by Rebecca West
I always found them mysterious, and now they were presenting us with a mystery particular to this hour. They greeted Oliver and me with cries that were in part their own tribal version of the convention followed by Lady Mortlake, which at once pushed effusiveness to its extreme and mocked it, and were in part intelligent enough references to our recent work. But soon their conversation was muted, and they became, for them, curiously immobile. They were like the bright herd we had seen on the knoll, all looking one way, all braced by a common perception. But we understood them hardly better than deer and could not guess what was coming down the wind to them. Presently they left us, saying, with gaiety that rang as queerly as the laughter one hears as one goes along corridors to a swimming-bath, that they would see us later.
Avis said, ‘They wanted to say something to you that they did not want me to hear.’
They had indeed averted their eyes from her and had said none of the pleasant things that would have been natural in such circumstances, they had not asked us how we found our new colleague and given us a chance to compliment her.
‘Come on, you silly little girl,’ said Oliver. ‘They do not like you, and why you should mind that I cannot see. Rose does not waste her time regretting that she has never been elected Beauty Queen of Clacton-on-Sea.’
‘As a matter of fact I do,’ I said. ‘Passionately. But let us get on.’
The sonata went much better this time. At the end we sat back and Oliver smoked a cigarette, and nodded his head at us as if he were a pasha, and said: ‘But it must be late. Yes, it is late. I wonder when they have dinner.’
‘Not so late as this,’ said Avis.
We had to ring several times before anybody came, and then it was the handsome silver-haired butler, who was still flushed, not now by the sunset, but by the glow of slight intoxication. He was surprised to see us. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘You were not expected to dine. I’m afraid there is nothing ready for you, and the rest of the staff has gone to the Fire Brigade Ball at Aysthorp. There is nobody here but young Alice the kitchenmaid. This ball is our great social occasion, Lord Clancardine himself, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, attends it. My own wife would never miss it, she has gone every year since she was a kitchenmaid herself, bless her, poor soul. It is a pity,’ he said censoriously, ducking his head to see himself in a mirror and sleeking his hair, ‘that her ladyship never now honours us with her presence. The dowager Lady Mortlake always made it her duty, so long as she could get about. But who am I,’ he said, with an effect of impersonation, ‘who am I to cast the first stone?’ He was perhaps admiring some debonair guest he had admired while waiting at table.
‘What were we intended to do about dinner?’
‘Why, her ladyship thought you would be going with the other guests to the party Mr Oswald Sinclair is giving over at Great Barn,’ said the butler. ‘You were all invited, to be sure, and I thought you had gone and we had the house to ourselves, for I believed I saw Lord Rothery and his friends come in here to tell you it was time to be leaving.’
‘There has been a mistake,’ said Oliver.
‘You have not missed much,’ said the butler dreamily. ‘Mr Sinclair has not an inherited cellar. But it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He returned to the study of his image in the looking-glass, bowing as if in gallantry.
‘Can you get us something to eat?’ asked Oliver.
‘Nothing hot, I fear,’ said the butler. ‘None of the staff will be back till midnight, and please God they are later. The time will pass like a flash, I fancy.’ He remained for a minute suspended in a smiling reverie. ‘But you must have a bite. What a pity I did not know before! For young Alice the kitchenmaid and I cooked something for Mr de Raisse and Lord Sarasen. They have had a falling-out and have made it up again, so they had a fancy not to go to Mr Sinclair’s party, but asked if they could have a meal private like, in the pavilion beside the lake. So young Alice and I cut them some cold chicken and gave them some white burgundy, just the same as I had got up for Alice and me, and a bit of the raspberry cream we had for lunch, and a nice piece out of the Stilton just the same as I’d got ready for Alice and me, and we carried it over. Very agreeable it was, going down to the lake. I would have done that for you and the two ladies with pleasure, with greater pleasure, for after all it is the way we were all brought up. I would like to do everything I can to make people happy tonight. Who is the better for it if things go wrong? So I will put out some cold meat and salad for you, and what is left of the raspberry cream and Stilton, and some of the peaches, and this white burgundy, this Montrachet, all in the Parrot Room, for that is where we have our little late suppers. It is opposite the foot of the staircase that takes you to your bedroom, and you cannot miss it, but I will leave the lights on and the door open, so that there can be no mistake. This is a confusing night.’
The door closed behind him, and Avis cried, ‘I told you they had something to tell you that they did not want me to hear. They did not want to take me with them, they hated me so much that they even ditched you so long as they could leave me out. It is partly this awful dress, it is the wrong colour, and it is no use ironing it, it gets crumpled at once, the housemaid did it for me this morning, she is nice. It was a bad buy, but I have no time. I have to rush through my work, and there is nobody to look after me, I have to be squalid. And I have almost no money, of course my clothes are awful. But I do not think that is the only reason why people hate me. There is something else. What does it matter what it is, it means that I have brought something horrid on you. You will not want to have anything to do with me.’
But the butler was back with us.
‘If there is anything you want, say it now,’ he bade us, ‘for now I will lock the door to the kitchen quarters. I will lay you out the supper, but then I will turn the key.’
He looked hard at us and assumed a look of grave responsibility. ‘It is to protect the silver,’ he said. He scrutinised our faces and told us, ‘The Mortlake silver is famous.’ Then bowed and walked backwards, as if we had been royalty, then turned about, and made an eager scuffle to the door, rising on his toes, as if he were a king bee about to take off in a nuptial flight. Some consideration struck him, and he called across the room, ‘Is there anything more? I am muddled tonight, it is all the vexations. Her ladyship is terrible,’ he said to himself. ‘When she has a new one, such a pack. And I have only one thing on my mind.’
The door closed on him.
‘See, Avis,’ said Oliver, ‘see what a kind of universe we live in! Not the grim cage of hate which you imagine, but a lovely warm swimmy place, with stuffy little rooms in the kitchen quarters where young Alice the kitchenmaid can be fed on chicken and white burgundy and learn what is good for her. Now, what shall we do until our supper is ready?’
‘Go through the sonata once again,’ said Avis. ‘I am not hungry any more, now I know that supper will be there. Let us get it as right as I can do it, so that I can sleep. Last night I cried for hours and was all swollen. I do not look so awful as this usually.’
‘Rose, could you do it?’ asked Oliver. ‘Right. Then let us start, and, Avis, never let your sense of the importance of the rhythm leave you.’
We started off again, and knew the combination of tense effort and serene relaxation that is a good rehearsal. I thought as we came to an end, ‘What is the good of a performance? Why do we not retire at the first possible moment and simply play good music with our own kind?’ When it was over I was in that state of exaltation when the intelligence that lives in one’s hands and in the depths of one’s mind suddenly visits one’s lips, and I was able to speak to Avis of technical tricks that I had long practised without ever realising it. This ugly child; who thought only of herself, was so wholly committed to beauty, so selfless, that she made immense additions to the treasure I had been seeking to lay up for myself for twice her lifetime.
But soon there was a distant sound of banging on wood, and the clanging of a bell, and I w
ent out to see if someone was trying to get into the house. I thought it might be that our fellow-guests had returned from their party and that the butler, in his desire for privacy and his slight confusion, had locked more than the door into the kitchen.
I went along the corridor past the circular hall by which we had entered the house. All the lights were extinguished but two torches held by bronze boys at the foot of the staircase, and the gods and goddesses cast on the curved walls huge shadows which the curve made comical, leviathan. At the door, on which some people were still beating, were the man whom we had found crying over the piano and another, in very beautiful dressing-gowns, one mulberry, one rich blue, who were pulling at the heavy bolts of the front door, and crying, ‘Darlings, we are doing all we can. But they’re frightful, too frightful!’ The bolts gave way so suddenly that the three people who had been beating on the door were precipitated into the hall. I stood behind the pedestal of Artemis and her hounds and watched with fascination because these people were not only performing certain movements and speaking certain words and creating an incident in the ordinary course of living, they were also acting the incident in the convention, or what we suppose to be the convention, of eighteenth-century Neapolitan opera.
The bolts were heavy, but the two men pulled them as if they were still heavier, as if they were of a weight such as would not have been put on the door of any house built later than the Middle Ages. The three people who fell into the hall affected to have lost their balance as would have been impossible unless each had been leaning all his weight against the door and had had only one toe on the ground. Recovering themselves, they rushed together and, engaging themselves in stylised embraces, made of their coloratura greetings a quintet. Their meeting, which could not have been less planned, was the more like a scene on the stage because the last person to fall into the hall was a famous beauty, Lady Phyllida Dane, whose natural fairness emitted as much light as any actress gone forth in make-up under the limes, and whose dress was of the particular greenish rose that any theatrical designer might have chosen to set off the mulberry and the blue of the two men’s dressing-gowns. The friends who accompanied her were both stock characters from early opera. One was a tiny and emaciated elderly woman with black ringlets, named Sukey Herzegovina, a pet of Lady Phyllida and her set, for whom she acted as interior decorator and fortune-teller and go-between. The other was pantaloon, an old retired diplomat called Sir Geraint Something-or-other. Without doubt he would be forced to marry Sukey in the second act, but it would turn out in the third act that it was all right because the priest who had performed the ceremony was really somebody’s serving-maid in disguise.
The quintet then developed into something so formal and so rich in invention that it actually recalled certain scenes in Cosi fan tutte. Standing to the left of the semicircle and crying out a sort of melody, Lionel de Raisse pinned Phyllida’s elbows to her side and cried, ‘Oh, darling, but you must stay the night, you must indeed,’ and she replied, ‘Oh, darling, we simply can’t, we are on our way to Carl,’ and Lord Sarasen and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint, standing at about the same position in the right semicircle, repeated this theme, with adaptations of the thematic material appropriate to their characters, for about the same number of bars. There was one delightfully anachronistic feature in the ensemble; I had been teased because Lord Sarasen’s manner of speech as he wept over the keyboard had aroused in me a musical memory which I could not quite identify, but I now realised that the plangent sweetness in his voice had the exact quality of the boy soprano’s rendering of ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’, which was the favourite record of Aunt Lily and Aunt Milly and Uncle Len, and, I believe, about a million other people at that time. But his barley-sugar smooth tenor twists and turns made delicious dramatic contrasts with Sukey’s refusals which were uttered in rapid triplets, denying extravagantly but keeping strict yet conciliatory time, and Sir Geraint’s falsetto runs, which were almost in the nature of an accompaniment. I felt some of the fascination they exercised on themselves and their friends, and did not, as I had intended, slip out of the shadow of Artemis and her hounds into the deeper shadows of the corridors and go back to my friends, but came out and smiled at the newcomers and greeted them before I went away. Lord Sarasen asked me if I had any idea how to get some food for these poor people who must be starving; he and Lionel had rung the bell and nobody had come. I explained that the staff were away at their revels but would be back at twelve, which could not be far off. I remembered how long Avis had worked, and how she had said that she had had no tea, and I turned back to them, and said, laughing, ‘If you find our supper in the Parrot Room do not eat it. Oliver and Avis and I have been rehearsing all evening. That Jenkinson child is a genius.’ ‘What, that dingy child?’ said Lionel de Raisse, and Lord Sarasen, the wings of the dove suddenly renounced, asked sadly, ‘Oh, do you think so?’ The newcomers caught an intimation that there was an issue between their friends and me, and for a second they stared at me like ill-natured children. But de Raisse and Lord Sarasen went on to talk about the possibility of getting food for his friends. In a trio Lady Phyllida and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint said that they had had an early dinner at Bracegirdle and that anyhow Carl would have champagne and oysters lying about the house. I left them laughing happily at Carl’s extravagance.
I went back to the music-room and found Oliver and Avis still busy with a problem that might be solved by an alteration of fingering. ‘What was all that, Rose?’ said Oliver, looking up. ‘Only Lady Phyllida Dane and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint,’ I said, ‘paying a call.’
‘Not staying here?’ asked Avis. ‘No? Oh, I wish I could have seen her. Is she really beautiful? I thought so. But if she comes here she is sure to be a beast.’
‘No, she is not a beast,’ said Oliver. ‘You really are a little ass, Avis. Phyllida Dane is a good girl, devoted to her plump little tea-cosy of a husband, and a great help to good causes. She takes a lot of dumb oxen to the ballet and to the right concerts that would just otherwise stand in the fields and low. Put your mind on your work and stop wasting your energy on your harmless inferiors.’
They did not need me. I went to a sofa at the end of the room and lay and watched them, and thought how well they were getting on together. I closed my eyes and set out on a backward journey through dreams to Papa and Mamma and Richard Quin. My heart ached as I found myself going through the dark corridor of that direction and I knew that when I turned this corner I would come on these three, but not on Rosamund, for though she was no longer in my life she was not dead. But I hurried on knowing that those who were safe in death would explain to me what had happened to her, and I was folded in one of those dreams so happy that they are not remembered on waking, for where they are experienced never sleeps, never wakes. I woke once to hear several cars drive out, and then the chatter and laughter of people passing the door. Our fellow-guests had come back from Mr Sinclair’s party. Sometimes the music Oliver and Avis were playing forced itself on me, as music does on sleep, not as sounds, but as ragged multicoloured streamers of light across the dark backcloth of the eyelid. I was at rest, I was not at rest, I was happy, I was distressed, that is to say I was alive. I shared in the peace of the dead, I was exiled from death in this state where I swayed on the balance, and then I was aware that two people were confronting me who were not dead, for they laughed, and laughter is the sign of our astonishment at this perpetual state of insecurity. I did not want to come back, but I was delighted at the faces of Oliver and Avis, they were so deeply familiar to me. I did not have to wonder for a minute who Avis was, though I had met her only that evening.
Oliver said, ‘I am pointing out to Avis that though you have been asleep and we have had our backs turned to you this last hour or more, nobody had crept in on all fours to steal your rings, so she need not think this such a house of evil. Now come on, we must find the Parrot Room and eat.’
We went through the corridors with our arms enlaced
, as if we were all students, and Avis said, ‘This is a great adventure. Nobody at the Athenaeum will believe it when I tell them except Mr Torbay.’
‘It has been a great adventure for us,’ said Oliver. ‘Nobody will believe us when we tell them how well you play.’
‘My sister Mary will,’ I said. ‘She sits waiting for news of people like you. She reminds me of the religious people who long for more and more children to be born so that they may serve God. She wants more and more musicians to play the works of the great composers.’
‘Will I be able to meet her too?’ asked Avis, but took it for granted she could, and burst out, ‘Oh, it is all right now! I will always remember how horrible it was and that you came and it was all right.’
‘But I see no door open on a room with all the lights on,’ said Oliver. ‘Can that old villain have forgotten us?’
‘This should be the room,’ I said. ‘He told us it was exactly opposite the foot of the staircase. But the door is closed.’
Oliver opened it gently and felt for the light. ‘This is it,’ he said, and we followed him in, Avis exclaiming, ‘Every room in this house is better than the last! They do not deserve it.’
There could be no doubt that this was the Parrot Room. It was a vague and languishing little library, the sort of place where a charming but ineffective man might write a sensitive diary of his empty days, or two egotists meet for courtship that would lead to nothing, however far it went. The curtains were sea-green and shining, and the walls were covered with the kind of old paper which has a pile like plush, and were the colour of green distance, of grassy hills seen afar in summer twilight. Against three of the walls were low bookcases, painted greenish white and cut very delicately, so that the many-coloured inlay of books seemed to float in lines rather than be packed on shelves; and on the fourth wall was a mantelpiece of sea-green marble, patterned with a pale orange stone in starry shapes that made it seem insubstantial. The centre of the mantelpiece and each bookcase had its blanc de chine parrot, each caught in a different moment of raucous and ruffling comment. They were the only objects in the room that gave back highlights, that were positive and recalled the action of the will, the reaction of criticism. This was the Parrot Room to which we had been directed; and under the chandelier was a table with a white cloth and set with silver and glass and china.
