The Morning Gift

Chapter 8

It was not until she stood on the platform and looked up at the royal-blue coaches with their crests and the words Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits painted over the windows, that Ruth realized they were travelling on the Orient Express.

Now, sitting opposite Quin in the dining car as the train streamed through the twilit Austrian countryside, she looked about her in amazement. She had expected luxury, but the Lalique panels, the rosewood marquetry of the partitions, the gilded metal flowers on the ceiling were sumptuous beyond belief. On the damask-covered table lay napkins folded into butterflies; a row of crystal glasses stood beside each plate; sprays of poinsettias, like crimson shields, glowed in the light of the lamp.

‘Oh, I can’t believe this,’ said Ruth, trying to feel guilty and not succeeding. ‘It’s like a real and proper honeymoon. You shouldn’t have done it.’

‘It was no trouble,’ said Quin, handing her the menu sheet.

But in fact the bribing and manoeuvring to get a compartment at such notice had been considerable. He’d done it, wanting to give her an interval of comfort between the days of hiding in the museum and the poverty which awaited her in London, and now, as she bent over the gold-lettered menu, he summoned the waiter and instructed him to pull down the blinds, for they were approaching the familiar country round her beloved Grundlsee.

‘I ought to be a Hungarian countess,’ said Ruth, looking round at the other diners. ‘Or at least a spy.’ She had taken one look at the people getting onto the train and unpacked the page-turning frock. Even so, she felt badly underdressed — whereas Quin, in the mysterious way of Englishmen who return from the wilds, was immaculate in his dinner jacket. ‘Look at that woman’s stole — it’s a sable!’ she said under her breath.

‘I dare say she’d swop with you,’ said Quin, glancing at their middle-aged neighbour with her heavily painted face.

‘Because I’m with you, do you mean?’

‘No, not because of that,’ said Quin, but he did not elaborate.

‘Do you think you might help me to order?’ asked Ruth presently. ‘There seems to be so much.’

‘I was hoping you would suggest that,’ said Quin. ‘You see, I think we should pay particular attention to the wine.’

The wine, when it came, was presented by the sommelier who undid its napkin and held it out to Quin rather in the manner of a devoted midwife showing the head of a ducal household that he really has his longed-for son.

‘Try it,’ said Quin, exchanging a look of complicity with the waiter.

Ruth picked up her glass… sipped… closed her eyes… sipped again… opened them. For a moment it looked as though she was going to speak — to make an assessment, a comparison. But she didn’t. She just shook her head once, wonderingly — and then she smiled.

All Ruth’s acquaintances in Vienna knew that she could be silenced by music. It fell to Quinton Somerville, proffering a Pouilly-Fuissé, Vieux, to discover that she could be silenced too by wine.

‘You know, I shall be sorry to relinquish your education,’ he said. ‘You’re a natural.’

‘But we can still be friends, can’t we? Later, I mean, after the divorce?’

Quin did not answer. The wine seemed to have gone to Ruth’s hair rather than her head: the golden locks shone and glinted, tendrils curved round the collar of her dress — one had come to rest in a whorl above her left breast — and her eyes were soft with dreams. Quin had friends, but they did not really look like that.

Ruth’s vol-au-vents arrived: tiny, feather-light, filled with foie gras and oysters, and she had time only to eat and marvel and throw an occasional admiring glance at Quin, despatching with neat-fingered panache his flambéed crayfish. It was not until the plates were cleared and the finger bowls brought that she said: ‘About our wedding… about being married…’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you mind if we didn’t tell anyone about it? No one at all?’

Quin put down his glass. ‘No, not in the least; in fact I’d prefer it; I hate fusses.’ But he was surprised: the Bergers seemed a family singularly unsuited to secrets. ‘Will you be able to keep it from your parents?’

‘Yes, I think so. Later I suppose they’ll find out because I’ll have my own passport and it’ll be British, but we’d be divorced by then.’ She hesitated, wondering whether to say more. ‘You see, they’re very old-fashioned and they might find it difficult to understand that a marriage could mean absolutely nothing. And I couldn’t bear it if they tried to… make you…’ She shook her head and began again. ‘They’ve been very good to Heini; he practically lived with us, but I don’t think they altogether understand about him… my mother in particular. She might think that you… that we…’

No, she couldn’t explain to Quin how she dreaded her parents’ approval of this marriage, the gratitude which would embarrass him and make him feel trapped. To make Quin feel that he was still part of her life in any way after they landed would be an appalling return for his kindness.

The sommelier returned, beaming at Ruth as at a gifted pupil who has passed out of her confirmation class with honours. The wine list was produced again and consulted, and it was with regret that he and Quin agreed that in view of mademoiselle’s youth it would be unwise to proceed to the Margaux he would otherwise have recommended with the guinea fowl.

‘But there is a Tokay for the dessert, monsieur — an Essencia 1905 which is something special, je vous assure.’

‘Is this how you live in your home?’ asked Ruth when her new friend had gone. ‘Do you have a marvellous cook and a splendid wine cellar and all that?’

He shook his head. ‘I have a cellar, but my home is not in the least like this. It’s on a cold cliff by a grey sea in the most northern county in England — if you go any further you bump into Scotland.’

‘Oh.’ It did not sound very inviting. ‘And who lives in it when you aren’t there? Does it stand empty?’

‘I have an old aunt who looks after it for me. Or rather she’s a second cousin but I’ve always called her aunt and she’s a very aunt-like person. My parents died when I was small and then my grandfather, and she came to keep house after that. I’m greatly beholden to her because it means I can be away as much as I want and know that everything runs smoothly.’

‘Were you fond of her as a child?’

‘She left me alone,’ said Quin.

Ruth frowned, trying to embrace this concept. No one had ever left her alone — certainly not her mother or her father or her Aunt Hilda or the maids… Not even Uncle Mishak, teaching her the names of the plants. And as for Heini…

‘Did you like that?’ she asked. ‘Being left alone, I mean?’

Quin smiled. ‘It’s rather a British thing,’ he said. ‘We seem to like it on the whole. But don’t trouble yourself — I don’t think it would suit you.’

‘No, I don’t think it would. Miss Kenmore — my Scottish governess, do you remember her? — she was very fond of Milton and she taught me that sonnet where you do nothing. The last line is very famous and sad. They also serve who only stand and wait. I’m not very good at that.’

The dessert came — a soufflé au citron — and with it the Tokay in a glass as graceful as a lily… And presently a bowl of fresh fruit straight out of a Flemish still life, and chocolate truffles… and coffee as black as night.

‘Oh, this is like heaven! If I was very rich I think I would spend my life travelling the world in a train and never get there. Never arrive, just keep on and on!’

‘It’s a dream many people have,’ said Quin, opening a walnut for her and inspecting it carefully before he put it on her plate. ‘Arriving means living and living is hard work.’

‘Even for you?’

‘For everyone.’

Ruth looked up, wondering what could be difficult for a man so independent, so successful, the citizen of a free and mighty land. ‘It’s odd, even before the horror… before the Nazis, people used to say to me, oh, you’re young and healthy, you can’t have any problems, but sometimes I did. It seems silly now when all one hopes for is to be alive. But you know… with Heini… I love him so much, I want to serve him, not by standing and waiting but by doing things. But sometimes I didn’t get it right.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, Heini is a musician. He has to practise most of the day and he likes me to be there. But I love being out of doors… everybody does, I suppose, only you can’t play the piano out of doors — not unless you’re in the Prater All Girls Band,’ she glanced reproachfully at Quin who grinned back, unrepentant, ‘and Heini isn’t. So sometimes I used to get very resentful sitting there hour after hour with the windows tight shut because draughts are bad for pianos. It seems awful to think of now when I realize how lucky I was and that all of us were safe. Do you think we shall go back to being petty like that if the world becomes normal again?’

‘If it is petty to want to be in the fresh air, then yes, I’m afraid we will,’ said Quin.

But now it could not be postponed much longer, for the diners were leaving; the waiters were bowing them out and pocketing their tips — and it became necessary for Ruth to face that technically she was on honeymoon with Professor Quinton Somerville and must now go to bed.

‘I’ll stay in the bar for a while and smoke my pipe,’ said Quin, and she rose and made her way down the train, through the dimly lit and silent corridors of the wagon-lits, and into Compartment Number Twenty-Three.

It was no good pretending that this bore the slightest resemblance to the kind of sleeping cubicles she had travelled in previously with their two bunks and narrow ladder. There was no question of climbing up and out of sight till morning, for confronting her were two undoubted beds, separated only by a strip of carpet. Had this been a proper honeymoon, she would have been able to stretch out her hand and hold her husband’s in the night. And the steward had been busy. Quin’s pyjamas, her own shamingly girlish cotton nightdress, were laid out on the monogrammed pillows and, above the marble wash basin, his shaving brush and safety razor rested beside her toothbrush in a manner that was disconcertingly connubial.

In other ways, though, the compartment was more like Aladdin’s cave: the snow-white triangle of the turned down sheets, the pink-shaded lights throwing a glow on the dark panelling… Carafes of fluted glass held drinking water; a bunch of black grapes lay in a chased silver bowl.

She undressed, put on the nightdress she had packed for her ascent of the Kanderspitze — and for a lusting moment imagined herself in eau-de-nil silk pyjamas piped in black. No one would have seen them; she would have stayed entirely under the bedclothes, but she would have known that they were there.

Safely in bed, she turned off the lights to give Quin privacy, turned them on again so that he wouldn’t fall over things — and found that in this marvellous train there was a third alternative — a dimmer switch which caused the room to be filled with a soft, faint radiance like the light inside the petals of a rose.

When Quin came she would roll over to face the wall and pretend to be asleep, but as the train raced through the night, her tired brain threw up images of bridal nights throughout the ages… Of virgins brought to the beds of foreign kings, inserted in four-posters as big as houses to await bridegrooms seen only once in cloth of gold… The Mi-Mi had communal wedding nights; old ladies sang outside the hut of the married couple, young people danced and called encouragement through the wooden slats… And those poor Victorian girls in novels, told the facts of life too late or not at all, who tried to climb up window curtains or hide in wardrobes…

Would she have been looking for wardrobes if this had been a proper wedding night? At least she knew the facts of life — had known them since she was six years old. Now, moving restlessly between the sheets, Ruth wondered if she had pursued her studies a bit too zealously, there on the Grundlsee. Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud… There was so much that could go wrong, all the gentlemen had agreed on that. Frigidity, for example. Ruth had been particularly alarmed about frigidity, being a child who even then preferred fire to ice. But probably that wouldn’t have happened here… not with someone who could always make her laugh.

It was an hour since she had left the dining car. Turning over, she closed her eyes and feigned sleep — but another hour passed, and another, and still he did not come.

She slept at last, only to be woken by a sudden jolt. The train had stopped, footsteps were heard outside, voices raised.

She was instantly terrified. It had happened. She was going to be taken off the train and turned back, as she had been turned back before. The bed beside hers was still empty. Unthinking, desperate, she ran out into the corridor.

Quin was standing by the window. He had pulled up the blind and was looking out at the moonlit landscape — and his pipe, for once, was actually alight.

‘They’re coming!’ she cried. ‘Oh, God, I knew it would go wrong! They’re going to send me back!’

He turned and saw her, half-asleep still, but terribly afraid, and without thought he opened his arms as she, equally without thought, ran into them.

‘Hush,’ he said, holding her, manoeuvring so as to lay his pipe on the narrow windowsill. ‘It’s perfectly all right. There’s something on the line, that’s all. A cow, perhaps.’

‘A cow?’ She blinked up at him, made a negative, despairing movement of the head.

‘One of those fat piebald ones, the kind you get on chocolate wrappers. Milk chocolate, of course; they’re very good milkers, piebald cows.’ He went on talking nonsense till the shivering grew less. Then: ‘We’re over the border,’ he said. ‘We’re absolutely safe. We’re in France.’

But she still couldn’t believe it. ‘Really?’ she said, lifting her face to his. ‘You’re telling me the truth? But how did we get across — no one came to search us. Usually they come and —’ She started to shiver again, knowing the brutality the border guards had shown to other refugees; the way they confiscated at the last minute even the few treasures they had been able to take.

‘I left our passport with the chef du train — the border’s only a formality for us.’

Our passport… The passport in which His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requested and required those whom it concerned to let the bearer pass without let or hindrance… For a moment, Ruth wanted nothing except to belong to this man and his world. With Quin, and those who protected him, one would always be safe. She would even live in a cold house on a northern cliff for that; even endure being left alone by his aunt.

Then, as the terror receded, she became aware that she stood in his arms in the corridor of a train in nothing but her nightdress — and not a suitable nightdress, a childish cotton one with a crumpled ribbon. That she had thrown herself at him and been entirely unashamed when all she owed him for ever and ever was to absent herself, to not make demands on him or claim even another minute of his time. Probably he thought — Oh God, surely not…

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been an idiot,’ she said pulling roughly away. ‘You must think —’

‘I don’t think anything,’ he said, but her fierce withdrawal had made him angry. Did she really think he would take advantage of her — a girl scarcely out of the schoolroom? Hadn’t he made it entirely clear what this marriage was about? ‘You’d better get back to bed,’ he said abruptly — and she saw confirmation of her fears in his set face, and hurried back to the compartment and shut the door.

When she woke in the morning, he was lying fully dressed on the bed with his arms behind his head and his eyes open as he watched the rising sun.

They reached Calais two hours later. Seagulls wheeled above them, porters shouted on the quayside, cranes swung over their heads. This was a clean, white world, as different as could be from the enclosed luxury of the train.

‘I’m really beginning to believe we’ll get there,’ said Ruth.

‘Of course we’ll get there.’

They went on board. Even for the short Channel crossing he had secured a cabin. ‘You’ll need another sweater,’ he said, lifting her suitcase onto the rack. ‘It’ll be cold on deck and you’ll have to pay your respects to the White Cliffs of Dover.’

She nodded and opened the case. On top, carefully packed, was a framed photograph which she had taken from the flat, kept in the museum… even packed, wrapped in her nightdress, in the rucksack with which she proposed to swim into France. Deliberately, she took it out and placed it in Quin’s hands. Here was the chance to show him how committed she was to someone else; to make him see that she would never again forget herself as she had done the previous night.

‘That’s Heini.’

Quin did not doubt it. The photo, taken on the day of his graduation from the Conservatoire, was in colour and emphasized Heini’s dark curls, his light grey, long-lashed eyes. He stood beside a Bösendorfer grand, one hand resting on the lid, and he was smiling. Across the right-hand corner of the picture, in large, spiky Gothic script, were the words: To my little starling, with fondest love, Heini.

‘How do starlings come into it?’ Quin wanted to know, remembering the distress that mention of these robust birds had caused her in the flat.

Ruth explained. ‘Mozart had one. He bought it in the market for thirty-four kreutzers and he kept it in a cage in his room. It used to sing and sing but however loud it sang it never bothered him…’ She told the story, her face alight, for she never forgot that first time when Heini had claimed her.

Quin listened politely. ‘And what happened to it?’ he asked when she had finished.

‘It died,’ Ruth admitted.

‘It would,’ commented Quin.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, they’re not cage birds, are they? Perhaps Mozart didn’t know that?’

‘Mozart knew everything,’ she flashed.

Quin grinned and left her. She put on an extra sweater and made her way onto the deck. As she emerged from the First-Class Lounge, she saw two fur-clad and unmistakably upper-class ladies, settled for sea sickness in reclining steamer chairs.

‘Wasn’t that Quin Somerville?’ said one.

‘Was it? I didn’t see.’

‘I’m pretty sure it was. That crinkly face… so attractive. I thought I saw him on the platform with a girl. One of those little peasants in a loden cape.’

‘Goodness! Could he be serious?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so, she hardly seemed his style. Not nearly soignée enough.’

A steward passed and the ladies demanded rugs.

‘If he is serious, poor Lavinia will go into a decline. She still thinks she’s going to get him for Fenella.’

‘Well, you can’t blame her. All that money and —’

Ruth drew back and went out by a different door. Quin was standing in the bows, his hair blown by the wind, absorbed in the pattern of the water as the ship drew away. I knew he was rich, of course, she thought: I must have known, and that the world is full of Fenellas waiting to marry him. Well, good luck to them — a man who sneers at Mozart and runs from Strauss as though the devil is at his heels.

‘I suppose we won’t see each other again after we land,’ she said resolutely.

‘I’d like to see you safe to Belsize Park, but after that it would certainly be best if we went our separate ways. If you want anything you have only to contact my solicitor — not just about the annulment, but about anything with which you need help. He’s an old friend.’

Yes, she thought; your solicitor. Not you.

‘I owe you so much,’ she said. ‘Not just that you got me out, but money. A lot of money. I must pay you back.’

‘Yes, you must do that,’ he said — and she turned to him in surprise. His voice was harsh and forbidding and she had not expected that. All along he had been so open-handed, so generous. ‘And you know what that means?’

‘That I must find a job and —’

‘That’s exactly what it doesn’t mean! The most stupid thing you can do is to take some trumpery job for short-term gain. I can just see you being a shop assistant or some such nonsense. The only sensible thing to do is to get yourself back to university as soon as possible. If University College has offered you a place you couldn’t do better. Remember there are all sorts of grants now for people in your position; the world is waking up at last to what is happening in Europe. Then when you’ve got a degree you can get a decent job and pay me back in your own good time.’

She digested this, but he noticed that she made no promise and he frowned, fearing some quixotic nonsense on her part — and Ruth, seeing the frown, remembered something else he had bestowed.

‘What about the ring?’ she asked. ‘What shall I do with it?’

‘Anything you like,’ he said indifferently. ‘Sell it, pawn it, keep it.’

Quelled, she looked down at her hand. ‘Anyway I’d better take it off before my parents ask questions. Or Heini, if he’s there already.’

She tugged at the ring, turned it, tugged again. ‘It’s stuck,’ she said, bewildered.

‘It can’t be,’ he said. ‘It slipped on so easily.’

‘Well, it is,’ she said, suddenly furious.

‘Perhaps your hands are hot.’

‘How could they be? It’s freezing!’ And indeed they were well clear of the harbour now and in a biting wind.

He laid a hand lightly on hers. ‘No, they seem to be cold, but I can’t see any chilblains. Try soap.’

She didn’t answer, but turned away and he watched her stamp off, her hair flying. She was away for a considerable time and when she returned and laid her hand on the rail once more, he was startled. Her ring finger was not just reddened, it looked as though it had been put through a mangle.

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Was it as bad as that?’

She nodded, still visibly upset, and, realizing that she had retreated into her Old Testamental world of omens and disasters, he left her alone.

When he spoke again, it was to say: ‘Look! There they are!’

And there, indeed, they were: the White Cliffs of Dover, the hymned and celebrated symbol of freedom. So much less impressive than foreigners always expected; not very high, not very white… yet Quin, who had made light often enough of this undistinguished piece of Cretaceous chalk, now found himself genuinely moved. After the horrors he had left behind in Europe, he was more thankful than he could have imagined to be home.