Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

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.

‘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.’

‘For God’s sake, Tessa, let me help. It would cost me nothing to reimburse you.’

‘No.’ The word was bleak, unadorned and final. ‘I have to do it myself, Guy. It’s not just the mess at the theatre — it’s the aunts too. I found out that they’ve been practically starving themselves so as not to spend the money I left in trust for them. Somehow, I have to find a way out.’

She shivered a little in her cotton blouse and Guy picked up the shawl she had left on the bench and managed to wrap it round her without once letting his fingers come into contact with her shoulders, an achievement which gave him a certain satisfaction. She thanked him. Then, forcing her voice to be casual, she asked, ‘When is the wedding?’

‘On the fourteenth of November.’

‘Oh, so soon?’ She was staring down at the leaf which was still cupped in her hand. ‘I haven’t forgotten about the Lily,’ she went on. ‘I’ll see that she gets it. I promised.’

‘There’s no reason why you should. Nerine has enough jewels to sink a battleship.’

‘No… the Lily’s not like that. It’s special. I never cared for jewels but the Lily’s different. It’s so old, you see, so incredibly old. I can’t explain, but when you look at it you know… what went into its making.’

She was like a lily herself, he thought: the pale head, the slender neck, the incorrigible elegance transcending whatever clothes she wore.

‘Is your foster-mother already at Pfaffenstein? Martha Hodge?’

‘Yes.’ Guy smiled. ‘She’s having a great time making friends in the village. Rudi eats out of her hand and grandmother Keller is teaching her some weird way of knitting socks.’

‘Oh, I’m glad! I’m so glad!’ The elfin face was suddenly alight. ‘And Nerine, of course, will have—’

Nerine doesn’t go into the village,’ he said tonelessly. ‘She’s afraid of catching an infection.’

‘An infection?’ Tessa’s hand had sprung to her throat. ‘Is their illness? Not typhus?’

No, no, nothing like that. A few cases of measles, that’s all.’ He paused. ‘Nerine is to be pitied, Tessa,’ he went on quietly.

Nerine! But she has everything!’

He shook his head. ‘She’s in love with her own beauty and with every hour that passes it fades a little. I’ve seen her, sometimes, looking in the mirror with panic in her eyes.’

‘“It is a fearful thing to love what time can touch”,’ quoted Tessa. ‘Who said that?’

‘I don’t know, but they were right. I would have done better,’ Guy went on bitterly, ‘to have spent three days getting to know Nerine rather than buying her a castle. I was in love with the past, with my own splendid fidelity. But she is not to blame. She is what she always was: a lovely, wilful child. It is I who made her into something else. And because of this,’ he said wearily, ‘I cannot now reject her.’

Tessa bowed her head. While she believed Guy to be infatuated, she could hope that he might wake. But he had already woken and still meant to keep his word, and so all hope was gone.

As they stood there, close but never touching, the red squirrel came cautiously down the tree, made as if to scamper away again, then calmed by their stillness, jumped down and settled on the grass, holding a beechnut between his paws.

‘What was that word you taught me at Pfaffenstein?’ said Guy, his voice very low. ‘For a wild strawberry place? Smultronställe, was that it?’

‘Yes.’

She did not ask why he enquired, for she saw in his face what he was saying. That this place, now, had become a smultronställe. That any place where they were together would be such a place, be it a railway station, a rainy street… ‘Here is my space’, Anthony had said to his Egyptian queen, meaning what Guy meant now.

‘Guy, when I came into the picture gallery at Pfaffenstein, when the aunts were telling you about the Lily… Nerine asked you then when you were born and you wouldn’t say. You said you didn’t know. But it was… Was it in June? Before the twenty-first? Are you a Gemini?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed, like a child reprieved from punishment. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in astrology, of course. It has to be nonsense. But all the same, I knew.’

They had been together longer than they realized. It was dusk now and a very young moon had climbed between the trees, cradling the evening star.

‘I must go — the aunts will be worried. Guy, I don’t know if we will meet again, but—’ Her voice broke and she tried again. ‘Sometimes, when you’re alone and you look up at—’ Once more, she had to stop. Then she managed, ‘If I cannot be anything else… could I be your Star Sister? Could I at least be that?’

Guy dug his nails into his palms. Everything in him rose in protest at the fey, romantic conceit. He did not want her in the heavens, linked to him by some celestial whimsy, but here and now in the flesh and after the death of the flesh, her hand in his as they rose from graves like these when the last trump sounded.

‘Yes,’ he managed to say. ‘You can be my Star Sister. You can at least be that.’

He felt something on his wrist — a breath more than a touch — and looking down saw that she was laying the beech leaf, like a most precious gift, into his hands.

Then she walked lightly away, pulling her shawl closer, and vanished like Giselle into the mist between the tombstones.

‘Did you find her, sir?’ asked David when Guy, with absolutely no recollection of the journey, reached Sachers.