A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories

by Eva Ibbotson

  But there I had reckoned without my wife. She had managed – heaven knows how – to get hold of Sir Godfrey socially and to interest him in the Havelock and me.

  We were having our coffee break when we heard the sound of purposeful footsteps approaching the director’s office, halting and then returning. Then came a knock on the door and a jovial, booming voice – ‘Ah, Bellingham, there you are! We’ve come to look in a bit early, as you see. Thought we might get your case through quicker that way.’

  I don’t know what I had expected from the chairman of the Natural History Commission. Hardly the Flash Gordon profile, the craggy jaw, the Bermuda tan. Flanked by three steely-eyed, grey-suited experts, Sir Godfrey advanced into the room. As he did so his jovial expression became more fixed, his craggy jaw tightened a little.

  On a camp-bed by the window Mrs Rahman was doing her ante-natal breathing, something we insisted upon. Matt, who was deeply into Yoga, was demonstrating the ‘Cobra’ to Uncle Laszlo. Brian, in the manner of tramps since time immemorial, was stuffing his boots with newspaper …

  Sir Godfrey came to a halt. He had to since Flossie, who had been on her hands and knees labelling specimens, now reared up in his path. I moved forward to remove a Rhodesian leg ornament which had got caught behind her ear, thought better of it and shook hands with Sir Godfrey.

  ‘Your staff, I take it?’ said Sir Godfrey, surveying the room. ‘Perhaps you’ll introduce me.’

  I introduced him. What else could I do?

  I must say he was straight with me. Biggers and I showed him round and he asked intelligent questions while his posse took notes. Then we went to my office.

  ‘Look, Bellingham, before we go any further there’s one thing I want to make quite clear. Every one of these peculiar volunteers must go and go for good. It’s absolutely out of the question that we could award a grant to a place run like … a jumble sale. You must know quite well that your exhibits are not insured for handling by unauthorised persons. And what about the medical question? Suppose that extraordinarily pregnant lady should be taken ill and her husband sue you? Or the old man have a fit? You must be as aware as I am of these considerations?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am.’

  ‘Good. Then I have your word that all these people will be removed immediately?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  A flush spread over Sir Godfrey’s handsome face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know exactly how you feel because I felt the same when I first came here. But I find I no longer care to go along with the way things are run nowadays. Friendly old people’s homes closed and the residents turned adrift because the fire escape’s two inches too narrow. People losing their jobs because they’re too old or too young or haven’t passed some arbitrary exam. All the goodwill of ordinary people going to waste. Havelock was a tea merchant. Everything he collected, he brought in during his spare time. This museum was built by amateurs and it’s only because I’ve had the help of other amateurs that I’ve been able to run it. If they go, I go.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Sir Godfrey, ‘there’s nothing more to be said.’

  They all knew at once of course. Biggers must have told them and when I came back from lunch they were waiting for me. Mrs Rahman, her doe-eyes wide with concern; Uncle Laszlo, shaking his head; Matt telling me I was silly, that they had always known they wouldn’t be allowed to stay.

  And Flossie, blaming herself. Flossie putting a hand on my arm and remembering, and turning away with a little gulp … Flossie who had lost both her parents in a car crash and to whom the Havelock was home.

  The letter refusing the grant came the following week. Vivian was furious with me and I couldn’t blame her. After all, Sir Godfrey was her protégé.

  ‘If you would climb down,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I could get him to change his mind.’

  But this I wouldn’t do. ‘Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted,’ I said wearily – and saw her recoil from my priggishness.

  Ten days later I came home to find a note on the mantelpiece. Always look for the obvious, they say, in matters of the human heart. But could I have foreseen anything as trite, as banal, as soul-destroying as Vivian and Sir Godfrey? Or that my disgust and bitterness would be so little help in blotting out the pain?

  At the Havelock we went on working like lunatics, all of us. You could have eaten your dinner off the floor on the day before we were due to close. That day we had a party. Matt and Brian fixed up a bar between the aardvark and the gnus, Mr Biggers made a speech, Uncle Laszlo and the Brigadier downed the champagne like mother’s milk, and to the sound of roe deer rutting noises Flossie and I solemnly waltzed.

  Parties poised over an abyss of leave-taking and calamity are generally the best. None of us noticed how late it was, or that Mrs Rahman had long since slipped away. When we did, Flossie went at once to find her.

  She returned as pale as death. ‘Oh, come quickly, please, please! And ring for an ambulance, someone – only I’m afraid it’s much too late!’

  Flossie was right. Mrs Rahman, that gentle soul, had not cared to spoil our fun. Now she lay on the trestle bed, glistening with sweat and trying between contractions to apologise.

  Heaven knows how we did it, but we did. And when it was over and we gave the radiant, exhausted woman her lusty son to hold, I had to hand it to Leboyer. Because I swear to you, the messy, beat-up little thing quite definitely smiled!

  It was November again. Bobbles on the plane trees; mist, wet leaves splayed on the pavement. A year had passed since I had first seen the naked sea slug and the football supporter had tottered out of her door, dropping her shrunken head. My decree had just come through and the sense of failure was bad.

  I went in past the bust of Sir William in his pith helmet … past the aardvark, the gnus … Everything was as it had been but a little better, a little more highly polished. A couple of Arab ladies were whispering reverently by the silk moths of the Emperor Wu-Ti. A lot of people came from the Middle East these days: the place was a kind of pilgrimage spot for them. The birth-place of Yusuf Mahomet Abu Rahman, the first healthy male child born to the son of a reigning sheik in the state of Quittah for forty years. Our endowment from the old man, running at one three-hundredth of his annual oil revenue, made the Havelock one of the wealthiest museums in the land.

  The door marked ‘Staff Only’ burst open. Her sixth sense unfailing, out she came.

  ‘Oh, Paul, why did you come in by the front, we’ve been waiting and waiting for you! Uncle Laszlo’s found some new bones which he thinks are—’ She broke off, tilted her tangled head. ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘Not now.’

  She lurched tentatively towards me. I opened my arms and she moved into them. My own personal football supporter. Mine. …

  THE ADULTERY OF JENNY CRAIG

  JENNY CRAIG knew that there was no such thing as adultery any more. The women’s movement, the new way of thinking had made the word, the whole concept, obsolete. There weren’t really ‘affairs’ any more either; there were just different people relating to each other, taking and giving love, some inside marriage, some out … That’s what it was like now.

  Only, seemingly, not for her. What she was planning to do: to meet a man called Thomas Marsham, to whom she was not married, for a weekend in London, felt like adultery. Furthermore the sleeplessness, the indigestion, the tension headaches she had developed as the result of the lies it had been necessary to tell her husband, felt like guilt.

  Jenny had been married to Philip Craig for twelve years and they had been good ones. All the trouble people had with sex hadn’t really come their way. Philip enjoyed it and so did she and when after the first few years they had done all the ordinary things and were perhaps inclined to get a little bit into a rut, they had gone out and bought some books and done slightly less ordinary things. Only, of course, after a while these too got a little bit repetitive, there being only so many things one can expect of the human body;
and lately, returning from one of his more exhausting business trips, Philip had been inclined to fall asleep before, rather than after, they had expressed themselves in this particular way.

  All of which Jenny understood and didn’t in the least mind. As far as she could see, the sex thing was a ‘heads you win, tails I lose’ situation up to a point, since if you started well you were bound to get caught up in the sheer repetition thing and if you started badly you’d had it anyway. So she was in no way inclined to use this as an alibi for what was about to happen between herself and Thomas Marsham.

  She had met Thomas at an adult education class in philosophy run by the local university where he had tried to explain to a group of housewives, retired schoolteachers and weirdos what Wittgenstein had meant by sentences like: ‘The World is all that is the case’.

  Jenny had not understood Wittgenstein, as she had not really understood Kant or Descartes or the doctrines of logical positivism, but over a cup of coffee in the university canteen she found that she understood Dr Marsham.

  He was a few years older than she was, with wild hair already turning grey and short-sighted blue eyes behind thick glasses: an untidy, chain-smoking, neglected-looking man with beautiful hands and a formidable intelligence which he concealed with idiotic jokes, self-denigration and buffoonery. He had married, at Cambridge, a Girtonian with a First in Anthropology whose academic career matched, and now seemed likely to surpass, his own. Between expeditions to the He-He in Basutoland (whose adopted tribe member she was), broadcasts and committee meetings, Professor Marjorie Marsham found life a full and absorbing business and though extremely fond of Thomas, was inclined to communicate with him mostly through little notes propped against the tea-pot informing him how and when to empty the dustbins and roughly what day he could expect her back from Basutoland.

  It was therefore with a pleasure whose innocence at first entirely misled him that he looked at Jenny Craig with her snub nose, shining curly brown hair and trusting grey eyes, and listened as she apologised for her lack of education, the fact that she had ‘only’ been a shorthand typist before her marriage, and confided in him her longing to avoid the ‘coffee morning’ set-up now that her two children were both at school. With students he was careful, even shy, but this little housewife with her shining cleanliness, her readiness to be impressed by the glory of learning, found him with his defences down.

  The first cup of coffee in the canteen after the lecture had been followed by others, as often as not chaperoned by some other member of the class. The way that Jenny looked round the filthy refectory with its plastic cups and garish walls, the wistful look with which she breathed in the ‘ academic’ atmosphere, touched him profoundly. Without realising it, he was starved of comfort, comeliness and grace and these old-fashioned qualities he found in this woman who apologised with every second sentence for her lack of brains.

  Inevitably, there came a day when Philip was away on a business trip, Professor Marsham was recording a broadcast in Manchester on the initiation rites of the Wai-Titi and Jenny’s mother was staying with her and longed only to put the children to bed undisturbed.

  ‘I suppose … you wouldn’t care to come to the concert in the City Hall?’ asked Thomas hesitantly, and waited – as the nicest men seem to go on doing all their lives – for a rebuff.

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Jenny, overcome by the honour of being chosen by the lecturer. ‘It’s the Brahms Fourth, isn’t it? I love that. The bit in the second movement…’

  So they went to the concert.

  A shared love of great music is known to be the greatest aphrodisiac of them all. If it had been Bach, Jenny thought later, perhaps it would have been all right. We might have been uplifted, but not the other thing. Instead, in the second movement, at the exact phrase that always sent her soaring, Thomas turned and smiled at her. After which the thing was done.

  They walked home hand in hand through the darkening streets of the industrial city which had suddenly become Elysium. The uncertainty and fear of rebuff were over, the plotting and scheming not yet begun. A halcyon interval; the best, perhaps, in any love affair. They kissed chastely and parted. Thomas had his hair cut, bought a new shirt and gave a series of lectures on ‘The Nature of Speech Acts’ which left even the stroppiest of his students gasping with admiration. Jenny sang about the house, lingered in her garden to touch the papery calices of her daffodils and bought a new nightdress to take off for Philip when he got back from his trip.

  Both of them felt wonderfully happy and very, very good.

  There followed the next stage, so familiar to all who have trodden this well-worn path: the attempt to open up the friendship, fit it into the quadrilateral of conventional married life. Jenny accordingly gave a little dinner party for Thomas and his wife and the most intellectual of Philip’s business friends, a couple who had done PPE at Oxford.

  The dinner party was a success. Jenny wore a dark red skirt and a white blouse and cooked Boeuf Bourguignon and Crème brûleé. There was a great deal to drink. Philip liked Thomas, who was extremely witty about university politics, and Jenny liked Professor Marjorie who made her laugh like anything about the kinship systems of the He-He. By this time, however, it was too late, Thomas and Jenny retaining little from the evening except the look in the other’s eye.

  It was now that Jenny began to fight. She fought honestly and hard – for her husband, Philip, whom she truly loved; for her own peace of mind and sense of honour, her deep-rooted, uncomplicated belief in an open life; above all for her children, who would pay the price if her indiscretions ricocheted.

  She had always turned to the printed word for comfort, so now she removed from her bedside table the women’s magazines, biographies and novels with which she usually read herself to sleep and substituted – but gradually, so as not to arouse Philip’s suspicions – the great cookery books of religion and ethics wherein the sages of the world have given their recipes for the good life. Thus Jenny borrowed, bought or scrounged the Tao Te Ching (which informed her that Desire is Illusion), the Dhammapada (which besought her to Straighten her Mind like a Fletcher Straightens his Arrow) and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, that great Stoic, who regarded it as essential to have nothing in one’s mind that could not immediately be spoken aloud to others. She read also a treatise called The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts and just to keep her options open, she read the Quiet Comer of Patience Strong.

  The only thing she didn’t read was the Bible. She didn’t read the Bible because she knew what the Bible had to say on the subject of adultery. The Bible said one should not commit it. As far as she could remember, the Bible did not say why one should not commit it, it just said one should not. This struck Jenny as useless and unfair; also old-fashioned in a way which even she, morally stranded as she apparently was in the Middle Ages, regarded as going altogether too far.

  She struggled on in this way for several weeks and in his smoke-filled, book-littered room in the university, Thomas Marsham – nominally finishing a thesis on ‘The Relationship of Quality to the Objective World’ – struggled also. Though more intelligent than Jenny, he was not a great deal wiser, nor did the discipline of his subject greatly aid him for philosophy has never been famous for producing men able to bring the concepts of duty, truth and morality to bear on their private lives.

  Philip, throughout this time, remained fond and attentive. Jenny would not in any case have attempted the ‘ he takes me for granted’ routine, since it had always seemed to her that if married people did not grant themselves, each to the other, to take, then marriage was something other than she had supposed.

  Term had ended, the lecture course was over. Thomas and Jenny were compelled to meet in secret for occasions referred to as ‘ only’ having lunch or ‘only’ going for a walk. Perhaps it was the falseness of the word ‘only’ that made Jenny finally throw in the sponge. Changing her dress three times in order ‘only’ to meet Thomas for a cup of tea in the refectory, ru
shing back through the darkening streets with a thumping heart, terrified that the children would be home before her, she experienced such self-loathing at her hypocrisy that for a moment it drowned everything else. That night she packed away the great cookery books of living. The next morning she rang Thomas at the university and in a voice almost inaudible with fright, told him she would meet him in London.

  The peace of mind which is supposed to follow any firm decision did not follow. Nor, come to that, did peace of body. But she stuck it out and behaved with efficiency, organising first the confidante so necessary for this kind of enterprise – a warm-hearted, rackety friend called Christine who had divorced her husband and lived a cheerfully promiscuous life somewhere off the Earl’s Court Road. Christine sent an eager invitation to an imaginary school reunion; Philip was delighted for her to go; her mother swooped happily on the children and bore them off to her cottage. Jenny threw up in the lavatory, had a hot bath and tottered, light-headed from sleeplessness, on to the 8.57 train.

  Thomas was waiting at Euston. He had bought a new jacket and cut himself a little shaving. Meeting, they were suddenly violently shy and embarrassed and in the taxi avoided each other’s eyes.

  Then, outside the hotel, Jenny suddenly exploded into sophistication, well-being and joy. She felt completely relaxed, wonderfully worldly. There was only one more moment of anxiety and that the worst of all, far transcending any guilt: the terror of not pleasing – and then that, too, was past.

  That first time there was mostly relief at having somehow not failed each other, but afterwards they talked in the way that men and women do talk at such a time – perhaps the only time that human speech, being no longer necessary, becomes what it was meant to be. Later they went out to eat and already the alchemy was at work, transforming Thomas from a gauche academic into a courteous and charming host; changing Jenny from a diffident housewife into a subtle and witty woman of the world. When they got back to the hotel they were already old-established friends and lovers and this time found themselves carried by that strange and mysterious act into a place which marvellously mingled gaiety and peace.