So now poor Jacob stepped out of the resplendent foyer with its gilded mirrors and corpulent muses, to search among the frangipani, the hibiscus and the voracious orchids in that steam-bath of a city for the flower which alone linked this lovely, deeply weary woman to her youth.
In his ornate gold-leaf and red-plush box next to the stage, a man whose look of extreme distinction even the recent months of strain and agony could not eradicate, waited — entirely without interest — for the curtain to rise.
As usual in these times of slump and mismanagement there had been a muddle about the posters. The company was second-rate, the opera was Carmen — that was all he knew and it was enough to have kept him away but for the need to kill time for an evening before the arrival of the tycoon from Sao Paulo to whom he was selling ‘The Dragonfly’. Everything else was sold already: the other boats, the carriages, the antique silver and fine furniture he had shipped out from Europe. Only for Roccella itself had he found no purchaser. Soon now the lovely Palladian yellow-stuccoed house with its blue shutters, its flower-wreathed arcades, its fountains and terraces, would vanish in the murderous embrace of the jungle from which he had wrested it.
‘Look, Mother, there’s Mr Varlov! So he can’t be in prison yet,’ said the convent-fresh daughter of a Portuguese customs official, looking raptly at the solitary figure in the box.
‘Don’t stare, dear,’ said her mother, irritably aware that neither disgrace nor bankruptcy would dim the image of this curiously magnetic figure in her daughter’s eyes.
But the girl’s father did stare, and nodded, for it seemed to him that Varlov had had a raw deal. Though he had been among the wealthiest of the planters and hospitable to a fault, Varlov had not indulged in the pranks of so many of the others — washing their carriage horses in champagne, sending their shirts back to Paris to be laundered. Varlov had built houses for the serengueiros who tended his thousands of acres of wild rubber, and schools for their children. It was to save these that he had gone to Rio when the crash came, to raise more money by means which, though he could not have known it at the time, had turned out to be illegal and now left him facing, along with the men he had trusted, a charge of malpractice and fraud.
Leaning back, indifferent to the looks he was attracting, Paul looked round the Opera House that he had helped to bring into being. It was he who had insisted on the best Carrara marble, he who had suggested that de Angelis himself be fetched from Italy to paint the ceilings. He had put thousands of pounds of his own money into this crazy, lovely building and for one reason only. Obsessionally, doggedly, idiotically, Paul had been convinced that one day she would come.
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.