Jacob was left staring in puzzlement at these somewhat autocratically worded instructions when Miss Purse had gone. Tessa? How had Herr Farne even seen Tessa? Could she be the explanation of the Englishman’s interest in the company? Impossible, surely? But if so… if she had that kind of potential, something must be done. Could he, perhaps, put her in a ballet?

Tessa, when he finally found her in the workshop, was painting the ballcock and chain of a derelict lavatory cistern with silver paint and as he gazed at her, Jacob’s bewilderment increased. Since the première of Pelleas she had taken to wearing a blue beret and now resembled both Jackie Coogan in The Kid and the smaller kind of French railway porter. Surely it was not conceivable that this foreign multi-millionaire with his power and sexuality intended to make her the object of his attentions?

‘Anita!’ shrieked Tessa when she heard what was to befall her. ‘I can’t afford Anita! And anyway, I have to finish this ball and chain for Cavaradossi and then I must go and get some manuscript paper for Herr Klasky and fetch the velvet samples from the warehouse because Frau Pollack has a migraine.’

Jacob frowned. The senior wardrobe mistress had been in a state of almost constant prostration since she had eaten — or very nearly eaten — the ashes of her great-uncle Sandor which had arrived from Budapest for burial and been supposed by her to be an ersatz meat powder of the kind much used in the last years of the war. ‘It’s an order,’ he said to Tessa. ‘The company is paying. Three o’clock.’

Three o’clock accordingly saw Tessa, dressed in a blue skirt and embroidered blouse from Pagliacci and carrying, for some reason, a large biscuit tin, enter the sacred portals of what was arguably the most expensive hairdresser in Europe.

‘Impossible!’ declared Anita, a platinum-blonde Berliner with a contempt for the easy-going Viennese. ‘It is out of the question that I can do anything with you. The hair has not been cut; it has been butchered. I am not a magician. It is too short.’

‘I know, I’m sorry,’ said Tessa. ‘They made me come, but I’ll go.’ She tried to get out of the chair. ‘I’ll grow it again.’

‘Grow it!’ sneered Anita, pushing her down. ‘Are you mad? Do you want to look like an Austrian strudel girl with earphones?’ She gestured to an assistant. ‘A fringe I must have to emphasize the eyes but my God, the back… And of course a Nestlé’s out of the question with that face.’

She began savagely to comb, to slash, to complain…

An hour later Tessa crept out of the shop. The biscuit tin was still clutched under her arm but there was a bewildered look in her eyes. ‘The simplicity which costs no less than everything’ is a phrase much beloved of saints and mystics who use it to describe the pursuit of a spiritual life. This simplicity Anita had brought to Tessa’s hair. The minutely calculated sweep of the silken fringe above the eyes, the curving fronds lapping the pointed ears, the soft strands nestling into the hollow at the back of the neck suggested now a very different kind of urchin: a winged messenger, the young Mercury perhaps, or Ariel.

‘You look charming.’

It had not been Guy’s intention to pursue his acquaintance with Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress. But leaving the Treasury on a personal errand he had recalled his instructions to Thisbe and, on an impulse, crossed the road to Anita’s. Now he too was startled. Tessa had been not so much transformed as revealed. The vulnerable little face, the delicate bones, the strange air of puzzlement as she tried to comprehend what the mirror had shown her moved Guy strangely. He had the absurd feeling that as one can see in young babies the throbbing of their pulse beneath the fontanelle, so he could put his hand on the bronze and shining head and feel the beating of her soul.

‘She is not ready,’ thought Guy. ‘Poor child, what have I done?’ And lightly he said, ‘May I relieve you of your burden?’ For the tin she was carrying, adorned with a painting of the former Empress Elizabeth in a tiara, was large.

‘Oh no, thank you. I’m just going to the Stadtpark to release the mice.’

‘The mice?’ said Guy, nevertheless taking the tin.

Tessa nodded. ‘You see, when I first came to work in the theatre they had those traps that break their backs, only sometimes… they… didn’t. So I borrowed some of those where the mice go in through those bristle tunnels that point backwards, you know, and then they can’t get out. Only then, of course, you have the mice.’

Guy, steering her across the road with a light hand under her elbow, said he saw this.

‘So I let them out in the Stadtpark,’ she said, ‘when I can get away. But please… I’m sure I’m delaying you?’

‘Not at all. I was only going to buy a birthday present for my foster-mother in England.’

They had entered the park where lilacs mingled their heavy, fragrant clusters with the golden tresses of the laburnums, little girls bowled their hoops and a troop of firemen in Ruritanian uniforms were marching towards the bandstand.

‘Are they musical mice?’ Guy enquired. ‘I mean, are we making for the Johann Strauss statue? Or the Schubert Memorial?’

Tessa smiled and shook her head. ‘I usually try to get down to the banks of the river — it’s steep there, a sort of cutting and not many people go. It’s the river Wien, did you know? Mostly it flows underground but here it comes to the surface for a little.’

‘Yes.’ Guy did know. He had come here with his poems to Nerine and floated them down the sluggish, sleepy little river which was nevertheless more truly Vienna’s own than the Danube, for the city had been named for it.

‘Here?’ he asked.

Tessa nodded and Guy opened the box.

‘I don’t want you to think I’m sentimental,’ she said as six damp and not noticeably grateful mice lurched away over the gravel. ‘If it were possible to eat them, I wouldn’t mind killing them. But I don’t think it is?’

‘No,’ said Guy gravely, as the last of the thumb-sized rodents vanished behind the stones. ‘I don’t see them as a really useful source of meat.’ But he wondered, suddenly, if the girl was ever actually hungry. Well, at least for a week at Pfaffenstein he would see that she was decently housed and fed.

As they scrambled up the bank, the band began to play. A waltz, of course… And drawn by the music, smiling at the firemen perspiring in their uniforms, they came to a halt before the bandstand at which Strauss himself had played.

‘I know the words in English,’ said Tessa proudly. And in a small, true voice she sang the self-congratulatory, foolish refrain.


‘Oh, what a piece of Heaven is this!

Vienna is bliss, Vienna is bliss!’

She smiled up at him. ‘Not very poetical, is it?’

No… all the same.’ He looked down at the small, sleek head striking fire from the sun. ‘Is it like that for you? A piece of heaven, this city?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it is like that for me. Heaven in springtime. Heaven in C major. Yes, sometimes it is like that for me.’

The next moment her dreamy pensive look had gone. An ex-serviceman on crutches had come up to beg and as he saw the note Guy put in his hand he exploded into fulsome gratitude.

‘Thank you, Herr Baron. God bless the Herr Baron. May the Herr Baron know nothing but happiness.’

‘Oh!’ said Tessa, her eyes kindling, when the man had hobbled away. ‘You shouldn’t let him do that!’

‘Do what?’

‘Grovel like that! Call you Herr Baron. This is a republic. Titles were abolished officially two years ago.’

‘I don’t think you will change human nature with political decrees,’ said Guy, who had always been rather amused by the Viennese habit of conferring titles on anyone they wished to flatter. ‘People will always be snobs.’

‘No, they won’t! They can be educated. When I am the first woman director of the Burg Theatre I’m going to put on plays which—’ she broke off. ‘I’m sorry, that was rude. Only, I am a very deep republican. You were on your way to buy a present?’

Guy accepted the change of topic. He nodded and they began to stroll towards the gate. ‘For my foster-mother. The woman who brought me up.’ He frowned. Guy had sent sables and mink and diamonds in a spate to the little house in Byker to which Martha stuck with quiet obstinacy. She received these with every protestation of delight, but he knew full well that they went into a cupboard in the back room until some friend or neighbour needed them for a wedding or a funeral. ‘I’ve sent her all the usual things: fur coats, jewels, but she just puts everything away.’

‘What is she like?’

Guy hesitated. ‘Sandy hair. Grey eyes. Plump. Talks broad Tyneside, smells of green soap…’ His voice grew warmer as he began to describe the woman who was Martha Hodge.

Tessa was silent when he had finished. ‘And she brought you up?’ she said at last. ‘You were really and truly an orphan?’

Guy laughed at the palpable longing in her voice.

‘Really and truly.’ He described his origins. ‘And I feel bound to tell you that it is most unlikely that I shall turn out to be a nobleman in disguise. Lost princes are extremely thin on the ground in Tyneside.’

But Tessa’s sense of humour had temporarily deserted her. ‘You’re so fortunate! To make your own life… always to have been free.’ Her dark eyes were shadowed with longing. ‘As for your Mrs Hodge, I know exactly what she would like. But you must think only about pleasing her.’

‘What?’

Tessa told him.

‘Good God,’ said Guy, outraged. ‘I couldn’t do that.’