The Morning Gift

Chapter 12

‘What do you mean, he isn’t back? Term begins next week. Do you intend to allow this kind of behaviour from your staff?’

Lady Plackett was annoyed. Since her husband had assumed his new position as Vice Chancellor of Thameside, she had taken a great deal of trouble planning suitable occasions at which the staff would be received. Their predecessor, Lord Charlefont, had been lackadaisical in the extreme and the position of the Lodge, marked off only by its Doric columns and Virginia creeper from the Arts Block which ran along the river, lent itself to the kind of haphazard coming and going which she had no intention of permitting. She had already had a Private notice put on the flagged path which led from the main courtyard to their front door, and instructed the college servants to erect a chain-link fence to keep their part of the river terrace free from students who seemed to think they had a right to sit there and eat their sandwiches.

To insist on one’s privacy was essential, as it was essential to restore the high moral tone of the university; students holding hands or embracing could not, of course, be tolerated. But Lady Plackett also meant to give… to enrich college life with her hospitality and make the Lodge a place where good conversation and good breeding could be relied upon. To do this, however, she had to separate the sheep from the goats and find out what material was to hand, and to this end she had planned a series of organized entertainments for the beginning of term. First the professors to sherry, properly labelled, of course, with their names and departments, for unlabelled gatherings were never satisfactory — then the lecturers to fruit juice… and lastly, in batches of twenty or so, the students to play paper and pencil games.

Now ticking off the labels on safety pins against the names of the senior staff, she found opposite Professor Somerville’s name the words: ‘Unable to attend’.

‘He’s up in Scotland,’ said Sir Desmond. A pale man with pince-nez, he had the kind of face it is impossible to recall within five minutes of seeing it, and owed his appointment to the fact that all the other candidates for the Vice Chancellorship had enough personality to acquire enemies. ‘Apparently the Foreign Office tried to enrol him for some secret work in Whitehall — code breaking or some such thing. Somerville thought it would mean sitting in a bunker all through the war so he went up to try and get himself into the navy.’

‘Well I hope you mean to have a word with him,’ said Lady Plackett. She was taller than her husband, with a long back, a long face and the close-set navy-blue eyes which characterized the Croft-Ellises. Having done several Seasons without, so to speak, a matrimonial nibble, Lady Plackett had accepted the son of an undistinguished chartered accountant and set herself to advancing his career. It had not been easy. Desmond, when she met him, did not even know that Cholmondely was pronounced Chumley, but she had persevered and now, after twenty-five years, she could honestly say that she was no longer ashamed to take him home to Rutland.

‘No, dear, I don’t think that would be wise,’ said Sir Desmond mildly. ‘We need Professor Somerville rather more than he needs us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s a very eminent man; they’re constantly offering him positions abroad and Cambridge has been trying to get him back ever since he left. Charlefont had quite a job persuading him to take the Chair and Somerville took it on condition he could get leave for his journeys. The college has done pretty well out of him — there’s always money for Palaeontology because of his distinction and the field course he runs at his place in Northumberland is supposed to be the highlight of the year.’

‘Northumberland?’ said Lady Plackett sharply. ‘Whereabouts in Northumberland?’

Sir Desmond frowned. ‘I can’t remember the name. Bow something, I think.’

‘Not…’ She had flushed with excitement. ‘Not Bowmont?’

‘That’s right. That’s what it was.’

‘Bow something’ indeed! Not for the first time, Lady Plackett felt the loneliness of those who marry beneath them. ‘You mean he’s that Somerville? Quinton Somerville — the owner of Bowmont? Old Basher’s grandson?’

Sir Desmond said his name was Quinton, certainly, and asked what was so unusual about Bowmont, but this was a question it was impossible to answer. Those who moved in the right circles knew why Bowmont was special, and to those who didn’t one couldn’t explain. ‘I know his aunt,’ said Lady Plackett. ‘Well, slightly. I shall write to her.’ And eagerly to her husband who was leafing through the book of staff addresses: ‘He isn’t married yet, is he?’

Sir Desmond looked for the M opposite married members of staff, found it absent and said so.

Without hesitation, Lady Plackett dropped the label with Professor Somerville’s name into the wastepaper basket. This man did not belong in large gatherings of people eating canapés. Professor Somerville would come to one of the intimate dinner parties with which she meant to put Thameside on the map and there he would find, in the gracious setting of her home, his intellectual equal, his future student and a girl of his own background. Would find, in short, Verena.

The Placketts’ only daughter was twenty-three years old and had inherited not only her mother’s breeding but her father’s brains. From the age of four, when she made it clear that she preferred her abacus to her dolls, it was evident that Verena would grow up to be an intellectual. The great Dr Johnson, of dictionary fame, had been told by his mother to repeat what she had taught him immediately to the next person he met, and if it was the milkman, no matter.

‘In that way you always remember it,’ she had said to her son.

There was no need for Lady Plackett so to instruct her daughter. Verena took in information and gave it out with equal efficiency. In India they had surrounded her with tutors and at nineteen she had enrolled in the European College at Hyderabad. It had been a brave step for her parents to take: true, the students and staff were all white, but it meant giving Verena an unusual amount of freedom.

Verena had not abused it. Science was her preferred subject, and it was without difficulty that she came top in every exam she took. Even so, when she had taken her basic degree, her mother insisted on sending her ahead to do the Season with her Croft-Ellis cousins from Rutland.

Lady Plackett’s intentions were good, but the plan was not a success. Verena stood five foot eleven in her socks and it is difficult to do the Season in socks. Nor did Verena make any secret of the fact that the vapid young subalterns and stockbrokers at the tops of whose heads she gazed on the dance floor, bored her beyond belief. As soon as her parents returned from India, she announced her intention of taking an Honours Degree, and taking it at Thameside.

About this, her mother had been uneasy. Though she had intended to look among the intelligentsia for a husband for Verena, it had been among Nobel Laureates or Fellows of the Royal Society that she had expected to find someone suitable, not among the corduroy-clad and bearded professors who so often did the actual teaching. Now, though, it looked as though Verena’s instinct had been right and it was with a light step that she made her way up to her daughter’s room.

‘Verena, I have something to tell you!’

Her daughter sat at her tidy desk, a large text book illustrated with diagrams of bones open in front of her, a propelling pencil and a notebook on her right, a ruler on her left.

‘Yes?’

Verena had inherited not only her mother’s height, but her close-set, downward curving eyes and Roman nose. Now she looked up without rancour at the interruption, though she had reached a difficult chapter and would have preferred to be alone.

‘I’ve just been speaking to your father and it turns out that Professor Somerville — the head of the Zoology Department — is Quin Somerville, the owner of Bowmont. Frances Somerville’s nephew.’

‘Yes, Mother. I know.’

Her mother stared at her. ‘You know?’

Verena nodded. ‘I made it my business to find out. That’s why I decided to do Zoology Honours. His reputation is second to none. I shall take his option, of course.’

Not for the first time, Lady Plackett marvelled at her daughter’s perspicacity. Verena had spent the summer with her cousins in Rutland, yet she was already better informed than her parents.

‘I’m going to invite him to dinner as soon as he gets back,’ she said. ‘A really carefully chosen group of guests. You will be seated next to him, of course, so that you have time to talk.’

Verena returned to her book.

‘Professor Somerville will find me ready,’ she said.

Ruth walked through the gates of Thameside College, greeted the porter in his lodge, and looked with delight at the closely mown grass, the ancient walnut tree, the statue of someone not on horseback.

Thameside was beautiful. She knew it to be one of the oldest buildings in London, but she had not expected the cloistered peace, the flowerbeds lapping the grey walls — and through a wide arch on the far side of the quadrangle, a breathtaking view of the river and the soaring dome of St Paul’s on the other bank. The University of Vienna was larger, more formal, but Ruth, passing the windows of booklined rooms and lecture theatres, was in a familiar world.

The statue, when she reached it, turned out to be of William Wordsworth, which was entirely suitable for he had stood on Westminster Bridge and said that Earth has not anything to show more fair, with which, having just crossed the river, she absolutely agreed. And there was a late rose, a golden voluptuous rambler curling round the railings of the Students’ Union which seemed to hold all the fragrance of the dying year.

She came as Vienna’s representative to the Groves of Academe and carried with her not only the good wishes of everyone at Number 27 and the Willow Tea Rooms, but their gifts in a straw basket pressed on her by Mrs Burtt. Though term did not begin for another two days, her father had insisted she take the magnifying glass he had had since his student days; Dr Levy had bequeathed his old dissecting kit rolled in a canvas pouch — and setting up a delicious rustle under her woollen skirt was the Venetian lace petticoat Leonie had worn when she was presented to the Austrian Chancellor.

Her appointment with Dr Felton was for 2.30; glancing at the clock which topped the archway to the river, she saw that she was ten minutes early. About to make her way towards the water’s edge, she was arrested by a sound of unutterable melancholy coming from the basement of the Science Building on her left. Letting go of the rose she had been smelling, she turned her head. The noise came again and this time it was unmistakable. Somewhere down there, in a state of apparent distress and abandonment, was a sheep.

Picking up her basket, Ruth made her way down the stone steps, pushed open a door — and found herself in a dusty, unlit laboratory. A Physiology lab, instantly familiar from her days in Vienna when she had ridden her tricycle through the animal huts of the university, watched by the pink eyes of a thousand snow-white rats. There were indeed rats here, and the big bins holding the flaky yellow maze they fed on, a pair of scales, microscopes, a centrifuge… and in one corner, staring from a wooden pen, the pale face and melancholy, Semitic snout of a large white ewe.

‘Ah yes, you’re lonely,’ said Ruth approaching. In the deserted room, she spoke in the soft dialect of Vienna. ‘But you see I musn’t touch you because you belong to Science. You’re an experimental animal; you’re like a Vestal Virgin dedicated to higher things.’

The sheep butted its head against the side of the pen, then lifted it hopefully to gaze at her with its yellow eyes. It seemed to be devoid of tubes or other signs of experimentation — seemed in fact to be in excellent health — but Ruth, well-trained as she was, kept her distance.

‘I can see that you aren’t where you would choose to be,’ she went on, ‘but I assure you that right now the world is full of people who are not where they would choose to be. All over Belsize Park and Finchley and Swiss Cottage I could show you such people. And you belong to a noble race because you are in the psalms and St Francis chose you to preach to and I can see why because you have listening eyes.’

The sheep’s butting became more frenzied, but its mood was lifting. The string of bleats it was emitting seemed to be social rather than despairing. Then quite suddenly it sat down, sticking out one hoof and extending its neck like someone listening to a lecture.

‘Very well, I will recite some Goethe for you which you will like, I think, because he is an extremely calming poet, though somewhat melancholy, I do admit. Now let me see, what would you like?’

In his room on the second floor of the Science Building, Dr Roger Felton blew the contents of a pipette into a tank of sea slugs and frowned. There should have been wreaths of translucent eggs now, hanging on the weeds, and there were not. He could get more slugs from the zoo, but he had set his heart on breeding his own specimens — not just for the students in his Marine Biology class, but because the Opisthobranchia, with their amazingly large nerve cells, were his particular interest.

All round the room, in salt-water tanks cooled and aerated by complicated tubes and pumps, a series of creatures swam or scuttled or clung to the sides of the glass: sea urchins and brittle stars, prawns and cuttle fish, and an octopus currently turning pink inside a hollow brick. Dr Felton loved his subject and taught it well. The nuptial dance of the ragworm on the surface of the ocean, the selfless paternity of the butterfish, entranced him as much now as it had done when he first beheld it fifteen years ago, but there were problems, not least of them the new Vice Chancellor who had made it clear that it was publications that counted, not teaching.

Dr Felton was aware that he ought to spend more time on his research and less on the students, but someone had to see to them with the Prof so much away. Not that he grudged Quin his journeys — having a man of that calibre in the department made all the difference. If Felton had any doubts they would have been stilled by the two terms during which Professor Robinson had done Quin’s teaching and the sound of laughter vanished from the common room.

Still, instead of getting ready to stimulate the posterior ganglion of the slug he had placed in readiness on a Petri dish, he now had to interview the new student wished on them by University College who had made a mess of things. Moving over to his desk, he took out Ruth Berger’s particulars and glanced through the eulogy provided by Vienna for the benefit of UC and now passed on to him. She certainly seemed to be well up to the standard of the third years and able to take her Finals in the summer. Her exam results were excellent and her father was an eminent palaeontologist. Even without the Prof’s instructions to accept refugees at all costs, he would have tried to find a place for her.

A knock at the door made him look up, ready to receive Miss Berger. But the figure who strode into the room, filling it with her bulk, her Nordic blondeness and Valkyrie-like strength, was Dr Elke Sonderstrom, the Lecturer in Parasitology, who worked in the room next to his.

‘Come downstairs a minute, Roger. But quietly — don’t say anything.’

Dr Felton looked enquiring, but Elke, grasping a tube of liver flukes in her mighty hand, only said: ‘I went down to the basement to use the centrifuge and — well, you’ll see.’

Puzzled, he followed her down two flights of stairs, to be met by Humphrey Fitzsimmons, the tall, skeletally thin physiologist.

‘She’s still there,’ he whispered, putting a finger to his lips.

The Physiology lab was bathed in Stygian gloom, yet at the far end of it they could make out a gleam of brightness which revealed itself as a girl’s abundant, loose and curling hair. She was draped over the side of the sheep pen, entirely absorbed, and at her feet was a straw basket which somehow suggested cornucopias and garlands and the flower-picking orgies of Greek girls on the slopes of Parnassus.

But it wasn’t the shining hair, the girl’s bent head, which held them. It was not even the unusual attitude of the listening sheep. No, what kept the three silent watchers transfixed, was the girl’s voice. She was reciting poetry and she was doing it in German.

All of them, to some extent, were familiar with the German language. It came daily from the wireless in Hitler’s obscene and hysterical rantings. As scientists they had waded through pages of it in various Zeitschriften, hoping to be rewarded, after interminable clauses, by a single verb.

But this… That German could sound so caressing, so lilting, so… loving. Dr Elke closed her eyes and was back in the wooden house on the white strand of Öland while her mother arranged harebells in a pottery jug. Humphrey Fitzsimmons, too upper class to have seen much of his mother, recalled the soft eyes of the water spaniel he’d owned as a boy. And Dr Felton remembered that his wife, whose red-rimmed eyes followed him in incessant reproach because they couldn’t start a baby, had once been a snowflake in the Monte Carlo Ballet with a borrowed Russian name and an endearing smile.

The girl’s voice grew ever softer, and ceased. She picked up her basket and bade the sheep farewell. Then, turning, she saw them.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said in English. ‘But I swear I haven’t touched her — not even with one finger. I swear by Mozart’s head!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fitzsimmons, still bemused. ‘She’s not being used for anything. She was supposed to be part of a batch to use for a government feeding trial, but they cancelled it after Munich and the rest of the animals never turned up.’

‘What was the poem?’ Dr Elke asked.

‘It’s by Goethe. It’s called “The Wanderer’s Night Song”. It’s a bit sad, but I suppose great poems always are and it’s a very rural sort of sadness with mountains and birdsong and peace.’

Dr Felton now came down to earth and assumed the mantle of Senior Lecturer, Tutor for Admissions and Acting Head (in the continuing absence of his Professor) of the Department of Zoology. ‘Are you by any chance Miss Berger? Because if so, I’ve been expecting you.’

Half an hour later, in Dr Felton’s room, the technicalities of Ruth’s admission were under way.

‘Oh, it will be lovely!’ she said. ‘Everything I like! I’ve always wanted to do Marine Zoology. In Vienna we didn’t do it because there was no sea, of course, and I’ve only been to the Baltic which is all straight lines and people lying in the sand with nothing on reading Schopenhauer.’

Her arms flew upwards, her cheeks blew out, as she mimed a portly nudist holding a heavy book above his head.

‘Well, that’s settled your basic subjects then,’ said Dr Felton. ‘Parasitology, Physiology and Marine Biology. Which leaves you with your special option. With your father’s record I imagine that’ll be Palaeontology?’

For a moment, Ruth hesitated and Dr Felton, already aware that silence was not Miss Berger’s natural state, looked up from the form he’d been completing.

‘Professor Somerville teaches that himself,’ he went on. ‘It’s usually oversubscribed but I think we could squeeze you in. He’s a quite brilliant lecturer.’

‘May I take it, then? Would it be all right?’

‘I’m sure it will be. There’s a field course too; we usually have it in the spring, but with the Professor having been away we’re holding it in October.’

He frowned because the field course was officially full, the last place having been taken by Verena Plackett a few days before, but Dr Felton did not intend to let this stop him. There were no nudists reading Schopenhauer on the curving, foam-fringed sands of Bowmont Bay.

‘I don’t think I’ll be able to go to that. The Quakers are paying my fees but there won’t be anything extra for travel. My parents are very poor now.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Dr Felton. There was a hardship fund administered by the Finance Committee on which he sat, but it was better to say nothing yet.

‘You are so kind,’ she said, lacing her fingers in her lap. ‘You can’t imagine what it means to be here after… what happened. I remember it all so well, you know. The smells and everything: formalin and alcohol and chalk… I didn’t think I should come to university, I thought I should work for my parents, but now I’m here I don’t think anything could get me away again.’

‘It was bad?’

She shrugged. ‘One of my friends was thrown down the steps of the university and broke his leg. But here it is all going on still, people trying to understand the world, needing to know about things…’

‘Sea slugs,’ said Dr Felton a trifle bitterly. ‘They won’t even reproduce!’

‘Ah, but that’s difficult… compatibility.’ She glanced up, testing the word, and he marvelled again at her command of English. ‘Even in people it’s difficult and if one is both male and female at the same time that cannot be easy.’

Dr Felton agreed, obscurely comforted, and sent her to the Union where one of the third years was waiting to show newcomers round. When she had left, accompanying her handshake with that half-curtsy which proclaimed the abandoned world of Central Europe, he drew her form towards him and looked at it with satisfaction. Quin was always complaining that students these days were without personality. He’d hardly be able to level that charge at his new Honours student. Quin, in fact, would be very pleased. Whether he would feel the same about Verena Plackett, whose application form lay beneath Ruth’s, was another matter.

‘Vell?’ said Mrs Weiss, and cocked her head in its feathered toque at Ruth, determined to extract every ounce of information about her first day at college.

‘It’s going to be wonderful,’ said Ruth, setting a pot of coffee in front of the old lady, for she had not yet given up her evening job at the Willow Tea Rooms.

Everyone was in the café, including her own family, for Ruth’s return to her rightful place among the intelligentsia demanded celebration and discussion. They had heard about the niceness of Dr Felton, the majesty of Dr Elke and her parasites, the beauty of the river and the Goethe-loving sheep.

‘And Professor Somerville?’ enquired her father, who had only just arrived, for on Fridays the library stayed open late.

‘He isn’t back yet. He went to Scotland to try and join the navy,’ said Ruth, frowning over the slice of guggle she was bringing to Dr Levy. She had been certain that a man of thirty should not have to go to war. ‘But everyone says he is the most amazing lecturer.’

The lady with the poodle now arrived, and in deference to her the conversation changed to English.

‘You haf met the students?’ Paul Ziller enquired.

‘Only one or two,’ said Ruth, vanishing momentarily into the kitchen to fetch the actor’s fruit juice. ‘But there’s a girl starting at the same time as me — Verena Plackett. She’s the daughter of the Vice Chancellor and I expect she could choose any course she liked, but she’s doing the Palaeontology option too which shows how good it is.’

Ziller put down his cup. ‘Wait!’ he said, raising a majestic hand. ‘Her I haf seen!’

The eyes of the entire clientele were upon him.

‘How haf you seen?’ enquired Leonie.

Ziller rose and made his way to the wicker table on which lay the piles of magazines which the Misses Maud and Violet, bowing to the need of the refugees for the printed word, now brought downstairs. Ignoring Woman and Woman’s Own provided by the poodle-owning lady, and Home Chat, the contribution of Mrs Burtt, he sorted through the copies of Country Life, selected the issue he wanted, and began to turn the pages.

Considerable tension was by now generated, and Mrs Burtt and Miss Violet came out of the kitchen to watch.

‘Hah!’ said Ziller triumphantly, and held up the relevant page.

In the front of Country Life there is always a full-page photograph of a girl, invariably well bred, frequently about to marry someone suitable, but whether engaged or not, presenting a prototype of upper-class womanhood. Here are the Fenella Holdinghams who, in the spring, will marry the youngest son of Lord and Lady Foister; here the Angela Lathanby-Gores after their victory in the Highlingham Steeplechase… And here now was Verena Plackett — daughter of the newly appointed Vice Chancellor of Thameside — and not just Verena Plackett, but Verena Plackett gowned for presentation at Their Majesties’ courts in flesh-coloured satin with a train embroidered in lover’s knots of diamanté, and ostrich feathers in her hair.

Ruth, putting down her tray, was awarded first look, and studied her fellow student with attention.

‘She looks intelligent,’ she said.

Passed round, Verena seemed to give general satisfaction. Ziller liked her long throat, von Hofmann praised her collar bones and Miss Maud said she’d have known her anywhere for a Croft-Ellis by her nose. Only Mrs Burtt was silent, giving a small sniff which it was easy to attribute to class hatred.

But it was Leonie who looked longest at the picture and who, when she left the café, asked if she could borrow the magazine.

‘I’m not a snob,’ she said to her husband, who smiled a wise and matrimonial smile, ‘but to have Ruth back where she belongs… Oh, Kurt, that is so good.’

It was not till Ruth had gone to bed that Leonie set up her ironing board for she did not want her daughter to know how long she worked, or for how little money. But as she smoothed the fussy ruffles and frills on Mrs Carter’s blouse, she was humming a silly waltz she’d danced to in her girlhood and presently she put down the iron and once more examined Verena’s face.

She did not look particularly affable, but who did when confronted by a camera, and if her mouth turned down at the corners, this was probably some inherited trait and did not indicate ill temper. What mattered was that Ruth was back where she belonged. The daughter of a Vice Chancellor was an entirely suitable companion for the daughter of an erstwhile Dean of the Faculty of Science.

Not I but thou… the refrain of all cradle songs, all prayers with which parents, ungrudging, send their children forth to a better life than their own, rang through Leonie’s head. Verena and Ruth would be the greatest of friends — Leonie was quite sure of it — and nothing, that night, could upset her; not even the smell of burning lentils as the psychoanalyst from Breslau began, at midnight, to cook soup.