by Rebecca West
Oliver said, ‘Why have you suddenly stopped talking?’ and I was irritated, it had happened so often when he came to see us that he himself suddenly stopped talking, and got up and went away, too. Then came that stretch of railway where there are more nursery gardens. We began to eat, and looked out on fields of roses, the cross-looking little plants set far apart on the rich earth, in the midst of their crossness the small flowers so bright that it could be seen even at that distance whether they were red or yellow or white. It was the time when the herbaceous plants were in their prime, and a full brush had painted broad blue bands of delphiniums and purple bands of Michaelmas daisies. Blue and purple comes out of the earth everywhere as July goes towards August, and in the hedgerows there were chicory and mallow and thistles and vetch. They reminded Oliver of the fields round the house in Norfolk where we had spent the first summer of the war, we always thought of it now as the last summer.
‘That is one of the things I always remember about that visit,’ said Oliver. ‘Either there were an extraordinary lot of flowers there, or I had never noticed them before. And there were wonderful ones down on the sea-shore too. Your brother once took me to a part of the dunes where there were miles of yellow sea-poppies. You cannot think how beautiful it was, with such a restrained beauty. Not many flowers on each spiky plant, and the leaves a wonderful blue-grey, that sometimes melted into the tongues of water that lay among the dunes.’ He spoke as if he were sure that Richard Quin had taken nobody to this stretch of sand except himself. But of course he had taken Mary and me there as soon as he found it. I found myself saying to my dear brother, ‘Really, you should not have been so ready to please, you came near to pretending.’ But of course this was nonsense, he had no faults.
After that the railway runs for a long time beside a trout-stream and a canal, set in a pale green landscape like the background of a Rowlandson drawing; and Oliver and I found that both of us had again and again looked out at them, and resolved to take a train to the district the first free day we had, and walk along the clean buff towpath and over the clean grey bridges. Of course we had never had time. Our own country was covered for us with a nexus of work; to get a holiday we had to take refuge in another country, it was impossible for us to travel in England. But this present journey, though there was to be a concert at the end of it, was half-way to a holiday. As we munched, the great downs, stretched out like sleeping dogs, came up between us and the South. In a field an elm lay prostrate, that had been felled by a winter storm but had brought its root with it, sticking up like its feet, so that it still lived and had brought forth its summer foliage. Among its leafy branches children played and waved to the passing train. They looked like the children in children’s books, genuinely different from adults, and preoccupied with other interests, as our family had never been. I waved back to them, though the sort of child I had been, not yet dead in me, despised them. Yet I wondered if such children grew into adults happier than Mary and myself; and instantly noted that this afternoon I was almost happy.
So was Oliver. ‘It should all go well,’ he said. ‘I have had several letters from Lady Southways, and really they sound very good.’ He took them out of his pocket and read me passages. ‘It is funny how all rich women write letters in scherzo form, and funny too that they evidently want to give the effect of a scherzo played by a pianist of imperfect technique, for they always end out of breath. But you see what hope uplifts her, she sees herself as godmother to a prodigy, as Diaghilev to Nijinsky. And that is really what she will be, if we can get her to keep him for a couple of years, if we can get him to be kept for a couple of years without biting the hand that feeds him and infecting it with a specially deadly microbe, which he has obtained by seducing the wife of a pathologist who once had done him a good turn.’ He laughed and, folding up the letter, said, ‘But I do not really think this funny at all. Why, why, I ask myself, why,’ and he sang the theme out of the second movement of the sonata.
We had left behind the neat little river that kept company with the canal, now there ran beside us a broader and wilder stream. Our train halted where it widened beside the ruins of a mill. We looked out of the windows on the other side and found this was our junction. We had to hurry to get out our suitcases and the lunch-basket, and reach the little train that took us, through wet fields veined where they were wettest with drifts of late meadowsweet to foothills that were golden with the afternoon sun. This was the West, almost as foreign as France. ‘It might be true,’ said Oliver, looking out at the cottages that sat with clumps of hydrangeas like footstools at their feet, and wore late clematis and roses and fuchsias like excessive jewellery, ‘that here they knew of no other ways of killing cats but by choking them with cream.’
But there was no car waiting for us at the station. We both took out our letters to see if we had made a mistake, but no, we had been told to be at this station, at this hour. There was no taxi in the village, so we left our luggage with the porter and crossed the road to an inn, the Huntsman’s Horn. The innkeeper’s wife said that we could have tea in the garden, and we warned her that a chauffeur from Barbados Hall would be coming to find us. She smiled at us as if we held a secret in common, and offered to make us scones if we would wait, but we reminded her that we might be fetched at any moment. We found a rustic table facing a bed of dahlias that were now transfixed by the horizontal shafts of the late sun. Crimson and scarlet, orange and yellow, purple and lavender, white and grey, burned the great lamps of incandescent velvet; and while we sat staring the innkeeper’s wife came along the paved path, tenderly bearing something white in her arms, smiling down on it. She spread it before us with a transparent affection of the casual, and we looked down on the phantom of a tablecloth, covered from hem to hem with darns. It was a disconcerting exhibition of toil and thrift in the midst of this profligate floral splendour, this velvet that had not been woven, these lamps that burned no oil. But it was her treasure. She smiled so proudly that I said, ‘What a wonderful cloth,’ and she said, ‘Why, yes, it is. It comes from Barbados Hall.’ She had been a kitchenmaid there in the time of Lord Mortlake’s father and mother, and when she had left to be married Lady Mortlake had told the housekeeper to give her any linen that there was to spare, and she had found a wonderful damask tablecloth that had been used for big dinner-parties but had had some hot candlegrease dropped on it. The hole had been right in the middle, so she had cut it into four, and she was still using them, though that was forty years ago. She could well believe, she told us, that we had never seen lovelier linen.
We sat among the fiery flowers, and drank strong tea and ate bread thick with strawberry jam and Devonshire cream, and followed with our fingernails the pious intricacies of the network of darning cotton, and talked of music and that summer in Norfolk and what Richard Quin might have done if he had not been killed. A bumble-bee came about us, making the very sound time would make if it did not pass silently. Almost an hour had gone, and the chauffeur had not come for us. ‘Martin will be going mad,’ said Oliver, ‘we should have gone through the sonata at least once before dinner. I will go and find a telephone.’ But he called from the house that there was none, he would have to go to the rectory up the road. I waited happily, for I was engaged in an adventure, I was doing something quite unlike anything I usually did. I was not in our home at St John’s Wood, I was not going to a real concert, I was not at the Dog and Duck, which was now more troubled than my too empty home or any concert-hall, because of the unresolved misery of Queenie. I was moving in a free place where my movement would have no consequences, for in three days Mary and I would go on our holiday, and there would be no more reason for me to see Oliver until he wrote a new composition which I could play. And that might be a long time, for he had spoken of beginning another opera, though for some reason I felt that that might be a mistake.
Oliver came back a little disconcerted. He always had his pride that with him everything went smoothly. ‘It seems the car they sent for us broke dow
n. We cannot be fetched until another car comes back and is sent out again. It will perhaps be another three-quarters of an hour before it comes. That is all right, though it seems a little strange, but what worries me is that I could not speak to Martin. Evidently the butler could not find Lady Mortlake, it was a pansy who spoke to me, I think it was Lionel de Raisse. He was very much concerned at the thought of you being left high and dry like this, but he really did not seem to grasp what I meant when I asked for Martin. But we will be all right, there is no reason to worry.’
The old inn-keeper came out and took us behind the dahlia-bed to show us his rabbits; blue Angoras, making a great show of sensibility. Just at the right time, when the light had left the garden, his wife hurried up the path, explaining that the Admiral who was the second husband of Lady Mortlake’s mother, and lived at the Dower House, had called in for some soda-water, and would be pleased to take us up to Barbados Hall, just as soon as he had fetched some medicine for his invalid wife at the surgery. ‘It will be nice for you,’ she breathed, ‘to be driven by one of the family.’ She made us feel like the donors of an altarpiece, elevated above their station by being represented in proximity to sacred personages, and, smiling, we waited for the instrument of our elevation on a bench outside the inn, our luggage at our feet, resting on a strip of cobbles, set shining grey in a network of blue shadow that edged the rose-red road.
‘That is a superb suitcase of yours,’ said Oliver. ‘An oddly superb suitcase, if I may say so. It is more what I would have expected of Lady Mortlake or Lady Southways.’
‘I bought it in Paris,’ I said. ‘It is the product of terror. When we were little our family luggage was awful, Japanese baskets that had broken at the sides, and pockmarked tin trunks. People used to laugh at us at railway stations, and the landladies at seaside lodgings used to sneer like Dickens characters when our things came off the cab.’
‘What, were you poor?’ exclaimed Oliver. ‘I never knew that.’
I stared at him. I felt as if he had lain indifferent on a beach while I drowned in the surf. ‘Of course we were poor. How could you know us and not know that we had been poor?’
‘I knew only that your mother was a widow, and that you had had an isolated childhood, and that you and Mary seemed unlike other people,’ said Oliver. ‘But you had that nice house in Norfolk, I supposed you were all right and always had been so. Weren’t you? You always seemed to have so much of everything. I told you, there were more flowers in the fields round that house than I had ever seen anywhere else.’
‘We had nothing,’ I told him angrily. ‘Oh, it was so dreadful for Mamma. We had less than nothing. There were always debts, duns came to the door, we had the most horrible clothes, and shoes were the worst thing of all, they were so dear that we always went on with the old ones long after they had begun to hurt. Ask Mary, she will tell you.’ I was enraged, but what I said was wide of the mark. I was angered not so much by his ignorance of our poverty as by his remark that Mary and I seemed unlike other people. I hated that he should share the obstinate persuasion of the world that there was something strange about us. But as I saw the pity on his face anxiety struck through me, I asked, ‘And you? What sort of childhood did you have? Were you poor?’
‘No, no,’ he said impatiently, ‘we were not rich, but we were not poor. But why were you so poor? How did it happen?’ He shook my arm to make me tell, but it was then that the Admiral came up in an old Daimler, driven by an old chauffeur, it might have been a chariot in a masque representing honourable old age. He hobbled out and introduced himself, and we were at once torn by that conflict which, for us, usually raged in the shadow of a great house such as Barbados Hall. The Admiral’s blue eyes were hard in the wrinkled waste of his old eyelids, he was hard and stupid and obsolete. There was impertinence in the candour with which he conveyed to us that, though it was not surprising that I was reasonably elegant and a pianist, since women were condemned to be entertainers of all sorts, it was surprising that anybody as masculine as Oliver should be a musician. But Oliver explained with perfect civility that from his earliest childhood he had never cared for anything but music, as he might have confessed to congenital asthma. The Admiral was so much nearer death than we were that it was not becoming for us to correct him; and indeed it is necessary that some people should be insensitive to music. All musicians know that a community in which everyone was susceptible to musical excitement would run mad. The old man’s deafness let sound speak its meaning in safety. Also he and the chauffeur, and all the crowd of servants one could divine behind him, had their own mystery. We drove into a park flooded by the setting sun, and on a knoll of golden turf, before a golden hanger, a herd of deer, bright brown, amber-bright, stood fixed in fineness, a line of attention running taut from each raised muzzle to the same point of the compass. ‘It’s easy to know what’s coming to them down the wind,’ called the chauffeur, and the Admiral gave a connoisseur’s chuckle and grunt. We had no idea what they meant. For these men the earth was covered with forms and embodied motives of which we were ignorant, as for us the air was a complex of sounds and articulated motives which they could not hear. They were also our associates in art, practitioners of a craft we could not undertake. Their kind had not built the house that lay in a sudden garden amid the deep folds of this part; but their kind had caused it to be built and had preserved it, as our careless kind could not. We reached it as the sunset blazed. The central wing had two storeys of deep red brick divided by stone pilasters; the brick was glowing, the stone was stained the colour of ripe peach flesh. In the windows flamed small reflected sunsets, their wildness bridled by good taste, for each window was so right a shape. Pilaster, strip of brick, pilaster, strip of brick, might have made too simple a pattern had not the pilasters burst into capitals under the eaves, capitals ornate as the heads of the heavier flowers, the stronger lilies or the Datura. On each side there was a wing in a later, classical mode, faced by a colonnade; the one not flushed by the sunset was lilac-blue. Time had not been allowed to spoil one square inch of this.
We could not drive up to the door, for there was a car in front of it. On the broad steps three menservants were coloured by the sunset like the stone, and might have been architectural details of the huge and highly decorated doorway. They looked at the Admiral’s car with a certain distaste, and the Admiral cut through our goodbyes with an enquiry as to whether we were quite sure that Lady Mortlake expected us to arrive tonight, and telling us that he had only wondered, and that he must be getting on, his wife had had a special salmon sent from Ireland, and some friends were coming in to share it at an early dinner. It might have been that there was the fog of a family quarrel in the air.
As we mounted the steps the butler remained standing against the carved framework of the door, his face and hands and shirt-front glowing in this remarkable identity of colour; he might have been a trompe l’oeil butler painted on the stone. We found it odd that his silvered handsomeness should be discomposed, that he should regard us with what seemed like open reproach, and should abruptly exclaim, ‘We would have fetched you!’ and should make no motion to usher us into the house. But just then there came through the door a woman whom I could not doubt to be Lady Mortlake, and not for a moment could we believe that she was there with the intention of welcoming us. She was dressed for departure, and she burst out of the house as if it were a constraining bodice and now her bosom could be bare and free. She looked at us with frank impatience because we were in her way, then recognised us, and after a hostile pause repeated our names loudly and with ecstasy. Some faces had shown behind her in the darkness of the doorway, and with a freshet of laughter these disappeared. It had been obvious that she had raised her voice for other ears than ours, that she had been giving what she knew would be a cue for that laughter, which was not good-natured, which she had known would not be good-natured. On us she turned the full brilliance of her appearance in a greeting far too cordial, to listen to it was like looking at a pa
ttern material from too short a distance. Like many women of that time, she spoke with a cat’s voice, and overstressed certain words, introducing into each sentence an affectation of unbounded enthusiasm and a satire on all spontaneity. She explained to us that she had to rush to the bedside of a sick relative. To convince us of her regret she leaned towards us and we were lapped by waves of an intoxicating scent, surely more useful at the bedside of the well than that of the sick. She had not seen the Admiral’s car, so she identified the invalid as his wife, her mother-in-law. The doctors could not tell, it seemed, what was the matter with her.
‘Well, she has a special salmon tonight,’ said Oliver, but Lady Mortlake was not attending. She ran on into the orange light as if it were the sea on which she was embarking for Cythera.
We went through a circular hall, where gods and goddesses stood on pedestals round the curved wall. Some people had a second before been looking down from the gallery above, but they had stepped back. We went to our bedrooms, which were the usual thing one finds in old houses, big square boxes with Queen Anne furniture and needlework pictures and 1860 watercolours, and I gave the housemaid my keys and washed and made up, and was ready when Oliver knocked on my door. His room was just round the corner of the corridor, I had heard him singing the theme of the first movement of the sonata as I washed. We went downstairs and found the butler, and before we could ask him where Martin Allen was, he told us with a bizarre hauteur, as if he were acting a butler in a film, that if we followed the footman to the small music-room we would find the violinist. As we went along the corridor Oliver hung back and muttered, ‘I wonder what this means. She was going to a lover, of course.’ It angered me that he spoke as if I would not know that. ‘But to the girdle do the gods inherit. But there is something else wrong: I cannot understand why she should think we cared whether she was here or not tonight, our time will be taken up with the rehearsal. Still, Martin will be able to tell us.’
