The Morning Gift (18 page)

'What do you mean, he isn't back? Term begins next week. Do you intend to allow this kind of behavior from your staff?'

Lady Plackett was annoyed. Since her husband had assumed his new position as Vice Chancellor of Thameside, she had taken a great deal of trouble planning suitable occasions at which the staff would be received. Their predecessor, Lord Charlefont, had been lackadaisical in the extreme and the position of the Lodge, marked off only by its Doric columns and Virginia creeper from the Arts Block which ran along the river, lent itself to the kind of haphazard coming and going which she had no intention of permitting. She had already had a
Private
notice put on the flagged path which led from the main courtyard to their front door, and instructed the college servants to erect a chain-link fence to keep their part of the river terrace free from students who seemed to think they had a right to sit there and eat their sandwiches.

To insist on one's privacy was essential, as it was essential to restore the high moral tone of the university; students holding hands or embracing could not, of course, be tolerated. But Lady Plackett also meant to
give
… to enrich college life with her hospitality and make the Lodge a place where good conversation and good breeding could be relied upon. To do this, however, she had to separate the sheep from the goats and find out what material was to hand, and to this end she had planned a series of organized entertainments for the beginning of term. First the professors to sherry, properly labelled, of course, with their names and departments, for unlabelled gatherings were never satisfactory - then the lecturers to fruit juice… and lastly, in batches of twenty or so, the students to play paper and pencil games.

Now ticking off the labels on safety pins against the names of the senior staff, she found opposite Professor Somerville's name the words: 'Unable to attend'.

'He's up in Scotland,' said Sir Desmond. A pale man with pince-nez, he had the kind of face it is impossible to recall within five minutes of seeing it, and owed his appointment to the fact that all the other candidates for the Vice Chancellorship had enough personality to acquire enemies. 'Apparently the Foreign Office tried to enrol him for some secret work in Whitehall - code breaking or some such thing. Somerville thought it would mean sitting in a bunker all through the war so he went up to try and get himself into the navy.'

'Well I hope you mean to have a word with him,' said Lady Plackett. She was taller than her husband, with a long back, a long face and the close-set navy-blue eyes which characterized the Croft-Ellises. Having done several Seasons without, so to speak, a matrimonial nibble, Lady Plackett had accepted the son of an undistinguished chartered accountant and set herself to advancing his career. It had not been easy. Desmond, when she met him, did not even know that Cholmondely was pronounced Chumley, but she had persevered and now, after twenty-five years, she could honestly say that she was no longer ashamed to take him home to Rutland.

'No, dear, I don't think that would be wise,' said Sir Desmond mildly. 'We need Professor Somerville rather more than he needs us.'

'What do you mean?'

'He's a very eminent man; they're constantly offering him positions abroad and Cambridge has been trying to get him back ever since he left. Charlefont had quite a job persuading him to take the Chair and Somerville took it on condition he could get leave for his journeys. The college has done pretty well out of him - there's always money for Palaeontology because of his distinction and the field course he runs at his place in Northumberland is supposed to be the highlight of the year.'

'Northumberland?' said Lady Plackett sharply. 'Whereabouts in Northumberland?'

Sir Desmond frowned. 'I can't remember the name. Bow something, I think,'

'Not…' She had flushed with excitement. 'Not
Bowmont?"

'That's right. That's what it was.'

'Bow something' indeed! Not for the first time, Lady Plackett felt the loneliness of those who marry beneath them. 'You mean he's
that
Somerville? Quinton Somerville - the owner of Bowmont? Old Basher's grandson?'

Sir Desmond said his name was Quinton, certainly, and asked what was so unusual about Bowmont, but this was a question it was impossible to answer. Those who moved in the right circles knew why Bowmont was special, and to those who didn't one couldn't explain. 'I know his aunt,' said Lady Plackett. 'Well, slightly. I shall write to her.' And eagerly to her husband who was leafing through the book of staff addresses: 'He isn't married yet, is he?'

Sir Desmond looked for the M opposite married members of staff, found it absent and said so.

Without hesitation, Lady Plackett dropped the label with Professor Somerville's name into the wastepaper basket. This man did not belong in large gatherings of people eating canapes. Professor Somerville would come to one of the intimate dinner parties with which she meant to put Thames-ide on the map and there he would find, in the gracious setting of her home, his intellectual equal, his future student and a girl of his own background. Would find, in short, Verena.

The Placketts' only daughter was twenty-three years old and had inherited not only her mother's breeding but her father's brains. From the age of four, when she made it clear that she preferred her abacus to her dolls, it was evident that Verena would grow up to be an intellectual. The great Dr Johnson, of dictionary fame, had been told by his mother to repeat what she had taught him immediately to the next person he met, and if it was the milkman, no matter.

'In that way you always remember it,' she had said to her son.

There was no need for Lady Plackett so to instruct her daughter. Verena took in information and gave it out with equal efficiency. In India they had surrounded her with tutors and at nineteen she had enrolled in the European College at Hyderabad. It had been a brave step for her parents to take: true, the students and staff were all white, but it meant giving Verena an unusual amount of freedom. Verena had not abused it. Science was her preferred subject, and it was without difficulty that she came top in every exam she took. Even so, when she had taken her basic degree, her mother insisted on sending her ahead
to
do the Season with her Croft-Ellis cousins from Rutland.

Lady Plackett's intentions were good, but the plan was not a success. Verena stood five foot eleven in her socks and it is difficult to do the Season in socks. Nor did Verena make any secret of the fact that the vapid young subalterns and stockbrokers at the tops of whose heads she gazed on the dance floor, bored her beyond belief. As soon as her parents returned from India, she announced her intention of taking an Honours Degree, and taking it at Thameside.

About this, her mother had been uneasy. Though she had intended to look among the intelligentsia for a husband for Verena, it had been among Nobel Laureates or Fellows of the Royal Society that she had expected to find someone suitable, not among the corduroy-clad and bearded professors who so often did the actual teaching. Now, though, it looked as though Verena's instinct had been right and it was with a light step that she made her way up to her daughter's room.

'Verena, I have something to tell you!'

Her daughter sat at her tidy desk, a large text book illustrated with diagrams of bones open in front of her, a propelling pencil and a notebook on her right, a ruler on her left.

'Yes?'

Verena had inherited not only her mother's height, but her close-set, downward curving eyes and Roman nose. Now she looked up without rancour at the interruption, though she had reached a difficult chapter and would have preferred to be alone.

'I've just been speaking to your father and it turns out that Professor Somerville - the head of the Zoology Department

- is
Quin
Somerville, the owner of Bowmont. Frances Somerville's nephew.'

'Yes, Mother. I know.'

Her mother stared at her. 'You know?'

Verena nodded. 'I made it my business to find out. That's why I decided to do Zoology Honours. His reputation is second to none. I shall take his option, of course.'

Not for the first time, Lady Plackett marvelled at her daughter's perspicacity. Verena had spent the summer with her cousins in Rutland, yet she was already better informed than her parents.

'I'm going to invite him to dinner as soon as he gets back,' she said. 'A really carefully chosen group of guests. You will be seated next to him, of course, so that you have time to talk.'

Verena returned to her book.

'Professor Somerville will find me ready,' she said.

Ruth walked through the gates of Thameside College, greeted the porter in his lodge, and looked with delight at the closely mown grass, the ancient walnut tree, the statue of someone
not
on horseback.

Thameside was beautiful. She knew it to be one of the oldest buildings in London, but she had not expected the cloistered peace, the flowerbeds lapping the grey walls - and through a wide arch on the far side of the quadrangle, a breathtaking view of the river and the soaring dome of St Paul's on the other bank. The University of Vienna was larger, more formal, but Ruth, passing the windows of book-lined rooms and lecture theatres, was in a familiar world.

The statue, when she reached it, turned out to be of William Wordsworth, which was entirely suitable for he had stood on Westminster Bridge and said that
Earth has not anything to show more fair,
with which, having just crossed the river, she absolutely agreed. And there was a late rose, a golden voluptuous rambler curling round the railings of the Students' Union which seemed to hold all the fragrance of the dying year.

She came as Vienna's representative to the Groves of Academe and carried with her not only the good wishes of everyone at Number 27 and the Willow Tea Rooms, but their gifts in a straw basket pressed on her by Mrs Burtt. Though term did not begin for another two days, her father had insisted she take the magnifying glass he had had since his student days; Dr Levy had bequeathed his old dissecting kit rolled in a canvas pouch - and setting up a delicious rustle under her woollen skirt was the Venetian lace petticoat Leonie had worn when she was presented to the Austrian Chancellor.

Her appointment with Dr Felton was for 2.30; glancing at the clock which topped the archway to the river, she saw that she was ten minutes early. About to make her way towards the water's edge, she was arrested by a sound of unutterable melancholy coming from the basement of the Science Building on her left. Letting go of the rose she had been smelling, she turned her head. The noise came again and this time it was unmistakable. Somewhere down there, in a state of apparent distress and abandonment, was a sheep.

Picking up her basket, Ruth made her way down the stone steps, pushed open a door - and found herself in a dusty, unlit laboratory. A Physiology lab, instantly familiar from her days in Vienna when she had ridden her tricycle through the animal huts of the university, watched by the pink eyes of a thousand snow-white rats. There were indeed rats here, and the big bins holding the flaky yellow maze they fed on, a pair of scales, microscopes, a centrifuge… and in one corner, staring from a wooden pen, the pale face and melancholy, Semitic snout of a large white ewe.

'Ah yes, you're lonely,' said Ruth approaching. In the deserted room, she spoke in the soft dialect of Vienna. 'But you see I musn't touch you because you belong to Science. You're an experimental animal; you're like a Vestal Virgin dedicated to higher things.'

The sheep butted its head against the side of the pen, then lifted it hopefully to gaze at her with its yellow eyes. It seemed to be devoid of tubes or other signs of experimentation - seemed in fact to be in excellent health - but Ruth, well-trained as she was, kept her distance.

'I can see that you aren't where you would choose to be,' she went on, 'but I assure you that right now the world is full of people who are not where they would choose to be. All over Belsize Park and Finchley and Swiss Cottage I could show you such people. And you belong to a noble race because you are in the psalms and St Francis chose you to preach to and I can see why because you have listening eyes.'

The sheep's butting became more frenzied, but its mood was lifting. The string of bleats it was emitting seemed to be social rather than despairing. Then quite suddenly it sat down, sticking out one hoof and extending its neck like someone listening to a lecture.

'Very well, I will recite some Goethe for you which you will like, I think, because he is an extremely calming poet, though somewhat melancholy, I do admit. Now let me see, what would you like?'

In his room on the second floor of the Science Building, Dr Roger Felton blew the contents of a pipette into a tank of sea slugs and frowned. There should have been wreaths of translucent eggs now, hanging on the weeds, and there were not. He could get more slugs from the zoo, but he had set his heart on breeding his own specimens - not just for the students in his Marine Biology class, but because the
Opisthobranchia,
with their amazingly large nerve cells, were his particular interest.

All round the room, in salt-water tanks cooled and aerated by complicated tubes and pumps, a series of creatures swam or scuttled or clung to the sides of the glass: sea urchins and brittle stars, prawns and cuttle fish, and an octopus currently turning pink inside a hollow brick. Dr Felton loved his subject and taught it well. The nuptial dance of the ragworm on the surface of the ocean, the selfless paternity of the butterfish, entranced him as much now as it had done when he first beheld it fifteen years ago, but there were problems, not least of them the new Vice Chancellor who had made it clear that it was publications that counted, not teaching.

Dr Felton was aware that he ought to spend more time on his research and less on the students, but someone had to see to them with the Prof so much away. Not that he grudged Quin his journeys - having a man of that calibre in the department made all the difference. If Felton had any doubts they would have been stilled by the two terms during which Professor Robinson had done Quin's teaching and the sound of laughter vanished from the common room.