The Morning Gift

Chapter 3

Leonie Berger got carefully out of bed and turned over the pillow so that her husband, who was pretending to be asleep on the other side of the narrow, lumpy mattress, would not notice the damp patch made by her tears. Then she washed and dressed very attentively, putting on high-heeled court shoes, silk stockings, a black skirt and crisply ironed white blouse, because she was Viennese and one dressed properly even when one’s world had ended.

Then she started being good.

Leonie had been brave when they left Vienna, secreting a diamond brooch in her corset which was foolhardy in the extreme. She had been sensible and loving, for that was her nature, making sure that the one suitcase her husband was allowed to take contained all the existing notes for his book on Mammals of the Pleistocene, his stomach pills and the special nail clippers which alone enabled him to manicure his toes. She had been patient with her sister-in-law, Hilda, who was emigrating on a domestic work permit, but had fallen over her untied shoelaces as they made their way onto the Channel steamer, and she had cradled the infant of a fellow refugee while his mother was sick over the rails. Even when she saw the accommodation rented for them by their sponsor, a distantly related dentist who had emigrated years earlier and built up a successful practice in the West End, Leonie only grumbled a little. The rooms on the top floor of a dilapidated lodging house in Belsize Close were cold and dingy, the furniture hideous, the cooking facilities horrific, but they were cheap.

But that was when she thought Ruth was waiting for them in the student camp on the South Coast. Since the letter had come from the Quaker Relief Organization to say that Ruth was not on the train, Leonie had started being good.

This meant never at any moment criticizing a single thing. It meant inhaling with delight the smell of slowly expiring cauliflower from the landing where a female psychoanalyst from Breslau shared their cooker. It meant admiring the scrofulous tom cats yowling in the square of rubble that passed for a garden. It meant being enchanted by the hissing gas fire which ate pennies and gave out only fumes and blue flames. It meant angering no living thing, standing aside from houseflies, consuming with gratitude a kind of brown sauce which came in bottles and was called coffee. It meant telling God or anyone else who would listen at all hours of the day and night, that she would never again complain whatever happened if only Ruth was safe and came to them.

By 7.30, Leonie had prepared breakfast for her family — bread spread with margarine, a substance they had never previously tasted — and sent Hilda, with red-rimmed eyes, off to her job as housemaid to a Mrs Manfred in Golders Green. If she hadn’t been so desperate about Ruth, Leonie would have greatly pitied her sister-in-law, who was constantly bitten by Mrs Manfred’s pug and found it impossible to believe that a bath, once cleaned, also had to be dried, but now she could only be thankful that Hilda would not be around to ‘help’ her with her chores.

At eight o’clock, Uncle Mishak, the English dictionary in the pocket of his coat, set off up the hill to join the long queue of foreigners in Hampstead Town Hall who waited daily for news of relatives, for instructions, for permission to remain — and as he walked, a tiny compact figure stopping to examine a rose bush in a garden or address an unattended dog, he was hailed by the acquaintances this kind old man had made even in the ten days he had been in exile.

‘Heard anything yet?’ asked the man in the tobacco kiosk, and as Mishak shook his head: ‘There’ll be news today, maybe. They’re coming over all the time. She’ll come, you’ll see.’

The cockney flower seller with the feather in her battered hat, from whom Mishak had bought nothing, told him to keep his pecker up; a tramp with whom he’d shared a park bench one afternoon stopped to ask after Ruth.

And as Uncle Mishak made his way up the hill, Professor Berger, holding himself very erect, forcing himself to swing his walking stick, made his way downhill for the daily journey to Bloomsbury House where a bevy of Quakers, social workers and civil servants tried to sort out the movements of the dispossessed — and as he walked through the grey streets whose very stones seemed to be permeated with homesickness, he raised his hat to other exiles going about their business.

‘Any news of your daughter?’ enquired Dr Levy, the renowned heart specialist who spent his days in the public library studying to resit his medical exams in English.

‘You’ve heard something?’ asked Paul Ziller, the leader of the Ziller Quartet. He had no work permit, his quartet was disbanded, but each day he went to the Jewish Day Centre to practise in an unused cloakroom, and each night he dressed up in a cummerbund to play bogus gypsy music in a Hungarian restaurant in exchange for his food.

Left alone in the dingy rooms, Leonie continued to be good. There were plenty of opportunities for this as she set about the housework. The thick layer of grease where the psychoanalyst’s stew had boiled over would normally have sent her raging down to the second-floor front where Fräulein Lutzenholler sat under a picture of Freud and mourned, but she wiped it up without a word. The bathroom, shared by all the occupants, provided almost unlimited opportunities for virtue. There was a black rim around the bath, the soaked bathmat was crumpled up in a corner… and Miss Bates, a nursery school teacher and the only British survivor at Number 27, had hung a row of dripping camiknickers on a sagging piece of string.

None of it mattered. Loving Miss Bates, hoping she would find a husband soon, Leonie wrung out the knickers, cleaned the bath. She had had servants all her life, but she knew how to work. Now everything she did was offered up to God: the Catholic God of her childhood, the Jewish God on whose behalf all these bewildered people roamed the streets of North-West London… any God, what did it matter so long as he brought her her child?

Then, at twelve o’clock, she renewed her make-up and set off for the Willow Tea Rooms.

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ said Miss Maud, filling the sugar bowls and looking out of the window at Leonie Berger’s slow progress across the square. Even at a distance it was easy to see how carefully she walked, with what politeness she spoke to the pigeons who crossed her path.

And: ‘It’s bad news,’ said her sister, Miss Violet, carrying a tray of empty cups to Mrs Burtt in the kitchen, who took her arms out of the washing-up water and said that Hitler would have something to answer for if ever she got hold of him.

Miss Maud and Miss Violet Harper had started the Willow Tea Rooms five years earlier when it was discovered that their father, the General, had not been as provident as they had hoped. It was a pretty place on the corner of a small square behind Belsize Lane and they had made it nice with willow-pattern china, dimity curtains and a pottery cat on the windowsill. Reared to regard foreigners as, at best, unfortunate, the ladies had stoutly resisted the demands of the refugees who increasingly thronged the district. The Gloriette in St John’s Wood might serve cakes with outlandish names and slop whipped cream over everything, the proprietors of the Cosmo in Finchley might supply newspapers on sticks and permit talk across the tables, but in the Willow Tea Rooms, the decencies were preserved. Customers were offered scones or sponge fingers and, at lunchtime, scrambled eggs on toast, but nothing ever with a smell — and anyone sitting more than half an hour over a cup of coffee, got coughed at, first by Miss Violet, and if this was ineffectual, by the fiercer Miss Maud.

Yet by the summer of 1938, as the bewildered Austrians joined the refugees from Nazi Germany, the ladies, imperceptibly, had changed. For who could cough at Dr Levy, with his walrus moustache and wise brown eyes, not after he had diagnosed Miss Violet’s bursitis — and who could help laughing at Mr Ziller’s imitation of himself playing ‘Dark Eyes’ on the violin to an American lady with a faulty hearing aid?

And now there was Mrs Berger who had come in on her first day in England with her distinguished-looking husband and her nice old uncle, and praised the sponge fingers and showed them photos of her pretty, snub-nosed daughter. Ruth was coming, she was going to study here; soon her boyfriend, a brilliant concert pianist, would follow. The change in Mrs Berger since then had shaken even the General’s daughters, used as they were to stories of loss and grief.

Leonie entered the café, navigated to the chair which Paul Ziller drew out for her, nodded at the actor from the Vienna Burg Theatre in the corner, at old Mrs Weiss in her feathered toque, at an English lady with a poodle…

Dr Levy put down his book on The Diseases of the Knee which he had understood intimately twenty years ago, but which came less trippingly in English from the tongue of a middle-aged heart specialist who’d had no breakfast.

‘I have heard that many student transports are coming in now to Scotland,’ he said, speaking English in deference to the lady with a poodle.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Leonie carefully. ‘My husband enquires.’

Miss Maud, unasked, set down Leonie’s usual cup of coffee. The actor from the Burg Theatre — a fair-haired, alarmingly handsome man exiled for politics not race — said many people were escaping through Portugal, a fact confirmed by the couple from Hamburg at a corner table.

Paul Ziller said nothing, only patted Leonie’s hand. Lonely beyond belief without the three men with whom he had made music for a decade, he was remembering the comical, blonde child who had climbed out of her cot the first time the quartet had played for Professor Berger’s birthday and come stamping down the corridor in a nightdress and nappies, refusing absolutely to be returned to bed.

Mrs Weiss, her auburn wig askew under her hat, now launched into an incoherent story involving a missing girl who had turned up unexpectedly on a milk train to Dieppe. The scourge of the Willow Tea Rooms, she was seventy-two years old and had been rescued by her prosperous lawyer son from the village in East Prussia where she had lived all her life. The lawyer now owned a mock Tudor mansion in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a fishpond, and an English wife who deposited her dreadful mother-in-law each morning in the café with a fistful of conscience money. The words ‘I buy you a cake?’ struck dread into the other habitués who knew that acceptance meant listening to Mrs Weiss’s interminable lament about her daughter-in-law who did not allow her to fry onions, speak to the maids, or help.

When she had finished, the English lady, who for a year had refused to speak across the tables, said that if Leonie really was an Aquarian, the stars in the Daily Telegraph that morning had been entirely favourable.

‘It definitely said that you can expect a pleasant surprise,’ said Mrs Fowler, feeding a biscuit to the dog.

But when Professor Berger came in, weary from his long walk up the hill, and then Uncle Mishak, it was clear that the stars in the Telegraph had not prevailed.

‘Well, tomorrow, perhaps,’ said Miss Maud, putting down the plate of bread and butter which was the Bergers’ lunch.

‘Yes, tomorrow,’ echoed Miss Violet.

And Leonie said, yes, and thank you, and remembered to ask about the wedding of Mrs Burtt’s niece, and the cat which had had kittens in an unsuitable linen basket in the ladies’ flat above the shop.

Then Professor Berger picked up his manuscript on The Mammals of the Pleistocene and went with Dr Levy to the public library, and Paul Ziller went to play Bach partitas among the wash basins and lockers of the Day Centre, and the actor (who had declaimed Schiller from Europe’s most prestigious stage) made his way to the casting offices in Wardour Street to see if someone would let him say Schweinehund in a film about wicked German soldiers in the Great War.

‘We go to look for schnitzel?’ said Mrs Weiss, cocking her raddled head at Leonie. And Leonie nodded and accompanied the old lady out into the street and into the shop of the nearby butcher with whom Mrs Weiss did daily battle — for helping Mrs Weiss to procure the delicate veal suitable for frying and thus confound her daughter-in-law was so time-consuming and so tiresome that it had — oh, surely — to be classed as Being Good.

Until the long day was done at last and Hilda returned with a hole in her skirt where she had caught it in Mrs Manfred’s carpet sweeper, and Uncle Mishak changed into his pyjamas in his cupboard of a room and said, ‘Good night, Marianne,’ as he had said every night for eighteen years and not stopped saying when she died. And Leonie and her husband climbed into their lumpy bed, and held each other in their arms — and did not sleep.

But in the flat above the Willow Tea Rooms, a light still burned.

‘I suppose we could serve some of those cakes of theirs,’ said Miss Maud as the two ladies, in flannel dressing-gowns, sat over their cocoa.

‘Oh, Maud! Not… strudels? I’m sure Father would not have wished us to serve anything like that.’ Three years younger than her sister, Violet was less skeletally thin and, at forty-three, her hair still retained traces of brown.

‘No, not strudels, I agree. That would be going too far. But there’s one they all talk about. It begins with a G. Sounds like guggle… Guglhupf or something.’

Violet put down her cup. ‘Buy it in from the Continental Bakery, you mean?’

‘Certainly not. There is no question of anything being bought in. But I did just glance at the recipe when I was in the library,’ said Miss Maud, blushing like someone admitting to a peep at a pornographic magazine. ‘You need a mould, but it isn’t difficult.’

There are many ways of helping. That early summer evening when Ruth was lost in Europe and the first airraid sirens were tried out in Windsor Castle, the ladies of the Willow Tea Rooms let compassion override principle.

‘Well, if you think so, Maud,’ said Violet — and they put the cat in with the kittens, and washed up their cocoa cups, and went to bed.