The Morning Gift

It was the matter of Heini’s piano which disposed of the last remnants of saintliness still adhering to Leonie. For there was only one place where it could possibly go: in the Bergers’ so-called sitting room – and Leonie was perfectly correct in saying that it would make the place impossibly crowded.

‘All right, he can sleep on the sofa till he has his own place, but Heini and the piano – Ruth, be reasonable.’

But when has love been reasonable? Seeing her daughter’s distress, Leonie consulted her husband, sure that his strictness would prevail. But the week in which they had believed Ruth lost had changed the Professor.

‘We shall manage,’ he said. ‘I work in the library in any case and we can take one of the chairs into our bedroom.’

So Ruth had put a jam jar on the windowsill, with a label on it saying Heini’s Piano. It was an entirely British jam jar, which gave her satisfaction, having contained Oxford marmalade and been retrieved from the dustbin of the nursery school teacher on the ground floor, but it was not filling up very quickly. Ruth had made enquiries about the deposit on the kind of piano Heini required and it was two guineas even before the weekly rental and there was a delivery charge as well. She gave her wages from the progressive lady weaver to her mother and had hoped that the money from the Willow Tea Rooms would help, but there always seemed to be an emergency: Aunt Hilda needed throat pastilles, or the teapot broke its spout. Though she bought nothing for herself during those long hot weeks of summer, not a hair ribbon, not an ice cream on the most sizzling day, the heap of coins at the bottom of the jar remained pitifully small.

If Heini’s letters were shown to everyone and were matters for rejoicing, the letters from Mr Proudfoot, arriving secretly at Ruth’s post office box, were another matter. Mr Proudfoot had seen fit to lay the conditions of nullity before Ruth, who found them daunting.

‘Are you sure there’s no insanity in the family?’ she asked her puzzled parents. ‘What about Great-Aunt Miriam?’

‘To believe that the Kaiser was a reincarnation of Tutankhamen may be eccentric, but it is not insane,’ said her father firmly.

But if the immediate prospects for annulment were poor, Mr Proudfoot was helpful about getting her British naturalization confirmed, sending her forms in prepaid envelopes and continuing to offer assistance. That Quin himself never wrote or sent a message was only what she had expected and did not disappoint her in the least.

By the middle of August, the crisis over Czechoslovakia began to dominate the newspapers. Hitler’s rantings grew more demented; newsreel pictures showed him strutting about with his arm round Mussolini or shaking his fist at anyone who dared to interfere with the concerns of Eastern Europe. Cabinet ministers abandoned their grouse moors and began to shuttle back and forth between London and Paris, between Paris and Berlin. The Czechs appealed for help.

Great Britain’s increasing preparations for war affected the inhabitants of Belsize Park in various ways. Mrs Weiss looked up at a large grey barrage balloon floating above her, said, ‘Mein Gott, vat is zat?’, fell over a hole in the pavement and was conveyed to Hampstead Hospital for stitches in her nose. Uncle Mishak, passing a poster which urged him to Keep Calm and Dig, did just that, excavating a vegetable patch in the rubble-strewn garden behind the house. In the Willow Tea Rooms, Miss Maud pored anxiously over a leaflet giving instructions for the assembling of a prefabricated air-raid shelter and received much good advice from the male customers who professed to understand them. Mrs Burtt stopped singing over the washing up because her Trevor had been passed fit for the air force, and Dr Levy, though he had made it perfectly clear that he was not entitled to practise medicine, was pulled into a neighbouring house to resuscitate a man with a weak heart whose wife had sought to amuse him by coming to bed in her gas mask.

For Ruth, the crisis meant only the dread of separation from Heini. She emptied the jam jar and sent frantic cables to Budapest, but his emigration papers, though expected at any moment, still hadn’t come through. There was one matter, however, on which she sought enlightenment from Miss Maud and Miss Violet who, as general’s daughters, could be expected to know about the army.

‘Would someone aged thirty, or a bit over, be called up?’

‘Only if the war went on for a long time,’ Miss Maud replied.

It was during these dark days that Ruth received news which would normally have caused her the deepest disappointment. University College had given her place on the Zoology course to another refugee. They were now full up and could not admit her in the coming year.