Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

Well, she had not come. He had entertained Charetti and her entire company from La Scala to a seven-course banquet on ‘The Dragonfly’, had taken half a Russian corps de ballet stricken with yellow fever back to Roccella to be nursed…

But she had not come and never would come now. It was over.

Jacob had found a rose. Feuerbach, twisting his idiot moustache into imagined perfection, went to the conductor’s rostrum. Padrocci completed the egg-swallowing and mi-mi-mi-ing routine so beloved of bad tenors all over the world and was eased into the uniform of Don Jose.

The curtain rose. Soldiers and passers-by, hopelessly sparse on the over-large stage, wandered about. Padrocci made his entrance. He had burst a button on his tunic and was already a quarter-tone flat.

In his box, Paul Varlov yawned.

Carmen appeared on the steps of the cigarette factory, was greeted by the crowd, moved forward, getting into position for her ‘Habanera’. A heavy black wig, a flounced skirt, In her hair a rose…

In the stage box a man stood up, threw out an arm, spoke some unintelligible words. He was glared at, hushed.

Nina looked up. Across the glare of the footlights, at a distance at which normally she could distinguish nothing, she saw him, understood why she had come — and began to sing.

What happened next was a miracle. Jacob Kindinsky said so, anyway, and he should have known. The kind of miracle that enables a mother to leap across a chasm to rescue a child threatened by fire, or enables a mortally-wounded pilot to land his aircraft safely. For Nina now sang as she had sung at the height of her glory. Her illness, the effect of her operation ceased to exist. ‘Sing with your voice, with your heart, with your life’, St Augustine had begged, and so now sang Nina Berg, forcing from Padrocci as the opera continued a decent, near-musical performance, from Feuerbach a respect for Bizet’s marvellously subtle score.

The first interval found Jacob in tears and Paul Varlov sitting in his box as if carved from stone. ‘I cannot do it again,’ he silently implored the Fates. ‘I cannot !’

For the first few moments, following the ecstasy and shock of seeing her, hope had soared. Even with the heavy make-up he could see how she had aged. That she was appearing with this appalling company at all seemed to indicate that her career was over. In which case, surely he had a right, even disgraced and bankrupt as he was…? But as she began to sing he knew it was not so. She was exactly what they had foretold: a great and glorious artist. If she was here it was for some chivalrous reason of her own.

The curtain rose again. Padrocci, pawing the white rose with his hot, fat hands, managed the ‘Flower Song’ and Paul, watching him, smiled crookedly. There was one gift and one gift only that he grudged the encroaching jungle. The greenhouse at Follina with its latticed screens, its fan and ice-machine where, to the puzzlement of his gardeners, he had coaxed and bullied from the black soil of Amazonia a sweetly-scented, snow-white rose.

Carmen read her doom in the cards, sent Jose away, went forward to her death… Right at the end the strain began to tell and Jacob, cowering, waited for the first tell-tale crack in her voice but Feuerbach, scenting the stable, was rampant again and no one noticed.

The curtain fell on an ovation. The audience rose, stamped, roared. Flowers rained on the stage. Nina took curtain call upon curtain call, leading forward the stunned Padrocci, the simpering Feuerbach. She was not at all impatient and hardly glanced at Paul’s box. There was all time, all eternity now for them to be together. Even she could not imagine a God so wrathful that he would separate them twice.

The delay before she could escape from the theatre gave Paul his chance. He sent a note round to the stage door and made his way quickly down to the docks. He was selling ‘The Dragonfly’ fully equipped and his Indian crew had been persuaded to stay on and work for the new owner. If he worked fast it could be done — her own devastating humility would aid him — but he thought it might be the last thing he would do.

Hurriedly he gave his instructions: a perfect intimate dinner for two on deck; the Venetian candlesticks, the best champagne — and no word to Madame, no single word to indicate that ‘The Dragonfly’ was no longer his.

They nodded, pleased to serve him once again. They would not betray him and spoke, in any case, only their own language and a smattering of Portuguese.

Time, now, to go to the riverside cafe he had appointed for their rendezvous.

She came as he had asked, alone, in a hansom, telling no one where she was going. As she stepped out and the lamplight shone on her well-remembered face, he felt a moment of rage that time had dared so patently to lay hands on her. Then it was over, for this was Nina. She, in her turn, experienced no such moment, for he was handsomer than ever, the skin taut over those incredible bones, the streaks of silver highlighting his jet-black hair.

‘Come,’ he said, allowing himself once and once only to touch her hand. ‘We’re going to have dinner on my yacht.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

She followed him like a child. She wanted to go on saying ‘yes’ to everything: ‘yes’ to the lapping of the river, ‘yes’ to the hot night and the cry of the frogs; ‘yes’ to the future — ‘yes’ even to the lonely and agonising past because it had led her to this place. So totally, shiveringly happy was she that she made a characteristic gesture, laying a finger sideways across her lips so as not to cry out and Paul, remembering it, stumbled for a moment as he led her aboard.

‘What a beautiful yacht, Paul!’

‘Yes: she’s the fastest on the river. I have four others: a schooner, a motor launch…’ He began to show off, boring her with tonnages and the luxurious fittings he had installed. Useless. She seemed enchanted at his success; to regard it as absolutely natural that he should boast like a silly boy.

‘Oh, I knew you’d do well! Tell me everything! Start with now . Where do you live?’

A servant had taken her cloak, drawn out a chair at the snowy candlelit table on the front deck. She took a roll, began to crumble it — then looked up at him to see if he remembered.

Yes, he remembered… That they had always kept a handful of crumbs from every meal they ate together and gone afterwards to find a one-legged pigeon who roosted between the feet of a particularly Gothic saint above the west door of the Stefan’s Dom. A good life they had given that pigeon, who had abandoned thereafter any efforts to support himself.

Deliberately he looked away, refusing the shared intimacy, and began to describe his house. ‘It was built by an Italian over a hundred years ago — it’s an exact copy of the palazzo in his native village. Roccella, it’s called. He didn’t live long to enjoy it, poor devil. I got it for a song and I’ve made a water garden, an arboretum…’

Yes, he would do that, thought Nina. She remembered how he had bought a packet of seeds once, mignonette they were, and they had wandered through the courtyards of the Hofburg scattering them in the cracks between the paving stones. She had been surprised and enchanted that someone so wild and masculine should care so much for flowers.

‘I’ve brought in trees from all over Amazonia — there must be five hundred species. And I’ve made the house into a real show place. The furniture’s mostly Louis Quinze shipped out from France, the chandeliers are Bohemian…’

He was getting nowhere. To his infantile showing-off she accorded only the lovely, quiet attention that was her hallmark.

‘I wish you could see it,’ he said.