The Morning Gift полностью

Tempted to pursue the argument, Quin forced himself back to the task that faced him. That Ruth would have been an interesting student was not in question.

‘Look, there’s no sense in postponing this. I shall ring O’Malley and get you transferred to Tonbridge and until then you’d better stay away.’

She had turned her back and was absently retying the scarf, with its motif of riding crops and bridles, round Daphne’s neck. In the continuing silence, Quin’s disquiet grew. He remembered suddenly the child on the Grundlsee reciting Keats . . . the way she had tried to make a home even in the museum. Now he was banishing her again.

But when she turned to face him, it was not the sad handmaiden of his musings that he saw, not Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. Her chin was up, her expression obstinate and for a moment she resembled the primitive, pugnacious hominid beside whom she stood.

‘I can’t stop you sending me away because you are like God here; I saw that even before you came. But you can’t make me go to Tonbridge. I didn’t intend to go to university, I thought I should stay and work for my family. It was you who said I should go and when I thought you wanted me to come here I was so –’ She broke off and blew her nose. ‘But I won’t start again somewhere else. I won’t go to Tonbridge.’

‘You will do exactly as you are told,’ he said furiously. ‘You will go to Tonbridge and get a decent degree and –’

‘No, I won’t. I shall go and get a job, the best paid one I can find. If you had let me stay I would have done everything you asked me; I would have been obedient and worked as hard as I knew how and I would have been invisible because you would have been my Professor and that would have been right. But now you can’t bully me. Now I am free.’

Quin rose from his chair. ‘Let me tell you that even if I am not your Professor I am still legally your husband and I can order you to go and –’

The sentence remained unfinished as Quin, aghast, heard the words of Basher Somerville come out of his own mouth.

Ruth put a last flourish to the bow round Daphne’s neck.

‘You have read Nietzsche, I see,’ she said. ‘When I go to a woman I take my whip. How suitable that even the scarves your girlfriends leave behind have things on them for beating horses.’

But Quin had had enough. He went to the door, held it open.

‘Now go,’ he said. ‘And quickly.’

The guest list for Lady Plackett’s first dinner party was one of which any hostess could be proud. A renowned ichthyologist just back from an investigation of the bony fish in Lake Titicaca, an art historian who was the world expert on Russian icons, a philologist from the British Museum who spoke seven Chinese dialects and Simeon LeClerque who had won a literary prize for his biography of Bishop Berkeley. But, of course, the guest of honour, the person she had placed next to Verena, was Professor Somerville whom she had welcomed back to Thameside earlier in the day.

By six o’clock Lady Plackett had finished supervising the work of the maids and the cook, and went upstairs to speak to her daughter.

Verena had bathed earlier and now sat in her dressing-gown at her desk piled high with books.

‘How are you getting on, dear?’ asked Lady Plackett solicitously, for it always touched her, the way Verena prepared for her guests.

‘I’m nearly ready, Mummy. I managed to get hold of Professor Somerville’s first paper – the one on the dinosaur pits of Tendaguru, and I’ve read all his books, of course. But I feel I should just freshen up on ichthyology if I’m next to Sir Harold. He’s just back from South America, I understand.’

‘Yes . . . Lake Titicaca. Only remember, it’s the bony fishes, dear.’

Sir Harold was married but really very eminent and it was quite right for Verena to prepare herself for him. ‘I think we’ll manage the Russian icons without trouble – Professor Frank is said to be very talkative. If you have the key names . . .’

‘Oh, I have those,’ said Verena calmly. ‘Andrei Rublev . . . egg tempera . . .’ She glanced briefly at the notes she had taken earlier. ‘The effect of Mannerism becoming apparent in the seventeenth century . . .’

Lady Plackett, not a demonstrative woman, kissed her daughter on the cheek. ‘I can always rely on you.’ At the doorway she paused. ‘With Professor Somerville it would be in order to ask a little about Bowmont . . . the new forestry act, perhaps: I shall, of course, mention that I was acquainted with his aunt. And don’t trouble about Chinese phonetics, dear. Mr Fellowes was only a stop gap – he’s that old man from the British Museum and he’s right at the other end of the table.’