Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘It’s hardly a secret. Everyone in the university here seems to make it their business.’

‘Could I ask why she is being sent away?’

The old man’s voice was dry and remote, but the distress behind the words was easy to hear and Quin, accustomed to thinking of himself as Berger’s underling, found himself increasingly uncomfortable.

‘I thought it was inadvisable that I should teach someone whose family I knew so well. It would lay your daughter open to charges that she was being favoured.’

The Professor smoothed his black hat. ‘Really? I have to say that if I had refused to teach the children of men I knew well in Vienna, I would have had many empty seats at my lectures.’

‘Perhaps. But British colleges are different. There is more gossip; they’re smaller.’

‘Professor Somerville, please tell me the truth,’ said Berger, and it was not till he heard this man, thirty years his senior, address him by his rank, that Quin realized how hurt the old man was. ‘Has Ruth done something wrong? Is she not equal to the course? We tried to teach her well, but —’

‘No, absolutely not. Ruth is an excellent student.’

‘Is it her manner then? Do you find her too forward? Reared among academics she perhaps appears lacking in respect?’

‘Not at all. She has already made more friends than one would have believed possible, both among the students and the staff.’

‘Then… can there have been… some kind of scandal? She is pretty, I know, but I would swear that she —’

Quin leant across his desk to speak with suitable emphasis. ‘Please believe me, sir, when I tell you that I am sending her away only because I think that the connection with your family, the debt I owe you —’

‘What debt?’ the other man interrupted sternly.

‘The symposium in Vienna, your hospitality. And the honorary degree.’

‘Yes, the degree. We heard from colleagues that you went to the ceremony, but not to the dinner.’

‘That’s correct. When I heard that you were not there —’ began Quin, and broke off. ‘I should have thanked you for arranging it, but I went straight up to Bowmont.’

There was a pause. Then Professor Berger, speaking slowly, looking at the ground, said: ‘My wife believes that it was you who helped Ruth in Vienna.’

Quin’s silence lasted a fraction too long. ‘Oh really? Why does she believe that?’

‘You may well ask,’ said the Professor, a trifle bitterly. ‘Normal thought processes are entirely foreign to Leonie’s nature. As far as I can gather it is because you dived into the Grundlsee to retrieve her sister-in-law’s monograph on the Mi-Mi. Also because you danced twice with her god-daughter, Franzi, at the University Ball. Franzi had very bad acne and a squint and it was because you singled her out and were kind to her that she agreed to have her eye operated on, and the acne disappeared of itself, and now she is married and has two abominably behaved children and has fortunately settled in New York.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t entirely follow you,’ said Quin apologetically.

‘There were other reasons with which I won’t bore you. Apparently you threw your hat over a Herrenpilz which Mishak was stalking, thereby preventing Frau Pollack from getting it. We always regarded the mushrooms near the house as ours and…’ He shook his head. ‘What a lost world that seems. But anyway, the gist of Leonie’s argument is that people don’t change; if you were kind then you would be kind now. If you found out that I was not at the university, you would look me up and find Ruth. That is what my wife thinks, not what I think, and I don’t want you to say anything you would like to keep to yourself. But it is possible that if Leonie is correct you might feel worried about having Ruth here. You might feel that she would become too attached to you.’

‘No, I don’t feel that.’

‘It would be natural, however. She has a very warm heart and she was always talking about you after you left us that summer. Not to mention the blue rabbit.’ And as Quin frowned in puzzlement: ‘The one you shot for her in the Prater. She went to bed with it for years and when its ear came off, we had to call in Dr Levy to perform surgery.’

‘I’d forgotten.’

‘You were young; the world was before you, it still is. Heaven forbid that you should cling to the past as we do. But what I wanted to say was that you need have no fears on that score… however fond Ruth is of you, however she might look up to you as…’

‘An older man,’ said Quin, raising his eyebrows.

Berger shrugged. ‘She is totally committed to her young cousin, to Heini Radek. Everything she does in the end is for him. So you see you would be quite safe. She will marry Radek and turn his music for him and choose the camellias for his buttonhole. It has been like that ever since he came to Vienna.’

‘In that case does it matter so much where she gets a degree? Or even whether?’

‘Perhaps I attach too much importance to learning: it is a characteristic of my race. Perhaps, too, I am one of those fathers who thinks no one is good enough for his daughter. Heini is a gifted boy, but I would have liked her to have a choice.’ He changed tack. ‘One thing is certain, Ruth won’t go to Tonbridge. She spent the morning at the Employment Exchange and now she is writing letters of application and trying not to cry.’

‘I’m sure she’ll see reason.’

‘Allow me to know my own daughter,’ said Berger with dignity. He unhooked his walking stick, ready to leave. ‘Well, you must do what you think right. I wouldn’t have been pleased if someone had told me how to run my department. I’m going to Manchester for a few weeks and I’d hoped —’

‘Ah yes!’ Quin seized the change of subject with alacrity. ‘You’ll enjoy the Institute. Feldberg’s a splendid fellow — but don’t let that skinflint of an accountant do you out of the proper fee. There’s a perfectly adequate endowment for classification work.’

‘I was not aware that I had mentioned my appointment at the Institute,’ said Professor Berger, looking at him sternly. ‘Nor that I had been asked to classify the Howard Collection.’

Taken, so to speak, from the rear while defending his flank, Quin shuffled some papers on his desk.

‘Things get about,’ he murmured.

‘So you arranged the job in Manchester? You asked them to get in touch with me? I should have guessed that.’

‘Well, for heaven’s sake, you’ve done nothing to help yourself since you came. A man of your eminence sitting in the public library next to a tramp! Why didn’t you contact the people you’ve helped in your time? I only mentioned your name — Feldberg didn’t even know you were in England!’

Berger had put on his hat, taken up his walking stick. When he spoke again, he was smiling. ‘It is strange, I have so many degrees — so very many — and my wife failed even her diploma in flower arranging because she always put too many flowers in the vase, and yet you see she was right. People don’t change.’

Only at the door did he turn, his voice grave once more, his face showing its utter fatigue. ‘Let the child stay, Quinton,’ he said, using the name he had used all those years ago. ‘It’s less than a year after all, and who knows what is in store for us.’ And very quietly: ‘She will not trouble you.’

But in the end it was not Berger’s plea which secured a reprieve for Ruth, nor the intervention of the students. It was not even the obvious pleasure which Lady Plackett had shown in getting rid of a girl who did not fit into the general mould. It was a poster by the newspaper kiosk Quin passed on the way home, announcing: HITLER IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA. PICTURES.

The pictures, when Quin bought the paper, showed the Führer grinning and garlanded with flowers, the swastika banners hanging from the buildings as they had done in Vienna. Austria in March, Czechoslovakia in October… could anyone believe it would stop there?

The average life of an infantry officer in 1918 had been six weeks. In the navy he might expect to last longer, but not much. When war came, as it surely must, would anyone mind who was married to whom and for how long?

‘O’Malley says he’s got no room,’ was Quin’s way of making his decision known to Dr Felton. ‘Tell Miss Berger she can stay.’

And Roger nodded, and neither then nor later revealed what he had just read in the University News: that O’Malley was in hospital with concussion after a car crash and not in a position to say anything at all.

In the second week of October, Leonie’s prayers on behalf of the nursery school teacher were answered. Miss Bates became engaged to be married — a triumph of camiknickers over personality — and went home to Kettering to prepare her trousseau. Her room on the ground floor back thus became vacant and Paul Ziller moved into it which made everybody happy. Ziller no longer had to practise in the cloakroom of the Day Centre but could stay at home; Leonie could get hold of his shirts to wash whenever it suited her and Uncle Mishak had direct access to the garden.

Mishak had not found it necessary to return the piece of land he had claimed at the time of the Munich crisis. They had told him to Keep Calm and Dig and he continued to do so. Since he couldn’t afford to buy plants or fertilizer, his activities were limited, but not as limited as one might expect. The old lady two doors down still owned her house and, in exchange for help with the digging, she gave Mishak cuttings and seeds from her herbaceous border. Nor were Mishak’s rambles through London’s parks without reward, for he carried his Swiss army knife in his pocket, and a number of brown paper bags. No more than Dr Elke’s tapeworms would have destroyed the host that nourished them would Mishak have caused harm to the plants he encountered, but a little discreet pruning often brought him back enriched by a cutting of philadelphus or a seedhead of clematis. And if there was no money for fertilizer, there was a plentiful supply of compost at Number 27 and the neighbouring houses, beginning with the remains of Fräulein Lutzenholler’s soups.

Hilda, meanwhile, had made a breakthrough in the British Museum, braving the inner sanctum of the Keeper of the Anthropology Collection and confronting him with her views on the Mi-Mi drinking cup.

‘It is not from the Mi-Mi,’ said Hilda, peering earnestly through her spectacles, and gave chapter and verse.

The Keeper had not agreed, but he had not ejected her. That refugees were not allowed to work was a misapprehension. No one minded them working, what they were not allowed to do was get paid. Her credentials established, Hilda spent happy hours in the dusty basement of the museum, sorting the artefacts sent back by travellers in the previous century, for this woman who spelled death to the most hardened floor polisher, could handle the clay figurines and ankle bracelets she encountered in her profession with delicacy and skill.

A certain cautious hope thus pervaded Number 27 during October, the more so as Ruth, now re-established at college, was obviously loving her work. Even the gloomy Fräulein Lutzenholler had a new occupation, for Professor Freud had at last left Vienna and been installed in a house a few streets away. She did not expect to be noticed by Freud, (who was, in any case, extremely old and ill) because she had spoken well of Freud’s great rival, Jung, at a meeting of the Psychoanalytical Society in 1921, but she liked just to stand in front of his house and look, as Cézanne had looked at Mont St Victoire.

With both Hilda and the psychoanalyst out of the way, and her husband busy preparing for his assignment in Manchester, Leonie could get through the housework unimpeded, but as the weather grew colder, she suffered a domestic sorrow which, though it caused her shame, she shared with Miss Violet and Miss Maud.

‘I live with mice,’ she said, her blue eyes clouding, for she felt the stigma keenly.

It was true. Mice, as the autumn advanced, were coming indoors in droves. They lived vibrant lives behind the skirting boards of Number 27, they squeaked in marital ecstasy behind the wainscot. Leonie covered everything edible, she scrubbed, she stalked and bashed with broomsticks, she bought poison out of her meagre allowance from the refugee committee — and they thrived on it.

‘What about traps?’ said Miss Maud. ‘We could lend you some.’

But traps needed cheese, and cheese was expensive. ‘That landlord,’ said Leonie, stirring her coffee, ‘I have said and said he must bring the rat-catching man, and he does nothing.’