The Morning Gift (41 page)

How pleased Ruth would be that he had decided to play the Mozart! Well, Mantella had decided, but there was no need to mention that; no point in depriving her of the happiness she would feel. And if it meant America! They would be married over there - he'd rather dreaded a scrappy wedding in the squalor of Belsize Park.

Abandoning the hand-stitched gloves, dreaming his dreams, Heini made his way to Dr Friedlander's surgery in Harley Street.

'She's done it!' said Dr Felton gleefully, pushing away the pile of exam papers he had been marking. He'd checked and double checked to make sure he'd been completely fair, and he had. Ruth had beaten Verena Plackett by two marks in the Marine Zoology paper, and by three in the Parasitology.

'Which, considering what she's been up against, is quite an achievement,' said Dr Elke, inviting her fellow members of staff to a celebratory glass of sherry in her room.

They had all been worried about Ruth who had been found asleep in various unexpected places in the college and had ended up in the Underground terminus of the Northern Line after a longer night than usual discussing the fingering of Beethoven's
Hammerklavier.

'And Moira's decided to adopt!' said Dr Felton, in the grip of end-of-term euphoria. 'So no more thermometers!'

The marks, when they went up on the board, gave general satisfaction. Verena was top in the other two theory papers and since one of these was Palaeontology, she was content. Sam had done unexpectedly well, and both Huw and Janet were comfortably through.

But it was Pilly's results that were the most surprising. She had failed only the Physiology practical in which she had fainted while pricking her finger to get a sample of blood, and was to be allowed to take her Finals without a resit.

'And it's all because of you, Ruth,' said Pilly, hugging her friend.

The party on the last day of term was thus a cheerful affair. Heini came, and even those of Ruth's friends who had been critical of his demands were charmed by his broken accent and wistful smile. Since his meeting with Mantella, he had been in excellent spirits and when Sam produced a pile of music from the piano stool and begged him to play, he did so without demur.

Quin, on the same evening, had been bidden to a pre-Christmas gathering of eminent academics at the Vice Chancellor's Lodge. Arriving purposefully late, he paused for a few moments outside the lighted windows of the Union Hall.

Heini was at the piano and Ruth sat by his side. She wore the velvet dress she had worn on the Orient Express and her head was bent in total concentration as she followed the score. Then she rose, one arm curved over the boy's head… her fingers, in one deft movement, flicked the page.

'You have to be like a wave when you turn over,' she had told him on the train. 'You have to be completely anonymous.'

Quin walked on across the darkened quadrangle. It seemed to him that he had never seen an action express such dedication, such gracefully given service - or such love!

Christmas Eve in the Willow would have surprised passers-by who were given to understand that it was a refugee cafe largely frequented by displaced persons and run by austere and frugal spinsters.

The tables had been pushed to the edge of the floor and in the centre stood the tree in all its festive glory. This tree had not been dug out of the garden of Mrs Weiss' son, Georg, while her daughter-in-law slept, though the old lady had been perfectly willing to attempt this foul deed. It had been bought in a shop, yet it was Mrs Weiss who was its source. A week before Christmas the hard-pressed Moira had paid a secret visit to Leonie and struck a bargain. A liberal sum of money which Moira could well spare if Leonie could guarantee that her mother-in-law was out of the house for the whole of Christmas Eve.

'I've got some people coming in - clients of George's; important ones. You understand?'

Leonie, at first, had been inclined to refuse, but on reflection it seemed to be a fair bargain. She herself, while still prosperous and in her native land, would have paid twice what Moira was offering to be sure of Christmas Eve without Mrs Weiss. She took the money and went shopping with the old lady for the tree, the silver tinsel, the candles, the spices, the rum…

Now the cafe was a bower of green, the glockenspiel of the banker's wife set up a sweet tinkling over the hubbub of voices… Voices which were stilled as Miss Maud, now primed in the mysteries of an Austrian Holy Night, handed the matches to Ruth.

'Careful!' said Professor Berger, as he had said every year since Ruth was old enough to light the candles on the tree. He had travelled overnight on the bus from Manchester and would greatly have preferred to be at home with his family, but now as he looked at the circle of faces and touched his daughter's head, he was glad they had come together with their friends.

'I never seen it like that,' said Mrs Burtt. 'Not with real candles.'

And Miss Violet and Miss Maud forgot the needles dropping on the floor and the wax dripping on to the tablecloths and even the appalling risk of fire, for it was beyond race or belief or nationality, this incandescent symbol of joy and peace.

Then came the presents. How these people, some of whom could scarcely afford to eat, had found gifts remained a mystery, but no one was forgotten. Dr Levy had discovered a postcard of the bench where Leonie had been overcome by pigeons and made for it a wooden frame. Mrs Burtt received a scroll in which Ruth, in blank verse, proclaimed her as Queen of the Willow. Even the poodle had a present: a bone marrow pudding baked on the disputed cooker at Number 27. :

But Heini's presents were the best. It had occurred to Heini that while he was borrowing money from Dr Fried-lander for the competition, he might as well borrow a little extra for Christmas, and the dentist had been perfectly happy to lend it to him. So Heini had bought silk stockings for Leonie and chocolates for Aunt Hilda and a copy of
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
for the Professor who was fond of the Roman Stoic. This had used up more money than he expected and when he went into a flower shop to buy red roses for Ruth, he found the cost of a bunch to be exorbitant. It was the assistant who had suggested a different kind of rose - a Christmas rose, pale-petalled and golden-hearted, and put a single bloom, cradled in moss, into a cellophane box -and now, as he saw Ruth's face, he knew that nothing could have pleased her more.

After the presents came the food - and here the horsehair purse of Mrs Weiss had turned into a horn of plenty, emitting plates of salami and wafer-thin smoked ham… of almonds and apricots, and a wild white wine from the Wachau for which Leonie had scoured the shops of Soho.

But at eleven, Ruth and Heini slipped out together and walked hand in hand through the damp, misty streets.

'It was lovely, wasn't it?' said Ruth. 'And you look so elegant!' On the first day of the holidays, she had returned to the progressively educated children of the lady weaver and used the money she had earned to buy Heini a silk scarf to wear with his evening clothes. 'But, oh if only it would snow! I miss snow so much - the quietness and the glitter. Do you remember the icicles hanging from the wall lamps in the Hofburg? And the C Minor Mass coming out of the Augustiner chapel, and the bells?'

They had reached the door of Number 27. 'I'll play it for you,' said Heini pulling her into the house. 'Come on! I'll play the snow and the choirboys and the bells. I'll play Christmas in Vienna.'

And he did. He sat down at the Bosendorfer and he made it for her in music as he had promised. He played Leopold

Mozart's "Sleigh Ride" and wove in the carols that the Vienna Choirboys sang: "Puer Nobis" and the rocking lullaby which Mary had sung to her babe… He played the tune the old man had wheezed out on his hurdy-gurdy in the market where the Bergers bought their tree - and then it became Papageno's song from
The Magic Flute
which had been Ruth's Christmas treat since she was eight years old. He played "The Skater's Waltz" to which she'd whirled round the ice rink in the Prater and moved down to the base to mime the deep and solemn bells of St Stephan's summoning the people to midnight mass. And he ended with the piece he had played for her every year on the Steinway in the Felsengasse - 'their' tune: Mozart's consoling and ravishing B Minor Adagio which he had been practising when first they met.

Then he closed the lid of the piano and got to his feet.

'Ruth,' he said huskily, 'I liked your present, but there is only one present I want and need - and I need it desperately.'

'What?' said Ruth, and her heart beat so loudly that she thought he must be able to hear.

'You!' said Heini. 'Nothing else. Just you. And soon please, darling. Very soon!'

And Ruth, still caught in the wonder of the music, moved forward into his arms and said, 'Yes. It's what I want too. I want it very much.'

Quin's Christmas Eve was very different.

He had walked since daybreak and now stood on the top of the Cheviots looking across at the rolling slopes of blond grass bent by the wind and the fierce storm clouds gathering above the sea. Tomorrow he would do his duty by his parishioners, read the lesson in church, and accompany his aunt to the Rothleys' annual party - but this day he had claimed for himself.

Yet when he began to apply his mind to the problem which had brought him up here, he found there was no decision to be made. It had made itself, heaven knew when, in that part of the brain so beloved of Professor Freud.

Instead of thought came images. A steamer to Dar es Salaam… the river boat to Lindi… a few days with the Commissioner to hire porters. And then the long trek across the great game plains on the far side of the Rift. He had dreamt of that journey when he was working in Tanganyika all those years ago - and if Farquarson was telling the truth… if there really was an outcrop of fossil-bearing sandstone in the Kulamali…

As he saw the landscape, so he saw the people he would take. Milner, of course, and Jacobson from the museum's Geology Department… Alec Younger, back from the East Indies and longing to be off again… Colonel Hillborough who'd had his fill of administration and would harness the resources of the Geographical Society to the trip… And one other person; someone young to whom he'd give a break. One of the third years, perhaps. It would depend on the exam results, but young Sam Marsh was a possibility.

Africa had been his first love: the bone pits of Tendaguru had set him on his way professionally and if this was to be his last journey it would be a fitting end to his travels. There were other advantages in going to Kulamali. The territory was British ruled and from it one could go through other protectorates back to the sea. No danger then, if war came, of being locked up as a foreigner. He'd be able to make his way back home and enlist.

Another decision, seemingly, had already been made in some part of his mind. This was not a journey to be packed into the summer vacation. He was leaving Thameside, and leaving it for good.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

'I must say sometimes I wish the human heart really was just a thick-walled rubber bulb, don't you?' said Ruth to Janet, with whom she had stayed behind to draw a model of the circulatory system kindly constructed for them by Dr Fitzsimmons.