by Rebecca West
‘Mamma,’ Cordelia began again, but Richard Quin interrupted her. ‘Let’s forget this horrible visit,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s talk or think of this hateful woman again, any more than we would talk or think of some drunkard we saw in the street.’
‘Oh, Richard Quin,’ said Mamma, ‘you must not talk like that about her, you have eaten her salt.’
‘No, that was Mr Morpurgo’s salt,’ said Richard Quin. I saw to my surprise that he was trembling, that there was a blue shadow round his mouth, that he was looking down on the ground as if he felt sick. I had not seen him angry since he was a baby and had hated being taken from his games to go to bed. ‘What she did takes all her rights away from her. Mr Morpurgo had told her that you were unhappy because Papa had gone away, and asked her to do what she could to make you happier, and she was too brainless and too careless to remember, and worse, she was too drunk, drunk with stupidity and ill-will. Mamma, promise you will never go near her again.’
‘I hope I never shall,’ said Mamma. ‘It was dreadful, sitting in that small room and having all that hatred played at one on the cornet. But you did not hear what poor, poor Mr Morpurgo said as we left. “I hope you will come again and bring Mary.” How could he think we could go back and endure all that a second time? And bring Mary, the most sensitive of you all.’ Cordelia jerked up her head and stuck out her stubborn little chin, angry at the idea that any of us were considered more sensitive than she was. ‘Poor Mary would have taken weeks to get over this, while all of you will be no worse by the time you have got home,’ Mamma went on, unconscious that she was giving any of us cause for offence, believing indeed that she was paying us a compliment. ‘But I am sure poor Edgar meant it, and I know he will be hurt when I refuse the invitation, and perhaps he will guess at the reason, and that is the last thing one must ever do - to make a husband think badly of his wife, to make a wife think badly of her husband. But I really will not be able to go.’
‘Well, stick to that,’ said Richard Quin. He sat back and looked down at his hands, clenching and unclenching them. ‘Anyway, we are probably worrying about nothing. She was not pleased that we had been invited, and she will be less pleased to have us in the house now she has seen you. Cordelia and Rose are much prettier than her daughters, and much younger than she is, and you have something that trumps her ace. Oh, ten to one we’ll not be asked again.’
‘Richard Quin,’ exclaimed Mamma, ‘how can you be so vulgar? I am sure that the woman, idiot as she is, would not have such petty thoughts. People are not like that in real life, only in Punch jokes.’
‘Mamma,’ I said, ‘how can you say that? Richard Quin is perfectly right. Of course Mrs Morpurgo was as jealous as could be. Didn’t you see how she was glaring at Cordelia?’
‘That horrid common woman does not matter,’ said Cordelia. ‘But, Mamma—’
‘Anyway, Mrs Morpurgo will not be in the house if we are asked again,’ I said. ‘I think Mr Morpurgo is going to divorce her.’
‘Oh, Rose! Rose!’ cried Mamma. ‘What has come over all of you? Talking of divorce beside this beautiful lake? Divorce! You are too young to utter the word, and there is no reason why you should, for you know nothing about it. You have never known anybody who was divorced. I don’t think I ever have, except of course Cosima Wagner, and I don’t expect you ever will. And nothing happened today to make you say the dreadful thing you have just said. Mrs Morpurgo was rude to us, she was disagreeable to poor Edgar, and of course it is the worst condemnation of a woman that she should not appreciate a husband like that. It was so strange,’ she said, going into a dream, ‘that she would not do what he wanted. It is such a pleasure when people you are fond of want you to do something. Your father was so taken up with his writing that he rarely asked me to do anything in particular. But Edgar asked his wife today to stay at home instead of going out, you would have thought that would be a great pleasure for her. But beyond that, Rose, Mrs Morpurgo did nothing wrong. There was no hint of any of the awful things that have to happen before there could be a divorce.’
‘But, Mamma,’ I protested, ‘there was the riding master.’
‘Yes, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Mamma, didn’t you understand about the riding master?’
We eyed her innocence with something of the same amazement that she herself had felt at seeing a grown man shorter than a boy.
‘Mamma, dear, there are lots of things we don’t know about,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I wouldn’t know how to go about getting mixed up in a divorce myself, and I don’t think Cordelia and Rose have the slightest idea how to start. But everybody has made us read the Bible, and our house is always knee-deep in newspapers, and we have a general idea as to why people get divorced. It starts with flirting, and goes on to mug-smudging, which is what the boys at my school call kissing; and, Mamma, do you know about things called limericks?’
‘Of course,’ said Mamma. ‘Edward Lear.’
‘No, not at all,’ said Richard Quin. ‘But let’s get on. Those beastly daughters, when they talked about the Captain Somebody-or-other at Pau who was getting married, they weren’t just drivelling. They were doing what is called letting the cat out of the bag. They were telling their father that their mother had been flirting with this riding master. They were sneaking. They were sneaking on their own mother to their own father.’
My mother laughed, her voice rang out as if she were young. ‘No,’ she said, as if she were a girl who had scored a victory over a boy. ‘You are wrong. I tried not to listen, but it was Stephanie who had been foolish about the riding master. Stephanie, the youngest girl, poor child.’
‘Why, who said that?’ wondered Richard Quin.
‘Mrs Morpurgo!’ I said scornfully. ‘Oh, Mamma, really! You see,’ I explained to him, ‘while you were in the library she came and told Mr Morpurgo a silly story about how it had been Stephanie who was in love with the captain, and Mr Morpurgo as good as told her to shut up, and she would go on, and then he said that anyway it didn’t matter, and she was so stupid that she didn’t see that he was being nice to her. But you should have understood, Mamma, really you should.’
‘No, surely not, dear,’ said Mamma. ‘Surely what upset him was that she insisted on going to that silly fête, and that she was so rude about his beautiful pictures. But perhaps … oh, yes, it must have been more than that. She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life, he must be used to her refusing anything he might admit he wants, and that silliness about the pictures was something she had often brought out before, like the way people play the same encore. But Edgar was as if he had been hit a great blow which he had not expected. Oh, perhaps it is as you say,’ she said, her voice dying away.
‘Poor, poor Mr Morpurgo,’ said Richard Quin. ‘He is so.…’ The words choked in his throat, he passed his hand over his forehead.
Cordelia broke into the silence. ‘Mamma,’ she said.
‘Yes, dear?’
‘Mamma, I have found out what I want to be.’
‘What?’ asked Mamma incredulously. ‘During that luncheon? In that house?’
‘Yes, Mamma. Mr Weissbach gave me the idea. I am going to be an art dealer’s secretary. Not just a typist. A sort of assistant. I know exactly what to do. I will find out everything tomorrow.’
‘Why, Cordelia,’ breathed my mother. ‘How single-minded you are!’ Then she grew wild and seemed to spread wide wings, an eagle defending its eyrie and its brood. ‘But you cannot become Mr Weissbach’s secretary. That I forbid.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Cordelia, looking very sturdy. ‘That would not do. But he hopes I will, so he has told me exactly what training to get, and I will be able to use it to get a post with someone else.’
Richard Quin broke into laughter. ‘Good old Cordy! I’ve always told you we needn’t worry about old Cordy.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call me
that,’ said Cordelia, ‘and stop that hideous guffawing. Mamma, the training should not be so expensive. I just have to study the history of art, it seems that there are classes, and I must get my French and German really good, and start Italian. I will work hard and it will not take long. I will be on my feet before Mary and Rose.’
‘How extraordinary!’ said my mother. ‘Really, how extraordinary!’
‘What is extraordinary?’ asked Cordelia crossly. Suddenly she looked young and tender, younger than me or even Richard Quin, and it seemed as if she might cry. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she said.
‘Why, you silly old Cordy, Mamma is so impressed she can hardly speak,’ said Richard Quin.
‘Yes, it is wonderful,’ said Mamma, ‘in the midst of all that - I cannot help thinking of it as cornet-playing, I have always disliked the cornet, it is such a coarse instrument, that woman was so coarse - there you were, quietly making your plans. But, my dear, be sure, I do not want you to rush into anything just for the sake of making a living. There are other things to think of than that. Are you sure you will enjoy it?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Cordelia. ‘I have always loved pictures,’ she added dreamily, screwing up her eyes as if she were already looking at one with an expert gaze.
‘What a lovely unexpected end to the day,’ said Mamma. ‘See, it is a good thing after all we went to luncheon with Mr Morpurgo, it has all turned out happily. I thought when we found these chairs free on a Saturday afternoon this could not be such an unlucky day as we had supposed. I wonder when you will know enough for it to be worth while for you to go to Florence. Most of the best pictures are there or in Venice. There are only a few in Rome, which I always thought a great blessing.’
‘How can it be that?’ I asked.
‘Because one never wants to be indoors in Rome,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, children, how lovely it is for you to have your lives before you. All the things that you are going to see and do!’
A family of ducks swam up, self-possessed in their smooth and shining close-fitting feather suits, some in brown tweeds, others in a birds’ version of men’s black and white evening clothes, only with the shirt-front right underneath them, so that their yellow paddling legs stuck out of its whiteness. Then they landed on the strip of grass in front of us and waddled about suddenly grown simpletons, stupid about their balance, not certain where to go. They were myself. Often I felt at ease and then, suddenly, I did not know what to do. I was a fool for all the world to see. Mamma laughed at them tenderly, and wished we had something to give them, and then an old man came up with a paper bag full of bread, and threw them crumbs. He stumbled over the low iron rail that marked the edge of the grass, and Richard Quin just saved him from a fall. He thanked our brother and explained that his sight was bad; and indeed it must have been nearly gone, for his eyes were milky with cataract. After he had given his bread to the ducks he told us the story of his life. He had fought at Omdurman, and that he had been in the Army and had fought in a famous battle was an aspect of his old age, for there were to be no more wars, everybody knew that. Walloh-wah, said the ducks, and went back to the water. The old man bade us goodbye, he told us his name, which was Timothy Clark, of course he had been Nobby Clark in the Army, all Clarks who served their time were Nobby Clarks. We told him our names and he said he had once known someone who was called Rose like me. When he had gone we sat in a happy drowse, the ducks we knew and other ducks inscribed arrowheads on the bright water; the green branches above us sometimes stirred but for the most part kept the pattern of shadow steady as if they were an awning; the people who came and went along the paths on the other side of the lake seemed carefree, as people do when seen from a distance. ‘It is beautiful to be at peace again,’ sighed Mamma. But presently we heard a clock strike and Mamma said, ‘We must go home. Mary and Rosamund, Constance and Kate.…’ We stood up; and Brown the chauffeur was beside us.
‘Are you ready to go home now, madam?’ he asked.
‘Why, Brown?’ exclaimed Mamma. ‘Where have you come from?’
‘I have been sitting behind you,’ he told her. ‘You said you only wanted to be here for a little time, so I locked the car and followed you.’
‘How kind of you. That was very thoughtful of you,’ said Mamma. Her hand sketched a grateful gesture in the air and stopped and changed to a vague blessing. She would have liked to tell him how troubled we had all been, and why we wanted to disinfect ourselves in the park, but that could not be done in time, it must wait for eternity. ‘But won’t Mr Morpurgo have been wanting you to do something else?’
‘He wouldn’t want me to do anything as much as he’d want me to look after you, Mrs Aubrey,’ said Brown. He took off his cap as if he were insupportably hot, though the day was no more than warm. ‘He thinks a lot of you, Mr Morpurgo does. And I’d like to do what pleases him today,’ he said wildly, ‘for I’m giving him my notice tomorrow.’
My mother wailed, ‘Oh, Brown, why are you doing that?’
Brown shook his head and did not answer. He no longer seemed full of blood, but full of tears.
‘Think it over carefully,’ advised Mamma. ‘Mr Morpurgo values you highly. It isn’t only that you are a careful driver, though he speaks of that. Heavens, what are our streets going to become! But also he likes you. He enjoys having you near him. I have heard him saying all sorts of pleasant things about you. He is very appreciative of the way you handle Mrs Morpurgo’s dogs for her.’
‘The poodles!’ exclaimed Brown. He was aghast. It was as if he had forgotten them until this moment, though they were among the first things he should have taken into account. ‘Yes, I’ll have to give up the poodles! Why, it’ll be like saying goodbye to my own flesh and blood.’
‘Think it over,’ my mother urged him, ‘think it over.’
To avoid her tender gaze he looked away, and what he saw, the people sitting on the little green chairs or lying on the grass, loose-limbed and Saturday-afternoonish under the network of sunshine and shadow cast by the trees, made him grimace. It was as if he did not like humanity, though that seemed hard to believe of a man built as he was. ‘I should have gone long ago,’ he said hoarsely, and wrapped his mystery around him and went ahead of us to the car. There seemed no end to the disclosure of pain made by this day in London, the grand London, London north of the river. I was glad to be on my way back to Lovegrove and my practising. Mary had had the run of the piano all day, she should be willing to cede it to me now. In my mind’s eye I saw the line of black and white notes, shining and innocent.
III
TO MAKE UP FOR the horrid visit to Mrs Morpurgo, my mother took us, either the next day, or a week later, I cannot remember which, to the Dog and Duck at Harplewood. This was a little inn on the Thames which we were learning to like as well as any place except our own home at Lovegrove, though we had come to know it through a tragic event. Among our schoolfellows at the High School there had been a tall and languid girl named Nancy Phillips, whose bright yellow hair contrasted strongly with her pallor and the nullity of her features. There was a faint, sharp sweetness about her, like the taste of raspberries; she wore fussy and frilly clothes and jingling bracelets with an air of surprised distaste, as if she had been put to sleep by a witch and had awoken to find herself in these trappings. She had almost no other characteristics, but I thought of her a great deal. I imagined that her home must be a strange place where she was not at ease, and when Rosamund and I went to a party there I found I was right. It was a large and comfortable villa, which should have been safe and jolly. We were given a splendid tea in a dining-room with embossed red wallpaper and red damask curtains, and silver biscuit-boxes and a tantalus on the mahogany sideboard, and it was no use telling me that it was vulgar, I came from a home where everything was shabby, as nothing was here, and I knew there were more melancholy things than vulgarity. But the drawing-room was frighteningly stupid. It had been furnished by Maples in the Japanese style, not that the family had any orien
tal connections, but simply because the backwash of the aesthetic movement had by then reached the suburbs. However, the tide had not rolled strongly enough here, and on the pale gold straw walls there hung huge comic pictures of motorists in teddy-bear coats and peaked caps. This place was not safe and jolly, it was sinister. Nancy’s Mamma was swarthy and sullen, and rudely went upstairs to lie down, instead of looking after her daughter’s guests as other Mammas did. We were left in the charge of her sister, Aunt Lily, and she was nice, though very plain, skimpy and bony and too pink of cheek and golden of hair; but she was not only plain, she looked ill-used, like a doll which has been thrown too often over the side of a pram. It emerged that this was in fact what happened to her in this household, for when she rang for some logs the parlour-maid was rude to her. Then when Nancy’s father came home her mother was not glad to see him, and, indeed, though he tried to be nice, he was like a tiresome dog that barks too loud and keeps on jumping up. Though the Laurels had been rich in particularly splendid gas-fittings, chandeliers like brass octopuses and brackets that gesticulated from the walls, all laded with frosted globes engraved with flowers, I remembered it as a dark house, full of shadows.
Very soon after that Nancy’s family and her house grew much stranger in our eyes, because they came to be associated with an event which none of us really believe can happen, though we are warned of it from our earliest childhood by the Bible and the fiercer sort of fairy-tale. Nancy’s father was murdered by her mother. Nancy and her aunt were left alone at the Laurels, and my father and mother took them in, which was a great sacrifice. It was not that poverty made it difficult to find the extra food and linen needed by our guests, for all Mamma’s married life had been spent in performing such conjuring tricks: it was that Aunt Lily talked facetiously and sentimentally and tritely all day long. Until Queenie had met the affectionate and tiresome man who had married her and been poisoned for it, the two sisters had been barmaids, and not at the height of their profession. They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride, and had to repeat old jokes because it could no longer invent new ones, and speak of virtues in phrases so worn by use that they gave the same feeling of want as rags. Too often, listening to Aunt Lily’s conversation was like having emptied at one’s feet a dustbin full of comic songs and jokes from pantomimes, catchwords which had not even that flimsy bond with sense, and protestations about being ready to share one’s last crust with a friend and saying what one meant to people’s faces instead of behind their backs. Yet if one gave up the idea of direct communication with her, and put what she said with what she did, and let time fit them into a mosaic, the pattern was beautiful. Though what she said when she was at ease was usually inaccurate and humbugging, when there was much at issue she was candid. She knew that falsity destroyed what was of real value. She never ceased to proclaim her belief in her sister’s innocence, except in our own home; it was as if she wanted there to be one place where it could be understood that she knew her sister was a murderess but loved her all the same. It might have served her sister’s cause if she had pretended the dead man had been a bad husband; but that was not true, so she would not say it, indeed, her Cockney whine changed into something more like a bird-song when she spoke of his gentleness. Through Aunt Lily it dawned on us that murders really were committed, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which we had all detested as children, were true. But there was, we also learned from Aunt Lily, a way of behaving under the shadow of murder which deflected its evil.
