Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

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:

‘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.