by Rebecca West
‘Van Gogh’s Sunflowers,’ repeated Oswald.
‘Have a bit of Stilton,’ said Uncle Len.
Oswald shook his head and repeated, ‘Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.’
We had a bit of Stilton; we could always have no supper when we went home, Kate knew we never ate much when we had been to the Dog and Duck. Uncle Len remarked that he had hung on the walls of this very room pictures of Fred Archer and Morny Cannon and Danny Maher and young Steve Donoghue, and Sceptre and Pretty Polly, those being the two loveliest horses he had ever seen, and if he’d had the great hulking originals hanging up instead of the pictures poor old Fred Archer and Morny Cannon and Sceptre and Pretty Polly would be smelling something shocking by now. At this Oswald crinkled up his eyelids as a child does when it is suddenly confronted by the deliciously ridiculous, and he laughed as loud as any of us. But Aunt Lily, who was in so sentimental a state that she could spare no time for laughter, shot out her long and bony neck and asked him whether, though he was going to have the original Nancy by him till death did them part, he wouldn’t love to hang on his walls a portrait of her, showing her just as she was that afternoon. ‘Oh, that,’ he smiled, turning to refresh his eyes by another sight of Nancy, ‘that would be something different.’ That settled part of our problem. ‘Our wedding-present!’ cried Mary and I. ‘A portrait of Nancy.’
It took a minute for them to understand we meant it. ‘Do you mean that just anybody can have their portrait painted?’ asked Aunt Milly cautiously. ‘Well, what’s the Royal Academy for?’ asked Aunt Lily stoutly, and Nancy said with a dogged sadness, ‘No, not me, it’s absurd,’ and Oswald said judicially, ‘It’s not a bad idea, but none of your modern artists, please,’ and Uncle Len, looking critically at Nancy, ‘It’s a damned good idea.’ Then Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily squealed simultaneously, ‘In your wed—’ and silenced themselves, but not before Nancy had heard them. Something stony and remote came into her eyes; Mary and I found afterwards that both of us had concluded that she was reminding herself always to do what pleased Oswald.
The afternoon went quickly. Because it was fine there might be some teas, though it was so late in autumn, and Aunt Milly baked some scones, while Uncle Len sat in an armchair, brooding over the intellectual treat which made all his winter week-ends happy, a weekly journal consisting solely of arithmetical and mathematical puzzles. It made his summer week-ends an agony of baulked desire; it was published on Saturdays and often the bar and the meals and the boats kept him so busy that it was not till Monday that he had leisure to consider how many schoolboys there must have been if in some improbable circumstances the eldest got three and threepence more than the youngest. Aunt Lily took us up to her room and showed us what she called ‘quite a nice letter, really,’ from Uncle Mat, by which she meant that it was really not a nice letter at all. It avoided crude statement, using the phrase ‘under the circumstances’ several times to achieve the same end; and in effect it said, ‘We have done everything for Nancy, and she has chosen to go off and stay with you, whose sister murdered her father, and find a husband under your roof. But because she is her father’s daughter, we hope she will be happy, and we will give her a handsome present and come to the wedding, and will accept her husband as one of the family.’ Jealousy howled round the paper on which the graceless letter was written. But Aunt Lily said, ‘Harry being such a simple soul, it must all have been hard to forgive.’ There was horror in her eyes. We knew our father and mother had respected her. She had retained her horror of the deed her sister had done, though her love for her must have importuned her honesty to forget it. ‘Not,’ she added as she folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, ‘that the silly sod has made much of a try at forgiving it, I should say.’ At that moment we heard the low bay of Mr Morpurgo’s huge car, and we hung from the window to greet him, and then ran downstairs and told him of our idea for our wedding-present and asked him to find a portrait-painter. His eyes rolled in their pouches and he said with an air of abnegation, ‘Someone whose work they will like. I will try.’
Nancy and Oswald came out of the pub while we were talking and they were having a mild quarrel. He was saying, ‘If you make me take off my bicycle clips as soon as I get into the house, of course I put them down and of course someone moves them, and then I’m told I’ve lost them.’ But a casement window opened, Aunt Milly’s plump hand held out the clips, her voice said, ‘Just where you left them,’ and the window snapped shut, but it opened again, and Aunt Milly advanced her bust and said, ‘Glad we found them, sonny,’ and closed the window gently. The incident was passed over as if it had not occurred, and he rode off to his lodgings, to bring back his bank book, Nancy told us, as she took us up to her room. There we all three lay down on the wide Victorian mahogany bed, Nancy in the middle, and she told us in her flat voice all about Oswald and his drunken mother, and he had no fear at all of marrying her, and how unselfish he was, and how specially nice he was when they were alone. As she talked we raised ourselves on our elbows and looked down on her as she lay in the trough of our shadows, twisting a lock of her long hair round a finger and covering her mouth with it, smiling at us dreamily and secretively; and we were aware she was different, really different. For us who knew her well she had always had a particular charm which was delicate and faintly tart, like the taste of raspberries; it was as delicate as it had always been but more manifest. She was like a woman who, born poor, has always worn her good clothes only on Sundays, but suddenly realises that she is rich and wears them every day. But presently she fell silent and we saw that tears were standing in her eyes. We did not know what to say. Not having been in her situation, we could not be sure that she might not now want to laugh and cry for reasons outside our understanding. But she drew back to what we understood very well, for she smiled brilliantly and began to talk of that first summer of the war, when she had stayed with us on the Norfolk coast. ‘Though Richard Quin was so slender he grew quite tall,’ she remembered, and, looking round her, said, ‘He would be too tall for this low room if he were here. Oh, how Oswald and he would have liked each other.’ It was true. We were pierced by a sense of our loss, of our inferiority. He would have rifled the little man’s nature with the skill of a burglar, and would have fingered and enjoyed the goodness and talent which we only knew to be there. Our talk rambled on, and because the house in Norfolk had a pretty staircase we fell into a discussion about stair-carpets, which went on until we heard the whirr of Oswald’s bicycle bell, and he called up to her window, and she instantly forgot us and ran out of the room and downstairs. We liked that very much. A short phrase in the middle of the keyboard, repeated three times, with half a bar’s rest between each repetition, followed by a descending scale in triplets.
Wondering if we might write an opera when we were older and there was less to do, we went out into the garden, and brought a man and his wife over in the ferry, and then got into the rowing-boat and took it upstream for half a mile or so, leaning back and cleaving the strong autumn water and wishing we could live in the country, and then we suddenly became panic-stricken about our hands, and turned the boat and drifted downstream till we were at home again. We went indoors, because it had started to rain quite heavily, and found Uncle Len and Mr Morpurgo very grave over a puzzle, silent and immobile, yet not inert. It could be felt that inside the pendant bulk of each a small but active spirit of calculation was running round and round, unable to find egress in a solution. All of us tried to help, even to the two people whom we had brought over on the ferry, but it was far too hard. Then Nancy and Oswald were with us again, each with an arm about the other’s shoulder, and at the sight of them Uncle Len and Mr Morpurgo pushed the puzzle magazine off the table into the shadows, and smiled at them with a guilty benevolence. But indeed, though Oswald was so nice, it would have been unbearable to see him work out a puzzle one could not solve oneself. But anyway Nancy and Oswald did not notice, they announced that they had been working it out and they thought that they could
afford the house they had liked so much that morning. There was a long discussion, and the man we had brought over on the ferry, who was by now having tea with his wife in the next room, put his head in at the door and announced that he couldn’t help overhearing, and he wondered if he could be of any assistance, as he was a local surveyor. Then we heard how much less than the agent’s price the owner would probably take, and what was wrong with the house and what was right, and there was some joyful affectation of embarrassment when he told us that there was an easement in the garden which sometimes gave trouble, and Aunt Milly asked, ‘What, a public one?’ in a tone of horror which revealed her misunderstanding of the term. We sat entranced by this professional store which disclosed that a house had its intense and eventful personal life being loved or unloved, cherished or neglected, the subject of both courtship and panderous mis-representation, the victim of aggressions which left such wounds as a troublesome easement, and periodically rejuvenated by espousal to such young couples as Nancy and Oswald. But suddenly Aunt Lily looked out of the window and cried that the storm was over and there was a marvellous rainbow, and we all went out into the garden. Over the scarlet and gold tree-tops to the east a pale green light pretended that this was the end of the world; and on this light was painted the huge childish toy which said that it was no such thing. With exultation we bade each other note that there was a double arc, for everybody believes that two rainbows are better than one, and we were delighted by the scene’s abandonment of the ordinary, for the river was now bottle-green and its foam was white as snow, and the driftwood shone with iridescent lambency. Aunt Lily was saying something about the suitability of a rainbow to an occasion when a family, and a family it really was, though few of us were related by blood, but then blood was no thicker than water, there never was a sillier saying, had gathered together to celebrate a most hopeful occasion, when we became conscious that we had an odd visitor.
A tall old man was striding down the lawn towards us. He was wearing a long black overcoat, almost as long as a dressing-gown, his silver hair was bare, and he carried a staff that might have come out of an allegory; as he drew nearer his appearance became more and more of a public performance. His black eyes flashed under prodigious silver eyebrows which it was to be supposed he would take off after the show, and his nostrils were dilated as if to store breath enough for a long passage in blank verse. ‘Len, have you anything on you if he wants a subscription?’ murmured Aunt Milly. We all saw him, except Nancy and Oswald, who were sealed in contemplation of the rainbow, and we gave him the indifferent and amiable greeting which people in an inn give to a newcomer, telling him that his body has a right to be there and he can do as he likes about asking company for his mind. That welcome was one of the reasons why we liked being at the Dog and Duck, but it seemed as if the old man were disappointed at the way we were taking him.
Oswald turned to me, saying, ‘See what I mean? Granted I can’t see a rainbow all the time. But I can see it often enough, as often as I can reasonably want to see a rainbow. So what do I want with the picture of a rainbow?’ His eyes went past me to the stranger, and vacillated. Then he said, pluckily enough, ‘Hello, Dad.’
All of us, even the surveyor and his wife, expressed happy surprise. Aunt Lily cried in ecstasy. ‘Now a family we really are.’ The old man answered politely; but though his face was impassive it suggested strong disapproval, as the blank sun intimates its power to burn. As he had crossed the grass he had suggested some sort of performer below the level of actual performance, like the buskers who entertain theatre queues. Now he seemed more elevated and more alarming. I recognised in Oswald the perpetual childishness of a child who has grown up in the shadow of a parent made formidable by an exceptional destiny. I had often recognised it in Mary and myself. If we had not been able to play as well as we did, our mother’s art, a fiery ball in the sky, would have consumed the marrow in our bones.
Oswald said, ‘Oh, Dad, I wish we had known you were coming,’ very much as Nancy would have said the same thing to us. There was the same primary and sincere expression of goodwill, ‘We wish we had been able to prepare a welcome for you,’ and the same secondary and even more passionately sincere expression of fear, ‘We wish we had more time to build defences round our delicate happiness and protect it from your excessive and inconsiderate force.’
The fear was reasonable. Mr Bates said ominously that he feared he was intruding. Uncle Len answered serenely and comprehensively, ‘That you aren’t. Any relation of young Os here is welcome, and the house is full of cold meat,’ but Mr Bates was not appeased, and looking very hard from Nancy to Mary and from Mary to me, asked coldly, ‘Son, which is your young lady?’
‘Why, Dad, I would have thought you could have guessed,’ said Oswald happily. ‘This is Nancy, of course.’
Mr Bates said sadly, dipping deep into the bass, that he would have liked to embrace Nancy as a daughter, but there was an obstacle.
For a minute we were all quite still. We sweated with terror, for there was manifest in this man the indecency of the prophet. We knew that there was nothing he would not say, in words which could not be forgotten. Mary and I moved towards Nancy, and stood behind her. Oswald’s arm was close round her waist. The surveyor and his wife began to walk away, but Mr Bates arrested them with a gesture and a splendid, still deeper note. ‘Stay,’ he bade them. ‘I want all the kith and kin of these young people to understand my views.’
‘But this gentleman is not a relative,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘He is a surveyor who has very kindly been giving the young people disinterested advice about a house they are proposing to buy. Good evening, sir, we are very grateful to you and your wife.’
‘And who are you?’ said Mr Bates.
‘My name is Morpurgo. I am a close friend of Nancy’s mother, a remarkable woman.’
‘And so she is,’ said Uncle Len.
‘You’d throw anybody in the river who said she wasn’t, wouldn’t you, Len?’ said Aunt Milly, using her hand as a lens in an effort to see the last traces of the vanishing rainbow.
‘I would,’ said Uncle Len placidly.
‘I would throw anybody into the river,’ Mr Bates remarked ferociously, ‘who said that any woman was not a remarkable woman, and any man not a remarkable man, for God made every one of them and Jesus Christ gave His life for every one of them, and the Holy Ghost is within every one of them.’
‘Well, you can’t say fairer than that,’ said Uncle Len.
‘So I will not approve my son’s union with Miss Nancy unless he consents to have it blessed by God the Father and God the Son and the Holy Ghost in the true spirit,’ Mr Bates continued. ‘So let us have no nonsense about a registry office. The Foundation Chapel of the Heavenly Hostages, Ilfriston, Essex, it is going to be, December 14, eleven thirty sharp, Brother Clerkenwell and me officiating.’
Oswald took a step forward. ‘No, Dad.’
‘Yes, son,’ said Mr Bates firmly. ‘Marriage is not a sacrament, I grant you. Nowhere in the gospels is it ordained as such, and only the false churches still under the yoke of Rome, though they are ashamed to own it, keep up this pretence out of hatred for the pure gospel. There are but two sacraments named as such by Jesus Christ, baptism and the eucharist. Let us abide by His word, nor let us use Christian marriage as an excuse for fine garments and feasting. But let it be Christian marriage, let a man and a woman made by God ask His blessing when they join together the lives they received from Him. So the Foundation Chapel of the Heavenly Hostages, Ilfriston, Essex, December 14, eleven thirty sharp, as I just said, it is going to be.’
‘No,’ said Nancy, ‘it is not.’
‘A young girl like you cannot be joined together to a strange man like the beasts,’ said Mr Bates.
‘This is our marriage, not yours,’ said Nancy, faintly smiling, ‘and if you want Oswald to alter the arrangements it was for you to ask him, not to come here and tell us. But even if you had asked Oswald he would have had to refuse on acco
unt of me. I have nothing to do with the Heavenly Hostages, and Oswald is going to marry me in that church over there, you can see the tower over the tree-tops. I was brought up in the Church of England, wasn’t I, Aunt Lily? We always went to church in Lovegrove, didn’t we?’
Aunt Lily said, ‘Yes, indeed, dear old St Jude’s,’ and made a gesture as if she were waving a little flag from a charabanc.
‘And all the time I lived with Uncle Mat and my Aunt Clara in Nottingham she was a communicant at St James’s,’ Nancy went on. ‘Why should I suddenly leave my church and go to the Heavenly Hostages, about whom I know nothing? All these people standing here have done a very great deal for me. I could not begin to tell you what I owe them. But not one would ask me to take such as you, the very first time I have ever seen you, have demanded of me. If Oswald should tell me we must obey you I would not marry him, though I do love him. I would think him weak and silly and not able to stand up for himself even about things that really matter. So we will be married in that church, and we will be very sad if you do not come.’
‘That’s our last word, Dad,’ said Oswald.
Mr Bates made a vaguely apocalyptic gesture and looked up at the place where the rainbow had been as if he might have asked it for guidance had it still been there, down at the river as if he might yet be driven to walk on it. Magnificently he declaimed, ‘Well said, my daughter. Go on the way you have chosen for the Lord will bring you to salvation. In the end. And very gratefully will I attend your marriage.’
‘Thank you,’ said Nancy. She wavered for a minute and then made the bobbing curtsy which, years ago, in our dancing class at Lovegrove, we had been taught to make to our elders; and Mr Bates bowed to her over his staff and held out his hand. ‘Let us walk together in the garden for a moment,’ he said, and they moved away from us, and stood talking beside the sliding and leaf-strewn waters.
