by Eva Ibbotson
‘Hurry, please, please! He was groaning so.’
‘The carp?’ suggested Sebastian, running with her up the steps.
‘My father. Oh, come!’
Maids moaned at the foot of the stairs. Tante Gerda sobbed on the landing.
Sebastian was magnificent. Within seconds he had seized a carved oak chair and begun to batter on the door. Quite quickly, the great door splintered and fell. At Sebastian’s heels they trooped into the bathroom.
Onkel Ernst sat propped against the side of the bath, now groaning, now swearing, his hand on his shoulder which was caked with blood. Round him were fragments of rose-encrusted china and shattered mirror which the lead shot ricocheting from the sides of the bath and grazing Onkel Ernst’s shoulder, had finally shattered. The carp, lurking beneath the water taps, appeared to be asleep.
‘Ernst!’ shrieked Tante Gerda and dropped on her knees beside him.
‘Bandages, scissors, lint,’ ordered Sebastian, and Graziella fled like the wind.
It was only a flesh wound and Sebastian, miracle of miracles, was a doctor, though the kind that worked in a lab. Quite soon Onkel Ernst, indisputably the hero of the hour, was propped on a sofa, courageously swallowing cognac, egg yolk with vanilla, raspberry cordial laced with kirsch. The family doctor arrived, pronounced Sebastian’s work excellent, stayed for cognac too. The fire brigade, trooping into the kitchen, preferred slivovitz.
And upstairs, forgotten, seeing nothing but each other, stood Graziella and Sebastian.
This was it, then, thought Graziella, this wanting to sing and dance and shout and yet feeling so humble and so good. This was what she had never felt and so had nearly thrown herself to Franz as one throws a bone to a dog to stop it growling… As if in echo to her thoughts, the bell shrilled yet again and Franz von Rittersberg was admitted. His eye was still swollen and his temper not of the best.
‘This place is turning into a madhouse,’ he said, running up the stairs. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
Graziella did not. Time had stopped when she ran into Sebastian’s arms and years were to pass before she quite caught up with it again.
‘Well, for heaven’s sake let’s finish off this blasted fish and get back to bed,’ he said, shrugging off his coat and taking out a knife and a glass-stoppered bottle. ‘I’ve brought some chloroform.’
‘No!’
Graziella’s voice startled both men by its intensity. ‘ In England,’ she said breathlessly, ‘in England, if you hang someone and it doesn’t work… if the rope breaks, you let him live.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Graziella, don’t give us the vapours now,’ snapped Franz. ‘ What the devil do you think we’re going to eat tomorrow, anyway?’
He strode into the bathroom. ‘You can help me,’ he threw over his shoulder to Sebastian, who had been standing quietly on the half-lit landing. ‘I’ll pull the plug out and pour this stuff on him. Then you bang his head on the side of the bath.’
‘No,’ Sebastian stepped forward into the light. ‘If Miss … if Graziella does not wish this fish to be killed, then this fish will not be killed.’
Franz put down the bottle. A muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘Why you … you … Who the blazes do you think you are, barging in here and telling me what to do?’
Considering that both men came from good families, the fight which followed was an extraordinarily dirty one. The Queensberry rules, though well-known on the Continent, might never have existed. In a sense of course the outcome was inevitable, for Franz was motivated only by hatred and lust for his Christmas dinner, whereas Sebastian fought for love. But though she was almost certain of Sebastian’s victory, Graziella, sprinkling chloroform on to a bath towel, was happily able to make sure.
Dawn broke. The bells of the Stephan’s Kirche pealed out the challenge and the glory of the birth of Christ.
In the Mannhaus mansion, Graziella slept and smiled and slept again. Onkel Ernst, propped on seven goose-feather pillows, opened an eye, reflected happily that today nothing could be asked of him – no carving, no wobbling on stepladders, no candle-lighting – and closed it again.
But in the kitchen Tante Gerda and the cook, returning from Mass, faced disgrace and ruin. Everything was ready – the chopped herbs (bravely, the cook had agreed to mace), the wine, the cream, the lemon … and upstairs, swimming strongly, was the centrepiece, the raison d’être for days of planning and contriving, who should have been floating in his marinade for hours already.
As though that was not enough, as they sat down to breakfast there was a message from Franz. He was still unwell and would not be coming to dine with them. It took a full minute for the implication of this to reach Tante Gerda and when it did, she put down her head and groaned. ‘Thirteen! We shall be thirteen for dinner! Oh, heavens! Gross-Tante Wilhelmina will never stand for that!’
But fate had not finished with Tante Gerda. The breakfast dishes were scarcely cleared away when the back-door bell rang and the maid returned struggling under a gigantic hamper.
‘Oh, no … NO!’ shrieked Tante Gerda.
But it was true. Now, at the eleventh hour, with everything still to do and the shops closing fast, the Pfischingers had ‘sent’.
And now it was here, the moment for which all these weeks had been the preparation. It was dusk. The little nieces boiled and bubbled in their petticoats, pursued by nursemaids with curling-tongs and ribbons. Inside ‘ the room’, Tante Gerda, watched complacently by Onkel Ernst, climbed up and down the step-ladder checking the candles, the fire-bucket, the angle of the silver star. Clucking, murmuring, she ran from pile to pile of the presents spread on the vast white cloth beneath the tree. Graziella’s young doctor, summoned from the laboratory, had agreed to come to dinner so that they wouldn’t be thirteen. He had even somehow contrived presents for the little nieces – three tiny wooden boxes which Tante Gerda now added to their heaps.
And now all the candles were lit and she rang the sweettoned Swiss cow-bell which was the signal that they could come in.
Though they had been huddled straining against the door, when it was opened the little nieces came slowly, very slowly into the room, the myriad candles from the tree shining in their eyes. Behind them came Graziella, her head tilted to the glittering star and beside her the young doctor – who had given her only a single rose.
And suddenly Tante Gerda’s headache lifted, and she cried a little and knew that somehow, once again, the thing she had struggled for was there Christmas.
You’d think that was the end of the story, wouldn’t you? But my mother, telling it years later, liked to go on just a bit further. To the moment when the little nieces, having politely unwrapped a mountain of costly irrelevancies, suddenly burst into shrieks of ecstasy and fulfilment. For, opening Sebastian’s wooden boxes, they found, for each of them, a tiny, pink-eyed, living mouse.
Or further still. To the family at table – white damask, crystal goblets, crimson roses in a bowl. To the little nieces (the youngest wobbling fearfully on her pile of cushions), each pocket of each knicker-leg bulgy with a sleepy, smuggled mouse. To Onkel Ernst magnificent in his bandages, and Graziella and Sebastian glowing like comets … To the sudden stiffening, knuckles whitening round the heavy spoons, as Tante Gerda brought in the huge silver serving-dish.
And the sigh of released breath, the look of awed greed as she set it down. Egg-garnished, gherkin-bedecked, its translucent depths glittering with exotic fishes and tiny jewelled vegetables, the celebrated concoction quivered gently before them. Lampreys in aspic! Truly – most truly, the Pfischingers had ‘sent’.
The littlest niece, when she grew up and became by mother, liked to end the story there. But I always made her go on just a little further. To the day after Christmas. To the house of the Pfischingers on the other side of Vienna. To Herr Doktor Pfischinger, a small, bald, mild little man ascending the stairs to his bathroom. He is carrying a long-bladed knife, a sledgehammer, a blunderbuss. …
; OSMANDINE
LATER, PEOPLE said she was a witch. A white witch, of course, white as snow, white as camellia blossom, but a witch all the same. Something to do with her name, which was Osmandine, and more still with the way she looked: that mass of red-gold hair right down her back, those glowing amber eyes, that skin. There was also the question of Cuthbert. It was perhaps natural to befriend an earthworm who had mistaken ‘up’ for ‘ down’ but Cuthbert’s status was surely more that of a familiar than a simple household pet?
Osmandine had reached Oversea by accident. She was a girl who liked fate to lead her where it willed, and when it had finished willing her into a boutique in London’s Fulham Road, a salami factory in Sicily and an agricultural commune in the Hebrides, it had willed her into the Stanislavsky School of Drama attached, though somewhat insecurely, to the new Oversea Civic Theatre.
‘I am in mourning for my life,’ said Osmandine, on the morning that this story begins, crossing the Market Square on the way from her digs to the acting school. They were studying Chekhov’s The Seagull and she had been instructed to feel her way into poor Masha.
It was at this point that she encountered Cuthbert who had made this mistake and was lying confused and dangerously dry upon the pavement.
‘Oh, you foolish worm!’ said Osmandine. She picked him up and looked round for a garden or a patch of earth. Oversea Market Square, however, remained securely paved and solidly cobbled. Only on the far side of the Square, where she had never been, stood a little bay tree outside a chemist’s shop.
‘Oh,’ said Osmandine, walking across and lowering Cuthbert tenderly into the tub of earth, ‘ what a beautiful shop!’
It was, too. Old-fashioned and bow-fronted with big urns of red and blue liquids, with real sponges in real straw baskets and calming cough sweets in tall glass jars.
Inside it was even better. Liquorice sticks, Beecham’s Powders, dark drawers with beckoning labels: Flowers of Sulphur, Citric Acid, Borax (Purified).
‘I shall buy a toothbrush,’ decided Osmandine, who knew that a girl with a toothbrush in her pocket is always safe.
She waited quietly, enjoying the hot-water bottles hanging like ripe fruit upon the hot-water-bottle stand, the yellow nipples on the lemon soap, but no one came. Osmandine was not a rapper on counters, but from her lovely, lubricated throat she dredged up a gentle cough.
It was answered by a groan. A groan of some seriousness coming from the half-open door of the dispensary.
Osmandine pushed it open. Lying on the floor, in an incongruously spotless lab-coat, lay an elderly man. His bald head glistened with sweat, his face was grey and drawn, his spectacles lay broken beside him.
‘It’s all right,’ said Osmandine, kneeling beside him, loosening his collar, ‘I’m going to get help at once. You’re going to be all right.’
‘Doctor Lee … Don’t want anyone else,’ whispered Mr Greenfield. ‘Number’s by the phone.’
Osmandine found the telephone and the number under Dr Lee, John.
‘I’ll come at once,’ he promised. He did, too, driving too fast in his Ferrari, limping from where he had broken his hip the year before because he always came to his patients too quickly in unsuitable Italian cars. A thin man with a beaky nose, hornrims and a nervous forehead etched into harrowing furrows by the follies of mankind.
‘Perforated ulcer,’ he said. ‘I’ll get an ambulance.’
On the telephone he turned and looked at Osmandine, kneeling statue-still because Mr Greenfield had taken a hunk of her hair and was strap-hanging with it on to consciousness. Inside that hair, thought Dr Lee, one could lie safe from the night-splintering telephone, from loneliness, from fear.
Except that one day, when one tottered in half dead from evening surgery there would be this note pinned to the pillow ‘ St George’s?’ he said, and gave instructions.
In the corridor of the hospital it was necessary to sever Mr Greenfield almost surgically from Osmandine’s hair.
‘The shop,’ he whispered, grey and anguished on his trolley.
‘I’ll mind it for you. I’d like to do it.’
Mr Greenfield tried to shake his head. ‘Dispensing … illegal … you mustn’t.’
Osmandine bent over him, her amber eyes shining with integrity. ‘I’m a fully qualified pharmacist,’ she said. ‘Honestly.’
Believing her, fumbling under his blanket for his bunch of keys, Mr Greenfield, his mind at rest, was wheeled away.
Back in Mr Greenfield’s shop, Osmandine rang her acting school, flicked a feather duster over the hair curlers, arranged the face flannels in a more becoming cluster and opened the shop. It was at this point that she noticed Cuthbert still lying passively in his bay-tree tub, unwilling or perhaps unable to submerge himself.
‘Oh, well, come on then,’ she said, sighing a little, for love is love and the emotional demands of a maladjusted earthworm can weigh as heavily as any other.
She had just placed him in a dampened saucer when her first customer arrived.
It was a man wanting razor blades. Then followed a woman needing hand cream and a girl who bought a packet of hair-dye. Osmandine was just growing complacent when Nemesis overtook her in the form of Mrs Berryman, bearing an undoubted prescription and looking as if she meant business.
‘I’d like this made up, please. It’s from Dr Lee. For my dyspepsia.’
‘Ah,’ said Osmandine. ‘Yes…’ She stared at the prescription, which was probably the right way up and looked like Linear B taken down in shorthand by a lunatic secretary. Dr Lee’s signature, on the other hand, seemed familiar. She had seen it in that section of her mother’s handwriting book devoted to criminals, the emotionally deprived and those whose native tongue was Sanskrit.
‘How is he? Dr Lee, I mean,’ enquired Osmandine.
Mrs Berryman said Dr Lee was overworking. ‘He’s never been right since that silly wife of his went off with a poet. Now about this prescription.’
‘Yes,’ said Osmandine again. ‘You see, Mr Greenfield is ill.’
‘Oh, dear. Well then, I’d better take it up the road to Ware and Nicholson.’
‘No!’ Already Osmandine had acquired Mr Greenfield’s dislike and fear of the trendy new chemist-cum-beauty-parlour two blocks away. ‘No, no, I’ll make it up for you. It’s just … If you could give me a little while. I’m new, you see.’
‘All right. Only I’ll have to have it. My digestion is terrible. I just can’t stand any more of those clunks.’
‘Clunks?’
‘That’s right. In my stomach. First it gets all knotted up and then the knotted bits clunk together.’
‘Mine gets like that,’ said Osmandine confidingly. ‘When I’m worried or sad.’
Mrs Berryman looked at her sharply. ‘Mine’s got nothing to do with that. I mean, what would I have to get worried about? A good husband, a nice little bungalow…’ She broke off. ‘Goodness, what’s that?’
It was Cuthbert, who had left his saucer and was strolling towards the False Eyelashes (Special Offer). Osmandine presented him and waited for Mrs Berryman’s recoil. But a very different expression crossed Mrs Berryman’s pinklypowdered face.
‘My Phillip was always bringing in things like that,’ she said. ‘I used to raise the roof but I don’t know … I mean, they’re alive, aren’t they, same as us.’
‘Where is he now, your Phillip?’
Mrs Berryman’s face became totally expressionless. ‘I really couldn’t say. We never see him, my husband and I. Never want to either, after the things he said to us the last time he came.’
‘Have you got any other children?’
‘No, he was the only one. It was a difficult birth. A breech, but he turned. What a bouncer he was! They say fat babies don’t thrive but you should have seen him! I fed him myself till he was eight months old and…’
Osmandine leaned her elbows on the counter and took into her inmost being Mrs Berryman’s Phillip’s dislike of sieved carrots and his amazing f
eat in learning to say ‘tomato soup’ before he could say ‘da da’. Pausing only to sell a cake of soap to a passing student, she shared his triumph over the woodwork prize, his first bicycle and the day he heard that he had got into Cambridge to read mathematics.
‘There’s me not able to add two and two and there was my Phillip doing calculus and all that,’ said Mrs Berryman. ‘And then, when he was all set for this marvellous research job, he met this girl. A real hussy. Half Jamaican or something. And what does Phillip do?’
‘Get’s her pregnant,’ said Osmandine.
Mrs Berryman flushed. ‘Exactly. And of course he must throw up his fellowship and marry her. We argued and argued and begged him not to. And then his father … Well, his father’s a good man but a bit hasty and he said one or two things about the girl. And Phillip just slammed out.’
‘And you’ve not seen him since?’
Mrs Berryman shook her head. ‘ That was nine months ago. Not that it would be any good him coming now. You’ll let me have those pills soon, won’t you? I don’t want another night like last night and it’s my birthday tomorrow.’
After Mrs Berryman came a bottle of aspirin, a toilet roll and five tins of baby cereal. Once again, Osmandine grew complacent. And for not recognising peril in the next customer she could be forgiven.
It was a boy of about fourteen wearing a bottle-green blazer with towers on the pocket. His shoulders were hunched under a huge khaki knapsack full of books and his eyes were the eyes of an old, old man.
‘I’ve got a prescription. From Dr Lee. For sleeping pills.’
‘Sleeping pills!’ The conviction that Dr Lee was not only emotionally deprived and criminal, but mad as well, took hold of Osmandine. ‘Why can’t you sleep?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s the exams. I mean, I’m doing nine subjects and they put me in a year early because they thought I was, clever, only,’ said Jeremy Blakeney, his voice rising dangerously, ‘ they’re wrong.’