Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Her appointment with Dr Felton was for 2.30; glancing at the clock which topped the archway to the river, she saw that she was ten minutes early. About to make her way towards the water’s edge, she was arrested by a sound of unutterable melancholy coming from the basement of the Science Building on her left. Letting go of the rose she had been smelling, she turned her head. The noise came again and this time it was unmistakable. Somewhere down there, in a state of apparent distress and abandonment, was a sheep.

Picking up her basket, Ruth made her way down the stone steps, pushed open a door — and found herself in a dusty, unlit laboratory. A Physiology lab, instantly familiar from her days in Vienna when she had ridden her tricycle through the animal huts of the university, watched by the pink eyes of a thousand snow-white rats. There were indeed rats here, and the big bins holding the flaky yellow maze they fed on, a pair of scales, microscopes, a centrifuge… and in one corner, staring from a wooden pen, the pale face and melancholy, Semitic snout of a large white ewe.

‘Ah yes, you’re lonely,’ said Ruth approaching. In the deserted room, she spoke in the soft dialect of Vienna. ‘But you see I musn’t touch you because you belong to Science. You’re an experimental animal; you’re like a Vestal Virgin dedicated to higher things.’

The sheep butted its head against the side of the pen, then lifted it hopefully to gaze at her with its yellow eyes. It seemed to be devoid of tubes or other signs of experimentation — seemed in fact to be in excellent health — but Ruth, well-trained as she was, kept her distance.

‘I can see that you aren’t where you would choose to be,’ she went on, ‘but I assure you that right now the world is full of people who are not where they would choose to be. All over Belsize Park and Finchley and Swiss Cottage I could show you such people. And you belong to a noble race because you are in the psalms and St Francis chose you to preach to and I can see why because you have listening eyes.’

The sheep’s butting became more frenzied, but its mood was lifting. The string of bleats it was emitting seemed to be social rather than despairing. Then quite suddenly it sat down, sticking out one hoof and extending its neck like someone listening to a lecture.

‘Very well, I will recite some Goethe for you which you will like, I think, because he is an extremely calming poet, though somewhat melancholy, I do admit. Now let me see, what would you like?’

In his room on the second floor of the Science Building, Dr Roger Felton blew the contents of a pipette into a tank of sea slugs and frowned. There should have been wreaths of translucent eggs now, hanging on the weeds, and there were not. He could get more slugs from the zoo, but he had set his heart on breeding his own specimens — not just for the students in his Marine Biology class, but because the Opisthobranchia , with their amazingly large nerve cells, were his particular interest.

All round the room, in salt-water tanks cooled and aerated by complicated tubes and pumps, a series of creatures swam or scuttled or clung to the sides of the glass: sea urchins and brittle stars, prawns and cuttle fish, and an octopus currently turning pink inside a hollow brick. Dr Felton loved his subject and taught it well. The nuptial dance of the ragworm on the surface of the ocean, the selfless paternity of the butterfish, entranced him as much now as it had done when he first beheld it fifteen years ago, but there were problems, not least of them the new Vice Chancellor who had made it clear that it was publications that counted, not teaching.

Dr Felton was aware that he ought to spend more time on his research and less on the students, but someone had to see to them with the Prof so much away. Not that he grudged Quin his journeys — having a man of that calibre in the department made all the difference. If Felton had any doubts they would have been stilled by the two terms during which Professor Robinson had done Quin’s teaching and the sound of laughter vanished from the common room.

Still, instead of getting ready to stimulate the posterior ganglion of the slug he had placed in readiness on a Petri dish, he now had to interview the new student wished on them by University College who had made a mess of things. Moving over to his desk, he took out Ruth Berger’s particulars and glanced through the eulogy provided by Vienna for the benefit of UC and now passed on to him. She certainly seemed to be well up to the standard of the third years and able to take her Finals in the summer. Her exam results were excellent and her father was an eminent palaeontologist. Even without the Prof’s instructions to accept refugees at all costs, he would have tried to find a place for her.

A knock at the door made him look up, ready to receive Miss Berger. But the figure who strode into the room, filling it with her bulk, her Nordic blondeness and Valkyrie-like strength, was Dr Elke Sonderstrom, the Lecturer in Parasitology, who worked in the room next to his.

‘Come downstairs a minute, Roger. But quietly — don’t say anything.’

Dr Felton looked enquiring, but Elke, grasping a tube of liver flukes in her mighty hand, only said: ‘I went down to the basement to use the centrifuge and — well, you’ll see.’

Puzzled, he followed her down two flights of stairs, to be met by Humphrey Fitzsimmons, the tall, skeletally thin physiologist.

‘She’s still there,’ he whispered, putting a finger to his lips.

The Physiology lab was bathed in Stygian gloom, yet at the far end of it they could make out a gleam of brightness which revealed itself as a girl’s abundant, loose and curling hair. She was draped over the side of the sheep pen, entirely absorbed, and at her feet was a straw basket which somehow suggested cornucopias and garlands and the flower-picking orgies of Greek girls on the slopes of Parnassus.

But it wasn’t the shining hair, the girl’s bent head, which held them. It was not even the unusual attitude of the listening sheep. No, what kept the three silent watchers transfixed, was the girl’s voice. She was reciting poetry and she was doing it in German.

All of them, to some extent, were familiar with the German language. It came daily from the wireless in Hitler’s obscene and hysterical rantings. As scientists they had waded through pages of it in various Zeitschriften , hoping to be rewarded, after interminable clauses, by a single verb.

But this… That German could sound so caressing, so lilting, so… loving. Dr Elke closed her eyes and was back in the wooden house on the white strand of Öland while her mother arranged harebells in a pottery jug. Humphrey Fitzsimmons, too upper class to have seen much of his mother, recalled the soft eyes of the water spaniel he’d owned as a boy. And Dr Felton remembered that his wife, whose red-rimmed eyes followed him in incessant reproach because they couldn’t start a baby, had once been a snowflake in the Monte Carlo Ballet with a borrowed Russian name and an endearing smile.

The girl’s voice grew ever softer, and ceased. She picked up her basket and bade the sheep farewell. Then, turning, she saw them.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said in English. ‘But I swear I haven’t touched her — not even with one finger. I swear by Mozart’s head!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fitzsimmons, still bemused. ‘She’s not being used for anything. She was supposed to be part of a batch to use for a government feeding trial, but they cancelled it after Munich and the rest of the animals never turned up.’

‘What was the poem?’ Dr Elke asked.

‘It’s by Goethe. It’s called “The Wanderer’s Night Song”. It’s a bit sad, but I suppose great poems always are and it’s a very rural sort of sadness with mountains and birdsong and peace.’