Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

‘Oh! I’m sorry!’ She started up, trying to rub away the tears with fingers so dusty that they merely accentuated the anguished mottling of her cheeks. ‘I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. Miss Romola’s dressing-room is upstairs. Or did you want one of The Heidis?’

Guy, standing debonair and faultlessly attired in the doorway, continued to stare in a most uncharacteristic way. Not at the girl’s great smudged eyes, not at her hands — the hands of an Altendorfer Madonna on a painting spree — nor at her ragamuffin clothes. No, what held him riveted was her hair — or rather, the place where normally one would have expected hair to be. For this miniature Countess of Monte Cristo, immured in the depths of one of Vienna’s most ancient edifices, seemed to have no hair. Above her anguished, lemur eyes and high forehead were only tufts such as certain capuchin monkeys achieve in their maturity, and her ears, which had the pricked look one finds in ferns and cyclamen, rested on an area of ravaged stubble. A stubble whose colouring — a warm beige shading to bronze — nevertheless seemed curiously familiar to Guy. And suddenly understanding, he said, ‘My God! That was your hair that Melisande was wearing. But why?’

Quickly, stammeringly, Tessa explained. ‘I was glad to do it, honestly. After all, Cosima cut off all her hair when Wagner died and put it in his grave so it was the least I could do. Only… just now I looked in the mirror — I didn’t really have time before, you know how it is before a première — and I suddenly realized… I mean, it isn’t as though I have anything else.’

She sketched with small and extraordinarily expressive hands the longed-for curves, the Amazonian bosom which her maker had so relentlessly withheld.

Guy studied her. In a sense she spoke the truth, but only in a sense. The dirty ragamuffin with her butchered hair did in fact have something, but it was not something to which at this late hour he could easily put a name. Style? No, it was something more intimate that Guy now chased through the painters he most loved. An image of innocence with the sad eyes of experience; of someone very young acquiescing in their fate. And moving from the tiny, rigid Infantas of Velasquez enduring their silken bandages of pomp to the grave, coiffed girls of Holbein, he came to rest on a Murillo urchin: the one who stands always in the shadows watching the others eat the cherries, the slice of water melon, the hunk of bread.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked abruptly, for the child looked utterly exhausted.

‘In the Wipplingerstrasse.’

‘And who is taking you home?’

‘Taking me? Goodness, no one takes me! It’s only half an hour’s walk. I’ve just got to sweep up and take Miss Romola’s dachshund out and set the mousetraps and then I’m going.’

‘My car is outside,’ said Guy. ‘I’ll give you twenty minutes while I talk to your director. Then I’ll take you back.’

‘Oh no, I really couldn’t!’ Tessa was aghast at the idea of depriving this stylish and powerful-looking foreigner, with his winged eyebrows and inky, velvet-collared cloak, of his scheduled night of pleasure.

Guy smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry; I haven’t any designs on you, I promise.’

What she said next moved him absurdly.

‘As though you could have,’ she said, brushing her fingers over her butchered hair. ‘Now.’

Guy’s interview with the director left Jacob in a state of jubilation bordering on delirium. It had happened! At last, at last, materializing out of the night as mysteriously as the stranger who had commissioned Mozart’s Requiem, the rich patron had come. Parodying Jacob’s wildest dreams he had offered to engage the company for a week in summer, to house and feed them and to finance the new production of an opera! And what an opera! Not some schmaltzy operetta or fashionable salon piece but The Magic Flute! Surprised in his bed by the Angel of Death and told he could bring one work with him to Paradise, Jacob in his nightshirt might have hovered between Figaro, Don Giovanni or The Flute, but it would have been with a score by Mozart in his palsied hand that he would have sought to meet his maker.

Great things would come of this commission, Jacob was sure of it. What the Esterhazys had been to Haydn, the mysterious Madam von Meck to Tchaikovsky, Herr Farne would be to the International Opera Company. So the man was English and had probably bayoneted babies… so he wished the company’s destination and his own part in the transaction to remain a secret which would make everything devilishly complicated… So! For the money Herr Farne was offering, Jacob would have secreted the Golden Horde.

The theatre at Pfaffenstein, said to be the loveliest in Austria with acoustics which were a legend! And in June, when attendances always fell off disastrously and just the week he would have had to send the Rhine-maiden to Baden-Baden! Was it Raisa who had wrought this miracle? He had been worried about her determination to play Melisande barefoot, but clearly the diva’s bunions had not cooled the ardour of the Englishman. Or was it to a Heidi’s tip-tilted profile that they owed this munificence?

Joyfully squeezing himself into his galoshes, Jacob prepared to go home and tell his Rhinemaiden that it would not be necessary, now, for her to pawn her pearls.

Returning to the wig room Guy found her waiting, her face scrubbed to a shining cleanliness — and seeing her attire, his sardonic eyebrows lifted appreciately.

‘La Bohème ?’ he enquired.

She nodded and pulled the blue velvet cloak with its gathered hood more closely round her. ‘From Act Three, you know, where she waits for Rudolfo in the snow and coughs.’ She gazed wistfully out at him like a dormouse in a yurt. ‘It’s a little big, perhaps?’

‘Well, a little,’ said Guy, as she attempted to pull still tighter the voluminous folds of the cloak designed for Raisa’s ample Rumanian form. ‘But not noticeably so. The muff is from Bohème too?’

‘Yes. But the gloves are from Traviata. Where she is back to being a courtesan and enormously elegant.’ She stretched out a small hand, quite drowned in a sea of stylishly wrinkled kid. ‘No one can see my hair now — no one can see anything — so perhaps I won’t disgrace you?’

‘There is no possible way that you could disgrace me,’ said Guy gently. ‘But I should like to know your name.’

‘Tessa,’ she said.

‘Just Tessa?’

She nodded and let him lead her in silence from the theatre. But at the car, parked under a lamp-post across the street, she gasped with admiration. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘How beautiful! Are you perhaps extremely rich?’

‘Well, fairly extremely. I’m glad you like it. Get in.’

Morgan, Guy’s chauffeur, was holding open the door. Impeccable and correct, he would never at any time have allowed himself to betray so extreme an emotion as surprise. But though it had been his habit to conduct females of all kinds from stage doors to whatever abode his master considered suitable — a chambre séparée at Maxims, a suite at the Ritz — he had never seen anything like this strange, dusty and submerged little creature.

But as she climbed into the car and he tucked the rug round her knees, she smiled and said with unexpected dignity, ‘Thank you, you are very kind.’

Guy spun round, for she had spoken in English. And if there are two words in the English language that test the pronunciation of the foreigner, they are ‘Thank you’. Words which this minion from the nether regions of a minor opera house had spoken in an English both unaccented and educated.

He changed also to his native tongue. ‘How is it that you speak English?’