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stay with you!’
    But he was beyond everything by now and gently he loosened her arms and picked up the great brass knocker shaped like the Imperial Eagle of the Czar, and then he just stood there very quietly and watched her go.

    My aunt stopped talking. She had finished her umbrella-jabbing and we stood side by side, our elbows on the parapet, looking at, and not seeing, the river Thames.
    ‘That’s all?’ I said at last.
    She shrugged. ‘He’d meant to go on, to see Moscow, Kiev, the Crimea. But his money had run out, of course, and anyway…’
    ‘So he went back to Edith?’
    My aunt nodded. ‘Edith,’ she said, ‘was tired after the
    I
    journey from Clapham. She was sitting up in bed with cream on her face and —’
    ‘No! She didn’t! She didn’t say it to him. Not that first night!’
    ‘She said it! And Edwin went up to her and said: “Yes. Tonight. And any other night I choose.” And went on living with her for thirty years.’
    ‘Oh,
hell
!’ I said. ‘He had so little. For so short a time.’
    ‘No,’ said my aunt. ‘You’re wrong. Edwin was all right.’
    I waited.
    ‘I was with him at the end, as I told you. And just before he died, suddenly… he lifted up his head…’ She broke off. ‘I have never,’ she went on, ‘seen such a look of happiness on any human face. And then he said this one word. I didn’t know what it was; I had to look it up.’
    ‘
Dousha
,’ I said. ‘Was it that?
Doushenka
?’ And suddenly it seemed desperately, frantically important that I had guessed right.
    My aunt looked up, started. ‘That was it. It’s an endearment, of course.’
    ‘Yes.’ It’s an endearment, all right, and for my money the best ever, the ultimate. ‘My soul’, ‘My little soul’…
    ‘So you see,’ said my aunt, unfurling her umbrella, ‘that he really was
all right
.’
    And we turned and left the quiet, grey, incurably English river and went home to tea.

A Glove Shop in Vienna
    I must have flown over Vienna a dozen times and scarcely stirred in my seat. So why, this time, did I peer forward so eagerly into the darkness, searching the haphazard sprinkling of lights below me for… what? The city of my boyhood? My youth?
    No, it wasn’t the Vienna of the chestnut trees, Strauss in the Stadtpark
, guglhupf at
Sacher’s that I groped for, devastated by the sudden, embarrassing nostalgia of middle age. It was something more specific; a particular collection of… ghosts, I suppose. The ghosts of my ancestors.
    Only of course they weren’t ancestors then. Just my relations. And could anyone have made ghosts of them though they were long, long dead?
    My Tante Wilhelmina, who threw me bodily over a laurel hedge in the
Tiergarten
to shield me from the sight of two ancient llamas making sudden love? Or Gross Tante Gretl, overcome by Goethe, walking skirtless in the Brahms Platz, the
Nature Lyrics
open in her hand?
    No, they would have made lousy ghosts, those gloriously batty aunts of Old Vienna. I can see them now, each embalmed, timeless in their own moment of legend: Great-aunt Netta, overcome by grief on the day that Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself, rolling her false grey plait into the
Apfelstrudel
. Great-aunt Trudi carrying the waistcoat button which had belonged to Beethoven to concerts in the Bosendorfer Saal.
    There wasn’t much wrong with my uncles either. Uncle Ernst, who ate eighteen
Zwetschkenknodel
on the day he died. Great-uncle Gotlieb, agonisingly shy, who spent his wedding night sitting alone beneath the equestrian statue of the Archduke Charles. Great-uncle Frederick, hurling – on the barricades in ‘48 – a barrel of salted gherkins at the Imperial Guard.
    But mostly, as the plane flew quietly through the night, I found myself thinking of one man in my past — my very distant past — Great-uncle Max.

    Great-uncle Max was a very old man indeed when I was a boy and he was famous by that time not for any particular eccentricity or