The Morning Gift

Chapter 14

‘My God, Ruth, what is the matter with your hair?’ said Leonie as her daughter appeared for breakfast on the morning that Professor Somerville was due to give his first lecture.

‘I have plaited it,’ said Ruth with dignity.

‘Plaited it? You have tortured it; you will be skinned, pulling it back like that.’

But Ruth, in pursuit of a total unobtrusiveness, said that she felt quite comfortable and asked if she could borrow Hilda’s raincoat which was black, mannish and in its dotage. With the collar turned up and a beret jammed on her head, she felt certain she could escape Professor Somerville’s notice until he wished to acknowledge her, and ignoring her mother, who said that she looked like a streetwalker in an experimental film by Pabst, she made her way to college. There she came under attack again. Janet pointed out that it wasn’t raining, and Sam asked sadly if her hairstyle was permanent. But if Ruth’s appearance was odd, her behaviour was odder.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Pilly as Ruth edged into the lecture theatre like the musk rat Chu Chundra in Kipling’s The Jungle Book, who never ventured into the middle of a room.

‘Yes, I am. Well, I feel a bit sick actually, so I think I’ll sit in the back row today in case I have to go out. But you go on down and get a good seat.’

This was a stupid remark. Where Ruth went, there Pilly went too, and presently Janet, Sam and Huw came to join them.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sam, resigning himself to being a long way from his idol. ‘You can always hear what he says.’

The lecture theatre was packed. Not only students from other years but from other disciplines had come to listen, and the external students Pilly had described: housewives, old ladies, and a red-faced colonel with a handlebar moustache.

‘Ah, here comes Verena,’ said Janet. ‘Could those curvaceous sausages on her forehead be in honour of the Prof?’

Verena did indeed have a new hairstyle, though the suit she wore was tailor-made as always, and the high-necked blouse severe. Descending the tiered lecture theatre with her crocodile skin briefcase, she found herself faced with an unexpected hitch. Her seat in the centre of the front row was filled.

There had been some unpleasantness about the college porter who was supposed to place the Reserved notice for Verena before lectures. He had complained to the bursar, saying that this was not part of his duties, and the bursar, who was probably in the pay of the unions, had supported him. So far this had not mattered since everyone now understood what was due to her, but today, with the place full of outsiders, the entire row was packed.

Anyone else might be deterred, but not Lady Plackett’s daughter.

‘Excuse me,’ she said — and holding the briefcase aloft, she passed along the row, stopping at the point where she was directly under the rostrum and facing the carafe of water. This was where she always sat and where she intended most particularly to sit today.

With her behind poised expectantly, Verena waited, ready to sink into her appointed place — and did not wait in vain. Such was the authority, the breeding exerted even by her posterior, that the woman on the right edged closer to her neighbour, the student on the left, with only a mutter or two, pushed himself against his friend — and with a polite ‘Thank you’, Verena sat down, opened her briefcase, took out the vellum notepad and the gold-nibbed fountain pen, and was ready to begin.

Quin entered the lecture theatre, put a single sheet of paper on the desk, moved the carafe out of the way, looked up to say ‘Good morning’ — and instantly saw Ruth, sitting as low as it was possible in the back row. She was partly obscured by a broad-shouldered man in the row in front of her, but the triangular face, the big smudged eyes, stood out perfectly clearly, as did an area of nakedness where her hair wasn’t. For an instant he thought she had cut it off and felt an irregularity in his heart beat as if his parasympathetic nerves had intended to send a message of protest and thought better of it, partly because it was none of his business, and partly because she hadn’t. Evidently she expected rain, for he could see the pigtail vanishing into her coat, and was reminded of the museum in Vienna and the water dropping from her hair the day he fetched her for their wedding.

These thoughts, if that was what they were, lasted a few seconds at the most, and were followed by another, equally brief, as he wondered why University College was sending their students to his lectures and made a note to stop them doing so. Then he picked up a piece of chalk, went to the blackboard — and began.

Ruth never forgot the next hour. If someone had told her that she would follow a lecture on ancestor descendant sequences in fossil rocks as though it was a bed-time story — as riveting, as extraordinary, at times as funny, as any fairy tale — she would not have believed them.

The subject was highly technical. Quin was reassessing the significance of Rowe’s work on Micraster in the English chalk, relating it to Darwin’s theories and the new ideas of Julian Huxley. Yet as he spoke — never raising his voice, making only an occasional gesture with those extraordinarily expressive hands, she felt a contact that was almost physical. It was as if he was behind her, nudging her forward towards the conclusion he was about to reach, letting her get there almost before him, so that she felt, yes… yes, of course it has to be like that!

All around Ruth, the others sat equally rapt. Sam had laid down his pen; few of the students took more than an occasional note because to miss even one word was unthinkable — and anyway they knew that afterwards they would read and read and even, somehow, make the necessary journeys… that they would become part of the adventure that was unfolding up there on the dais. Only Verena still wrote with her gold-nibbed pen on her vellum pad — wrote and wrote and wrote.

Halfway through, pausing for a moment, raking his hair in a characteristic gesture of which he was unaware, Quin found himself looking once more directly at Ruth. She had given up her Chu Chundra attitude and was leaning forward, one finger held sideways across her mouth in what he remembered as her listening attitude. The pigtail, too, had given up anonymity: a loop had escaped over her collar like a bracelet of Scythian gold.

Then he found his word and the lecture continued.

At exactly five minutes to the hour, he began on the recapitulation, laid the unravelled controversy once more before them — and was done.

He had not taken more than a few steps before he was surrounded. Old students came to welcome him back, new ones to greet him. The red-faced colonel reminded him that they had met in Simla, shy housewives hovered.

Verena waited quietly, not wishing to be lost in the crowd. Only when the Professor finally made his way to the door did she intercept him with a few powerful strides and gave him news which she knew must please him.

‘I am,’ she said, ‘Verena Plackett!’

‘What do you mean, you’ve admitted her?’

Dr Felton sighed. He’d been so pleased to see the Professor a couple of hours ago. Somerville’s arrival lifted the spirits of everyone in the department; the breeze of cheerfulness and enterprise he brought was almost tangible, yet now Felton rose, as if in respect to Quin’s rank, and wondered what was supposed to be the matter.

‘I’ve told you… sir,’ he began — and Quin frowned, for the ‘sir’ meant that he had put Roger down harder than he had intended. ‘University College gave her place to someone and they rang round to see if anyone could have her. I thought we might squeeze her in and I knew you were in favour of taking refugees wherever possible.’

‘Not this one. She must go.’

‘But why? She’s an excellent student. You may think that being pretty and having all that hair and talking to the sheep —’

‘Talking to the sheep? What sheep?’

‘It was sent down by the Cambridge Research Institute and now they don’t want it back.’ He explained, trying to work out why the Prof, who had come in in the morning in the best of tempers, was now so stuffy and irascible. ‘It’s lonely and Ruth recites poetry to it. Goethe mostly. There’s one called “The Wanderer’s Night Song” it likes particularly, only it sounds different in German, of course.’ And catching sight of the Professor’s face: ‘But what I’m saying is that though she’s original and… and, well, emotional, she’s very good at her work. Her dissections are excellent, and her experimental technique.’

‘I dare say, but you’ll have to get her transferred.’

‘I can’t. There isn’t anywhere. UC tried all sorts of places before they came to us. And honestly I don’t understand what all this is about,’ said Roger, abandoning respect. ‘The whole of London is riddled with refugees you’ve found work for — what about the old monster you wished on the library of the Geographical Society — Professor Zinlinsky who looks up the skirts of all the girls? And your aunt called in when she was here for the Chelsea Flower Show and she says it’s just as bad in Northumberland — some opera singer of yours trying to milk cows — and now you try and turn out one of the most promising students we’ve had. Of course it’s early days, but both Elke and I think she has a chance of beating Verena Plackett in the exams. She’s the only one who’s got a hope.’

‘Who’s Verena Plackett?’

‘The VC’s daughter. Didn’t she come and thank you for your excellent lecture?’

‘Yes, she did,’ said Quin briefly. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’m not prepared to argue about this. I’m sure O’Malley will take her down in Tonbridge. He owes me a favour.’

‘For God’s sake, that’s an hour on the train. She’s saving for Heini’s piano and —’

‘Oh she is, is she? I mean, who the devil is Heini?’

‘He’s her boyfriend; he’s on his way from Budapest and I don’t mind telling you that I think he ought to get his own piano; she doesn’t have any lunch because of him, and —’

‘My God, Roger, don’t tell me you’ve fallen for the girl.’

He had seriously hurt Felton’s feelings. Roger’s spectacle frames darkened, he scowled. ‘I have never in my life got mixed up with a student and I never will; you ought to know that. Even if I wasn’t married, I wouldn’t. I have the lowest possible opinion of people who use their position to mess about with undergraduates.’

‘Yes, I do know it; I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But you see I knew the Bergers pretty well when I was in Vienna; I stayed with them one summer when Ruth was a child. It’s entirely unsuitable that she should be in my class.’

Felton’s brow cleared. ‘Oh, if that’s all… Good heavens, who cares about that?’

‘I do.’

‘I suppose you think you might mark her up in exams, but I shouldn’t have thought there was much likelihood of that,’ said Felton bitterly. ‘You probably won’t even be here when it’s time to do the marking.’

‘All right, you have a point. However —’

‘She’s good for us,’ said Felton, speaking with more emotion than Quin had heard in him. ‘She’s so grateful to be allowed to study, she reminds the others of what a privilege it is to be at university. You know how cynical these youngsters can get, how they grumble. We too, I suppose, and suddenly here’s someone who looks down a microscope as though God had just lowered a slide of paramecium down from heaven. And she’s helping that poor little aspirin girl who always fails everything.’

‘Exactly how long has Miss Berger been here?’ asked Quin, whose ill temper seemed to be worsening with every minute.

‘A week. But what has that to do with anything? You know perfectly well that one can tell the first time someone picks up a pipette whether they’re going to be any good.’

‘Nevertheless, she’s leaving,’ said Quin, tight-lipped.

‘Then you tell her,’ said Dr Felton, defying his superior for the first time in his life.

‘I will,’ said Quin, his face like thunder. At the door, he turned, remembering something he needed. ‘Can you let me have the figures for last year’s admissions as soon as possible? The VC wants them.’

Felton nodded. ‘I’ve almost done them. They’ll be ready for you this evening — I swear by Mozart’s head.’ Quin spun round. ‘What did you say?’ Roger blushed. ‘Nothing. Just a figure of speech.’

The room occupied by the Professor of Vertebrate Zoology was on the second floor and looked out over the walnut tree to the façade of the Vice Chancellor’s Lodge and the arch with its glimpse of the river. The pieces of a partly assembled plesiosaur lay jumbled in a sand tray; the skull of an infant mastodon held down a pile of reprints. By the window, wearing a printed wool scarf left behind by his Aunt Frances, stood a life-sized model of Daphne, a female hominid from Java presented to Quin by the Oriental Exploration Society. The single, long-stemmed red rose in a vase on his desk had been placed there by his secretary, Hazel, an untroubling, middle-aged and happily married lady who could have run the department perfectly well without the interference of her superiors, and frequently did.

Ruth, summoned to the Professor’s room, had come in still filled with the happiness his lecture had given her. Now she stood before him with bent head, trying to hold back her tears.

‘But why? Why must I go? I don’t understand.’

‘Ruth, I’ve told you. In my old college in Cambridge members of staff weren’t even allowed to have wives, let alone bring them into college. It’s quite out of the question that I should teach someone I’m married to.’

‘But you aren’t married to me!’ she said passionately. ‘Not properly. You do nothing except send me pieces of paper about not being married. There is epilepsy and being your sister and a nun. And the thing about not consuming… or consummating or whatever it is.’

‘It won’t do, my dear, believe me. With the old VC we might have got away with it, but not with the Placketts. The scandal would be appalling. I’d have to resign which actually I don’t mind in the least, but you’d be dragged into it and start your life under a cloud. Not to mention the delay to our freedom if we were known to have met daily.’

‘All those things with C in them, you mean,’ said Ruth. Fluent though her English was, the legal language was taking its toll. ‘Collusion and… what is it…? Connivance? Consent?’

‘Yes, all those things. Look, leave this to me. I’m pretty sure I can get you on to the course down in Kent. They don’t do Honours but —’

‘I don’t want to go away.’ Her voice was low, intense. She had moved over to the window and one hand went out to rest on Daphne’s arm as though seeking a sister in distress. ‘I don’t want to! Everyone is so kind here. There’s Pilly who has to be a scientist because her father saw you striding about on a newsreel with yaks and that’s not her fault, and I’ve promised Sam that I’d bring Paul Ziller to the Music Club and Dr Felton’s classes are so interesting and he has such trouble with his wife wanting to have a baby and taking her temperature —’

‘He told you that!’ said Quin, unable to believe his ears.

‘No, not exactly — but Mrs Felton came to fetch him and he was delayed and we began to talk. I’m not reserved, you know, like the British. Of course, when we said our marriage should be a secret, that was different. A secret is a secret, but otherwise… Even my goat-herding grandmother used to tell people things. She would roll down her stockings and say “Look!” and you had to examine her varicose veins. She didn’t ask if you wanted to see her veins; she needed to show them. And, of course, the Jewish side of me doesn’t like distance at all, but it’s different with you because you are British and upper class and Verena Plackett is studying Palaeontology so that she can marry you when we have been put asunder.’

Quin made a gesture of impatience. ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Ruth. Now let’s think how —’

‘It isn’t rubbish! She’s bought a new dress for the dinner party tonight because you’re coming. It’s electric-blue taffeta with puffed sleeves. I know because the maid at the Lodge is the porter’s niece and he told me. Of course she is very tall but you could wear your hair en brosse and —’

Quin took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Ruth, I’m sorry; I know you’ve settled in but —’

‘Yes, I have!’ she cried. ‘There’s so much here! Dr Elke showed me her bed bug eggs and they are absolutely beautiful with a little cap on one end and you can see the eyes of the young ones through the shell. And there’s the river and the walnut tree —’

‘And the sheep,’ said Quin bitterly.

‘Yes, that too. But most of all your lecture this morning. It opened such doors. Though I don’t agree with you absolutely about Hackenstreicher. I think he might have been perfectly sincere when he said that —’

‘Oh, you do,’ said Quin, not at all pleased. ‘You think that a man who deliberately falsifies the evidence to fit a preconceived hypothesis is to be taken seriously.’

‘If it was deliberate. But my father had a paper which said that the skull they showed Hackenstreicher could have been from much lower down in the sequence so that it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to have come to the conclusions he did.’

‘Yes, I’ve read that paper, but don’t you see —’

Tempted to pursue the argument, Quin forced himself back to the task that faced him. That Ruth would have been an interesting student was not in question.

‘Look, there’s no sense in postponing this. I shall ring O’Malley and get you transferred to Tonbridge and until then you’d better stay away.’

She had turned her back and was absently retying the scarf, with its motif of riding crops and bridles, round Daphne’s neck. In the continuing silence, Quin’s disquiet grew. He remembered suddenly the child on the Grundlsee reciting Keats… the way she had tried to make a home even in the museum. Now he was banishing her again.

But when she turned to face him, it was not the sad handmaiden of his musings that he saw, not Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. Her chin was up, her expression obstinate and for a moment she resembled the primitive, pugnacious hominid beside whom she stood.

‘I can’t stop you sending me away because you are like God here; I saw that even before you came. But you can’t make me go to Tonbridge. I didn’t intend to go to university, I thought I should stay and work for my family. It was you who said I should go and when I thought you wanted me to come here I was so —’ She broke off and blew her nose. ‘But I won’t start again somewhere else. I won’t go to Tonbridge.’

‘You will do exactly as you are told,’ he said furiously. ‘You will go to Tonbridge and get a decent degree and —’

‘No, I won’t. I shall go and get a job, the best paid one I can find. If you had let me stay I would have done everything you asked me; I would have been obedient and worked as hard as I knew how and I would have been invisible because you would have been my Professor and that would have been right. But now you can’t bully me. Now I am free.’

Quin rose from his chair. ‘Let me tell you that even if I am not your Professor I am still legally your husband and I can order you to go and —’

The sentence remained unfinished as Quin, aghast, heard the words of Basher Somerville come out of his own mouth.

Ruth put a last flourish to the bow round Daphne’s neck.

‘You have read Nietzsche, I see,’ she said. ‘When I go to a woman I take my whip. How suitable that even the scarves your girlfriends leave behind have things on them for beating horses.’

But Quin had had enough. He went to the door, held it open.

‘Now go,’ he said. ‘And quickly.’

The guest list for Lady Plackett’s first dinner party was one of which any hostess could be proud. A renowned ichthyologist just back from an investigation of the bony fish in Lake Titicaca, an art historian who was the world expert on Russian icons, a philologist from the British Museum who spoke seven Chinese dialects and Simeon LeClerque who had won a literary prize for his biography of Bishop Berkeley. But, of course, the guest of honour, the person she had placed next to Verena, was Professor Somerville whom she had welcomed back to Thameside earlier in the day.

By six o’clock Lady Plackett had finished supervising the work of the maids and the cook, and went upstairs to speak to her daughter.

Verena had bathed earlier and now sat in her dressing-gown at her desk piled high with books.

‘How are you getting on, dear?’ asked Lady Plackett solicitously, for it always touched her, the way Verena prepared for her guests.

‘I’m nearly ready, Mummy. I managed to get hold of Professor Somerville’s first paper — the one on the dinosaur pits of Tendaguru, and I’ve read all his books, of course. But I feel I should just freshen up on ichthyology if I’m next to Sir Harold. He’s just back from South America, I understand.’

‘Yes… Lake Titicaca. Only remember, it’s the bony fishes, dear.’

Sir Harold was married but really very eminent and it was quite right for Verena to prepare herself for him. ‘I think we’ll manage the Russian icons without trouble — Professor Frank is said to be very talkative. If you have the key names…’

‘Oh, I have those,’ said Verena calmly. ‘Andrei Rublev… egg tempera…’ She glanced briefly at the notes she had taken earlier. ‘The effect of Mannerism becoming apparent in the seventeenth century…’

Lady Plackett, not a demonstrative woman, kissed her daughter on the cheek. ‘I can always rely on you.’ At the doorway she paused. ‘With Professor Somerville it would be in order to ask a little about Bowmont… the new forestry act, perhaps: I shall, of course, mention that I was acquainted with his aunt. And don’t trouble about Chinese phonetics, dear. Mr Fellowes was only a stop gap — he’s that old man from the British Museum and he’s right at the other end of the table.’

Left alone, Verena applied herself to the bony fishes before once again checking off Professor Somerville’s published works. He would not find her wanting intellectually, that was for certain. Now it was time to attend to the other side of her personality: not the scholar but the woman. Removing her dressing-gown, she slipped on the blue taffeta dress which Ruth had described with perfect accuracy and began to unwind the curlers from her hair.

‘I found it fascinating,’ said Verena, turning her powerful gaze on Professor Somerville. ‘Your views on the value of lumbar curve measurements in recognizing hominids seem to me entirely convincing. In the footnote to chapter thirteen you put that so well.’

Quin, encountering that rare phenomenon, a person who read footnotes, was ready to be impressed. ‘It’s still speculative, but interestingly enough they’ve come up with some corroboration in Java. The American expedition…’

Verena’s eyes flickered in a moment of unease. She had not had time to read up Java.

‘I understand that you have just been honoured in Vienna,’ she said, steering back to safer water. ‘It must have been such an interesting time to be there. Hitler seems to have achieved miracles with the German economy.’

‘Yes.’ The crinkled smile which had so charmed her had gone. ‘He has achieved other miracles too, such as the entire destruction of three hundred years of German culture.’

‘Oh.’ But this was a girl who only needed to look at a hound puppy for it to sink to its stomach and grovel — and she recovered her self-possession at once. ‘Tell me, Professor Somerville, what made you decide to start a field course at Bowmont?’

‘Well, the fauna on that coast is surprisingly diverse, with the North Sea being effectively enclosed. Then we’re opposite the Farne Islands where the ornithologists have done some very interesting work on breeding colonies — it was an obvious place for people to get practical experience.’

‘But you yourself? Your discipline? You will be there also?’

‘Of course. I help Dr Felton with the Marine Biology but I also run trips up to the coal measures and down to Staithes in Yorkshire.’

‘And the students stay separately — not in the house?’

‘Yes. I’ve converted an old boathouse and some cottages on the beach into a dormitory and labs. My aunt is elderly; I wouldn’t ask her to entertain my students and anyway they prefer to be independent.’

Verena frowned, for she could see problems ahead, but as the Professor looked as though he might turn to the left, where Mrs LeClerque, the unexpectedly pretty wife of Bishop Berkeley’s biographer, was looking at him from under her lashes, she plunged into praise of the morning’s lecture.

‘I was so intrigued by your analysis of Dr Hackenstreicher’s misconceptions. There seems no doubt that the man was seriously deluded.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Quin, receiving boiled potatoes at the hands of a cold-looking parlourmaid. ‘Miss Berger seemed to find my views unreasonable.’

‘Ah. But she is leaving us, is she not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mother was pleased to hear it,’ said Verena, glancing at Lady Plackett who was talking to an unexpected last-minute arrival: a musicologist just returned from New York whose acceptance had got lost in the post. ‘I think she feels that there are too many of them.’

‘Them?’ asked Quin with lifted eyebrows.

‘Well, you know… foreigners… refugees. She feels that places should be kept for our own nationals.’

Lady Plackett, who had been watching benignly her daughter’s success with the Professor, now abandoned protocol to speak across the table.

‘Well, of course, it doesn’t do to say so,’ she said, ‘but one can’t help feeling that they’ve rather taken over. Of course one can’t entirely approve of what Hitler is doing.’

‘No,’ said Quin. ‘It would certainly be difficult to approve of that.’

‘But she is rather a strange girl in any case,’ said Verena. ‘I mean, she talks to the sheep. There is something whimsical in that; something unscientific.’

‘Jesus talked to them,’ said the philologist from the museum. An old man with a white beard, he spoke with unexpected resolution.

‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ Verena conceded the point. ‘But she recites to it in German.’

‘What does she recite?’ asked the biographer of Bishop Berkeley.

‘Goethe,’ said Quin briefly. He was growing weary of the saga of the sheep. ‘“The Wanderer’s Night Song”’.

The philologist approved. ‘An excellent choice. Though perhaps one might have expected one of the eighteenth-century pastoralists. Matthias Claudius perhaps?’

There followed a surprisingly animated discussion on the kind of lyric verse which might, in the German language, be expected to appeal to the domestic ungulates, and though this was exactly the kind of scholarly banter which Lady Plackett believed in encouraging, she listened to it with a frown.

‘Wasn’t Goethe the man who kept falling in love with women called Charlotte?’ asked the appealingly silly wife of the biographer.

Quin turned to her with relief. ‘Yes, he was. He put it all in a novel called Werther where the hero is so in love with a Charlotte that he kills himself. Thackeray wrote a poem about it.’

‘Was it a good poem?’

‘Very good,’ said Quin firmly. ‘It starts:

And it ends with him being carried away on a shutter.’

Verena, watching this descent into frivolity with a puckered brow, now made a last attempt to bring Professor Somerville back to a subject dear to her heart.

‘When is Miss Berger actually due to leave?’ she asked.

‘It isn’t decided yet.’

He then turned resolutely back to Mrs LeClerque who began to tell him about a friend of hers who had become engaged to no fewer than three men called Henry, all of them unsuitable, and Verena decided to do her duty by her other neighbour.

‘Tell me, do you intend to pursue your researches into the bony fishes here in England?’ she enquired.

But for once her mother had let her down. The last minute arrival of the musicologist had necessitated a change in the seating arrangements. Blank-faced and astonished, the icon expert gazed at her.

It was Quin’s habit to drive to Thameside in a large, midnight-blue Crossley tourer with brass lamps and a deep horn which recalled, faintly, the motoring activities of the redoubtable Mr Toad.

The day after the Placketts’ dinner party, parking the car under the archway, he was confronted not by the usual throng shouting their ‘Good mornings’ but by two cold-looking students holding up a ragged banner inscribed with the words: RUTH BERGER’S DISMISSAL IS UNFAIR.

Safe in his room, he picked up the phone. ‘Get me O’Malley down in Tonbridge, will you please, Hazel?’

‘Yes, Professor Somerville. And Sir Lawrence Dempster phoned — he said would you ring him back as soon as possible.’

‘All right; I’ll deal with that first.’

By the time Quin had spoken to the director of the Geophysical Society, it was too late to phone O’Malley, who would be lecturing, and Quin applied himself to his correspondence till it was time to go to the Common Room where Elke, crunching a custard cream between her splendid teeth, brought up a subject he had declared to be closed.

‘She wrote a first-class essay for me after less than a week. And in what is, of course, not her native language.’

‘I’m not aware that Miss Berger has any trouble with English,’ said Quin. ‘She has after all been to an English school most of her life.’

His next attempt to phone Tonbridge was cut short by Hazel who announced that a deputation of students was waiting to see him.

‘I can give them ten minutes, but no more,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m lecturing at eleven.’

The students filed in. He recognized Sam and the little frightened girl whose father made aspirins, and the huge Welshman with cauliflower ears — all third years whom he didn’t know as well as he should have done because of his absence in India — but there were other students not in his department at all. It was Sam, wrapped in his muffler, who seemed to be their spokesman.

‘We’ve come about Miss Berger, sir. We don’t think she should be sent away.’ It cost him to speak as he did, for Professor Somerville, hitherto, had been his god. ‘We think it’s victimization.’ And as the Professor continued to look at him stonily: ‘We think it’s unfair in view of what the Jewish people —’

‘Thank you; it is not necessary to remind me of the fate of Jewish people.’

‘No.’ Sam swallowed. ‘But we can’t see why she should go just because of a few technicalities.’

‘Miss Berger is not being victimized. She is being transferred.’

‘Yes. But so are the Jews and the gypsies and the Freemasons in Germany,’ said Sam, scoring an unexpected point. ‘And the Socialists. They’re being transferred to camps in the East.’

‘And she doesn’t want to go,’ said Pilly, stammering with nerves at addressing the man on whose account she was being put through so much. ‘She likes it here and she helps. She can make you see things.’

‘It’s true, sir.’ A tall, fair man whom Quin did not recognize spoke from the back. ‘I’m from the German Department and… well, I don’t mind telling you I got pretty discouraged studying the language when all you hear is Hitler braying on the radio. But I met her in the library and… well, if she can forget the Nazis…’

Quin was silent, his eyes travelling over the deputation.

‘You seem to have forgotten one of Miss Berger’s most fervent admirers,’ he said. ‘Why has nobody brought the sheep?’

It was as he was returning from lunch that Quin found a visitor in his room.

‘You must forgive me for troubling you,’ said Professor Berger, rising from his chair.

‘It’s no trouble — it’s a pleasure to see you, sir.’

But Quin, as he shook hands, was shocked by the change in him. Berger had been a tall, upright figure, dignified in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. Now his face was gaunt and lined and there was a great weariness in his voice.

‘Is it all right to talk German?’

‘Of course.’ Quin shut the door, ushered him to a better chair.

‘I have come about my daughter. About Ruth. I understand there has been some trouble and I wondered if there was anything I could do to put it right.’

Quin picked up a ruler and began to turn it over and over in his hands.

‘She will have told you that I’m arranging to have her transferred to the University of Tonbridge, down in Kent.’

‘Ah. So that’s it. I didn’t know. She only told me that she had to leave.’

‘It’s hardly a secret. Everyone in the university here seems to make it their business.’

‘Could I ask why she is being sent away?’

The old man’s voice was dry and remote, but the distress behind the words was easy to hear and Quin, accustomed to thinking of himself as Berger’s underling, found himself increasingly uncomfortable.

‘I thought it was inadvisable that I should teach someone whose family I knew so well. It would lay your daughter open to charges that she was being favoured.’

The Professor smoothed his black hat. ‘Really? I have to say that if I had refused to teach the children of men I knew well in Vienna, I would have had many empty seats at my lectures.’

‘Perhaps. But British colleges are different. There is more gossip; they’re smaller.’

‘Professor Somerville, please tell me the truth,’ said Berger, and it was not till he heard this man, thirty years his senior, address him by his rank, that Quin realized how hurt the old man was. ‘Has Ruth done something wrong? Is she not equal to the course? We tried to teach her well, but —’

‘No, absolutely not. Ruth is an excellent student.’

‘Is it her manner then? Do you find her too forward? Reared among academics she perhaps appears lacking in respect?’

‘Not at all. She has already made more friends than one would have believed possible, both among the students and the staff.’

‘Then… can there have been… some kind of scandal? She is pretty, I know, but I would swear that she —’

Quin leant across his desk to speak with suitable emphasis. ‘Please believe me, sir, when I tell you that I am sending her away only because I think that the connection with your family, the debt I owe you —’

‘What debt?’ the other man interrupted sternly.

‘The symposium in Vienna, your hospitality. And the honorary degree.’

‘Yes, the degree. We heard from colleagues that you went to the ceremony, but not to the dinner.’

‘That’s correct. When I heard that you were not there —’ began Quin, and broke off. ‘I should have thanked you for arranging it, but I went straight up to Bowmont.’

There was a pause. Then Professor Berger, speaking slowly, looking at the ground, said: ‘My wife believes that it was you who helped Ruth in Vienna.’

Quin’s silence lasted a fraction too long. ‘Oh really? Why does she believe that?’

‘You may well ask,’ said the Professor, a trifle bitterly. ‘Normal thought processes are entirely foreign to Leonie’s nature. As far as I can gather it is because you dived into the Grundlsee to retrieve her sister-in-law’s monograph on the Mi-Mi. Also because you danced twice with her god-daughter, Franzi, at the University Ball. Franzi had very bad acne and a squint and it was because you singled her out and were kind to her that she agreed to have her eye operated on, and the acne disappeared of itself, and now she is married and has two abominably behaved children and has fortunately settled in New York.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t entirely follow you,’ said Quin apologetically.

‘There were other reasons with which I won’t bore you. Apparently you threw your hat over a Herrenpilz which Mishak was stalking, thereby preventing Frau Pollack from getting it. We always regarded the mushrooms near the house as ours and…’ He shook his head. ‘What a lost world that seems. But anyway, the gist of Leonie’s argument is that people don’t change; if you were kind then you would be kind now. If you found out that I was not at the university, you would look me up and find Ruth. That is what my wife thinks, not what I think, and I don’t want you to say anything you would like to keep to yourself. But it is possible that if Leonie is correct you might feel worried about having Ruth here. You might feel that she would become too attached to you.’

‘No, I don’t feel that.’

‘It would be natural, however. She has a very warm heart and she was always talking about you after you left us that summer. Not to mention the blue rabbit.’ And as Quin frowned in puzzlement: ‘The one you shot for her in the Prater. She went to bed with it for years and when its ear came off, we had to call in Dr Levy to perform surgery.’

‘I’d forgotten.’

‘You were young; the world was before you, it still is. Heaven forbid that you should cling to the past as we do. But what I wanted to say was that you need have no fears on that score… however fond Ruth is of you, however she might look up to you as…’

‘An older man,’ said Quin, raising his eyebrows.

Berger shrugged. ‘She is totally committed to her young cousin, to Heini Radek. Everything she does in the end is for him. So you see you would be quite safe. She will marry Radek and turn his music for him and choose the camellias for his buttonhole. It has been like that ever since he came to Vienna.’

‘In that case does it matter so much where she gets a degree? Or even whether?’

‘Perhaps I attach too much importance to learning: it is a characteristic of my race. Perhaps, too, I am one of those fathers who thinks no one is good enough for his daughter. Heini is a gifted boy, but I would have liked her to have a choice.’ He changed tack. ‘One thing is certain, Ruth won’t go to Tonbridge. She spent the morning at the Employment Exchange and now she is writing letters of application and trying not to cry.’

‘I’m sure she’ll see reason.’

‘Allow me to know my own daughter,’ said Berger with dignity. He unhooked his walking stick, ready to leave. ‘Well, you must do what you think right. I wouldn’t have been pleased if someone had told me how to run my department. I’m going to Manchester for a few weeks and I’d hoped —’

‘Ah yes!’ Quin seized the change of subject with alacrity. ‘You’ll enjoy the Institute. Feldberg’s a splendid fellow — but don’t let that skinflint of an accountant do you out of the proper fee. There’s a perfectly adequate endowment for classification work.’

‘I was not aware that I had mentioned my appointment at the Institute,’ said Professor Berger, looking at him sternly. ‘Nor that I had been asked to classify the Howard Collection.’

Taken, so to speak, from the rear while defending his flank, Quin shuffled some papers on his desk.

‘Things get about,’ he murmured.

‘So you arranged the job in Manchester? You asked them to get in touch with me? I should have guessed that.’

‘Well, for heaven’s sake, you’ve done nothing to help yourself since you came. A man of your eminence sitting in the public library next to a tramp! Why didn’t you contact the people you’ve helped in your time? I only mentioned your name — Feldberg didn’t even know you were in England!’

Berger had put on his hat, taken up his walking stick. When he spoke again, he was smiling. ‘It is strange, I have so many degrees — so very many — and my wife failed even her diploma in flower arranging because she always put too many flowers in the vase, and yet you see she was right. People don’t change.’

Only at the door did he turn, his voice grave once more, his face showing its utter fatigue. ‘Let the child stay, Quinton,’ he said, using the name he had used all those years ago. ‘It’s less than a year after all, and who knows what is in store for us.’ And very quietly: ‘She will not trouble you.’

But in the end it was not Berger’s plea which secured a reprieve for Ruth, nor the intervention of the students. It was not even the obvious pleasure which Lady Plackett had shown in getting rid of a girl who did not fit into the general mould. It was a poster by the newspaper kiosk Quin passed on the way home, announcing: HITLER IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA. PICTURES.

The pictures, when Quin bought the paper, showed the Führer grinning and garlanded with flowers, the swastika banners hanging from the buildings as they had done in Vienna. Austria in March, Czechoslovakia in October… could anyone believe it would stop there?

The average life of an infantry officer in 1918 had been six weeks. In the navy he might expect to last longer, but not much. When war came, as it surely must, would anyone mind who was married to whom and for how long?

‘O’Malley says he’s got no room,’ was Quin’s way of making his decision known to Dr Felton. ‘Tell Miss Berger she can stay.’

And Roger nodded, and neither then nor later revealed what he had just read in the University News: that O’Malley was in hospital with concussion after a car crash and not in a position to say anything at all.