A Glove Shop In Vienna (8 page)

But Nina, who stood so patiently while they fitted her costumes, who would put herself out for the most insignificant member of the chorus, only said very quietly that if they wanted her to sing Carmen they would have to find her a white rose. And as with Carmen, so with Violetta (whether or not she was the
Dame aux Camellias)
, with Mimi and Gilda and Butterfly.

So now poor Jacob stepped out of the resplendent foyer with its gilded mirrors and corpulent muses, to search among the frangipani, the hibiscus and the voracious orchids in that steam-bath of a city for the flower which alone linked this lovely, deeply weary woman to her youth.

In his ornate gold-leaf and red-plush box next to the stage, a man whose look of extreme distinction even the recent months of strain and agony could not eradicate, waited — entirely without interest – for the curtain to rise.

As usual in these times of slump and mismanagement there had been a muddle about the posters. The company was second-rate, the opera was
Carmen —
that was all he knew and it was enough to have kept him away but for the need to kill time for an evening before the arrival of the tycoon from Sao Paulo to whom he was selling ‘The Dragonfly’. Everything else was sold already: the other boats, the carriages, the antique silver and fine furniture he had shipped out from Europe. Only for Roccella itself had he found no purchaser. Soon now the lovely Palladian yellow-stuccoed house with its blue shutters, its flower-wreathed arcades, its fountains and terraces, would vanish in the murderous embrace of the jungle from which he had wrested it.

‘Look, Mother, there’s Mr Varlov! So he can’t be in prison yet,’ said the convent-fresh daughter of a Portuguese customs official, looking raptly at the solitary figure in the box.

‘Don’t stare, dear,’ said her mother, irritably aware that neither disgrace nor bankruptcy would dim the image of this curiously magnetic figure in her daughter’s eyes.

But the girl’s father did stare, and nodded, for it seemed to him that Varlov had had a raw deal. Though he had been among the wealthiest of the planters and hospitable to a fault, Varlov had not indulged in the pranks of so many of the others -washing their carriage horses in champagne, sending their shirts back to Paris to be laundered. Varlov had built houses for the
serengueiros
who tended his thousands of acres of wild rubber, and schools for their children. It was to save these that he had gone to Rio when the crash came, to raise more money by means which, though he could not have known it at the time, had turned out to be illegal and now left him facing, along with the men he had trusted, a charge of malpractice and fraud.

Leaning back, indifferent to the looks he was attracting, Paul looked round the Opera House that he had helped to bring into being. It was he who had insisted on the best Carrara marble, he who had suggested that de Angelis himself be fetched from Italy to paint the ceilings. He had put thousands of pounds of his own money into this crazy, lovely building and for one reason only. Obsessionally, doggedly, idiotically, Paul had been convinced that one day
she
would come.

Well, she had not come. He had entertained Charetti and her entire company from La Scala to a seven-course banquet on ‘The Dragonfly’, had taken half a Russian
corps de ballet
stricken with yellow fever back to Roccella to be nursed…

But she had not come and never would come now. It was over.

Jacob had found a rose. Feuerbach, twisting his idiot moustache into imagined perfection, went to the conductor’s rostrum. Padrocci completed the egg-swallowing and mi-mi-mi-ing routine so beloved of bad tenors all over the world and was eased into the uniform of Don Jose.

The curtain rose. Soldiers and passers-by, hopelessly sparse on the over-large stage, wandered about. Padrocci made his entrance. He had burst a button on his tunic and was already a quarter-tone flat.

In his box, Paul Varlov yawned.

Carmen appeared on the steps of the cigarette factory, was greeted by the crowd, moved forward, getting into position for her ‘Habanera’. A heavy black wig, a flounced skirt, In her hair a rose…

In the stage box a man stood up, threw out an arm, spoke some unintelligible words. He was glared at, hushed.

Nina looked up. Across the glare of the footlights, at a distance at which normally she could distinguish nothing, she saw him, understood why she had come — and began to sing.

What happened next was a miracle. Jacob Kindinsky said so, anyway, and he should have known. The kind of miracle that enables a mother to leap across a chasm to rescue a child threatened by fire, or enables a mortally-wounded pilot to land his aircraft safely. For Nina now sang as she had sung at the height of her glory. Her illness, the effect of her operation ceased to exist. ‘Sing with your voice, with your heart, with your life’, St Augustine had begged, and so now sang Nina Berg, forcing from Padrocci as the opera continued a decent, near-musical performance, from Feuerbach a respect for Bizet’s marvellously subtle score.

The first interval found Jacob in tears and Paul Varlov sitting in his box as if carved from stone. ‘I
cannot
do it again,’ he silently implored the Fates. ‘I
cannot
!’

For the first few moments, following the ecstasy and shock of seeing her, hope had soared. Even with the heavy make-up he could see how she had aged. That she was appearing with this appalling company at all seemed to indicate that her career was over. In which case, surely he had a right, even disgraced and bankrupt as he was… ? But as she began to sing he knew it was not so. She was exactly what they had foretold: a great and glorious artist. If she was here it was for some chivalrous reason of her own.

The curtain rose again. Padrocci, pawing the white rose with his hot, fat hands, managed the ‘Flower Song’ and Paul, watching him, smiled crookedly. There was one gift and one gift only that he grudged the encroaching jungle. The greenhouse at Follina with its latticed screens, its fan and ice-machine where, to the puzzlement of his gardeners, he had coaxed and bullied from the black soil of Amazonia a sweetly-scented, snow-white rose.

Carmen read her doom in the cards, sent Jose away, went forward to her death… Right at the end the strain began to tell and Jacob, cowering, waited for the first tell-tale crack in her voice but Feuerbach, scenting the stable, was rampant again and no one noticed.

The curtain fell on an ovation. The audience rose, stamped, roared. Flowers rained on the stage. Nina took curtain call upon curtain call, leading forward the stunned Padrocci, the simpering Feuerbach. She was not at all impatient and hardly glanced at Paul’s box. There was all time, all eternity now for them to be together. Even she could not imagine a God so wrathful that he would separate them twice.

The delay before she could escape from the theatre gave Paul his chance. He sent a note round to the stage door and made his way quickly down to the docks. He was selling ‘The Dragonfly’ fully equipped and his Indian crew had been persuaded to stay on and work for the new owner. If he worked fast it could be done – her own devastating humility would aid him – but he thought it might be the last thing he would do.

Hurriedly he gave his instructions: a perfect intimate dinner for two on deck; the Venetian candlesticks, the best champagne — and no word to Madame, no single word to indicate that ‘The Dragonfly’ was no longer his.

They nodded, pleased to serve him once again. They would not betray him and spoke, in any case, only their own language and a smattering of Portuguese.

Time, now, to go to the riverside cafe he had appointed for their rendezvous.

She came as he had asked, alone, in a hansom, telling no one where she was going. As she stepped out and the lamplight shone on her well-remembered face, he felt a moment of rage that time had dared so patently to lay hands on her. Then it was over, for this was Nina. She, in her turn, experienced no such moment, for he was handsomer than ever, the skin taut over those incredible bones, the streaks of silver highlighting his jet-black hair.

‘Come,’ he said, allowing himself once and once only to touch her hand. ‘We’re going to have dinner on my yacht.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

She followed him like a child. She wanted to go on saying ‘yes’ to everything: ‘yes’ to the lapping of the river, ‘yes’ to the hot night and the cry of the frogs; ‘yes’ to the future – ‘yes’ even to the lonely and agonising past because it had led her to this place. So totally, shiveringly happy was she that she made a characteristic gesture, laying a finger sideways across her lips so as not to cry out and Paul, remembering it, stumbled for a moment as he led her aboard.

‘What a beautiful yacht, Paul!’

‘Yes: she’s the fastest on the river. I have four others: a schooner, a motor launch…’ He began to show off, boring her with tonnages and the luxurious fittings he had installed. Useless. She seemed enchanted at his success; to regard it as absolutely natural that he should boast like a silly boy.

‘Oh, I
knew
you’d do well! Tell me everything! Start with
now
. Where do you live?’

A servant had taken her cloak, drawn out a chair at the snowy candlelit table on the front deck. She took a roll, began to crumble it – then looked up at him to see if he remembered.

Yes, he remembered… That they had always kept a handful of crumbs from every meal they ate together and gone afterwards to find a one-legged pigeon who roosted between the feet of a particularly Gothic saint above the west door of the Stefan’s Dom. A good life they had given that pigeon, who had abandoned thereafter any efforts to support himself.

Deliberately he looked away, refusing the shared intimacy, and began to describe his house. ‘It was built by an Italian over a hundred years ago – it’s an exact copy of the
palazzo
in his native village. Roccella, it’s called. He didn’t live long to enjoy it, poor devil. I got it for a song and I’ve made a water garden, an arboretum…’

Yes, he would do that, thought Nina. She remembered how he had bought a packet of seeds once, mignonette they were, and they had wandered through the courtyards of the Hofburg scattering them in the cracks between the paving stones. She had been surprised and enchanted that someone so wild and masculine should care so much for flowers.

‘I’ve brought in trees from all over Amazonia – there must be five hundred species. And I’ve made the house into a real show place. The furniture’s mostly Louis Quinze shipped out from France, the chandeliers are Bohemian…’

He was getting nowhere. To his infantile showing-off she accorded only the lovely, quiet attention that was her hallmark.

‘I wish you could see it,’ he said.

Ah, that was better. She had made a small movement of the head. Was she not going to see it, then?

‘You are happy in the Amazon, Paul? You like it?’

He was silent. Then, forgetting his role, he began to quote the lines that the great Cervantes had written about the new world that was South America:’… the refuge of all the poor devils of Spain, the sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers, the promised land for ladies of easy virtue, a lure and disillusionment for the many… and an incomparable remedy for the few.’

Nina had closed her eyes. ‘And you?’ she said softly. ‘Have you found it to be that? An incomparable remedy?’

Paul did not reply. For him there had always been only one ‘incomparable remedy’. This woman to whom he had committed himself wholly at their first meeting and whose absence had left him with a lifelong, ever undiminished sense of loss.

So now on with the slaughter, for he saw that like himself she had kept faith. He had only to reach out and she would give it all up – the fame and adulation, the homage of the students who had pulled her carriage through the Prater after her first
Boheme
, the bouquets glittering with diamond drops which besotted Habsburg counts threw for her on stage… If he mishandled the next few moments he would doom her to squalor and poverty, waiting for him to come out of prison if the trial went against him, friendless in this vile climate, in danger of every dread disease.

‘You gave an incredible performance tonight.’

She waved a hand. ‘No… no! It was a mistake, Paul. I am —’

He interrupted her. ‘But I wondered why you wore a
white
rose? One would expect Carmen to wear
red
flowers, don’t you think?’

There. He had done it. He had also, apparently, crushed the stem of his wine-glass.

Nina looked down at her plate. Not to make a fuss, that was what mattered. Women lost their only sons in battle. Children starved. Paul had not loved her. Blindly she groped for her fork, speared a dark, unfocused object and conveyed it, with infinite care, to her mouth.

Even now perhaps she could do it. If she admitted to him that her voice was finished. He was so chivalrous, so kind.

Oh, God,
no
!

Paul’s glass had been replaced; the next course brought. His bleeding hand, wrapped in a napkin, was concealed beneath the table. Now to finish it off.

‘Have some more wine, Nina. It will give me an excuse to have some. Steffi always fusses when I get drunk.’

‘Steffi? Your… wife?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re not actually married – one doesn’t bother out here. But she’s been with me for a long time.’

‘What is she like?’ said Nina. She was speaking with great care now, like a small child reciting poetry.

Paul’s mind juddered to a halt. What indeed was she like? Had he ever, among the string of girls with whom he had tried to forget Nina, even known a Steffi?

‘Well, she’s French… dark curls… a real minx but…’

He rambled on, creating an ‘ooh-la-la’
soubrette
from a fifth-rate operetta. (‘You cannot believe me, Nina. You
cannot
. Tell me I’m lying; see through this idiot game.’)

But she believed him. The modesty and selflessness he’d so much loved in her finished the job he had begun. It was over.

What followed was the worst. Nina lifted her chin and took up, almost visibly, the mantle of prima donna and woman of the world. For exactly the time that politeness demanded she made conversation, speaking amusingly of her travels, telling him bizarre and interesting stories of the stage. Then she rose, gave him her hand to kiss, sent her regards to Steffi.