Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

The decision to expel her had not been unanimous. Now it was reversed.

And so, on a still grey morning, he drove Kira back to Theatre Street. At the last minute she was afraid and by the same door at which he had found her she clung to him and said, ‘No! No! I want to stay with you!’

But he was beyond everything by now and gently he loosened her arms and picked up the great brass knocker shaped like the Imperial Eagle of the Czar, and then he just stood there very quietly and watched her go.

My aunt stopped talking. She had finished her umbrella-jabbing and we stood side by side, our elbows on the parapet, looking at, and not seeing, the river Thames.

‘That’s all?’ I said at last.

She shrugged. ‘He’d meant to go on, to see Moscow, Kiev, the Crimea. But his money had run out, of course, and anyway…’

‘So he went back to Edith?’

My aunt nodded. ‘Edith,’ she said, ‘was tired after the journey from Clapham. She was sitting up in bed with cream on her face and —’

‘No! She didn’t! She didn’t say it to him. Not that first night!’

‘She said it! And Edwin went up to her and said: “Yes. Tonight. And any other night I choose.” And went on living with her for thirty years.’

‘Oh, hell !’ I said. ‘He had so little. For so short a time.’

‘No,’ said my aunt. ‘You’re wrong. Edwin was all right.’

I waited.

‘I was with him at the end, as I told you. And just before he died, suddenly… he lifted up his head…’ She broke off. ‘I have never,’ she went on, ‘seen such a look of happiness on any human face. And then he said this one word. I didn’t know what it was; I had to look it up.’

‘ Dousha ,’ I said. ‘Was it that? Doushenka ?’ And suddenly it seemed desperately, frantically important that I had guessed right.

My aunt looked up, started. ‘That was it. It’s an endearment, of course.’

‘Yes.’ It’s an endearment, all right, and for my money the best ever, the ultimate. ‘My soul’, ‘My little soul’…

‘So you see,’ said my aunt, unfurling her umbrella, ‘that he really was all right .’

And we turned and left the quiet, grey, incurably English river and went home to tea.

I must have flown over Vienna a dozen times and scarcely stirred in my seat. So why, this time, did I peer forward so eagerly into the darkness, searching the haphazard sprinkling of lights below me for… what? The city of my boyhood? My youth?

No, it wasn’t the Vienna of the chestnut trees, Strauss in the Stadtpark , guglhupf at Sacher’s that I groped for, devastated by the sudden, embarrassing nostalgia of middle age. It was something more specific; a particular collection of… ghosts, I suppose. The ghosts of my ancestors.

Only of course they weren’t ancestors then. Just my relations. And could anyone have made ghosts of them though they were long, long dead?

My Tante Wilhelmina, who threw me bodily over a laurel hedge in the Tiergarten to shield me from the sight of two ancient llamas making sudden love? Or Gross Tante Gretl, overcome by Goethe, walking skirtless in the Brahms Platz, the Nature Lyrics open in her hand?

No, they would have made lousy ghosts, those gloriously batty aunts of Old Vienna. I can see them now, each embalmed, timeless in their own moment of legend: Great-aunt Netta, overcome by grief on the day that Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself, rolling her false grey plait into the Apfelstrudel . Great-aunt Trudi carrying the waistcoat button which had belonged to Beethoven to concerts in the Bosendorfer Saal.

There wasn’t much wrong with my uncles either. Uncle Ernst, who ate eighteen Zwetschkenknodel on the day he died. Great-uncle Gotlieb, agonisingly shy, who spent his wedding night sitting alone beneath the equestrian statue of the Archduke Charles. Great-uncle Frederick, hurling — on the barricades in ‘48 — a barrel of salted gherkins at the Imperial Guard.

But mostly, as the plane flew quietly through the night, I found myself thinking of one man in my past — my very distant past — Great-uncle Max.

Great-uncle Max was a very old man indeed when I was a boy and he was famous by that time not for any particular eccentricity or time-defying bon mot , but for something both less spectacular and more remarkable: a Great Love.

Needless to say, in the matter of a Great Love there are bound to be elements of secrecy, of mystery… As a boy, overhearing the women gossip in my mother’s drawing room, the story bored me. A Great Love seemed to me in every way less interesting than the ability to swallow eighteen Zwetschkenknodel or throw pickled gherkins at the Imperial Guard.

Now, close on half a century later, I was no longer quite so sure.

The story of my Great-uncle Max’s Great Love is unusual in that it has not only a happy ending but a happy middle. The beginning, however, was sad.

Max Bergmann was thirty-nine, unmarried, a successful solicitor, small, blue-eyed and just a little bald when he attended, on a historic night in May, a performance of Rheingold at the Opera House.

Rheingold , if you remember, is the first work in Wagner’s great operatic cycle, The Ring . Uncle Max, slipping into his box and bracing himself a little (for Wagner made him nervous) thus saw the curtain go up on what the programme referred to as ‘the underwater bottom of the Rhine’.

The Vienna Opera at the time prided itself on the realism of its stage effects. Cardboard waves undulated laboriously from left to right and back again: jagged rocks pierced the watery gloom; undefined but undoubtedly sub-aquatic plants wreathed upwards towards the proscenium arch.

And dead centre, triumphant, the piece de resistance : the three Rhinemaidens, lowered from steel cables to hang suspended some twenty feet above the stage.

Mermaid-tailed, scale-covered, golden-haired — the size of half-grown hippopotami — they swayed and sang, immortal sirens of the deep, beckoning men to their doom.

‘ Weia Waga, Woge du Welle’ sang the centre maiden, a lady named Helene Goertel-Eisen, not because she was off her head but because that was what Wagner, in his wisdom, had given her to sing.

The rest is operatic history. The ghastly twang of snapping steel; the orchestra, at first unheeding, pursuing its relentless Wagnerian leitmotif , then breaking into splintered sound, silence…

While Helene Goertel-Eisen, pushing forty, topping the scales at one hundred and twenty kilos, came crashing to the ground.

She was not, in fact, greatly hurt. Shaken, of course. Bruised. Angry; very. And the lawyer she called in to help her sue the Opera Company was Uncle Max.

Max had been deeply upset by the incident. The vast, invincible figure hanging aloft in shimmering silver, and then the flailing limbs, the crumpled body, the broken mermaid’s tail rolling into the footlights…

He never attended a performance of Rheingold again. And six months after the accident, he married Helene Goertel-Eisen.

Whether my Great-uncle Max and my Great-aunt Helene were happily married I cannot say, for it was a question which, in the Vienna of my childhood, no one asked, let alone answered. In those days (when the infant Freud, I daresay, was still bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse) one wasn’t happily married. One wasn’t unhappily married either. One was married.

Certainly my Uncle Max was very good to her. To the end, he called her his ‘Rheinmaderl’ and denied her nothing. As for my Aunt Helene, she gave up her career and settled down contentedly in the big yellow villa in the suburb of Hitzing which Max bought for her, furnishing it in the Makart style which was just sweeping Vienna: peacock feathers, shell ornaments and large numbers of small stuffed animals under glass. Freed from even the minimal restraints of her career, she was able to indulge her passion for Karlsbad plums and Linger Torte and became, even by current standards, not just very, but extraordinarily fat.