Eva Ibbotson

The Professor’s passion for his young wife soon cooled. It was clear that Sophie would be no use to him in his career. Though constantly instructed by himself and Louisa, she seemed quite unable to learn the most basic rules of academic protocol. Again and again her patient husband caught her out in the most appalling lapses: attempting to seat the wife of the Professor of Divinity below the wife of the Professor of Mathematics and once, in a tea-shop, smiling at a young lecturer who was wearing shorts. When he was passed over for the Mastership of his College it was Sophie he blamed and Louisa—who had never really relinquished the reins of the household—now gathered them even more firmly into her bony and frugal hands.

It was into this house that Harriet was born.

Babies, as everyone who cares for them knows, come trailing their own particular essence. There are grave, contemplative babies still patiently solving some equation of Euclidean geometry begun in another world, scrawny high-powered babies apparently shot into life without the slightest need to eat or sleep, and placid agricultural babies whose only concern is to thrive.

But sometimes… just sometimes, there are babies who appear to have swallowed some small private sun, rosy and endlessly obliging babies who explode into laughter long before one’s hand has actually touched their stomachs—laughter which has less to do with being tickled than with sharing and being together—and love.

Such a baby was Harriet Jane Morton in the first two years of her life: a baby who offered you her starfish of a foot, her slobbered rusk… a cornucopial life-affirmer from the start.

Then Sophie Morton, whose passion the child had been, caught a chill which turned to pneumonia and died. Two weeks later, Louisa dismissed the country girl who had been Harriet’s nurse.

Within months the plump, rosy baby became a serious, bird-thin and almost silent little girl. As though reflecting a scarcely comprehended grief, her hair darkened, her hazel eyes lost their green and golden lights and settled to a solemn brown. It seemed as if the very skin and bone and muscle of this bewildered little being had changed into a minor key.

Soon, too soon, she taught herself to read and vanished for long hours into her attic with a book, to be discovered by one of the servants shivering with a cold she had been too absorbed to notice. If she spoke now, it was to her invisible playmate—a twin brother, fleet-footed and strong—or to the small creatures she befriended in that loveless house: the sparrows which settled on her windowsill; a squirrel she had called down from the one tree in the raked gravel rectangle which was the Mortons’ garden.

Yet it would be wrong to say that Harriet was neglected. If Louisa found it impossible to love this child of the frivolous usurper who had ensnared her brother, she was determined to do her duty. Harriet was conveyed to music lessons and to dancing classes which the family doctor, disconcerted by her pallor and thinness, recommended. She was regularly aired and exercised, sent oh long walks with whatever ancient and grim-faced maid survived Louisa’s regime. If her father grew crustier and more bigoted as the years passed, he could still recognize academic excellence and himself taught her Latin and Greek.

And presently she was sent to an excellent day school most highly recommended by the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle who ruled Louisa Morton’s life.

No child ever loved school as much as Harriet. She was ready to leave with her satchel an hour before it was time to go; she begged for any job, however menial, which would keep her there in the afternoon. Arithmetic lessons, sago pudding, deportment… she enjoyed everything because it was shared by others and accompanied by laughter—because there was warmth.

Then a new headmistress came, detected in the vulnerable dark-eyed child a potential scholar, and herself coached her in English and History: lessons that Harriet was to remember all her life. After two terms she sent for Professor Morton in order to discuss Harriet’s university career. Did he favor Newnham or Girton, she inquired, pouring tea for him in her charming sitting-room—or would it be sensible to choose an Oxford college so as to give Harriet a fresh environment? Though it was always foolish to prophesy, she would be extremely surprised if Harriet failed to get a scholarship…

From the interview which followed both parties were invalided out in a state of fulminating rage. To the Professor it was genuinely incomprehensible that anybody could have lived in Cambridge for one week and not known his views on “women in the university.” And, unable to trust his daughter to this suffragette upstart, he took Harriet away from school.

That had been a year ago and Harriet could still not pass the familiar red brick building without a lump in her throat.