyone had crowded round. There were ‘Oh’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ from all sides, and the Rhinemaiden sighed like the sea.

  For the gesture that Klasky had made, torn as it was from the very depths of his being, was the right gesture, the only one. Something had been said to the Princess of Pfaffenstein which could have been said in no other way.

  Thus Tessa, on her last day as Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress, looked down at the object held in her trembling hand. Mottled, a little diseased-looking, frail – and valued beyond any jewel in Christendom – the waistcoat button of Ludwig van Beethoven himself.

  Guy, with his entourage, reached Vienna on a misty, mid-October afternoon. His part in the negotiations had been successfully accomplished. The League had granted the Austrian Republic an enormous loan with which to stabilize her currency and put her affairs to rights. Patiently enduring the eulogies in the continental press, the banquets and fulsome speeches which followed, Guy had only felt compelled to decline, with scrupulous politeness, the Great Cross of the Order of St Stephen which the grateful Austrian government endeavoured to confer on him.

  Immensely relieved to be done with it all, he stepped down from the Geneva Express.

  ‘Hurry the stuff out,’ he ordered David. ‘There’s a train at three, I think, that gets a connection to Pfaffenstein. Check the times – I’m going to get a paper.’

  David was back in a few minutes. ‘I’ve reserved a first-class compartment, and the cases are in. We leave in ten minutes.’

  No answer. Guy was reading with total concentration an article in the Wiener Presse, his face drawn into its most satanic lines. ‘Get the luggage out again,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘Take it to Sachers. Wait for me there, and Thisbe, too.’

  ‘Is anything—’ began David, but the only reply was the paper thrust into his hand. He read:

  KLOSTERN THEATRE CLOSES ITS DOORS

  PATRON PRINCESS RUINED

  THE LOSS OF MY OPERA IS WORLD’S LOSS

  SAYS KLASKY

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ thought David. He looked up but Guy had already vanished, lost in the crowd making its way to the taxi rank.

  Jacob was in his office, clearing his desk. The Rhine-maiden, supposedly helping him, was sniffing dolorously over old programmes and mementoes of former glory, removing them from the waste-paper basket as soon as Jacob put them in. Under the desk, in a nest of
discarded newspaper cuttings, Bubi was being a mouse.

  Already, even in so short a time, the theatre bore marks of desertion. The posters with their ‘Cancelled’ notices flapped dismally; the red plush seats were shrouded in tarpaulins; there was dust everywhere and it was bitterly cold.

  Into this dismal scene Farne burst unannounced, exuding energy and power and sending Jacob leaping exultantly to his feet.

  ‘Herr Farne! Welcome, welcome! Come in! A chair for Herr Farne, liebchen!’ he cried, sweeping a pile of music on to the floor.

  His squashed, despairing face was transformed. Herr Farne had heard of their plight; this famous music-lover could not bear to think of the demise of the Klostern Theatre; he had come to pay the six months’ rent; he was going to finance Fricassée. They were saved!

  The illusion lasted exactly as long as Farne’s first words.

  ‘If you imagine I would sit down in the same room as you,’ said the Englishman, raking Jacob with his disquieting eyes, ‘you must be an even greater fool than I took you for. You deserve to burn in hell for what you did to Tessa.’

  ‘I . . . she offered . . . I tried to refuse, but—’

  ‘You don’t seem to have tried very hard. Bankrupting yourself is your own business, but bankrupting a girl of twenty happens to be another matter. It would give me the greatest pleasure to see you in jail.’

  But Jacob had surfaced again. ‘Herr Farne, quite a small sum, now, could pull us round. Well, a fairly small sum. Klasky’s opera is undoubtedly a masterpiece and—’

  ‘Klasky’s opera doesn’t interest me in the slightest and if you think I’d lift a finger to save you after the way you’ve behaved, you must be out of your mind.’

  ‘But then . . . why have you come?’

  ‘I came to find Tessa. Where is she?’

  Jacob’s eyes flickered. If Farne was interested in Tessa, there was hope after all. More than hope! If Farne married Tessa, then Pfaffenstein, that lost Paradise, would be most gloriously regained. But no . . . the date of the Englishman’s wedding to the widow had been announced. A famous couturier had given an interview about ‘The Dress’.

  ‘She’s not in the theatre,’ he said. ‘She came here this morning to see if she could help, but then she went to visit one of our dancers who has not been well, Heidi Schlumberger.’

  Guy indicated his lack of interest in Heidi Schlumberger with a contemptuous shrug. ‘Is she coming back?’

  Jacob spread out his hands. ‘There is nothing to do here, Herr Farne,’ he said wretchedly. ‘We are finished.’

  ‘Then give me her address.’

  ‘Number 15, Friedhofgasse, Apartment 4. It’s near the Central Cemetery.’

  Then, prompted by some evil genius to try once more, he said, ‘Herr Farne, we did a beautiful Flute for you. Couldn’t you just lend—’

  Guy had reached the door, but now he turned. ‘If you dare to come crawling to me ever again after what you’ve done, I shall personally throw you downstairs. What’s more—’

  He was interrupted by a heart-rending wail, followed by a storm of sobbing.

  Bubi’s peaceful existence as a mouse named Heini had been progressively eroded by the angry voices coming from above the desk. The voices of people who did not like each other, who were cross with Papa and who were going to make Mama cry. He knew all about people like that. They were people in dark suits and bowler hats who came to the house and took things away. He staggered out from beneath the desk, his blond curls awry, his small face contorted by grief.

  ‘Bailiffs!’ cried Bubi pitifully. ‘Bailiffs!’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ The terrorizing of small children was not in Guy’s itinerary. He picked up Bubi, carried him to the desk and set him down. ‘I’m not a bailiff,’ he said. Impatient to be off, he took a short cut to solace. ‘Feel in my pocket,’ he ordered.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Either.’

  Bubi’s starfish hand vanished and reappeared with a match-case of wax vestas, a propelling pencil and then, a most marvellous thing: a glittering, golden fish with shining eyes.

  ‘Fish?’ said Bubi longingly.

  ‘It’s a dolphin. Press the tail.’

  Bubi pressed, and out of the wondrous creature’s mouth there shot a steely tongue.

  ‘Is it mine?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Guy. Abandoning without regret the gold and onyx cigar-piercer presented to him by the Brazilian President, he left.

  He found the Friedhofgasse easily, but his first view of the aunts appalled him. They looked shrunken and unwell, quite changed from the autocratic ladies of Pfaffenstein. And Tessa was not there.

  ‘We think she may have gone to see Frau Richter,’ said the Duchess.

  ‘She was a little bit upset,’ said the Margravine. ‘Not Frau Richter,’ she explained, ‘for whom it is no longer possible to be upset, but Tessa. There has been a little bit of trouble at the theatre, you may have heard. And she came back unexpectedly and—’

  The Margravine subsided, frowned down by a look from her sister-in-law. But it had been a wretched business, Tessa coming back without warning at midday and finding them like that – she with her skirt hitched up, washing down the bathroom, and Augustine cleaning the windows. Tessa had been rather unpleasant and wanted to know what had happened to the maid, then she had started snooping generally, asking why the stove was unlit and what they had had for lunch. And while it was true that kneeling was bad for her arthritis, there had been no need for Putzerl to make quite such a fuss.

  ‘Who’s Frau Richter?’ enquired Guy.

  ‘She is a lady of whom Putzerl is particularly fond. But dead. In the cemetery,’ explained the Margravine. She nodded at the vast graveyard, stretching away outside the windows.

  We think she may have gone there because she didn’t take Quin-Quin,’ said the Duchess, motioning at the pug who, almost as homesick as the aunts, had let himself go and was wrapped in nothing more impressive than a blanket.

  Compelled by the barest civility to give the old ladies the news of Pfaffenstein for which they craved, Guy did not reach the gates of the cemetery until a quarter of an hour later.

  The Central Cemetery was vast, mossy and overgrown. He walked quickly between the serried gravestones of black marble and grey stone, past urns and faded wreaths, past lichened angels collapsed in grief . . .

  The afternoon was drawing to a close. Tousled bunches of asters and marigolds glowed on the green mounds; trees of russet and gold stood out against the sombre darkness of holly and yew.

  Though he traversed the paths systematically, passing Schubert’s grave and Beethoven’s sarcophagus, there seemed to be no sign of her. Then, at last, at the far end of the cemetery, he saw the small, well-remembered figure, sitting on a bench. A copper beech spread its branches over her bent head; a red squirrel played beside her on the grass. It was a scene of total silence, limned in the colours of autumn and in autumn’s essence for her sadness, like those of the sculptured angels who wept and mourned over the graves, was unmistakable.

  Noting, with a dull lack of surprise, the rapid beating of his heart, Guy walked with his silent, panther gait towards her. Then his foot disturbed a pebble. She looked up, saw him and instantly, incredibly, was transformed. Everything about her: the eyes, the line of her mouth, the set of her shoulders proclaimed an uncontrollable happiness, and she rose to her feet and waited silently as he came towards her.

  Guy’s face as he approached showed no answering joy but only shock. I must not touch her, I must not touch her once, he thought; not for an instant.

  ‘I saw what happened in the papers,’ he said. ‘It’s true, is it? You’re ruined? All the money from Pfaffenstein’s gone?’

  ‘Well, not quite. Not all of it . . . But they said I wasn’t of age and threatened all sorts of things. You know what lawyers are – everything that’s awful and always for your own good.’

  ‘Tessa, let me help you. That’s why I came.’

  She shook her
head and some of the happiness drained from her face. For a moment she had thought, wildly, that he was free and had come to claim her.

  ‘You were mad,’ he said harshly. ‘Mad to do it.’

  ‘You did it at Pfaffenstein.’

  ‘I have a great deal more money than you. And if I had retained Witzler I would have kept him on a very firm rein, I assure you. As a matter of fact I did think of using Pfaffenstein for what you once said – serving music. I couldn’t imagine that Nerine and I would want to live in more than a very small part of the castle, and anyway my work keeps me travelling a great deal. But when I found that Nerine didn’t care for music, it became absurd, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was looking down at something she had been holding in her hand: a single, russet leaf from the beech tree above their heads. ‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘I used to try to stick the leaves back on the trees. I couldn’t bear autumn. I couldn’t bear them to fall.’

  ‘And now?’

  She shrugged. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look what people have to bear.’

  She led him a little way down a mossy path to a plain green grave with a simple headstone.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Guy. ‘Frau Richter? Your friend?’

  Together, they looked at the inscription.

  IN LOVING MEMORY OF

  Bertha Richter, died 1896 aged 75 years

  AND OF HER CHILDREN

  Hannah Richter, died 1843 aged 1 year

  Graziella Richter, died 1845 aged 6 months

  Herrman Richter, died 1846 aged 1 year

  Brigitta Richter (Bibi) died 1849 aged 3 months

  Klaus Richter, died 1865 aged 24 years

  ALSO OF HER HUSBAND

  Johannes Richter, 1st Hungarian Jaeger Regiment, killed in action at Königsberg, July 1886

  GOD HAVE MERCY

  ‘Yes,’ said Guy. ‘God had better have mercy, there.’

  ‘When things get bad,’ she said, ‘I think of Frau Richter who just went on living and living after all those children had died. Look, she lived to be seventy-five! Think of all the Bertha Richters in here . . . you can feel their courage, somehow, coming up through the ground.’ She turned and led him slowly back to the bench. ‘These are the people I come for when I’m down, not Beethoven or Schubert. The great people are for the times when it’s good to be alive.’