The Morning Gift

The statue, when she reached it, turned out to be of William Wordsworth, which was entirely suitable for he had stood on Westminster Bridge and said that Earth has not anything to show more fair, with which, having just crossed the river, she absolutely agreed. And there was a late rose, a golden voluptuous rambler curling round the railings of the Students’ Union which seemed to hold all the fragrance of the dying year.

She came as Vienna’s representative to the Groves of Academe and carried with her not only the good wishes of everyone at Number 27 and the Willow Tea Rooms, but their gifts in a straw basket pressed on her by Mrs Burtt. Though term did not begin for another two days, her father had insisted she take the magnifying glass he had had since his student days; Dr Levy had bequeathed his old dissecting kit rolled in a canvas pouch – and setting up a delicious rustle under her woollen skirt was the Venetian lace petticoat Leonie had worn when she was presented to the Austrian Chancellor.

Her appointment with Dr Felton was for 2.30; glancing at the clock which topped the archway to the river, she saw that she was ten minutes early. About to make her way towards the water’s edge, she was arrested by a sound of unutterable melancholy coming from the basement of the Science Building on her left. Letting go of the rose she had been smelling, she turned her head. The noise came again and this time it was unmistakable. Somewhere down there, in a state of apparent distress and abandonment, was a sheep.

Picking up her basket, Ruth made her way down the stone steps, pushed open a door – and found herself in a dusty, unlit laboratory. A Physiology lab, instantly familiar from her days in Vienna when she had ridden her tricycle through the animal huts of the university, watched by the pink eyes of a thousand snow-white rats. There were indeed rats here, and the big bins holding the flaky yellow maze they fed on, a pair of scales, microscopes, a centrifuge . . . and in one corner, staring from a wooden pen, the pale face and melancholy, Semitic snout of a large white ewe.

‘Ah yes, you’re lonely,’ said Ruth approaching. In the deserted room, she spoke in the soft dialect of Vienna. ‘But you see I musn’t touch you because you belong to Science. You’re an experimental animal; you’re like a Vestal Virgin dedicated to higher things.’

The sheep butted its head against the side of the pen, then lifted it hopefully to gaze at her with its yellow eyes. It seemed to be devoid of tubes or other signs of experimentation – seemed in fact to be in excellent health – but Ruth, well-trained as she was, kept her distance.

‘I can see that you aren’t where you would choose to be,’ she went on, ‘but I assure you that right now the world is full of people who are not where they would choose to be. All over Belsize Park and Finchley and Swiss Cottage I could show you such people. And you belong to a noble race because you are in the psalms and St Francis chose you to preach to and I can see why because you have listening eyes.’

The sheep’s butting became more frenzied, but its mood was lifting. The string of bleats it was emitting seemed to be social rather than despairing. Then quite suddenly it sat down, sticking out one hoof and extending its neck like someone listening to a lecture.

‘Very well, I will recite some Goethe for you which you will like, I think, because he is an extremely calming poet, though somewhat melancholy, I do admit. Now let me see, what would you like?’

In his room on the second floor of the Science Building, Dr Roger Felton blew the contents of a pipette into a tank of sea slugs and frowned. There should have been wreaths of translucent eggs now, hanging on the weeds, and there were not. He could get more slugs from the zoo, but he had set his heart on breeding his own specimens – not just for the students in his Marine Biology class, but because the Opisthobranchia, with their amazingly large nerve cells, were his particular interest.

All round the room, in salt-water tanks cooled and aerated by complicated tubes and pumps, a series of creatures swam or scuttled or clung to the sides of the glass: sea urchins and brittle stars, prawns and cuttle fish, and an octopus currently turning pink inside a hollow brick. Dr Felton loved his subject and taught it well. The nuptial dance of the ragworm on the surface of the ocean, the selfless paternity of the butterfish, entranced him as much now as it had done when he first beheld it fifteen years ago, but there were problems, not least of them the new Vice Chancellor who had made it clear that it was publications that counted, not teaching.