This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘Not half so easy as you suppose, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin.

  ‘I am having my hair cut tomorrow morning,’ said Cordelia. ‘I will make an appointment for you.’

  ‘Why did we never think of this before?’ marvelled Mary.

  ‘You and the lawn,’ I said, ‘the proper people will attend to you and you will both be beautiful.’

  ‘No, lawns renew themselves,’ she said, ‘and Mammas do not.’

  ‘Never mind, other Mammas believe they renew themselves by going to the hairdresser, and you can too if you try,’ said Richard. ‘And anyway you are perfect.’

  ‘Ponce de Leon, court hairdresser,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, how sweet these wallflowers smell, it is a wonderful scent, so heavy and yet so fresh.’

  ‘Such a pity the hyacinths did not come up,’ I said, ‘they have an even richer scent.’

  ‘Why do you speak of it? We planted them the wrong way, of course,’ said Cordelia. But again she spoke without bitterness, it was simply that she could not break her habit of depreciating everything we did. Her head was thrown back and she was smiling at the sunshine. ‘Sand. I read somewhere that one should always put sand under bulbs.’

  ‘The man at the market garden said nothing about sand,’ said Mary, but without passion. Today we would not quarrel.

  ‘It was so small a purchase he would not bother to tell us,’ said Cordelia, but she was still smiling.

  ‘I know why the hyacinths did not come up and the tulips did,’ said Richard Quin. ‘We planted the hyacinths, and Rosamund planted the tulips.’

  ‘Of course,’ we exclaimed, ‘that would be it.’

  ‘No, no,’ stammered Rosamund. ‘It cannot have been that. Planting a bulb is quite simple. You just put it in the ground, and it comes up.’

  ‘Nothing is quite as simple as that,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, the scent, the scent, it comes in waves.’

  It was then, I remember, that my happiness became ecstatic, that I felt again impatience because one cannot live slowly as one can play music slowly. Yet what was happening was the vaguest possible event, a matter of faint smiles and semi-tones of tenderness. A woman in late middle-age, four young girls and a schoolboy were looking at two common sorts of flowers and were not so much talking as handing amiable words from one to another, like children passing round a box of chocolates. I could not imagine why the blood should sing in my ears and I should feel that this was the sort of thing that music was about. But the moment passed before I could explain its importance to myself, for someone called from the house, and we looked round irritably, angry because our closed circle was broken.

  But it was Mr Morpurgo, and of course we never minded him. He was Papa’s old friend, who had always looked after him, even when Papa had behaved to him so strangely that they could not meet again, who had made him editor of the local newspaper in Lovegrove. We had never seen Mr Morpurgo till Papa went away, but since then he had often visited Mamma and had given her great help in restoring her affairs to order; and our impoverished childhood had given us a certain connoisseurship which appreciated the care he took to intimate that he was kind, not because he was sorry for us but because he liked us, particularly Mamma. He came across the lawn with the hesitation we had learned to expect of him. First he sent us a bright smile across the distance, then his face darkened and his step wavered, as if he could hardly bear to present his body to people whom his mind found attractive. He was indeed a very ugly man. His mournful face was sallow, his immense black eye-balls rolled too loosely in their bluish whites, and the pouches under his eyes drooped down to his cheeks, which drooped down towards his drooping chins; and under his beautiful neat clothes his little body was sagging confusion, as if an umbrella with all its ribs broken had been tied up to make a bundle. But we no longer thought of his appearance as a departure from the normal, rather we took it as a sign that he belonged to a species sweeter and more subtle than ordinary humanity: that he was not Mr Morpurgo but a morpurgo, as he might have been a moose or an ant-eater, and that that was a good thing to be.

  Mamma exclaimed, ‘How good that you have come back! Your secretary frightened us by writing that he did not know how long you were going to stay on the Continent,’ As he took her hand she gazed at him with concern, and indeed he was very yellow and mournful, even for him. ‘But how ill you look! I know what it is. You have been staying in some place where they cooked everything in oil!’

  He repeated, ‘Where they cooked everything in oil?’ For an instant he kept an awestricken silence. ‘How strange it is that you should have guessed that! Yes, they certainly cooked in oil. It was a harsh coast, and they were disobliging people. If they had had all the butter in the world, and all the lard too, they would have sent away for oil, and if it had been delivered to them fresh they would have kept it till it went rancid, just to have the right disgusting fumes pouring out of their disgusting kitchens into their disgusting alleys. But I am unfair. They were simple people and meant no harm. The fault lay in the business which took me among them. It gave me,’ he said, looking piteously at Mamma, ‘a horror of the place. But at least it was all over sooner than I had expected, and it is quite at an end. So now we will forget it. There is no point in not forgetting it,’ he told himself peevishly. ‘So I have tried to find some distraction in bringing the Aubrey family some flowers, and I find them looking at their own flowers, which are more beautiful than any I could bring you.’

  ‘You are laughing at us,’ said Cordelia.

  ‘No, I am speaking the plain truth,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You will not hear from me any humbug about crusts being better than caviare, in any department of life. Clare, your children will only be building up disappointments for themselves if they do not realise that as a general rule costly things are far, far nicer than cheap ones. This is true in a garden as in anywhere else. The superiority of orchids to Virginia stock is so great that you would have to degrade your minds not to perceive it. All the same, it is true that nobody can bring a friend flowers more beautiful than that friend has in his own garden, for the reason that a growing flower has an iridescence which a cut flower loses in an hour. Your tulips have a light on their petals which the ones I have brought you must have lost on the journey, and if you look inside you will see a powder on the anthers and the stamens’ - we were afraid he was going to pick one to show us, but of course he did not - ‘which started to drop off mine while the gardeners were carrying them up to the house. So I have brought you flowers that are not as good as those you have already, and I have done something else that is wrong. I have brought you too many. Look at my chauffeur, standing at your window, carrying twice his own weight in carnations and tulips and orchids, his controlled Gentile face taking care not to show his opinion of my excess. And there are more in the car. I always overdo things,’ he complained, looking round for sympathy.

  We had never heard him make so long a speech, and his querulousness sounded as if he were talking to prevent himself from doing whatever it was that men do instead of bursting into tears. We gathered closer to him, and Mary said, ‘But we like that. You can’t bear the idea of there being only one of anything nice, and the further you get from that stingy number the better you are pleased.’

  ‘But this time it is going to be inconvenient,’ grumbled Mr Morpurgo. ‘Your poor Kate will be looking everywhere for flower vases. I will go and buy some.’

  ‘No, no,’ begged Mamma. ‘You will buy far too many’.

  ‘You see!’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You know what I am.’

  ‘Come indoors and sit down quietly and have some tea while the children put the flowers in what they can find,’ said Mamma. ‘Really, Edgar, I am worried about you. To be troubled because you think you have brought too many flowers - too many flowers! - it is quite absurd. You must be ill. I tell you, it is all that cooking in oil. But we will find you some plain biscuits for tea.’

  So Mr Morpurgo huddled in the biggest armchair, looking as if he were much in the wrong, whil
e we fetched vases and jugs and ewers, and filled them with his prodigious flowers until Mamma said, ‘Now it looks like fairyland,’ and he sighed, ‘No, it does not, it looks like a flower-show.’ Then he took an envelope from his pocket. ‘Please read this letter from my wife,’ he said, and when she had taken it from him he smiled, as if glad to remember that in one respect the world was going his way.

  But my mother soon laid down the letter and said, ‘It is very kind of your wife to say she wishes to know me. It is really extraordinarily kind of her, particularly at such a time as this, when she has just come back from Pau, and must have so much to do. But I would never think of intruding on her. She must have so many friends, and it must be pure kindness which makes her invite me. She cannot possibly have any real desire to meet anybody as uninteresting as myself.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘you were a celebrated pianist, and you are a remarkable woman. Also,’ he added, ‘you are the wife of an old and dear friend of mine. Of course my wife wants to know you. If she did not she would be stupid, and very distant from me, and she is not that. She is very intelligent, and very handsome, and very impulsive and warm-hearted.’

  ‘It is natural that your wife should be all those things,’ said Mamma. ‘Still, she is being far too kind. Why, she says she wants all of us. But we are such a troop! And Richard Quin is only a schoolboy, he is far too young to go out yet.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘you must all come. For one thing, it is absurd that you should none of you have ever been to my house.’

  ‘But we have,’ said Mamma.

  ‘No, never,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. But that house in Eaton Place is not mine. It belonged to an uncle of mine who died some years ago, and my uncles and my cousins and I thought it saved trouble to keep it on. It is very handy when one or other of us want to close his town house, as it happened to me this winter, or if any of our relations from Paris or Berlin or Tangier turn up. Though as to that,’ he said, with the stern yet self-gratulatory air of a man who has struck on a thrifty notion, ‘the new Ritz Hotel is so pleasant that a suite there will really do them just as well. But my own house is quite a different matter. Look at the heading of the letter. I would like you all to see it, and never mind about Richard’s age. I want the whole of your family to meet the whole of mine, and anyway I don’t think he is more than a month or two younger than my Stephanie. If she is at luncheon there is no reason why he should not be there too. It may be a little dull for him but I hope Richard Quin will put up with that for once, to please me.’

  Richard Quin sat back on his haunches, yellow tulips strewn all round him, and smiled brilliantly. ‘I would do anything to please you.’ It was not humbug. He liked pleasing people as much as he liked playing games.

  ‘It is important that he should be there,’ said Mr Morpurgo over his head to Mamma, with a mystical air. ‘Have you thought of it, he is the only son in both our families? Oh, do not look so doubtful about the whole occasion. All things are in order, or I would not have brought you the invitation. My wife and I talked it over last night. She and my girls and their governess have been away at Pau for the last six months to be with her mother, who has asthma, and lives there now. She came back for twenty-four hours to tell me that her mother was better and that she intended to bring the whole party home in ten days’ time.’ He laughed. ‘I told you she was impulsive. She could not wait to tell me the news, she said that she felt suddenly that she must see me, and there she was. And now she is off again. How much I like it when she and my girls are back! To be with one’s wife and children and to entertain one’s friends, there can be nothing better. And you are the very first guests we will entertain. Well, I must go, and we will all see each other a fortnight from today. I chose a Saturday so that there could be no question of school for any of your young people.’ He rose, smiling, as if he had something pleasant to think of and wanted to hurry off and enjoy it all by himself. His black eyes, bright with their secret, fell on a heap of red carnations which Mary had laid on a tray, and his plump fingers shuffled among them till he found one of the more splendid flowers, broke its juicy stalk, and put it in his buttonhole. But he looked down on the dark rosette and grew sad again. ‘When things go well,’ he said apologetically to Mamma, ‘one cannot help feeling cheerful.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Mamma.

  He hesitated. ‘Surely it’s a kind of treachery’, he said, ‘to all the things that haven’t gone well.’

  ‘Such a ridiculous idea would never have come into your head,’ said Mamma, ‘if it had not been for all that cooking in oil.’

  Mary soon found an excuse for not going with us, I thought rather unscrupulously, by converting what had been a vague suggestion into a firm promise and then pressing on one of Mamma’s most sensitive points. We all knew perfectly well which day we were going to Mr Morpurgo’s house, but Mamma did not mention the exact date till some time had passed, and then Mary started and exclaimed, ‘The tenth! Well, Mamma, you must tell Mrs Bates that I cannot play at the St Jude’s Charity Concert that afternoon.’ At once Mamma replied, as Mary had known she would, ‘What! Is that the same day? Can you get back in time? No, I suppose you cannot. Well, you cannot break a promise to play just to keep a social engagement. You must never, never do that. What a pity! I will write at once to the Morpurgos.’

  I kicked Mary under the table, quite viciously, for we carried on a permanent quarrel over this issue of going out into the adult world. Mary thought that the people we would meet there would be just as tiresome as the girls and the teachers at school in Lovegrove, and that we should make up our minds to have nothing to do with them except play to them at concerts. There would be a few nice ones, just as at school there was Ida, who meant to be a doctor and had a mother who played Brahms quite well, but we would get to know these people anyway, they would be on the outside like us. And anyway, Mary said, we need not fear loneliness, for there were enough of us at home to give us all the companionship we needed. We were numerically quite strong. Now that Rosamund and her mother, Constance, were living with us for good, we were eight, including Kate our servant, who was completely one of us; and nine, if we counted Mr Morpurgo, and he seemed to have joined us; and if Papa came back we would be ten. What did we want with anybody else, Mary asked. But I held that it must be worth while exploring the territory outside Lovegrove because there must be people who were like the characters in books and plays. Authors could not just have made them up out of nothing at all.

  This luncheon-party had raised this hope of mine in a most attractive form. It seemed certain that Mrs Morpurgo must be kind and noble, for her husband said she was beautiful, and no beautiful woman would have married such an ugly man, had she not valued goodness above everything. We were very fond of George du Maurier’s novels, and of Peter Ibbetson specially, and I saw Mrs Morpurgo as the saintly and gigantic Duchess of Towers. She would be a little different; because she was a Jewess her hair would be black and not copper-brown, as du Maurier says that the Duchess’s was. But like Mary Towers and all the great ladies du Maurier drew, she would be very tall, and would lean slightly forward, her brows clouded with a concern which was not irritable but tender, provoked by fear that since she was so tall she might have overlooked some opportunity for kindness. I thought Mary a fool for throwing away her chance of meeting this splendid person, and I told her so on the day of the party while she was doing up the buttons at the back of my best blouse. But when she had finished and I faced her I saw she was looking cold and fierce and this was a sign that she was afraid. She looked like that when any of us were ill. So I simply called her a fool, to make her think I had not noticed anything, and went downstairs.

  In the drawing-room Cordelia was sitting on the sofa, ready dressed, even to her gloves, which the rest of us put on only at the last moment, because we disapproved of them on principle; and she was watching Richard Quin and Rosamund play a game of chess. She was frowning, although Richard Quin
was as ready to start as she was, and Rosamund was not coming with us. It worried Cordelia that Richard Quin was always playing games, and indeed as he and Rosamund sat at the chessboard they had a spendthrift and luxurious air, perhaps for no other reason than that they both were fair and the sunlight was pouring in on them. Nowadays Rosamund wore her hair up when she went out, but though she looked more grown-up than any of us she did not enjoy doing grown-up things as we did, and the minute she got home she used to raise her long hands and slowly draw out the pins from her hair and let it fall loose, slowly, curl by curl, over her shoulders. As I came in Richard Quin struck the board and set the red and white chessmen sprawling, and leaned across the table and tugged hard at one of these loose curls.

  ‘You have beaten me three times running,’ he said. ‘That’s against nature. The rule is that I beat you, you beat me, for ever and ever, amen.’

  ‘It would be like that,’ stammered Rosamund, ‘if today you weren’t thinking of something else.’

  ‘You never concentrate on anything,’ Cordelia told him.

  ‘Rosamund, I shall never understand this business about chess,’ I said. ‘You always say you are not clever, and you never got any prizes at school except for needlework and that horrible domestic science, and they didn’t think it worth while even putting you in for the Matric. Well, chess is a very difficult game, and Papa is a genius, and Richard Quin would be clever if he ever did any work, and yet you can beat them both. How can you do that if you’re not clever?’

  ‘It is quite simple,’ said Richard Quin. He had kept her long barley-sugar curl to twist between his fingers. ‘Rosamund hasn’t got a mind. But she does quite well without it. She thinks with her skin. The people who examine for the Matric don’t like that sort of thing, they don’t hold with it, as Kate says, but chess is different. So long as you can make the moves, chess doesn’t care if, like Rosamund, you just have something shining instead of a brain.’