Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

Really, I mean, saw me . She broke off, struggled up on her pillows, stretched out a hand. A spasm shook her and then over her silly, self-indulgent face there came a look that I had never seen on it before: a look of pure and unmistakable happiness.

‘ Ferdi ,’ she said, loud and clear, ‘Ferdi! I forgive you, Ferdi; I forgive you everything ?

Then she fell back on the pillows. Her breathing changed. Behind me I heard light footsteps, a door opening; someone begin softly to weep. It was only then that I realised that Tante Wilhelmina had made it at last, that she was dead. And I turned round and there was Ruth…

‘I’m so glad,’ said Ruth later. ‘Oh, God, I’m so glad she had the chance to forgive him.’

I don’t know where we were then. Hampstead Heath, perhaps. We had walked about for hours, holding each other’s hands like greedy children, and now it was quiet and green.

‘I’m glad, too. But I don’t understand, really. Why did she think I was Uncle Ferdi suddenly? She seemed quite sane.’

Ruth turned to me, surprised. ‘I forgot you didn’t know,’ she said. Then she opened her handbag, took out a mirror and held it up to me.

I looked at myself. Blue eyes; fair hair; shrapnel scar on the temple. Just a face.

Try a moustache,’ said Ruth. ‘And gold pince-nez.’

‘No,’ I said. Wo.’

Ruth nodded. ‘He was very lonely. And your mother was a sweet woman. You’re very like him.’

‘Good God! So that was the sin Tante Wilhelmina couldn’t forgive him! An affair with the housekeeper. To be made a fool of in her own house!’

Ruth smiled, but her gold-flecked eyes were sad. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was a big thing and it was years after. Tante Wilhelmina was awfully good about it. You know what a pet she made of you.’

‘But what, then? What had he done?’

So then Ruth lay back in the grass and I took her in my arms and she told me.

And if our marriage is exceptionally happy, if really we don’t seem to quarrel over trifles, perhaps it is because we both remember an old woman — locked in loneliness and silence because thirty years earlier, her new young husband, in a careless moment, had told her that her fresh-baked apfelstrudel tasted like a boot…

She was always reading, Nell. Well, when she wasn’t stroking the sooty London leaves of plane trees or laying her cheeks against cool window-panes or loving — ecstatically — unsuitable young men. You could have given her a Chinese couplet from any part of the Golden Dynasty of T’ang and she’d have finished it for you. Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children’s books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.

But somehow Freud, that great psychologist had passed her by. His theory, for example, that we forget what we want to forget, lose what we want to lose, had hardly crossed her mind.

So when she woke up and couldn’t at once find her engagement ring beside the bed, her panic, though intense, had no particular overtones. Sleep-drugged, she blundered round the room, picking things up, feeling the sweat collect on the nape of her neck. Larissa and Kay, with whom she shared the flat, wandered in and, their eyes half-shut still, began groping for it too. Looking for the ring Harold had given Nell had become second nature to them by now.

Nell found it herself, on the bathroom shelf next to the indigestion tablets which she’d bought because everyone knew that being engaged made you tense and gave you stomach cramps, and even before she’d cleaned her teeth she put it on and it was like putting on Harold. She felt safe, controlled, calm.

Harold… She was so grateful to Harold for so much. For being called Harold in the first place, when no one really was any more. For having a mother whom he not only loved but was taking that very afternoon to the Zoo. The idea of Harold steering his mother from the baboons to the sea lions, from the coypu pond to the zebra house, pulling her gently out of the way of supercilious camels with sticky children on their backs was, to Nell, infinitely touching. A guarantee, too, of the changes that would take place in her own life when she was married to Harold. She would stop drifting, taking any old job like this one she was doing now, for example. She would learn to say, ‘No’. ‘No, I will not lend you my last fiver.’ ‘No,’ (to the men who were never called Harold) ‘you cannot take me to Hampstead Heath to hear the nightingales, to St Tropez in your string vest of a car…’

She looked down at the ring. Two diamonds flanking a very reasonably sized ruby. Harold hadn’t actually said that it wouldn’t collect dust but he’d implied it because he was an Expert. A Time and Motion Expert, and this, too, Nell found moving. He would make things work for her. She would catch buses, water her house plants correctly from underneath , stop singeing her eyebrows on the geyser…

‘Half past,’ called Larissa from the kitchen, and Nell shot into violent action. Her hair, that was the most important thing. Today it had to stay tidy. After all, it was a sort of lab she worked in, it was science… She brushed it out: green-gold, plumb-straight; hair she washed as often and as carelessly as her face, and began to fasten it on to her head. A rubber band, two clips, a pin…

And now, suddenly, as happened every morning, she was frantically late.

‘Oh God, let me catch my bus,’ she prayed, and threw the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the indigestion tablets into a straw basket, and swallowing a mouthful of brioche ran out into the street.

At once, she was blinded by summer. The tarmac shimmered, the pavement bit her feet; the street cat lay like a spent Ingres courtesan across the steps.

Nell shut her eyes, pierced by a desperate longing for her childhood summers. For the smell of decaying weed along the tide line (which, whatever people said, really was ozone). For the voluptuousness of sand between her toes; for rose-coloured cowries mysteriously special in a handful of common shells. For a man she could see coming out of the water (but this was hardly childhood?) shaking back his hair and laughing as he uncoiled the strands of seaweed round his feet. A man she hoped so much was Harold. Only, would Harold have allowed the seaweed to tangle round his feet? Wouldn’t he, being an Expert, have seen and avoided it?

‘Oh no, my bus ,’ yelled Nell, and, too late, began to run, clutching her diamond ring with her free thumb and feeling already the first dreaded slither of what would soon be the waterfall of her descending hair…

On the other side of London, hemmed in between fifteen volumes of a decomposing German dictionary and something called Wissenschaftliche Padagogie , sat Toby Sandford, bent over his dissertation on Animal Symbolism in Sanskrit Literature and trying to extract from his pocket, in total silence, a vinegar-flavoured potato crisp.

The college library was all-enveloping, silent, fusty, with marble busts of surprisingly unclad scholars placed at intervals between the tomes, but Toby wasn’t fooled. This was one of those rare days when all the rules were broken and the whole country ran riot with summer.

He extracted a crisp, closed his eyes and gave himself over to an emotion for which he was really rather young: intense and violent nostalgia. He saw the sea as it had been on the limitless, empty beaches of his native Northumberland, not blue but a cool and pearly grey; saw the entrancing pink legs of oyster catchers glint in the sun, saw a girl (but this was moving out of childhood) come out of the water, letting a skein of seaweed trail in her hand. Now she was bending down, biting with delicate pleasure the bladders of wrack between her teeth. Girls always bit into seaweed…