Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

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A collection of short stories by the author of
reveals the writer’s ability to write funny and erudite historical fiction.
Known for her neatly fashioned romance fiction, Ibbotson (Madensky Square) here collects 19 decorous stories of love gained and lost. With settings that range from the early 1990s to the present day, they generally feature surprise endings, some of them sadly contrived. In the title story, Max, a lawyer and confirmed bachelor in pre-WW I Vienna, attends the opera, where Helene, a singer of Wagnerian heft, is hurt in an onstage accident. She hires Max to file suit; they marry; later, Max takes a mistress. On his wife’s death he is free to marry his paramour, but Helene’s will dictates otherwise — she knew that forbidden fruit is sweetest. The London grocer in “Doushenka” is obsessed by Russia. Traveling to St. Petersburg, he falls in love with a young ballerina, but their relationship is ended by his sacrifice on her behalf, and for the rest of his life he must be content with the memories of his Great Love. A Great Love is the essential element in these old-fashioned tales, of which “Sidi” is the most celebratory-and blatantly sentimental. Eschewing the angst and alienation discussed in much contemporary fiction, Ibbotson offers leisurely details of a more genteel era whose passing she obviously laments. Her stories, however, are oversweet and ultimately cloying. From Publishers Weekly
From Library Journal
Women who enjoy romantic fiction will enjoy these heartwarming stories, first published in Great Britain in 1984. Ibbotson concentrates on the infinite variety of Great Love-its discovery, development, recognition, loss, and denouement. Her characters, males and females of all ages and professions, are frequently seen during the Christmas season and in prewar Vienna and Russia. In many stories, people find and lose each other-often with an O. Henry twist. Ibbotson, a winner of the Romantic Novelists Association award, writes charmingly about love, forgiveness, loss, and happiness. Highly recommended.
Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.

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‘You have written in my diary!’ declared a shrill and agitated voice as the Countess Sartov, grey plaits flying, entered the room. ‘Here, where I have written that we must return to Moscow, you have written “WHY?”.’

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother.

‘Why?’ shrieked the Countess. ‘Why have you written “WHY”?’

‘Well,’ said my grandmother, ‘I wondered why you must return to Moscow when you all like it so much better here.’

The Countess stopped pacing. ‘But we always return to Moscow, isn’t it so, Petya?’ She ran back into the corridor. ‘Sergei,’ she yelled to her husband, ‘come and explain to Miss Petch why we must return to Moscow.’

‘We always return to Moscow,’ said the Count, entering with a heavy tread. (Old Bull had still not done his stuff.)

‘Father, was my grandfather a good man?’ interrupted Petya.

‘A good man? Your grandfather!’ yelled the Count. ‘He was a louse. A swine! When I was six he locked me in a cupboard for two days. Once he killed a serf with his bare—’

‘Then I can see no reason why you need be bound by your promise to him,’ said my grandmother briskly. ‘As for returning to Moscow, I suppose that’s because the house is not habitable in winter?’

‘Not habitable in winter?’ roared the Count, turning to his wife. ‘Did you hear that, Annushka? Why, the stoves in this house would heat the Kremlin. They would heat the Kremlin without the slightest—’

‘You have written in my diary!’ came a deep and passionate voice from the doorway. ‘Here, where I have written I may never hold the Countess Tata in my arms, you have written “WHY?”.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed my grandmother patiently.

‘Why have you written “WHY”?’ demanded the young tutor,’ when you know that it can never be?’

‘I suppose your father was an illiterate serf and so on? 1enquired my grandmother.

Nikolai looked surprised and said no, his father had been — and actually still was — headmaster of a Boys’ Academy in Minsk.

‘Well then, I take it that you are penniless and futureless?’ prompted my grandmother.

Nikolai turned his marvellous eyes on her and said that as it happened he had been left a little money by an aunt and was going in the autumn to take up a lectureship in Russian language at the University of Basle, in Switzerland. He had, he said, hopes of a Professorship fairly soon.

‘Well then,’ said my grandmother.

The Countess, who had been in feverish conversation with her husband, now turned round sharply. ‘What are you saying, Miss Petch? Tata is engaged to Prince Kublinsky.’

‘Madame, you must forgive me for speaking plainly but I am a doctor’s daughter,’ said my grandmother. ‘And in my opinion,’ she went on steadily, ‘you would be advised to look… very carefully… into Prince Kublinsky’s health.’

The Countess blanched. ‘No! Oh, my God, it is not possible. Yet I have heard rumours… His early dissipations… Oh, my poor Tata!’ She paused, then rallied. ‘Even so,’ she said, ‘it is out of the question that Tata should marry Nikolai Alexandro—’

‘You have written in my diary!’ announced the Countess Tata, arriving in the doorway bare-footed, tangle-haired and devastating.

‘Tata, Grandfather was a louse,’ yelled Petya, ‘so I need not be a soldier!’

‘We’re staying in the country, we’re staying in the country,’ sang Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha who had appeared from God-knows-where, and began turning ecstatic somersaults.

But it was at Nikolai, standing perfectly still in the centre of the room, that Tata looked.

‘Come here,’ said Nikolai. ‘Come here, Tata.’

He didn’t use her title, nor did he go to her but waited, his head up, until she came to him.

‘We’re going to be together, doushenka ,’ he said, taking her face between his hands. ‘I promise you this. We’re going to be together always.’

In spite of all entreaties, my grandmother insisted on leaving as soon as transport could be arranged. Her homesickness persisted and she felt she had done what she could.

When she reached London, Mr Fairburn was at the station to meet her.

‘How kind of you, Mr Fairburn,’ she said, allowing him to help her from the train.

‘I wish,’ said Mr Fairburn earnestly, ‘that you would call me Alfred.’

My grandmother realised that this was probably the most passionate speech that she would ever hear from him.

‘Weren’t you disappointed?’ I asked, remembering the mighty Volga, troikas and a little Countess hopelessly in love. ‘Didn’t it all seem rather tame?’

My grandmother said, no. One should know one’s limitations, she said. And call him Alfred she did.

A Question of Riches

Jeremy was seven when he first went to boarding school, his expensive new grey shorts enveloping his skinny knees, a roll of comics for the journey smudging in his tight-clasped, bird-boned little hand. Even Matron, jovial by profession, felt a pang as she unpacked the belongings of this patently unfledged fledgling and wondered whether another year in the nest would have done any harm.

Except that in Jeremy’s case there wasn’t really any nest. His father, one of the finest climbers of the decade, had died trying to help an injured companion on a distant, still unnamed Himalayan peak. Jeremy’s mother, gay and accomplished, had married again within two years — this time, for solid worth and safety. Jeremy’s stepfather was a mining engineer, kind, decent and magnificently unimaginative. When his firm sent him out to the Copper Belt in Central Africa, it seemed obvious to him that what Jeremy needed was to be left behind in a good English prep school.

And Jeremy’s school was good. When he wrote his weekly letter to his mother out in Africa, his pen digging holes in the thin blue air-mail paper, it was pointed out to him that to describe one’s homesickness was a bit selfish , didn’t he think? So he wrote instead, in his huge, sloping script, of cricket matches and other suitable topics suggested on the blackboard. After a while, too, he stopped crying under his pillow at night because, as Jenkins minor said, he was simply disgracing their dorm. And gradually, as the weeks crept by, he began to forget. He ‘settled’. Really he had no choice.

Fortunately there was no problem about where Jeremy should spend his holidays because he had grandmothers — a full set. There was his mother’s mother, Mrs Tate-Oxenham whose husband, Jeremy’s grandfather, sat on the Board of not fewer than seven major business enterprises. Mrs Tate-Oxenham lived in the centre of the most fashionable part of London in a tall house filled with valuable antiques and had a housekeeper, a chauffeur and a cook. Jeremy called her ‘Grandmother’ in full because abbreviations, she said, were slipshod: one was never that short of time.

Then there was his dead father’s mother Mrs Drayton; she was a widow and managed on her pension. She lived in London too: in a single room, in a shabby peeling house on the ‘wrong’ side of the river. Jeremy called her ‘Nana’ but not when Mrs Tate-Oxenham was around because it made her frown.

It was to ‘Grandmother’, that Jeremy went first when his school broke up for the summer. He had never actually stayed with Mrs Tate-Oxenham before, so that at first he took the uniformed chaffeur who had been sent to meet him at the station for some kind of admiral or chief of police.

‘Mind you sit still!’ said this lordly being, settling Jeremy into the huge black car with its silver fittings and the rug made of a whole dead zebra lying on the seat. ‘We don’t want anything kicked, do we?’

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