The Morning Gift

So Quin had his reprieve from the monotony of British boarding schools and furnished for himself a secret and entirely satisfactory world. Most children, especially only ones, have an invisible playmate who accompanies them through the day. Quin’s, from the age of eight, was not an imaginary brother or understanding boy of his own age; it was a dinosaur. The creature – a brontosaurus whom he called Harry – stretched sixty feet; his head, when he put it through the nursery window, filled the room and its heart-warming smile was without menace for he ate only the bamboo in the shrubbery or the moist plants in the coppice which edged the lawn.

An article in The Boy’s Own Paper had introduced him to Harry; Conan Doyle’s The Lost World plunged him deeper into the fabled world of pre-history. He became the leader of the dinosaurs, a Mowgli of the Jurassic swamps who learnt to tame even the ghastly tyrannosaurus rex on whose back he rode.

‘I must say, you don’t have to spend time amusing him,’ said his nurse, not realizing that nothing could compete with the dramas Quin enacted in his head. From the dinosaurs, the boy went backwards and forwards in time. He read of the geological layers of the earth, of lobe-finned fishes and the mammals of the Pleistocene. By the time he was eleven, he was risking his life almost daily, scrambling down cliffs and quarries, searching for fossils embedded in the rock, and had started a collection in the old stables grandly labelled ‘The Somerville Museum of Natural History’. As he grew older and Harry became dimmer in his mind, the museum was expanded to take in the marine specimens he found everywhere. For Quin’s home looked out over the North Sea to the curving, sand-fringed sweep of Bowmont Bay whose rock pools were his nursery; the creatures inside them more interesting than any toy.

Quin would have been surprised if anyone had told him he was ‘doing science’ or becoming educated, but later, at Cambridge, he was amused by the solemnity with which they taught facts which he had learnt before his eleventh year, and the elaborate preparations for field trips to places he had clambered up and down in gym shoes.

He got a First in the Natural History Tripos with embarrassing ease, but his unfettered childhood made him reluctant to accept a permanent academic post. Financially independent since his eighteenth birthday, he had managed to spend the greater part of his time on expeditions to inaccessible parts of the world, yet now he fell in love with Vienna.

Not with the Vienna of operettas and cream cakes, though he took both politely from the hands of his hostess, but with the austere, arcaded courts of the university with its busts of old alumni resounding like a great roll call of the achievements of science. Doppler was there in stone, and Semmelweis who rid women of puerperal fever, and Billroth, the surgeon who befriended Brahms. In the library of the Hofburg, Quin spun the great gold-mounted globe which the Emperor Ferdinand had consulted to send his explorers forth. And in the Natural History Museum, he found a tiny, ugly, potbellied figurine, the Venus of Willendorf, priceless and guarded, made by man at the time when mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers still roamed the land.

When the university term ended, the Bergers begged him to join them on the Grundlsee.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Ruth. ‘The rain and the salamanders – and if you lie on your stomach on the landing stage you can see hundreds of little fishes between the boards like in a frame.’

He was due back in Cambridge, but he came and proved an excellent bilberry picker, an enthusiastic oarsman and a man able to shriek ‘Wunderbar!’ with the best of them. If they enjoyed his company, he, in turn, took back treasured memories of Austrian country life: Tante Hilda in striped bathing bloomers performing a violent breaststroke without moving from the spot . . . The Professor’s ancient mother running her wheelchair at a trespassing goat . . . And Klaus Biberstein, the second violin of the Ziller quartet, who loved Leonie but had a weak digestion, creeping out at midnight to feed his secreted Knödel to the fish.

Of Ruth he saw relatively little, for in one of those wooden huts so beloved of Austrian musicians, her Cousin Heini practised the piano and she was busy carrying jugs of milk or plates of biscuits to and fro. Once he found her sitting by the shore with a somewhat surprising collection of books. Krafft-Ebing’s Sexual Pathology, Little Women and a cowboy story with a lurid cover called Jake’s Last Stand.

It was the Krafft-Ebing she was perusing with a furrowed brow.

‘Goodness!’ he said. ‘Are you allowed to read that?’

She nodded. ‘I’m allowed to read everything,’ she said. ‘Only I have to eat everything too, even semolina.’