The Morning Gift

She had put her loden skirt and woollen sweater under newspaper, weighed down by a tray of fossil-bearing rocks, but this attempt at home-ironing had not been successful. Should she after all wear the dress she had bought for Heini’s debut with the Philharmonic? She’d taken it from the flat and it hung now behind the door: brown velvet with a Puritan collar of heavy cream lace. It came from her grandfather’s department store: the attendants had all come to help her choose; to share her pleasure in Heini’s debut. Now the store had its windows smashed; notices warned customers not to shop there. Thank heaven her grandfather was dead.

No, that was Heini’s dress – her page-turning dress, for it mattered what one wore to turn over music. One had to look nice, but unobtrusive. The dress was the colour of the Bechstein in the Musikverein – it had nothing to do with an Englishman who ran away from Strauss.

She wandered through the galleries and, in the grey light of dawn, her old friends, one by one, became visible. The polar bear, the elephant seal . . . the ichthyosaurus with the fake vertebrae. And the infant aye-aye which she had restored to its case.

‘Wish me luck,’ she said to the ugly little beast, leaning her head against the glass.

She closed her eyes and the primates of Madagascar vanished as she saw the wedding she had planned so often with her mother. Not here, but on the Grundlsee, rowing across to the little onion-domed church in a boat – in a whole flotilla of boats, because everyone she loved would be there. Uncle Mishak would grumble a little because he had to dress up; Aunt Hilda would get stuck in her zip . . . and the Zillers would play. ‘On the landing stage,’ Ruth had suggested, but Biberstein said no, he was too fat to play on a landing stage. She would wear white organdie and carry a posy of mountain flowers, and as she walked down the aisle on her father’s arm, there would be Heini with his mop of curls and his sweet smile.

(Oh, Heini, forgive me. I’m doing this for us.)

Back in the cloakroom, she looked at her reflection once again. She had never seemed to herself so plain and unprepossessing. Suddenly she loosened her hair, filled the basin with cold water, seized the cake of green soap that the museum thought adequate for its research workers . . .

Quin, letting himself in silently, found her ready, her suitcase strapped.

‘Does the roof leak?’ he asked, surprised, for from the curving strands of her long hair, drops of water were running onto the floor.

She shook her head. ‘I washed my hair, but the electric fire doesn’t work.’

He saw the shadows under her eyes, the resolute set of her shoulders.

‘Come; it’ll be over soon – and it isn’t as bad as going to the dentist.’

At the bottom of the staircase, as they prepared to leave by the side door, a small group of people waited to wish her luck. The cleaning lady, the porter, the old taxidermist on the floor below. They had all known she was there and kept their counsel. She must remember that when she felt despair about her countrymen.

She had expected something grand from the British Consulate, but the Anschluss had forced a reorganization of the Diplomatic Service, and the taxi delivered them in front of a row of temporary huts, on the tin roof of which the rain was still beating down. A disconsolate plumber in oilskins was poking at an overflowing gutter with an iron tool. Inside, in the Consul’s makeshift office, the picture of George the Sixth hung slightly askew; out in the corridor someone was hoovering.

The Consul’s deputy was there, but not in the best of tempers. He had pinkeye, an unpleasant inflammation of the conjunctiva, and held a handkerchief to his face. Though he had found Professor Somerville personally courteous, he could not approve of the way the Consul, presumably on the instruction of the Ambassador, was rushing this ceremony through. Procedures which should have taken days had been telescoped into hours: the issuing of visas, the amendment of passports. Someone, thought the deputy, whose origins were working class, had almost certainly been at school with someone else. Professor Somerville’s father with the Ambassador’s cousin, perhaps . . . There would have been those exchanges by which upper-class Englishmen, like dogs round a lamppost, sniff out each other’s schooling – faggings at Eton, beatings at Harrow – and realize that they are brothers beneath the skin.

‘Can I have your documents, please?’

Quin laid the papers down on the desk, and saw Ruth’s knuckles tighten on the back of her chair. Scarcely twenty years old, and a child of the new Europe Hitler had made.

‘We shall need two witnesses. Have you brought any?’

‘No.’