Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

The blissful, self-seeking greed of a secure child who longs to gobble up the world was something he never forgot. Ruth was not sorry for him, she wanted him for her own purposes. Mishak changed his mind and came; they saw the llamas and more…

Now sitting in Kensington Gardens watching the children sail their boats, this quiet old man who preferred not to step on molehills in case there was someone at home, found that his knuckles had whitened on the sides of the bench, and knew that he would kill without compunction anyone who harmed his niece.

Professor Berger said little about his lost daughter. He went to Bloomsbury House each morning, he worked in the library each afternoon, but no one, now, would have taken him for a man of fifty-eight. Then one morning he took a bus to Harley Street where his sponsor, Dr Friedlander, had his dental practice.

‘I’m going back to Vienna,’ he said. ‘I’m going to find Ruth and I have to ask you to lend me the fare.’

No one knew what it cost him to ask for money. Since their arrival the Bergers had taken nothing from their sponsor in spite of frequent offers of help.

‘You can have the fare and welcome,’ said Friedlander. ‘I’ll lend it to you; I’ll give it to you. The poor Englanders are so grateful for someone who doesn’t pull out their teeth as soon as they sit down that they’re beating a path to my door. But you’re mad, Kurt. They won’t let you out again and then what’ll happen to Leonie? Is that what you imagine Ruth wants?’

‘I can’t do nothing,’ said the Professor, ‘it isn’t possible.’

‘Have you told Leonie that you mean to return?’

‘Not yet. There’s a big student transport coming on Thursday. I’ll wait till then, but after that…’

Leonie, meanwhile, continued to be good. She approached the psychoanalyst from Breslau and tried to persuade that black-haired, gloomy lady to let her help with the cooking so as to ensure a less lingering death for the bruised vegetables that were Fräulein Lutzenholler’s diet. She fetched Paul Ziller’s shirts from his room three houses down and washed them, and ironed his cummerbund, and she visited other émigrés in outlying suburbs. But at the end of the second week her body was beginning to take over. She had fits of dizziness, her skirt began to slip as she spectacularly lost weight. More frighteningly, she was finding it increasingly difficult to be good. She wanted to hit people, to throttle Miss Bates in her ever-dripping underwear. And if she stopped being good, the thin thread that bound her to a beneficent providence would snap and precipitate her daughter into hell.

Mrs Burtt, drying cups in the scullery behind the Willow Tea Rooms, was in a bad mood. She personally did not care for Jews, gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Commies, the world over, deserved everything they got. But the papers that morning had been even fuller than usual of nastiness — people in Berlin and Vienna being rounded up, old professors having to scrub the streets with toothbrushes — and though she didn’t even know where the Polish Corridor was and didn’t mind much what happened to the people in the Sudetenland, whoever they were, it was beginning to look as though something would have to be done about Hitler. Which brought her stomach lurching downwards yet again, because one of the people who would be doing it would be her nineteen-year-old son, Trevor, who that morning had said he fancied the air force.

The customers were in low spirits too, she could tell even without going out in front. They weren’t talking like they usually did, just reading the copies of Country Life the ladies now brought downstairs. It was odd how they fancied all those pictures of stately homes and the debutantes with the long necks who were going to marry the Honourable Somebody or Other. You wouldn’t think they’d be so keen, all those professors and doctors full of degrees and learning.

Still, the guggle cake had turned out a treat. Miss Maud had baked it last night and Miss Violet had iced it, and though it didn’t seem all that different to the rich sponge her auntie made except it was in a wiggly mould, the customers would be pleased. It had been Miss Violet’s idea to wait till Mrs Berger came and let her have the first slice on the house: sort of like launching a ship — and the least you could do with what was happening to her daughter.

Only Mrs Berger, this morning, was late.

Mrs Burtt was right. There was a new hopelessness in the air. Everyone knew that Ruth had not been on the student transport and that Professor Berger intended to go back to Vienna. Now they faced the long weekend, so dreaded by exiles, when every place that could help them was closed and even the libraries and cafés which sheltered them were barred.

Paul Ziller, trying to immerse himself in an article about the oiling of field guns, had dreamt yet again about his second violin, the plump, infuriating, curly-headed Klaus Biberstein whose terrible jokes had sent the quartet into groans of protest, whose unsuccessful pursuit of leggy blondes was a byword — and who only had to tuck his Amati under his chin to become a god. Ziller missed his cellist, now playing in a dance band in New York, and his viola player who was entirely Aryan and had stayed behind, but missing Biberstein was different because he was dead. Hearing the storm troopers come up the stairs to his fourth-floor flat he had shouted to the passers by to clear the pavement, and jumped.

Dr Levy was playing chess with the blond actor from the Burg Theatre, but it was hard to concentrate for today he knew with certainty that he would never resit his medical exams in English. At forty-two he was too old to begin again — and even if he passed, they would find some other regulation for keeping him from practising. Not that he blamed the medical profession. In Vienna the doctors had been just as repressive, banding together against émigrés from the East.

‘I’m going to take your knight,’ he said to von Hofmann, who had not been allowed to say Schweinehund or anything else in a film about the Great War. The actor’s union had objected, and anyway with another war perhaps on the way, no one wanted films about soldiers. They wanted Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and Deanna Durbin. They wanted ocean liners and Manhattan apartments furnished all in white — and who ever said Schweinehund in them?

The lady with the poodle entered, disappointing Mrs Weiss, with her bulging horsehair purse, who had hoped it was someone for whom she could buy a cake and tell about her daughter-in-law who that morning had forced open her bedroom window with some rubbish about rooms needing to be aired. Mrs Weiss had never allowed wet air into a room in which she slept and had told Moira so, and Georg (now called George) who should have taken his mother’s part, had slunk off to the garage and gone to work.

At the table by the hat stand the banker and his wife from Hamburg sat in silence, each reading a magazine. In Germany they had been a successful and well-established ménage à trois , but Lisa’s lover, a racially pure car salesman, had stayed behind and though he tried to take his place, the banker knew that he was failing. The walls of their small room were thin, the bed narrow — and afterwards, always, she sighed.

Then Leonie entered the café — and the sadness that was in all of them found a focus. There was no need to ask if there was any news. This was a Demeter who had given up all hope of rescuing her daughter from the Underworld. Ruth, like Persephone, was lost, and in the streets of North-West London, winter had come.

Supported by her husband and uncle, Leonie reached her table and sat down, but no one today did more than nod a greeting. Even a smile seemed intrusive.