Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘I’ll never get through,’ she said miserably. ‘I can’t even tell the difference between Pleistocene and plasticine.’

‘Yes you can… But, Pilly, why do you have to take that option? I mean, there are rather a lot of names.’

Pilly looked depressed and threw another crust into the water. ‘It’s to do with Professor Somerville.’

There was a pause. Then: ‘How is that? How is it to do with him?’

‘My father thinks he’s the perfect Renaissance man,’ said Pilly. ‘You know, he does everything. My father saw him on a newsreel about three years ago when he came back from Java with the skull of that Neanderthal lady and some other time when he was riding through Nepal on a yak. Or maybe it was a mule. You see my father had to go into a factory at fourteen and he never had a chance to do a degree or travel — that’s why he’s pushing me through college though I told him I was too stupid. And Professor Somerville is the sort of person he wants to have been.’

‘I see.’

‘He cuts all the articles about him out of the National Geographic. And then there’s the sailing — Professor Somerville won some race in a dinghy with the sea banging about over his head and my father liked that too. And he’s a Great Lover, like the Medicis, though I don’t suppose he poisons people so much.’

‘How do your parents know he’s a Great Lover?’

Pilly sighed. ‘It’s in the papers. In the gossip columns. An actress called Tansy Mallet chased him all over Egypt and now he’s got some stunningly beautiful Frenchwoman he takes to the theatre — and everyone’s always trying to get him to take them on field trips. You wait till he gets back — his lectures are always absolutely packed with people from the outside. They pay the university ten pounds a year and they can go to any lecture, but it’s his they go to.’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘And there’s Bowmont too.’

‘What’s Bowmont?’

‘It’s where Professor Somerville lives. You’ll see when we go on the field course.’

‘I’m not going on the field course,’ said Ruth. ‘But what’s so special about Bowmont? I thought it was just a house with no central heating?’

Pilly shook her head. ‘It can’t be because Turner painted it.’

‘Well, he painted a lot of things, didn’t he? Cows and sunsets and shipwrecks?’

‘Maybe — but everyone wants to go there all the same. Oh, Ruth, I’ll never do it. All those names — Jurassic and Mesozoic and on and on…’

‘You will do it,’ said Ruth, setting her jaw. ‘We’ll make lists — a list for the bathroom, a list for the lavatory… I expect you’ve got a lot of bathrooms so you can have a lot of lists and I’ll hear you every day. They’re only names like people being called Cynthia or George.’

The weather was fine that first week at Thameside and for Ruth everything was a delight. Dr Felton’s lectures, the first rehearsal of the Bach Choir which cost nothing to join and sent the sound of the B Minor Mass soaring over the campus. She coached Pilly, she made friends with a Ph.D. student in the German Department and persuaded him that Rilke, when properly spoken, was not a madman but a poet — and she was faithful to the sheep.

Yet if her happiness was real, it could be fractured in an instant by a reminder of the past. One afternoon she was crossing the courtyard on the way back from a seminar when she heard, coming from a window of the Arts Block the sound of the Schubert Quartet in E flat. She stood still for a moment, making sure that she was right, that it was the Zillers who were playing, and it was: they always took the Adagio with that heavenly slowness which had nothing to do with solemnity. And now the second violin lifted itself above the others to repeat the motif and she could see Biberstein’s dark curls standing on end and his chin pressed against his fiddle as he looked into the eye of Schubert, or of God.

Then she ran across the grass, through the archway, up the stairs… She knew, of course, before she opened the door of the Common Room, she knew it was impossible. Time had not run backward, she was not crossing the Johannesgasse towards the windows of the Conservatoire where the Zillers practised. But there were a few seconds while her body believed what her brain knew to be impossible — and then she saw the horn of the gramophone and the members of the Music Club sitting in a circle — and knew that the past was past, and Biberstein was dead.

It was on the following day that Verena was gracious enough to inform her fellow students that Professor Somerville would be back to give his Palaeontology lecture on Monday.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Sam.

‘Certainly I’m sure,’ said Verena. ‘He is to dine with us that night.’

‘My God, Ruth, what is the matter with your hair?’ said Leonie as her daughter appeared for breakfast on the morning that Professor Somerville was due to give his first lecture.

‘I have plaited it,’ said Ruth with dignity.

‘Plaited it? You have tortured it; you will be skinned, pulling it back like that.’

But Ruth, in pursuit of a total unobtrusiveness, said that she felt quite comfortable and asked if she could borrow Hilda’s raincoat which was black, mannish and in its dotage. With the collar turned up and a beret jammed on her head, she felt certain she could escape Professor Somerville’s notice until he wished to acknowledge her, and ignoring her mother, who said that she looked like a streetwalker in an experimental film by Pabst, she made her way to college. There she came under attack again. Janet pointed out that it wasn’t raining, and Sam asked sadly if her hairstyle was permanent. But if Ruth’s appearance was odd, her behaviour was odder.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Pilly as Ruth edged into the lecture theatre like the musk rat Chu Chundra in Kipling’s The Jungle Book, who never ventured into the middle of a room.

‘Yes, I am. Well, I feel a bit sick actually, so I think I’ll sit in the back row today in case I have to go out. But you go on down and get a good seat.’

This was a stupid remark. Where Ruth went, there Pilly went too, and presently Janet, Sam and Huw came to join them.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sam, resigning himself to being a long way from his idol. ‘You can always hear what he says.’

The lecture theatre was packed. Not only students from other years but from other disciplines had come to listen, and the external students Pilly had described: housewives, old ladies, and a red-faced colonel with a handlebar moustache.

‘Ah, here comes Verena,’ said Janet. ‘Could those curvaceous sausages on her forehead be in honour of the Prof?’

Verena did indeed have a new hairstyle, though the suit she wore was tailor-made as always, and the high-necked blouse severe. Descending the tiered lecture theatre with her crocodile skin briefcase, she found herself faced with an unexpected hitch. Her seat in the centre of the front row was filled.

There had been some unpleasantness about the college porter who was supposed to place the Reserved notice for Verena before lectures. He had complained to the bursar, saying that this was not part of his duties, and the bursar, who was probably in the pay of the unions, had supported him. So far this had not mattered since everyone now understood what was due to her, but today, with the place full of outsiders, the entire row was packed.

Anyone else might be deterred, but not Lady Plackett’s daughter.

‘Excuse me,’ she said — and holding the briefcase aloft, she passed along the row, stopping at the point where she was directly under the rostrum and facing the carafe of water. This was where she always sat and where she intended most particularly to sit today.

With her behind poised expectantly, Verena waited, ready to sink into her appointed place — and did not wait in vain. Such was the authority, the breeding exerted even by her posterior, that the woman on the right edged closer to her neighbour, the student on the left, with only a mutter or two, pushed himself against his friend — and with a polite ‘Thank you’, Verena sat down, opened her briefcase, took out the vellum notepad and the gold-nibbed fountain pen, and was ready to begin.

Quin entered the lecture theatre, put a single sheet of paper on the desk, moved the carafe out of the way, looked up to say ‘Good morning’ — and instantly saw Ruth, sitting as low as it was possible in the back row. She was partly obscured by a broad-shouldered man in the row in front of her, but the triangular face, the big smudged eyes, stood out perfectly clearly, as did an area of nakedness where her hair wasn’t. For an instant he thought she had cut it off and felt an irregularity in his heart beat as if his parasympathetic nerves had intended to send a message of protest and thought better of it, partly because it was none of his business, and partly because she hadn’t. Evidently she expected rain, for he could see the pigtail vanishing into her coat, and was reminded of the museum in Vienna and the water dropping from her hair the day he fetched her for their wedding.

These thoughts, if that was what they were, lasted a few seconds at the most, and were followed by another, equally brief, as he wondered why University College was sending their students to his lectures and made a note to stop them doing so. Then he picked up a piece of chalk, went to the blackboard — and began.

Ruth never forgot the next hour. If someone had told her that she would follow a lecture on ancestor descendant sequences in fossil rocks as though it was a bed-time story — as riveting, as extraordinary, at times as funny, as any fairy tale — she would not have believed them.

The subject was highly technical. Quin was reassessing the significance of Rowe’s work on Micraster in the English chalk, relating it to Darwin’s theories and the new ideas of Julian Huxley. Yet as he spoke — never raising his voice, making only an occasional gesture with those extraordinarily expressive hands, she felt a contact that was almost physical. It was as if he was behind her, nudging her forward towards the conclusion he was about to reach, letting her get there almost before him, so that she felt, yes… yes, of course it has to be like that!

All around Ruth, the others sat equally rapt. Sam had laid down his pen; few of the students took more than an occasional note because to miss even one word was unthinkable — and anyway they knew that afterwards they would read and read and even, somehow, make the necessary journeys… that they would become part of the adventure that was unfolding up there on the dais. Only Verena still wrote with her gold-nibbed pen on her vellum pad — wrote and wrote and wrote.

Halfway through, pausing for a moment, raking his hair in a characteristic gesture of which he was unaware, Quin found himself looking once more directly at Ruth. She had given up her Chu Chundra attitude and was leaning forward, one finger held sideways across her mouth in what he remembered as her listening attitude. The pigtail, too, had given up anonymity: a loop had escaped over her collar like a bracelet of Scythian gold.

Then he found his word and the lecture continued.

At exactly five minutes to the hour, he began on the recapitulation, laid the unravelled controversy once more before them — and was done.

He had not taken more than a few steps before he was surrounded. Old students came to welcome him back, new ones to greet him. The red-faced colonel reminded him that they had met in Simla, shy housewives hovered.

Verena waited quietly, not wishing to be lost in the crowd. Only when the Professor finally made his way to the door did she intercept him with a few powerful strides and gave him news which she knew must please him.

‘I am,’ she said, ‘Verena Plackett!’

‘What do you mean, you’ve admitted her?’

Dr Felton sighed. He’d been so pleased to see the Professor a couple of hours ago. Somerville’s arrival lifted the spirits of everyone in the department; the breeze of cheerfulness and enterprise he brought was almost tangible, yet now Felton rose, as if in respect to Quin’s rank, and wondered what was supposed to be the matter.

‘I’ve told you… sir,’ he began — and Quin frowned, for the ‘sir’ meant that he had put Roger down harder than he had intended. ‘University College gave her place to someone and they rang round to see if anyone could have her. I thought we might squeeze her in and I knew you were in favour of taking refugees wherever possible.’

‘Not this one. She must go.’