Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

So why, why? Why had he left ‘Our Les’ to snore in the Wendy House and gone to such crazy and dangerous lengths to secure a substitute?

I fetched the thermos and the bottle ‘Our Les’s‘ mother had given me and gave him a feed. Then I went for his clean nappy.

It wasn’t on the shelf where I had left it. Instead, a crumpled and soiled object lay rolled-up on the floor near by. Jimmy had changed him, then? Better make sure…

I undid the pins. And then, because I knew Jimmy like I knew Mr Hunter (and for the same reason) I understood everything. It was my fault, of course. Everything was my fault. I simply hadn’t checked the facts. I had made an assumption about ‘Our Les’ and the assumption had been crashingly unjustified. And in stressing as I had done throughout the year the strength and vigour, above all the masculinity of Our Lord’s life on earth I had made sure of one thing. Never in a hundred years would Jimmy MacAlpine allow the part to be taken by a girl !

It was almost dark by the time I had taken the baby home and returned to school. Only in Mr Hunter’s office a light still burned.

It didn’t take me long to scribble my resignation and take it across to him.

‘This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’ I said, slamming the paper down on his desk.

Mr Hunter gazed at it through the horn-rims I would never see again.

‘I had hoped you would resign, certainly,’ he said. ‘The truth is—’

He was interrupted by the shrill, insistent ringing of the telephone. ‘Wait!’ he commanded and picked up the receiver. I watched his eyebrows shoot up as he listened, doing shatteringly beautiful things to the lines across his forehead which 1 had always loved so much.

‘Miss Bennett is with me now,’ he said presently. ‘Perhaps you would like to speak to her yourself?’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to me. ‘It’s Mr Butterworth. As far as I can gather, he wants to give you vast sums of money. Apparently when they got back with the baby they found there’d been an accident on the road outside their house. A lorry skidded on a patch of ice and slewed into their garden. II the baby had been in the pram, he would probably have been killed.’

Dazedly I took the receiver. Miracles make me nervous and this one was too close to the bone in every way. ‘Mi Butterworth? Miss Bennett speaking. Listen, Mr Butterworth,

I don’t want anything for myself. No, really… But there is something that’s needed for the school. Badly needed.’

And very carefully, giving precise instructions — for I too had read the catalogues — I told him.

Then I put down the receiver.

‘Good-bye, Mr Hunter’ I said, stretching out my shaking hand. Mr Hunter ignored it; evidently my incredible nobility had completely stunned him and no wonder. How many men, after all, receive two dozen, low-level pedal-flush toilets at the hands of a girl they have wronged, humiliated and dismissed?

‘I was wondering,’ said Mr Hunter, still ignoring my outstretched hand, ‘how Jimmy MacAlpine got the baby into school?’

‘Russel Taylor’s brother’s box-cart,’ I said absently. I had found it abandoned in a corner of the yard. Then I stared at Mr Hunter.

‘You mean, you knew ?’ I shrieked. ‘You knew all the time and yet you just stood there and let me resign ?’

‘Caroline,’ said Mr Hunter — and my hitherto detested Christian name rang in my ears like a celestial glockenspiel. ‘You have no idea what a strain it has been having you on my staff.’ He rose and took down his coat. ‘I’ll clear up the business, of course. I just didn’t want Jimmy to get pounced on before I’d had a word with the child care people.’

‘There were extenuating circumstances,’ I said — and explained about ‘Our Les’.

Mr Hunter smiled, then he put on his coat and steered me gently out of the door. Glorifying the huddled town, the shadowy chimneys, the Evening Star rose trembling in the Christmas sky.

‘I was wondering,’ said Mr Hunter, whose marvellous cool, austere and Christian name was Charles, ‘whether one might ultimately interest you in a more… orthodox way of getting hold of babies?’

I turned and looked at him. ‘I am only interested,’ I said primly, ‘in one particular kind of baby. The kind with horn-rims and parallel lines across its forehead.’

Mr Hunter took my arm and drew it tenderly through his. Curiously enough,’ he said, ‘that’s precisely the kind I had in mind.’

It was just eleven months later, at the beginning of November that Alexander Dominic was born. Though lacking at birth the spectacles I’d craved, he came, otherwise, up to my wildest dreams. But when I offered him, beaming with pride, to the girl who had taken over my class, she turned him down flat. She wasn’t doing a Nativity Play, she said. She had been on this course. ‘Drama’, she said, ‘Should Come Spontaneously from Within…’

In the early years of this century my grandmother (whose name was Laura Petch) became engaged to a Mr Alfred Fairburn. A month later she set off for Russia to be a governess. ‘Oh,’ I said, anguished, when first I heard the story, ‘wasn’t it awful for you both, being separated so soon afterwards?’ My grandmother, who was very old by then, gave me a look. In those days, my dear,’ she said, ‘people knew how to wait.’ What with her brave sister Gwendolyn more or less permanently chained to the railings in Hyde Park because of women’s rights and her father a doctor in the London slums, my grandmother felt she wanted to achieve something before she settled down — and achieve something, in a sense, she did. ‘So, aged twenty-two, she travelled alone to Moscow and on still further in a slow and stuffy train through endless birch nests and shimmering plains, and even then her journey was not finished, for she took an old wooden boat down the Volga ‘Yes, my dear, the Volga,’ said my grandmother as I sighed) had at last reached the little village of Yaslova on the estate of her employers the Count and Countess Sartov. And there, on the landing stage, was the whole family to meet her.

The Count, ruddy-faced and smiling, standing beside his Countess, a pale, plump woman who peered anxiously across the sun-dappled water. Their three little boys, Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha, wearing identical sailor-suits and far more interested in the arrival of the boat than of the governess. Petya, the eldest son, all but grown-up, standing aloof; self-absorbed and dreaming.

But it was at the figure of the only girl that my grandmother looked hardest, as she walked down the gangway beneath her parasol. At the Countess Tatiana, aged sixteen, in her white dress and pink sash, for the little Countess was to be her special care.

Grey, gentle eyes; long, dark gold hair; a wide mouth Typically Russian features, and as she stepped forward to shake hands and greet her governess in the perfect French the family all spoke among themselves, she could have been any-well-brought-up Russian girl.

‘I’m Tatiana,’ said the little Countess, ‘but everyone calls me Tata,’ and she smiled. At which my grandmother stepped back a pace instinctively. For it occurred to her that it might be difficult not to love the Countess Tata, and to love anyone in this wild, vast country was not what she had intended.

Though she missed her parents, her brave sister Gwendolyn and of course kind and patient Mr Fairburn, my grandmother settled in quite easily to life at Yaslova. In the morning she taught Tata English and supervised her other lessons. In the afternoons she took her for walks, or they went rowing on the lake, or they played croquet. Often they were joined by Petya the literary and dreamy eldest son, or by Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha whose tutor — an aged and decrepit scholar — usually fell asleep over a volume of Pushkin after lunch.