The Morning Gift

Chapter 19

‘But why? Why won’t you come? Everyone is invited — all the students go to Sunday lunch at Bowmont. It’s a ritual.’

‘Well, it’ll be just as much of a ritual without me. I’m waiting for a message from Heini and —’

‘Not on a Sunday. The post office is shut.’

The other students joined in, even Dr Elke — but Ruth was adamant. She didn’t feel like a big lunch, she was going for a walk; she thought the weather might be breaking.

‘Then I’ll stay with you,’ said Pilly, but this Ruth would not hear of and Pilly was not too hard to persuade, for the thought of sitting in a well-upholstered chair and eating a substantial Sunday lunch was very attractive.

It was very quiet when the others had gone. For a while, Ruth wandered along the shore, watching the seals out in the bay. Then suddenly she turned inland, taking not the steep cliff path that led up to the terrace, but the lane that meandered between copses of hazel and alder, to join, at last, the drive behind the house.

She had been along here before on the way to the farm and now she savoured again the rich, moist smells as the earth took over from the sea. She could still hear the ocean, but here in the shelter were hedgerows tangled with rosehips and wild clematis; sloes hung from the bushes; and the crimson berries of whitebeam glinted among the trees.

After a while the lane looped back, passing between open farmland where freshly laundered sheep grazed in the meadows and she leant over the fence to speak to them, but these were not melancholy captives in basements, but free spirits who only looked up briefly before they resumed their munching.

She was close to the house now, but hidden from it by a coppice of larches. If she turned into the drive she would reach the lawns and the shrubberies on the landward side. The students had been told they could go where they wanted, and Ruth, who could not face Verena lording it over Quin’s dining table, still found that she was curious about his home.

Crossing the bridge over the ha-ha, she came to a lichen-covered wall running beside a gravel path — and in it, a faded blue door framed in the branches of a guelder-rose. For a moment, she hesitated — but the grounds were deserted, no sound came to break the Sunday silence — and boldly she pushed open the door and went inside.

‘I expect it’s the dietary laws,’ said Verena reassuringly to Aunt Frances. ‘She is a Jew, you know, from Vienna. Perhaps she expects that we shall be eating pork!’ And she laughed merrily at the oddness of foreigners.

Pilly and Sam, sipping sherry in the drawing room, looked angrily at Verena.

‘Ruth doesn’t fuss at all about what she eats, you know that — and anyway she was brought up as a Catholic.’

But this was not a very promising defence for no one knew now what excuse to make for Ruth. Aunt Frances, however, accepted the kosher version of events, remarking that it had been the same with the cowman Lady Rothley had employed in the dairy. ‘We could have given her something else, I suppose. An omelette. But there is always the problem of the utensils.’

Lady Plackett was spending the day with relatives in Cumberland, but Verena had accompanied the Somervilles to church and heard Quin read the lesson, and now, dressed in a cashmere twin set and pearls, she set about trying to put her classmates at ease. She had already prevented Sam and Huw from trying to dispose of their own coats, explaining that there was a butler there for the purpose and as they took their places at table, she kept a watchful eye on those who might have trouble with their knives and forks. Though Bowmont now was run with a minimum of servants, Verena was aware that the man serving at the sideboard, the maid with her cap and apron, might overwhelm those from simple homes, and since Dr Felton was conversing with Miss Somerville, and Dr Elke was giving Quin an account of a recent journey to Lapland, Verena applied herself to the burden of making small talk, asking Pilly about the average consumption of aspirin per head of the population and enquiring whether Janet’s father managed his parish with one curate or two. She also found time to check up on her protégé, Kenneth Easton. There was no question as yet of inviting Kenneth to the Lodge and she would, for example, have been far from happy to see him tackle an artichoke in melted butter, but considering his origins in Edgware Green, Kenneth was doing rather well.

They took coffee in the drawing room and then Quin rose and offered croquet on the lawn or the use of a rather bumpy tennis court, and bore Roger and Elke off to billiards in the library.

‘Would anyone like to look round the house?’ asked Miss Somerville.

Several students said they would, but before the party could set off, Verena said with proper deference: ‘Would you like me to show them round, Miss Somerville? I’m sure you must want to rest.’

For a moment, Frances’ eyebrows drew together in a frown. But she herself had bidden Verena make herself at home; the girl was only trying to be helpful.

‘Very well — only not the tower, of course.’

Leaving behind a very disgruntled group of students, she left the room. But she did not go upstairs to rest. Instead, she went to the lumber room to fetch a bag of bonemeal and the bulbs that had come the previous day from Marshalls, and made her way to the garden.

Opening the door in the high wall, Aunt Frances saw with displeasure that she was not alone.

A girl was standing with her back to her, one arm raised to a spray of Autumnalis where it climbed, loaded with blossom, up the southern wall. Moving forward angrily to remonstrate, Frances found that the girl was not in fact stealing a rose, but was rather, with some skill, tucking a stray tendril back behind the wire before burying her nose once more in the fragrance of the voluptuous deep-pink flowers.

‘You’re trespassing,’ she said, in no way placated by this appreciation of one of her favourite plants.

The girl spun round, startled, but not, in Miss Somerville’s opinion, suitably cowed. ‘I’m sorry. Professor Somerville said we could go into the grounds, but I can see this would be different. It’s almost like a room, isn’t it? — a hortus conclusus. All it needs is a unicorn.’

‘Well, it’s not going to get a unicorn,’ said Aunt Frances irritably. ‘The sheep are bad enough when they get in.’

She put down her trug and glared at the intruder.

‘I will go,’ promised Ruth. ‘Only it’s so unbelievable, this garden. The shelter… and the way it’s so contained and so rich… and the roses still going on as though it’s summer, and all those tousled, tangly things. And those silver ones like feathers; I don’t know what they’re called.

‘Artemesia,’ said Aunt Frances, still scowling.

‘It’s magic. To have that and the sea, the two worlds… And your scarf!’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Aunt Frances, wondering if the intruder was unhinged, for she was looking at the scarf round her neck as she had looked at the white stars of a lingering clematis.

‘It’s beautiful!’ said Ruth, feeling suddenly remarkably happy. ‘I saw it on the hominid in Professor Somerville’s room, but it looks much better on you!’

‘Don’t be silly, it’s just an old woollen thing. I’m surprised Quin remembered to bring it up.’

But she now had to face the fact that she was in the presence of the missing student, the one who had refused to come to lunch. Like many of the girls of her generation, Frances had spent six months being ‘finished’ in Florence where she had found it difficult to distinguish between Titian and Tintoretto and been unpleasantly affected by the climate. Still, she had retained enough to be aware that the intruder, in spite of her dark eyes, belonged to the tradition of all those Primaveras and garlanded goddesses accustomed to frolicking in verdant meadows. If she had indeed been about to pluck a flower for her hair it would not have been unreasonable. As a Jewish waitress for whom special food had to be prepared, however, she was not satisfactory.

‘You’re the Austrian girl, then? The one with the dietary problems?’

‘I don’t think I have dietary problems,’ said Ruth, puzzled. ‘Though I’m not very fond of the insides of stomachs. Tripe is it?’

‘Miss Plackett informed us that you didn’t eat pork. It is very foolish to suppose that anyone would make you eat what you don’t want. And anyway you could have had an omelette.’

She knelt down and began to clear a patch of earth for her bulbs, and Ruth knelt down beside her to help.

‘But I like pork very much. We often had it in Vienna — my mother does it with caraway seeds and redcurrant jelly; it’s one of her best dishes.’

Miss Somerville tugged at a tuft of couch grass. ‘I thought you were a Jewish refugee,’ she said, a touch of weariness in her voice, for she could see again that life was not going to be simple; that it was the blond cowman all over again.

‘Yes, I suppose I am. Well, I’m five-eighths Jewish or perhaps three-quarters — we don’t know for certain because of Esther Olivares who may have been Jewish but may have been Spanish because she came from Valencia and was always painted in a shawl which could have been a prayer shawl but it could have been one that she wore to bull fights. But my mother was a Catholic and we’ve never been kosher.’ She pulled up a mare’s-tail and threw it onto the pile of weeds. ‘It’s a bit of a muddle, I’m afraid — the poor rabbi in Belsize Park gets quite cross: all these people being persecuted who don’t even know when Yom Kippur is or how to say kaddish. He doesn’t think we deserve to be persecuted.’ She turned to Aunt Frances: ‘Would you like me to stop talking? Because I can. I have to concentrate, but it’s possible.’

Miss Somerville said she didn’t mind one way or another and passed her the bag of bonemeal.

‘I just can’t believe this garden! I used to think that when I went to heaven I’d want to find a great orchestra like you see it from the Grand Circle of a concert hall — all the russet-coloured violins and the silver flutes and a beautiful lady harpist plucking the strings. But then when I came here I thought it had to be the sea. Only now I don’t know… there can’t be anything better than this garden. Whoever made it must have been so good!’

‘Yes. She was a Quaker.’

‘Gardeners are never wicked, are they?’ said Ruth. ‘Obstinate and grumpy and wanting to be alone, but not wicked. Oh, look at that creeper! I’ve always loved October so much, haven’t you? I can see why it’s called the Month of the Angels. Shall I go and fetch a wheelbarrow?’

‘Yes, it’s over there behind the summerhouse. And bring a watering can.’

Ruth disappeared. Minutes passed; then there was a cry. Displeased, and for a moment fearful, Miss Somerville rose.

Ruth was kneeling down by a patch of mauve flowers which had gone wild in the grass behind the shed. Flowers like slender goblets growing without leaves so that their uncluttered petals opened to the sky and their golden centres mirrored the sun. She was kneeling and she was worshipping — and Miss Somerville, made nervous by what was obviously going to be more emotion, said sharply: ‘What’s the matter? They’re just autumn crocus. I put some in a few years ago and they’ve spread.’

‘Yes, I know. I know they’re autumn crocus.’ She looked up, pushing her hair off her forehead, and it was as Miss Somerville had feared; there were tears in her eyes. ‘We used to wait for them every year before we left the mountains. There were meadows of them above the Grundlsee and it meant… the marvellousness of summer but also that it was time to leave. Things that flower without their leaves… they come out so pure. I never thought I’d find them here by the sea. Oh, if only Uncle Mishak was here. If only he could see them.’

She rose, but it was hard for her to pick up the handle of the barrow, to turn her back on the flowers.

‘Who’s Uncle Mishak?’

‘He’s my great-uncle… he loves gardening. He’s managed to make a garden even in Belsize Park and that isn’t easy.’

‘No, I imagine not. A dreadful place.’

‘Yes, but it’s friendly. He’s cleared quite a patch, and now he’s trying to grow vegetables for my mother… We can’t get fertilizer but —’

‘Why on earth not? Surely they sell it there?’

‘Yes, but we can’t afford it. Only it doesn’t matter — we use washing-up water and things like that. But oh, if he saw these! They were Marianne’s favourite flowers. It was the wild flowers she loved. She died when I was six but I can remember her standing on the alp and just looking. Most of us ran about and shrieked about how lovely they were, but Marianne and Mishak — they just looked.’

‘She was his wife?’ asked Aunt Frances, realizing she would be informed whether she wished it or not.

‘Yes. He loved her — oh, my goodness those two! She was very tall and as thin as a rake, with a big nose, and she had a stammer, but for him she was the whole world. It was very hard for him to leave Vienna because her grave is there. He’s old now, but it doesn’t help.’

‘Why should it?’ said Miss Somerville tartly. And in spite of herself: ‘How old?’

‘Sixty-four,’ said Ruth, and Miss Somerville frowned, for sixty-four is not old to a woman of sixty.

Ruth, working in the compost, looked up at the formidable lady and made a decision. You had to be worthy to hear the story of Mishak’s romance, but oddly this sharp-tempered spinster who had left Quin alone was worthy.

‘Would you like to hear how they met — Uncle Mishak and Marianne?’

‘I don’t mind, I suppose,’ said Aunt Frances, ‘as long as you go on with what you’re doing.’

‘Well, it was like this,’ said Ruth. ‘One day, oh, many, many years ago when the Kaiser was still on his throne, my Uncle Mishak went fishing in the Danube. Only on that particular day, he didn’t catch a fish, he caught a bottle.’

She paused to judge whether she had been right, whether Miss Somerville was worthy, and she had been.

‘Go on then,’ said the old lady.

‘It was a lemonade bottle,’ said Ruth, pushing back her hair and getting into her stride. ‘And inside it was a message…’

Late that night, Aunt Frances stood by her bedroom window and looked out at the sea. It had rained earlier, raindrops as big as daisies had hung on the trees, but now the sky was clear again, and the moon was full over the quiet water.

But the beauty of the view did little for Miss Somerville. She felt unsettled and confused. It was all to be so simple: Verena Plackett, so obviously suitable, would marry Quin, Bowmont would be saved and she, as she had intended all along, would move to the Old Vicarage in Bowmont village and live in peace with Martha and her dogs.

Instead, she found herself thinking of a woman she had never known, a plain girl standing terrified before a class of taunting children in an Austrian village years and years ago. ‘She was as thin as a rake,’ the girl in the garden had said, ‘with a big nose, and she had a stammer. But for him she was the whole world.’

Frances had been just twenty years old when she went to the house on the Scottish Border, believing that she had been chosen freely as a bride. She knew she was plain, but she thought her figure was good, and she was a Somerville — she believed that that counted. The house was beautiful, in a fold of the Tweedsmuir Hills. She had liked the young man; as she dressed for dinner that first night, she imagined her future: being a bride, a wife, a mother…

It was late when she returned to her room where Martha waited to help her to bed. She must have left the door open, for she could hear voices outside in the corridor.

‘Good God, Harry, you aren’t really going to marry that anteater?’ A young voice, drawling, mocking. A silly youth, a friend of her fiancé’s who’d been at dinner.

‘You’ll have to feed her on oats — did you see those teeth!’ A second voice, another friend.

‘She’s like a hacksaw; she’ll tear you to pieces!’

And then the voice of her young man — her fiancé — joining in the fun. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got it all worked out. I’ll go to her room once a month in my fencing kit, that’s padding enough. Then as soon as she’s pregnant I’m off to town to get myself a whizzer!’

It was Martha who shut the door, Martha who helped her to undress. Martha who kept silence when, the next morning, Frances left the house and said nothing, enduring the anger of her parents, the puzzlement of the family on the Border. That had been forty years ago and nothing had happened since. No door had opened for Frances Somerville as it had opened for that other girl in an Austrian village. No black-suited figure with a briefcase had stood on the threshold and asked her name.

Irritated, troubled, Frances turned from the window, and at that moment Martha came in with her evening cocoa — and the puppy at her heels.

‘Now what?’ she said, relieved to have found something to be angry about. ‘I thought you were taking him down to The Black Bull after tea.’

‘Mrs Harper sent word she couldn’t have him,’ said Martha. ‘Her mother-in-law’s coming to live and she hates dogs.’ She looked down at the puppy who was winding himself round Miss Somerville’s legs like a pilgrim reaching Lourdes. ‘He’s a bit unsettled, not having been down with the students today.’

Frances said she could see that and picked him up. Nothing had improved: not his piebald stomach, not his conviction that he was deeply loved.

That was what things were coming to, she thought. Twenty years ago, the wife of a publican would have been honoured to have a dog from the big house. Any dog. It was all of a piece, this idiot mongrel… all of a piece with waitresses who wept over the autumn crocus, with cowmen who sang and Wagner’s stepdaughter with her unequal eyes. Comely slept in her kennel; she would not have dreamt of coming upstairs. And it wasn’t any good rereading Pride and Prejudice yet again. Mr Darcy might have been disappointed in Elizabeth Bennet in chapter three, but by chapter six he was praising her fine dark eyes.

‘I’ll take him down,’ said Martha, reaching for the dog.

‘Oh, leave him for a bit,’ said Frances wearily. Still holding the puppy in her arms, she sat down in the chair beside her bed.

‘I have come to fetch you,’ the little man had said, opening his briefcase, removing his hat…

It began so well, the trip to the Farnes. The weather had been unsettled for the past two days, but now the sun shone again and as the Peggoty chugged out of Sea-houses harbour, they felt that lift of the heart that comes to everyone who sails over a blue sea towards islands.

The puppy felt it too, that was clear. Its rejection by the innkeeper had left it emotionally unscarred and its position as student mascot was now established. Quin would not allow it in the dinghy, but the Peggoty was a sturdy fishing boat which he rented each year and there was a cabin of a sort where the owner stored his lobster pots and tackle — the dog could be shut in there when they landed.

Dr Felton had stayed behind to sort out the previous day’s samples; Quin was at the wheel, steering for one of the smaller islands where the warden was waiting to show them the work in progress. They had missed the spectacular breeding colonies of the spring when the cliffs were white with nesting guillemots and razorbills and the puffin burrows honeycombed the turf, but there were other visitors now: the migrant goldcrests and fieldfares and buntings — and the seals, hundreds of them, returning to have their pups.

They passed Longstone lighthouse and the Keeper, digging his vegetable patch, straightened himself to wave.

‘That’s where Grace Darling came from, isn’t it?’ asked Sam, thinking how like the Victorian heroine in the paintings Ruth looked with her wind-whipped hair.

Quin nodded. ‘The Harcar rocks are to the south, where the Forfarshire broke up. We’ll see them on the way back.’

‘It’s amazing that Mrs Ridley’s grandmother knew her, isn’t it?’ said Ruth. ‘Well, the family… someone in a legend. She said it wasn’t the tuberculosis so much that killed her, but the fuss they made of her afterwards making her a heroine. I wouldn’t mind being a heroine — it wouldn’t kill me!’

Quin didn’t doubt this. ‘How did you meet Mrs Ridley’s grandmother?’ he asked curiously. ‘She usually keeps herself to herself.’

‘I went to fetch some eggs and we got talking.’

They were very close to the shore when it happened. Dr Elke had gone into the cabin to hand out their belongings, Quin was watching the point, steering for the jetty on the far side.

And what did happen at first was simply funny. A large bull seal bobbed up unexpectedly not four feet from the boat on the island side. A benevolent, comical seal with long grey whiskers, making himself known.

The puppy had been asleep on a pile of canvas. Now he woke, lifted his head.

The seal sneezed.

The effect was electric. The puppy let out a sharp bark of excitement and clambered onto the gunwale. What he was seeing was unheard of… an ancestor? A monster? His barks became frenzied; he scrabbled with his feet against the wood.

The boat tilted.

It took only a second… one of those seconds that no one can believe are irreversible.

‘He’s gone! Oh God, the puppy’s gone!’

Quin looked round, assessed the creature’s chances. The sea was calm, but the tide here ran at five knots. To be dashed against the rocks or swept past them out to sea were the alternatives — yet he began to turn the boat, heading her into the wind.

No one dreamt that this was only the beginning. Ruth was impetuous, but she was not mad. Dr Elke was just emerging from the cabin, she was too far away to see; the others were leaning over the side, trying to chart the progress of the little dog as he bobbed up, paddling frantically, and vanished into the trough of a wave. Only when Pilly began to scream — then they saw. Saw Ruth’s bewildered face as the current took her, saw her head turn… not to search for the dog now… to measure her terrifying speed.

The next seconds were the stuff of Quin’s nightmare for years to come: those seconds in which he forced himself to remain where he was till he had turned the boat fully into the wind and shut down the engine. Not letting himself move till he could rely on the Peggoty to hold steady.

‘Keep her exactly like this,’ he said to Verena. ‘Do nothing else,’ and she nodded and took the wheel.

Now there could be speed, but as he took the rope Elke was holding out to him there were more moments lost for Sam had climbed onto the gunwale, was taking off his jacket, and Quin lunged out to pull him back onto the deck with such force that the boy lay there stunned. And then the rope was round his waist, the knot secure.

‘Now let me down,’ said Quin — and at last was in the sea.

The rocks were his only chance… if she could cling on long enough for him to reach her, but they loomed out of the water, barnacle encrusted and sheer. He saw her struggling for a hold… begin to pull herself out… then lose her grip and try to swim back towards him, but that was hopeless. No one could swim against that tide.

In the Peggoty, Huw turned his head and retched suddenly, the rope unmoving in his huge hands.

Quin was closer now… close enough for her to put out an arm to reach him — and then a wave broke over her head, and she was gone. Twice he found her… and lost her. And then, when hope was almost gone, he found something that he could grasp and hold and wind round his hand… Something that did not escape him; her hair.

‘No!’ said Dr Elke. ‘Leave her. You can talk to her later.’

Quin shook her off. Refusing to strip his soaking clothes, his teeth chattering, he had waited to turn the boat and set her on course for the harbour, but he would wait no longer. His anger was like nothing he had ever known: it came from the gods — a visitation abolishing cold, propriety, compassion.

Ruth lay where they had dragged her, naked but for a rough grey blanket, in the stuffy cubby hole beneath the deck. Her hair was coiled in an unappealing tangle among the lobster pots; there was a smell of fish, and tar. It was almost dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see Quin’s face.

‘Well, I hope you’re satisfied. You’re a heroine now, aren’t you — you and Grace Darling! You’ve put the life of half your friends at risk — that besotted youth who gawps at you tried to jump in after you, but that doesn’t matter, of course. Nothing matters as long as you can be in the limelight, you attention-seeking spoilt little brat. Well, let me tell you, Ruth, no one will ever take you on any field trip again, I’ll see to that. You’re a danger to everyone, you’re incapable of the two things that are needed — unselfishness and common sense. Dear God, Verena Plackett is worth ten of you. As soon as the doctor’s seen you, I’m packing you off home.’

She had closed her eyes, but there was no escaping his voice.

‘Is he dead?’ she managed to say.

‘Who?’

‘The puppy.’

‘Almost certainly, I should think. You can be glad he’s the only casualty. This isn’t some amusing Austrian lake, you know. This is the North Sea.’ And as she turned her head, trying to hide the tears under her lashes, his rage mounted again. ‘Are you even listening to what I’m saying? Are you capable of understanding just what you’ve done?’

Her voice, when it came, was almost inaudible. ‘Could I… please… have a bucket? I’m going to be sick.’

Late that evening there was a kind of miracle. A message from the coastguard carried to the boathouse to say that the puppy had been washed onto the shingle further down the island and was alive. But Ruth was not there to share in the rejoicing.

‘We have to tell her,’ said Pilly. ‘We have to find some way of getting a message to the house.’

‘The Professor will tell her,’ said Dr Elke.

‘No, he won’t.’ Pilly’s round blue eyes were desperate. ‘He’ll go on punishing her. He hates her.’

Dr Elke was silent. Existing in extreme content without the company of men, she sometimes saw further than she wished to.

‘No, Pilly,’ she said sadly. ‘He doesn’t hate her. It’s not like that.’