The Morning Gift

Ruth put a hand up to her eyes. ‘Ridiculously so. People laughed at them – plumping each other’s cushions, pulling out footstools. When she died he tried to die too, but he couldn’t manage it. That’s when my mother made him come to us.’

Back in the Inner City, Ruth pointed out the balcony on which she had stood stark naked at midnight, at the age of nine, hoping that pneumonia would release her from disgrace and ruin.

‘It was my great-aunt’s flat and I’d just heard that I only got Commended instead of Highly Commended in my music exam. Oh, and look, here’s the actual bench where my mother was overcome by pigeons and my father rescued her.’

‘There seem to have been a lot of happy marriages in your family,’ said Quin.

‘I don’t know . . . Uncle Mishak was happy, and my parents . . . but in general I don’t think they thought of it as something that made you happy.’

‘What then?’

Ruth was frowning. One ear turned colour slightly as she strangled it in a loop of hair. ‘It was what you did . . . because you had set out to do it. It was . . . work; it was like ploughing a field or painting a picture – you kept on adding colours or trying to get the perspective right. The women in particular. My Aunt Miriam’s husband was unfaithful and she kept ringing my mother and saying she was going to kill him, but when people suggested divorce she was terribly shocked.’ She looked up, her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I’m terribly sorry . . . I don’t mean us, of course. These were proper marriages, not ones with Morgan.’

Their last visit was to St Stephan’s Cathedral, the city’s symbol and its heart.

‘I’d like to light a candle,’ said Ruth, and he let her go alone up the sombre, incense-scented nave.

Waiting at the door, he saw across the square two terrified fair-haired boys with broad peasant faces being dragged towards an army truck by a group of soldiers.

‘They’re rounding up all the Social Democrats,’ said a plump, middle-aged woman with a feather in her hat. There was no censure in her voice; no emotion in the round, pale eyes.

Making his way to where Ruth knelt, determined to take her out by a side door, Quin found that she had lit not one candle but two. No need to ask for whom – all roads led to Heini for this girl.

‘Shall I ever come back, do you think?’

Quin made no answer. Whether Ruth would return to this doomed city, he did not know, but he and his like would surely do so, for he did not see how this evil could be halted by anything but war.

7

Heini had been ten days in Budapest. It was good to be back in his native city; good to walk along the Corso beside the river and look up at the castle on Buda hill; good to see the steamers glide past on their way to the Black Sea and to taste again the fiery gulyás which the Viennese thought they could make, but couldn’t. There was a fizz, an edge of wit here that was missing in the Austrian capital, and the women were the most beautiful in the world. Not that Heini was tempted – he was finding it all too easy to be faithful to Ruth; and anyway one always had to be careful of disease.

His father still lived in the yellow villa on the Hill of the Roses; the apple trees in the garden were in blossom; they took their meals on the verandah looking down over the Pasha’s tomb and the wooded slopes on to the Gothic tracery of the Houses of Parliament and the gables and roofs of Pest.

Heini did not care for his stepmother; she lacked soul, but with his father still editing the only liberal German newspaper in the city, he had to be glad that there was somebody to care for him.

Nor was there any problem about securing a visa for entry into Great Britain. Hungary was still independent, there was no stampede to leave the country; the quota was not yet full. It would take a little longer than he expected – a few weeks – but there was nothing to feel anxious about.

Best of all, Heini’s old Professor of Piano Studies at the Academy had managed to arrange a concert for him.

‘I’d have liked to organize something big for you in the Vigado,’ Professor Sandor said, mentioning the famous concert hall in which Rubinstein had played and Brahms conducted, ‘but it’s too short notice – and who knows, if you play here in the Academy, Bartók may come and that could lead to something.’

Heini had been properly grateful. He remembered the old building with affection; its tradition stretching back to Liszt and boasting now, in Bartók and Kodály and Dohnányi, as distinguished a group of professors as any music school in the world. It was to be an evening recital in the main hall; he was to get half the proceeds; all in all, Professor Sandor had been most helpful and generous.