Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

Later, he was to ask himself how much Nerine had been affected. She was always enchanting, looking up at him with those artless, deep-blue eyes, and he was accepted by the other girls as ‘hers’. But Frau von Edelnau and her minions had brought chaperonage to a fine art. Guy was allowed to waltz with her at private dances but never more than twice, to walk beside her carriage in the Prater, to procure lemonade at the manoeuvres and military parades so beloved of the Viennese, but it was impossible to be with her alone.

Until the picnic in the Vienna Woods…

The word ‘picnic’, which to the British suggests a casual and relaxed approach to eating, suggested to Frau Edelnau something quite different. Rugs and hampers of food were piled into carriages; the ropy arms of the chaperones emerged from hastily donned dirndls, and the expedition set off for the ruined monastery on the Kahlenberg now suitably provided with wooden tables, carefully sited vantage points and hygienic toilets.

They arrived… picnicked… the chaperones dozed, overcome by salami and pumpernickl. The girls picked cornflowers and marguerites to twine into their hair.

‘There can’t be anything better than this,’ said a freckle-faced, sunny American girl, looking at the tapestry of the green and gold-domed city below them.

‘Yes, there can,’ said Nerine.

‘What, then?’

‘Oh, being rich… having marvellous clothes… Dancing the night through with princes at a glittering ball. Living in a castle.’

Guy, as always, was beside her.

‘I’ll buy you a castle,’ he said.

Nerine turned and stared at him, caught not by the words but by the tone in which they were spoken. It was almost as though this impecunious boy really had the power to grant wishes. She became dreamy, pensive… Guy had found a glade of wild orchids in which there danced a myriad golden butterflies. Now he offered to show it to the girls and a party set off. The others fell behind and in a sudden shaft of sunlight Nerine, dazzled, stumbled on a root.

Guy caught her and quite beside himself by now, kissed her with all the passion of his nature.

And Nerine kissed him back.

To Guy, adrift in a foreign city, reared by Martha Hodge, that kiss meant one thing and one thing only. When Nerine returned to England, he followed her and in a daze of happiness, presented himself at the Crofts’ ornate and over-furnished villa in Twickenham to ask for her hand.

It is hard to see why they were not kind. So simple, surely, to have spoken of her youth, his need to complete his studies, their conviction that at seventeen their daughter could hardly know her own mind. Instead, the Crofts exhibited a cruelty and arrogance that he had not known existed.

‘Insolent puppy!’ snorted the empurpled Mr Croft, just returned from his city bank. ‘How dare you! I ought to have you horse-whipped.’

‘No birth, no family and no prospects,’ sneered Nerine’s brother, a pallid young man of Guy’s own age. ‘I must say you’ve got a nerve!’

‘And penniless!’ roared Mr Croft, to whom poverty was the ultimate crime.

‘Are you aware that Nerine’s aunt is an Honourable?’ enquired Mrs Croft, a small, tight-lipped woman with calculating eyes.

Unable to lift a finger against the relatives of his beloved, Guy stood stock-still in the centre of the drawing-room with its draped piano legs and overstuffed cushions. But the footman, coming forward in response to Mr Croft’s instructions to ‘Throw him out, James’, found himself reeling against the wall, nursing his arm.

Nerine was not present at the interview. His subsequent letters were returned.

That had been ten years ago. To say that the wound had never healed might seem absurd. If Guy was deflected, now, from the path of scholarship and determined to become rich enough to be revenged on the Crofts of this world, it was a decision he never regretted. Three years later he was in the Amazon, entertaining a string of lovely women on his yacht, and in the years that followed he had innumerable affairs. But he never again fell in love — and he never forgot.

Then, just two weeks before he left for Vienna, he had come out of the new, seven-storey office block in the Strand which housed his Associated Investment Company when he heard a soft voice say, ‘Guy!’ — and there she was.

Nerine was in half-mourning, her raven hair piled high under a plumed velvet hat. She had filled out, there were now a few lines round her lovely eyes, but Guy, as he gazed at her, was gazing at his youth.

She was pleased to see him, pleased and surprised, she made that clear, having no idea what had become of him. Her own story was sad: marriage to the son of a baronet who should have inherited a title and a comfortable life as a landowner — and had instead died by slow degrees of a wound received in Flanders.

‘So I’m back home,’ said Nerine, lifting a face full of courage and resignation to his. ‘And you, Guy? How are you?’

‘I’m just off to Vienna, as a matter of fact,’ said Guy, when he could trust his voice again.

‘Ah, Vienna! I was so happy there! Do you remember…?’ Guy remembered.

Nerine’s father was dead. Her brother had speculated unwisely. In the villa at Twickenham, Guy, though he kept his wealth a secret, was now a welcome guest. When he left for Austria, it was with Nerine’s promise to join him, with her brother, as soon as she was out of mourning. Though nothing could be settled until then, he had returned to Vienna as a man who, against all expectations, was to achieve his heart’s desire.

Though she was both emancipated and in a hurry, Tessa began the day by brushing, with three hundred regular strokes, her almost knee-length, toffee-coloured hair. Her country upbringing had been strict and even though her glorious new life in Vienna was now devoted to the service of art in general and opera in particular, she found it hard to break the habits of her childhood. Moreover, it was true that lacking the height, the Rubenesque and potentially heaving bosom and the Roman nose she so desperately craved, she could find a certain consolation in the rich, fawn tresses which she could most comfortably have sat on had her employer, Jacob Witzler, ever given her the time.

Whether Tessa would have appeared on the payroll of the International Opera Company as under wardrobe mistress, assistant lighting engineer, deputy wigmaker, A.S.M., prompter or errand girl, remained a theoretical question since she did not, in fact, get any pay. That it was an inestimable privilege to be allowed to work in the opera house and learn her craft, Tessa, her auburn eyes burning with artistic fervour, had assured Herr Witzler — a view which he entirely shared and had in fact suggested to her in the first place. And though she did not actually have any money to speak of, it had all worked out marvellously because Frau Witzler, a former Rhinemaiden and spear-carrying soprano of distinction, had found a family in the Wipplingerstrasse who, in exchange for a little help with their three young children, had offered Tessa one of the old servants’ attics. A beautiful room, she thought it, with its views over the roofs of the Inner City and the soaring spire of the Stefansdom.

Now she quickly braided and pinned her hair, washed her hands and face, dressed in her working smock of unbleached linen, and ran downstairs to where the three infant Kugelheimers in their cots greeted her with cries of satisfaction.

During the next half-hour she changed the baby, lugged the three-year-old Klara on to the gigantic, rose-adorned chamber-pot, ran into the kitchen to heat some milk, dressed the four-year-old Franzerl, made coffee for Frau Kugelheimer — and, finally, grabbing a letter from the postman which she thrust unread into her pocket, was safely out into the street.