Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

She did not look particularly affable, but who did when confronted by a camera, and if her mouth turned down at the corners, this was probably some inherited trait and did not indicate ill temper. What mattered was that Ruth was back where she belonged. The daughter of a Vice Chancellor was an entirely suitable companion for the daughter of an erstwhile Dean of the Faculty of Science.

Not I but thou… the refrain of all cradle songs, all prayers with which parents, ungrudging, send their children forth to a better life than their own, rang through Leonie’s head. Verena and Ruth would be the greatest of friends — Leonie was quite sure of it — and nothing, that night, could upset her; not even the smell of burning lentils as the psychoanalyst from Breslau began, at midnight, to cook soup.

Within three days of the beginning of term, Ruth was thoroughly at home at Thameside. To reach the university, she had to walk across Waterloo Bridge and that was like getting a special blessing for the coming day. There was always something to delight her: a barge passing beneath her with washing strung across the deck, or a flock of gulls jostling and screeching for the bread thrown by a bundled old woman who looked poor beyond belief, but was there each day to share her loaf — and once a double rainbow behind St Paul’s.

‘And it always smells of the sea,’ she told Dr Felton, who was becoming not only her tutor but a friend. ‘The rivers in Europe don’t do that — well, how could they with the ocean so far away?’

Dr Felton was a fine teacher, an enthusiast who shared with his students the amazing life of his creatures.

‘Look!’ he would cry like a child as he found, under the microscope, a cluster of transparent eggs from a brittle star, or the flagellum with which some infinitely small creature hurled itself across a drop of liquid. As she prepared slides and made her diagrams, Ruth was in a world where there was no barrier between science and art. Nor could anyone be indifferent to the extraordinarily successful lives led by Dr Elke’s tapeworms, untroubled by the search for food or shelter — living, loving, having their entire being in the secure world of someone else’s gut.

But if the staff were kind, and the work absorbing, it was her fellow students who made Ruth’s first days at Thameside so happy. They had worked together for two years, but they welcomed her without hesitation. There was Sam Marsh, a thin tousle-haired boy with the face of an intelligent rat, who wore a flat cap and a muffler to show his solidarity with the proletariat, and Janet Carter, a cheerful vicar’s daughter with frizzy red hair, whose innumerable boyfriends, of an evening, fell off sofas, got their feet stuck in the steering wheels of motor cars and generally came to grief in their efforts to attain their goal. There was a huge, silent Welshman (but not called Morgan) who was apt to crush test tubes unwittingly in his enormous hands… And there was Pilly.

Pilly’s name was Priscilla Yarrowby, but the nickname had stuck to her since her schooldays for her father was a manufacturer of aspirins. Pilly had short, curly, light brown hair and round blue eyes which usually wore a look of desperate incomprehension. She had failed every exam at least once, she wept over her dis-sections, she fainted at the sight of blood. The discovery that Ruth, who looked like a goose girl in a fairy tale, knew exactly what she was doing, filled Pilly with amazement and awe. That this romantic newcomer (with whom Sam was already obviously in love) was willing to help her with her work and to do so tactfully and unobtrusively, produced an onrush of uncontainable gratitude. Within forty-eight hours of Ruth’s arrival, it became almost impossible to prise poor Pilly from her side.

To the general niceness of the students there was one glaring exception. Verena Plackett’s arrival for the first lecture of term was one which Ruth never forgot.

She was sitting with her new friends, when the door opened and a college porter entered, placed a notice saying Reserved in the middle of the front bench, and departed again, looking cross. Since the lecture was to be given by Dr Fitzsimmons, the gangling, rather vague Physiology lecturer and was attended only by his students, this caused surprise, for Dr Fitzsimmons was not really a puller-in of crowds.

A few minutes passed, after which the door opened once more and a tall girl in a navy-blue tailored coat and skirt entered, walked to the Reserved notice, removed it, and sat down. She then opened her large crocodile-skin briefcase and took out a morocco leather writing case from which she removed a thick pad of vellum paper, an ebony ruler, a black fountain pen with a gold nib and a silver propelling pencil. Next, she zipped up the writing case again, put it back into the briefcase, shut the briefcase — and was ready to begin.

Dr Fitzsimmons had decided to start with an outline of the human digestive system. Moving slowly from the salivary glands of the mouth to the peristaltic movements of the oesophagus, he reached the stomach itself which he drew on the blackboard, occasionally breaking the chalk. And as he spoke, or drew, so did Verena follow him. There was no word that Dr Fitzsimmons uttered that she did not write down in her large, clear script; no ‘and’ or ‘but’ she omitted. Then, at five minutes to ten, she wound down the lead of her propelling pencil, screwed on the top of her fountain pen, opened the briefcase, unzipped the morocco leather writing case… But even when all her belongings were back in place, Verena did not at once follow the other students into the practical class, for she knew how gratifying it must be for a member of staff to have the Vice Chancellor’s daughter in the audience — and approaching the dais where Dr Fitzsimmons, lightly covered in chalk, was obliterating the human stomach, she stepped towards him.

‘You will have gathered who I am,’ she said, graciously holding out her hand, ‘but I feel I should thank you on behalf of my parents and myself for your interesting lecture.’

It was not till she entered the Physiology lab that Verena was compelled to communicate with her fellow students. Waiting on the benches were a number of coiled rubber tubes, each with a syringe on one end, and a slightly daunting set of instructions. Swallow the tube as far as the white mark and remove the contents of the stomach for analysis , they began.

The demonstrator, a friendly young man, came forward helpfully. ‘You will have to work in pairs,’ he said. And to Verena: ‘Since you’re new, Miss Plackett, I thought you might like to work with Miss Berger who’s started this year also.’

Ruth turned and smiled at Verena. She would have preferred to work with Pilly who was looking at her beseechingly, or with Sam, but she was more than ready to be friendly.

Verena, in silence, stood and looked down at Ruth. There had been a row in Belsize Park after Ruth’s acceptance at Thameside. Leonie had announced her intention of selling the diamond brooch she had secreted in her corset and kitting Ruth out for college, and Ruth had refused to hear of it. ‘There’ll be much more important things to spend money on,’ she’d said firmly.

This morning, accordingly, Ruth wore a lavender smock printed with small white daisies to protect her loden skirt — the property of Miss Violet who had a number of such garments in which to serve tea at the Willow. It was not what Ruth would have chosen to wear in a laboratory, but she had accepted gratefully, as she had accepted the virulently varnished pencil box decorated with pink hearts which Mrs Burtt had bought for her from Woolworth’s. Also in Ruth’s straw basket was her lunch — a bread roll in a paper bag — and a bunch of dandelions she had picked to give the sheep in the basement; and her hair, piled high on her head for purposes of experimentation, was bound by a piece of Uncle Mishak’s gardening twine.