The Morning Gift

Ruth’s need for music was so much a part of her Viennese heritage that no one at first noticed how acute it was. Ever since infancy it had been almost impossible to pull her away from music-making and she had her own places, music-places, she called them, to which she gravitated like a thirsty bullock to a water hole.

There was the ground-floor window of the shabby old Hochschule für Musik where the Ziller Quartet rehearsed, and the concert hall by the fruit market – the Musikverein – where, if the janitor had been kind enough to leave the door open, one could hear the Philharmonia play. One blind fiddler of all the beggars that played in the streets would halt her, and when she listened she seemed to turn pale with concentration, as children do in sleep. Her parents were sympathetic, she had piano lessons which she enjoyed, she passed her exams, but she had a need of excellence which she herself could not provide.

So for a long time she had listened with wide eyes to the stories about her Cousin Heini in Budapest.

Heini was a scant year older than Ruth, and he was a boy in a fairy story. His mother, Leonie’s stepsister, had married a Hungarian journalist called Radek and Heini lived in a place called the Hill of the Roses high above the Danube in a yellow villa surrounded by apple trees. A Turkish pasha was buried in a tomb further down on the slope of the hill; from Radek’s balcony one could see the great river curling away towards the Hungarian plains, the graceful bridges and the spires and pinnacles of the Houses of Parliament like a palace in a dream. For in Budapest, unlike Vienna, the Danube flows through the city’s very heart.

But that wasn’t all. When he was three, Heini climbed onto his father’s piano stool.

‘It was like coming home,’ he was to tell reporters afterwards. At the age of six, he gave his first recital in the hall where Franz Liszt had played. Two years later, a professor at the Academy invited Bartók to hear him play and the great man nodded.

But in fairy stories there is always grief. When Heini was eleven, his mother died and the golden Wunderkind became almost an orphan, for his father, who edited a German language newspaper, was always working. So it was decided that Heini should continue his studies in Vienna and be prepared there for entrance to the Conservatoire. He would lodge with his teacher, an eminent Professor of Piano Studies, but his spare time would be spent with the Bergers.

Ruth never forgot the first time she saw him. She had come in from school and was hanging up her satchel when she heard the music. A slow piece, and sad, but underneath the sadness so right, so . . . consoled.

Her father and aunt were still at the university; her mother was in the kitchen conferring with the cook. Drawn by the music, she walked slowly through the enfilade of rooms: the dining room, the drawing room, the library – and opened the door of the study.

At first she saw only the great lid of the Bechstein like a dark sail filling the room. Then she peered round it – and saw the boy.

He had a thin face, black curls which tumbled over his forehead and large grey eyes, and when he saw her, his hands still moving over the keys, he smiled and said, ‘Hello.’

She smiled too, awed at the delight it gave her to hear this music in her own home, overwhelmed by the authority, the excellence that came from him, young as he was.

‘It’s Mozart, isn’t it?’ she said, sighing, for she knew already that there was everything in Mozart; that if you stuck to him you couldn’t go wrong. Two years earlier she had begun to attend to him in her daydreams, keeping him alive with her cookery and care long after his thirty-sixth year.

‘Yes. The Adagio in B Minor.’

He finished playing and looked at her and found her entirely pleasing. He liked her fair hair in its old-fashioned heavy plait, her snub nose, the crisp white blouse and pleated pinafore. Above all, he liked the admiration reflected in her eyes.

‘I musn’t disturb you,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t mind you being here if you’re quiet,’ he said.

And then he told her about Mozart’s starling.

‘Mozart had a starling,’ Heini said. ‘He kept it in a cage in the room where he worked and he didn’t mind it singing. In fact he liked it to be there and he used its song in the Finale of the G Major Piano Concerto. Did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

He watched the thick plait of hair swing to and fro as she shook her head.

Then: ‘You can be my starling,’ Heini said.

She nodded. It was an honour he was conferring; a great gift – she understood that at once.

‘I would like that,’ said Ruth.