Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

But that was when she thought Ruth was waiting for them in the student camp on the South Coast. Since the letter had come from the Quaker Relief Organization to say that Ruth was not on the train, Leonie had started being good.

This meant never at any moment criticizing a single thing. It meant inhaling with delight the smell of slowly expiring cauliflower from the landing where a female psychoanalyst from Breslau shared their cooker. It meant admiring the scrofulous tom cats yowling in the square of rubble that passed for a garden. It meant being enchanted by the hissing gas fire which ate pennies and gave out only fumes and blue flames. It meant angering no living thing, standing aside from houseflies, consuming with gratitude a kind of brown sauce which came in bottles and was called coffee. It meant telling God or anyone else who would listen at all hours of the day and night, that she would never again complain whatever happened if only Ruth was safe and came to them.

By 7.30, Leonie had prepared breakfast for her family — bread spread with margarine, a substance they had never previously tasted — and sent Hilda, with red-rimmed eyes, off to her job as housemaid to a Mrs Manfred in Golders Green. If she hadn’t been so desperate about Ruth, Leonie would have greatly pitied her sister-in-law, who was constantly bitten by Mrs Manfred’s pug and found it impossible to believe that a bath, once cleaned, also had to be dried , but now she could only be thankful that Hilda would not be around to ‘help’ her with her chores.

At eight o’clock, Uncle Mishak, the English dictionary in the pocket of his coat, set off up the hill to join the long queue of foreigners in Hampstead Town Hall who waited daily for news of relatives, for instructions, for permission to remain — and as he walked, a tiny compact figure stopping to examine a rose bush in a garden or address an unattended dog, he was hailed by the acquaintances this kind old man had made even in the ten days he had been in exile.

‘Heard anything yet?’ asked the man in the tobacco kiosk, and as Mishak shook his head: ‘There’ll be news today, maybe. They’re coming over all the time. She’ll come, you’ll see.’

The cockney flower seller with the feather in her battered hat, from whom Mishak had bought nothing, told him to keep his pecker up; a tramp with whom he’d shared a park bench one afternoon stopped to ask after Ruth.

And as Uncle Mishak made his way up the hill, Professor Berger, holding himself very erect, forcing himself to swing his walking stick, made his way downhill for the daily journey to Bloomsbury House where a bevy of Quakers, social workers and civil servants tried to sort out the movements of the dispossessed — and as he walked through the grey streets whose very stones seemed to be permeated with homesickness, he raised his hat to other exiles going about their business.

‘Any news of your daughter?’ enquired Dr Levy, the renowned heart specialist who spent his days in the public library studying to resit his medical exams in English.

‘You’ve heard something?’ asked Paul Ziller, the leader of the Ziller Quartet. He had no work permit, his quartet was disbanded, but each day he went to the Jewish Day Centre to practise in an unused cloakroom, and each night he dressed up in a cummerbund to play bogus gypsy music in a Hungarian restaurant in exchange for his food.

Left alone in the dingy rooms, Leonie continued to be good. There were plenty of opportunities for this as she set about the housework. The thick layer of grease where the psychoanalyst’s stew had boiled over would normally have sent her raging down to the second-floor front where Fräulein Lutzenholler sat under a picture of Freud and mourned, but she wiped it up without a word. The bathroom, shared by all the occupants, provided almost unlimited opportunities for virtue. There was a black rim around the bath, the soaked bathmat was crumpled up in a corner… and Miss Bates, a nursery school teacher and the only British survivor at Number 27, had hung a row of dripping camiknickers on a sagging piece of string.

None of it mattered. Loving Miss Bates, hoping she would find a husband soon, Leonie wrung out the knickers, cleaned the bath. She had had servants all her life, but she knew how to work. Now everything she did was offered up to God: the Catholic God of her childhood, the Jewish God on whose behalf all these bewildered people roamed the streets of North-West London… any God, what did it matter so long as he brought her her child?

Then, at twelve o’clock, she renewed her make-up and set off for the Willow Tea Rooms.

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ said Miss Maud, filling the sugar bowls and looking out of the window at Leonie Berger’s slow progress across the square. Even at a distance it was easy to see how carefully she walked, with what politeness she spoke to the pigeons who crossed her path.

And: ‘It’s bad news,’ said her sister, Miss Violet, carrying a tray of empty cups to Mrs Burtt in the kitchen, who took her arms out of the washing-up water and said that Hitler would have something to answer for if ever she got hold of him.

Miss Maud and Miss Violet Harper had started the Willow Tea Rooms five years earlier when it was discovered that their father, the General, had not been as provident as they had hoped. It was a pretty place on the corner of a small square behind Belsize Lane and they had made it nice with willow-pattern china, dimity curtains and a pottery cat on the windowsill. Reared to regard foreigners as, at best, unfortunate, the ladies had stoutly resisted the demands of the refugees who increasingly thronged the district. The Gloriette in St John’s Wood might serve cakes with outlandish names and slop whipped cream over everything, the proprietors of the Cosmo in Finchley might supply newspapers on sticks and permit talk across the tables, but in the Willow Tea Rooms, the decencies were preserved. Customers were offered scones or sponge fingers and, at lunchtime, scrambled eggs on toast, but nothing ever with a smell — and anyone sitting more than half an hour over a cup of coffee, got coughed at, first by Miss Violet, and if this was ineffectual, by the fiercer Miss Maud.

Yet by the summer of 1938, as the bewildered Austrians joined the refugees from Nazi Germany, the ladies, imperceptibly, had changed. For who could cough at Dr Levy, with his walrus moustache and wise brown eyes, not after he had diagnosed Miss Violet’s bursitis — and who could help laughing at Mr Ziller’s imitation of himself playing ‘Dark Eyes’ on the violin to an American lady with a faulty hearing aid?

And now there was Mrs Berger who had come in on her first day in England with her distinguished-looking husband and her nice old uncle, and praised the sponge fingers and showed them photos of her pretty, snub-nosed daughter. Ruth was coming, she was going to study here; soon her boyfriend, a brilliant concert pianist, would follow. The change in Mrs Berger since then had shaken even the General’s daughters, used as they were to stories of loss and grief.

Leonie entered the café, navigated to the chair which Paul Ziller drew out for her, nodded at the actor from the Vienna Burg Theatre in the corner, at old Mrs Weiss in her feathered toque, at an English lady with a poodle…

Dr Levy put down his book on The Diseases of the Knee which he had understood intimately twenty years ago, but which came less trippingly in English from the tongue of a middle-aged heart specialist who’d had no breakfast.

‘I have heard that many student transports are coming in now to Scotland,’ he said, speaking English in deference to the lady with a poodle.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Leonie carefully. ‘My husband enquires.’