‘But it’s a bar mitzvah — my cousin’s boy, I told you.’
‘I don’t care if it’s the circumcision feast of the Shah of Persia, no one leaves my shop looking like a parakeet. I’ll frame the bill if you like and you can wear it as a brooch to show Miriam, but sequins, no!’
She laughed then, but almost at once, most disconcertingly, her eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh dear. I don’t know what I shall do without you,’ she said, groping for her handkerchief
‘He’s still thinking of going, then?’
Leah nodded. ‘I’ll never forgive that Theodor Herzl. Ever since Heini read his book he’s been insane. Who on earth wants a Jewish state? What am I supposed to do in Palestine with all those dreadful people?’
‘They say the Arabs are very courteous and friendly.’
‘Oh, it’s not the Arabs — I don’t suppose they’ll take any notice of us. It’s the other Jews… awful ghetto people from the slums of Poland.’
I tried not to smile. ‘Perhaps it won’t happen. It’s not so easy to pull up one’s roots and your husband will miss his patients.’
She shrugged. ‘I know; he’s mad. The best doctor in Vienna and he wants to grow oranges. Oranges! You should see the fuss when I serve fresh fruit at table. He has to have an extra napkin because of the juice, and a special silver knife and finger bowls all over the place — and even then he spends ten minutes in the cloakroom afterwards scrubbing his hands.’ She dabbed her eyes and sniffed. It’s bad enough having to die and go to heaven without starting on the Promised Land.’
I shut the shop between two and four. Gretl, who only lives ten minutes’ walk away, goes home to lunch but Nini (and I don’t quite know how this happened) has lunch with me.
Today, however, we sat in silence while my assistant glared at me over her goulash. I was about to take a cab to the von Metz palace and deliver the grey grosgrain day dress I had made for the old Countess — and of the Countess von Metz, Nini does not approve.
I remember so well the first time the Countess’s carriage drew up in front of my shop. Nini wasn’t with me yet so no muttered la lanterne from the workroom spoiled the excited, not to say servile, welcome of Gretl, holding open the door. The carriage was ancient, the manservant who let down the steps seemed scarcely able to walk and the Pekinese he deposited on the ground was both incontinent and blind, but the quarterings on the carriage door professed a lineage which went back to Charlemagne.
If I had known then what I know now I would have shut the door resolutely in the face of the disagreeable old woman who followed her dog into the shop. The Countess von Metz is short and squat with a face like an imperious muffin and a purple nose. That first time she stayed for an hour and made me take down every single roll of material I possessed while her Pekinese, cowering under one of my draped tables, made a puddle. When I had finished the dress she’d ordered, she quibbled for six months about the bill and eventually sent her manservant with half the sum she owed me and what she declared was a valuable Chinese vase.
Since then she has never once paid me a fair price for my work and in the last year has sent in a collection of bric-à-brac by way of payment for which the pawnbroker in the Dorotheergasse, shaking his head, scarcely gives me the price of the cloth. And yet I continue to dress this unpleasant, pathologically mean and ugly old lady. Why? It’s not easy to explain…
The von Metz palace is one of the smallest in Vienna, ancient and dark. It’s in a suburb overtaken by industry; the north side abuts on to a warehouse and in most of the rooms one needs a light on at midday. The Countess has sold or pawned everything of value: only the white and gold stoves, of which in winter far too few are lit, are still beautiful. She herself is served by a handful of decrepit retainers who are too old (not, I think, too faithful) to leave. She has no husband, no known lover in her past and her only brother, an army colonel, has long been dead. In this gloomy palace this ancient, none too clean lady lives entirely alone, her only ‘treat’ a monthly summons to a meal at Schönbrunn where the Emperor, Franz Joseph, is known to keep the worst table in Europe.
But the Countess von Metz loves clothes. She loves them pointlessly, passionately, for their own sake. Today as I walked through the fusty dark salon towards her boudoir she was waiting with glittering eyes and as I unwrapped the dress her swollen, mottled hands passed in benediction across the ribbed silk.
‘I wish to try it on,’ she said imperiously.
‘Of course, Countess.’
Her creaking maid arrived; the Countess waddled to an embroidered screen and presently emerged. The maid was dismissed and the old lady stood in silence before the cheval glass. In all the rooms of the palace there was no soul who cared for this old woman; no one whose glance would linger on her for an instant; even her dog was dead. Yet as she peered and turned and stared into the mirror, she might have been a girl of nineteen preparing for the ball that was to seal her fate.
‘There is one bow too many,’ she announced at last.
I had seen it already. We had arranged for a row of small grey velvet bows to run down the underskirt from waist to hem. There were twenty-four of these: the arrangement was expected and symmetrical, but the last bow did just crowd the eye a little.
I bent down, snicked the thread, removed the bow.
She nodded as I removed it — the tiny bow on the underskirt of a dress which no one would ever see in a house to which no one ever came. Then she sighed with satisfaction and turned once more to gaze at herself with rapt attention in the glass. And that, I suppose, is why I continue to dress the Countess von Metz.
After my visit to the Countess I felt in need of consolation so when the shop was shut I cleared the table in the workroom and began to cut out the cream silk dress which had come to me in my sleep. It’s a beautiful moment when the material spills out of its bale, voluptuous yet orderly, and one sees in its folds, as in a mirror, the finished form. I’d bought it from an old merchant whose grandfather had travelled the ancient silk route from Antioch through Merv to Samarkand, and on across the desert into China.
He’d told of the women running back and forth in their padded trousers with baskets of fresh-picked mulberry leaves for the worm princelings which spin the priceless silk. For they are the most delicate of creatures, these caterpillars; they cannot abide the smell of meat or fish, loud noise distresses them and they must be protected rigorously from draughts. Even the Empress of China is not too proud to work in the silkworm sheds.
The stories the old merchant had told were all there in the material — and indeed in its price! This will be the most beautiful dress I have ever made but it may just be the most expensive!
Ah, but how fortunate she is, the unknown woman out there, kissing her children goodnight, perhaps, or pulling on her gloves to go out to dinner and not knowing that soon, now, she will be impelled by an irresistible force towards my shop — and the dress that will set a seal on her happiness.
I worked for a couple of hours. Then suddenly I was tired and fetched a jar of apricot preserve out of my store cupboard and went across to visit Frau Schumacher.
Lisl admitted me and, knowing me well, took me first to the room where the little girls lay in their brass beds, ready for the night.
The four youngest in the first room were already asleep. Their nightdresses were white and their coverlets were white and they gave off a sublime smell of talcum powder and Pear’s soap. I walked slowly along the row, feasting my eyes.
Gisi, the baby, whose bed still had bars, her mouth greedily fastened round her comforter… Kati, her hair just grown long enough to plait, turned even in sleep towards the baby who by day she pushed and pulled and carried with ruthless maternalism… The quicksilver Resi, always in motion, falling out of trees, getting jammed in railings — and now twitching like a greyhound even in sleep… and Steffi — the family beauty, lying immaculate on her back. All the little girls are blonde and blue eyed, but Steffi has turned the basic Schumacher ingredients into something that turns heads.