‘Countess, those things are no good to me. I can’t pay my bills with them. Why don’t you go to Chez Jaquetta in the Kärnterstrasse? She may be honoured to dress someone of your rank for nothing.’
‘Chez Jaquetta! Are you out of your mind? I wouldn’t dress my parrot at that place. Her workmanship’s shoddy and she has as much taste as a kitchenmaid. Good Lord, she put the Baroness Lefevre into puce satin covered in dead birds. Ortolans, hundreds of them, hanging on with their beaks. When the Baroness sits down its like a charnel house: bones breaking, feathers flying…’
Defeat. Total defeat. I knew it even as I felt my face crease into an entirely involuntary smile. ‘It so happens I have a length of bottle-green broadcloth; it’s the end of a roll… ’
It’s impossible, reprehensible… something must be done about the deep and unadulterated joy that courses through me when people speak ill of Chez Jaquetta.
That her activities in the university might have made life difficult for her daughter does not seem to have occurred to Laura Sultzer.
I’d been to the town hall to pay my rates and was taking a short cut through the gardens when I saw Edith Sultzer sitting on a bench. She was reading a book and eating a large raw carrot, and I was about to pass her when she looked up and showed her pale gums in a smile of such friendliness that I felt compelled to stop.
‘How sensible of you to take your lunch out of doors.’
‘Yes, I… I used to eat in the university canteen but since my mother, . since she let out the rats… the other students aren’t very nice. Not that I have many friends there anyway. I don’t mind. I’m too busy with my studies.’
I asked after the Plotzenheimer Prize Essay and heard that it was going well. The deadline was the end of August, but Edith thought she would get it done in time. Her topic (suggested by her mother) was: ‘Seventeenth-Century Comments on the Epic of Beowulf with Special Reference to the Contribution of Theophilus Krumm’.
‘You know, I have to confess that I’ve never really read Beowulf I said. ‘What’s the actual story?’
Edith then told it to me and it sounded good. There was a brave knight, a monster called Grendel whom he slew, and in due course another hazard in the form of Grendel’s mother who was even nastier than her son.
‘But of course we don’t read the actual poem very much,’ explained Edith. ‘We read what people have said about it.’
As I got up to go, it occurred to me that Edith might have some information on a problem that was troubling me, namely Magdalena Winter’s hair.
‘You see, it’s not easy to design clothes for a grown-up woman who has her hair hanging down her back. Do you know why she wears it like that?’
Edith nodded. ‘Yes, I do. It’s because her hair belongs to Jesus. Only she calls Him The Christ.’
‘I see. But surely it could still belong to Him even if it was coiled up and pinned?’
The Bluestocking looked troubled. ‘Magdalena has a very special relationship with God,’ she said.
‘So I observe.’
I’m afraid things are going badly for the poor little Count of Monte Cristo across the way. His uncle is out every day trying to find someone to hear the child, but he is not a prepossessing figure and no one, so far, has shown the slightest interest in his Wunderkind. It is only in the evening when his uncle is back that Sigismund comes out into the square. Perhaps they are afraid that if no one is left to guard the piano it will vanish. Not so unlikely, it is only hired and their meagre stock of money is getting very low.
‘Another couple of months,’ Frau Hinkler says, ‘and then they’ll be off back where they came from, and good riddance.’
Meanwhile a new figure has entered my life. She sits on a woolly cloud staring down at me; a dark, angry-looking woman who resembles Frau Wilkolaz, the Polish lady in the paper shop who suffers with her nerves.
This gloomy angel is Sigismund’s mother and she is not pleased with me. She doesn’t think it is enough for me to say ‘Grüss Gott’ to her child of an evening when I feel like it. She wants me to take proper notice of him, to care for him and invite him to my house. True, I have shown Sigismund how to pat Rip, I have introduced him to General Madensky on his plinth and explained about the hair dye and the moustaches.
But though he stands and looks at my shop like a starveling in a fairy tale, I have not invited him into my house — and it is this that the Polish lady on her cloud does not think good enough. She wants me to bake vanilla kipferl for him in my kitchen, to stitch him a shirt and tell him stories, but she is destined to be disappointed. If I cannot have my daughter I won’t make do with substitutes — that I promised myself when I lost her all those years ago.
Tonight, as Sigismund stood by the fountain, I saw on his skinny, unwashed leg two weals as though made by a cane or ruler.
‘What are those, Sigismund? What happened?’
He looked down without much interest. ‘My uncle hit me.’ Of course; on the leg… Never on the precious hands, never a box on the ear.
‘Why?’
He shrugged his ancient shoulders. ‘He wants me to play the Waldstein Sonata because it looks difficult and people will think I’m clever. But the chords in the last movement are not possible.’
All Poles have to learn the language of their conquerors. Sigismund’s German is correct and formal, but he speaks in a low throaty voice so that sometimes I have to bend down to hear him.
‘You’re too young to play the Waldstein?’
He looked up and his hands came forward, stretched on an invisible keyboard.
‘I am not too young,’ he said. ‘I am too small.’
Edith was right. Magdalena’s hair does belong to The Christ. She confirmed this herself as she stood in my fitting room in her wedding dress.
Till I became steeped in mortal sin I was a good Catholic and even now I would be lost without the consolations of the church, but this annoyed me.
‘What about Herr Huber? Doesn’t it belong to him a little?’
Magdalena turned her beautiful sapphire eyes on me, more puzzled than offended, and regretting my sharpness I said:
‘You see, your headdress has been designed to be raised above your braided hair. If you’re going to wear it loose I shall have to think again. But do you really want to look like a bride in an Italian opera?’
Magdalena fingered her rosary and said she would ask. ‘That’s a good idea. Your mother would be able to advise you. Or perhaps you have other relatives?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t ask my mother. The Blessed Virgin will advise me. Or one of Them.’ She looked up at the draped ceiling of the cubicle and I remembered her tender conversation with the wax puppets under glass.
‘The saints, you mean?’
Magdalena nodded. The thought that she is a little crazy has of course occurred to me before — yet with her brothers she is said to be practical and kind, and when you can get her to fix her mind on her clothes her suggestions are often quite sensible. And after all, if more people discussed their hairstyles with the saints one might not see so many bedraggled birds’ nests or listing chignons. Even when carrying their eyes in front of them on cushions or tied to wheels, the saints always look neat and seemly.
Meanwhile Herr Huber — there is no doubt about it — has become our friend. He has sent round a kaiserwurst the size of Odin’s thigh and Alice (whom he admires inordinately as a hierophant of the sacred art of operetta) is awash in wiener wurstl.