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

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.
    ‘Look, this is a scientific department and there’s absolutely no room in it for whimsy. If you’re one of those antivivisectionists—’
    ‘Oh, but I’m not, I’m not!’ she cried and the worm, interested, raised up a dozen or so if its anterior segments and laid them across her thumb.
    ‘Of
course
people have to do experiments and test drugs and things. Of course they do!’
    ‘Well, then?’ I was getting impatient. All around me I could see butchered seminal vesicles, lacerated cerebral ganglia…
    ‘It’s just that I
personally
can’t kill this worm… I can just feel its bristles on my wrist,’ she said, and she