Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

The gardener’s boy reappeared.

‘Please, miss, Mr Turton says as they’re between the tides, so he can’t shoo ’em off right now. And he says to tell you, miss, that Lady Rothley telephoned and she’s coming at eleven.’

Miss Somerville tightened her lips. The tide-marks… the infuriating ancient law that decreed that the shore between low tide and high tide belonged to everyone. It was nonsense, of course. To get there they had come over Somerville land — the fields behind the bay all belonged to Quin and she made sure that the gates were kept locked.

For a moment, she felt old and discouraged. This was not her world. Beyond the point was ancient Dunstanburgh with a golf course now lapping its ruined towers. Trippers could creep in that way too and make their way to Bowmont. She was like King Canute, struggling uselessly against the defilement of the human race.

And Quin didn’t really help her. Quin had ideas that she tried to understand but couldn’t. Miss Somerville loved no one; it was a point of honour with her to have banished this destructive emotion from her breast, but Quin was Quin and she would have jumped off the cliff for him without further consideration. And yet from this boy, whom she herself had reared, came ideas and theories that she would not have expected to read even in the Socialist gutter press. Quin did not chase trippers off his land, merely requesting them to close the gates; he had acknowledged a right of way across the dunes to Bowmont Mill, and now there was talk of one day… not while she lived, perhaps… but one day, giving Bowmont to the National Trust.

The dreaded words made Miss Somerville shiver. The sun had established full dominion now; the terns were white arrows against the indigo of the water; harebells and yarrow and clusters of pink thrift glowed in the turf, but Miss Somerville, usually so observant, saw only the spectre of the future. A car park in the Lower Meadow, refreshment kiosks, charabancs with stinking exhaust pipes unloading trippers in the forecourt. Poor Frampton had done it, given his home away, and there were vulgar little green huts at the gates of Frampton Court and men in caps like doormen punching tickets, and a tea room and souvenir stall. But Frampton had an excuse; he was bankrupt. Quin had no such excuse. The farm was in profit, the rents from the village brought in sufficient revenue to see to repairs, and his inheritance from the Basher had left him a wealthy man. For Quin to give away his heritage was irresponsible and mad.

She turned and went in through a door beside the tower, to a store room which she had turned into a kennel for her Labradors.

‘How are they, Martha?’

‘Fine, Miss Frances. Just fine.’

Martha had been sent to her as a lady’s maid, but Miss Somerville, returning from her broken engagement on the Border, had refused any nonsense to do with dressing up and frippery, and Martha now looked after the dogs.

The puppies were sucking: five blissful, ever-swelling bags of milk whose mother thumped her tail in greeting and let her head fall back again onto the straw.

There was good blood there. Comely had been mated in Wales — Miss Somerville had taken her there herself and it had been a bother, but it always paid to get decent stock.

Oh, why couldn’t Quin marry, she thought, making her way across the courtyard. Not one of those girls he brought up sometimes: actresses or Parisiennes who came down to breakfast shivering in fur coats and asked about central heating, but a girl of his own kind, a girl with breeding. Once he had a lusty son or two, he’d forget all this nonsense about the Trust.

Later, in the drawing room, the subject came up again. Lady Rothley was the closet thing to a friend which Frances Somerville allowed herself and there was no need to make a fuss when she came. No need to light a fire, no need to shoo the dogs off the chairs. Ann Rothley bred Jack Russells and all the tapestry sofas at the Hall were covered in short white hairs.

‘I thought Quin would be back by now,’ she said, lifting the famille rose cup and sipping her coffee appreciatively. Frances might dress like a charwoman, but she kept the servants up to scratch.

‘He was delayed in Vienna,’ said Miss Somerville. ‘They gave him an honorary degree and he had to stay on to see to some business or other.’

Lady Rothley nodded. A dark, handsome woman in her forties, she did not object to Quin’s scholarship. It happened sometimes in these old families. At Wallington, the Trevelyans were for ever writing history books. ‘Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to break it to him, Frances. I simply had to get rid of that German he landed me with. The opera singer from Dresden. I sent him to the dairy because all the indoor posts were filled and it’s been a disaster. The dairy maid fell in love with him and he was useless with the cows.’

Miss Somerville nodded. ‘A Jew, I suppose?’

‘Well, he said he was, but he had fair hair. I can’t help wondering whether some of them go round pretending to be Jewish just to get the benefits. The Quakers are giving away fortunes in relief, I understand. I didn’t like to dismiss him, but the cows are not musical. There’s almost nothing I won’t do for Quin, but he must stop trying to get us all to employ these dreadful refugees. Poor Helen — he made her take a man from Berlin to act as a chauffeur and handyman and as soon as he’s finished work he gets people in and they play chamber music. It’s like lemons in your ears, you know — screech, screech. She’s had to tell them to go and do it in an outhouse. I wish Quin wasn’t so concerned about them. I mean, there are lots of other people to worry about, aren’t there? The unemployed and the coal miners and so on.’

Miss Somerville agreed. ‘Of course one cannot approve of the way Hitler carries on — he really is a very vulgar man. Not that one likes Jews. When they’re rich they’re bankers and when they’re poor they’re pedlars and in between they play the violin. I’m not having any of them at Bowmont while I’m in charge and I’ve told Quin.’

One of the Labradors yawned, jumped down from the chair, and rearranged himself across Miss Somerville’s feet.

‘Mind you, if there’s a war we’ll get evacuees from London,’ said Lady Rothley. She spoke cheerfully and no one knew what it cost her to do so, for Rollo, her adored eldest son, was eighteen years old.

‘Well, I’d rather have slum children than foreign refugees. One could keep them separate in the boat-house on mattresses with rubber sheets and take their food across. Whereas refugees would… mingle.’

There was a pause while the ladies sipped and the freshening wind stirred the curtains.

Then: ‘Has he said any more about… you know… the Trust?’

That Ann Rothley, so forthright and uncompromising, spoke with hesitation was a measure of her unease.

‘Well, I haven’t seen him for months, as you know — he’s been in India — but Turton said someone rang up from their headquarters and said Quin had asked them to send a man up later in the year. I think he means it, Ann.’

‘Oh God!’ Would the desecration never end, she thought wretchedly. Estates sold for building land, forests felled, townspeople gawping at the houses of one’s friends. ‘Isn’t there any hope that he will see his duty and marry?’

Miss Somerville shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Livy saw him at the theatre twice with a girl before he went abroad, but she didn’t think he was serious.’

‘He never is serious,’ said Lady Rothley bitterly. ‘Anyone would think one married for pleasure.’ She was silent, remembering the horror of her bridal night with Rothley. But she had not screamed or run away, she had endured it, as later she endured the boredom of his weekly visits to her bed, looking at the ceiling, thinking of her embroidery or her dogs. And now there were children and a future. Oak trees remained unfelled, parkland was tended because girls like her gritted their teeth. ‘It is for England that one marries,’ she said. ‘For the land.’

‘Yes, I know. But what more can we do?’ said Frances wearily. ‘You know how many people have tried…’

There was no need to finish the sentence. Girls of every shape and size had ridden through the gates of Bowmont on their thoroughbreds, climbed healthily up the turf path with their tennis rackets, smiled at Quin across dance floors in white organdie, in spangled tulle…

‘You don’t think he might be interested in someone who understood his work?’

‘Not a student!’ said Frances, horrified.

‘No… but… I don’t know; he’s so clever, isn’t he?’ said Lady Rothley, trying to be tolerant. ‘Only, I can’t see a decently brought up girl knowing about old bones, so I suppose it’s no good.’ She rose to her feet, re-knotted her scarf. ‘Anyway, give the dear boy my love — but tell him absolutely no more refugees!’

Left alone, Miss Somerville took her secateurs and her trug and went through to the West Terrace, to the sheltered side of the house away from the sea. For a moment, she paused to look at the orderly fields stretching away to the blue humpbacks of the Cheviots: the oats and barley, green and tall, the freshly shorn flock of Leicesters grazing in the Long Meadow. The new manager Quin had engaged was doing well.

Then she crossed the lawn, opened a door in the high wall — and entered a different world. The sun ceased to be merely brightness and became warmth; bumble bees blundered about on the lavender; the scent of stock and jasmine came to meet her — and a great quietness as the incessant surge of the sea became the gentlest of whispers.

‘I should hope so,’ said Frances firmly to a Tibetan poppy which two days ago had dared to look doubtful, but now unfurled its petals of heavenly blue.

It was Quin’s grandmother, the meek and silent Jane Somerville, who had made the garden. The daughter of a wealthy coal owner from County Durham, she brought the consolations of the Quaker faith to her enforced marriage with the Basher, and she needed them.

Jane had been two years at Bowmont when, to her own horror and amazement, she rose in the Meeting House at Berwick and found that she had been moved to speak.

‘I am going to make a garden,’ she said.

She never again spoke in Meeting, but the next day she gave orders for the field adjoining the West Lawn to be drained. She travelled to the other side of England to commandeer the old rose bricks of a recently demolished manor house; she planted windbreaks, built walls and brought in lorry loads of loam. The experts told her she was wasting her time; she was too far north, too close to the sea for the kind of garden she had in mind. The Basher, on leave from the navy, was furious. He made scenes; he queried every bill.

Jane, usually so gentle and acquiescent, took no notice. She sent roses and wisteria and clematis rioting up the walls; she brought in plants from places far colder and more inhospitable than Bowmont: camellias and magnolias from China, poppies and primulas from the Atlas mountains — and mixed them with the flowers the villagers grew in their cottage gardens. She set an oak bench against the south wall and flanked it with buddleias for the butterflies — and decades later, the Basher, who had fought her all the way, came there to die.

Miss Somerville knelt down by the Long Border, feeling the now familiar twinge of arthritis in her knee, and the robin flew down from the branches of the little almond tree to watch. But presently she dropped the trowel and made her way to the seat beside the sundial and closed her eyes.

What would happen to this garden if Quin really gave his house away? Hordes of people tramping through it, frightening away the robin, shrieking and swatting at the bees. There would be signposts everywhere — the lower classes never seemed to be able to find their way. And built against the far wall, where now the peaches ripened in the sun, two huts. No — one hut divided into two; she had seen it at Frampton. The lettering at one end would read Ladies, but the other end wouldn’t even spell Gentlemen. Made over entirely to vulgarity, the second notice would read Gents.

‘Oh, God,’ prayed Frances Somerville, addressing her Maker with unaccustomed humility, ‘please find her for me. She must be somewhere — the girl who can save this place!’

It had rained since daybreak: slanting, cold-looking sheets of rain. Down in the square, the bedraggled pigeons huddled against Maria Theresia’s verdigris skirts. Vienna, the occupied city, had turned its back on the spring.