The Morning Gift

Chapter 25

She tried not to run… tried to keep to a decorous walk, but it was impossible because she had to get there quickly. To Quin’s flat while her resolution held… to Quin who even now might save her.

She was beside the river, on a path between the Thames and the road with its busy end-of-the-day traffic. The lamps had just been lit, their reflections shone on the water, for the tide was high and the current raced out towards the sea.

‘Oh, God, let him be in,’ she prayed. ‘Let him be in and alone!’

But what right had she to pray? She wasn’t even a proper sinner who was entitled to the Almighty’s ear; she was a cold rejective failure. God hated the mean in spirit, she was sure of that. Or would he have understood about Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and the terrifying Eugene Feuermann? Would he think of her as simply ill and heed her after all?

It had been raining ever since she came out of the Underground; fine, slanting rain which soaked through her loden cape. Leonie had taken the hood off for relining; the cloak was dreadfully shabby, and her hair too was sodden. Not that that mattered — perhaps the rain would wash her clean once more.

A street sign opposite said Cheyne Walk, and she saw the crescent of Regency houses and the shapes of the fine trees in the gardens.

‘Henry the Eighth had a palace there,’ Quin had told her in Vienna, talking about his London home. ‘You can see a mulberry from my window that’s supposed to have been planted by Elizabeth the First. Not likely, but a nice idea.’

All the trees in the gardens of the tall houses looked as though they might have been planted by a queen. There were streaks of orange and amethyst still in the west, and turning she could see the necklace of lights on the Albert Bridge. It was a beautiful street. Well, of course. Quin was rich, he could live where he liked whereas she and Heini had had to make do with Janet’s flat. Perhaps that was why it had all gone so wrong.

But it was no good blaming anyone. The fault lay in herself. Only not entirely, perhaps. If Quin would only do what she asked it might still come right.

She was passing the wrought-iron gates of the houses now; the elegant carriage lamps, and the graceful fan windows which sent semicircles of light out onto the steps. There was no need to peer at house numbers. She had seen the Crossley at once, parked outside the door. Best to get it over then — and she walked resolutely up to the door and rang the bell.

Quin put down his pen, frowning. He had counted on a couple of hours’ work before dinner. It was Lockwood’s weekend off; he’d taken the phone off the hook and planned to finish his paper for the museum journal.

‘Good God! Ruth!’ And seeing her face, ‘What is it?’ Are you in trouble?’

She shook out her hair like a dog and followed him upstairs. ‘Yes, I am. I’m in very serious trouble.’ She spoke in her native language, her words gaining an extra and metaphysical weight.

‘Come in and get warm.’

He took the sodden cloak from her shoulders and led her into the drawing room, but though the curtains were drawn back, she did not go to the window, nor to the grate where a bright fire was burning. Instead she held out her hands to him, the palms upwards in the age-old gesture of beseechment.

‘I can’t stay. I just want you to do something for me. Something terribly important.’

‘What is it, my dear? Just tell me.’

Her head went up. Her entreating eyes held his.

‘I want you to divorce me. Completely and absolutely. This minute. Now.’

There was a pause. Then Quin, schooling his expression, said carefully: ‘I will, of course, do anything I can to help you. But I’m not quite clear how I can divorce you now. Dick Proudfoot is doing —’

‘No!’ she interrupted. ‘It’s nothing to do with Mr Proudfoot and documents and things. It’s much more fundamental than that. It’s to do with undoing a curse.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean that our wedding was a curse. But I knew when we said those words before witnesses… I mean, you might think if someone has bunions and cuts the sides out of their slippers it wouldn’t feel like a wedding, but bunions can’t stop oaths from mattering. So you have to absolve me and I know how you can do it because I asked Mrs Weiss. She wasn’t good about Hanukkah, but she knew about divorce and so did Paul Ziller, and anyway I knew before that. All you have to do is say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, three times. With your hand on my shoulder, I think, but I’m not sure about that. It’s an old Jewish law, truly, and it dissolves the marriage then and there. You should say it in front of a rabbi, but just saying it and really meaning it is what counts. Really repudiating me and wanting to be free. Only you have to say it — the man — because the old Jews were like that; it was the men who counted. And I know if you did it, things would get better. They might even be all right.’

She subsided, running out of breath, and as Quin was silent: ‘You will do it, won’t you?’ she begged. ‘If you said “I divorce thee” it might be better. More biblical.’ And as Quin moved towards the door, she added anxiously: ‘Where are you going?’

Quin did not answer. She heard him cross the landing; then he came back carrying a large white towel.

‘Come here,’ he ordered. ‘Sit down on the sofa. Next to the fire.’

She came, puzzled but obedient, and sat down.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Bend your head.’

‘But —’

‘You came to your wedding with wet hair. At least you can come to your divorce with it dry.’

As he spoke he began to towel her hair — but this was not what she wanted. This was not right. There was nothing in Old Testamental lore about having your hair dried by a husband who was putting you away and she tried to pull back, but it wasn’t like that. It was very peaceful and his hands…

But as he moved away from her scalp and down to the loose hair on her shoulders she became angry. For she could see his hands now and they had been a trouble to her from the start. When she was five years old, her father had brought back a book of Donatello sculptures from Italy and one night when she wasn’t well, he had shown her the plates.

‘A person can’t have made that,’ she had said, sitting on his knee. ‘It’s too beautiful. It must have come from a shop.’

It was the left hand of John the Baptist she had been looking at: the long fingers, one crooked to hold a scroll in place, the sinewy line leading to the wrist.

Now it was all going on again as Quin towelled her hair… as it had gone on in the museum when he helped her sort the cave bear bones… on the Orient Express when he cracked a walnut and laid it on her plate… and endlessly when he jabbed, poked at, emptied and almost never lit his pipe.

‘No, please, you must stop.’ She put up her arm to seize his wrist, but that was a mistake. Quite a big one really.

Quin folded the towel, carried it out of the room, and returned with a small glass containing a liquid the colour of a Stradivarius.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Drink this. It’ll warm you. And then tell me very quietly what all this is about.’

Ruth took the glass, sniffed, drained the Grand Armagnac. A small ‘Oh!’ of appreciation escaped her. She repressed it, called on her resources.

‘What it is about,’ she said, putting up her chin, ‘is… frigidity.’

Quin’s expression did not change. Only his eyebrows rose a fraction as he waited.

‘Proper, awful, medical frigidity, like in a book. Like I was reading about on the Grundlsee. Like in Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and Eugene Feuermann. I must have had a premonition because why would I read about it when I could have been reading Heidi or What Katy Did?’

‘One does wonder,’ murmured Quin.

‘I think I’ve always dreaded it most of all. Being cold. Not responding. Lying there like a log.’

‘Is that what you did?’

Now his expression had changed; the nails bit into his palm, but Ruth was looking at the floor.

‘Not exactly, because I didn’t lie. But effectively.’

‘This is Heini, I suppose? That is what we are talking about?’

Ruth nodded. ‘I told you Heini had changed his mind about Chopin and the études and he is preparing for this very important competition and he is going to play Lizst’s Dante Sonata which is all about the Eternal Feminine and he wanted… love. He said so on Christmas Eve and it was very moving. And when I left the annulment papers on the bus, it didn’t seem any good waiting till we could be married, so I arranged everything and Janet was very helpful and lent us her flat. She even gave me a bottle of wine — it was a Liebfraumilch from the Co-op, but it didn’t taste like the wine we had on the Orient Express.’

‘No,’ said Quin gravely. ‘It wouldn’t do. I have to say that Liebfraumilch from the Co-op might make anyone frigid.’

But to speak lightly was an effort. He wanted to strangle Heini slowly and with his bare hands.

‘Oh, please, it isn’t funny! It’s a frightful condition. Krafft-Ebing says the causes are often psychological, but how could I ever afford to find out what awful thing I saw my parents do — and Fräulein Lutzenholler is a dreadful woman. She’s supposed to be a professional and all she can do is drink cocoa with the skin on and babble about love. And if it’s physical that’s worse because you know how complicated the nervous system is and I don’t want to have operations.’

Quin had mastered himself. ‘Look, Ruth, the first time people make love is often a disaster. It’s a thing that has to be learnt and —’

‘Yes but how can it be? How can it be learnt if people are so frigid that there never is a first time? If they take their sweater off and then put it on again and run away down the fire escape? How can they ever get it right when they don’t even do it?’

Quin rose and went to the window. It struck him that the view was the most beautiful, possibly, in the world, and that he must be careful not to smile. ‘You mean you never got as far as making love at all?’

‘No. And it’s so awful because Heini took such trouble getting the contraception things from the machine and getting cream chocolate instead and then I rushed out into the night like a frightened hen. He’s scarcely spoken to me since and you can’t blame him.’

Quin came back and sat down beside her on the sofa. ‘And why do you think me saying “I divorce you” three times would make it better?’

Ruth looked at her empty glass, then down at the carpet. ‘You see, I want to be liberated and giving and, of course, I love Heini very much. But my family… it’s difficult to get away from one’s upbringing and they are old-fashioned and marriage has always been… marriage. Even ones like ours that aren’t proper ones. And I thought, maybe it isn’t just my nervous system being deformed or having seen something horrible in a haystack on the Grundlsee. Maybe some part of me is going to go on running down fire escapes till I’m unmarried. Which is why I want you please to do this thing now. It’s perfectly valid, I promise you.’ She looked about her and her eyes rested on two silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. ‘We could light some candles,’ she said. ‘That would make it more solemn.’

‘So we could,’ he said. He got up, carried the fluted candlesticks to the low table, lit a match.

‘Now,’ he said.

She turned to him. ‘Now you’re going to do it?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘Well, no,’ he said apologetically. ‘What I’m going to do now is not exactly that. What I’m going to do now, is kiss you.’

‘Oh, God — you mustn’t go away! I shall die at once if you leave me.’

He turned to where she lay beside him on the pillow. The window framed the night sky and the constellations named for the heroines of legend: Andromeda, the Pleiades… She belonged in their company now, this gallant girl who had taken her first journey into love.

‘I was going to get us something to eat,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly midnight. You must be starving.’ He ran his fingers down the curve of her cheek, her throat; gathered a handful of her tresses. ‘I am looped in the loops of her hair,’ he murmured, his face in the hollow of her shoulder.

‘Miss Kenmore didn’t teach me that,’ said Ruth, not pleased with this gap in her education.

‘No. We have rather moved out of Kenmore country.’

A long way out of it. He had evidently decided against killing her by getting out of bed and as she folded herself against him, she realized that she must be careful not actually to become him, which would be impractical. Then suddenly she drew away.

‘Quin, something terrible has happened! I haven’t had my tristesse!’ She gazed at him, her eyes huge. ‘You know, the thing you have afterwards. Total despair. Postcoital tristesse, it’s called. It’s in all the books! It’s when you realize that in spite of everything, every human soul is tragically and hopelessly alone, and I don’t feel it at all; I feel absolutely marvellous. I told you I wasn’t like other people.’

‘No,’ he said rather shakily. ‘You’re not in the least like other people. If you were, all the gods would come down from Olympus and proclaim Paradise on Earth.’ And presently: ‘We’ll eat later.’

But later, quite suddenly, he fell asleep and she followed him into his imagined dreams as he twitched, chased into a Utrillo landscape of rich green trees and hounds and huntsmen in scarlet — and she vowed to keep awake because she must miss nothing of this night, not one instant… but she did sleep in the end, briefly, and woke up in wonderment because she understood now what people meant when they said: ‘She slept with him.’ That it was part of the act of love, this sharing of oblivion.

When he too woke it was suddenly and with contrition. ‘Now you shall eat, my poor love,’ he said, and they went into the kitchen hand in hand because she wasn’t prepared to be separated from him even for as long as it took to cross the hallway, and had a picnic of bread and cheese and a wine that was not very much like the Liebfraumilch that she had drunk in Janet’s flat.

‘Oh, I’m so hungry,’ said Ruth, and she seemed to be tasting food for the first time. And pausing with a hunk of Emmentaler in her hand: ‘Do you think it will come later, the tristesse? The terrible, tragic hopelessness — the feeling that everyone is really alone?’

‘I am not alone,’ said Quin, coming round behind her, holding her. ‘And nor are you. We shall never be alone again.’

When they had eaten, they opened the French windows and stood looking out at the sleeping city and the river which never slept. Wrapped in Quin’s dressing-gown, feeling his warmth beside her, she took great breaths of the night air.

‘Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song,’ she quoted. ‘I may not know improper poems about people’s hair, but Miss Kenmore taught me a lot of Spenser. I love it so much, this river.’

‘I too,’ said Quin. ‘As a matter of fact I think I might go in for some bottle-throwing on my own account. I shall go out tomorrow and buy a thousand lemonade bottles and put a note in each and every one and drop them from the bridge.’

‘What will they say, the notes? What will you put in them?’

He turned his head, surprised at her obtuseness. ‘Your name, of course. What else?’

Hand in hand, still, they wandered back to bed. ‘It’s strange,’ said Ruth. ‘I thought love would be like the slow movement of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante… or like one of those uplifting paintings my mother used to take me to look at with putti and clouds and golden rays… or even like the sea. But it isn’t, is it?’

‘No. Love is like itself.’

‘Yes.’ She sighed… curled herself, warm and relaxed and pliant against his side.

But when presently she indicated that in spite of her deep frigidity and the tristesse which she expected at any moment, she was, so to speak, there, and he gathered her into his arms, he did not use any of the endearments in either of the languages which they spoke.

Clearly and quietly in the darkness, Quin said: ‘My wife.’