by Rebecca West
I was amazed by the wealth that had suddenly come to me. I ran my hand over him again. It was a pity I had had to give up something to get this. Mary and I were not as we had been. It was a pity that I had learned this on the very same day that Oliver and I had learned we loved each other, for I could never deceive myself into imagining her recoil from my new state as lover to be simply material distance, but the forking of our several paths through our professions. I was alone that evening, for Oliver had telephoned his solicitor to ask him how we could get married as soon as possible, so that we could have the longest time abroad before the concert season began again, and the solicitor was going on his holidays and would not see him except after dinner. So I lay on the sofa in the drawing-room, wondering at the new properties of my body and my soul, and waiting till Mary came home, to see her pass with grace from the old world I had lived in till that day to the new world that had just received me. When she came in I was enraptured by the sight of her, for she had spent all her day shopping and tying up loose ends that could not be left till we returned, and she was not tired or fretted, she was serene as the swans that had glided by me on the dark waters the night before, her silk dress was not crumpled. She could make any transit calmly, even if it were as strange as this. But not a second passed after I spoke before I knew that I had made a vast miscalculation, and that the sum was not to work out so that my books would balance.
She cried out, ‘You are going to marry! You are going to marry Oliver,’ so that all I could do was to laugh and expostulate, ‘Why do you say it like “Gone to be married! gone to swear a peace!”?’
She did not answer me, but stood staring, her parcels at her feet, as my flowers had been. I said, ‘But you like Oliver!’
‘Yes, of course, but what has that to do with it?’
‘Well, a great deal,’ I said. ‘I like him very much. I like him so much that I love him. It is an extreme that might be reached from that starting-point, don’t you think?’
She wanted to agree, but she could not say the words. She shut her eyes, then opened them. ‘Look,’ she smiled, ‘I am shutting my eyes, as I do when the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute is going to take her top F, as I do when we go to a theatre and I know somebody on the stage is going to fire a gun, or when we go to a horse show and they keep on putting the fences higher and higher. I am frightened.’
‘So am I,’ I said, ‘but millions of people, millions and millions of people, almost all people since the world began have got married.’
‘Yes,’ she said, dropping on her knees and finding a paper bag and taking out a bunch of gentians. ‘Look, I found these for you,’ she said, laughing and posing the gentians against my hair, ‘and, forgive me for bringing up the matter at this moment, but absolutely everybody since the world began has died. There’s nothing in that argument. But, oh, darling Rose, how glad I am that you are happy!’ Shuddering, she embraced me. ‘Rose, Rose, I hope Oliver understands I will kill him if he makes you unhappy. Oh, all of you are getting married, Rosamund, and Nancy, and you!’ The disgusted distortion of her mouth made it plain. ‘But never me, I will never marry!’
I said, ‘And more than me!’ and told her about Queenie and Oswald’s father.
‘Why, it is like the end of Der Ring der Nibelungen, with everybody getting burned!’ she exclaimed.
It could be conceived, I supposed, that my marriage was the end, a violent end. But I did not like it so. I cried out, ‘It will all be just the same as before. I will go on living here, we must buy the little house next door, it has been for sale for so long. Oliver does not like where he is living, and if he uses the house next door for a music-room and a study, we can fit in on my side of the house.’
‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘Oliver is not marrying me. You will not want a sister, a confidante in white linen. I will go away,’ she said, almost blithely.
‘Go away!’ I exclaimed. ‘But where?’
‘I went to see a woman in a curious house last week,’ she said, ‘and she is giving it up. It would suit me perfectly. It is a high building that was once part of a waterworks, in Stoke Newington, not really so far, a little further north than this. It is something to do with some waterworks that are not used now. One could practise whenever one liked, and one could be quite alone. I have never been in a place anywhere in London,’ she said with a sudden shining exultation, ‘where one could be quite so much alone.’
It was as if she was saying to herself, ‘Rose is going away to do this wild and unpleasant thing, I will go away to cling more closely to my delicious safety. You can all burn on your nuptial pyres, I will be above you, in the high, cool air.’ It was the thirst for pleasure in her eye which made me miserable. Could it be possible that she would have liked to leave me and live alone, rather than be with me, and that she had not mentioned the visit to this tower, which had evidently powerfully impressed her, simply because it had impressed her by reason of the opportunity it would offer her for complete solitude if she lived there alone, and she did not care to speak to me about it lest she betrayed how she would have preferred not to share a home with me. I wondered if she loved me as much as I loved her, and I feared that it would be my lot always to love more than I was loved. I remembered how Oliver had said, ‘Now I can love again,’ and not simply, in forgetfulness of all but me, ‘I love you.’ I wished Richard Quin and Rosamund were with me, because they both spared me this anguish, they both loved me as much as I loved them. But how could that be? How had they managed that? How was it that with them this particular situation could not possibly have arisen, that I could never have felt this sense, strong enough to pay a visit to me in the heights of my happiness, that I was slighted? I knew the answer as I asked it. They loved absolutely, as I could not. Richard Quin and Rosamund would have loved any partner so much that they would have accepted a reference to a previous love as a confidence and not a slight. If anyone they loved had said he or she wanted to go away and live alone their minds would have run to the new home, wondering with what gifts they could garnish it. I prayed for Richard Quin to intercede for me with the God it was so hard for us to approach from our special point of view, to make me able to love better, and I said to Mary, ‘I must telegraph to Rosamund and ask her to the wedding. I will do it now, for there is not much time. Oliver wants to be married as soon as possible. Help me with it.’
‘Soon,’ murmured Mary, infinitely troubled, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, you love me, you would choose to go on living with me even though it meant sacrificing the joy of solitude, for the sake of keeping me from this fearful thing, the top F, the gun going off on the stage, the six-foot jump.’ She went on to exclaim, ‘Yes, let us send a telegram at once. It will be wonderful, when Rosamund comes you will be able to talk to her about marriage, she will perhaps tell you why she married Nestor and left us.’
I cried, ‘No, she will never tell us, because the reason can have nothing to do with marriage.’ The delight I had already experienced from the touch of Oliver’s lips and arms shivered through my veins. ‘Oh, no, oh, no, she married him for some noble, unselfish purpose that she could least of all tell a woman who, like me, was marrying simply to be happy.’
‘Oh, Rose,’ said Mary, in wonder, ‘do you really feel like that? I am so glad.’
But obviously she felt as puzzled as if she had returned to the house that evening to find me wearing marigold wreaths and putting out saucers of clarified butter and doing nautch dances in the Hindu style of worship before our gas-stove. It would have been pleasant if she could have understood something of what I was feeling, and it was strange, it disturbed my heart, that she did not understand nearly as well as Kate or Miss Beevor, who were so virginal and so inexperienced. Both of them realised that I was in a state of holy drunkenness in which there was nothing of illusion or folly. They knew I was thinking of Oliver as if he were all summer, all music, all joy, all worth, and teased me about this foolishness, but they knew it was a necessary step towards wisdom
, they knew also that I was engaged in an athletic feat involving my whole organism. I do think it probable that Miss Beevor had no clear idea at all of the act of love, and that Kate saw it austerely, as a part of magic, as a kind of rite like curtsying to the new moon, practised by practitioners of another sort of magic than hers, but they understood well just what I had to do to carry myself along to it. It was a matter of anxiety to me that I would have to let my husband see me with no clothes on, for I knew that my face was considered all right and I felt sure Oliver thought it beautiful but I was not sure how my body, which was perhaps too thin and boyish, would please. I felt as if I had suddenly been told that I had not really got my diploma from the Athenaeum School of Music, which I thought I had gained years before, and had to sit for another examination.
I had also to lift myself to a state where I could advance to as extreme a form of spiritual intimacy as I had ever known, challenging in its confusion with the physical, with somebody who I had thought of all my life as a predestined stranger, and my nerves had to push me towards this climactic achievement. Every word of the old-fashioned raillery that came from Kate and Miss Beevor helped to this end, also the old-fashioned fuss they made; for though it was the case that a trousseau was absurd, since fashions now changed so rapidly that it was absurd to get more than a couple of dresses and a suit at one time, and our underclothing now was made not of cambric that soon lost its surface but of silks and satins that survived many washings, nevertheless Kate and Miss Beevor forced the idea of a trousseau on me, and I made new purchases that kept me busy during the few days that elapsed before my marriage. I was not at first to realise that Kate and Miss Beevor, knowing nothing, knew all that was to the point, and at first it appeared possible to me that Cordelia might be a help.
I came down to breakfast the day after I had become engaged and was glad to see that Mary was not there. I had awakened with a sense of danger that passed at once into ecstasy at my happiness, into incredulous wonder that the world could hold such a marvellous experience as was to be mine when I met Oliver for luncheon in Kensington Gardens. But when I looked at Mary’s place at the breakfast table I was afraid that she might revive my sense of danger that I might feel disgusted again, that I might flee from my joy. I knew now what my father felt. There was a rightness in winter; it would be fitting if winter came and was not succeeded by spring and lasted for ever; I would have a sort of sanctity if I denied myself to love and continuity. Only I knew from my mother that such sanctity was evil, was too safe, it meant coming to an end instead of working perpetually, as she and Richard Quin were now at work. In this Mary was, suddenly, on my father’s side.
I said to Kate, ‘This morning I will go and tell Cordelia.’
She answered, busy over the toaster, ‘Your Mamma will be pleased at that.’
‘I am not doing it because I am feeling priggish,’ I said. ‘I really want to see Cordy.’
‘That is what will please your Mamma,’ said Kate. ‘They say if you love a changeling enough it turns into the real child.’
She meant what she implied as a literal statement of fact. It was a startling idea even in our household.
‘She wasn’t a changeling,’ I said. ‘She had the same red hair as Papa’s father.’
‘They think of everything,’ said Kate.
‘You are a superstitious old thing,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ll want to tie me up with all sorts of amulets and charms on my wedding-day. What is it, something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue?’
‘That is all nonsense,’ said Kate, in a cold, rationalist tone. ‘The ring is all that is needed. It does the work of everything.’
It was about half past eleven when I got to Cordelia’s house, I knew she would have done her shopping by then. It was not as pretty as her first house, most of the prettiest houses in London are very small. But Alan’s father and mother had died, and they were better off, and they had bought a nice Regency house in one of the older squares, and it was still a charming frame for their good looks and their delightful possessions. Since they had money to spare, Cordelia had collected Italian pictures by the minor landscape masters of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and among her clean furnitures and greens and golds of her chintzes and brocades and the faint neutral stripes of her wallpaper one got glimpses of palaces and temples and fortresses, against rich blue skies, over seas and lakes that looked warm. The foreground and the background of her life were pleasant, and as I went into her house she was standing there, looking as always so very pretty, with her red-gold curls and her fresh complexion and her neat features. She had been the prettiest young woman, she was now prettily entering middle-age. I was ravished by her and by the greeting she gave me. At once she asked me if I would like tea or coffee or perhaps there was a lot of ice cream left from the dinner-party she had given the night before. Yes, that had been very good, we would each have a plate of that. She rang the bell and gave orders to the parlourmaid and then turned aside, murmuring to herself, almost cooing, pleased because she could give me something that was really nice. She really liked giving, she had said to the parlourmaid, ‘And mind you finish it in the kitchen, I will not want any at lunch.’
‘I am trying to find a letter that would interest you,’ she said. ‘It was from our ambassador in Belgium, he was so pleased by your concert in Brussels. So nice for you to play at that festival.’
I said to her, ‘Cordelia.’ But she did not stop or turn her eyes to me, she was kind but never attentive.
‘Cordelia,’ I said, ‘you remember Oliver?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Dear Oliver. So sad about poor Celia. How beautifully she sang.’
I said, ‘Oliver has fallen in love with me.’
Her mental distance from me was so great that it took her a moment for my words to reach her. Then she stopped rustling the papers on her desk, and turned to me, with what we called her ‘white look’. When she was troubled or baffled her blue-grey eyes seemed to get much lighter, almost white. She breathed deeply as if she had to collect her forces to meet a crisis. ‘Oh, Rose, are you quite, quite sure?’ she said.
I could not be unkind to her anxiety, so I at once explained, ‘He has asked me to marry him. And we are going to be married as soon as possible, in a few days, we hope.’
She still stared, then suddenly nodded. No doubt she recalled to herself how extraordinarily lucky I had always been. ‘How wonderful!’ she exclaimed, sinking down into a chair. ‘How wonderful! I suppose the poor man is very lonely. Alan will be so pleased. We were talking about you only the other night.’ Her voice grew serious. It had evidently been a despairing conversation. ‘It comes just at the right time. Oh, if only we could find someone for Mary! You met Oliver here, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We met him years and years ago, when we were playing at a private concert.’ I could not bring myself to say that it was the day we got our scholarships. One always spared her.
‘But the first time you really talked to him was at a party here,’ she persisted.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No. He stayed with us in Norfolk, the first summer of the war.’
‘But you were quite young then,’ she said, frowning slightly. ‘I know that you met him at dinner here, just after Celia died.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’
Yet, by the efforts she made to draw my marriage into the orbit of her marriage, to free it from the worthlessness she thought inherent in anything that appertained to me, I could see that Alan and she meant much the same thing to each other as Oliver and I meant to each other. It was a pity. Mary knew all about me but she could not understand anything about marriage. Cordelia knew all about marriage but she had no contact with me; I was still the odd-looking and eccentric woman whose undeserved success could not last as the years went by, and I was nothing else. No part of me escaped distortion. She was astonished that Oliver would consent to live in our house in St John’s Wood. ‘It always seemed
so …’ Whatever I might be, our house was beautiful. Yet such power had she over me that I had to assure myself that my house must be lovely, because Mr Morpurgo had so much to do with it, and his taste was known to be exquisite, and because this and that friend of mine delighted in it. But this, of course, was what love between man and woman was for. One’s family grew away from one, from the first unity divergencies developed; and at that point one started another relationship at the point of unity. I did not expect my marriage to be perfectly happy, though I was certain it would be so; and I put that certainty down to my intoxicated state. But if I was to be unhappy with Oliver as Mamma was unhappy with Papa that would be better than happiness. But perhaps it would be better to run away. But that was nonsense because I was going to be happy. I spent all day in such argument between extremes though I knew the argument was settled. Though I wanted to run across London to Oliver, even when I knew it would not be convenient, there were times I wanted to fly out of the house so that I would have gone before he entered it, I wished I could be sure this would end totally when I was married to Oliver, and I thought Rosamund might tell me this, even though her marriage was so strange a sort and so obviously inferior to mine.
