This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘Not if that photograph’s telling the truth, she won’t,’ said Uncle Len, and drew angrily on his pipe. There was not only Aunt Lily to be pitied, there was another plain woman coming along in the person of Nancy. Indeed there was a whole world of plain women who ought never to have been born, who ate their hearts out for other people’s children, who would die alone.

  Yet that was not the whole of his thought about women. It extended till it overlapped his thoughts about first causes. He had a high regard for my mother, whom most people would have called plain, for she had been made so shabby by misery that her improved fortunes could not restore her; she was an eagle, irrevocably stripped of half its feathers by the storm. He overlooked her plainness because he realised that she had a special value of a rare kind. This he discovered for himself.

  Aunt Lily had gathered during her stay with us that Mamma had once been a famous pianist, and she had handed on this information to Uncle Len and Aunt Milly, but the love they bore her did not constrain them to believe everything she said. But on my mother’s first visit to the inn, however, they began to wonder whether there was not something in the story, and one afternoon as she walked on the lawn, watching the sun glint on the river, they called Mary and me aside to enquire further into the matter.

  ‘Lil tells a tale,’ said Uncle Len, ‘that the Shah of Persia sent for your Ma because he’d heard all the top-o’-the-bill pianists in the world play “The Blue Danube”, and your Ma left the whole field beaten at the post, so he sent for her to go to his palace, all expenses paid, out in the desert, to play it to him over and over again. I take it, granted that Lil’s got everything wrong, that that was the way of it when your Ma was a professional?’

  The ratio between Aunt Lily’s stories and the facts on which they were founded was constant: she was always suggesting to the Creator that life might have been more dramatic, but never jettisoned His work altogether. We prepared to explain that Mamma had once stayed at the same hotel in Lucerne as the Shah of Persia, and one wet afternoon he had approached her because he had been told that she was a famous pianist, and asked her to play ‘The Blue Danube’ on the salon piano, and had made her play it over and over again, faster and faster, until by a fortunate chance it stopped raining. But Aunt Milly dismissed her husband’s question as unnecessary. ‘Oh, you don’t have to ask, Len. Look at the way she’s walking across the lawn this very minute, not taking one bit of notice of all the teas. Anyone could tell.’

  Uncle Len nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said reverently.

  Later I learned what they meant. The sight of my mother, walking as in solitude through the maze of tables on the lawn, her eyes set on the distant wooded hills that lay down together on the horizon, had taken Uncle Len and Aunt Lily back to the race-course, which had been the centre of their lives during their best years, when they had most vividly perceived events. There they had sometimes watched great men as they led their winning horses into the paddock or lowered their field glasses as their horses lost, and the greatest of these had borne themselves as if the multitudes were not there, as if they were alone on the bare downs. Even if they smiled it was to themselves. ‘And there was Lord Rosebery, as cool as a cucumber.’ My mother’s unawareness of her surroundings, which struck the suburb of Lovegrove as ridiculous, linked her in the minds of Uncle Len and Aunt Milly with these great men, and this was a sound perception. Like those great men, she was a public performer. They had made their speeches in Parliament, she had had her concerts. Alike they had had to learn as a first necessary technical trick the art of forgetting the spectators, though these might seem the essential factor of a public performance. Uncle Len and Aunt Lily had detected a discipline, and recognised a special sort of human being that won its place by ordeal.

  This perception waked with a myth that lay deeper in their minds. When a woman was great she need not be beautiful, she could be what she pleased, for she had magic powers which were superior to beauty. There were only six pictures on the walls of the Dog and Duck which did not represent horses and jockeys. They were all portraits of the Royal Family. One was of Edward the Seventh, one of the new king, George the Fifth, and one of Queen Mary, and these hung in a vestibule, in simple oak frames, on a wall often obscured in wet weather by hats and coats on a hall-stand. The other three were identical pictures of Queen Victoria, which were very differently treated. They had been given gilded plaster frames and filled the place of honour in the public bar, the saloon bar and the private sitting-room. They were coloured and showed the Queen when she was old and stout, and her face plummy crimson under her crowned white hair. Her eyes looked voluntarily blindish, rejecting all impressions of the outer world as unnecessary to her anointed royal state; her mouth was pursed with something more mystical than mere obstinacy, as if she had just closed it after an oracular pronouncement and would say nothing now that the inspiration had gone from her. The square bale of her bosom was crossed by the sash of the Order of the Garter, which was blue, such a clear blue as should properly have been worn by a young girl. In no way did this icon fulfil the conditions laid down for ordinary women: there was here no concern to please, and no tenderness. That was natural, for this woman did not play her part in ordinary life. She was a ju-ju, she controlled the natural forces which permit us to live and condemn us to die. Uncle Len was no fool, and he knew very well that Queen Victoria had taken little part in the government of England, but he believed that while she was alive and had travelled from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle, from Balmoral to Osborne, she had, simply by living, simply by that ritual gyration, conferred peace and prosperity on the British Empire. If he had been told that during her reign the British people had grown taller and lived longer than in the preceding and succeeding reigns, he would have believed it. Well, Mamma was a ju-ju too. She did not need to be excused for lack of tenderness, for she was rich in all feminine attributes except elegance; but for her inelegance she was pardoned only because she was a wonder-working fetish.

  We saw the extent of his confidence in her when his pursuit of knowledge brought him face to face with some particularly resistant problem. He knew that Mamma had excercised her mind on little but music and the affairs of her family, yet he expected her, and her alone, to know the answer to anything which struck him as really mysterious, though we, her son and daughters, were bound to have more information of the sort he wanted, since we had just made our way through the schoolbooks, which he was using as a map for the chase. Mr Morpurgo too should have been a help, and he was often at hand. When we were at the Dog and Duck he always drove over from his country-house and sometimes stayed the night. Richard Quin and I had been wrong in our prophecy of a divorce, and I think he found the inn as kind a shelter from the pain of going on living with his wife as we found it from the pain of going on living without our father. But even when he was there it was to my mother that Uncle Len turned for final enlightenment. Thus we learned how it had been in ancient Greece; first you put the troublesome matter to the philosophers and mathematicians, then you went off to consult the Sibyl.

  ‘Now, none of you go away for a minute,’ he said one day. ‘There’s loads of time for you to have a lark on the river before you have your dinner. It’ll be late at that. Leg of pork’s got to be cooked through. I’ve known them that met their death for not paying attention to that. Well, there’s something I read the other day that I can’t understand. It’ll be plain sailing for the lot of you, with your schooling and your music as well. It’s one of those short bits they put in the newspaper to fill up a column when the article ain’t long enough. I always read ’em, and very interesting they are. But I can’t get the hang of this one,’ he said, softly roaring. ‘I got it here.’ He took a clipping out of his little notebook. ‘“Architecture is frozen music.” What’s it mean, what’s it mean?’ he asked, each time roaring a little louder.

  This time it had to go straight to Mamma. Even Richard Quin and Mr Morpurgo had nothing to say. Mamma said, ‘Yes, I’ve
read that before. I can’t remember who said it. I should think it was someone who knew nothing about music, probably with the intention of pleasing a musician. Unmusical people often try to please musicians by talking about music just as people who have no children try to please people who have by talking about children, and in each case what they say usually falls wide of the mark. It is very strange and bound to create awkwardness,’ said Mamma, looking earnestly into Uncle Len’s eyes, anxious to give him the benefit of her experience, since it was information he wanted, ‘it is as if there are two great enclosures, and the people inside know they are inside, but the people outside do not know they are outside.’

  This was not the kind of information for which Uncle Len had been hoping. He ignored it and repeated heavily, a vein standing out on his forehead, ‘“Architecture is frozen music.” Sure it don’t mean anything to you at all?’

  ‘Nothing whatsoever,’ said Mamma. ‘There is no use not telling you the truth, for truth is what you enjoy. But music is sound, and it is useless to think of it as anything else, and architecture is stone and bricks. A piece of music makes one feel something when one hears it, a building makes one feel something when one looks at it, and there’s an end to the connection between them. You must simply remember that whoever said it was trying to be civil to something or someone.’

  ‘But wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Uncle Len. ‘You kids can give a bit of help here, I shouldn’t wonder? Sound’s waves, ain’t it? Right! Now suppose you could freeze the waves that make music, would they look like buildings?’

  The quicksand of this argument was rising round our knees.

  ‘I hope not,’ moaned Mamma, ‘it would be a coincidence that proved nothing,’ and Richard Quin said, ‘I don’t think so, I don’t see how frozen waves could look like a building with walls and roofs and windows and staircases and cellars.’

  ‘Come to think of it, they couldn’t,’ said Uncle Len, ‘not if they were all going the same way, which I suppose they would be more or less. Grrr,’ he exclaimed, and tore up the clipping and threw it away.

  ‘I think it must have been a German who said it,’ suggested Mr Morpurgo. He was going on to suggest that it might have been Goethe, when Uncle Len wailed, ‘Whadju mean? You’re saying that whoever said it might have been a German, when Mrs Aubrey here says that it must have been someone who didn’t know nothing about music, when everybody knows that the Germans are more a musical nation than us any day?’ Mr Morpurgo opened his mouth, closed it, and made a gesture of despair. ‘Oh, it’s my fault,’ continued Uncle Len, going down on his knees and picking up the bits of clipping, ‘it means something all right, and you mean something, but I can’t understand it, and anyway I can’t see the meaning of the general layout. Here’s this thing about music and architecture and here’s the lot of you, you kids and your Ma and Mr Morpurgo here, all saying there’s no sense to it. Now what’d he say it for, whoever said it, if it don’t mean nothing? That’s why I want to get my teeth into this science. According to what I understand they keep everything out of it that don’t make sense. It’s time somebody put the shutters up on this nonsense business. It’s all over the place. Granted the man who said this thing is the one to blame, what’s this newspaper doing, not letting the thing lie where it dropped, and putting it in at the end of the column where you’re bound to read it, if you care for interesting things. Lots I’ve learned that way. They had a bit last week about how if all the eggs in herring-roes grew up to be herrings you could walk across the North Sea on solid herring. Now they put this thing in about music being frozen architecture that can’t be true. You’re sure,’ he implored us, ‘it couldn’t mean something?’

  It was Mary who found his eye rolling on her. Doing her best, she said, ‘I don’t think it could, possibly. If architecture’s frozen music, then music’s thawed architecture, and that doesn’t work out.’

  ‘No, my girl, you’re wrong there,’ said Uncle Len. ‘That don’t follow. With all the asparagus we’ve served here, and I thank Heaven every summer for that beautiful bed, though mind you, it’s getting old now, I know better than that. Because a thing goes one way and changes into something else it don’t mean that it can turn round and go the other direction and end up as what it started. You take melted butter to the table all hot and runny, it don’t never cool down to being butter again. Now, why’s that, I wonder?’ he asked Mamma. She shook her head and held up her hands. His eyes questioned us, Mr Morpurgo, the Thames Valley, the summer sky. ‘But, oh, good glory,’ he said, plummeting down like a shot pheasant. There’s the Reading Young Methodist League. Twenty-four of them rowing up so happy, wanting their lunch at an ungodly hour because they rose with the lark, and who the heck asked them to do that, I’d like to know, and an ’orribly frugal meal they been and ordered. Monks I could understand, but they’re Dissenters, and why leave the C. of E. if you gain nothing, and anyway not a penny spent in the bar. Well, so long for the moment. Just remember where we got to in this argument, Mrs Aubrey, I’d be obliged.’

  ‘That I will not be able to do,’ sighed Mamma as he ran from us up the sloping lawn. ‘Oh, Edgar, Richard Quin, will you be able to remember where we left off and help the poor man?’

  ‘No’, said Mr Morpurgo, ‘I would not have enjoyed what he was saying so much if it had not been too odd to be remembered,’ but Richard Quin said, ‘I don’t think we need remember, it’s more a question of being ready to board the bus when it starts again.’

  That summed up our duty, and we were always ready to perform it, between fooling about in the dinghy, and bringing people over on the ferry, and feeding the hens, and helping with the lunches and teas. It was never a tedious duty, for Uncle Len’s bus travelled by picturesque routes. When he got his first Algebra book (Hall & Knight, of course) Aunt Lily looked over his shoulder and squealed that there weren’t just letters and figures, there were a lot of things that were neither, ’orrible things, and he had better get us to explain them thoroughly before we went home. But Uncle Len said, ‘If those girls in the laundries can read laundrymarks, I can find out what these mean.’ When I asked him why he should find it interesting to read that if all the eggs in herring-roes should turn into herrings the North Sea would be a solid shoal, he answered that, things actually turning out so different, it showed that there was a lot of waste going on in nature, and it seemed funny, because you couldn’t keep licensed premises going on that system. All the same, this careening bus took him a long way towards his destination. Richard Quin had told us that it would, that nobody could be a bookmaker unless he could calculate shifting odds on the course, so Uncle Len should find arithmetic easy and mathematics not impossible, and as horsebreeding was a matter of hereditary strains he ought at least to be interested in biology. It was odd how Richard Quin was aware of all sorts of things the rest of our family, and particularly Mamma, knew nothing about. We had no idea what bookmakers did beyond wearing loud checks and shouting, and not till this matter was raised had we suspected that Kate always had a shilling on the big races and half a crown on the Derby and the Grand National, and that the laundry-man, whom we had imagined to be absorbed in grief over his father-in-law’s habit of stealing lead from roofs, took her bets. But when Richard Quin said a thing it was so, it always was; and he was right about Uncle Len’s progress, which was rapid, though it never ceased to be bizarre. Presently he read some books on evolution, and when the doctor and the rector made their calls, he used to raise the subject with them, with a conspiratorial air which always puzzled them. You could see them wondering why he had glanced round to make sure that there was only the family present. But since he had only recently heard of the Darwinian controversy, he did not realise that for others the excitement had died down, and he thought of it as a race still pounding its way to a finish which would declare the winner. To talk openly about the origin of species with the doctor and the rector, whom he thought of as connected with rival stables which each had entries in the race, was to him
like standing up to watch a trial gallop instead of decently seeking concealment behind a furze-bush. He got many things wrong like this; but he was not making the mistakes of a stupid man, he was guessing like an explorer.

  That was how it was for a long time between us. He was an explorer in our territory, and we were hospitable natives, and at the same time we were explorers in his territory, and he was a hospitable chief. Then our relations altered, during a single night, when we were spending a fortnight of our summer holidays at the Dog and Duck. The inn was able to enfold us all. Mamma and Constance shared a bedroom in the old part that overlooked the river, and the rest of us found wilder lodgings in the rooms round the coaching yard which had been added in the eighteenth century. At that time a landowner in the district had joined up two roads and opened a cross-country road from Reading to East Anglia. ‘Go straight out of the door,’ Uncle Len used to say, ‘turn left and keep straight on and you’d fetch up at Norwich. These here motor-cars do it in the day, handy if you want to buy a canary. The best come from Norwich.’ But the coaches had not been able to do what motorcars do for there was a river that kept flooding and a bridge that kept tumbling down, and soon travellers grew shy of this byroad and went back to the old highway; so the Dog and Duck had no need of its extension. A later generation had pulled down part of it, and now the passage in the upper storey ended in a sealed door, with blanched fronds of wisteria thrusting through its hinged side. The remaining rooms, all high and light and handsome, were empty now except for a few pieces of quite elegant furniture, but they were kept scrupulously clean. They had therefore an air of being inhabited by dispossessed and stoical and housewifely ghosts which delighted us. Richard Quin chose to sleep on a straw pallet in a loft, because Letty Lind, the mare which drew Uncle Len’s trap, was stabled underneath, and he liked to hear her stirring. It reminded him of the games we used to play in the disused stables of our home in Lovegrove, when we pretended that the ponies and horses which had been there in my father’s childhood had never left, and took sugar from our hands by day, and stamped and whinnied in the night. We four girls slept in four beds set in the corners of a square room lined with mirrors, the glass brownish, the frames tarnished, which was divided by folding doors from what was called the Assembly Room, though it was quite small, no larger than the drawing-room in an ordinary house in a Kensington square. This was lit by a large and elaborate crystal chandelier, which must have been brought from some grander place; and when there was a moon we used to open the folding doors and watch, while we undressed, the lustres glittering fire and ice against the moth-soft glow of the walls and the hard black shadows. But one Saturday night when we went up to bed there was no moon, and the electricity suddenly failed. Mary and Cordelia were already in their nightgowns, so Rosamund and I called for Richard Quin and we three felt our way through the darkness to the stairs and went down to get candles and matches.