Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Ruth shook her head. ‘The polar bear was almost my favourite when I was small, but I don’t want to get chilblains — I might drop my sandwiches. You don’t want to go back in time? To the Dinosaur Hall?’

‘No. Too much like work. And frankly I’m not too happy about that ichthyosaurus. Whoever assembled that skeleton had a lot of imagination.’

Ruth flushed. ‘It was old Schumacher. He was very ill and he so much wanted to get it finished before he died.’ And then: ‘I know! Let’s go to Madagascar! The Ancient Continent of Lemuria! There’s an aye-aye there, a baby — such a sad-looking little thing. You’ll really like the aye-aye.’

Quin nodded. ‘Madagascar it shall be. Perhaps you can find us a towel or some newspaper; that’s all we need. I’m sure eating here’s against the regulations but we won’t let that trouble us.’

She disappeared into the cloakroom and came back with a folded towel, and with her hair released from its skewer. There could be doubts about her face thought Quin, with its contrasting motifs, but none about her impossible, unruly, unfashionable hair. Touched now by the last rays of the sinking sun, it gave off a tawny, golden warmth that lifted the heart.

It was a strange walk they took through the enormous, shadowy rooms, watched by creatures preserved for ever in their moment of time. Antelopes no bigger than cats raised one leg, ready to flee across the sandy veld. The monkeys of the New World hung, huddled and melancholy, from branches — and by a window a dodo, idiotic-looking and extinct, sat on a nest of reconstructed eggs.

Madagascar was all that Ruth had promised. Ring-tailed lemurs with piebald faces held nuts in their amazingly human hands. A pair of indris, cosy and fluffy like children’s toys, groomed each other’s fur. Tiny mouse lemurs clustered round a coconut.

And alone, close to the glass, the aye-aye… Only half-grown, hideous and melancholy, with huge despairing eyes, naked ears and one uncannily extended finger, like the finger of a witch.

‘I don’t know why I like it so much,’ said Ruth. ‘I suppose because it’s a sort of outcast — so ugly and lonely and sad.’

‘It has every reason to be sad,’ said Quin. ‘The natives are terrified of them — they run off shrieking when they see one. Though I did find one tribe who believe they have the power to carry the souls of the dead to heaven.’

She turned to him eagerly. ‘Of course, you’ve been there, haven’t you? With the French expedition? It must be so beautiful!’

Quin nodded. ‘It’s like nowhere else on earth. The trees are so tangled with vines and orchids — you can’t believe the scent. And the sunbirds, and the chameleons…’

‘You’re so lucky. I was going to travel with my father as soon as I was old enough, but now…’ She groped for her handkerchief and tried again. ‘I’m sure that tribe was right,’ she said, turning back to the aye-aye. ‘I’m sure they can carry the souls of the dead to heaven.’ She was silent for a moment, looking at the pathetic embalmed creature behind the glass. ‘You can have my soul,’ she said under her breath. ‘You can have it any time you like.’

Quin glanced at her but said nothing. Instead, he took the towel and spread it on the parquet. Then he began to unpack the hamper.

There was a jar of pâté and another of pheasant breasts. There were fresh rolls wrapped in a snowy napkin and pats of butter in a tiny covered dish. He had brought the first Morello cherries and grapes and two chocolate soufflés in fluted pots. The plates were of real china; the long-stemmed goblets of real glass.

‘I think you’ll like the wine,’ said Quin, lifting a bottle out of its wooden coffin. ‘And I haven’t forgotten the corkscrew!’

‘How did you do it all? How could you get all that? How did you have the time?’

‘I just went into a shop and told them what I wanted. It only took ten minutes. All I had to do was pay.’

She watched him lay out the picnic, amazed that he was thus willing to serve her. Was it British to be like this, or was it something about him personally? Her father — all the men she knew — would have sat back and waited for their wives.

When it was finished it was like a banquet in a fairy story, yet like playing houses when one was a child. But when she began to eat, there were no more thoughts; she was famished; it was all she could do to remember her manners.

‘Oh, it’s so good! And the wine is absolutely lovely. It’s not strong, is it?’

‘Well…’ He was about to advise caution but decided against it. Tonight she was entitled to repose however it was brought about.

‘Where have your parents gone to?’ he said presently, as they sat side by side, leaning their backs against a radiator. ‘I mean, what part of London?’

‘Belsize Park. It’s in the north-west, do you know it?’

‘Yes.’ The dreary streets with their dilapidated Victorian terraces, the cat-infested gardens of what had once been a prosperous suburb, passed before his mind. ‘A lot of refugees live there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And it’s very near Hampstead Heath, which is beautiful.’ (Near, but not very near… Hampstead, at the top of the hill, was a different world with its pretty cottages, its magnolia trees, and the blue plaques announcing that Keats had lived there, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and a famous Admiral of the Fleet.) ‘And Heini will go there too?’

‘Yes; very soon. He’s in Budapest getting his emigration papers and saying goodbye to his father, but there won’t be any trouble. He’s Hungarian and the Nazis don’t have anything to say there. He had to go quickly because he’s completely Jewish. After the goat-herding lady died, my grandfather married the daughter of a rabbi who already had a little girl — she was a widow — and that was Heini’s mother, so we’re not blood relations.’ She turned to him, cupping her glass. ‘He’s a marvellous pianist. A real one. He was going to have his debut with the Philharmonic… three days after Hitler marched in.’

‘That’s rough.’

‘Yes. He was absolutely frantic. I didn’t know how to comfort him; not properly.’

She retreated momentarily into her hair.

‘And you’re going to get married?’

‘Yes… Well, Heini doesn’t talk a lot about getting married because he’s a musician… an artist… and they don’t talk much about bourgeois things like marriage — but we’re going to be together. Properly, I mean. We were going to go away together after the concert, to Italy. I’d have gone earlier but my parents are very old-fashioned… also there was the thing about Chopin and the études.’

The fork which Quin had been conveying to his mouth stayed arrested in his hand. ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve lost me. How do Chopin études come into this?’

Too late, Ruth realized where she was heading and looked with horror at her empty glass, experiencing the painful moment when it becomes clear that what has been drunk cannot be undrunk. It had been so lovely, the wine, like drinking fermented hope or happiness, and now she was babbling and being indiscreet and would end up in the gutter, a confirmed absinthe drinker destined for a pauper’s grave.

But Quin was waiting and she plunged.

‘Heini had a professor who told him that Chopin thought that every time he made love he was depriving the world of an étude. I mean that… you know… the same energy goes into composing and… the other thing. A sort of vital force. And this professor thought it was good for Heini to wait. But then Heini found out that the professor was wrong about the way to finger the Appassionata, so then he thought maybe he was wrong about Chopin too. Because there was George Sand, wasn’t there?’

‘There was indeed,’ said Quin, deeply entertained by this gibberish. It wasn’t till they had finished the meal and Ruth, moving nimbly in the gathering darkness, had cleared away and packed up the hamper, that he said: ‘I’ve been thinking what to do. I think we must get you out of Vienna to somewhere quiet and safe in the country. Then we can start again from England. I know a couple of people in the Foreign Office; I’ll be able to pull strings. I doubt if anyone will bother you away from the town and I shall make sure that you have plenty of money to see you through. With your father and all of us working away at the other end we’ll be able to get you across before too long. But you must get away from here. Is there anyone you could go to?’

‘There’s my old nurse. She lives by the Swiss border, in the Vorarlberg. She’d have me, but I don’t know if I ought to inflict myself on anyone. If I’m unclean —’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said harshly. ‘And don’t insult people who love you and will want to help you. Now tell me exactly where she lives and I’ll see to everything. What about tonight?’

‘I’m going to stay here. There’s a camp bed.’

He was about to protest, suggesting that she come back to Sacher’s, but the memory of the German officers crowding the bar prevented him.

‘Take care then. What about the night watchman?’

‘He won’t come into my father’s room. And if he does, he’s known me since I was a baby.’

‘You can’t trust anyone,’ he said.

‘If I can’t trust Essler, I’ll die,’ said Ruth.

At two in the morning, Quin got out of bed and wondered what had made him leave a girl hardly out of the schoolroom to spend a night alone in a deserted building full of shadows and ghosts. Dressing quickly, he made his way down the Ringstrasse, crossed the Theresienplatz, and let himself in by the side entrance.

Ruth was asleep on the camp bed in the preparation room. Her hair streamed onto the floor and she was holding something in her arms as a child holds a well-loved toy. Professor Berger’s master key unlocked also the exhibition cases. It was the huge-eyed aye-aye that Ruth held to her breast. Its long tail curved up stiffly over her hand and its muzzle lay against her shoulder.

Quin, looking down at her, could only pray that, as she slept, the creature that she cradled was carrying her soul to the rain-washed streets of Belsize Park, and the country which now sheltered all those that she loved.

Leonie Berger got carefully out of bed and turned over the pillow so that her husband, who was pretending to be asleep on the other side of the narrow, lumpy mattress, would not notice the damp patch made by her tears. Then she washed and dressed very attentively, putting on high-heeled court shoes, silk stockings, a black skirt and crisply ironed white blouse, because she was Viennese and one dressed properly even when one’s world had ended.

Then she started being good.

Leonie had been brave when they left Vienna, secreting a diamond brooch in her corset which was foolhardy in the extreme. She had been sensible and loving, for that was her nature, making sure that the one suitcase her husband was allowed to take contained all the existing notes for his book on Mammals of the Pleistocene, his stomach pills and the special nail clippers which alone enabled him to manicure his toes. She had been patient with her sister-in-law, Hilda, who was emigrating on a domestic work permit, but had fallen over her untied shoelaces as they made their way onto the Channel steamer, and she had cradled the infant of a fellow refugee while his mother was sick over the rails. Even when she saw the accommodation rented for them by their sponsor, a distantly related dentist who had emigrated years earlier and built up a successful practice in the West End, Leonie only grumbled a little. The rooms on the top floor of a dilapidated lodging house in Belsize Close were cold and dingy, the furniture hideous, the cooking facilities horrific, but they were cheap.

But that was when she thought Ruth was waiting for them in the student camp on the South Coast. Since the letter had come from the Quaker Relief Organization to say that Ruth was not on the train, Leonie had started being good.

This meant never at any moment criticizing a single thing. It meant inhaling with delight the smell of slowly expiring cauliflower from the landing where a female psychoanalyst from Breslau shared their cooker. It meant admiring the scrofulous tom cats yowling in the square of rubble that passed for a garden. It meant being enchanted by the hissing gas fire which ate pennies and gave out only fumes and blue flames. It meant angering no living thing, standing aside from houseflies, consuming with gratitude a kind of brown sauce which came in bottles and was called coffee. It meant telling God or anyone else who would listen at all hours of the day and night, that she would never again complain whatever happened if only Ruth was safe and came to them.