This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘What children?’ I asked, cautiously. I was wondering if she had forgotten that we were all grown-up.

  She slept all that afternoon and all that evening. At ten o’clock that night, when Rosamund was going up to bed and Mary and I were settling down in our chairs on each side of Mamma, there was a ring at the door. I went down and found Constance on the doorstep, the arrows of a rainstorm striking down through the night behind her. In the hall, we were speaking of Mamma’s state, when she lifted her fair face, solemn and glazed with raindrops, and held up her hand to hush me. Then from the room above, thinly wailed, we heard my father’s Christian name. We were to hear it many times during the next three days and nights. Mamma had suddenly changed into a demented skeleton, who jerked about and cried my father’s Christian name with as fierce an anguish as if it were he and not Richard Quin who had just been killed. She cried it so loud that it could be heard in the street, she cried it wolfishly, there was no love left in her. She did not speak of Richard Quin any more, she did not recognise Mary or me. Constance and Rosamund and Kate she knew, only to the degree of knowing that these were the ones who were strong enough to lift her. No drug alleviated the pain of either her flesh or her spirit. They gave her injections, but though she sometimes slept it was not after she had had them, but at unpredictable times, when her anguish became confused and expostulatory. It was as if she retreated into sleep to carry on an argument more forcibly, and when she awoke again it was her anguish that had been refreshed, not her.

  But her sleep gave us refreshment, which we desperately needed. I had often wondered why doctors and keepers sought to soothe lunatics who were violent, why their families were so distressed, why they did not shut them in padded cells and let them indulge in what they had chosen as their pleasure. But now, watching my mother, who had become as hideous as a cankered and distorted tree on a windswept marsh, shaken by a demon that lived in each branch, I understood. As she screamed and writhed, the room became dangerous. Had it not been for Constance and Rosamund and Kate, who bent over her, like priestesses and athletes, cunningly bending their knees and getting the right grip to bind without inflicting pain, my mother’s anguish might have got loose, not to be made captive again, at least by us. They were injured, these strong women, though Mamma was so frail. The sweat ran down them, their breath was quick and shallow, when we took them food they ate it as if they had been starved for days, the one who was off duty slept as if she would never wake again.

  There was a great deal to do. Miss Beevor called on the first morning of this phase to see what she could do for us, and suddenly there broke into our conversation, screeched three times, my father’s Christian name. Her poor innocent eyes stared up at the landing. The name was screeched again. The white kid bag, with Athens in poker-work on it, dropped at my feet, and Miss Beevor ran out of the house and down the steps. I caught her up with the bag three houses along the street, and she quavered, ‘My own Papa and Mamma passed away so peacefully, I did not think it would be like this,’ and I remembered too late what my mother had said about not letting the children see her when it was too bad. I sent telegrams to Aunt Lily and Nancy Phillips, who had both said they wanted to come and see Mamma when they had heard about Richard Quin, and told them not to come until we sent for them; and I rang up Mr Morpurgo and told him to cease his daily visits, as Mamma needed complete quiet. I heard a sigh, and the click of a replaced receiver. I told Cordelia too, though I was not sure if that were right. This took time; and we had also to do the cooking, we got the charwomen out of the house as soon as possible.

  There were also the policemen to deal with, for Cousin Jock had disappeared. He had been disturbed at the news that Richard Quin had been killed, but he had not let Constance come and help Rosamund. We never heard by what devices he had kept her from doing what she so much desired to do, and indeed we were unaware of the exact nature of the drama he had improvised for the enchainment of his family, in his dingy and narrow house, out of his peculiar resources. Mamma knew, though we did not. But Constance had been helpless until at supper-time she had found his broken flute lying between his knife and fork, and heard from the servant that an hour before he had told her that he was going out and would not be back. ‘Did he not say that he would be out till supper?’ Constance had asked, and the girl had answered, ‘No, he had just said that he would not be back.’ Constance had then packed a bag and started out through the rain, calling at the local police-station, where she stolidly reported the disappearance of her husband, in the face of an incredulity which was not to last.

  Rosamund let Mary and me help her to feed Mamma, even when she was at her worst. There was a wild pleasure in going the whole way with her, though that way was horrible. Then one day, when Mary and I had gone out into the garden and were standing among the incongruously lovely trees, among the late lilac and the early May, breathing in the scents as if they were anaesthetics and might send us to sleep, Rosamund threw up a window-sash and cried, ‘Mary, Rose, come at once and see your mother.’ We found the room empty of what had filled it for three days and nights. The light was pure, and in a smooth bed Mamma lay quietly. We thought joyously, ‘She is going to live.’ But she said, ‘Rosamund has put me into a clean nightdress, and it did not hurt me at all,’ and her happiness was not an emotion but a distillate of emotion, and we knew that she was at the point of death. Her body and her soul were at last disentangled, and they were resting together before they parted company.

  ‘Dear Mamma, how lovely that you are better,’ said Mary.

  ‘I am not so much better as all that,’ she answered, rather crossly; and indeed Rosamund sitting at the head of her bed was still tense. ‘Sit down, children, and stay with me, you need not bother about your playing this one day. It is strange I cannot see you. I am not blind, there is something before my eyes, but I cannot put it all together. Still, I know you are good-looking, I have no need to worry. You are all good-looking, so much better looking than I was. That has been a great pleasure. You get your looks from your Papa.’ She sighed deeply, and slipped away from us for a time. Then she said, ‘You must give away all Richard Quin’s rackets and bats and boxing-gloves and things. But not his musical instruments. Keep them till all of us have gone. I wonder if he would ever have played any instrument really well if he had worked at it. But what a sensible boy he was. How wisely he laid out his time, knowing that he had to go.’

  ‘It was like a man making his fortune quickly in the City,’ said Rosamund, ‘a fortune for other people.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mamma cried out, ‘a fortune for other people. And with that he did enough, he should be allowed to rest.’ She trembled and looked hideous again.

  ‘Hush, hush,’ said Rosamund, ‘do not give us over to the power of that again.’

  ‘Forgive me, I keep on forgetting,’ said Mamma. ‘But it is not just, why should he have to go on and on?’

  ‘He has the strength to do it,’ said Rosamund.

  ‘Yes, he has the strength, but that does not mean that he will not suffer and be afraid and feel this terrible exhaustion. They should let him rest.’

  ‘But he was so kind. He could not rest if there was still something he could do.’

  ‘Yes, and that is taking advantage of him,’ blazed Mamma, ‘and what about me? I have no strength left. I want to come to an end, I want to be utterly consumed by worms, I want to be digested by the earth. For him and for myself I want that peace. Surely we have some rights.’

  ‘Please, please,’ said Rosamund. ‘I often get so frightened when I think how hard it is to be. Do not make me more of a coward than I am, do not stop helping me, as you have always helped me. Now it seems to you that we are all of the same age. But to me it does not, I am still wholly here, so I see you as older, I cling on to you. I cannot help it, and I cannot help asking you to make it easier for me because I am younger. Forgive me, we are still caught in this extraordinary life.’

  ‘Yes, I must allow for this extraordinary life
,’ murmured Mamma. Then she cried out in panic, ‘How do we know that it will not all be extraordinary?’

  ‘Richard Quin promised us that,’ said Rosamund. ‘He was a promise that it will not always be hard.’ She began to stammer and Mamma cut her short with her agreement. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘You must pardon me, I go on from blunder to blunder. Ask Kate and Constance to come, they are such examples to me always. And, Rose, I would not mind seeing the children now. But not at once. I am so tired, I must rest a little. Tell them to come this evening.’

  When Mr Morpurgo heard my voice, he said slowly, ‘I suppose you are ringing me up to tell me that she is dead.’ The darkness that surrounds people who are telephoning was full of finesse. He was inspired by the hope we all have that if we name an event we fear, it cannot happen; and the next step in his dream had been that I would say, ‘It has all been a mistake, the doctors have been quite wrong from the start, all that was wrong with Mamma was a fever that has passed completely, the doctor has seen her and he says that she is all right.’ When I did not say that, he began to touch wood in a different way and confess what he had hoped, but I cut through the web and said that Mamma wished to see him that evening, and asked him to get messages to Aunt Lily and Nancy. He promised like a sad djinn that it should be done. The baker came and I gave him a note to take along to Miss Beevor. Then I rang up Cordelia’s house and was answered by Alan. I asked him how it happened that he was at home in the afternoon and he gave me the unexpected news that it was Sunday. When I repeated my message he was sympathetic, but told me that he had put Cordelia to bed, she was so worn out worrying over Mamma’s illness, and, unless I thought her presence absolutely necessary, his mother would drive her down in the morning. I said I was sure that would do. Then my conscience pricked me and I asked him to hold the line until I heard what Mamma said.

  Constance was sitting by her, in a white overall that looked like a toga, holding on her lap a basin full of lotion that Kate made; she had gone off for two hours one day to pick some herbs that grew on a part of Clapham Common that her mother knew about. ‘Wipe my brow,’ said Mamma, and when Constance put back the gauze pad in the basin she said, ‘Yes, that will do. Send her my love and tell her how much I am looking forward to seeing her tomorrow morning. And think well of her. Promise to think well of her, or I will have to see her tonight, so that you shall be sure how well I think of her.’

  She seemed to sleep. I think we all drowsed, though Constance still sat upright. Then Mamma made an exclamation of mild distaste. ‘I am listening to someone playing,’ she said. ‘Is it Mary? Is it Rose? No, it would not be either of them. Whoever it is, is taking the third movement of the Beethoven Sonata in G minor far too quickly. But it is myself, of course, who is playing. I never managed that movement well. Let me go on listening. Let me have all the music I can before I go.’ For a long time she lay quite still, sometimes crying out in pleasure, sometimes clicking her tongue in reproof. Her self-reproaches were numerous, and she asked timidly, ‘Did I play well, at all?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary and I together, and Mary added, ‘You were among the great ones. Brahms would not have said it, if it had not been true.’

  ‘That is so,’ faintly agreed Mamma. ‘Mozart and Chopin, they might have lied, but not Brahms. Yet they were so much greater.’ She listened for a little longer, but wearied of it, and turned and twisted, and exclaimed, ‘How beautifully you play, Mary and Rose! I have provided for you well. But poor Cordelia! I wonder if there was not some musical instrument she could have played. But it is a mercy she did not sing. There are so many bad songs she would have liked. Oh, poor Cordelia.’ She astonished us by sitting up, but fell back at once. ‘I cannot bear it any more, my pain has come back, I cannot listen, I am face to face with what I cannot hear.’

  Constance took the gauze pad out of the lotion, drained it carefully on the side of the basin, and laid it on Mamma’s forehead, but she struck it away. ‘I cannot bear it. Oh, Mary, oh, Rose, Papa knew all those years that those jewels were hidden behind the panel over the chimneypiece and he did not tell me; and I knew all those years that the portraits over your beds were not copies, and I did not tell him. Yet we loved each other. If I had told him that those were the original pictures and let him sell them, that might have been the mad gift that softened his heart. But I could not tell him, because I had you children to think of, and he could not tell me about the jewels because there was something, it was ruin, of course, which he had to keep faith with. Our love was useless. My love for Cordelia was useless too. Yet what is useful except love?’

  Rosamund said, ‘Richard Quin knew that love was not useless. He did all that you and I have to do, and he was debonair. Here is your medicine.’

  ‘It makes me able to listen to music, I will take it,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, Mary, oh, Rose, how music keeps one safe. But outside music is this fact, that for me love was useless. I loved your father, I love your father. He did not tell me about those jewels, even when he knew I was distracted because I did not know where your next meal was coming from. And I kept the truth about those pictures from him, though in that awful time when he passed me in the street as if I were a stranger I saw that the reason for his misery was his feeling that he had nothing, the feeling that he had had even when he was rich, he felt,’ she wheezed, ‘that he had less than nothing, there was a huge debt that ate up everything that came to him. If I had given him the pictures it might have been that he would have felt that he had something.’

  Her breath wheezed as if there were an actual crack in her body. ‘But perhaps it would not,’ she said. Looking from one to another of us, she complained, ‘I see something, blocks of colours, but not you. All, all is passing, except my love. I have done nothing for you two with my life, had I not given you my music. I could do nothing at all for Cordelia, I could do nothing at all for your father.’

  ‘But I tell you there was Richard Quin,’ said Rosamund.

  ‘Yes, but I do not think Richard Quin was able to do anything for his poor Papa,’ said Mamma. ‘I want Papa raised from the dead, I want him to shed that cloud of darkness, I want him not to be muttering in that cell out in the centre of the iceberg. He was the dearest of all created things. But as I am getting sleepy with that medicine, I can hear the music again. You need not bother about me for a little.’

  About six o’clock Mr Morpurgo came into the house and rolled his pouched eyes about him with his connoisseur gaze, because it had become something extraordinary and intricate, and mysterious like a deeply chased jewel of unknown provenance, now that my mother was dying in it. I put him in the drawing-room and told him he must wait till I saw if she were ready for him. He held me back by my sleeve, and muttered: ‘All my life I have been frightened of something that was going to happen to me, and I never knew what it was. It is this.’ He turned away from me and went to the window and looked out into the twilight, drawing on the glass with his plump forefinger. Before I could get upstairs Miss Beevor was at the door, but she went down to the kitchen, in case she could help Kate, saying, ‘I do not want to see her. Your Mamma and I have come to know each other so well that one more glimpse of her is neither here nor there. But I would like to be here while she goes.’ Upstairs Mamma was still listening to music and took no notice of me, but asked Constance for another drink. I went down and told Mr Morpurgo that she was not yet ready. He was still drawing on the window-pane and said, without turning round, ‘It does not matter, I am quite happy here.’

  Leaving him, I became aware that my feet were burning and swollen; and indeed Mary and I had gone up and down stairs times without number during the last few days. Also I was faint with hunger. I went down to the kitchen, which was ritually clean. The china and glass winked brightness from the dresser shelves, and on a table scrubbed white Kate and Miss Beevor were preparing some dish for supper. But I said I could not wait, and Kate, chiding me and the others for having refused to eat the things she had sent up with tea an hour or two before, cu
t me a plateful of bread and butter with brown sugar on it, to take upstairs. She said to Miss Beevor, ‘I used to give them a lot of this when they were children. It did not make their hands sticky, you see, and their Papa could not bear stickiness, nobody likes it, of course, but he would nearly faint away if he put his hand on a sticky doorknob, so we got them to like this.’ Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable. My father had been disgusted by something we children did, and Mamma and Kate had devised a way to prevent us from disgusting him, and we had never known of it. All three had not told us, they had protected our pride, the past had been more tender than I thought.

  Up in Mamma’s bedroom everyone was glad to eat. Rosamund, who was very white, muttered, ‘She is much worse,’ and took the sweet slices wolfishly. From the bed a toneless voice squeaked, ‘You are all eating. What are you eating?’

  ‘Bread and butter and brown sugar.’

  ‘Why, are you little again? But why are you eating bread and butter and brown sugar in the middle of the night? And who gave it to you? You must be careful about taking things from strangers.’

  ‘It is all right, Kate gave it to us.’

  ‘But why is Kate up in the middle of the night and giving you bread and butter and brown sugar? Oh, dear. She would not do such a thing. It cannot be the middle of the night.’

  ‘It is dusk,’ we said, ‘the light is failing, your eyes are bad, you are very tired, that is why you have made the mistake.’

  ‘No, I should be able to tell the difference between night and day. Now I must see the children. Soon it will be too late.’

  ‘They are not all here yet. Aunt Lily and Nancy have not arrived. But shall Mr Morpurgo and Miss Beevor come up?’

  ‘No. Not yet. Let me rest a little. It is going to be hard. I must hide from them that I would let them burn in hell forever, I would let them be blotted out and never have existed, if it could help your Papa.’