Ibbotson, Eva - Magic Flutes

But they were nearly there. All of them were artists to their finger-tips – the money-grubbing Raisa, ridiculous Pino with his eggs – and they knew it. That indefinable something was in the air, like electricity, like the beating of wings. Barring an unexpected disaster, it would come.

‘I thought you would like to know, Your Highness,’ said Maxi’s valet, easing the skin-tight trousers of the Hussar uniform over his master’s calves. ‘Eight-thirty in the village hall.’

Maxi, standing passive in his corset, turned mournful eyes on his servant. ‘Yes, you did quite right to tell me, Franz. All the same, it’s a devilish business. I have to go to this concert.’

Melancholy gripped him by the throat. If there was one thing that really got him down it was a lieder recital. Those awful, pigeon-chested women in purple satin or green silk with trailing scarves and an idiotic, wispy handkerchief dribbling from their clasped hands. The way they closed their eyes and felt the music . . . the arch way they translated the stuff if it was in a foreign language. And then, just when one thought it was over, the torture of those interminable encores.

Well, he would endure it for Putzerl’s sake. He would sit beside her until she was softened up and then they would slip away and let the dogs out for their evening run and he would propose. But did God really have to arrange things so that on the very same evening, down in the village, they were showing Broken Blossoms with Lilian Gish?

He stretched out his arm for the frogged tunic whose buttons had kept Franz busy for the best part of the afternoon. ‘You’re going, I suppose?’ he enquired of his valet. ‘Yes, Your Highness.’

Maxi’s brows drew together, indicating thought. There was a quotation that fitted here. Something Latin and classy which the gladiators had said when they were about to go in among the lions and wished to salute those who were going to have a nice time and stay alive. But he could not quite remember how it went, and anyway it was way above Franz’s head. Arranging a strand of his perfectly pomaded hair to frame his duelling scar, Maxi went down to dinner.

Two hours later he sat in the picture gallery, keeping a vacant place beside him for Putzerl. Though the room was crowded, no one attempted to commandeer the chair, for the romance between the Prince of Spittau and the Princess of Pfaffenstein was most dear to everybody’s heart.

‘Ah, keeping a chair for Putzerl, are you?’ said Monteforelli approvingly, hobbling past, and even the Archduchess Frederica deigned to smile at him.

But a hush had fallen and the concert was about to begin. Where on earth was Tessa? The Rumanian diva came in – dressed in purple satin as Maxi had foreseen – and behind her the Magyar, reasonably shaved for once. And then . . . good God, it was unbelievable! Tessa, carrying a pile of music and seating herself beside the Magyar at the piano. She was going to turn over for him! She was going to be there all evening, miles away, out of reach!

It was too much. There were sacrifices that one made and sacrifices that were just plain silly. The first notes of Strauss’s ‘Morgen’ were just floating over the audience when Maxi reached the door and fled.

Fifteen minutes later, having run down the Narrenweg – which, with its thirteen wayside shrines, wound round the pinnacle of rock on the far side of the drawbridge – and hurried along the road which skirted the lake, Maxi entered the Pfaffenstein village hall.

The place was packed but the white screen at the far end was still mercifully blank. Old women he had known since childhood called greetings, the men saluted – but without servility, for this was a meeting of acolytes in which rank, for a while, was set aside.

Maxi walked down the aisle looking for an empty seat. Near the middle of the hall, he stopped. Could it be? It was! In a rose-pink dirndl with a snowy apron and blouse, sat Heidi Schlumberger.

‘Will you permit me to sit with you, Fräulein?’

Heidi lifted a rapt countenance. The Prince was in his Hussar uniform, the whole image overwhelming.

‘Oh, yes, Your Highness. Please.’

Maxi slipped into his seat.

‘Have you seen it before?’ she enquired shyly. ‘Broken Blossoms, I mean?’

‘Five times,’ said Maxi, waving a careless hand.

Heidi nodded. It was right that a man of such magnificence should have beaten her. ‘I’ve only seen it four times,’ she said meekly. ‘I’ve brought an extra handkerchief. That part where she looks up and sees the Angel of Death . . .’

‘And where she puts her hand on her heart like this,’ said the Prince, suiting the action to the words.

‘Yes.’ They fell silent, in tribute to the miracle that was Lilian Gish. Then, ‘What about Intolerance, have you seen that, too?’ asked Heidi.

‘Seven times,’ said Maxi proudly. ‘At Spittau I made them show it every night.’

‘Oh! You can do that?’

Maxi nodded. ‘We had Less Than The Dust for two whole weeks,’ he boasted.

‘Ah, Mary Pickford!’ The Littlest Heidi sighed. ‘I’ve seen Pollyanna eight times. I went every afternoon in Vienna, sometimes twice.’

Should he tell her how much she resembled the famous heroine? No, not yet. ‘And The Little Princess?’ Maxi enquired.

‘I like that even better, I think.’

‘Yes, that’s the very best of all.’

Maxi cleared his throat. ‘You don’t . . . by any chance . . . like cowboy films?’

‘But I do! I absolutely adore Tom Mix. When he rises in his stirrups like this,’ said the Littlest Heidi, lifting her entrancing bottom marginally from the seat, ‘and then shades his eyes with his hand – so . . . And in Child of the Prairie, where that Indian crawls out from behind the rock and he doesn’t even look but just whips out his gun!’

Maxi stared at her. A twin soul! It was incredible. But now the lights were going out. The lady at the piano began a stirring march. Not only Broken Blossoms but a Chaplin two-reeler first! He glanced down at Heidi’s hand nestling like a plump, delicious fledgling in the folds of her apron. Could he? Dared he?

Diffidently, flutteringly, in the dusk of the hall, the small hand crept closer. With the questing tentative grace that distinguishes the born cocotte, it raised itself a soupçon. Maxi grasped it. Then the screen flashed to life. The little man in the baggy trousers came marching down the street – and in the village hall of Pfaffenstein they were no longer prince and ballet girl and peasant but only a rapt and adoring audience, welded by laughter into one whole.

Tessa rose very early on the following day. There was a visit she wished to pay before she left, and while the rest of the company still slept she was approaching a small wooden house in a clearing in the forest, a mile or so behind the castle.

She knocked and entered. The room was small but spotless: a stove with a bench round it, a limewood table, a spinning wheel – and in the carved bed in the corner an old lady, as old as time itself. Her filmed eyes seemed almost sightless but she knew her visitor at once.

‘Your Highness!’ The smile transformed the wrinkled face. ‘You’re back, then. It’s true what they said.’

‘Yes.’ Tessa sat down on the bed, took the brown, transparent hand into her own. ‘Yes, I’m back, Grossmutterle, and I’ve brought you some nice things to eat so don’t turn into a wolf and eat me up.’

The toothless smile came first, then the whole body shook with laughter. Laughter which turned suddenly into a grimace of grief.

‘You’re going then, Your Highness? The castle is really sold?’

‘Yes, but it is sold to such a nice man, Grossmutterle. You’ll like him very much.’