Ibbotson, Eva - Magic Flutes

By now she had found women who could copy a Paris design in two days and tiny shops tucked away behind the Graben: a blouse shop which was an Aladdin’s cave of handmade lace and delicate embroidery, a shoe shop where she bought pumps in pigskin and in kid, gold-thonged sandals, lizard court shoes with matching handbags . . .

Never had Nerine been so happy. Freed from the constraints of mourning and the stinginess of the Hurlinghams, she glowed with well-being and health. As she entered the restaurant of the Grand, where Guy came each night to dine with her, every eye in the room followed her to her place.

‘You’re so good to me, darling,’ she would say to him. ‘You spoil me so.’

But Nerine did not only gush. She also freely shared her problems with Guy. One evening, for example, though attacking her schnitzel with undiminished relish, she admitted to being perplexed. That afternoon he had, she told Guy, tried on a full-length chinchilla coat whose soft blue-grey lustre took up, really quite uncannily, the colour of her eyes. She had already made up her mind to buy it when the wretched furrier had produced another coat – a high-collared Russian sable – which had quite simply taken her breath away.

‘What shall I do, Guy? Which one shall I buy? After all, I’m doing all this for you.’

Guy, detaching his mind from a complex calculation involving the land debt of Voralberg, gave the matter his consideration.

‘Buy them both,’ he said.

It was probably the most beautiful thing that anyone had ever said to Nerine, who went on to buy also a sauterne-dyed cape of Bukhara karakul and a jacket of Canadian lynx.

Arthur, meanwhile, had returned to England to escort Mama and Aunt Dorothy to Pfaffenstein for the wedding, but Nerine hardly noticed his departure for she had embarked on a new and profitable venture. Nowadays genteel ladies, mostly old and dressed in black, were often shown into her suite and after low, muffled conversations, departed without the sapphire heart pendant they had had on the day of their engagement, or the pearls their grandmothers had danced in at the Opera Ball. Sometimes she went further afield to visit shrouded villas in Hitzing or Heiligenstadt, returning with yards of priceless lace or small black boxes which she handed to the hotel manager to put in his safe.

After three weeks of chaperoning Nerine, Thisbe cracked.

‘My work’s piling up,’ she said to Guy. ‘I’ve got half a dozen reports to type. And I’m no good at this kind of thing, sir. Someone else who’s interested in clothes ought to go along. She could take her maid. And I can’t—’

But here the devoted Thisbe broke off, unable to criticize Nerine to the employer she adored. It was Morgan, threatening to resign if he was compelled to stand around outside any more fashion houses, who said bluntly, ‘And to my mind it isn’t right, sir, dunning those poor devils out of their possessions. A bargain’s a bargain, but conning an old woman out of her pearls for the price of three hot dinners isn’t right. No wonder they hate us for being British if we carry on like that.’

‘Nerine, I must insist that you ask me for exactly what you need for your purchases,’ said Guy that evening, as they drove in a fiacre down the Prater Hauptallee. ‘We shouldn’t take advantage of these people. Heaven knows, things are enough in our favour as it is. These old women don’t know what things are worth.’

The satisfied languorous look that had been on Nerine’s face ever since she came to shop, left her abruptly.

‘Guy, if your servants intend to snoop and spy on me, I think you should dismiss them. I was only trying to save you money.’

‘Well, don’t, Nerine. I have enough money,’ said Guy.

For a while they drove in silence between the magnificent chestnuts. Then, ‘You mean you don’t mind me actually buying the things?’ said Nerine, peeping at him from under an enchanting cartwheel hat. ‘That isn’t what you mind?’

No, why should I? But I’m here on behalf of the British government. We have to play fair and be seen to play fair. I’ll open a personal account for you at my bank,’ said Guy, almost absently.

Relief flooded Nerine. She could go on, spend more! Looking about her animatedly, she said, ‘Look, Guy – I’m sure we’ve been here before, with Frau Edelnau. That old pavilion over there, don’t you recognize it? It was some kind of feast day.’

‘Yes, it was Easter Sunday and a most glorious day. I picked you a bunch of blue scillas and an old man came and shook his fist at me. Quite right, too. They weren’t really wild, they were planted.’

Nerine was making a tremendous effort but the past did not quite yield itself, as yet, with the clarity she hoped for.

‘What was I wearing?’ she asked.

There was a moment of silence. Then, ‘I don’t remember,’ said Guy.

‘You mean Putzerl has refused you!’ shrieked the Swan Princess. ‘I don’t believe it! I simply don’t believe it! Why, I saw with my own eyes—’

But here the princess shut her beak with a snap, for much as she might despise her son she did not care to admit that she had watched his courtship through a telescope.

Aided by the discretion of the Littlest Heidi, and by Tessa’s nocturnal departure from Pfaffenstein, Maxi had been able to postpone the announcement of his failure until his return to Spittau. Now, however, the day of reckoning had come. Standing on the causeway which alone connected Spittau to the land, the Swan Princess (though swathed almost from top to toe in mosquito netting) nevertheless managed to stare with an amazing amount of venom at her son. Around them the dogs frisked and splashed; frogs plopped incessantly in and out of the moat.

‘I did my best, Mother. I said she could breed water spaniels,’ said Maxi moodily, massaging the labrador’s stomach with his foot.

‘You know what this is,’ said the Swan Princess. ‘This is the end. Even if I sell my pearls it is the end.’

‘She offered me some money. To repair the roof.’

‘And?’ enquired the Swan Princess sharply.

‘I refused, of course,’ said Maxi, flushing at the memory of this insult to his masculinity.

‘Foolish, obstinate girl. I blame Tilda and Augustine. Letting her run wild in Vienna. All that rubbish about art and music’

‘I could marry someone else,’ suggested Maxi, pulling a burr out of the wolfhound’s ear.

Beneath the netting, his mother screwed up her ravaged countenance. ‘Waaltraut might be acceptable as regards lineage, I suppose. But there’s no money. And she is almost certainly too old to breed.’

‘I thought maybe an American,’ said Maxi, who had turned pale at the mention of the oil-stained countess. ‘An heiress, of course.’ he added hastily.

‘Never!’ declared the Swan Princess. ‘Never a commoner. Never, never, never !’ She stood looking out over the vast, grey, melancholy lake. ‘We shall have to sell,’ she pronounced in failing accents. ‘After nine hundred years there will be no more Spittaus at Spittau.’

‘If we were very careful, couldn’t we manage . . .’

Not without a roof,’ snapped the princess. ‘And I must say, Maxi, I think it was remiss of you not to accept Tessa’s offer. With the roof mended we might have hung on, but as it is . . .’

Maxi looked bravely at the long, ochre, water-lapped pile: the last of the castles which his illustrious family still owned. So Spittau would go the same way as Hammerfelden with its four hundred rooms; the Pomeranian fortress on the River Oder; the palace in Vienna . . .

‘Well, if I have the misfortune to have given birth to a milksop who cannot get a girl without beauty or distinction to marry him, I shall just have to suffer,’ said the Swan Princess. ‘Do it, then. Put Spittau up for sale.’