This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘I am Gerald de Bourne Conway,’ he said, ‘I expect your brother has told you all about me. I’m his best friend. I don’t know what we could have done without each other, out here among the Philistines.’ Already, from these few sentences, we knew that he talked too much. ‘As soon as I saw your brother, I said, “There’s somebody who speaks my language.” You can always tell, can’t you? Your father was awfully clever, wasn’t he? So is mine. He got a first in Greats and the Locke Prize for Philosophy. And the Newdigate. Of course he’s wasted as a country parson. But it was a family living, and he was the youngest and didn’t inherit. So what could he do?’

  We murmured agreement and gazed on him still more tenderly. Of course Richard Quin had found a cripple to carry on his shoulders, of course he had not abandoned his favourite sport of mercy. At the same moment we heard him singing in the mist, and our hearts contracted at hearing his real voice, and we shouted to him. He too came suddenly out into visibility, running and leaping, but correctly, classically, not like this fragile and flimsy copy of himself.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Richard Quin, after he had taken us in his arms, ‘but you know, there’s no technique for terminating an interview with the Colonel before the Colonel wishes it. I hoped we’d meet you almost as soon as you’d got started.’

  ‘It didn’t matter,’ said Mary, ‘but we had got becalmed. And in such a dull part of the country.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it dull just here?’ said Richard Quin, looking round him. ‘There must be a lot of turnips somewhere near. Ah, yes, in that ramp over there. They give it out. But come on up that hill. At the top it’s fine weather.’

  ‘Fine weather?’ we echoed doubtfully. The mist was like a wet towel, we might have been by the sea.

  ‘Yes, that’s the odd thing about the country in winter,’ said Richard Quin. ‘It packs away the most extraordinary things.’

  ‘The most extraordinary things,’ said Gerald de Bourne Conway, emphatically, tugging as it were at Richard Quin’s sleeve, and begging to be treated as one of us. Richard looked at him kindly. ‘Gerald has told you who he is,’ he said. He might have been saying, ‘I would not care to tell you that myself. But for the moment I must take charge of him, you must bear with him.’ So we pleased Gerald by describing how we had taken him for Richard at first.

  It was true what Richard had said, the hill rose to a ridge where there was a blue and silver day, and the sunshine was reflected strongly from the white cloud packs which filled the valleys below. We walked on either side of our brother, Gerald sometimes ahead of us and sometimes at our heels, like a young dog, and it was as if we had all the leisure in the world, and there was no fear.

  Richard said, ‘I tell you, winter is the time to be in the country. Summer is spread all over the place, you hardly ever come on any pocket of private weather, except a shower here and there. But in winter one hillside will have the full sun on it, and on the next there will be a storm, and sometimes a whole district will stop being England and will look like Scotland and its hills will be mountains. And, look, winter in the country is a blonde, you never thought of that.’ He took us through a gate and we walked alongside the road on a patch of downland, and he showed us bare bushes bright as bone, and red leaves clinging to beech saplings, and bright orange willows, and the buds that were everywhere if one looked for them, though it was not yet Christmas. ‘And look down in the valleys, there are lots of fields which are being ploughed and got ready, and some with even a green fuzz on them,’ he told us. ‘Did you know there was such a thing as winter wheat? The truth is there is no winter in the country, there is always something growing.’

  ‘And the air up here is not merely cold,’ said Mary. ‘In London and Manchester and Liverpool the winter air has just had the warmth taken out of it and the damp put in, or it has been displaced by wind.’

  ‘Wind is just part of the enemy,’ I interrupted. The enemy in our household was what made cakes burn when they had been in the oven not nearly so long as the cookery book said they should be, what gave one a cold just before a concert.

  ‘But what we’re breathing now,’ said Mary, holding her arms out to it, ‘is the Hallelujah Chorus.’

  We three moved on singing. Gerald murmured in my ear that his sister had a very fine voice, everybody had said that she ought to have it trained, someone awfully good who really knew what he was talking about had said that she ought to sing in opera, but she had married a very good chap, who owned thousands of acres in Yorkshire. After half a mile we came up against barbed wire and went back to the road, which curved and brought us to a dip in the ridge where there was a knot of cottages and a sturdy little church, hardly more than a tower, giving back blackish brilliance to the sun from its flint walls. It was old and had the look of a shepherd in his plaid. But when we went inside we found that somebody had made it new and not at all protective. There were pews of varnished pine, and olive-green rep hassocks and cushions, and only a plain cross on the altar. The walls were distempered drab, it might have been a schoolroom. We stood in the doorway and sighed.

  Gerald de Bourne Conway said, ‘Ooh, isn’t it Protty?’

  When he explained that he meant Protestant, I asked him if he wasn’t a Protestant, and he told us, tossing his head, that his father went mad if anybody called him that. ‘We’re Catholics,’ he said. ‘It’s awful cheek of the Romans to talk as if they were the only Catholics.’ He took a step into the church, and his nose wrinkled. ‘Smell the carbolic soap. I bet nobody’s ever swung a censer here. I bet they have Morning and Evening Service too.’

  ‘Why, what do they have in your father’s church?’ asked Mary.

  ‘He celebrates mass,’ he answered cockily. ‘I’ve served for him ever since I was six. You should see me in my cotta. Look, not a crucifix in the place. And not a bit of plate on the altar. And I bet they call it a communion table at that.’ Looking scornfully about him, he moved down the aisle. He had held his cap under his arm all the time we walked on the downland, and the wind had ruffled his hair. He looked too young to be a soldier, he might have been a schoolboy and this a class-room and the altar a master’s desk. As he went further from us mischief appeared in his movements, he might have been a schoolboy considering what he might do to spoil the classroom while the master was absent from his desk, whether he could pour something that stank into the ink-wells or scrawl with coloured chalks on the blackboard. We felt concern for him. His movements were too simple, it was certain that when the master came back to his desk he would know what offences had been committed and by which offender; and though it was the boy’s desire to damage his school, he was a schoolboy, and the proper place for him was school, he would miss the other boys if he were sent away. When his hand twitched towards a pile of hymnbooks, when his strutting brought him to the sanctuary steps, it was as if the master had returned and was a grave presence at his desk. But Richard Quin called softly, ‘Gerald, Gerald,’ and he tiptoed back to us.

  Beyond the village the ridge broadened, and there were sentinels at the great gates of a park where yew-groves stood twisted and black and old on the sage-green winter turf, and in the distance cedars of Lebanon lifted their tiers of shade round a red-brick house with a white colonnade; and the best of the day was over. We had to be with other people after that. It had not mattered having Gerald with us, for he was part of Richard Quin’s spiritual uniform, as his Sam Browne belt was part of his military uniform; this was the recipient of pity without whom our brother would not have been complete. But these other people had really nothing to do with us. We were with them only because they too were being whirled to disaster by the turning earth, and they prevented us from concentrating on our brother, whom we desired to learn by heart. But they were kind. The Brigadier’s wife held a Pekinese under each arm, and as she had eyes like a Pekinese, and as her bust fell so loosely that the two Pekinese seemed extensions of it, she looked as if she were as curiously made as any tribeswoman that Othello had ever met; but s
he liked music, and had heard us play, and arranged for us to stay with her or one of the other wives whenever we could get away to see Richard Quin. So we went often, and Cordelia and Alan went down once or twice too, and everybody thought she was very pretty and gentle, but she did not really enjoy it. She paid a special visit to Lovegrove to tell us, not fiercely as she would have done before, but plaintively, and yet so insistently that it was still objectionable, that she thought it a great pity for Richard Quin to make such a friend of Gerald de Bourne Conway. People must think he could not be nice if he had such a terrible friend.

  In this she was wrong. The officers and their wives understood that Richard Quin was simply protecting Gerald. They knew he himself was all right, because he was a good soldier. There was much in life that Army people evidently did not understand but about this sort of thing they were good. There was no use telling Cordelia this, for she still thought, though she was trying to be nice about it, that all her family was awful, and if we had convinced her that Army people had a shrewd eye for character she would have felt quite certain that they were doubtful about Richard Quin.

  But Rosamund was able to come down to the camp with us twice, and each time it was like a big concert for Mary and me, Richard was so happy, and everybody admired her so much, though it was already obvious that fashion was turning away from her type. The new beauties of that age were fair by deficiency and jerry-built in figure, and cultivated an anxious, sickly rejecting stare and gape. But Rosamund was golden as honey, and abundant, and so strong that she never found it hard to lift any of her patients in hospital, and so good-natured that she could pass the spiritual equivalent of that test of strength when she went into society; and people seemed to be glad of her particular exhibition of the qualities they were condemning in general. Indeed it was hard to give them all the slip at the camp, and get out for a walk by ourselves; and of course we were never without Gerald, but that did not matter, he was just like a dog that was all right if it were checked the minute it barked too much and started jumping up, and Richard Quin always knew the right time to do that, and the right measure of comradeship and derision that would quiet him. So the boy did not spoil our walks at all. The last one we went all together, one February afternoon, took us to the high point of one of those ridges that run to the west of the Oxfordshire plains, where there was a ruined windmill by the side of the road. We rested there, looking down into the depth of the valley, where a long beechwood flowed as if it were a river, still dark with winter, soft as soot but brown, not black. The hillside pastures were greyish and needed spring to freshen them, but on some of the ploughed fields there was the green mist of the new crops. It was one of those days when the air is full of water that chooses to be not mist but glass, and the world is seen through a brightening lens.

  ‘You see, there is no winter in the country,’ said Richard Quin. He had his arm about Rosamund’s shoulder.

  ‘I say, look at those jolly old starlings,’ said Gerald.

  The flight came low over us, cutting in between two telegraph poles on the road. We heard the creak of the small wings, then watched them fall below us into the valley, till we looked down on them. A thought suddenly ran through them, spreading from the leftmost bird to a last straggler far to the right, and halted them. They balanced on it, going up and down, like a ball bobbing in the jet of a fountain, then swept back on us, and flew above us across the ridge and down into the unseen valley on the other side. But then another thought pervaded the spread body of the flight, and they repented and whirled about, but got no further than the telegraph poles. There they wrote themselves as music on the wires, as close-pressed demi-semi-quavers, and bickered and fluttered. One starling soared up from his wire, flew some ten yards above the road, turned in mid-air as if to mark a decision and alighted on the top branch of an ash-tree. Other birds whirred after him with a consequential air. There was a faction that went, a greater faction that stayed, on the wires, obstinate, quiet as if their obstinacy would last for ever. Then one bird threw itself from the tree towards the clouds in a straight upward dive, and when the force of its surrender to the motion was spent it glided slantwise downwards through the air, as a diver glides slantwise upwards through the water. All the starlings on the wires and in the trees were instantly convinced, and soared up in the same line as the lone one had ventured when he was a dissident, who was now a leader. But they did not fall back, a sense of triumph lifted them still higher. They swirled down the hillside into the hidden valley and rose again, and banked and turned with an increasing intention over our heads and swirled down into the valley where the beechwood ran like a river, and then came up the hillside at us and were back again over our heads, like a roll of drums made visible. Then peace entered into them, they travelled without haste to a hilltop ahead of us, and drifted down into the bronze cloud of a hangar, as if they knew themselves deserving of rest.

  ‘What did that mean?’ asked Richard Quin. His arm tightened round her shoulders and he repeated, ‘What did that mean?’

  She could not speak, she fluttered her fingers before her mouth, to show that she was choked by her stammer.

  She got down once to see him when he was moved to Sussex. It was a pity that she could not get away to be with him for all the forty-eight hours of his embarkation leave, but she was only able to come to us in the evening of the second day.

  By then it was late spring. There were only the three of us at home, Mamma and Mary and myself. That Easter Cousin Jock had sent for Constance, saying that he was alone and needed someone to look after him and would try to make amends if she returned, and she had stonily packed her bags and left us. She spent the day with us when she could, but that was not very often; and in the evenings the silence silted up in our house. Indeed, it was never quite dispelled even in the daytime, though there was much coming and going, for Mary and I had been asked by our colleges to do some teaching as their staffs had disintegrated under the demands of the war, and we gave many of our lessons at home. Mamma enjoyed this, for we often asked her in for advice, and though she was now too weak and too passionate to play more than a page at a time, she was able to scold both teachers and pupils with enlightening ferocity. But she was not quite so fierce as of old, at least towards the pupils, for of late she had begun to see young people as materially precious, to a degree that cancelled out their faults. She would frown as she listened to a girl of sixteen playing Beethoven and her hands would twitch on her stick, and then she would look down at the hands on the keyboard to trace the fault, and be taken unaware by the innocent flesh, the pliable fingers, the baby nails, and would simply shake her head and sing the phrase as it should have been played. But towards Mary and myself she showed no mercy, for though we were still young in years we were to her outside of time, she often expected us to remember things that had happened in her youth, it was as if it were now revealed to her that all of us had co-existed in eternity, and she could not understand that our portions of time overlapped like tiles on a roof. Her age alone was not great enough to account for this growing alienation from the arrangements of earth. The real cause was the illness which was day by day planing her body closer and closer to the bone. It had mercifully no other symptoms than this emaciation, and the dwindling of a concern for material conditions which had always been perfunctory. Her wild hair was still dark.

  Miss Beevor came in early that afternoon, just after I had brought Mamma back to the drawing-room after she had helped me to convince a girl, who was arrogant in the way a good player ought to be in adolescence, that she was wrong in refusing to play Liszt because a composer who wrote that way today would be no good. Mamma said, ‘Richard Quin is coming back tonight on his embarkation leave, Bayahtreechay.’

  Miss Beevor said, ‘Oh. But it will be all right. You are a lucky family. Look at Mary and Rose, and look at Cordelia’s wonderful marriage.’ She began suddenly to cry. Cordelia had never forgiven her, Cordelia had never asked her to her home. But she was crying over tha
t only because she did not want to cry over Richard Quin’s departure to France.

  Mamma said tartly, ‘It’s not such a wonderful marriage as that.’ She was becoming terribly frank, and had more than once lately revealed that Alan bored her. She did not really like the idea of men being civil servants, she thought they should not like so safe a way of life.

  Miss Beevor said, ‘So long as he’s happy,’ and sat down, and brought out of her kid bag (it had Athens on it in poker-work, she had been on a Cook’s tour) her last piece of fancy-work and asked Mamma what was wrong with it. Mamma held it, and she put her head on one side, and said, ‘Come now, it’s not so bad as that.’

  ‘No. No. Not nearly so bad,’ said Mamma, with grave self-criticism. ‘Of course it’s not.’ Then tea came in, and they gossiped and bickered, and Mary and I went down to the kitchen and helped Kate with the supper. She looked very wooden these days. As we worked we saw in our mind’s eye the dark bright circle of water in a bucket filled to the brim and set on a scullery floor. But surely if Kate and her mother had seen that anything dreadful was going to happen to Richard Quin we would see it in her face.

  When we went back into the drawing-room Mamma had fallen asleep. Yet there was a smoothness about her sleep, it was as if she were in a trance; and she awoke smoothly when Richard Quin came in and kissed her. She said, ‘It is ridiculous, you should be going now to Paris, then over the Alps to Italy.’ Sleep lay over our household like a quilt during that forty-eight hours. Richard Quin said he was tired, and we all went to bed early, and woke long after our usual hour. We took Richard Quin’s breakfast up to him, sure that he would be ready for it, since he was an early riser; in the summertime he had always lived an unobserved life before the rest of the world was about. But this morning he lay stretched in a deep dream, that made him sigh as we looked at him. We took the tray downstairs again and went to Mamma, who was awake, but drank her tea and turned away from us and slept again. We went quietly about the house and got everything ready for the day. We had put off all our pupils. At eleven he was with us, and we gave him breakfast in the drawing-room, and afterwards he walked round the garden with Mamma. Because we had never been able to afford flowers until Papa left us our patches of columbines and our clematises were always exciting. Then he got his flute and played some of his favourite music, and then he asked Mary and me to go over our duets for him. He loved Schubert’s Grand Rondo so much that he made us play it three times, and he said we did it better each time for him. ‘It is like fountains and ices and chandeliers and fireworks and diamonds,’ he said. ‘Oh, the fun of music.’ He was leaning on the end of the piano, he shuddered and passed his fingers down his face. ‘The Army’s really very good,’ he said, ‘better than you can think. But it’s been hard to live without music. It is like having one of one’s senses taken away from one. But go on, go on, quick. Play something else.’