by Rebecca West
Everybody was nice to us. First we met an old man with a beautiful blue ribbon across his shirt front who took a liking to us and asked us questions about ourselves, where we lived and what we did with ourselves, with a kind and worried smile as if he would like to buy some people like us to keep as pets, but thought he would never be able to cope with the problems of management. Suddenly he told us how he had gone to the opera in Vienna when he was a very young man and had seen the beautiful Empress Elizabeth, and then a duchess called him away. It was like talking with a court card. Then we met people whom we knew well, a young peer and his wife who lived in a long grey colonnaded house set naked in a park under the wild skyline of the Wiltshire downs, the ordained setting for a tragic drama, and were framed to act tragic parts, each having wide eyes and parted lips that seemed to have been forced open by the sight of disaster, but who were in fact happy people who found satisfaction in little exercises of taste and simple skill, in dyeing feather boas found in an old trunk and using them to garland the less remarkable of their family portraits, or in spraying the leaves of the shrubs round their house with gold and silver paint when they gave a party. Among these pastimes they included the giving of chamber music concerts, which is perhaps not so surprising as it seems, for though chamber music insists more often than any other kind of music on the tragic interpretation of life, it has for the most part been composed and performed under the patronage of persons who were seeking only to be amused. But this couple’s conception of amusement was of such a nursery kind that it was surprising to find that it embraced Beethoven’s later quartets, and to find oneself, when one had taken part in them, regarded as if one had discovered some clever trick like a way of painting a modern chimneypiece so that it looked like a Victorian Gothic organ. They were with some friends of theirs: a photographer who made all his sitters look like fairy princesses, a fat old lady who wrote fairy tales, a painter who was a famous cultivator of dwarf daffodils, a young man who made copies of famous doll’s houses, and a physicist and his wife who bred a very small kind of pony. One of them told us about a very funny house he had found in a Spanish sea-port, built by the schoolmaster, which was even funnier than the famous house in the South of France built by a postman.
We were having quite a nice time when we were approached by two of those young men, to be found at all parties in that decade, who had got very drunk because they felt they were going to be killed in the next war. They were wrong, of course, for when the next war came they were too old to fight, but their error was strong enough to force them to actions which now makes it surprising that they were not killed in peace. Their flushed faces were cleft by wide grins showing their well-cared-for teeth, and we knew that they were going to be horrid. One was the nephew of the host so it was difficult. Their method of averting the holocaust they saw before them was to lean over the fat old lady who wrote fairy stories, and say, in unison that must have been rehearsed, ‘Ah, Aunt Fanny! Still sleeping with that handsome jobbing gardener? Such fun behind the raspberry canes on those warm drowsy afternoons….’
As we hurried into the next room we were faced by Cordelia. She was looking very pretty, she was indeed one of the prettiest women at the party. She raised her eyebrows in surprise and said, ‘Oh, we did not expect to see you here! Are you all right, do you know anybody here? How nice your dresses are! Alan must see you, but he is talking to his chief now. See, I am wearing the necklace you gave me last Christmas, doesn’t it look nice?’
We were too slow in answering her, for the sight of her had chilled us for a minute. We forgot that she had been exorcised of her demon, we feared that she would look at us with that white stare, which asserted that we were doing something disgraceful.
Hurt, she put up her lovely little hand and raised the necklace from her skin. ‘Am I not wearing it the right way?’ she asked, her eyes going from one to another of us. ‘Of course you are,’ I said, ‘we just didn’t speak for a minute because you are so perfect.’
‘You look as well as anybody here,’ said Mary, ‘and better.’
‘Ah,’ breathed Cordelia, happily, and she added, with solemn zest, ‘We dined with the Possingworths first.’
We said warmly that that must have been wonderful, but a flash of shrewdness passed over Cordelia’s face. She recognised that we had either never known or had forgotten who the Possingworths were, and that we were making an effort to please her in which there was no grain of spontaneity. We saw her swallow and gaze about her, frowning slightly, at the marble pillars, the mirrors and gilt plasterwork. It was her ambitious look, that we knew so well from our childhood. She was saying, ‘My sisters may be horrid to me, still I was poor and I am here in this great house, just as they are.’ But her lip trembled.
Mary said, ‘Forgive us if we are hardly here, we are shattered. Something horrid has happened,’ and she told Cordelia how the two young men had insulted the fat old lady, and Cordelia was mollified. But I was not quite sure that she really trusted us. She knew too well Mary’s resourcefulness. Alan came up to us and was agreeable, but Cordelia fell silent, and I could see her remembering all the occasions when she had gone out to meet us with affection and we had stepped back coldly. She was suffering. But I could think of no way to comfort her, for I was wondering why she was suffering, whether it was because she loved us and needed our love, or because she was angry at our refusal to admire her perfection. I found myself in a desert. Why should she love us if I were capable of that doubt?
A colleague of Alan’s brought up his wife to be introduced to Cordelia, a peeress who was an amateur of music. She said, ‘Oh, my dears, so wonderful, that third movement,’ and, though our group need not have dissolved, Mary and I passed on through the golden humming glow of the party in another room. There we saw Lady Tredinnick, who had taken us to that horrible first party and had made it up to us so often by letting us see her flowers in her Cornwall garden. She was standing alone, looking up at a picture, and we hurried to her quickly and happily. But when she turned round she was not like herself. Always before, although she was now elderly, evening had been able to annul that masculinity to which her earlier life in the desert had tanned her spare body, and she had put on full femininity with her jewels and her grand clothes. Tonight she looked like a man dressed up as a woman. But she had hardly given the evening its chance. She was less elegant than we had ever seen her, her hair was carelessly pinned up, and one or two of the fasteners under her arms were undone; and when we spoke her name and she turned round her face was not varnished with the imperturbability which a woman of her kind normally assumes at a party. She looked wretched; and she did not look less wretched when she saw us, but slowly said something approving about us, as if she were telling us not to misunderstand her inability to be as we had known her. Then she paused and became wooden. To break the silence, we spoke of the picture at which she had been staring. ‘Is it a Poussin?’ asked Mary. ‘We heard they had a Poussin.’
‘Is it a landscape?’ asked Lady Tredinnick. She turned round and looked at it as if she had never seen it before. ‘Yes. That is their Poussin. There is one very like it at Chatsworth, but that is far finer.’ Again she ceased to speak, and under her tiara, between her ear-rings, over her necklace, the face of an ageing proconsul brooded in despairing meditation, in which we could have no part. At that moment a young man came up to her and said, ‘Do you remember me, Lady Tredinnick? I know your sons very well,’ and we were made still more aware that our old friend had changed. She greeted him politely, but what she was saying could hardly be heard, and she looked like an angry and important old man, offended by the violation of some principle he had defended in Parliament and tested by huge administrative practice. For a second or two we stood suspended, while she inaudibly followed a gracious routine from which her face dissented. Then her voice entirely failed her. She tried to force some sound through her lips, and when it would not come she made a disclaiming gesture and strode away.
I said to the you
ng man, ‘Lady Tredinnick must be ill,’ and was astonished to find that he was not merely disconcerted, he was so horrified that the sweat was standing on his brow.
Mary said, ‘If we go downstairs, could you get us a drink?’ He took the chance to recover, and as we stood at the buffet he told us in a pleasant and even tone, though his eyes searched our faces in incomprehensible anxiety, of a journey he had recently made in Italy. It was time for us to go home, and he saw us politely to our car, but as he turned away in the darkness we saw him take out his handkerchief and draw it across his brow.
‘What do you think was the matter with her?’ I asked.
‘She was not ill,’ said Mary, ‘she was full of vigour. She was unhappy.’ We were silent for a moment, then Mary cried out, ‘But where was Nancy? She should have been at the concert. She told me she was in London. She always loves to hear me playing the Emperor Concerto, but she did not come and see me afterwards. She always comes and sees me afterwards.’
I said, ‘I hope she was not too upset when she went to see her mother with Mr Morpurgo last week.’
‘Oh, poor Nancy,’ murmured Mary, and, a few minutes later, she said, ‘Look, we are nearly at the church, let us stop the car and walk home. I know it is late, but I cannot bear being in the car.’
After the chauffeur put us down at the corner opposite Lord’s we stood for a time looking through the railings at the Grecian church, the dark tilted tombstones under the trees, and the girl kneeling in prayer on the monument. Mary said, ‘We are so helpless without Mamma. Nancy was safe while Mamma lived, and Aunt Lily too, and Queenie. And Mamma would have known what was the matter with Lady Tredinnick. But we can do nothing for them.’ She pressed her forehead against the cold iron and was silent for a while, then burst out, ‘What good are we?’
‘We are quite good pianists,’ I said.
‘And what good is that?’ she asked. ‘What good is that to Nancy? Or to Aunt Lily? Or to Queenie?’
‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said. ‘Mamma wanted us to be pianists, so it must be some good.’
‘She may have wanted that just out of pity,’ she said, ‘to keep us busy because we were not able to do what she and Richard Quin were doing. But no. Of course I am being foolish. Everything in real music has something to do with Mamma and Richard Quin, and almost nothing outside it has anything to do with them. By making us play she lifted us up into their world.’
For a time I was caught up in the memory of certain passages of music, and when my attention went back to her she was saying, ‘I love those people we knew with Mamma and Richard, I cannot care about anybody else very much. Can you?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said. ‘I like lots of people. Don’t you really like anybody at all?’
‘Yes, but not much,’ she said, and pointed at the praying girl on the monument. ‘Not more than I like her. Not as much.’
‘Oh, I like people a great deal more than that,’ I said. ‘And I think, I think, I could like them much more still, if they would ever let us get near to them.’
‘I do not want them closer to me,’ said Mary. Again we were silent and then she said, ‘What a pity it is that all of the people who want to marry us do so in such an unfriendly spirit.’
It was true that our suitors fell in love with us very quickly, before we could get to know them, and proposed to us angrily, as if we had stolen something from them and this was the only way they could get it back, and were so infuriated by our refusals that they never spoke to us again and glared at us across parties. We sometimes thought that we would not mind marrying musicians, but we could not have married anybody of our own grade as concert performers, we would never have seen them, and the people below us always thought of us as stars and were tiresomely respectful. Really we had long known that we need not think of marriage.
‘I wish we could have Rosamund to live with us,’ I said. ‘It would have been lovely if she could have lived with us and been our secretary instead of Miss Lupton, though she’s all right.’
‘I have thought of that so often lately,’ said Mary. ‘But of course it is impossible. Her nursing is as important as our playing.’
‘Anything she does must be more important than anything we do,’ I said. ‘I know quite well she should not come down from her level to ours. But one can’t help wishing it would happen.’
‘There is nothing really lovely left for us to wish for except that,’ said Mary. ‘Nothing as lovely as it all was when Mamma and Richard Quin were alive.’
There was no point in looking any longer on the churchyard and its trees and tombstones, its kneeling stone girl. We went on our way along the empty streets, between the dark houses, from yellow street-lamp to yellow street-lamp. I said ‘Oh, Mary, tell me this. Something worried me in the plane this evening when I was flying from Paris. Richard Quin was called Richard Quin after his uncle who was called by his first and second names to distinguish him from another Richard in the family. But who was that other Richard?’
‘Papa told me,’ said Mary, ‘but I was quite little, I do not remember.’
‘Cordelia might know,’ I said.
‘No, she will have forgotten entirely. She wants to forget everything to do with our family. She will get flushed and look stubborn and say that she never heard that there was any reason for calling him by both names, and that she always thought it was a great pity, it must have struck people as so odd.’
‘Well, it does not matter,’ I said. ‘But it makes one angry that so many things happen and drift away and we cannot lay hands on them again.’
We had turned the corner of the street in which we lived, and went along between the dark houses, kicking at the chestnut leaves that had fallen thick during the day. ‘How bright and cold the stars look,’ said Mary, ‘though it is only autumn. And how queer it is that if you or I were coming home, and the other of us were playing, the music would sound sad as we heard it in the street. Whatever the composer might have meant it to be, whatever we might feel as we were playing, it would sound sad. Do you suppose that the ultimate meaning of music is sadness? But, of course, you do not know the answer to that better than I do.’
The closing of the door made a loud noise in the sleeping house. There were many letters on the hall table, but we did not like letters. None of the people we loved wrote letters if they could possibly help it. We knew that Kate would have left in the drawing-room milk in an electric saucepan and some sandwiches so we went in there, just to make going to bed less bleak. As soon as we turned on the light we cried out in pleasure and hushed ourselves as quickly. Rosamund was lying asleep on the sofa.
‘Shall we wake her?’ I whispered.
‘No, no,’ said Mary.
She was lying as Richard Quin had lain that day, years ago now, when he had fallen asleep while Cordelia had gone out of his attic to speak to Nancy and then come back to go on scolding him about going to Oxford. She had as suddenly withdrawn from the waking world, without time to arrange herself. Half of her long corn-gold hair was still held by its pins, half of it streamed in its tight corkscrew curls over the wine and silver satin stripes of the sofa, and her dark green dress was rucked up round her tall and splendid body. Her face was calm, as his had been, but there was the same sense that she was running and winning a race in some co-existent world where dimensions are otherwise, and it is possible to win something like a race without moving from the same spot. It had not seemed right to watch Richard Quin as he slept, and it seemed wrong to watch Rosamund now. A word might have escaped her parted lips which would have taken us so far from our world that we would not know how to comport ourselves. It was strange to have those closest to us so enmeshed in distance.
We shut the door and debated. ‘She came early. Kate gave her supper on a tray, I saw the tray on the hearth-rug. Do you suppose she meant to stay the night? Probably not. But she must stay now. It is too late for her to go home. We must see if the spare room is ready. And we must find her a lovely nightgown. Oh, i
f we had not stayed so long at that silly party.’
But the bed in the spare room was turned down, and one of the fine lawn nightdresses that Constance worked for her was spread on it, and the ivory brushes and combs we had given her as a Christmas present the first year we had made real money were lying on the dressing-table. There was nothing for us to do except choose the better of the two vases of late roses that were in our rooms and put them by her bed.
