This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  Neither Mary nor I answered for a minute. Then Mary said, ‘That was Lady Tredinnick’s house in Cornwall,’ and stopped pulling up daisies to make a chain and laid her face against the grass. I had not known she minded as much as I did.

  There was nothing really wrong, nothing that we were forced to recall often. It was only that both of us knew that Lady Tredinnick was going to ask us to stay with her again, and perhaps would so many times, but we knew that she would always ask us at short notice, because she had to wait for a time when her sons were away; and that had a tiresome significance for us. Lady Tredinnick was a patron of music of the dedicated sort that existed in these days; she did not seem to be very rich herself, but she knew many rich people who liked her, and she was always conjuring up scholarships and support for orchestras out of thin air, and she gave up mornings to musical charities to do the accounts and use copying-machines for appeals. We had played for some of her charity concerts and had got to know her quite well, drawn to her because her grey hair was almost as wild as our mother’s, though the rest of her was quite different. She had blue eyes shining like sapphires, a skin burned to leather by years in Asia, and a thin body always attired with military neatness. It was as if she could have coped with anything that men could cope with, but long hair, no. She seemed to like us as we liked her, and showed it sometimes in an engaging way by drawing close to us when she was in drawing-rooms full of potted palms or in drill halls (for her sort of concert had to be performed in places less majestic than proper concert-halls) and telling us, without shame at the irrelevance, of some place she had once visited that she had greatly preferred: say, a forest on a foothill of the Himalayas, where on the further side of an impassable mountain stream, roaring over sheer cascades, she had seen, growing high on a deodar, what looked at first like a swarm of huge white butterflies, but which under contemplation showed as an orchid, more beautiful than any she had ever seen, of a species she had not then seen nor ever was to see recorded anywhere, and utterly inaccessible: a sight given to her as a treasure shown to a child, not to be touched. There was sweetness in these flights of hers into the past and there was no malice against the present, they did not discredit, they simply superseded what surrounded us. We were pleased when she asked us to a dance she was giving for a niece, but frightened, and she was so nice that we were able to tell her so; and she said that that would be all right, we must come and if we did not feel at ease after half an hour she would arrange for a carriage to take us home. As it was it went all right. A Bond Street dressmaker for whom our Aunt Constance did embroidery sold us two of last season’s models for very little, and we had partners for every dance. But when we went home Lady Tredinnick was standing with two of her sons in an antechamber, saying goodbye to everybody, and she kissed us with her dry lips and said that we had looked beautiful and our dresses were pretty, and held us back for a moment to tell us how nice it was for people of her age to make such friends late in life, and we glowed. We were loving and happy, it was our hour, which we had not paid for with music, but which had come to us just because we were what we were apart from being musicians. But as we went out into the hall, a large mirror showed us Lady Tredinnick turning to her sons, her brown face still brimful of light, and eagerly asking them some question which might have been, ‘Don’t you like the two little sisters I met at the garden-party?’ and even, ‘Don’t you think they are pretty?’ Both the young men had danced with us more than once, and had talked to us with an air of interest. Yet each replied to his mother with an indulgent smile and nod that instantly faded. It was clear that they thought nothing of us. I do not know why we should have been so profoundly affected by the indifference shown towards us by two young men for whom we ourselves felt nothing more positive than a pale reflection of the friendship we felt for their mother. But I only knew I felt their rejection of myself and my sister so keenly that it came to me not in words but as a sensation of a sword slicing down through my heart. Possibly this was because I had realised during the evening that they and the other partners were the sort of young men whom my father would have liked us to marry, and had even madly expected to his very end that we would marry. But other perceptions added to that distress. There was the realisation that the quite different kinds of young men we worked beside in our music schools did not like us so very much more than these young Tredinnicks, though they would not have dismissed us so finally, because they respected our music; and there was the darker, and bewildering, realisation that men find a special pleasure in rejecting women, and will contrive to do it even to women who have not been offered to them.

  Rosamund had rolled away from me into the shadow that had left her, and was lying on her side, her cheek in the cup of her hand. I was too miserable to care if she wanted to fall back into sleep, I said, ‘Rosamund, do you go to hospital dances? Do you hate them?’

  ‘No,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘If one is not having a good time oneself one can always watch the people who are.’

  ‘But the young men are so awful. They are all like Mr D’Arcy, but worse.’

  For a long time Rosamund said nothing. She was, I saw, when I looked at her under my lids, struggling with a return of the stammer she had suffered from when she was a child. At last her tongue got free and she asked, ‘Have any people asked you to marry them yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Mary. ‘Men do not like us. Oh, except - except - somebody likes Rose - or me - he cannot make up his mind.’ We both laughed so much that we could hardly tell Rosamund, and as we got the words out she laughed so much she could hardly hear them - ‘he is a vegetarian -’

  ‘And wears suits of tweed that his mother weaves at home -’

  ‘- she seems to know a sheep -’

  ‘- and she tailors the cloth herself -’

  ‘- and he is studying composition so that he can write an opera on Beowulf -’

  ‘And he wanted to take the early British harp as his second instrument -’

  ‘- No, the earliest British harp, as it was reconstructed from fragments found in a Wiltshire barrow -’

  ‘- But it had only three strings -’

  ‘- and the Principal lost his temper and said he had never heard such damned nonsense -’

  ‘- and his parents christened him Leofric Canute -’

  ‘- Not christened, registered, they are Druids, the names were a concession to modernity -’

  But suddenly something struck me. I stopped laughing and said, ‘Rosamund, does somebody want to marry you?’

  Pulling another blade of grass and setting it between her teeth, she stammered, her eyes still closed, ‘Yes. One of the doctors at the hospital.’

  I felt a kind of vertigo. It was as if we had all suddenly found ourselves on ground far higher than we had known before. I felt angrily, ‘He will not be good enough. And he will take her away.’

  Mary said, ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Like? Oh, yes. I like him.’

  ‘Is he good-looking?’

  ‘Yes. And he is tall enough to dance with me. Lots of men I cannot dance with, but they insist on asking me, if they do not they will have to admit that they are shorter than I am, and they don’t like that. And there I have to go round the room, wanting to pick them up in my arms. But Robert is tall. Quite tall.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  She was taking pleasure in telling us about him, she plainly hoped that we would ask her more questions.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Robert Woodburn.’ She repeated it more slowly. ‘Robert Woodburn.’

  She liked him. This might be the last time, I panicked, that she ever came to see us, tired from the hospital, specially glad because we were the only people that belonged to her.

  Mary asked, ‘Are you going to marry him?’

  She sat bolt upright, her eyes open and grave. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘But why not, if you like him?’ I said. I was sure
she liked him very much. We must not, I told myself, stand in her way.

  She stared round her, at the house, at the garden, at the place where she had lived with us, the place where, I think, she most liked to be, as if what she saw would help her to answer. She looked at the bees visiting among the flower-beds, and the drift through the air of the pale green tree-flowers, and the long flights of the birds, and she stared up at the blue void above us, blanched with the great heat. Then her eyes lit up, for she had seen our brother behind us, running down the iron steps from the house. He came with great leaps and bounds across the lawn, a cross between an angel and a clown, crying out, ‘Rosamund, I’ve brought a present for you.’

  ‘Dear Richard Quin,’ she said. ‘How kind you are.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

  ‘Not very much,’ she said placidly. ‘I know it will be nice.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring it to her?’ I reproached him. Life was getting silly. If one liked a man, and he wanted to marry one, I supposed one married him. If somebody is giving somebody else a present, well, it ought to be given.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t bring it out here,’ said Richard. ‘It comes from a garden, but now it’s an indoor thing. Anyway you’ll see it in a minute, Kate says tea’s ready.’

  Miss Beevor was at the tea-table. Only a week before, my mother, standing by the french windows, had raised a pensive finger to her lips and said in tones of melting tenderness, ‘Those delphiniums Miss Beevor always admires so much will be out in a few days. I must ask her to tea, the poor, poor idiot.’ So there she was.

  ‘Rosamund, your present is on the sideboard done up in a bag ready for you to take back to the hospital,’ said Richard, ‘but there’s almost the same thing on the table. You see,’ he explained to us, ‘I stopped and looked in at the window of that dairy round the corner from my school, I often do, they have such a specially nice china swan, not coloured, pure white; and I saw they had a pile of honeycombs, and it struck me how like they are to Rosamund. Look at that one on the table, the one we’re going to eat. Nobody’ll ever do a better portrait of Rosamund than that.’

  We all exclaimed, for though honeycombs were then very cheap, costing only a shilling or two, they belonged to the same starred class of objects as certain flowers, such as orchids, which, even in places where they can be had for the plucking, nobody brought up within our imaginative system can regard as suitable for everyday enjoyment; and indeed the honeycombs were like Rosamund. They were golden like her, and her sweetness was private, reserved to itself in cells. She cut up the honeycomb as ceremoniously as she would have cut a birthday cake, standing up to do it and smiling at us. But the honeycomb she cut not in slices but in little squares, and that surely was as well, for now I look back on that afternoon I cannot think how we ate any tea after that mid-day meal. But it is to be said in our excuse that we were always hungry for the very good reason that we were working about as hard as young people could. Rosamund was working ten to twelve hours a day and was ill-fed; and I realise now, on seeing the properly curtailed hours prescribed for modern music students, that Mary and I were taking as much out of ourselves as has ever been demanded from young girls under twenty, except in slavery. And as for Richard Quin, he was awake soon after dawn and out in his own music-room in the old stables, trying out some new thing, either an athletic exercise or a new piece for one or other of the several musical instruments he had learned to play, or perhaps even a new instrument; and he ran through the rest of the day at full speed, learning his lessons and meeting new people as if they were lessons he had to learn, and then suddenly, after darkness fell, hurrying up to his room and falling suddenly asleep, racing into dreams that kept him laughing and muttering. So all our engines had need for stoking, and we stoked them, but with ears cocked to my mother’s conversation with Miss Beevor, which was, as always, a remarkable discharge of quixotically accepted obligations.

  ‘Have you thought any more, Mrs Aubrey,’ Miss Beevor began, ‘about the little outing we planned to have next week?’ This was her way of alluding to my mother’s suggestion that they should go to a concert together: a suggestion that was little less than saintly, considering the history of their relationship.

  ‘No, I left that until we could talk it over together,’ said Mamma. ‘Richard Quin, please go and get us The Times. ’ The newspapers were still left in the study after we had had a look at them during breakfast, just as if Papa were still in the house and keeping a journalist’s hours, and waking at noon. Also since my father had held a crumpled newspaper to be as disgusting as muddy shoes, we handled them very gingerly over our bacon and eggs, and Richard Quin was smoothing out the rough print-cobbled pages of The Times when he brought it to Mamma.

  ‘Well, on Wednesday Max Vogrich plays the Mendelssohn G minor with the Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall,’ said Mamma after a moment’s study, in a calmly dismissive tone which was lost on Miss Beevor, who said that that would be very nice, adding ‘He has such a beautiful touch.’ I am not acquainted with the musical affectations of today, and it may still be that to talk of ‘touch’ was a sign that one was one of the lesser breed without the law, as we used to put it.

  But Mamma who was listening only to imagined sounds, had gone further down the column. ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘the choir are giving the St Matthew Passion at the Albert Hall that very same night! Oh, how glorious. I never hear it with less joy than I did the first time I heard it, thirty years ago in Vienna!’ She blazed up in ecstatic flame, but almost immediately damped down the fires. ‘No,’ she said, kindly. ‘No. Perhaps a little heavy. But how extraordinary. Here’s something else. I did not know she came to London, I thought that when she played at that party she said she would not come to England again she was too busy, so many of the best French musicians won’t cross the Channel. They are so insular and nationalist. Not like the Germans. But here it is, Wanda Landowska is giving a concert at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday. And a delightful programme, delightful, Bach and Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin. A muddle but delightful. And all that harpsichord music is so interesting historically. Oh, Mary, and you too, Rose, you must hear her. After you have heard her play the pieces you have only heard on the piano, you will realise that quite a number of composers have been prophets, they have frequently written compositions which could not be properly performed, could not be fully realised, on the only instruments then existing, they were never truly heard till the piano was invented. Oh, you must hear her, children, we must all hear her—’ She had gone up in flames again, but as her burning glance swept the room it fell on Miss Beevor, and again the fires were damped. ‘Yes, children,’ she went on, ‘you must see to it you get to that concert. But I do not think I want to hear her again. You and I, Miss Beevor, will go to the Queen’s Hall and hear Max Vogrich.’

  But Miss Beevor had become more sensitive to the family atmosphere than my mother imagined. ‘I would prefer we did not,’ she said sitting up very straight. ‘I would like to hear the St Matthew Passion. ’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mamma, ‘it is so long, it demands such attention, now that I have to make up my mind about it I see I am too old for such feasts.’

  ‘If it is not to be the St Matthew Passion, ’ said Miss Beevor, implacably, ‘let it be this young woman you have been talking about.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mamma, ‘do not think of her either. Let us leave such things to the young, we will go to the Queen’s Hall.’

  ‘I do not want to go to the Queen’s Hall,’ said Miss Beevor. ‘I have been to the Queen’s Hall. On several occasions. I know that I am not a gifted musician. Nor a highly trained one. But surely it need not be taken that I am quite without musical taste.’

  ‘Oh, you are mistaken, Miss Beevor,’ sighed Mamma, with an instant adaptation to the needs of the moment so smooth as to be almost to her discredit. ‘I may be old, but that isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t brace myself to have one more evening with genius. So the Albert Hall and the St Matth
ew Passion it must be.’ For an instant she looked wildly about her. I have never known anybody who suffered such anguish if she hurt anybody’s feelings. She said, ‘So we should have a very satisfactory evening before us.’

  Because we all wanted to laugh, and were also wrung by our mother’s recognition that she had wounded Miss Beevor, we began to clear away the tea-things. Rosamund sat where she was and sighed, ‘Oh, dear, tea at St Katherine’s isn’t like this at all,’ and Richard Quin said, ‘Have you really had enough?’

  She shook her head and laughed, ‘Of course not. Is there such a thing as enough?’

  ‘How will you eat your honeycomb at hospital?’ asked Mamma. ‘Can you have your own things without having to give so many people shares that they’re lost to you? I know you would not mind, but I would like you to keep something for yourself.’

  ‘I do put things on the table,’ said Rosamund, ‘but not this. I wouldn’t share what Richard Quin gives me for anything. I’ll put the honeycomb in my locker, and draw my cubicle curtains, and eat it with a spoon when the food has been too dreadful, and after I’ve said my prayers at night.’

  ‘You can eat honeycomb with a spoon?’ exclaimed Miss Beevor. ‘Isn’t it dreadfully rich?’

  ‘Nothing is dreadfully rich to Rosamund and me,’ said my brother. ‘They’re rich, and rich is something right in itself. Rosamund could eat a spoonful now, after all that tea, couldn’t you, Rosamund?’

  ‘Oh, surely you couldn’t,’ exclaimed Mamma. But Rosamund laughed again and said that she could, and Richard Quin carved a spoonful out of the honeycomb and held it to her lips, and she looked up at him and stammered, ‘Thank you,’ and brought her mouth down to it. But he suddenly drew it back, crying, ‘I’ve thought of something better.’ He took up the cream jug with his left hand and poured it over the honey, and held it out to Rosamund, saying, ‘Yes, this will be better still.’

  ‘Oh, no, not cream with honey,’ our elders objected, ‘that will be far too rich. And after all that tea.’