The Morning Gift

Now the café was a bower of green, the glockenspiel of the banker’s wife set up a sweet tinkling over the hubbub of voices . . . Voices which were stilled as Miss Maud, now primed in the mysteries of an Austrian Holy Night, handed the matches to Ruth.

‘Careful!’ said Professor Berger, as he had said every year since Ruth was old enough to light the candles on the tree.

He had travelled overnight on the bus from Manchester and would greatly have preferred to be at home with his family, but now as he looked at the circle of faces and touched his daughter’s head, he was glad they had come together with their friends.

‘I never seen it like that,’ said Mrs Burtt. ‘Not with real candles.’

And Miss Violet and Miss Maud forgot the needles dropping on the floor and the wax dripping on to the tablecloths and even the appalling risk of fire, for it was beyond race or belief or nationality, this incandescent symbol of joy and peace.

Then came the presents. How these people, some of whom could scarcely afford to eat, had found gifts remained a mystery, but no one was forgotten. Dr Levy had discovered a postcard of the bench where Leonie had been overcome by pigeons and made for it a wooden frame. Mrs Burtt received a scroll in which Ruth, in blank verse, proclaimed her as Queen of the Willow. Even the poodle had a present: a bone marrow pudding baked on the disputed cooker at Number 27.

But Heini’s presents were the best. It had occurred to Heini that while he was borrowing money from Dr Friedlander for the competition, he might as well borrow a little extra for Christmas, and the dentist had been perfectly happy to lend it to him. So Heini had bought silk stockings for Leonie and chocolates for Aunt Hilda and a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius for the Professor who was fond of the Roman Stoic. This had used up more money than he expected and when he went into a flower shop to buy red roses for Ruth, he found the cost of a bunch to be exorbitant. It was the assistant who had suggested a different kind of rose – a Christmas rose, pale-petalled and golden-hearted, and put a single bloom, cradled in moss, into a cellophane box – and now, as he saw Ruth’s face, he knew that nothing could have pleased her more.

After the presents came the food – and here the horsehair purse of Mrs Weiss had turned into a horn of plenty, emitting plates of salami and wafer-thin smoked ham . . . of almonds and apricots, and a wild white wine from the Wachau for which Leonie had scoured the shops of Soho.

But at eleven, Ruth and Heini slipped out together and walked hand in hand through the damp, misty streets.

‘It was lovely, wasn’t it?’ said Ruth. ‘And you look so elegant!’ On the first day of the holidays, she had returned to the progressively educated children of the lady weaver and used the money she had earned to buy Heini a silk scarf to wear with his evening clothes. ‘But, oh if only it would snow! I miss snow so much – the quietness and the glitter. Do you remember the icicles hanging from the wall lamps in the Hofburg? And the C Minor Mass coming out of the Augustiner chapel, and the bells?’

They had reached the door of Number 27. ‘I’ll play it for you,’ said Heini pulling her into the house. ‘Come on! I’ll play the snow and the choirboys and the bells. I’ll play Christmas in Vienna.’

And he did. He sat down at the Bösendorfer and he made it for her in music as he had promised. He played Leopold Mozart’s ‘Sleigh Ride’ and wove in the carols that the Vienna Choirboys sang: ‘Puer Nobis’ and the rocking lullaby which Mary had sung to her babe . . . He played the tune the old man had wheezed out on his hurdy-gurdy in the market where the Bergers bought their tree – and then it became Papageno’s song from The Magic Flute which had been Ruth’s Christmas treat since she was eight years old. He played ‘The Skater’s Waltz’ to which she’d whirled round the ice rink in the Prater and moved down to the bass to mime the deep and solemn bells of St Stephan’s summoning the people to midnight mass. And he ended with the piece he had played for her every year on the Steinway in the Felsengasse – ‘their’ tune: Mozart’s consoling and ravishing B Minor Adagio which he had been practising when first they met.

Then he closed the lid of the piano and got to his feet.

‘Ruth,’ he said huskily, ‘I liked your present, but there is only one present I want and need – and I need it desperately.’

‘What?’ said Ruth, and her heart beat so loudly that she thought he must be able to hear.

‘You!’ said Heini. ‘Nothing else. Just you. And soon please, darling. Very soon!’

And Ruth, still caught in the wonder of the music, moved forward into his arms and said, ‘Yes. It’s what I want too. I want it very much.’

Quin’s Christmas Eve was very different.