A Glove Shop In Vienna by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online

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…

This Beetroot is not Screaming
    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