The Morning Gift

‘She left me alone,’ said Quin.

Ruth frowned, trying to embrace this concept. No one had ever left her alone – certainly not her mother or her father or her Aunt Hilda or the maids . . . Not even Uncle Mishak, teaching her the names of the plants. And as for Heini . . .

‘Did you like that?’ she asked. ‘Being left alone, I mean?’

Quin smiled. ‘It’s rather a British thing,’ he said. ‘We seem to like it on the whole. But don’t trouble yourself – I don’t think it would suit you.’

‘No, I don’t think it would. Miss Kenmore – my Scottish governess, do you remember her? – she was very fond of Milton and she taught me that sonnet where you do nothing. The last line is very famous and sad. They also serve who only stand and wait. I’m not very good at that.’

The dessert came – a soufflé au citron – and with it the Tokay in a glass as graceful as a lily . . . And presently a bowl of fresh fruit straight out of a Flemish still life, and chocolate truffles . . . and coffee as black as night.

‘Oh, this is like heaven! If I was very rich I think I would spend my life travelling the world in a train and never get there. Never arrive, just keep on and on!’

‘It’s a dream many people have,’ said Quin, opening a walnut for her and inspecting it carefully before he put it on her plate. ‘Arriving means living and living is hard work.’

‘Even for you?’

‘For everyone.’

Ruth looked up, wondering what could be difficult for a man so independent, so successful, the citizen of a free and mighty land. ‘It’s odd, even before the horror . . . before the Nazis, people used to say to me, oh, you’re young and healthy, you can’t have any problems, but sometimes I did. It seems silly now when all one hopes for is to be alive. But you know . . . with Heini . . . I love him so much, I want to serve him, not by standing and waiting but by doing things. But sometimes I didn’t get it right.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, Heini is a musician. He has to practise most of the day and he likes me to be there. But I love being out of doors . . . everybody does, I suppose, only you can’t play the piano out of doors – not unless you’re in the Prater All Girls Band,’ she glanced reproachfully at Quin who grinned back, unrepentant, ‘and Heini isn’t. So sometimes I used to get very resentful sitting there hour after hour with the windows tight shut because draughts are bad for pianos. It seems awful to think of now when I realize how lucky I was and that all of us were safe. Do you think we shall go back to being petty like that if the world becomes normal again?’

‘If it is petty to want to be in the fresh air, then yes, I’m afraid we will,’ said Quin.

But now it could not be postponed much longer, for the diners were leaving; the waiters were bowing them out and pocketing their tips – and it became necessary for Ruth to face that technically she was on honeymoon with Professor Quinton Somerville and must now go to bed.

‘I’ll stay in the bar for a while and smoke my pipe,’ said Quin, and she rose and made her way down the train, through the dimly lit and silent corridors of the wagon-lits, and into Compartment Number Twenty-Three.

It was no good pretending that this bore the slightest resemblance to the kind of sleeping cubicles she had travelled in previously with their two bunks and narrow ladder. There was no question of climbing up and out of sight till morning, for confronting her were two undoubted beds, separated only by a strip of carpet. Had this been a proper honeymoon, she would have been able to stretch out her hand and hold her husband’s in the night. And the steward had been busy. Quin’s pyjamas, her own shamingly girlish cotton nightdress, were laid out on the monogrammed pillows and, above the marble wash basin, his shaving brush and safety razor rested beside her toothbrush in a manner that was disconcertingly connubial.

In other ways, though, the compartment was more like Aladdin’s cave: the snow-white triangle of the turned down sheets, the pink-shaded lights throwing a glow on the dark panelling . . . Carafes of fluted glass held drinking water; a bunch of black grapes lay in a chased silver bowl.

She undressed, put on the nightdress she had packed for her ascent of the Kanderspitze – and for a lusting moment imagined herself in eau-de-nil silk pyjamas piped in black. No one would have seen them; she would have stayed entirely under the bedclothes, but she would have known that they were there.

Safely in bed, she turned off the lights to give Quin privacy, turned them on again so that he wouldn’t fall over things – and found that in this marvellous train there was a third alternative – a dimmer switch which caused the room to be filled with a soft, faint radiance like the light inside the petals of a rose.