The Morning Gift

But there was a snag. The Concert Committee had asked Heini to include in his programme the sonata that the third-year piano students were studying that term: Beethoven’s tricky and beautiful Opus 99. Heini had no objection to this, but though he had the last ten Beethoven sonatas by heart, this one he would have to play from the score – and that meant a page turner.

It was here that things had begun to go wrong. For Professor Sandor had a daughter, also a piano student, whom he had offered Heini in that role.

‘You’ll find her very intelligent,’ the Professor had said proudly; and at Heini’s first rehearsal Mali had duly appeared – and been a disaster.

Mali was not just plain – an unobtrusively plain girl would not have upset him – she was virulently ugly; her spectacles glinted and caught the light; she had buck teeth. Not only that, but she drove him nearly mad with her humble eagerness, her desperate desire to be of use, and though she could hardly fail to be able to read music, she was so hesitant, so terrified of being hasty, that several times he had had to nod at the bottom of the page. Worst of all, Mali perspired.

Heini had missed Ruth ever since he had come to Budapest, but in the days leading up to the concert his longing for her became a constant ache. Ruth turned over so gracefully, so skilfully that one hardly knew she was there; she smelled sweetly and faintly of lavender shampoo and never, in the years she’d sat beside him, had he found it necessary to nod.

Nor was his stepmother at all aware of the kind of pressures that playing in public put on him. Heini’s hands were insured, of course, and taking care of them had become second nature, but a pianist used all his body and when he tripped over a dustpan she had left on the stairs, he could not help being upset.

‘I’m not being fussy,’ he said to Marta, ‘but if I sprained my ankle, I wouldn’t be able to pedal for a month.’

It had been so different in the Bergers’ apartment, which had become his second home. Not only Ruth but her mother and the maids were happy to serve him, as he in turn served music.

But it was on the actual day of the concert that Heini’s need for Ruth became almost uncontainable.

The day began badly, when he was woken at nine o’clock by the sound of the maid hoovering the corridor outside his room. He always slept late on the day of a concert, but when he complained, his stepmother said that the girl had to get through her work and pointed out that Heini had already spent ten hours in bed.

‘In bed, but not asleep,’ Heini said bitterly – but he didn’t really expect her to understand.

Then there was the question of lunch. Heini could never eat anything heavy before he played and in Vienna Ruth always made a point of getting to the Café Museum early to keep a corner table and make sure that the beef broth, which was all that he could swallow, was properly strained and the plain rusks well baked. Whereas Marta seemed to expect him to play on a diet of roast pork and dumplings!

Leaving the house earlier than he had intended, Heini, walking down the fashionable Váci utca, faced yet another challenge: the purchase of a flower for his buttonhole. A gardenia was probably too formal for the Academy, a camellia too, but a carnation, a white one, should strike the right note. Ruth, of course, had bought his buttonholes – he had watched her once, searching for a flawless bloom, involving the shop assistant, who knew her well, in the excitement of kitting him out.

Bravely now, Heini went in alone and found a girl to help him. It was only when he came out again, his flower safe in cellophane, that he realized that he did not have a pin.

In the hall of the Academy, Professor Sandor was waiting.

‘It’s an excellent attendance – almost full. Considering we had less than two weeks for the publicity and there’s a premiere at the opera, we can be very pleased.’

Heini nodded and went to the green-room – and there was Mali in an unbelievably ugly dress: crimson crepe which clung unsuitably to her bosom and exposed her collar bones. The splash of colour would distract the eye even from the back of the hall. Ruth always chose dresses that blended with the colours of the hall, quiet dresses which nevertheless became her wonderfully.

‘Do you have a pin?’ he asked – and Mali did at least have that and managed, fumbling and nervous, to fasten the carnation in his buttonhole. ‘I shall need to be quiet now,’ he added firmly, and sat down as far away from her as possible.

Not that this ensured him the peace he craved. Mali fidgeted incessantly with the Beethoven sonatas, checking the pages; she cleared her throat . . .