The Morning Gift (35 page)

Ruth woke, bewildered, from a drugged sleep. The clock beside the bed said three o'clock - the pre-dawn hour in which demons gibber and people die. At first she didn't know where she was… she seemed to be in a large bed covered by some kind of animal skin: the pelt of a bear or something even more exotic. Then, as she touched it, she remembered.

She was in Quin's tower. He had given instructions to have her carried there after the boat landed - still furious, taking no notice when she said that she was perfectly well, that she wanted to go back to the boathouse with the others. He'd told the students to keep away and sent for two men from the farm to carry her.

'No one is to go near her till she's seen a doctor,' he'd said.

This wasn't help; it wasn't concern; it was punishment.

The doctor had come earlier, an old man, sounding her chest, feeling her pulse.

'I'm all right,' she'd kept saying, and he said, 'Yes, yes,' and left her something in a bottle to make her sleep.

But she wasn't all right. Even the news brought in by Martha - that the dog was safe - couldn't make her all right. It wasn't the waves breaking over her head that had troubled her half-sleep. It was what Quin had said: his rejection, his cruelty. She was in disgrace, she was to be sent home.

She got up, her bare feet feeling the wooden boards. This was the most masculine room she had ever seen; almost without furniture, the uncurtained windows letting in pools of moonlight, the bear skin thrown carelessly over the bed with its single pillow. To sleep thus was to get as close as one could get to sleeping out of doors.

The nightdress she was wearing must have belonged to Aunt Frances; made of thick white flannel, it billowed out over her feet; the ruffles on the neck half buried her chin. Turning on the lamp, she saw, on a small desk pushed against the wall, the photograph of a young woman whose dark, narrow face above the collar of the old-fashioned dress was startlingly familiar. Picking it up, she carried it to the window and examined it.

'What are you doing?'

She turned abruptly, caught out again, once more in the wrong.

'I'm sorry; I woke.'

Quin's face was still drawn and closed, but now he made an effort. 'There's nothing wrong with her physically,' the doctor had said to him, 'but she looks as though she's had some kind of shock.'

'Well, obviously,' Quin had replied. 'Nearly drowning would be a shock.'

But old Dr Williams had looked at him and shaken his head and said he didn't think it was that; she was young and strong and hadn't been in the water long. 'Go easy,' he'd said, 'treat her gently.'

So he came over, took the picture from her hand. 'Are you feeling better?'

'Yes, I'm perfectly all right. I wish I could go.'

'But you can't, my poor Rapunzel; not till the morning. Even your pretty hair wouldn't be long enough to pull up a prince to rescue you.'

'And there's a shortage of princes,' she said, trying to speak lightly for the edge was still there in his voice.

Quin said nothing. Earlier he had found Sam on the terrace, looking up at Ruth's window, and sent him away.

'It's your mother, isn't it?' she asked, looking down at the portrait.

'Are we so alike?'

'Yes. She looks intelligent. And so… alive.'

'Yes, she was, I believe. Until I killed her.'

It was Ruth now who was angry. 'What rubbish! What absolute poppycock.
Schmarrn!'
she said, spitting out the Viennese word, so much more derogatory than anything in English. 'You talk like a kitchen maid.'

'I beg your pardon?' he said, startled.

But his attack on the boat had freed Ruth. Born to please, trained to put herself at the service of others, she now abandoned the handmaiden role.

'I shouldn't have said that. Kitchen maids are often highly intelligent, like your Elsie who told me the names of all the plants on the cliff. But you talk like someone in a third-rate romantic novel - you killed her, indeed! Well, what does one expect from a man who sleeps under dead animals… a man who owns the sea!'

She had succeeded better than she'd hoped in riling him. 'Nobody owns the sea,' he said. 'And if it interests you, I'm giving away what I do own. The year after next, Bowmont goes to the National Trust.'

She took a deep breath. She was, in fact, totally confounded and worse than that, utterly dismayed; she felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach. .

'All of it?' she stammered. 'The house and the gardens and the farm?'

'Yes.' He had recovered his equanimity. 'As a good Social Democrat I'm sure you'll be pleased.'

She nodded. 'Yes…' she struggled to say. 'It's the right thing to do. It's just…'

But what it was was something she could not put into words. That she was devastated by the loss of a place which had nothing to do with her, which she would never see again. That she had been storing Bowmont in her mind: its cliffs and flowers, its scents and golden strands ..; There would be a lot of waiting in her life with Heini: sitting in stuffy green-rooms, accompanying him in crowded trains. Like the coifed girls in medieval cloisters who wove mysterious trees and crystal rivers into their tapestries, she had spun for herself a dream of Bowmont: of paths where she could wander, of a faded blue door in a high wall. And the dream meant Bowmont as it was - as Quin's demesne, as a place where an irascible old woman bullied the flowers out of the ground.

'Is it because you will benefit the people?' she asked, sounding priggish but not knowing how to say it otherwise.

Quin shrugged. 'I doubt if the people - whoever they are

- are all that interested in Bowmont; the house is nothing much. What they want, I imagine, is access to the sea and that could be arranged with a few more rights of way. I'm afraid I don't share your passion for "the people" in the abstract. One never knows quite who they are.'

'Well, why then?'

Quin took the portrait of his mother from her hands. 'You chose to sneer when I said I killed her. Yet it is not untrue. My father knew that she was not supposed to have children. She'd been very ill - they met in Switzerland when he was there in the Diplomatic Service. She was in a sanatorium, recovering from TB. He wanted a child because of Bowmont. He wanted an heir and he didn't mind what it cost. An heir for Bowmont.'

'And if he did?' Ruth shrugged. She seemed to him relentless, suddenly; grown up, no longer his student, his protegee. 'Men have always wanted that. A tobacconist will want an heir for his kiosk… the poorest rabbi wants a son to say kaddish for him when he's dead. Why do you make such a thing of it?'

'If a man forces a woman to bear a child… if he risks her life so that he can come to his own father - the father he quarrelled with and loathed - and say: "Here is an heir" -then he is committing a sin.'

But she wouldn't heed him. 'And what of her? Do you think she was so feeble? Do you think she didn't want it? She was brave - look at her face. She wanted a child. Not for Bowmont, not for your father. She wanted one because a child is a marvellous thing to have. Why do you patronize women so? Why can't they risk their lives as men do? They have a right, as much as any man.'

'To jump into the sea for a half-grown mongrel?' he jeered.

'Yes. For anything they choose.' But she bent her head, for she knew she had risked not only her own life, but his and perhaps Sam's - that his cruelty down there on the boat had had a cause. 'I'm a mongrel too,' she said very quietly. 'And anyway your aunt loves it.'

'Loves the puppy? Are you
mad}
She's done nothing but try to give it away.'

Again that shrug, so characteristic of the Viennese. 'My father always says, "Don't look at what people
say
look at what they
do."
Why did your aunt choose the carpenter -everyone knew his wife had asthma and she wasn't allowed to have pets? Why the publican when his mother was attacked by an Alsatian when she was little and she was terrified of dogs?'

'How do you know all this?' he said irritably. How did she know, in a week at Bowmont, that Elsie was interested in herbalism, that Mrs Ridley's grandmother knew the Darlings? It was infuriating, this foible of hers: this embarrassing ability to go in deep. Whoever married her would be driven mad by it. Heini would be driven mad by it. 'Anyway, my father never recovered. He carried the guilt and wretchedness for the rest of his life. It probably killed him too - he volunteered in 1916 when there was no need to do so.'

'There you go again. The English are so melodramatic! A bullet killed him.'

'What's the matter with you?' asked Quin, not accustomed to being deflated by a girl whose emotionalism was a byword. And amazed by what he was about to do, he went over to the desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out a faded exercise book with a blue marbled cover.

'Read it,' he said. 'It's my father's diary.'

The book fell open at the page he had read a hundred times and not shown to a living soul, and Ruth took it and moved closer to the lamp.

‘I came back from Claire's funeral,
she read,
and Marie brought me the baby, as though the sight of it could console me, that puce, wrinkled creature with its insatiable greed for life. The baby killed her
-
no, I killed her. I was cleverer than the doctors who told me she musn't bear a child. I knew better, I wanted a son. I wanted to bring the boy back to Bowmont and show my father that I had produced an heir - that he need despise me no longer. Yes, I who hated him, who fled Bowmont and turned my back on the iniquities of inheritance and wealth, was as tainted as he was by the desire for power. Claire wanted a baby;

I try not to forget that, but it was my job to be wiser than she.

Now I have to try and love the child; he is not to blame, but I have no desire to live without her and no love left to give. If I have a wish it is that he at least will relinquish his inheritance and go forth as a free man among his equals.

Ruth shut the diary. 'Poor man,' she said quietly. 'But why do you embalm him? You should grow radishes, like Mishak.'

'What?' For a moment he wondered whether her brain had been affected by the accident.

'Marianne didn't like radishes. His wife. He never grew them when she was alive. When she died, he said, "Now I must grow radishes or she will remain under the ground." He meant that the dead must be allowed to move about freely inside us, they musn't be encapsulated, made finite by their prejudices.' She paused, moving her hair out of her eyes in a gesture with which he was utterly familiar. 'He grows a lot of radishes and I don't like them very much as it happens, but I eat them. All of us eat them.' She paused. 'Perhaps it's right to give Bowmont away; I don't know about that, and it's none of my business - but surely it must be because you want to, not because of what you think he might have wanted? He would have grown and changed and seen things differently perhaps. Look how you hated me this afternoon - but you have not always done so and perhaps one day you will do so no longer.'

Quin looked at her, started to speak. Then he took the diary and locked it up again in the bureau. 'Come,' he said, 'I think it's time you met the Basher.'

He took his old tweed jacket off the peg behind the door and put it round her shoulders. As he led her downstairs, he made no attempt to be unheard, switching on lights as he came to them, walking with a firm tread. He knew exactly what he would do if they were discovered and that it would cause him no moment of unease.

They made their way down the corridor that connected the tower with the body of the house and as he steered her, one hand on her back, through the rooms, she touched, here and there, the black shabby leather chair, the surface of a worn, much-polished table, learning Quin's house, and liking what she learnt. Inside the fortress was an unpretentious home, and the hallmark of the woman who had been its curator was everywhere. Aunt Frances, who had left Quin alone, had left his house alone also. There was none of the forbidding grandeur Ruth had imagined; only a place waiting quietly for those who wished to come.

But this was a journey with a particular end," and by the far wall of the library, Quin stopped. In Aunt Frances' flannel nightgown, Quin's jacket hanging loose from her shoulders, Ruth stared at the portrait of Rear Admiral Quin-ton Henry Somerville in his heavy golden frame.

The Basher had been seventy when the portrait was commissioned by his parishioners and the artist, a local worthy, had clearly done his best to flatter his sitter, but his success had been moderate. The Basher's cheeks, for which a great deal of rose madder had been required, showed the broken veins caused by the whisky and the weather; his short, surprisingly snub nose was touched at the tip with purple. In spite of his grand dress uniform and the bull neck rising from its braided collar, Quin's grandfather, with his small mouth, bald pate and obstinate blue eyes, resembled nothing so much as an ill-tempered baby.

'And yet,' said Ruth, 'there is
something
…' 'There's something all right. Pig-headedness, ferocity… in the navy he bullied his officers; he thought flogging was good for the ratings. He married for money - a: lot of money - and treated his wife abominably. And when he died, every single soul in North Northumberland came to the funeral and shook their heads and said that the good times were past and England would never be the same again.'
'
'Yes, I can see that it might be so.' 'He despised my father because he liked poetry - because he liked to be with his mother in the garden. He was terrified that he'd bred a coward. Cowardice frightened him; it was the only thing that did - to have a son who was a weakling. My father was wretched at school - he went when he was seven and he cried himself to sleep every night for years. He hated sailing, hated the sea. He was a gentle soul and the Basher despised him from the bottom of his heart. He was determined that my father should go into the navy, but my father wouldn't. He stood up to him over that. Then at fifteen he ran away to one of his mother's relatives. She took him abroad and he joined the Diplomatic Service and did very well - but he never went back to Bowmont. He loathed everything it stood for - power, privilege, Philistinism - the contempt for the things he valued. Yet you see when it came to the point, he risked my mother's life so that it could all go on.'