‘I’ve been so worried about him,’ said Alice, at the same time lowering a dazzlingly beautiful black tulle hat clouded in polka dot veiling on to her curls. ‘Last time he came he was so exhausted I thought perhaps we shouldn’t make love. In fact I suggested it.’
‘I expect he thought that was a bad idea?’
Alice turned her head away in the hope that the hat would be less becoming from the side, but it was not. ‘He thought it was a perfectly terrible idea,’ she said and smiled into the mirror. ‘But now everything will be all right. I’ll soon get him completely well again, you’ll see. Can’t life be absolutely marvellous suddenly!’
She then took the exquisite hat to Yvonne, a shrivelled old charlatan who is nevertheless the best hatmaker in Vienna, and returned shaking her head.
‘Thirty kronen for a handful of tulle — she’s mad!’
‘Let me lend you the money, Alice; please. It looks so marvellous on you.’
‘No, Sanna, it’s sweet of you but I’d rather not. Anyway, who needs a black hat in the middle of summer?’
Magdalena is better. Herr Huber brought her for a fitting in his canary-yellow motor, and with the kind thought of saving Edith from the back of the tandem he picked her up at her house and brought her too.
The contrast between the two girls was almost painful. Magdalena drifted in, a rosary dripping from her fingers; slender, willowy, dressed in white. Behind her came Edith with her bad skin, her dandruff-covered hair, her extraordinary spectacles.
But what upset me was the way Herr Huber looked at his fiancée. Naturally I had expected him to be very much in love, but the adoration, the humble yet frenzied worship, worried me. I wish I understood this marriage.
Of course Magdalena is very beautiful though I admit I felt a little disconcerted as I welcomed her. Not because of the rosary, though I do not have many clients who bring rosaries to their fittings, nor by the absent look in her deep blue eyes, but by the fact that at eleven in the morning in a dress shop in the Inner City, she was wearing her lovely, rippling hair loose almost to the knees. You can of course design for these Ophelia-like girls who model themselves on the English pre-Raphaelites, but it had been my intention also to consider occasions like the Meat Retailers’ Outing, or afternoon tea with Herr Huber’s sister in Linz.
I left Edith in the second cubicle while I draped Magdalena in Seligman’s brocade. By the time I reached the Bluestocking with the toile for the moss-green crêpe, she had been waiting for some time in her unfortunate underclothes and I had no right to be irritated by her bulging briefcase lying on the velvet stool, but I was.
‘You could leave your case outside, Fraulein Sultzer. It would be quite safe.’
A sort of gulp issued from the Bluestocking and her pale lips twitched into a nervous smile. Then she snatched the briefcase and began to empty out the contents. A black and tattered copy of Beowulf an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, two note books… and something rolled in tissue paper which she put into my hands.
I unrolled the package. Inside the tissue was a well-made and very serviceable corset.
‘I spoke to my father,’ said Edith, flushing, ‘and he said it was all right. So I went between lectures.’ She looked up at me appealingly. ‘My mother doesn’t know.’
I was extremely pleased and told her so. For a moment I even wondered if I could do something quite fundamental to make her into an attractive girl. If I changed her spectacles… if I gave her raw liver sandwiches…
No, not even then.
I have not dared to write this down before for fear of tempting the gods, but I have been watching my pear tree very carefully and I think I can now say that this autumn I shall have an undoubted, a long-awaited and actual pear.
Today it rained and my two least favourite clients came to the shop.
I have made Frau Egger a good cloak: brown loden cloth edged with braid in a darker tone, and frogging.
‘Horn buttons would definitely work better, Frau Egger,’ I said, laying them against the material. The others are far too heavy.’
But she still wanted the military buttons. She wanted the buttons with an owl’s head pierced by a lance and the word Aggredi repeated twelve times on her bosom, for the cloak is double-breasted.
‘We’d better postpone a decision till the final fitting,’ I said.
But the final fitting won’t, alas, be final, for Frau Egger has ordered a skirt in the same material as the cloak. I’m under no illusions that it is my brilliant dressmaking that attracts the poor woman to my shop. She is still desperate about her husband’s affair with Lily from the post office; still determined to speak to Nini and find out what is going on. And the absurd thing is that her panic is quite unnecessary. Lily, quite unprompted, has jettisoned the Minister: pomposity, meanness, Nasty Little Habit and all.
She told him it was because she didn’t want to hurt his wife,’ said Nini, ‘but it isn’t that at all. He’s just a horrible man.’
No sooner had Frau Egger left than the Countess von Metz’s creaking carriage drew up before my door and the detestable old woman alighted, unexpected and unannounced, and stumped into the shop.
‘I have sent for you twice,’ she said imperiously. ‘I desire you to make me a coat and skirt.’
‘When you pay me for the last two dresses I have made for you, I shall be pleased to attend you, Countess.’
The Countess ignored this. ‘Wasn’t that the Egger I saw coming out of your shop?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really, I don’t know why you dress that dreary middle-class sheep. Her husband is an abomination. He’s just turned poor old Baron König out of his house. Some rubbish about widening the street to improve traffic flow. A lot of drunken cab drivers and nouveaux riches in motor cars — why should they flow?’
I repressed the disquiet I always feel when the Minister’s activities are mentioned, and picked up Frau Egger’s buttons to return them to their box.
‘Good God,’ said the Countess rudely, peering at the buttons through her lorgnette. ‘The Pressburg Fusiliers! A useless lot — they were stationed near my brother’s regiment in Moravia. Disbanded in 84 and good riddance! What on earth are they doing here?’
‘A customer brought them.’
‘Well, she has no right to. Goodness knows what my brother would have said, turning army insignia into playthings.’ And as I kept silence: ‘I thought a dark green broadcloth or needlecord, perhaps? A flared skirt and a fitted jacket with a peplum — very simple but with bishop sleeves. Your sleeves are always satisfactory, I admit.’
I didn’t answer, picked up my account book.
‘A lot of people won’t wear green. After green comes black, they say. But I don’t care for that. Black came to me from the cradle. My mother died when I was two, then my sister, then my aunt. And my brother, of course, but that was later. No, I’m not afraid to wear green.’ She hit the floor with her cane. ‘You are aware that the dagger I sent you was worth far more than the grosgrain dress? It is a valuable antique.’
‘It’s a pruning knife. Ask the pawnbroker.’
‘The pawnbroker! I give you the treasures of my household and you take them to a pawnbroker! If you are unwise enough to sell, at least take them to a proper antique dealer who knows his job.’
But I wasn’t going to be provoked and went on with my accounts.
‘Well… perhaps I might have made a mistake about the dagger.’ Her purple nose twitched with longing for the workroom with its bales of cloth. ‘It so happens I have one or two interesting things I could let you have. My brother’s cigar box, for example.’