Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

‘Sanctuary,’ said Alex Hamilton, and smiled once more, and slept.

‘Vanni! Doushenka! Milenkaya !’

For all her seventy years, Madame Delsarte ran down the last flight of stairs, and the elegant woman standing in the hall turned and absurdly, in her Chanel coat and sable muff, she curtseyed. To be pulled to her feet, embraced and addressed in a spate of Russian.

‘Oh you bad, bad girl!’ scolded Madame. ‘To give it all up just like that! After such a Giselle !’ She shook her head. ‘How you must have suffered! What a struggle!’

Vanni smiled. ‘No. There was no struggle. I never had to think, not for a moment. As soon as I found him again, all I wanted was to be with him.’

‘Yes, I can see it in your face, your happiness. He must be a good man, I think, not only a brave soldier. So you have no regrets?’

‘None.’ But Vanni’s eyes rested now, with an infinity of love, on the child who had followed Madame and stood quietly waiting on the upstairs landing.

‘Is she—’ she began, but found she could not trust her voice.

‘She is accepted, of course,’ said Madame Delsarte. She paused. Then throwing common-sense, caution, even wisdom to the winds, she put an arm round Vanni and answered the question in her former pupil’s gentle eyes. ‘Do not fear, doushenka ,’ she said, too softly for the child to hear. ‘She is one of us. She will dance.’

It was about the second week in December that I became really desperate about the baby Jesus.

The trouble was, I could see their point very well. Jimmy MacAlpine’s point and Russell Taylor’s point — and Maggie Burtt’s point too, before the school doctor excluded her because of the nits in her hair. We had had real frogs from real frogspawn, real hyacinths thrusting from real black, crumbly soil, a real goldfish with — alas — real fungus on its fins. My class had a thing about real-ness — and it was I who had put it there.

So naturally for the Nativity Play, they wanted a real baby Jesus.

‘A proper ‘un. Alive,’ said Jimmy MacAlpine, standing threateningly in front of me and sending laser beams of willpower’ at me from out of his violet eyes. Jimmy’s mother was dead, his father in prison; so that to cast him as the Angel Gabriel and allow him to annunciate from a step-ladder wreathed in cloud-grey tissue paper had seemed the least I could do. Also, I most terribly loved him.

It was rather a place for love, Markham Street Primary School. Perhaps it was the ugliness outside — the belching chimneys of the Butterworth Chemical Works dwarfing the town; the black, greasy streets; the dank, discouraged river. You had to light it up somehow, so you did it from inside.

But that was only an excuse of course. Mr Hunter, for example, I would have loved even in a green and grassy school, a school with plate-glass windows and an abstract sculpture in the hall. I would have loved him in the King’s Road, Chelsea, in a cafe in Greenwich Village or on the Boulevard St Michel. It didn’t need adversity to make me love Mr Hunter.

He was the headmaster — superb in horn-rims, with three unbelievably beautiful and entirely parallel lines across his forehead and the eyes of a bloodhound which has reached Enlightenment.

It was to Mr Hunter, naturally, that I took the problem of the baby Jesus.

I sought him out at break, in the beastly office which the Education Committee deemed good enough for him: pro-cessed-pea walls, a homicidal gas-fire, acres of asphalt framed in the window…

‘Mr Hunter,’ I said quickly, anxious not to waste his time. ‘Do you know how I could get hold of a baby?’

Mr. Hunter blinked behind his horn-rims and came back from a long, long way away. His face was unbearably sad and because I loved him I knew that he had been thinking about his sorrow, which is the same sorrow as besets so many head teachers in the poorer English primary schools, namely the lavatories which were too few, too far away, too old…

‘A baby, Miss Bennet?’

‘For the Nativity Play.’

‘Ah.’

Mr Hunter had been angelic about my Nativity Play- the more so because recently he had been away on a Drama Course. This course said that old-fashioned, rehearsed plays were right out for young children. Drama, said this course, had to ‘Come Spontaneously From Within’. Whereas my play was the old-fashioned kind with the Angel Gabriel in golden wings and Shepherds with tea-towels on their heads and the Virgin Mary (if only they cured her nits in time) singing ‘Little Jesus Sweetly Sleep’. And since I and my class had eaten, slept and dreamed the Nativity Play for the past fortnight and were covered in sticking plaster from fixing crowns and stars and golden trumpets, and had to wade knee-deep through bundles of straw every time we wanted to get to a cupboard, I doubted very much whether it could be classed even remotely as ‘Spontaneous Drama Coming From Within’.

‘There would be certain hazards with a real baby, don’t you think?’ suggested Mr Hunter now.

‘I know, but I don’t think it matters. I mean Jesus was real, wasn’t he, on earth — he did cry , he must have done. I don’t want it all prettied up. I want them to feel—’

But here I broke off because what I wanted my thirty-five awful children to feel about the birth of Christ was something I couldn’t put into words. So I looked at my reflection in Mr Hunter’s horn-rims and wondered whether if I hadn’t been wearing a badge which said ‘I am Superman’s friend’ and a chain of glass beads which Jimmy MacAlpine had almost certainly shop-lifted for me from Woolworths, not to mention a decayed chrysanthemum from Russell Taylor’s Dad’s allotment, I might have found favour in his eyes.

‘What about Mrs Burtt?’ asked Mr Hunter, rubbing his nose, a gesture he performed with unbelievable grace.

It was a good question. Mrs Burtt could generally be relied upon to do a baby every year — but of course this year some interfering person from the Family Planning had been at her.

‘Or Mrs Taylor?’

But as I explained to him, Mrs Taylor too had chosen this year of all years for her sabbatical.

In the end I had to tear myself away from Mr Hunter, the issue unresolved, and go to the staff-room where Miss Crisp, who taught the top class, was busy crunching up a custard cream between her even white teeth and despising me.

In the matter of the all-pervading love at Markham Street, Miss Crisp was quite definitely the exception that proves the rule. She was related to the Butterworths who owned the vast Chemical Works and therefore virtually the town — so that she ‘obliged’ rather than taught. She was neat and composed and never wore badges proclaiming that she was Superman’s Friend or belonged to the Lollipop League. Her class always seemed to be sitting in orderly rows looking at the blackboard and hamsters never got loose in her Wendy House because she didn’t keep any. What is more, on Friday her Register added up neatly in all directions and when Mr Hunter came to check it she would lean over him complacently, revealing acres of calm and creamy bust.

We worked hard on the Nativity Play all the next week. Lacking the real thing, we had cast the best doll we could find for the baby Jesus, but really it was no good pretending it was a success. There was a static, glassy quality about its pinkly shining face which was the absolute antithesis of the warm radiance the part required. And when Maggie Burtt, still sticky around the head but mercifully restored to me, leant over the manger and said ‘Shut yer bloomin’ mouth,’ instead of ‘Hush, my baby’ I found it hard to chide her as I should.

In the afternoon, walking home to my digs on the other side of the town, quietly saving Mr Hunter from fire or pestilence or flood, I would succumb to sudden and terrible lusts… These lusts were not what you think they were, though I had those too. They were lusts for Jonathan Tobias Butterworth.