Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘For God’s sake, Ruth, what’s the matter? It’s all over now. Tomorrow evening you’ll be with your family.’

She blew her nose, shook out her hair.

‘You see, we shall be cursed!’

‘Cursed! What on earth are you talking about? Could we have less of the Old Testament, please?’

‘Ha! You see… Now you are also anti-Semitic.’

‘Well, I do think this might be the moment to take after the goat-herding grandmother rather than some gloomy old rabbi. What do you mean, we shall be cursed?’

‘Because of the words. Because we said those words before witnesses. I didn’t think the words would be so strong. And you shouldn’t have said that about with my worldly goods I thee endow because even if we were going to do the worshipping with the body, there would still be Morgan.’

‘Ah, Morgan. I thought we hadn’t heard the last of him. Look, Ruth, it doesn’t become you, this kind of fuss. You know what Hitler is like, you know what had to be done.’

‘I should have escaped over the border; I should not have let you swear things that are lies.’

Quin too was very weary. It was with difficulty that he repressed his views on her ascent of the Kanderspitze. ‘Come, we’ll go to the Imperial and have two whopping schnitzels. Because one thing you’ll find it hard to come by in London is a decent piece of frying veal.’

‘I can’t go in these old clothes. And if I’m seen…’

Quin’s arrogance was quite unconscious. ‘Nothing can happen to you now. You are a British subject — and in my care.’

The schnitzels were a success. When they left the restaurant, her hair was dry and enveloped her in a manner that was disorganized, but cheerful. He had already gathered that it was a kind of barometer, like seaweed.

‘We’ve still got three hours left. Where would you like to go on your last afternoon in Vienna?’

To his surprise, she suggested they take a tram to the Danube. He knew how little the wide, grey river, looping round the industrial suburbs of the city, actually concerned the Viennese. Gloomy Johann Strauss, with his dyed moustaches and inability to smile, might have written the world’s most famous waltz in tribute to the river, but the Danube’s vicious flooding had compelled the inhabitants, centuries ago, to turn their backs on it.

But when they stood on the Reich Bridge, it was clear that Ruth was on a pilgrimage.

‘Do you see that little bay over there, just by the warehouse?’

He nodded…

‘Well, my Uncle Mishak used to fish there — only he’s my great-uncle really. That was years and years ago. Imagine it, the Kaiser was still on his throne and Austria and Hungary were joined up. One could take a barge down to Budapest — no passport, no restrictions. Anyway, Uncle Mishak had joined my grandfather in his department store, but he loved the open air and every Sunday he went fishing. Only on this particular Sunday, instead of a fish, he caught a bottle!’ She turned to Quin, full of narrative self-importance. ‘It was a lemonade bottle and inside it was a message!’

Quin was impressed, knowing how rarely messages in bottles are ever read.

‘It said: My name is Marianne Stichter, I am twenty-four years old and I am very sad. If you are a kind and good man, please come and fetch me. And she’d put the address of the school where she taught. It was in a village on the river near Dürnstein — you know, where Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned.’

‘Go on.’

‘The school was run by her father and he was a sadist and a bully. There was an elder sister who’d married and escaped, but Marianne was quiet and plain and shy, and she had a stammer, and he’d made her teach the junior class. Of course, the children all imitated her — every time she entered the classroom, she just wanted to die.’

Ruth paused and looked at Quin, savouring, on his behalf, what was to follow.

‘Then one day she was giving a Geography lesson on the rivers of South America when the door opened and a small man in a dark suit and homburg hat came in, carrying a briefcase.

‘The children started tittering but she didn’t even hear them, she just stood and looked at the little man. Then my Uncle Mishak took off his hat — he was pretty bald by then, and he wore gold pince-nez, and he said: “Are you Fräulein Stichter?” He wasn’t really asking, he knew, but he waited till she nodded and then he said: “I have come to fetch you.” Just like that. “I have come to fetch you.” And he opened his briefcase and took out the note from the bottle.’

‘And she came?’

Ruth smiled and parted her hair with her fingers so that she could narrate unimpeded. ‘She didn’t say anything. Not a word. She picked up the duster and very carefully she wiped off the rivers of South America — the Negro and the Madeira and the Amazon. Then she put the chalk back into the box and opened a cupboard and took out her hat and put it on. The children had stopped tittering and started gawping, but she walked down between the desks and she didn’t even see them; they didn’t exist. At the door, Uncle Mishak gave her his arm — he didn’t come much above her shoulder — and they walked across the play yard and down the road and got on the paddle boat for Vienna — and no one there ever saw them again!’

‘And they were happy?’

Ruth put a hand up to her eyes. ‘Ridiculously so. People laughed at them — plumping each other’s cushions, pulling out footstools. When she died he tried to die too, but he couldn’t manage it. That’s when my mother made him come to us.’

Back in the Inner City, Ruth pointed out the balcony on which she had stood stark naked at midnight, at the age of nine, hoping that pneumonia would release her from disgrace and ruin.

‘It was my great-aunt’s flat and I’d just heard that I only got Commended instead of Highly Commended in my music exam. Oh, and look, here’s the actual bench where my mother was overcome by pigeons and my father rescued her.’

‘There seem to have been a lot of happy marriages in your family,’ said Quin.

‘I don’t know… Uncle Mishak was happy, and my parents… but in general I don’t think they thought of it as something that made you happy.’

‘What then?’

Ruth was frowning. One ear turned colour slightly as she strangled it in a loop of hair. ‘It was what you did… because you had set out to do it. It was… work; it was like ploughing a field or painting a picture — you kept on adding colours or trying to get the perspective right. The women in particular. My Aunt Miriam’s husband was unfaithful and she kept ringing my mother and saying she was going to kill him, but when people suggested divorce she was terribly shocked.’ She looked up, her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I’m terribly sorry… I don’t mean us, of course. These were proper marriages, not ones with Morgan.’

Their last visit was to St Stephan’s Cathedral, the city’s symbol and its heart.

‘I’d like to light a candle,’ said Ruth, and he let her go alone up the sombre, incense-scented nave.

Waiting at the door, he saw across the square two terrified fair-haired boys with broad peasant faces being dragged towards an army truck by a group of soldiers.

‘They’re rounding up all the Social Democrats,’ said a plump, middle-aged woman with a feather in her hat. There was no censure in her voice; no emotion in the round, pale eyes.

Making his way to where Ruth knelt, determined to take her out by a side door, Quin found that she had lit not one candle but two. No need to ask for whom — all roads led to Heini for this girl.

‘Shall I ever come back, do you think?’

Quin made no answer. Whether Ruth would return to this doomed city, he did not know, but he and his like would surely do so, for he did not see how this evil could be halted by anything but war.