Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

But in the morning she had decided to go to college.

‘Ruth, you’re not fit to go,’ said Leonie, looking at her daughter’s drawn face and quenched eyes.

‘I must, Mama. It is the last day of term and Professor Somerville’s last lecture.’

She had said his name. She had been British like Lord Nelson on the column.

But in the Underground, she faced the truth. It wasn’t courage, it was the impossibility of not being where he was, and it was then, staring at Mr Therm and the Phonotas girl who would come weekly to clean and sterilize your telephone, that the abject, crawling thoughts came back again. For she had pleased him a little; she knew that. If she accepted his terms, if she kept away from Bowmont and his public life… if she got a job somewhere here in London and found a flat… a cheap flat like Janet’s where he could come sometimes? The annulment could go ahead, he could marry some girl of his own world if he wished, but she would be there. Just to see him once in a while… just to know that she didn’t have to be pushed forward into grey deserts of time without him.

No, it wouldn’t work. Secret love nests were for people in control, not for people who thought they would die if someone got out of bed to fetch a glass of water. She loved him far too much for that, she would make scenes and demands. There was only one thing to do — finish her degree and get right away for ever.

When she got out at the Embankment and made her way to the lift, she found that Kenneth Easton had been on the same train. Kenneth was usually unfriendly, copying Verena’s attitude, but today he seemed to want to walk with her and Ruth saw that he looked pale and wretched, so that their reflections, in the mirror of a shop, showed a pair of weary, green-faced wraiths.

‘You look a bit tired,’ said Ruth, as they made their way to the bridge.

‘Yes, I am,’ said Kenneth. ‘I am very tired. I didn’t sleep at all.’

‘It’s been a long term,’ said Ruth. ‘You’ll be able to take it easy after tomorrow. And you’ve been playing a lot of squash — that’s tiring.’

Kenneth turned to her, his long face showing signs of gratitude, for she had given him the lead he wanted.

‘Yes, I have been playing a lot of squash and it’s a very expensive occupation. And in other ways too… you may think it’s easy all the time to say napkin instead of serviette and that Featherstonehaugh is pronounced Fanshaw, but it can be quite a strain and my mother doesn’t always understand. In Edgware Green a toilet is a toilet and if you suddenly start saying loo people look at you. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered because I really thought that Verena might grow to care for me.’

They had reached the river and Ruth, for a moment, lost concentration. (‘I shall buy a thousand lemonade bottles and put a note in each and every one…’)

When she could hear Kenneth again, he was admitting to his foolishness. ‘I sort of declared myself. It was last night after squash and we were having a drink together in the club and it was so companionable. I completely forgot that my father was a grocer. He’s dead, of course, but that only makes it worse. If he’d lived he might have gone on to other things, but now he’s a grocer for ever.’

‘And Verena turned you down?’

‘Yes, she did. And she told me about Professor Somerville and that seemed to make it worse. I knew she cared for him, of course, but I thought it might just be one-sided — only when she told me about Africa, I realized —’

Watch the water, Ruth told herself. Water heals… it carries away pain. ‘What about Africa?’

‘That the Professor is taking her. She knew before, but she didn’t say anything because it’s a secret — and yesterday she went to the Geophysical Society and the Professor’s assistant had just been to arrange for a special cabin. No one’s supposed to know — I shouldn’t be telling you. You won’t say anything, will you, Ruth? Promise?’

‘No, Kenneth. Of course I won’t.’

‘I should have understood. They always stick together, the upper classes. People like us are all right for them to amuse themselves with, but when it comes to the point we’re nowhere. My father’s a grocer, that’s all there is to it. I never had a chance.’

No. I never had a chance either. My father is something worse than a grocer. Well, at least she was spared the humiliation of offering herself to Quin as a kind of concubine. The African journey was bound to be a long one and it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t marry Verena at some point. Kenneth had done her a good turn by severing the last shreds of hope.

She managed a few words of comfort, and together they made their way through the arch and into Thameside’s courtyard. Facing them, a confirmation of everything that Kenneth had told her, stood Quin and Verena in animated conversation beneath the walnut tree.

Quin lifted his head; he looked directly at her, and though she had thought in the night that nothing could get worse, she had been wrong: for what she had to do now was not to run towards him, not to throw herself into his arms and beg him to release her from this nightmare, and that was worse. It was impossible, but she had done it; she had plucked at Kenneth’s arm, she was pronouncing words.

‘Kenneth, I’ve decided not to go to the lecture — Heini wanted me to come to the practice rooms and I feel I ought to go. Will you tell Professor Somerville and make my excuses? Tell him I have to be with my fiancé — be sure to tell him that — and ask Sam to let me borrow his notes.’

Kenneth, suffering also, managed a magnanimous gesture. ‘I’ll let you have my notes, Ruth. My handwriting is far more legible than Sam’s.’

Quin had seen her come; had seen her bright head, her gallant figure in its worn cape, and his heart had leapt for now, in the morning, he knew it was impossible, what he had thought in the night — and he waited for her to walk towards him, relieved and grateful for the return of sanity. And then she checked and turned and went away, and even before Kenneth gave — verbatim — Ruth’s message, pronouncing the word fiancé in a way which was displeasing to Verena, the pain struck and clawed, and incredulity became belief. He had been used and betrayed.

But Quin, as he went to his room, had an escape which men have perfected and Ruth had yet to learn. Anger. An all-enveloping fury, a rage which consumed him: rage against Heini, against Ruth, against himself for having been duped. Tearing his gown from its hook, marching blindly to his lecture, he let it have its way — this torrent of fury which was so much less agonizing than the pain.

Ruth spent the Easter vacation working. It was the work which, she assured her mother, accounted for the rings under her eyes, her loss of appetite and a certain greenish tinge under her skin.

‘Then you must stop !’ yelled Leonie, unable to endure the sight of her lovely daughter reduced to the kind of person one saw crawling out of bombed houses in newsreels of Canton or Madrid.

‘I can’t,’ said Ruth and (inevitably) quoted Mozart who had said he went on working because it fatigued him less than it did to rest.

If Ruth was exhausted, Heini was in excellent spirits. He and Ruth had been completely reconciled. She had come to him and asked his pardon and he had wholeheartedly forgiven her.

‘It’s not your fault, darling,’ he’d said. ‘That flat would put anybody off. Only Ruth, if you’d help me now, if you’d be beside me, I know I can win! I won’t ask for anything physical — when I’m established we can be married and have a honeymoon in some splendid hotel. You see, Mantella thinks he can get me to America if all goes well and if he does, you have to come with me! You have to — I couldn’t go alone.’