Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

‘I go to Schalk!’ pronounced Raisa, sitting on the bed shaped like a mouth in which she would never, now, be ravished by the capitalist mill-owner. But her voice was forlorn and a tear forced itself out of her greedy almond eye and rolled down her cheek.

Disaster had struck the International Opera Company. Two weeks earlier, the owners of the theatre had given Jacob an ultimatum. In view of Herr Witzler’s unsatisfactory record in the past, they were only willing to renew the lease — at a considerably increased rent, of course — if Herr Witzler could pay them six months’ rent in advance. Failing this, they intended to offer the tenancy to Herr Kitzbuhler who, for a long time, had been looking for a theatre in which to play farce.

It was the cheque for this sum — which Tessa had insisted on writing — that had been returned three days earlier, with the information that Her Highness’s credit with the Bank of Austria was now officially exhausted.

The incident led to a spate of calamities. Two black-clad gentlemen arrived in Witzler’s office, claiming to represent the Princess of Pfaffenstein, and informed him that if there were any more attempts to obtain money from Her Highness an action would be brought against him for exerting pressure on a minor. Jacob’s creditors closed ranks and the owners of the theatre wrote and ordered him to vacate the premises on the twenty-first of October, the date scheduled for the première of Fricassée.

Now the company was assembled on the stage of the theatre in a tableau vivant of despair. Outside, the newspapermen waited like piranhas, but inside it was silent and dark. The phone, with its endless, doom-filled shrilling, had been cut off earlier in the day; the great arc lamps, lined up for a lighting rehearsal of Fricassée, were extinguished.

‘Cheer up, ’ighness,’ said one of the stage-hands, giving Tessa’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘It aint your fault. You’ve bin a bloomin’ marvel!’

‘Yes, truly,’ said the Littlest Heidi, forgetting her own troubles in order to comfort her friend. ‘You’re a heroine.’

But Tessa, perched like a disconsolate fledgling on a luggage trolley, was beyond comfort. Outwardly silent, inwardly she seethed with rage and frustration. If only she had been of age… if she had been just one year older, she could have defeated the beastly lawyers. There were still a few securities she could have sold. She could have kept going somehow till Fricassée redeemed their fortunes. As it was, she had failed art, her friends, everything…

Jacob, white with dyspepsia and guilt, paced between the scaffolding, occasionally coming to stand before his under wardrobe mistress like a whipped spaniel. Even now, the bailiffs were probably stripping his villa in Hitzing; prison was a distinct possibility, but he was used to it whereas Tessa…

The blow was shattering for everyone. Raisa knew perfectly well that she could not go to Schalk, who had his own stable of dazzling sopranos; nor would Pino be welcome at La Scala as he had frequently boasted. The stage-hands and technicians, close enough to the breadline at the best of times, faced almost certain unemployment. Yet everyone now set themselves to comfort Tessa.

‘Never will we forget your sacrifice!’ declared the Rhinemaiden. She spoke with authority on the subject, for her own pearls lay unredeemed in the pawn shop in the Dorotheagasse.

‘Here, have a piece of this,’ said Boris, handing her half his gherkin sandwich. ‘I’ve told you, you don’t eat enough.’

Bubi, who had been sitting at Tessa’s feet, now raised his head. He had commandeered Pino’s peaked porter’s cap and was engaged in an engrossing game of tram conductors with Tessa’s cheque stubs for tickets, but it had become clear to him that he had a contribution to make.

‘Bubi loves Tessa,’ he announced. ‘Bubi loves Tessa an awful lot.’ He pondered. ‘More than vanilla kipferl, Bubi loves Tessa.’

But as Tessa, managing to smile, replied in kind, there came a clarion call from Raisa.

‘Ver is beink Zoltan?’ she enquired, in a voice throbbing with portent.

‘Yes, where is Klasky?’

The conductor had stridden purposefully from the theatre at midday, promising to return quickly, but that had been many hours ago.

‘I zink per’aps ’e ’as shooted into ’imself,’ said Raisa, not without a certain satisfaction.

‘Oh, my God!’ Jacob rushed towards the phone, then remembered that it had been cut off. That Klasky had done himself some kind of injury was not impossible. To see the masterpiece he had created with such anguish brought to naught was quite enough to unhinge this sensitive genius with his wild Magyar blood.

‘Go on! Klasky couldn’t shoot a barn door from ten centimetres away,’ said the first flautist whose vendetta against the Hungarian, originating in a dispute about tempi in Meistersinger, was now in its fifth year.

‘Shall I go round to his house?’ said Tessa anxiously, slipping down from the trolley. ‘It wouldn’t take long.’

But at that moment, entering dramatically from stage left, Klasky himself appeared.

One glance at his wild hair, his burning countenance, made it clear that the composer of Fricassée had been through some ultimate and purging experience, some dark night of the soul, from which he had now emerged to pursue a high and noble task.

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.