A Glove Shop In Vienna by Eva Ibbotson Page A

found an understudy, placated the manager of the Opera House, brought a Portuguese doctor who offered him a choice of lethal tropical diseases and suggested he cut the
diva’s
waist-length, still golden hair.
    Jacob refused, sat with her for three days and nights and remembered for the first time in ages that he had a wife in Linz who ran his leather goods business and made the best
blintzies
in Lower Austria.
    Nina, however, did not die. On the fourth day she got up, apologised, kissed Jacob and prepared for the journey home. Neither of them mentioned her voice, for both knew that she would never sing again.
    So now she stood again by the rail of the steamer, erect and careful but with a new gesture, her arms folded across the bodice of her dress as if to stop the pain escaping and troubling others with its unmannerly intensity. They reached the ‘Wedding of the Waters’, began to steam down the ‘River Sea’
    After a while Jacob came over to stand beside her. He must make her speak, listen,
anything
.
    ‘You never asked where I found your white rose,’ he said.
    She flinched, but as always answered gently. ‘No. Where did you get it?’
    ‘It was quite an adventure,’ said Jacob proudly. ‘I think perhaps it was the only white rose in Amazonia. I tried everywhere and then I met an Indian who had been employed as a gardener on one of the great estates. The man who owned it had left – he’s gone bankrupt and faces a prison charge too, poor devil. But the Indian swore there was a special place there, where the owner used to grow a white rose. Apparently he made a great fuss about doing it – it’s very difficult to grow roses here.’
    Nina’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘What was it called, this place?’
    ‘Roccella. An Italian built it after
some palazzo
in —’
    He broke off for Nina had clasped his shoulders. She was looking at him as if he were wreathed in unutterable majesty and her eyes were the eyes of a young girl.
    ‘Again, Jacob, please. Tell me again what happened there.
Everything
.’

    Not all great loves, faithfully kept, end in tragedy. Nina returned, found Paul hunched and despairing by the riverside, saw his face as he watched her come towards him… and knew why she had been born. His prison sentence was minimal. She waited. They returned to Roccella to begin again. Nor had they been in any way mistaken: each found in the other, and was to do so always, the ‘incomparable remedy’ they had sought.
    No, if there was a tragedy, it was that of Jacob Kindinsky who had adored Nina and now returned to Linz. But a passerby, seeing him on his verandah above the Danube, spooning sour cream on to his
blintzies
and listening to the clink of the till as his wife chatted to the customers in the shop below, might think that as a tragedy it was… well,
endurable
. Soon, too, he is going to write a book that will take the operatic world by storm. He has the title ready:
The Diva with a Rose
.

A Little Disagreement
    Because I have been married with great content (and to the same woman) for twenty years, I am often asked questions. Questions which imply that there is some formula for married happiness; a recipe for success. And when this happens and I am forced into an answer, I tell the questioner a story. The story of Tante Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer and her husband Uncle Ferdi, in Vienna, before the war.
    And I begin at the end. With Tante Wilhelmina’s death-bed, to be exact, which took place on a Tuesday evening during that socially grey period when the Opera Ball is over for another year, the holy statues wear their Lenten shrouds and a wind straight from the plains of Hungary bites eastward into the city.
    On a dull, cold Tuesday in early March, then, Tante Wilhelmina (who actually was no relation to me at all; I was the housekeeper’s son and still a child) clutched her heart, shrieked, turned purple – and sent for the hairdresser.
    In life, Tante Wilhelmina, prematurely