He changed also to his native tongue. ‘How is it that you speak English?’
‘I had an English grandmother and I spent a lot of time with her when I was small. She was a marvellous woman. I loved her most dearly.’
Guy had given Morgan his instructions and the car set off. ‘Tell me about her.’
‘She came from the very north of England where there are lots of sheep. More sheep, she said, than people, and moors with purple heather. She lived in Carinthia with my grandfather but she was always homesick, I think.’
Only a very slight increase in care, an almost imperceptible stress on certain words, betrayed the fact that she no longer spoke her native tongue.
‘And she’s dead now?’
‘Yes. At the end of the war. She had lived in the same village all her married life and done so much good. But the peasants — of course it’s no good blaming them, but they started saying that the English… that they boiled corpses to make oil and… well, you know.’
‘Yes, indeed I do know,’ said Guy bitterly. ‘Our side produced exactly the same kind of pernicious rubbish.’
‘They say people can’t really die of a broken heart,’ she continued, ‘and of course that’s true. But they can just wait for an excuse. And with her it was the flu epidemic three years ago. It killed my mother too.’
‘And your father?’
She shrugged. ‘He was killed in 1914 at Tannenberg.’ Then, conscious of her duty to this distinguished-looking foreigner, ‘Have you been in Vienna before?’
‘Yes.’
She glanced up quickly, caught by something in his voice, but when she spoke it was to say, ‘In that case, you know that we are just passing the house where Mozart’s sister-in-law first saw the score of Don Giovanni.’
Guy, aware that he was about to get a view of Vienna hitherto denied him, said he had not known that and Tessa obligingly pointed out in the lamplit streets the place where Anton Bruckner bought his manuscript paper, the café where Schönberg got his idea for ‘Verk-larte Nacht’ and — as they turned into the Kärntnerstrasse — the shop where the prima donna of the State Opera got her underwear.
‘Oh, it’s good to see the lamplight again. Everything is beginning, don’t you feel it?’ Her voice had changed, she had forgotten her hair. This was the Murillo urchin who got the cherries, who played the mandolin. ‘There will be no more wars and art will make everybody equal and free,’ said the wardrobe mistress, her eyes shining. ‘And to be allowed to work! I cannot tell you how marvellous that is.’
Wondering what sort of childhood made it a privilege to work as a drudge to the International Opera Company, Guy listened to her prattle and was suddenly astonished when she said quietly, ‘Were you very happy, then, the last time you were in Vienna?’
There was a pause. Then, ‘Yes,’ said Guy. ‘Happier than I’ve ever been in my life.’
She nodded, well pleased with this tribute to her city, and was off again.
‘People always tell you that this is where they keep the hearts of the Habsburgs, the ones that are buried in the Kapuziner crypt,’ she said, waving a hand drowned in its wrinkled kid at the moonlit spire of the Augustinerkirche, ‘but what is really interesting, I think, is that Brahms’s housekeeper used to come here every day to light a candle when Brahms had a liver complaint. Every single day she came!’
They drove on through small squares, as quiet and enclosed as rooms, down narrow cobbled streets, taking in apparently the place where William Gluck’s little dog had almost been run over by a hansom cab and the house of the hairdresser whose father had dyed Johann Strauss’s moustache.
But the biggest treat was still to come.
‘Do you think we could stop for just a moment?’ she said as they drove across the Michaelerplatz. ‘In that little street on the left, about half-way down?’
Guy gave instructions and the car drew to a halt. They were opposite a small and fusty-looking café from which a dim, pink light shone out on to the pavement. Beside him, Guy felt Tessa tense in a momentary anxiety; then she relaxed and said, ‘Yes, there she is. Look, in that corner by the aspidistra. Can you see her?’
Sitting alone, an ancient lady dressed in black was consuming with apparent dedication a large slab of yellow cake.
‘She comes here every night and has a cup of coffee and a piece of gugelhupf. Even in the war when food was so difficult, the proprietor always kept one for her.’
‘Who is she?’
Tessa sighed with fulfilment and with awe. ‘Schubert’s great-niece,’ she said rapturously. ‘In the flesh.’
To his surprise, Guy was sorry when the car drew up in front of the house where she lived. As she got out and turned to thank him, her hood fell back and instinctively she reached up to pull it back over her savaged hair.
‘No!’ Guy’s hand came down over hers, pulling it away. He turned her head so as to catch the lamplight and stood for a moment, studying the narrow, fine-boned little face. Then he nodded. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. It will be a triumph when it’s cut, you’ll see.’
‘Cut! But surely I must grow it again?’
‘On no account,’ said Guy. He opened the door for her — and was gone.
Left alone in the lobby, Tessa stood for a moment, frowning and bewildered. She knew about phantom limbs: that the place where they had been went on aching even after they had been cut off. Her cheek, where the Englishman’s fingers had been, did not exactly ache… but very strangely, most curiously… it felt.
5
Guy was mistaken in thinking that Nerine was unaware of his wealth. Ever since her brother Arthur, an avid reader of the Financial Times, had suggested that the Farne who appeared so frequently and impressively in its columns might be the young man who had had the effrontery to propose to her all those years ago, Nerine had never rested. Arthur was despatched to make enquiries in the City and returned with the information that in addition to the enterprises which bore his name, Guy Farne was chairman of Ouro Preto Inc., had a controlling interest in nine other companies, and was regarded as one of the richest as well as the most brilliant men in Europe.
‘He’s in for a knighthood too, they say,’ he added, ‘despite the fact that he’s so young.’
‘A knighthood!’ Nerine was shaken. It looked as though her family had been hopelessly wrong in their assessment of her youthful suitor.
Her meeting with Guy outside the Associated Investment building was thus most carefully contrived, for Nerine’s first attempt at a brilliant marriage had been a disastrous failure. That her parents had forced her to marry Charles Hurlingham was not strictly true. Mrs Croft in particular, whose snobbery was so intense as to amount almost to a religious vocation, had been resolute in advising Nerine to wait for bigger prey. But it so happened that in the space of three weeks, the French girl who had been Nerine’s friend in Vienna wrote that she was marrying a marquis and the freckle-faced American sent ten pages of rapture about her engagement to a young industrialist. To be beaten to the altar by two girls who were, in every possible way, grossly her inferiors was not to Nerine’s taste. Charles was heir to a baronetcy and a famous estate in Wiltshire; she accepted him and had to endure the four years’ martyrdom that followed his injury in Flanders. Unspeakable years, walled up in the country with Charles who seemed to expect her to stay with him constantly though he had excellent nurses, and who followed her with his devoted, doggy eyes whenever she left the room. Oh, God, the waste of those years, the boredom, the frustration!