‘Could I perhaps get Your Highness some more champagne?’ suggested the Littlest Heidi when they returned, defeated, to the stage. ‘There are still bottles and bottles in the great hall.’

Like everybody else, she knew that the prince was to marry Tessa and thoroughly approved the match. She was a modest girl and when she gazed as she gazed now — rapt and awed — into his face, it was not marriage that she had in mind.

Maxi indicated his approval. ‘Only you will want some too. We’ll go together.’ Damn it, there were limits to what a fellow could do and there was still tomorrow. ‘I know a short cut,’ he said.

The ‘short cut’ — through the trophy room, the picture gallery and the library — was, perhaps, not a sensational time-saver but Heidi made no demur. For the library, when they reached it, was quite deserted and splendidly provided with statues, niches and literary nooks. At exactly the right moment, she stumbled over a fluffy Afghan rug and was prevented from falling by the heroic prince. With exactly the right, almost imperceptible wriggle she indicated that his hands, now resting on the indescribable delights of the softly rounded rabbit tail, were not giving offence. And because the prince’s hands were now engaged, she felt emboldened to enquire whether His Highness would not wish her to loosen his collar, knowing how much the military suffered in their uniforms.

‘You can call me… Maximilian,’ murmured the Prince, as her plump little hands fluttered up to his throat.

But this the Littlest Heidi, though otherwise so totally obliging, felt unable to do.

Nerine was feeling aggrieved. She had worked ceaselessly and unstintingly all that day on her surprise for Guy. After all, she was not seventeen any longer; it had been no easy task to produce the miracle that was her own appearance en grande tenue. Then, just because she had dozed off for a few minutes at the end of that absolutely interminable opera, Guy was in a mood. She could tell he was although he had said nothing, only escorted her up to the boudoir which adjoined the state bedroom. Naturally, she had not been able to face a party which consisted largely of drunken theatricals, but though Guy had accompanied her upstairs, accepting the excuse that she was tired, he showed no inclination to leave her alone and let her prepare for bed.

‘Are you cross because I dropped off for a minute?’ she asked. ‘Because really I can’t see why. I’ve never pretended to be brainy, you know.’

‘No, I’m not cross. Only… Nerine, just how much does music mean to you?’

She shrugged and suppressed a yawn. If she did not get a full eight hours’ sleep she would have rings under her eyes tomorrow, and there was still the farewell banquet on the following night.

‘Well, I like it very much. To dance to, I mean. And when Charles was so ill and I never got about, Mama took me to Chu Chin Chow and I enjoyed that very much. In fact, that was where I met Lord Frith,’ said Nerine, but saw that this was not a point to pursue. ‘Mama went to Chu Chin Chow four times, actually, so you can’t say we’re not a musical family. But after all, dear, I am English.’

‘English?’ echoed Guy.

‘Yes, dear, English,’ said Nerine with quiet pride. ‘And the English have never been fond of opera, have they? It’s foreigners, really, who go in for that. Germans and Italians like opera and Russians like ballet. But in England it’s not like that. You don’t have to go to the opera socially, like you do in Vienna, to be seen. You go to Ascot and Henley and Goodwood. Of course, I’ll come with you while we’re living here — to the Vienna Opera, I mean. I quite see that it’s necessary here. But quite honestly, all those priests droning on and that rather ridiculous birdcatcher…’

‘Yes.’ Guy was perfectly aware, at one level, of the absurdity of the art he loved, and saw without rancour what Nerine meant. ‘Idiotic of me not to have asked you. You see, when we met that first time at the opera…’ He broke off and stood twisting a candlestick over and over in his hands. ‘I always remembered how you sighed when the curtain went up. Always, I remembered that.’

‘Well, so would you sigh,’ said Nerine, suddenly exasperated, ‘if you faced nearly four hours of boredom. Good heavens, Guy, it never ended at that academy. Concerts where funny little men almost fell off their piano stools, all that interminable trudging through museums in the heat… I never pretended,’ cried Nerine, ‘to be intellectual and clever. I never pretended it!’

Guy bowed his head. The truth of what she said was absolute, she had not pretended. The foolishness, the idiocy, had all been his. He had fallen in love not just with her appearance but with a response — wholly imagined, he could see now — to beauty and art. Tessa’s coup de foudre as she overheard the choirboys at Schönbrunn, Jacob’s experience at Carmen, had had its counterpoint when Martha took him to the pantomime in Newcastle for the first time. Just seven years old, Guy had emerged from the dirty, Doric portico of the Theatre Royal in a state of trance and had not come down to earth for several days. But what did his own passion for music and the theatre have to do with Nerine? He had been blind and foolish, and worse than that, for to twist another person into one’s own image is to do them an incalculable injury.

Well, she should not suffer. Never would he reveal his mistake nor tell her what hopes he had had of a future in which his wealth would serve the purposes of art. From now on he would take her as she was: a lovely woman who had promised him nothing and owed him nothing but her own existence.

He put down the candlestick and picked up one of her hands. ‘No, you never pretended and you shall never need to,’ he said, playing with her fingers. ‘As for operas — we’ll have no more of them!’

She smiled, relieved. ‘Well, frankly, dear, I think Mama and Aunt Dorothy would be a bit horrified if they found they had to sit through an opera when they came to the wedding. And really, there’s no harm done, is there? Your guests enjoyed tonight and the company have been well paid — too well paid, I shouldn’t wonder. They will probably boast of their week at Pfaffenstein for the rest of their lives. But since we’re talking about music, dearest,’ said Nerine, pleased to show that she did after all know something about the subject, ‘which would you prefer at our wedding? The Mendelssohn March? Or the one from Lohengrin?’

Guy smiled: a smile that did not quite manage to reach his eyes. ‘I leave that to you, my dear. Either will do perfectly well for me.’

13

On the last day of Guy’s house party, the green and glacial waters of Lake Pfaffenstein saw two momentous though disconnected events.

Not far from the southern shore of the lake lay a wooded island on which the fifth Prince of Pfaffenstein had built a classic temple, following his return from the Grand Tour. Boats to journey to this and other islands, and boatmen to row them, had been provided by Guy for his guests. At an hour when most of them still slept, Klasky, carrying a briefcase full of manuscript paper and wearing his habitual dark suit, silk socks which had belonged to Gustav Mahler and patent leather shoes, was rowed across to this peaceful spot.

Dismissing the boatman, instructing him to return at lunchtime, Klasky repaired to the bench in front of the temple. Nature, always abundant in the month of June, smiled at the Hungarian but she smiled in vain. Cuckoos called, dragonflies shimmered, marguerites, balsam and meadow-sweet scented the grass by the water’s edge, but all to no avail. Klasky’s impassioned eyes were turned on a wholly inward vision as his thin white fingers raced across the lined paper. Sometimes he hummed — a distracted sound as of a deprived and atonal bee — sometimes he whistled. Midges bit him, lavender beetles dashed across his shoe. Caught in a white heat of creative fervour, he saw nothing that did not come from within.

For it was coming! The breakthrough when he had changed the hero from a policeman to a railway porter had been followed by one even more fundamental, when he had discovered that by changing the B flat in his tone row to G the whole musical structure of the work fell into place. Since then, he had lacked only the vision for the chorus that would conclude his opera. The heroine, betrayed by the mill-owner, has hanged herself. Her husband, the railway porter, has gone mad. The mill-owner, wrongly believing that he has consumed his child in a fricassée, has jumped out of the window. The action then is over, but it is left to the plate-layers, engine-greasers and lavatory attendants who represent the simple, uncorrupted spirit of the people, devoid of capitalism and desire, to sum up the inner meaning of the tragedy.

The theme of this last chorus had continued to elude the composer. The lament of the captive Israelites in Nabucco, the paean of the prisoners in Fidelio, were to pale into insignificance beside the yea-saying life-enhancement of these signalmen and engine-greasers assembled on a railway platform somewhere between Vlodz and Kranislav.

Klasky had despaired of doing justice to this last, all-important vision. But as Witzler had hoped, the fresh air, the excellent food, above all the absence of Klasky’s latest mistress — a voracious Burg Theatre actress — had done the trick. His élan vital undisturbed, Klasky, in spite of the previous night’s excesses, had woken at dawn with the chorus in his mind. Now, discord followed meaningful discord as the voices of the oppressed came to him in an unbroken stream of sound.

The boatman returned and was waved away by the perspiring Hungarian. The shadows lengthened…