‘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.
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’