Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘If it is petty to want to be in the fresh air, then yes, I’m afraid we will,’ said Quin.

But now it could not be postponed much longer, for the diners were leaving; the waiters were bowing them out and pocketing their tips — and it became necessary for Ruth to face that technically she was on honeymoon with Professor Quinton Somerville and must now go to bed.

‘I’ll stay in the bar for a while and smoke my pipe,’ said Quin, and she rose and made her way down the train, through the dimly lit and silent corridors of the wagon-lits, and into Compartment Number Twenty-Three.

It was no good pretending that this bore the slightest resemblance to the kind of sleeping cubicles she had travelled in previously with their two bunks and narrow ladder. There was no question of climbing up and out of sight till morning, for confronting her were two undoubted beds, separated only by a strip of carpet. Had this been a proper honeymoon, she would have been able to stretch out her hand and hold her husband’s in the night. And the steward had been busy. Quin’s pyjamas, her own shamingly girlish cotton nightdress, were laid out on the monogrammed pillows and, above the marble wash basin, his shaving brush and safety razor rested beside her toothbrush in a manner that was disconcertingly connubial.

In other ways, though, the compartment was more like Aladdin’s cave: the snow-white triangle of the turned down sheets, the pink-shaded lights throwing a glow on the dark panelling… Carafes of fluted glass held drinking water; a bunch of black grapes lay in a chased silver bowl.

She undressed, put on the nightdress she had packed for her ascent of the Kanderspitze — and for a lusting moment imagined herself in eau-de-nil silk pyjamas piped in black. No one would have seen them; she would have stayed entirely under the bedclothes, but she would have known that they were there.

Safely in bed, she turned off the lights to give Quin privacy, turned them on again so that he wouldn’t fall over things — and found that in this marvellous train there was a third alternative — a dimmer switch which caused the room to be filled with a soft, faint radiance like the light inside the petals of a rose.

When Quin came she would roll over to face the wall and pretend to be asleep, but as the train raced through the night, her tired brain threw up images of bridal nights throughout the ages… Of virgins brought to the beds of foreign kings, inserted in four-posters as big as houses to await bridegrooms seen only once in cloth of gold… The Mi-Mi had communal wedding nights; old ladies sang outside the hut of the married couple, young people danced and called encouragement through the wooden slats… And those poor Victorian girls in novels, told the facts of life too late or not at all, who tried to climb up window curtains or hide in wardrobes…

Would she have been looking for wardrobes if this had been a proper wedding night? At least she knew the facts of life — had known them since she was six years old. Now, moving restlessly between the sheets, Ruth wondered if she had pursued her studies a bit too zealously, there on the Grundlsee. Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud… There was so much that could go wrong, all the gentlemen had agreed on that. Frigidity, for example. Ruth had been particularly alarmed about frigidity, being a child who even then preferred fire to ice. But probably that wouldn’t have happened here… not with someone who could always make her laugh.

It was an hour since she had left the dining car. Turning over, she closed her eyes and feigned sleep — but another hour passed, and another, and still he did not come.

She slept at last, only to be woken by a sudden jolt. The train had stopped, footsteps were heard outside, voices raised.

She was instantly terrified. It had happened. She was going to be taken off the train and turned back, as she had been turned back before. The bed beside hers was still empty. Unthinking, desperate, she ran out into the corridor.

Quin was standing by the window. He had pulled up the blind and was looking out at the moonlit landscape — and his pipe, for once, was actually alight.

‘They’re coming!’ she cried. ‘Oh, God, I knew it would go wrong! They’re going to send me back!’

He turned and saw her, half-asleep still, but terribly afraid, and without thought he opened his arms as she, equally without thought, ran into them.

‘Hush,’ he said, holding her, manoeuvring so as to lay his pipe on the narrow windowsill. ‘It’s perfectly all right. There’s something on the line, that’s all. A cow, perhaps.’

‘A cow?’ She blinked up at him, made a negative, despairing movement of the head.

‘One of those fat piebald ones, the kind you get on chocolate wrappers. Milk chocolate, of course; they’re very good milkers, piebald cows.’ He went on talking nonsense till the shivering grew less. Then: ‘We’re over the border,’ he said. ‘We’re absolutely safe. We’re in France.’

But she still couldn’t believe it. ‘Really?’ she said, lifting her face to his. ‘You’re telling me the truth? But how did we get across — no one came to search us. Usually they come and —’ She started to shiver again, knowing the brutality the border guards had shown to other refugees; the way they confiscated at the last minute even the few treasures they had been able to take.

‘I left our passport with the chef du train — the border’s only a formality for us.’

Our passport… The passport in which His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requested and required those whom it concerned to let the bearer pass without let or hindrance… For a moment, Ruth wanted nothing except to belong to this man and his world. With Quin, and those who protected him, one would always be safe. She would even live in a cold house on a northern cliff for that; even endure being left alone by his aunt.

Then, as the terror receded, she became aware that she stood in his arms in the corridor of a train in nothing but her nightdress — and not a suitable nightdress, a childish cotton one with a crumpled ribbon. That she had thrown herself at him and been entirely unashamed when all she owed him for ever and ever was to absent herself, to not make demands on him or claim even another minute of his time. Probably he thought — Oh God, surely not…

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been an idiot,’ she said pulling roughly away. ‘You must think —’

‘I don’t think anything,’ he said, but her fierce withdrawal had made him angry. Did she really think he would take advantage of her — a girl scarcely out of the schoolroom? Hadn’t he made it entirely clear what this marriage was about? ‘You’d better get back to bed,’ he said abruptly — and she saw confirmation of her fears in his set face, and hurried back to the compartment and shut the door.

When she woke in the morning, he was lying fully dressed on the bed with his arms behind his head and his eyes open as he watched the rising sun.

They reached Calais two hours later. Seagulls wheeled above them, porters shouted on the quayside, cranes swung over their heads. This was a clean, white world, as different as could be from the enclosed luxury of the train.

‘I’m really beginning to believe we’ll get there,’ said Ruth.

‘Of course we’ll get there.’

They went on board. Even for the short Channel crossing he had secured a cabin. ‘You’ll need another sweater,’ he said, lifting her suitcase onto the rack. ‘It’ll be cold on deck and you’ll have to pay your respects to the White Cliffs of Dover.’

She nodded and opened the case. On top, carefully packed, was a framed photograph which she had taken from the flat, kept in the museum… even packed, wrapped in her nightdress, in the rucksack with which she proposed to swim into France. Deliberately, she took it out and placed it in Quin’s hands. Here was the chance to show him how committed she was to someone else; to make him see that she would never again forget herself as she had done the previous night.