The Morning Gift

Chapter 27

Ruth spent the Easter vacation working. It was the work which, she assured her mother, accounted for the rings under her eyes, her loss of appetite and a certain greenish tinge under her skin.

‘Then you must stop!’ yelled Leonie, unable to endure the sight of her lovely daughter reduced to the kind of person one saw crawling out of bombed houses in newsreels of Canton or Madrid.

‘I can’t,’ said Ruth and (inevitably) quoted Mozart who had said he went on working because it fatigued him less than it did to rest.

If Ruth was exhausted, Heini was in excellent spirits. He and Ruth had been completely reconciled. She had come to him and asked his pardon and he had wholeheartedly forgiven her.

‘It’s not your fault, darling,’ he’d said. ‘That flat would put anybody off. Only Ruth, if you’d help me now, if you’d be beside me, I know I can win! I won’t ask for anything physical — when I’m established we can be married and have a honeymoon in some splendid hotel. You see, Mantella thinks he can get me to America if all goes well and if he does, you have to come with me! You have to — I couldn’t go alone.’

‘America! Oh, Heini, that’s so far!’

What he had said then, standing in his shirtsleeves looking out at the grey, slanting rain, had shaken her badly.

‘Far?’ said Heini. ‘From where?’ — and she had seen what he saw in her adopted country: the shabby lodgings, the poverty, the unfamiliar language and ill-cooked food. But she struggled still.

‘I couldn’t leave my parents.’

He’d taken both her hands then, looked into her eyes. ‘Ruth, you’re being selfish. We can bring them over as soon as I’m established. Everyone says there’s going to be a war — what if London is bombed?’

‘Yes.’ He was right. She was being selfish. She could help her parents best that way… and help herself. Three thousand miles of ocean should ensure that she was never tempted to crawl cravenly back to Quin and the remembrance of happiness.

‘All right, Heini; if you win and Mantella can arrange it, I’ll come. And I’ll help you all I can.’

That had been two weeks ago and Ruth had helped. She glued Heini’s tattered music; she massaged his fingers; she sat beside him as he mastered the dreaded arpeggios of the Hammerklavier.

She helped Pilly too, travelling to her house and writing even more revision notes to paste on her bedroom wall, till even Mr Yarrowby, shaving each day under diagrams of Reproduction in the Porifera or graphs of Dinosaur Distribution in the United States, became quite a competent zoologist. And she continued to work at the Willow.

Just before Easter, Professor Berger, whose tenure in Manchester had been renewed for three months, moved into a larger room and asked Leonie to join him. Torn between her husband and her daughter, Leonie became distracted and it was Ruth who bullied her.

‘You must go, Mama,’ she insisted. ‘I’m fine. I have Mishak and Tante Hilda and it’s only a few weeks. When the competition is over, and the exams, we’ll have a marvellous holiday.’

So Leonie went and Ruth, freed from the constraints of maternal care, worked even harder and felt even iller — and then it was time for the beginning of the summer term.

Quin’s lectures had ended at Easter. In the weeks before the final exams he only gave two revision seminars, spending the rest of the time in the museum.

He had been quite prepared to deal with Ruth when he saw her: anger had been succeeded by an icy indifference. The past was done with; Thameside itself, as the day of his departure grew nearer, was growing shadowy. In the event, his studied indifference, the cool nod he meant to bestow on her, were not needed. Ruth cut his seminars and managed never to be anywhere that he might be. This was not the game of invisibility she had played at the beginning of the year; this was a sixth sense bestowed on those who love unhappily and one which seldom failed her. She knew when Quin was in college — even before she saw the Crossley at the gates she knew — and took the necessary action. That her work suffered was inevitable, but that no longer seemed to matter. Survival was what mattered now.

Her friends, of course, saw that she looked ill; that she had lost her appetite.

‘What is it, Ruth?’ Pilly begged day after day — and day after day Ruth said, ‘Nothing. I’m fine. I’m just a bit worried about Heini, that’s all.’

From being a girl tipped to get a First, she became someone whom the staff hoped would simply last the course. Dr Elke wanted to speak to her and then, for reasons of her own, decided against it and Dr Felton, who normally would have made it his business to find out what ailed her, was himself struggling through his days, for the Canadian ballet dancer, to everyone’s consternation, had produced twins. The babies were enchanting — a boy and a girl — so that Lillian, after years of frustration, achieved in one fell swoop a perfect family, but among their accomplishments, the babies did not number an ability to sleep. Night after night, poor Dr Felton paced his bedroom and thought wistfully of the days when his wife’s thermometer was all he had to contend with. He knew that Ruth was unwell, that her work was slipping, but he too accepted the general opinion: that she was anxious about Heini, that her work at Thameside was now second to her life with him.

There was only one treat which Ruth allowed herself during those wretched weeks, and it arose out of a conversation she had with Leonie before her mother went north.

‘That old philosopher,’ Ruth had asked. ‘The one who used to meditate on the bench outside the Stock Exchange. What happened to him?’

‘Oh, they locked him away in a Swiss sanatorium years ago. He was completely batty — when they came to clear up his flat they found it full of women’s underwear he’d stolen from the shops, and he treated his housekeeper like dirt.’

That settled it. A man could be mad and one could still heed his words; even being an underwear fetishist could be forgiven — but ill-treating one’s housekeeper was beyond the pale.

And then and there, Ruth gave up her long struggle to love Verena Plackett.

The results of the first round of the piano competition were a surprise to no one. Heini was through, as were the two Russians and Leblanc; and the second round confirmed the general opinion that the winner must come from one of those four. But the Russians, though exceedingly gifted, had been shut away in their hotel under the ‘protection’ of their escorts and Leblanc was a remote, austere man whom it was difficult to like. By the time of the finals in the Albert Hall, Heini, with his winning personality and his now well-known romance, was the public’s undoubted favourite.

‘I feel so sick,’ said Ruth, and Pilly, beside her, pressed her hand.

‘He’ll win, Ruth. He’s bound to. Everyone says so.’

Ruth nodded. ‘Yes, I know. Only he was so nervous. All last night he kept waking up.’

All last night, too, Ruth had stayed awake herself, making cocoa for Heini, stroking his head till he slept, but not able to sleep again herself. Not that that mattered much: sleep was not really one of her accomplishments these days.

A surprising number of people had come to the Albert Hall for the finals of the Bootheby Piano Competition. Of the six finalists, three had played the previous day: one of the Russians, a Swede, and Leblanc whom Heini particularly feared. Today — the last day — would start with the pretty American girl, Daisy MacLeod, playing the Tchaikovsky and end with the tall Russian, Selnikoff, playing the Rachmaninoff — and in between, came Heini. Heini had been disappointed when they drew lots: he had hoped to play at the end. Whatever people said, the last performer always stayed in people’s minds.

The orchestra entered, then the conductor. To get Berthold to conduct the BBC Symphonia for the concertos was a real coup for the organizers. Heini, rehearsing with them in the morning, had been over the moon.

On Ruth’s other side, Leonie turned to smile at her daughter. She had come down from Manchester and meant to stay till the exams the following week. Her anxiety about Ruth, who was clearly unwell, was underlain by a deeper wretchedness for she knew that if Heini won it meant America and the idea of losing Ruth was like a stone on her chest.

‘You must not show it,’ Kurt had said. ‘You must want it. She’ll be safe there and nothing matters except that.’

Since March, when Hitler, not content with the Sudetenland, had marched into Prague, few people believed any more in peace.

The whole row was filled with Ruth’s friends and relations. Beside Pilly sat Janet and Huw and Sam. The Ph.D. student from the German Department was there, and Mishak and Hilda… even Paul Ziller had come and that was an honour. Ziller was very preoccupied these days; the chauffeur from Northumberland was pursuing him, begging to be heard — there was pressure from all sides for him to lead a new quartet.

It was hot in the hall with its domed roof. Leonie, dressed even at three in the afternoon like a serious concert-goer in a black skirt and starched white blouse, fanned herself with the programme. And now Daisy MacLeod came onto the platform with her dark hair tied back with a ribbon and her pretty blue dress and shy smile, and a storm of clapping greeted her. The Tchaikovsky suited her. She was very young; there were rough passages and once or twice she lost the tempo, but Berthold eased her back and the performance was entirely pleasing. Whether she won or not, she was assured of a career.

The applause was loud and prolonged, bouquets were carried onto the stage; the judges wrote things down and nodded. Ruth liked Daisy, liked her playing, but: ‘Oh, God, don’t let her win.’

And now the culmination of all those weeks of worry and work. Heini came on the platform with his light, springing gait; bowed. Ruth had searched the flower shops of Hampstead for the perfect camellia, Leonie had ironed each ruffle on his shirt, but the charm, the appealing smile, owed nothing to their ministrations. His platform manner had always been one of his strong points, and Ruth looked up at the box where Mantella sat with Jacques Fleury, the impresario, who as much as the judges held the keys to heaven or hell. Mantella was important, but Fleury was god — he could waft Heini over to the States, could turn him into a virtuoso and star.

Berthold raised his baton; the orchestra went into the tutti… the theme was stated gently by the violins, taken up by the woodwind…

And everybody smiled. Mantella had been right. The audience was ready for this music.

When the angels sing for God they sing Bach, but when they sing for pleasure they sing Mozart, and God eavesdrops.

Heini waited, looking down at the keys in that moment of stillness she had always loved. Then he came in, stating the theme so rightly, so joyfully… and she let out her breath because he was playing marvellously. Obviously he had been nervous only to the necessary degree: now he was purged of everything except this limpid, tender, consoling music which flowed through him from what had to be heaven if there was a heaven anywhere. He had performed this miracle for her the first time she heard him and she would never tire of it, never cease to be grateful. All her past was contained in the notes he played — all her life in the city she once thought would be her home for ever. No wonder she had been punished when she forsook that world.

The melody climbed and soared, and she climbed with it, out of her sadness, her wretchedness, the discomforts of her body… out and up and up. Ah God, if only one could stay up there; if only one could live like music sounded — if only the music never stopped!

The slow movement next. She was old enough now for slow movements, she was immemorially old. It must be possible to love someone who could draw such ravishment from the piano. And it was possible. She could love Heini as a friend, a brother, someone whose childishness and selfishness were of no account when set against this gift. But not as a man — not ever, now that she knew… and suddenly the platform, Heini himself, grew blurred in a mist of tears, for it was a strange cross that Fate had laid on her, ordinary as she was: an inescapable, everlasting love for a man to whom she meant nothing.

The last movement was a relief, for no one could live too long in the celestial gravity of the Andante — and here now was the famous theme! It would have to be a very unusual starling to have sung that melody, but what did it matter? Only Mozart could be so funny and so beautiful at the same time! Everyone was happy and Ziller was nodding his head which was important. Ziller didn’t like Heini, but he knew.

Then suddenly it was over and Heini rose to an ovation. People stamped and cheered; a group of schoolgirls threw flowers on to the stage — there were always schoolgirls for Heini — and in his box, Jacques Fleury had risen to his feet.

‘I’m sorry I said he was too long in the bath,’ said Leonie, dabbing her eyes. ‘He was too long, but I’m sorry I said it.’

He had to have won. There could be no doubt… not really.

But now Berthold returned, and the tall Russian, Selnikoff, to play the Rachmaninoff.

And, God, he was good! He was terrifyingly good, with the weight of his formidable training behind him and the outsize soul that is a Russian speciality.

Ruth’s nausea was returning. Please, God — oh, please… I’ll do anything you ask, but let Heini have what he so desperately wants.

The dinner, as always at Rules, had been excellent; they’d drunk a remarkable Chablis, and Claudine Fleury, in a little black dress which differed from a little chemise only on a technicality, had made Quin a much-envied man.

Now she yawned as delicately as she did everything. ‘That was lovely, darling. I wish I could take you back, but Jacques is here for another week.’

‘Of course, I quite understand,’ said Quin, managing to infuse just the right amount of regret into his voice. Claudine’s father was notoriously easy-going, but there is an etiquette about such things. She had rung him a few days earlier to suggest dinner before he left for Africa and he had been ready to take the evening any way it suited her, for he owed her many hours of pleasure, but the temporary return of Jacques Fleury to attend to business was not unwelcome.

‘How is Jacques? Has he snapped up any more geniuses?’

‘As a matter of fact, he has. He called just before I left. He’s signed up an Austrian boy — a pianist whom he’s going to bring to New York and turn into a star! There was some competition today; he wanted me to come, but three concertos in one afternoon — no thank you!’

‘He won, then, this Austrian?’

‘No. He tied with a Russian and he wasn’t too pleased, I gather. Jacques thinks the Russian is more musical, but you can’t do anything with Russians; they’re so guarded — whereas he can get the Austrian boy over almost straight away. He’s going to bring his girlfriend over too — apparently she’s very pretty and absolutely devoted… worked in some café to pay for Radek’s piano or something. Jacques thinks he can use that at any rate till they’re married; she photographs well! There was some story about a starling…’

She yawned once more; then stretched a hand over the table. ‘I suppose we won’t meet again before you go?’

‘No, I’m off in less than three weeks. And Claudine… thanks for everything.’

‘How valedictory that sounds, darling!’ Her big brown eyes appraised him. ‘Surely we’ll meet again?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

For a moment, he felt the touch of her fingertips, light as butterflies, on his knuckles. ‘I shall miss you, chéri. I shall miss you very much, but I think you need this journey,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think you need it badly.’

The news that Quin was leaving Thameside, which the Vice Chancellor received officially on the first day of the summer term, had affected Lady Plackett so adversely that Verena had been compelled to take her mother aside and make her acquainted with the real state of things.

‘There is no doubt, Mummy, that he means to take me to Africa, but the matter has to be a secret for the time being. I can trust you, I know.’

Lady Plackett had not been as pleased as Verena had hoped. It was a proposal of marriage that she wanted from Quin, not the use of her daughter as an unpaid research assistant. She was still busy bringing Thameside’s morals up to scratch and had managed to get two first-year students sent down who had been caught in flagrante in the gym, so that her daughter accompanying a man, however platonically, to whom she was not married, was far from agreeable. But Verena had always done what she wanted, and Lady Plackett, accepting that times had changed, continued to be civil to Quin and to invite him to the Lodge.

Verena’s preparations, meanwhile, were going well. She had acquired a sunray lamp; she had been to the Army and Navy Stores for string vests and khaki breeches; she rubbed methylated spirits, nightly, into her feet. Some people might have wondered why the Professor was taking so long to inform her of his plans, but Verena was not a person to doubt her worth, and if she had felt any uncertainty, it would have been quelled by Brille-Lamartaine whose increasingly fevered descriptions of the academic femme fatale who had ensnared Somerville fitted her like a glove.

Nevertheless, with the final exams only a week away, Verena felt she could at least give the Professor a hint. He had praised her last essay so warmly that it had brought a blush to her cheek, and the intimate discussion she had had with him on the subject of porous underwear seemed to indicate that the time for secrecy was past.

So Quin was invited to tea, and aware that it was his last social engagement with the Placketts, he set himself to please.

It was a beautiful early summer day, with a milky sky and hazy sunshine. The French windows were open; the view was one Quin had enjoyed so often in previous years when Charlefont was alive and the talk had been easy and unaffected, not the meretricious academic babble he had had to endure from the Placketts.

‘Shall we go out on to the terrace for a moment?’ suggested Verena, and he nodded and followed her while Lady Plackett tactfully hung back. Leaning over the parapet, Quin let his thoughts idle with the lazy river, meandering down to the sea.

‘You always live by water, don’t you?’ the foolish Tansy Mallet had said, and it was true that he lived by water when he could and was likely to die by it, for he still had his sights set on the navy.

But it was not Tansy he thought of now, nor any of the girls he had once known.

They had collected a lot of rivers, he and Ruth. The Varne which she had intended to swim with a rucksack… The Danube which had brought Mishak his heart’s desire… and the Thames by which they’d stood on the night he thought had set a seal on their love. Once more he heard her recite with pride, and an Aberdonian accent so slight that only a connoisseur could have detected it, the words which Spenser had penned to celebrate an earlier marriage. Had she known it was a prothalamium, a wedding ode, that she spoke, standing beside him in the darkness? Had Miss Kenmore told her that?

And suddenly Quin was shaken once more by such an agony of longing for this girl with her lore and her legends, her funniness and the dark places which the evil that was Nazism had dug in her soul, that he thought he would die of it.

It was as he fought it down, this savage, tearing pain, that Verena, beside him, began to speak, and for a moment he could not hear her words. Only when she repeated them, laying a hand on his arm, did he manage to make sense of her words.

‘Isn’t it time we told everyone, Quin?’ she asked — and he recoiled at the intimacy, the innuendo in her voice.

‘Told them what?’

‘That you are taking me to Africa? I know, you see. Brille-Lamartaine told me that you were taking one of your final students and Milner confirmed it. You could have trusted me.’

Horror gripped Quin. Too late he saw the trail of misunderstandings that had led to this moment. But he was too fresh from his images of Ruth to be civil. The words which were forced out of him were cruel and unmistakable, but he had no choice.

‘Good God, Verena,’ he said, ‘you don’t think that I meant to take you!’

The final examinations for the Honours Degree in Zoology took place in the King’s Hall, a large, red-brick building shared by all the colleges south of the river. An ugly, forbidding place, its very walls seemed steeped in the fear of generations of candidates. Dark wooden desks, carefully distanced each from the other, faced a high rostrum on which the invigilators sat. There were notices about not smoking, not eating, not speaking. A great clock, located between portraits of rubicund Vice Chancellors, ticked mercilessly, and the stained floorboards were bare.

To this dire place, Ruth and her friends had crawled, day after day, their stomachs churning… had waited outside, pale with fear and sleeplessness, trying to crack jokes till the bell rang and they were admitted, numbered like convicts, to shuffle to the forbidding desks with their blue folders, the white rectangles of blotting paper which they would see in their dreams for years to come.

But today was the last exam, if the most important. In three hours they would be free! It was the Palaeontology paper, the one in which Ruth would have hoped to excel, but she hoped for nothing now except to survive.

‘It’ll be all right, Pilly.’ Wretched as she was, Ruth managed to smile at her friend, glad that whatever else had gone wrong with her life she had not neglected to help Pilly. ‘Don’t forget to do the “Short Notes” question if there is one; you can always pick up some marks on those.’

The bell rang. The door opened. Even on this bright June morning, the room struck chill. The two invigilators on the platform were unfamiliar: lecturers from another college whose students also had exams this morning. A woman with a tight bun of hair and a purple cardigan; a grey-haired man. Not Quin, who was sailing in a week, and Ruth was glad. If things went wrong, as they had before, she wouldn’t want him watching her.

‘You may turn over your papers and begin,’ said the lady with the bun in a high, clear voice.

A flutter of white throughout the hall… ‘Read the paper through at least twice,’ Dr Felton had said. ‘Don’t rush. Select. Think.’

But it would be better not to select or think too long. Not this morning…

What do you understand by the Theory of Allometric Growth? She could do that; it was a question she’d have enjoyed tackling under different circumstances — the kind of question that enabled one to show off a little. Discuss Osborn’s concept of ‘aristogenesis’ in the evolution of fossil vertebrates. That was interesting too, but perhaps she’d better do the dunce’s question first — Question Number 4. Write short notes on a) Piltdown Man b) Archaeopteryx c) The Great Animal of Maastricht…

Clever candidates were usually warned against the ‘short notes’ questions; they didn’t give you a chance to excel — but she wasn’t a clever candidate now, she was Candidate Number 209 and fighting for her life.

Verena had started writing already; she could hear her scratching with her famous gold-nibbed pen. Verena frightened her these days. Verena was solicitous, her eyes bored into Ruth.

But Verena didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except to get through the next three hours of which seven minutes had already passed.

The Theory of Allometric Growth, which quantifies the relationship of small animals to large ones, wrote Ruth, deciding to take a chance.

Pilly scratching out her views on Piltdown Man, whose reconstructed skull mercifully hung above her father’s shaving mirror, looked up, saw Ruth’s bright head bent over her paper, and exchanged a relieved look with Janet. The clock jerked forward to the first half-hour. One question done, thought Ruth; four more… The short notes, then, because it was beginning; it was getting quite bad, actually, but she would fight it off; she would take deep breaths and it would pass. Oh God, I’ve worked so hard, she thought, suddenly swamped by self-pity. It can’t all be wasted!

The Great Animal of Maastricht was discovered in 1780 in the underground quarries of St Peter’s Mountain, wrote Ruth, her pen moving very fast because nothing mattered except to get something down for which someone could give her a mark. If she failed this paper, she would fail her degree… there could be no resits in December; not for her.

But there was no way of writing fast enough. She could feel the sweat breaking out on her skin, the dizziness… Another deep breath.

Ruth put up her hand.

On the dais the lady with the bun looked up, said something to the man beside her, and made her way slowly, agonizingly slowly, between the desks.

‘Yes?’

‘I need to go to the toilet.’

‘So soon?’ The lady was displeased. ‘Are you sure?’ She looked again at Ruth, at the beads of sweat on her forehead. ‘Very well. Come with me.’

Everyone watched as Ruth was led out. It was a complicated procedure, taking out a candidate — no one could go unwatched. It was like escorting a prisoner, making sure there was nothing secreted behind the lavatory seat — no file to saw through the bars, no crib giving the geological layers of the earth’s crust.

Pilly bit her lip. Huw and Sam exchanged worried glances. Ruth had had to go out before, but never so early.

Then Verena, too, put up her hand.

This wasn’t just inconvenient; this had the making of a minor crisis. No candidate could leave the room unattended — on the other hand at least one invigilator had to be present at all times. Up on the rostrum, the grey-haired man frowned and pressed a bell beneath his desk. A secretary from the Examination Office appeared in the doorway and was directed to the desk where Verena, still writing with her right hand, continued to hold her left arm aloft.

‘I wish to be excused,’ said Verena.

The secretary nodded. Verena rose — and the incredulous gaze of all the Thameside candidates followed her to the door. It was hard to believe that Verena even had bodily functions.

The gold hand of the great clock jerked forward… three minutes… four…

Then Verena returned. She looked pleased and well, and immediately took up her pen again. Of Ruth Berger there was no sign.

It’ll be all right, thought Pilly frantically. Ruth had had to go out in the Physiology exam too, and in the Parasitology practical… but never for as long as this. Never for twenty minutes… for half an hour… for forty minutes… Ruth was clever but no one could miss so much of an exam and still pass.

The woman with the bun had returned long ago; she was conferring with the grey-haired man, they were looking at Ruth’s empty desk.

Three-quarters of an hour… an hour…

And then it was over and still she had not come.