Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘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.

Ruth had scarcely slept. Now she folded the blanket on the camp bed, washed as best she could under the cloakroom tap, brewed a cup of coffee.

‘This is my wedding day,’ she thought. ‘This is the day I shall remember when I lie dying —’ and felt panic seize her.

She had put her loden skirt and woollen sweater under newspaper, weighed down by a tray of fossil-bearing rocks, but this attempt at home-ironing had not been successful. Should she after all wear the dress she had bought for Heini’s debut with the Philharmonic? She’d taken it from the flat and it hung now behind the door: brown velvet with a Puritan collar of heavy cream lace. It came from her grandfather’s department store: the attendants had all come to help her choose; to share her pleasure in Heini’s debut. Now the store had its windows smashed; notices warned customers not to shop there. Thank heaven her grandfather was dead.

No, that was Heini’s dress — her page-turning dress, for it mattered what one wore to turn over music. One had to look nice, but unobtrusive. The dress was the colour of the Bechstein in the Musikverein — it had nothing to do with an Englishman who ran away from Strauss.

She wandered through the galleries and, in the grey light of dawn, her old friends, one by one, became visible. The polar bear, the elephant seal… the ichthyosaurus with the fake vertebrae. And the infant aye-aye which she had restored to its case.

‘Wish me luck,’ she said to the ugly little beast, leaning her head against the glass.

She closed her eyes and the primates of Madagascar vanished as she saw the wedding she had planned so often with her mother. Not here, but on the Grundlsee, rowing across to the little onion-domed church in a boat — in a whole flotilla of boats, because everyone she loved would be there. Uncle Mishak would grumble a little because he had to dress up; Aunt Hilda would get stuck in her zip… and the Zillers would play. ‘On the landing stage,’ Ruth had suggested, but Biberstein said no, he was too fat to play on a landing stage. She would wear white organdie and carry a posy of mountain flowers, and as she walked down the aisle on her father’s arm, there would be Heini with his mop of curls and his sweet smile.

(Oh, Heini, forgive me. I’m doing this for us.)

Back in the cloakroom, she looked at her reflection once again. She had never seemed to herself so plain and unprepossessing. Suddenly she loosened her hair, filled the basin with cold water, seized the cake of green soap that the museum thought adequate for its research workers…

Quin, letting himself in silently, found her ready, her suitcase strapped.

‘Does the roof leak?’ he asked, surprised, for from the curving strands of her long hair, drops of water were running onto the floor.

She shook her head. ‘I washed my hair, but the electric fire doesn’t work.’

He saw the shadows under her eyes, the resolute set of her shoulders.

‘Come; it’ll be over soon — and it isn’t as bad as going to the dentist.’

At the bottom of the staircase, as they prepared to leave by the side door, a small group of people waited to wish her luck. The cleaning lady, the porter, the old taxidermist on the floor below. They had all known she was there and kept their counsel. She must remember that when she felt despair about her countrymen.

She had expected something grand from the British Consulate, but the Anschluss had forced a reorganization of the Diplomatic Service, and the taxi delivered them in front of a row of temporary huts, on the tin roof of which the rain was still beating down. A disconsolate plumber in oilskins was poking at an overflowing gutter with an iron tool. Inside, in the Consul’s makeshift office, the picture of George the Sixth hung slightly askew; out in the corridor someone was hoovering.

The Consul’s deputy was there, but not in the best of tempers. He had pinkeye, an unpleasant inflammation of the conjunctiva, and held a handkerchief to his face. Though he had found Professor Somerville personally courteous, he could not approve of the way the Consul, presumably on the instruction of the Ambassador, was rushing this ceremony through. Procedures which should have taken days had been telescoped into hours: the issuing of visas, the amendment of passports. Someone, thought the deputy, whose origins were working class, had almost certainly been at school with someone else. Professor Somerville’s father with the Ambassador’s cousin, perhaps… There would have been those exchanges by which upper-class Englishmen, like dogs round a lamppost, sniff out each other’s schooling — faggings at Eton, beatings at Harrow — and realize that they are brothers beneath the skin.