The Morning Gift

And: ‘It’s bad news,’ said her sister, Miss Violet, carrying a tray of empty cups to Mrs Burtt in the kitchen, who took her arms out of the washing-up water and said that Hitler would have something to answer for if ever she got hold of him.

Miss Maud and Miss Violet Harper had started the Willow Tea Rooms five years earlier when it was discovered that their father, the General, had not been as provident as they had hoped. It was a pretty place on the corner of a small square behind Belsize Lane and they had made it nice with willow-pattern china, dimity curtains and a pottery cat on the windowsill. Reared to regard foreigners as, at best, unfortunate, the ladies had stoutly resisted the demands of the refugees who increasingly thronged the district. The Gloriette in St John’s Wood might serve cakes with outlandish names and slop whipped cream over everything, the proprietors of the Cosmo in Finchley might supply newspapers on sticks and permit talk across the tables, but in the Willow Tea Rooms, the decencies were preserved. Customers were offered scones or sponge fingers and, at lunchtime, scrambled eggs on toast, but nothing ever with a smell – and anyone sitting more than half an hour over a cup of coffee, got coughed at, first by Miss Violet, and if this was ineffectual, by the fiercer Miss Maud.

Yet by the summer of 1938, as the bewildered Austrians joined the refugees from Nazi Germany, the ladies, imperceptibly, had changed. For who could cough at Dr Levy, with his walrus moustache and wise brown eyes, not after he had diagnosed Miss Violet’s bursitis – and who could help laughing at Mr Ziller’s imitation of himself playing ‘Dark Eyes’ on the violin to an American lady with a faulty hearing aid?

And now there was Mrs Berger who had come in on her first day in England with her distinguished-looking husband and her nice old uncle, and praised the sponge fingers and showed them photos of her pretty, snub-nosed daughter. Ruth was coming, she was going to study here; soon her boyfriend, a brilliant concert pianist, would follow. The change in Mrs Berger since then had shaken even the General’s daughters, used as they were to stories of loss and grief.

Leonie entered the café, navigated to the chair which Paul Ziller drew out for her, nodded at the actor from the Vienna Burg Theatre in the corner, at old Mrs Weiss in her feathered toque, at an English lady with a poodle . . .

Dr Levy put down his book on The Diseases of the Knee which he had understood intimately twenty years ago, but which came less trippingly in English from the tongue of a middle-aged heart specialist who’d had no breakfast.

‘I have heard that many student transports are coming in now to Scotland,’ he said, speaking English in deference to the lady with a poodle.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Leonie carefully. ‘My husband enquires.’

Miss Maud, unasked, set down Leonie’s usual cup of coffee. The actor from the Burg Theatre – a fair-haired, alarmingly handsome man exiled for politics not race – said many people were escaping through Portugal, a fact confirmed by the couple from Hamburg at a corner table.

Paul Ziller said nothing, only patted Leonie’s hand. Lonely beyond belief without the three men with whom he had made music for a decade, he was remembering the comical, blonde child who had climbed out of her cot the first time the quartet had played for Professor Berger’s birthday and come stamping down the corridor in a nightdress and nappies, refusing absolutely to be returned to bed.

Mrs Weiss, her auburn wig askew under her hat, now launched into an incoherent story involving a missing girl who had turned up unexpectedly on a milk train to Dieppe. The scourge of the Willow Tea Rooms, she was seventy-two years old and had been rescued by her prosperous lawyer son from the village in East Prussia where she had lived all her life. The lawyer now owned a mock Tudor mansion in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a fishpond, and an English wife who deposited her dreadful mother-in-law each morning in the café with a fistful of conscience money. The words ‘I buy you a cake?’ struck dread into the other habitués who knew that acceptance meant listening to Mrs Weiss’s interminable lament about her daughter-in-law who did not allow her to fry onions, speak to the maids, or help.

When she had finished, the English lady, who for a year had refused to speak across the tables, said that if Leonie really was an Aquarian, the stars in the Daily Telegraph that morning had been entirely favourable.

‘It definitely said that you can expect a pleasant surprise,’ said Mrs Fowler, feeding a biscuit to the dog.

But when Professor Berger came in, weary from his long walk up the hill, and then Uncle Mishak, it was clear that the stars in the Telegraph had not prevailed.

‘Well, tomorrow, perhaps,’ said Miss Maud, putting down the plate of bread and butter which was the Bergers’ lunch.

‘Yes, tomorrow,’ echoed Miss Violet.