Cousin Rosamund
Page 9
On his departure the laughter and chatter of his guests fused into a fountain of something just decently short of derision. Like many of the most disagreeable occasions of adult life, this party made us feel we were back at school. These people were like the girls at Lovegrove High School when they gathered round us and asked about our music examinations and said how glad they were we had first-class honours, but said something else after we had left the room so that we always heard a burst of laughter through the closed door. Alan and Cordelia crossed the room towards us, and Cordelia said to us, with her white look, ‘Was it really quite impossible for you to change?’ We looked round and saw that all the women had very good dresses and jewels, and the men had the slow and bulky look that is given by certain sorts of riches. There was nobody there we recognised, though by now we knew many people in London. We recognised in Cordelia’s panic the respect she paid to people who were not of our sort. She would instantly think that, because we did not know these people, they must be our superiors; that they might be our inferiors would never strike her. From an armchair in the corner there rose Mr Morpurgo who came to us and without offering any greeting said, ‘He is not a Jew.’
We said to the three of them, ‘Where is Rosamund?’
Alan said, ‘She tore her dress, Constance is mending it.’
‘How is she?’
‘Very happy, I am sure,’ answered Cordelia, restored for a moment by malice.
It was a curious thing that even now when Mary and I were angry with Cordelia we wanted to hit her and pull her hair as if we were still little.
I lowered my voice and said, ‘Who are all these people?’
Alan shrugged his shoulders, Cordelia pursed her lips. Mr Morpurgo said, ‘They are all coming up. Some are City people, there are two Members of Parliament, and a lawyer or two, and some newspaper people. I have never met any of them before.’ He looked at them coldly out of this pouched eyes. ‘Some of them will get through. Some will not.’
Mary whispered in my ear, ‘But why did she ask anybody but us?’
‘She could not help it,’ I said. ‘You know she could not help it.’
The fat little man was back with us. He returned to his stance on the rug in the middle of the room, although he addressed Mary and me in an extremely personal manner. It evidently appeared to him as an advantage that the party was too small for any person present to remain unaware of what he was doing and saying. ‘My wife Rosamund is so happy that her cousins have come. “Oh, it is Mary. Oh, it is Rose,” she cries.’ He spoke the words in a falsetto voice and clasped his hands in a cloying attempt to imitate an ecstatic feminine gesture. ‘And how wonderful it is for me too to see these young ladies. Look, I have married the most beautiful woman in the world, and I say to her, and you know how you say anything when you love a beautiful woman and you are first married, “Your family shall be mine,” and I mean it, for which of us English is not good with our families? But it might be a hard vow to keep, for not all families are easy to be good with. But all my wife’s family are as my heart desires, they are nice, they are beautiful, look at these two young ladies, you can see how they are, and they are that and more. Do you know who they are? Look hard. For they are famous. They are the greatest pianists in the world.’
He said our names, and the guests murmured politely. They had of course never heard of us, they were the kind of people who never go to concerts; and that was perhaps as well, considering the idiotic description. But even so, a voice said, ‘Give the little girls a hand,’ and some people clapped, while others knew one another well enough to know it was all absurd, and tittered.
‘They play,’ said Nestor Ganymedios, voluptuously closing his eyes, ‘more beautifully than anybody has ever played since anybody invented the piano, not counting the harpsichord. Do I know, since grandfather’s cousin was Anton Rubinstein?’ He suddenly grew sad and his chin dropped on his chest. ‘Alas, that great man is dead. We must all die.’ Cheerfulness, however, immediately brought his head up again. ‘But many people are dead. Good God, when one thinks of it, all people are dead except those who are actually alive. It is an immense number, we cannot worry about them, let us think of Mary and of Rose, they are alive and they play everything. Continually they play in Berlin, no artists are better known in Germany, and from now when they come to Berlin they will stay with my dear wife and me at my house at Dahlem that was built for me by the great Schaffhausen. I tell you, it is a thing only I can say, my house which was built by the great Schaffhausen. For he builds town halls, and art galleries, he builds, and universities, and huge concert-halls, and a cathedral, yes, in Thuringia he has built a cathedral, but dwelling-houses he does not build. For why? They are too small, and he is a great man. So he will build none, until he meets me, and then he says, “For you, Nestor Ganymedios, for you I will break my rule and I will build a house.” And now there it stands in Dahlem, it is the wonder of all, there is a huge window of glass, people do not know what it is, they guess, a factory, a hospital, and these young ladies they will stay with me there, and so will all of you.’ Somebody said, ‘Right, Nestor, we’ll take you up on that, old man,’ and the little man flung out his arms, ‘You shall all come. Waiters, waiters, let there be caviare. But, my friends, it cannot be now. Not till I have returned from South America where I go to buy twenty-eight hotels.’
‘Twenty,’ said Mr Ramponetti, suddenly, from his seat at the dinner-table.
‘Why do you say only twenty?’ asked Nestor Ganymedios irritably. ‘That old man is eighty-seven, he will die soon.
Maybe,’ he said, growing chubby with optimism, ‘he is dying now, we will buy those eight hotels from his heirs.’
‘If you are eighty-seven you may be eighty-eight, you may be eighty-nine, you may be ninety,’ said Mr Ramponetti. ‘Otherwise how are there all those old men?’
‘But I am very lucky,’ said Nestor.
‘So too is Arturo Arahona,’ said Mr Ramponetti, ‘or he would not be eighty-seven.’
Everybody laughed. ‘Mr Ramponetti is very witty,’ said Nestor, beaming round the room. ‘He has what foreigners so much admire, the English phlegm. For like me he is English in spite of his name. But who shall say how a man gets his name? But we are quite English, Mr Ramponetti is very English. Though he came late he could have had what I gave you for dinner, the oysters, the mushroom soup, the sole, the duck, but he is so English, he would have only eggs and bacon.’ He looked affectionately at Mr Ramponetti, and bade a waiter, ‘Give my friends much coffee, and take round again the champagne and the brandy.’ Suddenly his eyes fell on us, he gaped, he struck his forehead, and wailed, ‘My God, my God, I have forgotten. Rosamund wants you to go into the bedroom to see her, she is with her dear mother, who is to live with us in Berlin, all my wife’s family shall be as mine. Her dear mother is mending her dress, so tall is my wife that she trod on the hem of her long skirt, and she bade me send you in to her. Go, go at once, she will not forgive me, for she loves you as if you should be her own sisters.’
There was but one Constance in the bedroom. She was sitting stiff-backed in a chair by the window. Her body had always been an effigy representing the kind of woman that she was, but it had never revealed what she was thinking or feeling at any particular moment. So she looked us full in the face and we looked back at her, and we learned nothing except that whatever course of action had brought her to this room, she would persist in it until it was achieved, for such was her habit, not to begin what she did not finish. But because there were many panels of looking-glass in the room, we saw six Rosamunds. Each was sitting with back a little bowed on one of the twin beds, and wore a dress of pale sea-green satin with huge, shining, spreading skirts. Its body was closely and deeply cut, and the shoulder-straps were narrow for her splendid breadth. But she did not look naked for she was wearing a diamond necklace so massive and so remarkable that it clad her as decently as if it were a scarf. She was breathing slowly, and with each breath the diamonds rose and fel
l, and in the mirrors a dazzling multicoloured brightness flickered over her breast and shoulders. Some hairdresser had seen that her beauty was outside the sphere of fashion and had piled up her hair into a helmet of curls, and one golden ringlet fell past her ear and rested on the diamond necklace. She hardly moved as we entered, and it was not possible for her to speak. She threw her head back to look at us better under her heavy lids, and we saw her stammer beating like a huge pulse against her mouth. But we knew why she had left the party. The curtains were pulled back, and against the glass, only faintly patterned with the reflections of the room, was the darkly shining Thames with its barges, and the innocent and trivial electric signs, and the south-side factories with their smoke-stacks wearing the red oval blotch of their reflected fires above them, and the Houses of Parliament, with Big Ben as a second moon; and these things made the London which she and we had known all through our childhood and our youth. That window made the room a refuge to her disgraced flesh.
I became aware that she had lied to us about our Atlantic crossing. She had known that we were planning to sail on the Ile de France; she had pretended that she thought we were travelling on the Berengaria simply in order that she might spend her one night in London too early for us to meet her husband. It did not matter. We sank on our knees beside her and put our arms round her and kissed her, and looked up into her face, and waited for her to explain.
But she said nothing, only smiled faintly and stroked our faces with her beautiful hands, which, now that she had stopped nursing, were as white as ours. She was wearing a huge diamond engagement ring.
Mary said, ‘I am sure he is very nice,’ but still she did not speak.
I asked, ‘Where are you going to live?’
She could just force out the words. ‘Germany. Always Germany.’
‘Oh, Rosamund. You are forsaking us. But we shall see you often?’
Surely the meaning of her expression was pure pain. We turned to Constance but her face was blank. It occurred to me that perhaps Nestor Ganymedios was a lunatic whose misfortunes Rosamund had resolved to share; that this suite and the diamonds were extravagances he could not afford, and that Mr Ramponetti was a rogue who was using his employer’s lunacy as a decoy. Then there would be poverty and humiliation, perhaps involvement with the law, to take her back to her accustomed destiny.
‘Tell us,’ begged Mary. But at that moment Nestor Ganymedios burst into the room, crying, ‘Come back, come back, my darling, the Lord is coming.’ He embraced her so roughly that his lesser weight rocked her backwards, and gave her such a smacking kiss as he had given us. ‘See, Mary, see, Rose, does she not look beautiful? You are now of my family, some day I will tell you what her necklace has cost, but I grudge nothing to my beautiful wife, though I know she has always been poor, and would have been content with cheaper presents.’ She rose slowly to her feet and gave him her hands, smiling. She could not have made it more plain that she wanted to be with him, that she intended to stay with him, that this was a marriage which would never be broken.
I was enraged. It was against nature that she should be happy with this man, who was a head shorter than she was, who was ridiculous in form, whose head ran down with almost no neck into his body, which dwindled from plumpness to his tiny feet so gradually that he was like a fish standing on its tail. And indeed she was not happy with him. She was ashamed and repelled, so deeply that she felt almost nothing else. The one emotion that had not been driven out of her by this distress was, against all reason, this resolute loyalty towards the cause of her distress. This man could have no such rights over her unless he were going to go mad or starve; and indeed there was already the froth of madness on his phrases.
‘There will be coming in at the door, he has telephoned from his house, one of the richest men in the world, let me not lie, let me tell the strict truth, one of the richest men in the universe, and he is coming to drink my wine and eat my caviare and see my wife, and he is bringing with him the little one, but he is the big one, that I have dropped in the Bosporus this afternoon, that my janizaries tied up in the sack. How I wish,’ he suddenly howled, ‘that you could wear more of your jewels, that you could wear all of your jewels, but here people do not know how to live. Come now, my rose of the world; but come first, Mary and Rose, my family, my own family, which shall be round me like the vine, come first. For my wife she must make the big entrance when the rich man is here.’
We did not really think that any new and important guests would come. The party was from one point of view just like school, and from another it was like certain musical parties. While we waited on our return to the room we got the feeling of the people, and they were certainly rich and might be powerful, but they were not supremely so. They were as Mr Morpurgo had seen them; and they had accepted Nestor’s invitations because it seemed to them possible that his strange strategic assault on them might have had some chance of success, and they would not yet disdain any connection which might be useful. But they felt no certainty, and they were careful to mock him a little in the sight of their own kind, so that, if he failed, they would be able to claim that they had never believed in him. They were taking out this insurance every moment of the party. As each lifted his glass of champagne from the waiter’s tray he smiled slyly over the brim at his neighbour, however slight their acquaintance; each listened to Nestor’s stories with the laughter that he asked for, but changed it to a grin when he looked away. Had these people been satisfied with their position they would have stayed at home. So I was sure that no prodigious millionaire was about to appear; and I was wrong.
After about a quarter of an hour two men came into the room who were certainly very rich. One was Lord Branchester, a tall lean man with silver hair, rather like Lady Tredinnick’s husband, but not leathery, for he had not been in the tropics, he was a private banker. We knew him because his wife liked music, and though they did not really understand it they tried very hard, and they were generous and were on the list of guarantors of all sorts of concerts and operas. The other was Lord Catterock, whom we did not know so well, but had often met, for he was always at parties. He was a little man who hunched his shoulders to look as if they were broad and had a huge mouth, and spoke with a strong American accent, because he had been brought up in Texas. He had made a fortune in oil and was supposed to be one of the richest men in Europe. He was disappointing. You could see him saying to himself, ‘I am so rich that I can behave as I like, nobody dares punish me,’ and he was perpetually advertising, by a whimsical expression, that he meant to use this immunity in some impish and entertaining way. But it never came to anything except some violation of good manners, a too abrupt departure, a noisy demand for some food or drink or companion not available, or a sudden boorish quarrel.
Mary and I had dined with the Branchesters just before we had sailed for America, but he looked into our faces blankly. A muscle was twitching in his lean cheek. Lord Catterock was grinning widely and saving to him, ‘Come on, man, come on,’ though in fact he was not hanging back, he was simply behaving as one does when one comes to a party late, and is not sure where one’s host may be. But Lord Catterock was organising this arrival with cruel intention. He met Nestor on the Persian rug in the middle of the room, and the two small men, by their terrible need for attention, made it a stage which everybody watched. Rosamund came out of the bedroom and stood unnoticed behind them. She had disguised her misery and was blank. It might have been supposed that she was a stupid and beautiful woman who thought and felt little more than that she was wearing a beautiful sea-green dress and a beautiful diamond necklace.
Lord Catterock belled in his deep Texan voice: ‘All my friends will tell you that I never leave my own home in the evening. But I broke my rule to come and see you, Mr Ganymedios.’
‘You are like me, Lord Catterock,’ said Nestor, forcing his voice down to Lord Catterock’s level. ‘Never do I leave my own home except to see a dear friend. It is a great thing to have friends.’
‘Yes, I was surprised,’ said the other.
‘By God,’ said Lord Catterock, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so surprised. And the whole shareholders’ meeting was surprised. You fairly stole a march on them there, didn’t you, Mr Ganymedios?’
‘I had my men dig by night and change the course of the stream,’ said Nestor modestly. Then his eyes and Lord Catterock’s met, and for a minute they were two small fat men mocking a tall thin one.
‘And mind you, it’s not easy to surprise Branchester,’ the huge mouth continued. ‘Though I once surprised him myself. Didn’t I, Branchester? Do you remember how I surprised you?’
‘I have not forgotten it,’ said Lord Branchester.
In my ear Mr Morpurgo murmured, ‘Excuse me, Rose, I must leave you, you will find me in the corridor, I need fresh air.’
‘I surprised him so much that he’s been on his guard ever since,’ Lord Catterock persisted. ‘Haven’t you, Branchester?’
‘I thought so,’ said Lord Branchester.
‘And, mind you, he took it in good part, and we’re the best of friends now, aren’t we, Branchester?’ There was no answer, and the huge mouth was irritably licked by a huge tongue; but after a second the Texan accent went on. ‘I’ve brought him here tonight to make friends with you. Nothing like a surprise to make a foundation for friendship. But it has to be trodden down before it makes a foundation.’ He repeated this, as if he were reading Today’s Great Thought off a calendar. ‘And by God that was a surprise and a half you sprung on him this afternoon. It should be a great friendship between you and him that starts today. A great friendship. Yes, yes. And you know,’ - he chuckled suddenly - ‘it surprised me too. I don’t think I’ve ever been more astonished in my life.’