Left alone, Verena applied herself to the bony fishes before once again checking off Professor Somerville’s published works. He would not find her wanting intellectually, that was for certain. Now it was time to attend to the other side of her personality: not the scholar but the woman. Removing her dressing-gown, she slipped on the blue taffeta dress which Ruth had described with perfect accuracy and began to unwind the curlers from her hair.
‘I found it fascinating,’ said Verena, turning her powerful gaze on Professor Somerville. ‘Your views on the value of lumbar curve measurements in recognizing hominids seem to me entirely convincing. In the footnote to chapter thirteen you put that so well.’
Quin, encountering that rare phenomenon, a person who read footnotes, was ready to be impressed. ‘It’s still speculative, but interestingly enough they’ve come up with some corroboration in Java. The American expedition . . .’
Verena’s eyes flickered in a moment of unease. She had not had time to read up Java.
‘I understand that you have just been honoured in Vienna,’ she said, steering back to safer water. ‘It must have been such an interesting time to be there. Hitler seems to have achieved miracles with the German economy.’
‘Yes.’ The crinkled smile which had so charmed her had gone. ‘He has achieved other miracles too, such as the entire destruction of three hundred years of German culture.’
‘Oh.’ But this was a girl who only needed to look at a hound puppy for it to sink to its stomach and grovel – and she recovered her self-possession at once. ‘Tell me, Professor Somerville, what made you decide to start a field course at Bowmont?’
‘Well, the fauna on that coast is surprisingly diverse, with the North Sea being effectively enclosed. Then we’re opposite the Farne Islands where the ornithologists have done some very interesting work on breeding colonies – it was an obvious place for people to get practical experience.’
‘But you yourself? Your discipline? You will be there also?’
‘Of course. I help Dr Felton with the Marine Biology but I also run trips up to the coal measures and down to Staithes in Yorkshire.’
‘And the students stay separately – not in the house?’
‘Yes. I’ve converted an old boathouse and some cottages on the beach into a dormitory and labs. My aunt is elderly; I wouldn’t ask her to entertain my students and anyway they prefer to be independent.’
Verena frowned, for she could see problems ahead, but as the Professor looked as though he might turn to the left, where Mrs LeClerque, the unexpectedly pretty wife of Bishop Berkeley’s biographer, was looking at him from under her lashes, she plunged into praise of the morning’s lecture.
‘I was so intrigued by your analysis of Dr Hackenstreicher’s misconceptions. There seems no doubt that the man was seriously deluded.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Quin, receiving boiled potatoes at the hands of a cold-looking parlourmaid. ‘Miss Berger seemed to find my views unreasonable.’
‘Ah. But she is leaving us, is she not?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mother was pleased to hear it,’ said Verena, glancing at Lady Plackett who was talking to an unexpected last-minute arrival: a musicologist just returned from New York whose acceptance had got lost in the post. ‘I think she feels that there are too many of them.’
‘Them?’ asked Quin with lifted eyebrows.
‘Well, you know . . . foreigners . . . refugees. She feels that places should be kept for our own nationals.’
Lady Plackett, who had been watching benignly her daughter’s success with the Professor, now abandoned protocol to speak across the table.
‘Well, of course, it doesn’t do to say so,’ she said, ‘but one can’t help feeling that they’ve rather taken over. Of course one can’t entirely approve of what Hitler is doing.’
‘No,’ said Quin. ‘It would certainly be difficult to approve of that.’
‘But she is rather a strange girl in any case,’ said Verena. ‘I mean, she talks to the sheep. There is something whimsical in that; something unscientific.’
‘Jesus talked to them,’ said the philologist from the museum. An old man with a white beard, he spoke with unexpected resolution.
‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ Verena conceded the point. ‘But she recites to it in German.’
‘What does she recite?’ asked the biographer of Bishop Berkeley.
‘Goethe,’ said Quin briefly. He was growing weary of the saga of the sheep. ‘“The Wanderer’s Night Song”’.
The philologist approved. ‘An excellent choice. Though perhaps one might have expected one of the eighteenth-century pastoralists. Matthias Claudius perhaps?’
There followed a surprisingly animated discussion on the kind of lyric verse which might, in the German language, be expected to appeal to the domestic ungulates, and though this was exactly the kind of scholarly banter which Lady Plackett believed in encouraging, she listened to it with a frown.
‘Wasn’t Goethe the man who kept falling in love with women called Charlotte?’ asked the appealingly silly wife of the biographer.
