The Morning Gift

No. I never had a chance either. My father is something worse than a grocer. Well, at least she was spared the humiliation of offering herself to Quin as a kind of concubine. The African journey was bound to be a long one and it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t marry Verena at some point. Kenneth had done her a good turn by severing the last shreds of hope.

She managed a few words of comfort, and together they made their way through the arch and into Thameside’s courtyard. Facing them, a confirmation of everything that Kenneth had told her, stood Quin and Verena in animated conversation beneath the walnut tree.

Quin lifted his head; he looked directly at her, and though she had thought in the night that nothing could get worse, she had been wrong: for what she had to do now was not to run towards him, not to throw herself into his arms and beg him to release her from this nightmare, and that was worse. It was impossible, but she had done it; she had plucked at Kenneth’s arm, she was pronouncing words.

‘Kenneth, I’ve decided not to go to the lecture – Heini wanted me to come to the practice rooms and I feel I ought to go. Will you tell Professor Somerville and make my excuses? Tell him I have to be with my fiancé – be sure to tell him that – and ask Sam to let me borrow his notes.’

Kenneth, suffering also, managed a magnanimous gesture. ‘I’ll let you have my notes, Ruth. My handwriting is far more legible than Sam’s.’

Quin had seen her come; had seen her bright head, her gallant figure in its worn cape, and his heart had leapt for now, in the morning, he knew it was impossible, what he had thought in the night – and he waited for her to walk towards him, relieved and grateful for the return of sanity. And then she checked and turned and went away, and even before Kenneth gave – verbatim – Ruth’s message, pronouncing the word fiancé in a way which was displeasing to Verena, the pain struck and clawed, and incredulity became belief. He had been used and betrayed.

But Quin, as he went to his room, had an escape which men have perfected and Ruth had yet to learn. Anger. An all-enveloping fury, a rage which consumed him: rage against Heini, against Ruth, against himself for having been duped. Tearing his gown from its hook, marching blindly to his lecture, he let it have its way – this torrent of fury which was so much less agonizing than the pain.

27

Ruth spent the Easter vacation working. It was the work which, she assured her mother, accounted for the rings under her eyes, her loss of appetite and a certain greenish tinge under her skin.

‘Then you must stop!’ yelled Leonie, unable to endure the sight of her lovely daughter reduced to the kind of person one saw crawling out of bombed houses in newsreels of Canton or Madrid.

‘I can’t,’ said Ruth and (inevitably) quoted Mozart who had said he went on working because it fatigued him less than it did to rest.

If Ruth was exhausted, Heini was in excellent spirits. He and Ruth had been completely reconciled. She had come to him and asked his pardon and he had wholeheartedly forgiven her.

‘It’s not your fault, darling,’ he’d said. ‘That flat would put anybody off. Only Ruth, if you’d help me now, if you’d be beside me, I know I can win! I won’t ask for anything physical – when I’m established we can be married and have a honeymoon in some splendid hotel. You see, Mantella thinks he can get me to America if all goes well and if he does, you have to come with me! You have to – I couldn’t go alone.’

‘America! Oh, Heini, that’s so far!’

What he had said then, standing in his shirtsleeves looking out at the grey, slanting rain, had shaken her badly.

‘Far?’ said Heini. ‘From where?’ – and she had seen what he saw in her adopted country: the shabby lodgings, the poverty, the unfamiliar language and ill-cooked food. But she struggled still.

‘I couldn’t leave my parents.’

He’d taken both her hands then, looked into her eyes. ‘Ruth, you’re being selfish. We can bring them over as soon as I’m established. Everyone says there’s going to be a war – what if London is bombed?’

‘Yes.’ He was right. She was being selfish. She could help her parents best that way . . . and help herself. Three thousand miles of ocean should ensure that she was never tempted to crawl cravenly back to Quin and the remembrance of happiness.

‘All right, Heini; if you win and Mantella can arrange it, I’ll come. And I’ll help you all I can.’

That had been two weeks ago and Ruth had helped. She glued Heini’s tattered music; she massaged his fingers; she sat beside him as he mastered the dreaded arpeggios of the Hammerklavier.