by Rebecca West
But Rosamund swallowed it down, and threw her head back on her strong throat, and said dreamily, ‘That was lovely, the smoothness of the cream, the roughness of the comb, the sweetness of the honey.’
And Richard Quin, who had given himself another such spoonful, stood and looked at it with the same sleepy concentration: for a minute they looked too fair, too strong, too solid and monumental in their pleasure, for this small room, for us. But soon they went out together, taking the tea-things down to Kate, and they stayed away till Constance asked me to go and warn Rosamund that the cab would be coming soon to take her to the station. I found them sitting together in the dark half-way up the basement stairs, which was a place we often used for talking secrets: nobody could hear you upstairs, and somehow it did not matter about dear Kate. The two were not laughing then, and I had an idea that Rosamund might have been telling Richard Quin why she would not marry the doctor, though she liked him. It struck me that it was a pity that Rosamund was older than Richard Quin, they might have got on well if they had been married, and one could imagine the ceremony. For a minute my mind floated off into an area of images which suggested no words: the eyes on peacocks’ tails, the grooves in the glassy waters that pile up around the posts of a weir. As I gave my message the two turned their faces towards me and grew less remarkable, and we were together as we always had been.
When she was dressed, and Richard had got from Kate the case in which we had packed her clean clothes and the food, she went into the sitting-room, where Mamma and Constance were still talking to Miss Beevor.
‘You look a very grown-up young lady,’ said Mamma, looking up at her tallness. ‘You look more splendid than my girls, you look more like the people I used to play to, in big houses, in palaces. Are you sure you like nursing?’
‘I told Mary and Rose,’ said Rosamund proudly, ‘I nurse as they play.’ She tossed her head in parody of her own pride, and then the stammer began to choke her. But she insisted on saying, ‘There is one thing.’
‘One thing?’ said Constance, quickly but still placidly. She knew there was probably something that could be done to right it, whatever it was, provided one did not become excited.
Rosamund forced herself to say: ‘I cannot bear it when children die of burns.’
My mother looked away from her, out into the garden, where there was proceeding that liquefaction of colours which deepens and fuses the flowers and leaves and grass on summer evenings, under a sky of green crystal. She might have been calling on buried truth to disinter itself and come to our help. Constance picked up some needlework that she had set down on the table, and said, with calm acidity, ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no unbearable truths.’ Richard Quin put his arms round Rosamund’s shoulders and rested his head against the bush of her thick hair. She said, ‘Oh, well, if everything should stop, should come to an end, you know, one would remember that such things happened and mind less,’ and toured the circle of the elders, giving her smooth lips to their pleated cheeks, and was gone.
I went to my piano and made up for lost time by practising till it was quite dark, and then went into the sitting-room and found Mamma sitting there among the shadows, the gas not lit.
‘We have all had a lovely day,’ I said, and sat down beside her. ‘But, oh, Mamma, why are you crying?’. . . .
‘I was awful to Miss Beevor,’ she quavered. ‘I have lost the knack of dealing with her. I used to give her quite a lot of pleasure when she came here - and goodness knows I have not asked her nearly often enough, I think she is very lonely - by saying when she left, “Goodbye, Bay-ah-tree-chay,” but tonight I did not dare. She might have thought I was laughing at her, for she thought that about the St Matthew Passion. . . .’
I did not have time to comfort her properly, for suddenly Aunt Lily and Mr Morpurgo were with us, she hungry and tired and disturbed as she always was after such expeditions. He was tired too, and nervous lest Mamma should think he should have taken better care of his charge. On this occasion he had some grounds for anxiety, because this time Aunt Lily was in an unusually poor state. As a rule she returned in a state of garrulous and mendacious optimism, alleging that the head wardress had whispered in her ear telling her to keep her chin up, the King was considering giving Queenie a free pardon after the New Year, or Easter, or August Bank Holiday. But this evening she was squealing with misery, and turning and twisting her little bony body as if she had St Vitus’ Dance.
At supper she was silent for a time then put down her knife and fork and told us: ‘She’s lost her spirit. Queenie’s lost her spirit, and I know who’s done that. It’s a funny thing, but when I see that ginger-haired wardress I always find myself remembering the words “ruptured kidney”. I’ve only heard them once in my life and that was years ago. At the very first place where Queenie and I worked, when we were just girls, bits of the shell on our feathers, a customer made an awkward mistake. He thought one of the other customers wasn’t the welterweight champion for Middlesex, but his brother, who wasn’t there, he thought, but he was, and the other one who wasn’t was dead of the ’flu, but the matter wasn’t cleared up till he had asked the one he thought wasn’t to go outside to settle a difference, if I make myself clear. “Ruptured kidney” was what the coroner said at the inquest. I never thought of the words since till I saw that ginger-haired wardress. “I’d like to give you something, my lady, that’d leave you with a ruptured kidney.” That’s what passes through my mind every time I see that little ginger-haired so-and-so.’
‘That is only natural,’ said Mamma. ‘But eat your supper, what you need is to go straight off to bed.’
Lily repeated for the twentieth time, ‘She’s lost her spirit, her spirit’s gone.’
‘Oh, Lily dear,’ said Mamma, ‘are you sure what you notice is not just that your sister is being good and kind again. But if you think that she’s being ill-treated Mr Morpurgo will help you. He knows people at the Home Office; they will look into it.’
Not listening, Lily said, ‘I tell you, it’s all gone, the old Queenie. She sits there like a beaten dog. She never let out at me once the whole time we were there.’
‘Oh, my dear, eat and get to bed. When you have had some sleep things will seem different, and you may find you have something to balance against your misfortunes. You are so brave, you’ll be glad to see what a relief it will be to your sister if she doesn’t feel that she has to rage against you and can take the affection you give her.’
‘Who’s saying she was ever rude and unkind to me? Nobody ever had a better sister than Queenie’s been to me,’ wailed Aunt Lily, forgetting that most of the people in the room had at some time or other seen Queenie turn on her a glance remarkable in its inclusive contempt, which had suggested that had she cared to address the company present on her sister’s insufficient bust measurement, her slightly projecting teeth, or her unwedded state, she could have gone on for a long time. But Aunt Lily was not for the moment paying much respect to reality. She passed on to a representation of Papa as a Cockney version of a Greek messenger, describing the imprisonment of Queenie in terms of pity and protest which seemed unlikely, considering he had frequently expressed the opinion that she was damned lucky not to have been buried in Holloway Prison instead of being alive in Buckinghamshire. ‘Time and time again, I’ve heard your father say, and bless him wherever he is, and there’s many could bear me out, that he didn’t think we knew half of what went on inside Aylesbury Jail, I’ll swear on my Bible oath, he used to say, that your poor martyred sister’s suffering such torments as haven’t been heard of since they done them to Maria Monk, and I doubt as if she’ll ever get out of that hell-hole alive. And why should we care, asked someone. Someone who happened to be there, trying to be smart, you know, and your father answered quick as a flash, “Because she’s one of the finest women that ever lived and—”’
My mother, who had been swaying on her chair with fatigue, was suddenly still, and said, sharply, ‘For heaven’s sake, Lil
y, what is really the matter?’ I do not know how she knew.
‘I’m telling you,’ said Aunt Lily, cutting her tongue and lettuce with an air of defiance.
‘No, my dear, you are not,’ said Mamma. ‘Mr Morpurgo, why is Lily in this state?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘but poor Lily has been unhappy, very unhappy, all the way home.’
‘Didn’t any of them say anything to you?’ my mother asked him, and he shook his head sadly. He would be thinking that Mamma was thinking that Papa would have found out what had gone wrong.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Aunt Lily threw down her knife and fork and rested her elbows on the table and hid her face in her hands, and raised it to bawl. ‘She’s asked me to put flowers on his grave.’ As nobody said anything she wagged her tear-stained face at us, and pierced our dullness with a full scream. ‘His grave. Harry’s grave. Her husband’s grave. She asked me to put flowers on it, me that knew the minute the coppers came what she’d been up to.’
‘Oh, Lily, dear,’ begged Mamma, ‘do not scream, do not cry, get on with your supper and go off to bed. You are such a brave woman, and you do things no other woman could do, and then you make a fuss about things you really should be able to take as a matter of course.’
‘This ain’t a matter or course,’ protested Lily. ‘It’s disgusting. Flowers on his grave. It’s so unlike her. She done him in. We all know she done him in.’
‘Lily, just think. You are so intelligent, but you will not think. Can’t you see that if one had happened to kill one’s husband, or anybody else, it would be very difficult to find a way of telling him one was sorry except by putting flowers on the poor man’s grave? I really cannot think of anything else one could do in such a situation. Now, do be sensible and be glad that your sister is settling down into her real self, and have a good sleep tonight, and we will see about the flowers for poor Harry tomorrow morning.’
‘You’re too good,’ sniffed Aunt Lily, and took up her knife and fork again, saying, ‘I know I’m a silly girl. Always was.’ In a low voice, like a child talking to a companion who has come off just well enough but not too well in a family row, Mr Morpurgo said to her, ‘Give me time in the morning and I’ll drive home and get some flowers, so that they’ll be absolutely fresh.’ Lily answered with a nod and a watery smile, but then looked doubtful and said, ‘Thanks ever so, but, if you don’t mind, nothing fancy,’ and as he looked puzzled explained, ‘I mean, none of your giant South American doodahs. If this were a wedding it would have been a quiet one.’
The meal continued in silence. In other households it might have been supposed that one of the older children had been rude to someone and had been smacked down by authority; and as on such more usual crises the younger members of the party are silently convulsed by laughter. Mary and Richard Quin and I saw that Aunt Lily had been exhausted to a shock, that the part of her which was as serious and venerable as anybody we knew had recoiled from the darkness known as sin, but we also saw that Mamma had been very funny, and that twice over. First, when she paused before uttering the word ‘happened’ in the sentence beginning ‘if one had happened to kill one’s husband’. We all were aware that she had been about to say, ‘if one had killed one’s husband,’ but had thought it incumbent to introduce a word suggesting that the fatality might have been, to some degree, accidental in nature; and we were aware too that this was not only to spare Aunt Lily’s feelings, it was out of a far-flung politeness to all the killers of the world, of whatever time. She was making things no harder than they need be to Burke and Hare, Charles Peace, Tamberlane and Robespierre. She would have risked her own life to bring them to the scaffold, but she would never have insulted them. Her second absurdity was flattering to us, and all created things. When she said that she could not see any other way that a murderer could show his regret for his crime except by putting flowers on his victim’s grave, her glance had swept round the table and rested for a fiery instant on each of our faces. She really had thought that one of us might come up with a valid solution to that insoluble problem. As always, she was expecting more of life than its best friends would have claimed for it; but no look of disappointment, of discontent with the family she had borne and the friends she had gathered, passed over her face, and never had, except when my eldest sister Cordelia played the violin.
That exception came to my mind as I cast my eyes round the room to avoid seeing the repressed amusement that was giving the faces of Mary and Richard Quin an unnatural blandness. So it was that I noticed that the dining-room door was open, and Cordelia was standing in the hall outside, looking in at us all, but not moving. She had not taken off her outdoor things. A small black straw hat with a curved brim and a little veil round the crown was still perched on her red-gold hair and shadowed her perfect little face; and a long coat was fluted round her waist and then fell in pleats, making her sturdiness look as if it were fragility that could easily be snapped across. She had put down her gloves and her handbag, and her hands were crossed on her chest, her long fingers with their nails polished, but not varnished, according to the fashion of the day, intertwining just at the base of her little round neck. I could not see her expression but I assumed that, as she was looking at her family, it would be disagreeable. What are they doing now? she would be asking. What have they been doing while I have been away? How long is it before they will bring down ruin on themselves and on me? But she moved forward into the gas-lit room, and I saw that I could not have been more wrong. She was a gazelle, a lamb, a dove. She was meek. She greeted our guests and refused to take her place at table because she was not hungry, in a barely audible voice, and sat down in a corner of the room, still in her hat and coat. All this was odd, but I felt no curiosity, taking it for granted that this was simply another of her impersonations, which might be abandoned at any moment. But as soon as Mr Morpurgo had driven away and Aunt Lily had been put to bed, and I had gone to the room I shared with Mary and was undressing, Mary came in and said, ‘Something is going on. I went into the dining-room because I saw a light and thought Richard Quin hadn’t turned the gas off, and there were Mamma and Cordelia, and Cordelia was behaving as if she were telling Mamma the facts of life. She looked at me with infinite patience until I went away.’
‘It is too bad, Mamma has had such a long day,’ I said, and I was going to put on my dressing-gown and run downstairs and break up whatever silliness was going on, but just at that moment Mamma came into the room and sat down on my bed. She told us in hesitating and incredulous tones that Cordelia had had news which, Mamma said, would make us all happy, and indeed that was true. For some time past Cordelia had been talking a great deal about a girl called Angela Houghton-Bennett who had been a fellow-student in one of her courses at the School of Art, and who had asked her to her home on a number of occasions, though for one reason or another she never brought her back to our house, although Mamma said we must always try and return all hospitality. Now it appeared that Angela had a brother called Alan, and he had proposed to Cordelia, and would be calling tomorrow morning to ask Mamma for her consent.
Mary and I were stunned into silence, but Mary recovered and asked, ‘When are they going to get married?’
‘Sooner than usual,’ answered Mamma. It was then the custom for engagements to last a year or more. ‘His father has to return to the East for a long journey in the autumn and the family think it will be much nicer for them to marry before he leaves.’ She looked at us sharply and we looked back blankly. But she knew quite well she had spoken with a satisfaction of a kind she would not have wished to feel, and that we had noticed it. She said, gravely, ‘Of course I am pleased. Particularly as all this art business couldn’t really have led anywhere. So of course I am glad that she is going to marry.’
We asked how old he was and what he did, and she said, ‘He is eight years older than Cordelia, which is just right. And he is a civil servant, he is in the Treasury, and your father used to say that was where
all the cleverest men went. And it is better still about his father. He was in the Indian Civil Service. Your father always said that that was the greatest service in the world. Oh, there are many reasons why we should be glad.’ Again she was putting a problem to us and we could not solve it for her. She was silently telling us ‘Reassure me. Tell me that I am not pushing Cordelia out of the house, tell me that I am not determined to get rid of her at the first opportunity. Tell me that I am considering this proposal for her interests and not for ours, that if I think him unsuitable for any reason I will be honest and ask her to hold back and consider the possibilities of happiness all over again.’ But we would not help her. We could not help her. We knew that Cordelia hated us, and we were still too young to have lost the child’s feeling, inherited from the primitive, that a person who hates can work a spell on whom he hates and destroy him. I remember the agitated, brief, fluttering goodnight kiss Mamma gave us as she left the room, with deep contrition, but still I knew that it was useless for Mary and me to try to give her what she needed.
Once she had gone we lay down on the beds and waved our legs in the air. ‘It will be wonderful to have nobody in the house who hates us,’ I said, but Mary had a more impersonal attitude to the news. ‘Why should anyone want to marry Cordelia? Anybody could see with half an eye she isn’t kind. I can understand why anybody should want to marry Rosamund, even if she weren’t beautiful. She’s kind. But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn’t do anything to people but blame them for things they haven’t done? It will be like spending one’s whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry for Mr Houghton-Bennett,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know him and I don’t care, really, not really, what happens to him so long as we don’t have to go on living with somebody who is perpetually cross. But, of course, I agree with you. It’s odd that anybody should want to marry Cordelia.’
