This Real Night

by Rebecca West

‘There is a refrigerator,’ said Mamma. ‘This house makes its own electricity. The Kurzes are the kindest people.’

  ‘I have never had enough lobster,’ said Mary. ‘There may not be so many to give away tomorrow.’

  ‘Remember, children,’ said Mamma, ‘lobster is said to be very indigestible.’

  ‘Up to now,’ I claimed, ‘none of your children have ever eaten anything they could not digest. The only question is whether there will be any lobsters at all to give away tomorrow.’

  But there were about three dozen in the car, and we even had difficulty in finding room for them in the refrigerator. We had a wonderful dinner; and afterwards, when Mamma had happily gone to bed and Mary sat down at the piano, Richard Quin and I walked on the lawn in the soft August darkness.

  ‘I wish women could go into pubs,’ I said. ‘Uncle Len lets us be in the bar at the Dog and Duck if there are not many people, and I always like it. And it must have been fun at Powerscliffe.’

  ‘It was a good rag,’ he said. ‘But it was odd, being with all those people, and feeling so damned cold and lonely. Where are the nearest houses I can leave the lobsters tomorrow?’

  ‘At that village where the road takes a bend by a church where the hills start.’

  ‘Oh, that’s near enough. I wonder what sort of people live there.’

  We halted and looked through the night down into the landscape. Beneath us the bowl of cornland, frosted by the light of the young moon, looking larger than by day; and the indigo sky, not anything, simply a nothingness and a miracle in which the heavy stars were suspended. The village was a clot of brightness, and farmsteads on the high ground which we had not seen by day now shone like the eyes of wild things which thought it safe now to show themselves.

  ‘I can feel everything tonight,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I can feel how every stalk of corn grows up from those fields. I can feel how the light in that farm over there is heating the glass chimney of the lamp. I can feel how the stones in that church tower are locked together with mortar. I can imagine how the works of the church clock whirr and make a fuss before the hour strikes.’ He walked away from me and called his own name into the darkness, six or seven times. Then he came back, saying, ‘It’s funny, if you repeat your own name it soon begins to sound quite meaningless.’ But he called it out once more, straight up to the vault of the sky overhead, and might have again, if he had not broken off to say, ‘Rose, Rose, look at Orion. The stars are glorious now. It’s such a fat buttery light that drips from them in summer time. I would like to sit up all night and watch the constellations turning and sliding off the sides of the sky beneath the horizon. I’ve never done that. The trouble is that sleep is good too. Too many things in the world are good. When one enjoys something one is always missing something else. But sleep is very good. Let us sleep now.’

  When the papers came at noon the next day and we learned that Great Britain was at war with Germany, we all had a glass of sherry, though we hardly ever drank, and Richard Quin explained to us that now we could settle down and have a good holiday, because he had applied for a commission in a regiment in which poor Mr Morpurgo had served in the South African War, and he thought he would get it, for Mr Morpurgo was helping him, but it would take some time. So we were there together all through that beautiful and horrible August, though not alone. We had invited some guests beforehand, and indeed expected Nancy Phillips to be with us for most of the time, for Cordelia had very adroitly put an end to the prejudice Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara had conceived against our household. She had remembered that Alan had a relative, a Cousin George, living in retirement near Nottingham, who had acquired a title. The Houghton-Bennetts had several titles in the family, and were proud of them, but were embarrassed by this one for it had been earned too easily. The others had come by way of Colonial Governorships or Army Service but Cousin George had been knighted because King Edward had visited the industrial town where he had been a Town Councillor at the time of an influenza epidemic, which had not spared the Mayor or the Deputy Mayor, so it had fallen to him to conduct the royal party round a new hospital. Cordelia and Alan visited this relative and manoeuvred him and his wife to accompany them in a call on Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, who felt that they had no right to stand between Nancy and such aristocratic friends. So she came to stay with us that summer, and was very happy, and fell a little in love with Richard Quin. We knew it when Rosamund came for the only weekend she was able to manage, as she had her proper holiday earlier in the year, and Nancy followed her and Richard Quin with spaniel eyes and said, without malice but with relief, ‘It is a pity they are not the right ages. If he had not been younger than her, they might have made a couple.’

  But we were joined by other guests who were unable to make such remarks, who were so unrelated to us that they could never speak of our relationship, who could say nothing to us except what people dancing or weeping in the streets to the tune of history say to each other. Musicians we knew only little or not at all, who had intended to spend the summer in France or Italy or Switzerland, members of the strange army of friends enrolled by Richard Quin, some of the girls who had been at school or college with us, reported themselves to us for one reason or another and were invited, and came to sleep in our house, or in a great barn that stood high on the hill, or in lodgings in the neighbourhood which had been vacated by nervous visitors, as it was bruited about that East Anglia was the probable theatre of German invasion. Kate and her mother were suddenly with us, saying that they could not abide to be separated from us at this time, particularly as all Kate’s brothers had gone to sea, and they helped in the house, so the two servants left by the Kurzes were not dismayed, and everything was agreeable about this time of carnival which preceded the Lent that was to endure all our lives.

  We were of course never without awe of the future, never without pity for the men who in the first and middle days of that month went out to die and in its latter days died their anticipated deaths. But we were very gay. We did not go to the seaward side of the hill again, for we were not far from the exact spot of the coast where it was supposed that any invading German force would make its landing, and the sands were taken over by the military. But we swam in a river not far away, and as soon as the Kurzes returned from Scotland they made us free of the lake in their part. Also we spilled over the fields, too, and helped with the exuberant harvest and all of us made music in our several ways. There came to stay with the Kurzes a grey-eyed young man named Oliver whom we recognised after a day or two as the composer whose works had been played at the concert in Regent’s Park where we heard we had got our scholarships. We were embarrassed at seeing him again, because he had given us inscribed copies of his songs, and we had lost them on the way home, not carelessly but because we were so excited, and we always felt that we ought to own up. With a fervour that was partly a desire to expiate this guilt we took up our flutes again and joined in the performance of a cantata he had written on the subject of Venus rising from the sea at a South Coast resort when the Mayor and the Corporation were opening a new pier and taking down to the depths with her the Town Clerk, who was the tenor. We liked his music, which had a deliberately thin quality which was a search for the economy which had gone from Victorian music and had not been brought back by Elgar. We thought we might have liked him, too, had he not been suddenly drawn from us as Richard Quin was to be drawn a week or so later. It turned out Oliver had liked coming to us much more than we had thought, when he said goodbye to Mamma and thanked her for the times he had been to our house he suddenly could not speak any more, and bent down and kissed her hand. Mamma cried over his bowed head, ‘And khaki is such a hideous colour, the old scarlet was far better.’

  After Richard Quin had gone the others lingered for only a few days. By the end of the week we were alone. Then we went and stayed with the Kurzes while Kate and her mother helped the two servants to restore the house to order. The Kurzes had beautiful pictures and furniture, but it was as if we were looking
at them through deep waters; their two sons were with the British Expeditionary Force. Mercifully the house was requisitioned for a hospital, which gave them something to think about. When we got home we found that all our possessions too were now remote, divided from us by a chill clear barrier; and that here too the part was greater than the whole. The Kurzes’ great house had been dwarfed by the rooms their sons had left empty, and our house was nothing more than Richard Quin’s attic. Mary and I got on with our lives as well as we could. Our careers for some time continued. The First World War did not suddenly turn on civil life and strangle it as the Second did. Simply we saw a fungoid bloom of ruin slowly creep across the familiar objects among which we had been reared.

  For the first twelve months we had to carry out existing contracts, and still went on tour through the provinces. But there was a mournful intimation in the restriction which was at once applied to our elders and betters. The great pianists of those days, Paderewski and Busoni, and Rachmaninov and Pachmann, would go to their favourite among the great London pianoforte makers as they arrived from the Continent to undertake an English tour, and would spend a morning choosing a friendly instrument, and would have it shipped from town to town. That practice was abandoned in the autumn of 1914 and was never to be revived. The rise in the cost of labour and freight after the war made it an extravagance that not even the greatest virtuosos could impose on his impresario. This was, I think, in view of the mystical relationship which develops between a pianist and his instrument, a far greater pity than can be demonstrated on technical grounds. Gradually such signs convinced us that for the moment the world was going to stop its readings from the Arabian Nights' Entertainment. Travel became more and more uncomfortable, our fees and our engagements alike grew less.

  But we were fortunate in that our misfortunes came at a time when good fortune would have inconvenienced us. Before the war Mary and I could take any engagement away from home and know that Richard Quin would be with Mamma at night. But now that he was in the Army Mary and I had to scan our engagements to see that they did not clash, in case Mamma were left alone. Even when they did not, we eyed them mistrustfully, because they might mean that we would miss one of Richard Quin’s leaves. There was not anything we wanted to do but be as much with Richard Quin as we could manage. It happened that he liked the Army and it suited him, and each time he came he was more joyful and more of a man, and more deeply infatuated with some mastered technique. We would save up our meat coupons to buy him a duck, our sugar and eggs and butter and dried fruit and make him a really rich plum duff, and we would open one of the bottles of wine Mr Morpurgo had given us so that we could entertain, and dinner would last a long time, and afterwards we would sit round the fire, and Kate would come in and join us, and he would sit with his glass in his hand, finishing the wine, telling us all about gunnery, and how it was almost as much fun as music or cricket when one had got into the theory of it. Because of his bearing there was nothing lachrymose in our desire not to miss a minute of his leaves, it was a gay greed for pleasure. We felt, I remember, almost guilty, as if we were doing something improperly light-minded, when we accepted an invitation to play for a war charity in Oxford, one Friday night in the late autumn of 1915, because we were promised by one of the promoters that he would let us stay for the weekend in a lodge on his estate, which was not far from the camp where Richard Quin was stationed. We enjoyed such engagements, though of course a charity concert is not a concert, too many people are there for other than the private reasons which alone should drive one to a concert, for we always played on such occasions the lovely old fountain-spout duets such as Schubert’s Reposez-vous, bon chevalier, and Notre amitié est invariable and Grand Rondo, and Schumann’s Ball-Scenen and Kinderball. They soothed our audiences and us by their placid superfluity. Only in a secure community could pairs of people sit down at a piano to spend hours in perfecting performances of an artistic form in which nothing actually very important can be said, in which there is merely reaffirmed the pleasantness of the pleasant. At Oxford we played three such duets, and were then put into an old-fashioned carriage, a phaeton, I believe, and were driven along the moonlit High, all its towers and archways etched in silver and underlined with sooty shadow, into a countryside where the hedges were sharply bright as barbed wire. A turn of the road suddenly showed us the moonlight squandered over a broad river, which I suppose was the Thames, in which black bulrushes appeared to have huge clubbed heads as they stood sharp-cut in the shining water. We left it after a hundred yards or so, with regret, with a sense of guilt, it was so wrong that this beauty should lie so splendidly open to eyes that were not there. Then we followed a great brick wall for a mile or two till we came to high gates and a little polygonal Gothic lodge beside them, with the moon shining back from the panes on one of its sides. A sleepy woman with her hair in curlers opened the door, showed us a queerly shaped room where there were two beds, set at an angle, the shape was so very weird. She said, ‘Your brother came here this evening,’ and smiled at the recollection, and almost forgot to give us the packet he had left for us. It contained some salmon mayonnaise sandwiches and a note, ‘I leave these because you two are always hungry. In the morning walk over towards the camp when it is getting on for noon. It is two miles up the road. I will meet you.’

  We woke the next morning to find that there was a light fog which blotted out all the gaunt arms of the trees about us. There was an air of suspended safety very like that period of the war, the arms were so very threatening, but they came no nearer. The woman brought us breakfast in bed, with strong tea and brown eggs and real butter, and told us to eat what we could, here in the country there was plenty. But there were no newspapers. We lay and pretended that a copy of The Times would come later in the morning which would tell us that the war was over.

  Mary said, ‘Oxford looked nice yesterday. If Richard Quin ever goes there he will ask us down to dances.’

  ‘But you hate dances,’ I said.

  ‘It would be different with Richard Quin,’ said Mary. ‘He would have nice friends.’

  Noon was a long way off. We lazed until the woman brought in a can of hot water, and first Mary and then I washed in a big china basin, our nightdresses dropped to our waists and tied up by the sleeves. By this time the sun was shining strongly just above the mist, which it changed to the colour of topaz. We were faintly dyed with it, we decided we were Redskins, and Mary begged being Wenonah because she could not bear being Laughing Water, a name we had decided when we were children was what Seidlitz Powders thought of themselves as being called, since there was no reason to suppose that things are not just as conceited as people. We went out of the lodge singing bits of Coleridge Taylor’s music, which made us think of the Albert Hall, and talk of the conductors we liked and hated, until the winter landscape captivated and absorbed us. There was this topaz mist, which closed in on us more closely on the left, where it rose in a wall just beyond a hedge whose bare black winter-bones were loaded with deep crimson berries, than on the right, where there was a beechwood, with lucidity stretching into the distance between its silver trunks. In and out of the hedgerow weaved fleets of very small birds, some of them bright yellow. In the wood there were pools of black glassy water, and at their bottom the sodden leaves were visibly rotting, were a soft vegetable paste, yet were distinct in every vein and every indentation. Here and there, high on the tree-trunks, were brackets of pale fungus, delicately fluted, and on the ground were clusters of toadstools, reddish and squat, like details out of the illustrations of comfortable books for children. We did not know that the country was so interesting in winter-time, we had thought of it as being like an opera-house, empty and dark; nor had we heard before such silence. This was an active principle. If we stopped walking it was too silent. We were not frightened, there was obviously nothing to frighten us. Only we feared that Richard Quin might not come to us out of the mist.

  We came to a cross-roads, and Mary asked, ‘Did he say keep str
aight on?’

  ‘Yes, but he said nothing about a steep hill,’ I answered. The road before us mounted sharply and disappeared into the mist, which here had paled, had grown grey again. It was suddenly wet against our faces. We were standing by a gate that led into a field where there was a conical haystack, sliced in half, distraught straw sticking out of the cut surface, and an agricultural machine lying beside it, showing rusty metal teeth, and on the other side of the road a brick house turned a windowless wall towards us.

  ‘Let us wait here,’ said Mary. ‘We might miss him, it might all go wrong.’

  There was a mist within the mist. Clouds of a grosser fog, quite white, showed through the general grey mass of moisture. Above, the dimmed sun was small and bright, like a new shilling.

  ‘How alone we are,’ I said.

  ‘I hear all sorts of things,’ said Mary. ‘Or is it the blood in my ears?’

  ‘It is the blood in our ears,’ I said. ‘Yet I am not sure.’

  We stood still. A white cloud was driven past and through us. We heard, or did not hear, the lowing of distant cattle.

  ‘Richard Quin will not be long now,’ I said. ‘He is always very late when it does not matter, and very punctual when it does.’

  ‘He is here,’ she smiled.

  He had come suddenly out of the mist on the steep fall of the hill, running and leaping, his head bare, his cap held in his hand. He had not seen us, he was shouting a song to himself as he ran, and twirling his cap on his fist to mark the time. We cried out to him, and he saw us, and we ran towards him, and he shouted a welcome. But it was not Richard Quin. We halted, and he cried out, laughing, ‘You quite thought I was Richard Quin, didn’t you? People often take us for each other, from a distance. But not close to.’ That indeed was true. His hair was fair-over-dark, like Richard Quin’s, but there was a greenish tinge in the fairness and in the hollow of his temples and round his nostrils, while Richard Quin’s hair was true pale gold where it was not dark, and shadows showed a blueness in his skin. This boy’s eyes, too, were more grey than blue, while Richard’s were more blue than grey; and his features were not so much delicate as finicking. But of course everybody was inferior to Richard Quin, and it was hard on anybody else to look like him and challenge comparison, so we looked on the stranger benevolently.