by Eva Ibbotson
What I remember most vividly is not Tante Wilhelmina’s racking sobs, nor even Ruth Goldmann’s gold-flecked eyes as they widened to take in the shock and pain, but the baffled, bewildered look on old Kugelheim’s face as he stepped forward, clutching his curling-tongs, and stood looking down at Uncle Ferdi’s totally bald head …
After Uncle Ferdi’s death, Tante Wilhelmina went to pieces. She grieved as though their marriage had been the most fantastic idyll. She lost two stones in weight, dressed totally in black, saw no one.
I was shocked by what seemed to me to be the most appalling hypocrisy, ‘Why does she carry on like that?’ I said to my mother. ‘She can’t have loved him.’
My mother didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Later, people often looked at me as though they envied me my youth, but that day I saw my youth profoundly pitied.
It was Steffi, adopted on a whim from an orphanage, silly, undervalued Steffi who now took charge of Tante Wilhelmina, carrying the broken old woman off to Berlin where Victor had a new job in the Conservatoire, comforting her, caring. The house was sold; my mother went to work in a shop; we moved to a little flat in the suburbs. There were no more death-beds. And no more Ruth.
As though Uncle Ferdi, sitting sadly in his study, had kept the old world together, his death seemed to unleash chaos. Chaos in the outside world as Hitler seized power in Germany and the conflict and cruelty began to seep across the border to smug and sleepy Austria. Chaos within as the loss of Ruth unleashed in me all the squalor and confusion of adolescence.
Politically, my mother and I were almost simpletons. So that when a year later Ruth Goldmann wrote to me from England, I wasn’t relieved for her safety, I was appalled. England, that grey and foggy land of horsemen and ham-and-eggs; what was Ruth doing there? How would I ever get to her again?
‘It is good here,’ Ruth wrote, ‘ because no one minds that Father is a Jew and they don’t spit at us in the street. When we arrived, Mother said the prayer of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the tribes of Israel, but Father said it was the prayer to make married people have children…’
It was a long letter and it ended: ‘I would like it very much if you remembered me.’
Well, I remembered her. I remembered her through the Anschluss and the war in which, by then, I was old enough to fight. I remembered her through three years of imprisonment by the Russians and I remembered her when, sick and verminous and sullen, I was released.
But by then the continent was adrift in chaos and I lost her. Physically. Literally. No letters reached her in England, none came to me.
All the same, within a year of the war’s end, I managed to get myself to London on a language course. I went, of course, to look for Ruth. Anyone less naïve would have known how hopeless it was. Each evening, when I finished at the language school, I rang up another couple of dozen Goldmanns, trudged round the refugee organisations, the Emigration Office … Nothing …
And yet in the end, quite by chance, I did find someone.
I was walking, on a warm evening in May, from Swiss Cottage tube station towards the room in which I lodged. My way led through streets of large Victorian terrace houses, many of them knocked together to make a hostel or hotel.
In front of one of these I used to linger and eavesdrop. It was a kind of old people’s home – though a pretty classy one – run by a Viennese woman and filled with the elderly relatives of refugees whose matriarchal ‘Momma’ or embarrassingly proletarian ‘ Poppa’ had not fitted into the new prosperity of the house in Golders Green or Finchley. From this hotel the smell of good Austrian cooking used to drift out, plus plaintive comments in German or Polish or broken English.
‘No,’ I heard on this particular day. ‘I go absolutely not to the death-bed of that old schickse. I am sensitive, me, and my nerves cannot hold out such nonsense.’
A pleading murmur, softer, in English. A resigned: ‘Once more, then; once more only, I go,’ from an old gentleman.
And an arm in a white overall, scooping up a huge, reluctant cat…
‘Excuse me, but do you have anyone staying here by the name of Ziegelmayer? Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer?’
The flustered maid looked at me with relief. ‘Oh yes, we were expecting one of the relatives. I’ll take you up.’
I followed her upstairs, opened the door.
On the pillows, in a nightdress of the austerest post-war cotton, lay Tante Wilhelmina. Where Herr Kugelheim had stood with his curling-tongs sat the matron, looking resigned and holding in a vice-like grip a large and displeased cat. And in a circle round the bed, creaking with visible reluctance, sat an assortment of elderly ladies and gentlemen.
Tante Wilhelmina was forgiving them. She forgave Frau Feldmann for taking the last of the sauerkraut at luncheon; she forgave Madame Kollinsky for always hogging the best armchair in the lounge. She forgave Herr Doktor Zellman for the extraordinarily unappetising way he left the bathroom.
And then Tante Wilhelmina saw me.
Really, I mean, saw me. She broke off, struggled up on her pillows, stretched out a hand. A spasm shook her and then over her silly, self-indulgent face there came a look that I had never seen on it before: a look of pure and unmistakable happiness.
‘Ferdi‚’ she said, loud and clear, ‘Ferdi! I forgive you, Ferdi; I forgive you everything.’
Then she fell back on the pillows. Her breathing changed. Behind me I heard light footsteps, a door opening; someone begin softly to weep. It was only then that I realised that Tante Wilhelmina had made it at last, that she was dead. And I turned round and there was Ruth …
‘I’m so glad,’ said Ruth later. ‘ Oh, God, I’m so glad she had the chance to forgive him.’
I don’t know where we were then. Hampstead Heath, perhaps. We had walked about for hours, holding each other’s hands like greedy children, and now it was quiet and green.
‘I’m glad, too. But I don’t understand, really. Why did she think I was Uncle Ferdi suddenly? She seemed quite sane.’ Ruth turned to me, surprised. ‘I forgot you didn’t know,’ she said. Then she opened her handbag, took out a mirror and held it up to me.
I looked at myself. Blue eyes; fair hair; shrapnel scar on the temple. Just a face.
‘Try a moustache,’ said Ruth. ‘And gold pince-nez.’
‘No,’ I said.’ No.’
Ruth nodded. ‘He was very lonely. And your mother was a sweet woman. You’re very like him.’
‘Good God! So that was the sin Tante Wilhelmina couldn’t forgive him! An affair with the housekeeper. To be made a fool of in her own house!’
Ruth smiled, but her gold-flecked eyes were sad. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was a big thing and it was years after. Tante Wilhelmina was awfully good about it. You know what a pet she made of you.’
‘But what, then? What had he done?’
So then Ruth lay back in the grass and I took her in my arms and she told me.
And if our marriage is exceptionally happy, if really we don’t seem to quarrel over trifles, perhaps it is because we both remember an old woman – locked in loneliness and silence because thirty years earlier, her new young husband, in a careless moment, had told her that her fresh-baked apfelstrudel tasted like a boot …
TANGLE OF SEAWEED
SHE WAS always reading, Nell. Well, when she wasn’t stroking the sooty London leaves of plane trees or laying her cheeks against cool window-panes or loving – ecstatically – unsuitable young men. You could have given her a Chinese couplet from any part of the Golden Dynasty of T’ang and she’d have finished it for you. Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children’s books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.
But somehow Freud, that great psychologist had passed her by. His theory, for example, that we forget what we want to forget, lose what we want to lose, had hardly crossed her mind.
So when she woke up and couldn’t at once find her enga
gement ring beside the bed, her panic, though intense, had no particular overtones. Sleep-drugged, she blundered round the room, picking things up, feeling the sweat collect on the nape of her neck. Larissa and Kay, with whom she shared the flat, wandered in and, their eyes half-shut still, began groping for it too. Looking for the ring Harold had given Nell had become second nature to them by now.
Nell found it herself, on the bathroom shelf next to the indigestion tablets which she’d bought because everyone knew that being engaged made you tense and gave you stomach cramps, and even before she’d cleaned her teeth she put it on and it was like putting on Harold. She felt safe, controlled, calm.
Harold … She was so grateful to Harold for so much. For being called Harold in the first place, when no one really was any more. For having a mother whom he not only loved but was taking that very afternoon to the Zoo. The idea of Harold steering his mother from the baboons to the sea lions, from the coypu pond to the zebra house, pulling her gently out of the way of supercilious camels with sticky children on their backs was, to Nell, infinitely touching. A guarantee, too, of the changes that would take place in her own life when she was married to Harold. She would stop drifting, taking any old job like this one she was doing now, for example. She would learn to say, ‘No’. ‘No, I will not lend you my last fiver.’ ‘No,’ (to the men who were never called Harold) ‘you cannot take me to Hampstead Heath to hear the nightingales, to St Tropez in your string vest of a car…’
She looked down at the ring. Two diamonds flanking a very reasonably sized ruby. Harold hadn’t actually said that it wouldn’t collect dust but he’d implied it because he was an Expert. A Time and Motion Expert, and this, too, Nell found moving. He would make things work for her. She would catch buses, water her house plants correctly from underneath, stop singeing her eyebrows on the geyser …
‘Half past,’ called Larissa from the kitchen, and Nell shot into violent action. Her hair, that was the most important thing. Today it had to stay tidy. After all, it was a sort of lab she worked in, it was science … She brushed it out: green-gold, plumb-straight; hair she washed as often and as carelessly as her face, and began to fasten it on to her head. A rubber band, two clips, a pin …
And now, suddenly, as happened every morning, she was frantically late.
‘Oh God, let me catch my bus‚’ she prayed, and threw the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the indigestion tablets into a straw basket, and swallowing a mouthful of brioche ran out into the street.
At once, she was blinded by summer. The tarmac shimmered, the pavement bit her feet; the street cat lay like a spent Ingres courtesan across the steps.
Nell shut her eyes, pierced by a desperate longing for her childhood summers. For the smell of decaying weed along the tide line (which, whatever people said, really was ozone). For the voluptuousness of sand between her toes; for rose-coloured cowries mysteriously special in a handful of common shells. For a man she could see coming out of the water (but this was hardly childhood?) shaking back his hair and laughing as he uncoiled the strands of seaweed round his feet. A man she hoped so much was Harold. Only, would Harold have allowed the seaweed to tangle round his feet? Wouldn’t he, being an Expert, have seen and avoided it?
‘Oh no, my bus,’ yelled Nell, and, too late, began to run, clutching her diamond ring with her free thumb and feeling already the first dreaded slither of what would soon be the waterfall of her descending hair …
On the other side of London, hemmed in between fifteen volumes of a decomposing German dictionary and something called Wissenschaftliche Pädagogie, sat Toby Sandford, bent over his dissertation on Animal Symbolism in Sanskrit Literature and trying to extract from his pocket, in total silence, a vinegar-flavoured potato crisp.
The college library was all-enveloping, silent, fusty, with marble busts of surprisingly unclad scholars placed at intervals between the tomes, but Toby wasn’t fooled. This was one of those rare days when all the rules were broken and the whole country ran riot with summer.
He extracted a crisp, closed his eyes and gave himself over to an emotion for which he was really rather young: intense and violent nostalgia. He saw the sea as it had been on the limitless, empty beaches of his native Northumberland, not blue but a cool and pearly grey; saw the entrancing pink legs of oyster catchers glint in the sun, saw a girl (but this was moving out of childhood) come out of the water, letting a skein of seaweed trail in her hand. Now she was bending down, biting with delicate pleasure the bladders of wrack between her teeth. Girls always bit into seaweed …
Or did they? He played the last reel through again in his mind, hoping against hope that the girl was Margaret, with whom he had what was generally termed a relationship. But would Margaret have bitten into a piece of seaweed? Wouldn’t she even there, coming out of the sea in the swimsuit whose straps would not have worked loose, been carrying her dissecting scissors, her scalpel?
‘Overwork,’ said Toby to himself. He’d been determined to finish the thesis for his doctorate before he went away, and usually an English summer was easy enough to ignore. But today …
Suddenly he closed his book, bundled up his papers. He’d take a day off, take Margaret out. To the Zoo? To the Aquarium! And immediately an explosion of images ran through his brain. ‘Sabrina fair … under the glassy, cool, translucent wave…’ ‘Full fathom five thy father lies…’ He saw ferns and fronds and fins and was suddenly and devastatingly happy.
Margaret, when he ran her to ground in the Zoology lab, saw only an interruption to a sensibly planned day. She sat in her white lab coat, bent over the hepatic portal system of an extremely pickled dog fish, lifting with calm forceps the fragile threads of empty arteries, snipping unruffled among clusters of organs as delicate as Lilliputian grapes. Like Toby, she was doing post-graduate research. Unlike him, she never felt as he did, even after he took a First at Oxford, that the research was doing him.
In the end, however, she took off her overall, resigned, composed, because he was nothing but a child, really, and needed humouring, and went to fetch the large, cool, plastic handbag which had in it all the things that Toby never had – clean handkerchiefs, door keys that really fitted doors – and still smelling slightly but impressively of formalin, agreed to go with him to the Aquarium …
There was nothing impulsive about the visit of Harold, with his mother, to the Zoo. It had been carefully planned for days and the route they were to follow memorized from Harold’s map. So far all had gone well, but it was with a certain amount of relief that Harold went up the steps to the Aquarium. The llamas, overcome by the unusual heat, had shown a disconcerting amorousness and the baboons – well, baboons were like that. But it was his pride to spare Mother, who lived alone in Teddington, the least unpleasantness, and there was always something calmingly ethereal about fish.
After the heat outside, the dark, columned halls of the Aquarium were marvellously cool. Margaret and Toby were proceeding tank by tank along its length, for Margaret was above all a systematic girl. A fleet of bass floated motionless in a forest of bamboo. Flounders performed strange and dreamy acrobatics with their bulging eyes. Dust-speckled bubble stars illumined a black heaven beneath which a deeply placid carp smiled as he swam.
‘In a cool curving world he lies and ripples with dark ecstasies,’ said Toby happily, and Margaret, who was beginning to despair of ever curing him of quoting pointless bits of poetry, sighed.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘ they have an interesting reproductive system‚’ and told him serious things about whitish tubercules and elongated papillae.
‘Oh,’ said Toby, unaccountably cast down, and moved on. An octopus with rows of suckers like milky pearls, gave them an enfant terrible grin from a Stonehenge of sea-washed rocks.
‘Their pancreas is excretory, did you know?’ said Margaret, and elaborated.
‘Well, I don’t like it,’ said a sharp, elderly voice beside them, and Toby, who didn’t either, who wanted the octopus entire and lovable,
turned round in sympathy. But the woman, who appeared even on this burning summer day to be clutching a plastic raincoat, was suffering from a different obsession. ‘ Nothing will make me believe that the girl will settle down and make you a good wife. I tell you, I heard her talking to my begonias when you brought her to tea. No self control, she said they had. And always barefoot with those straw baskets. An invitation to thieves.’
‘She is very willing to learn,’ said Harold calmly, and looked down at the luminous dial of his watch, pleased to observe that they were comfortably within schedule.
‘Oh!’ said Toby, suddenly and deeply harrowed. In front of them a hopelessly narcissistic lung fish alone in its tank floated constantly upwards to kiss its own reflection in the moment that it broke.
‘That’s tragedy,’ said Toby, ‘to be in love with yourself because there’s no one else.’
Margaret, who disliked him to be fanciful, had moved on to a tank of bewigged anemones like infant dish mops. She was explaining something about interlamellar junctions.
‘And then she’s always losing things,’ came the querulous voice as the woman with the plastic raincoat caught up with them. ‘Even her ring.’
‘I shall help her,’ said the man’s voice calmly. ‘I shall draw up a routine for her.’
As though the word ‘routine’ was a beautiful image now to be permanently shattered, thirty-odd children – a school party from Bracken Hill Secondary Modern – erupted into the dark and vaulted halls of the Aquarium. At once, like molecules of effervescent gas, they filled every corner, emitting shocked ‘coos’ and admiring ‘cors’, finding everything either terribly funny or marvellously beautiful.
Only one boy, by far the smallest, stood silent, aloof from the rest in the shelter of a pillar. His knee socks had hopelessly descended, the lenses of his goggle glasses threw back weak glimmers of light from a tank of guppies and he was shivering with fear.
