Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

What happened next was odd and Annika couldn’t make sense of it. Loremarie stopped to speak to her when she met her in the street — and not to sneer or to show off. She was polite, almost friendly, and though she still stuck out her behind, the black eyes, sunk so deep in her face, did not seem quite so baleful.

The first time Loremarie came up to her was when Annika was wheeling out the new Bodek baby in his ancient, rickety pram. Usually Loremarie walked past all the Bodeks with her nose in the air, but now she forced herself to look under the hood and even asked how old he was.

The second time, Annika was returning from the shops with a basket of new potatoes and this time Loremarie actually crossed the street to speak to her.

But it wasn’t till she found Annika leaning over the rim of the fountain, crumbling bread into the water for the goldfish, that the reason for Loremarie’s friendliness became clear. She wanted something from Annika and it was the last thing that Annika expected.

‘You know you’re poor,’ she began, ‘aren’t you?’

Annika shrugged. She was worried about the goldfish — one of them had fungus on his fins — and though it would have been nice to hit Loremarie, there was always a fuss at home when she hit people.

‘So would you like to earn some money?’ Loremarie went on, looking back at the windows of her house to make sure her mother wasn’t watching.

Annika crumbled the last of the bread into the water.

‘How much money?’

‘Quite a lot. Twenty kreutzers. Each time you go.’

‘Each time I go where?’

Loremarie looked round again furtively. ‘Go and read to my great-aunt. Sit with her. I’m supposed to do it for half an hour every afternoon. The doctor told my mother that she was lonely — the old woman. But I can’t. I tried once and it was awful. She dribbles and her head wobbles and suddenly she goes to sleep and her mouth falls open.’ Loremarie shuddered. ‘It made me feel sick.’

‘Yes, but how could I do it instead of you? Your mother would know.’

‘No, she wouldn’t. I go up between tea and supper when she rests. Anyway, even if she did find out she probably wouldn’t mind as long as it keeps the old woman quiet. The doctor is horrid to us. He says we’ll be old one day and we should be kind to her. But we won’t — not like that… poor and mad and dribbly…’

Annika was thinking, wringing the water from the ends of her hair. ‘I can’t come till next week when school breaks up and even then I have jobs to do. But I’ll come when I can. Only you must give me twenty-five kreutzers. Twenty isn’t enough.’

If she could stick it out a few times she’d have enough money to buy a proper birthday present for Ellie.

‘All right. I’ll leave the money on the window sill in the scullery, in an envelope. You’ll come in by the back door, of course, being a kitchen child, so you’ll see it.’

Annika nodded. It was odd how people thought she wanted to come in by the front door instead of straight into the nice, warm, friendly kitchen of whatever house she visited.

School had finished; exams were over and so was the tidying up, which was almost worse. Pauline had come top in everything except gymnastics, in which she got a very low mark indeed, and this set her worrying about a man called Ferdinand Haytor, who had become wrestling champion of Lower Austria even though he had been born with his left foot the wrong way round.

‘I don’t know why I can’t be like him,’ she said.

Annika was still very busy. Ellie had decided that she was old enough to make a proper apple strudel entirely by herself.

Making an apple strudel on your own is a bit like climbing Everest without oxygen. Only one very special type of flour will do, the dough has to be teased out to be paper-thin and laid over a tablecloth, and the apple slices and melted butter and nuts and spices have to be poured on without making a single hole, before it is rolled into a dachshund shape and baked.

Annika managed it, but it was a mixed blessing because Ellie then said it was time she started working with aspic.

‘Quails’ eggs in aspic — now there’s a dish!’ she said.

In the holidays, too, Professor Emil liked to take Annika behind the scenes in the art museum, to the restoration room, where men in baize aprons were at work cleaning old paintings.

‘Look at that!’ he would say as the halo of some tortured saint turned from grubby brown to shining gold under the restorer’s hand. ‘Isn’t that splendid? And that idiot Harteisen actually thinks pictures shouldn’t be cleaned! The darker and dirtier they are, the better he is pleased.’

But on Saturday the children still escaped to their deserted garden. Stefan’s older brother Ernst came too and they acted the whole of The Count of Monte Cristo with the hut as the dungeon on the island and the steps of the ruined house as the palace of the villain who had plotted the count’s downfall.

In the story the count escaped and vengeance was done. But in the Eggharts’ attic, the other prisoner still lay unvisited and alone.

The first time Annika went to sit with the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie was waiting to show her the way. As she tiptoed after her up the stairs, Annika’s feet sank deep into the patterned carpet; Chinese vases stood on pedestals, there was a smell of hothouse lilies.

After the third flight of stairs they came to a landing with a wooden partition and a door. This led to a last flight of stairs, but these were very different: narrow and bare and airless, and instead of the scent of lilies it was the smell of disinfectant that drifted towards them.

Here were the two attics where the servants slept, and a third one, which now housed the unwanted old lady.

Loremarie turned the handle, pushed Annika into the room, and closed the door again.

The room looked like a lumber room. The trunk and the two wooden boxes that had come in the ambulance were stacked in the corner; nothing seemed to have been unpacked. In the middle of the floor was a narrow bed with a chair beside it. On a bedside table was a jug of water, a glass and a pile of books. No flowers, no fruit, nothing that was usual in the bedrooms of the sick.

The Eggharts’ great-aunt was snoring, small snuffling snores like the snores of a pug dog; and her mouth hung open, just as Loremarie had said.

Annika walked to the window. It was strange seeing her own house and her attic from the other side of the square.

Behind her, the snoring had stopped. She turned.

The old lady was so small and wizened that she scarcely made a hump in the bedclothes. Her white hair was so sparse that you could see the scalp through it. She might have been dead already.

But not when she opened her eyes. They were very blue and her gaze was steady.

‘You’re not Loremarie,’ she said.

Annika came over to the bed. ‘No.’

The old lady gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s a good thing anyway,’ she said.

Annika smiled. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. ‘Would you like me to read to you?’

The great-aunt sighed. ‘Not really. Not from those dreadful books.’

Annika picked up the top book on the pile. It was the colour of bile and the title was Meditations of a Working Bishop . The one below that was called The Evening of Life by One Who Has Suffered .

‘They’re not exactly cheerful books, are they?’ said Annika.

‘No. No indeed. But then the Eggharts are not exactly a cheerful family. That’s why—’ She was stopped by a fit of coughing.

‘Would you like some water?’

‘Yes. You’ll have… to help… me to… sit up.’

She was so light and bony and frail, it was like propping up a bird.