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if multiple miseries had been undergone. By a supreme irony nothing remained of her earlier prettiness, the prettiness that had made her her father’s darling. Now she looked agelessly adult, as if she had never had a girlhood at all, let alone a legendary one. What grief there was behind that almost Roman façade was all for herself. My mother sensed it, and at the same time knew that nothing she could ever do would make those grim features relax into a fond smile. She resigned herself, therefore, to the task of giving no further offence. Nor did she think that she would be much missed, although it meant that her mother would be left alone. The hardness of Toni’s heart acted as a kind of preservative: my mother was confident that no harm would come to her, alone in the house in Maresfield Gardens, with only a daily help for company. In a confused and genuinely helpless sense my mother recognised that she would leave no gap in her mother’s life, once she had left home.
    They were no doubt too fundamentally different ever fully to understand one another. Toni Ferber had been born Toni Meyer, the daughter of an ophthalmologist, in Vienna. She had been given the names Antonia Sara, this last in deference to not too distant Galician forbears, but was always known as Toni. Her father was moderately successful in hisprofession, which was something of an irony, as his own eyes were weak and occasionally watery, which gave him a melancholy appearance. This ocular melancholy might even have masked something more profound, as if a genuine grief were manifesting itself in this singularly appropriate symbol. Vienna was alive with metaphors: no explanation was too far-fetched.
    Dr Meyer was a widower, his wife having died in childbirth. His household was supervised by a certain Frau Zimmermann, whom he took care never to address as Gusti, although his daughter did. But this was done to annoy, since the infant Toni could not bear her father’s attention to be diverted by any female presence other than her own. She worshipped her father: every morning, before Dr Meyer left the apartment in the Berggasse to cross the landing to his consulting room she performed for him various little songs and dances which she had learned at school or with her music teacher on the previous day. He was uneasy about this, for he could sense the disapproval of Frau Zimmermann, who had strict notions of discipline and to whom Toni was a constant source of aggravation. Sometimes he could sense this disapproval very strongly indeed, for Frau Zimmermann stood rigidly in a corner of the breakfast room while Toni, as she evidently thought, made a fool of herself, and would not leave until the doctor had issued out of the front door to begin his day’s work. Only then would Frau Zimmermann unbend and go about her duties.
    The beautiful child—and she was beautiful, for I have seen photographs—experienced both grief and frustration throughout her early years, for with her father’s absence inthe daytime she was left to the mercies of Frau Zimmermann, and even during her years at school she felt a certain anguish when she returned home to the apartment in the afternoon, to find a glass of milk and the sort of pastry that is wrongly called Danish on the table of the breakfast room, and the sort of silence that made her long for the presence of even Frau Zimmermann, whom she hated. Therefore, when her father came home in the evening, she was almost hysterical with relief and gaiety, and set about entertaining him to the best of her ability. He was touched, but he was also embarrassed: she was too fervent, too ardent, and he knew that her affections were too febrile to secure her the serious love of a serious man. There were such men in Vienna, but he knew them too well, men who would delight in a pretty virgin, but only for a few months. For his daughter, of whose eventual marriage he was now beginning to think, he wanted someone simple, someone reliable,