In the next room the two older girls were still awake. Franzi was lying on her side, chewing her pigtail, and though I smiled at her I went quickly past her bed because I knew she was telling herself a story. She is the nervous one who lives in her head; not quite as pretty as the others but the most imaginative.
Mitzi, the eldest, was sitting up in bed holding a heavy book and looking worried.
‘What is it, Mitzi?’ I whispered. ‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s about Patagonia.’ Her sweet, plump face was puckered as she peered at a swirling map of mountains and Fjords. ‘Maia lent it to me.’
‘I thought she wanted to go to Madagascar?’
‘That was last week,’ said Mitzi. She sighed, and my heart went out to her. If there ever was a domestic soul, a Spirit of the Hearth, it was Mitzi Schumacher who begged to be allowed into her mother’s kitchen as other children begged to go to the Prater, but Maia held her entirely in thrall.
Frau Schumacher was on the day bed in her room, crocheting a shawl for the expected son; as welcoming as always, but looking very tired.
‘My dear, how lovely to see you! You always do me good… just to look at you! How that blue brings out your eyes!’
‘Ah, but you should see the dress I’m making!’ I launched into a description of the rich cream dress. ‘I’m just hoping nothing’ll go wrong on the stock exchange — it’ll take a millionaire to buy it!’
We spoke lightly for a while, but when the baby suddenly kicked, almost causing Frau Schumacher to drop her crochet hook, our eyes met in a look of serious speculation. Was this the kick of the future head of A. Schumacher Timber Merchant and Importer — or was it not?
‘Have you decided on the names yet?’
Frau Schumacher nodded. ‘Ferdinand Anton Viktor,’ she said, rolling the names off her tongue.
‘And if it’s a girl?’
‘Oh please, Frau Susanna, don’t even mention it. I don’t know what I’d do. Last time Albert was away all night and so drunk they had to bring him home in a laundry basket… well, you know. And you couldn’t have had a sweeter baby than Gisi.’
‘She’s adorable. They all are.’
‘Well, I promise you, if it’s another girl he’ll go quite mad. He hardly takes any notice of the two youngest even now. I doubt if he’s picked them up since they were born.’
I must have looked fiercer than I intended, being uniquely ill-fitted to regard the birth of a daughter as a misfortune, because Frau Schumacher now felt constrained to defend her husband.
‘It’s the business, you see. The doctor told him again that I mustn’t have any more and if this one’s not a boy, Albert’ll have to take in his brother’s boy from Graz.’
We fell silent considering Herr Schumacher’s deeply masculine world. The yard with its mechanical saws, the carts rumbling across the cobbles, the sheds piled high with planks of beech and sycamore and elm…
‘He’s not a very nice child, his brother’s boy. The last time he came he emptied all the water out of the girls’ aquarium and stamped on the goldfish. But the midwife says I’m carrying high — that’s a good sign, isn’t it?’
I put my arms around her, laid my cheek against hers. ‘It’ll be all right, Helene. Whatever happens, it’ll be all right; you’ll see.’
As I crossed the square, half an hour later, the unknown pianist was still playing. I stood for a moment, listening. It puzzles me, the way he plays: the strength, the vigour — and then suddenly the break in certain passages. I’ve seen the man with the sideburns a few times but he looks too tired, too dejected, to produce such a torrent of sound.
I’ll have to be brave and ask the ill-tempered concierge. Frau Hinkler has a deformity of one shoulder which makes it necessary to excuse her greed, her spite and her incompetence. She also has Rip. I suppose it’s part of the infinite wonder of the universe that the nastiest woman in Vienna should have the nicest dog.
Each year I can’t believe that there ever was such a spring! I can’t believe that the hyacinths in the Schumachers’ window boxes were ever so vivid, the buds on the lilac beside the churchyard gate ever so fat! The blossom on my pear tree was surely never so exquisite; never showered my courtyard with such abundance. Well this at least is true! My pear tree — I am certain of it — is ready now to produce an actual and undoubted pear!
With the end of Lent approaching, my customers seem to go a little mad. They call in incessantly to make certain that the outfit in which they mean to dazzle the congregation on Easter Sunday will be ready, and to order new ones for the regattas and garden parties that are to come. Frau Hutte-Klopstock (but I expected this) wants to go to the City Parks Associations Summer Ball looking like Isadora Duncan dancing barefoot to Beethoven. I wasn’t cross with her, however, because she told me of a disaster that had befallen Chez Jaquetta. Jaquetta, whose fashionable shop in the Kärnterstrasse is so stuffed with gold bird cages and hanging baskets that you can’t turn round, has done her best to make life difficult for me, and the news that a treble row of green pom-poms with which she had seen fit to decorate a client’s bosom had been eaten by a cab horse outside Sacher’s was balm to my soul.
‘No blame attaches to the animal,’ said Frau Hutte-Klopstock. ‘It simply mistook them for brussels sprouts.’
The first tourists are beginning to arrive. Poor things, you see them trailing round the Kunsthistorisches Museum behind their guides or rushing in and out of Birth Houses and Death Houses or houses where Beethoven is supposed to have poured buckets of water over himself. The Danube is a particular problem for foreign visitors: a yellow-grey river skirting only the northern industrial suburbs.
‘Someone ought to sue that Johann Strauss,’ said an exhausted American lady sinking into my oyster velvet chair. ‘The Blue Danube indeed! Though I suppose you can’t blame him for the dead cats.’
Did they tell you that it’s only blue when you’re in love?’
‘They did,’ she said grimly. A nice woman. Nini modelled the green-sprigged muslin for her and she bought it on the spot.
I’ve only been able to work on my rich cream dress in snatches, but there’s no doubt about it, it’s going to be my masterpiece!
I was woken on this glorious Easter morning by a timid ring on the doorbell of the flat. Outside stood Mitzi Schumacher in white organdie, holding out to me a straw-filled basket.
‘Mama said I could show you our eggs. We did them all ourselves — well, except Gisi. We helped her.’
I admired Mitzi’s own egg, decorated with multi-coloured bows, and Franzi’s, garlanded in leaves. Resi, the one who is always upside down or falling out of trees, had approached hers with such energy that she had cracked the shell and covered the cracks with yellow zig-zags, like lightning.
‘But there are six of you and seven eggs. Whose is the seventh?’ I asked.
Mitzi beamed. ‘It’s for the new baby.’ She handed me an extremely virile egg, very hard-boiled looking and painted with a bright red railway engine from whose funnel there erupted fierce black puffs of smoke. ‘Papa said we should do a train because boys like them best.’
‘Girls like trains too, Mitzi.’
‘Yes. But Papa is a good man and he works hard so God will bring us a brother,’ said Mitzi. And then leaning confidentially towards me: ‘We all have new ribbons for our hats. You’ll see in church. Mine’s blue to match my sash. It matches exactly!’