The Morning Gift (51 page)

Ah, thank God, there she was, making her way through the crowd. She wore her loden cape, buttoned up even on this warm day, and carried her straw basket so that she looked even more like a goose girl on an alp, and for a moment he wondered if he had made a mistake… if she would fit in with the sophisticated life he was bound to lead. But Mantella thought the world of her, and Fleury… and his father ate out of her hand. He had never met a man who didn't like Ruth, and now as she came up the gangway, a sailor walking down turned his head to look at her.

'Ruth!'

'Heini!'

They were in each other's arms; he felt her hair against his cheek, the warmth, the familiarity.

'You've been crying, darling.' He was solicitous, wiping a tear away with his fingers.

'Yes. But it doesn't matter. It's all right now. And I've brought us a present. A lovely present. It was a chance in a million, finding them in the summer, but look!'

She bent down to the straw basket and took out a small brown paper bag which she put into his hands. Heini felt the warmth before he opened it, and smiled.

'
Maroni
! Oh, Ruth, that takes me back!'

He took out a chestnut, almost too warm to hold, gazed at the spilt skin, the wrinkled, roasted flesh - drank in the delicious smell. Both of them now were back in the city they had grown up in, wandering along the Karntnerstrasse, dipping into the bag… sharing… sniffing… Ruth had carried them in her muff for him, walking to fetch him from the Conservatoire… Once they had eaten three bags of them, driving in a sledge through the snowbound Prater.

'I'll peel one for you,' said Ruth - and she freed it deftly from the skin and held it out to him - as she had held out wild strawberries on the Grundlsee, a piece of marzipan pilfered from her mother's kitchen.

'Shall we take them down below?' he suggested.

'No, let's eat them here, Heini. Let's stay by the sea.'

So they stood side by side and emptied the bag and threw the skins into the water, where they were swooped on - and then rejected - by the gulls.

'Is your luggage aboard, then?' asked Heini. 'We sail in less than an hour.'

'Everything's taken care of,' said Ruth. She put her arms round him and once again he felt her tears. 'Only listen, darling - there's something I have to tell you.'

No one ever forgot where they were on the morning of the 3rd of September.

Pilly, who had joined the WRNS without waiting for the result of her exams, heard Chamberlain's quavery voice in the naval barracks at Portsmouth. Janet heard it in her father's vicarage the day after which, to everyone's amazement, she had become engaged to his curate.

The inhabitants of Number 27 heard the news that Britain was at war with Germany clustered round the crackling wireless set in Ziller's room and as they listened the expression on every face was strangely similar. Relief that the shillyshallying and compromise were over at last, and with it the realization that they were cut off finally from the relatives and friends that they had left behind in Europe.

And from Ruth. From Ruth who had been five weeks in America and had not yet written - or probably had written, but the letter with the uncertainty of the time had not arrived. And now every mail would be threatened by U-boats, every telephone line requisitioned for the war.

'Oh, Kurt,' said Leonie, coming to stand beside her husband.

'Just think that she is safe. That's all you have to think of; that she is safe.'

Almost before Chamberlain had stopped speaking came the air-raid warning, and with it a taste of things to come as Fraulein Lutzenholler dived under the table and Mishak went out into the garden so as to die in the open air. A false alarm, but it made it easier for Leonie to heed her husband's words. Ruth
was
safe - the
Mauretania
had berthed without mishap; they had rung the shipping office. She herself had said it might be a while before a letter reached them, but oh, God, let her write soon, thought Leonie. She knew how disappointed Kurt had been in Ruth's exam results: the aegrotat she had been awarded was almost worthless - and in something about Ruth herself which had held them at a distance before she sailed, but he suffered scarcely less than she did at this separation from the daughter he loved so much.

Quin heard the news three days later in a manner which would have done credit to a Rider Haggard yarn. A horse-man, galloping across the plains towards him in a cloud of dust, reigned in and handed him a letter.

'So it's come,' said Quin, and the African nodded.

One by one the men who had been working on the cliff put down their tools. There was no need to ask what had happened. The Commissioner at Lindi had promised to inform them and he had kept his word.

'We're going home, then?' asked Sam - and filled his eyes with the blue immensity of the sky, the sea of grass- the antelopes moving quietly over the horizon.

Quin put an arm round the boy's shoulder. Sam had proved his worth out here and would never be free now of the longing to return.

'Yes,' he said. 'Straightaway.'

The first weeks of the war saw a number of crises in Belsize Park, but none was due to enemy action. The old lady two doors down collided with a lamp post in the blackout and was taken to Dr Levy, now permitted to practise his profession and established in a surgery on Hampstead Hill. An officious air-raid warden reduced Miss Violet to hysterics by hammering on her bedroom door and accusing her of being a German spy because a chink of light was visible between her curtains. Leonie, now employed in the kitchen of a service canteen behind Trafalgar Square, was reprimanded for spreading margarine too thickly on the soldiers' sandwiches. Leaflets were showered on the populace: they were told to Dig for Victory, to remember that Careless Talk Costs Lives, to Carry Their Gas Masks at all times. Evacuated children from the slums of London screamed in the silence and safety of their country billets.

Only at sea had the war started in earnest. Ships travelled in convoy and in secrecy, escorted by destroyers; even so the U-boats claimed victim after victim - and every boat sent to the bottom could have carried the letter Ruth had written to assure her parents that she was safe and well.

But when at last the longed-for letter came from New York, it was not from Ruth, but from Heini, and by the time she had read it, Leonie was a shivering wreck clinging to the edge of the table.

Heini wrote to thank them for their hospitality throughout the years and he enclosed a message for Ruth.

'I don't want to reproach her,' he wrote, 'I suppose it was honest of her to say that she did not love me and did not want to share my life. But you can imagine how I felt, sailing alone to an unknown land. Fortunately, as soon as I arrived, everything went splendidly. The Americans are as warm-hearted as one hears and my debut at the Carnegie Hall was a triumph. Will you tell Ruth this, and tell her too that someone else has now entered my life - a very musical woman, a little older, who uses her influence to help me and who insisted that I move into her apartment - a dream-like place with picture windows overlooking Central Park. So Ruth must not feel guilty - but she must not think either that I shall take her back. I shall always remember her with fondness, as I remember all of you, but the past is past.'

Leonie had collapsed into a chair, trying to still the trembling of her limbs. 'God, Kurt, what has happened? Where is she? Why didn't she tell us?'

'Hush, hush. There will be an explanation.' But as he stroked his wife's back, the Professor himself was fighting for control. This couldn't happen twice, his beloved daughter lost in the Underworld.

'We must tell the police. They must find her,' said Leonie.

'We will see first what we can discover for ourselves.'

But they discovered nothing. Pilly, to whom they telegraphed, had not heard from Ruth, nor had Janet and everyone at Thameside believed that Ruth had sailed on the
Mauretania.
Once more, Leonie stifled her sobs under the pillow and drearily promised God to be good, but before she could make herself seriously ill, a letter came by the afternoon post with which Hilda hurried to the Willow, where Miss Maud and Miss Violet, their windows taped, their doors suitably sand-bagged, were carrying on as usual.

'It came just now - that's Ruth's handwriting, I'm sure.'

Silence fell in the cafe as the envelope was opened. Silence was maintained as Leonie and her husband read what Ruth had written.

'She is safe,' said Leonie at last. 'She is safe and in England. In the country. And she has a job.'

'So why this long face?' enquired von Hofmann. 'Why are you not dancing on the tables?'

Things had gone well with him since the outbreak of war. A whole spate of anti-Nazi films were lined up by the studios and he had secured the part of an SS officer who said not only
Schvpeinehund
but
Gott in Himmel
before dying a very nasty death.

'She wants to be alone.' Leonie's lip trembled as she tried to embrace this extraordinary concept.

'Like Greta Garbo?' enquired the lady with the poodle.

Leonie shook her bewildered head. 'I don't understand… she says she must be independent… she must learn to grow up by herself. Later she will come back, but now she must discover who she is. Twice she says this about the discovering.'

'Everybody goes through such times,' said Ziller. 'Times when they need to find out who they are. It is natural.'

Mrs Weiss disagreed. 'So she finds out who she is?' she said, spearing a piece of guggle with her fork. 'What has she from that? Myself, it is bad enough that I
am
it, but to find out, no!'

Mrs Weiss' views, rather surprisingly, were shared by Miss Maud and Miss Violet who said they thought it didn't do much good to go delving about in one's self, but were sure it wouldn't last.

'You'll see,' said Miss Maud, 'she'll be back soon enough. It's feeling she's failed you with the exams, perhaps, and breaking with Heini.'

'There is no address,' said Leonie wretchedly. 'And I can't read what is on the stamp. But in the post office they will read it and tell me. We
must
find her, Kurt; we must!'

Professor Berger put down the letter in which his daughter had begged for their understanding. 'No,' he said curtly. 'We will respect her wishes.'

'Oh, God -I don't want to respect her wishes, I want
her!'
cried Leonie.

'We have spoken enough of this,' said the Professor - and she looked up, silenced, aware of a hurt even deeper than her own.

'No go home?' begged Thisbe, as Ruth pushed her pushchair back down the rutted lane.

'Thisbe, we have to go home. It's teatime.'

The little girl's face puckered; she let out a thin wail. Ruth bent down to her. The wind was getting up, the top of the fells were wreathed in mist. However much both she and the three-year-old Thisbe preferred to be out of doors, there were limits. The Lake District in late autumn was beautiful, but it was hardly suitable for alfresco life.

'No soup?' begged Thisbe, shifting her ground.

Ruth sighed. She felt sympathy with Thisbe who dreaded a return to the domestic hearth: to the cold stone floors of the tiny shepherd's cottage, the chaos, the screams of her two brothers as they returned from school. Progressive child-rearing did not suit Thisbe, who was no trouble as she and Ruth plodded through the countryside conversing with sheep, picking berries, chatting on stone walls, but became almost ungovernable at home.

Ruth had been two months now with the lady weaver whose children she had looked after on Hampstead Heath. Penelope Hartley was kind enough in a vague way, and offering Ruth bed and board in exchange for help with the children was generous under the circumstances. When war became inevitable and she had transferred her loom to Cumberland, Ruth had gone with her. There was certainly plenty of wool which Penelope gathered from the hedges, often in a less than appetising state, and carded and dyed… and out of the appalling muddle in which she worked, there did, surprisingly, emerge some rather pleasant and occasionally saleable rugs. But Mr Hartley, some years ago, had sought consolation elsewhere, and Penelope had rather let things go.

Inside the small, dark cottage with its oil lamps and view of a sheer scree, they found something nameless bubbling on the stove. Not a sheep's head broth, for Penelope did not eat meat, but a vegetable equivalent: a stew of mangelwurzels, old carrots, the tops of Brussels sprouts caught by the first frost, which nevertheless managed to suggest the presence of bristles and teeth and protruding eyes.

'No
soup!'
repeated Thisbe, and lay down on the floor, ready to start a tantrum.

'No, we'll find some bread and butter.'

Rationing had not yet affected them here, so far from the towns; there was plenty of food in Cumberland or there would have been if there had been any money to buy it with and not all the villagers turned away from Ruth; some had been helpful. But, of course, Penelope believed in 'Nature', not realizing how very unnatural good husbandry really is. Three damp chickens which did not lay wandered into the house, soiling the flagstones; old milk, dripping through discoloured muslin, failed dismally to turn into cheese.

The boys now returned noisily from school. Peter, whom she had pleased by hitting him on the leg in the far-off days on Hampstead Heath, and Tristram, a year older.

'Oh God, not mother's muck,' said Tristram. 'I won't eat it, and she needn't think it.'

Ruth, fetching peanut butter and apples from the larder, reassured him. If only it didn't get dark so soon. When they'd first come, she'd been able to go out with the boys after supper while they kicked a ball around or searched for conkers, but now they all faced an interminable evening sitting round the smoking Aladdin lamp. Even so she could manage if only Penelope stayed next door at her loom. They could play dominos or ludo - at least they could if the pieces weren't lost again; she wasn't as nimble as she had been at crawling round the floor looking for missing toys after the children were in bed.