Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

‘Must have been Vernon Hartleypool, I suppose,’ said Peckham, puzzled. ‘He had quite a long chat with him, I know.’

But it is of Pringle that I think, always, when I remember my last days at Torcastle. Pringle the survivor, crouched over his tank, shielding something with his hand.

‘I want you to understand, James,’ he is saying, ‘that this is a happy beetroot. A very happy beetroot indeed!’

She had not expected it to be so beautiful.

In Vienna, in her luxurious villa in Schonbrunn, she had read about the ‘Green Hell’ of the Amazon. Now, standing by the rails of the steamer on the last day of her thousand-mile voyage up the ‘River Sea’, she was in a shimmering world in which trees grew from the dusky water only to find themselves in turn embraced by ferns and fronds and brilliantly coloured orchids. An alligator slid from a gleaming sandbar into the leaf-stained shallows; the grey skeleton of a deodar, its roots asphyxiated by the water, was aflame with scarlet ibis.

She was bound for a city which even in the few decades of its existence had become a legend: fabled Manaus with its rococo mansions, its mosaic sidewalks and exquisite shops… A city of unbelievable luxury and sophistication thrown up by the wealthy rubber barons in the mazed and watery jungle to rival the capitals of Europe which they had left behind. And in particular — since she was a singer — for the prime jewel in the exotic city’s heart: the Opera House, the Teatro Amazonas, the loveliest, they said, in all the Americas.

Only a few years ago her journey would have been a fitting one. Lured by unimaginable fees, Sarah Bernhardt had acted there and Caruso sung before an audience whose jewels would have put Paris and London to shame. But now, in the autumn of 1912, the good times were over. Faced by competition from the East, the ‘black gold’ that was rubber had crashed as spectacularly as before it had risen. Fortunes were lost overnight; the spoiled and pampered women who had lived like princesses in their riverside fazendas returned to the countries from which they came; the men, according to temperament, shot themselves or prepared to begin again. And to the Opera

House there came now only second-rate companies — people who were glad to get an engagement anywhere.

Yet the woman who stood by the rails, her blonde head under the lacy parasol bent in attention to the river, was not — and never could be — second-rate. Nina Berg was an opera singer of distinction and quality who in her native Vienna had been accorded the homage which the Russians reserve for their dancers, the British for their sportsmen and the Austrians for those who sing. ‘Is she beautiful?’ an eager student had once asked Sternhardt, the famous regisseur who directed her. ‘At second sight,’ the great man had answered, paying tribute to her stillness and the gentle reflection in her blue eyes.

From this hard-working and intelligent woman, youth had stealthily crept away. At first she did not heed its passing: venerable divas abound in the opera houses of the world. But now, far too soon, hastened by an unexpected illness and an operation that had gone awry, her voice was going too. And with her voice would go all the rest: the villa, the money, the adulation and protection of men… She would become a singing teacher in a little dark courtyard somewhere, one of the tens of thousands of musicians who had never achieved their goal, or passed it, and now watched young girls scrape fiddles or sing arpeggios.

Well, so be it! But why, having accepted her fate, had she decided to come on this trip? Why, when she had been warned of the danger if she sang again, had she decided to appear in this doomed wraith of an opera house? And why, oh why, had Kindinsky chosen Carmen — one of the few operas she did not like — for her farewell?

Jacob Kindinsky, sitting sad-eyed and perspiring in a deck-chair, watching her, could have told her why: because Carmen was a part that suited neither her temperament nor her voice and he did not choose to be dismembered by seeing her bring to her last Violetta or Mimi her unique quality of bewilderment at the loss, the inexplicable passing of happiness. It was bad enough, thought Jacob, to have to come to this unspeakable place — seemingly full of boa constrictors and electric eels, not to mention a fish that he dared not even contemplate which entered one’s orifices when one was bathing and became, by means of backward-pointing spines, impossible to dislodge… Bad enough to be broiled alive and in the end, in all probability, not even paid , without having to submit to Nina’s devastating empathy with those doomed and great-hearted girls. Whereas in the role of Carmen, singing opposite that Milanese bullock, Padrocci, who was now snoring under the fan in his cabin; keeping abreast of the ludicrious tempi which that clown Feuerbach would imagine to be ‘South American’, she would be compelled into the routine, heel-tapping, fan-clicking performance — and Feuerbach’s imbecile crescendos would drown those heartrending breaks in her top notes.

And Jacob, who could hardly bear what was happening to Nina, found himself wondering for the first time in years if they had done right — he, Sternhardt who had become her regisseur and Fallheim, the director of the Academy, when they had sent that boy away. Jacob had been with Fallheim at that last interview when they had finally persuaded him that he was harming Nina and standing in her way. He had never forgotten the look in the boy’s eyes, but he had forgotten his name. Stefan? Georg? Karl?

The boy’s name had been Paul — Paul Varlov — and Nina, now watching with her customary quiet attention, a flock of green and orange parakeets had not forgotten it. It was, she could have said (without hysteria, without hyperbole) stamped into the marrow of her bones.

He had been twenty-three — a Russian father, a Hungarian mother, educated by some whim in an English public school and when Nina met him, a student at the University of Vienna. In him, nations and causes bubbled and boiled; just to touch him was to risk burning, he was so terribly alive. With his too large, too dark eyes, his high cheekbones and olive skin, he was an outlandish figure among his phlegmatic classmates, yet everywhere he went he was surrounded by friends who clung to him like puppies, lapping at his obsessions: the novels of Dostoyevsky, the Brotherhood of Man, the fate of the pigeons on the Stefan’s Dom… He made speeches on Freedom for Hungary, waving his searingly beautiful hands; swam the Danube; discovered the Secessionists, made yoghurt in his landlady’s button boots…

Then, standing at a Mahler Concert, he found himself next to a girl, golden-haired and gentle, with a sweet wide mouth and tender eyes.

Nina was twenty, studying piano and singing at the

Academy. Paul’s friends parted to let her through and closed again behind her. She was home.

Her innocence, at that time, was total. She believed herself to be an indifferent student — seeing in the extra work, the harsher criticism that her professors handed out to her, only evidence of her own inadequacy. Everyone else in the Academy knew of her promise, but not she.

Now, in any case, she forgot her studies; forgot everything except the glory of being alive and loved by Paul. The selflessness and modesty that were her hallmark enabled her to respond completely to his passion. Uniquely, for someone so young, she never got in the way of her own happiness.

So it was spring in Vienna… In the Prater, the violets; on the slopes of the Wienerwald, the greening larches. And everywhere, in the cafes, the parks, floating from the windows of the grey, stone-garlanded houses — music. Sometimes the friends came, unexacting and affectionate as spaniels; sometimes they were alone. Their love was so immense it spilled over to embrace the children bowling their hoops in the Tiergarten, the waiters in restaurants who paused, leaning on their brass trays, to tell them the stories of their lives. They stood, marvelling, their fingers interlaced, before the quiet Durers in the Albertina, adopted an ageing llama in the Kaiser’s zoo, danced to the open-air bands under the linden trees…