The Morning Gift

Quin took the portrait of his mother from her hands. ‘You chose to sneer when I said I killed her. Yet it is not untrue. My father knew that she was not supposed to have children. She’d been very ill – they met in Switzerland when he was there in the Diplomatic Service. She was in a sanatorium, recovering from TB. He wanted a child because of Bowmont. He wanted an heir and he didn’t mind what it cost. An heir for Bowmont.’

‘And if he did?’ Ruth shrugged. She seemed to him relentless, suddenly; grown up, no longer his student, his protegée. ‘Men have always wanted that. A tobacconist will want an heir for his kiosk . . . the poorest rabbi wants a son to say kaddish for him when he’s dead. Why do you make such a thing of it?’

‘If a man forces a woman to bear a child . . . if he risks her life so that he can come to his own father – the father he quarrelled with and loathed – and say: “Here is an heir” – then he is committing a sin.’

But she wouldn’t heed him. ‘And what of her? Do you think she was so feeble? Do you think she didn’t want it? She was brave – look at her face. She wanted a child. Not for Bowmont, not for your father. She wanted one because a child is a marvellous thing to have. Why do you patronize women so? Why can’t they risk their lives as men do? They have a right, as much as any man.’

‘To jump into the sea for a half-grown mongrel?’ he jeered.

‘Yes. For anything they choose.’ But she bent her head, for she knew she had risked not only her own life, but his and perhaps Sam’s – that his cruelty down there on the boat had had a cause. ‘I’m a mongrel too,’ she said very quietly. ‘And anyway your aunt loves it.’

‘Loves the puppy? Are you mad? She’s done nothing but try to give it away.’

Again that shrug, so characteristic of the Viennese. ‘My father always says, “Don’t look at what people say look at what they do.” Why did your aunt choose the carpenter – everyone knew his wife had asthma and she wasn’t allowed to have pets? Why the publican when his mother was attacked by an Alsatian when she was little and she was terrified of dogs?’

‘How do you know all this?’ he said irritably. How did she know, in a week at Bowmont, that Elsie was interested in herbalism, that Mrs Ridley’s grandmother knew the Darlings? It was infuriating, this foible of hers: this embarrassing ability to go in deep. Whoever married her would be driven mad by it. Heini would be driven mad by it. ‘Anyway, my father never recovered. He carried the guilt and wretchedness for the rest of his life. It probably killed him too – he volunteered in 1916 when there was no need to do so.’

‘There you go again. The English are so melodramatic! A bullet killed him.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Quin, not accustomed to being deflated by a girl whose emotionalism was a byword. And amazed by what he was about to do, he went over to the desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out a faded exercise book with a blue marbled cover.

‘Read it,’ he said. ‘It’s my father’s diary.’

The book fell open at the page he had read a hundred times and not shown to a living soul, and Ruth took it and moved closer to the lamp.

‘I came back from Claire’s funeral, she read, and Marie brought me the baby, as though the sight of it could console me, that puce, wrinkled creature with its insatiable greed for life. The baby killed her – no, I killed her. I was cleverer than the doctors who told me she musn’t bear a child. I knew better, I wanted a son. I wanted to bringthe boy back to Bowmont and show my father that I had produced an heir – that he need despise me no longer. Yes, I who hated him, who fled Bowmont and turned my back on the iniquities of inheritance and wealth, was as tainted as he was by the desire for power. Claire wanted a baby; I try not to forget that, but it was my job to be wiser than she.

Now I have to try and love the child; he is not to blame, but I have no desire to live without her and no love left to give. If I have a wish it is that he at least will relinquish his inheritance and go forth as a free man among his equals.