by Rebecca West
‘Oh, how I want to wake her up,’ said Mary. ‘But we must not.’
‘Still, we can sit beside her,’ I said.
But she woke of her own accord as soon as we went into the room again. She opened her eyes and looked about her with a look of voluptuous pleasure, and rubbed her cheek against the satin cushion, and put up a finger to stroke it. Then she saw us and said sleepily, ‘What is it, that wonderful scent?’
‘Lanvin’s Pétales Froissées,’ I said. ‘I brought some home this afternoon but we have lots, you shall have this bottle I brought.’
‘I should love it,’ she said, and her heavy lids fell again. ‘The wards don’t smell of anything from Lanvin,’ she murmured, and drowsed again. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, with her eyes shut. ‘Was it a nice house and were the people lovely and were the jewels and the dresses beautiful?’ We told her, and she murmured, ‘It must have been heaven.’
‘You must come with us to a party again,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, there is one next week given by some people we know well enough to ask if we can bring someone else,’ I said. ‘A good party, too, Carlton House Terrace, a view over St James’s Park.’
‘You darlings, I will try to come,’ she sighed. ‘It is the staircases I love, they look as if they went up and there was floor upon floor, and something gorgeous on each. How I would like to be a duchess.’ She seemed to sleep again, then started up. ‘Mary, Rose, I must wake up and tell you why I am here. It is about Nancy.’ She began to laugh, taking out the pins that were left in her hair, and letting her curls fall about her shoulders. ‘Oh, you will not believe it.’
‘She is all right then?’ said Mary. ‘I was so worried because she did not come to my concert.’
‘But she did,’ said Rosamund, ‘you need not be worried about her at all.’
‘Of course it is all right now you have come,’ I said. ‘Here is a box of marrons glacés, eat them all, you are worth it.’
‘These are the best marrons,’ said Rosamund, ‘the ones that have just a touch of ginger in the syrup. I probably will eat them all. But about Nancy. You cannot think how happy she is. You know that look she has always had, as if one were seeing her through water, as if she were floating an inch or two below the surface of a river? It has all gone, she is like anybody else.’
Mary and I cried out together, ‘She is going to be married.’
‘Yes, to the one man whom it is possible for her to marry,’ said Rosamund. ‘She came to tell me tonight, after she had been to your concert.’
‘But why did she not come to tell me?’ asked Mary. But she added meekly, ‘It is natural that she didn’t. Lots of people seem to feel that they cannot tell us things.’
‘You know, Nancy has been far more unhappy than any of us guessed,’ said Rosamund. She was speaking smoothly without a trace of her stammer. It was not often so. ‘She has always wanted to be married, of course. She should be married, too. She would be better at it than any of us. She will know as we will not what to do when her husband is out all day, she will do small things about the house that he will like when he comes home. And she has all that dammed-up affection which she has given to us, and which it is hardly fair for us to take, since to us she has, of course, been only an afterthought.’
She said it lightly and put another marron glacé in her mouth. Mary exclaimed, ‘Oh, no.’ We both wished Rosamund had not said it, but we knew she was right when she said, ‘Compared to what your Mamma gave her, we have all given her only our afterthoughts. But that is not quite the point. What has made her life in Nottingham so difficult is that Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara have given her so much of their attention. They have tried so hard to be good to her, and all in the wrong way. It appears that in Nottingham many families are not so well off as they once were. They used to make all that window-curtain lace and now the people who liked it buy cretonne and chintz instead. But Uncle Mat is very well off, and he is the managing director of a big engineering firm, and controls a department store that has branches in several Midland towns, and Nancy, you know, has quite a lot of money. She is not rich-rich, like the people who give the parties you go to, but she and her brother will each have nearly a thousand a year. They got all their father’s money, though he left most of it to Queenie. She could not benefit by his death. There is a law which sees to that. How terrible for her to marry a man for his money and to kill him in order to get her freedom, and get neither her freedom nor his money.’ She meditated for a while, stroking her golden head and looking into the distance, then went on with her story. ‘Everybody in Nottingham knew who Nancy was. Or she thinks they did, which is the same thing. And indeed Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara thought so too, and dealt with the matter in their own way. Nancy is quite sure, from something that happened, something so horrid that she would not tell me what it was, that Uncle Mat told people in Nottingham about Nancy’s money, and let it be understood that any young man who married her would not only get a well-to-do wife but would probably get a good job either in Uncle Mat’s engineering firm or in the department store.’
Mary covered her face. I said, ‘I remember Papa saying, when Uncle Mat would not ask Aunt Lily to come with Nancy to Nottingham, “You might as well expect a bull to be kind to a horse.” This is how a bull, poor thing, might try to be kind to a heifer.’
‘Nancy saw that,’ said Rosamund. ‘She is very fair, very forgiving. But it was even worse for her than it appears. For she understands herself much better than you might think, and she knows quite well that if someone said he loved her she would want to believe him so much that she would not be able to disbelieve him, she would not be able to stop herself from marrying him. Oh, Mary, Rose, this part of her story is horrid because she was ashamed to tell me that. Mamma was in bed, so she was alone with me, and we were just two stupids together, but even so she could bring herself to own that to me. How hateful it is that it is thought disgraceful for women to want to be loved, which only means they want to love.’
Mary said, ‘That proves how evil human beings are,’ and knelt down by the electric fire and spread out her shivering fingers to the glow.
‘Poor Nancy, she sees it all so clearly, not only the general thing, the disadvantage at which any of us might find ourselves. And of course that is not the worst that could happen,’ she interjected suddenly. ‘Give me another marron glacé, how I love that wheaty sweetness, and that gentle tang of ginger. But to get back to Nancy. She knows just what it would be like to make the kind of marriage Uncle Mat had tried to contrive. She has seen herself and her husband together, in a new house where they might have been happy, had it not been for what her mother had done. She has felt him take her in his arms, and then suddenly shudder and freeze, so that he draws her no closer and she is there, stuck there. And she has heard herself saying, “What is the matter, dear?” and has heard him answer, “Only someone walking over my grave.” Poor Nancy stood in my room and said, “Wouldn’t that have been awful if that happened? And I used to feel as if it was happening all the time, as if it happened again and again, as if it were the only thing that could ever happen to me, and indeed ought to happen to me.” So you see, any marriage she could have made in Nottingham would have been impossible, particularly as Queenie will be released next year. That she had foreseen with the deadliest particularity. She has imagined a husband who would welcome Queenie, but only for that thousand a year, that job in the engineering firm or the department store; and that would have been blasphemy. And of course we could do nothing. We could not have helped. What could we have done,’ she asked us, turning on us her huge, bright eyes, and smiling almost as if our common plight amused her, ‘now Mamma and Richard Quin have gone?’
‘Nothing,’ we admitted.
‘But now we need not worry any more,’ said Rosamund. ‘It has all come right. It is the river which has done it really. And of course Aunt Lily and Uncle Len and Aunt Milly, who are getting more like the river the longer they live by it, they just flow on.
You know Nancy has been down at the Dog and Duck a great deal this year. Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara have their son and his family back from the East and mercifully there is not really enough room in the house to put all the children and the two amahs unless Nancy goes away. So she has been down on the river nearly all the summer, and she has got quite good at handling a boat, and one evening Uncle Len asked her to take somebody over on the ferry, and when she got back she dropped an oar into the water, and then, you know what she is, she lost all confidence, she felt she had done something very stupid and would never get it back. So she called out for help, but nobody heard, and then a man who was just going into the pub ran down the lawn and turned the boat round and picked up the oar. So she told him how sorry she was to have troubled him, but she had thought that the oar might sink, and then he sat down in the boat and explained the scientific principles which make an oar apt to float instead of sink. He is the science master at that big secondary school about five miles off, and he has taken lodging for the summer with that old Mrs Crump, the widow who has that nice red-brick house with an apricot tree all over it. They sat in the boat until it got quite dark. Then Aunt Lily got anxious and came out and called for Nancy.
‘I bet she said, “Alice, where art thou?”’ and Mary suggested, ‘And “Has anybody here seen Kelly?”’
‘That’s just what she did,’ said Rosamund, ‘and the man asked her what the words of “Alice, where art thou?” were. He likes to know everything. They went into the house together and he had a pint but left most of it, and went off home and then came the next evening, and the next, and every evening, and it was always for Nancy, and she liked him very much. He tells her things like why oars float, and she finds it lovely. Then she got terribly upset, because she thought he did not know about her mother and he would go away if he knew. So she shut herself up in her room and cried, but of course Aunt Lily knew why. It is quite dreadful how Aunt Lily understands everything about women who want to get married.’
‘The poor, poor darling,’ murmured Mary.
‘So she went to Mr Morpurgo, who happened to come down there just at that time, if, of course, she did not send for him. But you know how often he goes there.’ Of late years Mr Morpurgo had become a familiar of the Dog and Duck. His wife had died, and he was suffering the peculiar resentful unhappiness of a widower who is left alone, too old to remarry, after a long marriage during which he has always felt lonely; and his children greatly offended him. They were in full retreat from his Judaism and would have none of it, even to his love of art; and he did not understand that when he turned the glazed eye of his connoisseurship on them they became aware just how much they would fetch in the open market, and could not forgive him. Something had gone wrong a long time before, and he could not go back and put it right, though he had often asked Mamma how he could do it. So quite often he drove down to the Dog and Duck in his splendid Rolls-Royce, and he and his chauffeur, who was getting old too, would take out their rods and go into the meadow next the garden, so as to get away from the ferry, and take their stand on the bank and watch the sliding black glass of the tree-shadowed river, till the evening came up on them, and they went up to the pub and listened to what the people in the bar were saying, and then had supper, and drove back to Belgrave Square. ‘So Mr Morpurgo,’ Rosamund went on, ‘called at Mrs Crump’s and waited till the science master came home, his name is Oswald Bates, and then he told him all about Queenie. And, do you know, the science master had known about it all the time? Mrs Crump had told him. Not horridly, sympathetically. And it seems, just think of it, that there is a reason for that. The village says that if Mrs Crump is a widow she has only herself to thank for it. It is funny,’ said Rosamund, with a flash of that ruthlessness I had sometimes noticed in my mother, ‘what odd things sometimes turn out to be useful in the end.
‘Well, then Mr Morpurgo and Oswald went for a long walk by the river, and you know how that water flowing by makes one talk, Oswald told Mr Morpurgo all sorts of things about himself, and it seems that Nancy has a special value to him because of Queenie. He belongs to a very respectable family. His father was an ironmonger who kept things for farms in a market town, is quite well off and retired and is a preacher for a religious sect called the Heavenly Hostages, it is a sect that if you repent of your sins you become a child of heaven and then you are a hostage and God will treat the world better because you are there, and he has two aunts who are deaconesses, but his mother was dreadful and drank, and he has always been terribly ashamed of her. She was once actually arrested by the police and his father had to go to court and pay a fine, and everybody in the district knew, and it was hateful for him at school.’
‘Surely there isn’t much hope for humanity,’ I said. ‘It is always hateful for people at school when they need kindness.’
‘But there will be much more happiness for Nancy and him because of school,’ said Rosamund. ‘Listen to what he told Mr Morpurgo. They moved several times to make a fresh start, in villages outside the market town, but then that meant that the father was away for long hours and sometimes the boy was alone with his mother when he saw that she was going to start drinking. He and his father lived through the whole thing again and again, always with the same end, and he felt dreadfully degraded and he was very much afraid that when he grew up he would be a drunkard too, and be a misery to everybody and perhaps to his own little boy. So he took up science at school because he heard somewhere that science proved that heredity was nothing and that environment was everything, but by the time the poor boy had committed himself to being a scientist he found that if science has a definite opinion on the subject it is that heredity is much more important than environment, so he was very much upset.’
‘You ought to know about science since you are a nurse,’ said Mary, ‘but isn’t that very silly? How can they tell? How can they tell whether heredity or environment matters most unless they get people who had only heredity and others who had only environment?’
‘The only reason one believes in it at all is that sometimes it works,’ said Rosamund. ‘Anaesthetics do send people to sleep so that surgeons can operate on them, X-ray photographs really show what is happening inside people. But I am not thinking what I am saying. It is quite easy to take X-ray photographs, but very few people can read them.’
She looked away from us at an empty corner of the room, and her profile was cold, condemning. ‘Oh, a lot of it is nonsense,’ she said, even with disgust. Then went on, ‘But anyway, science did not comfort Oswald as he had hoped, and even though his mother is dead now he doesn’t like mixing with people and that is why he always takes lodgings far from the school. Then one late afternoon - and you will see, it is all right, he is not just making use of Nancy, there is real love in it, the choice, the choice that is made by something deep down in one which will not be satisfied by anything else. He saw her down by the landing-stage, and he thought how lovely her fair hair was, and he went near her to see if she was pretty and he thought she looked like an angel, and he wondered how he could get to know her, and he felt it was no good, she would not want to know him. But two days later he came down to the bar for some cigarettes, and he saw her standing beside Aunt Milly and he realised that this girl who looked like an angel was the daughter of Queenie, who was a murderess and far worse than his own mother. And then two days later he came down to the bar for some more cigarettes, really to see Nancy, and it was then that she was down in the ferry-boat and lost her oar and called for help. So you see it was all perfect.’
‘Oh, yes,’ we breathed, ‘it is perfect.’
‘And after that Mr Morpurgo managed everything almost too beautifully,’ Rosamund went on. ‘He told Oswald that he was right about Nancy being an angel, and also how wonderful Aunt Lily was, and he found out that Uncle Len and Aunt Milly never served anybody who had too much, and they went on and on talking, and Mr Morpurgo told him how he had known lots and lots of people whose parents drank and none of them ever did. Then he war
ned Oswald that Queenie would be coming out next year, and he said he knew that, Mrs Crump had told him, and he would like to help Nancy over that too. So they walked right on to the next lock and had to telephone for the Rolls, and they came back great friends, and it was all settled. But then they went and sat in the garden and went on talking about how lovely it was all going to be, and they forgot all about Nancy, until Aunt Lily who was watching them through the bar window could bear it no longer, and sent down the chauffeur to tell Mr Morpurgo that there was a telephone call from London. When she heard it was all right she scolded him, and kept him with her, and shouted to Nancy through the door, and told her that she was wanted to fetch somebody on the ferry, and of course when Nancy was crossing the lawn Oswald went to her, and it was all right. They will be married at the end of this school term, so that they can have the Christmas holidays for the honeymoon.’
She dropped her head back on the cushion, she closed her eyes and lay loose-jointed among her golden hair, smiling.
We had never in all our lives heard her talk so long without stammering. Like the Thames her story had flowed on, reflecting in its fluency the images, fusing and easy and on their way to the sea, of the people we had previously seen as isolated and static. We longed to chatter about it and discuss what we would give Nancy as wedding-presents, but we leaned over her and asked if she would like to go to bed. She shook her head. ‘I am just thinking of it all,’ she said, ‘I will go when you do.’ She had another marron glacé, and we heated up the milk and drank it, and I said, ‘But you haven’t told us when you heard all this.’
‘Because Nancy told me tonight,’ said Rosamund. ‘Oh, I am stupid, I leave out what is important. There is still a great deal to be done. Listen. She took Oswald to the concert tonight. She has talked to him perpetually about you and Richard Quin and your Mamma and your Papa. You are the glories of her life. So she took him to the concert tonight, and brought him on to see me afterwards.’
