The Morning Gift

Though he was impatient to be gone, Quin nodded. Dick went to a bureau by the wall, opened a drawer, took out a small painting: a feathery tamarisk, each brush stroke as light as gossamer, against a mass of scarlet geraniums.

‘I did it in Madeira. Do you think she’d like it? Ruth?’

‘I’m sure she would.’

‘I’ll get it framed then and send it along.’

Out in the street, Quin looked at his watch. Ruth should have received his gift by now – Cavour had promised to send it instantly. Light-headed from lack of sleep and the conviction that he would live for ever, he turned his car towards the museum. It shouldn’t be difficult to book an extra cabin on the boat, but he’d better put Milner on to it right away. And how very agreeable to know that Brille-Lamartaine, if he chose to make further enquiries, would learn nothing but the truth. For he was taking along a woman, one of his own students . . . and one with whom he was passionately in love!

Ruth had not expected to go to sleep after she left Quin. She had crept in and climbed into her bed only wanting to relive the whole glorious night again, but she had fallen instantly into deep oblivion.

Now, as she woke and stretched, it was to a transformed world. The bedroom she shared with her Aunt Hilda, with its swirling brown wallpaper, had never seemed to be a place in which to let the eye linger, but now she could imagine the pleasure the designer must have felt in being allowed to wiggle paint about. And Hilda herself, as she brushed her sparse hair, seemed to Ruth the personification of the academic ideal – devoted all her life to a tribe she never saw, made ecstatic by a chipped arrowhead or drinking cup. How good Aunt Hilda was, how grateful Ruth was to be her niece!

She swung her feet over the side of the bed, smiled at the shrunken head. She was walking now over the buried biscuit tin containing her wedding ring, her marriage certificate. Soon – today perhaps – she could dig it up and take it to her mother.

‘I’m married, Mama,’ she would say. ‘I’m married to Professor Somerville and I love him terribly and he loves me.’

She slipped on her dressing-gown and went to the window and here too was a beauty she had never perceived before. True, the gasometer was still there, but so was the sycamore in the next-door garden and, yes, the bark was sooty and one of the branches was dead – but oh, the glory of the brave new leaves!

On the landing she encountered Fräulein Lutzenholler, glowering, with her sponge bag.

‘He is in the bathroom,’ she said.

There was no need for Ruth to ask who. It was always Heini who was in the bathroom. But this morning she did not rush to Heini’s defence, she was too busy loving Fräulein Lutzenholler who had been so right about everything: who had said that we lose what we want to lose, forget what we want to forget . . . who had said that frigidity was about whether you loved someone or not. Ruth, in her dramatic nonfrigidity, beamed at the psychoanalyst and would have kissed her but for the moustache and the knowledge that, so early in the morning, she could not yet have cleaned her teeth.

‘Hurry up, Heini,’ called Ruth.

The thought of Heini did halt her. Heini was going to be badly hurt and for a moment her joy was clouded by apprehension. But only for a moment. Heini would find another starling – a whole flock of them in years to come. It was music he loved, and rightly – and what had happened last night was beyond anything one could be sorry for. It was a kind of metallurgical process, a welding of body and soul; you couldn’t argue about it.

Oh, Quin, she thought, and hugged herself, and Fräulein Lutzenholler, furiously waiting, looked at her, startled, remembering the existence of something she seldom came across in her profession: joy.

Giving up hope of the bathroom, Ruth went into the kitchen where all of them, since Heini’s arrival, kept a spare toothbrush. Her mother was laying the breakfast and Ruth stood for a moment in the doorway watching her. Leonie looked tired these days, there were lines on her face that had not been there when they left Vienna, and strands of grey in her hair, but to her daughter she looked beautiful. And with the love that enveloped Ruth, with the ecstasy of her remembered night, there came an overwhelming gratitude, for now she would be able to help her parents, help Uncle Mishak . . . pay back at last.