The Morning Gift

The oration ceased, leaving him the youngest professor in the University of Thameside, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gold Medallist of the Geographical Association and the Sherlock Holmes of pre-history whose inspired investigations had unlocked the secrets of the past.

Quin scowled and climbed the dais. The Chancellor raised his sausage – and recoiled.

‘The chap looked as though he wanted to kill me,’ he complained afterwards.

Quin mastered himself, took the scroll, returned to his place.

And now at last it was over and he could ask the question that had haunted him throughout the tedious ceremony.

‘Where is Professor Berger?’

He had spoken to the Registrar whose pale eyes slid away from him.

‘Professor Berger is no longer with us. But the new Dean, Professor Schlesinger, is waiting to greet you.’

‘I, however, am not waiting to greet him. Where is Professor Berger? Please answer my question.’

The Registrar shuffled his feet. ‘He has been relieved of his post.’

‘Why?’

‘The Nuremberg Laws were implemented immediately after the Anschluss. Nobody who is not racially pure can hold high office.’ He took a step backwards. ‘It’s not my fault, I’m only –’

‘Where is Berger? Is he still in Vienna?’

The Registrar shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Many Jews have been trying to emigrate.’

‘Find me his last address.’

‘Yes, Professor, certainly, after the reception.’

‘No, not after the reception,’ said Quin. ‘Now.’

He remembered the street but not, at first, the house. Then a particularly well-nourished pair of caryatids sent him through an archway and into the courtyard. The concierge was not in her box; no one impeded him as he made his way up the wide marble staircase to the first floor.

Professor Berger’s brass plate was still screwed onto the door, but the door itself, surprisingly, was ajar. He pushed it open. Here in the old days he had been met by a maid in a black apron, but there was no one there. The Professor’s umbrella and walking sticks were still in the stand, his hat hung on its hook. Making his way down the passage with its thick Turkey carpet, he knocked on the door of the study and opened it. He had spent many hours here working on the symposium, awed by Berger’s scholarship and the generosity with which he shared his ideas. The Professor’s books lined the wall, the Remington, under its black cover, stood on the desk.

Yet the silence was eerie. He thought of the Mary Celeste, the boat found abandoned in mid-ocean with the cups still on the table, the uneaten food. A double door led from the study into the dining room with its massive table and tall leather-backed chairs. The Meissen plates were still on the dresser; a cup the Professor had won for fencing stood on the sideboard. Increasingly puzzled, he moved on into the drawing room. The paintings of alpine landscapes hung undisturbed on the walls; the Professor’s war medals lay in their cases under glass. A palm tree in a brass pot had been watered – yet he had never sensed such desolation, such emptiness.

No, not emptiness after all. In a distant room someone was playing the piano. Hardly playing, though, for one phrase was repeated again and again: an incongruous, chirruping phrase like the song of a bird.

He was in the rooms facing the courtyard now, opening more doors. And now a last door, and the source of the sound. A girl, her head cradled in the curve of her arm as it lay on the piano, the other hand touching the keys. In the moment before she noticed him, he saw how weary she was, how bereft of hope. Then she lifted her head and as she looked at him he remembered, suddenly, her name.

‘You must be Professor Berger’s daughter. You must be Ruth.’

It was a certain triumph, his recognition, for much had happened to the pretty, prattling child with her flaxen pigtail. A kind of Rapunzel situation had developed with her hair; still blonde, but loose to below her shoulders and shot through with colours that were hard to name . . . ash . . . bronze . . . a sort of greenish gold that was almost khaki. Inside its mass as she waited, perhaps, for a prince to ascend its tresses, was a pale triangular face with dark smudged eyes.

‘What were you playing?’ he asked.

She looked down at the keys. ‘It’s the theme of the last movement of the G Major Piano Concerto by Mozart. It’s supposed to be based on the song of a starling that –’ Her voice broke and she bent her head to vanish, for a moment, into the privacy accorded by her tumbled hair. But now she, too, recalled the past. ‘Of course! You’re Professor Somerville! I remember when you came before and we were so disappointed. You were supposed to have sunburnt knees and a voice like Richard the Lionheart’s.’

‘What sort of a voice did he have?’

‘Oh, loud! Horses used to kneel at his shout, didn’t you know?’