Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘But she is rather a strange girl in any case,’ said Verena. ‘I mean, she talks to the sheep. There is something whimsical in that; something unscientific.’

‘Jesus talked to them,’ said the philologist from the museum. An old man with a white beard, he spoke with unexpected resolution.

‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ Verena conceded the point. ‘But she recites to it in German.’

‘What does she recite?’ asked the biographer of Bishop Berkeley.

‘Goethe,’ said Quin briefly. He was growing weary of the saga of the sheep. ‘“The Wanderer’s Night Song”’.

The philologist approved. ‘An excellent choice. Though perhaps one might have expected one of the eighteenth-century pastoralists. Matthias Claudius perhaps?’

There followed a surprisingly animated discussion on the kind of lyric verse which might, in the German language, be expected to appeal to the domestic ungulates, and though this was exactly the kind of scholarly banter which Lady Plackett believed in encouraging, she listened to it with a frown.

‘Wasn’t Goethe the man who kept falling in love with women called Charlotte?’ asked the appealingly silly wife of the biographer.

Quin turned to her with relief. ‘Yes, he was. He put it all in a novel called Werther where the hero is so in love with a Charlotte that he kills himself. Thackeray wrote a poem about it.’

‘Was it a good poem?’

‘Very good,’ said Quin firmly. ‘It starts:

And it ends with him being carried away on a shutter.’

Verena, watching this descent into frivolity with a puckered brow, now made a last attempt to bring Professor Somerville back to a subject dear to her heart.

‘When is Miss Berger actually due to leave?’ she asked.

‘It isn’t decided yet.’

He then turned resolutely back to Mrs LeClerque who began to tell him about a friend of hers who had become engaged to no fewer than three men called Henry, all of them unsuitable, and Verena decided to do her duty by her other neighbour.

‘Tell me, do you intend to pursue your researches into the bony fishes here in England?’ she enquired.

But for once her mother had let her down. The last minute arrival of the musicologist had necessitated a change in the seating arrangements. Blank-faced and astonished, the icon expert gazed at her.

It was Quin’s habit to drive to Thameside in a large, midnight-blue Crossley tourer with brass lamps and a deep horn which recalled, faintly, the motoring activities of the redoubtable Mr Toad.

The day after the Placketts’ dinner party, parking the car under the archway, he was confronted not by the usual throng shouting their ‘Good mornings’ but by two cold-looking students holding up a ragged banner inscribed with the words: RUTH BERGER’S DISMISSAL IS UNFAIR.

Safe in his room, he picked up the phone. ‘Get me O’Malley down in Tonbridge, will you please, Hazel?’

‘Yes, Professor Somerville. And Sir Lawrence Dempster phoned — he said would you ring him back as soon as possible.’

‘All right; I’ll deal with that first.’

By the time Quin had spoken to the director of the Geophysical Society, it was too late to phone O’Malley, who would be lecturing, and Quin applied himself to his correspondence till it was time to go to the Common Room where Elke, crunching a custard cream between her splendid teeth, brought up a subject he had declared to be closed.

‘She wrote a first-class essay for me after less than a week. And in what is, of course, not her native language.’

‘I’m not aware that Miss Berger has any trouble with English,’ said Quin. ‘She has after all been to an English school most of her life.’

His next attempt to phone Tonbridge was cut short by Hazel who announced that a deputation of students was waiting to see him.

‘I can give them ten minutes, but no more,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m lecturing at eleven.’

The students filed in. He recognized Sam and the little frightened girl whose father made aspirins, and the huge Welshman with cauliflower ears — all third years whom he didn’t know as well as he should have done because of his absence in India — but there were other students not in his department at all. It was Sam, wrapped in his muffler, who seemed to be their spokesman.

‘We’ve come about Miss Berger, sir. We don’t think she should be sent away.’ It cost him to speak as he did, for Professor Somerville, hitherto, had been his god. ‘We think it’s victimization.’ And as the Professor continued to look at him stonily: ‘We think it’s unfair in view of what the Jewish people —’

‘Thank you; it is not necessary to remind me of the fate of Jewish people.’

‘No.’ Sam swallowed. ‘But we can’t see why she should go just because of a few technicalities.’

‘Miss Berger is not being victimized. She is being transferred.’

‘Yes. But so are the Jews and the gypsies and the Freemasons in Germany,’ said Sam, scoring an unexpected point. ‘And the Socialists. They’re being transferred to camps in the East.’

‘And she doesn’t want to go,’ said Pilly, stammering with nerves at addressing the man on whose account she was being put through so much. ‘She likes it here and she helps. She can make you see things.’

‘It’s true, sir.’ A tall, fair man whom Quin did not recognize spoke from the back. ‘I’m from the German Department and… well, I don’t mind telling you I got pretty discouraged studying the language when all you hear is Hitler braying on the radio. But I met her in the library and… well, if she can forget the Nazis…’

Quin was silent, his eyes travelling over the deputation.

‘You seem to have forgotten one of Miss Berger’s most fervent admirers,’ he said. ‘Why has nobody brought the sheep?’

It was as he was returning from lunch that Quin found a visitor in his room.

‘You must forgive me for troubling you,’ said Professor Berger, rising from his chair.

‘It’s no trouble — it’s a pleasure to see you, sir.’

But Quin, as he shook hands, was shocked by the change in him. Berger had been a tall, upright figure, dignified in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. Now his face was gaunt and lined and there was a great weariness in his voice.

‘Is it all right to talk German?’

‘Of course.’ Quin shut the door, ushered him to a better chair.

‘I have come about my daughter. About Ruth. I understand there has been some trouble and I wondered if there was anything I could do to put it right.’

Quin picked up a ruler and began to turn it over and over in his hands.

‘She will have told you that I’m arranging to have her transferred to the University of Tonbridge, down in Kent.’

‘Ah. So that’s it. I didn’t know. She only told me that she had to leave.’

‘It’s hardly a secret. Everyone in the university here seems to make it their business.’

‘Could I ask why she is being sent away?’

The old man’s voice was dry and remote, but the distress behind the words was easy to hear and Quin, accustomed to thinking of himself as Berger’s underling, found himself increasingly uncomfortable.

‘I thought it was inadvisable that I should teach someone whose family I knew so well. It would lay your daughter open to charges that she was being favoured.’

The Professor smoothed his black hat. ‘Really? I have to say that if I had refused to teach the children of men I knew well in Vienna, I would have had many empty seats at my lectures.’

‘Perhaps. But British colleges are different. There is more gossip; they’re smaller.’

‘Professor Somerville, please tell me the truth,’ said Berger, and it was not till he heard this man, thirty years his senior, address him by his rank, that Quin realized how hurt the old man was. ‘Has Ruth done something wrong? Is she not equal to the course? We tried to teach her well, but —’

‘No, absolutely not. Ruth is an excellent student.’

‘Is it her manner then? Do you find her too forward? Reared among academics she perhaps appears lacking in respect?’

‘Not at all. She has already made more friends than one would have believed possible, both among the students and the staff.’

‘Then… can there have been… some kind of scandal? She is pretty, I know, but I would swear that she —’

Quin leant across his desk to speak with suitable emphasis. ‘Please believe me, sir, when I tell you that I am sending her away only because I think that the connection with your family, the debt I owe you —’

‘What debt?’ the other man interrupted sternly.

‘The symposium in Vienna, your hospitality. And the honorary degree.’

‘Yes, the degree. We heard from colleagues that you went to the ceremony, but not to the dinner.’

‘That’s correct. When I heard that you were not there —’ began Quin, and broke off. ‘I should have thanked you for arranging it, but I went straight up to Bowmont.’

There was a pause. Then Professor Berger, speaking slowly, looking at the ground, said: ‘My wife believes that it was you who helped Ruth in Vienna.’

Quin’s silence lasted a fraction too long. ‘Oh really? Why does she believe that?’

‘You may well ask,’ said the Professor, a trifle bitterly. ‘Normal thought processes are entirely foreign to Leonie’s nature. As far as I can gather it is because you dived into the Grundlsee to retrieve her sister-in-law’s monograph on the Mi-Mi. Also because you danced twice with her god-daughter, Franzi, at the University Ball. Franzi had very bad acne and a squint and it was because you singled her out and were kind to her that she agreed to have her eye operated on, and the acne disappeared of itself, and now she is married and has two abominably behaved children and has fortunately settled in New York.’