The Morning Gift

Considerable tension was by now generated, and Mrs Burtt and Miss Violet came out of the kitchen to watch.

‘Hah!’ said Ziller triumphantly, and held up the relevant page.

In the front of Country Life there is always a full-page photograph of a girl, invariably well bred, frequently about to marry someone suitable, but whether engaged or not, presenting a prototype of upper-class womanhood. Here are the Fenella Holdinghams who, in the spring, will marry the youngest son of Lord and Lady Foister; here the Angela Lathanby-Gores after their victory in the Highlingham Steeplechase . . . And here now was Verena Plackett – daughter of the newly appointed Vice Chancellor of Thameside – and not just Verena Plackett, but Verena Plackett gowned for presentation at Their Majesties’ courts in flesh-coloured satin with a train embroidered in lover’s knots of diamanté, and ostrich feathers in her hair.

Ruth, putting down her tray, was awarded first look, and studied her fellow student with attention.

‘She looks intelligent,’ she said.

Passed round, Verena seemed to give general satisfaction. Ziller liked her long throat, von Hofmann praised her collar bones and Miss Maud said she’d have known her anywhere for a Croft-Ellis by her nose. Only Mrs Burtt was silent, giving a small sniff which it was easy to attribute to class hatred.

But it was Leonie who looked longest at the picture and who, when she left the café, asked if she could borrow the magazine.

‘I’m not a snob,’ she said to her husband, who smiled a wise and matrimonial smile, ‘but to have Ruth back where she belongs . . . Oh, Kurt, that is so good.’

It was not till Ruth had gone to bed that Leonie set up her ironing board for she did not want her daughter to know how long she worked, or for how little money. But as she smoothed the fussy ruffles and frills on Mrs Carter’s blouse, she was humming a silly waltz she’d danced to in her girlhood and presently she put down the iron and once more examined Verena’s face.

She did not look particularly affable, but who did when confronted by a camera, and if her mouth turned down at the corners, this was probably some inherited trait and did not indicate ill temper. What mattered was that Ruth was back where she belonged. The daughter of a Vice Chancellor was an entirely suitable companion for the daughter of an erstwhile Dean of the Faculty of Science.

Not I but thou . . . the refrain of all cradle songs, all prayers with which parents, ungrudging, send their children forth to a better life than their own, rang through Leonie’s head. Verena and Ruth would be the greatest of friends – Leonie was quite sure of it – and nothing, that night, could upset her; not even the smell of burning lentils as the psychoanalyst from Breslau began, at midnight, to cook soup.

13

Within three days of the beginning of term, Ruth was thoroughly at home at Thameside. To reach the university, she had to walk across Waterloo Bridge and that was like getting a special blessing for the coming day. There was always something to delight her: a barge passing beneath her with washing strung across the deck, or a flock of gulls jostling and screeching for the bread thrown by a bundled old woman who looked poor beyond belief, but was there each day to share her loaf – and once a double rainbow behind St Paul’s.

‘And it always smells of the sea,’ she told Dr Felton, who was becoming not only her tutor but a friend. ‘The rivers in Europe don’t do that – well, how could they with the ocean so far away?’

Dr Felton was a fine teacher, an enthusiast who shared with his students the amazing life of his creatures.

‘Look!’ he would cry like a child as he found, under the microscope, a cluster of transparent eggs from a brittle star, or the flagellum with which some infinitely small creature hurled itself across a drop of liquid. As she prepared slides and made her diagrams, Ruth was in a world where there was no barrier between science and art. Nor could anyone be indifferent to the extraordinarily successful lives led by Dr Elke’s tapeworms, untroubled by the search for food or shelter – living, loving, having their entire being in the secure world of someone else’s gut.

But if the staff were kind, and the work absorbing, it was her fellow students who made Ruth’s first days at Thameside so happy. They had worked together for two years, but they welcomed her without hesitation. There was Sam Marsh, a thin tousle-haired boy with the face of an intelligent rat, who wore a flat cap and a muffler to show his solidarity with the proletariat, and Janet Carter, a cheerful vicar’s daughter with frizzy red hair, whose innumerable boyfriends, of an evening, fell off sofas, got their feet stuck in the steering wheels of motor cars and generally came to grief in their efforts to attain their goal. There was a huge, silent Welshman (but not called Morgan) who was apt to crush test tubes unwittingly in his enormous hands . . . And there was Pilly.