Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

‘My dear, I’m so sorry but I’m afraid the girl I spoke of has turned out to be quite unfit to take her final vows!’ She lowered her voice. ‘We found her with the carpenter who came to fix one of the prie-dieux. Such a scandal! We had to send her straight home!’

Two days later Tessa arrived at the Convent of the Annunciation in the working-class district of Ottakring, only to find that she had been beaten by a Swiss merchant who had appeared the day before and bought up the entire crop of hair.

‘He paid in Swiss currency, you see,’ the Mistress of Postulants apologized, ‘and our Order is very poor.’

The Convent of the Blessed Virgin was in quarantine for typhus. The Convent of the Resurrection yielded a single, meagre hank of hair at which Boris looked in disgust.

‘I can fudge the colour, but I’ve got to have the length,’ he said gloomily.

With a week to go to the dress rehearsal, Boris grew frantic. The making of a wig is a most delicate business, for some four thousand strands of hair have to be knotted painstakingly into the lace.

‘What am I going to do?’ he enquired. ‘Jesus Maria, what am I going to do?’

Tessa, who was sewing silver stars on to Melisande’s cloak, lifted her head and rather sadly told him.

At Pfaffenstein, everything was going ahead as Guy had planned. The absent Putzerl had given her consent to the sale; the workmen, much impressed by the dollars with which they were paid, had promised to carry out the necessary repairs in the minimum of time and David, left in charge at the Pfaffenstein Arms, was following his employer’s orders to spare no expense in preparing for the house party in June.

Guy meanwhile had returned to Vienna and immersed himself once more in the gruelling work connected with the loan, and it was not until he had finished his report on the first stage of the negotiations that he felt free to turn his attention to the matter of the opera.

That music was to play a main part in the entertainment of his guests went without saying: there would be an orchestra to play for the ball and to accompany the fireworks; there would be chamber music at night for those who cared for it. But for the climax of his house party, Guy intended to do no less than stage, in the theatre at Pfaffenstein, the opera at which he had first seen Nerine.

At the beginning of every love affair there is a moment when the timeless essence of the beloved is somehow encapsulated, crystallized and fixed in the mind for ever. It may be no more than the way she bends to a flower or touches the head of a passing child, yet in that instant the lover will perceive the uniqueness and wonder of her whole life. For Guy, this moment had come when Nerine gave that first, small, anticipatory sigh as the curtain rose on the dream landscape of Mozart’s Magic Flute. To share with her once more the music of a composer he worshipped above all others, to meet her eyes again over Pamino’s avowal of undying love — that would be to set the seal, like nothing else he could imagine, on the joy and miracle of their reunion.

Now, in his suite at Sachers, he rang for Thisbe Purse.

The woman who arrived in response to his summons was a grim-faced spinster with a greying bun of hair and steel-rimmed spectacles. The prize pupil in her year at Mr Pitman’s Academy for typing and shorthand, she travelled everywhere with Guy — forming with Morgan, his chauffeur-valet, and David Tremayne, the trio of indispensables who enjoyed Guy’s confidence and trust.

‘I want tickets for the opera, Thisbe, please. For tonight.’

‘Yes, Mr Farne,’ said Thisbe, who lived in constant hope of an earthquake, flood or fire from which — with her teeth if necessary — she could rescue her employer. ‘For the State Opera or the Volksoper?’

‘Neither. There’s a company called the International Opera Company, I believe?’

‘Yes, sir. They’re in the Klostern Theatre, in the Braungasse.’ Her employer’s passion for music was such that she made it her habit to investigate all musical events in any city in which they arrived. ‘I’ll go and look in the paper.’

‘It’s Pellas and Melisande,’ she said, returning with the Wiener Presse. ‘By Debussy. A première.’

Guy’s eyebrows rose in surprise. From a small and unsubsidized company he had expected rather another Waltz Dream or Merry Widow.

‘All right. That will do. Get me a ticket, please.’

‘Not a box, sir?’

No, I’m going alone. One ticket. Centre stalls.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Thisbe Purse. That there might not be a ticket for a première occurred to her but she did not mention it. If Mr Farne wanted a ticket, he got it. No one who worked for him was left in doubt of that.

The theatre, with its baroque insouciance, pleased Guy. Still in his opera cloak, for public buildings were still very poorly heated, he skimmed the programme and joined in the applause for the conductor whose tormented eyes, as he acknowledged it, seemed to imply a dreadful martyrdom ahead.

The introduction began and Guy relaxed. The orchestra was good; the interpretation sensitive and precise. The curtain rose…

Melisande crouched, lost and frightened, by the moonlit well. ‘Ne me touchez pas, ne me touchez pas,’ cried Raisa, managing after all to ‘zink’ in French. But Gollaud did touch her, married her, took her back to his gloomy castle to be loved and destroyed by Pelleas. Of the tenor, Pino Mastrini, even the producer had not demanded that he act, only that he should sing the actual notes which had been written. The glorious voice that God had seen fit to place in the throat of this Milanese bullock did the rest.

The production interested Guy. The scene where Melisande lowered her hair from the window and Pel-leas toyed with it came over remarkably well. Lovely hair, it was, but real — not the excessive, overdone Rapunzel stuff he had seen in some productions. With its soft, blown look it made the love scene very moving, and even Pino Mastrini knew how to toy. Long before the curtain came down on Melisande’s death bed, Guy knew that the International Opera Company would do.

At the stage door he parted the waiting crowd of students and admirers, presented his card and asked to see the director. But once inside the theatre he did not hurry to follow the directions that the doorman (rendered obsequious by Guy’s air of authority) had given him, but wandered along enjoying the notices on the call board and the rueful graffiti pencilled on the bleak, tiled walls. Some of Guy’s happiest moments had been spent in freezing theatre corridors like this: waiting for the delectable Claudine from the Paris Opera Ballet when he was on leave in France, for a Spanish chanteuse from the Teatra Amazonas in Manaus, for a Russian girl from the Ballets Russes who had been his mistress for a year in London.

Avoiding the babble from Raisa Romola’s dressing-room, he turned left, then right and down a flight of curving, rickety stairs.

And stopped suddenly.

The sound he had heard, though soft, was unmistakable and in these dungeon-like depths below the level of the street, curiously unnerving. Someone, behind the peeling, dark green door he had just passed, was crying.

He turned, threw open the door and went in.

The room, lit by a single, naked bulb, was entirely crammed with wigs on stands, trays of moustaches, switches of hair, hat boxes piled on shelves. There was an ironing-board, a sink, a table littered with scissors, glue, rolls of ribbon… On the draining-board stood a jar of sour milk and a battered samovar and everywhere on the floor were wicker baskets overflowing with clothes.

However, it was only gradually that Guy took in this clutter, for his eyes were immediately drawn to the only occupant of the room: a girl who could scarcely have been out of her teens. A girl in a rumpled, paint-stained smock, crouched on the lid of an enormous hamper, who, as he entered, put down the mirror she had been holding and looked up to reveal a small, startled face somewhat dramatically streaked with dust and tears. A face with huge eyes the colour of a Stradivarius, eyes which might have been put in by the thumb of Titian himself when he grew too old for detail and was concerned only with the extreme condition of the human soul.