The Morning Gift

Chapter 18

The first day of the field course was, by tradition, spent close to Bowmont’s shores. Though everyone worked hard, learning the sampling techniques they would need to make proper observations, there was a festive air among the students — for if this was science it was also a marvellous seaside holiday and the experienced staff made no attempt to curb their pleasure. Indeed Dr Felton himself, his hornrims turning to russet or amber to match the creatures he fished from the pools, looked like a boy let out of school — and Dr Elke, pacing the littoral in shorts and a straining, reindeer-covered sweater was a sight to make the gods themselves rejoice. Which was as well, for the coast of North Northumberland was continuing to drive Ruth a little mad. She knew it was not really British to feel like this, but her state of ecstasy, though she tried to control it, continued to get the better of her. It got her by the throat when she saw a wave lift itself against the light so as to make a window for the sky; it came at her with the dazzle of a gull’s wing; it was transmitted through her bare feet as she followed the wave ripples in the sand. She filled her pockets with shells and when her pockets were full, she fetched her sponge bag and filled that. She bit into the bladders of seaweed, choked on the salty liquid, and did it again.

And she beachcombed…

‘Look, oh look!’ cried Ruth every ten minutes — and then whoever was closest had to go and examine what was undoubtedly a plank from the treasure chest of a Spanish galleon, or a coconut from the distant Indies. Dr Felton might point out, gently, the words ‘Bentham and Son, Sanitary Engineers’ on the back of the plank, making the galleon theory unlikely; Janet might turn the coconut round so as to reveal the stamp of a Newcastle grocer — but it made no difference to Ruth whose next find was as mysterious and magical as the one before.

Verena’s approach to the delights of the seashore was different. She had appeared after breakfast in a white cable-knit sweater as pristine as her lab coat and now, followed by Kenneth Easton who received the contents of her net as once he had received the contents of her stomach, she moved unerringly over banks of seaweed and through rocky pools.

‘Not, I think, a bearded horse mussel?’ said Verena, addressing Dr Felton, but throwing a sidelong glance at the Professor who was showing Huw and Sam how to sink a box quadrant into a patch of sand. ‘A horse mussel, but not, I would hazard, bearded?’

Dr Felton, examining the creature she had prised from the rock, agreed with her, and Kenneth, moved to spontaneous admiration, said: ‘Really, Verena, you are quite brilliant with bivalves!’

But it was not only bivalves with which Verena was brilliant. The other students might be glad to recognize a limpet, but Verena could tell a slit limpet from a keyhole limpet; she knew of a whole armoury of limpets; tortoiseshell limpets and slipper limpets and blue-rayed limpets, and was aware that the brave periwinkle, fighting dessication on the higher rocks, might be smooth or edible or rough.

But Ruth, here in this world which washed one free of pettiness, did not, as she would have done in London, go to the reference books in the laboratory to search for mussels that were yet more bearded, or a bristlier bristle worm than the one turned up by Verena’s spade. She did not want to read about mussels, she wanted to hold one and marvel at the blue and black striations of its shell. She was free of the urge to excel and succeed; she even gave up her complicated manoeuvres to keep out of the Professor’s way — and when she found her most valuable treasure of the morning, it was to him she came.

‘Look!’ said Ruth for the hundredth time. ‘Oh, look! Emeralds!’ He held out his hands and she tipped the smooth green stones into his palms.

‘Could they be?’ she said. ‘My great aunt had a bracelet and the stones looked just like that!’

He didn’t laugh at her. There were gem stones on this coast: carnelians and agates and amethysts — and leading her gently away from her dream, he said: ‘Only the sea does that — makes stones so perfect and so smooth. You could hire the best jeweller in the world and set him to work for a year and a day and he wouldn’t get anywhere near.’

He took one and held it to the light and as she came closer to look, he thought how wonderfully emeralds would have become her with her dark eyes and lion-coloured hair.

But Verena, never far from the Professor, now appeared by their side. ‘Good heavens, girl,’ she said, peering at the stones. ‘They’re just bits of bottle glass — surely you knew that? Even in Vienna they must have bottles.’

She looked at Quin, ready to share the joke of Ruth’s idiocy — but he had turned away and was putting the stones back into Ruth’s cupped hands as carefully as if they really were precious jewels.

‘Bottles can be extremely important,’ he said, holding her eyes. ‘It isn’t necessary for me to tell you that.’

And she flushed and smiled and moved away, feeling a glow of warmth, for whether they were emeralds or not mattered very little, but that he remembered what she had told him, there by the Danube — that mattered a lot!

At lunchtime Verena, approaching the Professor, said: ‘Isn’t it time we went to the house? Luncheon is at one o’clock, I understand?’

But here she suffered a reverse.

‘Yes, you go; my aunt’s a stickler for punctuality. I’ll stay down here — I don’t usually bother much with lunch.’

This remark caused considerable amusement to Dr Elke who had past experience of Quin’s conviction that he did not eat in the middle of the day, and gathering two of the girls to help, she made her way to the boat-house where she unwound an extra coil of sausages which Pilly proceeded to fry with an expertise which amazed her friends.

‘Why aren’t you afraid of sausages?’ asked Janet, as Pilly deftly turned the sizzling, ferociously spitting objects. ‘They’re much more dangerous than the experiments we do.’

‘I don’t have to learn sausages,’ said Pilly.

But in the afternoon Verena came into her own again, for the Professor took boatloads of students out into the bay to show them how to sweep for plankton and Verena, who had sailed in India and crewed for her cousin at Cowes, was in her element. She had only to twitch once at its toggle, and the outboard motor roared into life; she knew exactly what to do with sails, she rowed like an Amazon, so that it was natural that as the students changed places, Verena should remain by the Professor and help.

Secure in her position, she was extremely gracious to her inexperienced classmates, helping them into the dinghy and giving them instructions on seamanship so as to leave the Professor free to show them how to work the nets. Only when Ruth came aboard in her turn and offered to take one of the oars, did Verena’s graciousness desert her.

‘Can you row?’ she said snubbingly. ‘I didn’t think anyone had boats in Vienna.’

But Ruth, though she set a murderous pace, said nothing. She was in the grip of a new and noble resolution which, late that night, she proceeded to share with her friends.

‘I have decided,’ she announced, ‘to love Verena Plackett!’

The students were sitting round a bonfire of driftwood, roasting potatoes in the light of the moon — a dramatic setting in keeping with Ruth’s uplifted state. Only Kenneth Easton was absent. He had wandered away by himself for it had been hard for him seeing Verena go up to the house to dine with the Professor. Kenneth had examined his face carefully in the scrap of mirror which was all the students had to shave by and couldn’t help noticing how much more regular his features were than the Professor’s, how much less broken-looking his nose, and if he smoked a pipe he was certain he would have been able to keep it alight for reasonable stretches of time. Yet it was clear that it was the Professor Verena preferred and now, alone and melancholy, he gazed up at the lighted windows of Bowmont and sighed.

‘I mean it,’ persisted Ruth as her friends stared at her. ‘I’m entirely serious.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Janet, spearing another potato. ‘Raving mad. Verena is entirely and utterly awful.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Ruth. ‘So there is no point at all in trying to like her. Liking Verena would be to attempt the impossible. But there was an old philosopher who used to come and see us in Vienna — he had a long white beard and he used to meditate every day on a bench outside the Stock Exchange — and what he said was: “You must love what you cannot like.” He said it quite often.’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Pilly sadly — and a thin bespectacled youth called Simon said he didn’t either.

‘It sounds better in German,’ Ruth admitted, ‘but what it means is that though you can’t like everybody, you can love them deep down — in fact the more you don’t like them, the more important it is that you should. You have to love them as though they were your brother or sister… as part of the created world. As a fellow sinner,’ said Ruth, getting excited and dropping her potato in the sand.

Sam, though he knew it was not a Lancelot-like remark, said she was talking nonsense, and Janet pointed out that sinners were a doddle compared to Verena.

‘Sinners are human,’ she said.

But nothing could deflect Ruth from the noble path she had chosen and she quoted yet another European sage, the great Sigmund Freud, who had said that a thing cannot become lovable until it is loved.

‘Like Beauty and the Beast. You have to kiss it before it becomes a prince.’

As was inevitable the conversation now became ribald, but as she accepted the less burnt half of Sam’s potato, Ruth’s eyes were shining with moral virtue and the consciousness of right.

‘You’ll see. I’ll begin tomorrow when we go to Howcroft. I shall love her all day.’

‘Barker’s taken him then?’ asked Miss Somerville encountering Martha the following morning as she returned from the village. ‘He’s agreed?’

The puppy had been conveyed to the carpenter’s house before breakfast, but Martha’s kind, round face looked unaccustomedly shifty. ‘No, he hasn’t. He won’t have him.’

‘Won’t have him?’ Miss Somerville was incredulous. ‘Did you point out that the work on the pews is two months overdue?’

‘Yes, I did. He says his wife’s got asthma and she’s expecting and the doctor said she wasn’t to go near anything with hair.’

‘I must say I find that extraordinary. People like that wouldn’t have heard of asthma in the old days. It makes you wonder whether education is such a good thing.’ She bent to pick up her gardening trug. ‘Where is it, then?’

‘He offered to shoot it for me,’ said Martha. ‘He said it wouldn’t feel a thing — well, that’s true enough; he’s done enough poaching in his time, Barker has — he could knock down a hare at fifty yards and no trouble.’

Miss Somerville straightened her back. Her face was expressionless.

‘So you agreed? It’s been shot?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Martha shortly, and watched her employer’s hands relax on the handle of the trug. ‘Drowning the things at birth before their eyes are open is one thing, but shooting them in cold blood is another. If you want it shot, you can give the instructions yourself.’

‘Where is it, then?’

‘One of the students took it. I met her coming up for the milk. She says she’ll keep it; they’re off to Howcroft Point, I thought she might as well with Lady Plackett not being too fond of it and company coming.’

Miss Somerville nodded. The Rothleys were coming for drinks and the Stanton-Derbys, to welcome Verena and talk about the dance, and she didn’t really want any more jokes about the little dog. She was setting off across the lawn when Martha said: ‘Who’s this Richard Wagner, then? Some kind of musician fellow?’

‘He was a composer. An extremely noisy one, with a reprehensible private life. Why?’

‘This girl… the one who’s taken the puppy… she said he had a step-daughter with eyes like that — Wagner did. One blue and one brown, same as the puppy. Daniella she was called.’

‘The student?’

‘No, the stepdaughter.’

Deciding not to pursue the matter, Miss Somerville made her way to the garden. She thought she would postpone talking to Lady Plackett about the extraordinary behaviour of the carpenter. After all, it was none of her business.

Ruth, meanwhile, had reached the boathouse.

‘What is it?’ enquired Dr Elke, looking at Comely’s love child which was climbing with passionate enthusiasm over her feet.

‘It’s a mixture,’ admitted Ruth.

Dr Elke said she could see that and removed her shoe from the puppy’s grasp.

‘But full of personality?’ suggested Ruth. ‘Though not perhaps strictly beautiful.’

‘No, not strictly.’

‘Voltaire wasn’t beautiful either,’ said Ruth, ‘but he used to say that if he had half an hour to explain away his face, he could seduce the Queen of France.’

‘More than half an hour would be necessary in this case,’ said Dr Elke, and told Ruth to pass the hammers, for she was checking supplies for the day’s fossil hunting on the cliffs off Howcroft Point.

Ruth did so. There was a pause. Then: ‘I thought he might come with us on the bus? Martha said he was very fond of transportation and he’s never sick.’

‘Ask the Professor,’ said Elke and went into the lab.

Since Quin at that moment came down the path, Ruth repeated her request.

‘I thought he might be useful,’ she said.

‘Really?’ Quin’s eyebrows were raised in enquiry. ‘What sort of usefulness had you in mind?’

‘Well, dogs are always digging up bones. Suppose he found something interesting? The femur of a torosaurus, perhaps?’

‘That would certainly be interesting on the coal measures,’ said Quin drily. But seeing Ruth’s face, he relented. ‘Keep him out of the way; I suppose he can’t do much harm on the moors.’

By the time the bus deposited them at Howcroft Point, the puppy had acquired the kind of following that Voltaire himself would have envied. Pilly had held him on her knees throughout the journey, Janet spoke to him in a voice which made Ruth understand what happened in the backs of motor cars, and Huw was on hand to lift him over boulders which defeated even his intrepid scramblings.

It was another perfect day. The cliffs here were topped by heather and gorse, the curlews called — but the work now was hard. For here, in the carboniferous outcrop which ran from the moors out onto the shore, were embedded those creatures that determined all subsequent life on earth. Fragments of ancient corals, whorled molluscs, each characteristic of the layered zones, had to be prised from the rock, labelled, wrapped and carried back to the laboratory. And since no day is complete without the chance for self-improvement, Ruth was fortunate, for the opportunities for loving Verena Plackett on Howcroft Point were endless. Always at the Professor’s heels, she tapped unerringly with her brand-new hammer, finding not only an undoubted specimen of caninia, but also a crinoid complete with tentacles — and laughed merrily whenever Pilly mispronounced a word.

Since the tide was high, they had lunch above the strand on a patch of heather while the puppy consumed sandwiches, fell in and out of rabbit holes and fell suddenly and utterly asleep on Huw’s collecting bag. Most of the students too were glad to be lazy, but Ruth, accustomed to the ascent of high places from which to say ‘Wunderbar!’ scrambled to the top of the hill which commanded a view of the coast for miles, and the moors inland, still showing glimmers of purple. It was not till she caught the whiff of tobacco from behind a boulder that she realized she was not alone.

‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ said Quin, gesturing with his pipe at the low line of Holy Island to the south, and the dramatic pinnacle of Howcroft Rock. ‘I’m glad you’ve seen it like this — autumn and winter are best for the colours.’

She nodded. ‘People always say that views are breathtaking, don’t they? But they should be breath-giving, surely?’ She turned to smile at him. ‘And I don’t just mean the wind.’

For a few minutes they stood side by side in silence, watching the dazzle of spray over the rocks, the unbelievable dark blue of the water. A curlew called above them, the scent of vanilla drifted from a late flowering bush of gorse.

‘I came here for the first time when I was ten,’ said Quin. ‘I bicycled from Bowmont with my hammer and my Boy’s Own Book of Fossils. I started to chip at the rock — and suddenly there it was. An absolutely perfect cycad, as clear and unmistakable as truth itself. That was when I knew I was immortal — that I personally without the slightest doubt would solve the riddle of the universe.’

‘Yes, I know that one. Things that are for you. No doubts, no hesitation.’

‘Music in your case, I suppose,’ he said resignedly, waiting for the ubiquitous Mozart to appear on the horizon, towing Heini in his wake.

‘Yes. The first time I heard the Zillers play. But…’ She shook her head, ‘I loved the Grundlsee. I really loved it, the lake and the berries and the flowers, but when we went there it was still part of the way I’d always lived… with the university and people talking about psychoanalysis and all that. But here… the first morning by the sea… and now, still… I don’t understand what’s happened.’ She looked up at him and he saw the bewilderment on her face. ‘I feel as though I shall be homesick for this place all my life… for the sea… but how can I be? What has it to do with me? It’s Vienna I’m homesick for. I must be.’

His silence lasted so long that she turned her head. It seemed to her that his face had changed — he looked younger, more vulnerable, and when he spoke it was without his usual ease.

‘Ruth, if you wanted it to be different… If —’

He broke off. A shadow had fallen between them and the sun. Tall and looming, Verena Plackett stood there, holding out a piece of rock.

‘I wonder if you could clear up a point for me, Professor,’ she said. ‘I think this must be one of the brachiopods, but I’m not entirely sure.’

Quin did not speak to Ruth again till after their return. He was making his way up the cliff path when he heard footsteps and turned to find her hurrying after him, the puppy in her arms.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, but could you be so kind as to take him up to the house? Pilly would, but she’s busy cooking and I promised Martha I’d see that he got back safely.’

‘Why don’t you take him yourself? You’ve obviously made friends with Martha.’

‘No.’

He remembered her refusal to come to lunch, and meaning to tease her, said: ‘You’ll have to look at the place sometime, you know. After all, if I’m killed before Mr Proudfoot can put us asunder, Bowmont will be yours.’

Her reaction amazed him. She was furious; her face distorted — he almost expected her to stamp her feet.

‘How dare you talk like that! How dare you? Mr Chamberlain said there would be no war, he promised… and even if there is you don’t have to fight in it. It was absolutely unnecessary you going off to the navy like that, everyone said so. You could do much more good doing scientific work. It was ostentatious and stupid and wrong.’

‘Come, I was only joking.’

‘Exactly the sort of jokes one would expect from an Englishman. Jokes about people being dead.’

She thrust the puppy in his arms and stamped away down the hill.

‘As a woman I was unfortunately not able to follow the sport,’ said Verena, who was engaging Lord Rothley in a conversation about pigsticking. ‘But I watched it in India and found it quite fascinating.’

Lord Rothley mumbled something and held out his glass to Turton who, detecting a certain glassiness in his lordship’s eye, filled it to the brim with whisky.

The party was a small one: The Rothleys, the Stanton-Derbys and the widowed Bobo Bainbridge, come to welcome the Placketts and discuss the arrangements for Verena’s dance. Needless to say Verena, who had prepared so assiduously for Sir Harold in the matter of the bony fishes, had gone through the Northumberland Gazette to ascertain the interests of the guests, though in the case of Lord Rothley she had been deceived a little by the small print. It was pig breeding rather than pig sticking that interested his lordship.

Her duty to him completed, Verena moved over to Hugo Stanton-Derby standing with Lady Plackett by the fireplace. The excellent relationship which Verena enjoyed with her mother had enabled them to divide their labours: Verena had repaired to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the library to read up about Georgian snuff boxes which Stanton-Derby collected, while Lady Plackett immersed herself in the Financial Times for it was as a stockbroker that he earned his living.

The resulting conversation was as informed and intelligent as might have been expected, and when Verena turned to the women, they found her most understanding and sympathetic about their complaints. For as might have been expected, the refugees that Quin had wished on them were continuing to be ungrateful and difficult. Ann Rothley’s dismissed cowman had been taken on by the Northern Opera Company and caused havoc among the servants.

‘They’re all asking for time off to go to Newcastle and hear him sing in that ridiculous opera — the one where they burn a manuscript to keep warm. Something about Bohemians.’

And Helen’s chauffeur too was giving trouble: he was threatening to leave and go to London to try and join a string quartet.

‘Well if he does at least you won’t have to listen to all that chamber music,’ said Frances.

But, of course, it wasn’t so simple — it never is.

‘Actually, he’s rather good at his job,’ said Helen, ‘and much cheaper than an Englishman would be.’

Only with Bobo Bainbridge did Verena not attempt to converse. Bobo, whose adored husband had dropped dead nine months ago and whose mother-in-law did not approve of displays of grief, now navigated through her social engagements by means of liberal doses of Amontillado, and for women who let themselves go in this way, Verena had nothing but contempt.

At nine o’clock, Quin took the men to smoke and play billiards in the library and the women were left to discuss Verena’s party.

This, somewhat to Frances’ dismay, soon grew into a much larger affair than she had intended. Her suggestion of a buffet supper and dancing to the gramophone caused Lady Plackett considerable surprise.

‘The gramophone?’ she said in offended tones. ‘If it is a matter of expense…’

‘No, of course it isn’t,’ interrupted Ann Rothley, rather put out by this gaffe, ‘but actually, Frances, there’s a very good little three-piece band just starting up in Rothley — it would be a kindness to give them work.’

So the three-piece band was agreed on, and Helen Stanton-Derby (over-ruling Lady Plackett’s suggestion of lilies and stephanotis from the florist in Alnwick) said she would do the flowers. ‘There’s such lovely stuff in the hedges now — traveller’s joy and rosehips… with only a little help from the gardens one can make a marvellous show.’

‘And I thought mulled wine,’ said Frances. ‘Cook has an excellent recipe.’

Mulled wine, however, affected Lady Plackett as adversely as the gramophone had done and she asked if she could contribute to a case of champagne, an offer which Miss Somerville refused. ‘I’ll speak to Quin,’ she said firmly; ‘he’s in charge of the cellar,’ and they went on to discuss the menu and the list of guests.

Comments on Verena, as the County drove home, were entirely favourable.

‘A very sensible girl,’ said Ann Rothley and her husband grunted assent, but said he was surprised that Quin, who’d had such beautiful girlfriends, was willing to marry somebody who, when all was said and done, looked like a Roman senator.

His wife disagreed. ‘She has great presence. All she needs is a really pretty dress for the dance and she’ll be as attractive as anyone could wish.’

An unexpected voice now spoke from the back of the motor where Bobo Bainbridge had been supposed to be asleep.

‘It will have to be a very pretty dress,’ said Bobo — and closed her eyes once more.

Frances, meanwhile, had followed Quin into the tower — a thing she did seldom — to ask his advice about the drinks.

‘Ah yes, Verena’s dance.’ Quin had taken so little notice of discussions about this event that it took an effort to recall it. ‘It’s on Friday week, isn’t it? Does Verena want me to look in or would she prefer to entertain her friends on her own?’

Frances looked at him in dismay. ‘But of course she wants you to be there. It would look very odd if you weren’t.’ And then: ‘You do like Verena, don’t you?’

‘She’s an excellent girl,’ said Quin absently. And then: ‘Who have you invited?’

‘Rollo’s coming up from Sandhurst — he won the Sword of Honour, did Ann tell you? And he’s bringing a friend of his who’s going to join the same regiment. And the Bainbridge twins have got leave from the air force so —’

‘From the air force? Mick and Leo? But they can’t be more than sixteen!’

‘They’re eighteen, actually — they went in as cadets. Bobo was hoping one of them would stay on the ground, but they’ve always done things together; they’re both fully fledged pilots now.’

‘My God!’ Bobo’s adored twins had kept her alive after her husband’s death. When they came home, she sobered up, became the friendly, funny person she had been throughout his childhood.

‘And both Helen’s girls are coming up from London. Caroline’s going to marry that nice red-haired boy in the Marines — Dick Alleson.’ Caroline had carried a torch for Quin for many years and everyone had rejoiced when she became so suitably engaged.

She went on counting off the guests and Quin looked out over the silvered sea. It might not come — the war — but if it did, there was not one of those gilded youths but would be in the thick of the slaughter.

‘I know what we’ll drink, Aunt Frances!’ he said, taking her hands. ‘The Veuve Clicquot ’29! I’ve got two cases of it and I’ve been saving it for something special.’

Frances stared at him. She was no connoisseur of wine but she knew how Quin prized his fabulous champagne. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Why not? Let’s make it a night to remember!’

Frances went to bed a happy woman, for what could this open-handed gesture mean except that he wished to honour Verena? But the next morning came the remark she had been dreading.

‘If there’s a party of young people, we must ask the students if they’d like to come along.’

Gloom descended on Aunt Frances. Jewish waitresses, girls who did things in the backs of motor cars, to mingle with the decently brought up children of her friends.

‘They’re coming to lunch on Sunday. Surely that’s enough?’

Quin, however, was adamant. ‘I can’t single Verena out to that degree, Aunt Frances, you must see that.’

But to Frances’ great surprise, Verena entirely agreed with Quin and offered herself to invite the students.

She was as good as her word. Arriving at the boat-house while everyone was still at breakfast, she said: ‘There’s going to be a dance up at Bowmont for my birthday. Anyone who wouldn’t feel uncomfortable without the proper evening clothes would be entirely welcome.’

By the time Quin appeared to begin the morning’s work, she was able to tell him with perfect truth that the students had refused to a man.