by Rebecca West
We enjoyed the marriage better than anything that had happened to us since we were alone. The only sadness about it was that Mr Morpurgo’s youngest daughter asked if she might come, and of course Nancy and Oswald said that they would be very pleased, and she came and watched everything with a certain desperate attention. Also she wore her beautiful clothes carelessly, she slumped down inside them, as if she were not young. We realised that she was in trouble, that she would have liked to tell her father all about it, but she felt that she did not really know him. She was aware that he liked coming to the Dog and Duck, and she had thought that if she found out why, she would understand him better, and could break down the barrier between them. But it was no use. He kept on going where she was not, coming back to see how she was getting on out of kindness; and she was too miserable to make friends with us at once. This was one of the times we missed our mother, who would have flashed her eyes across the dull girl’s face and imparted some of her brilliance to it, and fused her with her father by the power of that electric force. But that was the one flaw in the day.
A year later, on Christmas Eve, I met Mary walking along La Salle Street in Chicago, smiling at a memory, almost laughing. I said, ‘You are thinking of Nancy’s wedding,’ and I was right. That was a wonderful meeting. We had both been on tour longer than we liked. Mary had been playing in a Bach festival week that a millionaire was giving to six universities in turn, and I had been going the rounds of the symphony concerts with the French concerto I had played for the first time just before we heard of Nancy’s engagement. It had grown dear to me, I thought of it always as the Chestnut Leaves Concerto, for they had fallen bronze about me every morning when I went out for a walk before the rehearsals in Paris, and it built up a stoically pleasant place in my mind, a place such as the Champs Elysées might be; there were no houses there but only the arch at its crown and beyond the arch a wide-open eye, and the first splendid cold of the year. But it was exhausting to play, as all new music is, the audience’s incomprehension presses in as a resistant ambient, which has to be beaten back and dissolved by an act of will, a conscious care to explain as well as interpret. So I was tired, as Mary was for another reason, because she had to play only the greatest music for a long period, which meant participating in occasions when people who did not take music as musicians do were excited in a way the nerves could not ignore. Many nice people asked us to spend Christmas with them, for Americans are very kind, but we made a plot with our secretaries and agents and arranged to lose ourselves for three days, to say to the hosts we left before Christmas that we were going straight to the hosts who were taking us in after Christmas, and during the stolen three days to hide together and sleep and eat as we chose in a hotel by the lake in Chicago which we had both liked when we had stayed there on other tours.
Mary got there first. When I arrived in the afternoon the bathroom was already hung with stockings. That is how one recognises the female interpretative artist: on their travels they cannot find themselves near a supply of hot water without immediately washing their clothes. She had left a note saying she had gone out shopping to replace some things she had lost. I found that I had left my manicure set in San Francisco, so I went out to get another, and so it was that I met Mary outside Marshall Fields, smiling to herself over Nancy’s wedding, in spite of the high wind that was like invisible ice splinters about us.
We put our arms round each other and kissed, and I said, ‘Just look, we’re both of us too thin,’ and Mary said, ‘Yes, it’s wonderful, we shall be able to eat what we like during these three days, we will have waffles and maple syrup whenever we think of it.’
‘And no squab,’ I said.
‘Why do Americans like squab?’ asked Mary. ‘And those horrid clams, embittered spinster oysters. And toast all leathery in a napkin instead of in a toast-rack, as God decreed. But everything else is nice. This is a lovely continent to be given the run of. Shall we go and look at the Christmas trees in the big stores?’
‘No, we are too tired,’ I said.
‘Of course we are,’ said Mary. ‘Kate would not let us go if she could see us now. But it will be nice just to be alone together in that big room. Can you ever get used to the big hotel rooms we can afford now?’
We stocked up for our days of rest by buying an armful of magazines and a big box of coffee walnuts and several sorts of bath salts, and then took a Yellow Cab back to the hotel, and went into the coffee-shop on the ground floor and had a table by the window, and had our first indulgence in waffles and maple syrup. ‘We will have no flowers in our room,’ said Mary. ‘We cannot buy flowers for ourselves, it is against nature. But it will be good not to have the room crammed with flowers which are given in such a way that one has no occasion to look up the Language of Flowers. They are beautiful, but there’s no time to look at them, and the hotels never have the right vases, and one isn’t clear who they come from, and so often they come just from people who like our playing.’ Dusk fell, and through the window we watched a procession of bright automobiles, cells of privacy in the cold public night, sweeping on their way to homes that would be more warm and private still. ‘How good it is to be tired,’ said Mary. ‘If we were not tired we might feel lonely here.’
‘Would you rather have been with people?’ I asked. ‘Let us go on to the Wallensteins by the night train, they probably would not mind if we telephone and ask if they could have us early, you know how nice everyone is here.’ But she shook her head. With her elbows on the table, her smooth face cupped in her fine fingers and nursed by her fur collar and her fur cuffs, she continued to watch the stream of shining cars pass by, or halt at the florist’s shop next door. It was amusing to see people hurrying in and out with last-minute presents. One man had trouble in packing a flowering apple tree growing out of a pot into his car, though that was nearly as big as a tram. We drank more coffee, but presently the coffee-shop closed early, because it was Christmas Eve, and we went into the hotel. A clerk at the desk tried to give us our letters but we asked him to send them in the morning. The management had sent us up some roses, so our room was not bare after all. We had long baths, with lots of bath salts, and put on our dressing-gowns and lay down on our beds, meaning to read a little before we ordered dinner, but we fell asleep. When we woke it was nearly nine o’clock and we were not very hungry, so we ordered just oyster stew. There was a lot of it, and we pulled our chairs to the window and drew back the curtains and ate the lovely milky mess, looking down on the long line of steady lights that ran along the black lake’s edge, the two lines of moving lights that ran beside them, one line moving north and the other south.
I said, ‘When it’s this time over there they’ll be closing the bar at the Dog and Duck and starting to put up the holly.’
‘And Kate and her brothers will be putting it up at her mother’s cottage.’
‘And poor Mr Morpurgo will have gone home and be sitting in a big chair with his family, after spending all day driving round and leaving presents on people he really likes.’
‘And Miss Beevor will be with Constance at Baker Street if her bronchitis is too bad, at the Dog and Duck if she is better.’
‘And Cordelia and Alan will be decorating the house. She will do it so prettily, it is a shame they will have to go out to the in-laws for all Christmas Day. What a pity they have no children.’
‘No, it is not,’ said Mary. ‘She wants children more than anything else in the world, but she would not have been kind to them.’
‘She might, you know,’ I said. ‘After all, they would have been hers.’
‘But they would not have been her,’ said Mary, ‘and that is what she cannot forgive.’
‘You think she would have fought them as she used to fight us? But she has changed so much for the better. She is always nice to us now.’
‘Yes, the battle was drawn. We have our work, she has her marriage. But if she had had children she would have been faced again with the problem of other people existi
ng. Things are better for her as they are.’
We were not being cruel. We did not hate Cordelia any more. But we knew that as she stood at the bottom of the stepladder and told Alan to put the longer spray of silver laurel further to the left of the Wilson Steer watercolour, she would be bound to remember how it had been at Lovegrove on Christmas Eve, how we had heard through our bedroom floor the voices of our father and mother as they put up the holly and the mistletoe and laid out our wonderful presents; and she would, with that white look, push away the thought of Papa, because he was wicked and deserted us, and Mamma, because she was so ugly and queer, and also Richard Quin, because she had always felt doubtful about him, and so she would cut herself off from the glory by which we lived, without which we would hardly exist. She also knew that she let herself think of us out of dutifulness and also out of respect for our success, and we were not exalted enough to forget this.
Mary broke our silence by saying, ‘How strange it is that we know exactly what all of our people will be doing tonight except one. I have no idea what Rosamund is doing, have you?’
‘No, none at all. But it will be something wonderful.’
But it was strange. She might have a patient, she might not. If she were free then she would drive her mother and Miss Beevor down to the Dog and Duck, unless Miss Beevor was too ill, and then they would all stay at Baker Street. Wherever she was, she would transform the place by her presence. But though we knew her so well, though she was so much more truly our sister than Cordelia, though we had benefited so often from her power to work miracles, we could not conjure up any vision of the nature of that inevitable transformation.
‘We cannot imagine what she will do because it is outside our range,’ said Mary.
We sat and thought of her until a storm blurred the lake and the lights and blew snow against the window. We were too tired to bother with a storm, so we pushed the room-service trolley out into the corridor and went to bed. After we had turned out the lights we heard people come out of the next room, laughing. One of them wheeled our trolley away, running quite fast, rattling the china and glass, and the rest ran after him, and one of them tooted on a tin trumpet.
When it was quiet again Mary said through the darkness, ‘I do wish something.’
‘What?’
‘I wish that when we get our letters tomorrow there will be one from Nancy saying that she is going to have a baby.’
‘There’s plenty of time. I don’t think Oswald would let Nancy have a baby the first year. He would feel obliged not to, out of respect for birth control, because it is modern, however much they wanted to have one. But they are sure to have several in the end.’
‘I hope so. Otherwise, as Cordelia isn’t having any, we shall run so short of people when we are old.’
‘So we shall.’
The storm beat on our windows. ‘No, no,’ I said, turning in my bed, ‘look at Uncle Len and Aunt Milly. They must have feared that, but they came on Aunt Lily again, and now they have Nancy and us. That’s evidently how things work.’
‘Something like that might happen to us,’ said Mary. ‘But one would like to be sure.’
‘It will be all right, my darling,’ I said, ‘it will be all right.’
She did not answer for some time. Then she said, ‘I am not really worrying. But when one is tired one is not sure. And how lovely Nancy’s wedding was, it was one of the loveliest things that ever happened to us.’
‘Nancy looked so beautiful,’ I said. ‘It was so strange, someone we had known all our lives surprising us like that. She has always looked nice, but not like that.’
‘And everybody was so… How would we have put it when we were little? I know. Nobody was cross.’
‘And Oswald was so good. One saw why Nancy wanted to marry him.’
‘I was so glad that he proposed Queenie’s health. And he did it so well. He did not make capital out of it by saying anything about her. He just asked us to drink to her, and said how much they wished she was there.’
‘I am sure Nancy did not know he was going to do it.’
‘No. She was amazed. It made a change in her. Suddenly she looked free. Till then she had a little left of her frightened look.’
‘Yes. She held her head up then. And how that wreath Rosamund made for her suited her.’
‘It was exquisite. And she and Kate and Constance made it in only a few minutes.’
The people who made the veil had forgotten to send the pearl circlet which had been ordered, and at the last minute had sent the wrong one; it was so big that it fell over poor Nancy’s ears. She sat before her mirror and said very quietly, ‘Of course I wasn’t meant to be married like this, I shouldn’t have tried,’ and Aunt Lily wailed, ‘Poor lamb, poor innocent lamb,’ betraying too candidly that she too believed her stock pursued by a blasting fate deserved by only one of its branches. Their sense of insecurity was suddenly revealed, and I cried out, ‘Rosamund, Rosamund,’ for I knew that she and Constance and Kate were helping prepare the tables underneath. There was at once the sound of the three coming upstairs, and the low room was full of tall women, bending in concern. ‘My circlet,’ said Nancy, her lips quivering, and Aunt Lily said, ‘It’s a shame.’ Rosamund sat down by the mirror, a smile on her lips, and turned the circlet in her hands, grimaced and threw the useless thing down on the dressing-table. When my call had reached them they had been filling vases with some white flowers, and Rosamund had some on her lap now. ‘There is plenty of time,’ she stammered, and slowly stripped the wire from the discarded circlet, and remade it in a narrower and more fragile form. Making a teasing mouth at Nancy’s anxious reflection in the mirror, she leaned back and handed the circlet over her shoulder to Constance, who turned it about in her hands and pressed it more firmly into shape, and gave it to Kate, who pressed it too and gave it back to Rosamund. ‘Give me some thread,’ she stammered again, and bound the flowers to the stiff shape. They rested on the wire as the dogwood blossom rests on the bare branch, as the clematis floats on the vine. Constance bent down and freed some buds that lay too close to the wire, Kate made secure a flower that had been grown too gorgeously by Mr Morpurgo’s gardeners and stood out stiffly, and the three women raised the crown to Nancy’s head, laughing at her in the mirror, laughing at her fear, as a splendid gust of winter wind leaped in riot among the elms that stood beside the inn. That wind joined with the wind that was blowing snow across Lake Michigan a year later, and I slept. Later there were more people running about in the corridor, and this time several of them had tin trumpets, and I woke just long enough to hear Mary turn in her sleep and say, ‘Let something happen so that Rosamund can live with us all the time, please, please, Mamma, arrange it,’ and I slept again.
In the morning I waited till I heard Mary stirring, and then I felt for my present to her, which I had ready on my table, and I got into her bed.
‘Merry Christmas, Sister,’ we said, and kissed each other. Then we said, ‘Merry Christmas, Papa, Merry Christmas, Mamma. Merry Christmas, Richard Quin,’ and I gave her my present.
‘It isn’t a bit what I wanted, it’s much nicer,’ said Mary. I had given her an emerald clip, not the most expensive kind of emerald, but the better, lighter kind which looks like sea water over a sandy bottom when the sun strikes through it. ‘I say, can you really afford this?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘Gramophone records, you know. And you could always sell it.’
‘My present’s on the settee,’ said Mary. ‘I got up when you were asleep and put it out. I saw it in Bonwit Teller’s in October, and I said, “I have a sister who would look good in that.’” It was an evening coat made of gold damask brocade with a rose mauve bloom on it. I would be able to wear it every time I was asked out to supper at a restaurant after a concert, and that happened a great deal on an American tour. In the looking-glass I looked a stranger, now I had this cloak things might happen to me that had never happened before.
‘I will lend you this
if ever you want it,’ I said.
‘I won’t ever lend this clip to you or anybody else,’ said Mary, lying on her back and holding the clip over her and kicking the bedclothes off and waving her legs in the air.
We rushed at each other and kissed and pulled each other’s hair, and put on our dressing-gowns and ordered a big breakfast with shirred eggs and bacon, and telephoned the desk to send up our letters. We gave the waiter and the bell-hop their Christmas tips and good-luck charms that Mary had found in the Greek quarter in Buffalo, and had the trolley pushed up to the window, for though the weather was still stormy and rough, weather on an inland sea has always an air of futile ill-temper, there was a pure light roving the great grey Middle Western sky. There were a great many letters for us, and we took them as they came; and read them at a comfortable pace; we had plenty of time before we went out to find a church. Though the manufacturers of the water-softener we had just installed in the St John’s Wood house sent us greetings which we suspected of lacking personal warmth, the people we really loved had all caught the right post. I got Uncle Len and Aunt Lily, Mary got Aunt Milly. The cards they enclosed each showed a robin; they always did, every Christmas. Kate had been fortunate and found Lord Nelson’s Victory; and in her big sloping handwriting she told us she would go to Lovegrove on Christmas Eve and stand outside our house, as she did every year, and she was pleased that she had nothing but good news of us to take, though she would have to own that she thought we worked too hard. I could see her while I read, as she had kept that promise a few hours before, four thousand miles away, in the warm sun of the sacred night, threading her solemn path among the people with their armfuls of parcels and holly, and the children leaping at their sides, looking so tall and black and decent and prosaic as she carried out her errand to the other world. But Mary called me away from her.
‘Rose, Rose.’
She was on her feet, there was such happiness on her face that it seemed as if there must have been a letter from one of our dead in our Christmas post.
