This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘Then do not see them. They love you and they would not want to be a burden to you.’

  ‘No. That is the kind of thing your father would never pardon. And I will enjoy it. I love them, though I love him better. Rosamund, Rosamund, if there is anything you can do to make the pain better, I need it now. Go away, dears.’

  We left the room, and not long after a car drew up, and it was the one that they always hired at the Dog and Duck, and Aunt Lily and Nancy got out. When we went out Aunt Lily was telling the driver: ‘Round the corner to the left, past the turning, there’s another that’s even better, the Nag’s Head, and they’ll give you some cold beef and pickles in the bar. But so will the Bull. Then come back here. They’ll find a corner for you to wait. Tata for now and thanks ever so.’ Then she greeted us. ‘I got to know all the pubs round here when I stayed here during Queenie’s trouble, running out to have a nip when I couldn’t bear it, and sucking peppermints after it to try to deceive your Papa and Mamma, though they would not have demeaned themselves to notice such a sprat’s tail of a thing. Oh, my poor kiddies, what shall we do without her?’

  ‘It is so strange that the house looks just the same,’ said Nancy, who was very pale.

  Though there were only two of them, they straggled, it was difficult to get them up to the front door. I took them down into the kitchen and Kate gave them tea, and they would not sit down. Aunt Lily wandered about, red-eyed, with her cup and saucer. Nancy leaned against the dresser. They were dogs who see the removal vans at the door and fear that they may be left behind. Mary and I would have been like that if Mamma had not made us musicians. Aunt Lily left us to go up and speak to Mr Morpurgo, and Miss Beevor went to lay the dining-room table for the supper which we would assuredly not eat.

  Nancy said, ‘I suppose you do not believe in people going on?’

  ‘Why do you suppose that?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Well, you are all so clever here, and more and more clever people do not believe in God or anything,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Everybody in this house believes,’ said Kate.

  ‘Then do you really think that your brother and your Mamma are going on?’ Nancy asked. She sounded faintly quarrelsome.

  ‘We know it,’ said Mary.

  ‘We are quite sure,’ I said.

  ‘Then you cannot really be sad,’ said Nancy argumentatively.

  This is what the death of a father or mother means. The limelight shifts from them to you, and you have to do what you have seen them do. We found ourselves obliged to take over Mamma’s occupation and temper the wind to the shorn lamb. With an exultation we believed to be false, I said, ‘She is going to Richard Quin,’ and Mary added, ‘They will go on doing what they did here.’

  ‘Yet you do not seem quite happy,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Why, they are tired,’ said Kate, ‘and dying, even for the chosen, is as painful a business as being born. They do not like to see their Mamma suffer. But all of us in this house know that she is going to Richard Quin.’

  We watched Nancy take comfort from the cause of our mother’s monumental agony; and presently Kate lifted her head, listened, and reminded us that time was passing and we had better see whether Mamma was ready for her visitors. So once again I climbed the stairs and found that the end had nearly been accomplished. Rosamund and Constance were very pale, and their tall bodies moved as if they were in a trance. From the heap of bones that raised the sheets so little came a hollow straw of speech: ‘No, it is no use giving me water, I am eaten up with thirst, but it is not thirst and water will not help. My body is turning me out, and it will stop at nothing. Is that Rose or Mary? Send up the children one by one. I cannot leave it longer. I will see them only for a few minutes. More would be too much for them.’

  I brought up Mr Morpurgo first, and as he softly padded towards my mother’s bed I noticed that the window-curtains had not been closely drawn. This was a negligence that always annoyed her, so I went over and pulled them till they met. As I closed the gap I looked through it, down on the street. I paused for the moment and tugged the curtains till they overlapped and stood for a second staring as if I could see through the stuff. I turned to Mr Morpurgo, but he was now a dark mass, like a stranded whale, beside Mamma’s bed, and her hand was jerking its way across the quilt till it found his shining black head. I left them and went into the next room where Rosamund and Constance were sitting, spent and visionary. I felt under no obligation to tell them that I had just seen a man leaning against the lamp-post by our gate, his face raised towards Mamma’s window. He was slender, he was ageless, there was a flash of fairness answering the gaslight, there was an indefinite lewdness about his stance, he was eccentrically dressed, his trousers were too short; though there was a kind of elegance about him. Surely it was Cousin Jock. But I saw no purpose in telling Rosamund and Constance, for we had enough to do with Mamma, and also I was not certain whether he was alive or dead. It might be that the way he stood was shocking because he was not standing at all, but hanging from the lamp-post, with his feet just touching the ground. I was not even certain, whether standing or hanging, he was physically there at all. After spending the last few days on this drag-tide between the world, I was in a state when it seemed quite possible that what I had seen was a phantom. In any case his appearance was a response to my mother’s death, and there was no reason for us to carry on the argument any further by noting it. If he were living, she would soon be beyond his reach; if he were dead, he had no power to hurt her. The shape of his body, whether it were solid or a shadow, was an ideograph meaning defeat. Existence was about to split into two, and Mamma was to be one side of an abyss and the rest of us on the other. At this moment he had found that he could not hold his own against her, and the long contention between them had ended in her victory.

  We heard Mr Morpurgo come out of her bedroom, tread slowly and softly down the stairs, and close the front door. I took up Aunt Lily next, and then Nancy. Aunt Lily sobbed as she went upstairs, ‘What shall we do without her, we shall be all lost kiddies,’ and Nancy said, tight-lipped, ‘Why do they make such a fuss about murder when ordinary death is so terrible?’ But they came out of the room like flowers that had been cut a long time before and had now been put in water. Miss Beevor only went up because Mamma asked for her. To the last she said that she did not want to trouble Mamma, and as I brought her into the room she cried out harshly, ‘I wanted to stay away from you because I knew I should have to bother you with a question. But you are the only person I have ever told about that horrible thing I once did. Is it fair for me to go on being friends with Mary and Rose without telling them?’

  Mamma cried out sharply, ‘Do not tell them.’

  ‘But they might not like me any more if they knew,’ said poor Miss Beevor.

  ‘Do not start being stupid now,’ squeaked Mamma. ‘They will like you for ever. Must you always be a fool? Oh, forgive me, how rude I have always been, so rude to you. But let that thing die. Come close, my dear, I want to thank you for everything. My dear Bayahtreechay.’

  They all left us. The night closed in on the house, the clocks ticked away. Kate came up from the kitchen, she had not changed into her black afternoon dress, she wore a clean print and a clean cap and apron, and with Rosamund’s uniform and Constance’s overall the room was full of stiff white linen, that spoke when they moved; and on the white sheets lay our dark and withered mother. The future was a desert except for music. But even so it was astonishing there was so wild an anguish in us. She had married late, she was now old, we had known her to be ill for a long time, all people die, yet we felt as if she were the first person to die, and we the first people to suffer a beloved’s death. But suddenly Rosamund smiled, and we knew it was a sign of wonder.

  Mamma spoke faintly, ‘I wish my body would spit me out of its mouth.’

  ‘Tell us what to do with your body,’ said Rosamund.

  ‘It is dreadful that I am lying down. I feel as if I were falling through the bed but
cannot fall.’

  ‘You would like to sit up?’

  ‘Yes. But of course I cannot. It would hurt too much.’

  ‘No. Kate and I can do it.’

  ‘God, help me to do this,’ said Kate, and put her hands under Mamma’s body with the extremest gentleness, and Rosamund took the pillows and sat where they had been, swivelling herself round so that Mamma could lie back and lean her body against her breast. Now our cousin was not white and tired any more, she was beautiful and golden and content, and against her broad fairness Mamma rested like a twisted branch. It might have been that Rosamund had been walking on a beach and had picked up a piece of driftwood that was in the shape of something sacred, and she was showing it to us. ‘This is heavenly, this is joy,’ murmured Mamma. ‘Mary, Rose, move away a little further, I might be able to see you. No, a little nearer. No, it is no use. Never mind.’ But a little later she whimpered, ‘My hands are cold, they are so cold they ache.’ Constance and Kate knelt on each side of the bed and gently warmed her hands with theirs, and she was quiet. But suddenly there was no gratitude coming from her, neither towards Rosamund nor to the two who had been warming her hands, and she was not thinking of us. It seemed that she was dead, though her eyes still seemed to see. Then she scourged the whole room with one of her flashing looks and cried, ‘Yes, yes, it is not so yet, but it should be so,’ and she sped from us like an arrow. Kate and Constance started to their feet and threw up their hands in wonder, and Rosamund, smiling, clasped the relic closer to her breast.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1984 by the estate of Rebecca West

  cover design by Karen Horton

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0706-2

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com