Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

In the kitchen, Miss Violet fetched the cake knife, Miss Maud cut a wedge from the virgin Guglhupf, Mrs Burtt fetched a plate — and the procession set off.

‘With the compliments of the management,’ said Miss Maud, setting the plate down in front of Leonie.

Leonie looked and understood. She took in the sacrifice of principle, the honour they did her. Then she breathed once deeply, like a swimmer about to go under. Her face crumpled, her shoulders sagged — and she burst into the most dreadful and heart rending sobs. It was weeping made incarnate: once begun it was impossible to stop. Professor Berger took her hand, but for the first time in her life, she pushed him away. She wanted to rid herself of tears and die.

In the café, no one else made a sound. Dr Levy did not offer professional help; von Hofmann, usually so gallant, did not proffer his handkerchief. And Miss Maud and Miss Violet looked at each other, horrified by what they had done.

Then suddenly Paul Ziller, at a table by the window, pushed back his chair.

‘Oh dear!’ said Miss Maud.

It was a mild remark, coming from the daughter of a general, for the damage was considerable. The coffee pot on the Bergers’ table knocked over, staining the cloth, three willow-pattern plates broken… Mrs Berger’s chair, as she pushed it back, had fallen on to Dr Levy’s scrambled eggs. Nor had the poodle found it possible to remain uninvolved. Barking furiously, he had collided with the hat stand which had keeled over, missing the pottery cat but not the bowl of potpourri on the windowsill, nor the pretty blue and white ashtray the ladies had brought from Gloucestershire.

In the middle of the wreckage stood Leonie, holding her daughter in her arms. Except that this wasn’t holding it was fusion. The tears she still shed were Ruth’s tears also; no human agency could have separated those two figures. Even for her husband, Leonie could not relinquish Ruth… could only draw him closer with a briefly freed hand. There had been joy in the moment of marriage, joy in childbirth — but this was a joy like no other in the world.

Uncle Mishak was the first member of the family to notice the devastation: Miss Violet dabbing at the tables, Miss Maud picking up pieces of crockery, Mrs Burtt on her knees. To add to the chaos, Aunt Hilda, who had leapt from her bed after redirecting Ruth to the café, had fallen over the bucket into which the ladies were wringing their cloths.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Leonie, emerging, and did indeed try hard to embrace the concept of sorryness and to calculate the damage.

It was now that Mrs Weiss rose. Her raddled face was bathed in an unaccustomed dignity, her voice was firm.

‘I will pay!’ she announced. ‘I will pay for every-think.’

And she did pay. The ladies accepted her offer; everyone understood that the old lady had to be part of what was happening. Pound notes and half-crowns, shillings and sixpences tumbled out of the dreadful purse made of the scalped hair of East Prussian horses. She paid not for one coffee pot, but for two: not for three willow-pattern plates, but six. For the first time since she had come to England, the purse bulging with her daughter-in-law’s conscience money was empty; the clasp clicked together without catching on the unshed largesse. It was Mrs Weiss’s finest hour and not one person in the Willow Tea Rooms grudged it to her.

‘So!’ said Leonie, some twenty minutes later. ‘Now tell us. How did you get here? How did you come?’

The tables had been cleared, clean cloths spread, fresh coffee brought. Though she found it necessary to sit so that her shoulder touched Ruth’s, Leonie was now able to listen.

Ruth had rehearsed her story. Sitting between her parents, smiling across at Mishak and her friends from Vienna, she said: ‘Someone rescued me. An Englishman who helps people to escape.’

‘Like the Scarlet Pimpernel?’ enquired Paul Ziller, impressed.

‘Yes, a bit like that. Only, I mustn’t ever get in touch with him again. None of us must. That was part of the bargain.’

‘There was nothing illegal?’ asked her father, stern even in the midst of his great happiness. ‘No forged papers or anything like that?’

‘No, nothing illegal; I swear it on Mozart’s head,’ said Ruth, and the Professor was satisfied, aware of the position the composer’s head occupied in his daughter’s life.

Leonie, however, was not satisfied at all. ‘But this is awful! How can we thank him? How can we tell him what he has done for us?’ she cried. A multitude of deeds she could have performed in gratitude — a plethora of baked cakes, embroidered shirts, letters of ecstatic appreciation — rose up before her. She wanted to rush out into the street after this unknown benefactor, to wash his feet as Mary Magdalene had done with Jesus.

‘It has to be like that,’ said Ruth, ‘otherwise we might endanger other people that he could rescue’ — and aware that her mother was having difficulties, she quoted Miss Kenmore’s favourite sonnet. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ said Ruth, without, however, impressing Leonie who was not of the stuff that those who only stand and wait are made.

It was only now that Ruth, who had wanted to give her first moments wholly to her parents, dared to ask the question she had held back.

‘And Heini?’ she said.

It was all right. Not aware that she had crossed her hands on her breast in the age-old gesture of apprehension, she saw her father smile.

‘All is well, my dear,’ said the Professor. ‘He’s still in Budapest but we’ve had a letter. He is coming.’

It was very quiet in the café after the Bergers had left. One by one, the other customers got up to go, but the three men who had known the family in Vienna sat on for a while.

‘So Persephone has returned,’ said the actor.

Dr Levy nodded, but his face was grave and the other two exchanged glances for the doctor had his own Persephone: a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed and silly girl whom he nevertheless loved. Hennie had been glad enough to marry the distinguished consultant she had ogled while still a junior nurse, but she seemed in no hurry to join him in exile.

‘Perhaps a little celebration?’ suggested Ziller, for it did not seem to him a good idea that Levy should return alone to his The Diseases of the Knee.

‘We could just see what’s on,’ said von Hofmann.

And what was on, as they found when they had crossed the square and made their way uphill towards the Odeon, was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat — and without further consultation the three eminent gentlemen, none of whom could afford it, entered the cinema — and Elysium.

While back in the kitchen of the Willow Tea Rooms, Miss Maud and Miss Violet pronounced judgement.

‘A very nicely behaved girl,’ said Miss Maud.

‘Father would have liked her,’ said Miss Violet.

There was no higher accolade, but as so often Mrs Burtt managed to get the last word.

‘And pretty as a peach!’

When he was not at Bowmont or on his travels, Quin lived in a flat on the Chelsea Embankment. On the first floor of a tall Queen Anne house, it had a trellised ironwork verandah from which one looked, over the branches of a mulberry tree, at London’s river. The walls of his drawing room were lined with books, a Constable watercolour hung over the fireplace, Persian rugs were scattered on the parquet floor, but no one visiting Quin ever lingered over the furnishings. Without exception, they moved over to the French windows and stood looking out on the panorama of the Thames.

‘You always live by water, don’t you, darling?’ a woman had said to him: ‘Very Freudian, don’t you think?’

Quin did not think. He liked Chelsea; the little shops in the streets that ran back from the river; greengrocers and shoemakers and picture framers, and the pubs where the bargees still drank, and though he did not go to his lectures at Thameside by boat, it amused him to think that it was possible.

Just as a man’s friends are those who get there first and refuse to go away, so his servants are those who have installed themselves and become, for one reason or another, impossible to dismiss. Lockwood had been butler at Bowmont and should not have been shopping and cooking and valeting Quin, a job which meant a considerable loss of salary and prestige. Nevertheless, since Quin at the age of eight had brought his first discoveries up from the beach and demanded that the Somerville Museum of Natural History be set up in the stables, Lockwood had regarded the boy as his responsibility. This involved no show of amiability on the butler’s part. He was a tall, thin man with a Neanderthal cranium and mud-coloured eyes and there were those who maintained that Quin’s unmarried state was due to the fact that Lockwood had dismembered all aspiring Mrs Somervilles and thrown the pieces in the river.

Quin arrived in the middle of the afternoon, having dropped Ruth off in Belsize Park. Though he had been away five months, Lockwood’s greeting was measured.

‘Saw you on the newsreel,’ he said, and carried Quin’s suitcase to the bedroom.

But the furniture glowed with polish, the post was stacked in neat piles, there were fresh flowers in the vases, and now he returned with the tea tray and a plate of muffins.

‘Will you be dining at home, then?’ When he left Bowmont, Lockwood had dropped the obsequious manner of an upper servant and now addressed Quin as if he was a wayward, but gifted, nephew.

‘Yes, I will, Lockwood. That isn’t boeuf en daube I can smell, by any chance?’

Lockwood bared his teeth in what he regarded as a smile and agreed that it was. Knowing that he had made his servant happy, for Lockwood was a formidable cook, Quin turned to the post. There were innumerable invitations from hostesses who were presenting their daughters, or giving dances for them, or making up little parties for Ascot and Henley, and the knowledge that he had missed most of these without the necessity of refusing, was pleasant. Though his professional mail went to the university, there was a letter from Saskatchewan offering him the Chair of Zoology and the usual missives from people who had found bones in their gardens and were sure they were mammoths or mastodons. Among the list of names of those who had telephoned, that of Mademoiselle Fleury, who was back from Paris, was prominent.

But it was not Claudine Fleury whom Quin now telephoned, though the thought of her brought a smile to his face; it was his long-suffering deputy and senior lecturer at Thameside, Dr Roger Felton.

Quin had not intended to accept an academic post. It was the journeys, the freedom to follow clues wherever they turned up that he valued in his professional life, and though he kept a room in the Natural History Museum, he had resisted all offers of a chair.

The man who had changed this was Lord Charlefont, the Vice Chancellor of Thameside, an enlightened despot who had changed Thameside from a worthy but undistinguished college of further education into a university with its own charter and a reputation throughout the country. Under Charlefont’s reign, Thameside had merged with an art college in Pimlico, taken over the Institute of Natural Sciences and moved into a gracious Palladian building on the south bank of the river which he had wrested from the Ministry of Works.

‘I know you don’t need the job,’ he had said, offering Quin the Chair of Vertebrate Zoology, ‘but we need you. I want excellence; I want someone with an international reputation. There shouldn’t be any trouble about going off on journeys — I can always find someone to fill in for a term or two — and I think you’d like teaching.’

So Quin had accepted, specifying a personal chair at a lower salary and no administration, and the arrangement had worked well. He found he did like teaching; in Roger Felton he had a willing and efficient deputy, and the field course he ran at Bowmont had become a model of its kind. Moreover, in Lord Charlefont he discovered not only the ideal employer but a friend. The Vice Chancellor’s Lodge at Thameside was built into the main courtyard and Charlefont kept open house. A first-year student with problems was as welcome as the most eminent academic and Quin had enjoyed some of the best conversations of his life in the long drawing room with its terrace on the river.

But six months ago, just before Quin left for India, Charlefont had had a heart attack and died within hours. A good end for a strong and active man, but a blow to Thameside and to Quin. Of his successor, Desmond Plackett, who had spent ten years in the Indian Educational Service and been rewarded with a knighthood, Quin, as yet, knew nothing.