The Morning Gift (4 page)

His turn now.

'It has been decided to confer the degree of Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa on Quinton Alexander St John Somerville. The public orator will now introduce Professor Somerville to you.'

Quin rose and went to stand facing the Chancellor, one of whose weak blue eyes was partly obscured by the golden tassel hanging from his cap. While the fulsome platitudes in praise of his achievements rolled out, Quin grew increasingly uneasy - and suddenly what had seemed to be an archaic but not undignified attempt to maintain the traditions of the past, became a travesty, an absurd charade mouthed by puppets.

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
Marie 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 Somer-ville! 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?'

Quin shook his head, but he was amazed, for she had pushed back her hair and smiled at him - and in an instant the beleaguered captive in her tower vanished and it was summertime on an alp with cows. It was not the eyes one noticed now, but the snub nose, the wide mouth, the freckles. 'Of course, it was the degree ceremony today, wasn't it? My father tried to contact you while he was still allowed to telephone. Did it go all right?'

Quin shrugged. 'Where is your father?'

'He's in England. In London. My mother too, and my aunt… and Uncle Mishak. They went a week ago. And Heini as well - he's gone to Budapest to pick up his visa and then he's joining them.'

'And left you behind?'

It didn't seem possible. He remembered her as, if anything, over-protected, too much indulged.

She shook her head. 'They sent me ahead. But it all went wrong.' It was over now, the pastoral time on the alp with cows. Her eyes filled with tears; one hand clenched itself into a fist which she pressed against her cheek as though to hold in grief. 'It went completely wrong. And I'm trapped here now. There is nobody left.'

'Tell me,' said Quin. 'I've plenty of time. Tell me exactly what happened. And come away from the piano so that we can be comfortable.' For he had understood that the piano was some special source of grief.

'No.' She was still the good university child who knew the ritual. 'It's the Chancellor's Banquet. There's always a dinner after the honorary degrees. You'll be expected.'

'You can't imagine I would dine with those people,' he said quietly. 'Now start.'

Her father had begun even before the Anschluss, trying to get her a student visa.

'We still hoped the Austrians would stand out against Hitler, but he'd always wanted me to study in England - that's why he sent me to the English School here after my governess left. I was in my second year, reading Natural Sciences. I was going to help my father till Heini and I could…'

'Who's Heini?'

'He's my cousin. Well, sort of… He and I…'

Sentences about Heini did not seem to be the kind she finished. But Quin now had recalled the prodigy in his wooden hut. He could attach no face to Heini, only the endless sound of the piano, but now there came the image of the pigtailed child carrying wild strawberries in her cupped hands to where he played. It had lasted then, her love for the gifted boy.

'Goon.'

'It wasn't too difficult. If you don't want to emigrate for good, the British don't mind. I didn't even have to have a J on my passport because I'm only partly Jewish. The Quakers were marvellous. They arranged for me to go on a student transport from Graz.'

As soon as her departure was settled, her parents had sent her to Graz to wait.

'They wanted me out of the way because I'd kicked a Brown Shirt and -'

'Good God!'

She made a gesture of dismissal. 'Anyway, after I went, my father was suddenly arrested. They took him to that hell hole by the Danube Canal - the Gestapo House. He was held there for days and no one told me. Then they released him and told him he had to leave the country within a week with his family or be taken to a camp. They were allowed to take just one suitcase each and ten German marks - you can't live for a day on that, but of course nothing mattered as long as they could get away. I'd gone ahead on the student transport two days before.'

'So what happened?'

'We got to the border and then a whole lot of SS people got on. They were looking for our Certificates of Harmless-ness.'

'Your
what
?"

She passed a hand over her forehead and he thought he'd never seen anyone so young look so tired. 'It's some new piece of paper - they invent them all the time. It's to show you haven't been politically active. They don't want to send people abroad who are going to make trouble for the regime.'

'And you hadn't got one?'

She shook her head. 'At the university there was a boy who'd been to Russia. I'd read Dostoevsky, of course, and I thought one should be on the side of the proletariat and go to Siberia with people in exile and all that. I'd always worried because we seemed to have so much. I mean, it can't be right that some people should have everything and others nothing.'

'No, it can't be right. But what to do about it isn't always simple.'

'Anyway, I didn't become a Communist like he was because they kept on calling each other "Comrade" and then quarrelling, but I joined the Social Democrats and we marched in processions and had fights with the Brown Shirts. It seems childish now - we thought we were so fierce. And, of course, all the time the authorities had me down as a dangerous radical!'

'So by the time they took you off the student train your parents had gone?'

'No, they hadn't actually. I phoned a friend of theirs because they'd cut off our telephone and she said they were off the next day. I knew that if they realized I was still in Austria they wouldn't go, so I went to stay with our old cook in Grinzing till they left.'

'That was brave,' said Quin quietly.

She shrugged. 'It was very difficult, I must say. The most difficult thing I've ever done.'

'And with luck the most difficult thing you'll ever have to do.'

She shook her head. 'I think not.' The words were almost inaudible. 'I think that for my people, night has come.'

'Nonsense.' He spoke with deliberate briskness. 'There'll be a way of helping you. I'll go to the British Consulate in the morning.'

Again that shake of the head, sending the blonde, absurdly abundant hair swinging on her shoulders. 'I've tried everything. There's a man called Eichmann who runs something called the Department of Emigration. He's supposed to help people to leave, but what he really does is make sure they're stripped of everything they own. You don't know what it's like - people weeping and shouting…'

He had risen and begun to walk up and down, needing to think. 'What a huge place this is!'

She nodded. 'Twelve rooms. My grandmother had two of them, but she died last year. When I was small I used to ride round and round the corridors on my tricycle.' She followed him. 'That's my father in the uniform of the 14th Uhlans.

He was decorated twice for bravery — he couldn't believe that none of that counted.'

'Is he completely Jewish?'

'By birth, yes. I don't think he ever thought about it. His religion was to do with people… with everyone trying to make themselves into the best sort of person they could be. He believed in a God that belonged to everyone… you had to guard the spark that was in you and make it into a flame. And my mother was brought up as a Catholic so it's doubly hard for her. She's only half-Jewish, or maybe a quarter, we're not quite sure. She had a very Aryan mother - a sort of goat-herding lady.'

'So that makes you… what? Three-quarters? Five-eighths? It's hard to believe.'

She smiled. 'My snub nose, you mean - and being fair? My grandmother came from the country - the goat-herding one. My grandfather really found her tending goats — well, almost. She came from a farm. We used to laugh at her a bit and call her Heidi; she never opened a book in her life, but I'm grateful to her now because I look like her and no one ever molests me.'

They had reached a glassed-in verandah overlooking the courtyard. In the corner beside an oleander in a tub, was a painted cradle adorned with roses and lilies. Over the headboard, painstakingly scrolled, were the words
Ruthie's cradle.

Quin set it rocking with the toe of his shoe. Beside him, Ruth had fallen silent. Down in the courtyard a single tree -a chestnut in full blossom - stretched out its arms. A swing was suspended from one branch; on a washing line strung between two posts hung a row of red-and-white checked tea towels, and a baby's shirt no bigger than a handkerchief.

'I used to play down there,' she said. 'All through my childhood. It seemed so safe to me. The safest place in the world.'

He had made no sound, yet something made her turn to look at him. She had thought of the Englishman as kind and civilized. Now the crumpled face looked devilish: the mouth twisted, the skin stretched tight over the bones. It lasted only a moment, his transformation into someone to fear. Then he laid a hand lightly on her arm.

'You'll see. There will be something we can do.'

Ruth had not exaggerated. There were no words to describe the chaos and despair the Anschluss had caused. He had arrived early at the British Consulate but already there were queues. People begged for pieces of paper - visas, passports, permits - as the starving begged for bread.

'I'm sorry, sir, I can't do anything about this,' said the clerk, looking at Ruth's documents. 'It's not the British refusing to let her in, it's the Austrians refusing to let her out. She'd have to re-apply for emigration and that could take months or years. The quota's full, as you know.'