Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

Mrs Weiss disagreed. ‘So she finds out who she is?’ she said, spearing a piece of guggle with her fork. ‘What has she from that? Myself, it is bad enough that I am it, but to find out, no!’

Mrs Weiss’s views, rather surprisingly, were shared by Miss Maud and Miss Violet who said they thought it didn’t do much good to go delving about in one’s self, but were sure it wouldn’t last.

‘You’ll see,’ said Miss Maud, ‘she’ll be back soon enough. It’s feeling she’s failed you with the exams, perhaps, and breaking with Heini.’

‘There is no address,’ said Leonie wretchedly. ‘And I can’t read what is on the stamp. But in the post office they will read it and tell me. We must find her, Kurt; we must!’

Professor Berger put down the letter in which his daughter had begged for their understanding. ‘No,’ he said curtly. ‘We will respect her wishes.’

‘Oh, God — I don’t want to respect her wishes, I want her !’ cried Leonie.

‘We have spoken enough of this,’ said the Professor — and she looked up, silenced, aware of a hurt even deeper than her own.

‘No go home?’ begged Thisbe, as Ruth pushed her pushchair back down the rutted lane.

‘Thisbe, we have to go home. It’s teatime.’

The little girl’s face puckered; she let out a thin wail. Ruth bent down to her. The wind was getting up, the tops of the fells were wreathed in mist. However much both she and the three-year-old Thisbe preferred to be out of doors, there were limits. The Lake District in late autumn was beautiful, but it was hardly suitable for alfresco life.

‘No soup?’ begged Thisbe, shifting her ground.

Ruth sighed. She felt sympathy with Thisbe who dreaded a return to the domestic hearth: to the cold stone floors of the tiny shepherd’s cottage, the chaos, the screams of her two brothers as they returned from school. Progressive child-rearing did not suit Thisbe, who was no trouble as she and Ruth plodded through the countryside conversing with sheep, picking berries, chatting on stone walls, but became almost ungovernable at home.

Ruth had been two months now with the lady weaver whose children she had looked after on Hampstead Heath. Penelope Hartley was kind enough in a vague way, and offering Ruth bed and board in exchange for help with the children was generous under the circumstances. When war became inevitable and she had transferred her loom to Cumberland, Ruth had gone with her. There was certainly plenty of wool which Penelope gathered from the hedges, often in a less than appetising state, and carded and dyed… and out of the appalling muddle in which she worked, there did, surprisingly, emerge some rather pleasant and occasionally saleable rugs. But Mr Hartley, some years ago, had sought consolation elsewhere, and Penelope had rather let things go.

Inside the small, dark cottage with its oil lamps and view of a sheer scree, they found something nameless bubbling on the stove. Not a sheep’s head broth, for Penelope did not eat meat, but a vegetable equivalent: a stew of mangelwurzels, old carrots, the tops of Brussels sprouts caught by the first frost, which nevertheless managed to suggest the presence of bristles and teeth and protruding eyes.

‘No soup !’ repeated Thisbe, and lay down on the floor, ready to start a tantrum.

‘No, we’ll find some bread and butter.’

Rationing had not yet affected them here, so far from the towns; there was plenty of food in Cumberland or there would have been if there had been any money to buy it with and not all the villagers turned away from Ruth; some had been helpful. But, of course, Penelope believed in ‘Nature’, not realizing how very unnatural good husbandry really is. Three damp chickens which did not lay wandered into the house, soiling the flagstones; old milk, dripping through discoloured muslin, failed dismally to turn into cheese.

The boys now returned noisily from school. Peter, whom she had pleased by hitting him on the leg in the far-off days on Hampstead Heath, and Tristram, a year older.

‘Oh God, not mother’s muck,’ said Tristram. ‘I won’t eat it, and she needn’t think it.’

Ruth, fetching bread, butter and apples from the larder, reassured him. If only it didn’t get dark so soon. When they’d first come, she’d been able to go out with the boys after supper while they kicked a ball around or searched for conkers, but now they all faced an interminable evening sitting round the smoking Aladdin lamp. Even so she could manage if only Penelope stayed next door at her loom. They could play dominoes or ludo — at least they could if the pieces weren’t lost again; she wasn’t as nimble as she had been at crawling round the floor looking for missing toys after the children were in bed.

But, of course, Penelope did come in, concerned for her motherhood, and within minutes the boys were at each other’s throats and Thisbe was lying on the floor drumming her heels. Too many sages had made their way into Penelope Hartley’s head: Rudolf Steiner who said children should not learn to read till their milk teeth were shed; the Sufi chieftain who set Penelope to her meditations instead of the washing up; A. S. Neill with his child-centred education. The poor, confused children of Penelope Hartley were so child-centred that they almost imploded each night in the confines of the tiny cottage — and tonight, as so often before, Ruth who was supposed to finish her work at seven, carried Thisbe upstairs and eased her into her nappies and sat with her till she slept.

And then the long evening began when she went to her attic under the eaves which was at least her own and looked out at the darkness and the rain, and longed for her mother and the lore and certainties of her own childhood and the painted cradle, now splintered wood, in which her baby should have lain.

But she wouldn’t yield. It wasn’t so long now — less than two months. She would see it through on her own. Not whose I am, but who I am, there lies my search… The lines of some half-remembered poem ran again through her head.

Only who was she? Someone who had loved and been rejected; a daughter who had caused her parents disappointment and pain… and now, soon, a mother who knew nothing.

And yet she had no regrets. She blamed no one, not even Verena, hissing her ultimatum in the cloakroom, threatening to expose her condition unless she left Thameside then and there, and for ever. In a way Verena had done her a service, bringing home the contempt and disgust with which the world might now regard her state. If her father, so strict, so upright, had turned his back on her as a fallen woman, Ruth couldn’t have borne it: she’d have revealed the marriage and then it would have all have begun… finding Quin, letting him know… begging for a place in his life… And Verena had kept her own side of the bargain; no one at college knew what had happened or where she was.

Nor had Quin carried her dreamily from his sofa to his bed. He had said: ‘Wait; there are things to be attended to.’ He had said it very gently, very lovingly, cupping her face in his hands, but firmly: he had begun to leave her, and it was she who had clung on to him and said: ‘No, no, you mustn’t go!’… because even then she couldn’t bear to be away from him. ‘It’s absolutely safe,’ she’d said. ‘It’s my completely safe time; I know because of Dr Felton’s wife and the thermometers. It’s as safe as houses!’

She hadn’t been lying; she’d believed it and he’d believed her. Only houses, these days, were not so very safe: houses in Guernica and Canton and Warsaw toppled like cards as bombs fell on them, and she’d been wrong. She’d been a whole week out in her calculations and that was another mark chalked up to Fräulein Lutzenholler and Professor Freud. She wasn’t usually sloppy about dates — it was that damnable thing way below the level of reason which all along had wanted nothing except to belong to this one man.