Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

And really it was tactful of his great-aunt to die after only a few months in their attic. He had been afraid that the mess and the expense would be long drawn out.

‘How do I look, Mummy?’ asked Loremarie, coming into the bedroom. She too had acquired a whole new outfit for the funeral: a purple velvet dress with lace round the collar, and black kid gloves.

The hearse set off for the short journey across the square. The Eggharts followed with bowed heads, and after them at a respectful distance came the Eggharts’ maids and their manservant, the snooty Leopold.

As they made their way to the front pew, the Eggharts noticed that quite ordinary and unimportant people had come to pay their respects to the old lady. There were three of the Bodek boys, the old bookseller and his granddaughter… and sitting with the professors, as though they had a right to be there, their servants, Ellie and Sigrid, and their adopted daughter, Annika. It is not possible to turn people out of a church during a funeral, but the Eggharts were not pleased. Fortunately the head of the asylum, a very eminent doctor, had also come, and two councillors from Herr Egghart’s office, as well as the manager of his bank.

Ellie and Sigrid had mourning dresses; so many of their elderly relations had died. Annika only had the black shawl that Sigrid wore to mass over her Sunday dress, and Loremarie turned round to throw her a contemptuous glance.

Annika didn’t even see her. She had watched the coffin carried up the aisle and, though she had promised herself not to cry any more, she couldn’t stop the tears coming, because La Rondine shouldn’t have been shut up in a box — no one should, but certainly not someone who had flown high over the stages of the world.

I should have gone to see her more often, thought Annika. I should have brought her more flowers, and stayed longer; she was so lonely.

Beside her, Ellie squeezed her arm.

‘She was glad to go, love,’ she whispered. ‘You know that. She was so tired.’

‘But I’m not glad,’ sobbed Annika. ‘I didn’t want her to die.’

The organ pealed out, the service began. Annika, not wanting to be seen in tears, wrapped herself in Sigrid’s shawl.

The Latin words of the service were dark and frightening. Though the priest spoke about resurrection, he seemed to spend more time on the yawning grave and the dust to dust. The incense swept through the church like smoke.

Annika heard the old lady’s voice: ‘The world was so beautiful in those days, Annika.’ And her own reply: ‘Honestly, it still is.’

She’d been wrong. The world was not beautiful. People you were fond of died, and got shovelled into holes.

The congregation rose for the last hymn. Annika let slip her enveloping shawl and lifted her head, to look up at the roof of the church.

And then for a moment she saw her! Not the exhausted old lady — but the girl on the swing. Higher she went, and higher, in time to the music; there were flowers in her hair and she was strewing the beams of light from the stained-glass windows.

As they filed out, Loremarie turned and hissed at her. ‘You smiled. I saw you. You smiled because my poor great-aunt is dead.’

Annika looked at her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I smiled.’

The funeral tea, like the funeral, was a most dignified affair. The maids had set out slices of Sachertorte and various kinds of strudel, and open sandwiches spread with fish roe, which might well have been caviar — though actually it wasn’t. Needless to say, the servants from the professors’ house were not invited back, nor the Bodeks, nor the old bookseller and his daughter, but the head of the asylum stayed, and the councillors and the manager of the bank.

‘We will miss her dreadfully,’ Frau Egghart told her guests, dabbing her perfectly dry eyes with a handkerchief. ‘And Loremarie was so fond of her, weren’t you, dear?’

‘What?’ said Loremarie, turning round with her mouth full of cake.

‘Weren’t you so fond of your great-aunt?’ shouted Frau Egghart above the noise of the conversation.

‘Yes,’ said Loremarie, letting some crumbs fall from her mouth, and turned back to reach for another slice of chocolate cake.

Then, as soon as the last guest had gone, the maids were sent up to the attic with buckets of hot water and scrubbing brushes and mops and bottles of disinfectant. Frau Egghart came with them and saw that the work was done properly: the bed stripped and the bed linen steeped in Lysol, every window pane squirted, every floorboard scoured.

‘That’s better,’ she said when it was done and all traces of the old lady had been removed. ‘That’s much, much better.’

After that Leopold came with another man, to take the great-aunt’s trunk and boxes down to the cellar for the dustcart to take away.

‘I could use the things in the trunk for dressing up,’ Loremarie said. ‘All those funny turbans and jewels and things.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ her mother said. ‘Everything in there is full of germs. And you can’t use vulgar rubbish like that, even to dress up. You’d look like a circus horse.’

So the trunk and the wooden boxes were taken down to the cellar and that was that.

But the following morning two men in dark coats arrived and presented their cards. ‘Gerhart and Funkel,’ they said. ‘We work for the firm in the Karntner Strasse. The old lady’s lawyers. She left a will and we have to take all her possessions into safekeeping. Here are the papers.’

Frau Egghart pursed her lips. ‘She hasn’t got any possessions. She was penniless.’

‘It says here a large tin trunk and two wooden boxes.’

‘That’s all rubbish. It’s in the cellar waiting to be carted away.’

‘Nevertheless we would like to take charge of it.’

‘I tell you it’s all vulgar rubbish.’

‘But perhaps not to her,’ said the lawyer’s clerk quietly. And then, ‘Have it brought up, please.’

Annika used to love October almost best of all the months: the smell of chestnuts roasting everywhere on street corners, the school outing to the Vienna Woods to collect mushrooms and berries, the drift of blue smoke from garden bonfires…

But this year she saw autumn not just as beautiful but as sad. She missed the old lady and for the first time she wondered about her own future.

Stefan too seemed less settled. He still carried his younger brothers about, delivered the washing for his mother, ran errands… But once, in the hut, he put it into words: ‘I don’t want to end up spearing rubbish with a stick like my father,’ he told Annika and Pauline.

‘Yes, but what do you want to do?’

Stefan blushed. ‘I want to be an engineer. I’d like to build bridges.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

‘Everything. Even if I got into the technical school, I couldn’t spend long training. My parents need the money I’ll bring in when I start work.’

Because she felt restless, Annika’s daydreams about her mother became longer and more detailed. She came now not in a carriage but in one of the new motors like the Eggharts’, except that it wasn’t a garish yellow but a soft and tasteful grey. She wore a hat with a plume and carried a sable muff, and the dog she brought had become grander too: a Russian borzoi, white and brown and black, with a silken tail. But the words with which she entered the house were always the same:

‘Where is she, my long-lost daughter? Take me to her, please — take me to my child!’

But when the first snow fell, Annika cheered up; and in no time, she and Ellie and Sigrid were off to the market to buy the Christmas tree.

This was a serious business. The tree could not be big; it had to fit into a particular corner of the dining room — but it had to be perfect.