At the stage door he parted the waiting crowd of students and admirers, presented his card and asked to see the director. But once inside the theatre he did not hurry to follow the directions that the doorman (rendered obsequious by Guy’s air of authority) had given him, but wandered along enjoying the notices on the call board and the rueful graffiti pencilled on the bleak, tiled walls. Some of Guy’s happiest moments had been spent in freezing theatre corridors like this: waiting for the delectable Claudine from the Paris Opera Ballet when he was on leave in France, for a Spanish chanteuse from the Teatra Amazonas in Manaus, for a Russian girl from the Ballets Russes who had been his mistress for a year in London.
Avoiding the babble from Raisa Romola’s dressing-room, he turned left, then right and down a flight of curving, rickety stairs.
And stopped suddenly.
The sound he had heard, though soft, was unmistakable and in these dungeon-like depths below the level of the street, curiously unnerving. Someone, behind the peeling, dark green door he had just passed, was crying.
He turned, threw open the door and went in.
The room, lit by a single, naked bulb, was entirely crammed with wigs on stands, trays of moustaches, switches of hair, hat boxes piled on shelves. There was an ironing-board, a sink, a table littered with scissors, glue, rolls of ribbon . . . On the draining-board stood a jar of sour milk and a battered samovar and everywhere on the floor were wicker baskets overflowing with clothes.
However, it was only gradually that Guy took in this clutter, for his eyes were immediately drawn to the only occupant of the room: a girl who could scarcely have been out of her teens. A girl in a rumpled, paint-stained smock, crouched on the lid of an enormous hamper, who, as he entered, put down the mirror she had been holding and looked up to reveal a small, startled face somewhat dramatically streaked with dust and tears. A face with huge eyes the colour of a Stradivarius, eyes which might have been put in by the thumb of Titian himself when he grew too old for detail and was concerned only with the extreme condition of the human soul.
‘Oh! I’m sorry!’ She started up, trying to rub away the tears with fingers so dusty that they merely accentuated the anguished mottling of her cheeks. ‘I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. Miss Romola’s dressing-room is upstairs. Or did you want one of The Heidis?’
Guy, standing debonair and faultlessly attired in the doorway, continued to stare in a most uncharacteristic way. Not at the girl’s great smudged eyes, not at her hands – the hands of an Altendorfer Madonna on a painting spree – nor at her ragamuffin clothes. No, what held him riveted was her hair – or rather, the place where normally one would have expected hair to be. For this miniature Countess of Monte Cristo, immured in the depths of one of Vienna’s most ancient edifices, seemed to have no hair. Above her anguished, lemur eyes and high forehead were only tufts such as certain capuchin monkeys achieve in their maturity, and her ears, which had the pricked look one finds in ferns and cyclamen, rested on an area of ravaged stubble. A stubble whose colouring – a warm beige shading to bronze – nevertheless seemed curiously familiar to Guy. And suddenly understanding, he said, ‘My God! That was
Quickly, stammeringly, Tessa explained. ‘I was glad to do it, honestly. After all, Cosima cut off all her hair when Wagner died and put it in his grave so it was the least I could do. Only . . . just now I looked in the mirror – I didn’t really have time before, you know how it is before a première – and I suddenly realized . . . I mean, it isn’t as though I have anything else.’
She sketched with small and extraordinarily expressive hands the longed-for curves, the Amazonian bosom which her maker had so relentlessly withheld.
Guy studied her. In a sense she spoke the truth, but only in a sense. The dirty ragamuffin with her butchered hair did in fact have something, but it was not something to which at this late hour he could easily put a name. Style? No, it was something more intimate that Guy now chased through the painters he most loved. An image of innocence with the sad eyes of experience; of someone very young acquiescing in their fate. And moving from the tiny, rigid Infantas of Velasquez enduring their silken bandages of pomp to the grave, coiffed girls of Holbein, he came to rest on a Murillo urchin: the one who stands always in the shadows watching the others eat the cherries, the slice of water melon, the hunk of bread.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked abruptly, for the child looked utterly exhausted.
‘In the Wipplingerstrasse.’
‘And who is taking you home?’
‘Taking me? Goodness, no one takes me! It’s only half an hour’s walk. I’ve just got to sweep up and take Miss Romola’s dachshund out and set the mousetraps and then I’m going.’
