Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

But now there had to be only the music. He closed his eyes for a moment of concentration, opened them — and began to play.

And Professor Sandor, who had slipped into the front row, nodded, for the boy in spite of all was very, very musical and the persuasion, the work, he had put into arranging the concert had been worthwhile.

It was after three encores, after the applause and the flowers thrown onto the platform by an excited group of schoolgirls, that Heini thought of Ruth again. She always waited for him wherever he played — unobtrusive, quiet, but so very pretty, standing close by so that he could smile at her and claim her, but never crowding in when people wanted to tell him how much they had enjoyed the music. And afterwards she would take him back to the Felsengasse and Leonie would have his favourite dishes on the table, and they would talk about the concert and relive the evening till he was relaxed enough to sleep. Or if he was invited to a party, to people who might be useful to him, Ruth slipped quietly away without a word of reproach.

Whereas Mali now was waiting for praise, her eyes worried behind her spectacles. ‘Was it all right?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘Everything was all right, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, managing to smile, and then returned to greet his well-wishers, and to receive their volatile greetings, so different from the well-bred handshakes and heel clicks of the Viennese.

But late that night, returning home, he realized again how bereft he was. That his father would be working late in his editorial office he knew, but his stepmother too had gone out. True she had left a note and a pot of goulash on the stove, but Heini had never had to return to an empty house.

He was out on the moonlit verandah when his father came through the French windows carrying two glasses of wine.

‘How did it go?’

‘Pretty well, I think.’

‘I’ve heard good things already on the grapevine. You’ll go far, Heini.’

Heini smiled and took his glass. ‘I miss Ruth,’ he said.

‘Yes, I can imagine,’ said his father, who had met Ruth in Vienna. ‘If I were you, I’d marry her quickly before someone else snaps her up!’

‘Oh, they won’t do that. We belong.’

Beside him, Radek was silent, looking down at the lights of the city in which he had lived all his life. A man of fifty, he looked older than his age and troubled.

‘How’s it going with your visa?’

‘All right, as far as I know.’

‘Well, don’t delay, Heini. I don’t like the way things are shaping. If Hitler moves against the Czechs, the Hungarians will try and get a share of the pickings and that means kowtowing to the Germans. There aren’t any laws against the Jews yet, but they’ll come.’ And abruptly: ‘I’ve taken a job in Switzerland. Marta is going ahead next week to find us an apartment.’

Left alone again, Heini was filled with disquiet. For his father to leave his home and the prestige he enjoyed in Hungary meant there was danger indeed. Heini did not like the idea of England: The Land Without Music, the country of fogs and men in bowler hats who had done unmentionable things to each other at boarding school, but it looked as though he had better get himself there quickly. And he was going to Ruth, his starling, his page turner, his love. Humbly, Heini, staring down at the lights of a barge as it slipped beneath the Elisabeth Bridge, admitted that he had taken Ruth too much for granted. Well, all this was going to change. Not only would he make Ruth wholly his, physically as well as mentally, but he was ready — yes, he was almost ready now — to marry her. At twenty-one he was very young to be taking such a step and his agent in Vienna had advised against it. So much patronage at the start of a musician’s career came from wealthy matrons and they were apt to look with a particular kindness on unmarried youths. But this did not matter. He was prepared to make the sacrifice.

On an impulse, he fetched a piece of paper and, lighting the lamp in the corner of the verandah, sat down to write a letter. He told Ruth of the concert and the disaster Mali had been, and wrote movingly and without hesitation of his love. Knowing, though, how practical Ruth was, how she needed to help, he wrote also of what he wanted her to do.

I shall have to have a piano as soon as I arrive, darling, wrote Heini. I don’t of course expect you to buy one — I know money may be a little tight till your family gets settled — only to rent one. A baby grand would be ideal, but if your parents’ drawing room won’t accommodate that, I’ll make do with an upright for the time being. A Bösendorfer would be best, you know how I prefer them, but I’ll be quite happy with a Stein-way or a Bechstein, but if it’s a Bechstein it must be a Model 8, not any of the smaller ones. Perhaps you’d better leave the tuning till the day before I come — and not an English piano, Ruth, not even a Broadwood. I’m sure I can leave it all to you, my love; you’ve never failed me yet and you never will.

When he had signed the letter, Heini still lingered for a while, inhaling the scent of mignonette from the garden. ‘I love you, Ruth,’ he said aloud, and felt uplifted and purged and good as people do when they have committed themselves to another. He would have stayed longer, but for the whine of a mosquito somewhere above him. Once, on the Grundlsee, a midge had bitten him on the pad of his index finger and it had turned septic. Hurrying indoors, Heini closed the window and then went to bed.

It was not until she stood on the platform and looked up at the royal-blue coaches with their crests and the words Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits painted over the windows, that Ruth realized they were travelling on the Orient Express.

Now, sitting opposite Quin in the dining car as the train streamed through the twilit Austrian countryside, she looked about her in amazement. She had expected luxury, but the Lalique panels, the rosewood marquetry of the partitions, the gilded metal flowers on the ceiling were sumptuous beyond belief. On the damask-covered table lay napkins folded into butterflies; a row of crystal glasses stood beside each plate; sprays of poinsettias, like crimson shields, glowed in the light of the lamp.

‘Oh, I can’t believe this,’ said Ruth, trying to feel guilty and not succeeding. ‘It’s like a real and proper honeymoon. You shouldn’t have done it.’

‘It was no trouble,’ said Quin, handing her the menu sheet.

But in fact the bribing and manoeuvring to get a compartment at such notice had been considerable. He’d done it, wanting to give her an interval of comfort between the days of hiding in the museum and the poverty which awaited her in London, and now, as she bent over the gold-lettered menu, he summoned the waiter and instructed him to pull down the blinds, for they were approaching the familiar country round her beloved Grundlsee.

‘I ought to be a Hungarian countess,’ said Ruth, looking round at the other diners. ‘Or at least a spy.’ She had taken one look at the people getting onto the train and unpacked the page-turning frock. Even so, she felt badly underdressed — whereas Quin, in the mysterious way of Englishmen who return from the wilds, was immaculate in his dinner jacket. ‘Look at that woman’s stole — it’s a sable!’ she said under her breath.

‘I dare say she’d swop with you,’ said Quin, glancing at their middle-aged neighbour with her heavily painted face.

‘Because I’m with you, do you mean?’

‘No, not because of that,’ said Quin, but he did not elaborate.

‘Do you think you might help me to order?’ asked Ruth presently. ‘There seems to be so much.’

‘I was hoping you would suggest that,’ said Quin. ‘You see, I think we should pay particular attention to the wine.’

The wine, when it came, was presented by the sommelier who undid its napkin and held it out to Quin rather in the manner of a devoted midwife showing the head of a ducal household that he really has his longed-for son.

‘Try it,’ said Quin, exchanging a look of complicity with the waiter.

Ruth picked up her glass… sipped… closed her eyes… sipped again… opened them. For a moment it looked as though she was going to speak — to make an assessment, a comparison. But she didn’t. She just shook her head once, wonderingly — and then she smiled.

All Ruth’s acquaintances in Vienna knew that she could be silenced by music. It fell to Quinton Somerville, proffering a Pouilly-Fuissé, Vieux, to discover that she could be silenced too by wine.

‘You know, I shall be sorry to relinquish your education,’ he said. ‘You’re a natural.’

‘But we can still be friends, can’t we? Later, I mean, after the divorce?’

Quin did not answer. The wine seemed to have gone to Ruth’s hair rather than her head: the golden locks shone and glinted, tendrils curved round the collar of her dress — one had come to rest in a whorl above her left breast — and her eyes were soft with dreams. Quin had friends, but they did not really look like that.

Ruth’s vol-au-vents arrived: tiny, feather-light, filled with foie gras and oysters, and she had time only to eat and marvel and throw an occasional admiring glance at Quin, despatching with neat-fingered panache his flambéed crayfish. It was not until the plates were cleared and the finger bowls brought that she said: ‘About our wedding… about being married…’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you mind if we didn’t tell anyone about it? No one at all?’

Quin put down his glass. ‘No, not in the least; in fact I’d prefer it; I hate fusses.’ But he was surprised: the Bergers seemed a family singularly unsuited to secrets. ‘Will you be able to keep it from your parents?’

‘Yes, I think so. Later I suppose they’ll find out because I’ll have my own passport and it’ll be British, but we’d be divorced by then.’ She hesitated, wondering whether to say more. ‘You see, they’re very old-fashioned and they might find it difficult to understand that a marriage could mean absolutely nothing. And I couldn’t bear it if they tried to… make you…’ She shook her head and began again. ‘They’ve been very good to Heini; he practically lived with us, but I don’t think they altogether understand about him… my mother in particular. She might think that you… that we…’

No, she couldn’t explain to Quin how she dreaded her parents’ approval of this marriage, the gratitude which would embarrass him and make him feel trapped. To make Quin feel that he was still part of her life in any way after they landed would be an appalling return for his kindness.

The sommelier returned, beaming at Ruth as at a gifted pupil who has passed out of her confirmation class with honours. The wine list was produced again and consulted, and it was with regret that he and Quin agreed that in view of mademoiselle’s youth it would be unwise to proceed to the Margaux he would otherwise have recommended with the guinea fowl.

‘But there is a Tokay for the dessert, monsieur — an Essencia 1905 which is something special, je vous assure.’

‘Is this how you live in your home?’ asked Ruth when her new friend had gone. ‘Do you have a marvellous cook and a splendid wine cellar and all that?’

He shook his head. ‘I have a cellar, but my home is not in the least like this. It’s on a cold cliff by a grey sea in the most northern county in England — if you go any further you bump into Scotland.’

‘Oh.’ It did not sound very inviting. ‘And who lives in it when you aren’t there? Does it stand empty?’

‘I have an old aunt who looks after it for me. Or rather she’s a second cousin but I’ve always called her aunt and she’s a very aunt-like person. My parents died when I was small and then my grandfather, and she came to keep house after that. I’m greatly beholden to her because it means I can be away as much as I want and know that everything runs smoothly.’

‘Were you fond of her as a child?’

‘She left me alone,’ said Quin.

Ruth frowned, trying to embrace this concept. No one had ever left her alone — certainly not her mother or her father or her Aunt Hilda or the maids… Not even Uncle Mishak, teaching her the names of the plants. And as for Heini…

‘Did you like that?’ she asked. ‘Being left alone, I mean?’

Quin smiled. ‘It’s rather a British thing,’ he said. ‘We seem to like it on the whole. But don’t trouble yourself — I don’t think it would suit you.’

‘No, I don’t think it would. Miss Kenmore — my Scottish governess, do you remember her? — she was very fond of Milton and she taught me that sonnet where you do nothing. The last line is very famous and sad. They also serve who only stand and wait. I’m not very good at that.’