The Morning Gift

Chapter 9

At the end of the Bergers’ second week in Belsize Park, Hilda was sacked. She had climbed onto a stepladder to dust an ornament on the top of Mrs Manfred’s bookcase, and the bookcase had fallen on top of her. It was the only one in the house, Mrs Manfred not being a reader, but glass-fronted, and a splinter had hit the dog.

No one was surprised, and no one blamed Mrs Manfred, but Hilda took it hard and stayed in bed, covered in zinc plaster, and wrote letters to the district officer in Bechuanaland enquiring after the Mi-Mi, which she did not post because she had no money for stamps and Leonie looked as though she would keel over if asked for anything at all.

Uncle Mishak, as the days passed and Ruth still did not come, got up at dawn and walked. He covered vast distances in his slow, countryman’s gait and he knew that this was risky, for in one month, or perhaps two, his shoes would wear out, but he had to be out of doors.

Mishak’s beloved wife was beyond hurt. He had brought a handful of earth from her grave into exile, but he needed nothing to remind him of Marianne. She was inside his soul.

But to Ruth, in the nightmare world his country had become, there could befall unthinkable harm. Mishak had not wanted to come to the Felsengasse when Marianne died. He appreciated Leonie’s kindness, but he had wanted to stay in the house he had built for his wife on the slopes of the Wienerwald. He had come to the flat to thank Leonie for her offer and to refuse it. But Leonie was out. It was the six-year-old Ruth, fresh from her bath, who had thrown her arms around him and said: ‘Oh, you’re coming to live, won’t it be wonderful! You’ll take me to the Prater, won’t you — I mean the Wurstlprater, not the healthy part with fresh air — and can we go and see the llamas at Schönbrunn? Inge says they spit and make you quite wet. And you’ll let me lean out of the window of the cable car when we go up to the Kahlenberg, won’t you? You won’t keep holding my legs?’

The blissful, self-seeking greed of a secure child who longs to gobble up the world was something he never forgot. Ruth was not sorry for him, she wanted him for her own purposes. Mishak changed his mind and came; they saw the llamas and more…

Now sitting in Kensington Gardens watching the children sail their boats, this quiet old man who preferred not to step on molehills in case there was someone at home, found that his knuckles had whitened on the sides of the bench, and knew that he would kill without compunction anyone who harmed his niece.

Professor Berger said little about his lost daughter. He went to Bloomsbury House each morning, he worked in the library each afternoon, but no one, now, would have taken him for a man of fifty-eight. Then one morning he took a bus to Harley Street where his sponsor, Dr Friedlander, had his dental practice.

‘I’m going back to Vienna,’ he said. ‘I’m going to find Ruth and I have to ask you to lend me the fare.’

No one knew what it cost him to ask for money. Since their arrival the Bergers had taken nothing from their sponsor in spite of frequent offers of help.

‘You can have the fare and welcome,’ said Friedlander. ‘I’ll lend it to you; I’ll give it to you. The poor Englanders are so grateful for someone who doesn’t pull out their teeth as soon as they sit down that they’re beating a path to my door. But you’re mad, Kurt. They won’t let you out again and then what’ll happen to Leonie? Is that what you imagine Ruth wants?’

‘I can’t do nothing,’ said the Professor, ‘it isn’t possible.’

‘Have you told Leonie that you mean to return?’

‘Not yet. There’s a big student transport coming on Thursday. I’ll wait till then, but after that…’

Leonie, meanwhile, continued to be good. She approached the psychoanalyst from Breslau and tried to persuade that black-haired, gloomy lady to let her help with the cooking so as to ensure a less lingering death for the bruised vegetables that were Fräulein Lutzenholler’s diet. She fetched Paul Ziller’s shirts from his room three houses down and washed them, and ironed his cummerbund, and she visited other émigrés in outlying suburbs. But at the end of the second week her body was beginning to take over. She had fits of dizziness, her skirt began to slip as she spectacularly lost weight. More frighteningly, she was finding it increasingly difficult to be good. She wanted to hit people, to throttle Miss Bates in her ever-dripping underwear. And if she stopped being good, the thin thread that bound her to a beneficent providence would snap and precipitate her daughter into hell.

Mrs Burtt, drying cups in the scullery behind the Willow Tea Rooms, was in a bad mood. She personally did not care for Jews, gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Commies, the world over, deserved everything they got. But the papers that morning had been even fuller than usual of nastiness — people in Berlin and Vienna being rounded up, old professors having to scrub the streets with toothbrushes — and though she didn’t even know where the Polish Corridor was and didn’t mind much what happened to the people in the Sudetenland, whoever they were, it was beginning to look as though something would have to be done about Hitler. Which brought her stomach lurching downwards yet again, because one of the people who would be doing it would be her nineteen-year-old son, Trevor, who that morning had said he fancied the air force.

The customers were in low spirits too, she could tell even without going out in front. They weren’t talking like they usually did, just reading the copies of Country Life the ladies now brought downstairs. It was odd how they fancied all those pictures of stately homes and the debutantes with the long necks who were going to marry the Honourable Somebody or Other. You wouldn’t think they’d be so keen, all those professors and doctors full of degrees and learning.

Still, the guggle cake had turned out a treat. Miss Maud had baked it last night and Miss Violet had iced it, and though it didn’t seem all that different to the rich sponge her auntie made except it was in a wiggly mould, the customers would be pleased. It had been Miss Violet’s idea to wait till Mrs Berger came and let her have the first slice on the house: sort of like launching a ship — and the least you could do with what was happening to her daughter.

Only Mrs Berger, this morning, was late.

Mrs Burtt was right. There was a new hopelessness in the air. Everyone knew that Ruth had not been on the student transport and that Professor Berger intended to go back to Vienna. Now they faced the long weekend, so dreaded by exiles, when every place that could help them was closed and even the libraries and cafés which sheltered them were barred.

Paul Ziller, trying to immerse himself in an article about the oiling of field guns, had dreamt yet again about his second violin, the plump, infuriating, curly-headed Klaus Biberstein whose terrible jokes had sent the quartet into groans of protest, whose unsuccessful pursuit of leggy blondes was a byword — and who only had to tuck his Amati under his chin to become a god. Ziller missed his cellist, now playing in a dance band in New York, and his viola player who was entirely Aryan and had stayed behind, but missing Biberstein was different because he was dead. Hearing the storm troopers come up the stairs to his fourth-floor flat he had shouted to the passers by to clear the pavement, and jumped.

Dr Levy was playing chess with the blond actor from the Burg Theatre, but it was hard to concentrate for today he knew with certainty that he would never resit his medical exams in English. At forty-two he was too old to begin again — and even if he passed, they would find some other regulation for keeping him from practising. Not that he blamed the medical profession. In Vienna the doctors had been just as repressive, banding together against émigrés from the East.

‘I’m going to take your knight,’ he said to von Hofmann, who had not been allowed to say Schweinehund or anything else in a film about the Great War. The actor’s union had objected, and anyway with another war perhaps on the way, no one wanted films about soldiers. They wanted Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and Deanna Durbin. They wanted ocean liners and Manhattan apartments furnished all in white — and who ever said Schweinehund in them?

The lady with the poodle entered, disappointing Mrs Weiss, with her bulging horsehair purse, who had hoped it was someone for whom she could buy a cake and tell about her daughter-in-law who that morning had forced open her bedroom window with some rubbish about rooms needing to be aired. Mrs Weiss had never allowed wet air into a room in which she slept and had told Moira so, and Georg (now called George) who should have taken his mother’s part, had slunk off to the garage and gone to work.

At the table by the hat stand the banker and his wife from Hamburg sat in silence, each reading a magazine. In Germany they had been a successful and well-established ménage à trois, but Lisa’s lover, a racially pure car salesman, had stayed behind and though he tried to take his place, the banker knew that he was failing. The walls of their small room were thin, the bed narrow — and afterwards, always, she sighed.

Then Leonie entered the café — and the sadness that was in all of them found a focus. There was no need to ask if there was any news. This was a Demeter who had given up all hope of rescuing her daughter from the Underworld. Ruth, like Persephone, was lost, and in the streets of North-West London, winter had come.

Supported by her husband and uncle, Leonie reached her table and sat down, but no one today did more than nod a greeting. Even a smile seemed intrusive.

In the kitchen, Miss Violet fetched the cake knife, Miss Maud cut a wedge from the virgin Guglhupf, Mrs Burtt fetched a plate — and the procession set off.

‘With the compliments of the management,’ said Miss Maud, setting the plate down in front of Leonie.

Leonie looked and understood. She took in the sacrifice of principle, the honour they did her. Then she breathed once deeply, like a swimmer about to go under. Her face crumpled, her shoulders sagged — and she burst into the most dreadful and heart rending sobs. It was weeping made incarnate: once begun it was impossible to stop. Professor Berger took her hand, but for the first time in her life, she pushed him away. She wanted to rid herself of tears and die.

In the café, no one else made a sound. Dr Levy did not offer professional help; von Hofmann, usually so gallant, did not proffer his handkerchief. And Miss Maud and Miss Violet looked at each other, horrified by what they had done.

Then suddenly Paul Ziller, at a table by the window, pushed back his chair.

‘Oh dear!’ said Miss Maud.

It was a mild remark, coming from the daughter of a general, for the damage was considerable. The coffee pot on the Bergers’ table knocked over, staining the cloth, three willow-pattern plates broken… Mrs Berger’s chair, as she pushed it back, had fallen on to Dr Levy’s scrambled eggs. Nor had the poodle found it possible to remain uninvolved. Barking furiously, he had collided with the hat stand which had keeled over, missing the pottery cat but not the bowl of potpourri on the windowsill, nor the pretty blue and white ashtray the ladies had brought from Gloucestershire.

In the middle of the wreckage stood Leonie, holding her daughter in her arms. Except that this wasn’t holding it was fusion. The tears she still shed were Ruth’s tears also; no human agency could have separated those two figures. Even for her husband, Leonie could not relinquish Ruth… could only draw him closer with a briefly freed hand. There had been joy in the moment of marriage, joy in childbirth — but this was a joy like no other in the world.

Uncle Mishak was the first member of the family to notice the devastation: Miss Violet dabbing at the tables, Miss Maud picking up pieces of crockery, Mrs Burtt on her knees. To add to the chaos, Aunt Hilda, who had leapt from her bed after redirecting Ruth to the café, had fallen over the bucket into which the ladies were wringing their cloths.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Leonie, emerging, and did indeed try hard to embrace the concept of sorryness and to calculate the damage.

It was now that Mrs Weiss rose. Her raddled face was bathed in an unaccustomed dignity, her voice was firm.

‘I will pay!’ she announced. ‘I will pay for every-think.’

And she did pay. The ladies accepted her offer; everyone understood that the old lady had to be part of what was happening. Pound notes and half-crowns, shillings and sixpences tumbled out of the dreadful purse made of the scalped hair of East Prussian horses. She paid not for one coffee pot, but for two: not for three willow-pattern plates, but six. For the first time since she had come to England, the purse bulging with her daughter-in-law’s conscience money was empty; the clasp clicked together without catching on the unshed largesse. It was Mrs Weiss’s finest hour and not one person in the Willow Tea Rooms grudged it to her.

‘So!’ said Leonie, some twenty minutes later. ‘Now tell us. How did you get here? How did you come?’

The tables had been cleared, clean cloths spread, fresh coffee brought. Though she found it necessary to sit so that her shoulder touched Ruth’s, Leonie was now able to listen.

Ruth had rehearsed her story. Sitting between her parents, smiling across at Mishak and her friends from Vienna, she said: ‘Someone rescued me. An Englishman who helps people to escape.’

‘Like the Scarlet Pimpernel?’ enquired Paul Ziller, impressed.

‘Yes, a bit like that. Only, I mustn’t ever get in touch with him again. None of us must. That was part of the bargain.’

‘There was nothing illegal?’ asked her father, stern even in the midst of his great happiness. ‘No forged papers or anything like that?’

‘No, nothing illegal; I swear it on Mozart’s head,’ said Ruth, and the Professor was satisfied, aware of the position the composer’s head occupied in his daughter’s life.

Leonie, however, was not satisfied at all. ‘But this is awful! How can we thank him? How can we tell him what he has done for us?’ she cried. A multitude of deeds she could have performed in gratitude — a plethora of baked cakes, embroidered shirts, letters of ecstatic appreciation — rose up before her. She wanted to rush out into the street after this unknown benefactor, to wash his feet as Mary Magdalene had done with Jesus.

‘It has to be like that,’ said Ruth, ‘otherwise we might endanger other people that he could rescue’ — and aware that her mother was having difficulties, she quoted Miss Kenmore’s favourite sonnet. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ said Ruth, without, however, impressing Leonie who was not of the stuff that those who only stand and wait are made.

It was only now that Ruth, who had wanted to give her first moments wholly to her parents, dared to ask the question she had held back.

‘And Heini?’ she said.

It was all right. Not aware that she had crossed her hands on her breast in the age-old gesture of apprehension, she saw her father smile.

‘All is well, my dear,’ said the Professor. ‘He’s still in Budapest but we’ve had a letter. He is coming.’

It was very quiet in the café after the Bergers had left. One by one, the other customers got up to go, but the three men who had known the family in Vienna sat on for a while.

‘So Persephone has returned,’ said the actor.

Dr Levy nodded, but his face was grave and the other two exchanged glances for the doctor had his own Persephone: a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed and silly girl whom he nevertheless loved. Hennie had been glad enough to marry the distinguished consultant she had ogled while still a junior nurse, but she seemed in no hurry to join him in exile.

‘Perhaps a little celebration?’ suggested Ziller, for it did not seem to him a good idea that Levy should return alone to his The Diseases of the Knee.

‘We could just see what’s on,’ said von Hofmann.

And what was on, as they found when they had crossed the square and made their way uphill towards the Odeon, was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat — and without further consultation the three eminent gentlemen, none of whom could afford it, entered the cinema — and Elysium.

While back in the kitchen of the Willow Tea Rooms, Miss Maud and Miss Violet pronounced judgement.

‘A very nicely behaved girl,’ said Miss Maud.

‘Father would have liked her,’ said Miss Violet.

There was no higher accolade, but as so often Mrs Burtt managed to get the last word.

‘And pretty as a peach!’