Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Heini had been ten days in Budapest. It was good to be back in his native city; good to walk along the Corso beside the river and look up at the castle on Buda hill; good to see the steamers glide past on their way to the Black Sea and to taste again the fiery gulyás which the Viennese thought they could make, but couldn’t. There was a fizz, an edge of wit here that was missing in the Austrian capital, and the women were the most beautiful in the world. Not that Heini was tempted — he was finding it all too easy to be faithful to Ruth; and anyway one always had to be careful of disease.

His father still lived in the yellow villa on the Hill of the Roses; the apple trees in the garden were in blossom; they took their meals on the verandah looking down over the Pasha’s tomb and the wooded slopes on to the Gothic tracery of the Houses of Parliament and the gables and roofs of Pest.

Heini did not care for his stepmother; she lacked soul, but with his father still editing the only liberal German newspaper in the city, he had to be glad that there was somebody to care for him.

Nor was there any problem about securing a visa for entry into Great Britain. Hungary was still independent, there was no stampede to leave the country; the quota was not yet full. It would take a little longer than he expected — a few weeks — but there was nothing to feel anxious about.

Best of all, Heini’s old Professor of Piano Studies at the Academy had managed to arrange a concert for him.

‘I’d have liked to organize something big for you in the Vigado,’ Professor Sandor said, mentioning the famous concert hall in which Rubinstein had played and Brahms conducted, ‘but it’s too short notice — and who knows, if you play here in the Academy, Bartók may come and that could lead to something.’

Heini had been properly grateful. He remembered the old building with affection; its tradition stretching back to Liszt and boasting now, in Bartók and Kodály and Dohnányi, as distinguished a group of professors as any music school in the world. It was to be an evening recital in the main hall; he was to get half the proceeds; all in all, Professor Sandor had been most helpful and generous.

But there was a snag. The Concert Committee had asked Heini to include in his programme the sonata that the third-year piano students were studying that term: Beethoven’s tricky and beautiful Opus 99. Heini had no objection to this, but though he had the last ten Beethoven sonatas by heart, this one he would have to play from the score — and that meant a page turner.

It was here that things had begun to go wrong. For Professor Sandor had a daughter, also a piano student, whom he had offered Heini in that role.

‘You’ll find her very intelligent,’ the Professor had said proudly; and at Heini’s first rehearsal Mali had duly appeared — and been a disaster.

Mali was not just plain — an unobtrusively plain girl would not have upset him — she was virulently ugly; her spectacles glinted and caught the light; she had buck teeth. Not only that, but she drove him nearly mad with her humble eagerness, her desperate desire to be of use, and though she could hardly fail to be able to read music, she was so hesitant, so terrified of being hasty, that several times he had had to nod at the bottom of the page. Worst of all, Mali perspired.

Heini had missed Ruth ever since he had come to Budapest, but in the days leading up to the concert his longing for her became a constant ache. Ruth turned over so gracefully, so skilfully that one hardly knew she was there; she smelled sweetly and faintly of lavender shampoo and never, in the years she’d sat beside him, had he found it necessary to nod.

Nor was his stepmother at all aware of the kind of pressures that playing in public put on him. Heini’s hands were insured, of course, and taking care of them had become second nature, but a pianist used all his body and when he tripped over a dustpan she had left on the stairs, he could not help being upset.

‘I’m not being fussy,’ he said to Marta, ‘but if I sprained my ankle, I wouldn’t be able to pedal for a month.’

It had been so different in the Bergers’ apartment, which had become his second home. Not only Ruth but her mother and the maids were happy to serve him, as he in turn served music.

But it was on the actual day of the concert that Heini’s need for Ruth became almost uncontainable.

The day began badly, when he was woken at nine o’clock by the sound of the maid hoovering the corridor outside his room. He always slept late on the day of a concert, but when he complained, his stepmother said that the girl had to get through her work and pointed out that Heini had already spent ten hours in bed.

‘In bed, but not asleep,’ Heini said bitterly — but he didn’t really expect her to understand.

Then there was the question of lunch. Heini could never eat anything heavy before he played and in Vienna Ruth always made a point of getting to the Café Museum early to keep a corner table and make sure that the beef broth, which was all that he could swallow, was properly strained and the plain rusks well baked. Whereas Marta seemed to expect him to play on a diet of roast pork and dumplings!

Leaving the house earlier than he had intended, Heini, walking down the fashionable Váci utca, faced yet another challenge: the purchase of a flower for his buttonhole. A gardenia was probably too formal for the Academy, a camellia too, but a carnation, a white one, should strike the right note. Ruth, of course, had bought his buttonholes — he had watched her once, searching for a flawless bloom, involving the shop assistant, who knew her well, in the excitement of kitting him out.

Bravely now, Heini went in alone and found a girl to help him. It was only when he came out again, his flower safe in cellophane, that he realized that he did not have a pin.

In the hall of the Academy, Professor Sandor was waiting.

‘It’s an excellent attendance — almost full. Considering we had less than two weeks for the publicity and there’s a premiere at the opera, we can be very pleased.’

Heini nodded and went to the green-room — and there was Mali in an unbelievably ugly dress: crimson crepe which clung unsuitably to her bosom and exposed her collar bones. The splash of colour would distract the eye even from the back of the hall. Ruth always chose dresses that blended with the colours of the hall, quiet dresses which nevertheless became her wonderfully.

‘Do you have a pin?’ he asked — and Mali did at least have that and managed, fumbling and nervous, to fasten the carnation in his buttonhole. ‘I shall need to be quiet now,’ he added firmly, and sat down as far away from her as possible.

Not that this ensured him the peace he craved. Mali fidgeted incessantly with the Beethoven sonatas, checking the pages; she cleared her throat…

Ruth knew exactly how to quieten him during those last moments before a concert or an exam. She brought along a set of dominos and they played for a while, or she just sat silently with her hands folded and that marvellous hair of hers bright and burnished, but taken back with a velvet band so that it didn’t tumble forward and distract the audience. Ruth made sure he had fresh lemonade waiting for him in the interval; he never had to think about his music, it was always there and in the right order. And now, glancing in the mirror, he saw that his carnation was listing quite noticeably towards the left!

‘Five minutes,’ called the page, knocking on the door.

‘My handkerchief!’ said Heini suddenly in a panic. The white one in the pocket of his dinner jacket was there, of course, but the other one, the one with which he wiped his hands between the pieces…