Guy commiserated but said, ‘Why on earth are you selling? I thought Tessa was bringing you enough to do it up. Doesn’t she care for the place?’

‘Oh, she cares for it all right. Tessa’s very fond of Spittau, always was. Likes the frogs and all those things. Fond of the people, too. And the dogs, of course. She offered me some money to do the roof, but of course I couldn’t take it. If she’d been going to marry me it would have been different, but a man’s got his pride.’

Guy stared at him. ‘What on earth do you mean? Surely you and Tessa are engaged to be married?’

‘No, we aren’t.’

‘But everybody—’

‘Everybody,’ said Maxi, with unaccustomed asperity, ‘seems to have been watching out of some telescope or other and saw Tessa give me a kiss. But it was just her way of saying she was sorry. I’m absolutely sick of people coming up and congratulating me.’

‘Yes, I can see that.’ An image of Tessa leaning against the lorry, white and silent, while he upbraided her, rose up before him. He dismissed it and said, ‘What’s she doing, then?’

‘Well, that’s just it. She’s financing that blasted Hungarian, and if I’d known—’

‘You mean she’s living with Klasky?’ said Guy, and at his voice Maxi looked up, his forehead wrinkled. What was the matter with the chap? He was supposed to be so cool and clever.

The prince shook his head. ‘She’s back with Witzler’s company and she’s supporting this opera about…’ But at the thought of what Fricassée was about, he gave up. ‘You’ve never heard such stuff. Railway porters and engine-greasers with fits, and music like a lot of cats with a throat disease. Got poor Little Heidi in a boiler suit—’ But here the prince broke off, for as a matter of fact Heidi in dungarees with a spanner had looked quite peculiarly ravishing. ‘And Tessa’s paying for it all. Does nothing but sign cheques all day long and looks as peaked as a starved rat, and if you tell her she’s a fool, she just bites off your head and says it’s a privilege to serve art and people like us ought to do it.’

‘Oh, my God!’ said Guy.

‘That’s exactly it,’ agreed Maxi. ‘My uncle ruined himself with a ballet company, and opera’s a damn sight worse. They say Witzler’s in all sorts of trouble. Borrowed like mad because he thought you were going to set him up at Pfaffenstein and now they’re closing in on him. Shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t all end up in jail, and Tessa along with them, and what Mother will say then…’

Guy was standing perfectly still, staring down at the contours of the paving stones.

‘Fortunately, she’s left half her money in trust for her aunts,’ Maxi continued, ‘so she’ll get that when they die. But if I’d known what she was going to do, I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t have let her repair the roof. At least she would have had somewhere to come to if she was in trouble.’

Guy lifted his head. ‘Would you still marry her, even now? Even if she loses all her share of the money?’

Maxi flushed. ‘Certainly I would. I’d marry Putzerl any time. I’m dashed fond of her. If you’ve got Putzerl in a boat you don’t need a—’

But Guy, unequal to hearing about Putzerl’s ability to imitate a call duck, now interrupted him to say, ‘You owned a number of other properties, didn’t you? Places that were confiscated by the Allies. Where were they?’

‘Well, there was one at Hammerfelden, that’s near Kiel; and there was Pstattin, on the Oder, in Pomerania. The palace here in the Himmelgasse was sold by my father before the war, unfortunately.’

Guy shook his head. ‘We won’t get any change out of Berlin. Wasn’t there anything in the Affiliated Zones? Alsace-Lorraine? Trieste? Somewhere outside the direct military areas?’

‘There was a chateau in Alsace,’ Maxi admitted. The Chateau d’Arboras. Quite a small place — not more than eighty rooms, I’d say, but the land was good. About twenty thousand hectares, mostly vineyards. We used to make a very decent sort of wine.’

‘And you’ve never claimed compensation from the Land Redistribution Trust in Strasbourg?’

Maxi shook his head. ‘I asked our lawyers if anything could be done, but they said it was hopeless.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Schweinhofer and Brillerman, in the Kohlmarkt. They’re a very old firm.’

‘Old, idle and useless,’ said Guy tersely. He had taken out his notebook and begun to write. ‘You’ve got a chance, I’d say quite a good one. You’ll have to plead loss of livelihood but the vineyards will come in handy there. Take this to Hermann Rattinger at Number 12, Borseplatz, and tell him to look particularly at paragraph 8 in section 15. Don’t let anyone except Rattinger touch it.’ He looked up and saw Maxi’s face contorted by the effort of taking in so much information. ‘I’ll give him a ring myself, tomorrow. You won’t get much, but if you can do the necessary repairs you ought to get by and when your mother dies I dare say you’ll find something to do with the place — run it as a hotel or something. None of us can look too far ahead with the hens’ breakfast they’ve made of the Peace Treaty.’

He tore the leaf out of his notebook, handed it to Maxi and ruthlessly cutting down the prince’s fulsome expressions of gratitude, strode away down the Ring.

Maxi, left behind on the pavement, was a happy man. The possibility of a little bit of cash, coupled with Guy’s casual assumption that the Swan Princess would not live for ever, produced a feeling of light-headedness in the prince. First thing tomorrow, he would present himself at the address that Guy had written down for him. Now, however, he strolled at a leisurely pace to a quiet street near the Danube canal, where presently he knocked at the door of a modest Biedemayer house and was taken through into a courtyard and up some wooden steps to a little apartment which, in the past few weeks, had become home to him.

And there, among the plump cushions and teddy-bears and ornamental feathers in shell-encrusted jars which Heidi Schlumberger had lovingly collected, lulled by the hooting of the tugboats which came to them through the closed green shutters, the prince and his little dancer gave way to their unquenchable compatibility.

The heat of August defeated even Nerine’s passion for shopping. She returned to Pfaffenstein and Guy, though he kept his suite at Sachers, came with her.

They found the West Tower empty except for Tessa’s old nurse, for the Duchess and the Margravine, leaving a letter of gratitude for Guy, had moved to Vienna to make a home for their niece. Nerine was delighted at their departure and Guy, though he missed the old ladies, shared her relief, for he wanted Tessa back at Pfaffenstein no more than his fiancée did.

He was, in any case, still fiendishly busy. Though the Austrian Parliament was in recess, officials continued to come from the Treasury, some remaining as house guests, and there were long sessions in the library preparing the final drafts of the immensely complicated documents they would present in Geneva. When Guy did emerge from the interminable, stuffy meetings, he took exercise, a point on which Morgan happened to comment when he met David Tremayne returning from the squash court before dinner.

‘Been playin’ ’im again, ’ave you?’ Morgan enquired, anointing the Hispano-Suiza with a polish he mixed to a secret recipe of his own.

David nodded. ‘Got thoroughly beaten, of course. He’s doing a work-out in the gym now.’

Morgan, still polishing, nodded. ‘Taking a lot of exercise, is Mr Farne. Yes, a lot of exercise. Mind you, he’s a man who’s always kept himself fit.’

‘But not as fit as this?’ prompted David. Morgan had been Guy’s batman in the war and knew him as well as any man.

‘Oh, I dunno. ’e ’as patches. I remember after Passchendaele… Young Whittaker got ’is chips then and Mr Farne thought ’e should ’ave got ’im out. Well, ’e did; ’e went over the line and brought ’im back but there wasn’t much to bring back. We went on leave after that and Mr Farne took a lot of exercise then. Squash, tennis, work with the dumb-bells oh, yes, he was very fit that summer. And, of course, when we went up to Newcastle because Mrs Hodge was in ’ospital. Peritonitis, it was, and they got to ’er late because she was looking after a neighbour’s little girl and didn’t like to say she felt poorly. Touch and go it was, for a week, and Mr Farne got ’imself very fit then. Oh, yes. Five ’undred lengths in the swimming baths and beat ’is old fencing master with the sabres. And went up those bloomin’ Cheviots like a bat in hell — covered in snow they were, too. It’s nothing unusual for Mr Farne to take a lot of exercise.’

Silence fell.

‘It will be this loan,’ said David. ‘It must be a great anxiety to him.’

‘That’s what it must be,’ agreed Morgan. ‘Though ’e didn’t seem to notice much that time he took on the Argentinians over the Olinda oil deal. Or the time he grabbed the Uruguay zinc right off Kripper…’

If Guy had hoped that Nerine would now begin to get to know her parishioners, his hopes remained unfulfilled. She had heard of a case of measles in the village which made it quite impossible. ‘Mama always kept me away from infection, you see,’ she explained to Guy, ‘so I have absolutely no immunity.’

But though Guy was so preoccupied, Nerine was far from bored. Owing to the tardiness of the League, Austria’s case was not coming up until October. The wedding, therefore, was now scheduled for mid-November, but Nerine made no complaint at the delay. She had put her wedding dress out to tender among three of Vienna’s leading couturiers and was busy examining the samples of brocade and fashion sketches which came by every post. Meanwhile, she had discovered a new and absorbing activity: she sunbathed.