by Rebecca West
I let go the tree and slid down the bank and ran towards them, crying, ‘Papa isn’t dead.’
They spun round and faced me with exactly the same movement, straightening themselves and letting their clenched fists fall by their sides, and trying to hide the naked pity in their faces by putting on their blindish, indolent air. It was not, as I sometimes thought, that one was copying the other. They were so alike in nature that it was a wonder they were not the same person.
‘I didn’t see you, I didn’t see you!’ groaned Richard Quin. ‘Oh, I should have known you might be about, we are so apt to go to the same places.’
‘I am glad she heard,’ said Rosamund. ‘Now he won’t have to be the only one of you that knows. It has been so hard on him,’ she told me.
The three of us drew together on the path, and I found that I could only whisper, ‘Oh, Richard Quin, you might have shown me the letter.’
‘What letter?’
‘Didn’t he write a letter about it?’
‘No, there wasn’t a letter. Papa only wrote letters to the papers. Not to us. At first I only guessed. I thought you might have guessed too. You were there when it first came out, that day last spring. Don’t you remember? The day we were out in the garden showing Mamma the tulips. The hyacinths hadn’t come up, Rosamund didn’t plant them. Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, of course I do. But what are you talking about? We never mentioned Papa.’
‘No,’ said Richard Quin. ‘But Mr Morpurgo brought Mamma all those flowers. Such a lot of flowers.’
‘What are you trying to read into that? He is always bringing us flowers. Far too many flowers. Mamma is always giving them away.’
‘He never brought us quite so many before or since,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Well, people send flowers to funerals.’
‘She must sit down,’ Rosamund told him, ‘there is a tree-trunk over there.’
While they guided me I cried out, as if I were reproaching them, ‘I saw that golden tree too. I meant to bring you here after tea.’ I sat down behind them and rocked backwards and forwards, my elbows on my knees, my chin on my palms, while their hands stroked my hair and my face and my shoulders, very lightly, as if what I had heard would have bruised my flesh. ‘But you must have more to go on than that,’ I said, contemptuously.
‘I have, but that was almost enough,’ he said. ‘Think. Mr Morpurgo had been away, and he had come back different, and he said to Mamma that he felt happy because his wife was coming home, and he was ashamed of being happy, he felt as if he were being callous about something terrible that had happened. And he spoke as if he were begging Mamma’s pardon, as if she were involved in whatever it was that he thought terrible. What is it that could be terrible both for him and Mamma? Only one thing. I guessed then that he had been abroad to see Papa, and that Papa had died.’
The darkness in the wood behind us, where the starved holly and hawthorn looked like broken chairs and rickety tables, was the real world. ‘What, at that place that smelled of oil?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Where was it?’
‘In Spain, I think. Those horrible daughters of Mr Morpurgo’s had a box of Spanish sweets they said he had brought them. He would always bring back presents, whatever he had gone away to do.’
I thought for a moment of the atlas, but not to any purpose. We had never done Spain at school. ‘But Papa need not be dead. In a place like that they probably put people in prison for debt. Papa had been away from us for quite a time, he must have got into debt. Perhaps he is in prison.’
‘Nobody ever gives people flowers because someone belonging to them is in prison,’ said Richard Quin, ‘and if Mr Morpurgo had found Papa in prison he would have paid his debts and got him out.’
‘But he said it was a dreadful place,’ I persisted. ‘Perhaps if one went to prison there, they would not let one out, and one would just have to stay there. Like dying.’ I used it as the absurd ultimate, which is only brought in for the sake of argument, which does not really exist. But it existed. Its existence was proved by the faces of Richard Quin and Rosamund, which, now I looked at them, were not the same as they had been before, when there was no question of Papa being dead. The real world was indeed that strange world where a dark wood could feel poor and rivers had business, and nameless forces could set trees alight for a message that had no meaning. For there death could be; but in the ordinary world where one played the piano and did lessons and ate and slept there was no place for this thing that was not an object, nor an action, nor really a thought that one could think, yet surpassed in violence any storm and left a huge hole where something huge had been. There was a pain in my head because the two worlds were meeting there.
‘Oh, Rose, my silly sister, Rose,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Our father has died. But, you know, you must not grieve too much, such things are always happening. I was quite sure that they were happening to us, and of course there isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t, when we were at Mr Morpurgo’s house, and he got so angry with his beastly wife, because she asked Mamma where Papa was. Oh, I know he got angry with her about other things afterwards, but his fury began when she put that question. He could have killed her for it. And don’t you see, he’d told her to be specially nice to us about Papa. I don’t know if he had told her exactly what it was. I think that though he was so keen on her coming home he didn’t trust her, which seems so odd.’
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Rosamund. ‘Your mother loved your father, and she didn’t trust him.’
‘Yes, so she did,’ said Richard Quin, ‘but all the same it seems strange. I can’t understand it. But anyway, Mr Morpurgo had told his wife something, and he had told her too that she must not let it out. Don’t you remember her asking, “What was it that Edgar was telling me about your husband? That he’d gone on a journey?” It was then he went quite white. So I said to make quite sure, “He has gone to Tartary,” and then - oh, don’t you remember? Mr Morpurgo said, “Yes, he has gone to Tartary”.’
His mouth was stopped by what it had said. I repeated, ‘Tartary? Tartary? But that’s in Asia. It’s where Marco Polo went. What’s that to do with Papa? When you said that I thought you were making fun of Mrs Morpurgo because she was so rude and stupid, it was like saying, Oh, he has gone to the North Pole.’
‘There’s another Tartary,’ said Richard Quin. ‘It’s an old word they used to translate Tartarus.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said, my voice a whisper again. ‘Tartarus was Hell. You can’t have said that Papa had gone to Hell.’
‘No, no, not that Papa had gone to Hell,’ he said, ‘I didn’t say that. But Tartarus — ’ He stirred, and pointed at the woodland on the opposite bank as if the place was there. ‘Tartarus wasn’t Hell. You didn’t have to be wicked to go there. The sons of the Titans were in Tartarus. It says so in the sixth book of the Aeneid. You did that last year, didn’t you? Well, don’t you remember? The sons of the Titans hadn’t done anything but anger the gods by being nearly as good as they were. A nasty lot, the gods. Anyway, Tartarus was part of the underworld, and one part of the underworld is as bad as another. Oh, how I hate death,’ he said, looking across the river, ‘how I hate death.’
‘If we were to be given life,’ stammered Rosamund, ‘we should have been given it for ever.’ Behind my back I felt his hand find hers.
‘But Papa had death on as good terms as it can be got,’ he told me. ‘At the end of that afternoon in Mrs Morpurgo’s house, when the rest of you went downstairs and he stayed behind and helped me to put away the books I had been looking at on the window-seat, he said to me, “You need not be too sorry for your father, he did not suffer at all.”’
Now it was certain, and tears ran down my face. ‘What shall we do?’ I said, shivering in my brother’s arms.
‘Why, go on as we did before,’ he answered.
‘I want to tear the world to pieces,’ I said.
‘If you did you still wouldn’t find him,’
he said, rocking me. ‘Papa has gone. He simply is not here. The whole world is the place where he isn’t. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning and think of that, and you’ll wake up the day after tomorrow and you’ll think of it again, and morning after morning it will be the first thing to come into your mind. Until it stops, and that itself I won’t like. But you must get it over. So now to learn to say to yourself, “It had to happen, he could not have lived for ever,” and keep repeating it. Say it, Rose.’
‘It had to happen, he could not have lived for ever,’ I said. ‘It had to happen, he could not live for ever.’
‘I would give anything to feel what you two are feeling,’ said Rosamund. ‘When my father dies, I will be sorry for him, as I would be sorry for anybody who dies. But I won’t feel this. You’ve had things that I’ve never had.’
‘But everything we have is yours,’ I said, speaking as generously as if it were not grief that I was offering to share, ‘and Papa thought of you as one of us. At the end, when he was getting tired of everybody, he still noticed you and Richard Quin.’ It seemed so natural now that as he went down to the underworld he should have turned and looked at these two, who were so very fair.
‘All the same,’ she stammered, ‘he was not my father.’
‘But when he liked nothing else, he liked to play chess with you,’ I said and stopped, seeing him as he was when he opened the drawing-room door, holding the long pale feather of his quill pen in his stained and wasted hand, and said, in a voice already sounding as if it came from a great distance, that his work was going badly, and he would be glad if Rosamund would give him a game. How thin he had grown, grieving over the world, which had not cared for him at all. I said, ‘How did he die?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ said Richard Quin.
I stared at him in astonishment. He appeared to be simply watching the river flow by; there was a fork of branches, it must have been half a willow tree, bobbing and canting on the main stream, as if it were choosing its way.
‘He’s always right,’ Rosamund reminded me in an undertone.
‘I didn’t ask,’ he explained, ‘because if people tell you things it never comes out right. Think how it always is at school. Something happens, they find some silly stuff written on the blackboard or some lab apparatus broken, and they run about trying to find out who did it. They never get what happens. You’re told boys were seen in the schoolroom in the late afternoon when they were really out in the slips, and masters think they left early when they left late, and even when that is tidied up you find that you are being praised or blamed for something you didn’t do. The thing is a secret, because every master and every boy is thinking of something that nobody else knows anything about. It always works out the same way, there is a grand pi-jaw, and you stand looking at the bar of sunshine on the floor-boards, and they go on and on, never coming near to what happened. Well, they’re always saying that school prepares us for life, and I don’t doubt it does. So, you see, if people at that place in Spain told Mr Morpurgo how Papa died, they’d get almost everything wrong, just because they weren’t Papa, who alone knew how he died his own, special death. And then if Mr Morpurgo told us what they told him, he would get a lot more things wrong, because he was not Papa, and not these people, either. Something might seem complicated which was quite simple; as simple as if he were lying in bed with a candle, and the wind blew open a window, and put out the light. Or,’ he sighed, ‘as if he had got tired and stretched out his hand and pinched the wick between his fingers.’
Together we three kept our eyes on the river. There must have been a heavy storm nearer its head waters. We had heard nothing of it here, but the driftwood kept on coming downstream. ‘We know all we need know,’ he said presently. ‘Everything about Papa had come to a stop, and now he has come to a stop too. That’s all you can get out of it.’
We were silent again, and then he broke out. ‘The awful thing is that I had hated him so! That I do hate him now. I have got myself into Tartarus. Virgil said that got you there. Hic quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat, Pulsativus parens. Pulsativus parens. I said to myself that if ever I met him in the street, I would beat him, beat him savagely for leaving us, for taking that packet of jewellery he found in the cupboard over the chimneypiece without making sure that Mamma and you girls had anything to live on when he had gone. I know Mamma did not mind, I know she told us that he was going away because a demon of ruin had got hold of him and he did not want the demon to take us too. But nobody should keep demons if they have a wife and children. That’s the last truth, there’s nothing behind that one. If I live to be a hundred I shall never find out that that isn’t true. So I could have beaten him, when I thought of him I hated him so much that it was like when you are going to be sick and you taste the sickness in your mouth. And the thing is that I was not wrong. Virgil thought so too, he put a lot of people into Tartarus who kept their money to themselves and didn’t give their own family what they needed, aut qui divitiis soli incubere repertis Nec partem posuere suis. I’m not wrong, it must be right that I should hate him, yet I wish I did not.’
Just then Rosamund made one of the murmuring sounds by which she sometimes intimated distress, which were not peevish yet made a complaint, like the coo of a dove, and were so brief and faint that one was not quite sure that she had uttered it, and hastened the more to find out whether she, who asked for so little, was actually asking for something now. ‘My head aches,’ she explained. ‘Do you think I might take down my hair?’ She spoke timidly, for in those days it was unthinkable that a girl who had put her hair up should ever renounce such a dignity, and to let it flow again would have been Ophelia-ish. ‘I shall never,’ she said piteously, ‘get used to having it up.’ She raised her arms to her head, arching her back, so that I thought of a caryatid, and slowly took out the hairpins and shook her heavy golden curls loose, one by one, while my brother watched her and forgot what he had been saying. Though these two had been together since they were children they often regarded each other with pleased curiosity, as if they had just met each other for the first time.
‘Now I feel happier,’ she breathed. ‘You do not mind? We are not likely to meet anybody on the way back. This is a public path, but it is one of our private places.’
‘You haven’t finished the job,’ he said. He was smiling, but he was still not himself, some part of him was glad of a discord. ‘You have left two curls pinned up, there, above your left ear, it makes it all look wrong.’
‘Oh, I am clumsy,’ she owned. ‘Isn’t it funny, I can sew so well, but I am clumsy. You do it for me.’ She knelt down in front of him and bowed her head. At first he did not seem to want to touch her, but he leaned forward and took out the pins, and then ran in his fingers deep into her hair and brought them up to the light, again and again. She raised her face, which was at once brilliant and dim, like the Pleiades. It might have been timidity, or slowness or apprehension, or reserve that veiled it. I think it was reserve, though her smooth forehead and the wide space between her eyes promised a candour more than was required, tending to stupidity. She said to his silence, ‘We must go back now.’
‘It is so odd that something not metal should be as bright as your hair,’ he said.
‘We must go back now,’ she repeated. ‘If we start now Rose will have plenty of time to wash her face and comb her hair before tea. If she scamps it Aunt Clare will see that she has been in a state and will wonder why.’
