The Morning Gift

She put her suitcase down by the filing cabinet and wandered through into the cloakroom with its gas ring and kettle. Leading out of it was a preparation room with shelves of bottles and a camp bed on which scientists or technicians working long hours sometimes slept for a while.

‘Oh God, let him come,’ prayed Ruth.

But why should he come, this Englishman who owed her nothing? Why should he even have got the keys she had left with the concierge? Hardly aware of what she was doing, she pulled a stool towards the tray of jumbled bones and began, with practised fingers, to separate out the vertebrae, brushing them free of earth and fragments of rock. As she bent forward, her hair fell on the tray and she gathered it together and twisted it into a coil, jamming a long-handled paintbrush through its mass. Heini liked her hair long and she’d learnt that trick from a Japanese girl at the university.

The silence was palpable. It was early evening now; everyone had gone home. Not even the water pipes, not even the lift, made their usual sounds. Painstakingly, pointlessly, Ruth went on sorting the ancient cave bear bones and waited without hope for the arrival of the Englishman.

Yet when she heard the key turn in the door, she did not dare to turn her head. Then came footsteps which, surprisingly, were already familiar, and an arm stretched over her shoulder so that for a moment she felt the cloth of his jacket against her cheek.

‘No, not that one,’ said a quiet voice. ‘I think you’ll find that doesn’t match the type. Look at the size of the neural canal.’

She leant back in her chair, feeling suddenly safe, remembering the hands of her piano teacher coming down over her own to help her with an errant chord.

Quin, meanwhile, was registering a number of features revealed by Ruth’s skewered hair: ears . . . the curve of her jaw . . . and those vulnerable hollows at the back of the neck which prevent the parents of young children from murdering them.

‘How quick you are,’ she said, watching his long fingers move among the fragmented bones. And then: ‘You had no luck at the Consulate?’

‘No, I had no luck. But we’ll get you out of Vienna. What happened back at the flat? Did you save anything?’

She pointed to her suitcase. ‘Frau Hautermanns warned me that they were coming.’

‘The concierge?’

‘Yes. I packed some things and went down the fire escape. They weren’t after me. Not this time.’

He was silent, still automatically sorting the specimens. Then he pushed away the tray.

‘Have you eaten anything today?’

She shook her head.

‘Good. I’ve brought a picnic. Rather a special one. Where shall we have it?’

‘I suppose it ought to be in here. I can clear the table and there’s another chair next door.’

‘I said a picnic,’ said Quin sternly. ‘In Britain a picnic means sitting on the ground and being uncomfortable, preferably in the rain. Now where shall we go? Africa? You have a fine collection of lions, I see; a little moth-eaten perhaps, but very nicely mounted. Or there’s the Amazon – I’m partial to anacondas, aren’t you? No, wait; what about the Arctic? I’ve brought rather a special Chablis and it’s best served chilled.’

Ruth shook her head. ‘The polar bear was almost my favourite when I was small, but I don’t want to get chilblains – I might drop my sandwiches. You don’t want to go back in time? To the Dinosaur Hall?’

‘No. Too much like work. And frankly I’m not too happy about that ichthyosaurus. Whoever assembled that skeleton had a lot of imagination.’

Ruth flushed. ‘It was old Schumacher. He was very ill and he so much wanted to get it finished before he died.’ And then: ‘I know! Let’s go to Madagascar! The Ancient Continent of Lemuria! There’s an aye-aye there, a baby – such a sad-looking little thing. You’ll really like the aye-aye.’

Quin nodded. ‘Madagascar it shall be. Perhaps you can find us a towel or some newspaper; that’s all we need. I’m sure eating here’s against the regulations but we won’t let that trouble us.’

She disappeared into the cloakroom and came back with a folded towel, and with her hair released from its skewer. There could be doubts about her face thought Quin, with its contrasting motifs, but none about her impossible, unruly, unfashionable hair. Touched now by the last rays of the sinking sun, it gave off a tawny, golden warmth that lifted the heart.

It was a strange walk they took through the enormous, shadowy rooms, watched by creatures preserved for ever in their moment of time. Antelopes no bigger than cats raised one leg, ready to flee across the sandy veld. The monkeys of the New World hung, huddled and melancholy, from branches – and by a window a dodo, idiotic-looking and extinct, sat on a nest of reconstructed eggs.

Madagascar was all that Ruth had promised. Ring-tailed lemurs with piebald faces held nuts in their amazingly human hands. A pair of indris, cosy and fluffy like children’s toys, groomed each other’s fur. Tiny mouse lemurs clustered round a coconut.