Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  He fingered the marble sphinx and fell silent.

  ‘Oh, Oliver! Oh, Oliver!’ I breathed.

  ‘I was at first terribly angry. I could not bear it that she had not told me. It seemed to me vile that I should have shared her with him. Not because I minded that, though of course I do, but because she minded it, I knew she had, looking back on it.’

  I wished furiously he would not talk of such things. But his voice cracked with misery as he said, ‘I asked her why she had done this, and she said that Jasperl had asked her not to tell me. I said she need not have told me who her lover was, she could just have said she had a lover. Then she told me that she had put that to Jasperl, and he had forbidden her to tell me that she had a lover, even when she offered to give me lying details, so that I would think that it was someone quite unlike Jasperl. When I asked her what reason he had given for this monstrous prohibition, she said he had given none. It had seemed to her that if he told her to do something it was right for her to obey; and as we sat there in this window by the river, with this letter he had written to torture me and dismiss her, lying on a table between us, I saw that it still seemed to her a law of nature that she should do anything that he told her to do. I was in the presence of what I then called madness. I would not call it that now. But anyway the agony was something I could not understand.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘That is it, not being able to understand.’ This was far worse than Rosamund.

  Oliver suddenly laughed. ‘How I should hate to tell this story to our forthright little Avis,’ he said. ‘By God, she’s good, isn’t she? But to get on, I stopped being angry with Celia, and I must have been fairly irritating to her, because I was patient with her as one is with people who are mad. We separated for a time. She cancelled her engagements and went to stay with some people in Italy, and I went over to America and stayed with old Lowenthal in New England. I was full of confidence, for a damn silly reason. I had got all his early compositions and I had quite rightly thought them worthless. This gave me a feeling of superiority. Then we started all over again in the Hammersmith house. And in six months Jasperl got her back again.’

  I cried out.

  ‘Well, he would want to,’ Oliver said. ‘It is his aim, his constant aim, to hurt people. By getting Celia back he hurt me, and he had by now a considerable interest in me; and he humiliated her, and humiliated the German conductor’s wife with whom he had eloped in the interval, and then had all the fun of humiliating Celia again when he left her. As he did a few months later. That was a peculiarly horrible business. He had fallen ill with phthisis, and Celia had felt that she was of use to him, looking after him during his haemorrhages. She was very kind to people when they were ill. It also made some sense of their relationship. She was not just there to be the object of his sadistic passion, the subject of her own masochistic passion. She was his wife, his mother. At this point, and of course it was inevitable, he threw her out. He professed a sudden loathing for her which, he said, made him feel excited and ill, so that his doctors ordered that she must go away. This was at Lausanne. She did not leave the town at once, for there was no longer anybody to look after him. By this time all that horrible business of Kehl I told you about was over. But Jasperl did not send for her, and she decided to kill herself. It was unfortunate that she was one of those people who are compelled to read everything in print that comes their way, if a parcel came to us wrapped up in sheets of newspaper or pages of a book she would flatten them out and see what they were about. Somewhere she had read that some quite common medicine which is quite easy to get a doctor to prescribe is fatal, if one takes it over a period of a week or so and stops oneself from drinking anything. She got a prescription of the stuff and sat in a grim little hotel taking the dose and drinking almost nothing. If it had not been that her eye had caught this wretched piece of information I think she would still be alive, for she was so kind, she would not have hurt her family and me by causing the scandal of a suicide. Her family do not yet know either that she ever left me or that she killed herself.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ I said. ‘Did she kill herself? I heard only that she came back to you and got ill and died.’

  ‘She killed herself,’ said Oliver. ‘But it took a very long time. She got so ill that she fell into a coma and they took her to a hospital, and I was sent for. I was there for weeks, and then I took her home. But she had done the job, her kidneys were destroyed. She died dreadfully.’ He slipped forward from his chair and buried his face on the cushions of the sofa where I lay, just below my feet. I sat up and leaned forward and stroked his hair, and presently he raised his face and said, ‘During the time when she was dying she often spoke of Jasperl, but she never told me anything good or pleasant about him. When she was delirious and cried out for him it was not as if she longed for him, it was more as if he was a torment against which she was protesting. It was simply as if he were the disease from which she was suffering.’

  ‘This was madness,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said obstinately, ‘it was not. She had been horribly disfigured by her illness, but after she was dead her beauty returned to her. I stood by her body and I was intensely conscious that she looked as she had done until she went to Jasperl, but that she was gone from me; while she had been with me, unchanged, my wife, till the last moment of her life, though she had been puffed and swollen and slow. All these strange dealings with Jasperl had been carried on by the Celia that I had loved.’

  I thought to myself, ‘Yes, what Rosamund has done she herself has done, she is not changed.’

  ‘Then, when I had buried her, I heard that Jasperl had written these new works, this symphony, this violin concerto, this opera, and I went to great trouble to get the scores. My motive was part curiosity. I had a feeling that perhaps I might find what she had seen in him. But I also was being base. I had derived great satisfaction when I first knew she had been Jasperl’s mistress in reading his early compositions and finding they were worthless. I am sure I hoped that those later compositions would be worthless too.’

  ‘I wish they had been,’ I said.

  ‘No, that would have done no good. It would have left the mystery of Celia’s love for him unsolved. And you know, Rose, that no good can be done by there being more bad music in the world. Even when I read the stuff and hammered out the important passages on the piano and realised that Jasperl had genius I was glad that it was so. But it added to my perplexity. I had loved Celia, Celia had seemed to love me, we had led a happy life together, she had lied to me and degraded herself and walked into a bog of cruelty for the sake of a man who had nothing good or even agreeable about him, who was a fiend out of hell. That was one mystery. Now there was another. To me music is contrary to hell, the annulment of evil, but this fiend out of hell was a better composer than I am.’

  ‘No, no,’ I cried.

  ‘As we stand now, he is the better of the two,’ said Oliver obstinately. ‘Rose, what does that mean? You see what the problem is. I don’t mean that I think music ought to help people to be kind to their mothers or pay the rent regularly, and I am sure that at the very moments when mutts are most sure that Bach was ecstasising over the Christian mysteries he was thinking of sound and nothing else. But music is what Celia and I were, and not what Celia and Jasperl were. And it is strange, it makes nonsense of it all if Jasperl is a great composer. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought of the person I loved as being the same as music, too. And all my doubts seem doubts of music, too.’

  ‘You know, I always knew you understood,’ said Oliver. ‘How strange we should have the same experiences. But I must tell you what I want to ask you. After Celia died I fixed about selling the house at Hammersmith and I went to Switzerland, and I sought out Jasperl. I did it to show that I did not believe Celia’s love of him was simply madness; and I did it to show I still believed in music. He was not sure when I found him that I had not come to kill him, so you can guess what he did. He s
tammered out that Celia had from the first pursued him and that his motive in sending her away, the first and the second time, was to send her back to her lawful husband, partly out of respect for holy matrimony, partly out of respect for my compositions, which he professed to admire. I think it may have been true that Celia pursued him. He was her destiny, the martyrdom to which her cruel God called her, it is possible that when she came face to face with him she followed him as an early Christian saint might follow a bishop whom she knew was to lead her to the stake, the grid, the lions of the arena. That is not, however, how Jasperl put it, but there were the three damned scores, unperformable, perverse, magnificent. I explained that I had not come to talk about Celia but to see how I could keep him alive and get him on to writing more music. He was miserably unhappy in a state sanatorium which was good enough for the ordinary patient, but no good for him. He could do no work. I got him out of that to a more comfortable private place, where he could have his own chalet and a piano and strum away as he pleased. I have been keeping him going ever since, and, Rose, I cannot do it any more. Not a day more.’

  ‘Of course you cannot,’ I said. ‘We must think of something.’ ‘Oh, Rose, he is so vile!’ sighed Oliver. ‘He cuckolded me, and I, the funny English cuckold, come over and save his life. Of course it is funny if such things are funny; and to Jasperl they are enormously funny. Or rather he pretends that he finds them so. He knows everything. He has chosen to be evil with his eyes open. He knows that in a marriage such as Celia’s and mine the husband is not a cuckold. That is the main difficulty. There are others. Twice I have had to go out to Switzerland, just to find him another sanatorium, because he has made himself intolerable to the quite decent and kindly people who were looking after him. But this is the chief source of trouble: that the man whom he cuckolded is now helping him. The jest chokes him every time I go to see him. I know he has roared over it with the nurse or the poor little patient who is the last seducee on the strength. His silly little wife has always shown that she is sorry for me. But once he is out of the sanatorium the temptation to carry the joke a little further will be irresistible. It will be fun for him to run up enormous bills, at hotels, with tradesmen, with wretched copyists, that will be paid by me, the funny English cuckold who grudges his dead wife’s lover nothing. Rose, Rose, I cannot bear it. For one thing, it gives Celia such a dreadful immortality. I should remember her for what she was at Venice on our honeymoon, what she was like in our house at Hammersmith, other people should remember her for her singing. She will be remembered in Switzerland, in Switzerland of all places, where they make milk chocolates and watches, where they ski and yodel, as the discarded mistress of a vulgar freak, as a suicide. I cannot bear it.’

  Again he buried his face in the cushion by my feet, and this time he sobbed. ‘Come nearer to me,’ I said, and he moved along till I could let him rest his head on my arms, and presently wipe his eyes with my handkerchief. I said in my heart to the shadows in the angles of the walls and the ceiling, ‘Celia, if you are there, come back and tell him it is all right.’ It seemed to me she must be all right, for it was surely impossible that anyone would go such a strange journey, the measure of its strangeness being that it took her by her own free will away from Oliver, except to find some extraordinary prize. But it is forbidden, they do not return. At least he raised his head and said, ‘I wanted to stop giving him money and get Lady Southways to give it him instead. But we cannot play at that concert, we must go in the morning.’

  ‘I suppose we could stay,’ I said. ‘Avis would do it if we asked her. After all, it was not Lady Mortlake’s fault that this happened.’

  ‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘You know you are only offering to do this to help me. And it would be wrong. That Mortlake bitch should have stayed to see we were properly treated, she is no fool, she is quite well aware that she has her house full of rubbish that might misbehave. If we do not pack up and leave, we are going over to the side of Jasperl. I know what I have to do. I have to go on keeping Jasperl, but I want to do it without him knowing that I have anything to do with the money. He is so clever, he will guess if I send it through any of my friends. But you, you have played so much in America, do you know anybody who could impersonate an anonymous admirer and send him the money in dollars?’

  I knew that Mr Morpurgo would arrange it through his American lawyer. I said, ‘Very easily. Tell me your bank and I will get somebody to do it in two days’ time. But do not give him too much. You are too good.’

  ‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘You do see this is something I must do?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. I wondered how I could show I still believed in Rosamund. ‘I see it might be the most important thing in your life.’

  ‘I have let it run on too long,’ he said, ‘it should be settled soon. He will be out of the sanatorium in a fortnight’s time. I have such hateful, civil, mischievous letters from him. I have one in the pocket of this dressing-gown now.’

  ‘Burn it,’ I said. ‘Take it out and burn it. Oh, please, Oliver. Celia would not like it to be there now.’

  ‘Celia is dead,’ said Oliver.

  ‘She cannot be so dead that she would want you to have that letter in your pocket,’ I said. ‘Nobody is as dead as that.’

  ‘I wonder what you mean,’ he said, but took out the paper and put it on an ashtray and burned it with his lighter. The flame went higher than one would think. It was a long letter. Our shadows wavered madly on the wall.

  He continued to watch the ashes until they were quite grey. Then he raised his eyes and looked at me steadily and said, ‘You will see to the money, and I will write to Jasperl and tell him I will have nothing more to do with him. And I will never write to him or see him again. But that is the least thing you have done for me. Sitting with you in this room where we have never been before, where we will never be again, is like being out of life a night and knowing everything. I know why Celia had to go to Jasperl. She had a genius for love. I was all right. I could love. But Jasperl cannot love, he is the negation of love, he is hatred, he is nonsense, given time he would uncreate the world. His state was a challenge to her. She had to win his soul from Satan. She went to him as to a battlefield.’

  After a silence he said, ‘I have kept you up for hours when you should be asleep, worrying you over a perplexity I never need have felt. If it comes to that I have been howling like a dog and not getting on with my work for years, because I have had no sense. I should have seen why she had gone to him if on that first day when I read the anonymous letter in that room- with the window on the Thames I had not forgotten that she was love itself. She could do nothing vital except for the sake of love. I have remembered it only sitting in this room with you.’

  ‘No, you knew it all the time,’ I said. ‘You said to me something about it being possible that your wife had pursued Jasperl, because he was her destiny, the martyrdom to which her cruel God had called her.’

  ‘So I did,’ he said, and thought for a while. ‘Yes, I knew it with my mind, as I might a fact about a stranger that I had read in a book. But now, sitting here, I knew it with my whole being, as I know that we were once happy. I never should have forgotten.’

  I never should have forgotten how Rosamund had been the peer and companion of Richard Quin, how they had laughed together in an innocence that nothing could destroy. I never should have forgotten how, immune from perturbation by any external event, she held up my mother’s body as it ejected her soul. We smiled at each other.

  ‘Oh, dear Rose, I have been terrible to you,’ he said. ‘Bringing you down to this hell-hole. Telling you this beastly story of Jasperl, which I might well have kept to myself; and keeping you awake. But I was selfish. I wanted my soul saved. Well, you have done it. Now, will you be able to sleep?’

  ‘Indeed I will,’ I said. ‘Will you?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Though, curiously enough, I should like to go out for a walk.’

  ‘So should I,’ I said, ‘but we dar
e not. I have a feeling that there is just one thing this household has still got up its sleeve, and that is to let loose big dogs on us. But I should go to the window and look out at the night.’

  He found my slippers for me under the sofa and slipped them on to my feet. It seemed strange to have a man do that, but he seemed to find it quite natural and even to take some pleasure in doing it. We shook back a great fall of golden brocade and looked out at a smooth lawn deep in the bluish frost of moonlight, where one tall tree stood incandescent.

  ‘It seems to be in blossom,’ said Oliver, ‘but are there trees that blossom now?’ We stood for some moments side by side, and then he said, ‘And you, Rose?’

  ‘And I?’

  ‘You said there was someone you loved with whom you were not happy any more.’ He looked at me. ‘I would have thought that a man whom you loved would never leave you.’

  ‘Oh, it was not a man, it was not that sort of love!’ I told him impatiently. ‘It is my cousin Rosamund. But you have made me happy about her.’

  ‘Your cousin Rosamund? I remember her. Beautiful, golden-haired, stammered, so never spoke.’

  ‘Mary and I loved her more than anyone in the world. She was the nearest of all of us to Richard Quin, she looked after Mamma when she died. At any time she was utterly lovable. We thought her perfectly good, but she has married someone repulsive. Not like Jasperl. But dwarfish, and, we think, dishonest and queer. And very rich. But when you said what you had forgotten about Celia, I knew we had forgotten the essential thing about Rosamund too. She was good. When she married this man she must have done it for the sake of goodness.’