In the Fischer household that child had been Vicky. Now, with the centre dropped out of their Christmas world, Herr Doctor and Frau Fischer nevertheless had to push the day relentlessly along its course.
Fritzl, moody and ill-looking, was no help. It was the twins with their sublime unconcern, their uncomplicated greed, who made it possible to carry on; Rudi wriggling through morning mass in St Stephen’s cathedral, Tilda screeching up and down the corridors waiting for dusk.
And then at last it was over, the agonising waiting, and the moment had come. The moment when they all assembled in the dining room and listened to the sweet soft tones of the old cow-bell with which their mother summoned them. The moment when the door was thrown open and, the children first, the adults afterwards walked in, dazzled, towards the presents and the tree.
With a last despairing glance at Vicky’s face, Frau Fischer reached for her bell. And then: ‘Stop!’ said Vicky. ‘We’re not all here.’
Everyone looked at everyone else. ‘I’m here,’ said Rudi, reasonably, sticking to essentials. So were Tilda and Fritzl; so was Fritzl’s mother. Herr Doktor Fischer with his home-made fire extinguisher was there; so was the cook, so were the maids.
‘Cousin Poldi isn’t here,’ said Vicky.
Herr Doktor Fischer and his wife exchanged glances.
‘She’s gone, Vicky; she’s going back to Linz. She thought it would be better.’
‘Then she must be fetched,’ said Vicky.
‘But, Vicky…’
‘We can’t go in till we are all together,’ said Vicky, still in that same inflexible, unchildlike voice. ‘She’ll have to be fetched.’
Herr Doktor Fischer took out his watch. ‘The train doesn’t go until four,’ he said to his wife. ‘I could probably get her still. But it would take some time.’
Vicky said nothing. She just stood and waited and for the first time since Fritzl had stolen to her in the night, there was a glimmer of tears in her eyes.
‘You had better go,’ said Vicky’s mother quickly. ‘We can wait.’
The word wait fell on the twins’ heads like a cartload of boulders.
‘No,’ wailed Rudi, ‘Rudi can’t wait!’
‘Nor can’t Tilda wait neither. Tilda wants her presents now!’
‘Hush,’ said Vicky sternly. ‘How dare you act like that on Christmas Eve? And anyway, I’m going to tell you a story.’
Still sniffing, doubtful, they came closer. ‘In the bathroom?’
‘No. Here.’
Vicky looked over at Fritzl, ready to measure herself against him, and then looked away again because somehow there was no longer any threat.
‘What story do you think?’ she said to the twins. ‘On a day like this? The story of the Christmas Angel, of course. The one who came last night, to bring the presents and decorate the tree.’
And she told the story. Told it so that Frau Fischer had to move over to the velvet window curtain and hide her face. Told it so that the sound of Herr Doktor Fischer’s footsteps, the squeak of Cousin Poldi’s returning button boots, were almost an intrusion.
No one said anything. Only when at last the great doors did open and Vicky moved forward to follow Fritzl and the ecstatically tottering twins into the room, her mother held her back.
‘No, Vicky,’ she said softly, ‘let the children go in first. We adults… we adults will come on afterwards.’
And then very slowly, she led her daughter forward towards the shining glory of the tree.
DOUSHENKA
There was nothing odd about finding a photograph of Great-uncle Edwin wedged at the back of a bureau drawer. It was a day for finding wedged great-uncles, crumpled brides cut from local newspapers, albums of yellowing babies… I was in my last year at Oxford and had come up to London to help my parents move house.
But Great-uncle Edwin…? He had been a grocer, I thought, in a South London suburb. Wimbledon? Teddington? So why this photograph in which he wore a high-necked boyar blouse, felt boots and a round fur hat? Beside the mild, slightly surprised figure in its Russian clothes was the usual draped table on which he rested a light hand. But where was the aspidistra? Where the picture of the Queen? That wasn’t… but of course it was. A samovar!
I put the picture in my pocket, but I had to wait until the following Christmas for the visit of my mother’s eccentric older sister, my Aunt Geraldine, to get the story.
‘Edwin?’ she said. ‘Ah, yes, poor Edwin! Dear God, what a romantic that man was! And then to marry Edith… And yet…’
‘Would you tell me?’ I said. We were walking along the Embankment towards Chelsea Bridge. Beside us, the Thames snuffled gently against its walls, a slow barge went down towards Greenwich. It was all very English, very peaceful, very grey.
She looked at me, surprised, pleased perhaps that I — uncouth and masculine and young- should seem to care about the past.
‘He was obsessed,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how it happened. Perhaps a label on a crate of smoked sturgeon from the Volga, a delivery note for Ternov ham… He kept a grocer’s shop in Putney.’
‘Russia?’ I said and shivered as she nodded, because it is a devastating experience, finding a fellow-sufferer from the same disease.
‘If he was walking along here with you,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘he wouldn’t see this river.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘He’d see the blue ice beginning to break on the Neva, the pale facade of the Winter Palace, Rasputin’s unspeakable head bobbing on the water…’
My aunt looked at me. A long look. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Though of course in those days Rasputin was still alive.’
‘One can’t choose one’s obsessions,’ she went on, and I think she meant to comfort me. ‘I myself spent the first three years of my adolescence as Third Daughter in the House of the Four Winds in the province of Soo Chow. Outwardly, of course, I was Geraldine Ferguson, the only girl in the Upper Fourth with acne and bunions. But inwardly I was Golden Bells whose verses did not displease the Emperor.’ She stopped for a moment and we leant over the Embankment Wall. ‘Something to do with reincarnation, perhaps,’ she said.
‘And Uncle Edwin?’ I prompted.
‘Ah yes. Well, he had it very badly. Words like “droshki” or “troika” would send him into a sort of trance. I imagine he must have been the only grocer in London who climbed to his haricot bean jar on three volumes of Lermontov. But of course he never had a hope of going and he found the language almost impossible to learn.’
‘And then he married Edith?’
My aunt nodded, staring at the gentle, unfrozen, incurably un-Russian Thames.
‘I shall never know what made him do it,’ she said.
‘What was she like?’
‘If I know what she was like, it is because I was with Edwin when he died. It was only in the last days of his life that he spoke freely. Before that he never complained.’
I waited.
‘She was a “not tonight, dear” woman,’ said my aunt. ‘They’re extinct now, I gather, and thank God for it because they’re killers. Slow killers. Poisoners. Edith didn’t just have nights when it was too hot and nights when it was too cold and nights when she had cream on her face. She had nights when her stays had left her tender and nights when the neighbour’s mother-in-law was asleep the other side of the wall…’
‘Poor Edwin.’
‘Poor Edwin indeed. Of course it just made him worse. He’d read Pushkin: “soul of my soul, light of my heart”, sitting there on a barrel of pickled cucumbers, and then go upstairs and find Edith with her mouth shut like a trap because it was the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s funeral.’