‘Which uniforms are you going to take to Pfaffenstein?’ she asked her son.
Maxi brightened. ‘I thought the Tyrolean Rifles for the banquet and the Hussars for the opera. And for the reception and the opening ball, the Artillery. That’s Putzerl’s favourite.’
‘An infantry regiment for the banquet?’ said his mother, shocked. ‘Still, that’s not until the last day. If you haven’t got hold of Putzerl by then, God help us all. Let’s go and have a look.’
But when the arthritic old princess, leaning heavily on her son, reached the huge, painted cupboard in which Maxi’s uniforms were kept, disaster awaited them. Mildew had mottled the splendid silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles; some biologically interesting but unsavoury fungi had colonized the pink breeches of the Hussars…
Furiously, the princess tugged at the bell-rope and the prince’s valet appeared.
‘The prince’s uniforms must be taken to the drying room at once,’ she ordered. ‘How dare you let them get into such a state!’
The valet pointed to the walls, running with moisture, and shrugged. ‘What can you do, Highness?’ he said, and gathered up the offending garments, forebearing to point out that the drying room was now unheated.
‘The Artillery’s all right,’ said Maxi, relieved, fingering the sumptuous, braided uniform with its beguiling slender lines in the style of the Crown Prince Rudolf, which had won first prize at the Paris World Fair as the most beautiful uniform on earth. Yes, he would propose to Putzerl in that. It was not as though she was the sort of girl who would expect him to go down on his knees, something which the tightness of the trousers rendered quite impossible.
Or would it after all be better done in mufti? In some private spot in the forest? With, of course, the dogs…?
‘As for me,’ declared the princess, ‘it doesn’t matter what I wear, because I still have my pearls.’
But almost immediately she frowned. For if Maxi did not get hold of Putzerl, the pearls would have to go.
‘I always stab the air with my left hand,’ said Pino Mastrini, greatly offended at being asked to extend his acting range. ‘Always. I stab — so — and then I drop down on my left knee, so. Always.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m complaining about,’ said Jacob, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.
‘In zis bodice I cannot zink! I cannot zink even ’igh C, and ’igh F you can forget absolutely it,’ complained Raisa, erupting from the wings, followed by an infuriated Frau Pollack with her mouth full of pins.
‘The starcloth will have to be cut down, Herr Witzler. It’s half a metre too long.’
The International Opera Company was preparing for its mysterious assignment in June. Jacob had kept Farne’s secret, and no one knew who their patron was or whither they were bound. But underlying the speculation and the rumours was a growing sense of excitement, as though this was the chance that they had all been waiting for.
And so they worked. The Magic Flute had been in the repertory for years, but now they prepared to study Mozart’s immortal singspiel as though it had at that moment just been composed.
Jacob himself was in a white heat of expectation. He had seen pictures of Pfaffenstein rearing romantically on its crag above the lake, heard descriptions of the enchanting theatre. Now he dreamed of the Perfect Performance in the Perfect Setting in the presence of the Perfect Patron who would lead the company from financial darkness into light. In the cafés, among his acquaintances, Jacob showed off and swaggered; he ran up new bills and defaulted on his creditors, but over his opera he dreamed true. And because of this, though they might complain and argue, nobody failed him.
‘Where’s Bubi?’ cried the Rhinemaiden, who had come along to help.
‘I have him, Frau Witzler.’
Tessa appeared briefly in the pit carrying the Witz-ler’s three-year-old son on one arm and a plate piled high with sandwiches in the other. She emerged in the rehearsal room where Klasky — cursing the violins in Hungarian, the cellos in Czech and the woodwind in Serbo-Croat — appeared to be preparing Mozart’s score for an audience of ranking cherubim.
‘Thank you. Put them over there,’ said Klasky, glaring at the orchestra who, having rehearsed for five hours without a break, now foolishly assumed that they could eat. He passed a moist hand absently over Bubi’s blond curls and smiled at Tessa. She was a nice little thing, always willing to help. Perfect pitch, too… Pity there was never any time. Still, perhaps it was just as well. Like Chopin, who believed that to approach George Sands in love was to deprive the world of an étude, Klasky was convinced that women drained away a man’s creativity and it would never do to dissipate his energy. For in spite of the recent spate of rehearsals, Klasky had made a real breakthrough with his own opera. By changing the wronged husband from a policeman to a railway porter, he had unblocked his imagination in a most amazing way. A chorus for platelayers and signalmen had come to him in a single flash of inspiration; a soliloquy for an engine-greaser, a kind of Holy Fool who would speak for the oppressed proletariat, virtually wrote itself.
And sighing, for the girl was charming, he picked up his baton once again. ‘From the letter D, gentlemen. And remember that sostenuto means sostenuto. Even for Herr Katzenbirger it means sostenuto.’
As the time drew nearer for their departure, the company’s preparations grew more frantic.
‘I am not a canary,’ announced Raisa, arriving for a morning rehearsal. ‘I cannot zink at ten o’clock,’ but she sang. The coloratura Jacob had filched from Dresden to play the Queen of the Night fell off her stepladder, twisted an ankle, and climbed up again to sing ‘O Zittere Nicht’ in a way that had the orchestra banging on their music stands. Boris stayed up until 3 a.m. creating exotic head-dresses for Sarastro’s priest. Even Frau Pollack, presented with new fabrics after years of making do, forgot her almost-eaten great-uncle and trod the treadle of her sewing-machine like a Valkyrie.
As for Tessa, she was everywhere: prompting, copying, sewing, ironing and only once, very quietly and unnoticed, fainting in the laundry room when she had missed a little more food, a little more sleep than her small frame could endure.
On a Saturday evening, just five days before they were due to leave, Jacob received a phone call in his office which sent him hurrying in search of his under wardrobe mistress.
‘I’ve just had a call from Herr Klasky, Tessa. He’s conducting at the Musiksverein at eight-thirty and he’s forgotten The Button!’
‘Oh no!’ Tessa’s eyes were wide with concern. ‘Is it a première?’
Jacob nodded. ‘Berg’s Concerto. We must get it to him. It would be a disaster if he got upset now, so soon before the tour.’
All performing artists are superstitious and Klasky, though technically sane, could only conduct a première while in possession of a small, mottled object suggesting, with its faint air of decay and transparency, the shed milk tooth of an undernourished child, but authenticated without a doubt as the waistcoat button of Ludwig van Beethoven himself.
‘He’s rung his housekeeper,’ Jacob continued. ‘He wants you to run round quickly and fetch it and leave it at Sachers at the reception desk. He’s dining there now on his way to the hall. Can you manage that?’
A faint shadow had crossed Tessa’s face at the mention of Austria’s most famous hotel, once the favourite haunt of the aristocracy, which the terrifying Frau Sacher still ran with a complete disregard for recent changes. But she only said, ‘Yes, Herr Witzler,’ and was presently found by the Littlest Heidi, rummaging hastily in a wicker skip for something to replace her paint-encrusted smock.