Eva Ibbotson: Magic Flutes

‘Very well, Herr Farne.’

‘Oh, and I want to hire an opera company. Is there one that you can recommend?’

Even the ladies of Burg Pfaffenstein were impressed by the high-handedness of this.

‘The International Opera Company in the Klostern Theatre is said to be very good. Putzerl often speaks of it.’

‘And she’s extremely musical. In fact she’s studying music’

Guy thanked them, removed a spider which had fallen into his wineglass and took his leave.

It was not until they were halfway back to Vienna, eating supper in the candle-lit dining room of the White Horse Inn, that Guy, crumbling a roll in his long fingers, chose to give his secretary some kind of explanation.

‘You’ve been very patient, David. You must think I’ve gone quite mad. All that for a woman… Only, you see, she’s had a rotten life — forced into an unhappy marriage, then watching the poor devil take four years to die.’ He was silent for a moment, his eyes on the candle flame, the customary mocking look momentarily absent from his face. He looked years younger and to David, who worshipped him, suddenly and frighteningly vulnerable.

‘I want her to have everything she wanted at seventeen, however absurd,’ he went on. ‘Everything. She doesn’t even realize I’m rich — we only met a fortnight before I came away and I didn’t tell her. When I knew her before, I was twenty years old and penniless. I want her to come upon Pfaffenstein lit up for a ball and peopled with princes. I want her to walk into a fairy tale — and know that all of it is hers.’

‘She must be very beautiful,’ said David quietly.

‘The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She’s lovely now but at seventeen — oh, God!’

And for the first time in his life, Guy began to speak of his love for the girl who had been Nerine Croft.

Whether it was the sheer beauty of the city, then at the height of its imperial splendour: a city from whose every window came music, a lazily grey and gold-domed city framed in the cherished hills and vineyards of the Wienerwald… whether it was Vienna itself or the cosmopolitan society Guy experienced there, or the fizz of new thought as Schönberg revolutionized music, Klimt’s golden, exotic ladies scandalized the world of art and Sigmund Freud produced the outrageous theories which were to change men’s views of themselves for ever… or whether it was simply that he was young and at the height of his powers, Guy now paused in the conquest of knowledge, the world, himself — and began simply to enjoy life.

What happened next was of course inevitable, but to Guy it was the miracle that a first love, truly and violently experienced, is to every man who is worthy of the name.

Vienna, in those halcyon years, was not only a gay and fashionable capital but also the centre of a thriving international industry: Europe’s most popular marriage mart. To the finishing schools of Vienna came the daughters of American millionaires, British industrialists and the French nouveau riche, nominally to learn German, study music and appreciate art — actually to take the preliminary steps which would secure, in due course, a husband both nobly born and rich.

Housed generally in some magnificent Schloss whose owners had fallen on hard times, protected by high walls and splendid iron gates, these girls, who often could scarcely add two numbers together, nevertheless understood precisely the subtle arithmetic by which a German ritter with land might equal a Hungarian count without… how a French vicomte with a pedigree could nevertheless be set aside for an Italian marchese with factories discreetly out of sight somewhere which made him a millionaire. As for a prince, he needed nothing else. To be addressed as ‘princess’ these girls, well-trained by their mothers, would have embraced a man of fifty with dentures and the pox.

Meanwhile, enchantingly dressed in their muslins, frantically chaperoned by hatchet-faced and underpaid ‘companions’, the girls trooped through museums, attended concerts and military manoeuvres and took excursions into the surrounding countryside.

This beguiling, hot-house world was one to which normally Guy would never have had access. But coming into the university lobby in his first month in Vienna, he found a pale, frightened, long-haired young man pinned to the wall by two cropped louts from the Jew-baiting Burschenschaft who were questioning him about his ancestry.

Guy had been leading a life of exceptional docility but a look of pleasure now spread over his face. Taking one of the louts by the shoulder, he said he would be obliged if they would leave his friend alone.

The lout, swinging round to meet a pair of malachite eyes, asked what business it was of his? Guy, mustering his German, said that bullying did not amuse him, adding that if there was no objection to duelling with someone who had been found under a piece of sacking on the Fish Quay in Newcastle upon Tyne and was most unlikely to have been born in wedlock, then he would be delighted to meet him. Otherwise, if he did not go away, Guy would pulverize him into insensibility and knock his idiotic duelling scar into his earhole. The second lout, coming to trip him up, found himself rolling down the steps towards the Ringstrasse.

Nonplussed, the louts departed. The victim, who in spite of his tragic and semitic appearance was the scion of a noble Hungarian house, now became Guy’s devoted slave and invited him to his family’s box at the Opera. In the neighbouring box, displayed like the choicest flowers from Olympus for the gaze of the populace, was a group of girls from Frau von Edelnau’s Academy. Pretty girls, striking girls — and one, in the seat nearest to Guy, who possessed that unique quality: an unequivocal and breathtaking beauty.

The English are a plain race but just occasionally, borrowing usually from some Celtic ancestor, they achieve a breathtaking perfection. Nerine Croft’s dusky, abundant ringlets were tied high with a golden thong to dance on her bare shoulders: the forget-me-nots embroidered on her white muslin dress mirrored the heavenly blue of her wide-set eyes and her small nose, as though to ward off the accusation of a cold perfection, was slightly, tantalizingly retroussée.

If it hadn’t been The Magic Flute … if she had not, as the curtain rose, given the smallest of anticipatory sighs… if she had not, at the end of Pamino’s miraculous aria of exalted love, turned in the soft dusk of the lôge and smiled at him.

But it was Mozart’s masterpiece, and she did so turn. The parents of Guy’s friend were acquainted with Frau Edelnau, and in the interval he was introduced. Nerine, delighted to find that he was English, said, yes, the singing had been wonderful and, yes, he could procure for her an ice.

So it began. It was spring: violets in the Prater; Strauss in the Stadtpark; the café tables with their bright, checked cloths spilling out on to the pavements once again. Bells rang in this enchanted city, the Kaiser drove out in a carriage with golden wheels… It was Frau Edelnau’s policy to invite suitably vetted young men to private dances and outings with her girls. To this select band of officers and students Guy, who at twenty was a strangely compelling creature with his wolf’s eyes and air of compressed energy, was now admitted. And Nerine, trained almost from birth to beguile and flirt and please, was enchanting to her young compatriot whose physical courage and intellectual brilliance were becoming something of a legend in the University.

And so, in a city which God might have designed for the purpose, Guy experienced the miracle, the transforming alchemy of total love. Every plumed spray of lilac in the Volksgarten, every caryatid supporting Vienna’s innumerable pillars, every street-seller with her brazier of chestnuts seemed to him limned in light. He wrote songs to Nerine and sent them floating as paper boats down the River Wien; he kept vigil outside her window at night. Friends clustered round him like puppies, bemused by his happiness. He discovered the Secessionists, climbed the dizzying verdigris dome of the University, and hardly ever went to bed. That spring and summer of his twenty-first year, Guy was invincible.