The Morning Gift

Chapter 15

In the second week of October, Leonie’s prayers on behalf of the nursery school teacher were answered. Miss Bates became engaged to be married — a triumph of camiknickers over personality — and went home to Kettering to prepare her trousseau. Her room on the ground floor back thus became vacant and Paul Ziller moved into it which made everybody happy. Ziller no longer had to practise in the cloakroom of the Day Centre but could stay at home; Leonie could get hold of his shirts to wash whenever it suited her and Uncle Mishak had direct access to the garden.

Mishak had not found it necessary to return the piece of land he had claimed at the time of the Munich crisis. They had told him to Keep Calm and Dig and he continued to do so. Since he couldn’t afford to buy plants or fertilizer, his activities were limited, but not as limited as one might expect. The old lady two doors down still owned her house and, in exchange for help with the digging, she gave Mishak cuttings and seeds from her herbaceous border. Nor were Mishak’s rambles through London’s parks without reward, for he carried his Swiss army knife in his pocket, and a number of brown paper bags. No more than Dr Elke’s tapeworms would have destroyed the host that nourished them would Mishak have caused harm to the plants he encountered, but a little discreet pruning often brought him back enriched by a cutting of philadelphus or a seedhead of clematis. And if there was no money for fertilizer, there was a plentiful supply of compost at Number 27 and the neighbouring houses, beginning with the remains of Fräulein Lutzenholler’s soups.

Hilda, meanwhile, had made a breakthrough in the British Museum, braving the inner sanctum of the Keeper of the Anthropology Collection and confronting him with her views on the Mi-Mi drinking cup.

‘It is not from the Mi-Mi,’ said Hilda, peering earnestly through her spectacles, and gave chapter and verse.

The Keeper had not agreed, but he had not ejected her. That refugees were not allowed to work was a misapprehension. No one minded them working, what they were not allowed to do was get paid. Her credentials established, Hilda spent happy hours in the dusty basement of the museum, sorting the artefacts sent back by travellers in the previous century, for this woman who spelled death to the most hardened floor polisher, could handle the clay figurines and ankle bracelets she encountered in her profession with delicacy and skill.

A certain cautious hope thus pervaded Number 27 during October, the more so as Ruth, now re-established at college, was obviously loving her work. Even the gloomy Fräulein Lutzenholler had a new occupation, for Professor Freud had at last left Vienna and been installed in a house a few streets away. She did not expect to be noticed by Freud, (who was, in any case, extremely old and ill) because she had spoken well of Freud’s great rival, Jung, at a meeting of the Psychoanalytical Society in 1921, but she liked just to stand in front of his house and look, as Cézanne had looked at Mont St Victoire.

With both Hilda and the psychoanalyst out of the way, and her husband busy preparing for his assignment in Manchester, Leonie could get through the housework unimpeded, but as the weather grew colder, she suffered a domestic sorrow which, though it caused her shame, she shared with Miss Violet and Miss Maud.

‘I live with mice,’ she said, her blue eyes clouding, for she felt the stigma keenly.

It was true. Mice, as the autumn advanced, were coming indoors in droves. They lived vibrant lives behind the skirting boards of Number 27, they squeaked in marital ecstasy behind the wainscot. Leonie covered everything edible, she scrubbed, she stalked and bashed with broomsticks, she bought poison out of her meagre allowance from the refugee committee — and they thrived on it.

‘What about traps?’ said Miss Maud. ‘We could lend you some.’

But traps needed cheese, and cheese was expensive. ‘That landlord,’ said Leonie, stirring her coffee, ‘I have said and said he must bring the rat-catching man, and he does nothing.’

Miss Maud then offered one of her kittens, but Leonie, with great politeness, refused.

‘To live with mice, to live with cats — for me it is the same,’ she said sadly.

Ruth too was troubled by the mice. She did not think that they could chew through the biscuit tin with the Princesses on the lid, but a great many documents of importance were collecting under the floorboards as Mr Proudfoot laboured on her behalf and it was disconcerting to feel that they provided a rallying point for nesting rodents.

But life in the university was totally absorbing. If there had been any anxiety about Heini’s visa, she could not have given herself to her studies as she did, but Heini wrote with confidence: his father had now found exactly who to bribe and he expected to be with her by the beginning of November. If Heini had any worries they were about the piano, but here too all was going well. For Ruth still worked at the Willow three evenings a week and the café was beginning to attract people from up the hill. She would not have taken tips from the refugees even if they could have afforded them, but from wealthy film producers or young men with Jaguars in search of ‘atmosphere’, she took anything she could get and the jam jar was three-quarters full.

Ruth’s response to news of her reprieve had been to ask Quin if she could see him privately for half an hour.

There was, she said, something she particularly wanted to tell him.

In trying to think of a place where they would meet no one of his acquaintance, Quin had hit on The Tea Pavilion in Leicester Square which no one in his family would have dreamt of frequenting, and was hardly a haunt of eminent palaeontologists. He had not, however, expected to score such a hit with Ruth who looked with delight at the Turkish Bath mosaics, the potted palms and black-skirted waitresses, obviously convinced that she was at the nerve centre of British social life.

The meeting began badly with what Quin regarded as an excessive outburst of gratitude. ‘Ruth, will you please stop thanking me. And I don’t take sugar.’

‘I know that,’ said Ruth, offended. ‘I remember it from Vienna. Also that it is upper class to put the tea in first and then the milk because Miss Kenmore told me that that is what is done by the mother of the Queen. But to expect me not to thank you is unintelligent when you have probably saved my life and found a job for my father and now are letting me return to college.’

‘Yes, well I hope you’ve thought that through properly. I don’t know if the courts interest themselves in the details of how we spend our days but you know what Proudfoot said about collusion. If Heini comes back and finds that there are unnecessary delays to your marriage he won’t be at all pleased. I think you should take that into consideration.’

‘Yes, I have. But I’m sure it’ll be all right and with Heini it’s more to do with being together, I told you. It would have happened before, but my father could never understand about the glass of water theory. One couldn’t even discuss it in his presence.’

‘What on earth is the glass of water theory?’

‘Oh, you know, that love… physical love… is like drinking a glass of water when you are thirsty; it’s nothing to make a fuss about.’

‘I don’t know if you could discuss it in my presence either,’ said Quin meditatively. ‘It sounds like arrant nonsense.’

‘Do you think so?’ Ruth looked surprised. ‘But anyway, I don’t think that he will mind about being married at once because of his career.’

‘I wonder. It’s my belief that the international situation will concentrate his thoughts wonderfully. I’ll bet he’ll want to claim you, and to do so legally, as soon as possible. However, I’ve made my point; if you’re sure you know what you’re doing, I’ll say no more.’

The plate of cakes he had ordered for Ruth now arrived and was greeted by her with rapture.

‘English patisserie is so… bright, isn’t it?’ she said, surveying the yellow rims of the jam tarts, the brilliant reds and greens of their fillings. She passed the plate to Quin who said he limited his consumption of bicarbonate of soda to medicinal purposes, and passed it back. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘I wanted to say something important about the annulment. That’s why I asked you to meet me. In case it goes wrong. I’m sure it won’t, but in case. You see, I’ve been talking to Mrs Burtt who is very intelligent and used to work for a lot of people who got divorced. Not annulled, but divorced. I didn’t realize how different that was.’

‘Who is Mrs Burtt?’

‘She’s the lady who washes up in the Willow Tea Rooms where I…’ She broke off, suspecting that Quin, like her father, might make a fuss on hearing that she still had an evening job. ‘It’s a place where we all go to. Anyway, she told me exactly what you have to do to get divorced.’

‘Oh, she did?’

‘Yes.’ Ruth bit into her jam tart. ‘You go to a hotel somewhere on the South Coast. Brighton is best because it has a pier and slot machines and you book into a hotel with a special lady that you have hired. And then you and the lady sit up all night playing cards.’ She looked up, her face a little troubled. ‘Mrs Burtt didn’t say what kind of card games — rummy, I expect, or perhaps vingt-et-un? Because for bridge you need more people, don’t you, and poker is probably not suitable? And then when morning comes you get into bed with the lady and ring for the chambermaid to bring you breakfast, and she comes and then she remembers you and the detective who has followed you calls her to give evidence and you get divorced.’

She sat back, extremely pleased with herself.

‘Mrs Burtt seems to be very well informed. And certainly if necessary I shall —’

‘Ah, but no! That is what I wanted to say. You’ve been so incredibly good to me that I couldn’t let you do that because I don’t think you would enjoy it, so I shall do it instead! Only of course I won’t hire a lady, I shall hire a gentleman which I shall be able to do by then because I shall have paid for Heini’s piano and got a job. Except that I don’t know any card games except Happy Families, but I shall learn and —’

‘Ruth, will you please stop talking rubbish. As though I would involve you in any squalid nonsense like that.’

‘It isn’t nonsense. It’s just as important for you to be free so that you can marry Verena Plackett.’

‘I wouldn’t marry Verena Plackett if she was the last —’ began Quin, caught off his guard.

‘Ah, but that is because you think she is too tall, but she could wear low heels or go barefoot which is healthy — and even if you don’t marry her there are all the ladies who jump at you from behind pyramids and the ones who leave scarves in your rooms — and I want to help.’

‘Well, you’re not going to help by getting mixed up in that sort of rubbish,’ said Quin. ‘Now tell me about your parents — how are they getting on and how is life in Belsize Park?’

Though she was clearly offended by Quin’s rejection of her plan, Ruth accepted the change of subject, nor did her hurt feelings prevent her from eating a second jam tart and a chocolate eclair, and by the time they left the restaurant, she was able to turn to Quin and make him a promise with her customary panache.

‘I know you don’t like to be thanked, but for tea everybody gets thanked and I want to tell you that from now on I will never again try to be alone with you, I will be completely anonymous; I will,’ said Ruth with fervour, ‘be nonexistent.’

Quin stood looking down at her, an odd expression on his face. Ruth’s eyes glowed with the ardour of those who swear mighty oaths, her tumbled hair glowed in the light of the chandeliers. A young man, passing with a friend, had turned to stare at her and bumped into the doorman.

‘That would interest me,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, your nonexistence would interest me very much.’

Ruth was as good as her word. She sat at the back of the lecture theatre (though no longer in a raincoat); she flattened herself against the wall when the Professor passed; her voice was never heard in his seminars.

This did not mean that she failed to ask questions. As Quin’s lectures opened more and more doors in her mind, she trained her friends to ask questions on her behalf, and to hear Pilly stumbling through sentences which had Ruth’s hallmark in every phrase, gave Quin an exquisite pleasure.

Nevertheless, Nature had not shaped Ruth for nonexistence, a point made by Sam and Janet who said they thought she was overdoing it. ‘Just because you knew him in Vienna, you don’t have to fall over backwards to keep out of his way,’ said Sam. ‘Anyway it’s a complete waste of time — one can see your hair halfway across the quad — I bet he knows exactly where you are.’

This, unfortunately, was true. Ruth leaning over the parapet to feed the ducks was not nonexistent, nor encountered in the library behind a pile of books, a piece of grass between her teeth. She was not nonexistent as she sat under the walnut tree coaching Pilly, nor emerging, drunk with music, from rehearsals of the choir. In general, Quin, without conceit, would have said he was a man with excellent nerves, but a week of Ruth’s anonymity was definitely taking its toll.

If Ruth was trying to keep out of the Professor’s way, Verena Plackett was not. She emerged each morning from the Lodge, punctual as an alderman, bearing her crocodile skin briefcase and carrying over her arm a spotless white lab coat, one of three, which her mother’s maids removed, laundered, starched and replaced each day. Verena continued to thank the staff on her parents’ behalf at the end of every lecture; she accepted only the sycophantic Kenneth Easton as her partner in practical; the liver fluke, seeing her coming, flattened itself obediently between glass slides. But it was in Professor Somerville’s seminars that Verena shone particularly. She sat in the chair next to the Professor’s, her legs neatly crossed at the ankle, and asked intelligent questions using complete sentences and making it clear that she had read not only the books he had recommended, but a great many others.

‘I wonder what you think about Ashley-Cunningham’s views on bone atrophy as expressed in chapter five of his Palaeohistology?’ was the kind of thing the other students had to endure from Verena. ‘It wasn’t on our reading list, I know, but I happened to find it in the London Library.’

That Ruth might be a serious rival academically had not, at the beginning, occurred to Verena. A fey girl who conversed with sheep was hardly to be taken seriously. It was something of a shock, therefore, when the first essays were returned and she found that Ruth, like herself, was getting alphas and spoken of as someone likely to get a First. Verena set her jaw and decided to work even harder — and so did Ruth. Ruth, however, blamed herself, she felt besmirched, and at night when Hilda slept, she sat up in bed and spoke seriously to God.

‘Please, God,’ Ruth would pray, ‘don’t let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.’

She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler’s bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall. And Ruth, her prayers completed, would spoil everything and get out of bed and take her lecture notes to the bathroom, the only place at Number 27 where, late at night, one could study undisturbed.

As term advanced, the talk turned increasingly to the field course to be held at the end of the month. Of this break in the routine of lectures, the research students who had been to Bowmont spoke with extreme enthusiasm.

‘You go out in boats and there are bonfires and cook-ups and on Sunday you go up to the Professor’s house for a whopping lunch.’

Ruth was prepared to believe all this, but she was adamant about not going.

‘I can’t possibly afford the fare, let alone all those Wellington boots and oilskins,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I have to prepare for Heini. I don’t mind, honestly.’

Pilly, however, did mind and said so at length, and so did Ruth’s other friends.

And Dr Felton minded. He did more than mind. He was absolutely determined to get Ruth to Bowmont.

For there was a Hardship Fund. It existed to help students in difficulties and it was under the management of the Finance Committee on which Roger sat, as he sat on most of the committees that came the department’s way since Quin had made it clear from the start that he was not prepared to waste his time in overheated rooms and repetitive babble.

The committee was due to meet on a Saturday morning just two weeks before the beginning of the course. Felton had already canvassed members from other departments and found only goodwill. The fund was healthily in credit, and everyone who knew Ruth Berger (and a surprising number of people did) thought it an excellent idea that it should be used to send her to Northumberland. It was thus with confidence and hope that Roger walked into the meeting.

He had reckoned without the new Vice Chancellor. Lord Charlefont had steered committees along at a spanking pace. Sir Desmond, whose degree was in Economics, thrived on detail: every test tube to be purchased, every box of chalk came under his scrutiny and at one o’clock, before the question of the Hardship Fund could be fully discussed, the committee was adjourned for lunch.

‘Do you really have to go back?’ asked Lady Plackett, who had hoped to persuade her husband to attend a private view.

‘Yes, I do. Felton from the Zoology Department is trying to get one of the students on to Somerville’s field course. He wants to use the Hardship Fund for that. It’s a very moot point, it seems to me — there’s a precedent involved. To what extent can not going on a field trip be classed as hardship? We shall have to debate this very carefully.’

‘It’s not the Austrian girl he wants the money for? Miss Berger?’

Sir Desmond reached for the agenda. ‘It doesn’t say so, but it seems possible. Why?’

‘If so, I would regard it as most inadvisable. As you know, Professor Somerville wanted to send her away — there was some connection with her family in Vienna. He was obviously aware of the danger of favouritism. And Dr Felton has been paying her special attention ever since, so Verena tells me.’

‘You mean —’ Sir Desmond looked up sharply.

‘No, no; nothing like that. Just bending the regulations to accommodate her. But if it got about that a fund intended strictly for cases of hardship was being used to give an unnecessary jaunt to a girl who is already here on sufferance, I think it could lead to all sorts of gossip and speculation. Better, surely, to keep the money for British students who are genuinely needy?’

‘Well, it’s a point,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘Certainly any kind of irregularity would be most unfortunate. She is a girl who has already attracted rather a lot of attention.’

‘And not of a favourable kind,’ said Lady Plackett.

‘What is it?’ asked Quin. He had just returned from the museum and was preparing to work late on an article for Nature.

‘That creep, Plackett.’ Roger’s spectacle frames looked as though they had been dipped in pitch. ‘He’s blocked the Hardship Fund — we can’t use it to get Ruth to Bowmont. It would set an unfortunate precedent if any student felt they could travel at the college’s expense!’

‘Ah. That’s probably Lady Plackett’s doing. She doesn’t care for Ruth.’ Quin, to his own surprise, found that he was very angry. He would have said that he did not want Ruth at Bowmont. Ruth being ‘invisible’ was bad enough here at Thameside — at Bowmont it would be more than he could stand, but the pettiness of the new regime was hard to accept.

‘Does Ruth want to go?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t the famous Heini due any day?’

‘Not till the beginning of November; we’ll be back by then,’ said Roger. He stared gloomily into the tank of slugs. ‘She wants to go right enough, whatever she says.’

‘You’re very keen to have her, you and Elke? Because she will benefit?’

‘Yes… well, damn it, you run the course, you know it’s the best in the country. But I wanted her to see the coast. I owe her…’

‘You what?’

Roger shrugged. ‘I know you think we make a pet of her — Elke and Humphrey and I… but she gives it all back and —’

‘Gives what back?’

Roger shook his head. ‘It’s difficult to explain. You prepare a practical… good heavens, you know what it’s like. You’re here half the night trying to find decent specimens and then the technician’s got flu and there aren’t enough Petri dishes… And then she comes and stares down the microscope as though this is the first ever water flea, and suddenly you remember what it was all about — why you started in this game in the beginning. If her work was sloppy it would be different, but it isn’t. She deserved more than you gave her for that last test.’

‘I gave her eighty-two.’

‘Yes. And Verena Plackett eighty-four. Not that it’s my business. Well, I reckon nothing can be done, not with you falling over backwards not to favour her because she sat on your knee in nappies.’

‘I do nothing of the sort, but you must see that I can’t interfere — it would only do Ruth harm.’ And as his deputy still stood there, looking disconsolate: ‘How are things at home? How is Lillian?’

Roger sighed. ‘No baby yet. And she won’t adopt. If only I hadn’t asked Humphrey to supper!’ Dr Fitzsimmons had meant well when he had told Roger’s wife about the drop in temperature a woman could expect before her fertile period, but he didn’t have to watch Lillian come out of the bathroom bristling with thermometers and refusing him his marital rights until the crucial time. ‘I shall be glad to go north for a while, I can tell you.’

‘I shall be glad to have you there.’

Ruth was not disappointed in the findings of the Finance Committee because she did not know of Dr Felton’s efforts on her behalf. But if she held firm over her decision to stay behind, she was perfectly ready to join in the speculations about Verena Plackett’s pyjamas.

For Verena, of course, was going to Northumberland, and what she would wear in bed in the dormitory above the boathouse occupied much of her fellow students’ thoughts. Janet thought she would turn into her wooden bunk in see-through black lace.

‘In case the Professor comes up the ladder at midnight with a cranial cast.’

Pilly thought a pair of striped pyjamas was more likely, with a long cord which she would instruct Kenneth Easton to tie into a double knot before retiring. Ruth, on the other hand, slightly obsessed by Verena’s pristine lab coat which she deeply envied, suggested gathered calico, heavily starched.

‘So you will hear her crackle in the night,’ she said.

But in fact none of them were destined to see Verena’s pyjamas, for the Vice Chancellor’s daughter had other plans.

If Leonie each night looked eagerly to Ruth for her account of the day, and Mrs Weiss’s dreaded ‘Vell?’ began her interrogation in the Willow Tea Rooms, Lady Plackett waited with more self-control, but no less avidity, for Verena’s news.

Verena reported with restraint about the staff, but where the students were concerned, she permitted herself to speak freely. Thus Lady Plackett learnt about the unsuitable — not to say lewd — behaviour of Janet Carter in the back of motor cars, the dangerously radical views of Sam Marsh, and the ludicrous gaffes made by Priscilla Yarrowby who had confused the jaw bone of a mammoth with that of a mastodon.

‘And Ruth Berger persists in helping her, of which one cannot approve,’ said Verena. ‘It is no kindness to inadequate students to push them on. They should be weeded out for their own sake and find their proper level.’

Lady Plackett agreed with this, as all thinking people must. ‘She seems to be a very disruptive influence, the foreign girl,’ she said.

She had not been pleased when Professor Somerville had reinstated Ruth. There was something… excessive… about Ruth Berger. Even the way she smelled the roses in the quadrangle was… unnecessary, thought Lady Plackett, who had watched her out of the window. But on one point Verena was able to set her mother’s mind at rest. Ruth was not liked by the Professor; he seemed to avoid her; she never spoke in seminars.

‘And she is definitely not coming to Bowmont,’ said Verena, who was unaware of her mother’s interference in the matter of the Hardship Fund.

‘Ah, yes, Bowmont,’ said Lady Plackett thoughtfully. ‘You know, Verena, I find that I cannot be happy about you cohabiting in a dormitory with girls who do… things… in the backs of motor cars.’

‘I confess I have been worrying about that,’ said Verena. ‘Of course, one wants to be democratic.’

‘One does,’ agreed Lady Plackett. ‘But there are limits.’ She paused, then laid a soothing hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I have had an idea.’

Verena lifted her head. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if it is the same as mine.’