Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  Avis said, ‘Will it always have been like this? Or has she done it, though she is so horrid?’

  But Oliver and I were looking at the table. Round it five chairs were set askew. The glasses held wine at different levels; on the plates were peach-skin, peach-stones, the buttery mess where somebody had scraped off the rind of a cheese like Camembert and Brie; there were emptied coffee-cups standing oh saucers full of wet cigarette-ash. On a butler’s tray set up against a bookcase there were more dirty plates, a dish with a chicken’s carcass on it, another with some aspic to show there had been cold meat there, an empty salad-bowl, a glass dish with some ooze of whipped cream in it.

  ‘We are like the three bears,’ I said. ‘Who’s been eating my porridge?’

  ‘They have left us some bread,’ said Oliver. And he fingered some bottles at the back of the tray, ‘But nothing to drink.’

  Anger blinded me and choked me. ‘They have taken your supper. How dare they!’

  ‘What!’ said Avis, who had been touching the parrot on the mantelpiece with her fingertips and now turned round. ‘But they all went out. Why did they want our supper?’

  ‘I told them it was our supper,’ I raged.

  ‘But who were they?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘When Phyllida Dane and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint came Lionel de Raisse and Lord Sarasen let them in, and they wanted to give them something to eat,’ I explained, ‘and I said, “There is some supper for us in the Parrot Room, please do not eat that, we have had no dinner.” They knew!’

  ‘What a prep-school trick,’ said Oliver. ‘Oh dear, Rose, how can I get you something to eat?’

  ‘It is not me,’ I said, ‘but it is you, men always ought to have lots of food to eat, and Avis, she is young, at her age she should have lots to eat.’

  ‘I could not eat now,’ said Avis. ‘I want to kill them, I wanted to kill them before you came, now I want to kill them and torture them as if I were a Red Indian. How dare they eat your supper and make a fool of you, when you told them where the supper was? They did not like you, of course. They kept saying you were a virgin.’

  ‘Oh, Avis, and you did not protect Rose’s good name by saying that you had heard different?’ said Oliver.

  She gaped and asked, ‘Oh, should I have?’ and I said, ‘It is all right, he is laughing at you. Oh, Oliver, do not laugh at us. This is really horrid.’

  ‘Yes, it is horrid,’ said Oliver, ‘because one does not know what to do. I feel it is absurd to be angry because three pederasts and a blonde and a procuress have eaten our supper. But I feel that if I am not angry I really am a little too docile for something that walks on two legs. I feel I shouldn’t have let this happen to you and Avis. But it is all so silly. Must we be angry?’

  ‘Must we be hungry is what we had better ask,’ I said. ‘Do you think that when that butler’s wife came home he forgot his care for the cellar and unlocked the door between the house and the kitchen?’

  But the padded leather door down the passage was firmly closed. Avis said, ‘I told you they were beasts, why did you tell me I was wrong?’

  ‘We did not quite tell you that they were not beasts,’ said Oliver. ‘We suggested to you that they were not beasts to such an extent that you had to worry about them. But just at this moment they have been beasts enough to get us into a situation where we are thoroughly hungry.’

  We walked back towards the Parrot Room, and hesitated at the door while Oliver asked us if we would care to eat the bread, and I exclaimed, ‘Oh, I remember now! There are some sandwiches we did not eat in my picnic-basket, and some coffee. Let us go up to my room, and we will eat them before we go to bed.’

  ‘That will make up for everything,’ said Avis.

  ‘It will make up for everything, and we will play our sonata tomorrow afternoon and go away.’

  ‘But I shall never see you again,’ said Avis.

  ‘Nonsense, we are saddled with you, and you are saddled with us, for the rest of our lives,’ said Oliver. ‘We know how good you are, because we are so good ourselves, and you know how good we are, because you are so good yourself, and we cannot get rid of each other. Now, up these stairs, for Rose’s sandwiches and bed.’

  But when we came to the landing we stopped. Mine was the first room: and outside it were my suitcase and my picnic-basket, draped with my nightdress and my dressing-gown, and my sponge-bag and my beauty-box and my bedroom slippers on the floor beside them.

  ‘By God, it cannot be,’ said Oliver. He turned the doorhandle, but the door was locked. ‘But by God it is.’

  ‘Phyllida and Sukey and Sir Geraint meant to go on to Carl’s, wherever that is,’ I explained, ‘but Lionel de Raisse and Lord Sarasen wanted them to stay. Well, they have stayed.’

  ‘But are they all in one room?’ said Oliver. A suspicion crossed our minds. ‘My room is just round the corner.’

  But as we went to see if what we thought had happened Avis caught us back. ‘If they wanted three rooms, they would take mine too,’ she said. ‘Mine is beside yours, oh, I cannot bear it if they have put my things outside my room. They are so disgusting. It is a hateful thing they have done to you, because you are a goddess, but your nightdress is lovely, your dressing-gown and everything is lovely, my suitcase is brown-paper, but my nightdress is cotton and my dressing-gown is flannel and it isn’t even clean. Oh, why did I ever come to be tortured like this?’

  ‘Oh, this is hell,’ said Oliver.

  ‘You are a silly little fool,’ I said. ‘How should you have decent clothes before you have earned any money? And even now when I go on tour I get my things in an awful mess. Come along and we will see.’

  We went to the corner of the passage; and there was Oliver’s suitcase with thick silk pyjamas of a curious violet-blue and wine-coloured dressing-gown on it. It was odd to think of him doing his shopping. And in front of the next bedroom was Avis’ brown-paper suitcase and her poor things, thrown out with special contempt. She could not help crying, and I too found tears of rage on my cheeks.

  ‘I do not know what to do,’ said Oliver. ‘I should kick in the doors, beginning with yours, Rose. But when I had done that I would have to roll out whoever was in your bed, and I don’t think you would care to sleep in sheets warmed by Phyllida or Sukey.’

  ‘But how could they do this?’ I wondered.

  ‘Because they are all drunk,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, de Raisse and Sarasen were a little drunk when they let the others in,’ I said.

  ‘And there were three bottles of burgundy there, and a brandy-bottle,’ said Oliver, ‘all empty. Yet I would have thought this hardly old Geraint’s mark, even drunk. But let that be. We will find bathrooms to wash in, and I will carry down your cases and we will pick ourselves the most comfortable sofas downstairs.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Avis. ‘Let me carry my own things down.’

  ‘Let that be,’ said Oliver. ‘That is not what really troubles you. What do you want to do?’

  ‘Why, run at the doors, and kick the panels in, and then run at whoever I find inside and scratch their faces and pull their hair out by the roots and hit them till they fell on the ground and then jump on them,’ said Avis, ‘and there is something out of the Bible about bowels gushing out that I would like to happen to them.’

  ‘I am so angry that I would like to do that too,’ said Oliver, ‘and yet I do not want to do it at all. And neither do you. You simply want to go away and get on with your work. And that is all Rose wants too. But that makes us more Quakerish animals than we like to be.’

  ‘There is something,’ said Avis, and choked.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’ I said.

  ‘I do not want to play to these beasts tomorrow afternoon,’ she sobbed.

  ‘There is no question of that,’ said Oliver. ‘Neither Rose nor you can play here.’

  ‘We will go home and play together later,’ I said.

  We made her sleep on a very fat sofa in a little library, and
when she was settled under a rug we had found in the hall, we gave her the sandwiches that were left in the picnic-basket. We had to say we had had some while she was washing. She tried to prevent us seeing her flannel dressing-gown, which was indeed quite dirty. I could not wait till I got her home to Mary, who would see her through all this. Then Oliver found me a sofa in a long drawing-room and a tablecloth for a blanket, and we said goodnight. Since leaving Avis he had grown silent and looked unhappy; and beyond telling me how sorry he was he had let me in for this insult he made his goodnight brief enough.

  After he had gone I shuddered with fury at the humiliation we had suffered, and was exasperated at the beauty of the room. There were vague pictures of mountains sloping to plains and fused by them in golden sunshine, temples on seas themselves swimming underneath seas of light, a heroic vision of earth, floating on walls made vaporous by raised plaster-work, which suggested a ghostly growth of flowers up an invisible trellis, and on the faint golden ceiling above me showed plasterwork and Venus and Adonis. I lay on golden brocade and there were deep falls of golden brocade at all the tall windows. There was something very displeasing in suffering such an extreme humiliation in these gorgeous surroundings. The fundamental flaw in the world was that there was no drama worthy of the setting at the Dog and Duck. Green trees, each shapely as if turned by some craftsman neat as a potter but in love with wilder shapes, leaned over the mirror of the Thames, and should have witnessed some serene consummation of the lives of Uncle Len and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily, but they had to stand still and be scorched by the fire of Queenie’s unassuageable and even unidentifiable longing. The house where Mary and I had our home should have seen some event that had never happened within its walls, that should have happened if we were to be quite sure that music was real, that it was an honest interpretation of life and not a legend to be told to distract our attention from intolerable features of existence. It was not right that these worthless dilettantes in this house, who were taking refuge from life in perversity, who were going further than perversity into the pure mischief of monkeys, should have the power to make me doubt the value of the world, the value of art. And there was not Rosamund to reassure me. I tossed and turned and put out the light.

  Perhaps I slept a little. In any case I was awake when the door opened and the light was turned on. Golden light flooded down on the golden room from great chandeliers, faintly tinted. I sat up and saw Oliver standing at the end of the room in his dressing-gown. I noted the jut of his shoulders, which was strange, for they were not broad, yet he held them as men with broad shoulders do. I put on the reading-lamp on the table by my sofa and he switched off the chandeliers. I was a little cave of light in a hall of shadows, and he came to me out of the shadows. He looked wretched.

  ‘Were you asleep?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. What is the matter? Have they done anything else?’

  ‘No, no. All quiet on the barbaric front.’

  ‘But there is something worrying you.’

  He stood by the sofa, and sighed deeply. ‘Rose, Jasperl means something more to me than I have told you.’

  The lamp shone strongly on his anguished face. I looked up into the darkness that hung about the upper walls, past the landscapes of sunny plains and mountains, of seas incarnadined by sunset, faintly glossed, to the ceiling, at the huge black shadow his standing figure cast across the golden brocade curtains. I had not thought Oliver was homosexual. He had spoken of men that were with mockery. But then homosexuals often mocked their own sort. I drew the tablecloth that was my coverlet more neatly round me, and straightened myself. I felt too tired to talk about this, and thought how peaceful it must be to lie quietly in a coffin.

  ‘You knew my wife? You knew Celia?’

  I nodded.

  ‘She was very beautiful and she was a good musician and I loved her very much. And it was all right for a time. We could not have been happier.’ He sat down and turned the lamp away so that it shone on neither of us, only on a little marble sphinx that lay on the table. ‘Could we have been happier? That is one of the things I do not know. I am not sure whether she was ever happy. One is an idiot,’ Oliver said, ‘however little one is an idiot about other things, one is an idiot about love. I used to come into our house at Hammersmith and pass through the square hall we had, and in the middle of the hall there was a highly polished table and Celia used to put flowers on it, in a round dish, a little raised, so that it cast a big reflection on the shining wood. I remember specially that every spring she used to fill it with those very brown wallflowers and forget-me-nots, and when I came in I used to see the blue forget-me-nots reflected on the wood. When I wonder whether Celia was ever really content with me, I think, “Of course she was, just think how wonderful it was when I used to shut the door behind me and see the curved garland of reflection of those forget-me-nots blue among the highlights and the brown depths of the wood, and I felt I was home, that everything in the house was going to be like that. Of course we were happy!” But that is stupid. All that that meant was that Celia liked putting forget-me-nots in that particular dish, on that particular table, and that I liked the look of them when I came in.’

  Rosamund had come back into my mind. It was no argument that she loved us, that she had liked to eat cream and honeycomb with Richard Quin, all people not dyspeptics like to eat cream and honeycomb, nobody had suffered from spiritual dyspepsia badly enough not to like being with Richard Quin.

  ‘But of course I have more reason than that to think that we were happy,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes, that I understand,’ I said.

  ‘But if you love anybody does it not last for ever?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘It does with me,’ I said.

  ‘It does with me,’ said Oliver. ‘You and I are the same sort of people. Celia is dead but I still love her. I cannot love anybody else.’

  ‘The person I love is not dead,’ I said, ‘but it would be easier if death was what divided us. But I could not love anybody new.’

  ‘When they take charge of you like that, they should not go away,’ said Oliver.

  ‘What do you mean? Was it not you who went away?’ I asked.

  ‘I?’ said Oliver. ‘I could not have left her any more than I could have cut off one of my hands or feet. What is it?’

  ‘Ah. I made a mistake,’ I said. ‘But it does not matter. Go on. Go on.’

  ‘I have to tell you all this because it is all so strange, and nobody else that I can think of would understand. I cannot think of anything you would not understand. I must have bored you a lot lately because I come and see you and derive a stupid satisfaction from the thought that if I told you what was troubling me you would not think me a fool.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver, my dear, I wish you had told me long ago. I would never think you a fool.’

  ‘Most people would. You see it was Jasperl who took Celia away from me.’

  ‘Jasperl!’ I looked about me, at the glowing suggestions of the sunlit plains and mountains, the flushed temples, on the darkness of the walls, the faint moulding on the darkness above that suggested the beauty of Venus and Adonis. ‘But he is so horrible.’

  ‘Yes. He is horrible.’

  I wanted to cry out that Celia must have been horrible too. I had to bite my knuckles.

  ‘He is horrible as musicians are not. He is horrible as few really good artists of any kind are. He is horrible like a bad French painter living at St Tropez might be, with a wife and a mistress quarrelling in a small kitchen and their children, mixed with the children of a seduced servant, playing in a yard with ironmongery, dragging an old tin bath about. He has thick black hair with a wave like a woman’s and a jaw like a boat, and a huge Adam’s apple, and he mocks and leers.’

  ‘How could she?’ I breathed.

  ‘Am I so bad, Rose? Tell me frankly,’ Oliver asked.

  ‘You are quite good-looking and you are nice, you behave properly,’ I said.

  ‘I thought I mad
e her happy,’ said Oliver. He stopped and pondered. ‘Looking back, I cannot believe it. Also we had enough money. I’ve always had this house, which I thought quite lovely. We could go away when we wanted. We had pleasant friends. What was it that I did not give her? But I could not give her what Jasperl gave her, for it was vile.’

  ‘Did she run away from you with him?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘She went to Switzerland to give three Fauré and Duparc concerts,’ said Oliver, ‘and when she came back she was quite different. She made some excuse to go back to Switzerland quite soon, and this kept on happening, she was supposed to be giving lessons. She was unhappy. Anyone could have seen that. She enjoyed nothing. Yet she seemed well, even more vigorous than I had ever known her. But her work went off. I thought that was what was worrying her. She did not care about it any more. She sang quite without genius for the last four years of her life.’ He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘I would not have thought she could have existed without her genius. But there was a lot more than that. She suddenly stopped being well. She went to Switzerland and was away far longer than usual. Then she came back, utterly miserable. And I got an anonymous letter telling me that she had been the mistress of Jasperl. What made is specially disagreeable was that the letter came from Jasperl.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’ I asked.

  ‘I gave it to Celia at once,’ said Oliver, ‘and she recognised the writing. I realised that moment what was to be our tragedy. You never were at the Hammersmith house. There was a room at the back that was almost all window. I have a feeling that a grey river flowed through my head at that moment, carrying barges with it. I thought it unlikely that Celia had spoken of me in any way that would lead Jasperl to suppose I was not likely to give her an anonymous letter about herself. If he had not disguised his writing it could only be that he wished her to know that he had written it. He was, we both thought, trying to get rid of her finally. It appeared from what she told me that he had told her he was tired of her some time before. She had made not only her last visit to Switzerland, but the one before, in order to persuade him to take her back.’