Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘My handkerchief!’ said Heini suddenly in a panic. The white one in the pocket of his dinner jacket was there, of course, but the other one, the one with which he wiped his hands between the pieces…

Mali flushed and jumped to her feet. ‘I’m sorry… I didn’t know that I…’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He found the one his stepmother had washed for him, but cotton, not linen. The Bergers’ maids always laundered his handkerchiefs; they smelled so fresh and clean with just the lightest touch of starch: Ruth saw to that.

It was time to go. Professor Sandor put his head round the door. ‘Bartók is here!’ he said, beaming — and Heini rose.

The applause which greeted him was loud and enthusiastic for Heini Radek was an amazingly personable young man with his dark curls, his graceful body. This was how a pianist should look and in Liszt’s city comparisons were not hard to make.

Heini bowed, smiled at a girl in the front row, again up at the gallery, gave a respectful nod in the direction of Hungary’s greatest composer. Turning to settle himself on the piano stool he found that Mali, her Adam’s apple working, was leaning forward in her chair. He had told her again and again that she had to sit back, that the audience must not be aware of any figure but his, and she jerked backwards. It was unbelievable — how could anyone be so gauche? And she had drenched herself with some appalling sickly scent beneath which the odour of sweat was still discernible.

But now there had to be only the music. He closed his eyes for a moment of concentration, opened them — and began to play.

And Professor Sandor, who had slipped into the front row, nodded, for the boy in spite of all was very, very musical and the persuasion, the work, he had put into arranging the concert had been worthwhile.

It was after three encores, after the applause and the flowers thrown onto the platform by an excited group of schoolgirls, that Heini thought of Ruth again. She always waited for him wherever he played — unobtrusive, quiet, but so very pretty, standing close by so that he could smile at her and claim her, but never crowding in when people wanted to tell him how much they had enjoyed the music. And afterwards she would take him back to the Felsengasse and Leonie would have his favourite dishes on the table, and they would talk about the concert and relive the evening till he was relaxed enough to sleep. Or if he was invited to a party, to people who might be useful to him, Ruth slipped quietly away without a word of reproach.

Whereas Mali now was waiting for praise, her eyes worried behind her spectacles. ‘Was it all right?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘Everything was all right, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, managing to smile, and then returned to greet his well-wishers, and to receive their volatile greetings, so different from the well-bred handshakes and heel clicks of the Viennese.

But late that night, returning home, he realized again how bereft he was. That his father would be working late in his editorial office he knew, but his stepmother too had gone out. True she had left a note and a pot of goulash on the stove, but Heini had never had to return to an empty house.

He was out on the moonlit verandah when his father came through the French windows carrying two glasses of wine.

‘How did it go?’

‘Pretty well, I think.’

‘I’ve heard good things already on the grapevine. You’ll go far, Heini.’

Heini smiled and took his glass. ‘I miss Ruth,’ he said.

‘Yes, I can imagine,’ said his father, who had met Ruth in Vienna. ‘If I were you, I’d marry her quickly before someone else snaps her up!’

‘Oh, they won’t do that. We belong.’

Beside him, Radek was silent, looking down at the lights of the city in which he had lived all his life. A man of fifty, he looked older than his age and troubled.

‘How’s it going with your visa?’

‘All right, as far as I know.’

‘Well, don’t delay, Heini. I don’t like the way things are shaping. If Hitler moves against the Czechs, the Hungarians will try and get a share of the pickings and that means kowtowing to the Germans. There aren’t any laws against the Jews yet, but they’ll come.’ And abruptly: ‘I’ve taken a job in Switzerland. Marta is going ahead next week to find us an apartment.’

Left alone again, Heini was filled with disquiet. For his father to leave his home and the prestige he enjoyed in Hungary meant there was danger indeed. Heini did not like the idea of England: The Land Without Music, the country of fogs and men in bowler hats who had done unmentionable things to each other at boarding school, but it looked as though he had better get himself there quickly. And he was going to Ruth, his starling, his page turner, his love. Humbly, Heini, staring down at the lights of a barge as it slipped beneath the Elisabeth Bridge, admitted that he had taken Ruth too much for granted. Well, all this was going to change. Not only would he make Ruth wholly his, physically as well as mentally, but he was ready — yes, he was almost ready now — to marry her. At twenty-one he was very young to be taking such a step and his agent in Vienna had advised against it. So much patronage at the start of a musician’s career came from wealthy matrons and they were apt to look with a particular kindness on unmarried youths. But this did not matter. He was prepared to make the sacrifice.

On an impulse, he fetched a piece of paper and, lighting the lamp in the corner of the verandah, sat down to write a letter. He told Ruth of the concert and the disaster Mali had been, and wrote movingly and without hesitation of his love. Knowing, though, how practical Ruth was, how she needed to help, he wrote also of what he wanted her to do.

I shall have to have a piano as soon as I arrive, darling, wrote Heini. I don’t of course expect you to buy one — I know money may be a little tight till your family gets settled — only to rent one. A baby grand would be ideal, but if your parents’ drawing room won’t accommodate that, I’ll make do with an upright for the time being. A Bösendorfer would be best, you know how I prefer them, but I’ll be quite happy with a Stein-way or a Bechstein, but if it’s a Bechstein it must be a Model 8, not any of the smaller ones. Perhaps you’d better leave the tuning till the day before I come — and not an English piano, Ruth, not even a Broadwood. I’m sure I can leave it all to you, my love; you’ve never failed me yet and you never will.

When he had signed the letter, Heini still lingered for a while, inhaling the scent of mignonette from the garden. ‘I love you, Ruth,’ he said aloud, and felt uplifted and purged and good as people do when they have committed themselves to another. He would have stayed longer, but for the whine of a mosquito somewhere above him. Once, on the Grundlsee, a midge had bitten him on the pad of his index finger and it had turned septic. Hurrying indoors, Heini closed the window and then went to bed.

It was not until she stood on the platform and looked up at the royal-blue coaches with their crests and the words Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits painted over the windows, that Ruth realized they were travelling on the Orient Express.

Now, sitting opposite Quin in the dining car as the train streamed through the twilit Austrian countryside, she looked about her in amazement. She had expected luxury, but the Lalique panels, the rosewood marquetry of the partitions, the gilded metal flowers on the ceiling were sumptuous beyond belief. On the damask-covered table lay napkins folded into butterflies; a row of crystal glasses stood beside each plate; sprays of poinsettias, like crimson shields, glowed in the light of the lamp.

‘Oh, I can’t believe this,’ said Ruth, trying to feel guilty and not succeeding. ‘It’s like a real and proper honeymoon. You shouldn’t have done it.’

‘It was no trouble,’ said Quin, handing her the menu sheet.

But in fact the bribing and manoeuvring to get a compartment at such notice had been considerable. He’d done it, wanting to give her an interval of comfort between the days of hiding in the museum and the poverty which awaited her in London, and now, as she bent over the gold-lettered menu, he summoned the waiter and instructed him to pull down the blinds, for they were approaching the familiar country round her beloved Grundlsee.

‘I ought to be a Hungarian countess,’ said Ruth, looking round at the other diners. ‘Or at least a spy.’ She had taken one look at the people getting onto the train and unpacked the page-turning frock. Even so, she felt badly underdressed — whereas Quin, in the mysterious way of Englishmen who return from the wilds, was immaculate in his dinner jacket. ‘Look at that woman’s stole — it’s a sable!’ she said under her breath.

‘I dare say she’d swop with you,’ said Quin, glancing at their middle-aged neighbour with her heavily painted face.

‘Because I’m with you, do you mean?’

‘No, not because of that,’ said Quin, but he did not elaborate.

‘Do you think you might help me to order?’ asked Ruth presently. ‘There seems to be so much.’

‘I was hoping you would suggest that,’ said Quin. ‘You see, I think we should pay particular attention to the wine.’

The wine, when it came, was presented by the sommelier who undid its napkin and held it out to Quin rather in the manner of a devoted midwife showing the head of a ducal household that he really has his longed-for son.

‘Try it,’ said Quin, exchanging a look of complicity with the waiter.

Ruth picked up her glass… sipped… closed her eyes… sipped again… opened them. For a moment it looked as though she was going to speak — to make an assessment, a comparison. But she didn’t. She just shook her head once, wonderingly — and then she smiled.