A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories

by Eva Ibbotson

  My Tante Helene’s picnics were famous. Seldom fewer than three carriages as well as unbelievable quantities of food set out from Hitzing. On this particular Sunday there was Tante Helene herself, a tenor resting from the Opera on account of nodules on his larynx, a string quartet from Buda-Pest, my Uncle Max, his articled clerk – and of course, Cousin Lily.

  The party disembarked. The food baskets were carried to a forest clearing and with nature-loving cries, the party plunged joyfully into the woods. Only Cousin Lily remained, half-concealed by the lid of an enormous hamper, her button boots pointing skywards, her milk teeth necklace paled by the September sunshine as she patiently buttered rolls, sliced salami, spread topfen cheese upon the pumpernickl…

  For a while, only the sound of distant bird-song threaded the air. Then, from the depths of the forest, came a loud and triumphant shriek.

  ‘Herrenpilze!’ screamed my Tante Helene and plunged thunderously into a thicket from which the yellow, shining caps of the edible boletus beckoned.

  The tenor with nodules followed. So did the string quartet, although their shoes were thin. Uncle Max joined them.

  It is difficult to convey the wild, primeval excitement which, even to this day, the sight of edible fungi arouses in the bosom of the Austrian middle class. Perhaps it is the last expression of a blood-lust which the English, possessing such things as a coastline and moors full of grouse and partridge, are able to express in other ways.

  The party, at all events, went wild. They gathered herrenpilze, they gathered steinpilze. They gathered baehrenpatzen and chanterelles and all the other slimy horrors which the Viennese eat and which even now, forty years later, can bring the bile to my throat as I remember them.

  Over one toadstool, however, there was argument.

  ‘No, Helenchen, not that one!’ admonished Uncle Max.

  ‘But yes, Maxerl, don’t fuss. We always ate that one as children in the Dorflital.’

  ‘Please, Helene, don’t let Bettinka put that one in the soup,’ begged Cousin Lily later that evening, as they returned triumphantly to Hitzing.

  But it went into the soup. The maids wouldn’t eat it. Uncle Max and Cousin Lily, with unaccustomed firmness, declined it also. But Helene ate every mouthful.

  Twenty-four hours later, she was dead.

  Uncle Max was shattered. He suffered. He blamed himself. Long after the black horses with their fearful, nodding plumes had carried his Rhinemaiden to her last resting place, my Uncle Max crept desolately between his villa in Hitzing and his office in the Wipplinger Strasse. It was left to Cousin Lily, from whose dusty black pockets crumpled mauve handkerchiefs protruded like terrible boils, to manage the household and offer – between bouts of weeping – to return to Graz.

  My Uncle Max did not visit his Susie for over a month after the funeral. When he did they made love in muted undertones, embarrassed by their unquenchable compatibility. After a few weeks, however, there occurred to Uncle Max the thought which would have occurred a great deal sooner to somebody less nice.

  He was free! Free to drive his Susie in a carriage through the Prater, free of Herr Finkelstein from Linz, free to visit her whenever he wished with the shutters open to the sky!

  No, idiot that he was, what was he thinking of? Free to marry her!

  ‘Susie, Putzchen, Liebchen!,’ my Uncle Max must have cried when next he saw her, throwing his hat joyfully on to the squirrel. ‘Don’t you understand, my little schatz? No more secrecy, no more pretending and hiding away!’

  Susie, who had grasped this within three seconds of hearing of Tante Helene’s death, looked shyly up at him.

  ‘Oh, Maxi, I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ echoed Uncle Max. He began to pull the pins out of her hair, a thing which gave him the same intense, uncomplicated pleasure he had experienced when picking wild strawberries as a child.

  This time however he faltered, stopped. Susie, too, drew away a little.

  ‘It will seem so strange,’ said Susie presently, ‘not having to call you “Herr Finkelstein”. Not ever again.’

  ‘But nice? You’ll like it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Susie hastily. ’ Very nice. I shall like it very much.’

  ‘I can hardly believe it myself,’ said Uncle Max. ‘Just getting into a fiacre and giving your address. In broad daylight!’

  ‘You’ll enjoy it, though?’

  ‘But of course,’ said Uncle Max. ‘Of course I shall enjoy it. I shall enjoy it very much. It will all be so … simple.’

  And they stood and looked at each other, subdued and a trifle silent as they contemplated the undoubted and perpetual bliss which faced them. Contemplated it so long and so solemnly that in the end Uncle Max left without taking advantage of her unpinned hair. It was the first time he had ever done so: a foretaste of their future life together: unhurried, respectable but not, of course, even remotely dull.

  Helene had died in the autumn. Max and Susie’s wedding was fixed for the following spring. A very quiet wedding, needless to say. All the same, one likes to think of Susie scuttling up and down the Kärntner Strasse buying material for the wedding dress. Not white, exactly, for she was a tactful girl, but pink, I daresay, or pale blue – and somewhere, one imagines, rosebuds.

  And then, less than a month before the wedding, Tante Helene’s will was read.

  There had been a delay in the settling of her affairs, for etiquette forbade that she should trust her estate to her own husband, and the lawyer she had chosen had caught typhus shortly after the matter of the toadstools and was only now recovered.

  The will was straightforward. She left a small legacy to her Cousin Lily. The rest of her property went unconditionally to her ‘beloved Max.’

  There was, however, a letter.

  ‘I need not inform a colleague of your eminence ‚’ the lawyer now said to Uncle Max, ‘that this letter is in no way binding by law. Nevertheless, it was your wife’s most earnest wish that you should consider the contents as … a kind of testament.’

  And overcome by embarrassment, he fell to polishing his pince-nez. After which, in silence, he handed a large, sealed envelope to Uncle Max.

  The next part hardly bears thinking of My Uncle Max running up the stairs of the little apartment … Susie on the sofa, perhaps sewing a muslin flounce on to her wedding dress. And Uncle Max, ashen-faced, holding out the letter in a shaking hand.

  ‘Oh, Maxerl! Oh, my darling, my Liebchen! Oh no, you can’t do it! She can’t ask it of you!’

  Together they clung, rocking in agony, while the crumpled wedding dress fell unheeded to the floor.

  ‘Cousin Lily!’ wailed Susie. ‘Oh no, no, no, no!’

  ‘She is alone in the world, you see,’ explained Uncle Max, brokenly kissing his Susie behind the ear.

  ‘So dreadful for you!’

  ‘Not dreadful, really,’ said Uncle Max bravely. ‘She runs the house. And she wouldn’t expect … Only on the Kaiser’s birthday, perhaps. But it’s you, Susie, don’t you see?’

  ‘You mean we would have to be so secret again? To pretend, to hide away from the world?’

  Max nodded, sorrow making him speechless. Clinging together, they faced it in all its tragedy: the brief and stolen hours, the secret bed behind closed shutters, Herr Finkelstein from Linz …

  ‘Susie, this is a terrible blow. It is the most terrible blow we have ever faced together,’ said my Uncle Max. ‘But we can face it. We can conquer it!’

  ‘Oh, yes, Maxi!’ cried Susie, illumined by sacrifice. ‘We can Together we can conquer everything.’

  And because time was short, and always would be short, because their plight was really very desperate, it was Susie herself who pulled the hairpins from her long and golden hair.

  And here ends – freely interpreted by me – the official version of my Uncle Max’s ill-starred and lifelong love for Susie Siebermann. He married Cousin Lily and in exchange for a single sacrifice on her part (the replacement of her
milk teeth necklace by a string of garnets he bought for her), he gave her security, consideration, even affection. Cousin Lily, as is the way of frail, pale, unassuming women, lived an extraordinarily long time. By the time she died, my Uncle Max himself was close on eighty and Susie herself had only a year to live. Throughout his life, however, he visited her on Tuesday evening and on Saturday afternoon. The last time he went to see her she apologised for being no longer any ‘ use’ to him, and then she died.

  ‘It’s monstrous,’ I had said to my mother, years and years later. Just a week ago, in fact, before I took this flight. ‘All his life he loved her and never once could they be openly together.’

  My mother had followed me to England and settled in Oxford, first to be near me as a student, later, when I began to roam again, for choice. Now, thirty-odd years away from her native city, she made a gesture which was still infinitely, unmistakably Viennese.

  ‘Rubbish!’ she said. (Only what she said was ‘Schmarrn’.)

  ‘That old cow, Helene,’ I went on. ‘Leaving a letter like that. Emotional blackmail of the crudest sort.’

  My mother sighed and quoted Schiller. “With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain” she said. ‘You, my poor boy, are an idiot.’ She paused, her head on one side. ‘Although one must admit you never saw the squirrel.’

  I stared at her. Mere senility is always too much to hope for in my mother.

  ‘I went to Susie’s apartment once or twice before she died,’ she went on. ‘Such a clean, fresh, pretty place! And then that awful squirrel. Someone had to have given it to her. Someone she respected too much to throw the thing away.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Who collected stuffed animals? Who adored the smelly things? Who filled her house with them?’ demanded my mother, twitching at her shawl.

  ‘Helene? Helene knew Susie? You must be mad!’

  My mother raised her eyebrows. In old age and exile she had taken on a patrician, Habsburg haughtiness which went down like a bomb in North Oxford, but not with me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted my mother. ‘ But taken in conjunction with the gloves… ’

  ‘All right,’ I said, defeated. ‘ Go on about the gloves.’

  ‘When I was a very small girl they took me to see Aunt Helene in Hitzing. You know how bored children get. When she was out of the room I started playing around with the sofa cushions and I found her sewing basket pushed out of sight. There was a pair of men’s grey gloves in it and a pair of scissors. The gloves had been cut, deliberately.’

  I stared at her. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Why not? I liked Helene. It’s not so funny, after all, to fall off a steel cable. If she couldn’t make Max happy in that way, I think she might well have found a nice, friendly girl and seen to it that he met her.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ I said. And then: ‘No, it’s just possible. But if she knew all about it and wished Susie well, why did she mess it all up for them? Why did she leave that note about Cousin Lily?’

  My mother looked at me and shook her head. ‘My poor boy,’ she said. ‘ How many doctorates have they given you? Even you,’ she went on, ‘must see what Helene gave to those two.’

  I was silent for a moment, thinking of my Uncle Max as I had last seen him: small and bandy and very, very old – and of the legend which encircled him.

  ‘A Great Love?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, as for that,’ said my mother, pulling her shawl closer, ‘ I don’t know. That was extra, I think. A bonus…’

  And that’s all really. A period piece – something from the safely distant past. We manage things better now; more honestly.

  Only just for one moment, as the plane came in to land, I wished we didn’t. So that one day, perhaps, I might go into a glove shop in the Kärntner Strasse … If there still are glove shops in the Kärntner Strasse …

  If I wore gloves …

  THIS BEETROOT IS NOT

  SCREAMING

  IT WAS always rather gratifying, the first day of term. Sitting in the staff-room which faced the pleasant, green-turfed courtyard of Torcastle Agricultural College, we could see them all arrive; mostly men of course, because that’s how it is with life, but here and there like sudden gherkins in a jar of unpromising pickle, the girls … Wholesome, old-fashioned girls, prospective farmers’ wives and mushroom growers’ daughters whose tiny mini-skirts and simple, bursting sweaters told fashion where it could put its latest kinks.

  Not that any of us was seriously at risk. I myself could reckon to lecture to rooms-full of girls – all looking at me with eyes turned by incomprehension of the reticulo-endothelial system into twin pools of despair – without turning a hair. Rescuing their eyelashes from the pancreas of a pickled dogfish, disentangling their earrings from stray vertebrae was nothing to me after three years as lecturer in Zoology at Torcastle.

  It was not quite so easy for Pringle, who suffered domestically from a ‘not-tonight-dear’ wife and research-wise from a recalcitrant beetroot supposedly respiring in a tank of CO . ‘ It’s the way they 2 keep tossing all that hair back as they walk,’ he said, watching a tall brunette glide past the window.

  Davies, the nutrition expert, admitted to a more conventional, a mammary approach. ‘And freckles…’

  It was left to the vet, Ted Blackwater, to give the tone of the conversation its coup de grâce.

  ‘With me,’ he said humbly, ‘ it’s simply legs. Legs and legs and legs …’

  ‘That’s the lot,’ I said. And then: ‘Oh, my God!’

  Trailing up the path like one of those perennial ‘wait-for-me’ ducklings tucked on to the end of so many otherwise normal broods, came this girl. She wore ancient jeans and a shapeless duffel coat, her tow-coloured village-idiot-looking hair seemed to have tangled with a spray of traveller’s joy and her pollen-dusted nose was tilted ecstatically skyward.

  ‘I’ll bet she’s in my option,’ I said gloomily.

  And of course I was right.

  My first-year Zoology practical class is a strictly academic and orthodox affair, the Principal insists on that. Straightforward dissections of the earthworm, the frog, the afferent and efferent systems of the dogfish, that kind of thing. And although the lab assistant, Potts, is a treasure, everyone – another college rule – prepares their own specimens.

  Torcastle is low on student unrest. I entered the lab that first morning to find two dozen earnest heads already bent over their pinned-out earthworms, scalpels flashing, scissors snipping …

  Except, in the corner of a bench by the window, this kind of anarchic cell, this area of silent nihilism. In short, the tow-coloured duckling girl whose name, it seemed, was Kirstie Hamilton, gazing raptly through the orifices in her nose-length fringe at something held in her cupped hands.

  ‘You haven’t begun yet?’

  She lifted her head and looked at me. Both her eyes were green, but one was also yellow and the whole thing was not what I was accustomed to.

  ‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry, but I find myself unable to chloroform this worm.’

  At first I didn’t take in what she had said and this was because her voice, with its rolling ‘R-s’ and lilting vowels, let out of the bag my ten-year-old self, the one that had been going to live in a Hebridean croft, befriended by seals, the confidant of shearwaters, world expert on the breeding habits of the cuddy-fish. When I had disposed of him and her words registered, I grew cross.

  ‘Look, this is a scientific department and there’s absolutely no room in it for whimsy. If you’re one of those anti-vivisectionists –’

  ‘Oh, but I’m not, I’m not!’ she cried and the worm, interested, raised up a dozen or so if its anterior segments and laid them across her thumb.

  ‘Of course people have to do experiments and test drugs and things. Of course they do!’

  ‘Well, then?’ I was getting impatient. All around me I could see butchered seminal vesicles, lacerated cerebral ganglia. ‘It’s just that I personal
ly can’t kill this worm… I can just feel its bristles on my wrist,’ she said, and she might have been describing a ‘Night of Love’ in Acapulco.

  Something in me snapped. ‘ Perhaps you would like to go out and look for a worm that’s died of natural causes?’

  Clearly, she was not a girl sensitive to sarcasm. ‘ Oh, thank you, Dr Marshall. What a marvellous idea! Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’

  And with her hand still cupped protectively around her specimen, she left the lab.

  The whole thing rattled me. I went to look at my experiment, but what had seemed like a pretty significant breakthrough in endocrine physiology now looked like thirty-eight mice without their ovaries looking less cheerful than thirty-eight mice who still had them. Fortunately the Principal, Dr Peckham, chose that moment to send for me.

  ‘James,’ he said excitedly as soon as I entered his study, his bald head and his bi-focals all gleaming with joy. ‘I think we’re going to make it!’

  ‘No! You mean our Charter?’

  Dr Peckham nodded. ‘ Sir Henry Glissop’s coming with the whole Glissop commission. They wouldn’t send him unless there was a good chance. Just think of it, James! Us and the Tech. and the Art School all united in the new University of Torcastle!’

  Raptly, Dr Peckham made for the open window, seeing I knew, not the pleasant flower gardens of Torcastle Agricultural College, its unpretentious animal houses and white-washed farm but a glittering campus, a towering Science Block and he himself, gowned in scarlet, hurrying from Senate Meeting to Congregation and back again …

  ‘It all depends on the research side of course,’ he went on. ‘How’s Pringle’s beetroot?’

  ‘Playing up a bit, sir.’

  Peckham frowned. ‘And Blackwater? That new technique for storing A.I. samples?’

  ‘Well, sir, you know how it is with Hannibal,’ I said and Peckham winced, for Hannibal, after fathering some three thousand offspring in all corners of the globe, had suddenly gone cold on the whole thing and lounged about in the North Paddock, a seventeen-hundredweight drop-out from the permissive society, wincing when a heifer even passed his gate.