Magic Flutes

And so, in a city which God might have designed for the purpose, Guy experienced the miracle, the transforming alchemy of total love. Every plumed spray of lilac in the Volksgarten, every caryatid supporting Vienna’s innumerable pillars, every street-seller with her brazier of chestnuts seemed to him limned in light. He wrote songs to Nerine and sent them floating as paper boats down the River Wien; he kept vigil outside her window at night. Friends clustered round him like puppies, bemused by his happiness. He discovered the Secessionists, climbed the dizzying verdigris dome of the University, and hardly ever went to bed. That spring and summer of his twenty-first year, Guy was invincible.

Later, he was to ask himself how much Nerine had been affected. She was always enchanting, looking up at him with those artless, deep-blue eyes, and he was accepted by the other girls as ‘hers’. But Frau von Edelnau and her minions had brought chaperonage to a fine art. Guy was allowed to waltz with her at private dances but never more than twice, to walk beside her carriage in the Prater, to procure lemonade at the manoeuvres and military parades so beloved of the Viennese, but it was impossible to be with her alone.

Until the picnic in the Vienna Woods . . .

The word ‘picnic’, which to the British suggests a casual and relaxed approach to eating, suggested to Frau Edelnau something quite different. Rugs and hampers of food were piled into carriages; the ropy arms of the chaperones emerged from hastily donned dirndls, and the expedition set off for the ruined monastery on the Kahlenberg now suitably provided with wooden tables, carefully sited vantage points and hygienic toilets.

They arrived . . . picnicked . . . the chaperones dozed, overcome by salami and pumpernickl. The girls picked cornflowers and marguerites to twine into their hair.

‘There can’t be anything better than this,’ said a freckle-faced, sunny American girl, looking at the tapestry of the green and gold-domed city below them.

‘Yes, there can,’ said Nerine.

‘What, then?’

‘Oh, being rich . . . having marvellous clothes . . . Dancing the night through with princes at a glittering ball. Living in a castle.’

Guy, as always, was beside her.

‘I’ll buy you a castle,’ he said.

Nerine turned and stared at him, caught not by the words but by the tone in which they were spoken. It was almost as though this impecunious boy really had the power to grant wishes. She became dreamy, pensive . . . Guy had found a glade of wild orchids in which there danced a myriad golden butterflies. Now he offered to show it to the girls and a party set off. The others fell behind and in a sudden shaft of sunlight Nerine, dazzled, stumbled on a root.

Guy caught her and quite beside himself by now, kissed her with all the passion of his nature.

And Nerine kissed him back.

To Guy, adrift in a foreign city, reared by Martha Hodge, that kiss meant one thing and one thing only. When Nerine returned to England, he followed her and in a daze of happiness, presented himself at the Crofts’ ornate and over-furnished villa in Twickenham to ask for her hand.

It is hard to see why they were not kind. So simple, surely, to have spoken of her youth, his need to complete his studies, their conviction that at seventeen their daughter could hardly know her own mind. Instead, the Crofts exhibited a cruelty and arrogance that he had not known existed.

‘Insolent puppy!’ snorted the empurpled Mr Croft, just returned from his city bank. ‘How dare you! I ought to have you horse-whipped.’

‘No birth, no family and no prospects,’ sneered Nerine’s brother, a pallid young man of Guy’s own age. ‘I must say you’ve got a nerve!’

‘And penniless!’ roared Mr Croft, to whom poverty was the ultimate crime.

‘Are you aware that Nerine’s aunt is an Honourable?’ enquired Mrs Croft, a small, tight-lipped woman with calculating eyes.

Unable to lift a finger against the relatives of his beloved, Guy stood stock-still in the centre of the drawing-room with its draped piano legs and overstuffed cushions. But the footman, coming forward in response to Mr Croft’s instructions to ‘Throw him out, James’, found himself reeling against the wall, nursing his arm.

Nerine was not present at the interview. His subsequent letters were returned.

That had been ten years ago. To say that the wound had never healed might seem absurd. If Guy was deflected, now, from the path of scholarship and determined to become rich enough to be revenged on the Crofts of this world, it was a decision he never regretted. Three years later he was in the Amazon, entertaining a string of lovely women on his yacht, and in the years that followed he had innumerable affairs. But he never again fell in love – and he never forgot.

Then, just two weeks before he left for Vienna, he had come out of the new, seven-storey office block in the Strand which housed his Associated Investment Company when he heard a soft voice say, ‘Guy!’ – and there she was.