Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Yes, she thought; your solicitor. Not you.

‘I owe you so much,’ she said. ‘Not just that you got me out, but money. A lot of money. I must pay you back.’

‘Yes, you must do that,’ he said — and she turned to him in surprise. His voice was harsh and forbidding and she had not expected that. All along he had been so open-handed, so generous. ‘And you know what that means?’

‘That I must find a job and —’

‘That’s exactly what it doesn’t mean! The most stupid thing you can do is to take some trumpery job for short-term gain. I can just see you being a shop assistant or some such nonsense. The only sensible thing to do is to get yourself back to university as soon as possible. If University College has offered you a place you couldn’t do better. Remember there are all sorts of grants now for people in your position; the world is waking up at last to what is happening in Europe. Then when you’ve got a degree you can get a decent job and pay me back in your own good time.’

She digested this, but he noticed that she made no promise and he frowned, fearing some quixotic nonsense on her part — and Ruth, seeing the frown, remembered something else he had bestowed.

‘What about the ring?’ she asked. ‘What shall I do with it?’

‘Anything you like,’ he said indifferently. ‘Sell it, pawn it, keep it.’

Quelled, she looked down at her hand. ‘Anyway I’d better take it off before my parents ask questions. Or Heini, if he’s there already.’

She tugged at the ring, turned it, tugged again. ‘It’s stuck,’ she said, bewildered.

‘It can’t be,’ he said. ‘It slipped on so easily.’

‘Well, it is,’ she said, suddenly furious.

‘Perhaps your hands are hot.’

‘How could they be? It’s freezing!’ And indeed they were well clear of the harbour now and in a biting wind.

He laid a hand lightly on hers. ‘No, they seem to be cold, but I can’t see any chilblains. Try soap.’

She didn’t answer, but turned away and he watched her stamp off, her hair flying. She was away for a considerable time and when she returned and laid her hand on the rail once more, he was startled. Her ring finger was not just reddened, it looked as though it had been put through a mangle.

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Was it as bad as that?’

She nodded, still visibly upset, and, realizing that she had retreated into her Old Testamental world of omens and disasters, he left her alone.

When he spoke again, it was to say: ‘Look! There they are!’

And there, indeed, they were: the White Cliffs of Dover, the hymned and celebrated symbol of freedom. So much less impressive than foreigners always expected; not very high, not very white… yet Quin, who had made light often enough of this undistinguished piece of Cretaceous chalk, now found himself genuinely moved. After the horrors he had left behind in Europe, he was more thankful than he could have imagined to be home.

At the end of the Bergers’ second week in Belsize Park, Hilda was sacked. She had climbed onto a stepladder to dust an ornament on the top of Mrs Manfred’s bookcase, and the bookcase had fallen on top of her. It was the only one in the house, Mrs Manfred not being a reader, but glass-fronted, and a splinter had hit the dog.

No one was surprised, and no one blamed Mrs Manfred, but Hilda took it hard and stayed in bed, covered in zinc plaster, and wrote letters to the district officer in Bechuanaland enquiring after the Mi-Mi, which she did not post because she had no money for stamps and Leonie looked as though she would keel over if asked for anything at all.

Uncle Mishak, as the days passed and Ruth still did not come, got up at dawn and walked. He covered vast distances in his slow, countryman’s gait and he knew that this was risky, for in one month, or perhaps two, his shoes would wear out, but he had to be out of doors.

Mishak’s beloved wife was beyond hurt. He had brought a handful of earth from her grave into exile, but he needed nothing to remind him of Marianne. She was inside his soul.

But to Ruth, in the nightmare world his country had become, there could befall unthinkable harm. Mishak had not wanted to come to the Felsengasse when Marianne died. He appreciated Leonie’s kindness, but he had wanted to stay in the house he had built for his wife on the slopes of the Wienerwald. He had come to the flat to thank Leonie for her offer and to refuse it. But Leonie was out. It was the six-year-old Ruth, fresh from her bath, who had thrown her arms around him and said: ‘Oh, you’re coming to live, won’t it be wonderful! You’ll take me to the Prater, won’t you — I mean the Wurstlprater, not the healthy part with fresh air — and can we go and see the llamas at Schönbrunn? Inge says they spit and make you quite wet. And you’ll let me lean out of the window of the cable car when we go up to the Kahlenberg, won’t you? You won’t keep holding my legs?’

The blissful, self-seeking greed of a secure child who longs to gobble up the world was something he never forgot. Ruth was not sorry for him, she wanted him for her own purposes. Mishak changed his mind and came; they saw the llamas and more…

Now sitting in Kensington Gardens watching the children sail their boats, this quiet old man who preferred not to step on molehills in case there was someone at home, found that his knuckles had whitened on the sides of the bench, and knew that he would kill without compunction anyone who harmed his niece.

Professor Berger said little about his lost daughter. He went to Bloomsbury House each morning, he worked in the library each afternoon, but no one, now, would have taken him for a man of fifty-eight. Then one morning he took a bus to Harley Street where his sponsor, Dr Friedlander, had his dental practice.

‘I’m going back to Vienna,’ he said. ‘I’m going to find Ruth and I have to ask you to lend me the fare.’

No one knew what it cost him to ask for money. Since their arrival the Bergers had taken nothing from their sponsor in spite of frequent offers of help.

‘You can have the fare and welcome,’ said Friedlander. ‘I’ll lend it to you; I’ll give it to you. The poor Englanders are so grateful for someone who doesn’t pull out their teeth as soon as they sit down that they’re beating a path to my door. But you’re mad, Kurt. They won’t let you out again and then what’ll happen to Leonie? Is that what you imagine Ruth wants?’

‘I can’t do nothing,’ said the Professor, ‘it isn’t possible.’

‘Have you told Leonie that you mean to return?’

‘Not yet. There’s a big student transport coming on Thursday. I’ll wait till then, but after that…’

Leonie, meanwhile, continued to be good. She approached the psychoanalyst from Breslau and tried to persuade that black-haired, gloomy lady to let her help with the cooking so as to ensure a less lingering death for the bruised vegetables that were Fräulein Lutzenholler’s diet. She fetched Paul Ziller’s shirts from his room three houses down and washed them, and ironed his cummerbund, and she visited other émigrés in outlying suburbs. But at the end of the second week her body was beginning to take over. She had fits of dizziness, her skirt began to slip as she spectacularly lost weight. More frighteningly, she was finding it increasingly difficult to be good. She wanted to hit people, to throttle Miss Bates in her ever-dripping underwear. And if she stopped being good, the thin thread that bound her to a beneficent providence would snap and precipitate her daughter into hell.

Mrs Burtt, drying cups in the scullery behind the Willow Tea Rooms, was in a bad mood. She personally did not care for Jews, gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Commies, the world over, deserved everything they got. But the papers that morning had been even fuller than usual of nastiness — people in Berlin and Vienna being rounded up, old professors having to scrub the streets with toothbrushes — and though she didn’t even know where the Polish Corridor was and didn’t mind much what happened to the people in the Sudetenland, whoever they were, it was beginning to look as though something would have to be done about Hitler. Which brought her stomach lurching downwards yet again, because one of the people who would be doing it would be her nineteen-year-old son, Trevor, who that morning had said he fancied the air force.

The customers were in low spirits too, she could tell even without going out in front. They weren’t talking like they usually did, just reading the copies of Country Life the ladies now brought downstairs. It was odd how they fancied all those pictures of stately homes and the debutantes with the long necks who were going to marry the Honourable Somebody or Other. You wouldn’t think they’d be so keen, all those professors and doctors full of degrees and learning.

Still, the guggle cake had turned out a treat. Miss Maud had baked it last night and Miss Violet had iced it, and though it didn’t seem all that different to the rich sponge her auntie made except it was in a wiggly mould, the customers would be pleased. It had been Miss Violet’s idea to wait till Mrs Berger came and let her have the first slice on the house: sort of like launching a ship — and the least you could do with what was happening to her daughter.

Only Mrs Berger, this morning, was late.

Mrs Burtt was right. There was a new hopelessness in the air. Everyone knew that Ruth had not been on the student transport and that Professor Berger intended to go back to Vienna. Now they faced the long weekend, so dreaded by exiles, when every place that could help them was closed and even the libraries and cafés which sheltered them were barred.

Paul Ziller, trying to immerse himself in an article about the oiling of field guns, had dreamt yet again about his second violin, the plump, infuriating, curly-headed Klaus Biberstein whose terrible jokes had sent the quartet into groans of protest, whose unsuccessful pursuit of leggy blondes was a byword — and who only had to tuck his Amati under his chin to become a god. Ziller missed his cellist, now playing in a dance band in New York, and his viola player who was entirely Aryan and had stayed behind, but missing Biberstein was different because he was dead. Hearing the storm troopers come up the stairs to his fourth-floor flat he had shouted to the passers by to clear the pavement, and jumped.

Dr Levy was playing chess with the blond actor from the Burg Theatre, but it was hard to concentrate for today he knew with certainty that he would never resit his medical exams in English. At forty-two he was too old to begin again — and even if he passed, they would find some other regulation for keeping him from practising. Not that he blamed the medical profession. In Vienna the doctors had been just as repressive, banding together against émigrés from the East.

‘I’m going to take your knight,’ he said to von Hofmann, who had not been allowed to say Schweinehund or anything else in a film about the Great War. The actor’s union had objected, and anyway with another war perhaps on the way, no one wanted films about soldiers. They wanted Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and Deanna Durbin. They wanted ocean liners and Manhattan apartments furnished all in white — and who ever said Schweinehund in them?

The lady with the poodle entered, disappointing Mrs Weiss, with her bulging horsehair purse, who had hoped it was someone for whom she could buy a cake and tell about her daughter-in-law who that morning had forced open her bedroom window with some rubbish about rooms needing to be aired. Mrs Weiss had never allowed wet air into a room in which she slept and had told Moira so, and Georg (now called George) who should have taken his mother’s part, had slunk off to the garage and gone to work.

At the table by the hat stand the banker and his wife from Hamburg sat in silence, each reading a magazine. In Germany they had been a successful and well-established ménage à trois, but Lisa’s lover, a racially pure car salesman, had stayed behind and though he tried to take his place, the banker knew that he was failing. The walls of their small room were thin, the bed narrow — and afterwards, always, she sighed.

Then Leonie entered the café — and the sadness that was in all of them found a focus. There was no need to ask if there was any news. This was a Demeter who had given up all hope of rescuing her daughter from the Underworld. Ruth, like Persephone, was lost, and in the streets of North-West London, winter had come.

Supported by her husband and uncle, Leonie reached her table and sat down, but no one today did more than nod a greeting. Even a smile seemed intrusive.