Well now I know, because I have seen one of Laura Sultzer’s notices. It was pinned to the door of her room just as in the legends that Alice and I have collected through the years and there was no letdown at all.
Silence! it said, Frau Sultzer is reading Grillparzer.
I stared at it entranced while the maid who had admitted me looked worried.
‘I don’t like to disturb her — she’s got them all in there, you see.’
‘The Group, you mean? She’s reading aloud?’
‘That’s right. It’ll be a good hour before they’re through.’
But I’d come myself with Edith’s completed bridesmaid’s dress instead of sending Gretl, for I have decided to keep an eye on the Bluestocking, and I had no intention of going without seeing her.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility,’ and I knocked and opened the door.
Laura sat on a high-backed chair reading aloud from Austria’s most famous (and some would say her only) poet. Round her, in poses of rapt attention, sat her acolytes. I took in a pair of hermaphrodite feet in open sandals and the bosom of the lady who does Croatian cross-stitch, heavily banded in red and black.
‘I’ve come to borrow Fräulein Edith,’ I said cheerfully, ‘I want her to try on her dress.’
Frau Sultzer put down her book and glared.
‘As you can see we are busy.’
Edith rose quickly to her feet. ‘Oh, but Frau Susanna has come herself…’
Accompanied by stares of outrage from the ladies, she hurried to the door.
The room that Edith took me to had to be her bedroom because it contained a bed. There was, however, nothing else even mildly feminine: no dressing table, no mirror, and the wash stand looked dangerously small. Instead there were bookcases lined with dark tomes and on the wall, framed in black, the prizes Edith had won at school.
The dress was a perfect fit, the soft green not unbecoming, but as Edith’s bespectacled face, the bewildered eyes, emerged, I had again the feeling that in designing for her I had missed some clue.
‘Have you been attending to your diet?’ I asked her, for there was a large red spot in the middle of her chin.
‘Well, I try. I remembered what Herr Huber said about red meat making good blood. Of course when I’m with the Group I can’t… but when I’m alone, Cook sometimes brings me a steak.’
‘That’s good. Now all you have to do is wash your hair a bit more often and your skin will soon improve. Dandruff is very bad for acne. Every three or four days with a good shampoo.’
‘Every three or four days!’ Edith looked at me with horror. ‘But my mother… I mean, surely that would interfere with one’s natural oils?’
‘Edith,’ I said firmly, ‘I do assure you that there is nothing that needs interfering with so much as one’s natural oils.’
As she was dressing I asked her a question I had been turning over in my mind. ‘Has Magdalena ever given you a hint of another… attachment? Someone she is fond of?’
‘No, never; never. If she’s got another attachment it’s to the church. To God. She’s asked Herr Huber to let her go into retreat once a month here in Vienna after their marriage; just for a few days. So you see…’
And I did indeed see. A few days every month to be with her lover — and for the rest, her family provided for, a generous and complaisant husband. Well, why not — many people would regard it as a sensible solution to her problems, but there was something about Herr Huber’s innocence that made me furious on his behalf.
I was preparing to leave when Edith touched my arm. ‘I’ve got something for… your friend. If you think she’d like it? If it wouldn’t upset her?’
She led me to her rolltop desk, opened it — and took out a package. Inside was a long-stemmed pipe with a blue dragon on the china bowl.
‘It was my father’s favourite,’ said Edith and, somewhat unnecessarily, added: ‘My mother doesn’t know.’
‘That’s very sweet of you, my dear. I think she’d love to have it.’
But I’d caught sight of something else that Edith had hidden in her desk. A book that was quite different from the scholarly volumes stacked round her walls. The cover was garish, the title, in tall red letters, stood out clearly, The Art of Pork Butchering by Hector Schlumberger.
Alice was sitting at her table playing patience with the new pack of cards she’d bought for Rudi to use during their summer idyll, and she’d lost weight.
‘Edith thought you’d like to have this.’
She took the pipe, opened the porcelain lid, closed it… traced the outline of the dragon with one finger.
‘It was his favourite,’ she said, as Edith had done. And then: ‘Sanna, I’ve never asked you, but I wondered… I mean how long does it go on hurting so much? How long was it before it stopped hurting after you came back from Salzburg? They say that Time Heals, but how much time? When did it stop, the hurt about your daughter?’
I hesitated, then told the truth. ‘Oh Alice, it’s never stopped. I don’t know what time does, but I don’t think it does that. Only, after a while… two years… three, perhaps… the pain becomes manageable. It becomes part of you and if someone offered to take it away… you wouldn’t want them to because the pain is the link with the person you’ve lost. It sounds maudlin, but I don’t mean it like that.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘I see,’
She then went to get ready for the dress rehearsal of Wienerblut, which is just as bad as everyone expected. ‘They’ve given us new outfits for once: really very smart: sprigged muslin and poke bonnets… but you might as well be naked when the horses are on the stage. They’ve hired a special man with a gold shovel to scoop up their droppings and that’s all the audience will be waiting for. The man with the shovel.’
I know it’s completely ridiculous, but deep down I feel a touch of resentment because Rudi left her so unprovided for. It’s five years before she’ll get her pension and even then it’s nothing much. Yet what could he have done without hurting Laura, a thing both of them spent their lives trying not to do?
After all, the gardenias, the decollete were not in vain! Sigismund has been reprieved. With luck now his piano will turn into an Arab steed on which he can gallop away to his destiny; a three masted galleon in which he can sail to glory!
I had given up all hope of Van der Velde but yesterday he came and he is going to give Sigismund a concert!
‘I’ve got an unexpected gap,’ he said, striding into my shop in his velvet-collared overcoat. ‘A soprano I booked for October has let me down, the bitch. It’s a six o’clock recital in the small salon at the Zelinka Palace so there’s not much at stake.’
‘He’s really good, then?’
Van der Velde shrugged. ‘He’s small for his age and he’s Polish; I can probably do something with that. But God, what a hovel! Someone’ll have to clean him up,’ he said, looking meaningfully at me.
‘Are you going to give them an advance? They’re practically starving.’
‘An advance! You’re out of your mind. They’ll get twenty per cent of the takings if there are any, and that’s generous. I’ll need every kreutzer I’ve got for advertising, and even then I’m chancing my arm. I’ve never seen an uglier child — and obstinate too. He won’t play the Waldstein. Still, its mostly Chopin they’ll want.’
He hadn’t been gone for more than an hour when Jan Kraszinsky appeared in the shop and asked me to make the boy’s concert clothes.