Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

The committee was due to meet on a Saturday morning just two weeks before the beginning of the course. Felton had already canvassed members from other departments and found only goodwill. The fund was healthily in credit, and everyone who knew Ruth Berger (and a surprising number of people did) thought it an excellent idea that it should be used to send her to Northumberland. It was thus with confidence and hope that Roger walked into the meeting.

He had reckoned without the new Vice Chancellor. Lord Charlefont had steered committees along at a spanking pace. Sir Desmond, whose degree was in Economics, thrived on detail: every test tube to be purchased, every box of chalk came under his scrutiny and at one o’clock, before the question of the Hardship Fund could be fully discussed, the committee was adjourned for lunch.

‘Do you really have to go back?’ asked Lady Plackett, who had hoped to persuade her husband to attend a private view.

‘Yes, I do. Felton from the Zoology Department is trying to get one of the students on to Somerville’s field course. He wants to use the Hardship Fund for that. It’s a very moot point, it seems to me — there’s a precedent involved. To what extent can not going on a field trip be classed as hardship? We shall have to debate this very carefully.’

‘It’s not the Austrian girl he wants the money for? Miss Berger?’

Sir Desmond reached for the agenda. ‘It doesn’t say so, but it seems possible. Why?’

‘If so, I would regard it as most inadvisable. As you know, Professor Somerville wanted to send her away — there was some connection with her family in Vienna. He was obviously aware of the danger of favouritism. And Dr Felton has been paying her special attention ever since, so Verena tells me.’

‘You mean —’ Sir Desmond looked up sharply.

‘No, no; nothing like that. Just bending the regulations to accommodate her. But if it got about that a fund intended strictly for cases of hardship was being used to give an unnecessary jaunt to a girl who is already here on sufferance, I think it could lead to all sorts of gossip and speculation. Better, surely, to keep the money for British students who are genuinely needy?’

‘Well, it’s a point,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘Certainly any kind of irregularity would be most unfortunate. She is a girl who has already attracted rather a lot of attention.’

‘And not of a favourable kind,’ said Lady Plackett.

‘What is it?’ asked Quin. He had just returned from the museum and was preparing to work late on an article for Nature.

‘That creep, Plackett.’ Roger’s spectacle frames looked as though they had been dipped in pitch. ‘He’s blocked the Hardship Fund — we can’t use it to get Ruth to Bowmont. It would set an unfortunate precedent if any student felt they could travel at the college’s expense!’

‘Ah. That’s probably Lady Plackett’s doing. She doesn’t care for Ruth.’ Quin, to his own surprise, found that he was very angry. He would have said that he did not want Ruth at Bowmont. Ruth being ‘invisible’ was bad enough here at Thameside — at Bowmont it would be more than he could stand, but the pettiness of the new regime was hard to accept.

‘Does Ruth want to go?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t the famous Heini due any day?’

‘Not till the beginning of November; we’ll be back by then,’ said Roger. He stared gloomily into the tank of slugs. ‘She wants to go right enough, whatever she says.’

‘You’re very keen to have her, you and Elke? Because she will benefit?’

‘Yes… well, damn it, you run the course, you know it’s the best in the country. But I wanted her to see the coast. I owe her…’

‘You what?’

Roger shrugged. ‘I know you think we make a pet of her — Elke and Humphrey and I… but she gives it all back and —’

‘Gives what back?’

Roger shook his head. ‘It’s difficult to explain. You prepare a practical… good heavens, you know what it’s like. You’re here half the night trying to find decent specimens and then the technician’s got flu and there aren’t enough Petri dishes… And then she comes and stares down the microscope as though this is the first ever water flea, and suddenly you remember what it was all about — why you started in this game in the beginning. If her work was sloppy it would be different, but it isn’t. She deserved more than you gave her for that last test.’

‘I gave her eighty-two.’

‘Yes. And Verena Plackett eighty-four. Not that it’s my business. Well, I reckon nothing can be done, not with you falling over backwards not to favour her because she sat on your knee in nappies.’

‘I do nothing of the sort, but you must see that I can’t interfere — it would only do Ruth harm.’ And as his deputy still stood there, looking disconsolate: ‘How are things at home? How is Lillian?’

Roger sighed. ‘No baby yet. And she won’t adopt. If only I hadn’t asked Humphrey to supper!’ Dr Fitzsimmons had meant well when he had told Roger’s wife about the drop in temperature a woman could expect before her fertile period, but he didn’t have to watch Lillian come out of the bathroom bristling with thermometers and refusing him his marital rights until the crucial time. ‘I shall be glad to go north for a while, I can tell you.’

‘I shall be glad to have you there.’

Ruth was not disappointed in the findings of the Finance Committee because she did not know of Dr Felton’s efforts on her behalf. But if she held firm over her decision to stay behind, she was perfectly ready to join in the speculations about Verena Plackett’s pyjamas.

For Verena, of course, was going to Northumberland, and what she would wear in bed in the dormitory above the boathouse occupied much of her fellow students’ thoughts. Janet thought she would turn into her wooden bunk in see-through black lace.

‘In case the Professor comes up the ladder at midnight with a cranial cast.’

Pilly thought a pair of striped pyjamas was more likely, with a long cord which she would instruct Kenneth Easton to tie into a double knot before retiring. Ruth, on the other hand, slightly obsessed by Verena’s pristine lab coat which she deeply envied, suggested gathered calico, heavily starched.

‘So you will hear her crackle in the night,’ she said.

But in fact none of them were destined to see Verena’s pyjamas, for the Vice Chancellor’s daughter had other plans.

If Leonie each night looked eagerly to Ruth for her account of the day, and Mrs Weiss’s dreaded ‘Vell?’ began her interrogation in the Willow Tea Rooms, Lady Plackett waited with more self-control, but no less avidity, for Verena’s news.

Verena reported with restraint about the staff, but where the students were concerned, she permitted herself to speak freely. Thus Lady Plackett learnt about the unsuitable — not to say lewd — behaviour of Janet Carter in the back of motor cars, the dangerously radical views of Sam Marsh, and the ludicrous gaffes made by Priscilla Yarrowby who had confused the jaw bone of a mammoth with that of a mastodon.

‘And Ruth Berger persists in helping her, of which one cannot approve,’ said Verena. ‘It is no kindness to inadequate students to push them on. They should be weeded out for their own sake and find their proper level.’

Lady Plackett agreed with this, as all thinking people must. ‘She seems to be a very disruptive influence, the foreign girl,’ she said.

She had not been pleased when Professor Somerville had reinstated Ruth. There was something… excessive… about Ruth Berger. Even the way she smelled the roses in the quadrangle was… unnecessary, thought Lady Plackett, who had watched her out of the window. But on one point Verena was able to set her mother’s mind at rest. Ruth was not liked by the Professor; he seemed to avoid her; she never spoke in seminars.

‘And she is definitely not coming to Bowmont,’ said Verena, who was unaware of her mother’s interference in the matter of the Hardship Fund.

‘Ah, yes, Bowmont,’ said Lady Plackett thoughtfully. ‘You know, Verena, I find that I cannot be happy about you cohabiting in a dormitory with girls who do… things… in the backs of motor cars.’

‘I confess I have been worrying about that,’ said Verena. ‘Of course, one wants to be democratic.’

‘One does,’ agreed Lady Plackett. ‘But there are limits.’ She paused, then laid a soothing hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I have had an idea.’

Verena lifted her head. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if it is the same as mine.’

‘Look at him,’ said Frances Somerville bitterly, handing her binoculars to her maid. ‘Gloating. Rubbing his hands.’

Martha took the glasses and trained them on the middle-aged gentleman with the intellectual forehead, making his way along the cliff path towards the headland.

‘He’s writing in his book,’ she said, as though the taking of notes was further proof of Mr Ferguson’s iniquity.

‘Well he needn’t expect me to give him lunch,’ said Miss Somerville. ‘He can go to The Black Bull for that.’

Mr Ferguson had arrived soon after breakfast, sent by the National Trust at Quin’s request to see if the Trust might interest itself in Bowmont. A man of impeccable tact, scholarly and mild-mannered, he had been received by Miss Somerville as though he had just crawled out of some particularly repellent sewer.

‘Maybe it won’t come to anything,’ said Martha, handing back the glasses. After forty years in Miss Somerville’s service, she was allowed to speak to her as a friend. ‘Maybe he won’t fancy the place.’

‘Ha!’ said Miss Somerville.

Her scepticism was justified. Though Mr Ferguson would report officially to Quin in London, he had already indicated that three miles of superb coastline, not to mention the famous walled garden, would probably interest the Trust very much indeed.

So there it was, thought Frances wretchedly: there the men in peaked caps, the lavatory huts, the screeching trippers. Quin had made it clear that even if negotiations went forward, he would insist on a flat in the house set aside for her use, but if he thought she would cower there and watch over the defilement of the place she had guarded for twenty years, he was mistaken. The day the Trust moved in, she would move out.

Perhaps if the letter from Lady Plackett hadn’t arrived just after Mr Ferguson took his leave, Miss Somerville would have reacted to it differently. But it came when she felt as old and discouraged as she had ever felt in her life and ready to clutch at any straw.

The Vice Chancellor’s wife began by reminding Miss Somerville of their brief acquaintance in the finishing school in Paris.

You may find it difficult to remember the little shy girl so much your junior, wrote Lady Plackett, who was not famous for her tact, but I shall always recall your kindness to me when I was homesick and perplexed. Miss Somerville did not remember either the homesick junior or her own kindness, but when Lady Plackett went on to remind her that she had been Daphne Croft-Ellis and that she had been presented in the same year as Miss Somerville’s second cousin, Lydia Barchester, the heel of whose shoe had come off as she left Their Majesties walking backwards, she read on with the attention one affords letters from those in one’s own world.

I was so excited to find that your dear nephew was on our staff and he may perhaps have mentioned that Verena, our only daughter, is taking his course. She is quite enchanted with his scholarship and expertise and at dinner recently they had a most engrossing conversation which was, I fear, quite above my head. You will, however, be wondering what emboldens me to write to you after so many years away in India and I will be entirely frank. As you know, dear Quinton runs a field course for our students at Bowmont. To this course Verena, as one of his Honours students, will, of course, be required to go and indeed she is looking forward to it greatly. However her position here at Thameside is delicate, as I know you will understand. She herself insists on being treated like all the other students as regards examinations and academic standards and there is certainly no difficulty there, for she is very clever. But socially, of course, she leads a different life, and we are careful not to encourage her classmates to take her presence at university functions for granted. Without some sense in which the Vice Chancellor and his family are different from ordinary academics, both staff and students, there could be no authority and no stability. This is something I need not explain to you.