‘I wish to try it on,’ she said imperiously.
‘Of course, Countess.’
Her creaking maid arrived, the Countess waddled to an embroidered screen and presently emerged. The maid was dismissed and the old lady stood in silence before the cheval glass. In all the rooms of the palace there was no soul who cared for this old woman; no one whose glance would linger on her for an instant; even her dog was dead. Yet as she peered and turned and stared into the mirror, she might have been a girl of nineteen preparing for the ball that was to seal her fate.
‘There is one bow too many,’ she announced at last.
I had seen it already. We had arranged for a row of small grey velvet bows to run down the underskirt from waist to hem. There were twenty-four of these: the arrangement was expected and symmetrical, but the last bow did just crowd the eye a little.
I bent down, snicked the thread, removed the bow.
She nodded as I removed it – the tiny bow on the underskirt of a dress which no one would ever see in a house to which no one ever came. Then she sighed with satisfaction and turned once more to gaze at herself with rapt attention in the glass.
And that, I suppose, is why I continue to dress the Countess von Metz.
After my visit to the Countess I felt in need of consolation so when the shop was shut I cleared the table in the workroom and began to cut out the cream silk dress which had come to me in my sleep. It’s a beautiful moment when the material spills out of its bale, voluptuous yet orderly, and one sees in its folds, as in a mirror, the finished form. I’d bought it from an old merchant whose grandfather had travelled the ancient silk route from Antioch through Merv to Samarkand, and on across the desert into China.
He’d told of the women running back and forth in their padded trousers with baskets of fresh-picked mulberry leaves for the worm princelings which spin the priceless silk. For they are the most delicate of creatures, these caterpillars; they cannot abide the smell of meat or fish, loud noise distresses them and they must be protected rigorously from draughts. Even the Empress of China is not too proud to work in the silkworm sheds.
The stories the old merchant had told were all there in the material – and indeed in its price! This will be the most beautiful dress I have ever made but it may just be the most expensive!
Ah, but how fortunate she is, the unknown woman out there, kissing her children goodnight, perhaps, or pulling on her gloves to go out to dinner and not knowing that soon, now, she will be impelled by an irresistible force towards my shop – and the dress that will set a seal on her happiness.
I worked for a couple of hours. Then suddenly I was tired and fetched a jar of apricot preserve out of my store cupboard and went across to visit Frau Schumacher.
Lisl admitted me and, knowing me well, took me first to the room where the little girls lay in their brass beds, ready for the night.
The four youngest in the first room were already asleep. Their nightdresses were white and their coverlets were white and they gave off a sublime smell of talcum powder and Pear’s soap. I walked slowly along the row, feasting my eyes.
Gisi, the baby, whose bed still had bars, her mouth greedily fastened round her comforter… Kati, her hair just grown long enough to plait, turned even in sleep towards the baby who by day she pushed and pulled and carried with ruthless maternalism… The quicksilver Resi, always in motion, falling out of trees, getting jammed in railings – and now twitching like a greyhound even in sleep… and Steffi – the family beauty, lying immaculate on her back. All the little girls are blonde and blue eyed, but Steffi has turned the basic Schumacher ingredients into something that turns heads.
In the next room the two older girls were still awake. Franzi was lying on her side, chewing her pigtail, and though I smiled at her I went quickly past her bed because I knew she was telling herself a story. She is the nervous one who lives in her head; not quite as pretty as the others but the most imaginative.
Mitzi, the eldest, was sitting up in bed holding a heavy book and looking worried.
‘What is it, Mitzi?’ I whispered. ‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s about Patagonia.’ Her sweet, plump face was puckered as she peered at a swirling map of mountains and fiords. ‘Maia lent it to me.’
‘I thought she wanted to go to Madagascar ?’
‘That was last week,’ said Mitzi. She sighed, and my heart went out to her. If there ever was a domestic soul, a Spirit of the Hearth, it was Mitzi Schumacher who begged to be allowed into her mother’s kitchen as other children begged to go to the Prater, but Maia held her entirely in thrall.
Frau Schumacher was on the day bed in her room, crocheting a shawl for the expected son; as welcoming as always, but looking very tired.
‘My dear, how lovely to see you! You always do me good… just to look at you! How that blue brings out your eyes!’
‘Ah, but you should see the dress I’m making!’ I launched into a description of the rich cream dress. ‘I’m just hoping nothing’ll go wrong on the stock exchange – it’ll take a millionaire to buy it!’
We spoke lightly for a while, but when the baby suddenly kicked, almost causing Frau Schumacher to drop her crochet hook, our eyes met in a look of serious speculation. Was this the kick of the future head of A. Schumacher Timber Merchant and Importer – or was it not ?
‘Have you decided on the names yet?’
Frau Schumacher nodded. ‘Ferdinand Anton Viktor,’ she said, rolling the names off her tongue.
‘And if it’s a girl?’
‘Oh please, Frau Susanna, don’t even mention it. I don’t know what I’d do. Last time Albert was away all night and so drunk they had to bring him home in a laundry basket… well, you know. And you couldn’t have had a sweeter baby than Gisi.’
‘She’s adorable. They all are.’
‘Well, I promise you, if it’s another girl he’ll go quite mad. He hardly takes any notice of the two youngest even now. I doubt if he’s picked them up since they were born.’
I must have looked fiercer than I intended, being uniquely ill-fitted to regard the birth of a daughter as a misfortune, because Frau Schumacher now felt constrained to defend her husband.
‘It’s the business, you see. The doctor told him again that I mustn’t have any more and if this one’s not a boy, Albert’ll have to take in his brother’s boy from Graz.’
We fell silent considering Herr Schumacher’s deeply masculine world. The yard with its mechanical saws, the carts rumbling across the cobbles, the sheds piled high with planks of beech and sycamore and elm…
‘He’s not a very nice child, his brother’s boy. The last time he came he emptied all the water out of the girls’ aquarium and stamped on the goldfish. But the midwife says I’m carrying high – that’s a good sign, isn’t it ?’
I put my arms around her, laid my cheek against hers. ‘It’ll be all right, Helene. Whatever happens, it’ll be all right; you’ll see.’
As I crossed the square, half an hour later, the unknown pianist was still playing. I stood for a moment, listening. It puzzles me, the way he plays: the strength, the vigour – and then suddenly the break in certain passages. I’ve seen the man with the sideburns a few times but he looks too tired, too dejected, to produce such a torrent of sound.
I’ll have to be brave and ask the ill-tempered concierge. Frau Hinkler has a deformity of one shoulder which makes it necessary to excuse her greed, her spite and her incompetence. She also has Rip. I suppose it’s part of the infinite wonder of the universe that the nastiest woman in Vienna should have the nicest dog.
Each year I can’t believe that there ever was such a spring! I can’t believe that the hyacinths in the Schumachers’ window boxes were ever so vivid, the buds on the lilac beside the churchyard gate ever so fat! The blossom on my pear tree was surely never so exquisite; never showered my courtyard with such abundance. Well this at least is true! My pear tree – I am certain of it – is ready now to produce an actual and undoubted pear!
With the end of Lent approaching, my customers seem to go a little mad. They call in incessantly to make certain that the outfit in which they mean to dazzle the congregation on Easter Sunday will be ready, and to order new ones for the regattas and garden parties that are to come. Frau Hutte-Klopstock (but I expected this) wants to go to the City Parks Associations Summer Ball looking like Isadora Duncan dancing barefoot to Beethoven. I wasn’t cross with her, however, because she told me of a disaster that had befallen Chez Jaquetta. Jaquetta, whose fashionable shop in the Karnterstrasse is so stuffed with gold bird cages and hanging baskets that you can’t turn round, has done her best to make life difficult for me, and the news that a treble row of green pom-poms with which she had seen fit to decorate a client’s bosom had been eaten by a cab horse outside Sacher’s was balm to my soul.
‘No blame attaches to the animal,’ said Frau Hutte-Klopstock. ‘It simply mistook them for brussels sprouts.’
The first tourists are beginning to arrive. Poor things, you see them trailing round the Kunsthistorisches Museum behind their guides or rushing in and out of Birth Houses and Death Houses or houses where Beethoven is supposed to have poured buckets of water over himself. The Danube is a particular problem for foreign visitors: a yellow-grey river skirting only the northern industrial suburbs.
‘Someone ought to sue that Johann Strauss,’ said an exhausted American lady sinking into my oyster velvet chair. ‘The Blue Danube indeed! Though I suppose you can’t blame him for the dead cats.’
‘Did they tell you that it’s only blue when you’re in love ?’
‘They did,’ she said grimly. A nice woman. Nini modelled the green-sprigged muslin for her and she bought it on the spot.
I’ve only been able to work on my rich cream dress in snatches, but there’s no doubt about it, it’s going to be my masterpiece!
I was woken on this glorious Easter morning by a timid ring on the doorbell of the flat. Outside stood Mitzi Schumacher in white organdie, holding out to me a straw-filled basket.
‘Mama said I could show you our eggs. We did them all ourselves – well, except Gisi. We helped her.’
I admired Mitzi’s own egg, decorated with multi-coloured bows, and Franzi’s, garlanded in leaves. Resi, the one who is always upside down or falling out of trees, had approached hers with such energy that she had cracked the shell and covered the cracks with yellow zig-zags, like lightning.
‘But there are six of you and seven eggs. Whose is the seventh?’ I asked.
Mitzi beamed. ‘It’s for the new baby.’ She handed me an extremely virile egg, very hard-boiled-looking and painted with a bright red railway engine from whose funnel there erupted fierce black puffs of smoke. ‘Papa said we should do a train because boys like them best.’
‘Girls like trains too, Mitzi.’
‘Yes. But Papa is a good man and he works hard so God will bring us a brother,’ said Mitzi. And then leaning confidentially towards me: ‘We all have new ribbons for our hats. You’ll see in church. Mine’s blue to match my sash. It matches exactly!’
St Florian’s on Easter Sunday is an unforgettable sight. It was hard to believe that two days earlier I had come in to see
Our Lady wreathed in black, Father Anselm in inky vestments, and the very stones impregnated with the sorrow of the crucifixion. And today pasque flowers spilled out of vases, the altar glowed with gold, and white-petalled stars of jasmine wreathed the Madonna’s head.
Everyone in the square seemed to be in church. Old Augustin Heller, who almost never leaves his book shop, sat beside his raven-haired granddaughter in her sailor suit. Maia’s head was bent reverently over her missal, but between its pages I distinctly saw the indented contours of a map.
In the same pew as Heller was my neighbour on the other side, Herr Schnee. The saddler is a crusty man who seldom speaks, but is always willing to be helpful if it is deeds not words that are required. I confess that I often envy him his clients: gentle carriage horses, spirited trotters, not one of whom wants to look like Karsavina in
The Firebird
or Isadora Duncan in bare feet. Beside Frau Schumacher, like crotchets in a descending scale, bobbed the heads of the six little girls…
Father Anselm proclaimed the resurrection. Ernst Bischof (who the day before had stoned a ginger tomcat sunning itself on the sacristy wall) sang the
Gloria
as though lowered down from heaven for the purpose. And as the service drew to a close, I steeled myself to waylay the vile-tempered concierge, Frau Hinkler, and ask her who it was that played in her attic flat.
I had known she was in church because I had seen Rip outside on the pavement. Fastened to the pretty wrought-iron gate that leads into our churchyard is a notice. It says: dogs not admitted – and Rip knows that this is what it says. Father Anselm, who is so young that his Adam’s apple still juts out above his clerical collar, did not put up this notice; nor – I am entirely certain of this – was it countenanced by God.
But Rip – a law-abiding Austrian animal – never enters the churchyard and lies with his head between his paws, only emitting occasionally the despairing sighs of those who wait.
I had risen to my feet and was about to accost Frau Hinkler as she stumped down the aisle when I was hailed from behind by Professor Starsky. The Professor had taken great trouble with his toilette. His tussore suit was scarcely crumpled, his tie unspotted by hydrochloric acid – but his eyes were troubled.
And understandably, for the story he told me as we moved out into the sunshine was a heart-rending one. A ferocious anti-vivisectionist lady had arrived at the university on a tandem and had released three hundred white rats and two cages of guinea pigs from the zoology lab.
‘And she took my terrapins,’ said the poor Professor. ‘There was another lady on the back and they took the whole lot away in a bucket and dropped them in the fountain. The ducks have made mincemeat of them of course. And I wasn’t going to dissect them, Frau Susanna – there would have been no point in that. I was only measuring the effect of mashed spinach on their rate of growth.’