Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

I wish I could think of better and less hackneyed words to use, but I cannot. So I only state that I fell — and it really was a falling — in love.

I knew, of course, that Steffi and Victor Goldmann had a daughter. But while I normally had the freedom of the house, when visitors or relations came my mother kept me strictly in the servants’ quarters. So it was not until she was old enough to attend her first death-bed that I saw Ruth.

It was an autumn death-bed, I remember. The chestnuts in the square outside were dropping golden fingers on to the Archduke somebody-or-other who rode out there for ever. I remember this because Ruth’s hair was the colour of those leaves and so were her eyes — her father’s wise, El Greco eyes — but hair and eyes, both, were lightened, gold-flecked, because of silly, blonde, incurably Aryan Steffi.

I don’t think anything happened, except that I had an overwhelming longing to cross the room and stand beside her on the other side of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed, but didn’t because she was ‘family’ and I was the housekeeper’s son. But after that we met secretly after school wherever and whenever we could; in the Volksgarten, on the steps of the Karls Kirche, by the Mozart memorial… And if I say I was happier then than I have ever been, I don’t want to imply some childish mock-romantic idyll. It was with absolute seriousness that Ruth and I, trailing our satchels through the streets of Vienna, discussed our future life together, planning everything from the kind of dog we would breed on our farm near Salzburg to the portion of our income we would donate to the poor.

And then came the last death-bed. The one at which death, which had been mocked so long, was mocked no longer.

It began exactly like the others. The hairdresser came, the cats were caught. Even Siegfried, temporarily sated, was present for once — and Ruth had a blue ribbon in her hair.

Tante Wilhelmina forgave the maids, the rollmops cousin, Steffi, me…

And finally struggled into a sitting position to stare, her arm extended, at Uncle Ferdi.

Uncle Ferdi had aged a lot recently. His eyes behind the gold pince-nez had lost their piercing blue; his moustache drooped; even his bald head no longer shone bravely in the lamplight and I remember praying that this time it really would happen. That this time, at last, she really would forgive him.

‘F… Fer…’ began Tante Wilhelmina. And then suddenly, her whole face crumpled into a look of agony and disbelief.

While slowly, very slowly, Uncle Ferdi slipped from his chair on to the floor and lay there, very peaceful looking and quite, quite still.

What I remember most vividly is not Tante Wilhelmina’s racking sobs, nor even Ruth Goldmann’s gold-flecked eyes as they widened to take in the shock and pain, but the baffled, bewildered look on old Kugelheim’s face as he stepped forward, clutching his curling-tongs, and stood looking down at Uncle Ferdi’s totally bald head…

After Uncle Ferdi’s death, Tante Wilhelmina went to pieces. She grieved as though their marriage had been the most fantastic idyll. She lost two stones in weight, dressed totally in black, saw no one.

I was shocked by what seemed to me to be the most appalling hypocrisy, ‘Why does she carry on like that?’ I said to my mother. ‘She can’t have loved him.’

My mother didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Later, people often looked at me as though they envied me my youth, but that day I saw my youth profoundly pitied.

It was Steffi, adopted on a whim from an orphanage, silly, undervalued Steffi who now took charge of Tante Wilhelmina, carrying the broken old woman off to Berlin where Victor had a new job in the Conservatoire, comforting her, caring. The house was sold; my mother went to work in a shop; we moved to a little flat in the suburbs. There were no more death-beds. And no more Ruth.

As though Uncle Ferdi, sitting sadly in his study, had kept the old world together, his death seemed to unleash chaos. Chaos in the outside world as Hitler seized power in Germany and the conflict and cruelty began to seep across the border to smug and sleepy Austria. Chaos within as the loss of Ruth unleashed in me all the squalor and confusion of adolescence.

Politically, my mother and I were almost simpletons. So that when a year later Ruth Goldmann wrote to me from England, I wasn’t relieved for her safety, I was appalled. England, that grey and foggy land of horsemen and ham-and-eggs; what was Ruth doing there? How would I ever get to her again?

‘It is good here,’ Ruth wrote, ‘because no one minds that Father is a Jew and they don’t spit at us in the street. When we arrived, Mother said the prayer of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the tribes of Israel, but Father said it was the prayer to make married people have children…’

It was a long letter and it ended: ‘I would like it very much if you remembered me.’

Well, I remembered her. I remembered her through the Anschluss and the war in which, by then, I was old enough to fight. I remembered her through three years of imprisonment by the Russians and I remembered her when, sick and verminous and sullen, I was released.

But by then the continent was adrift in chaos and I lost her. Physically. Literally. No letters reached her in England, none came to me.

All the same, within a year of the war’s end, I managed to get myself to London on a language course. I went, of course, to look for Ruth. Anyone less naive would have known how hopeless it was. Each evening, when I finished at the language school, I rang up another couple of dozen Goldmanns, trudged round the refugee organisations, the Emigration Office… Nothing…

And yet in the end, quite by chance, I did find someone.

I was walking, on a warm evening in May, from Swiss Cottage tube station towards the room in which I lodged. My way led through streets of large Victorian terrace houses, many of them knocked together to make a hostel or hotel.

In front of one of these I used to linger and eavesdrop. It was a kind of old people’s home — though a pretty classy one — run by a Viennese woman and filled with the elderly relatives of refugees whose matriarchal ‘Momma’ or embarrassingly proletarian ‘Poppa’ had not fitted into the new prosperity of the house in Golders Green or Finchley. From this hotel the smell of good Austrian cooking used to drift out, plus plaintive comments in German or Polish or broken English.

‘No,’ I heard on this particular day. ‘I go absolutely not to the death-bed of that old schickse . I am sensitive, me, and my nerves cannot hold out such nonsense.’

A pleading murmur, softer, in English. A resigned: ‘Once more, then; once more only, I go,’ from an old gentleman.

And an arm in a white overall, scooping up a huge, reluctant cat…

‘Excuse me, but do you have anyone staying here by the name of Ziegelmayer? Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer?’

The flustered maid looked at me with relief. ‘Oh yes, we were expecting one of the relatives. I’ll take you up.’

I followed her upstairs, opened the door.

On the pillows, in a nightdress of the austerest post-war cotton, lay Tante Wilhelmina. Where Herr Kugelheim had stood with his curling-tongs sat the matron, looking resigned and holding in a vice-like grip a large and displeased cat. And in a circle round the bed, creaking with visible reluctance, sat an assortment of elderly ladies and gentlemen.

Tante Wilhelmina was forgiving them. She forgave Frau Feldmann for taking the last of the sauerkraut at luncheon; she forgave Madame Kollinsky for always hogging the best armchair in the lounge. She forgave Herr Doktor Zellman for the extraordinarily unappetising way he left the bathroom.

And then Tante Wilhelmina saw me.