Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

Ah, that was better. She had made a small movement of the head. Was she not going to see it, then?

‘You are happy in the Amazon, Paul? You like it?’

He was silent. Then, forgetting his role, he began to quote the lines that the great Cervantes had written about the new world that was South America:’… the refuge of all the poor devils of Spain, the sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers, the promised land for ladies of easy virtue, a lure and disillusionment for the many… and an incomparable remedy for the few.’

Nina had closed her eyes. ‘And you?’ she said softly. ‘Have you found it to be that? An incomparable remedy?’

Paul did not reply. For him there had always been only one ‘incomparable remedy’. This woman to whom he had committed himself wholly at their first meeting and whose absence had left him with a lifelong, ever undiminished sense of loss.

So now on with the slaughter, for he saw that like himself she had kept faith. He had only to reach out and she would give it all up — the fame and adulation, the homage of the students who had pulled her carriage through the Prater after her first Boheme , the bouquets glittering with diamond drops which besotted Habsburg counts threw for her on stage… If he mishandled the next few moments he would doom her to squalor and poverty, waiting for him to come out of prison if the trial went against him, friendless in this vile climate, in danger of every dread disease.

‘You gave an incredible performance tonight.’

She waved a hand. ‘No… no! It was a mistake, Paul. I am —’

He interrupted her. ‘But I wondered why you wore a white rose? One would expect Carmen to wear red flowers, don’t you think?’

There. He had done it. He had also, apparently, crushed the stem of his wine-glass.

Nina looked down at her plate. Not to make a fuss, that was what mattered. Women lost their only sons in battle. Children starved. Paul had not loved her. Blindly she groped for her fork, speared a dark, unfocused object and conveyed it, with infinite care, to her mouth.

Even now perhaps she could do it. If she admitted to him that her voice was finished. He was so chivalrous, so kind.

Oh, God, no !

Paul’s glass had been replaced; the next course brought. His bleeding hand, wrapped in a napkin, was concealed beneath the table. Now to finish it off.

‘Have some more wine, Nina. It will give me an excuse to have some. Steffi always fusses when I get drunk.’

‘Steffi? Your… wife?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re not actually married — one doesn’t bother out here. But she’s been with me for a long time.’

‘What is she like?’ said Nina. She was speaking with great care now, like a small child reciting poetry.

Paul’s mind juddered to a halt. What indeed was she like? Had he ever, among the string of girls with whom he had tried to forget Nina, even known a Steffi?

‘Well, she’s French… dark curls… a real minx but…’

He rambled on, creating an ‘ooh-la-la’ soubrette from a fifth-rate operetta. (‘You cannot believe me, Nina. You cannot . Tell me I’m lying; see through this idiot game.’)

But she believed him. The modesty and selflessness he’d so much loved in her finished the job he had begun. It was over.

What followed was the worst. Nina lifted her chin and took up, almost visibly, the mantle of prima donna and woman of the world. For exactly the time that politeness demanded she made conversation, speaking amusingly of her travels, telling him bizarre and interesting stories of the stage. Then she rose, gave him her hand to kiss, sent her regards to Steffi.

‘Steffi?’ said Paul wildly, nearly ruining it all.

But the pain was beginning to take over now; she noticed nothing and holding herself very erect she walked down the gangway to where the hansom cab still waited — and was gone.

The next day, Nina fell ill. Jacob, who knew nothing of what had passed, was convinced that she was dying. He had read about swans who sing gloriously before dying and Nina, lying mute in her hotel room, managing to shiver although the temperature was 95° in the shade, seemed a good candidate for death. He found an understudy, placated the manager of the Opera House, brought a Portuguese doctor who offered him a choice of lethal tropical diseases and suggested he cut the diva’s waist-length, still golden hair.

Jacob refused, sat with her for three days and nights and remembered for the first time in ages that he had a wife in Linz who ran his leather goods business and made the best blintzies in Lower Austria.

Nina, however, did not die. On the fourth day she got up, apologised, kissed Jacob and prepared for the journey home. Neither of them mentioned her voice, for both knew that she would never sing again.

So now she stood again by the rail of the steamer, erect and careful but with a new gesture, her arms folded across the bodice of her dress as if to stop the pain escaping and troubling others with its unmannerly intensity. They reached the ‘Wedding of the Waters’, began to steam down the ‘River Sea’

After a while Jacob came over to stand beside her. He must make her speak, listen, anything .

‘You never asked where I found your white rose,’ he said.

She flinched, but as always answered gently. ‘No. Where did you get it?’

‘It was quite an adventure,’ said Jacob proudly. ‘I think perhaps it was the only white rose in Amazonia. I tried everywhere and then I met an Indian who had been employed as a gardener on one of the great estates. The man who owned it had left — he’s gone bankrupt and faces a prison charge too, poor devil. But the Indian swore there was a special place there, where the owner used to grow a white rose. Apparently he made a great fuss about doing it — it’s very difficult to grow roses here.’

Nina’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘What was it called, this place?’

‘Roccella. An Italian built it after some palazzo in —’

He broke off for Nina had clasped his shoulders. She was looking at him as if he were wreathed in unutterable majesty and her eyes were the eyes of a young girl.

‘Again, Jacob, please. Tell me again what happened there. Everything .’

Not all great loves, faithfully kept, end in tragedy. Nina returned, found Paul hunched and despairing by the riverside, saw his face as he watched her come towards him… and knew why she had been born. His prison sentence was minimal. She waited. They returned to Roccella to begin again. Nor had they been in any way mistaken: each found in the other, and was to do so always, the ‘incomparable remedy’ they had sought.

No, if there was a tragedy, it was that of Jacob Kindinsky who had adored Nina and now returned to Linz. But a passerby, seeing him on his verandah above the Danube, spooning sour cream on to his blintzies and listening to the clink of the till as his wife chatted to the customers in the shop below, might think that as a tragedy it was… well, endurable . Soon, too, he is going to write a book that will take the operatic world by storm. He has the title ready: The Diva with a Rose .

Because I have been married with great content (and to the same woman) for twenty years, I am often asked questions. Questions which imply that there is some formula for married happiness; a recipe for success. And when this happens and I am forced into an answer, I tell the questioner a story. The story of Tante Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer and her husband Uncle Ferdi, in Vienna, before the war.

And I begin at the end. With Tante Wilhelmina’s death-bed, to be exact, which took place on a Tuesday evening during that socially grey period when the Opera Ball is over for another year, the holy statues wear their Lenten shrouds and a wind straight from the plains of Hungary bites eastward into the city.