The Morning Gift

Mishak had not found it necessary to return the piece of land he had claimed at the time of the Munich crisis. They had told him to Keep Calm and Dig and he continued to do so. Since he couldn’t afford to buy plants or fertilizer, his activities were limited, but not as limited as one might expect. The old lady two doors down still owned her house and, in exchange for help with the digging, she gave Mishak cuttings and seeds from her herbaceous border. Nor were Mishak’s rambles through London’s parks without reward, for he carried his Swiss army knife in his pocket, and a number of brown paper bags. No more than Dr Elke’s tapeworms would have destroyed the host that nourished them would Mishak have caused harm to the plants he encountered, but a little discreet pruning often brought him back enriched by a cutting of philadelphus or a seedhead of clematis. And if there was no money for fertilizer, there was a plentiful supply of compost at Number 27 and the neighbouring houses, beginning with the remains of Fräulein Lutzenholler’s soups.

Hilda, meanwhile, had made a breakthrough in the British Museum, braving the inner sanctum of the Keeper of the Anthropology Collection and confronting him with her views on the Mi-Mi drinking cup.

‘It is not from the Mi-Mi,’ said Hilda, peering earnestly through her spectacles, and gave chapter and verse.

The Keeper had not agreed, but he had not ejected her. That refugees were not allowed to work was a misapprehension. No one minded them working, what they were not allowed to do was get paid. Her credentials established, Hilda spent happy hours in the dusty basement of the museum, sorting the artefacts sent back by travellers in the previous century, for this woman who spelled death to the most hardened floor polisher, could handle the clay figurines and ankle bracelets she encountered in her profession with delicacy and skill.

A certain cautious hope thus pervaded Number 27 during October, the more so as Ruth, now re-established at college, was obviously loving her work. Even the gloomy Fräulein Lutzenholler had a new occupation, for Professor Freud had at last left Vienna and been installed in a house a few streets away. She did not expect to be noticed by Freud, (who was, in any case, extremely old and ill) because she had spoken well of Freud’s great rival, Jung, at a meeting of the Psychoanalytical Society in 1921, but she liked just to stand in front of his house and look, as Cézanne had looked at Mont St Victoire.

With both Hilda and the psychoanalyst out of the way, and her husband busy preparing for his assignment in Manchester, Leonie could get through the housework unimpeded, but as the weather grew colder, she suffered a domestic sorrow which, though it caused her shame, she shared with Miss Violet and Miss Maud.

‘I live with mice,’ she said, her blue eyes clouding, for she felt the stigma keenly.

It was true. Mice, as the autumn advanced, were coming indoors in droves. They lived vibrant lives behind the skirting boards of Number 27, they squeaked in marital ecstasy behind the wainscot. Leonie covered everything edible, she scrubbed, she stalked and bashed with broomsticks, she bought poison out of her meagre allowance from the refugee committee – and they thrived on it.

‘What about traps?’ said Miss Maud. ‘We could lend you some.’

But traps needed cheese, and cheese was expensive. ‘That landlord,’ said Leonie, stirring her coffee, ‘I have said and said he must bring the rat-catching man, and he does nothing.’

Miss Maud then offered one of her kittens, but Leonie, with great politeness, refused.

‘To live with mice, to live with cats – for me it is the same,’ she said sadly.

Ruth too was troubled by the mice. She did not think that they could chew through the biscuit tin with the Princesses on the lid, but a great many documents of importance were collecting under the floorboards as Mr Proudfoot laboured on her behalf and it was disconcerting to feel that they provided a rallying point for nesting rodents.

But life in the university was totally absorbing. If there had been any anxiety about Heini’s visa, she could not have given herself to her studies as she did, but Heini wrote with confidence: his father had now found exactly who to bribe and he expected to be with her by the beginning of November. If Heini had any worries they were about the piano, but here too all was going well. For Ruth still worked at the Willow three evenings a week and the café was beginning to attract people from up the hill. She would not have taken tips from the refugees even if they could have afforded them, but from wealthy film producers or young men with Jaguars in search of ‘atmosphere’, she took anything she could get and the jam jar was three-quarters full.

Ruth’s response to news of her reprieve had been to ask Quin if she could see him privately for half an hour.

There was, she said, something she particularly wanted to tell him.