The Morning Gift (43 page)

'I'm glad!' said Quin warmly. 'And if you've got a vacancy for a godfather, perhaps you'd consider me?'

Roger's face lit up. 'The job is yours, Professor.' Crossing the courtyard after his talk with Roger, Quin encountered Verena accompanied by Kenneth Easton, carrying a squash racket and clearly in the best of spirits.

'You look very fit,' said Quin when it was evident that she would not let him pass.

'Oh I am, Professor!' said Verena archly. She did not actually invite him to feel her biceps, but this was not necessary. Bare-armed and in shorts, the state of her musculature was evident to anyone with eyes to see. And then: 'I was wondering what you thought of the Army and Navy Stores? Would you recommend them as the best outfitters before an expedition?' 'Yes, indeed. They're excellent -I always use them; you'll find everything you want there. If you mention my name to Mr Collins, you'll find him very helpful.'

'Thank you, I'll do that. And flea powder? Do you recommend Coopers or Smythsons?'

Quin, who had vaguely gathered that Verena was off on some kind of journey with her Croft-Ellis cousins, came down in favour of Coopers and made his way to his room, leaving Kenneth in a state of deep depression. The sacrifices he had made for Verena were considerable. He travelled fourteen stations on the Underground to partner her in squash; he had stopped saying 'mirror' and 'serviette' both of which, it seemed, were common, and been corrected when he mispronounced Featherstonehaugh. And yet every time she saw the Professor, Verena bridled and simpered like a schoolgirl. There were times, thought Kenneth, when one wondered if it was all worthwhile.

'I am leaving,' announced Heini. 'I'm going to look for another room.'

Leonie stared at the wild-haired youth who had come back in a towering rage after spending Saturday in town.

'But why, Heini? What has happened.'

'I can't discuss it, but I have to leave. I'm too upset to stay here. I can't even play.'

This was not strictly true. Heini had been home for half an hour and had considerably decreased the life expectancy of the hired piano by crashing through the Busoni Variations so as to send the dishes rattling on the sideboard.

'Does Ruth know?' asked Leonie nervously.

'Not yet. But she will not be surprised,' said Heini darkly, 'Oh, dear. If you've quarrelled… I mean, that does happen.'

'Not this,' said Heini obscurely. 'This does not happen. I'll leave as soon as I've found somewhere to go.'

Warring emotions clashed in Leonie's breast. Ruth would be upset and Leonie would do anything to spare her daughter pain. Yet the thought of Heini being elsewhere rose like an image of Paradise in her mind. To be able to wander in and out of her sitting room at will, to be able to put her feet up in the afternoon… To be able to get into the bathroom!

Not knowing what to say, she retreated into the kitchen where Mishak was looking at the pages of a gardening catalogue lent to him by the lady two houses down.

'Heini says he is leaving. I think he and Ruth have had some dreadful quarrel.'

Mishak looked up. 'Where will he go?' 'I don't know. He says he's going to look for another room.'

'And how will he pay for it?'

Heini had, of course, been living rent-free; the money he had brought from Budapest having been used up long ago. 'I don't know. But he's very determined.' In Mishak's mind, as in Leonie's, there rose a vision of Number 27 without Heini. He imagined hearing the blackbirds in the morning, the rustle of wind in the trees.

'Do you think he'll want any supper?' asked Leonie, preparing to mix the pancakes which, when filled with scraps of various sorts, could fill up large numbers of people at very little expense. 'He was very upset.'

'He will want supper,' said Mishak, and was proved right. It was Ruth who did not want supper. Ruth who phoned to say the she would be late… and who was walking the streets wringing her hands like a Victorian heroine. Ruth who felt disgraced and shamed and wished the earth would open up and swallow her…

For after all, it had happened, the thing she had dreaded that night on the Orient Express. It was prophetic, all the reading she had done there on the Grundlsee. They had not minced their words, those behavioural experts with their three-volumed tomes: Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and a particularly alarming man called Eugene Feuermann. It was not for nothing that they had devoted chapter after chapter to one of the great scourges of those who seek fulfilment in the act of love.

Anything would have been better than what had happened. There were chapters on nymphomania too, but Ruth would have settled for that. Nymphomania might end badly, but it sounded generous and giving. Someone with nymphomania might expect to live utterly and die whereas… Why me? thought Ruth, when I was so much looking forward to being with him. And what would Janet say? Could one even mention it to Janet who was so bountiful in the backs of motor cars?

The word drummed in her ear - the dreaded word which branded her as ice cold, as having splinters in her heart as if the Snow Queen herself had put them there. It had begun to drizzle and she pulled up the hood of her loden cape, but the bad weather suited her. Why should the sun shine ever again on someone who was the subject of two whole chapters and a set of tables in Feuermann's
Sexual Psychopathology?

Ruth walked for one hour, and two… and then, tainted or not, she made her way to the Underground. Sooner or later she would have to face Heini and to add cowardice to coldness would solve nothing.

'Come in.'

Fraulein Lutzenholler sat in her dressing-gown drinking a cup of cocoa with a wrinkled skin, which she had made earlier, spilling the milk. Above her hung the portrait of the couch she had used to see patients in Breslau, a small blue flame hissed in the gas fire, and she was not at all pleased to see Ruth.

'I am going to bed,' she announced.

Ruth entered, her hair in disarray, her eyelids swollen. 'I know; I'm sorry. And I know you can't help me because I can't pay you and psychoanalysis only works if you pay the person who's doing it.'

'And in any case I am not permitted to practise in England,' said Fraulein Lutzenholler firmly.

'But I thought you might know if there's anything I can do.' It had been difficult to come into the analyst's uninviting room and after her remarks about the lost papers on the bus, Ruth had sworn never to consult her again, but it seemed one couldn't escape one's fate. 'I am so unhappy, you see, and I thought there might be something I haven't understood about my childhood. Something I have repressed.'

Fraulein Lutzenholler sighed and put down her cup. 'Is it true that Heini is moving away?' she asked.

Ruth nodded, and something that was almost a smile passed over the analyst's features, lightening the moustache on her upper lip.

'It is not so simple, repression,' she said.

'No. But I know that if you see something awful when you are small… if your parents… you know if you find them making love. But I never did. When Papa had his afternoon rest everyone crept about and my mother sat in the drawing room with her embroidery like a Grenadier Guard shushing everybody. And anyway our flat had double doors, you couldn't hear anything. And on the Grundlsee I always fell asleep very quickly because of all that fresh air and though the maids told me about Frau Pollack always wanting gherkins before she let her husband come to her, I don't think it was a trauma and anyway I haven't repressed it. And I can't think - '

Fraulein Lutzenholler frowned. The good humour caused by the news that Heini was leaving had evaporated and she was worried about her hot-water bottle. She had filled it half an hour before and liked to get into bed while it was still in peak condition.

'What are you talking about?' she said, spooning the cocoa skin into her mouth. 'I don't understand you.'

Ruth, who had shied away from the word all day, now pronounced it.

There was a pause. Fraulein Lutzenholler looked at the clock. 'Ruth, it is a quarter to eleven. I cannot discuss this with you now. It is a technical problem and there can be very many causes; physiological, psychological…'

'Oh, please… please help me!'

Fraulein Lutzenholler stifled a yawn

'Very well, tell me what happened.'

Ruth began to speak. Her words tumbled over each other, tears sprang to her eyes, her hair fell over her face and was roughly pushed away.

To these outpourings of a tortured soul, Fraulein Lutzenholler listened with increasing and evident displeasure. She put her soiled cup back in its saucer. She frowned.

'Please understand, Ruth, that technical terms are not there as playthings for amateurs. There is nothing I can do to help you and I now wish to go to bed.'

'Yes… I'm sorry.'

Ruth wiped her eyes and rose to go. She had reached the door when Fraulein Lutzenholler uttered - and in English -a single sentence.

'Per'aps,' she said, 'you do not lof 'im.'

A few days later, Heini announced that after all he would stay. His stint of room hunting had shaken him: rents were exorbitant, there were absurd restrictions on practising and, of course, no one provided food. With the first round of the competition only six weeks away, he owed it to everyone to provide himself with the best conditions for his work. There was also Mantella. Heini's agent had planned an interview with the press at which Ruth was to be present. If Heini could not altogether forgive her, he was determined not to harbour a grudge and as the spring term moved towards Easter, a kind of truce was established in Belsize Park.

Among Verena's many excellent qualities could be numbered a thirst for learned gatherings, especially those with receptions afterwards at which, as the daughter of Thameside's Vice Chancellor, she was invariably introduced to the participants.

Her reasons for attending a lecture at the Geophysical Society was, however, rather more personal. The subject -Cretaceous Volcanism - was one which she was certain would interest Quin, and seeing the Professor out of hours was now her main objective.

But when she took her seat in the society's lecture theatre, Quin was nowhere to be seen. Instead, on her left, was a small, dapper man with a carefully combed moustache and slightly vulgar two-coloured shoes who introduced himself as Dr Brille-Lamartaine, and showed a tendency to remain by her side even when she moved through into the room where drinks and canapes awaited them.

'An excellent lecture, I think?' said the little man, who turned out to be a Belgian geologist of some distinction. 'I expected to see Professor Somerville here, but he is not.'

Verena agreed that he was not, and asked where he had met the Professor.

'I was with 'im in India. On his last expedition,' said Brille-Lamartaine, taking a glass of wine from the passing tray but rejecting the canapes, for prawns, in this country, were always a risk. 'I was instrumental in leading 'im to the caves where we 'ave made our most important finds.'

He sighed, for Milner, that morning, had told him something that distressed him deeply.

'How interesting,' said Verena, who was indeed anxious to hear more. 'Did you enjoy the trip?'

'Yes, yes. Very much. There were accidents, of course… my spectacles were destroyed .;. and the provisions were not what I would have expected. But Professor Somerville is a great man… obstinate… he would not listen to many things I told him, but a great man. Because I have been on his expedition, they have made me a Fellow of the Belgian Academy of Sciences. But now he is finished.'

'Finished? What on earth do you mean?'

'He takes a woman on his next expedition! A woman to the Kulamali Gorge… one of his students with whom he has fallen in love. I tell you, this is the end. I will not go with him… I know what will happen.' He took a second glass of wine and mopped his brow, pursued by hideous images. A naked woman with loose, lewd hair crawling into the safari tent… hanging her underwear on the line strung between thorn trees… She would soon hear of his private fortune and make suggestions: Somerville was known to be someone who did not wish to marry. 'I have great respect for the Professor,' he said, draining his glass and drawing closer to Verena who was not at all like the Lillith of his imagination… who was in fact very like his maiden aunt in Ghent, 'but this is the end!'

'Wait a minute, Dr Brille-Lamartaine, are you sure he is taking one of his students? And a woman?'

The Belgian nodded. 'I am sure. His assistant told me yesterday - he is completely in the Professor's confidence. The Professor has fallen in love with a girl in his class who is very high-born and very brilliant. It is a secret because she must not be favoured, but in June he will declare 'imself. I tell you, women must not go on these journeys, it is always a disaster, I hav' seen it. There is jealousy, there is intrigue… and they wear nothing underneath.' He drained his glass and wiped his brow once more. 'You will say nothing, I know,' he said. 'Oh, there is Sir Neville Ayillington - you will excuse me?'

'Yes,' said Verena. 'Yes, indeed.'

She could not wait, now, to be alone. If any confirmation was needed, this was it! Not that she had really doubted Quin, but his continuing silence sometimes confused her. But how could he speak while she was still his student? Only last week a Cambridge professor had been dismissed because of his involvement with an undergraduate: she had been foolish all along imagining that Quin could declare himself at this stage. And she wasn't even going to demand marriage before they sailed. Marriage would come, of course, when he saw how perfectly they were matched, but she would not make it a condition.

So now for her First and for being even fitter - if that was possible - than she had been before!

Frances usually came down to London only twice a year; in November for her Christmas shopping and in May for the Chelsea Flower Show.

This year, however, the wedding of her goddaughter - the niece of Lydia Barchester who had come to grief when retreating backwards from Their Majesties - brought her to London at the end of March. She came under protest, as the result of fierce bullying by Martha who had decreed that she needed a new dress and, in particular, new shoes.