Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

She could hear the clang of the bell echoing inside the house. Would Turton even announce her, seeing her state? She belonged at the back door or in one of those dark genre paintings of banished women staggering out into the night.

The bolt was drawn back slowly… so slowly that Ruth would have had time to turn away down the steps.

‘Yes? What is it?’

It was not Turton who stood there, not any of the servants. It was Aunt Frances herself, barring the way, showing no welcome, no inclination to move aside — not even when she recognized who it was that stood on her threshold.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she went on, horrified. ‘This is no place for you!’

Ruth drew breath, lifted her head. Not I, but thou… She must fight for her child. But the words she brought out were halting, inadequate; she was suddenly so exhausted that she could hardly stand.

‘Please… I beg you… Can I stay?’

‘Stay here! Stay here in your condition! Really, Ruth, I know all foreigners are mad but this goes beyond everything. Of course you can’t stay.’

‘There is an explanation… There is a reason.’

‘Explanations have nothing to do with it. You can’t stay here, absolutely and definitely not, and that’s the end of the matter.’

Ruth looked up at the gaunt fierce woman she had nevertheless hoped was her friend. As she pulled her cloak tighter, struck by a deathly cold, the first flakes of snow began to fall.

It had been Pilly’s ambition, when she joined the WRNS, to be employed as a cook, but the third-class degree which made so little impression in academic circles secured her a status she did not really seek. She was deployed as a driver and by the end of November was carrying signals to and from the docks and senior naval officers about their business.

But the officer she had been asked to collect from the destroyer Vigilantes at an outlying berth some ten miles from the base was a mere sublieutenant and it was better not to ask why he rated a car or why the ship, supposedly on Atlantic convoys, was being refitted in this obscure and inconveniently sited dock on the South Coast. There were a lot of things one did not ask this first winter of the war.

It was a raw December afternoon; the quay was deserted except for the two sailors guarding the barrier, but Pilly, standing beside her car, waited contentedly. Her instructions were clear; her passenger would come.

But when he did come, a lone figure carrying a duffel bag, and she saluted, the result was unexpected.

‘Good God, Pilly!’ Quin peered, moved closer in the dusk. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, well, this is amazing!’ He threw his bag into the back and climbed into the front seat. ‘I had no idea you were in the same outfit. How do you like it?’

‘I absolutely love it!’

Quin smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice and at the change in the nervous girl who had peered so sadly at her specimens. Pilly was slimmer, the uniform suited her, and as they turned inland, he saw that she handled the big car with confidence and skill.

‘My instructions are to take you to the station,’ she said, ‘but it wouldn’t take a minute to call in at the mess if you wanted to pick up your mail?’

‘No, thanks.’

The mail was of no interest to him now. He had put a moratorium on his past life. In the forty-eight hours before his next assignment, he was going down to a pub in Dorset to walk and eat and sleep. Mostly to sleep.

‘Janet’s in the ATS,’ Pilly said, for she knew she must ask him nothing personal, ‘though she’s getting married soon, and Huw is in the army. And Sam’s going to join the RAF.’

Quin turned his head sharply. ‘He could have got deferment with a Science degree. I told him.’

‘Yes — but he wanted to be part of it. He really hates the Nazis and not just because he was so fond of Ruth.’

She changed down and they began to climb up the slope of the Downs. Well, it was inevitable that the girl who had followed Ruth like a shadow, should mention her name. Impossible, now, not to proceed.

‘Have you heard from Ruth?’

‘Yes, I have. I heard two weeks ago.’

‘And how does she like America?’

No answer. They had reached the top of the hill and she turned left between trees. Thinking she might need to concentrate on the dark stretch of road, he waited, but when she still did not answer, he repeated his question.

Pilly made up her mind. ‘She is not in America,’ she said.

‘You must be mistaken.’ His efforts to keep his voice neutral were only partly successful. ‘She sailed with Heini on the Mauretania at the end of July.’

‘No, she didn’t. Heini sailed, but Ruth didn’t. She told me in her letter.’

‘Where is she, then?’

Another decision to make… but this new and confident Pilly made it.

‘She’s somewhere in the North of England working as a mother’s help.’

‘What! No, you must have got that wrong.’

Pilly shook her head. ‘I haven’t. And I’m very worried about her. I don’t understand what’s happening. She keeps saying she’s all right, but she isn’t — I know she isn’t. She’s unhappy and in a mess… and I think she’s being silly.’

‘What do you mean?’

Pilly, waiting at a crossroads, tried to explain. ‘I love Ruth,’ she said. ‘I really love her. It’s because of her I got my degree, but that isn’t why. She made life… big for me. For all of us. Important, not petty. But sometimes suddenly she’d behave like someone in a book or an opera. Like she did when she was trying to give herself to Heini. All that business about being like La Traviata or that girl with a muff. Love isn’t about operas,’ said Pilly — and smiled for she had met a petty officer who had promised to marry her and take her away from Science for ever.

They had driven for several minutes before Quin spoke again.

‘Do you have her address?’

‘No, I don’t. She didn’t give it in her letter. That’s why I think she’s being someone in a book again. A sort of Victorian heroine going out into the snow.’ She glanced sideways at her passenger. He had been a famous scientist and would, if he survived, most probably be a hero with a medal, but he was still a man and the suspicion that she and Janet had harboured could not be voiced to him. ‘It’s not because she hasn’t gone with Heini that I’m worried. Obviously she didn’t love him and —’

‘Really? That was not my impression.’

God, don’t let it start again, he thought, looking out at the winter trees. There was no rage to call on nowadays; just a relentless sense of bereavement lying below his conscious thoughts as dark and heavy as stone.

‘I’m going to try and find her,’ said Pilly. She had switched on the headlights; they were turning into the road which led to the station. ‘The trouble is, my next leave is not for three months.’

‘How can you find her without an address?’

‘I think she’s in Cumberland — the postmark looked as though it might be Keswick.’ Pausing at a traffic light, she turned to look at him. ‘I’ve got the letter in my locker back at headquarters, if you had time to look — you’re good at deciphering things. And if it is Keswick, that’s not so far from Bowmont, is it? So if you were going north —’

‘But I’m not. I’ve got exactly forty-eight hours and it takes a whole day now to go north, as you know.’

Pilly sighed. Probably Dr Elke had been wrong. Probably she herself was mistaken. ‘If she was a dinosaur’s tooth you’d find her,’ she said. ‘And she isn’t; she’s Ruth.’

The car drew to a halt in front of the station. Quin reached for his duffel bag — and dropped it back on the seat.

‘All right, Pilly, you win. We’ll go and look at your envelope.’

But when Pilly hurried back to him in the hallway of the officers’ mess carrying the letter, she saw that Ruth’s cause was lost. Quin was staring at a telegram in his hand and his face was ashen.

‘Thank God we called in here,’ he said. ‘My aunt’s been taken ill. I’ll have to go to her at once.’

He handed her the message which had been waiting with the Vigilantes’ mail.

COME IMMEDIATELY WARD THREE NEWCASTLE GENERAL HOSPITAL URGENT SOMERVILLE.

There was no chance to sleep in the crowded, blacked-out train; nothing to eat or drink. There were only the dragging hours in which to recall, in unsought detail, the services his aunt had performed during her life and to realize the blow her death would deal him.

They reached Newcastle at ten in the morning and, still in his rumpled uniform, he snatched a few minutes to wash and shave in the station cloakroom before jumping into a taxi. He’d sent a cable before he left; giving his name at the hospital reception desk, he was directed to the first floor.

As he entered the ward, the Sister came towards him. ‘Ah yes, we’ve been expecting you. It’s not visiting time, but I understand the circumstances are exceptional. I’ll take you to your aunt.’

Steeling himself to face what awaited him, Quin followed her to the door of a small day room which she opened.

Aunt Frances was not ill and she was certainly not dead. As she saw him she rose and came towards him — and she was laughing. Not the reluctant smile she occasionally allowed herself at the foibles of mankind, but the full-bodied laughter of intense amusement.

‘Oh, thank goodness!’ She embraced him, but her shoulders still shook. ‘Only… don’t worry,’ she managed to say. ‘It’s just a few days and then it’ll disappear. He’ll lose it completely — isn’t that so, Sister?’

Sister agreed that it was.

‘Lose what?’ said Quin, completely bewildered.

‘The resemblance. The likeness. Oh dear, I wouldn’t have believed it! Go and see! She’s in the end bed on the left.’

Walking in a dream, Quin made his way up the ward. Girls were sitting up in bed, some talking, some knitting — but all watching him as he passed.

Then suddenly there was Ruth, her hair mantling her shoulders. Ruth as he remembered her… warm… feminine; somehow both triumphant and unsure.

But he didn’t go to her at once. At the foot of the bed, as at the foot of all the beds, was a cot. And inside it — lay Rear Admiral Basher Somerville.

The baby wasn’t like the Basher. It was the Basher — shrunk to size, a little more crumpled, but identical. The Beethovian nose, the bucolic, livid face, the double chin and pursed-up mouth.

Quin could not speak, only stare — and his son moved his ancient, wrinkled head, one eye opened — a fathomless, deep blue, lashless eye… the mouth twitched in a precursor of a smile.

And Quin was undone. In an instant, this being of whose existence he had been unaware five minutes earlier, claimed him, body and soul. At the same time, he knew that he could die now and it did not matter because the child was there and lived.

Only I must not hold him back, he thought. He is himself. I swear that I will let him go.

Then he looked up at Ruth, watching him in silence. But not her, he thought exultantly. Not her! I shall never relinquish her — and he moved, half-blind, to the head of the bed, and took her in his arms.

The Sister had said: ‘Half an hour, but no more, since you’re on leave.’ She had drawn the cold blue curtains round the bed, but the lazy December sun touched them with gold. Inside was Cleopatra’s barge, was Venus’ bower as Quin touched Ruth’s face, her hair.

‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you could have been so stupid. I just wanted to give you something lovely and priceless.’

‘I know… I was an idiot. I think I didn’t believe I should be happy when there was so much suffering in the world. And there was Verena. She told everyone that you were taking her to Africa.’

‘Ah, yes. An unpleasant woman. She’s going to marry Kenneth Easton and teach him how to pronounce Cholmondely, did you know?’

Ruth liked that. She liked it a lot. But Quin was still shaken by the risk he had taken when she came to him that night. ‘When I think that you went through all that alone.’

‘Well, actually I didn’t,’ said Ruth a trifle bitterly. ‘Not at the end. All I can say is that your aunt may have left you alone but she certainly didn’t leave me!’

And she described the moment when Aunt Frances had appeared in the doorway at Bowmont, apparently barring the way. ‘She said I couldn’t stay and I was desperate, but she meant I couldn’t stay in case we were cut off by the snow and the ambulance couldn’t get through. She just bundled me into the car and took me down to Mrs Bainbridge’s house in Newcastle and even when my parents came, she didn’t let me out of her sight. I think she was worried because of what happened to your mother.’