The Morning Gift

The tables had been cleared, clean cloths spread, fresh coffee brought. Though she found it necessary to sit so that her shoulder touched Ruth’s, Leonie was now able to listen.

Ruth had rehearsed her story. Sitting between her parents, smiling across at Mishak and her friends from Vienna, she said: ‘Someone rescued me. An Englishman who helps people to escape.’

‘Like the Scarlet Pimpernel?’ enquired Paul Ziller, impressed.

‘Yes, a bit like that. Only, I mustn’t ever get in touch with him again. None of us must. That was part of the bargain.’

‘There was nothing illegal?’ asked her father, stern even in the midst of his great happiness. ‘No forged papers or anything like that?’

‘No, nothing illegal; I swear it on Mozart’s head,’ said Ruth, and the Professor was satisfied, aware of the position the composer’s head occupied in his daughter’s life.

Leonie, however, was not satisfied at all. ‘But this is awful! How can we thank him? How can we tell him what he has done for us?’ she cried. A multitude of deeds she could have performed in gratitude – a plethora of baked cakes, embroidered shirts, letters of ecstatic appreciation – rose up before her. She wanted to rush out into the street after this unknown benefactor, to wash his feet as Mary Magdalene had done with Jesus.

‘It has to be like that,’ said Ruth, ‘otherwise we might endanger other people that he could rescue’ – and aware that her mother was having difficulties, she quoted Miss Kenmore’s favourite sonnet. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ said Ruth, without, however, impressing Leonie who was not of the stuff that those who only stand and wait are made.

It was only now that Ruth, who had wanted to give her first moments wholly to her parents, dared to ask the question she had held back.

‘And Heini?’ she said.

It was all right. Not aware that she had crossed her hands on her breast in the age-old gesture of apprehension, she saw her father smile.

‘All is well, my dear,’ said the Professor. ‘He’s still in Budapest but we’ve had a letter. He is coming.’

It was very quiet in the café after the Bergers had left. One by one, the other customers got up to go, but the three men who had known the family in Vienna sat on for a while.

‘So Persephone has returned,’ said the actor.

Dr Levy nodded, but his face was grave and the other two exchanged glances for the doctor had his own Persephone: a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed and silly girl whom he nevertheless loved. Hennie had been glad enough to marry the distinguished consultant she had ogled while still a junior nurse, but she seemed in no hurry to join him in exile.

‘Perhaps a little celebration?’ suggested Ziller, for it did not seem to him a good idea that Levy should return alone to his The Diseases of the Knee.

‘We could just see what’s on,’ said von Hofmann.

And what was on, as they found when they had crossed the square and made their way uphill towards the Odeon, was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat – and without further consultation the three eminent gentlemen, none of whom could afford it, entered the cinema – and Elysium.

While back in the kitchen of the Willow Tea Rooms, Miss Maud and Miss Violet pronounced judgement.

‘A very nicely behaved girl,’ said Miss Maud.

‘Father would have liked her,’ said Miss Violet.

There was no higher accolade, but as so often Mrs Burtt managed to get the last word.

‘And pretty as a peach!’

10

When he was not at Bowmont or on his travels, Quin lived in a flat on the Chelsea Embankment. On the first floor of a tall Queen Anne house, it had a trellised ironwork verandah from which one looked, over the branches of a mulberry tree, at London’s river. The walls of his drawing room were lined with books, a Constable watercolour hung over the fireplace, Persian rugs were scattered on the parquet floor, but no one visiting Quin ever lingered over the furnishings. Without exception, they moved over to the French windows and stood looking out on the panorama of the Thames.

‘You always live by water, don’t you, darling?’ a woman had said to him: ‘Very Freudian, don’t you think?’

Quin did not think. He liked Chelsea; the little shops in the streets that ran back from the river; greengrocers and shoemakers and picture framers, and the pubs where the bargees still drank, and though he did not go to his lectures at Thameside by boat, it amused him to think that it was possible.