Magic Flutes

‘Here,’ he said. The word seemed to have been forced out of him. ‘I’ve been to fetch it. It’s for you.’

He had put his hand into the pocket of his suit to take out a small, black box. At this point, however, emotion overtook him and he had to feel in his other pocket for a monogrammed handkerchief with which to blow his nose. Then, with a last purposeful thrust, he put the box into Tessa’s hand.

‘No!’ Tessa’s low, startled exclamation was nevertheless audible in every corner of the stage. ‘No, please . . . I couldn’t!’

But the Hungarian was in control again. ‘Yes,’ he said gruffly. ‘I want you to have it. To show my gratitude for what you tried to do. It’s yours.’

Now, everyone had crowded round. There were ‘Oh’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ from all sides, and the Rhinemaiden sighed like the sea.

For the gesture that Klasky had made, torn as it was from the very depths of his being, was the right gesture, the only one. Something had been said to the Princess of Pfaffenstein which could have been said in no other way.

Thus Tessa, on her last day as Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress, looked down at the object held in her trembling hand. Mottled, a little diseased-looking, frail – and valued beyond any jewel in Christendom – the waistcoat button of Ludwig van Beethoven himself.

Guy, with his entourage, reached Vienna on a misty, mid-October afternoon. His part in the negotiations had been successfully accomplished. The League had granted the Austrian Republic an enormous loan with which to stabilize her currency and put her affairs to rights. Patiently enduring the eulogies in the continental press, the banquets and fulsome speeches which followed, Guy had only felt compelled to decline, with scrupulous politeness, the Great Cross of the Order of St Stephen which the grateful Austrian government endeavoured to confer on him.

Immensely relieved to be done with it all, he stepped down from the Geneva Express.

‘Hurry the stuff out,’ he ordered David. ‘There’s a train at three, I think, that gets a connection to Pfaffenstein. Check the times – I’m going to get a paper.’

David was back in a few minutes. ‘I’ve reserved a first-class compartment, and the cases are in. We leave in ten minutes.’

No answer. Guy was reading with total concentration an article in the Wiener Presse, his face drawn into its most satanic lines. ‘Get the luggage out again,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘Take it to Sachers. Wait for me there, and Thisbe, too.’

‘Is anything—’ began David, but the only reply was the paper thrust into his hand. He read:

KLOSTERN THEATRE CLOSES ITS DOORS

PATRON PRINCESS RUINED

THE LOSS OF MY OPERA IS WORLD’S LOSS

SAYS KLASKY

‘Oh, Lord!’ thought David. He looked up but Guy had already vanished, lost in the crowd making its way to the taxi rank.

Jacob was in his office, clearing his desk. The Rhine-maiden, supposedly helping him, was sniffing dolorously over old programmes and mementoes of former glory, removing them from the waste-paper basket as soon as Jacob put them in. Under the desk, in a nest of discarded newspaper cuttings, Bubi was being a mouse.

Already, even in so short a time, the theatre bore marks of desertion. The posters with their ‘Cancelled’ notices flapped dismally; the red plush seats were shrouded in tarpaulins; there was dust everywhere and it was bitterly cold.

Into this dismal scene Farne burst unannounced, exuding energy and power and sending Jacob leaping exultantly to his feet.

‘Herr Farne! Welcome, welcome! Come in! A chair for Herr Farne, liebchen!’ he cried, sweeping a pile of music on to the floor.

His squashed, despairing face was transformed. Herr Farne had heard of their plight; this famous music-lover could not bear to think of the demise of the Klostern Theatre; he had come to pay the six months’ rent; he was going to finance Fricassée. They were saved!

The illusion lasted exactly as long as Farne’s first words.

‘If you imagine I would sit down in the same room as you,’ said the Englishman, raking Jacob with his disquieting eyes, ‘you must be an even greater fool than I took you for. You deserve to burn in hell for what you did to Tessa.’

‘I . . . she offered . . . I tried to refuse, but—’

‘You don’t seem to have tried very hard. Bankrupting yourself is your own business, but bankrupting a girl of twenty happens to be another matter. It would give me the greatest pleasure to see you in jail.’

But Jacob had surfaced again. ‘Herr Farne, quite a small sum, now, could pull us round. Well, a fairly small sum. Klasky’s opera is undoubtedly a masterpiece and—’

‘Klasky’s opera doesn’t interest me in the slightest and if you think I’d lift a finger to save you after the way you’ve behaved, you must be out of your mind.’

‘But then . . . why have you come?’

‘I came to find Tessa. Where is she?’