Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

My Tante Helene’s picnics were famous. Seldom fewer than three carriages as well as unbelievable quantities of food set out from Hitzing. On this particular Sunday there was Tante Helene herself, a tenor resting from the Opera on account of nodules on his larynx, a string quartet from Buda-Pest, my Uncle Max, his articled clerk — and of course, Cousin Lily.

The party disembarked. The food baskets were carried to a forest clearing and with nature-loving cries, the party plunged joyfully into the woods. Only Cousin Lily remained, half-concealed by the lid of an enormous hamper, her button boots pointing skywards, her milk teeth necklace paled by the September sunshine as she patiently buttered rolls, sliced salami, spread topfen cheese upon the pumpernickl…

For a while, only the sound of distant bird-song threaded the air. Then, from the depths of the forest, came a loud and triumphant shriek.

‘ Herrenpilze !’ screamed my Tante Helene and plunged thunderously into a thicket from which the yellow, shining caps of the edible boletus beckoned.

The tenor with nodules followed. So did the string quartet, although their shoes were thin. Uncle Max joined them.

It is difficult to convey the wild, primeval excitement which, even to this day, the sight of edible fungi arouses in the bosom of the Austrian middle class. Perhaps it is the last expression of a blood-lust which the English, possessing such things as a coastline and moors full of grouse and partridge, are able to express in other ways.

The party, at all events, went wild. They gathered herrenpilze , they gathered steinpilze . They gathered baehrenpatzen and chanterelles and all the other slimy horrors which the Viennese eat and which even now, forty years later, can bring the bile to my throat as I remember them.

Over one toadstool, however, there was argument.

‘No, Helenchen, not that one!’ admonished Uncle Max.

‘But yes, Maxerl, don’t fuss. We always ate that one as children in the Dorflital.’

‘Please, Helene, don’t let Bettinka put that one in the soup,’ begged Cousin Lily later that evening, as they returned triumphantly to Hitzing.

But it went into the soup. The maids wouldn’t eat it. Uncle Max and Cousin Lily, with unaccustomed firmness, declined it also. But Helene ate every mouthful.

Twenty-four hours later, she was dead.

Uncle Max was shattered. He suffered. He blamed himself. Long after the black horses with their fearful, nodding plumes had carried his Rhinemaiden to her last resting place, my Uncle Max crept desolately between his villa in Hitzing and his office in the Wipplinger Strasse. It was left to Cousin Lily, from whose dusty black pockets crumpled mauve handkerchiefs protruded like terrible boils, to manage the household and offer — between bouts of weeping — to return to Graz.

My Uncle Max did not visit his Susie for over a month after the funeral. When he did they made love in muted undertones, embarrassed by their unquenchable compatibility. After a few weeks, however, there occurred to Uncle Max the thought which would have occurred a great deal sooner to somebody less nice.

He was free! Free to drive his Susie in a carriage through the Prater, free of Herr Finkelstein from Linz, free to visit her whenever he wished with the shutters open to the sky!

No, idiot that he was, what was he thinking of? Free to marry her!

‘Susie, Putzchen, Liebchenl ,’ my Uncle Max must have cried when next he saw her, throwing his hat joyfully on to the squirrel. ‘Don’t you understand, my little schatz ? No more secrecy, no more pretending and hiding away!’

Susie, who had grasped this within three seconds of hearing of Tante Helene’s death, looked shyly up at him.

‘Oh, Maxi, I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’

‘Wonderful,’ echoed Uncle Max. He began to pull the pins out of her hair, a thing which gave him the same intense, uncomplicated pleasure he had experienced when picking wild strawberries as a child.

This time however he faltered, stopped. Susie, too, drew away a little.

‘It will seem so strange,’ said Susie presently, ‘not having to call you “Herr Finkelstein”. Not ever again.’

‘But nice? You’ll like it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Susie hastily. ‘ Very nice. I shall like it very much.’

‘I can hardly believe it myself,’ said Uncle Max. ‘Just getting into a fiacre and giving your address. In broad daylight!’

‘You’ll enjoy it, though?’

‘But of course,’ said Uncle Max. ‘Of course I shall enjoy it. I shall enjoy it very much. It will all be so… simple.’

And they stood and looked at each other, subdued and a trifle silent as they contemplated the undoubted and perpetual bliss which faced them. Contemplated it so long and so solemnly that in the end Uncle Max left without taking advantage of her unpinned hair. It was the first time he had ever done so: a foretaste of their future life together: unhurried, respectable but not, of course, even remotely dull.

Helene had died in the autumn. Max and Susie’s wedding was fixed for the following spring. A very quiet wedding, needless to say. All the same, one likes to think of Susie scuttling up and down the Karntner Strasse buying material for the wedding dress. Not white, exactly, for she was a tactful girl, but pink, I daresay, or pale blue — and somewhere, one imagines, rosebuds.

And then, less than a month before the wedding, Tante Helene’s will was read.

There had been a delay in the settling of her affairs, for etiquette forbade that she should trust her estate to her own husband, and the lawyer she had chosen had caught typhus shortly after the matter of the toadstools and was only now recovered.

The will was straightforward. She left a small legacy to her Cousin Lily. The rest of her property went unconditionally to her ‘beloved Max.’

There was, however, a letter .

‘I need not inform a colleague of your eminence,’ the lawyer now said to Uncle Max, ‘that this letter is in no way binding by law. Nevertheless, it was your wife’s most earnest wish that you should consider the contents as… a kind of testament.’

And overcome by embarrassment, he fell to polishing his pince-nez. After which, in silence, he handed a large, sealed envelope to Uncle Max.

The next part hardly bears thinking of. My Uncle Max running up the stairs of the little apartment… Susie on the sofa, perhaps sewing a muslin flounce on to her wedding dress. And Uncle Max, ashen-faced, holding out the letter in a shaking hand.

‘Oh, Maxerl! Oh, my darling, my Liebchen ! Oh no, you can’t do it! She can’t ask it of you!’

Together they clung, rocking in agony, while the crumpled wedding dress fell unheeded to the floor.

‘Cousin Lily!’ wailed Susie. ‘Oh no, no, no, no!’

‘She is alone in the world, you see,’ explained Uncle Max, brokenly kissing his Susie behind the ear.

‘So dreadful for you!’

‘Not dreadful, really,’ said Uncle Max bravely. ‘She runs the house. And she wouldn’t expect… Only on the Kaiser’s birthday, perhaps. But it’s you , Susie, don’t you see?’

‘You mean we would have to be so secret again? To pretend, to hide away from the world?’

Max nodded, sorrow making him speechless. Clinging together, they faced it in all its tragedy: the brief and stolen hours, the secret bed behind closed shutters, Herr Finkelstein from Linz…

‘Susie, this is a terrible blow. It is the most terrible blow we have ever faced together,’ said my Uncle Max. ‘But we can face it. We can conquer it!’

‘Oh, yes, Maxi!’ cried Susie, illumined by sacrifice. ‘We can . Together we can conquer everything.’