This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘Words,’ sniffed Mary, ‘words,’ and I jeered, ‘Words, what we like is meaning.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you, you couple of dotty musicians,’ he jeered back, ‘what you like is sounds that in that sense don’t mean anything at all, not in the way words do when they’re used in a newspaper. Poetry is like music, it gets at meaning in another way, you needn’t snigger. I know more about it than you do. I’m going to be a writer.’

  ‘Well, write if you like, but don’t stick up for Milton,’ said Mary, and I said, ‘No, because he couldn’t have meant anything good, because he was a horrible old hypocrite, keeping his wives just as slaves who could write down his poetry and writing that thing all about freedom called Areowhatever—’

  ‘Children, you must not quarrel,’ said Kate, ‘not even in fun—’

  ‘This isn’t fun,’ I said. ‘Kate, you don’t know what a hog Milton was, a perfect hog—’

  ‘You may not have heard both sides,’ said Kate.

  ‘But do you really want to be a writer like Papa?’ I said doubtfully. It had seemed so contentious and dusty compared to music.

  ‘No, not like Papa,’ said Richard Quin, shaking his fair head stiffly, as my father would have shaken his dark head, had he wished to dissociate himself from his father. ‘Not politics. Poetry. Yes, I know quite well what I’m going to do. I shall start by getting into Oxford, I can manage that though it’s true I haven’t worked, and then I shall get the Newdigate Prize for Poetry—’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever heard you say you wanted to get a prize,’ said Mary.

  ‘Well, I don’t really want the Newdigate,’ said Richard Quin, ‘not what you’d really call “want”, but one must begin somewhere.’ He took my cup of tea, and of course I did not mind, though I said I did, and pulled his hair.

  ‘Be quiet, all of you,’ said Kate, ‘I hear your mother’s key in the door. Put on the kettle, one of you. No, fill it with fresh water, that water has been boiled up twice and would do for you but not for your mother. She will need a good cup, too, she always does when she has been to see Miss Beevor. Her maid is a good sensible child from an orphanage, I have talked to her in the fishmonger’s, but poor Miss Beevor would not know how to train her. Oh, ma’am,’ she said to my mother, ‘go upstairs and I will have your tea ready in a minute. You look,’ she said censoriously, ‘very tired.’

  This was not true. She said it only because she thought that my mother’s benevolence must be limited like the money in her purse, and that some day she might pay it all out and there would be nothing left. In fact my mother was flushed with happiness. ‘I would rather have it down here with the rest of you,’ she said. ‘How beautiful that fire is, with the coals pressed together like that and glowing. They are just the colour of those pink roses we have by the gate. Do you know, I really like Miss Beevor. I like her very much.’

  We all cried out in protest, and Richard Quin said, ‘Oh, Mamma, don’t go on forgiving everybody as if you were St Francis, we like you better than him.’

  ‘Lots,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t believe the birds liked being preached to.’

  ‘What, did St Francis preach to the birds?’ asked Kate. ‘Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to cats.’

  ‘Yes, it has to be admitted that there he chose the easier way,’ sighed Mamma. She pondered for a moment, then, overcome by the horror that any public performer must feel at the thought of a completely unresponsive audience, she exclaimed, ‘Preach to cats! No, one must not ask the impossible, even of saints.’ Her mind, doubtless because she was thinking of what cats do to birds, swept us anxiously. ‘You must not be cruel to unfortunate people, particularly when there is no reason for it. Miss Beevor is a generous woman,’ she announced, in glowing indifference to our mockery, ‘as fast as I say I like the composers she likes, she says she likes the composers I like. I know both of us are lying,’ she owned, ‘but really no harm is done, the score remains as it would have been if we were both telling the truth, and it is very pleasant of her.’

  I broke into laughter at the further joke she did not see. Did Miss Beevor, I wondered, signal that she was about to make concessions to what she considered Mamma’s depraved musical tastes, by stilling a jerking foot and swallowing? But nobody asked me why I was laughing, for this was one of the fortunate evenings which every united family enjoys from time to time when its members, returning from the day’s occupations, find such amused delight in recognising each other’s oddities that strangers might suppose them to be meeting for the first time after years of separation. There was, however, a shadow on my pleasure. I had been disconcerted when Mary had met so calmly my doubt regarding our gifts as pianists. It was as if I had put out my hand and touched her and found that she had been changed to ivory. This was absurd if I had really been seeking from her a reassurance about our futures, for she had given me that. But I had in my heart of hearts been hoping that that was just what she would not do. I would have liked her to answer, ‘Yes, it is true, we are not remarkable. It is absurd to think that we can ever make our mark as great concert pianists, though we will do enough for teachers. So we need not work so hard, and it will not be wrong for us to leave time in our lives for other things.’ But apparently I had two hearts, for when I imagined her giving that answer I knew that I would have been just as disappointed. It had not merely been the insanity of a moment, that impulse I had had to accept Mr Burney Harper’s anxiety about my technique as a final dismissal, that equally strong impulse I felt a minute later to accept any technical discipline that he might impose on me. I was like a sea pulled by two moons. This must mean a boiling of the waters, tides that rushed up and carried away structures meant for living in, and then receded till earth that should be covered lay naked. I wanted to play the piano, and I did not want to be stretched on the rack of that calling. This was my secret, which I did not dare to speak, for fear of undermining life as I knew it.

  I had another secret, which I now suppose was part of the other. I wanted to make friends. We had friends, of course, at the Dog and Duck, and we had Mr Morpurgo; but they were not young and they joined us to no others. I wanted, so much that I wept at night, to be part of the general web, to be linked with boys and girls and men and women who were not yet what they would be in the end, and would disclose themselves in plays, and would let me act with them and find out what I was. But nobody wanted very much to be with any of us except Richard Quin, who constantly attached people of all ages to himself by simply meeting them, so that we were surprised, when we went for walks with him through Lovegrove, by the number of grown-ups who nodded and smiled at him, by the number of houses which were not just sealed boxes for him.

  ‘I don’t know who the bald-headed old man is, but the other one, the upright old thing with the red face who waved his cane, that’s Surgeon-Major O’Brien. He was in the Crimean War, in all that row about Florence Nightingale. He is still angry with her as a meddler. But he is a good old stick.’

  ‘How did you get to know him?’

  ‘Oh, easily. I play the flute sometimes for the vet’s wife, who wishes her husband was something literary and thinks of Papa as a sign and a wonder, and has a club for chamber-music and once met the Dolmetsches. They live next door to the Surgeon-Major. They spoke of him and said how funny it was to hear him talk of that Nightingale woman. His cat was ill, so I offered to take along its medicine. I often go in and see him for a minute or two, he’s very lonely.’

  Or it would be, ‘I wonder why anybody built a house in the Chinese style right in the middle of an ordinary road.’

  ‘Silly, the Chinese house was here long before the others. They are built on what used to be its grounds. You must come in and see the inside, it is strange too. The people are nice, they would be glad to show it to you, they are proud of the place. Their grandfather was a naval man who built it when he came home from the China station, but their father lost all his money in railway shares, you know ther
e was once a boom and a panic afterwards. So he had to sell the gardens, but could not bear to give up the house. And the grandson who lives there now loves it too, though he is far too poor to live there, really, for the father was like ours, he kept on getting ruined, da capo, da capo.’

  ‘But how did you get to know them?’

  ‘I was curious about the place, so I asked the postman who lived there, and he told me that the owner was the cashier who takes in the money at the Gas Company offices. I got Mamma to let me take along the money one quarter, and made friends with him. I told Rosamund, I forgot to tell you.’

  It was not fair, this private golden age which had been given Richard Quin, where there were neither strangers nor trespassers, only friends and open doors. For he did not like people more than we did, he liked most of them less. He was to shock me by his indifferences to the sort of friendliness for which I longed, one night in the following spring, when we went together to a party given in a big dull villa by a girl called Myrtle Robinson, who had been in the same class as Mary and myself: a girl who was quite rich, because her father manufactured the Constantia Robinson brand of jams and jellies and pickles. It was a mark of Richard Quin’s power to go in and out of people without heed for the usual boundaries that he was invited, for he was the only person there who was still at school, and this was because some days before he had travelled down from London in the same railway carriage as Myrtle’s mother, a heavy, timid woman with white eyelashes, and had carried her parcels for her. But when he got to the house he was as irritably ungrateful as Papa might have been.

  ‘Why, what a waste of an evening this is going to be,’ he grumbled to me as we stood in the still congealed crowd of guests among the potted palms in the drawing-room. ‘When they are so rich, why can’t they have one single picture worth looking at? Nothing but gondoliers and cardinals. That’s a good oath. Gondoliers and cardinals, it sounds worse than what Othello said, goats and monkeys! And they haven’t any books. And there isn’t a pretty girl.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I muttered, ‘and anyway you’re wrong. That girl by the piano has beautiful golden hair.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen her, how dare she, with so plain a face? It is almost the colour of Rosamund’s hair.’ Rage shook him. He was frenzied because Rosamund was not there, because he had so little of her now that she had gone to her training in the children’s hospital in an eastern suburb, hard to reach from Lovegrove.

  I said, ‘But you did choose to come.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he admitted. ‘But all the same, it is a waste of time. There is so little time.’

  For a moment he was quiet beside me, swallowing his resentment, and then he set about building a diversion for himself. I knew the signs. A tremor ran through him, as if he were a bird tired of his perch, and then he smoothly crossed the room by doing favours. In those days old people were always complaining of draughts; their years brought the mirage of a blasted heath into every room at every season. Myrtle’s grandmother lived with the family, a little bent old woman, whose face, brown and shrivelled like an unpeeled almond, seemed the tinier because the pleated white lawn and trailing black crêpe of her widow’s cap were so unusually massive. The corner where she sat in her wheeled chair had suddenly appeared to her as a cave of the winds, and Richard Quin found her a corner which he assured her was peculiar in its peace, and she believed him. Then he knelt and freed a girl’s shoe-buckle from the hem of her lace skirt, and when he stood up was brought by a single step to the spot where he wanted to be, where Myrtle’s mother shifted from foot to foot with her back to a window, fingering her moonstone necklace and smiling about her with unperturbed surprise, as if there were more guests than she had expected but there was enough in the kitchen for all comers. When she saw Richard Quin she said, ‘Oh, it’s you!’ and her smile became tender, amused and flattered. He must have been charming to her in the train. My brother affected to catch sight of something through a chink in the silver and blue brocade curtains behind her, put his eye to it, and cried out to ask her if she knew what the moon was doing to her garden. He seemed astonished because the moon was so big and yellow, though he and I had watched it rise over the trees at the end of our lawn, before we started for the party. Myrtle’s mother, as if pleased to please him, drew back the curtains and let him take them from her hands and open the french windows. The standard rose-trees on the edge of the lawn gleamed as if moonbeams were wet paint; at the foot of a gentle slope a lily-pond was zebra-striped with white light and black glass; a rose pergola behind it seemed cut finely in hard stone.

  In those days young people did not stray into gardens during dances, at least not in Lovegrove. To sit out in a conservatory among potted plants that were not usually there, that had been hired for the evening, and listen to the dance-band (which was here the trio which played every afternoon in the tea-room at the Bon Marché in Lovegrove High Street) was considered a sufficient departure from the normal routine to make the situation as heady as it could safely be. But Myrtle’s mother, smiling now like a deaf person almost sure that the sound of music is again penetrating a long useless ear, made us free of the night my brother had revealed to her. Between the waltzes, the gallops, the polkas, the barn-dances, the Bostons, the one-steps, we walked in the moonlight, easy with each other as if we were disguised in masks and dominoes. Sometimes my partner and I passed Richard Quin and some girl, and each time I had to note how perfectly he had assumed the adoring and humble voice, now hesitant, now artlessly precipitate, which would reconcile a girl proud of being newly grown up to being paired off with a schoolboy. Then I met him no more, and the perspiring trio from the Bon Marché, Mr Krause, Miss Mackenzie and her sister Flora, ceased their good-natured thumping and supper was served. We took our plates of chicken mousse and our goblets of claret cup out into the garden, and found seats on the rustic benches and on the steps leading to the striped lily-pond, and my brother was with me again.

  A thread of sweet sound was spun into the night. My brother had gone home during the last dance and fetched his flute, and was playing it in the summer-house behind the pergola. Above us the sweet hollow voice rose and fell, doubled back on itself and glided forward, ubiquitous, tracing a pattern among the stars and another within us, behind our breast-bones. Myrtle’s mother had been lumbering down the steps, breathily asking us if we had everything we wanted. Now she bent over me and sighed, ‘When he asked me, I didn’t think it would be as good as this.’ Moving as if she were a bear, as if her feet were soft rounded pads, and her limbs were thick and hardly jointed, she went down to the lily-pond and stood still beneath my brother’s music and the night sky. There was a rounded hedge of hair above her forehead, according to the fashion then set by the Royal Family; the moonlight seemed entangled in it. She looked up at us through the darkness, turning her illuminated face from side to side, as if she wanted to be sure that all of us received the blessing of her smile, which was ecstatic yet tentative, hardly convinced of the fullness of her own gratification.

  The young man beside me had ceased to speak or move. He held his goblet an inch or two from his lips and did not drink. His name was Martin Grey, and I had met him several times lately, at dances and at tennis tournaments, and he had always sought me out. He had a sweep of fair hair across his broad forehead and deep grey eyes, and I had found him more interesting when he talked about sailing, which was his hobby, than I would have thought possible. So interesting that now, when my brother played, I knew that if he wanted to marry me I would be content to live with him all my life long and never leave Lovegrove. I would give up everything to serve him, and it would be no sacrifice, for it would be an ordinary life, and that was good enough, there was no need for an exceptional destiny. I did not love him, but I could do so if he would say he wished it. My brother’s music was proclaiming that there would be a huge vacuum in the universe, a hole that would swallow all, if we did not fill it with something that the notes defined with a clarity forbidden to words.

>   But the young man did not speak or move. It was not to be expected that he should. That sort of young man would find his wife among the more prosperous families in Lovegrove, whose daughters stayed at home after they left school. I knew well that that was the supreme attraction. It was no good at all for a girl to be clever, and not much good being pretty; ‘staying at home’ was what was irresistible. I was better off than some not in that case. Poor Eva Lowson, who had been one of the prettiest girls at our school, was now a cashier at the Bon Marché, because her father had ‘failed’, as they put it in those stable days when a man went bankrupt, so she had not been invited to the party. But all the same I was at a disadvantage compared to all the other girls sitting beside their partners in the warm moonlight, simply because I was known to be committed to a profession. I was not in the leper class with Eva, but I was, so to speak, wearing a nose-ring. I sat there beside Martin Grey, feeling a little cold and thinking how right the suffragettes were; and then I remembered that his father was the manager of the bank where my father had kept his account. There can have been no such real point of indifference between the Capulets and the Montagus. I burst out laughing and was afraid that Martin might ask me why, but he did not notice.