Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

And what did happen at first was simply funny. A large bull seal bobbed up unexpectedly not four feet from the boat on the island side. A benevolent, comical seal with long grey whiskers, making himself known.

The puppy had been asleep on a pile of canvas. Now he woke, lifted his head.

The seal sneezed.

The effect was electric. The puppy let out a sharp bark of excitement and clambered onto the gunwale. What he was seeing was unheard of… an ancestor? A monster? His barks became frenzied; he scrabbled with his feet against the wood.

The boat tilted.

It took only a second… one of those seconds that no one can believe are irreversible.

‘He’s gone! Oh God, the puppy’s gone!’

Quin looked round, assessed the creature’s chances. The sea was calm, but the tide here ran at five knots. To be dashed against the rocks or swept past them out to sea were the alternatives — yet he began to turn the boat, heading her into the wind.

No one dreamt that this was only the beginning. Ruth was impetuous, but she was not mad. Dr Elke was just emerging from the cabin, she was too far away to see; the others were leaning over the side, trying to chart the progress of the little dog as he bobbed up, paddling frantically, and vanished into the trough of a wave. Only when Pilly began to scream — then they saw. Saw Ruth’s bewildered face as the current took her, saw her head turn… not to search for the dog now… to measure her terrifying speed.

The next seconds were the stuff of Quin’s nightmare for years to come: those seconds in which he forced himself to remain where he was till he had turned the boat fully into the wind and shut down the engine. Not letting himself move till he could rely on the Peggoty to hold steady.

‘Keep her exactly like this,’ he said to Verena. ‘Do nothing else,’ and she nodded and took the wheel.

Now there could be speed, but as he took the rope Elke was holding out to him there were more moments lost for Sam had climbed onto the gunwale, was taking off his jacket, and Quin lunged out to pull him back onto the deck with such force that the boy lay there stunned. And then the rope was round his waist, the knot secure.

‘Now let me down,’ said Quin — and at last was in the sea.

The rocks were his only chance… if she could cling on long enough for him to reach her, but they loomed out of the water, barnacle encrusted and sheer. He saw her struggling for a hold… begin to pull herself out… then lose her grip and try to swim back towards him, but that was hopeless. No one could swim against that tide.

In the Peggoty, Huw turned his head and retched suddenly, the rope unmoving in his huge hands.

Quin was closer now… close enough for her to put out an arm to reach him — and then a wave broke over her head, and she was gone. Twice he found her… and lost her. And then, when hope was almost gone, he found something that he could grasp and hold and wind round his hand… Something that did not escape him; her hair.

‘No!’ said Dr Elke. ‘Leave her. You can talk to her later.’

Quin shook her off. Refusing to strip his soaking clothes, his teeth chattering, he had waited to turn the boat and set her on course for the harbour, but he would wait no longer. His anger was like nothing he had ever known: it came from the gods — a visitation abolishing cold, propriety, compassion.

Ruth lay where they had dragged her, naked but for a rough grey blanket, in the stuffy cubby hole beneath the deck. Her hair was coiled in an unappealing tangle among the lobster pots; there was a smell of fish, and tar. It was almost dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see Quin’s face.

‘Well, I hope you’re satisfied. You’re a heroine now, aren’t you — you and Grace Darling! You’ve put the life of half your friends at risk — that besotted youth who gawps at you tried to jump in after you, but that doesn’t matter, of course. Nothing matters as long as you can be in the limelight, you attention-seeking spoilt little brat. Well, let me tell you, Ruth, no one will ever take you on any field trip again, I’ll see to that. You’re a danger to everyone, you’re incapable of the two things that are needed — unselfishness and common sense. Dear God, Verena Plackett is worth ten of you. As soon as the doctor’s seen you, I’m packing you off home.’

She had closed her eyes, but there was no escaping his voice.

‘Is he dead?’ she managed to say.

‘Who?’

‘The puppy.’

‘Almost certainly, I should think. You can be glad he’s the only casualty. This isn’t some amusing Austrian lake, you know. This is the North Sea.’ And as she turned her head, trying to hide the tears under her lashes, his rage mounted again. ‘Are you even listening to what I’m saying? Are you capable of understanding just what you’ve done?’

Her voice, when it came, was almost inaudible. ‘Could I… please… have a bucket? I’m going to be sick.’

Late that evening there was a kind of miracle. A message from the coastguard carried to the boathouse to say that the puppy had been washed onto the shingle further down the island and was alive. But Ruth was not there to share in the rejoicing.

‘We have to tell her,’ said Pilly. ‘We have to find some way of getting a message to the house.’

‘The Professor will tell her,’ said Dr Elke.

‘No, he won’t.’ Pilly’s round blue eyes were desperate. ‘He’ll go on punishing her. He hates her.’

Dr Elke was silent. Existing in extreme content without the company of men, she sometimes saw further than she wished to.

‘No, Pilly,’ she said sadly. ‘He doesn’t hate her. It’s not like that.’

Ruth woke, bewildered, from a drugged sleep. The clock beside the bed said three o’clock — the pre-dawn hour in which demons gibber and people die. At first she didn’t know where she was… she seemed to be in a large bed covered by some kind of animal skin: the pelt of a bear or something even more exotic. Then, as she touched it, she remembered.

She was in Quin’s tower. He had given instructions to have her carried there after the boat landed — still furious, taking no notice when she said that she was perfectly well, that she wanted to go back to the boat-house with the others. He’d told the students to keep away and sent for two men from the farm to carry her.

‘No one is to go near her till she’s seen a doctor,’ he’d said.

This wasn’t help; it wasn’t concern; it was punishment.

The doctor had come earlier, an old man, sounding her chest, feeling her pulse.

‘I’m all right,’ she’d kept saying, and he said, ‘Yes, yes,’ and left her something in a bottle to make her sleep.

But she wasn’t all right. Even the news brought in by Martha — that the dog was safe — couldn’t make her all right. It wasn’t the waves breaking over her head that had troubled her half-sleep. It was what Quin had said: his rejection, his cruelty. She was in disgrace, she was to be sent home.

She got up, her bare feet feeling the wooden boards. This was the most masculine room she had ever seen; almost without furniture, the uncurtained windows letting in pools of moonlight, the bear skin thrown carelessly over the bed with its single pillow. To sleep thus was to get as close as one could get to sleeping out of doors.

The nightdress she was wearing must have belonged to Aunt Frances; made of thick white flannel, it billowed out over her feet; the ruffles on the neck half buried her chin. Turning on the lamp, she saw, on a small desk pushed against the wall, the photograph of a young woman whose dark, narrow face above the collar of the old-fashioned dress was startlingly familiar. Picking it up, she carried it to the window and examined it.

‘What are you doing?’

She turned abruptly, caught out again, once more in the wrong.

‘I’m sorry; I woke.’

Quin’s face was still drawn and closed, but now he made an effort. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her physically,’ the doctor had said to him, ‘but she looks as though she’s had some kind of shock.’

‘Well, obviously,’ Quin had replied. ‘Nearly drowning would be a shock.’

But old Dr Williams had looked at him and shaken his head and said he didn’t think it was that; she was young and strong and hadn’t been in the water long. ‘Go easy,’ he’d said, ‘treat her gently.’

So he came over, took the picture from her hand. ‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right. I wish I could go.’

‘But you can’t, my poor Rapunzel; not till the morning. Even your pretty hair wouldn’t be long enough to pull up a prince to rescue you.’

‘And there’s a shortage of princes,’ she said, trying to speak lightly for the edge was still there in his voice.

Quin said nothing. Earlier he had found Sam on the terrace, looking up at Ruth’s window, and sent him away.

‘It’s your mother, isn’t it?’ she asked, looking down at the portrait.

‘Are we so alike?’

‘Yes. She looks intelligent. And so… alive.’

‘Yes, she was, I believe. Until I killed her.’

It was Ruth now who was angry. ‘What rubbish! What absolute poppycock. Schmarrn!’ she said, spitting out the Viennese word, so much more derogatory than anything in English. ‘You talk like a kitchen maid.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, startled.

But his attack on the boat had freed Ruth. Born to please, trained to put herself at the service of others, she now abandoned the handmaiden role.

‘I shouldn’t have said that. Kitchen maids are often highly intelligent, like your Elsie who told me the names of all the plants on the cliff. But you talk like someone in a third-rate romantic novel — you killed her, indeed! Well, what does one expect from a man who sleeps under dead animals… a man who owns the sea!’

She had succeeded better than she’d hoped in riling him. ‘Nobody owns the sea,’ he said. ‘And if it interests you, I’m giving away what I do own. The year after next, Bowmont goes to the National Trust.’

She took a deep breath. She was, in fact, totally confounded and worse than that, utterly dismayed; she felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach.

‘All of it?’ she stammered. ‘The house and the gardens and the farm?’

‘Yes.’ He had recovered his equanimity. ‘As a good Social Democrat I’m sure you’ll be pleased.’

She nodded. ‘Yes…’ she struggled to say. ‘It’s the right thing to do. It’s just…’

But what it was was something she could not put into words. That she was devastated by the loss of a place which had nothing to do with her, which she would never see again. That she had been storing Bowmont in her mind: its cliffs and flowers, its scents and golden strands… There would be a lot of waiting in her life with Heini: sitting in stuffy green-rooms, accompanying him in crowded trains. Like the coifed girls in medieval cloisters who wove mysterious trees and crystal rivers into their tapestries, she had spun for herself a dream of Bowmont: of paths where she could wander, of a faded blue door in a high wall. And the dream meant Bowmont as it was — as Quin’s demesne, as a place where an irascible old woman bullied the flowers out of the ground.

‘Is it because you will benefit the people?’ she asked, sounding priggish but not knowing how to say it otherwise.

Quin shrugged. ‘I doubt if the people — whoever they are — are all that interested in Bowmont; the house is nothing much. What they want, I imagine, is access to the sea and that could be arranged with a few more rights of way. I’m afraid I don’t share your passion for “the people” in the abstract. One never knows quite who they are.’

‘Well, why then?’

Quin took the portrait of his mother from her hands. ‘You chose to sneer when I said I killed her. Yet it is not untrue. My father knew that she was not supposed to have children. She’d been very ill — they met in Switzerland when he was there in the Diplomatic Service. She was in a sanatorium, recovering from TB. He wanted a child because of Bowmont. He wanted an heir and he didn’t mind what it cost. An heir for Bowmont.’

‘And if he did?’ Ruth shrugged. She seemed to him relentless, suddenly; grown up, no longer his student, his protegée. ‘Men have always wanted that. A tobacconist will want an heir for his kiosk… the poorest rabbi wants a son to say kaddish for him when he’s dead. Why do you make such a thing of it?’

‘If a man forces a woman to bear a child… if he risks her life so that he can come to his own father — the father he quarrelled with and loathed — and say: “Here is an heir” — then he is committing a sin.’