by Rebecca West
He made everything sound infinitely tedious, as if henceforward we would have no time to talk to Mamma and help her to bear things, because of a multiplicity of organisational duties, onerous in themselves, which we would find specially onerous because of our moral and mental deficiencies. He also suggested that though he was going to get a specialist down to see Mamma it would be onerous for him and he would only be able to carry out the project because of his superiority to us, and would find it particularly grievous because, of course, owing to our lack of interest in her welfare, this attention would be fruitless, since it had been left too late.
As soon as he had gone I wrote to Rosamund and to Constance, too, and Mary went out and posted the letters, while I went up to see Mamma. ‘I wonder if that doctor is gloomy about anything in particular,’ she asked, ‘or if it is just the breed, as they say about Labradors. I wish we had not had to have a strange doctor, but do not worry about what you can do for me. It will make no difference, this is the end.’ She turned her head aside, sighing, ‘My son, my son,’ and closed her eyes. But she opened them again to look sharply at me and say, ‘All this is no reason why you should neglect your practising.’
We sat beside her bed in a house that had changed for ever. The silence that had been silting up in the rooms ever since Richard Quin went away now filled it as an invisible solid. It was not to be dispersed by any noise. Now Richard Quin was nowhere but he was everywhere. He was standing on the lawn, he was on the pavement outside the gate, he was even lying on his bed in his own room. But always his face turned away from us, he refused to have anything more to do with us. Yet we felt guilty because we were not doing the thing, whatever that might be, which would bring him back to us and let him smile and live again. Nothing was the same, even our music. Now when we played we listened for a statement that was made to us without the intention of the composer, that was made, indeed, even by scales and arpeggios. The sounds affirmed our knowledge that Richard Quin was everywhere, was nowhere, was failing us, had been failed by us; and yet they said that though these things were true there was another truth. But the silence rushed in on the sounds, before we could hear that truth. We listened with idiotic intensity, for it is known that this message is never more explicit than that. But we were asking for news of our mother as well as our brother.
It seemed less natural to us that Mamma should die than Richard Quin. We could all of us remember a time when he had not existed, so we had realised that he was not a permanent part of the world. But Mamma had always been there, it seemed to us that she was as little likely to leave us as the ground under our feet. And we could do nothing for her. She was grieving over the death of Richard Quin, but she knew so much more of what was happening to him that we could not grieve in company with her. She sometimes lifted her thin pleated eyelids and cried out things about him and what he was doing that we could not understand, we could not even remember them, they were so far beyond the frontiers of our experience. We could hardly help her physically. She needed often to be lifted up in bed, for any attitude soon grew painful, and, light though she was, we could not lift her. Her body had become so sensitive that she could endure the touch of others only for a second; and it needed Kate’s strength to seize her and shift before she wailed in pain. The doctor never called without remarking that we were indeed unfortunate to be of so little use in what he called the sickroom; for what he had seen in the case-book had not altered his opinion of us at all, he had to medicine himself by dislike of us.
On the second day after we had heard of Richard Quin’s death Mr Morpurgo came to see Mamma. We did not tell him that the doctor said that she was dying, for his face was swollen and he talked as if he were in church. When he came down from her room he said sulkily that she was better than he had supposed she would be, then asked for her doctor’s telephone number and sighed, ‘We must have lots of specialists.’ He sat with us for a little time but could not speak. On the doorstep he kissed us both for the first time in our lives, and muttered thickly, ‘I have no right to be this age when your brother was so young.’ Again we could do nothing. We could help him no more than we could help Mamma. I saw the life of these days as a flagon of grey glass, filled with salt water, with collected tears. The occasion of our grief was classically decorous, our brother had died for his country. But our grief was useless. Salt water, spilled on the ground, does not feed what grows there, but kills it.
We could not master any part of this time and make it kinder. There was always the doctor. He brought down not the specialist my mother had visited often before, but another stranger, who had evidently been told that Mary and I were feckless and selfish, and that Kate was clumsy, and who called Mamma little lady. He took care to rub into us the specialists’ verdict, and called often, not so much to help Mamma as to remind us. It was infuriating to think how easily, had it been peacetime, we could have disengaged ourselves from this hearselike and denigrating man; but any war constantly inflicts on the peoples involved variations of the torture practised in the French Revolution by which naked persons unknown to each other were bound together and cast into the river, and we could not get another doctor. Mercifully Mamma could outwit much of her pain. When a sudden thunderstorm hurt her head, she could find relief in wondering why a sound that she had loved all her life should now give her pain. She began to master the sensitiveness of her body by speculating about its causes. She was interested in her emaciation, saying sometimes, ‘I have found a new bone.’ But suddenly that resource left her. On the fourth morning she asked if the announcement of Richard Quin’s death had yet appeared in The Times, and we gave her the newspaper, which we had not looked at ourselves, for we could not steel ourselves to it. We had had our names in the newspaper because of pleasant things that had happened to us, it should have been like that for him.
She had got us to put on her spectacles. They fell from her face as she clutched at the newspaper with both of her hands, trying to tear it and as she failed she threw herself back on the pillows, crying in harsh, endless, animal rage. Before we had given her the newspaper, she had not been quite our mother, she had been the wax model of our mother, made on a smaller scale, and coloured more like the sheets than like flesh. Now she was a monkey that had been shot by a hunter.
I could not take her in my arms because that would have hurt her. I stood quite still and prayed that we might all die. The newspaper had fallen from her bed on the floor and Mary picked it up.
Mamma sobbed, ‘To take his son from him.’
Mary handed me the newspaper, saying, ‘You should not have let Cordelia hand in the notice. There is nothing she cannot turn to harm.’
At first I could not find the place in the long list of ‘Killed on Active Service’. Then I read it aloud, till I came to the words ‘only son of the late—’ and then I stopped. Cordelia had omitted the distinctive middle name of our father, which he had always used when he wrote or spoke in public, and she had not mentioned the place where he was born and where he had lived till he was unfortunate. Nobody who read the announcement could guess that Richard Quin was Papa’s son.
‘Cruel,’ wept Mamma, ‘cruel.’
‘She is coming this afternoon,’ Mary said to me.
‘What shall we do?’ I asked, knowing that there was no answer.
‘And listen,’ said Mary. ‘There is somebody at the front door. It is sure to be that doctor.’
‘I will not see him,’ wailed Mamma.
‘You shall not,’ I said, and went to bar him out. But it was not the doctor, it was Rosamund, in her outdoor uniform, without her handsomeness, pale and too stout. She laid her arms about our shoulders, then knelt by Mamma’s bed and told her, ‘I could not come before.’
‘It is not possible that instead of the doctor it should be you,’ Mamma sighed. ‘I had thought that now everything would go wrong. Ah, my poor bairn.’
‘I suppose I should take it better, since we have always known it was going to happen,’ said Rosamund, �
��but till now I was never quite sure that we were not telling ourselves the story because we wanted it not to happen. But, oh, how all of me knows now that it is true. Not a bit of me, to the fingernails, but knows it.’
‘My poor bairn, my poor bairn,’ said Mamma, ‘it is so wrong for me to trouble you now. But you will be able to lift me, I think, and it hurts me so when people touch me, you must forgive me for being selfish.’
‘You are not being selfish at all,’ said Rosamund. ‘You are saving me. Nursing is my music, I am more than me when I nurse. But I weaken, I told you once, I felt like giving up nursing because of the children who get burned, and Richard Quin being killed is like that. When I heard I wanted to walk out of the hospital. But now I must nurse you, of course I can lift you, and that puts me back in safety.’
‘Yes, yes, you can lift me and make it easy for me to go,’ said Mamma, ‘and you can help Mary and Rose not to think too much of it.’ Again she drowsed.
Rosamund went on kneeling by the bed, her cheek on the counterpane, close to Mamma’s hand, and she closed her eyes. But presently she sat up and covered her ears as if to shut out a noise, and said softly, ‘The house is so quiet now.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘We thought it quiet when he was away in camp, or when he had first gone to France, but it was not as quiet as this.’
‘But everywhere it is the same,’ said Rosamund. ‘In hospital too, it is so quiet. I have been on night duty and when I have walked along the corridors I have had to stop and stand still, my footsteps rang so loud on the stone. Oh, I am so glad to be here. I cannot bear the hospital just now. It is horrible to go on and on down long corridors knowing that where you are going is right at the end, and that you must keep on till you get there.’ She dropped forward on her knees again, and laid her face against Mamma’s hands, and said, ‘But with her it seems all right. You go and do whatever you have to do. I shall be here.’
‘Yes, children,’ sighed Mamma, without opening her eyes. ‘Get on with your playing.’ But when we reached the door she called us back, with more strength than we liked. She said, ‘Say nothing to Cordelia when she comes. She cannot help it. But see that I am put in the paper as your Papa’s wife. And on the stone too.’ She started up in bed, agony flecked her lips. ‘Your poor Papa,’ she moaned.
‘Oh, quiet,’ said Rosamund, ‘quiet.’
Mamma stopped, but asked indignantly, ‘And why should I be quiet?’
‘You know quite well why you should be quiet,’ said Rosamund . ‘To cry and toss yourself about, it lets in the other ones.’
‘Yes, yes, I had forgotten,’ said Mamma. ‘Am I older or younger than you? I forget. But anyway my memory is going. They never came back to your house, did they?’
‘No, no, never again after that day you and Rose came to visit us,’ said Rosamund. She moved slowly towards the door, stretched herself and yawned, and said lazily, confidently, ‘It will be all right. I will go and wash and put on my indoor uniform.’ But she did not hurry. Now there was an immense sense of leisure about the house, and an unchanging white light, all day it was as if it was a cold dawn.
I couldn’t think what time it was when I came downstairs and saw Cordelia standing in the hall, slowly taking off her gloves. She looked very small and the blood had gone from her face. Was it an hour when I ought to offer her a meal? And, if it were, would it be luncheon or tea? She winced at the sight of me and wavered as if she wanted to run out of the house. I suppose she felt guilty about the announcement of Richard Quin’s death, and as our eyes met I said, ‘The Times...’
She said placidly, ‘I thought it looked quite nice. But how is Mamma? Kate let me in, but she does not seem to realise anything.’
I was carrying a tray, I came down and laid it on the hall-table, I put my arms round the incomprehensible and uncomprehending world of her body. It was stiff with fear. There was no use talking to her about The Times announcement, there never would be any use. I said, ‘Mamma is much worse. It is the end. The doctor says that she has only a few days to live.’ To my surprise her body relaxed, and her face was flooded with pure and affectionate relief. I thought, ‘Does she know more than any of us? Is it true that in dying Mamma will escape from an appalling calamity that is going to break over us?’ But Cordelia was always wrong.
She said vaguely, ‘I wish I could come down here to stay, it must be dreadful for you with nobody to take the responsibility.’
‘Rosamund is here,’ I said, and she answered, ‘What a pity she has not finished her training,’ but she was not seriously disturbed. Her eyes went past me and saw my mother’s coach rounding the bend in the road which would take her clear of the lava pouring down from the volcano.
Rosamund leaned over the landing banisters and told her that Mamma had heard her arrive and wanted her to come up at once, because she felt sleepy. I realised that Mamma was exercising that technique to which it was very hard to put a name, as she was also candid. And as she went into the room she told Cordelia in a very faint voice not to kiss her, as she could not bear to be touched. Then she cut into Cordelia’s enquiries by saying more strongly, ‘That’s a pretty coat. Stand away from the bed so that I can see it.’
It was one of those Cossack coats that women wore in the First World War, the very short, full skirt deeply hemmed with fur, and it fanned out round Cordelia’s beautiful, slender, strong legs, gleaming in black milanese stockings.
‘So pretty,’ said Mamma. ‘You look like a doll. And the little veiled hat, so pretty too. Dear Cordelia.’ Her voice trailed away and she closed her eyes.
‘You had better go now,’ said Rosamund, and Mamma whispered from the sheets, ‘So sorry, goodbye, dear.’
Once outside the room and down the stairs, Cordelia said, ‘She is far worse than I thought. You would not think anybody could be so thin and live,’ and there was peace in her voice. It was not to be argued with, her persuasion that our mother was being borne into safety. But then she frowned and shook her head, and I knew that she had remembered to see with what special severity the impending danger would afflict her. This was her usual nonsense. Yet the patience and tenderness in my mother’s voice when she said, ‘You look like a doll,’ forbade me to feel anger. Kate brought us tea with hot buttered scones, and we ate them with the tears running down our cheeks and into our mouths. Presently I said, ‘Is there anything of Richard Quin’s you would like to have?’ and she did not answer, but looked at me with eyes that might have been those of a seer, or of a doll. I remembered how hateful she had been about Richard Quin’s exhibition at New College, but I also remembered what Richard Quin had been, the mischievous smile Rosamund had given as she leaned over the banisters and heard Cordelia belittling her, the patience and tenderness in my mother’s voice, so I went on eating buttered scones. Rosamund looked round the corner of the door at us and went away again; and Cordelia, to whom Rosamund’s presence was always a challenge, said in a very grown-up way, ‘You should not distress yourself by handling his things now, when you have so much else weighing on you.’ But her nostrils were dilating again, she was afraid, again she was holding back something terrible she thought she knew.
Rosamund was again at the door. ‘I told your Mamma that you were eating hot buttered scones, and she said something about bread and butter and being carried on a shutter. She is worried because she can’t remember the verse.’
I ran up and knelt by the bed. Mamma was laughing. ‘After all the times I have heard your Papa repeat that I can’t remember how it goes. How my mind is going. Has gone.’ I recited:
‘Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter,
Would you like to know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And, for all the wealth of Indies,
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more by it was troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body,
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.’
We laughed and laughed silently, as if this were a secret between us, until laughter hurt her too much, and she began to sob, and I wept into the quilt. I felt her fingers on my hair, very lightly and reluctantly, for it was now as painful for her to touch as to be touched, and softly, as if this too were a secret, she said, ‘It is so foolish, I keep on thinking that I wish I could die rather than give you all this trouble.’ She raised her hand with difficulty, and laid the palm against the wall, as she had done so often just after we heard that Richard Quin had been killed; and a listening look came into her eyes. ‘And it will be worse before the end,’ she said. ‘I cannot go easily. You must forgive me. It seems to be quite an iron rule that it should happen like this. Go downstairs, now, dear.’
But at the door I turned and came back to her; and indeed she needed comforting. ‘But to cause trouble. You will need to forgive me. And when it is too bad do not let the children see me.’
