Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

And because time was short, and always would be short, because their plight was really very desperate, it was Susie herself who pulled the hairpins from her long and golden hair.

And here ends — freely interpreted by me — the official version of my Uncle Max’s ill-starred and lifelong love for Susie Siebermann. He married Cousin Lily and in exchange for a single sacrifice on her part (the replacement of her milk teeth necklace by a string of garnets he bought for her), he gave her security, consideration, even affection. Cousin Lily, as is the way of frail, pale, unassuming women, lived an extraordinarily long time. By the time she died, my Uncle Max himself was close on eighty and Susie herself had only a year to live. Throughout his life, however, he visited her on Tuesday evening and on Saturday afternoon. The last time he went to see her she apologised for being no longer any ‘use’ to him, and then she died.

‘It’s monstrous,’ I had said to my mother, years and years later. Just a week ago, in fact, before I took this flight. ‘All his life he loved her and never once could they be openly together.’

My mother had followed me to England and settled in Oxford, first to be near me as a student, later, when I began to roam again, for choice. Now, thirty-odd years away from her native city, she made a gesture which was still infinitely, unmistakably Viennese.

‘Rubbish!’ she said. (Only what she said was ‘Schmarrn’.)

‘That old cow, Helene,’ I went on. ‘Leaving a letter like that. Emotional blackmail of the crudest sort.’

My mother sighed and quoted Schiller. ‘ “With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain” ‘ she said. ‘You, my poor boy, are an idiot.’ She paused, her head on one side. ‘Although one must admit you never saw the squirrel.’

I stared at her. Mere senility is always too much to hope for in my mother.

‘I went to Susie’s apartment once or twice before she died,’

she went on. ‘Such a clean, fresh, pretty place! And then that awful squirrel. Someone had to have given it to her. Someone she respected too much to throw the thing away.’

‘Well?’

‘Who collected stuffed animals? Who adored the smelly things? Who filled her house with them?’ demanded my mother, twitching at her shawl.

‘ Helene ? Helene knew Susie? You must be mad!’

My mother raised her eyebrows. In old age and exile she had taken on a patrician, Habsburg haughtiness which went down like a bomb in North Oxford, but not with me.

‘I don’t know ,’ admitted my mother. ‘But taken in conjunction with the gloves…’

‘All right,’ I said, defeated. ‘Go on about the gloves.’

‘When I was a very small girl they took me to see Aunt Helene in Hitzing. You know how bored children get. When she was out of the room I started playing around with the sofa cushions and I found her sewing basket pushed out of sight. There was a pair of men’s grey gloves in it and a pair of scissors. The gloves had been cut, deliberately.’

I stared at her. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Why not? I liked Helene. It’s not so funny, after all, to fall off a steel cable. If she couldn’t make Max happy in that way, I think she might well have found a nice, friendly girl and seen to it that he met her.’

‘It’s impossible,’ I said. And then: ‘No, it’s just possible. But if she knew all about it and wished Susie well, why did she mess it all up for them? Why did she leave that note about Cousin Lily?’

My mother looked at me and shook her head. ‘My poor boy,’ she said. ‘How many doctorates have they given you? Even you,’ she went on, ‘must see what Helene gave to those two.’

I was silent for a moment, thinking of my Uncle Max as I had last seen him: small and bandy and very, very old — and of the legend which encircled him.

‘A Great Love?’ I said.

‘Oh, as for that,’ said my mother, pulling her shawl closer, ‘I don’t know. That was extra, I think. A bonus…’

And that’s all really. A period piece — something from the safely distant past. We manage things better now; more honestly.

Only just for one moment, as the plane came in to land, I wished we didn’t. So that one day, perhaps, I might go into a glove shop in the Karntner Strasse… If there still are glove shops in the Karntner Strasse…

If I wore gloves…

It was always rather gratifying, the first day of term. Sitting in the staff-room which faced the pleasant, green-turfed courtyard of Torcastle Agricultural College, we could see them all arrive; mostly men of course, because that’s how it is with life, but here and there like sudden gherkins in ajar of unpromising pickle, the girls… Wholesome, old-fashioned girls, prospective farmers’ wives and mushroom growers’ daughters whose tiny mini-skirts and simple, bursting sweaters told fashion where it could put its latest kinks.

Not that any of us was seriously at risk. I myself could reckon to lecture to rooms-full of girls — all looking at me with eyes turned by incomprehension of the reticulo-endothelial system into twin pools of despair — without turning a hair. Rescuing their eyelashes from the pancreas of a pickled dogfish, disentangling their earrings from stray vertebrae was nothing to me after three years as lecturer in Zoology at Torcastle.

It was not quite so easy for Pringle, who suffered domestically from a ‘not-tonight-dear’ wife and research-wise from a recalcitrant beetroot supposedly respiring in a tank of CO2. ‘It’s the way they keep tossing all that hair back as they walk,’ he said, watching a tall brunette glide past the window.

Davies, the nutrition expert, admitted to a more conventional, a mammary approach. ‘And freckles…’

It was left to the vet, Ted Blackwater, to give the tone of the conversation its coup de grace .

‘With me,’ he said humbly, ‘it’s simply legs. Legs and legs and legs…’

‘That’s the lot,’ I said. And then: ‘Oh, my God!’

Trailing up the path like one of those perennial ‘wait-for-me’ ducklings tucked on to the end of so many otherwise normal broods, came this girl. She wore ancient jeans and a shapeless duffel coat, her tow-coloured village-idiot-looking hair seemed to have tangled with a spray of traveller’s joy and her pollen-dusted nose was tilted ecstatically skyward.

‘I’ll bet she’s in my option,’ I said gloomily.

And of course I was right.

My first-year Zoology practical class is a strictly academic and orthodox affair, the Principal insists on that. Straightforward dissections of the earthworm, the frog, the afferent and efferent systems of the dogfish, that kind of thing. And although the lab assistant, Potts, is a treasure, everyone — another college rule — prepares their own specimens.

Torcastle is low on student unrest. I entered the lab that first morning to find two dozen earnest heads already bent over their pinned-out earthworms, scalpels flashing, scissors snipping…

Except, in the corner of a bench by the window, this kind of anarchic cell, this area of silent nihilism. In short, the tow-coloured duckling girl whose name, it seemed, was Kirstie Hamilton, gazing raptly through the orifices in her nose-length fringe at something held in her cupped hands.

‘You haven’t begun yet?’

She lifted her head and looked at me. Both her eyes were green, but one was also yellow and the whole thing was not what I was accustomed to.

‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry, but I find myself unable to chloroform this worm.’

At first I didn’t take in what she had said and this was because her voice, with its rolling ‘R-s’ and lilting vowels, let out of the bag my ten-year-old self, the one that had been going to live in a Hebridean croft, befriended by seals, the confidant of shearwaters, world expert on the breeding habits of the cuddy-fish. When I had disposed of him and her words registered, I grew cross.