The Morning Gift

Ah, thank God, there she was, making her way through the crowd. She wore her loden cape, buttoned up even on this warm day, and carried her straw basket so that she looked even more like a goose girl on an alp, and for a moment he wondered if he had made a mistake . . . if she would fit in with the sophisticated life he was bound to lead. But Mantella thought the world of her, and Fleury . . . and his father ate out of her hand. He had never met a man who didn’t like Ruth, and now as she came up the gangway, a sailor walking down turned his head to look at her.

‘Ruth!’

‘Heini!’

They were in each other’s arms; he felt her hair against his cheek, the warmth, the familiarity.

‘You’ve been crying, darling.’ He was solicitous, wiping a tear away with his fingers.

‘Yes. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all right now. And I’ve brought us a present. A lovely present. It was a chance in a million, finding them in the summer, but look!’

She bent down to the straw basket and took out a small brown paper bag which she put into his hands. Heini felt the warmth before he opened it, and smiled.

‘Maroni! Oh, Ruth, that takes me back!’

He took out a chestnut, almost too warm to hold, gazed at the split skin, the wrinkled, roasted flesh – drank in the delicious smell. Both of them now were back in the city they had grown up in, wandering along the Kärntnerstrasse, dipping into the bag . . . sharing . . . sniffing . . . Ruth had carried them in her muff for him, walking to fetch him from the Conservatoire . . . Once they had eaten three bags of them, driving in a sledge through the snowbound Prater.

‘I’ll peel one for you,’ said Ruth – and she freed it deftly from the skin and held it out to him – as she had held out wild strawberries on the Grundlsee, a piece of marzipan pilfered from her mother’s kitchen.

‘Shall we take them down below?’ he suggested.

‘No, let’s eat them here, Heini. Let’s stay by the sea.’

So they stood side by side and emptied the bag and threw the skins into the water, where they were swooped on – and then rejected – by the gulls.

‘Is your luggage aboard, then?’ asked Heini. ‘We sail in less than an hour.’

‘Everything’s taken care of,’ said Ruth. She put her arms round him and once again he felt her tears. ‘Only listen, darling – there’s something I have to tell you.’

No one ever forgot where they were on the morning of the 3rd of September.

Pilly, who had joined the WRNS without waiting for the result of her exams, heard Chamberlain’s quavery voice in the naval barracks at Portsmouth. Janet heard it in her father’s vicarage the day after which, to everyone’s amazement, she had become engaged to his curate.

The inhabitants of Number 27 heard the news that Britain was at war with Germany clustered round the crackling wireless set in Ziller’s room and as they listened the expression on every face was strangely similar. Relief that the shillyshallying and compromise were over at last, and with it the realization that they were cut off finally from the relatives and friends that they had left behind in Europe.

And from Ruth. From Ruth who had been five weeks in America and had not yet written – or probably had written, but the letter with the uncertainty of the time had not arrived. And now every mail would be threatened by U-boats, every telephone line requisitioned for the war.

‘Oh, Kurt,’ said Leonie, coming to stand beside her husband.

‘Just think that she is safe. That’s all you have to think of; that she is safe.’

Almost before Chamberlain had stopped speaking came the air-raid warning, and with it a taste of things to come as Fräulein Lutzenholler dived under the table and Mishak went out into the garden so as to die in the open air. A false alarm, but it made it easier for Leonie to heed her husband’s words. Ruth was safe – the Mauretania had berthed without mishap; they had rung the shipping office. She herself had said it might be a while before a letter reached them, but oh, God, let her write soon, thought Leonie. She knew how disappointed Kurt had been in Ruth’s exam results: the aegrotat she had been awarded was almost worthless – and in something about Ruth herself which had held them at a distance before she sailed, but he suffered scarcely less than she did at this separation from the daughter he loved so much.

Quin heard the news three days later in a manner which would have done credit to a Rider Haggard yarn. A horseman, galloping across the plains towards him in a cloud of dust, reined in and handed him a letter.

‘So it’s come,’ said Quin, and the African nodded.

One by one the men who had been working on the cliff put down their tools. There was no need to ask what had happened. The Commissioner at Lindi had promised to inform them and he had kept his word.

‘We’re going home, then?’ asked Sam – and filled his eyes with the blue immensity of the sky, the sea of grass, the antelopes moving quietly over the horizon.