Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

On a dull, cold Tuesday in early March, then, Tante Wilhelmina (who actually was no relation to me at all; I was the housekeeper’s son and still a child) clutched her heart, shrieked, turned purple — and sent for the hairdresser.

In life, Tante Wilhelmina, prematurely retired from the chorus of the Opera, took little interest in her appearance. Death, however, was a different matter. Now, as she lay gasping on her pillows in a nightdress of lilac crepe de Chine, she nevertheless managed to give precise instructions to Herr Kugelheim.

‘You will, of course, make absolutely certain that I am dead. You know how to do this?’

Herr Kugelheim, ancient, bandy-legged and servile, clutched his curling-tongs and muttered something about mirrors.

‘Then two low curls on the forehead. Low, and a plaited chignon in the nape. Have you got that?’

I, meanwhile, had been sent to fetch the cats. Wotan and

Parsifal presented no problems. Huge, neutered tom-cats, they were perfectly prepared to finish their cream at the foot of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed. Siegfried, however, was another matter. Siegfried’s operation had not been a success and he was absent on the tiles.

By the time I had returned from an unsuccessful search, most of the relatives sent for by my mother had arrived, and in hushed whispers were assembling in the bedroom. It is naturally with hindsight that I see the grouping as having the weight and dignity of a Delacroix or Titian. In the centre, of course, lay Tante Wilhelmina, the lamp falling on her ravaged features and heaving breast. Behind her, the hairdresser; across her feet, the cats. At the back of the room, in shadow, a respectfully doleful row of servants. Leaning against the wardrobe, a creaking cousin, male, from Plotz…

Kneeling by the bed itself, hiccuping with grief, was Tante Wilhelmina’s adopted daughter, Steffi; a blonde, kind, silly woman, her trusting sea-cow eyes brimming with tears. By the window Steffi’s husband, Victor Goldmann, a Jewish violinist from the Philharmonic, surveyed the scene like a flayed, El Greco martyr.

Tante Wilhelmina stirred and groaned. Silence fell. A waiting silence.

As though on a cue that only she could hear, my mother now stepped forward.

‘ Gnadige Frau ,’ she said, leaning over Tante Wilhelmina, ‘if you will forgive the impertinence, I think the Herr Professor should be sent for. I think your husband should be here.’

Then: ‘If you… insist,’ said Tante Wilhelmina, speaking with great difficulty. ‘I… don’t wish it… personally. But if… you insist.’

A sigh of relief seemed to pass round the room. Tante Wilhelmina stretched out a failing arm and reached for the note-pad on her bedside table. ‘I AM DYING,’ she wrote in indelible pencil and underlined each word.

My mother tore off the paper and handed the message to me. At a nod from her, I ran downstairs and knocked on the door of Uncle Ferdi’s study.

Uncle Ferdi had been sitting there quietly, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight. Now he peered at the note through gold pince-nez, blew softly through his moustache, sighed, nodded — and followed me upstairs…

And if all this seems a little odd, the explanation is very simple. Tante Wilhelmina and Uncle Ferdi had been married for thirty years. And for twenty-nine of these, they had not exchanged a single word.

No one knew what Uncle Ferdi had done, only that it was very, very bad. That somehow he had hurt and humiliated Tante Wilhelmina to such an extent that she had never been able to forgive him. There had been no scandal, no break-up. They lived under the same roof and when she wanted anything she sent him notes, first through Steffi (adopted from an orphanage mainly for the purpose), later through me. But from that day to this no word had passed between them.

And now, with Uncle Ferdi sitting sadly in the big carved chair which had been placed in readiness for him, the deathbed could begin.

I was ten years old and very nervous. A bit ghoulish, too, as I leant against my mother’s skirts. What would happen? Would she scream or gasp or… rattle ? Would there be blood?

Well, what happened was that Tante Wilhelmina forgave people.

She forgave everybody. She forgave the maids for not dusting behind the piano and she forgave the creaky cousin for doing her out of a barrel of rollmops during the First World War. She forgave her sister-in-law for filching her recipe for lungenbeuschel and she forgave my mother for not appreciating Wagner. She even (and this took some time) forgave me.

After that came Steffi.

What she forgave Steffi for was not marrying a Jew, for in those days Hitler was just a faint, foul cloud on the horizon. What she forgave Steffi for was getting it all so wrong . And it is true that the intricacies of Jewish orthodoxy seemed to be quite beyond poor Steffi, who cooked gefilte fish on days of strictest fasting and was once seen trying to remove her husband’s hat on the way to synagogue.

And then Tante Wilhelmina turned and fixed her suffering, other-worldly eyes on Uncle Ferdi.

With a superhuman effort, the dying woman struggled up from her pillows. My mother on one side, Steffi on the other managed to support her heaving, swaying form into an upright position. An arm in lilac crepe de Chine crept out towards her mournful, waiting husband.

It was going to be all right. She was going to forgive him. The great wrong he had done her almost thirty years ago was now expiated. In death they would be reconciled.

‘F… Fer…’ Gasping, choking, Tante Wilhelmina tried to say her husband’s name. Then with an unutterably awful cry she fell backwards on to the pillows.

A choking rattle followed. Silence.

Uncle Ferdi, grief-stricken, huddled back in his chair. The hairdresser stepped forward tentatively, a mirror in his hand…

And jumped back like a scalded cat as Tante Wilhelmina, exhausted by her labours, gave vent to yet another enormous and room-shattering snore.

‘You mean she often does it?’ I said to my mother a few days later. ‘Often has a death-bed?’

My mother was folding table linen, her square deft hands flicking the damask. Now she looked up at me and sighed. ‘Fairly often. About twice a year. You were too young before; I always sent you away.’

‘But why?’ I said. ‘ Why ?’

My mother frowned. ‘I think… I don’t know really… but I think perhaps she wants very much to forgive him. To make up the quarrel. Only her pride won’t let her. The death-beds are a way of… forcing her own hand. But then in the end, she can’t quite make it.’

I only partly understood. But: ‘Poor Tante Wilhelmina,’ I said, and my mother smiled and touched my hair as though I had said something to please her.

It was then that I plucked up courage to ask something I had wanted to ask for years. ‘What was the quarrel about ? What was it that Uncle Ferdi did to her?’

The smile left my mother’s face. ‘Never ask me that, Karl,’ she said, turning back to the linen.

During the next few years the death-beds came thick and fast. By the time I was twelve, I could have organised one almost as well as my mother. Long before Herr Kugelheim arrived with his curling tongs, I’d have caught Wotan and Parsifal, arranged the big chair for Uncle Ferdi, helped to round up the maids, the cousins and Steffi… Always Tante Wilhelmina forgave the rest of us and always, just before she could forgive her husband, she fell back, apparently lifeless, on the pillows. ‘I SEEM TO HAVE BEEN SPARED’ she would write to him next day. And everything would go on exactly as before.

Then, when I was about thirteen, came a death-bed which I shall never forget because what happened there set the pattern for the rest of my life.