The Morning Gift

Without hesitation, Lady Plackett dropped the label with Professor Somerville’s name into the wastepaper basket. This man did not belong in large gatherings of people eating canapés. Professor Somerville would come to one of the intimate dinner parties with which she meant to put Thameside on the map and there he would find, in the gracious setting of her home, his intellectual equal, his future student and a girl of his own background. Would find, in short, Verena.

The Placketts’ only daughter was twenty-three years old and had inherited not only her mother’s breeding but her father’s brains. From the age of four, when she made it clear that she preferred her abacus to her dolls, it was evident that Verena would grow up to be an intellectual. The great Dr Johnson, of dictionary fame, had been told by his mother to repeat what she had taught him immediately to the next person he met, and if it was the milkman, no matter.

‘In that way you always remember it,’ she had said to her son.

There was no need for Lady Plackett so to instruct her daughter. Verena took in information and gave it out with equal efficiency. In India they had surrounded her with tutors and at nineteen she had enrolled in the European College at Hyderabad. It had been a brave step for her parents to take: true, the students and staff were all white, but it meant giving Verena an unusual amount of freedom.

Verena had not abused it. Science was her preferred subject, and it was without difficulty that she came top in every exam she took. Even so, when she had taken her basic degree, her mother insisted on sending her ahead to do the Season with her Croft-Ellis cousins from Rutland.

Lady Plackett’s intentions were good, but the plan was not a success. Verena stood five foot eleven in her socks and it is difficult to do the Season in socks. Nor did Verena make any secret of the fact that the vapid young subalterns and stockbrokers at the tops of whose heads she gazed on the dance floor, bored her beyond belief. As soon as her parents returned from India, she announced her intention of taking an Honours Degree, and taking it at Thameside.

About this, her mother had been uneasy. Though she had intended to look among the intelligentsia for a husband for Verena, it had been among Nobel Laureates or Fellows of the Royal Society that she had expected to find someone suitable, not among the corduroy-clad and bearded professors who so often did the actual teaching. Now, though, it looked as though Verena’s instinct had been right and it was with a light step that she made her way up to her daughter’s room.

‘Verena, I have something to tell you!’

Her daughter sat at her tidy desk, a large text book illustrated with diagrams of bones open in front of her, a propelling pencil and a notebook on her right, a ruler on her left.

‘Yes?’

Verena had inherited not only her mother’s height, but her close-set, downward curving eyes and Roman nose. Now she looked up without rancour at the interruption, though she had reached a difficult chapter and would have preferred to be alone.

‘I’ve just been speaking to your father and it turns out that Professor Somerville – the head of the Zoology Department – is Quin Somerville, the owner of Bowmont. Frances Somerville’s nephew.’

‘Yes, Mother. I know.’

Her mother stared at her. ‘You know?’

Verena nodded. ‘I made it my business to find out. That’s why I decided to do Zoology Honours. His reputation is second to none. I shall take his option, of course.’

Not for the first time, Lady Plackett marvelled at her daughter’s perspicacity. Verena had spent the summer with her cousins in Rutland, yet she was already better informed than her parents.

‘I’m going to invite him to dinner as soon as he gets back,’ she said. ‘A really carefully chosen group of guests. You will be seated next to him, of course, so that you have time to talk.’

Verena returned to her book.

‘Professor Somerville will find me ready,’ she said.

Ruth walked through the gates of Thameside College, greeted the porter in his lodge, and looked with delight at the closely mown grass, the ancient walnut tree, the statue of someone not on horseback.

Thameside was beautiful. She knew it to be one of the oldest buildings in London, but she had not expected the cloistered peace, the flowerbeds lapping the grey walls – and through a wide arch on the far side of the quadrangle, a breathtaking view of the river and the soaring dome of St Paul’s on the other bank. The University of Vienna was larger, more formal, but Ruth, passing the windows of booklined rooms and lecture theatres, was in a familiar world.