Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

She was passing the wrought-iron gates of the houses now; the elegant carriage lamps, and the graceful fan windows which sent semicircles of light out onto the steps. There was no need to peer at house numbers. She had seen the Crossley at once, parked outside the door. Best to get it over then — and she walked resolutely up to the door and rang the bell.

Quin put down his pen, frowning. He had counted on a couple of hours’ work before dinner. It was Lockwood’s weekend off; he’d taken the phone off the hook and planned to finish his paper for the museum journal.

‘Good God! Ruth!’ And seeing her face, ‘What is it?’ Are you in trouble?’

She shook out her hair like a dog and followed him upstairs. ‘Yes, I am. I’m in very serious trouble.’ She spoke in her native language, her words gaining an extra and metaphysical weight.

‘Come in and get warm.’

He took the sodden cloak from her shoulders and led her into the drawing room, but though the curtains were drawn back, she did not go to the window, nor to the grate where a bright fire was burning. Instead she held out her hands to him, the palms upwards in the age-old gesture of beseechment.

‘I can’t stay. I just want you to do something for me. Something terribly important.’

‘What is it, my dear? Just tell me.’

Her head went up. Her entreating eyes held his.

‘I want you to divorce me. Completely and absolutely. This minute. Now.’

There was a pause. Then Quin, schooling his expression, said carefully: ‘I will, of course, do anything I can to help you. But I’m not quite clear how I can divorce you now. Dick Proudfoot is doing —’

‘No!’ she interrupted. ‘It’s nothing to do with Mr Proudfoot and documents and things. It’s much more fundamental than that. It’s to do with undoing a curse.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean that our wedding was a curse. But I knew when we said those words before witnesses… I mean, you might think if someone has bunions and cuts the sides out of their slippers it wouldn’t feel like a wedding, but bunions can’t stop oaths from mattering. So you have to absolve me and I know how you can do it because I asked Mrs Weiss. She wasn’t good about Hanukkah, but she knew about divorce and so did Paul Ziller, and anyway I knew before that. All you have to do is say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, three times. With your hand on my shoulder, I think, but I’m not sure about that. It’s an old Jewish law, truly, and it dissolves the marriage then and there. You should say it in front of a rabbi, but just saying it and really meaning it is what counts. Really repudiating me and wanting to be free. Only you have to say it — the man — because the old Jews were like that; it was the men who counted. And I know if you did it, things would get better. They might even be all right.’

She subsided, running out of breath, and as Quin was silent: ‘You will do it, won’t you?’ she begged. ‘If you said “I divorce thee” it might be better. More biblical.’ And as Quin moved towards the door, she added anxiously: ‘Where are you going?’

Quin did not answer. She heard him cross the landing; then he came back carrying a large white towel.

‘Come here,’ he ordered. ‘Sit down on the sofa. Next to the fire.’

She came, puzzled but obedient, and sat down.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Bend your head.’

‘But —’

‘You came to your wedding with wet hair. At least you can come to your divorce with it dry.’

As he spoke he began to towel her hair — but this was not what she wanted. This was not right. There was nothing in Old Testamental lore about having your hair dried by a husband who was putting you away and she tried to pull back, but it wasn’t like that. It was very peaceful and his hands…

But as he moved away from her scalp and down to the loose hair on her shoulders she became angry. For she could see his hands now and they had been a trouble to her from the start. When she was five years old, her father had brought back a book of Donatello sculptures from Italy and one night when she wasn’t well, he had shown her the plates.

‘A person can’t have made that,’ she had said, sitting on his knee. ‘It’s too beautiful. It must have come from a shop.’

It was the left hand of John the Baptist she had been looking at: the long fingers, one crooked to hold a scroll in place, the sinewy line leading to the wrist.

Now it was all going on again as Quin towelled her hair… as it had gone on in the museum when he helped her sort the cave bear bones… on the Orient Express when he cracked a walnut and laid it on her plate… and endlessly when he jabbed, poked at, emptied and almost never lit his pipe.

‘No, please, you must stop.’ She put up her arm to seize his wrist, but that was a mistake. Quite a big one really.

Quin folded the towel, carried it out of the room, and returned with a small glass containing a liquid the colour of a Stradivarius.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Drink this. It’ll warm you. And then tell me very quietly what all this is about.’

Ruth took the glass, sniffed, drained the Grand Armagnac. A small ‘Oh!’ of appreciation escaped her. She repressed it, called on her resources.

‘What it is about,’ she said, putting up her chin, ‘is… frigidity.’

Quin’s expression did not change. Only his eyebrows rose a fraction as he waited.

‘Proper, awful, medical frigidity, like in a book. Like I was reading about on the Grundlsee. Like in Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and Eugene Feuermann. I must have had a premonition because why would I read about it when I could have been reading Heidi or What Katy Did?’

‘One does wonder,’ murmured Quin.

‘I think I’ve always dreaded it most of all. Being cold. Not responding. Lying there like a log.’

‘Is that what you did?’

Now his expression had changed; the nails bit into his palm, but Ruth was looking at the floor.

‘Not exactly, because I didn’t lie. But effectively.’

‘This is Heini, I suppose? That is what we are talking about?’

Ruth nodded. ‘I told you Heini had changed his mind about Chopin and the études and he is preparing for this very important competition and he is going to play Lizst’s Dante Sonata which is all about the Eternal Feminine and he wanted… love. He said so on Christmas Eve and it was very moving. And when I left the annulment papers on the bus, it didn’t seem any good waiting till we could be married, so I arranged everything and Janet was very helpful and lent us her flat. She even gave me a bottle of wine — it was a Liebfraumilch from the Co-op, but it didn’t taste like the wine we had on the Orient Express.’

‘No,’ said Quin gravely. ‘It wouldn’t do. I have to say that Liebfraumilch from the Co-op might make anyone frigid.’

But to speak lightly was an effort. He wanted to strangle Heini slowly and with his bare hands.

‘Oh, please, it isn’t funny! It’s a frightful condition. Krafft-Ebing says the causes are often psychological, but how could I ever afford to find out what awful thing I saw my parents do — and Fräulein Lutzenholler is a dreadful woman. She’s supposed to be a professional and all she can do is drink cocoa with the skin on and babble about love. And if it’s physical that’s worse because you know how complicated the nervous system is and I don’t want to have operations.’

Quin had mastered himself. ‘Look, Ruth, the first time people make love is often a disaster. It’s a thing that has to be learnt and —’

‘Yes but how can it be? How can it be learnt if people are so frigid that there never is a first time? If they take their sweater off and then put it on again and run away down the fire escape? How can they ever get it right when they don’t even do it?’