Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

If Heini’s letters were shown to everyone and were matters for rejoicing, the letters from Mr Proudfoot, arriving secretly at Ruth’s post office box, were another matter. Mr Proudfoot had seen fit to lay the conditions of nullity before Ruth, who found them daunting.

‘Are you sure there’s no insanity in the family?’ she asked her puzzled parents. ‘What about Great-Aunt Miriam?’

‘To believe that the Kaiser was a reincarnation of Tutankhamen may be eccentric, but it is not insane,’ said her father firmly.

But if the immediate prospects for annulment were poor, Mr Proudfoot was helpful about getting her British naturalization confirmed, sending her forms in prepaid envelopes and continuing to offer assistance. That Quin himself never wrote or sent a message was only what she had expected and did not disappoint her in the least.

By the middle of August, the crisis over Czechoslovakia began to dominate the newspapers. Hitler’s rantings grew more demented; newsreel pictures showed him strutting about with his arm round Mussolini or shaking his fist at anyone who dared to interfere with the concerns of Eastern Europe. Cabinet ministers abandoned their grouse moors and began to shuttle back and forth between London and Paris, between Paris and Berlin. The Czechs appealed for help.

Great Britain’s increasing preparations for war affected the inhabitants of Belsize Park in various ways. Mrs Weiss looked up at a large grey barrage balloon floating above her, said, ‘Mein Gott, vat is zat?’, fell over a hole in the pavement and was conveyed to Hampstead Hospital for stitches in her nose. Uncle Mishak, passing a poster which urged him to Keep Calm and Dig, did just that, excavating a vegetable patch in the rubble-strewn garden behind the house. In the Willow Tea Rooms, Miss Maud pored anxiously over a leaflet giving instructions for the assembling of a prefabricated air-raid shelter and received much good advice from the male customers who professed to understand them. Mrs Burtt stopped singing over the washing up because her Trevor had been passed fit for the air force, and Dr Levy, though he had made it perfectly clear that he was not entitled to practise medicine, was pulled into a neighbouring house to resuscitate a man with a weak heart whose wife had sought to amuse him by coming to bed in her gas mask.

For Ruth, the crisis meant only the dread of separation from Heini. She emptied the jam jar and sent frantic cables to Budapest, but his emigration papers, though expected at any moment, still hadn’t come through. There was one matter, however, on which she sought enlightenment from Miss Maud and Miss Violet who, as general’s daughters, could be expected to know about the army.

‘Would someone aged thirty, or a bit over, be called up?’

‘Only if the war went on for a long time,’ Miss Maud replied.

It was during these dark days that Ruth received news which would normally have caused her the deepest disappointment. University College had given her place on the Zoology course to another refugee. They were now full up and could not admit her in the coming year.

‘It was a muddle,’ she said, holding out the letter. ‘When I wasn’t on the student transport, the Quakers got in touch with them and they had so many people begging to come that they accepted someone else. They’re going to see if they can get me into another college, but they’re not very hopeful as it’s so late.’

After the first shock, however, she made the best of it. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I want to go on working anyway, to help you and to help Heini when he comes.’

‘It matters a great deal,’ said the Professor sternly.

For him and his wife, Ruth’s rejection was a bitter blow. Like parents the world over, they would accept any tribulation if their child could go forward into a better future. Ruth must not live in the twilit world of the refugees, the world of menial jobs, of anxiety about permits and poverty and fear.

‘I wonder if I should get in touch with Quinton Somerville,’ said the Professor that night when Ruth had gone to bed. ‘I feel sure he would help.’

‘No, I wouldn’t do that.’

The Professor looked at her in surprise. ‘Why not?’

But Leonie, who seldom found a use for logical thought and was pursuing a hunch so nebulous that it could not possibly be uttered, just said that she thought it was a bad idea — and in the days that followed nobody had time to think of their personal lives.

All the clichés written later about the Munich crisis were true. The world did hold its breath, the storm clouds did gather over Europe, strangers did stop each other in the street and ask for news. Then Neville Chamberlain, that obstinate old man who had never been in an aeroplane before, flew to meet Hitler, flew home again, and back once more… to return at last with a piece of paper in which he believed wholly and which he held up to his people with the words ‘Peace in our time.’

There were many who cried appeasement and many — and the refugees, of course, among them — who knew what Hitler’s promises were worth, and that the Czechs had been betrayed, yet who could want war? As the crowds cheered in front of Buckingham Palace, Ruth waltzed with Mrs Burtt among the pots and pans in the Willow Tea Rooms kitchen because Heini could come now and Mrs Burtt’s Trevor sleep safe in his bed.

It was in this time of renewed hope, when the chrysanthemums glowed gold and russet in the flower seller’s basket and little boys called at Number 27 for the conkers Uncle Mishak collected in his wanderings, that Professor Berger came home to find Ruth reading a letter — and was startled by the radiance in her face.

‘From Heini?’ he asked. ‘He is coming?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s from the University of Thameside. They’ve offered me a place, straight away. I start next week.’

He took the letter she held out to him. It was signed by the Admissions Tutor, but no one was deceived by that.

‘This is Somerville’s doing,’ said the Professor, and felt a weight lift from his heart because it had hurt, the belief that his young protégé had forgotten them. ‘He’s Professor of Zoology there. And sternly to Ruth: “You will be worthy of his kindness, I know.”

She had retired into her hair, trying to still the confusion in her mind and remained in it, figuratively speaking, till late that night when her Aunt Hilda’s snuffling proclaimed her to be asleep, and she could lean out of the window, breathing in the sooty air, and try to think things out.

Why had he done it? Why had Quin, who had made it so clear that they should never meet again, accepted her as a student? What had made him override his decision and ignore the warnings of his solicitor about collusion and consent and heaven knew what else, to give her this chance?

But what did it matter why? He had done it, and the future lay bright and shining before her. She would be the most studious student they had ever seen at Thameside. She would work till she burst, she would get a First — she would get the best First they had ever had — and she would do it without ever making him speak to her, without even once looking his way.

That her acceptance had nothing to do with Quin, that he did not even know of it, was something which could not have occurred to Ruth or to her family, accustomed as they were to the formal working of Austrian academic life, yet it was so. Quin always left the admissions, indeed most of the administration, to his second in command, Dr Felton, and was himself not only not in London, but not even in his Northumbrian home.

Believing in the inevitability of war, he had taken himself off to a naval base in Scotland to evoke the revered name of his appalling grandfather, Rear Admiral ‘Basher’ Somerville, and get himself into the navy. To talk himself into the corridors of power had been relatively easy; to talk himself out of them, as the threat of war receded, was taking longer.

Professor Somerville was going to be late for the beginning of term.

‘What do you mean, he isn’t back? Term begins next week. Do you intend to allow this kind of behaviour from your staff?’

Lady Plackett was annoyed. Since her husband had assumed his new position as Vice Chancellor of Thameside, she had taken a great deal of trouble planning suitable occasions at which the staff would be received. Their predecessor, Lord Charlefont, had been lackadaisical in the extreme and the position of the Lodge, marked off only by its Doric columns and Virginia creeper from the Arts Block which ran along the river, lent itself to the kind of haphazard coming and going which she had no intention of permitting. She had already had a Private notice put on the flagged path which led from the main courtyard to their front door, and instructed the college servants to erect a chain-link fence to keep their part of the river terrace free from students who seemed to think they had a right to sit there and eat their sandwiches.

To insist on one’s privacy was essential, as it was essential to restore the high moral tone of the university; students holding hands or embracing could not, of course, be tolerated. But Lady Plackett also meant to give… to enrich college life with her hospitality and make the Lodge a place where good conversation and good breeding could be relied upon. To do this, however, she had to separate the sheep from the goats and find out what material was to hand, and to this end she had planned a series of organized entertainments for the beginning of term. First the professors to sherry, properly labelled, of course, with their names and departments, for unlabelled gatherings were never satisfactory — then the lecturers to fruit juice… and lastly, in batches of twenty or so, the students to play paper and pencil games.