Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Verena’s preparations, meanwhile, were going well. She had acquired a sunray lamp; she had been to the Army and Navy Stores for string vests and khaki breeches; she rubbed methylated spirits, nightly, into her feet. Some people might have wondered why the Professor was taking so long to inform her of his plans, but Verena was not a person to doubt her worth, and if she had felt any uncertainty, it would have been quelled by Brille-Lamartaine whose increasingly fevered descriptions of the academic femme fatale who had ensnared Somerville fitted her like a glove.

Nevertheless, with the final exams only a week away, Verena felt she could at least give the Professor a hint. He had praised her last essay so warmly that it had brought a blush to her cheek, and the intimate discussion she had had with him on the subject of porous underwear seemed to indicate that the time for secrecy was past.

So Quin was invited to tea, and aware that it was his last social engagement with the Placketts, he set himself to please.

It was a beautiful early summer day, with a milky sky and hazy sunshine. The French windows were open; the view was one Quin had enjoyed so often in previous years when Charlefont was alive and the talk had been easy and unaffected, not the meretricious academic babble he had had to endure from the Placketts.

‘Shall we go out on to the terrace for a moment?’ suggested Verena, and he nodded and followed her while Lady Plackett tactfully hung back. Leaning over the parapet, Quin let his thoughts idle with the lazy river, meandering down to the sea.

‘You always live by water, don’t you?’ the foolish Tansy Mallet had said, and it was true that he lived by water when he could and was likely to die by it, for he still had his sights set on the navy.

But it was not Tansy he thought of now, nor any of the girls he had once known.

They had collected a lot of rivers, he and Ruth. The Varne which she had intended to swim with a rucksack… The Danube which had brought Mishak his heart’s desire… and the Thames by which they’d stood on the night he thought had set a seal on their love. Once more he heard her recite with pride, and an Aberdonian accent so slight that only a connoisseur could have detected it, the words which Spenser had penned to celebrate an earlier marriage. Had she known it was a prothalamium, a wedding ode, that she spoke, standing beside him in the darkness? Had Miss Kenmore told her that?

And suddenly Quin was shaken once more by such an agony of longing for this girl with her lore and her legends, her funniness and the dark places which the evil that was Nazism had dug in her soul, that he thought he would die of it.

It was as he fought it down, this savage, tearing pain, that Verena, beside him, began to speak, and for a moment he could not hear her words. Only when she repeated them, laying a hand on his arm, did he manage to make sense of her words.

‘Isn’t it time we told everyone, Quin?’ she asked — and he recoiled at the intimacy, the innuendo in her voice.

‘Told them what?’

‘That you are taking me to Africa? I know, you see. Brille-Lamartaine told me that you were taking one of your final students and Milner confirmed it. You could have trusted me.’

Horror gripped Quin. Too late he saw the trail of misunderstandings that had led to this moment. But he was too fresh from his images of Ruth to be civil. The words which were forced out of him were cruel and unmistakable, but he had no choice.

‘Good God, Verena,’ he said, ‘you don’t think that I meant to take you!’

The final examinations for the Honours Degree in Zoology took place in the King’s Hall, a large, red-brick building shared by all the colleges south of the river. An ugly, forbidding place, its very walls seemed steeped in the fear of generations of candidates. Dark wooden desks, carefully distanced each from the other, faced a high rostrum on which the invigilators sat. There were notices about not smoking, not eating, not speaking. A great clock, located between portraits of rubicund Vice Chancellors, ticked mercilessly, and the stained floorboards were bare.

To this dire place, Ruth and her friends had crawled, day after day, their stomachs churning… had waited outside, pale with fear and sleeplessness, trying to crack jokes till the bell rang and they were admitted, numbered like convicts, to shuffle to the forbidding desks with their blue folders, the white rectangles of blotting paper which they would see in their dreams for years to come.

But today was the last exam, if the most important. In three hours they would be free! It was the Palaeontology paper, the one in which Ruth would have hoped to excel, but she hoped for nothing now except to survive.

‘It’ll be all right, Pilly.’ Wretched as she was, Ruth managed to smile at her friend, glad that whatever else had gone wrong with her life she had not neglected to help Pilly. ‘Don’t forget to do the “Short Notes” question if there is one; you can always pick up some marks on those.’

The bell rang. The door opened. Even on this bright June morning, the room struck chill. The two invigilators on the platform were unfamiliar: lecturers from another college whose students also had exams this morning. A woman with a tight bun of hair and a purple cardigan; a grey-haired man. Not Quin, who was sailing in a week, and Ruth was glad. If things went wrong, as they had before, she wouldn’t want him watching her.

‘You may turn over your papers and begin,’ said the lady with the bun in a high, clear voice.

A flutter of white throughout the hall… ‘Read the paper through at least twice,’ Dr Felton had said. ‘Don’t rush. Select. Think.’

But it would be better not to select or think too long. Not this morning…

What do you understand by the Theory of Allometric Growth? She could do that; it was a question she’d have enjoyed tackling under different circumstances — the kind of question that enabled one to show off a little. Discuss Osborn’s concept of ‘aristogenesis’ in the evolution of fossil vertebrates. That was interesting too, but perhaps she’d better do the dunce’s question first — Question Number 4. Write short notes on a) Piltdown Man b) Archaeopteryx c) The Great Animal of Maastricht…

Clever candidates were usually warned against the ‘short notes’ questions; they didn’t give you a chance to excel — but she wasn’t a clever candidate now, she was Candidate Number 209 and fighting for her life.

Verena had started writing already; she could hear her scratching with her famous gold-nibbed pen. Verena frightened her these days. Verena was solicitous, her eyes bored into Ruth.

But Verena didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except to get through the next three hours of which seven minutes had already passed.

The Theory of Allometric Growth, which quantifies the relationship of small animals to large ones , wrote Ruth, deciding to take a chance.

Pilly scratching out her views on Piltdown Man, whose reconstructed skull mercifully hung above her father’s shaving mirror, looked up, saw Ruth’s bright head bent over her paper, and exchanged a relieved look with Janet. The clock jerked forward to the first half-hour. One question done, thought Ruth; four more… The short notes, then, because it was beginning; it was getting quite bad, actually, but she would fight it off; she would take deep breaths and it would pass. Oh God, I’ve worked so hard, she thought, suddenly swamped by self-pity. It can’t all be wasted!

The Great Animal of Maastricht was discovered in 1780 in the underground quarries of St Peter’s Mountain , wrote Ruth, her pen moving very fast because nothing mattered except to get something down for which someone could give her a mark. If she failed this paper, she would fail her degree… there could be no resits in December; not for her.