The Morning Gift

The students were due any moment now: the bus hired to fetch them from Newcastle could bump its way right down to Anchorage Bay. He’d been down earlier to check that the arrangements were in order: the stove lit in the little common room, the Bunsen burners connected to the Calor gas, the blankets in the dormitories above the lab properly aired. Everything was in hand yet he felt restless, and hardly aware of what he was doing, he picked up the guitar in the corner of the room and began to tune the strings.

Quin’s guitar studies had not progressed very far. He had in fact stayed stuck on Book Two of the manual and his friends at Cambridge had always been unpleasant about his performance, putting their fingers in their ears or leaving the room. But though he could play only a few of the pieces in the book, they covered the normal range of human emotion: ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ was cheerful and outgoing; ‘Evening Elegy’ was lyrical and romantic – and the ‘Mississippi Moan’ was – well, a moan.

It was this piece which had particularly emptied the room when he played it at college, but Quin was much attached to it. Now, as the plaintive lament from the Deep South stole through the room, Quin realized that he had not chosen the ‘Moan’ at random. He did in fact feel a sense of disquiet . . . of unease . . . and a few broken chords later, he realized why.

For it had to be admitted that he had not behaved well over Felton’s efforts to bring Ruth to Bowmont. Roger worked ceaselessly for the students and deputized willingly for him, enduring all the boredom of committees. If he had set his heart on bringing the girl to Northumberland, Quin should have helped him. It would have been perfectly simple to work something out, nor was he in the least troubled by the disapproval of the Placketts. The truth was, he had acted selfishly, not wanting to be involved in the girl’s emotionalism, her endless ability to live deep.

Well, it was done now, and the ‘Moan’ – as it so often did – had cleared the air. Putting regret behind him, Quin moved to his desk and picked up Hackenstreicher’s latest letter to Nature. Time to put this idiot out of his misery once and for all. Pulling the typewriter towards him, he inserted a clean sheet of paper.

Dear Sir, he wrote, It is perhaps worth pointing out in connection with Professor Hackenstreicher’s communication (Nature, August 6th 1938) that his examination of a single cranial cast of Ceratopsian Styracosaurus scarcely warrants a rejection of Broom’s reconstruction of evolution from a common stock. Not only was the cast incomplete, but its provenance is disputed by . . .

He was still writing as the bus passed the gates behind the house and bumped its way towards the beach.

Ruth woke very early in the dormitory above the boat-house. Everyone else still slept; Pilly, beside her, was curled up against the expected disasters of the coming day – only a few tufts of hair showed above the grey blanket. At the end of the row of bunks, Dr Elke’s slumbering bulk beside the door protected her charges.

Of the previous night, Ruth remembered only the driving rain, the sudden chill as they scuttled indoors from the stuffy bus . . . that and the monotonous slap of the waves on the beach.

But now something had happened – and at first it seemed to her that that something was simply . . . light.

She dressed quickly, crept past her sleeping friends, past Dr Elke, twitching as she rode through Valhalla in her dreams, climbed down the ladder and opened the door.

‘Oh!’ said Ruth, and walked forward, unbelieving, bewildered . . . dazzled. How could this have happened overnight, this miracle? How could there be so much light, so much movement; how could everything be so terribly there?

The sun was rising out of a silver sea – a sea which shimmered, which changed almost moment by moment. And the sky changed too as she watched it; first it was rose and amethyst, then turquoise . . . yet already a handful of newly fledged cotton-wool clouds waited their turn . . .

And the air moved too – how it moved! You didn’t need to breathe, it breathed itself. It wasn’t wind now, not yet, just this newly created, newly washed air which smelled of salt and seaweed and the beginning of the world.

There was too much. Too much beauty, too much air to breathe, too much sky to turn one’s face to . . . and unbelievably too much sea. She had imagined it so often: the flat, grey, rather sad expanse of the North Sea, but this . . .