Magic Flutes

Housed generally in some magnificent Schloss whose owners had fallen on hard times, protected by high walls and splendid iron gates, these girls, who often could scarcely add two numbers together, nevertheless understood precisely the subtle arithmetic by which a German ritter with land might equal a Hungarian count without . . . how a French vicomte with a pedigree could nevertheless be set aside for an Italian marchese with factories discreetly out of sight somewhere which made him a millionaire. As for a prince, he needed nothing else. To be addressed as ‘princess’ these girls, well-trained by their mothers, would have embraced a man of fifty with dentures and the pox.

Meanwhile, enchantingly dressed in their muslins, frantically chaperoned by hatchet-faced and underpaid ‘companions’, the girls trooped through museums, attended concerts and military manoeuvres and took excursions into the surrounding countryside.

This beguiling, hot-house world was one to which normally Guy would never have had access. But coming into the university lobby in his first month in Vienna, he found a pale, frightened, long-haired young man pinned to the wall by two cropped louts from the Jew-baiting Burschenschaft who were questioning him about his ancestry.

Guy had been leading a life of exceptional docility but a look of pleasure now spread over his face. Taking one of the louts by the shoulder, he said he would be obliged if they would leave his friend alone.

The lout, swinging round to meet a pair of malachite eyes, asked what business it was of his? Guy, mustering his German, said that bullying did not amuse him, adding that if there was no objection to duelling with someone who had been found under a piece of sacking on the Fish Quay in Newcastle upon Tyne and was most unlikely to have been born in wedlock, then he would be delighted to meet him. Otherwise, if he did not go away, Guy would pulverize him into insensibility and knock his idiotic duelling scar into his earhole. The second lout, coming to trip him up, found himself rolling down the steps towards the Ringstrasse.

Nonplussed, the louts departed. The victim, who in spite of his tragic and semitic appearance was the scion of a noble Hungarian house, now became Guy’s devoted slave and invited him to his family’s box at the Opera. In the neighbouring box, displayed like the choicest flowers from Olympus for the gaze of the populace, was a group of girls from Frau von Edelnau’s Academy. Pretty girls, striking girls – and one, in the seat nearest to Guy, who possessed that unique quality: an unequivocal and breathtaking beauty.

The English are a plain race but just occasionally, borrowing usually from some Celtic ancestor, they achieve a breathtaking perfection. Nerine Croft’s dusky, abundant ringlets were tied high with a golden thong to dance on her bare shoulders: the forget-me-nots embroidered on her white muslin dress mirrored the heavenly blue of her wide-set eyes and her small nose, as though to ward off the accusation of a cold perfection, was slightly, tantalizingly retroussée.

If it hadn’t been The Magic Flute . . . if she had not, as the curtain rose, given the smallest of anticipatory sighs . . . if she had not, at the end of Pamino’s miraculous aria of exalted love, turned in the soft dusk of the lôge and smiled at him.

But it was Mozart’s masterpiece, and she did so turn. The parents of Guy’s friend were acquainted with Frau Edelnau, and in the interval he was introduced. Nerine, delighted to find that he was English, said, yes, the singing had been wonderful and, yes, he could procure for her an ice.

So it began. It was spring: violets in the Prater; Strauss in the Stadtpark; the café tables with their bright, checked cloths spilling out on to the pavements once again. Bells rang in this enchanted city, the Kaiser drove out in a carriage with golden wheels . . . It was Frau Edelnau’s policy to invite suitably vetted young men to private dances and outings with her girls. To this select band of officers and students Guy, who at twenty was a strangely compelling creature with his wolf’s eyes and air of compressed energy, was now admitted. And Nerine, trained almost from birth to beguile and flirt and please, was enchanting to her young compatriot whose physical courage and intellectual brilliance were becoming something of a legend in the University.