Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Ruth, summoned to the Professor’s room, had come in still filled with the happiness his lecture had given her. Now she stood before him with bent head, trying to hold back her tears.

‘But why? Why must I go? I don’t understand.’

‘Ruth, I’ve told you. In my old college in Cambridge members of staff weren’t even allowed to have wives, let alone bring them into college. It’s quite out of the question that I should teach someone I’m married to.’

‘But you aren’t married to me!’ she said passionately. ‘Not properly. You do nothing except send me pieces of paper about not being married. There is epilepsy and being your sister and a nun. And the thing about not consuming… or consummating or whatever it is.’

‘It won’t do, my dear, believe me. With the old VC we might have got away with it, but not with the Placketts. The scandal would be appalling. I’d have to resign which actually I don’t mind in the least, but you’d be dragged into it and start your life under a cloud. Not to mention the delay to our freedom if we were known to have met daily.’

‘All those things with C in them, you mean,’ said Ruth. Fluent though her English was, the legal language was taking its toll. ‘Collusion and… what is it…? Connivance? Consent?’

‘Yes, all those things. Look, leave this to me. I’m pretty sure I can get you on to the course down in Kent. They don’t do Honours but —’

‘I don’t want to go away.’ Her voice was low, intense. She had moved over to the window and one hand went out to rest on Daphne’s arm as though seeking a sister in distress. ‘I don’t want to! Everyone is so kind here. There’s Pilly who has to be a scientist because her father saw you striding about on a newsreel with yaks and that’s not her fault, and I’ve promised Sam that I’d bring Paul Ziller to the Music Club and Dr Felton’s classes are so interesting and he has such trouble with his wife wanting to have a baby and taking her temperature —’

‘He told you that!’ said Quin, unable to believe his ears.

‘No, not exactly — but Mrs Felton came to fetch him and he was delayed and we began to talk. I’m not reserved , you know, like the British. Of course, when we said our marriage should be a secret, that was different. A secret is a secret, but otherwise… Even my goat-herding grandmother used to tell people things. She would roll down her stockings and say “Look!” and you had to examine her varicose veins. She didn’t ask if you wanted to see her veins; she needed to show them. And, of course, the Jewish side of me doesn’t like distance at all, but it’s different with you because you are British and upper class and Verena Plackett is studying Palaeontology so that she can marry you when we have been put asunder.’

Quin made a gesture of impatience. ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Ruth. Now let’s think how —’

‘It isn’t rubbish! She’s bought a new dress for the dinner party tonight because you’re coming. It’s electric-blue taffeta with puffed sleeves. I know because the maid at the Lodge is the porter’s niece and he told me. Of course she is very tall but you could wear your hair en brosse and —’

Quin took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Ruth, I’m sorry; I know you’ve settled in but —’

‘Yes, I have!’ she cried. ‘There’s so much here! Dr Elke showed me her bed bug eggs and they are absolutely beautiful with a little cap on one end and you can see the eyes of the young ones through the shell. And there’s the river and the walnut tree —’

‘And the sheep,’ said Quin bitterly.

‘Yes, that too. But most of all your lecture this morning. It opened such doors. Though I don’t agree with you absolutely about Hackenstreicher. I think he might have been perfectly sincere when he said that —’

‘Oh, you do,’ said Quin, not at all pleased. ‘You think that a man who deliberately falsifies the evidence to fit a preconceived hypothesis is to be taken seriously.’

‘If it was deliberate. But my father had a paper which said that the skull they showed Hackenstreicher could have been from much lower down in the sequence so that it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to have come to the conclusions he did.’

‘Yes, I’ve read that paper, but don’t you see —’

Tempted to pursue the argument, Quin forced himself back to the task that faced him. That Ruth would have been an interesting student was not in question.

‘Look, there’s no sense in postponing this. I shall ring O’Malley and get you transferred to Tonbridge and until then you’d better stay away.’

She had turned her back and was absently retying the scarf, with its motif of riding crops and bridles, round Daphne’s neck. In the continuing silence, Quin’s disquiet grew. He remembered suddenly the child on the Grundlsee reciting Keats… the way she had tried to make a home even in the museum. Now he was banishing her again.

But when she turned to face him, it was not the sad handmaiden of his musings that he saw, not Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. Her chin was up, her expression obstinate and for a moment she resembled the primitive, pugnacious hominid beside whom she stood.

‘I can’t stop you sending me away because you are like God here; I saw that even before you came. But you can’t make me go to Tonbridge. I didn’t intend to go to university, I thought I should stay and work for my family. It was you who said I should go and when I thought you wanted me to come here I was so —’ She broke off and blew her nose. ‘But I won’t start again somewhere else. I won’t go to Tonbridge.’

‘You will do exactly as you are told,’ he said furiously. ‘You will go to Tonbridge and get a decent degree and —’

‘No, I won’t. I shall go and get a job, the best paid one I can find. If you had let me stay I would have done everything you asked me; I would have been obedient and worked as hard as I knew how and I would have been invisible because you would have been my Professor and that would have been right. But now you can’t bully me. Now I am free.’

Quin rose from his chair. ‘Let me tell you that even if I am not your Professor I am still legally your husband and I can order you to go and —’

The sentence remained unfinished as Quin, aghast, heard the words of Basher Somerville come out of his own mouth.

Ruth put a last flourish to the bow round Daphne’s neck.

‘You have read Nietzsche, I see,’ she said. ‘When I go to a woman I take my whip. How suitable that even the scarves your girlfriends leave behind have things on them for beating horses.’

But Quin had had enough. He went to the door, held it open.

‘Now go,’ he said. ‘And quickly.’

The guest list for Lady Plackett’s first dinner party was one of which any hostess could be proud. A renowned ichthyologist just back from an investigation of the bony fish in Lake Titicaca, an art historian who was the world expert on Russian icons, a philologist from the British Museum who spoke seven Chinese dialects and Simeon LeClerque who had won a literary prize for his biography of Bishop Berkeley. But, of course, the guest of honour, the person she had placed next to Verena, was Professor Somerville whom she had welcomed back to Thameside earlier in the day.

By six o’clock Lady Plackett had finished supervising the work of the maids and the cook, and went upstairs to speak to her daughter.

Verena had bathed earlier and now sat in her dressing-gown at her desk piled high with books.

‘How are you getting on, dear?’ asked Lady Plackett solicitously, for it always touched her, the way Verena prepared for her guests.