A Glove Shop In Vienna (12 page)

‘I didn’t really want any of it?’ inquired Nell.

‘No,’ said Toby.

‘Not even Harold?’

‘Particularly not Harold.’

‘I get afraid when I’m alone,’ said Nell. ‘All that ecstasy, all that despair…’

‘I hadn’t thought of you being alone,’ said Toby, shocked. ‘I hadn’t thought of that at all.’

And as they turned to each other, not quite believing, yet, that dreams and reality could meet so unconflictingly, Harold, not seeing them, appeared on the other bank. His arm was through Margaret’s and though it must have become clear to both of them that Toby, unlike a ball lost in a field, was indulging in purposeless and confusing movements of his own, they continued — so pleased were they with each other’s company – to move gravely past the camel house, the zebras, the antelopes, searching, in ever-narrowing concentric circles, the emptying Zoo…

The silken, sky-blue curtains of the luxurious fitting booth in London’s most famous department store parted and the young bride stepped out. Her dress of snowy muslin was tight-waisted, wickedly full-skirted, ankle-length: a paean to the ‘New Look’ which Dior had launched, in a sunburst of ruched and tuckered extravagance to banish, in this spring of 1947, the austerities of the war.

But it was not at the dress that the bride’s erstwhile governess was staring, but at the look in the girl’s eyes. For here was radiance and serenity and a shining, unmistakable joy. No, this could be no marriage of convenience. In marrying John West, whoever he was, Sidi, with banners flying, was going home.

Well, why not? Why this ridiculous sense of disappointment, of betrayal? Had she herself not told Sidi, years and years ago in Berlin, about Lot’s wife and the uselessness of looking back? Did she really expect this child who, above all others, deserved her happiness, to remember a place that was now a heap of rubble, a country that was despoiled, dismembered and unreachable?

It was nine years since she had last seen Sidi, who had spent the war in America, evacuated with her English boarding-school within a year of reaching Britain. Sidi’s excited voice on the phone, tracking her down in her Berkshire cottage to tell her of this wedding, had been their first contact since then.

‘You
must
come, Hoggy,’ Sidi had said, her voice still retaining beneath the New England burr she had acquired in the States the traces of her European origins. ‘I need you most
particularly
.’

And Miss Hogg had agreed to come not only to the wedding but to this fitting, for of all the children she had looked after only Sidi, that strange little Continental waif, had stayed in her memory. Yet as the dressmakers surged forward and Sidi’s glamorous mother, now in her third marriage to a wealthy stockbroker, issued her instructions, she longed to push them all aside and say to this illumined, joyous bride: ‘Don’t you
remember
, Sidi? Don’t you remember Vlodz?’

She had been named, among other things, for the woman who had loved and succoured the great German poet, Wolfgang von Goethe: Sidonie Ulrike Charlotte Hoffmansburg. But she was a small child with worried dark eyes, the frail, squashed-looking features of an orphaned poodle and soft, straight hair which was cut to lap her eyebrows but never quite made it to her ears, and ‘Sidi’ was as much of her name as she could manage.

This small girl traversed, four times a year, the great plains and forests of Central Europe – from her mother’s elegant apartments in Berlin or Dresden to her father’s estate in Hungary, sent ‘like a paper parcel’, she said to herself, backwards and forwards, forwards and back.

The year was 1935, divorce less common, less civilised. The little girl, the victim of her parents’ inability to endure each other, bled internally. All she hoped for as she climbed on to the train at the Friedrich Strasse Bahnhof, already pale with indigestion from consuming the sugared almonds and
longues de chats
pressed on her by her mother’s latest lover, was that her father would say one kind word about her mother. All she prayed for as she mounted the train in Budapest, clutching the doll in Hungarian peasant costume hastily procured by her father’s current mistress, was that her mother would at least ask how her father was. A simple wish, but one that in all her life was never granted.

This was the time of the great
trains de luxe
, beasts of power and personality which raced across the Continent. The
Train Bleu
, the
Ahlberg-Orient
, the
Sud Express
… Sidi travelled in immense comfort, gallantly swallowing five-course dinners in the restaurant car of the wagons-lits, retiring to snowy bed-linen in her damask-lined first-class sleeper with its gleaming basin and pink-shaded lamps. Yet her eyes, as she looked out over the heaths and birch forests, the great fields of maize and rye, seldom lost their sad, bewildered look. Who wanted her?

where did she belong?

Sidi’s mother was an actress, the ravishing Sybilla Berger whose silken peroxide-blonde hair, plucked ethereal eyebrows and high cheekbones concealed the constitution of an ox and the single-mindedness of a column of driver ants.

Marriage to a minor Austro-Hungarian landowner without influence or brains was a mistake she quickly rectified. After three years of domesticity in Vienna she divorced him, moved to Berlin, broke into films… ‘Home’ for Sidi with her mother was a series of suites in ‘Grand Hotels’ from which the little girl was exercised by the hotel porter along with the dachshunds and schnautzers of the guests and ‘listened for’ at night by suitably tipped chambermaids. Sometimes taxis would call for her and she would be taken to film studios, patted by directors, kissed by actresses – and then forgotten, sometimes for hours. She played under cafe tables and, in the corners of frowsty dressing-rooms; made pebble houses in the courtyards of restaurants, looking up occasionally to trace through the clouds of cigarette smoke the face of her loved and unattainable mother.

Then suddenly there would be a spate of clothes-and-present buying to impress the other parent, an affecting scene at the station as Sybilla, surrounded by admirers, took leave of her little girl… and the long journey to the moated Wasserburg at Malazka to see if perhaps it was her tall, good-natured father with his easy laugh who really loved and wanted her – and to watch the tumbrils cross the cobbled courtyard with the piled corpses and blood-stained antlers of the deer which her father spent his days in killing as he killed, with seasonal enthusiasm, his pheasants and water-fowl and boars.

Sometimes, when her parents tired of their tug-of-war, other pieces were thrown on the board: a grandmother in Prague, a trio of maiden aunts in Paris – and Sidi, the small pawn in their machinations, was put on to yet another great train with some hastily assembled travelling companion.

Thus Sidi, at nine years of age, was a child to whom one could not give a present without her passing it on within minutes to some recipent from whom she might buy even a momentary affection; a child who, if you played her at halma, would wrinkle her abortive nose, trying and trying to lose so that the winner might be pleased and care for her. A child at whose feet the waters of Babylon inexorably lapped.

At which point there entered Miss Hogg.

Miss Hogg was English, a governess, imported with Frau Hoffmansburg’s marmalade and riding boots. A stout redheaded lady, she proceeded to bring order and routine into Sidi’s life – but not love. Love was a commodity in which Miss Hogg no longer dealt.

Once it had been different. Once, long ago, Miss Hogg had been the Vicar’s Sarah-Ellen with a bridge of freckles across her upturned nose and waist-length tresses that struck fire from the sun. Once she had had an adored twin brother, two ginger-haired boy cousins with a penchant for dreadful practical jokes and a fiance called Hughie who could melt her bones just by entering the room. On her nineteenth birthday her brother and the twins and Hughie had taken her in a punt down the river with hampers and bottles of champagne and a gramophone that played ragtime. A year later, not one of the four young men was still alive. When the last of the telegrams came, the one that told her of Hughie’s death on the Somme, Sarah-Ellen had excised her heart, gone to a training college and become, eventually, a governess.

Miss Hogg’s twin brother, however, had been a train fanatic. Consulting the Baedecker for Central Europe, she found that it was not necessary, when travelling from Berlin to Herr Hoffmansburg’s estate on the edge of the Carpathian hills, to go through Budapest. One could, instead, take the express to Bucharest and, by arrangement with the guard, be set down at an obscure railway station in the middle of nowhere from which, some three hours later, one could catch a stopping train which meandered southwards into Hungary.

And the name of this station was Vlodz.

One could look for a long time at the map of Central Europe and not find Vlodz. It is not quite in Romania, not really in Czechoslovakia, more or less in Poland. The rivers Wistok, Klodza and Itzanka are not far away, nor is the town of Jaroslaw. But since this helps most people very little, it is easier to say that the station was very like a thousand others in that vast European plain: the platform riding high over a sea of Indian corn, sunflowers leaning their enormous heads against the low, white-painted building, geese perambulating on the tracks… A Fiddler-on-the-Roof station, a station over which the painter Chagall might have floated a blue-green, dreaming poet… A station to the like of which Tolstoy had come in old age to die.

And yet Vlodz was not quite like other stations. To begin with, to those in the know – as was Miss Hogg – it was a junction. Because of this there was a proper waiting-room with a picture of Marshal Pilsudski on the wall, a curly iron stove and wooden benches. There was a real booking office, a place for registering parcels… And to accommodate all these, the station-master’s house had been detached and built elsewhere, in a meadow just across the earthen road.

Over certain houses there seems to hang a kind of Tightness, almost a seal of approval bestowed by a divine hand leaning down with a fatherly pat from the sky. This is the kind of house that children will draw for you with their new Christmas crayons; the kind of house to which storks will return year after year, winging their way from Egypt. The station-master’s house was built of aspen wood with a sheen that was almost silver; hearts and roses were carved into its shutters, and into the window-boxes in which petunias and French marigolds grew with the neat abundance which is the hallmark of careful husbandry. Each part of the garden was cultivated and cross-cultivated, a palimpsest of lettuce and kohlrabi, of onions and mignonette, of sweet peppers and raspberry canes and mint. The pig in its pen seemed a little cleaner and fatter than the pigs kept by a thousand station-masters between Cracow and Kiev, the ducks livelier, the bantams more brightly-coloured and audacious.

In this house there lived the station-master, Mr Wasilewski and his wife, Hannah, who had learnt in the practice of a daily kindliness the secret of a happy marriage. There lived also a complacent and not very feline marmalade cat, a dog called Joseph, a canary…

And a boy…

A boy who, sitting in his attic from which he could look over the road, the station, the great sea of ripening maize which led to Abyssinia, heard the signal clank downwards, closed his school-books and ran downstairs.

For it was very seldom that the Berlin Express deigned to stop at Vlodz. There might, just once, really be treasure trove: an explorer in a topee who wanted his luggage carried to the inn; a wild bear in a crate…

His father was ready, his tunic buttoned, his cap straight. Once it had been the boy’s greatest joy to be allowed to blow the horn which hung on a chain round his father’s neck, to unfurl and wave the green flag. But he was eleven now, no longer a child, and he waited quietly, perched on a trolley, his arms clasped round his knees. He could make out the black dot of the engine now, hear the imperative whistle with which it signalled its intention to stop – and seconds later it was there, blotting out the sky, hissing, enveloping him in its hot breath.

Somewhere at the far end of the platform a door opened and at the same time a great cloud of steam billowed out from under the carriage, obscuring everything.

Almost at once, the door slammed shut again, Mr Wasilew-ski waved his flag. The train began to move, to gather speed.

The steam cloud lifted.

No treasure trove… Only, standing alone, surrounded by her luggage, a little girl.

Miss Hogg had gone into the building to reconnoitre. ‘Wait here,’ she had said to Sidi and Sidi waited. She had hurt her fingers, trapped them in the twisted, heavy leather strap when the guard pulled down the window, but there was no blood so as an injury it didn’t count. No blood, no tears – everyone knew that.

She glanced up. A boy had appeared as if from nowhere. He had cropped fair hair, very blue eyes, leather trousers and bare feet… A peasant boy who would despise her, shout things, perhaps throw stones.

She bit her lip, waited as the boy came closer, staring. He had never in his life seen such an elegant and burnished little girl. She wore a white sailor suit, a blue beret set back on her narrow head, snowy knee-socks, gleaming black shoes with silver buckles. Nothing was crumpled even after hours in the train -nothing except her face.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’ he asked.

He had rejected his native tongue, spoken in German. He could have managed, also, a little French. The village schoolmaster—a saint — had picked him out for university and, given a little luck, the premiership of Poland.

She looked at him in amazement. ‘It was my fault,’ she stammered.

To his own intense surprise, he reached out, took her creased, bruised fingers, blew on them… And was suddenly, blindingly pierced – rent – no word is too apocalyptic – by an all-consuming, earth-shaking tenderness.

Somewhere, two hundred miles or so to the south-west, in the beautiful grey and gold city of Vienna, the great Sigmund Freud was at that moment propounding to a world destined to be entirely transformed by his doctrines, his theories of infant and pre-pubertal sexuality. But the Professor, if present at Vlodz station, would have been wide of the mark. This was the other thing.