Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Quin had slept in the room at the top of the tower since his grandfather had led him there at the age of eight, a bewildered orphan in foreign clothes and a pair of outsize spectacles supposed to strengthen his eyes after an attack of measles. Separated by three flights of stairs from his nurse, laid to rest each night under the pelt of a polar bear which the Basher had shot in Alaska, Quin had gone to bed in terror — yet even then he would not have changed his eyrie for the world.

The students were due any moment now: the bus hired to fetch them from Newcastle could bump its way right down to Anchorage Bay. He’d been down earlier to check that the arrangements were in order: the stove lit in the little common room, the Bunsen burners connected to the Calor gas, the blankets in the dormitories above the lab properly aired. Everything was in hand yet he felt restless, and hardly aware of what he was doing, he picked up the guitar in the corner of the room and began to tune the strings.

Quin’s guitar studies had not progressed very far. He had in fact stayed stuck on Book Two of the manual and his friends at Cambridge had always been unpleasant about his performance, putting their fingers in their ears or leaving the room. But though he could play only a few of the pieces in the book, they covered the normal range of human emotion: ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ was cheerful and outgoing; ‘Evening Elegy’ was lyrical and romantic — and the ‘Mississippi Moan’ was — well, a moan.

It was this piece which had particularly emptied the room when he played it at college, but Quin was much attached to it. Now, as the plaintive lament from the Deep South stole through the room, Quin realized that he had not chosen the ‘Moan’ at random. He did in fact feel a sense of disquiet… of unease… and a few broken chords later, he realized why.

For it had to be admitted that he had not behaved well over Felton’s efforts to bring Ruth to Bowmont. Roger worked ceaselessly for the students and deputized willingly for him, enduring all the boredom of committees. If he had set his heart on bringing the girl to Northumberland, Quin should have helped him. It would have been perfectly simple to work something out, nor was he in the least troubled by the disapproval of the Placketts. The truth was, he had acted selfishly, not wanting to be involved in the girl’s emotionalism, her endless ability to live deep.

Well, it was done now, and the ‘Moan’ — as it so often did — had cleared the air. Putting regret behind him, Quin moved to his desk and picked up Hackenstreicher’s latest letter to Nature. Time to put this idiot out of his misery once and for all. Pulling the typewriter towards him, he inserted a clean sheet of paper.

He was still writing as the bus passed the gates behind the house and bumped its way towards the beach.

Ruth woke very early in the dormitory above the boat-house. Everyone else still slept; Pilly, beside her, was curled up against the expected disasters of the coming day — only a few tufts of hair showed above the grey blanket. At the end of the row of bunks, Dr Elke’s slumbering bulk beside the door protected her charges.

Of the previous night, Ruth remembered only the driving rain, the sudden chill as they scuttled indoors from the stuffy bus… that and the monotonous slap of the waves on the beach.

But now something had happened — and at first it seemed to her that that something was simply… light.

She dressed quickly, crept past her sleeping friends, past Dr Elke, twitching as she rode through Valhalla in her dreams, climbed down the ladder and opened the door.

‘Oh!’ said Ruth, and walked forward, unbelieving, bewildered… dazzled. How could this have happened overnight, this miracle? How could there be so much light, so much movement; how could everything be so terribly there?

The sun was rising out of a silver sea — a sea which shimmered, which changed almost moment by moment. And the sky changed too as she watched it; first it was rose and amethyst, then turquoise… yet already a handful of newly fledged cotton-wool clouds waited their turn…

And the air moved too — how it moved! You didn’t need to breathe, it breathed itself. It wasn’t wind now, not yet, just this newly created, newly washed air which smelled of salt and seaweed and the beginning of the world.

There was too much. Too much beauty, too much air to breathe, too much sky to turn one’s face to… and unbelievably too much sea. She had imagined it so often: the flat, grey, rather sad expanse of the North Sea, but this…

A shaft of brilliant light pierced the surface and caught the needle of a lighthouse on a distant island… There were fields on this ocean: patches of shining brightness, others like gunmetal and calm oases like lagoons. It never stopped being, the sea, she had not been prepared for that.

The tide was out. Taking off her shoes and stockings, she felt the cool, ribbed sand massaging her bare feet. There were acres of it; golden, unsullied… Moving drunkenly towards the edge of the water, she began to calm down enough to notice the inhabitants of this light-dappled world… Three heavy, ecclesiastical-looking birds diving from a rock — cormorants she thought — but could not name the narrow-winged flock whose whiteness was so intense that they seemed to be lit up from within.

Now she came to the first rock pool and here was a simpler, more containable, delight. Dr Felton had taught her well; she knew the Latin names of the anemones and brittle stars, the little darting shrimps, but this was the world of fairy tale. Here were submerged forests, miniature bays of sand, pebbles like jewels…

By the rim of the ocean, she paused and put a foot into the water, and gasped. It was like being electrocuted, so cold. Even the foam carried a charge… and then almost at once she became accustomed to it. No, that was wrong; you couldn’t become accustomed to this invigorating, fierce stab of cold and cleanness, but you could want more of it and more.

I didn’t know, she thought. I didn’t imagine that anything could be like this, could make one feel so… purged… so clean… so alone and unimportant and yet so totally oneself. For a moment, she wanted everyone she loved to be there — her parents and Mishak and Mishak’s beloved Marianne risen from the dead, to come and stand here beside the sea. But then the sky performed one of its conjuring tricks, sending in a fleet of purple clouds which moved over the newly risen sun, so that for a moment everything changed again — became swirling and dark and turbulent… and then out came the sun once more, strengthened… higher in the sky… and she thought, no, here I can be alone because there isn’t any alone or not alone; there’s only light and air and water and I am part of it and everyone I love is part of it, but it’s outside time, it’s outside needing and wanting.

It was at this point of exaltation that she noticed a small white sail and a boat coming round the point and making for the bay.

Quin too had woken at dawn and made his way to the sheltered cove by Bowmont Mill where he kept the dinghy when it was not in use. He’d been glad of an excuse to get away from the house and bring the boat round for the students; glad that the weather had lifted: the golden day was an unexpected bonus. For the rest he was without thought, feeling the wind, tending his sail…

He saw the lone figure as soon as he rounded the point and even from a distance realized that the girl, whoever she was, was in a state of bliss. The breeze whipped her hair, one hand held the folds of her skirt as she moved backwards and forwards, playing with the waves.

The obvious images were soon abandoned. This was not Botticelli’s Venus risen from the foam, not Undine welcoming the dawn, but something simpler and, under the circumstances, more surprising. This was Ruth.

She stood quietly watching as he dropped his sail and allowed the dinghy to run onto the sand. It was not until she waded out to help him, pulling the boat up with each lift of the waves, that he spoke.

‘An unexpected pleasure,’ he said idiotically — but for Ruth the creased, familiar smile threatened for a moment the impersonality of this scoured and ravishing world. ‘I didn’t think you were coming.’

‘My mother bullied me and Uncle Mishak. Oh, but imagine; if they hadn’t. Imagine if I’d missed all this!’

‘You like it?’ asked Quin, who found it advisable to confine himself to banalities, for it had been disconcerting how well she had fitted the dream of those who come in from the sea: the long-haired woman waiting by the shore.

She shook her head wonderingly. ‘I didn’t think there could be anything like this. You lose yourself in music, but in the end music is about how to live; it comes back to you. But this… I suppose one can have petty thoughts here, but I don’t see how.’

The dingy was beached now. Quin took a rope from the bows and tied it round a jagged rock — and together they made their way towards the boathouse. Since she had walked in a trance towards the rim of the sea, Ruth had never once looked backwards to the land. Now she stopped dead and said: ‘Oh, what is that? What is that place?’

‘What do you mean?’ Quin, at first, didn’t understand the question.