Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘Let the boy run wild,’ the family doctor sensibly advised when Quin, soon after his arrival, developed a prolonged and only partly explained fever. ‘There’s time for school later; he’s bright enough.’

So Quin had his reprieve from the monotony of British boarding schools and furnished for himself a secret and entirely satisfactory world. Most children, especially only ones, have an invisible playmate who accompanies them through the day. Quin’s, from the age of eight, was not an imaginary brother or understanding boy of his own age; it was a dinosaur. The creature — a brontosaurus whom he called Harry — stretched sixty feet; his head, when he put it through the nursery window, filled the room and its heart-warming smile was without menace for he ate only the bamboo in the shrubbery or the moist plants in the coppice which edged the lawn.

An article in The Boy’s Own Paper had introduced him to Harry; Conan Doyle’s The Lost World plunged him deeper into the fabled world of pre-history. He became the leader of the dinosaurs, a Mowgli of the Jurassic swamps who learnt to tame even the ghastly tyrannosaurus rex on whose back he rode.

‘I must say, you don’t have to spend time amusing him,’ said his nurse, not realizing that nothing could compete with the dramas Quin enacted in his head. From the dinosaurs, the boy went backwards and forwards in time. He read of the geological layers of the earth, of lobe-finned fishes and the mammals of the Pleistocene. By the time he was eleven, he was risking his life almost daily, scrambling down cliffs and quarries, searching for fossils embedded in the rock, and had started a collection in the old stables grandly labelled ‘The Somerville Museum of Natural History’. As he grew older and Harry became dimmer in his mind, the museum was expanded to take in the marine specimens he found everywhere. For Quin’s home looked out over the North Sea to the curving, sand-fringed sweep of Bowmont Bay whose rock pools were his nursery; the creatures inside them more interesting than any toy.

Quin would have been surprised if anyone had told him he was ‘doing science’ or becoming educated, but later, at Cambridge, he was amused by the solemnity with which they taught facts which he had learnt before his eleventh year, and the elaborate preparations for field trips to places he had clambered up and down in gym shoes.

He got a First in the Natural History Tripos with embarrassing ease, but his unfettered childhood made him reluctant to accept a permanent academic post. Financially independent since his eighteenth birthday, he had managed to spend the greater part of his time on expeditions to inaccessible parts of the world, yet now he fell in love with Vienna.

Not with the Vienna of operettas and cream cakes, though he took both politely from the hands of his hostess, but with the austere, arcaded courts of the university with its busts of old alumni resounding like a great roll call of the achievements of science. Doppler was there in stone, and Semmelweis who rid women of puerperal fever, and Billroth, the surgeon who befriended Brahms. In the library of the Hofburg, Quin spun the great gold-mounted globe which the Emperor Ferdinand had consulted to send his explorers forth. And in the Natural History Museum, he found a tiny, ugly, potbellied figurine, the Venus of Willendorf, priceless and guarded, made by man at the time when mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers still roamed the land.

When the university term ended, the Bergers begged him to join them on the Grundlsee.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Ruth. ‘The rain and the salamanders — and if you lie on your stomach on the landing stage you can see hundreds of little fishes between the boards like in a frame.’

He was due back in Cambridge, but he came and proved an excellent bilberry picker, an enthusiastic oarsman and a man able to shriek ‘Wunderbar!’ with the best of them. If they enjoyed his company, he, in turn, took back treasured memories of Austrian country life: Tante Hilda in striped bathing bloomers performing a violent breaststroke without moving from the spot… The Professor’s ancient mother running her wheelchair at a trespassing goat… And Klaus Biberstein, the second violin of the Ziller quartet, who loved Leonie but had a weak digestion, creeping out at midnight to feed his secreted Knödel to the fish.

Of Ruth he saw relatively little, for in one of those wooden huts so beloved of Austrian musicians, her Cousin Heini practised the piano and she was busy carrying jugs of milk or plates of biscuits to and fro. Once he found her sitting by the shore with a somewhat surprising collection of books. Krafft-Ebing’s Sexual Pathology, Little Women and a cowboy story with a lurid cover called Jake’s Last Stand.

It was the Krafft-Ebing she was perusing with a furrowed brow.

‘Goodness!’ he said. ‘Are you allowed to read that?’

She nodded. ‘I’m allowed to read everything,’ she said. ‘Only I have to eat everything too, even semolina.’

But on the night before he had to leave, Miss Kenmore could no longer be gainsaid and Quin was informed that Ruth would recite Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ for him after supper.

‘She has it entirely by heart, Dr Somerville,’ she said — and Quin, repressing a sigh, joined the family in the drawing room with its long windows open to the lake.

Ruth’s fair hair had been brushed out; she wore a velvet ribbon — clearly the occasion was important — yet at first Quin was compelled to look at the floor and school his expression, for she spoke the famous lines in the unmistakable accent of Aberdeen.

Only when she came to the penultimate verse, to the part of the poem that belonged personally to her, for it was about her namesake, did he lift his head, caught by something in her voice.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears among the alien corn…

Hackneyed lines, lines he had grown weary of at school, they still had power to stir him.

Yet no one there, not one of the people who loved her, not Quin, not Ruth herself, enjoying the poem’s sadness, were touched by a single glimmer of premonition. No hairs lifted on the nape of any necks; no ghosts walked over the quiet waters of the lake. That this protected, much-loved child should ever have to leave her native land, was unimaginable.

The next day, Quin left for England. The family all came to see him off and begged him to come back soon — but it was eight years before he returned to Vienna and then he came to a different city and a different world.

On the day that Hitler marched into Vienna, Professor Somerville was leading his not noticeably grateful expedition down a defile so narrow that overshadowing precipices blocked out all but a strip of the clear blue sky of Central Asia.

‘You can’t possibly get the animals down this way,’ a Belgian geologist he had been compelled to take along had complained.

But Quin had just said vaguely that he thought it might be all right, by which he meant that if everyone nearly killed themselves and did exactly what he told them, there was a chance — and now, sure enough, the chasm widened, they passed the first trees growing wherever roots could take hold, and made their way through forests of pine and cedar to reach, at last, the bottom of the valley.

‘We’ll camp here,’ said Quin, pointing to a place where the untroubled river, idling past, dragged at the overhanging willows, and drifts of orchids and asphodels studded the grass.

Later, when the mules were grazing and the smoke from the fire curled upwards in the still air, he leant back against a tree and took out the battered pipe which many women had tried to replace. He was thirty years old now, lines were etched into the crumpled-looking forehead and the sides of the mouth, and the dark eyes could look hard, but at this moment he was entirely happy. For he had been right. In spite of the gloomy prognostications of the Belgian whose spectacles had been stepped on by a yak; in spite of the assurances of his porters that it was impossible to reach the remoter valleys of the Siwalik Range in the spring, he had found as rich a collection of Miocene fossils as anyone could hope for. Wrapped now in woodwool and canvas, more valuable than any golden treasure from a tomb, was the unmistakable evidence of Ramapithecus, one of the earliest ancestors of man.

There were three weeks of travelling still along the river valley before they could load their specimens onto lorries for the drive down to Simla, but the problems now would be social: the drinking of terrible tea with the villagers, bedbugs, hospitality…

A lammergeier hung like a nail in the sky. The bells of browsing cattle came from a distant meadow, and the wail of a flute.

Quin closed his eyes.

News of the outside world when it came at last was brought by an Indian army officer in the rest house above Simla and was delivered in the order of importance. Oxford had won the Boat Race, an outsider named Battleship had romped home at Aintree.

‘Oh, and Hitler’s annexed Austria. Marched into Vienna without a shot being fired.’

‘Will you still go?’ asked Milner, his research assistant and a trusted friend.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I suppose it’s a terrific honour. I mean, they don’t give away degrees in a place like that.’

Quin shrugged. It was not the first honorary degree he had been awarded. Persuaded three years ago to take up a professorship in London, he still managed to pursue his investigations in the more exotic corners of the world, and he had been lucky with his finds.

‘Berger arranged it. He’s Dean of the Science Faculty now. If it wasn’t for him I doubt if I’d go; I’ve no desire to go anywhere near the Nazis. But I owe him a lot and his family were very good to me. I stayed with them one summer.’

He smiled, remembering the excitable, affectionate Bergers, the massive meals in the Viennese apartment, and the wooden house on the Grundlsee. There’d been an accident-prone anthropologist whose monograph on the Mi-Mi had fallen out of a rowing boat, and a pig-tailed little girl with a biblical name he couldn’t now recall. Rachel…? Hannah…?

‘I’ll go,’ he decided. ‘If I jump ship at Izmir I can connect with the Orient Express. It won’t delay me more than a couple of days. I know I can trust you to see the stuff through the customs, but if there’s any trouble I’ll sort it out when I come.’

The pigeons were still there, wheeling as if to music in this absurdly music-minded city; the cobbles, the spire of St Stephan’s glimpsed continually from the narrow streets as his taxi took him from the station. The smell of vanilla too, as he pulled down the windows, and the lilacs and laburnums in the park.

But the swastika banners now hung from the windows, relics of the city’s welcome to the Führer, groups of soldiers with the insignia of the SS stood together on street corners — and when the taxi turned into a narrow lane, he saw the hideous daubings on the doors of Jewish shops, the broken windows.

In Sacher’s Hotel he found that his booking had been honoured. The welcome was friendly, Kaiser Franz Joseph in his mutton chop whiskers still hung in the foyer, not yet replaced by the Führer’s banal face. But in the bar three German officers with their peroxided girlfriends were talking loudly in Berlin accents. Even if there had been time to have a drink, Quin would not have joined them. In fact there was no time at all for the unthinkable had happened and the fabled Orient Express had developed engine trouble. Changing quickly into a dark suit, he hurried to the university. Berger’s secretary had written to him before he left England, explaining that robes would be hired for him, and all degree ceremonies were much the same. It was only necessary to follow the person in front in the manner of penguins.

All the same, it was even later than he had realized. Groups of men in scarlet and gold, in black and purple, with hoods bound in ermine or tasselled caps, stood on the steps; streams of proud relatives in their best clothes moved through the imposing doors.

‘Ah, Professor Somerville, you are expected, everything is ready.’ The Registrar’s secretary greeted him with relief. ‘I’ll take you straight to the robing room. The Dean was hoping to welcome you before the ceremony, but he’s already in the hall so he’ll meet you at the reception.’