The Morning Gift

Chapter 28

She was the most famous ship on the Atlantic route: the Mauretania, still Queen of the Ocean with her luxurious salons, her cinema, her glamorous shops. Film stars travelled on her and Arab princes and business tycoons. Even now a woman in a fantastic fur coat was coming up the gangway, pursued by photographers for whom she turned and produced a dazzling smile. Heini too had been photographed as he left on the boat train; his life, since the competition, had been completely transformed. Even half the prize money had enabled him to leave Belsize Park and move into a small hotel. He could have travelled First Class too, but Fleury was bringing Ruth over and that meant travelling Tourist. Having made that sacrifice made Heini feel benign — and actually even the Tourist accommodation was luxurious enough. Leaning on the rail watching for Ruth, who should have been here by now, Heini let his eye travel over the bustle of the docks — cranes loading mysterious packages, vans bringing last-minute cargo — and drank in the smell of tar and rope and seaweed. The Mauretania might be a kind of floating grand hotel, but she was still a ship, and a dockside the world over catches at the heart strings with its promise of adventure.

It was all beginning, his new life, the life he knew from childhood was really his. America and fame! And he would share it with Ruth, young as he was. There would be many women who would want him — Heini, without conceit, knew that — but a musician needs roots and a wife. Horowitz’s playing had taken on a new depth when he married Toscanini’s daughter; Rubinstein’s wife protected him from all disturbance. Ruth would do that for him, he knew.

Only where was Ruth? He looked at his watch, for the first time a little anxious. He had respected her wish to make her own way to the docks — in fact he had been rather patient with all Ruth’s moods and foibles in the month since the end of her exams. The results weren’t out yet, but he sympathized with her disappointment. Having gastric flu during the finals was rotten luck and having missed almost the whole of the last paper was a real blow to a girl as ambitious as Ruth. The most she could hope for now was an aegrotat and that wasn’t worth much, but he didn’t see that it mattered greatly now that her life was linked with his.

Only an hour before they sailed. Some of the relatives and friends who’d come on board were leaving. Perhaps he’d given Ruth too much freedom? She’d insisted on making her own arrangements for her visa and he’d given way over that too, but he hoped in general that she wasn’t going to be obstinate.

A poor family, obviously immigrants from the East — the men in black wide-brimmed hats, the women in shawls, pushing children, made their way up the gangway to the steerage — bound for some sweatshop in Brooklyn perhaps. Two old women belonging to them waited on the quayside, waving and keening: steerage passengers were not allowed to bring relatives on board to see them off. There’d have been plenty of weeping and wailing in Belsize Park as they said goodbye to Ruth; he was glad he’d missed all that. He’d have to be a bit careful about Ruth’s determination to bring her family over. He’d promised to do it and he would do it, but there were expenses to take care of first: a decent apartment, a Steinway, insuring his hands…

Ah, thank God, there she was, making her way through the crowd. She wore her loden cape, buttoned up even on this warm day, and carried her straw basket so that she looked even more like a goose girl on an alp, and for a moment he wondered if he had made a mistake… if she would fit in with the sophisticated life he was bound to lead. But Mantella thought the world of her, and Fleury… and his father ate out of her hand. He had never met a man who didn’t like Ruth, and now as she came up the gangway, a sailor walking down turned his head to look at her.

‘Ruth!’

‘Heini!’

They were in each other’s arms; he felt her hair against his cheek, the warmth, the familiarity.

‘You’ve been crying, darling.’ He was solicitous, wiping a tear away with his fingers.

‘Yes. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all right now. And I’ve brought us a present. A lovely present. It was a chance in a million, finding them in the summer, but look!’

She bent down to the straw basket and took out a small brown paper bag which she put into his hands. Heini felt the warmth before he opened it, and smiled.

‘Maroni! Oh, Ruth, that takes me back!’

He took out a chestnut, almost too warm to hold, gazed at the split skin, the wrinkled, roasted flesh — drank in the delicious smell. Both of them now were back in the city they had grown up in, wandering along the Kärntnerstrasse, dipping into the bag… sharing… sniffing… Ruth had carried them in her muff for him, walking to fetch him from the Conservatoire… Once they had eaten three bags of them, driving in a sledge through the snowbound Prater.

‘I’ll peel one for you,’ said Ruth — and she freed it deftly from the skin and held it out to him — as she had held out wild strawberries on the Grundlsee, a piece of marzipan pilfered from her mother’s kitchen.

‘Shall we take them down below?’ he suggested.

‘No, let’s eat them here, Heini. Let’s stay by the sea.’

So they stood side by side and emptied the bag and threw the skins into the water, where they were swooped on — and then rejected — by the gulls.

‘Is your luggage aboard, then?’ asked Heini. ‘We sail in less than an hour.’

‘Everything’s taken care of,’ said Ruth. She put her arms round him and once again he felt her tears. ‘Only listen, darling — there’s something I have to tell you.’

No one ever forgot where they were on the morning of the 3rd of September.

Pilly, who had joined the WRNS without waiting for the result of her exams, heard Chamberlain’s quavery voice in the naval barracks at Portsmouth. Janet heard it in her father’s vicarage the day after which, to everyone’s amazement, she had become engaged to his curate.

The inhabitants of Number 27 heard the news that Britain was at war with Germany clustered round the crackling wireless set in Ziller’s room and as they listened the expression on every face was strangely similar. Relief that the shillyshallying and compromise were over at last, and with it the realization that they were cut off finally from the relatives and friends that they had left behind in Europe.

And from Ruth. From Ruth who had been five weeks in America and had not yet written — or probably had written, but the letter with the uncertainty of the time had not arrived. And now every mail would be threatened by U-boats, every telephone line requisitioned for the war.

‘Oh, Kurt,’ said Leonie, coming to stand beside her husband.

‘Just think that she is safe. That’s all you have to think of; that she is safe.’

Almost before Chamberlain had stopped speaking came the air-raid warning, and with it a taste of things to come as Fräulein Lutzenholler dived under the table and Mishak went out into the garden so as to die in the open air. A false alarm, but it made it easier for Leonie to heed her husband’s words. Ruth was safe — the Mauretania had berthed without mishap; they had rung the shipping office. She herself had said it might be a while before a letter reached them, but oh, God, let her write soon, thought Leonie. She knew how disappointed Kurt had been in Ruth’s exam results: the aegrotat she had been awarded was almost worthless — and in something about Ruth herself which had held them at a distance before she sailed, but he suffered scarcely less than she did at this separation from the daughter he loved so much.

Quin heard the news three days later in a manner which would have done credit to a Rider Haggard yarn. A horseman, galloping across the plains towards him in a cloud of dust, reined in and handed him a letter.

‘So it’s come,’ said Quin, and the African nodded.

One by one the men who had been working on the cliff put down their tools. There was no need to ask what had happened. The Commissioner at Lindi had promised to inform them and he had kept his word.

‘We’re going home, then?’ asked Sam — and filled his eyes with the blue immensity of the sky, the sea of grass, the antelopes moving quietly over the horizon.

Quin put an arm round the boy’s shoulder. Sam had proved his worth out here and would never be free now of the longing to return.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Straightaway.’

The first weeks of the war saw a number of crises in Belsize Park, but none was due to enemy action. The old lady two doors down collided with a lamp post in the blackout and was taken to Dr Levy, now permitted to practise his profession and established in a surgery on Hampstead Hill. An officious air-raid warden reduced Miss Violet to hysterics by hammering on her bedroom door and accusing her of being a German spy because a chink of light was visible between her curtains. Leonie, now employed in the kitchen of a service canteen behind Trafalgar Square, was reprimanded for spreading margarine too thickly on the soldiers’ sandwiches. Leaflets were showered on the populace: they were told to Dig for Victory, to remember that Careless Talk Costs Lives, to Carry Their Gas Masks at all times. Evacuated children from the slums of London screamed in the silence and safety of their country billets.

Only at sea had the war started in earnest. Ships travelled in convoy and in secrecy, escorted by destroyers; even so the U-boats claimed victim after victim — and every boat sent to the bottom could have carried the letter Ruth had written to assure her parents that she was safe and well.

But when at last the longed-for letter came from New York, it was not from Ruth, but from Heini, and by the time she had read it, Leonie was a shivering wreck clinging to the edge of the table.

Heini wrote to thank them for their hospitality throughout the years and he enclosed a message for Ruth.

‘I don’t want to reproach her,’ he wrote, ‘I suppose it was honest of her to say that she did not love me and did not want to share my life. But you can imagine how I felt, sailing alone to an unknown land. Fortunately, as soon as I arrived, everything went splendidly. The Americans are as warm-hearted as one hears and my debut at the Carnegie Hall was a triumph. Will you tell Ruth this, and tell her too that someone else has now entered my life — a very musical woman, a little older, who uses her influence to help me and who insisted that I move into her apartment — a dream-like place with picture windows overlooking Central Park. So Ruth must not feel guilty — but she must not think either that I shall take her back. I shall always remember her with fondness, as I remember all of you, but the past is past.’

Leonie had collapsed into a chair, trying to still the trembling of her limbs. ‘God, Kurt, what has happened? Where is she? Why didn’t she tell us?’

‘Hush, hush. There will be an explanation.’ But as he stroked his wife’s back, the Professor himself was fighting for control. This couldn’t happen twice, his beloved daughter lost in the Underworld.

‘We must tell the police. They must find her,’ said Leonie.

‘We will see first what we can discover for ourselves.’

But they discovered nothing. Pilly, to whom they telegraphed, had not heard from Ruth, nor had Janet and everyone at Thameside believed that Ruth had sailed on the Mauretania. Once more, Leonie stifled her sobs under the pillow and drearily promised God to be good, but before she could make herself seriously ill, a letter came by the afternoon post with which Hilda hurried to the Willow, where Miss Maud and Miss Violet, their windows taped, their doors suitably sand-bagged, were carrying on as usual.

‘It came just now — that’s Ruth’s handwriting, I’m sure.’

Silence fell in the café as the envelope was opened. Silence was maintained as Leonie and her husband read what Ruth had written.

‘She is safe,’ said Leonie at last. ‘She is safe and in England. In the country. And she has a job.’

‘So why this long face?’ enquired von Hofmann. ‘Why are you not dancing on the tables?’

Things had gone well with him since the outbreak of war. A whole spate of anti-Nazi films were lined up by the studios and he had secured the part of an SS officer who said not only Schweinehund but Gott in Himmel before dying a very nasty death.

‘She wants to be alone.’ Leonie’s lip trembled as she tried to embrace this extraordinary concept.

‘Like Greta Garbo?’ enquired the lady with the poodle.

Leonie shook her bewildered head. ‘I don’t understand… she says she must be independent… she must learn to grow up by herself. Later she will come back, but now she must discover who she is. Twice she says this about the discovering.’

‘Everybody goes through such times,’ said Ziller. ‘Times when they need to find out who they are. It is natural.’

Mrs Weiss disagreed. ‘So she finds out who she is?’ she said, spearing a piece of guggle with her fork. ‘What has she from that? Myself, it is bad enough that I am it, but to find out, no!’

Mrs Weiss’s views, rather surprisingly, were shared by Miss Maud and Miss Violet who said they thought it didn’t do much good to go delving about in one’s self, but were sure it wouldn’t last.

‘You’ll see,’ said Miss Maud, ‘she’ll be back soon enough. It’s feeling she’s failed you with the exams, perhaps, and breaking with Heini.’

‘There is no address,’ said Leonie wretchedly. ‘And I can’t read what is on the stamp. But in the post office they will read it and tell me. We must find her, Kurt; we must!’

Professor Berger put down the letter in which his daughter had begged for their understanding. ‘No,’ he said curtly. ‘We will respect her wishes.’

‘Oh, God — I don’t want to respect her wishes, I want her!’ cried Leonie.

‘We have spoken enough of this,’ said the Professor — and she looked up, silenced, aware of a hurt even deeper than her own.

‘No go home?’ begged Thisbe, as Ruth pushed her pushchair back down the rutted lane.

‘Thisbe, we have to go home. It’s teatime.’

The little girl’s face puckered; she let out a thin wail. Ruth bent down to her. The wind was getting up, the tops of the fells were wreathed in mist. However much both she and the three-year-old Thisbe preferred to be out of doors, there were limits. The Lake District in late autumn was beautiful, but it was hardly suitable for alfresco life.

‘No soup?’ begged Thisbe, shifting her ground.

Ruth sighed. She felt sympathy with Thisbe who dreaded a return to the domestic hearth: to the cold stone floors of the tiny shepherd’s cottage, the chaos, the screams of her two brothers as they returned from school. Progressive child-rearing did not suit Thisbe, who was no trouble as she and Ruth plodded through the countryside conversing with sheep, picking berries, chatting on stone walls, but became almost ungovernable at home.

Ruth had been two months now with the lady weaver whose children she had looked after on Hampstead Heath. Penelope Hartley was kind enough in a vague way, and offering Ruth bed and board in exchange for help with the children was generous under the circumstances. When war became inevitable and she had transferred her loom to Cumberland, Ruth had gone with her. There was certainly plenty of wool which Penelope gathered from the hedges, often in a less than appetising state, and carded and dyed… and out of the appalling muddle in which she worked, there did, surprisingly, emerge some rather pleasant and occasionally saleable rugs. But Mr Hartley, some years ago, had sought consolation elsewhere, and Penelope had rather let things go.

Inside the small, dark cottage with its oil lamps and view of a sheer scree, they found something nameless bubbling on the stove. Not a sheep’s head broth, for Penelope did not eat meat, but a vegetable equivalent: a stew of mangelwurzels, old carrots, the tops of Brussels sprouts caught by the first frost, which nevertheless managed to suggest the presence of bristles and teeth and protruding eyes.

‘No soup!’ repeated Thisbe, and lay down on the floor, ready to start a tantrum.

‘No, we’ll find some bread and butter.’

Rationing had not yet affected them here, so far from the towns; there was plenty of food in Cumberland or there would have been if there had been any money to buy it with and not all the villagers turned away from Ruth; some had been helpful. But, of course, Penelope believed in ‘Nature’, not realizing how very unnatural good husbandry really is. Three damp chickens which did not lay wandered into the house, soiling the flagstones; old milk, dripping through discoloured muslin, failed dismally to turn into cheese.

The boys now returned noisily from school. Peter, whom she had pleased by hitting him on the leg in the far-off days on Hampstead Heath, and Tristram, a year older.

‘Oh God, not mother’s muck,’ said Tristram. ‘I won’t eat it, and she needn’t think it.’

Ruth, fetching bread, butter and apples from the larder, reassured him. If only it didn’t get dark so soon. When they’d first come, she’d been able to go out with the boys after supper while they kicked a ball around or searched for conkers, but now they all faced an interminable evening sitting round the smoking Aladdin lamp. Even so she could manage if only Penelope stayed next door at her loom. They could play dominoes or ludo — at least they could if the pieces weren’t lost again; she wasn’t as nimble as she had been at crawling round the floor looking for missing toys after the children were in bed.

But, of course, Penelope did come in, concerned for her motherhood, and within minutes the boys were at each other’s throats and Thisbe was lying on the floor drumming her heels. Too many sages had made their way into Penelope Hartley’s head: Rudolf Steiner who said children should not learn to read till their milk teeth were shed; the Sufi chieftain who set Penelope to her meditations instead of the washing up; A. S. Neill with his child-centred education. The poor, confused children of Penelope Hartley were so child-centred that they almost imploded each night in the confines of the tiny cottage — and tonight, as so often before, Ruth who was supposed to finish her work at seven, carried Thisbe upstairs and eased her into her nappies and sat with her till she slept.

And then the long evening began when she went to her attic under the eaves which was at least her own and looked out at the darkness and the rain, and longed for her mother and the lore and certainties of her own childhood and the painted cradle, now splintered wood, in which her baby should have lain.

But she wouldn’t yield. It wasn’t so long now — less than two months. She would see it through on her own. Not whose I am, but who I am, there lies my search… The lines of some half-remembered poem ran again through her head.

Only who was she? Someone who had loved and been rejected; a daughter who had caused her parents disappointment and pain… and now, soon, a mother who knew nothing.

And yet she had no regrets. She blamed no one, not even Verena, hissing her ultimatum in the cloakroom, threatening to expose her condition unless she left Thameside then and there, and for ever. In a way Verena had done her a service, bringing home the contempt and disgust with which the world might now regard her state. If her father, so strict, so upright, had turned his back on her as a fallen woman, Ruth couldn’t have borne it: she’d have revealed the marriage and then it would have all have begun… finding Quin, letting him know… begging for a place in his life… And Verena had kept her own side of the bargain; no one at college knew what had happened or where she was.

Nor had Quin carried her dreamily from his sofa to his bed. He had said: ‘Wait; there are things to be attended to.’ He had said it very gently, very lovingly, cupping her face in his hands, but firmly: he had begun to leave her, and it was she who had clung on to him and said: ‘No, no, you mustn’t go!’… because even then she couldn’t bear to be away from him. ‘It’s absolutely safe,’ she’d said. ‘It’s my completely safe time; I know because of Dr Felton’s wife and the thermometers. It’s as safe as houses!’

She hadn’t been lying; she’d believed it and he’d believed her. Only houses, these days, were not so very safe: houses in Guernica and Canton and Warsaw toppled like cards as bombs fell on them, and she’d been wrong. She’d been a whole week out in her calculations and that was another mark chalked up to Fräulein Lutzenholler and Professor Freud. She wasn’t usually sloppy about dates — it was that damnable thing way below the level of reason which all along had wanted nothing except to belong to this one man.

And even now, an official ‘unmarried mother’ from whom the older villagers averted their eyes, even now when Quin had unmistakably rejected her, there was, deep down below the anxiety and fear for the future, an unquenchable sense of joy because she was carrying his child.

Only the child itself had lately disconcerted her. This fishlike creature still unable to breathe or eat except by her decree, had developed a will of its own. Ruth did not need the doctors in the antenatal clinic to which she travelled once a fortnight on innumerable buses, to tell her that her baby was fit and well, but what about its mental state — its obstinacy? It disagreed completely with Ruth’s careful plans and was profoundly uninterested in her voyage of self-discovery.

Bowmont is only sixty miles away, it said, twisting its foot merrily round her spinal nerves. You may be an upstart and an outcast, but I’m half a Somerville.

I want, it said, my home.

At the end of November, Leonie received a visit from Mrs Burtt who had left the Willow to work in a munitions factory and was greatly missed by the customers. Smartly dressed in a new brown coat and a hat with a feather, she was carrying a small parcel wrapped in silver paper and seemed a little shy and tentative which was not her usual state.

‘I’m sorry to be bothering you,’ she said, ‘but… well, I thought you wouldn’t mind; you wouldn’t take it amiss.’

‘How could I do this?’ asked Leonie. ‘I am very happy to see you.’

She led Mrs Burtt into the sitting room, in which one could actually sit once more now that the piano had been sent back, and offered coffee which Mrs Burtt refused.

‘I don’t want to pry,’ she said, after asking rather oddly if they would be undisturbed. ‘But well, I really like her, you know, and people sometimes say things, but I know Ruth is as good as they make them. And her going off like that to have it on her own… well, it’s like her. Not wanting to bother anyone. But I want her to know that whatever she’s done I know she’s a good girl and I’d like you to give this to her. Afterwards. Not before, because that’s bad luck, but when it’s all over. I knitted it myself.’

She laid the parcel on the table, and Leonie, who was having trouble with her breathing, stretched out her hand. ‘May I see?’ she said.

Mrs Burtt removed the wrapping paper. Pride shone for a moment on her face. ‘Took me hours, that did. It’s a brute of a pattern. It’s those scallops, see? But it’s come out nice, hasn’t it? I kept it white to be on the safe side, but she can put a blue ribbon through it or a pink when it’s all over.’

Leonie was still having difficulty with the business of drawing air into her lungs. ‘Thank you — she will be so pleased. It is the most beautiful jacket. I will see that she has it… and tell her… what you have said.’

Mrs Burtt nodded. ‘I don’t want to know any more now,’ she said. ‘It’s not my business. Just to know she’s all right and the baby’s safe.’

Leonie, swallowing the unbearable hurt her daughter had done her, said: ‘Did she tell you… herself… about the baby?’

Mrs Burtt shook her head ‘Bless you, no. She’s no blabber. But I was one of four daughters and I’ve three girls of my own. I guessed soon enough. There’s ways of being sick that’s a bug in the tummy and there’s ways that isn’t. And she got so tired. I came out with it and I think it was a relief she could talk to someone.’

‘And… where she was going… her plans? Did she tell you about that?’

‘No. And I didn’t ask her. I knew it wasn’t Heini that was the father, so there wasn’t any more for me to say.’

Leonie lifted her head. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

‘Well, you could see she didn’t love ’im, couldn’t you? Tried too hard all the time… And if it wasn’t him, I wasn’t going to go nosing around.’

‘I didn’t see… as well as you,’ said Leonie out of her deep despair.

Mrs Burtt’s work-roughened hand rested for a moment on her own. ‘You was so close, the two of you,’ she said. ‘You loved her so much. It’s a real killer, love is, if you want to see.’

Left alone, Leonie sat as still as a statue, holding the exquisite, tiny garment in her hands. Ruth had not trusted her. She had confided in a lady who washed dishes and not in her. She had gone off alone.

Professor Berger, returning home, found her still in a state of shock.

‘What has happened, Leonie? What have you got there?’

‘It’s a baby’s jacket.’ She traced the scallops on the collar, the lacy frill, with blind fingers. ‘Mrs Burtt brought it for Ruth.’

She watched as her husband’s face changed; saw the incredulity, the dismay… then the tightness of anger.

‘My God, that scoundrel, Heini. I’ll force him to marry her,’ he said furiously.

‘Oh, Kurt, it isn’t Heini’s child. If it was she’d have gone with him.’

This was worse. His beloved, protected daughter a fallen woman, the bearer of an unknown child. Pitying him as he paced the room, Leonie had no energy to retrieve him from his conventional hell of moral outrage. What is it I have not understood? she thought. What is it that is missing here? And if I was right all along, how could it have come to this?

The doorbell rang, shrill and insistent. Neither of the Bergers moved.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked the Professor — and the sudden helplessness of this proud man did touch her.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ she began.

A second ring… and now Fräulein Lutzenholler’s door could be heard opening, and her indignant footsteps as she made her way downstairs. The easing of laws against refugees at the onset of hostilities meant she was allowed to practise her profession and, incredible as it seemed, people came to her room and paid to have her listen. Answering the doorbell would annoy this exalted person very much.

She returned, as displeased as Leonie had anticipated, and with her was a red-faced man in some kind of uniform.

‘It’s the rodent officer,’ said Fräulein Lutzenholler — and as Leonie stared blankly at this man she had awaited with hope and passion for month after month: ‘He has come about the mice.’

‘Oh, yes… thank you…’ Leonie rose, tried to collect herself.

‘Please go where you will. They are everywhere. The kitchen is bad… and the back bedroom.’

‘That’s all right, ma’am. I’ll just get on with it. Looks like a sizable infestation you have here — I may have to take up some boards.’

He left the room and they could hear him moving about, tapping the walls, opening cupboards.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ said Leonie, turning back to her husband. ‘I’m going to take Ruth’s letter to the post office and make them tell me where it comes from and then I’m going to go there and find her. And when I have found her I’m going to bring her back here and look after her and after my grandchild. And if the father’s a chimney sweep I’m going to do it.’ She swallowed. ‘Even if he is a Nazi chimney sweep, because if Ruth gave herself to him it’s because she loved him and she is my blood and yours also, so you will please not —’

A knock at the door and the rodent officer reappeared.

‘I found this under the boards in the back room,’ he said — and deposited on the table a large, square biscuit tin covered in mouse droppings and adorned with a picture of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose patting a corgi dog.

She had come by bus as far as Alnwick, but there were eight miles still to go before she reached Bowmont. She’d have walked it easily enough in the old days, but not now, and she spent some of her meagre stock of money on a taxi as far as the village. It would have made sense to be set down by the house itself, but she couldn’t face that. She didn’t want to sweep up as a claimant — it was sanctuary she sought at Bowmont, not her rights.

The driver was worried; she had a suitcase, the afternoon was grey and chill, but she reassured him.

‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I need some air.’

She certainly looked as though she needed something, thought the driver, turning his cab, watching the bundled figure in its shabby cape set off up the hill.

There was nobody about and that was a blessing; there might have been people who recognized her and till she knew her fate she wanted to speak to no one. And her fate depended on a ferocious old woman known for her sharp temper and her strict and old-fashioned views.

‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ she said bitterly, addressing her unborn child. She had fought a long battle, pitting her pride and independence against the creature’s blind, stubborn thrust towards what it considered to be its home, and she had lost. Now, trudging up the hill, she tried to face the consequences of rejection. Where would she go if she was turned away? It was growing dark, she could hardly go back to Penelope whose advice she had ignored… whom, in a sense, she had left in the lurch. She was mad, coming here like this at the eleventh hour.

‘Oh God, why did I listen?’ she thought, for the sense of dialogue between herself and the child had been with her from the start.

But she knew why. Even now, in the bitter cold of a raw December day with the storm clouds massing in the west and the light withdrawing itself in readiness for an endless winter night, she walked through a heart-stopping beauty. The wind-tossed trees, the tumble and thrust of the waves against the cliffs and Bowmont’s tower etched against a violet sky, brought a sudden mist of tears to her eyes — and that was not very sensible nor very practical. She had to find her way, not stumble, for she was not alone.

Yet memories, as she made her way up the last stretch of road, came unbidden to weaken her further. The incredible clarity of the stars; the dazzling silver of the morning sea the first time she had walked towards it; the enfolding, unexpected warmth and fragrance of the garden — and she thought that if she was sent away again she would not know how to bear it.

She was on the gravel drive now and still she had encountered no one. Then as she reached the steps and put down her suitcase, she knew with certainty that her quest would fail. Aunt Frances hated refugees, she hated foreigners; she belonged to a bygone age. There was no sanctuary here, no safety, no hope.

She could hear the clang of the bell echoing inside the house. Would Turton even announce her, seeing her state? She belonged at the back door or in one of those dark genre paintings of banished women staggering out into the night.

The bolt was drawn back slowly… so slowly that Ruth would have had time to turn away down the steps.

‘Yes? What is it?’

It was not Turton who stood there, not any of the servants. It was Aunt Frances herself, barring the way, showing no welcome, no inclination to move aside — not even when she recognized who it was that stood on her threshold.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she went on, horrified. ‘This is no place for you!’

Ruth drew breath, lifted her head. Not I, but thou… She must fight for her child. But the words she brought out were halting, inadequate; she was suddenly so exhausted that she could hardly stand.

‘Please… I beg you… Can I stay?’

‘Stay here! Stay here in your condition! Really, Ruth, I know all foreigners are mad but this goes beyond everything. Of course you can’t stay.’

‘There is an explanation… There is a reason.’

‘Explanations have nothing to do with it. You can’t stay here, absolutely and definitely not, and that’s the end of the matter.’

Ruth looked up at the gaunt fierce woman she had nevertheless hoped was her friend. As she pulled her cloak tighter, struck by a deathly cold, the first flakes of snow began to fall.