by Rebecca West
‘And what is odder still is that I somehow don’t think people are going to want to marry us.’
‘Don’t let’s bother about that tonight,’ I said. But I knew what she meant, people said how wonderful we were but they kept at a distance. But all the same, I was right, it was too late to start thinking about it that night.
When we were dressing in the morning, we heard noises in the drawing-room below, and when we got downstairs we found Cordelia and Kate standing in the middle of the room, which looked quite different, for all the furniture had been moved. Cordelia was saying to Kate, ‘Now I think that looks a little better,’ and then she turned her white stars on us and asked, ‘Are you going to be in this morning?’ We said shortly that we would not, we had lessons and went off to have breakfast. Presently she came in and said that she was sorry if she had been rude, and added gravely, as if we were all in church, that she was going to marry somebody called Alan Houghton-Bennett, and he was coming about eleven o’clock to get Mamma’s consent, and she had hoped we would meet him. Because we knew that she was lying and was glad that we were going to be out, and because we had ourselves been lying in saying that we had lessons that morning, an atmosphere of false amiability was established. But we were shaking with anger, not only because of her desire to get us out of the house, which was after all as much ours as it was hers, but because of her new manner, which had changed a little, and not for the better, since the previous night. She was still meek, but her meekness was pretentious. Though she was a lamb, it was one which had got itself embroidered on a church banner. There was also a sort of pietistic prudery about her, which we suspected of alluding to a side of life about which we knew little but, in the light of that knowledge, did not greatly approve.
‘It’s as if she were the Virgin Mary,’ I said, ‘And as if what she is making a fuss about was not an engagement but an Annunciation.’
‘That’s putting it rather high,’ said Mary. ‘She reminds me more of Miss Higgins when she gave that special biology lesson that we couldn’t attend unless our parents gave written permission. Don’t you remember? Miss Higgins told us with magic lantern slides how a calf was born.’
‘Oh, I remember all right,’ I said, ‘we all agreed it would have been more interesting if the calf had told us with magic lantern slides how Miss Higgins had been born.’
We giggled and ran out into the garden and shouted up to Richard Quin’s window and got him down with us to play our private family elaborate form of catch-ball, breaking off to exchange more heartless jests at the expense of our sister. I blush to recall our savagery, but it did not last long, we were so sorry for Alan Houghton-Bennett and so certain of the dire outcome of his resolve to marry our sister. He turned out to be a likeable person, tall and good-looking, with grey eyes and black hair, intelligent in the way Papa had liked, and very polite. He appalled us by his vulnerability indicated by this obvious sincere politeness of his, this real regard for other people’s feelings. So far as we could see, he would have no defences against our awful sister.
There were only two grounds for hoping that he could survive. One was that she really loved him, and that seemed possible. Otherwise she could not have changed so completely; she worked on herself as drastically as a mezzo-soprano has to if she finds it necessary to change herself into a coloratura-soprano. That, of course, might not last. The mezzo-sopranos who have successfully converted themselves to the higher range must be very few indeed. But a second factor in the situation was her great enthusiasm for Alan’s family and his home, which might well be lasting. Sir George Houghton-Bennett was plump and balding and, except that the Asian sun had burned him as brown as Lady Tredinnick, he was exactly like any other elderly gentleman one did not remember very well, and his daughters Olivia and Angela were exactly like the girls one did not remember very well, and Lady Houghton-Bennett was exactly like millions of people since she was disguised by the hideous and individuality-destroying uniform imposed in those days on the middle-aged and elderly women of the prosperous classes. She had masses of hair done in the teapot style, on which there rested nearly all day long, even at her own table when she was entertaining guests, a large and heavy hat; her skirts were long and weighty and trailed behind her; her bodices were boned till they might as well have been cuirasses; her sleeves were vast from shoulder to elbow and then constricted to the wrist, and out of doors she wore high boots with high heels which made her stoop as she hobbled along. As she went about the day’s business, this gear (which was utterly unfeminine, which neither followed the lines of a woman’s body nor suggested the distinctive virtues of women) obliged her to bend and balance this way and that, with the result that her face was always distorted by a false peevishness. Moreover, though Lady Houghton-Bennett had a good mind, and used it, having written several useful handbooks for the use of British soldiers’ wives in India, teaching them something of the language and the everyday customs of the native population, she was now compelled to waste her time on such insensitive routines as ‘leaving cards’, which meant that she must spend an afternoon every month or so driving in her carriage to the houses of her friends and acquaintances, not to see them but to leave with the servant who opened the door her own and her husband’s visiting cards, which had to be distributed owing to a code of which I can now remember nothing except that it meant that one was going away if one turned up a corner of one’s card. The tedium of these rituals, together with the weight of her clothes, caused occasional failures in geniality; but like her husband and her daughters, she was remarkable for her good faith. They would not have gone back on a promise, and to them any contact with another human being, even so little as a ‘good morning’, constituted a promise, which could not be broken unless the other party to it made a disavowal. Even their concentration on fact, which was absolute and barred them from any understanding of the arts, was a way of keeping faith with the world about them. Of course Cordelia had to love people who had won so long ago and so finally the war against insecurity that we had waged all our lives. This was so particularly because the security attained was not only material but moral. They were as good as Mamma but in quite a different way: and as Cordelia had never been able to emulate Mamma’s type of virtue, this gave her a second chance and she was, quite humbly, grateful.
But surely Cordelia did not have to love their awful house. This was a Victorian mansion high on Campden Hill, built of greyish brick; and within its walls Asia had taken its revenge against colonisation. It was full of brass cobras, elephants’ feet, teak furniture, Indian silver bowls and ebony and ivory screens; and Cordelia liked it. The first time she took Mary and myself there, and the parlourmaid left us alone in the drawing-room, she looked round at its horrible treasures and said to us solemnly, as if we were all quite little children, ‘Do not touch anything.’ Mary and I were stilled. We were not little children, but she was a little child, and she would never grow up, and the terrible fears of infancy would always be with her. She was afraid that her beautiful new toy, her marriage, would be taken away from her if her naughty little sisters did not obey the rules the fairy godmother had laid down. Puzzled by what she saw on our faces, she stared first at me and then at Mary. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked quite pitifully. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Mercifully, Olivia Houghton-Bennett came into the room at that moment, a little late because she had forgotten the time playing with the darling little kiddies (a word then used by all classes) in the East End Settlement where she worked three times a week.
‘She cannot help it,’ we found ourselves saying of Cordelia, after that, and we remembered how Richard Quin had been saying the same thing about her for years. It was strange how our brother, who was younger than we were, who was still at school, had been wiser than either of us for quite a long time, though wisdom was not his overt aim. He lived for pleasure, delicate pleasure, the easy exploitation of his body and his mind. Of this Cordelia had always disapproved, yet now she gained by it. Lady Houghto
n-Bennett and Olivia and Angela had instantly fallen in love with him, and, more than that, he was useful not only to them but their friends because he played excellent tennis, could sing and play and dance, and he grew into a sager kind of Cherubino. Thus it was that he was able to save us from a nightmare threat to the wedding-day. It would have been natural for the Houghton-Bennett girls and Mary and me to be bridesmaids, and indeed we would have enjoyed it, for it would have given us the chance to dress up without the horrors of going to an ordinary party. But Cordelia would be so certain that we were doing the wrong thing at the end of her train that she would be compelled, perhaps at the very climax of the ceremony, even at the moment when Alan was putting the ring on her finger, to turn round and seek us out with her white stare. When we hinted this to Mamma, however, she hinted back that she did not see how we could explain this to Lady Houghton-Bennett without intimating that we had found Cordelia a difficult sister, and Cordelia herself became like a distracted dove, ruffling its feathers, when we expressed our reluctance to follow her down the aisle. I think she feared that the Houghton-Bennetts would be put on the scent of our hopeless undesirability as sisters-in-law if we departed from the routine. It was left to Richard Quin when he was playing tennis with Olivia at Ranelagh to blurt out with apparent tactlessness that Mary and I suffered from agonising stage-fright if we found ourselves the object of public attention anywhere but on the concert platform. It made us feel sick, he said, and added that on one occasion we had actually been sick, and that he doubted whether, try as we might, we would be able to go through with it, and he thought it probable we would baulk at the last moment. He made this tale more convincing by inventing an anecdote about Liszt fainting when officiating as a best man at a friend’s wedding (Liszt of all people! But the Houghton-Bennetts would, he rightly supposed, not know about that). We followed on by half-finished sentences and anxious looks next day when our bridesmaid dresses were mentioned; and soon all was well and Cordelia had the look of a general who has altered and improved his disposition of troops.
She was a child. But not, we sometimes thought, a lovable one. We realised that, when she came into our room one night, quite late, when Mamma had gone to bed. She was wearing one of her trousseau dresses, which had just come from the dressmaker, and she said that she wanted our opinion as to whether the sleeves were not set in crooked. They were perfect. We told her that the dress was lovely, and that she would look lovely in it, as she did in all her dresses, and Mary asked, very gently for her, what was worrying her.
Cordelia’s voice failed her. She moistened her lips and whispered, ‘Sometimes I am afraid Papa will come back. Before the wedding,’ and she added, in a voice sharpened by dread of a threat that would overhang the years that would go on for ever, ‘or after.’
We could not answer. This was too pathetic. All of us, even Kate, were counting the days when she should leave the house; and all of us, if we had heard Papa’s key in the door again, would have been transported with joy, we might have turned into birds, and flown about.
I said, ‘But Cordelia, Papa is dead.’
‘How do we know?’ said Cordelia, her eyes full on my face.
‘We know,’ I said and Mary said, ‘We know.’
‘But we have heard nothing,’ said Cordelia, suddenly slipping into her old role of the only sensible person in the house, ‘absolutely nothing. It is not that I did not love him, I often thought I loved him more than any of you. Of course I would like him back. But Mamma has told Alan’s mother that Papa is dead, and if he turns up, what will they think?’
Mary broke the silence. ‘You know as well as we do he is dead.’
‘But how do we know?’ Cordelia asked, impatiently, angrily.
‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘We know, for one thing, because Mr Morpurgo went away about the time that Papa left us, and he came back utterly wretched, and was especially kind to Mamma, and indeed kind to us all. What could that mean except that Papa was dead.’
Mary’s fingers slipped into mine. So neither of us added, ‘By his own hand.’
‘Well, if you think so, it is all right,’ sighed Cordelia. But after a minute she reverted to the role of the most sensible person in the house and said, ‘But could not we ask Mr Morpurgo?’
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘He loved him. Do go to bed.’
‘I will,’ said Cordelia. ‘I will be able to sleep now.’
In point of fact, Cordelia need never have given herself away to us, for the Houghton-Bennetts had dealt in their own way with the phenomenon of our Papa and there was no need for her to concern herself with him. Mamma was so obviously irreproachable that it never occurred to them that there could be anything scandalous about Papa. As we learned long afterwards, the Houghton-Bennetts had been misled by Cordelia’s reticence about her father, and Mr Morpurgo’s references to his long intimacy with him. They concluded that Papa had been a Jew and that poor Cordelia had been the victim of anti-Semitic teasing at school; and as the Cordelia they knew was vulnerability itself, this increased their protective love for her. They were, indeed, all at sixes and sevens in their estimation of us. It was obvious to us that the Houghton-Bennetts were behaving with extraordinary generosity in welcoming so warmly a daughter-in-law from a family with no social position and no fortune. What we did not realise was that though we had, all the same, something to say for ourselves, they had never grasped this. They knew nothing of music, partly because they were not musical and partly because they had been so long in the Far East; though like practically everybody else in the world at that time, they had heard of Paderewski, that was all they knew of the subject, and the fact that Mamma had once been famous could not enter into their minds, there was no place for it to go. When Olivia and Angela came to our house and we showed them Brahms’ signed photograph and boasted that he had given it to Mamma because he thought her the best woman pianist since Clara Schumann, they were unimpressed, though visibly touched at such importance being attached to such a drab souvenir, for the reason that their home on Campden Hill was rich with silver-framed photographs of Royalties and Viceroys and Governors and Rajahs; and they would hardly have credited that Mamma had some of those too, but they were kept in the trunks in the box-room. They thought of our home as humble, in the Biblical sense of the word, and as free from vainglory; and of Cordelia, whose blazing ambition had all but burned down our house, as the humblest of all. They doted on us as Wordsworth doted on his cottagers. Indeed, looking back on them, I think we were a relief to the Houghton-Bennett parents’ noblest part; for they looked on their son’s marriage as an affirmation of the claim that they owed debts to other than Caesar. It is ironical that at the same time we were feeling towards them like unscrupulous horse-dealers who have sold a dangerous horse to an urban simpleton.
But nobody could have believed that irony played any part at our sister’s wedding, it was so beautiful. They were married in St Mary Abbott’s which is a church of distances, and all the distances led to masses of flowers - Mr Morpurgo’s flowers - and Cordelia’s eyes were set on some sacred goal behind those flowers, until she neared the altar, and then her gaze marvelled at the candles and thanked the cross for all this beauty, and for more than that. For when she reached the altar, there could she take the vow of obedience which her whole being craved, since she was framed only to obey. She was submission, she was sacrifice, and nothing else. At the sight of her many people in the congregation were wiping their eyes, and we wept also, but our tears were inspired by the bridegroom, awaiting his bride, not knowing that he might as well await a river of lava.
It was terrible to see them standing side by side in the Houghton-Bennetts’ drawing-room, which really did not look so bad now they had taken out the enormous ivory model of the Taj Mahal and the ivory lily (with coral stamens and jade stalk and leaves) embedded in a black velvet panel and supported on a Burmese silver easel. We were exhilarated to see that no matter what the eternal truth of the situation might be, the festivity celebrating it a
ll looked very pretty. The drawing-room and the staircase were crammed with people who were happy as people are at a wedding where the bride and bridegroom are romantic figures; and the air was alive with the curious exhalation of sound which rises from chattering people yet is so much more like a bird-chorus than human speech. It went so well that as soon as the reception line came to its end Sir George and his wife went and sat on a sofa, and whenever they did not have to talk to the guests, spoke to each other in laughing undertones, and it could be seen that they had been much in love, and were still so in their elderly way. We were slightly shocked by Mamma, for though she should have known better than anyone there this marriage would end in misery, she was certainly enjoying herself, and making her own success, for Aunt Constance had made her look quite ordinary by putting her into fancy dress and turning her into an early Victorian, with a coal-scuttle bonnet to hide her wild hair and shade her wild eyes, and a tight-fitting bodice and a full skirt that she could not make untidy. She had met an old lady and gentleman in whose house she had played when they were first married and she was young, and the three were sitting on a window-seat, and all might always have gone smoothly for her ever since they had last met. Rosamund and Richard Quin too, were taking the occasion in a light-minded way with Olivia and Angela and their friends. But, when we took a minute to reflect, outsiders who did not know might have thought we were enjoying ourselves; and that, we suddenly realised, was exactly what we were doing. Only Mr Morpurgo was looking sad, which surprised us, for we thought he had never seen through Cordelia. It was not till some days later that we discovered that his gloom was among the ironies of the occasion. He had not been in the least disconcerted by the marriage since Mamma had approved it and he took it for granted that she was right about everything. But the reception had shocked him by revealing what was in his eyes a world of terrifying poverty. He knew that many people were poor, and that our family had been poor until our father left us, but that was the result of failure: of inability to get to the top. Here, however, was a crowd of people who were all successful, and had for the most part been certified as such by this and that decoration and title, but their wives had not a Paris dress among them, and few of them had carriages or motor-cars, and they seemed undisturbed by finding themselves in a house where the furniture was ignoble and there was not an Old Master - not even, he pointed out to us afterwards, an Old Master drawing - on the walls; and what made it worse was that they owed their success to the exercise of gifts which he knew he lacked and esteemed far above those he possessed. He was so preoccupied by shame at the injustice by which the world had favoured him above his superiors, that I doubt if he had a moment to consider the possible future of Alan and Cordelia; and I have to admit that we forgot our prophetic gloom till it was time to go upstairs to help Cordelia into her going-away dress (which was a coat and skirt of pale amber facecloth in which she looked transparent, about to rise into the skies) and there our vision of them returned to us in full measure. True, she seemed to be changed. Always before, when we had done her up, to use a phrase which long ago lost its meaning, she had put it to us that we were ruining for ever whatever garment it was that we were buttoning or hooking or snapping, through that preternatural clumsiness from which she alone of all the family was exempt; but now she remained still under our fingers and thanked us. Also her goodbye kisses she gave us felt as if she had really been fond of us. But we knew the truth, and were astonished when we saw that Kate, who came down like a hawk on all our faults, wept under that kiss. But it was under Alan’s kiss that our eyes filled with tears. The honeymoon was to be spent in Florence, and we imagined him suddenly shocked into woodenness by his first discernment of our sister’s real quality, against a background of cypresses and campanili which should have been the framework of happiness.
