This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  Without resentment Rosamund asked him, ‘Since I am like that, will I be able to be a good nurse?’

  But Richard Quin looked past her at the opening door. Mamma came in and went silently to an armchair and sat down. Cordelia and I inspected her to see if she were properly dressed for the party, but Richard Quin asked sharply, ‘What is the matter?’ and we saw that her face was quite white and that she was twisting a piece of paper in her hands. It was as if Papa were still living with us.

  ‘Children,’ she said, ‘a horrid thing has happened.’

  ‘Oh, not today! Not today!’ exclaimed Cordelia. ‘Mr Morpurgo will be here at any moment.’

  ‘There is a man who has come here from time to time to ask for money,’ said Mamma. ‘It is his trade, and of course such people must exist, and there would be no need for them to exist if everyone paid their debts. Oh, children, you must always pay your debts. This man came here first to ask for the rent, but you must not count that against Cousin Ralph, the house-agent did it without telling him. I wrote to your Cousin Ralph, asking him not to do it again, and explaining that it was useless, that when I had the money I paid the rent. He answered me quite nicely, saying that he had not known about the bailiff and would see to it that we were not bothered in this way again. Then another time this man came to ask for the rent for those offices your father and Mr Langham took for that company that never was started, something to do with ostrich feathers. And there were other times, but I forget them.’

  ‘Well, if he’s here now, it can’t be for the same reason,’ said Richard Quin, who had gone to sit on the arm of Mamma’s chair. ‘The solicitor has had all the bills.’

  ‘He is in the dining-room now,’ said Mamma, ‘and he says we owe a printer ten pounds.’

  ‘Well, let us pay him off,’ said Cordelia, rising to her feet. ‘Surely we have ten pounds? I will run to the bank if you will write a cheque. But perhaps we have not got ten pounds. I suppose we still have very little money.’

  ‘Sit down again, dear, you give no help by standing, and it makes me nervous,’ said Mamma. ‘The trouble is that we do not owe him ten pounds, or even one pound. Or so I should think. I am sure that everything is settled, and this man has nothing to prove the debt but this piece of paper. Marchant & Ives, printers, Kingston, in October, to account rendered, ten pounds. I never heard of them, and I do not think that your father had had anything printed for a long time before he went away. That was one of the ways I knew he was ill, he was not writing any more.’

  ‘And the date is October,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Papa had gone by then.’

  ‘That means nothing, the months mentioned in connection with any of your father’s debts might be in any year, past or to come; your father was debt itself,’ said Mamma, quite without bitterness, simply as if she spoke of a storm. ‘But this thing is absurd. When this man came before, he had official papers. He always showed them to me, though I did not look. But now he has nothing but this dirty piece of paper.’

  ‘Then we’ll go and tell him that we’ll fetch the police if he does not leave at once,’ I said, sitting down on the other arm of the chair and kissing her.

  ‘You are all a great comfort to me,’ said Mamma, ‘but get up, dears, no furniture was built to stand such a strain, and you are missing the point. You see, he is just a poor old man. He has a grey beard, it used to be trim, now it is straggling, and his coat is dirty. I remembered him as quite neat when he came before. What can have happened to him? But what a foolish question, so many things may have happened to him. In any case I suppose the word has gone round among such people that we are paying all our debts, and he has thought of this way of raising money for himself.’

  ‘Let us turn him out,’ I said, ‘and I wish we could kill him.’

  ‘But why do you think Papa did not really owe this money?’ asked Cordelia. ‘When he owed money everywhere, why should he not owe money to this Kingston printer?’

  ‘I am sure this is not a real debt,’ said Mamma. ‘When I first went into the room I saw that the old man had been crying. It is not only that he is much more unkempt than he used to be, he seems years older. Also he looked at me sideways after he had been rude to me, to see whether I was going to give in, and his eyes were like an old dog’s. What can we do for the poor wretch? We cannot pretend that we really owe him ten pounds, that is too mad, and five pounds, too, is a lot of money.’

  ‘But how do five pounds come in?’ asked Richard Quin.

  ‘Why, I do not see how we are to offer him less than five pounds without letting him see that we know him to be a fraud,’ said Mamma. ‘And I feel so guilty, for I never thought of such people as having a life of their own; I saw them as coming into existence in order to plague me and then vanishing. But this old man certainly has a life of his own, and I think it is sad.’

  ‘Mamma, try to stick to the point,’ Cordelia implored her. ‘How do you know we do not owe him this money?’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mamma, impatiently, ‘if it would not hurt his feelings, I would tell you to open the door and look at him. He is in utter misery. I wish there were something small in the room that was worth a little so that he could put it under his coat and take it away.’

  ‘No, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin. ‘No. We cannot stock our rooms with objects which are just the right size for putting under a coat so that thieves can steal them and thus not have their feelings hurt by the knowledge that you know they are dishonest. That really is too mad.’

  ‘Yes, but what are we to do?’ asked Mamma. ‘I tell you, he is suffering.’

  ‘Aunt Clare,’ stammered Rosamund. She had been setting the red and white chessmen back in their proper places on the board.

  ‘But what does it matter whether he is suffering or not,’ I said, ‘if he has been rude and tried to cheat you?’

  ‘The car will be here in a second,’ said Cordelia. ‘We must do something; will nobody be sensible?’

  ‘Aunt Clare,’ Rosamund repeated. With a clumsy gesture she upset the chessmen on the floor. ‘Oh, dear,’ she breathed.

  ‘Papa’s beloved chessmen!’ exclaimed Cordelia. ‘Rose, take care not to tread on them. Oh, I cannot kneel to pick them up, my skirt is too tight, it will get creased.’

  ‘There is no reason why you should pick them up, Rosamund will do that,’ said Mamma. ‘And she so seldom drops or breaks anything that we can let her have an accident without drawing attention to it. I wish I could think what I should do about this poor old man.’

  Richard Quin winked at me. We both understood that Rosamund had upset the chessboard in order to break up the argument and get us to listen to her, and that Mamma and Cordelia, for quite different reasons, were incapable of divining this.

  ‘Aunt Clare,’ stammered Rosamund, ‘you should not try to deal with this old man yourself. It is not for any of us to do that.’

  ‘Well, who else is to do it?’ asked Mamma.

  ‘Why, there is K-K-Kate,’ said Rosamund, opening her eyes in a wide, babyish stare. ‘Give me some money and I will take it down to the kitchen and ask her to make a cup of tea for the old man, and she will carry it up and give him the money, and she will say something that will show him that we know he is a fraud. She will be able to put it in a way that will not hurt his feelings, at least not as much as anything we could say.’

  She had risen, and now she was standing on one side of Mamma’s chair, while Richard Quin stood on the other. ‘Yes, Mamma,’ he said, patting her thin shoulder, ‘Rosamund is right, that is the way to do it.’ She looked up at them fearfully, so much smaller than they were, and so pale. They bent down over her, strong and bright, and working in smooth confederation. ‘If you give me the money it can all be settled before you go,’ said Rosamund, and Richard Quin said, ‘Your handbag, dear.’

  Mamma’s eye roved fiercely about her in search of a better solution. She was an eagle plagued by a conscience. ‘I wonder if this is not too much to expect of Kate,’ she said. ‘She
is very kind, otherwise she would have left us years ago to work in a place where she had less to do and would be paid more. But she might not see the necessity of sparing someone who has tried to harm us.’

  ‘You are a fuss-box, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin. ‘When Cordelia fusses she is being your own daughter. Kate is all right. You need not be afraid of what she will do to the old man. If a dog attacked one of us she would beat it, but not cruelly. Here is your handbag.’

  He gave it not to Mamma but to Rosamund, who opened it with her slow dexterity, and found at once the sovereign case which lay in its disorder. ‘How much money shall I take, Aunt Clare?’ she asked, in docile tones.

  ‘He has asked for ten,’ sighed Mamma, ‘it would be insulting to offer him less than five - oh, I know that is absurd. Say three.’

  ‘Not three sovereigns, but one,’ said Richard Quin to Rosamund, ‘and don’t you be misled by the Prayer Book into thinking that this is the same as saying not one sovereign but three.’

  ‘I have told you children again and again that you must not make fun of the Athanasian creed,’ said Mamma. ‘Do you listen to nothing else in church? And it is foolish to laugh at the Athanasian creed, you will understand it when you grow up. Or perhaps that is too much to say. But you will see that things can be like that, more or less. But yes, one sovereign to begin with. Oh, I must be honest, he smells of drink. And mercifully Kate will find out if there is some way of helping him later.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Clare,’ said Rosamund. She took a coin and gave Mamma back her handbag, remarking that there were some stitches gone in the sovereign case and that she would take it to the saddler’s next morning, and then she was gone. Mamma looked round at us and asked, as if we were her elders, whether it was going to be all right. Then she sighed, and said that she supposed her hat must now be crooked, and crossed the room to the looking-glass. But she struggled only feebly with her lack of interest in her own appearance, and I went to help her. Though her voice had been steady enough she was trembling; it was like having a bird under one’s hand. But of course to have a dun in the house again had reminded us all of the offences Papa had committed against us, which we had been able to forget now he was not there. It was a blessing that Rosamund and Richard Quin had been clever enough to find a way by which Mamma could get rid of the old man without doing what was against her nature and refusing to help him. Yet I was not quite pleased by that. As the two had stood on each side of my mother’s chair, they were not unprepared, like the rest of us in that room. They had moved in such perfect concert and had been so ready to pick up their cues that they might have been playing a scene which they had often rehearsed in secret; and their smooth and radiant colouring gave them the appearance of players made up for the stage. But the comparison was not apt, for the faith of actors is that they should speak and move so that the meaning of the play is made plain to their audience. Richard Quin and Rosamund were more like a conjuror and his assistant, who practise the false candour of rivers, which run open under the light but will not stop to be examined. I loved Richard Quin and Rosamund more than I loved anybody except Papa and Mamma, for I could not exactly love Mary, she was my twin and we were both pianists, we were nearly the same person. I was sure that Richard Quin and Rosamund loved me in return, but there was an understanding between them to which I was not admitted, and I found it hard to see how that was compatible with any love either might feel for me.

  Cordelia said explosively, ‘Oh, how foolish we shall all look when it turns out that the man really has a writ.’

  Mamma wheeled about, saying irritably, ‘Nonsense, men who have writs do not cry.’ Then she saw that Cordelia was near to tears and she cried out tenderly, ‘Oh, Cordelia, I have been stupid. I thought you were being silly about that man, but what is really the matter with you is that you are nervous about going out for the first time to a big house, to see people who are rich. Of course you are frightened, it is only natural. But you need not have the smallest alarm. There is no reason why I should not speak frankly to you, you are not conceited. You are a pretty girl, even an exceptionally pretty girl, and people like young girls who are pretty.’

  ‘Yes, Cordy,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I will now tell you something which should prevent you getting the wind up, now or ever after. After you’ve been to a cricket-match it isn’t only the other boys who ask me about you, it is the masters, too. They raise the subject in a roundabout way, particularly the older ones, but they get to it in the end. Well, you know, that’s a test. If you can get schoolmasters interested you can get anybody.’

  ‘You remember how your father used to say how like you were to his Aunt Lucy,’ Mamma went on. ‘Well, she was considered quite a beauty. When you go to any new place and you feel nervous, just stand there and let people look at you, and you will find that everybody wants to be friendly. I never had that advantage. When people first saw me, even when I was quite young, they felt that I was strange. But I have often seen pretty girls coming in and everybody liking them at once. It is a charming sight,’ she said, smiling at some memory.

  Cordelia laughed timidly. ‘Am I really all right?’ she asked us. She turned towards me and seemed to steel herself, and repeated, ‘Am I really all right?’

  I thought to myself, ‘Why, it is as if she thought that I was always so hard on her that if I say she is pretty it really must be true,’ and I wondered why she should feel like that about me.

  Was I sometimes savage? I was under the impression that I was mild, though often people were savage to me. I thought too how odd it was that she needed reassurance about her looks, considering that when she had played the violin badly at concerts she had exploited her prettiness with what had looked to me like a complete understanding of its effects. Could it be that Cordelia had been so disconcerted by having it proved that she had no musical gift, that she now doubted the existence of the gifts she really possessed? I said, ‘Of course, Cordelia, you are lovely,’ but I do not know if she ever heard me, for at that moment our servant Kate came into the room, followed by Rosamund, and Kate wore her wooden look of consequence, which meant that she thought the family which employed her had gone too far in its path towards folly, and she was about to call them to a halt.

  My mother cried, ‘Kate, you must be gentle with that poor old man.’ She had never learned to recognise the warning in that wooden look.

  ‘What poor old man?’ asked Kate. She held the pause as if some invisible conductor was giving her the beat. ‘Tom Partridge is no poor old man. He is the laundryman’s father-in-law and a great grief to all his family. But I have been gentle with him, to please you.’

  ‘What, have you seen the old man already?’ said Mamma.

  ‘Yes, indeed. I did not wait to make tea for him. Tea is not his drink. I went up and gave him money as you had ordered, but not all you gave Miss Rosamund. Here is five shillings change.’

  ‘What, you gave him fifteen shillings?’ exclaimed Mamma. ‘I am sure you were right, but it is an odd sum. One never says to oneself, “Poor man, I would like to give him fifteen shillings”.’

  ‘I did not give him fifteen shillings. Fifteen shillings for old Tom Partridge! I gave him five shillings,’ said Kate, as much timber as an old sailing ship.

  ‘It was a half-sovereign I took from your case, not a sovereign,’ explained Rosamund. Her tone was bland. I had noticed before that she often spoke of her own actions as if she were reporting something of no interest to her, simply what she had chanced to perceive.

  ‘Oh, Rosamund! That was mean, and not like you!’ exclaimed Mamma. ‘And, Kate, you have been hard! The old man may be a bad character, but he was in some sort of trouble. He was crying, Kate.’

  ‘Yes, ma’m,’ said Kate. ‘He is in some sort of trouble. His trouble is that he is bad. If he was crying, it was most likely because he had drunk too much last night, and, ma’am, since you are so, so, so -’ she wanted to say ‘foolish’, but that would have destroyed the system of relationships to whic
h she was accustomed. ‘So kind,’ she said, ‘he has gone away happy. What he wanted was to get some money out of somebody by a trick, so that he could spend it on drink, and feel how clever he was. If you had given him nothing, then that would have been hard on him, he would have slunk off like a dog, and felt that his day was over. But the smallest sum that he got by his tricks would send him out in good heart. To be sure, he begged for a little more, but I said something that brought our talk to an end without being disagreeable.’

  ‘Oh, Kate, Kate, are you sure it was not disagreeable?’ Mamma begged.

  ‘No, no, it was nothing cruel,’ Kate assured her. ‘I simply said that if he went about pretending that he was collecting debts that nobody owed, it would be no time before he found himself inside again.’

  ‘Inside what?’ repeated Mamma.

  ‘In prison,’ explained Kate.

  ‘Has the poor man been in prison?’ asked Mamma.

  ‘Six months in Wandsworth,’ said Kate, ‘and not a day too short.’

  ‘But he must have been terribly hurt when you said that!’ protested Mamma.

  ‘No, he would not be hurt so long as I called it inside,’ said Kate, impatiently, as if Mamma might not understand quite a lot of things, but she should have understood that.

  ‘Why was he sent to prison?’ asked Cordelia, shivering with distaste.

  ‘He got into trouble because he cannot leave well alone,’ said Kate. ‘He has this good job as a debt-collector, but the thought of a roof on an empty house is too much for him.’

  ‘But what can he do with the roof of an empty house?’ marvelled Mamma.

  ‘He gets together with some like himself, who you would probably like to help as well,’ Kate told her, just not altering her deferential tone, ‘and they break into the house and climb on the roof and strip off the lead and take it away and sell it to dealers, who give them next to nothing for it because they know where it comes from, and that is what annoys the laundry-man most, his name dragged in the mud and all for a few shillings. And it is a cruel thing to do, too. When the lead is gone off a roof, the rain comes in, and think of the poor people who are the next to move in and find themselves soaked in their beds, and the poor landlord who has to replace the lead! And it is not like giving way to a strong temptation, like a poor man passing a shop and seeing something only the rich can enjoy and making away with it. To break in to a house and take the lead off the roof a man must carry tools and have his mind made up. And it was a mean thing to do, to come to you and blacken the poor master’s name with a debt more than he owed, when there is no grown man in the house to give scoundrels what they deserve. I did not think the old wretch was as bad as that.’