Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

So they stood side by side and emptied the bag and threw the skins into the water, where they were swooped on — and then rejected — by the gulls.

‘Is your luggage aboard, then?’ asked Heini. ‘We sail in less than an hour.’

‘Everything’s taken care of,’ said Ruth. She put her arms round him and once again he felt her tears. ‘Only listen, darling — there’s something I have to tell you.’

No one ever forgot where they were on the morning of the 3rd of September.

Pilly, who had joined the WRNS without waiting for the result of her exams, heard Chamberlain’s quavery voice in the naval barracks at Portsmouth. Janet heard it in her father’s vicarage the day after which, to everyone’s amazement, she had become engaged to his curate.

The inhabitants of Number 27 heard the news that Britain was at war with Germany clustered round the crackling wireless set in Ziller’s room and as they listened the expression on every face was strangely similar. Relief that the shillyshallying and compromise were over at last, and with it the realization that they were cut off finally from the relatives and friends that they had left behind in Europe.

And from Ruth. From Ruth who had been five weeks in America and had not yet written — or probably had written, but the letter with the uncertainty of the time had not arrived. And now every mail would be threatened by U-boats, every telephone line requisitioned for the war.

‘Oh, Kurt,’ said Leonie, coming to stand beside her husband.

‘Just think that she is safe. That’s all you have to think of; that she is safe.’

Almost before Chamberlain had stopped speaking came the air-raid warning, and with it a taste of things to come as Fräulein Lutzenholler dived under the table and Mishak went out into the garden so as to die in the open air. A false alarm, but it made it easier for Leonie to heed her husband’s words. Ruth was safe — the Mauretania had berthed without mishap; they had rung the shipping office. She herself had said it might be a while before a letter reached them, but oh, God, let her write soon, thought Leonie. She knew how disappointed Kurt had been in Ruth’s exam results: the aegrotat she had been awarded was almost worthless — and in something about Ruth herself which had held them at a distance before she sailed, but he suffered scarcely less than she did at this separation from the daughter he loved so much.

Quin heard the news three days later in a manner which would have done credit to a Rider Haggard yarn. A horseman, galloping across the plains towards him in a cloud of dust, reined in and handed him a letter.

‘So it’s come,’ said Quin, and the African nodded.

One by one the men who had been working on the cliff put down their tools. There was no need to ask what had happened. The Commissioner at Lindi had promised to inform them and he had kept his word.

‘We’re going home, then?’ asked Sam — and filled his eyes with the blue immensity of the sky, the sea of grass, the antelopes moving quietly over the horizon.

Quin put an arm round the boy’s shoulder. Sam had proved his worth out here and would never be free now of the longing to return.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Straightaway.’

The first weeks of the war saw a number of crises in Belsize Park, but none was due to enemy action. The old lady two doors down collided with a lamp post in the blackout and was taken to Dr Levy, now permitted to practise his profession and established in a surgery on Hampstead Hill. An officious air-raid warden reduced Miss Violet to hysterics by hammering on her bedroom door and accusing her of being a German spy because a chink of light was visible between her curtains. Leonie, now employed in the kitchen of a service canteen behind Trafalgar Square, was reprimanded for spreading margarine too thickly on the soldiers’ sandwiches. Leaflets were showered on the populace: they were told to Dig for Victory, to remember that Careless Talk Costs Lives, to Carry Their Gas Masks at all times. Evacuated children from the slums of London screamed in the silence and safety of their country billets.

Only at sea had the war started in earnest. Ships travelled in convoy and in secrecy, escorted by destroyers; even so the U-boats claimed victim after victim — and every boat sent to the bottom could have carried the letter Ruth had written to assure her parents that she was safe and well.

But when at last the longed-for letter came from New York, it was not from Ruth, but from Heini, and by the time she had read it, Leonie was a shivering wreck clinging to the edge of the table.

Heini wrote to thank them for their hospitality throughout the years and he enclosed a message for Ruth.

‘I don’t want to reproach her,’ he wrote, ‘I suppose it was honest of her to say that she did not love me and did not want to share my life. But you can imagine how I felt, sailing alone to an unknown land. Fortunately, as soon as I arrived, everything went splendidly. The Americans are as warm-hearted as one hears and my debut at the Carnegie Hall was a triumph. Will you tell Ruth this, and tell her too that someone else has now entered my life — a very musical woman, a little older, who uses her influence to help me and who insisted that I move into her apartment — a dream-like place with picture windows overlooking Central Park. So Ruth must not feel guilty — but she must not think either that I shall take her back. I shall always remember her with fondness, as I remember all of you, but the past is past.’

Leonie had collapsed into a chair, trying to still the trembling of her limbs. ‘God, Kurt, what has happened? Where is she? Why didn’t she tell us?’

‘Hush, hush. There will be an explanation.’ But as he stroked his wife’s back, the Professor himself was fighting for control. This couldn’t happen twice, his beloved daughter lost in the Underworld.

‘We must tell the police. They must find her,’ said Leonie.

‘We will see first what we can discover for ourselves.’

But they discovered nothing. Pilly, to whom they telegraphed, had not heard from Ruth, nor had Janet and everyone at Thameside believed that Ruth had sailed on the Mauretania. Once more, Leonie stifled her sobs under the pillow and drearily promised God to be good, but before she could make herself seriously ill, a letter came by the afternoon post with which Hilda hurried to the Willow, where Miss Maud and Miss Violet, their windows taped, their doors suitably sand-bagged, were carrying on as usual.

‘It came just now — that’s Ruth’s handwriting, I’m sure.’

Silence fell in the café as the envelope was opened. Silence was maintained as Leonie and her husband read what Ruth had written.

‘She is safe,’ said Leonie at last. ‘She is safe and in England. In the country. And she has a job.’

‘So why this long face?’ enquired von Hofmann. ‘Why are you not dancing on the tables?’

Things had gone well with him since the outbreak of war. A whole spate of anti-Nazi films were lined up by the studios and he had secured the part of an SS officer who said not only Schweinehund but Gott in Himmel before dying a very nasty death.

‘She wants to be alone.’ Leonie’s lip trembled as she tried to embrace this extraordinary concept.

‘Like Greta Garbo?’ enquired the lady with the poodle.

Leonie shook her bewildered head. ‘I don’t understand… she says she must be independent… she must learn to grow up by herself. Later she will come back, but now she must discover who she is. Twice she says this about the discovering.’

‘Everybody goes through such times,’ said Ziller. ‘Times when they need to find out who they are. It is natural.’