A Glove Shop In Vienna by Eva Ibbotson

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. Wo.’
    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 engagement 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