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

might have been describing a ‘Night of Love’ in Acapulco.
    Something in me snapped. ‘Perhaps you would like to go out and look for a worm that’s died of natural causes?’
    Clearly, she was not a girl sensitive to sarcasm. ‘Oh, thank you, Dr Marshall. What a marvellous idea! Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’
    And with her hand still cupped protectively around her specimen, she left the lab.

    The whole thing rattled me. I went to look at my experiment, but what had seemed like a pretty significant breakthrough in endocrine physiology now looked like thirty-eight mice without their ovaries looking less cheerful than thirty-eight mice who still had them. Fortunately the Principal, Dr Peckham, chose that moment to send for me.
    ‘James,’ he said excitedly as soon as I entered his study, his bald head and his bi-focals all gleaming with joy. ‘I think we’re going to make it!’
    ‘No! You mean our Charter?’
    Dr Peckham nodded. ‘Sir Henry Glissop’s coming with the whole Glissop commission. They wouldn’t send him unless there was a good chance. Just think of it, James! Us and the Tech. and the Art School all united in the new University of Torcastle!’
    Raptly, Dr Peckham made for the open window, seeing I knew, not the pleasant flower gardens of Torcastle Agricultural College, its unpretentious animal houses and white-washed farm but a glittering campus, a towering Science Block and he himself, gowned in scarlet, hurrying from Senate Meeting to Congregation and back again…
    ‘It all depends on the research side of course,’ he went on. ‘How’s Pringle’s beetroot?’
    ‘Playing up a bit, sir.’
    Peckham frowned. ‘And Blackwater? That new technique for storing A.I. samples?’
    ‘Well, sir, you know how it is with Hannibal,’ I said and Peckham winced, for Hannibal, after fathering some three thousand offspring in all corners of the globe, had suddenly gone cold on the whole thing and lounged about in the North Paddock, a seventeen-hundredweight drop-out from the permissive society, wincing when a heifer even passed his gate.
    ‘But your work?’ said Peckham hopefully. And then: ‘Good heavens, what on earth is that girl doing crawling about in that flower bed?’
    I told him. Peckham didn’t really like it. He didn’t, in fact, like it at all.

    Sir Henry’s visit was timed for the last week of term and following Peckham’s instructions, the college threw itself into a frenzy of scientific activity. The pigs were put into metabolism cages, the turkeys reserved for the staffs Christmas dinner vanished from their shed and reappeared in a pen marked ‘Organo-Phosphate Toxicity Trials’. Davies doggedly anaesthetised thirty sheep, stuck tubes into their stomachs and set up an impressive — if statistically dicey — feeding experiment. Blackwater began a systematic attack on Hannibal’s failing libido, tramping nightly over to the North Paddock with house-sized syringes of hormone extract, while Pringle (though his wife had taken to covering herself all over with cold cream) set up five more beetroots respiring in a tank.
    All in all, it was a surging, forward-looking scene with nothing to indicate that already there was a canker gnawing at its breast.

    The Zoology practical class the following week was a straightforward dissection of the frog. Killing a frog is simple and painless. All the same, it was with a leaden lack of surprise that I walked past the neatly pinned dissections and came, presently, upon this palpably still living frog, its bulging ‘cornered-financier’ eyes glittering moistly, one webbed foot hanging limply from a space between her fingers.
    ‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry -‘
    ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said bitterly. ‘I know. You personally, just at this minute, find yourself unable to kill this frog.’
    She nodded. ‘Those spots are really sort
of golden
…’
    Goodness knows how it would have ended. I walked away and left her and when I came back