Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  Outside the inn, while Avis was fetching her violin-case, he said to me, ‘How Celia would have liked you, if she had known you better,’ and walked away, his eyes on the ground. I stood trembling with fury, and he turned back to say, ‘Not that she did not like what she saw of you, and of course she admired your playing, but you met her so seldom.’

  I was still tingling all our journey to the junction. I would not have wanted Celia to like me, she was so polluted by this world of masculinity. It now seemed not so absurd to me that the Victorians had taken women who had slept with men to whom they were not married and shut them up in rescue homes. Marriage, inviolate marriage was the only way by which the traffic between men and women could be rendered tolerable. If two people went to a church in festive dress and took part in a pretty rite in the presence of their friends, and then shared the same house and always went about together, then one could think of these public things as all that was happening. But women like Celia forced the most reluctant mind to follow them to the private horror of their pollution. Why did she leave Oliver? To go into a room with Jasperl. Why? You know, you cannot help but know. It is the ugliest thing for a woman to know, for such pollution spoils women to the destruction of their essence, they become rubbish. Celia must have become rubbish when she had confused her life with Oliver and Jasperl, and though I would have thought it could do nobody much harm to be with Oliver, the germ of Jasperl was in Oliver, for Jasperl’s offence was to have carried masculinity to its logical conclusion. All this rank stuff, that made one remember stenches, must end in wickedness. Not only had Oliver brought Celia into the orbit of masculinity and thus been responsible for all she had done there, he had chosen to wrestle with Jasperl, to be smeared with the shine of what was worst in himself carried to a worse stage by a man with a worse self than him. He was not internally vile like Jasperl but he was now externally defiled.

  I sat back in my corner-seat and shut my eyes and pretended I had gone to sleep. It was all right, for Oliver was quite happy talking to Avis. It would be a good thing if he married her. His kindness would help her solve the difficulties of her genius, and he would have something else to think about than Celia and Jasperl. The coarseness in Avis, her greasy skin and her greedy over-anxiety about her career, made me not regret it if she married, as I would (I now realised for the first time) have regretted it if Mary had got married.

  Oliver said, ‘Rose, we are running into the junction.’ I did not open my eyes. I feared he might touch me, and my body stiffened in an agony that was not allayed when he did nothing of the sort. Simply he said, ‘Rose, poor Rose, you are so tired, but you must wake up.’ In spite of my violent disgust I was delighted with the words as if they had a specially intricate rhythm; yet of course they had none.

  The Reading train was in the station, but it did not start at once. I had to spend some time standing at the window and looking down at Avis and Oliver, in a state of embarrassment because they were plainly so disappointed at my departure. This was new for me. I always wanted people more than they wanted me. It was my great sorrow that so few of all the men and women I met sought to be close to me. Evidently, this was something that happened as one got older. Of course I did not enjoy the act of rejection, but I knew it was inevitable, I was glad I had the strength to perform it. I belonged to others, to a small group that was forever complete and closed. These two people could mean nothing to me.

  Oliver broke off something he was saying about Avis’s fingering and stared at me, and asked sharply: ‘What tree can that have been?’

  ‘What tree?’

  ‘The tree we looked at through the window in the moonlight. It seemed to be in blossom. What can it have been? Surely no trees are in blossom at this time of year.’

  ‘Oh, that tree!’ I said. ‘How strange I have not thought of it before! How could I have forgotten that tree?’

  ‘It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life,’ he said. ‘Did you not think so?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,’ I said. ‘But it went out of my mind. How could that be?’ The memory was a ringing in my ears, I felt the same prickling of the skin that comes in listening to certain high notes played on the trumpet.

  ‘I meant to look at it this morning, but I felt such a need to get out of that house that I forgot,’ said Oliver. ‘Shall I go back and ask the gardener?’

  ‘No, no,’ cried Avis and I. ‘Please do not do that,’ I said, ‘Barbados Hall is bad magic. The tree would be gone and they would say it had never been there,’ and Avis said, ‘There is a market gardener near us at home, who is famous for his trees and shrubs. I will go and ask him what it could be, it will be an excuse for writing to you.’

  ‘Curse it, the train is going to start,’ said Oliver, speaking with an absurd impatience, as if it might be supposed never to do so. ‘Rose, what are we doing about meeting again? You are going to the Dog and Duck now, but you said that you were going on a holiday with Mary almost at once - does that mean that you will be at home any time tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, leaning far out, ‘I will be there in the afternoon.’

  ‘Damn it, there the green flag goes. Quite early in the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Do not forget,’ said Oliver, running beside the train.

  ‘Oh, he is lucky,’ panted Avis, bobbing just behind him. ‘He will see you so soon again.’

  They ran right to the end of the platform and stood there waving, and so long as they could be seen at all, they kept their character, which was unique, and uniquely pleasant. They belonged to the same order of existence as everything I liked, and I realised this with an exquisite acuteness for I was again in that exalted and divided state that I had experienced earlier in the morning. I found myself able to remember several pieces of music at once, and they all seemed changed and new, so new that as one theme travelled through my mind’s ear, I said to myself, ‘What, have I suddenly become a composer?’ My state of excitement might be adequately explained if I had undergone the huge fundamental alteration that is necessary if an interpretative artist is to become a creator.

  Oliver’s face appeared before me, and I saw no other sight. He was, I reflected, exceptional in his appearance. It was not simply that he was fairly good-looking, there was something better than nature about the carving of his face. The brooding lines across his brow, the slant of his cheekbones, which made him look Russian, the fineness of his nostrils, and the fairness of his lips, which were, however, not thin; all these were exactly as one would have chosen them to be, and it seemed impossible that a face could simply happen to be as right as that, it seemed that a master craftsman must have worked upon it.

  I was still thinking of Oliver’s face when I found that we had come to Reading station. Though I knew very well that I had to hurry to the bay where the local train was just about to start, I made my way instead to the open space outside the station. I was seized with laughter.

  It was an area given over to chaos, neither a square nor a triangle nor a circle; and as I stood on an island in the middle of its sprawl I raised my eyes and saw that Reading station, above the postered walls on ground level, offered an amusing incongruity. Its upper elevation was of prison-coloured brick, pierced with mean windows overhung by heavy mouldings of sooty stone, pointless dream of one of the millions of stupid men who have sat in England and thought about Rome, for no particular reason; and this was surmounted by a trim little clocktower, of unmistakably marine character, the sort of thing that ought to decorate the Customs-house in a small port such as Ramsgate, and house an eccentric Dickens character in a yachting cap with a telescope to his eye. I hoped I might show it to Oliver, I knew he would be delighted.

  I went further and found, at one of the outlets from this formless open space, a statue of Edward VII which represented him as a slim man with projecting teeth holding his body under a regal robe in the attitude by which wax models in cheap tailors’
show that the trousers they wear are of an easy fit. Laughter seized me again; this too I wished to show Oliver.

  I made my way back to the station and asked a porter where I could get a taxi to take me to the Dog and Duck. He was a wrinkled man with a preacherish air, and he told me shrewishly that I should hurry to the bay, for the train was only just due to start. I would not do it, and he grumbled sourly that it was a waste of money to take a taxi for so long a journey, and that there was another train in two hours, and if I could not wait all that time I could go by bus with only two changes. I could not help hurting this man, for when I obeyed my natural impulse and told him that I had ten pounds in my bag and knew that the fare would be less than that, and anyway I could afford it, he was enraged that anybody should have ten pounds in their bag, that anybody should have enough money to hire a car. He was glad when we had to send to a garage in the town for a taxi that would go so far, and it did not come for nearly an hour; and when I overtipped him he hated me for my power to do so, he did not even give me credit for doing my best. I could not even feel sorry for him because he showed an innate peevishness that, glutted with good fortune, would simply have made him another Lord Sarasen. Yet still I was happy. I felt that such people would not always be and that there was an answer. I sang bits from the Messiah and the Creation all the way as we drove through the winding lanes, their margins starred and delicate with the huge white heads of cow-parsley, past crops that were greener than the crops in the West Country and only half-possessed their ripeness as a faint gold immanence, through woods where the heaviness of midsummer foliage cast a shade as dark as storm. But indeed as we drew nearer the Dog and Duck the skies grew duller. I liked it, the colours of the landscape were the richer for it.

  The Dog and Duck was very busy. There were some motor-launches moored alongside, the school holidays had begun, there were many people having tea in the garden round the house, and through the coffee-room window my eye was caught by Aunt Lily’s new frock, a flower print in magenta and viridian green, and I watched her tenderly as she crossed the room holding high a loaded tray. She and Uncle Len and Aunt Milly would all be too busy for me, and I felt it a pity, since I had this soaring and swelling happiness to share. I looked down the slope and saw Mr Morpurgo sitting out at a solitary table at the water’s edge. He looked dejected and in front of him a little box was lying across its wrapping paper. Evidently some present he had brought for Queenie had failed to amuse. I ran across the lawn to share my soaring and swelling happiness with him, and as I sat down at the table a sword went through my heart and I burst into tears. It was extraordinary that I should have only a moment before imagined I was happy. I knew nothing except grief.

  ‘Rose, poor Rose,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Take this other chair, then nobody will see you. Lean your elbows on the table, and your face on your hands, and it will not look as if you were crying. Don’t try to stop.’

  It was a long time before I could speak. My weeping was hideous and painful. My face was screwed up and sodden, my nose ran, my sobs hurt me like violent hiccups. At last I whispered, ‘Such a horrible thing happened to me at Barbados Hall.’

  ‘Barbados Hall?’ said Mr Morpurgo. His eyes rolled against their yellow whites, then fixed on a point in the distance. ‘Why did you go to Barbados Hall?’

  ‘To play at a charity concert,’ I sobbed.

  ‘There is something to be said for keeping women in purdah,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Free to come and go, they may be subjected to unpleasant experiences. You should not have gone to that house. Lady Mortlake is a whore. She will sleep with any man who can make her some money. It was even once made plain’ - his hand ran over his face in fascinated self-loathing - ‘that she might sleep with me. She should be stoned,’ he said, with terrible hatred.

  ‘No, no, Morpy,’ I said. I put out my hand and caressed his face where his fingers had coldly passed. ‘Oh, no, Morpy, anyway I don’t care if she is a whore, what happened had nothing to do with that. All she did was to go away.’ But I choked and could not go on.

  ‘Shall I go up and get you a cup of tea or some brandy? But of course not. You and I do not respond to irrigation, like the rest of the world. Take your time.’

  But he was not indignant when he heard that Lady Mortlake had insolently picked a substitute for Martin out of the hedges, he was amused.

  ‘You should smile at that,’ he said. ‘There is a Yiddish word, schlemiel, a man who falls over everything, who buys brass for gold. There should be a goy word for the elegant schlemiel, who has been born to handle gold but never knows it from brass and calls it gold with the weight of authority, who falls over everything but does it with such assurance that the fall is taken for a curtsy.’ He was amused too when he heard that the substitute had turned out to be a genius.

  ‘Life defeats them, brass defeats them, it turns out to be gold, we acquire it,’ he chuckled. ‘Where is this girl?’

  But when I raged on with my story, his amusement went from him. ‘They stole your supper and laughed at you,’ he said. ‘Look at those two swans coming along on the dark water. How white they are, how calm their bodies make them for all the vicious temper that lives inside.’ He ran a finger round his collar to loosen it but his cold anger broke out. ‘By God, they treated you like Jews without money. If I can make them pay for this I will.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing could make it better now, it happened, but they did something worse.’

  When he heard of our stolen bedrooms he leaned over the table and took my hands in his.

  ‘Dear Rose,’ he said, ‘this will hurt for a long time. I wake even now and think of some of the things the boys did to me at school. Idiotic of my mind to go back so far. There have been plenty of incidents which have happened to me since.’ His teeth bared. ‘There is no wound to pride that does not fester. A bite from an ape, I believe, always goes septic. But you must remember that it was an ape that offended, not a force you need respect.’

  ‘“Goats and monkeys,” Oliver kept on saying,’ I snuffled.

  ‘They were wise words,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘That is why Shakespeare is so restful, he never pretends that human beings are not horrible. All other writers pretend that we are all good fellows if we are looked at from the right angle. We are not.’

  I was better now, the sobbing had stopped, but the tears were streaming down my face.

  ‘How this has hurt you, Rose,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I am so stupid, I keep on thinking can I not give her something that will distract her? But who should know better than I that humiliation is something that will not permit distraction, it makes first claim on the soul. It is like certain kinds of physical pain. The tooth, the throat, the belly, the foot. I know I cannot do anything. But I cannot bear the daughter of your mother to have been insulted. I feel there is some visible inheritance of honour that people should respect. And you are such a good girl, Rose. You do so little to offend, you do so much to please. I wish indeed this had not happened.’

  There were tears in his eyes, and I felt, as I had done all through our conversation, very guilty. For I knew I was not weeping about the tricks these inept people had played on me at Barbados Hall. I would not have lifted a finger to save them from a painful death, but I would have thought of my crime as insecticide; I knew that these people were so alien to me that they could not hurt me. But though I was well aware that I was weeping for another and deeper cause, I did not know what it was.

  I tried hard to speak the truth. ‘But there is more than that, I am so miserable. Not just over this. I am miserable all the time.’

  ‘Dear Rose, dear Rose. Tell me what is wrong. Surely I can do something?’

  What could it be? ‘I do not like people,’ I found myself saying. ‘I hate all people except Mary, who is more or less me, and the people here, you, and Aunt Lily and Aunt Milly and Uncle Len and Queenie, and Nancy, and the baby, and of course Kate and Miss Beevor. I am so lonely! I am so lonely! I am only happy here.’

 
‘That I can understand,’ he said. ‘Your mother has gone, and the world could never be the same after that. It has lost the sources of its wealth. Richard Quin has gone. And so has Rosamund.’

  ‘Yes, she has gone, much more than Mamma,’ I cried. ‘She has gone to that man.’

  ‘And your sister Cordelia was never really one of the family.’

  ‘Yes, she would have been on the side of the people at Barbados Hall,’ I said. ‘If I tell her she will ask me what I did to annoy them and will say, “But you must have done something, dear.’”

  ‘One has sisters that are not of one’s blood, some antipathetic children that are strangers, the facts of biology are not properly understood,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘But perhaps we understand them as well as is necessary. Yes, I can realise that you are very lonely, my poor child. But we are here. We wait for you. We talk of you when you are not with us. You and Mary are very fortunate, my dear. You are greatly loved. These dear people here love you … I cannot tell you how well they love you. It is a treasure they lay up for you. You are rich.’

  ‘Only when I am with them,’ I cried. ‘Morpy, I hate my work. I want to give it up.’ That was what was troubling me. I had found it at last.

  ‘Your playing?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘You are surprised? But what does my work do for me? These horrible people come and listen to me, and they pay me money, and they send me presents, but they give me nothing. I give them everything that I can and they give me nothing in return. It is not fair.’

  ‘They give you money, you have said so, and they send you presents, and they admire you,’ he reminded me. ‘And you love music.’

  ‘But that is not what I want,’ I said. ‘I want them to give me something. I feel empty without it. I never get it from anybody but the people here, and Kate, and Miss Beevor.’