A Glove Shop In Vienna (2 page)

Even so, she must have slept once more because she was woken by the sound of sobbing. Not the twins’ sobbing, not a child’s sobbing at all, but an ugly tearing sound. A sound which frightened her.

She got up and went on to the landing. Though she’d known really what it was, she stood for a while outside Cousin Poldi’s door as though hoping for a reprieve.

Then she turned the handle and went in.

Cousin Poldi was sitting upright in a chair. Her starved looking plaits hung down on either side of her blotchy face and there was something dreadfully wrong with her mouth. On the table between the glowing, shining things: snippets of silver ribbon, wisps of gossamer lace, lay the hair bracelet, curled like the tail of some old, sick animal.

Vicky took two steps forward and stood still.

‘Your mother is right,’ mumbled Cousin Poldi, her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m an old idiot, fit for nothing. Every year she reminds me to block up the keyhole – and then I forget.’

Vicky said nothing.

‘I get excited, you see… All year I prepare… So many things are wasted in a milliner’s shop, you wouldn’t believe; pieces of stuff, bits of ribbon. I keep them all and then in the evenings I make things for the tree. It’s a bit lonely in Linz, you see… It keeps one busy.’

Vicky took a sudden step back. She had seen the teeth in the glass beside the bed and understood now what was wrong with Cousin Poldi’s mouth.

‘Every year I’ve done the tree for your mother. It was so nice being able to help… she’s so good to me, so beautiful. If it had been her you’d seen…’ She broke off. Then forgetting her naked gums she dropped her hand and looked at Vicky with a last entreaty in her rheumy eyes.

‘I’ve spoilt it for you for ever, haven’t I?’ said Cousin Poldi.

And Vicky, implacable in her wretchedness, said, ‘Yes.’

In every family there is apt to be a child around whom, in a given year, Christmas centres – not, of course, because that child is more greatly loved than the others, but because of something – a readiness, a special capacity for wonder, perhaps just a particular age – which gives that child the power of absolute response.

In the Fischer household that child had been Vicky. Now, with the centre dropped out of their Christmas world, Herr Doctor and Frau Fischer nevertheless had to push the day relentlessly along its course.

Fritzl, moody and ill-looking, was no help. It was the twins with their sublime unconcern, their uncomplicated greed, who made it possible to carry on; Rudi wriggling through morning mass in St Stephen’s cathedral, Tilda screeching up and down the corridors waiting for dusk.

And then at last it was over, the agonising waiting, and the moment had come. The moment when they all assembled in the dining room and listened to the sweet soft tones of the old cow-bell with which their mother summoned them. The moment when the door was thrown open and, the children first, the adults afterwards walked in, dazzled, towards the presents and the tree.

With a last despairing glance at Vicky’s face, Frau Fischer reached for her bell. And then: ‘Stop!’ said Vicky. ‘We’re not all here.’

Everyone looked at everyone else. ‘I’m here,’ said Rudi, reasonably, sticking to essentials. So were Tilda and Fritzl; so was Fritzl’s mother. Herr Doktor Fischer with his home-made fire extinguisher was there; so was the cook, so were the maids.

‘Cousin Poldi isn’t here,’ said Vicky.

Herr Doktor Fischer and his wife exchanged glances.

‘She’s gone, Vicky; she’s going back to Linz. She thought it would be better.’

‘Then she must be fetched,’ said Vicky.

‘But, Vicky…’

‘We can’t go in till we are all together,’ said Vicky, still in that same inflexible, unchildlike voice. ‘She’ll have to be fetched.’

Herr Doktor Fischer took out his watch. ‘The train doesn’t go until four,’ he said to his wife. ‘I could probably get her still. But it would take some time.’

Vicky said nothing. She just stood and waited and for the first time since Fritzl had stolen to her in the night, there was a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

‘You had better go,’ said Vicky’s mother quickly. ‘We can wait.’

The word
wait
fell on the twins’ heads like a cartload of boulders.

‘No,’ wailed Rudi, ‘Rudi
can’t
wait!’

‘Nor can’t Tilda wait neither. Tilda wants her presents now!’

‘Hush,’ said Vicky sternly. ‘How
dare
you act like that on Christmas Eve? And anyway, I’m going to tell you a story.’

Still sniffing, doubtful, they came closer. ‘In the bathroom?’

‘No. Here.’

Vicky looked over at Fritzl, ready to measure herself against him, and then looked away again because somehow there was no longer any threat.

‘What story do you think?’ she said to the twins. ‘On a day like this? The story of the Christmas Angel, of course. The one who came last night, to bring the presents and decorate the tree.’

And she told the story. Told it so that Frau Fischer had to move over to the velvet window curtain and hide her face. Told it so that the sound of Herr Doktor Fischer’s footsteps, the squeak of Cousin Poldi’s returning button boots, were almost an intrusion.

No one said anything. Only when at last the great doors did open and Vicky moved forward to follow Fritzl and the ecstatically tottering twins into the room, her mother held her back.

‘No, Vicky,’ she said softly, ‘let the children go in first. We adults… we
adults
will come on afterwards.’

And then very slowly, she led her daughter forward towards the shining glory of the tree.

There was nothing odd about finding a photograph of Great-uncle Edwin wedged at the back of a bureau drawer. It was a day for finding wedged great-uncles, crumpled brides cut from local newspapers, albums of yellowing babies… I was in my last year at Oxford and had come up to London to help my parents move house.

But Great-uncle Edwin… ? He had been a grocer, I thought, in a South London suburb. Wimbledon? Teddington? So why this photograph in which he wore a high-necked
boyar
blouse, felt boots and a round fur hat? Beside the mild, slightly surprised figure in its Russian clothes was the usual draped table on which he rested a light hand. But where was the aspidistra? Where the picture of the Queen? That wasn’t… but of course it was. A samovar!

I put the picture in my pocket, but I had to wait until the following Christmas for the visit of my mother’s eccentric older sister, my Aunt Geraldine, to get the story.

‘Edwin?’ she said. ‘Ah, yes, poor Edwin! Dear God, what a romantic that man was! And then to marry Edith… And yet…’

‘Would you tell me?’ I said. We were walking along the Embankment towards Chelsea Bridge. Beside us, the Thames snuffled gently against its walls, a slow barge went down towards Greenwich. It was all very English, very peaceful, very grey.

She looked at me, surprised, pleased perhaps that I -uncouth and masculine and young- should seem to care about the past.

‘He was obsessed,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how it happened. Perhaps a label on a crate of smoked sturgeon from the Volga, a delivery note for Ternov ham… He kept a grocer’s shop in Putney.’

‘Russia?’ I said and shivered as she nodded, because it is a devastating experience, finding a fellow-sufferer from the same disease.

‘If he was walking along here with you,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘he wouldn’t see this river.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘He’d see the blue ice beginning to break on the Neva, the pale facade of the Winter Palace, Rasputin’s unspeakable head bobbing on the water…’

My aunt looked at me. A long look. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Though of course in those days Rasputin was still alive.’

‘One can’t choose one’s obsessions,’ she went on, and I think she meant to comfort me. ‘I myself spent the first three years of my adolescence as Third Daughter in the House of the Four Winds in the province of Soo Chow. Outwardly, of course, I was Geraldine Ferguson, the only girl in the Upper Fourth with acne
and
bunions. But inwardly I was Golden Bells whose verses did not displease the Emperor.’ She stopped for a moment and we leant over the Embankment Wall. ‘Something to do with reincarnation, perhaps,’ she said.

‘And Uncle Edwin?’ I prompted.

‘Ah yes. Well, he had it very badly. Words like “
droshki”
or “
troika”
would send him into a sort of trance. I imagine he must have been the only grocer in London who climbed to his haricot bean jar on three volumes of Lermontov. But of course he never had a hope of going and he found the language almost impossible to learn.’

‘And then he married Edith?’

My aunt nodded, staring at the gentle, unfrozen, incurably un-Russian Thames.

‘I shall never know what made him do it,’ she said.

‘What was she like?’

‘If I know what she was like, it is because I was with Edwin when he died. It was only in the last days of his life that he spoke freely. Before that he never complained.’

I waited.

‘She was a “not tonight, dear” woman,’ said my aunt. ‘They’re extinct now, I gather, and thank God for it because they’re killers. Slow killers. Poisoners. Edith didn’t just have nights when it was too hot and nights when it was too cold and nights when she had cream on her face. She had nights when her stays had left her tender and nights when the neighbour’s mother-in-law was asleep the other side of the wall…’

‘Poor Edwin.’

‘Poor Edwin indeed. Of course it just made him worse. He’d read Pushkin: “soul of my soul, light of my heart”, sitting there on a barrel of pickled cucumbers, and then go upstairs and find Edith with her mouth shut like a trap because it was the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s funeral.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘What happened then,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘was that a man called Mr Frobisher shot himself.’

‘He hadn’t,’ she went on, ‘
meant
to shoot himself. He’d been after pheasants on his home moor when he tripped and fell and the gun went off. Mr Frobisher was a retired haberdasher who’d done extremely well out of a patent spring-clip for bow ties. He was also Edwin’s godfather and when the will was read, it turned out that he’d left Edwin a thousand pounds.’

I stopped dead, a few yards from the Albert Bridge.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t?’

My aunt nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was a brave man. He went to Russia.’

‘Brave?’ I said. ‘Idiotic! Insane!’ To put all those dreams to the test… to travel on trains to whose wheels still clung ghost shreds of Anna Karenina’s muff… to let the sapphire curtains of the Maryinsky part on the fabulous Kschessinskaya, mistress of the Czar…

‘He left his assistant to look after the shop,’ said my aunt, ‘sent Edith back to Mummy in Clapham (and weren’t they both pleased!) and arrived, at the end of April, at the Finland Station in St Petersburg.’

Like everyone who dreams of Russia, he had seen it always under snow. But now it was spring. In the Alexander Gardens, where the English governesses sat watching diminutive princesses roll their hoops, the lime trees were green and gold. The Neva sparkled and danced between its granite banks, the air blew softly from the Gulf of Finland. From his hotel he could see Peter the Great, bronze and invincible, astride his rearing horse; in the drawer of his writing desk, impressing him vastly, he found the visiting card of the room’s former occupant: Lord Broomhaven of Craghill Castle, Yorks.

Edwin had no plan for his days. He just walked and walked, as pleased with the marble and jasper sarcophagi of the dead Romanovs as with a stall selling gingerbread from Tver.

And then one evening he was walking down Theatre Street…

My aunt paused. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ I’d heard of it all right. A wide and elegant street running between the Alexandrinsky Theatre and the Fontanka river. A street peopled with limbo’s most graceful ghosts: the young Pavlova running to the Summer Gardens to feed her swans; Karsavina, after her debut, ecstatic at Petipa’s praise; sledgeloads of nascent cygnets or Sugar-plum fairies driving to rehearsal at the Maryinsky… For on one side of Theatre Street, half huge and splendid palace, half nunnery, is the place where it all began: the Imperial Ballet School.

Edwin was no balletomane. It was the hour of the evening meal, the street was empty and he was on the way back to his hotel. What stopped him was a sound: perhaps the most forlorn sound in the whole world. The sound of someone
not
crying.

He turned. Leaning against a closed doorway in the side of the huge building was a young girl. She wore an old-fashioned brown cloak a little small for her; an ancient carpet-bag lay like an unwanted animal across her feet, and on her long, dark lashes he could see the tears held steady by her bursting will.

‘Are you locked out?’ Edwin managed in his clumsy Russian.

She lifted her face to his. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But for ever. I have been expelled for ever from the Imperial Ballet school.’

Her name was Kira. Edwin took her back to the hotel. And began, he said, his life.

‘If you consider,’ said my aunt, ‘you’ll realise that always, in every age, there’s been a romantic ideal: a kind of girl whose looks, whose whole way of life, appeases that yearning for chivalry and tenderness that even the most sophisticated men don’t seem able to stamp out of themselves. All those Paris
midinettes
with their poverty and hearts of gold; those demure oppressed Victorian governesses… And of course, then as now, the girls of the ballet.’

Kira was barely seventeen, small-boned and supple as a willow. Not at all beautiful, Edwin told my aunt, desperately proud of this piece of detachment. Not beautiful, then: a narrow face with immense Byzantine eyes, smooth hair pulled up behind faun’s ears. ‘And when she sat down to listen to you,’ Edwin said, ‘it was her
feet
she folded.’

As soon as he took charge of Kira, Edwin changed. He might really have been the Lord Broomhaven of Craghill whose visiting card he had taken to carrying in his pocket. He ordered a room for her in the hotel, was told there was no room, insisted – and got one. He asked for a meal to be served to them upstairs, was told it was too late, and presently sat with her by his window over grilled sturgeon and sparkling Crimean wine.