by Rebecca West
As we sat down at the breakfast table we were joined by Mr Morpurgo. ‘Lovely smell, frying bacon,’ said Uncle Len. ‘That’s the smell I hope will come through the pearly gates as they swing ajar for me. I haven’t no use for a heaven where there wouldn’t be grub. Grub. And girls,’ he added, smacking Aunt Milly’s behind as she put his plate before him and passed on to me.
‘Be ashamed of yourself,’ she said, mechanically.
‘This is no day for shame,’ he said, ‘it is a marriage day! For Christ’s sake bring in Lily. She’s weeping over the sink, she always goes running over the sink, I’ll be bound, when she’s upset.’
‘Well, you can’t hear her if she is,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘But I can feel her,’ complained Uncle Len. ‘Dripping into the sink, doing the taps out of a job. I’m sick of weeping women. Rose was piping her eyes yesterday. I’d like a lot of busty cheerful women such as you might have blowing trumpets on music-hall ceilings, that’s what I’d like. Send Lil in, I mean it, Milly. And sit down yourself.’
In a minute Aunt Lily was with us, sniffling. ‘I couldn’t touch a thing,’ she said through her handkerchief.
‘Oh, go on, that’s what Os said. I wouldn’t have had you in the house all these years if you’d been the same sort of bleater as poor old Os. Here, you got some bacon and eggs for her, Milly? Drop your muzzle to that nosebag and don’t let me hear another neigh.’ Aunt Lily was so like a horse that Mr Morpurgo and I felt this admonition as an indelicacy, but she obeyed without protest. ‘That’s right,’ said Uncle Len, ‘and don’t you be a silly girl no more. Your sister Queenie wanted something to fill her life, and she’s got it.’
‘He’s an old bastard of a preacher,’ said Lily. ‘He’ll be bringing up you know what against her all the time, she’ll slip back.’
‘He won’t be bringing any you know what against her,’ said Uncle Len. ‘He won’t have time, he’ll be doing you know what to her as often as his years permit him.’
‘Len, hush yourself!’ said Aunt Milly.
‘Preachers are against that sort of thing,’ wept Aunt Lily.
‘You’re just simple,’ said Uncle Len. ‘Many of them become preachers because they are so much for that sort of thing that they get worried. I could tell you. I seen a lot of life in my time. But another time. Anyway, that old Bates, he’s keen on it all right. I can tell you.’
‘You’re being coarse,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘What Rose and Mr Morpurgo will think of you I don’t know, and, anyway, how could you tell if he was keen on it? We haven’t seen him except that time by the river and half a dozen times at Nancy’s, and he was hollering his head off about the Heavenly Hostages. How can you tell, Mr Clever?’
‘I can tell,’ said Uncle Len. ‘He knows the quality of a bit of skirt. When Oswald told him it was Nancy that was his young lady and not Mary or Rose the old man had a look on his face like a customer who’s been served with chicken and gets dark meat when he’s wanted white. So’d anybody, a man who cares about women, if it was a question of having Nancy or having Mary or Rose.’
‘Nancy’s a good girl,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘Of course she’s a good girl,’ said Uncle Len. ‘We’re not talking of that. We’re talking of -’ He put down his knife and fork, described the female form in the air, and then took them up again.
‘Well, if he’s just a dirty old man,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘what’s there in Queenie in that?’
‘There’s a lot to be said for being a dirty old man,’ said Uncle Len, ‘it’s a lot more fun than just being an old man. You’ve got ways of passing the time, and the time of whoever’s with you, and anyway who says it’s dirty? Os would and he’s always wrong.’ He bent enthusiastically to his plate.
‘You’ll excuse Len,’ Aunt Milly said to Mr Morpurgo and me. ‘He’s upset.’
‘I am not upset,’ said Uncle Len. ‘I’m glad. There was poor Queenie looking more and more like a waterlogged punt every day, and here she’s rushed off down the river like a smart motor-launch from one of those Maidenhead houses. Oh, Lily, sit up and be honest. Something’s happened to Queenie, and this in itself is a good thing. But you two.’ He put down his knife and fork, and stared at Mr Morpurgo and me. ‘You two were in it. You knew.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Maybe you didn’t. But Morpurgo there thought there was something. No use saying you didn’t, and I know you when you look as if you’d eaten the canary. Tell us what happened.’
‘Nothing,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘Must have been something.’
‘Well, obviously there was something,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘But it didn’t look like very much. She was coming towards our table, and he intercepted her, and after they had talked for a little they went away together.’
‘You didn’t hear what they said to each other?’
We shook our heads.
‘But you said they’d gone off to Nancy’s. What made you think that? They didn’t. They went to Brother and Sister Clerkenwell. God, ain’t that a shame. I’m sorry they didn’t get down to it at once.’
‘Len!’
‘Well, something tells me they didn’t. Even when I was a young man and set on it, and Rose isn’t a kid any more and anyway she needn’t understand me if she doesn’t want to, even when I was a young man, I’m saying, and I met a girl I fancied, I wouldn’t take her to stay with a couple who called themselves Brother and Sister Clerkenwell, and hope we’d feel any better in the morning.’
Aunt Lily said, ‘Yes, it all seems unnatural, doesn’t it? But they’re old. We’re all old.’
‘We’re not so damned old,’ said Uncle Len, ‘and Queenie and Mr Bates, in a manner of speaking, aren’t old at all. Oh, Lil, stop being silly. They’ll give each other an interest. I don’t know what he can manage now. It varies from all I hear. But if all he can do is kiss Queenie on Easter Sunday morning, his mind will be going further than that, and so will hers. They’ll have an interest.’
The telephone rang, and Lily sprang from her seat, saying, ‘It may be Queenie.’
‘Poor duck,’ said Uncle Len, looking after her as she went out, ‘it won’t be Queenie. A funny thing, the way, Lil not having been married or anything, she can’t understand. Rose here hasn’t either, but from what I gather your music tells you everything. But Lil can’t understand that male and female created He them. For what it’s worth. And anyway it’s worth a lot.’ He emptied his cup of tea, and lit his pipe, and, nodding over it, left the room, pausing at the door to say, ‘Hell it must be, to be the sort of man who feels up to the old rough and tumble with Queenie, who, let’s face it, is a terror, and who’s got Os for an only son.’
When he had gone Aunt Milly said, ‘I’ve never known Len so coarse.’
Mr Morpurgo answered, ‘He was sensible enough.’
‘But he doesn’t understand how well it works out,’ said Milly. ‘Nancy would never have got an upstanding chap like Len or old Mr Bates, but she can hope one of the children’ll be a throw-back. And Os will never know. But half the things in life people never know. Thank God for that.’ And she too left us.
Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Rose, I am thinking of your mother. This is her work. She turned none of the family away. She took in Lily, she held out her hand to protect Queenie, she was a mother to Nancy. So they were all still linked. Through Lily Queenie and Nancy came her, through Nancy Queenie has found -’ He broke off. ‘Let us go into the garden.’
‘First I must telephone to London,’ I said. ‘I must see someone this afternoon. I will go home and take some flowers in, then I must go and have my hair done. I will just have time.’
‘How collected you are,’ he said. ‘Yesterday you could not stop weeping. You wanted never to make any plans again. Now you are as you have always been.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I must be ill. I have been so many people in the last twenty-four hours, most of them quite idiotic. I still cannot think of anything or remember anything.’
‘It would seem to me,’ he said, ‘that you were thinking quite a lot systematically.’
When I had spoken to Kate and made my hair appointment with Miss White and got a taxi to meet me on the other side of the ferry, I said goodbye to the family and went into the garden, and waited till we saw the taxi drive up on the opposite bank.
‘You said that through Nancy Queenie had found something, and then you broke off,’ I said. ‘Surely you meant to say a husband. Why did you break off? Do you not think they are going to marry?’
‘Of course they are going to marry. But I did not want to say that Queenie had found a husband, for that might mean nothing. It might mean that she had found a husband which was as much use to her as’ - his hand performed the counter-caress it often gave his face, it traced the path of his self-loathing from feature to feature - ‘as many husbands are to many wives.’
‘You mean he will be a companion to her.’
‘No,’ he said. Then added coldly, ‘There is no substitute for sex. I would not be glad if she has merely found someone to play two-handed patience with her. When they looked at each other yesterday evening it was like something I have seen in the streets where a man picks up a streetwalker. That is a curious recommendation. But there is no use in any relationship between a man and a woman which is not one note in a scale, the lowest note of which is not just that, the sort of thing that makes a man go out into the street to look for a woman, that makes a woman stand in the night waiting for a man. It is a pity, but it is so. Or is it not a pity? No. Len can bear that it should be so. Oswald Bates cannot bear it. Len is right, of course.’
He had been speaking in a soft Oriental murmur. He came back to his ordinary voice to say, ‘There is your taxi.’ We strolled down the lawn towards the punt, and he said, murmuring again, ‘I was glad I saw their meeting. Now it seems possible I did witness some classic performance of the raffish kind, perhaps a vicious youth drinking champagne from a dancer’s slipper, and that will be just that, yet so much more. For of course that meeting we saw was much more than a man and a woman picking each other up for their last possibility of gratification.’
‘Yes, but what was it that happened?’ I said. ‘I could not understand. But it shook me, it is what is shaking me now, why I cannot think.’
‘We heard Mr Bates doing for Queenie what your mother would have done for her,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and what all the rest have failed to do. He took her seriously. That is the great thing one needs in the world. To be taken seriously. In practice one cannot get it from more than one person. How curious it all is. Goodbye, dear Rose. I hope whatever is going on goes well, and I cannot help seeing that something is going on.’
The house in St John’s Wood would be full of flowers, sent to me by friends and by people who had heard me play. But it seemed to me necessary that I should buy a great many flowers myself to decorate the house for that afternoon. I stopped the taxi at a florist’s a long way from my home, in North Audley Street, because I felt secretive about this purchase, and after some indecision, since, though it was a big shop, none of the flowers seemed quite good enough, I bought a great many gladioli. I spent a ridiculous amount of money, for far more flowers than I could possibly use. If I put them all in vases the place would have looked like the Chelsea Show. But I felt obliged to have tall glasses in the drawing-room, each holding some scarlet gladioli, some crimson, some rose, some orange, some of that kind that are nearly black. But they sold them only by the dozen of separate colours, so I had to buy five dozen. I hoped I would get into the house without Mary or Kate meeting me and questioning me about this imbecile purchase. They were actually hard to fit in the taxi, they were so long. As we drove past Lord’s the sight of the white girl praying on the tomb filled me with repulsion; it is not a good statue, she is coarsely made, surely she would not be given what she wanted. Yet there is something beautiful about the act of prayer, it lent her the beauty she did not possess in her own right, perhaps what she desired would come to her. What one does can surely make one more deserving than what one is. I wish I had not travelled to a country where there were laws I did not know, or perhaps no laws at all.
I had no time to turn my key in the lock of the front door. Kate opened it for me. I could hear someone playing in my music-room; whoever it was must have left the soundproof door open, and was not playing at all well. Kate explained that it was Oliver, who had telephoned that morning, and had on hearing that I would be back by half past eleven said that he would come then and not wait for the appointment he had made with me for the afternoon.
‘Oh, this has spoiled it all!’ I said, throwing my flowers down on the floor. ‘I will not have time to put these in the tall glasses in the drawing-room. And I had planned to have my hair done!’
‘Here is your brush and comb, I brought them down,’ she said. ‘Stand by the glass and I will give you a neater head. It is not as if your hair really needs washing.’
‘But it does,’ I said, ‘it does.’
‘No, no, you had it washed and set only three days ago,’ she said placidly. ‘When you said that you had made an appointment with Miss White for this morning I knew you must be in one of your states, though you have no more concerts.’
‘But the flowers,’ I said.
‘I will put them in water for you,’ she told me.
‘But I wanted only one of each kind in each glass.’
‘I could do things even more difficult than that,’ said Kate. ‘Now let me run a comb round the back of your neck, and you can run along.’
Where the three steps from the passage rose to the music-room I halted. The playing continued, and Kate had gathered up the five paper-shrouded sheaves from the floor and taken them into the housemaid’s cupboard where the vases were kept. There was nobody to stop me if I went out of the house. But I went up the first step and stood listening only, I thought, to protect myself by analysing to the full limit of justifiable contempt this obtuse playing. Oliver was pounding out the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Minor. The piano had been his second subject when he was at the Athenaeum, but his technique, and he must have had some, I supposed, had perished beneath the deadly influence of composition, which, except in the case of such rare and inhuman geniuses as Busoni, makes people quite unable to play the piano except in a crude utilitarian sense. A composer sits down at the keyboard and plays as if he were a strong man using a blunt tin-opener. They do not want to hear the music as the composer wants an audience to hear it; they want to exhaust its ideas and inform themselves how those ideas appeared to the composer at the moment of their inception, so that they can separate (as an audience should not be allowed to do) the matter from the manner. They unpick the work instead of sewing it together. It is a thing offensive to the pianists, unless the composer who plays is greater than the composer whose work he is maltreating. I could not think Oliver a greater composer than Mozart, though for an instant I found myself possessed by the insane hope that in some future work he might prove himself to be this. Then I asked myself what I, who played Mozart so well, by comparison with nearly every other pianist, was doing bothering myself with this man who insisted on spending his life composing so much less well than Mozart. I knew also that this was an idiotic kind of arithmetic, and then again that even by its idiotic laws I was wrong. I went up to the second step and stopped again. The difficult thing about the C minor concerto is that it is elegant and light in texture, yet is tragic, it records endurance of the deepest suffering, of the ultimate doubt. It is extremely difficult not to impair one or other of these qualities, which would seem to be incompatible, and would be so in any other composer’s work. The problem is presented in its most acute form in the second movement, where what old people call ‘a pretty little tune’ is the voice of sorrow itself, lamenting a loss which has really happened, which cannot be converted to a profit by looking at it in any different way. I was gritting my teeth at hearing this tune not even allowed to be difficult in its own s
ubtle way, as it was poked out of the keyboard, when Oliver broke off and repeated, with a delicacy which I had not believed within his powers, the first four bars of the movement, in which the tune is first presented in all its prettiness. The third time he played it he achieved a certain colour of tone in the second bar which somehow solved the problem and established it on the level of classical dignity. I had never thought of this effect. Why had I never thought of it? Because I had a lower order of musical intelligence than he had. I might be a better pianist than he was a composer but to be a creative artist with any valid title to the name is a better thing than to be an interpreter. He was much my superior, and I tingled with pleasure. But all this was irrelevant, even had he not been a musician I could not have obeyed my almost irresistible desire to leave the house. I mounted the third step, and Oliver saw me through the open door.
He stopped playing and stood up. I went into the room and we faced each other, trembling.
A look of guilt came over his face and passed. He said exultantly, ‘Now I can love again.’
It struck me to the heart that he should put it in those words, but my deepest self said coldly that so long as I had him nothing else mattered. He came towards me and I became rigid with disgust, it seemed certain that I must die when he touched me, but instead, of course, I lived.
VIII
IN OUR BED in the villa by the Mediterranean my husband slid from my body and said, ‘How I hate all Wagner. Tristan and Isolde is nothing like it, is it? It is so sharp and clear, and the Tristan music is like two fat people eating thick soup. Drinking thick soup,’ he corrected himself pedantically, and yawned, and nuzzled his face against my shoulder, and was asleep. I ran my arm down his straight back. When I had thought of his face in the train to Reading, it had seemed to me more right than nature could make it, it was as if a master craftsman had worked on it. His body was like that too. I enjoyed everything about being married, though I could not have endured it with any other husband but Oliver. I was amazed at lovemaking. It was so strange to come, when I was nearly middle-aged, on the knowledge that there was another state of being than any I had known, and that it was the state normal for humanity, that I was a minority who did not know it. It was as if I had learned that there was a sixth continent, which nearly everybody but me and a few others had visited and in which, now I had come to it, I felt like a native, or as if there was another art as well as music and painting and literature, which was not only preached, but actually practised, by nearly everybody, though they were silent about their accomplishment. It was fantastic that nobody should speak of what pervaded life and determined it, yet it was inevitable, for language could not describe it. I looked across Oliver at the window, which we had opened after we had put out the light and there was no fear of attracting mosquitoes. There was the sea, glittering with moonlight, the dark mountains above it, then the sky dusted with other earths, which looking at us might not know that our globe was swathed in this secret web of nakedness that kept it from being naked of people, chilly with lack of love and life, a barren top spinning to no purpose. Their architecture would be as fantastic but would not be the same, because there were not two of anything alike, every person was different, every work of art was different, every act of love was different, every world was different. It was a pity we did not know the end to which this wealth was to be put, but surely if this plenitude existed, and not the nothingness which somehow seemed to be more natural, more what one would have expected (though it is the one state of which the universe had and could have no experience), we might conclude that all would be well. I could believe that this precious intricate creature I held in my arms, who made love and wrote music, would never be destroyed.
