Madensky Square (28 page)

I shivered as I stepped out into the slush and picked my way past the piles of timber and the scaffolding on the stable block. The place was far bigger than I had realized.

‘I wanted you to see for yourself,’ he said, and in spite of myself, as he began to show me round, I became interested. On every other subject Herr Schumacher’s conversation is to be avoided, but as he explained the function of each of the machines, ran his thumb along a particularly finely seasoned plank, or outlined his plans for expansion, he spoke with energy and sense.

‘My father was a carpenter,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the first smells I remember, the lovely smell of wood.’

The tour ended in his office and here at last, Herr Schumacher came to the point.

‘Frau Susanna, I asked you to come because I know you have run your own business for a number of years. And very successfully.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are a woman.’

To this also I agreed.

‘Now what I want to know,’ he said, leaning towards me, ‘is this. Have you ever found yourself at a disadvantage on account of your sex? When a rep comes, for example?’

‘No. Never.’

‘And your accounts? Have you had difficulty with them?’

‘Certainly not. Why should I? I can add and subtract and multiply. On good days I can even divide.’

Herr Schumacher put up a hand to indicate that he had intended no disrespect. He paced to the noticeboard, rearranged the position of the calendar, turned.

‘You see, I have been in great trouble over the inheritance,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘It’s natural for a man to want everything he’s built up to go to his own kind.’

I pulled up the collar of my coat. The office was unheated and the topic not one that excited me as it should.

‘And then I thought… it came to me in a flash,’ said Herr Schumacher, his eyes glittering. ‘Yes, in a flash! It isn’t only Gustav who has the blood, I thought. Someone else has it.
Someone else has the Blood
, Frau Susanna! My daughter, Donatella!’

‘All your daughters have the Blood, Herr Schumacher. Mitzi and Franzi and Steffi… all of them.’

‘Yes, but they’ll marry. Whereas Donatella -‘

‘I should think she’ll marry too,’ I said. ‘With that personality and those eyebrows no one will worry about her cheek.’

I had said the wrong thing.

‘No no, I shouldn’t think she’ll marry. I should think she’ll want to stay with her father. So I thought,
why don’t I train her up to succeed me
? But the question is, can she do it? And that’s what I want to ask you, Frau Susanna. Do you think a girl could manage all this?’ He swept a hand towards the window and his domain. ‘Could she ?’

‘Of course she could. Without the slightest difficulty, if she wanted to.’

I appeared to have conferred an invaluable gift on Herr Schumacher. He became wreathed in smiles, he pumped my hand. He opened his cigar case to offer me a cigar, recalled himself, and closed it.

‘Thank you, Frau Susanna. Thank you. You’ve taken a weight off my mind. That’s what I’ll do then. She can start quite young. Lisl can bring her round sometimes just to get the feel of the place. Oh, yes – it won’t take me long… she can already tell sycamore from oak, you know. There’s not the slightest doubt about it.’

Two hours later I was in the presence of the timber heiress herself as she sat on a white damask cloth beneath the glittering Christmas tree, obstinately ignoring her presents and passionately consuming a piece of wrapping paper.

Nothing can really describe the Schumachers’ drawing room on Christmas Eve: the candlelight, the blissful little girls and Helene’s eyes as she watched them. I’d stitched a lace-edged bed jacket for each of them and they came one by one and thanked me and curtseyed – but the spontaneous shrieks of appreciation were reserved for an afterthought I’d brought along in a pudding basin: a dozen muscular-looking water snails which Professor Starsky had got for me, promising that they would keep the aquarium free from slime.

Alice and I stayed to supper and went with the Schumachers to Midnight Mass, so it was one in the morning before I let myself into the house – to find the salon ablaze with light, and standing in the centre of the room, revolving slowly before the gilt-edged mirrors, Nini.

She wore her nightdress and over it, unbuttoned, a fur coat.

I’m not a person who goes in to ecstasies over valuable furs; I’ve seen far too many priceless pelts ruined by indifferent tailoring. But this coat was a miracle. It might have been made for Catherine the Great, or Anna Karenina… or Nini.

‘Daniel’s Christmas present?’ I asked.

She barely nodded. She was too busy revolving, looking, touching… turning the high collar up to frame her face, watching the fall of the hem as it caressed her bare feet.

And all the time, steadily, the tears ran down her cheeks.

But it didn’t matter of course. You can cry on a Russian sable. There’s nothing you can’t do to a coat like that.

Edith has won the Plotzenheimer Essay Prize in Anglo-Saxon studies. I saw the announcement in the paper and meant to write her a note of congratulation, but as it happened I saw her the next day. Professor Starsky had persuaded me to come to a lecture in the university given by an eminent philosopher, and I was taking my seat among his colleagues, pathologists and physiologists mostly, when I felt a kind of tremor pass along the row, heard a few muttered oaths – and looked up to see that Laura Sultzer had swept into the room.

The intrepid rescuer of rats looked whiskery and well, but poor Edith, trailing behind her, was a doleful sight. Her face, beneath the dead-cat beret that she wore, was paler than ever, her shoulders were hunched in weariness.

When the lecture was over I excused myself from the Professor and went to speak to her as she stood in the foyer, guarding her mother’s briefcase and waiting for the tandem. ‘I heard about the prize, Edith; that’s wonderful! You must be very pleased.’

‘Yes,’ said Edith listlessly. ‘My mother is pleased. She’s arranging for me to stay on and take my doctorate. I’m to investigate the ideas of Theophilus Krumm in greater depth.’ ‘And you? Do you like the idea?’

Edith shrugged. ‘I suppose it will be all right. I’m very busy really. I’m secretary to the Group now and I have to take notes at all the meetings.’

‘You haven’t seen Magdalena again?’ ‘No, but she’s very happy, I think. Her brothers have passed their exams for cadet college.’ ‘And Herr Huber? Are you in touch with him?’ Edith shook her head, found an ink-stained handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘I don’t have any reason to see him – he’s hardly ever in Vienna now.’ Then suddenly she turned to me and said: ‘Frau Susanna… it isn’t true, is it… what they say about clothes? I mean, that they can transform people? That they can turn an ugly duckling into a swan? Or make the wrong person into the right one?’

‘No, Edith,’ I said sadly. ‘They can’t do that. It’s more likely to be the other way round. They’re more likely to turn a swan into an ugly duckling.’

Then the tandem came and Edith mounted, getting oil on her skirt, and wobbled away.

But that night I had an idea.

First I consulted Alice. She was doubtful, she thought it would be too difficult technically. All the same, she wanted to be involved – Edith, after all, is Rudi’s daughter.

‘I’ll help behind the scenes,’ she said. ‘You might be glad of some sort of headgear.’

Nini too thought it wouldn’t work, but she can never resist a challenge and soon she was busy with calico and pins, looking out discarded materials and almost her old self as she prepared for the charade.

‘We could use the oi-yoi-yoi dresses,’ she said. ‘They’re still in the storeroom.’

The oi-yoi-yoi dresses were brought to me by a poor widow years ago to sell and I was always meaning to throw them away. (They’re called that because oi-yoi-yoi is what Leah Cohen said when she first saw them.) Then we made a list of Edith’s good points (her waist, her ankles) and her bad points (practically everything else) and settled down to our task.

Next I telephoned the Bluestocking and told her that I had some beautiful dresses which I was selling off cheap.

‘I’d like you to come and try them on; they’re just right for you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, my mother…’

‘Edith, I’m not talking about your mother, I’m talking about you. Your father left you an allowance, didn’t he? You’d be doing me a favour. I have to clear my stock.’

‘I see?… Yes… Well, in that case…’

‘Come to lunch first and be prepared to spend some time. I’m going to invite Herr Huber.’

I then contacted Herr Huber and said I needed his advice about suitable removal firms and we arranged for him to come on Wednesday when he was in town.

The luncheon party was a success. Edith had washed her hair, asked warmly after Herr Huber’s sisters in Linz, and made intelligent suggestions about the franchise for supplying charcuterie on the boats of the Danube Steamship Company. When the meal was over, I took the butcher aside. ‘I wonder if you’d do me a favour, Herr Huber ? You see, I have some clothes I want Fraulein Edith to try on and I remember what excellent taste you have. Could you possibly stay and give us the benefit of your advice? She has great confidence in your judgement and her mother isn’t quite…’

‘Really? Well, of course. Certainly. It will be a pleasure. Such a well-informed girl, such an excellent brain.’

Not a propitious beginning, but I was determined to proceed.

We put him down in the oyster velvet chair and I took Edith to the fitting room where I removed her spectacles, loosened her hair and instructed her to change into a broderie Anglaise slip I had brought down. ‘Some of the dresses are very close fitting,’ I said, firmly confiscating the Croatian petticoat which smelled faintly of camomile tea.

Poor Edith. She looked at me with such trust.

Then Nini brought the first of the dresses.

It was an oi-yoi-yoi dress of brown moire, but we had improved it, slashing the neckline so that Edith’s salt-cellar collar bones jutted out above the zig-zag edging, and turning the puffed sleeves round to form two listing protuberances on her shoulders.

I led her out to where Herr Huber sat.

‘What do you think ?’ I asked the butcher.

‘If you forgive me, Frau Susanna, I think it is not at all a good choice. That brown is quite wrong. Fraulein Edith has quite nice grey eyes.’

I shrugged. ‘I know,’ I said as Edith scuttled back into the cubicle, ‘but I have to think what would be acceptable to her mother. Frau Sultzer is not noted for her taste.’

We removed the mud-coloured moire and substituted a half-stitched frock of emerald satin, and Nini grinned for it had been her idea to add a bustle which started half way up Edith’s back and ended disastrously on the most prominent part of her behind.

Once again we pushed her out and revolved her in front of

Herr Huber who shook his great head from side to side, wondering, I suppose, if I had taken leave of my senses. An oi-yoi-yoi coat and skirt which Nini had dyed an unspeakable shade of puce came next.

‘Oh, please, Frau Susanna, please don’t make me try that one. I
know
it won’t suit me.’

‘Now, Edith, don’t fuss,’ I said briskly, bundling her into it. ‘You can’t tell till you’ve tried it on,’ and I jammed Alice’s contribution, a frilled lampshade of the same vile material, over one eye.

Herr Huber this time was in anguish. ‘No no! Fraulein Edith must have soft colours and gentle curves. That is all wrong!’

The last dress Nini and I had tacked together the night before and it was our masterpiece. Red and purple spotted silk left over from an order for a fancy dress party, straining over Edith’s hips, hugging every bulge on her stomach. Not only that, but the twelve hooks and eyes which fastened it at the back were almost impossible to undo. I tumbled her hair over her bodice and made sure that her spectacles were out of reach.

‘Well, if you really don’t like it,’ I said, managing to sound offended, ‘you can take it off. Nini and I’ll go upstairs and see what else we can find.’

Then we left her. But we didn’t go upstairs; we stayed behind the door in the workroom and eavesdropped.

‘Oh God!’ Edith was becoming increasingly desperate as she pulled and tugged, trying to free herself. The humiliation of being seen in those awful clothes, the disappointment, was bringing her close to tears.

‘What is it?’ we heard the butcher ask in worried tones. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I can’t get out of this horrible dress. I’m stuck, I’m completely stuck. I want to get out of here! I want to go home!’

She was really crying now as she struggled with the recalcitrant hooks. It was hard not to go to her aid, but we waited, peering through the crack in the door.

‘Oh God, why was I born!’ sobbed Edith. ‘I never wanted to be clever and give my toys to the poor; all I ever wanted was to be ordinary and now I have to be mocked and made a fool of. I’ll never get out of this dress,
never
?

Herr Huber rose, took a few steps towards the fitting booth, flushed and retreated.

‘Can’t someone help me,
please
?’

Herr Huber rose once more, looked at the door behind which we were hiding. ‘They seem to have gone,’ he said. He approached the cubicle again, hesitated. Then: ‘If you will allow me,’ he said, and disappeared inside.

For a few moments we heard only low murmuring – then a sudden and violent tearing of cloth as Herr Huber lost patience.

‘Oh dear! It’s torn. They’ll be so angry!’

‘Nonsense! Such a dress needs to be torn. Now we’ll just take the nasty thing right off and then you’ll soon be more comfortable. There, that’s better, isn’t it? Now don’t distress yourself, my poor girl, let me wipe your pretty eyes.’

Edith was still crying, but the sobs were muffled. She was crying
into
something.

‘I’m spoiling your coat.’

‘No, no… not at all. I have plenty of coats. Only don’t be sad, my little one. See how pretty you look in your petticoat. And see how soft your hair is… Look how it likes to fall over my hand…’

The truth is, I’m a genius, and clairvoyant too. But when the happy pair had left arm in arm and I told my helpers about the vision I’d had of Edith bouncing on a bed beside a wide grey river, they were not impressed.