The Morning Gift (31 page)

Dr Felton, examining the creature she had prised from the rock, agreed with her, and Kenneth, moved to spontaneous admiration, said: 'Really, Verena, you are quite brilliant with bivalves!'

But it was not only bivalves with which Verena was brilliant. The other students might be glad to recognize a limpet, but Verena could tell a slit limpet from a keyhole limpet; she knew of a whole armoury of limpets; tortoiseshell limpets and slipper limpets and blue-rayed limpets, and was aware that the brave periwinkle, fighting dessication on the higher rocks, might be smooth or edible or rough.

But Ruth, Here in this world which washed one free of pettiness, did not, as she would have done in London, go to the reference books in the laboratory to search for mussels that were yet more bearded, or a bristlier bristle worm than the one turned up by Verena's spade. She did not want to read about mussels, she wanted to hold one and marvel at the blue and black striations of its shell. She was free of the urge to excel and succeed; she even gave up her complicated manoeuvres to keep out of the Professor's way - and when she found her most valuable treasure of the morning, it was to him she came.

'Look!' said Ruth for the hundredth time. 'Oh, look!
Emeralds!'
He held out his hands and she tipped the smooth green stones into his palms.

'Could they be?' she said. 'My great aunt had a bracelet and the stones looked just like that!'

He didn't laugh at her. There were gem stones on this coast: carnelians and agates and amethysts — and leading her gently away from her dream, he said: 'Only the sea does that - makes stones so perfect and so smooth. You could hire the best jeweller in the world and set him to work for a year and a day and he wouldn't get anywhere near.'

He took one and held it to the light and as she came closer to look, he thought how wonderfully emeralds would have become her with her dark eyes and lion-coloured hair.

But Verena, never far from the Professor, now appeared by their side. 'Good heavens, girl,' she said, peering at the stones. 'They're just bits of bottle glass - surely you knew that? Even in Vienna they must have bottles.'

She looked at Quin, ready to share the joke of Ruth's idiocy - but he had turned away and was putting the stones back into Ruth's cupped hands as carefully as if they really were precious jewels.

'Bottles can be extremely important,' he said, holding her eyes. 'It isn't necessary for me to tell you that.'

And she flushed and smiled and moved away, feeling a glow of warmth, for whether they were emeralds or not mattered very little, but that he remembered what she had told him, there by the Danube - that mattered a lot!

At lunchtime Verena, approaching the Professor, said: 'Isn't it time we went to the house? Luncheon is at one o'clock, I understand?'

But here she suffered a reverse.

'Yes, you go; my aunt's a stickler for punctuality-. I'll stay down here - I don't usually bother much with lunch.'

This remark caused considerable amusement to Dr Elke who had past experience of Quin's conviction that he did not eat in the middle of the day, and gathering two of the girls to help, she made her way to the boathouse where she unwound an extra coil of sausages which Pilly proceeded to fry with an expertise which amazed her friends.

'Why aren't you afraid of sausages?' asked Janet, as Pilly deftly turned the sizzling, ferociously spitting objects.

'They're much more dangerous than the experiments we do.'

'I don't have to
learn
sausages,' said Pilly.

But in the afternoon Verena came into her own again, for the Professor took boatloads of students out into the bay to show them how to sweep for plankton and Verena, who had sailed in India and crewed for her cousin at Cowes, was in her element. She had only to twitch once at its toggle, and the outboard motor roared into life; she knew exactly what to do with sails, she rowed like an Amazon, so that it was natural that as the students changed places, Verena should remain by the Professor and help.

Secure in her position, she was extremely gracious to her inexperienced classmates, helping them into the dinghy and giving them instructions on seamanship so as to leave the Professor free to show them how to work the nets. Only when Ruth came aboard in her turn and offered to take one of the oars, did Verena's graciousness desert her.

'Can you row?' she said snubbingly. 'I didn't think anyone had boats in Vienna.'

But Ruth, though she set a murderous pace, said nothing. She was in the grip of a new and noble resolution which, late that night, she proceeded to share with her friends.

'I have decided,' she announced, 'to love Verena Plackett!'

The students were sitting round a bonfire of driftwood, roasting potatoes in the light of the moon - a dramatic setting in keeping with Ruth's uplifted state. Only Kenneth Easton was absent. He had wandered away by himself for it had been hard for him seeing Verena go up to the house to dine with the Professor. Kenneth had examined his face carefully in the scrap of mirror which was all the students had to shave by and couldn't help noticing how much more regular his features were than the Professor's, how much less broken-looking his nose, and if he smoked a pipe he was certain he would have been able to keep it alight for reasonable stretches of time. Yet it was clear that it was the Professor Verena preferred and now, alone and melancholy, he gazed up at the lighted windows of Bowmont and sighed.

'I mean it,' persisted Ruth as her friends stared at her. 'I'm entirely serious.'

'You're mad,' said Janet, spearing another potato. 'Raving mad. Verena is entirely and utterly awful.'

'Yes, I know,' said Ruth. 'So there is no point at all in trying to
like
her. Liking Verena would be to attempt the impossible. But there was an old philosopher who used to come and see us in Vienna - he had a long white beard and he used to meditate every day on a bench outside the Stock Exchange - and what he said was: "You must love what you cannot like." He said it quite often.'

'I don't know what that means,' said Pilly sadly - and a thin bespectacled youth called Simon said he didn't either.

'It sounds better in German,' Ruth admitted, 'but what it means is that though you can't like everybody, you can love them deep down - in fact the more you don't like them, the more important it is that you should. You have to love them as though they were your brother or sister… as part of the created world. As a fellow sinner,' said Ruth, getting excited and dropping her potato in the sand.

Sam, though he knew it was not a Lancelot-like remark, said she was talking nonsense, and Janet pointed out that sinners were a doddle compared to Verena.

'Sinners are
human
,' she said.

But nothing could deflect Ruth from the noble path she had chosen and she quoted yet another European sage, the great Sigmund Freud, who had said that a thing cannot become lovable until it is loved.

'Like Beauty and the Beast. You have to kiss it before it becomes a prince.'

As was inevitable the conversation now became ribald, but as she accepted the less burnt half of Sam's potato, Ruth's eyes were shining with moral virtue and the consciousness of right.

'You'll see. I'll begin tomorrow when we go to Howcroft. I shall love her
all day.'

'Barker's taken him then?' asked Miss Somerville encountering Martha the following morning as she returned from the village. 'He's agreed?'

The puppy had been conveyed to the carpenter's house before breakfast, but Martha's kind, round face looked un-accustomedly shifty. 'No, he hasn't. He won't have him.'

'Won't
have
him?' Miss Somerville was incredulous. 'Did you point out that the work on the pews is two months overdue?'

'Yes, I did. He says his wife's got asthma and she's expecting and the doctor said she wasn't to go near anything with hair.'

'I must say I find that extraordinary. People like that wouldn't have
heard
of asthma in the old days. It makes you wonder whether education is such a good thing.' She bent to pick up her gardening trug. 'Where is it, then?'

'He offered to shoot it for me,' said Martha. 'He said it wouldn't feel a thing - well, that's true enough; he's done enough poaching in his time, Barker has - he could knock down a hare at fifty yards and no trouble.'

Miss Somerville straightened her back. Her face was expressionless.

'So you agreed? It's been shot?'

'No, I didn't,' said Martha shortly, and watched her employer's hands relax on the handle of the trug. 'Drowning the things at birth before their eyes are open is one thing, but shooting them in cold blood is another. If you want it shot, you can give the instructions yourself.'

'Where is it, then?'

'One of the students took it. I met her coming up for the milk. She says she'll keep it; they're off to Howcroft Point, I thought she might as well with Lady Plackett not being too fond of it and company coming.'

Miss Somerville nodded. The Rothleys were coming for drinks and the Stanton-Derbys, to welcome Verena and talk about the dance, and she didn't really want any more jokes about the little dog. She was setting off across the lawn when Martha said: 'Who's this Richard Wagner, then? Some kind of musician fellow?'

'He was a composer. An extremely noisy one, with a reprehensible private life. Why?'

'This girl… the one who's taken the puppy… she said he had a step-daughter with eyes like that - Wagner did. One blue and one brown, same as the puppy. Daniella she was called.'

'The student?'

'No, the stepdaughter.'

Deciding not to pursue the matter, Miss Somerville made her way to the garden. She thought she would postpone talking to Lady Plackett about the extraordinary: behaviour of the carpenter. After all, it was none of her business.

Ruth, meanwhile, had reached the boathouse.

'What is it?' enquired Dr Elke, looking at Comely's love child which was climbing with passionate enthusiasm over her feet.

'It's a mixture,' admitted Ruth.

Dr Elke said she could see that and removed her shoe from the puppy's grasp.

'But full of personality?' suggested Ruth. 'Though not perhaps strictly beautiful.'

'No, not strictly.'

'Voltaire wasn't beautiful either,' said Ruth, 'but he used to say that if he had half an hour to explain away his face, he could seduce the Queen of France.'

'More than half an hour would be necessary in this case,' said Dr Elke, and told Ruth to pass the hammers, for she was checking supplies for the day's fossil hunting on the cliffs off Howcroft Point.

Ruth did so. There was a pause. Then: 'I thought he might come with us on the bus? Martha said he was very fond of transportation and he's never sick.'

'Ask the Professor,' said Elke and went into the lab.

Since Quin at that moment came down the path, Ruth repeated her request.

'I thought he might be useful,' she said.

'Really?' Quin's eyebrows were raised in enquiry. 'What sort of usefulness had you in mind?'

'Well, dogs are always digging up bones. Suppose he found something interesting? The femur of a torosaurus, perhaps?'

'That would certainly be interesting on the coal measures,' said Quin drily. But seeing Ruth's face, he relented. 'Keep him out of the way; I suppose he can't do much harm on the moors.'

By the time the bus deposited them at Howcroft Point, the puppy had acquired the kind of following that Voltaire himself would have envied. Pilly had held him on her knees throughout the journey, Janet spoke to him in a voice which made Ruth understand what happened in the backs of motor cars, and Huw was on hand to lift him over boulders which defeated even his intrepid scramblings.

It was another perfect day. The cliffs here were topped by heather and gorse, the curlews called - but the work now was hard. For here, in the carboniferous outcrop which ran from the moors out onto the shore, were embedded those creatures that determined all subsequent life on earth. Fragments of ancient corals, whorled molluscs, each characteristic of the layered zones, had to be prised from the rock, labelled, wrapped and carried back to the laboratory. And since no day is complete without the chance for self-improvement, Ruth was fortunate, for the opportunities for loving Verena Plackett on Howcroft Point were endless. Always at the Professor's heels, she tapped unerringly with her brand-new hammer, finding not only an undoubted specimen of
caninia,
but also a crinoid complete with tentacles - and laughed merrily whenever Pilly mispronounced a word.

Since the tide was high, they had lunch above the strand on a patch of heather while the puppy consumed sandwiches, fell in and out of rabbit holes and fell suddenly and utterly asleep on Huw's collecting bag. Most of the students too were glad to be lazy, but Ruth, accustomed to the ascent of high places from which to say
"Wunderbar!"
scrambled to the top of the hill which commanded a view of the coast for miles, and the moors inland, still showing glimmers of purple. It was not till she caught the whiff of tobacco from behind a boulder that she realized she was not alone.

'It's quite something, isn't it?' said Quin, gesturing with his pipe at the low line of Holy Island to the south, and the dramatic pinnacle of Howcroft Rock. 'I'm glad you've seen it like this - autumn and winter are best for the colours.'

She nodded. 'People always say that views are breathtaking, don't they? But they should be breathgiving, surely?' She turned to smile at him. 'And I don't just mean the wind.'

For a few minutes they stood side by side in silence, watching the dazzle of spray over the rocks, the unbelievable dark blue of the water. A curlew called above them, the scent of vanilla drifted from a late flowering bush of gorse.

'I came here for the first time when I was ten,' said Quin. 'I bicycled from Bowmont with my hammer and my
Boy's Own Book of Fossils.
I started to chip at the rock - and suddenly there it was. An absolutely perfect cycad, as clear and unmistakable as truth itself. That was when I knew I was immortal - that I personally without the slightest doubt would solve the riddle of the universe.'