We had scarcely finished the meal when Herr Schumacher called and asked me to go for a drive.
‘Now?’ I said, amazed. Alice and I were going over later to see the lighting of the tree and the children opening their presents.
‘Please,’ said Herr Schumacher, unaccustomedly humble. ‘Helene said you might be so kind. There is something on my mind.’
It was a strange drive I took with him, almost in silence, through the deserted streets, past windows where families still sat at table, past wreaths and ribbons hung on the doors. Then we turned in at the timber yard.
I shivered as I stepped out into the slush and picked my way past the piles of timber and the scaffolding on the stable block. The place was far bigger than I had realized.
‘I wanted you to see for yourself,’ he said, and in spite of myself, as he began to show me round, I became interested. On every other subject Herr Schumacher’s conversation is to be avoided, but as he explained the function of each of the machines, ran his thumb along a particularly finely seasoned plank, or outlined his plans for expansion, he spoke with energy and sense.
‘My father was a carpenter,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the first smells I remember, the lovely smell of wood.’
The tour ended in his office and here at last, Herr Schumacher came to the point.
‘Frau Susanna, I asked you to come because I know you have run your own business for a number of years. And very successfully.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are a woman.’
To this also I agreed.
‘Now what I want to know,’ he said, leaning towards me, ‘is this. Have you ever found yourself at a disadvantage on account of your sex? When a rep comes, for example?’
‘No. Never.’
‘And your accounts? Have you had difficulty with them?’ ‘Certainly not. Why should I? I can add and subtract and multiply. On good days I can even divide.’
Herr Schumacher put up a hand to indicate that he had intended no disrespect. He paced to the noticeboard, rearranged the position of the calendar, turned.
‘You see, I have been in great trouble over the inheritance,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘It’s natural for a man to want everything he’s built up to go to his own kind.’
I pulled up the collar of my coat. The office was unheated and the topic not one that excited me as it should.
‘And then I thought… it came to me in a flash,’ said Herr Schumacher, his eyes glittering. ‘Yes, in a flash! It isn’t only Gustav who has the blood, I thought. Someone else has it. Someone else has the Blood, Frau Susanna! My daughter, Donatella!’
‘All your daughters have the Blood, Herr Schumacher. Mitzi and Franzi and Steffi… all of them.’
‘Yes, but they’ll marry. Whereas Donatella…’
‘I should think she’ll marry too,’ I said. ‘With that personality and those eyebrows no one will worry about her cheek.’
I had said the wrong thing.
‘No no, I shouldn’t think she’ll marry. I should think she’ll want to stay with her father. So I thought, why don’t I train her up to succeed me? But the question is, can she do it? And that’s what I want to ask you, Frau Susanna. Do you think a girl could manage all this?’ He swept a hand towards the window and his domain. ‘Could she?’
‘Of course she could. Without the slightest difficulty, if she wanted to.’
I appeared to have conferred an invaluable gift on Herr Schumacher. He became wreathed in smiles, he pumped my hand. He opened his cigar case to offer me a cigar, recalled himself, and closed it.
‘Thank you, Frau Susanna. Thank you. You’ve taken a weight off my mind. That’s what I’ll do then. She can start quite young. Lisl can bring her round sometimes just to get the feel of the place. Oh, yes — it won’t take me long… she can already tell sycamore from oak, you know. There’s not the slightest doubt about it.’
Two hours later I was in the presence of the timber heiress herself as she sat on a white damask cloth beneath the glittering Christmas tree, obstinately ignoring her presents and passionately consuming a piece of wrapping paper.
Nothing can really describe the Schumachers’ drawing room on Christmas Eve: the candlelight, the blissful little girls and Helene’s eyes as she watched them. I’d stitched a lace-edged bed jacket for each of them and they came one by one and thanked me and curtseyed — but the spontaneous shrieks of appreciation were reserved for an afterthought I’d brought along in a pudding basin: a dozen muscular-looking water snails which Professor Starsky had got for me, promising that they would keep the aquarium free from slime.
Alice and I stayed to supper and went with the Schumachers to Midnight Mass, so it was one in the morning before I let myself into the house — to find the salon ablaze with light, and standing in the centre of the room, revolving slowly before the gilt-edged mirrors, Nini.
She wore her nightdress and over it, unbuttoned, a fur coat.
I’m not a person who goes in to ecstasies over valuable furs; I’ve seen far too many priceless pelts ruined by indifferent tailoring. But this coat was a miracle. It might have been made for Catherine the Great, or Anna Karenina… or Nini.
‘Daniel’s Christmas present?’ I asked.
She barely nodded. She was too busy revolving, looking, touching… turning the high collar up to frame her face, watching the fall of the hem as it caressed her bare feet.
And all the time, steadily, the tears ran down her cheeks. But it didn’t matter of course. You can cry on a Russian sable. There’s nothing you can’t do to a coat like that.
Edith has won the Plotzenheimer Essay Prize in Anglo-Saxon studies. I saw the announcement in the paper and meant to write her a note of congratulation, but as it happened I saw her the next day. Professor Starsky had persuaded me to come to a lecture in the university given by an eminent philosopher, and I was taking my seat among his colleagues, pathologists and physiologists mostly, when I felt a kind of tremor pass along the row, heard a few muttered oaths — and looked up to see that Laura Sultzer had swept into the room.
The intrepid rescuer of rats looked whiskery and well, but poor Edith, trailing behind her, was a doleful sight. Her face, beneath the dead-cat beret that she wore, was paler than ever, her shoulders were hunched in weariness.
When the lecture was over I excused myself from the Professor and went to speak to her as she stood in the foyer, guarding her mother’s briefcase and waiting for the tandem.
‘I heard about the prize, Edith; that’s wonderful! You must be very pleased.’
‘Yes,’ said Edith listlessly. ‘My mother is pleased. She’s arranging for me to stay on and take my doctorate. I’m to investigate the ideas of Theophilus Krumm in greater depth.’
‘And you? Do you like the idea?’
Edith shrugged. ‘I suppose it will be all right. I’m very busy really. I’m secretary to the Group now and I have to take notes at all the meetings.’
‘You haven’t seen Magdalena again?’
‘No, but she’s very happy, I think. Her brothers have passed their exams for cadet college.’
‘And Herr Huber? Are you in touch with him?’
Edith shook her head, found an ink-stained handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘I don’t have any reason to see him — he’s hardly ever in Vienna now.’ Then suddenly she turned to me and said: ‘Frau Susanna… it isn’t true, is it… what they say about clothes? I mean, that they can transform people? That they can turn an ugly duckling into a swan? Or make the wrong person into the right one?’
‘No, Edith,’ I said sadly. ‘They can’t do that. It’s more likely to be the other way round. They’re more likely to turn a swan into an ugly duckling.’
Then the tandem came and Edith mounted, getting oil on her skirt, and wobbled away.