Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘I’m nearly ready, Mummy. I managed to get hold of Professor Somerville’s first paper — the one on the dinosaur pits of Tendaguru, and I’ve read all his books, of course. But I feel I should just freshen up on ichthyology if I’m next to Sir Harold. He’s just back from South America, I understand.’

‘Yes… Lake Titicaca. Only remember, it’s the bony fishes, dear.’

Sir Harold was married but really very eminent and it was quite right for Verena to prepare herself for him. ‘I think we’ll manage the Russian icons without trouble — Professor Frank is said to be very talkative. If you have the key names…’

‘Oh, I have those,’ said Verena calmly. ‘Andrei Rublev… egg tempera…’ She glanced briefly at the notes she had taken earlier. ‘The effect of Mannerism becoming apparent in the seventeenth century…’

Lady Plackett, not a demonstrative woman, kissed her daughter on the cheek. ‘I can always rely on you.’ At the doorway she paused. ‘With Professor Somerville it would be in order to ask a little about Bowmont… the new forestry act, perhaps: I shall, of course, mention that I was acquainted with his aunt. And don’t trouble about Chinese phonetics, dear. Mr Fellowes was only a stop gap — he’s that old man from the British Museum and he’s right at the other end of the table.’

Left alone, Verena applied herself to the bony fishes before once again checking off Professor Somerville’s published works. He would not find her wanting intellectually, that was for certain. Now it was time to attend to the other side of her personality: not the scholar but the woman. Removing her dressing-gown, she slipped on the blue taffeta dress which Ruth had described with perfect accuracy and began to unwind the curlers from her hair.

‘I found it fascinating,’ said Verena, turning her powerful gaze on Professor Somerville. ‘Your views on the value of lumbar curve measurements in recognizing hominids seem to me entirely convincing. In the footnote to chapter thirteen you put that so well.’

Quin, encountering that rare phenomenon, a person who read footnotes, was ready to be impressed. ‘It’s still speculative, but interestingly enough they’ve come up with some corroboration in Java. The American expedition…’

Verena’s eyes flickered in a moment of unease. She had not had time to read up Java.

‘I understand that you have just been honoured in Vienna,’ she said, steering back to safer water. ‘It must have been such an interesting time to be there. Hitler seems to have achieved miracles with the German economy.’

‘Yes.’ The crinkled smile which had so charmed her had gone. ‘He has achieved other miracles too, such as the entire destruction of three hundred years of German culture.’

‘Oh.’ But this was a girl who only needed to look at a hound puppy for it to sink to its stomach and grovel — and she recovered her self-possession at once. ‘Tell me, Professor Somerville, what made you decide to start a field course at Bowmont?’

‘Well, the fauna on that coast is surprisingly diverse, with the North Sea being effectively enclosed. Then we’re opposite the Farne Islands where the ornithologists have done some very interesting work on breeding colonies — it was an obvious place for people to get practical experience.’

‘But you yourself? Your discipline? You will be there also?’

‘Of course. I help Dr Felton with the Marine Biology but I also run trips up to the coal measures and down to Staithes in Yorkshire.’

‘And the students stay separately — not in the house?’

‘Yes. I’ve converted an old boathouse and some cottages on the beach into a dormitory and labs. My aunt is elderly; I wouldn’t ask her to entertain my students and anyway they prefer to be independent.’

Verena frowned, for she could see problems ahead, but as the Professor looked as though he might turn to the left, where Mrs LeClerque, the unexpectedly pretty wife of Bishop Berkeley’s biographer, was looking at him from under her lashes, she plunged into praise of the morning’s lecture.

‘I was so intrigued by your analysis of Dr Hackenstreicher’s misconceptions. There seems no doubt that the man was seriously deluded.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Quin, receiving boiled potatoes at the hands of a cold-looking parlourmaid. ‘Miss Berger seemed to find my views unreasonable.’

‘Ah. But she is leaving us, is she not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mother was pleased to hear it,’ said Verena, glancing at Lady Plackett who was talking to an unexpected last-minute arrival: a musicologist just returned from New York whose acceptance had got lost in the post. ‘I think she feels that there are too many of them.’

‘Them?’ asked Quin with lifted eyebrows.

‘Well, you know… foreigners… refugees. She feels that places should be kept for our own nationals.’

Lady Plackett, who had been watching benignly her daughter’s success with the Professor, now abandoned protocol to speak across the table.

‘Well, of course, it doesn’t do to say so,’ she said, ‘but one can’t help feeling that they’ve rather taken over. Of course one can’t entirely approve of what Hitler is doing.’

‘No,’ said Quin. ‘It would certainly be difficult to approve of that.’

‘But she is rather a strange girl in any case,’ said Verena. ‘I mean, she talks to the sheep. There is something whimsical in that; something unscientific.’

‘Jesus talked to them,’ said the philologist from the museum. An old man with a white beard, he spoke with unexpected resolution.

‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ Verena conceded the point. ‘But she recites to it in German.’

‘What does she recite?’ asked the biographer of Bishop Berkeley.

‘Goethe,’ said Quin briefly. He was growing weary of the saga of the sheep. ‘“The Wanderer’s Night Song”’.

The philologist approved. ‘An excellent choice. Though perhaps one might have expected one of the eighteenth-century pastoralists. Matthias Claudius perhaps?’

There followed a surprisingly animated discussion on the kind of lyric verse which might, in the German language, be expected to appeal to the domestic ungulates, and though this was exactly the kind of scholarly banter which Lady Plackett believed in encouraging, she listened to it with a frown.

‘Wasn’t Goethe the man who kept falling in love with women called Charlotte?’ asked the appealingly silly wife of the biographer.

Quin turned to her with relief. ‘Yes, he was. He put it all in a novel called Werther where the hero is so in love with a Charlotte that he kills himself. Thackeray wrote a poem about it.’

‘Was it a good poem?’

‘Very good,’ said Quin firmly. ‘It starts:

And it ends with him being carried away on a shutter.’

Verena, watching this descent into frivolity with a puckered brow, now made a last attempt to bring Professor Somerville back to a subject dear to her heart.

‘When is Miss Berger actually due to leave?’ she asked.

‘It isn’t decided yet.’

He then turned resolutely back to Mrs LeClerque who began to tell him about a friend of hers who had become engaged to no fewer than three men called Henry, all of them unsuitable, and Verena decided to do her duty by her other neighbour.

‘Tell me, do you intend to pursue your researches into the bony fishes here in England?’ she enquired.

But for once her mother had let her down. The last minute arrival of the musicologist had necessitated a change in the seating arrangements. Blank-faced and astonished, the icon expert gazed at her.