This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘Were they lovely?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Oh, far lovelier than you would think, I could hardly believe it when I held them in my hands,’ said Richard Quin, his mouth full of bread and jam. ‘And this man and his wife adored their pigeons, they were Seventh Day Adventists, and that means that they cannot drink tea or coffee or beer or wine or whisky, so instead they got drunk on pigeons.’

  ‘Is the coo pleasant when you are quite near them?’ asked Mamma.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Richard Quin, ‘and it is so funny to feel it rolling right through their bodies, it takes much more organisation than you would think, they use all of themselves for it. But the wonderful thing is how they fly. The man let me do it. Oh, not the best racing ones. They have to be let out of a loft and handled very carefully. But there were some which did not really matter, and he showed me how to send them off.’

  He stood up behind the tea-table and the light shone back from him. ‘You pick up the pigeon as if it were a ball, and you throw it into the air, and when it is up there it starts flying. It is as if you were bowling and the ball became alive,’ He flung out his arm two or three times towards the ceiling, his curved hand quivering with the pleasure it remembered. ‘You would like the feeling, Mamma,’ he said, sitting down again to eat.

  ‘So I should,’ said Mamma, enchanted.

  ‘Well, I will take you along some day,’ said Richard Quin.

  ‘Wouldn’t he think it odd for someone as old as me to want to do it?’ Mamma asked wistfully.

  ‘No, no. You see, I told them a lot about you,’ said Richard Quin.

  Cordelia asked impatiently, ‘And your lessons? What about your lessons? Will you not be late, starting your homework?’

  ‘Oh, that will be all right,’ he said.

  ‘Will it?’ she asked. ‘Have you any hope of getting that scholarship?’

  Richard Quin’s eyes narrowed, he seemed to bite back a sharp answer.

  ‘Don’t you want to go to Oxford?’ Cordelia pressed.

  His eyes were wide again. ‘Yes, very much,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you what I would feel if I could be sure that I were going to Oxford.’

  All of us except Cordelia were surprised by his gravity, for he seemed to take no more thought for the morrow than the lilies in the field, which did not disturb us, since we knew that he was among the lilies and not among the weeds.

  ‘Yes,’ Cordelia persisted, her exasperation growing, ‘but are you sure you ought to go to Oxford? Would it not be better for you to try a musical career?’

  He made a face at her. ‘How afraid you are, when you think someone is going to succeed in doing what he wants. A minute ago you were scolding me because I was not working hard enough for an Oxford scholarship, now because I say I want to go you tell me that I shouldn’t go to Oxford at all.’

  She was disconcerted, for a minute she stared at him as if she at last understood something, but she hastily ran back into her anger, and cried at our amused faces, ‘You are all hopeless. It is not fair to the boy. Richard Quin, you must make up your mind about your future. I wish you would give up one of these evenings you are always frittering away playing games and come and spend an evening with Alan’s father.’

  ‘That is just what I arranged to do yesterday,’ said Richard Quin. ‘He has found out how well I can skate, and we are booked to go to Prince’s together one evening next week, so that I can give him some tips.’

  Cordelia was ruffled by our laughter, and left us. In the hall she said meekly to me, after she had kissed me goodbye, ‘Forgive me for being cross with Richard Quin. But I am so worried in case he becomes a burden on you all.’ I was coldly silent. It would have been quite possible for Mary and me to borrow enough money to send Richard to Oxford on our existing contracts, and I was enraged, because she was again pretending, as in the days of her unprofitable career as a child violinist, that she was the stay of our household and the rest of us were imprudent and incapable of supporting ourselves. But she passed from my anger into a kind of trance. She stared at me, lifting a tremulous finger to her lips, and murmured, ‘And the disgrace,’ and went out into the darkness, hurrying back to Alan.

  It happened that she did not hear at once that Richard Quin failed to get a scholarship but succeeded in winning an exhibition at New College, and had gone at once to Mr Morpurgo to ask him to lend the money to make up the difference between the exhibition and his probable expenses, so that he need take nothing from Mamma or Mary or me. Neither Mary nor I wrote to tell her, simply because we hardly ever thought of her except when she appeared before us. Mamma did not write either, but that was because she was growing noticeably remote and inactive. She played the piano less and less, and very often let a whole day pass without opening it. We were not sure whether she was ill, or whether what we saw was the result of age, for she had indeed married later than was the custom for women at that period and she was much older than the mothers of our contemporaries. We took her to a Harley Street specialist, but he could find nothing wrong with her, and as she did not seem to be in pain or to be worried about herself, we pushed our sense that she had changed to the back of our minds. But it was a sign of that change when, in spite of her resolution to keep Cordelia in our circle she did not write to her about Richard Quin’s success. And Richard Quin did not write himself, because her doubt about his future was the one point on which he was sensitive. We had never seen him downcast before, except about that one misfortune which could still draw tears to the eye of any one of us when we thought of it; the loss of our father. Every event except that had struck Richard Quin as either agreeable, or capable of being made so or nearly so, either by laughter or by his particular innocuous kind of finesse. But when Cordelia said that she did not think that he ought to go to Oxford and showed that she believed him worthless, I saw the light go out of him for an instant. It was almost as if what she thought were true, and she were forcing him to admit guilt which till then he had always falsely denied. So he did not write to her about his exhibition. But he met Rachel Houghton-Bennett by chance the day after it was all settled, and she passed on the news to Cordelia, who was with us by the middle of the afternoon.

  We had even fresher news to tell her, but she would not listen to it. We thought this a pity, because it had pleased us all. About noon that day I had been standing in the hall reading a press cutting; we hated letters, we had not enough time for them, and we always kept them on the hall-table and read them when we had a spare moment. Our agents handled all our engagements, and we had had a telephone put in, so it worked quite well. Then I heard someone knocking, and I opened the front door, and found a tall pale girl, about my own age, standing outside. She said in a flat voice, ‘I hoped you were still living here,’ and I recognised Nancy Phillips.

  I pulled her in and called to the others, and Mamma and Mary and Kate all came out, and we were so glad to see her that for a long time we never thought of moving out of the hall. She said she was well, and she would have been good-looking if it had not been for her lack of colour, and a doubtfulness which made not only her movements but even her features tentative and unimpressive. She had not had a very pleasant time since she saw us. It had been a great relief to her, she told us, to read about Mary and me in the papers, because so little had happened in her own life. It turned out that she had not been trained to do anything since she had left school and she had just been at home with Aunt Clara.

  It was then Mamma seized her arm and said, ‘Take your hat and coat off. And do you want to stay the night? There is a bed for you,’ and Kate said, ‘There is a lot of food, I have much more now to cook with than I used to have.’

  It had disturbed Mamma and the rest of us when Nancy was a schoolgirl, her idleness. It was so heartrendering. We were having such fun working, Mamma enjoyed our work as if she were living her youth over again, and if we often forgot to read our press cuttings Kate never did, and she liked it when people gave us flowers. But Nancy had neither work nor anybody ab
out her who worked. She had, indeed, nothing. She knew it, she turned sad eyes on Mamma and said so, and confirmed it by her pallor, her listlessness. When Richard Quin came in for lunch, she marvelled to see how grown-up he was, and when we told her how he was going to Oxford, and she was really glad, and he thanked her for her gladness by kissing her, which pleased her very much, she looked like a child holding a shell to her ear to hear the sound of the sea.

  At luncheon and afterwards she told us all about her life in Nottingham. She had not written to us, because her Uncle Mat still felt very bitter against her mother, he had loved her father so much. It had hurt him quite badly that she had insisted on writing to Aunt Lily, and she had never dared to tell him that she would have loved to see her. The trouble was not that she had been afraid of him, though he was a blunt man, indeed he prided himself on his bluntness, he was so blunt that he had not many friends. It was that he and his wife had been so good to her. They had two sons of their own, but both were married and one was in Melbourne and the other in Singapore, and so they had treated Nancy and her brother as their own children. Her eyes were wide with wonder at their kindness, but she did not seem to be remembering any scenes that had been shaped and informed by that kindness. I remembered how Papa had likened Uncle Mat to a bull, and it seemed probable that Nancy had experienced such tedium as might befall a young girl who had been adopted by a benevolent bull and cow. They had given her brother a good education, and he had trained as an accountant and had gone out to Canada, where he was doing well. It was terrible, the centrifugal force exercised by the kindness of this blunt man, which drove its recipients outwards over the continents. So Nancy had been quite alone with her uncle and aunt for the last few years. But they had done everything they could to prevent her feeling lonely, they had given her a wonderful coming-out dance, and had often taken her on holidays to stay at lovely hotels, all over England and Scotland.

  ‘I think they hoped that I would get married,’ she told us, ‘but, of course, I am not very attractive.’

  She paused, and I wondered that Richard Quin did not tell her that she was graceful and had lovely hair, for he was clever at reassuring girls about their looks. Olivia Houghton-Bennett was very self-conscious because she was rather tall, and I have heard her murmur to him, as they went into a room, ‘Am I looking awful,’ to which he answered, with convincing hesitation, ‘Yes, you are, rather. But I think it is only because you are stooping and crawling about sideways like a crab, if you would stand up straight you would look ripping.’ But he made no attempt to reassure Nancy, and I saw why, when she went on: ‘And, of course, everybody knows who I am. Aunt Clara and Uncle Mat thought that nobody guessed, because they made us change our names. I have not been Nancy Phillips since I left this house. They made me call myself Nancy Kingston. There is some sense in it, my father’s mother, Uncle Mat’s mother, was Nancy Kingston before she married. All the same, it sounds a silly, made-up name. It is not mine.’

  She ran her fingers distastefully along the table-edge in front of her, and let them drop in her lap. She was without employment, she had had her own name taken away from her, she had nothing.

  ‘And it was quite useless, too,’ she continued. ‘Everybody in Nottingham realised who we were as soon as we were brought there, and of course nobody wants to marry me.’ It was as well that Richard Quin had not told her that she was pretty, for if he had convinced her of it that would only have made her more certain that people did not want to marry her because she was the daughter of a murderess. ‘And I would not care, either, to marry anybody who thought it was nothing that my mother murdered my father.’

  ‘I am so glad that you have grown up a sensible girl,’ said Mamma. ‘That is quite the right way to look at it.’

  ‘It was an appalling crime,’ said Nancy, and yawned, as if she had thought over the quality of her mother’s deed so long that it now held nothing for her but tedium.

  ‘Appalling,’ agreed Mamma, ‘as your mother would be the first to admit.’

  ‘But would she?’ asked Nancy. ‘I always thought she pretended she had not done it.’

  ‘That was at first,’ said Mamma. ‘I think we would all have done that at first. But she is completely changed now. Nobody could look down on her as she is today.’

  Nancy started, looked at her incredulously, and then was silent. She said, ‘So it is all right. I mean, there is a way of thinking about it. At Nottingham we never spoke of it, and it was terrible. You must tell me about this afterwards. I hope you do not mind me talking about this in front of you all, but it has been so hard for me, and you have always seemed able to understand anything.’

  We all said she could talk about it all she liked, and Mamma asked if she would like some pudding, and Nancy said, ‘Indeed I would, I had this pudding when Aunt Lily and I were staying with you, and I have often told Aunt Clara about it but we could never get a cook to make it.’

  This delighted Mamma, for it was a queer pudding you beat raspberry jam into and steamed in an open mould, not covered with a cloth or with a buttered paper, and nobody could get it right except her. Kate never acquired the knack. Then Nancy began talking about how we had all washed our hair and eaten roasted chestnuts by the fire, and all the silly jokes we had made, and as the meal came to the end she said, ‘I don’t want to rebel against Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, they’re quite elderly now, they were much older than my Papa, and they have been very kind to me. But I said I wanted to come up to London to the theatre with another girl, because I must do something about, about, you know, being who I really am. I must see Aunt Lily again. I really must. But that will hurt Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara very much, for they say she is working as a barmaid in just a common pub, it is not even as if she was employed in a proper hotel.’

  ‘But it is a heavenly place,’ said Mary, and we all said how lovely it was and how much we enjoyed going to the Dog and Duck, and how nice Uncle Len and Aunt Millie were.

  ‘So that is all right too,’ said Nancy. ‘Now what can I do about seeing my mother?’

  ‘I was coming to that,’ said Mamma, ‘but before we talk of that, let me say now - and you must listen, children. You three, you have had a great deal of success lately, and now you have Nancy back here, but it must not delude you into thinking things will always go easily. But come into the drawing-room, Nancy, and we will tell you where your mother is and we can talk over what would be the best thing to do.’

  So we scattered, and Mary went over to practise in the music-room which Mr Morpurgo, at a cost which it is bewildering to remember, it was so small, had built for us as a Christmas present on the further side of the stables, and Richard Quin went up to his room. He still slept in the attic, though he could have had Cordelia’s room. He said he had been too happy there to leave it. I went to find Kate, and we were thinking what we would give Nancy if she stayed for supper, when Cordelia came in. I told her about Nancy, but she was not very much interested. She said, ‘How nice, dear, but where is Richard Quin?’

  ‘Oh, of course, you haven’t seen him since he got the news, you haven’t congratulated him,’ I said. ‘Come upstairs, he is in his room.’ I ran up before her, calling, ‘Richard Quin, Richard Quin, another sister to flatter you.’

  We found him lying on his bed, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi open before him, and a Jew’s harp in the palm of one hand. It amused him to play phrases of real music on that humble instrument, lifting it suddenly to his lips as he read and twanging out the notes, twice or thrice, while he went on with his reading. He had that capacity for doing two things at once which enrages those who have it not. When we came in he did not rise but took up the Jew’s harp and welcomed us with the equivalent of a flourish of trumpets, but stopped half-way to free his mouth so that he could say ‘How pretty you look, Cordelia, in that black hat.’ And so she did, it was one of those silky long-haired beaver hats we wore then, and against it her red-gold hair and peachy complexion were delicious.

  ‘What are y
ou doing lying down in the middle of the day?’ she asked. ‘You should be out of doors.’ She turned away to give herself reassurance by looking at her neat perfection in the mirror, and said vaguely to its depths, ‘Out of doors or something.’

  Richard Quin’s face grew grey. He had expected that at last she would praise him.

  ‘And what is that you were playing? A Jew’s harp?’

  ‘I play it a lot,’ he told her, raising himself on his elbow and smiling and knitting his brows, as if he were anxious to please her but knew that there was practically no way of doing that.

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to do,’ she said, with her crossness. ‘They are horrible things, errand-boys play them in the streets. You do not play in the street?’

  He fell back into the pillows laughing. ‘Only when I find I am passing Doctors’ Commons.’

  ‘Or the College of Preceptors,’ I suggested. These were all places that had amused us when we heard of them in our childhood.

  ‘Or Negretti & Zambra,’ said Richard. ‘In fact, I stand outside Negretti & Zambra and give them as much of the “Ruin of Athens” as I can get on a Jew’s harp,’ said Richard.

  ‘But Negretti doesn’t like it and knocks on the window with the curling-tongs he uses to frizz his long black ringlets,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he likes it well enough, but it disturbs Zambra, who is always casting horoscopes,’ he said.

  ‘You are too old for this perpetual nonsense,’ said Cordelia.

  ‘We do other things as well,’ I said. ‘Mary and I play the piano a little, and Richard here has won an exhibition at New College.’

  ‘Yes, it is about that I want to talk,’ said Cordelia, vehemently.

  ‘Is there anything to say about it except that it is very pleasant?’ I asked.