Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  Oswald said proudly, ‘She understood him at sight, saw that the only thing to do with him is to stand up to him.’ But his face clouded. ‘How on earth,’ he asked, ‘did she come to forget that I’m against any religious ceremony at all?’

  ‘She was excited,’ said Aunt Lily.

  ‘It would startle any girl, him coming in like that,’ said Uncle Len.

  ‘We were all startled,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

  ‘Does it matter?’ said Mary.

  ‘Well, a lot of people know my opinions,’ said Oswald doubtfully.

  ‘But your dad did promise to come to the wedding,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘and that was nice of him.’

  ‘I shouldn’t discourage him now that he’s climbed down,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I take it that it doesn’t happen often.’

  ‘It was Nancy’s little victory,’ said Aunt Lily.

  ‘I don’t see how you can open up the whole thing again,’ said Uncle Len.

  ‘Put that way,’ said Oswald, ‘I suppose it’s better to leave things as they are. Give and take. It’s a good principle.’ His father called to him from the water’s edge. He had his arm round Nancy’s shoulder and her face was moved and bright, he could not be entirely a humbug, perhaps he was not a humbug at all. ‘They’re getting on well together,’ said Oswald cheerfully, and hurried off to them.

  ‘I wonder how she’ll manage to get the kids christened,’ said Uncle Len softly.

  ‘Hush, he’s no idea,’ said Aunt Lily.

  ‘Just think of Nancy going after what she wants,’ marvelled Aunt Lily. ‘There’s more of Queenie in her than you’d think.’

  The three at the water’s edge were close together. Nancy raised her lips to the old man’s cheek, and then drew herself away, and came to us. Her face wet with tears, she told us, ‘He is nice really. He understands how hard everything has been for Oswald. I am happy, so very happy.’ She lost her power to speak, and walked away from us towards the house, but turned back. ‘About the church,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t just for the portrait and the wedding-dress.’

  ‘We knew that,’ said Mary.

  She had to turn back a second time. ‘But it was partly that. That did come into it.’

  Both Mary and I were so constituted that we needed a life of this character to run parallel with our lives. It was not only that we loved these people and loved them more year by year. It was that they were candid, and we were their familiars, and we could see how they worked on their circumstances, and how their circumstances worked on them, and how they were imposing form on the chaos that had been given them. Their achievement had great relevance to all that we had unquestionably of our own, which was our musical life. Musicians, by their own talents and their acceptance of tradition, impose meaning on the meaningless world of sound. It would take vanity of a sort incompatible with real music, incompatible with the self-criticism of Beethoven and Mozart, to suppose that musicians are the only servants of meaning, and that the process of art has no analogue in life. Mary and I were supremely happy in our work at that time. I had found a special happiness in having acquired a power, mastered by Mary a long time before, of putting myself in a bland and trance-like state of mind before I played, so that my hands and arms were controlled by my intellectual conception of what I was playing, without giving a chance of intervention to that treacherous element in the soul which hates the will and incites the muscles to frustrate it. Also we were both playing a great deal of Russian music, which had the charm for us that it represented a kind of music misunderstood by Beethoven and Mozart for a reason which cast a bright light on their greatness. For their Turkish marches showed that they had heard Asiatic music (as how should they not, since the Turks had been encamped outside Vienna less than a century before they were born, and had left the countryside encumbered with their camp-followers?), and that they had made not so much of it as we can, simply because they had not listened to their own music as much as we had, and were therefore not sufficiently aware of the definitive character of Western music to know what the dissimilarity of Asiatic music signifies. Infinitely less than Beethoven and Mozart, we were yet more than they were, because of the passage of time, the century and a half during which their music had spread through the world and entered into the very constitution of human beings.

  That musical happiness would have been ours in any case, for our mother had given it to us; but we enjoyed it more because we knew these people at the Dog and Duck so well that in talking to them we fell into an analogue of the bland and trance-like condition which we found favourable to our playing. When we talked to them we always expressed the love we felt for them and never made the chilling remarks which the part of us undesirous of friendship sometimes tricked us into making to those who might possibly have become our friends. But we were also much better with strangers because of our beloved familiars. Our mother’s light had made us understand that our father’s darkness was not mere absence of light; even so the certainties of the Dog and Duck enabled us to be unperturbed by a world that was at that time always announcing its uncertainty. We never feared that our kind was dying, we did not doubt that the sacred patterned snake was still turning and twisting in the heat of the unexhausted sun.

  But we might have lost the Dog and Duck had not Rosamund come to us that night to explain Oswald. Without knowledge of what his mother had done to him we would not have been prepared for his tiresomeness, and we might have shown our impatience and so lost Nancy wholly, and the others in part. For Oswald was very tiresome. It was not an exceptional event when, one November afternoon, Nancy having gone up to town to shop with Aunt Clara, I came into the parlour and found Uncle Len and Aunt Lily sitting by the fire, their eyes fixed, and their feet circling on their ankles, while Oswald, with uplifted forefinger, told a cosmic story.

  I thought it as well to continue with the task which had been laid on me by Aunt Milly and search the garden for flowers. After I had cut some laurestinus I went to take some of the winter jasmine that was showing yellow round the bar windows, and as I put my scissors on the black and substanceless stalks I heard someone come into the bar, though it was still afternoon. One window was open, and I put my head in; and I saw Uncle Len, his red dewlaps heavy about him, take down a bottle of port from the shelf and select an appropriate glass from the tray below it, look at it, shake his head, and replace it with one of the few larger glasses kept in reserve in case someone wanted to drink wine. He filled it full, nodding in approval at his image in the mirror facing the bar, and raised it to his lips, but paused to say, with the solemnity of a man keeping a lonely tryst with truth, ‘B stands for Bates and for balls.’

  It was not a moment on which I could intrude, and I meant to go away, but just then the door opened on Aunt Lily. She did not speak, but slowly shook her head from side to side, and clicked her tongue.

  ‘Here,’ said Uncle Len, and gave her too a draught of port in a wine-glass.

  She raised her eyebrows and beamed at the special generosity but could not speak until she had refreshed herself. ‘All that,’ she said, ‘just for asking how the world began.’

  ‘For mercy’s sake, Lil,’ exclaimed Uncle Len. ‘Is that what started him off? You ought to have a better headpiece on you. That’s not a question that would bring a short answer out of Os.’

  ‘Oh, blame me, of course,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘but it’s a short question, and so it ought to get a short answer. That’s only logical.’

  ‘Logical?’ exclaimed Uncle Len. ‘Oh, Lil, that it’s not.’

  ‘What, a short question shouldn’t get a short answer? What’s not logical about that?’

  ‘Never mind,’ groaned Uncle Len. ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t.’ But they felt better as they drank their port, and presently he asked, ‘Has he finished?’

  ‘No. Milly took over listening when I left.’

  ‘We’ll get back,’ he said. ‘And it’s a little thing really, when you think how fond he is of Nancy.’

  ‘
Yes,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘now we know she’ll be all right when we’ve gone.’

  They emptied their glasses and dutifully left the bar, and when I got back to the parlour they had taken up their burden and were on opposite sides of the hearth, with Aunt Milly in the basket-chair in between, all wagging their heads reverently as Oswald, one elbow on the chimneypiece, brought his story to a confident close.

  The perorative cadence of his voice inspired Uncle Len to say, ‘Hear, hear,’ and Aunt Lily to say, ‘Well, it’s a comfort to really know,’ and Aunt Milly to say, ‘Tea, you must need your tea after all that, Oswald,’ and they rose to their feet and went about their business. But they had spoken so graciously that he was undisturbed by their speed, and told me happily how sorry he was that I hadn’t heard the little thing he had been trying to explain. He said that it was funny to think that when he had started teaching he had found it difficult, now he reckoned that he could make anyone understand anything. He surveyed himself complacently at the chimneypiece and straightened his tie, but instantly lost interest in himself and asked wistfully if I thought there was any chance that Nancy would catch an earlier train. Mary had spoken the truth when she said that no man had ever shown any signs of being as nice as Oswald was about Nancy.

  We would not really have liked to be Nancy, because she could not play the piano and she had not been the daughter of Papa and Mamma, nor Richard Quin’s sister. But we would have been quite pleased to be Nancy on her wedding-day. It was one of those weddings at which more than two persons are married, which are as general as springtime, which revive the affections of all present. We went to bed the night before with a comfortable feeling that everything was ready for the first step towards a huge advancement in our happiness. Rosamund could not leave London till the morning, so even though Kate had a bedroom to herself there was a room left over, where Nancy’s white dress and veil lay on the bed like an unfearsome ghost. We would have liked to leave them overnight on a hanger, but that would have meant pinning the shoulders of the dress close to the wood, lest it slip down to the floor, and we could not bear to spoil the gleaming satin even with pinpricks. The bouquet, which had been sent from Mr Morpurgo’s garden that afternoon, had been left on a table in a disused saddle-room so that the cold air should keep it fresh; and we had surrounded the vase with heavy boxes so that it should not be blown over, though it was most unlikely that a tornado should spring up in a closed room with one high window. We were apprehensive too lest the river should rise and flood the church, in spite of our knowledge that that had happened only once in the last twenty years, and this had been a dry autumn. But all this was a game we were playing. We could mimic insecurity because of the security that let us fall asleep as soon as we got into bed.

  But in the early morning I woke suddenly because there was someone moving about in the house. For a moment I thought Papa might have come back. He had gone like a thief in the night, he might come back like a thief in the night. I cried out against the new robbery, the new cruelty he might commit, I asked nothing better than that he should commit it. Then I was fully awake, learned again of my father’s death from that strange sense which had told me of it when it had happened, and remembered Uncle Len had said he would get up in the middle of the night to stoke the church boiler; and I rose and kilted up my nightdress and put over it a sweater and a skirt, and tugged on my stockings and my shoes. Mary did not move. She had had a big concert in Edinburgh two nights before, and now lay limp and recipient, drop by drop the night was pouring its fullness into her. Downstairs Uncle Len was on his knees by the door into the garden, wheezing with bulkiness and trying to compel his thick arthritic fingers to free the bolts without noise. As I knelt and slid them back, he whispered, ‘You’ve a quick hand, Rose,’ gripped my shoulders, and heaved himself to his feet, the breath whistling up his chest. Featureless in the dark, he was age and weight and infirmity and nothing else. By day he was Uncle Len, and did not seem old or ill, and I felt a sudden fear at this news about him that had come in the dark.

  We stepped out into the fierce, silent, still riot of a winter night. The stars appeared not at all remote. It was as if, not far above us, the bare black branches of the tree-tops were locked in combat with the white and sparkling tree-tops of woods growing downwards through the frosty skies with their roots in outer space. But the moon was calm and private in a coign between these two contending forests, and was itself again in a broken road of light across the river. The grass was furred with moonlight and on it each object drew a picture of itself in soft and sooty shadow, but the ground was hard as steel under our feet, and the air was minerally hard with intense cold. We went into the churchyard through the wicket-gate, treading on its shadows as on a grid, and found the graves rehearsing a resurrection, the stones shining as risen bodies might some day. We halted among them and listened to the falling waters of a weir so far distant that we never heard it by day; and I found myself waiting for the cry that should have come from the open mouth of a cherub carved above an epitaph, now forced into high relief by the moonbeams. But if the stone had spoken it would not have been that which made the hour remarkable. The strong light and the December silence were like the sound of a trumpet blown with a single breath in the past, the present, and the future.

  Suddenly the church windows were bright. I stared, expecting again that a miracle had happened. It seemed possible that my father and my mother might be standing on the steps of the altar, come to give their blessing to take back to Nancy, who also was to be married. But of course Uncle Len had gone ahead of me and switched on the electric light. He was standing in the aisle, his eyes on the new white sanctuary that Mr Morpurgo’s gardeners had made with lilies and chrysanthemums. White flowers were wound round the pillars too, and Uncle Len’s hands went up in timid wonder to trace the wires that held them. It would have looked more beautiful had there not been so many memorials in the church. The north and south transepts and the little lady chapel were cluttered with them. A Tudor marchioness and her duchess daughter in their ermined crimson robes and their coronets knelt face to face on a high tomb, their heads bowed over their wide ruffs in recognition of God, their tie of blood, their rank; a Victorian statesman reclined under a coarse imitation of a Gothic canopy; two bearded and armoured brothers of the Renaissance age, who had alike been the King’s envoys and were alike killed in his wars, lay side by side; an Edwardian boy in knickerbockers prayed between his two labradors; a heraldic swan spread its wings on an obelisk enamelled with coats of arms. It did not matter that some of these memorials were beautiful, they were still an obstacle to the eye and prevented it laying on the shape of the buildings which signified the meaning of the church. They did wrong in their incongruity, for they were a reminder that life is committed to disorder because all men are not dead and do not die at the same moment. There might have been perfect order round me, had my father and my mother and Richard Quin and Mary and I been contemporaneous, none of us having to wait until the rest were born, none of us having to lose the others. Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present. Yet the altar could be seen as never before, because it was decked with white flowers for Nancy’s wedding, and the value of the wedding, which gave the flowers their power, lay in time. All the years that Nancy had lived till now she had not been Oswald’s wife; and the years that were to come she was to be his wife. That was the marvel of her wedding-day.

  Uncle Len had left me. Through the open door of the boiler-room I heard the sober and dutiful sounds of stoking; the deliberate, stubborn push of the shovel under the coal, the prudent, measured tipping-out of the load. I hurried to him. He had propped back the boiler door with an iron bar but it always gave. I held the iron bar in place. He wheezed softly, ‘Good girl.’ We went out into the churchyard and found ourselves in another night. The river had been unseen when we came in, a mere trough of darkness between the furthest grav
es and the nearest woods. Now a mist had risen from it, and suffused with moonlight flowed above it like another less substantial river. The tombstones did not shine like resurrected bodies, but glowed softly, like some bright thing that was sleeping. The wind had changed, and the sound of the falling weir-water was even louder than before. The past was irrecoverable. Nancy and Mary and Richard Quin and I would never be children again, eating mealy chestnuts round the fire after we had washed our hair, with our towels on our knees, in our little warm house; Nancy would go to meet her happiness and be borne away from it, and then would only for a short while persist in the memory of a few, and then the rumour of her would become as remote as the sound of waters falling over a distant weir, and then she would be wholly forgotten, there would be nothing left of her in any place. I wept. It was very cold, beneath my sweater my flesh was frozen for an inch below the skin, it was as if I were wearing icy armour. Uncle Len put his arm in mine and, whispering out of respect for the graves, said, ‘A cup of tea for us and back to our beds,’ and we went back to the wicket-gate. Above us the night sky, hard with vague light, faceted with stars, fitted over the horizon of the sensitive earth like an inflexible helmet. Beyond the gate Uncle Len paused and looked on the inn, frail as cardboard under the strong moon. Stroking my arm, he murmured the names of all that were sleeping under its roof, and said, ‘Funny to think of them, all lying there, funny.’ I looked up and my sight travelled between the stars to outer space, where there is no more universe. Nothing divided me from it. I was here, I was there, my father and mother and Richard Quin were there and were here, and Nancy would not be destroyed. The light and the silence blew their blast on the trumpet.