The Morning Gift

If her husband had been with her, Leonie would have found it difficult to provide suitable refreshment, for the food budget was desperately tight, but the absence of the professor – much as she missed him – meant they had been able to eat potatoes and apple purée made from the windfalls Mishak collected on his rambles and save.

Leonie accordingly had saved, and bought two kilos of fine flour . . . had bought freshly ground almonds and icing sugar and unsalted butter and the very finest vanilla pods – and by nine o’clock was removing from the oven batch after batch of perfectly baked vanilla Kipferl.

At which point her plans for the morning began to go wrong. Leonie wanted Mishak to stay and meet Ruth’s friends – she always wanted Mishak – but what she wanted Hilda to do was go to the British Museum and what she wanted Fräulein Lutzenholler to do was go up the hill and look at Freud.

She had reckoned without the power of the human nose to unlock emotion and recall the past. Hilda came first, stumbling out of the bedroom in her dressing-gown.

‘It is true, then,’ she said. ‘I smelled them, but I thought it was a dream.’ And she decided that as it was a Saturday, she would not go to the museum, but work at home.

Fräulein Lutzenholler, her fierce face tilted in disbelief, came next, carrying her sponge bag. ‘Ah, yes: the piano,’ she said and added the dreaded words, ‘I will stay here and help.’

By the time the scent of freshly ground coffee came to blend with the warm, familiar scent of the thumb-sized crescents, it was clear that not only would no one voluntarily leave Number 27 that morning, but a great many others would come. Ziller, of course, had been invited, but presently Mrs Weiss arrived in a taxi and Mrs Burtt, whose day off it was, and then a lady from next door murmuring something ecstatic in Polish.

Thus Ruth, arriving with her friends, came to a house redolent of all the well-remembered smells and the sound of eager voices, and stopped for a moment, caught by the past, before she ran upstairs and threw her arms round Leonie.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have baked, but how marvellous,’ she said and rubbed her cheek against her mother’s.

Anyone Ruth was fond of would have been welcomed with warmth by Leonie, but in Pilly she detected, beneath the expensive clothes and Harrods handbag, just the kind of poor little scrap she had protected in Vienna. As for Sam, he was so overawed at being in the same room as Paul Ziller, all of whose records he had collected, that he could hardly speak. Even without the arrival of the piano, the gathering had all the makings of a splendid party.

But punctually at 11.30, the piano did arrive.

‘Easy does it,’ said the removal man, as removal men have said throughout the ages, trundling the upright down the ramp and into the house – and ‘steady there’, as they fastened ropes and pulleys to raise it to the top floor.

Steadiness was difficult. Fräulein Lutzenholler had escaped from the sitting room and was giving advice; Hilda hovered . . . But at last the job was done and the keys handed, with a courtly bow, to Ruth.

‘No, you unlock it, Huw,’ she said – and everyone felt the rightness of the gesture, for it was the huge, monosyllabic Welshman, doggedly searching the music shops of London, who had found, in a distant suburb near the college rugby field, exactly the piano Heini wanted: A Bösendorfer, one of the last to come out of the old workshops and famous for its sweetness of tone.

‘It makes it real now,’ Ruth said softly, touching the keys. ‘I can believe now that Heini is coming.’

‘Come on, try it,’ said Leonie, filling plates for the removal men, who thought they could leave now but found themselves mistaken.

Though one of the world’s best violinists was in the room, Ruth sat down without embarrassment and played a Schubert waltz – and Ziller smiled for it always touched him, this passion for music which had been hers since infancy and transcended all limitations of technique.

‘I suppose you wouldn’t, sir . . . I mean . . . you wouldn’t play?’ Sam, nervous but entreating, had come to stand beside him.

‘Of course.’

Ziller went to fetch his violin and played a Kreisler piece and a Beethoven bagatelle – and then he and Ruth began fooling about, giving imitations of the customers in the Hungarian restaurant trying not to tip the gypsies who came to their table – and presently a quite extraordinary sound was heard: a rusty, wheezing noise which no one had heard before: Fräulein Lutzenholler’s laughter.

It was Pilly who spoiled it all, poor Pilly who always got everything wrong.

‘Oh, Mrs Berger,’ she said impetuously, ‘please, please won’t you persuade Ruth to come on the field course with us? We want her to come so much!’

Leonie put down her coffee cup. ‘What course is this?’

Silence fell as Ruth looked with deep reproach at her friend and Pilly blushed scarlet.

‘It’s at Professor Somerville’s place,’ she stammered. ‘We’re all going. In three days’ time.’