‘I’m just going,’ said Tessa. She fetched the can, ran to the dairy three streets away, and back, hiding the egg she had managed to wheedle out of the dairyman in a box labelled ‘Spats’.

The theatre was fully awake now. Hammering resounded from the scene dock, pieces of scenery suddenly flew upward. Cries of ‘Where’s Tessa?’ came with increasing frequency — from Frau Pollack, the wardrobe mistress, who wanted to know why Tessa had not brought down the costumes for Tosca, had not sorted out the buckle box, had not made the coffee… from the lighting assistant who wanted her to hold a spot, from the carpenter who had a splinter in his eye.

At eleven the Herr Direktor, Jacob Witzler, arrived and began to go through the pile of bills, of notices threatening to cut off the water, the telephone and the electricity, which constituted his morning mail.

This frog-eyed Moravian Jew, with his ulcer and his despair, quite simply was the International Opera Company. Jacob’s dedication, his sacrifices, his chicanery, cajoling and bullying had steered this unsubsidized company for over twenty years through crisis after financial crisis, through war and inflation and the machinations of his rivals.

In a way the whole thing had been bad luck. Jacob came of a wealthy and not particularly musical family of leather merchants in the Moravian town of Sprotz. His life was marked out almost from birth — a serene progress from bar mitzvah to entry into the family firm, marriage to a nice Jewish girl already selected by his mother, a partnership…

Jacob was deprived of this comfortable future in a single afternoon when at the age of eleven he was taken, scrubbed to the eyeballs and in his sailor suit, to a touring company’s performance of Carmen.

All around him, dragged in by their culture-hungry parents, sat other little boys and girls, Christian and Jewish, Moravian and Czech, wriggling and fidgeting, longing for the interval, thirsting for lemonade, bursting for the lavatory.

Not so Jacob. The Hippopotamus-sized mezzo dropped her castanets, Escamillo fell over his dagger, the orchestra was short of two trumpets, three violins and the timpani. No matter. Alone of all the infants of Moravia Jacob Witzler was struck down, and fatally, by the disease known as Opera.

Now, some thirty years later, his fortune gone, his health ruined, his faith abandoned, he reached for a dyspepsia pill and settled down to work. The claque was clamouring to be paid but that was absurd of course. Raisa would get enough applause tonight; the mad scene always got them and next week they were alternating Tosca with Fledermaus, old war horses both. Frau Kievenholler had put in a perfectly ludicrous claim for cab fares for her harp…

The phone rang: a tenor wanting to audition for the chorus. And rang again: someone was coming round to inspect the fire precautions! And rang again…

At noon Jacob put down his pen and sent for Tessa.

‘Good morning, Herr Witzler.’

The under wardrobe mistress stood respectfully before him. There was a smut on her small and surprisingly serious nose, her hair was coming down and her smock was liberally spattered with paint, but as he looked at the little figure emitting as always an almost epic willingness to be of use, Jacob at once felt better. His blood pressure descended; his ulcer composed itself for sleep.

Allowing Tessa to come and work for him was one of the best things he had done and if the police did come for her one day he, Jacob, was going to fight for her tooth and nail. True, she had obviously lied to him about her age — he doubted if she was twenty, let alone the twenty-three she had laid claim to. Nor had she remembered to respond, within half an hour of her interview, to the surname she had offered him. She appeared to have no relatives to vouch for her, no documents, certainly no references of any sort; that she had run away from some institution in the country seemed clear enough. He had told himself that he was mad to take her on, but he knew this was not true.

Since then his hunch had paid off a thousand times. It was not simply that this fragile looking waif with her earth-brown eyes worked a fifteen-hour day, trotting indefatigably through the labyrinthine corridors with loads which would have tired a mountain pony. Nor, even, that she herself had no personal ambition to sing or act or dance but only and always to help and to learn. It was, perhaps, that her patent ecstasy at being allowed to serve art somehow vindicated his own absurd and obsessive life. He and this foundling were fellow sufferers from the same disease.

‘Have you seen to Miss Romola’s bouquet for tonight?’ he began.

‘Yes, Herr Witzler. It’s ordered and I’m going to fetch it after lunch.’

‘You don’t think we could make it a bit smaller?’

Raisa’s bouquets had been steadily shrinking on the principle of the horse from whose feed one removes each day a single oat. It was Tessa’s opinion, now delicately voiced, that they were down to the stage where the horse was in danger of dropping dead.

‘But I could get Herr Klasky’s buttonhole out of it, I think,’ she said, referring to the conductor, ‘which would save a little?’

‘Good, do that. What about the wine for the party tonight?’

‘It’s just arrived and I’ve put it in the wig oven, very low, to make it chambré.’

‘And you’ve remembered my wife’s reservations at Baden-Baden?’

‘Yes, Herr Witzler. A room for one week from June the eighteenth at the Hotel Park, with a cot for your son.’

Jacob nodded gloomily. He had married Leopoldine Goertl-Eisen after that lady, suspended aloft (and in the act of singing ‘Weie, Wiege, Wage die Welle’) had been horribly precipitated by the snapping of her steel cable on to the stage of the Klostern Theatre during a matinee of Rheingold. If he had espoused the massive, bruised Silesian soprano mainly to stop her from suing the International Opera Company, there was no doubt that the marriage was a success. Understandably, however, his Rhinemaiden’s nerves had been affected. When they gave Rheingold anywhere in Vienna, Jacob was compelled to send her to Baden-Baden and the expense was appalling.

‘Then there’s a tenor auditioning at three,’ he went on. ‘Respini can’t come, so you’ll have to accompany him.’

‘Ah, but I don’t play well enough.’

‘For a tenor you play well enough,’ said Jacob firmly. He sighed. ‘I was wondering about a ballet for Tosca?’

Tessa screwed up her waif-like countenance, pondering. Sylphides in the torture scene? Swans in the prison yard?

Jacob’s efforts to insert a ballet into almost everything were herculean and disinterested since he himself was indifferent to ‘the Dance’. He employed, however, three delectably pretty and available ballet girls known collectively as The Heidis (since two of them were christened thus) in the hope that their presence would lure in the rich patron he so desperately craved.

‘If the Heidis were in the stage box dressed in their tutus with rosebud wreaths and some gauze on their shoulders, you know?’ suggested Tessa. ‘We could keep the lôge light on low above them. Then the gentlemen could see them and if they wished to… afterwards… they could…’

Jacob beamed. ‘Yes! That’s what we’ll do. Now that leaves the new Fledermaus programmes to be fetched from the printers, and I want you to go round and tell Grabenheimer that if I don’t get those poster designs by Friday I’m not interested and if he’s in the Turkish bath, get him out!’

At six the conductor arrived and demanded his button-hole. Zoltan Klasky was a Hungarian with tormented eyes, a shock of long, dark hair and the kind of divine and profound discontent which has sent Magyars through countless centuries galloping westwards and giving everybody hell. He was a brilliant musician who loathed sopranos, tenors and everything that both moved and sang except the occasional nasal and impoverished Gypsy.

Though he conducted even the lightest operettas with maniacal expertise and care, Klasky’s own being was dedicated to the composition of an expressionist opera, now in its seventh year of labour. The libretto of this work, authentically based on a newspaper clipping, concerned the wife of a village policeman who is seduced by a millowner, bears him a son and hangs herself, after which the policeman goes mad and tries to murder the baby and serve it to the millowner in a fricassée.

While Tessa had doubts about the operatic qualities of the fricassée, like the rest of the company she was a staunch believer in Klasky’s opera which was scored for strings, mandolins and thirty percussion instruments and would herald a new era in atonal music drama, when it was at last performed.

Now, however, there was a peremptory screech from the star dressing-room, announcing Raisa Romola’s arrival. Within five minutes, Raisa’s dachshund (who inexplicably had remained uneaten during the hardest years of the war) had made a puddle, the state of her head notes made it impossible for her to go on and the tenor, Pino Mastrini, had accused her of stealing his egg.

Tessa dealt with the dachshund, rushed down to the spats box to fetch the egg so vital to the tenor’s larynx, ran up to the chorus dressing-room to help Lucia’s clansmen with their tartan plaids…

And the curtain went up.

Three hours later Tessa, leaning humbly against an upstage tombstone holding her glass of wine, heard Jacob Witzler announce that their new production would be Debussy’s lyrical masterpiece, Pelleas and Melisande.

The clock was striking two when she let herself back into the house in the Wipplingerstrasse. It was not until she was standing at her attic window, once again brushing her hair, that she remembered the letter which had come that morning and was still unread in the pocket of her smock.