Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  There were some steps leading down from the terrace and an iron gate into the garden. The ape ran after us, squalling, but was comforted when Mary led it by the crimson tinsel ribbon. We walked over the white grass in front of the arc-lamps, our shadows long and black before us, touching the feet of the people we sought as soon as we started. I hoped we could take Rosamund home with us that very night. Somewhere in the crowd that sauntered between the gold and silver masts there would be Cordelia, her prettiness pursed in contempt, her white gloves clenching and unclenching and twitching the pearls about her neck, as she raged to Alan that all the things she had said about Rosamund were true. She would be on the point of weeping for fear, lest they were indeed not the lies she had always known them to be. But there would be an end to her fear, and to all our fears, if Rosamund came back with us. But as we drew nearer the group it was not the same group that we had seen from the terrace, and did not permit the same conclusions.

  The elephant and the camels ceased to be familiar and credible. We no longer saw them from the distance, as painters and photographers see such great beasts, in order to fit them into their canvases or lenses. The creatures lacked the unity the further vision gave them. Surely each camel’s front legs belonged to a tall and supple Negro runner, the hind legs to another; and the two had joined together in fame under some shabby hides, older than themselves, and were carrying before them in play a great swag of a neck and a mask made with great clacking teeth taken from other beasts, which they had stolen from a medicine man’s hut. It had long fair eyelashes, which surely it had failed to darken not because animals do not make up but because it was unworldly; and behind these lashes were distressed myopic eyes, which showed these odds and ends to be inhabited by one spirit, at a loss. The elephant had seemed smooth and cast in a mould of flowing lines, we now saw the deep corrugations of its trunk, the rough linen-like surface of its tusks, the wet pink formless gash of its mouth, the shapelessness of its ear, clapped on the sides of its head like bits of sacking; and from the stuffed tent of the vast bulk protruded a small mean tail, belonging to a smaller beast. But again there was the eye, little and genial and self-possessed, to show that all these things were one.

  We had forgotten the inherent strangeness of the world. Though human beings are less strangely shaped than the great beasts, what is within keeps the balance even. The strangeness of these people, to our distress, was not where we would have preferred it, among the strangers. The old man and the woman in the sari were a king and queen from the East as they are pictured in a thousand children’s books. Nestor had been seen almost as often, as the rogue who went out of the gabled city riding backwards on an ass. But Rosamund was not to be recognised, not to be understood. She was staring towards us but did not see us, for she was blinded by the lamps. She was therefore not veiled by any pretence. It was her true face that we saw; and its meaning was not the meaning of her body. That still told its story of complete disgust. But the straight bar of her eyebrows and the curved bars of her lips showed her as much at peace as if she were sleeping. The dejection of her spine, the weary clumsiness of her arms and hands, which worsened the moment by making her seem unworthy of Nestor’s ecstasy, spoke of an accumulation of sick perceptions. The old man and the woman in the sari could keep their opinion of her secret no better than Lord Branchester and Lord Catterock; indeed she had an even sharper knowledge of their misjudgment, for the last few months had given her practice in measuring contempt. But as we drew nearer, it became more certain that her peace was untroubled by the least bad dream. In her eye there was no explanation that disunity was unity. Her pure blank gaze simply stated that disgust and serenity could lie down in her together.

  When she saw us she cried out, ‘Mary! Rose!’ and Nestor said, ‘Ah, it is the great pianists come to see how the poor boy who married their cousin can give a party.’ He drew us both to him and we shut our eyes, since he intended to kiss us. But he suddenly stepped back and pointed his finger at something behind us. Mary had let fall the crimson tinsel ribbon, and the ape was now lamenting its abandonment, holding its head in its hands and rocking itself and groaning. ‘What, it is a monkey!’ exclaimed Nestor, in loathing. He watched it for a moment, then put his hands up to his head and rocked himself and groaned. ‘This is the most horrible thing I ever saw, it looks like a little man, it looks so like a little man.’ He covered his eyes, ‘Rosamund, Rosamund, get them to take it away. It should be killed, it looks like a man being sad.’

  The woman in the sari looked at the old man and raised her eyebrows, as if to say their host was even stranger than had at first appeared. But he ignored her and said, ‘Yes. It looks just like a man when he is sad.’

  Rosamund put her arm round Nestor’s shoulder and soothed him. But she did not have to do anything about the monkey, for the attendant standing beside the elephant silently came forward and held out his arms to the little creature, who jumped up into the embrace. The attendant wheeled about and held it up to the elephant, who threw out his trunk to grip it and lifted it on to his back. There the monkey bowed to the four quarters and began to somersault, over and over and over, and Rosamund said, ‘Nestor, look. You can look now. Up there.’

  He was instantly enchanted. ‘Ah, the little one! Up there on the big one! He is not afraid!’ The attendant said, in a shallow, sweet, quick, oriental voice, ‘No, they are great friends, they spend nearly all day together.’ Nestor, his eyes on the somersaulting, took a note from his pocket and held it out to the attendant, mistaking the direction by a wide angle. When he realised this he made no motion to move it nearer the attendant, who had to walk to him to get it. His generosity became a proclamation of indifference to its object. ‘Ah, nothing so comical as a monkey,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old man, ‘there is no animal more comical than a monkey.’

  Later we sat with Nestor and Rosamund beside a stage in the centre of the lawn and watched two great dancers without seeing them. She sometimes stroked our hands and once asked with terrible candour and humility, ‘Can you enjoy anything of all this?’ We stayed till nearly the end, and would have stayed longer had it not been that Mr Ramponetti had sat down beside us and wearied us.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, when the sun comes up,’ he said, smiling at the glittering scene, ‘how bad all this will look. All the lawn trodden, bits of broken champagne-glasses, and where the animals have been. Shocking it will be.’ He glowed with a sense of co-operation with ruin. ‘We will pay, of course, but it will be a long time before the poor people in all these houses have a nice garden again, a long time indeed.’

  V

  ROSAMUND did not speak of staying in England, or of visiting it again, and in the next day’s evening papers there were photographs of them leaving Croydon Airport for the second party in Paris. We were tormented and we were alone. Our only consolation was the perfect efficiency with which the business of most importance in our world was transacted, without the aid of Rosamund. Nancy gave birth to her son, Richard Adam Bates, without trouble to herself or anybody else. She even contrived that he should be born not at night but a most convenient period of the day, at an hour which allowed Oswald to go off to the school in the morning without suspecting that there was anything unusual afoot and to return home in the evening and find everything in order. It was represented that she had sent for Aunt Lily as soon as she felt the first pains, but there had been some finesse there, for it was all over when Aunt Lily arrived.

  A month later, Nancy said, ‘There was almost no fuss. It was important.’ She was pouring out tea for Aunt Lily and me in the dining-room. ‘I wanted to keep Oswald calm. He worried himself ill thinking I was going to die. It’s all his father’s fault, those everlasting sermons about the Last Day. The old man didn’t mean any harm, of course, but it is a pity to bring up a sensitive child not to realise that there are a lot of days as well as the Last Day.’ Aunt Lily wistfully objected that it was nice to have a husband who made a fuss of his wife, but Nancy sho
ok her head. ‘No, it is tiring too. If I am to have four we cannot have all this fuss.’ Her upper lip rose from her teeth, she was gay but she was weak, she warned us that she could not work beyond her strength.

  ‘Why must you have four?’ I asked.

  ‘Oswald will feel so grand with four, and we can afford to keep them.’ She meant, ‘I will take this bullied child that has been terrorised by eternity and make him at ease in time.’ She did in fact love him. He was not simply the sole companion her circumstances allowed her, not the one instrument by which she could make herself new company. Yet she was honest and was obliged to add, ‘And I have always thought it would be nice to have four.’

  The baby had been stirring and squeaking in its Moses basket. She rose and picked it up without passion, with a movement that was neat and debonair. ‘Nothing the matter with you, my lambkin,’ she said. ‘Only a minute’s cuddle and down you go again. But how beautiful you are, oh, how beautiful.’

  ‘Maybe you won’t have as many as four,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘but I’ll be glad when you have another. For the mite’s sake. It would be awful to be an only child. I couldn’t have borne it myself. I should have been so lonely without Queenie, it would have been past bearing.’

  ‘Yes, you have a sister, I have a brother, Baby must have a sister and brother,’ said Nancy. Her cynicism was really enormous.

  ‘Bless him, he’s the image of Mr Bates,’ said Aunt Lily.

  ‘Yes, he’ll be a handsome man,’ said Nancy, ‘but he mustn’t preach silly-willy sermy-wermons. Mummy won’t let him. Look at his little puds, aren’t they sweet.’

  It was remarkable how she practised the ritual in spite of her cynicism.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, his being like Father Bates,’ said Nancy. ‘And nothing to worry about if the next one is Janet Ruth, and looks like Mrs Bates.’ Our eyes went up to the enlarged photographs: to the preacher, not defying the lightning but taking it into his bosom, to the preacher’s wife with her oval face, her troubled brows, her tiny mouth. ‘I wonder why she drank.’

  Aunt Lily winced. ‘Oh, hush. Don’t say it out like that.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ said Nancy. ‘Skeletons must feel hurt at being kept in cupboards all the time. If we’re not to forget Oswald’s mother, as I shouldn’t like to be forgotten, we have to own she drank.’

  ‘The poor thing, it’s a madness,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Your tongue goes up to the roof of your mouth, and then you’re gone. So they say. But you’re right. I wonder why she should have had that weakness, though. She had her own home and a husband. You might say she had everything.’

  ‘Nobody has everything,’ said Nancy. ‘But my Richard, my Dick, my precious, I have you.’ She and the baby were fused in an embrace which had no tension in it, not even warmth; it was as if a spring wind had blown a flowering branch back against the tree that bore it, and rocked them together.

  ‘Queenie isn’t coming home to something lovely, not half she isn’t,’ said Aunt Lily, and then sighed. Hesitantly she began, ‘Talking of your brother,’ but Nancy said, ‘We all want another cup. Run and get some more hot water, Aunt Lil, there’s a dear.’ As the door closed she put the baby back in the Moses basket and looked at me through tears. ‘I am stupid since Baby came,’ she said, ‘I can’t do anything more. I can’t rise to it. Please tell Aunt Lily what Cecil wrote to me.’

  In the kitchen a kettle had been put on to boil, and Aunt Lily was passing the time by comparing methods of tea-leaf-reading with Bronwyn. ‘Well,’ she was saying, turning a cup round and round between her hands, ‘my mother would have said that meant a commercial traveller. I’m sure she would. But your mother may be right. And in a way it’s the same thing.’ I took her out into the hall, and we sat down side by side on the stairs, and I wished very much that Rosamund could have been there.

  I began, ‘Nancy wants me to tell you that she has heard from Cecil. She wanted me to tell you because she still feels weak after the baby.’ My arm was round Aunt Lily’s waist. I felt her meagre skeleton adjust itself to withstand a blow, and her teeth chattered. I could not imagine how Rosamund would have told this story. I followed what I supposed would have been her line by saying that Cecil was very unhappy and had suffered much from the family tragedy; but what I said had no power. I did not myself grasp the precise mode of his unhappiness. I thought it probable that Nancy was right and he was not really unhappy but moved by an ungracious temperament to take advantage of what was clearly an exceptional opportunity for ungraciousness. My words were therefore only words and worked no transformation of the news I gave; and when I finished Aunt Lily groaned and struggled to her feet and clasped the newel-post.

  ‘The little bastard,’ she said. ‘Not that he was, mind you.’

  I implored her not to upset Nancy, and she sobbed that she would not, she always remembered that Nancy was feeding the kid. She put her head against the wooden ball she hugged, and swallowed her sobs. I said, still without force, still knowing what I said to be so inexact that it could have no value, that Cecil had to be excused for not forgiving his mother because, after all, it was his father who had died. She burst into a torrent of whispered words, pointing a gnarled and useful finger, incongruously frivolous with scarlet nail polish, at the dining-room door, to remind us both that Nancy must not hear. What Queenie had done, she told me, was not just hard to forgive; it was impossible to forgive it. Her own blood often ran cold at nights thinking of Harry, who had never harmed a mouse, and how his insides had been wrung out of him by what she gave him, and he had grudged her nothing. She had been in the house, she had seen it. But we had all done the impossible thing and pushed on with the job. How could we leave Queenie alone with what she had done? It would be like leaving someone to freeze to death outside the door on a winter’s night, only she wouldn’t die. And my Mamma had made it quite plain to her that it had been a special sin to make away with Harry for the very reason that he wouldn’t lie quiet in his grave if anybody was persecuted just for doing him an injury. Why couldn’t the silly little shit Cecil come in with the rest of us on this? She clapped her hand over her mouth and asked me not to tell Len she had used that word, but muttered, ‘Oh, hush,’ as the dining-room door slowly opened.

  Nancy looked out, immense shadows under her eyes. She swayed as she saw us and hung on to the door-handle.

  ‘Why, Nancy,’ said Aunt Lily, her voice cracking, ‘you look such a kiddy, and you’ve got a kiddy yourself now! Listen, Rose and me have had a bit of a pow-pow over young Cecil. Don’t you worry. Men grow up late. He’ll come round in a couple of years, and Queenie won’t be put out. She’ll wait. Now let’s see about the kettle, I’m dying for my other cup.’

  I was still young, so I thought that after a certain period of time events, however violent, retired and lived on a diminishing emotional pension accorded by those they had affected. I knew this was not so in my own life. I was aware that my father’s desertion of me had never ceased to happen; when I went to Cordelia I knew that there was a Wilson Steer over the chimneypiece and a certain timid exquisiteness about her dress and the food, because there still rang in her ears the brutal comminations of a long-dead German violin-teacher, pronouncing her a barbarian. But I believed that other people were able to travel out of the orbit of experience, as easily as they could leave a town so far behind them that they could not hear its church-bells. I was surprised that the murder of Harry Phillips was still so appalling to his family that the return of his murderess was to them a domestication of horror, a confusion of this world with hell. The language of my friends was banal with a banality which was perfect, with a perfection which admitted no exceptions, which often wearied me, although I loved them as much as if I were forced to listen to a mindless tune in C major in two-four time strummed hour after hour on a poor piano. They cultivated also a banality of mood, a cheerfulness which might have proceeded from stupidity and which often was stupid, because it was automatic, which often prevented them saying what their courage
and serenity and shrewdness had to communicate. Nevertheless I knew they were standing in a desert place, like people in the Bible who are being tried by the Lord.

  It was about this time that Kate came into the drawing-room when I was eating sandwiches after a concert, and stood with a distant air, her hands folded in front of her spread skirts, as she always did when she was asking a favour. The proud intention of this stance was to present herself simply as a servant, and renounce all advantage to be drawn from our affection for her. Yet it was so she melted our hearts, for she was then most Kate, most a sailor dressed in skirts. The years were working on her, as they had long worked on Lady Tredinnick, to harden her out of unfemininity. But there was a difference, for Lady Tredinnick was becoming male in aspect, while Kate was changing into some sexless natural substance, say wood of a ship long at sea. She made her voice impersonal as if she were answering roll-call on deck; and she told me that because she had heard Mary and me say that we had not heard from old Miss Beevor for some time, she had been down to Lovegrove to visit the old lady, and had found her sad and ill. She wanted us to ask the old lady to stay with us.

  ‘What has tipped the balance is that the old half-Persian cat has died,’ said Kate, ‘and that now she cannot play the piano at all. Her fingers are too rheumatic. She has nothing to do but sit and think of your Mamma and all your family. It is such a life as not a dog should have. But you must understand that if we have her she will never leave. She will not come, of course, unless you pretend she is only to come for a short time till her bronchitis mends, and she will mean to leave. But she will never be well enough in her body or her mind to go back and live by herself. And she will be curst when she is old, she is fretty now. But I hope you will ask her to come.’