Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Thus Quin, walking lightly up the steps between the little box trees in tubs — and Mr Cavour, seeing him coming, metaphorically licked his lips.

‘What had you in mind?’ he asked when Quin had been shown to a blue velvet chair beside a rosewood desk. In the show cases, lit like treasures of the Hermitage, were Fabergé Easter eggs, earrings trembling with showers of crystal, a butterfly brooch worn by the exiled Spanish Queen. ‘What kind of gems, for example?’

Quin smiled, aware that he was cutting a slightly absurd figure: a man willing to mortgage himself for a gift with only the haziest notions of its nature. What gems did he have in mind? Diamonds? Sinbad had found a valley filled with them; they were lodged in the brains of serpents and carried aloft in eagle’s bills. The Orlov diamond had been plucked from the eye of an Indian idol… the Great Mogul, the most famous jewel in antiquity, was the favourite treasure of Shah Jahan.

Were diamonds right for Ruth, with her warmth, her snub nose and funniness? Was there too much ice there for his new-found wife?

‘Or we have a ruby parure,’ said Mr Cavour. ‘The stones are from the Mogok mines; unmatchable. The true pigeon’s blood colour. They were sold to an American by the Grand Duchess Tromatoff and they’re just back on the market.’

Quin pondered. Mogok, near Mandalay… paddy fields… temples… He had been there, making a detour after an earlier expedition and had seen the mines. Why not rubies with their inner fire?

‘And there is a pearl and sapphire necklace which you would be hard put to match anywhere in the world. Someone is interested in it, but if you wished to make a definite offer…’ He flicked at an underling. ‘Go on down to the safe, Ted, and get Number 509.’

Quin’s mind was still in free fall, pursuing he knew not what. The Profane Venus was always painted richly dressed in a fillet of pearls. It was the Celestial Venus that they painted naked, for they knew, those wise men of the Renaissance, that nakedness was pure. Either was all right with him: Ruth in her loden cape, loaded with jewels; Ruth without it at midnight, eating a peach.

The box was brought, snapped open. The necklace was superb.

‘Yes… it’s very beautiful,’ said Quin absently.

Then suddenly it came, the clue, the allusion… the thing he had been waiting for: Ruth, barefoot with windblown hair, coming towards him on Bowmont beach, cupping something in her hand. ‘Look,’ she was saying, ‘Oh, look !’

He rose, waved away the necklace. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I know now what it has to be. I know exactly!’

His next errand did not take him long.

Dick Proudfoot had returned from Madeira, suntanned and pleased with life. He had also produced four watercolours of which only three displeased him. Now, however, he looked down at the complicated document, with its seals and tassels — a replica of the first which his clerk had brought in when Professor Somerville appeared unexpectedly in the office — and up again at Quin.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me! I want you to tear the thing up. I’m stopping the annulment. I’m staying married.’

Proudfoot leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head.

‘Well, well. I can’t say I’m surprised.’ He grinned. ‘Allow me to congratulate you.’

It struck him that he had not seen Quin look so relaxed and happy for a long time. The volcanic craters were missing; there was peace in those alert, enquiring eyes. Proudfoot pulled the document towards him, tore it in two, dropped it in the wastepaper basket. ‘Quite apart from anything else, it’s a great relief — we were on pretty dodgy ground all along. Will you be living at Bowmont?’

‘Yes. She fits the place like a glove — she was only there a few days, yet everyone remembers her: the shepherd, the housemaids… it’s uncanny!’ For a moment, a slight shadow fell over his face. ‘The trouble is, I’ve set up this trip to Africa.’

But even as he spoke, Quin realized what he would do. The climate on the plains was healthy; the trip was not hazardous — and in an emergency Ruth could always stay with the Commissioner and his wife at Lindi.

‘Do you want me to write to Ruth?’

‘No; I’ll tell her myself. And thanks, Dick, you’ve been splendid. If you send your account to Chelsea I’ll settle it before I go.’

He had reached the door when Proudfoot called him back. ‘Have you got a minute?’

Though he was impatient to be gone, Quin nodded. Dick went to a bureau by the wall, opened a drawer, took out a small painting: a feathery tamarisk, each brush stroke as light as gossamer, against a mass of scarlet geraniums.

‘I did it in Madeira. Do you think she’d like it? Ruth?’

‘I’m sure she would.’

‘I’ll get it framed then and send it along.’

Out in the street, Quin looked at his watch. Ruth should have received his gift by now — Cavour had promised to send it instantly. Light-headed from lack of sleep and the conviction that he would live for ever, he turned his car towards the museum. It shouldn’t be difficult to book an extra cabin on the boat, but he’d better put Milner on to it right away. And how very agreeable to know that Brille-Lamartaine, if he chose to make further enquiries, would learn nothing but the truth. For he was taking along a woman, one of his own students… and one with whom he was passionately in love!

Ruth had not expected to go to sleep after she left Quin. She had crept in and climbed into her bed only wanting to relive the whole glorious night again, but she had fallen instantly into deep oblivion.

Now, as she woke and stretched, it was to a transformed world. The bedroom she shared with her Aunt Hilda, with its swirling brown wallpaper, had never seemed to be a place in which to let the eye linger, but now she could imagine the pleasure the designer must have felt in being allowed to wiggle paint about. And Hilda herself, as she brushed her sparse hair, seemed to Ruth the personification of the academic ideal — devoted all her life to a tribe she never saw, made ecstatic by a chipped arrowhead or drinking cup. How good Aunt Hilda was, how grateful Ruth was to be her niece!

She swung her feet over the side of the bed, smiled at the shrunken head. She was walking now over the buried biscuit tin containing her wedding ring, her marriage certificate. Soon — today perhaps — she could dig it up and take it to her mother.

‘I’m married, Mama,’ she would say. ‘I’m married to Professor Somerville and I love him terribly and he loves me.’

She slipped on her dressing-gown and went to the window and here too was a beauty she had never perceived before. True, the gasometer was still there, but so was the sycamore in the next-door garden and, yes, the bark was sooty and one of the branches was dead — but oh, the glory of the brave new leaves!

On the landing she encountered Fräulein Lutzenholler, glowering, with her sponge bag.

‘He is in the bathroom,’ she said.

There was no need for Ruth to ask who. It was always Heini who was in the bathroom. But this morning she did not rush to Heini’s defence, she was too busy loving Fräulein Lutzenholler who had been so right about everything: who had said that we lose what we want to lose, forget what we want to forget… who had said that frigidity was about whether you loved someone or not. Ruth, in her dramatic nonfrigidity, beamed at the psychoanalyst and would have kissed her but for the moustache and the knowledge that, so early in the morning, she could not yet have cleaned her teeth.

‘Hurry up, Heini,’ called Ruth.

The thought of Heini did halt her. Heini was going to be badly hurt and for a moment her joy was clouded by apprehension. But only for a moment. Heini would find another starling — a whole flock of them in years to come. It was music he loved, and rightly — and what had happened last night was beyond anything one could be sorry for. It was a kind of metallurgical process, a welding of body and soul; you couldn’t argue about it.