This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  We all said that indeed we saw, we exclaimed at the dangers that had encompassed Uncle Len, at the courage with which he had annulled them; all except Rosamund, who still lay back on her pillows. She was pressing her thumb against her lower lip, as she often did when she could not make up her mind. She was very babyish in some ways, this was very near sucking her thumb. While Cordelia was saying that all the same she could not understand why the police did not stop this sort of thing, Richard Quin moved to Rosamund’s bedside and stretched out his arm and ran his fingers deep through her hair and tumbled her heavy golden curls over her face. But under them it could be seen that she was keeping her thumb pressed against her lower lip.

  He sighed as if he were too tired to talk any more, but went on: ‘Oh, you know, you have to admit it, Uncle Len is a great man, Wellington would have liked him. You see, he had to take hold of Benny’s tie with his right hand and smash the tumbler with his left. He had to do it that way, he couldn’t help it, because he was standing with the bar counter on his left; and he says he hadn’t the slightest idea whether he could do it or not. He had never tried it with his left hand, why should he? But if he hadn’t been able to do it, then Benny could quite easily have reached out and smashed a tumbler himself, for of course the bar was on his right. But Uncle Len had to risk it, just to show he was on top. Oh, he was wonderful.’

  Rosamund took her thumb away from her mouth and shook back her curls and sat up in bed, clasping the sheet to her breast with one hand, and looked up at him with great clear eyes. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I remember that. Uncle Len broke the tumbler with his left hand.’

  ‘With his left hand,’ he repeated, coaching her slowness.

  ‘But that was terrible!’ she exclaimed in a sudden fluttering flurry. ‘Why, it is as if someone were to tell you, your whole life depends on whether you can thread a needle with your left hand. Oh, poor Uncle Len, poor Uncle Len!’

  It was the kind of thing she understood. With her talent for serenity she would have ignored the existence of diddacoys, had she been a gipsy; and she would have avoided the attention of hooligans by the use of her talent for evasion, which was nearly but not quite the same as her talent for serenity. But when a man was asked to do something with his left hand which he was used to doing with his right, that evoked her pity. It was like the crisis in a fairy-tale, where the princess will be changed into a pig or a frog if she cannot fill a basket with wild strawberries in the winter woods; and it was to some such early world as that, more simple than ours and yet more strange, that she belonged. Now that she could sympathise with Uncle Len’s plight she was at rest, and she was totally restful, just as she had been totally hurt when Richard Quin had come into the room. They exchanged clear and shining and blank smiles, as if they were a prince and princess in a fairy-tale, looking forward to their featureless and eternal happiness. Richard Quin wanted nothing to spoil the moment of harmony which, though I was excluded from it, I knew to be exquisite. He turned about abruptly and blew out the candles, and said in a voice that trembled a little, ‘Goodnight, my silly sisters, goodnight, Rosamund.’

  Through the darkness she stuttered, ‘Goodnight, Richard Quin. I am sorry I was so stupid.’

  ‘Oh, you were not stupid,’ he told her as he went through the door. Though he spoke tenderly the way he said it suggested that he meant either, ‘No, you were not exactly stupid, but you were certainly going along in that direction, but it doesn’t matter,’ or, ‘No, considering that you are stupid, I don’t think you were being particularly stupid.’ Surely that was rude, yet it was not rude between them, and I heard Rosamund settle down again in bed with a contented sigh.

  Mary and Cordelia and I chattered for a little about the new Uncle Len that our brother had left painted on the darkness. Mary said that we must be sure to give him a really good birthday present, I wondered when his birthday was, Cordelia said she had it in her birthday book and expressed wonder that the rest of us did not keep up our birthday books, it was such an easy thing to do, and, as the present instance proved, so useful. There grew on me the sense that round my bed was the dark room, round my room was the dark house, round the house was the dark garden, the dark garden lay on the side of a dark hill beside a dark river which protected it like a moat, which was the Thames but also seemed as I sunk down into sleep to be Uncle Len, flowing so strongly from his unsuspected beginnings to his unknown end. As I was taken by my dreams, I no longer recollected what my brother had told us about Uncle Len as a story but rather as a long composition he had played us on the flute, on that second mouth set obliquely to the first which the fingers have to teach to speak. Once I woke up and thought I heard Mary crying, and I sat up and said anxiously, ‘What’s the matter, you ass?’ but it was laughter that was shaking her, and she gasped, ‘If it is true that everybody, absolutely everybody who’s called D’Arcy is a gipsy, then Pride and Prejudice is quite a different book from what we thought.’ I laughed back, ‘And how Elizabeth would hold it over him!’ and we slept again.

  Then I woke up in the white light of early morning and lay looking round me with that sense of ease which anoints the young when they do not have to hurry out of bed to school. The rains of the previous winter had soaked in through a gutter and left a couple of stains high on the dado above the two windows. One stain was like the helmeted head of a woman, the other was like a spread hand. Uncle Len had said he would get down to a job on the plaster and mend the guttering outside as soon as the season was over and he had a moment to himself. He was indeed wonderful. He had been born of wild people, his childhood had been ruined and his youth disappointed, and if he had wanted to take revenge on the world he had the strength and cunning to do it, yet he did small things about the house as though he were a tame, weak man good for nothing else. Eager to see him, I got up; and lest I should wake the others I took my clothes in my arms and dressed in the passage, near the sealed door which was pierced on its hinged side by blanched fronds of wisteria. They were growing long and straggling, the last leaves on the spurs were tiny, we had nearly come to the end of this summer which had been happy although Papa had gone away. I went out of the silent part of the house into the small morning noises of the inn. Some horses were clopping their hooves on the cobblestones in the yard, men were calling to them, ‘Yup, yup,’ as if they were eating soup, and then all at once shouting in priggish warning, like schoolteachers telling one that one is going to knock over something when one is not, ‘Oh yo! Oh yo!’ Then the horses gave exasperated neighs, saying it was all a fuss and they could get on all right if they were allowed to do things their own way, and then there was a contented orderly scamper out to the road and the hoof-clops became softly resonant and died away. The kitchen door was ajar and I heard Milly and Lily exchanging remarks which were like the cawing of the rooks when they left the elm-trees in the morning or came back to them at night, which meant nothing yet were not meaningless, since they proclaimed loyalty to a routine. The kettle must be full boiling or the tea won’t be what you could call tea, yes, indeed, and the pot must be ’ot to the touch. All the people at the Dog and Duck dropped their h’s, not invariably but to impart emphasis. Horrible was always ’orrible, and surely ’orrible is much the more impressive of the two words. But I did not hear Uncle Len coming in with his caw and telling them for goodness’ sake to get on with it, or he wouldn’t get his breakfast before closing time. I went out into the garden and he was not there either. But Rosamund’s mother, Constance, was walking on the lawn at the river’s edge, a cup and saucer in her hand, and I ran to join her.

  Constance was very like her daughter, yet was comic. Rosamund recalled classical sculpture, but Constance was like a statue, not a very good statue, imperfectly Pygmalionised. Her skin was smooth as marble and her calm was like marble too; and it seemed probable that under any sudden catastrophe she would simply keel over, her queenly stance unaltered, and it would then be our duty not to bring her brandy and rub her hands but to call on the officials
of some museum who owned the tackle that could restore her to an upright position. But today she was not only comic, she was also exquisitely in harmony with the quiet grey morning, as she walked beside the glassy river, sometimes raising the O of her cup to her bland lips, while her large, perfectly shaped hand held the O of her saucer steadily level, and her wide eyes rolled slowly from side to side. As I called to her she set her cup back on the saucer and pointed to the window of the bedroom she shared with my mother.

  ‘Your Mamma is still sleeping,’ she told me when I reached her. ‘There is no doubt she is improving.’ We took some steps together, and she drank again. ‘She is slowly getting over the loss of your father. The first wild grief is gone,’ she said, in tones so flat that it seemed as if no such thing as grief could exist, ‘but she has to fight against what lasts far longer.’

  ‘What is that?’ I asked apprehensively.

  ‘Why, she misses your Papa coming in from his office and telling her what has happened during the day.’

  ‘Surely that can’t matter so much!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘It matters a great deal,’ she stated. ‘When a marriage comes to an end, whether through death or some such accident as has happened to your Papa, the wife is always distressed, whether she loved her husband, as your Mamma did, or not.’ She paused and thought, but gave no example. ‘Because he no longer brings her in the news,’ she ended. She raised her cup to her lips again, and seemed to forget that I was there. We strolled downstream, she veiled in her reflections, I remembering that if Mamma had been deserted by her husband, she was fleeing from hers. They would not suffer in vain, for I knew too much ever to have one of my own. The river was dimmed by broken mists drifting along the shining surface in hummocks and wisps, not so fast as the current, more nearly at our pace, and above us a struggling sun was pale as the moon. The summer, we said to each other, was nearly over.

  She said suddenly, ‘Oh, there is Uncle Len. This morning he found that one of our boats had not been tied up properly and had been swept away, so he and Tom went off to find it.’ The two boats had just rounded the bend of the river where dark grey woods, sharp-edged against a pale grey sky, seemed now to meet and form a solid wall. The pot-boy was rowing and could hardly be seen in the fogged distance; his boat was just a dark shape which spurted forward, sped on till it flagged, then spurted on again. Uncle Len was standing in the stern of his boat, rooted to his solid midriff in the mists, which there a shaft of sunlight was touching with yellowish silver. He was backwatering with an oar, bringing his craft along as swiftly as the other, with a trick of the arm as delicate as he was gross, a trick which had the air of being a secret he could not have imparted even had he wished. I had seen him make many such movements. Of course he was a gipsy.

  ‘Run and tell Milly and Lily to start his breakfast,’ said Constance. ‘I came out to keep watch for them.’

  I gave them warning in the kitchen and went down the village street to fetch his Daily Mail. Our happiness had slipped into its groove again.

  IV

  OUR HAPPINESS at the Dog and Duck was so great that it was the first place where Mary and I felt any prolonged twinge of rebellion against our destinies. Usually we accepted the knowledge that we were pianists, not in the sense that we chose to play the piano, for that implied that we could have stopped if we had wished, but because we had been born so, as Hindus are born Brahmins or Untouchables, so we made no fuss about it. But at the Dog and Duck, when we had to sit practising at the piano Mamma had hired from Reading, we often sulked. I would rather have been on a bench in the garden, shelling peas or stringing beans into one of those big china bowls, white inside, dark cream and fluted outside, which are surely among the handsomest of household objects, until the ferry-bell rang and I put down my bowl on the grass and slipped on my padded gloves, and took the punt over, hearing first the lovely gush of the water as the pole parted it and went down to the one right place where it should strike the river-bottom, and then the delicate spit-spit-spit of the drops it scattered as it came up between my twirling hands. That was another grievance. Even in padded gloves, that was all the boating we were allowed to do. Richard Quin and Rosamund were good about taking us out on the river, but that was not quite what we wanted. They often took us into the arcade of some backwater they had discovered, not to be seen from the bank, nosing the boat in slowly so that the green crystal pavement was not shattered more than need be, until we came to the inner reach, which seemed sealed by greenness at each end, and we sat as quietly as if we were in church, nobody knowing that we were there, and the ruffled water settling to crystal again around us. But Mary and I could never be the showmen.

  Our resentment really went deeper than that. Mary and I would have liked to have a life together on the river which would have proved us as close companions, sharing as many secrets, as Rosamund and Richard Quin. Also it irritated us that even the restriction on our rowing was not quite our own. Cordelia was infringing our rights in our grievance, by a fantasy which ignored the absolute certainty that she would never be a violinist. The great teacher who had heard her play had dispersed her hopes so brutally that even her iron resolution was convinced and broken, and she never touched her violin now. It was even shut up in one of Mamma’s old trunks; we could not think why Mamma did not give it away. But when she was asked if she would like to take out a boat she would assume her white, worried stare, which suggested that she was bearing in mind some important consideration wantonly ignored by everybody else, and she would look down at her hands and shake her red-gold head. This trick afflicted Mary and myself with a sense of panic. Cordelia was trying to live our lives, not because she had no life of her own, because there was concealed in her small, compact, delicate, biddable-looking body a self so gargantuan in its appetite that she wanted to snatch whatever good she saw on the plate of any other self. Music was our food, so she had tried to take it away from us. She had failed because it had ceased to exist as soon as she had laid hold of it. It wasn’t hers. But we could not have even the pleasure of feeling forthright indignation at her attempted theft, so impudently persisted in after the nature of things had proved that it was impossible, because we knew that what she was doing had another meaning, which deserved our pity. She had been hurt by her failure to be a violinist in the same way that Mamma had been hurt when Papa had left us. She had been married to something and had been deserted. But again we could not feel sorry for her in comfort, because our musical training by Mamma had left us with the belief that to play an instrument badly was as shameful as any crime short of murder. In our eyes, therefore, Cordelia had been miraculously rescued from mortal sin and ought to be rejoicing at her salvation. It is one of the major disharmonies of life that complicated relationships are not reserved for adults. The wind is not tempered to the lamb, shorn or unshorn.

  Indeed a lamb may be delivered over to the blast at its strongest, just because it is a lamb, and subject to some mood peculiar to immaturity. One afternoon, when Mary was practising, I followed the towing-path that ran from the inn-garden through the churchyard and along the foot of the steep woodlands. Presently my eye was caught by a cast branch lying on the ground, the leaves of which were dusty-white on one side and the berries a bright dark crimson. Looking up I saw on the edge of the wood the low tree from which it had been broken, and I tried to break off another branch, the berries were so bright. But the fibre was tough, and to get a better purchase I climbed the rising ground behind the tree. But even then I could not snap it, and I tired of the effort, and looked over my shoulder into the wood and took some steps into its dusk; and although I had left my childhood I was immediately overcome by that sense of the world’s strangeness which visits children as intensely as if they were accustomed to be somewhere else. Since the wood was uphill it was very dark. There were some beeches, unaltered by being where they were; they raised against the sky layer after layer of green design, and so much light filtered through and between their leaves that their lower br
anches were as splendid as the upper. Those trees might have been standing free and clear in an open field. But the firs cut off the light, though they etched only a spare and spiky pattern on the sky, and their underbranches were bare and fretted with sordid shrivelled twigs, and the stunted hollies and hawthorns that grew beside them had the look of broken furniture in an attic. Here and there on the earth between there were deep cushions of emerald moss, but there were more brambles and much coarse, blanched grass, and there was an air of natural want, of vegetable shabbiness. It was odd that there was not a sound to be heard, for the treetops must have been thickly peopled with birds and squirrels, and I knew the ground that I walked on to be the ceiling of galleries and halls where rabbits and stoats and weasels had their homes. I listened to the silence till it became itself a sound loud as a trumpet, and as if it were calling me or some others I ran, either obeying it or fleeing from it, I did not know which, back to the edge of the wood. But my terror was only half-real, and it was pleasant enough to keep me from going right out into the open, so I stayed in the dusk, leaning against the trunk of the low tree with dusty leaves and bright berries, and I looked down on the river and saw it strange as the wood. It flowed with a haste so like an air of purpose that it was hard not to think it a great snake fully aware of what it was on its way to do. In the woods on the other side of the water, opaque with that dull green which is the sediment of summer colour after August has drained off its radiance, I saw a signal. One tree, and no other, had been touched by autumn and was bright gold. It must have been growing in a deep cleft on the hillside, for it was visible only from this spot; I had not seen it as I came along the bank. It was shaped like a blown flame, but that clear gold was the colour of light and not heat. In this childish mood, this retreat into legend and fairy-tale and dream, I saw this as a flag flown by some immensity, not a giant, for that would have been too ordinary, a mere magnification of my own kind, but by a cloud with a will, or the force behind one of the seasons. I clung to the tree-trunk, pretending that I believed that the world was made of the enlaced and breathing bodies of natural things, and that one among them was communicating with me by this tree, while at the same time I was thinking that I must bring the others here after tea. It was then that I saw Richard Quin and Rosamund standing just below me at the water’s edge, and heard him say, ‘It is a queer thing, colours do not seem as bright to me as they did when Papa was still alive.’