This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  This was typical of all their conversation, which for long periods would seem not to be a true interchange, and travelled on parallel lines that might never meet, had they not suddenly fused on to understanding. A little later Aunt Lily suddenly stopped singing and burst into tears, sobbing into her handkerchief that she didn’t want to go to that horrible place, even in summer it seemed so cold that her winter chilblains started up again and what she’d find there and she couldn’t bear it, and what she’d like to do would be to go upstairs and throw all her clothes on the floor and get into bed and put her head under the sheets. But soon she gave a brave howl and said that of course she’d go and what a silly she was to think of not going to her sister, her own sister, when she was in a bit of bad luck, and she pronounced herself a rotten job, and no class, and kicked her bony left ankle with her bony right foot.

  Mamma then gave her what strangers might have thought rather too scholarly an address, pointing out that throughout the ages great writers had composed plays universally admitted to be the greatest of all plays, called tragedies, which showed great men, kings and conquerors and statesmen, facing just such violent events as Lily herself had had to endure, and in these tragedies the kings and conquerors and statesmen were always represented as bent and broken by the confrontation. Lily had, my mother reminded her, sometimes bent under her cruel experience, but had never been broken, not for one moment, so she had every title to respect in her own eyes and everybody else’s. At this Aunt Lily accepted the clean handkerchief my mother had been holding out to her, blew her nose and stopped sniffing, and gazed into a golden distance. ‘If anybody does write a play about me, and from what you say it seems very likely, I wonder who they’d get to play me? Edna May, I’d like it to be.’ This was an American actress of surpassing beauty who was at that time making a great success in London as the Salvationist heroine of a musical comedy called The Belle of New York. ‘She’s rather me, I think,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Yes,’ my mother said, but her voice died in her throat. So we all said, ‘Yes, we had noticed it.’

  All was well. Perfect communion had been established between Mamma and Aunt Lily, they had debated spiritual matters and come to an agreement enabling them to contemplate Creation without fear, at least for the moment, though without resort to conventional patterns of argument. When Mr Morpurgo arrived ten minutes later it was natural enough that he should look round with an air of contentment and say, ‘What a happy atmosphere there always is in this house.’ He himself was a calm and impressive figure, in the clothes he always wore when he took Aunt Lily to see Queenie: clothes which suggested that he had not made up his mind whether he was going to a funeral or to Ascot. He stayed only long enough to pin on Aunt Lily’s chest the orchid he always brought her on these occasions from his Sussex greenhouses, and to give his chauffeur time to leave in the kitchen the usual presents of fruit and vegetables, and then they were off. He always seemed a little uneasy and anxious to be on his way at this stage in the proceedings, I think the reason was that he knew how solemnly Mamma regarded the tragedy of the Phillips family, and was afraid she might be shocked if he knew what pleasure he took in these journeys to prison. There were indeed innocent ingredients in that pleasure: for one thing he liked Aunt Lily, and for another he was surprised and pleased that, although he had been spoiled all his life, he could discharge a disagreeable duty. But he was also the child who stares at the accident, knowing he should not. Either he feared Mamma’s disapproval, or he feared the raising of any issue which might prove to him she thought of him as a child.

  Even then Mary and I did not get to our pianos. We went down with Mamma to the kitchen, which was very busy, because our Cousin Rosamund was a probationer at a children’s hospital in London, and this was her monthly day off, and now that her mother had come to live with us she always spent her days off with us; and she always arrived in a state of hunger, because the hospital meals were so bad. She was even hungrier than the rest of us, who all liked food. This was just what my mother wished, for now that we had sold the family pictures she was able to pay the tradesmen’s bills as soon as the envelopes tumbled through the letter-box on to the hall mat, and she took a voluptuous pleasure in the purchase of provisions of even the dullest sorts. She still did not buy extravagantly, as to quantity or exotic quality: when a wolf is driven from a door it leaves its ghost behind. But instead of paying a single and embarrassed visit to the butcher’s shop to buy the cheapest cut that could be tricked out with evergreen turnips and carrots, those loathsome dietary cosmetics, she would make two visits in order to buy the best chops for Irish stew on Wednesday and a perfect rose-red silverside for Thursday and Friday, without the phrase ‘a bit on account’ being uttered and no fear that it ever should be uttered again: and sometimes, when Mary and I brought home some music-students or Richard Quin some schoolfellows, my mother’s present happiness coalesced with her past, and she was inspired by memories of the parties her father and mother had given in Edinburgh when she was young. This often led her to a dead end. My grandmother’s favourite cookery book not only prescribed that a braised ham à la parisienne should be moistened with a glass of brandy and half a bottle of sherry, it explicitly stated that a ham for which this amount of liquid appeared excessive was, quite simply, not worth serving. Mamma drooped over such injunctions as if she had actually taken food out of her friends’ mouths in not providing them with such dishes, but she set her targets lower with superb results, and years afterwards musicians who had been at college with us have recalled, with greater enthusiasm than they gave to memories of us, our veal and ham pies, and indeed they were unique. The jelly was an exquisite silvery topaz.

  So we had a good enough lunch planned for Rosamund, but now we had to alter it in view of Mr Morpurgo’s asparagus, which was the slender, bright green sort, not the white logs the restaurants serve, some really small broad beans, and lots of those tiny unripe gooseberries which still have thin skins and a mild flavour. In the end nothing survived of our original menu except the cold chicken and mayonnaise. We decided to start with hot asparagus with melted butter, and serve the chicken with broad bean salad, and scrap the treacle tart for gooseberry fool. This change of plan meant that Mary and I simply had to help. It was not just laziness and frivolity that was keeping us away from our pianos. Kate had always too much to do, and Aunt Constance had her hands full, for she was ironing a pile of underclothes for Rosamund to take back to the hospital and she had still to finish a new nightgown for her. So Mary and I took the gooseberries and two bowls and two pairs of scissors and a tray for the tops and tails, and with all of them around us we sat on the iron steps that led down to the garden, and sang every now and then ‘Clip clip! Clip clip!’ as our scissors attacked, till we noticed that we had company. In the grove at the end of the lawn a pair of turtle-doves were hidden somewhere in their high green residence; not brawling, throat-clearing Cockney pigeons, but true turtledoves, such as still came deep into the London suburbs in those days, cooing tenderly, and meaning every coo.

  I am writing all this down in full knowledge that it will not now seem important, for the reason that that is just what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance. Everything enjoyable had an equal value. In life we were not divided. Life itself was not divided. Mamma sleeping upstairs, on a rickety old bed because she would not replace it, partly because she hated to spend money on her own comfort, and partly because old furniture acquires the power of an old dog to make claims; Kate and Constance working in the kitchen, speaking sometimes but not to say anything, just to confirm their companionship like the turtle-doves’ cooing; my brother Richard Quin, like a coiled spring, out of sight, down the road at school; Rosamund, out of sight too, but, golden and splendid, sitting in the lumbering tram that was carrying her down through South London, radiating her peculiar unfocused amiability, smiling at everybody, smiling at nobody, and Mary and I sitting here on the steps, getting ready the lovely things to eat; we were all
one with the grass and the flowers and the trees and the sunshine. And we were on about something, we were not passive, we were in a plot to maintain for ever the sun, the sky, the delight. At times I come on shreds of this unity still clinging to the earth. Driving through a village on a Sunday afternoon, I pass a cricket match on the green, and the silver gleam of the white flannels under the golden sun, the ball in flight, the monosyllable of the ball on the bat, the flowerbed of the spectators, the Red Dragon on the inn sign, the coasting clouds above - for a second all seems conspiring for an eternal perfection of delight. But now such sights come rarely, and at that period, I do assure you, they were the connective tissue that held the whole of life together.

  That morning was both long and short. About noon we heard Rosamund call out as she came into the house, but we stayed where we were as she always spent the hours before lunch alone with her mother, and indeed we had enough to do. After we finished the gooseberries we had to go round the garden and look for the apple mint left by the people who had lived in the house before us to get some sprigs to cook with the broad beans, and then we had to beat cream for the fool in the cool passage; and when we took the finished white whorl in the basin down to the kitchen Kate made us taste things, the mayonnaise, which in our household was faintly flavoured with tomato ketchup, the almond biscuits which Kate doubted now were light enough to eat with the fool; the queen cakes we were to have for tea. Then Mary and I sat down on the steps again and waited, singing a Chopin Nocturne as du Maurier had made Trilby do (we thought he was showing his musical ignorance till we found that Pauline Viardot, Malibran’s sister, had really done just that at concerts, over and over again, and with Chopin’s approval).

  There were only five of us for lunch, Mamma, Rosamund, Constance, Mary and me. Cordelia’s work at the art gallery and her classes kept her in town till late afternoon, and Richard Quin had his midday meal at school. This was as well, for I think Cordelia could not bear Rosamund’s Greek, blind look. She felt as a famous conductor did if an orchestra stonily ignored his baton. For the moment she was wholly ours, and we fused as families do when they are together again after they have been parted, and Rosamund and Mary and I became much more alike than we really were, and Mamma and Constance, who were as different as wine from milk, settled down into a mild resemblance. We sat at the table for a long time, partly because of Rosamund’s wolfishness, partly because that was the leisurely pace at which the warm day was passing. Then we cleared the table and one of us broke a plate, but it did not matter. As Mary and I could never help with the washing up, because of our hands, we two went out into the garden with Rosamund and put down some cushions on the lawn under the trees. Rosamund lay on her back, the shadow of leaves on a high branch falling as a changing mask on her face, and we stretched out on our stomachs, our heads at her feet, our elbows on the ground, and watched her and sucked grass. Always, when we saw her again after she had been away, we were specially aware of how unlike anybody else she was.

  She murmured praise of the gooseberry fool, and then said, ‘But it was different.’ She had had gooseberry fool before in our house and it had been all right, oh, more than all right, but not lovely like this, and Mary said yes, she did think it could be fairly classed as a lucent syrop, and I said, but not tinct with cinnamon, that wasn’t it, and Rosamund said, no, she realised that, but probably in argosy transferred, and we said, well, no, it was a local product. Someone had said to Kate on a tram that all fruit, and especially gooseberries, tasted better if one dropped a couple of elderflowers into the sugar and water one was cooking them in, just for two minutes, and Kate had been so much impressed that when the time came for elders to flower she looked round for some to pick. But as the Victorians considered elders to be the most vulgar of trees, suitable only for the meanest municipal park (and parks were mean indeed in those days) they were not to be found in our genteel suburb of Lovegrove, except in the gardens of a large and pretentious Victorian villa, somebody’s folly and long untenanted, which stood incongruously at the corner of our road of little Regency houses. There the elders had taken over, mobbing the flowering cherries, the apple trees and the laburnums which lined the carriage sweep, and thrusting up their fibrous canes through the gravel in front of the Doulton-tiled Italianate porch; and there it was that Kate went as soon as she saw through the railings that the flat, greenish-white filigree flowers were appearing among the coarse leaves on the flimsy branches. She went by night, for to her cutting a sprig from a tree in the garden of an empty house was not much less criminal than shop-lifting, and she was terrified by the knowledge that there was a police station about a quarter of a mile away, for she believed that policemen had the right to take straight to prison all persons guilty of any offence whatsoever, even as mild as this. Her state was worsened because she was afraid of the dark and of ghosts. The day after this daring theft she had found that there were no gooseberries yet in the shops, so she had tried the recipes on some stewed apples and found that it did in fact give them a special exotic charm. She then formed a great desire to give Rosamund gooseberry fool when she came down for her next day off, and on the night before had made another foray among the elder thickets in the deserted garden. But this had seemed a useless achievement. When the greengrocer left our order he told her there were still no gooseberries, and she seemed to resign herself to making a treacle tart; and deep was her conviction that God was punishing her for theft.

  Naturally, in these circumstances Mr Morpurgo’s punnets of gooseberries would be received by Kate as a gift not from the gods but from God. There were the little gooseberries like jade beads in the straw basket on the kitchen table, and there was the pilfered elder branch lolling sideways in a high jug by the scullery sink, the flowers still fresh enough to be luminous in the basement shadows, so Kate said quietly but firmly, ‘It was meant.’ Mary and I knew well that she was not speaking to us but to her conscience, which she saw as worsted. She was bidding it civilly not to bring up again that little matter of trespass and larceny. This made us all laugh hugely, we three girls, lying on the lawn in the sleepy sunshine. It was so like Kate, who wanted to be good and was good but abhorred that excess of emotion which the eighteenth century called enthusiasm. Hardly a muscle of her face had moved during this moral death and reprieve. We laughed too at the tale she had told us of sitting on a tram with a stranger and falling into a discussion about gooseberry fool and elderberries. How had the conversation started and where did it go from that point? The whole thing was odder than it seemed at first, Rosamund pointed out, if you considered that all this must have happened when gooseberries and elderflowers were out of season, no passing sight of market-garden or waste-ground could have brought them to mind, for Kate had had to wait quite a time before she could try out the recipe. We laughed over the mystery and fell asleep.

  I was awakened by a flurry of birds in the branches above, but stayed quiet for fear of disturbing Rosamund, until she stirred and said, ‘You have so many more flowers in the garden now.’ She was leaning on her elbow, a blade of grass between her teeth, and was looking about her at the lupins and the late peonies in the long bed by the wall, the standard roses near the house, the clematis and the jasmine beside the iron staircase. What she said was true. The flowers in our garden were like the cream in our larder, there was enough where there had been almost nothing until my father had gone away. But always when I thought of my father’s disappearance and his probable, or, rather, his certain death, such trivial facts faded and left me almost as soon as they came into my mind, and I was overcome by an abstract sense of grief, something like the moan of shingle dragging back to sea between breakers, although I made no sound. I pressed my face down against the grass, while Rosamund yawned that she loved blue flowers, and seemed to sleep again. But presently she spoke, laughing. ‘Elderflowers. Imagine them being nice to taste as well as to smell. And the taste is delicate, while the smell’s coarse and heavy. But I like that. I like a scent to be heavy. The other day a
patient who works at a florist’s gave one of the sisters some tuberoses. Just two or three, but you could smell them every time her door opened. And the scent was so heavy one could have weighed it.’

  ‘Nothing heavier for me than lilac,’ murmured Mary, and I asked, ‘Rosamund, if you like that sort of thing how can you bear the hospital?’ It was not so foolish a question as it sounds today. In those times the standard disinfectants were fiercer beasts than they are now, and skinned the inside of one’s nostrils, while lying down beside the offensive odours of the place rather than dispersing them.

  ‘Oh, that’s different, nursing’s my music. Hospitals are my concert-halls.’ She plucked a fresh blade of grass and laid it crosswise between her teeth, and closed her smooth bluish lids. ‘I want to do nothing but nursing, all my life long.’

  ‘Well, nobody’s stopping you,’ said Mary, sleepily. ‘That’s what’s so lovely about the way things are going. You’re nursing, and we’re playing, and nobody is trying to stop us. Though our sister Cordelia, I think, often fears that all this will come to no good.’

  We must have slept for some time, for when we woke the shadows were all different, bluer and longer and shifted noticeably to other angles. Rosamund was sitting up, resting on one hand, and looking round her. ‘Forgive me if I go on about blue flowers,’ she was saying. ‘I do so love them. Where was it, that place you went and stayed, where there was an old house high above the sea, and there was a flower-bed built up on the edge of the cliff, so that you looked at blue flowers rising to blue sea, and above that there was blue sky? Somewhere in the West Country.’