by Rebecca West
Down by the lily-pond Myrtle’s mother was suddenly abashed. Her fingers went to her moonstone necklace and it could be seen that she was wondering what she was doing out there, in front of everybody, all alone. She moved slowly, as if she thought delay would make her less visible, out of the moonlight into the flanking shadow cast by a knot of trees. Beside me Martin raised his goblet to his lips and began to drink. Till then I had been listening to my brother’s flute as if I were one of the strangers to whom he was playing, but now I knew that I was not. I was as much divided from the young men and women, simply because of what I was, as Myrtle’s mother was by her stout middle age. So now I listened to Richard Quin with the special knowledge that came of being his sister, and I was astonished by the simplicity of the strangers. They were melting under the influence of a tenderness which they believed to be in his performance, but was not there. They were inventing it because they needed it. The music promised sweetness which was for himself alone. He ached with a desire to be in another place than this, where he would find that sweetness. If he felt concern whether they found the same delight for themselves, it left no trace in the sounds he made. And he felt no such concern; from this and that, over the years, I knew he did not. There was this excuse for his indifference, he had already discharged whatever debt he owed to them. He could speak of what they desired and they could not. Without him they would have been voiceless. With him their need pierced the night like the reply to the ray of a star. Yet surely that was not quite right, surely one never discharges one’s full debt to other people. But again that cannot be true, if the payment one makes is large enough. I could not work it out.
I was angry with Richard Quin after the party ended. In the hall Myrtle’s mother stood beside her husband, who was as softly and slowly ursine as she was, and they eyed Richard Quin with wonder while they thanked him, as though they found him as prodigious a guest as a unicorn, and hoped that other legends also would come true; and under a rosy lamp they reverently watched him take me down the path. Outside the gate knots of young men and girls and chaperons were saying goodbye beside a line of cabs, and as we passed they cried out their thanks to my brother; and a girl’s voice cried out shyly and bravely, ‘Rose, because of your brother, we’ll never forget tonight.’ Our road home was folded round a hill, and below us Lovegrove lay dark as woodland within the yellow pattern drawn by the street-lamps, for our suburb went early to bed. Beyond, the lights of London were reflected on the clouds as a rusty glow. Richard Quin looked down on the landscape as if it were unpeopled space, and said, ‘Well, I got myself out of that dreary mess pretty well.’ His voice was shocking and beautiful in its coldness, like a glacier stream.
We did not speak again until we had come to our house, which slept like all its neighbours, but was theatrically illuminated by the street-lamp at our gate. The gas-light was not very strong, but the shadows it cast brushed the grooves in the pediment and the shadows under the veranda as if they were black paint laid on canvas, and the creepers might have been cut out of metal. ‘The curtain rises on a small Regency house standing in a suburban garden; the time is midnight,’ one of us said, I forget which. When we had opened the false-looking door and let ourselves into the creaking and obscure reality behind it, we took off our shoes and crept downstairs into the kitchen and got ourselves some milk from the larder, cool off the slate shelves. We always did this when we had been out with strangers. While we drank it we sat on the kitchen table, swinging our stockinged feet.
Richard Quin said, ‘That clock has the loudest tick. I can’t think how Kate can stand it.’
‘She says it’s company when we are out.’
‘What horrid company.’ He shuddered and went on with his drink. ‘I say, they used to make wine-glasses cloudy-white like a tumbler that has had milk in it, did you know? I saw some in the antique shop near the Town Hall. They might do for Mamma’s birthday. Not to use. There are only four. But they would look all right on the chimneypiece in the dining-room and they are Mamma’s sort of thing. But talking of time and birthdays and all that, you saw that poor old lady, Myrtle’s grandmother? Well, she was the original Constantia Robinson. The one the firm’s called after,’
‘Was she? How very strange.’ I added, ‘I mean, the widow’s cap.’
‘What was strange about that? Wasn’t it like anybody else’s who wears that kind of thing? They’re horrid things. I wouldn’t like my widow to wear one.’
‘Yes, it was like any other, I suppose. What I meant was that last year the firm was fifty years old, they had lots of advertisements about it. And it was she who started it. She made jams and lemon curd and pickles in her kitchen, after her husband had died and left her with three children. Well, fifty years is a long time. She has probably forgotten what her husband looked like. It must be so strange to put on something every day in memory of someone she might not recognise if he came into the room.’
‘She will have forgotten him if she didn’t love him and she will remember him if she loved him,’ said Richard Quin.
He took my empty glass and went into the larder to get more milk for us both. While he was away I had that illusion which comes on one in a sleeping house; I could feel the earth turning on its axis, bearing houses and sleepers through the night towards the day.
When he sat down beside me on the table again he said, ‘Now I would like to go for a long walk. Wouldn’t you like to be on the top of Purley Downs now, staring the moon in the face?’
We had crept into the house, we could creep out again. I smiled at him, proud of being admitted into his wildness, but I shook my head. ‘But if we did we should be no good for work tomorrow.’
‘I don’t care about that,’ he said. ‘Oh, I do, really. I am all right, you know. I mean to write, and anyway I will always pay my way somehow. But I needn’t bother to tell you that, you’re not Cordy. But about that old woman, Myrtle’s grandmother, there was one queer thing. I went into the kitchen to borrow the waiter’s bicycle so that I could come back here and fetch my flute. I couldn’t have borne to talk to one more of those silly girls. Well, the Robinsons’ kitchen is a whacking great place. The whole place is absurdly big, of course. What do people like that want with so many rooms? They haven’t got lots of beautiful pictures and china and books to house, and you can’t imagine they would ever want to give a grander party than the one they gave tonight. I can understand the way Mr Morpurgo lives, and the way they live at the Dog and Duck, and the way we live, and the way Kate and her mother live, but I can’t see the sense of what goes on in between being gorgeous and being simple. But anyway the Robinsons have a scullery twice the size of this kitchen, with a double sink, a colossal thing, and a shelf running all round the walls, covered with all the sort of ironmongery we used to want to buy for Mamma’s birthday when Papa was here and we had horrible old saucepans. Do you remember, we would see a huge fish-kettle in that shop on the corner, and come back and tell Kate we were going to get it for Mamma, and Kate used to say that a double boiler would be better, big things like that were only for the households of the nobility and gentry. Where did she get that phrase, I wonder?’
‘It is on the label of one of the famous sauces,’ I said.
‘Good for her to pick it out. It makes one think of Shakespearean courtiers. How nice, putting a sauce-bottle to one’s eye to get a distant rumour of the Tudors, like putting a shell to one’s ear to hear the sea. Well, anyway, under this shelf in the Robinsons’ scullery, there were pails, lots and lots of pails, between twenty and thirty of them, and they were all full of eggs, floating on something the servants call water-glass. They say it keeps the eggs fresh for six months at least, a year’s more like it. In the pails that had just been filled it’s like water, but greyish, the eggs look like the ghosts of eggs. When it’s older it goes white and crusty, they might have been laid up by Egyptian priests for the mummies to eat in their tombs. Well, it seems that in the old days people used to put down eggs in summer when the hens lay lo
ts and eat them in the winter when the hens had stopped laying, and in remote places in the country they still do it. But hardly anybody does it now. And nobody in towns, nobody in a place like Lovegrove. But the old lady, Myrtle’s grandmother, Constantia Robinson, the original Constantia Robinson, she insists on doing it.
‘They did it, of course, on the farm where she was brought up. Just think, that farm was much nearer London than here; it really wasn’t far outside Lambeth, it was in Crockton, near the place where the London road forks and there’s a big church standing up between the two roads. That was years ago, if she was a widow half a century ago, she must have been a child back in the fifties. Well, ever since then she’s been in the food business, or her sons have, and she’s seen food getting cheaper all the time, and nobody having to bother about keeping it, the shops do that for you, you go in and buy it off marble slabs, and eggs particularly you don’t worry about, they’re cheap enough any time of the year, unless you’re deadly poor. Why, even at our worst we’ve always had eggs, and of course the Robinsons are cracking rich. But the old woman can’t bear it if there aren’t those pails and pails full of eggs in the scullery. She tries not to interfere with Myrtle’s mother over running the house - they’re very nice people, you know, you can tell that from the way the servants speak of them. But she will have those eggs put down in water-glass. She knows people think she’s being silly, but she can’t help it. She gets so worried in case they’re not doing it that she gets up at night and hobbles down that staircase, holding on to those awful carved banisters, and goes down into the scullery to make sure. Usually they hear her and go down with her, but twice they haven’t, and she fell, and the servants found her in the morning and called down the family. How queer it is to think of all those ordinary people standing in the kitchen in the early morning in their night-clothes, looking down on that tiny creature, that sort of witch, on the floor. It is sad for Myrtle and her mother that they have white lashes, that must be dreadful for a woman. They get terribly worried about their grandmother and want to have someone sleeping in her room, but she won’t hear of it. She’s a fierce old thing. Afraid of draughts but of nothing else.
‘What’s so odd is that they don’t really think she’s being silly. They believe in her. She’s something like Mamma, you know, everything seems to come through her, and so of course it does. Everything in the place, Myrtle’s father, Myrtle, the villa itself and all the stuff in it, down to the nobility and gentry fish-kettles. I know it was Myrtle’s father who turned the business into a big company but she had the idea, she actually made the jam. I wonder how one turns jam into a company. Not that I’d ever want to do it. I want to write. Rose, do you think I could write? But I know I could write. I know I can write. Anyway, I’m for old Constantia, shuffling about the kitchen in the dead of night, making sure that whatever happens there’ll be food for her family. I know it’s nonsense, the shops are five minutes away. But shops are daylight business, and, don’t you feel, what happens at night matters more?’
The quiet house moved on through the night; he let his mind run like the sand falling through an hour-glass; I lost my sense of separateness from him. When I put out my hand and ran my finger along the fine line of his jaw it was as if I touched myself. We were more or less the same person, and since one cannot envy oneself, I did not grudge him that he had got something out of the evening, and I nothing. Indeed, I had come back with an entry on the debit side. I knew that a day I had hoped for would never come. My sisters and I had had some harsh treatment at our school which could not be charged to our own defects. It was of our father’s debts that our schoolfellows whispered in corners, throwing us oblique glances which served the double purpose of letting them flatter themselves that they were taking care we did not hear, and leaving us in no doubt at all as to what it was we could not hear. But I was sure that as I grew older I was growing less savage, and I had supposed my schoolfellows also were being civilised by time. So in my mind’s ear I had often heard them saying to their mothers, in voices, made delightful by shy contrition, ‘But this time we want to ask the Aubreys to our party. Yes, I know, but we were wrong about them, they are really very nice’; and I had foreseen that at their parties their brothers would ask us to dance again and again with a charm that I found it hard to visualise precisely, for the reason that though I had seen these young men since they were little boys they were faceless and figureless in my memory. I did not think it exorbitant to demand so much from young men to whom I had given such perfunctory attention; there had been no reason why we should trouble to imprint each other’s images on our minds while we were still children, but now it was different. But it was not different enough. Of course it was something that Myrtle Robinson had asked me to her first grown-up party. But Lovegrove did not want me. Not that that mattered much, I was so happy sitting in the kitchen with my brother, listening to him while the clock ticked, while the stars shifted over our roof.
Part Two
VI
AFTER CORDELIA SUFFERED such cruel disappointment over her failure to become a violinist we felt she ought to be exempt from distress for ever. But we had so little in common with her that she seemed almost abstract: an inorganic burden like a knapsack.
It was not to be believed how suddenly that burden fell from our shoulders.
The news of our enfranchisement came at the end of a summer’s day. We should have been practising hard for the end of term concerts which were given by both our musical schools, but we did not go near our pianos - and I can remember no other day in our youth when this was true - because so much was happening. First of all, Aunt Lily had been staying the night with us, because next morning Mr Morpurgo was taking her to see her sister Queenie in the prison to which she had been sent when she had left Aylesbury Jail, and this made an unrestful beginning to the day. She always meant to obey my mother’s advice not to wear her best clothes on such journeys, for fear that their elegance would make her sister discontented and the wardresses envious. Nevertheless her appearance always needed some chastening touches, not for the reason Mamma had given, but for poor Mr Morpurgo’s sake. This time she had restrained herself sufficiently not to wear her best clothes, which consisted of a navy blue coat and skirt with many brass buttons and an Admiral’s tricorn hat, the whole thing inspired by a romantic dream of how the ladies who went yachting with King Edward the Seventh might have been attired. The dress she wore was plain and dark, but it was then the fashion for women to wear at their throats a thing called a jabot, a gentle version of a hunting stock, made of white lawn or fine linen, with two ends hanging loose for three or four inches in front. Aunt Lily’s attempt to follow this fashion was not successful but was arresting. Her jabot was made of starched linen and it stuck out at right angles to her flat chest. She might have been a signal rigged up by a company of mariners shipwrecked on a reef, to catch the attention of passing craft. There was an air of gallantry about the composition, but that would not have stopped little boys from laughing at her in the street. So we had to praise the effect in the evening, and in the morning Mamma had to sigh and remind her of the probable effect of such elegance on poor Queenie in her prison dress and the wardresses in their uniforms; and then Aunt Constance, who lived with us now, ran upstairs and came down with her workbox and perhaps a collar from an old dress which she changed for the unfortunate jabot, while we all stood round and said such things as, ‘It seems a shame’, and ‘Of course it doesn’t look nearly as nice,’ at which Aunt Lily sighed, ‘Yes, I know, but of course your Mamma’s right. It’s too cruel to make them feel what they have to do without.’
These proceedings were particularly delicate that morning, because Aunt Lily was nervous, so nervous that she was shivering, as she had been before and after her last two visits to her sister.
When she had lost her jabot and was no longer an announcement that rescue was imperative, since the crew was running out of water and the cabin boy had broken his leg, she sat down on the chair in t
he hall grasping her handbag and umbrella and the little exercise book in which she wrote down all the news she thought would interest Queenie, and opening it sometimes to correct an inaccuracy. ‘I mustn’t tell her that down where we lived Mr Hayter, the grocer, ran away with a barmaid from the Blue Boar. It turns out not to be true. How awful people are. How awful I am, telling her a story that wasn’t true. The harm it could have done.’ She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air. ‘What am I saying?’ she exclaimed. ‘What harm would it do if I told that story to Queenie; who could she repeat it to in that horrible place? And how could it possibly hurt anyone if she did? Nobody would know who the people were, and come to think of it I don’t myself, there are two Mr Hayters in that grocery business, which one it was, or wasn’t as it turns out, I don’t really know, and there are three barmaids at the Blue Boar, and who can tell which it wasn’t, even if they found out what district we lived in. Oh, silly me, silly me,’ she lamented, smiling round at us with the innocence of Adam and Eve before the invention of guilt. Mamma instantly exclaimed, ‘How sensible you are! To attach little if any importance to a fault which miraculously has no practical consequences, which causes no sufferings! What a lesson to all those wretched saints!’ But she added, her voice rising in urgency, ‘You must remember that it was harmless by a miracle, and you must thank God for intervening between you and yourself.’ This admonition received no direct answer, for Lily had already raised her voice in song. ‘Can’t get away to marry you today, my wife won’t let me. But where,’ she said, her voice sliding down to speech level, ‘is our Mr Morpurgo?’ My mother reminded her that Mr Morpurgo was not due for half an hour, and that he had shown his characteristic kindness in working out the exact time when they ought to start for Waterloo, not too soon and not too late, so that she could catch the train without an unnecessary wait on the platform; to which Aunt Lily did not exactly reply yet did not merely remark, ‘Yes, but gentlemen do hate ladies to be unpunctual.’
