by Rebecca West
My daily life went smoothly, more smoothly than before. Miss Beevor and Kate were so enchanted to have a man in the house that I felt humiliated when I realised how wrong I had been when I thought I had given them the essentials of a contented life. They had always enjoyed my good clothes, they liked Oliver’s even better. There was a greatcoat of his made of vicuna which they specially cherished, joining together to brush it with a carefully chosen brush, soft but firm, wrapped in a thick silk handkerchief, almost as affectionately as if it were a pet animal.
‘It is a pity,’ said Kate, one day, when I came into her sewing-room and found them tending this coat, ‘that your Papa could not have had such clothes! Richard Quin did not care about such things. But they went with your Papa.’
‘Oh, your Papa,’ sighed Miss Beevor. ‘Such a gentleman! But so,’ she added kindly, ‘is Oliver.’
I understood what it must have meant to my mother, who for all her genius and mystical accomplishment was a simple woman like these, when my father went away and she was deprived of domesticated vital principle, this unpredictable, extravagant, violent thing that was tamed enough to live in a house. Why, that might happen to me. I knew Oliver would never leave me, but he might die. I had my family’s knowledge of immortality, but that is never a complete consolation for mortality, and now seemed less so. Oliver and I could not but leave much behind with our flesh.
‘Rose, I declare,’ said Miss Beevor. She had looked up and seen my face in the glass over the chimneypiece.
‘What have you to cry about, Miss Rose?’ said Kate.
‘It struck me that Oliver might die,’ I said.
‘Not for a long time, I should say,’ said Kate. ‘But is it not good that you should have learned to cry for other reasons than that you are angry? They had terrible tempers when they were little,’ she told Miss Beevor, ‘all but Richard Quin, the blessed lamb.’
‘Oh, they were not so bad,’ said Miss Beevor. She could look back on our childhood without distress now. Cordelia had long forgiven her, and had her to a meal once every two months.
‘No, they were not so bad, but they were not so good,’ said Kate, ‘and will you tell me, does Mr Oliver like prawns?’
‘He says he does. I asked him when you told me to, and he distinctly said he did.’
‘But he always leaves them. I think he has mixed them up with something else. With Dublin prawns, perhaps. We will try. Your Papa was like that. He often got names wrong. But your Mamma was very clever at finding out what he meant. You must make an effort, Miss Rose.’
Literature was then delivering a heavy broadside against marriage, which was regarded as so unsatisfactory an institution that a divorce was no longer assumed to be a tragedy. If one knew the people who were getting divorced it usually turned out that there was some sadness attached; either there was some condition that had made for prolonged unhappiness, drunkenness or insane jealousy, or one partner had ceased to love a still loving partner; but the picture that was provoked by the news of a divorce was simply of the sensible cancellation of an arrangement that had appeared irksome. Yet everybody whom I met when I was still so newly married that they took note of my state showed a faith in marriage, gave signs that they thought it not an unreasonable hope that Oliver and I would be happy together for ever. The only exception was Lady Tredinnick. I had sent her a slice of my wedding-cake, and a letter in which I had tried to breach the gulf that had opened between us in spite of the affection Mary and I had always felt for her, because she had tried, vainly but generously, to admit us into the world of fortunate young girls, and because when she had failed, she had so sweetly tried to substitute another kind of gift by showing us her flowers. When she had stood by the daffodils in her Cornish garden she showed a loyalty to beauty that was disarming. She sent me a present, a Chinese vase, which I recognised; it had stood on the chimneypiece in her library in the Cornish home, and she had told me that it had been brought from Siam by one of her husband’s ancestors who had gone to the East with Samuel White in the seventeenth century. It was not a possession I would have expected her to let pass out of the family, and I could not doubt her continued affection for me, so I wrote to her and asked her to come and see us on our return from the South, but she made the excuse that she was still in Cornwall. Then one day, I was walking along the Brompton Road, on the side where trees grow and there is a sort of ledge along the pavement, I saw her some yards ahead of me. She looked an old woman not by reason of any signs of physical weakness; a wide black felt hat was crushed down on her head, forcing a knot of iron-grey hair which was disordered down on the collar of her long and shapeless coat. She was walking along very slowly, looking into the windows of the antique-shops which are so numerous in that street, and I was reminded of the evening at the party where Mary and I had first realised that our old friend was degenerated into awkward oddity, because she was so rude to an inoffensive young man. She had then stared at a Poussin and not known what it was till we spoke of it; she could not be observing anything of the objects on which she was setting her eyes, for she was spending as long on those that were trumpery as those that were precious, and it must have been that she was simply using them as places on which to repose her discouraged sight, as a lame man might support himself on posts set along the road without feeling any interest in those posts for their own sake. I spoke to her and, as she did not hear, touched her gently on the shoulder, and she wheeled about, her upper lip raised from her teeth; and a long moment passed when she stared at me and made sure who I was. The bones of her face were taking control of her ageing flesh; her nose was now very Roman, and the bridge shone white and her greying brows had settled in a fierce line, so that her eyes appeared to have no other expression but impatience and command. She looked not unlike the later pictures of the Duke of Wellington. ‘Why, it is Rose!’ she exclaimed, and then said with a nervous laugh, ‘I cannot think who I thought it might be.’ I told her how much I had hoped she would dine with us, and she said, ‘Ah, yes, you married Oliver. You will be very happy. No doubt,’ she repeated, without a shade of geniality, even with some rage, ‘you will be very happy.’ We walked alongside for a little while, trying to talk and then I went into a shop, so sure was I that if I went any further with her she would take the too plain path of evasion and turn into Brompton Oratory, though I knew she was not a Catholic. I was so disturbed I told nobody of this. But a few days later Mary met her and had the same impression of angry degeneration.
But this was the one note of hostility that my marriage evoked. I did not go so often to the Dog and Duck, for Oliver had more friends than I had had, and we had to visit them and be visited; but Len and Milly and Lily were so contented with my marriage that they could take all its consequences, even if they included less of my company. The first time I went down after our return from the South they found their own ways of telling me that. Uncle Len said to me, as he washed some glasses and I dried them, ‘You’re better off now, Rose. It’s more natural to be married, no matter who you are. And you were always the natural one of you three girls. From a child up. But you’ll have to fall in with this Oliver’s ways, and if they aren’t ours, well, we heard you take your vows at that church up your way, and if keeping them means we don’t see so much of you, there’ll be no hard feelings.’ Milly, sitting in front of her dressing-table, said, ‘In the long run it’s worth it,’ and ran a comb through her silver hair so that it rose like a coronet, and added, ‘Come down when you can, but your young man may have his ties and prefer them and you must respect them. When I married Len I threw a lot overboard that had belonged to the old days.’ Her comb primly lifted her hair higher still to the likeness of a crown, and I saw that she had nourished through the years the vision of a picturesque alternative career which she had sacrificed for the sake of an elevation that still seemed to her miraculous, and she considered this the mark of a creditable marriage. Aunt Lily, planting peach-stones in a flower-bed under the bar window, as she always did every autumn,
never with any success, was more wistful.
‘Queenie’s very happy with Mr Bates, Fred I should call him, though it will never come natural if I live to be a hundred,’ she told me. ‘She goes to all his services, and she’s got her own job there, she helps with the hymn-singing.’
‘I did not know she sang,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, she’s got a fine contralto, a mezzo-soprano, whatever you need to sing Carmen, but she wasn’t one just to sing when there was no purpose to be served by it.’ It was true, there was an economy about Queenie. ‘When we were young she would always sing a tune if there was a jollification, then afterwards she let her voice be. But now she’s singing a lot. Funny, your music brought you and Oliver together, and Queenie’s singing’s helping her with Fred, but I played the piano not so badly, not like you, still I could always get through the Lancers, yet it didn’t bring me anything. Oh dear, I try not to feel bitter. I know it says in the Bible that one shall be taken and one shall be left, but there’s such a lot been taken, there’s Queenie, twice over, and Milly, and your sister Cordelia, and then Nancy, and now you, and there’s only Mary and me left, and Mary might go any time, and there’ll be only me. I don’t really mind, there’s lots of ways for me to share in your lives, but sometimes I worry, it’s as if there must have been something the matter with me, as if I must have been plain. But I don’t think I was. There was someone, you know, but he never wrote a line after Queenie’s trouble started. And I am bound to say he’d never been what you’d call assiduous. Just another bastard, I suppose. Excuse me, dearie, I suppose I can use that word now you’re a married woman. Let’s face it, I’ve been left. Well, it’s this way, and the way you’ve been taken means that you can’t come down so often, there’s no fighting against it. I would far rather lose you,’ she said incomprehensibly, ‘than really lose you.’
But their obvious fear that Oliver would feel unfriendly to them because he came of a different class was without foundation, and it would have been difficult to explain to them without offending them that, as he was composing a new symphony, he was not clearly aware of anything about them. They were amiable coloured shadows, creatures which lived for him only because I loved them and would have disappeared if I had tired of them, and Uncle Len became real to him only because of that weekly paper devoted to puzzles. Often Oliver and Mr Morpurgo and Uncle Len used to spend happy hours on a weekday, particularly at tea-time, eating sliced buns and drinking strong Indian tea by the fire working out ‘What then was the chance of X being dealt an ace out of the third pack?’ and Len would ask the others, ‘You with all your education, don’t you follow what’s going on?’ and they would shake their heads. ‘Funny, that!’ he once exclaimed. ‘I’d give my ears to have had the schooling so that I could understand what they mean when they say that modern physics shows us a universe our five senses can’t picture. That mean anything to you? Sometimes I think I get it. Sometimes I know I don’t.’ Mr Morpurgo and Oliver shook their heads. ‘Could you write music that made sense but nobody could hear?’ Len asked Oliver.
He was startled by the question. ‘Yes. Of course I could. I could write music that made a rhythm out of superimposed and competing rhythms which would give me enormous satisfaction to imagine but which no instruments could convey to any listener’s ear. But many composers have written music which, at the time they wrote it, nobody could hear because the instruments of their time could not reproduce it.’
‘So music’s always catching up on itself,’ Len reflected, ‘and maybe we’ll learn to think so that we can get a picture of this new universe. No, I don’t think that’s what they mean. I think they mean we won’t never be able to see what it’s really like, it’d need more than our five senses.’
‘There is something which may be relevant,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I have noticed as I have gone through life that the more people know the more they become incomprehensible to those who know less. People who are very good or very clever, I put it that way though of course to be good is to be clever in a certain way, people who are very good or very clever always seem to stupid people to be acting irrationally. Very often we call such people eccentric, off the centre when, since they know more of the whole than the rest of us, they are probably better able to judge where the centre is. There is always mystery above us. The appearance of mystery in the universe is therefore nothing new. It is a constant condition of our lives.’
‘I do not know why Christ got Himself crucified,’ said Oliver, who had fallen to scribbling a staff and some notes on an envelope.
‘You do not, and you are a Christian,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and I do not, and I am a Jew. But we may count ourselves happy, if we observe the argumentative despair of the Moslem peoples, whose saviour did nothing which the least of them cannot understand.’
‘I’d like to understand everything,’ said Len. ‘It seems more natural. Give me old Ptolemy. There is a nice system for you, a downstairs and an upper stairs, a floor and a ceiling.’
‘You are right, it would be happier if it were so,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The human race is not a beautiful spectacle if it is a pyramid with the top wrapped in mist and the base sunk in mud. But we must have faith.’
Oliver was lost in his music, Uncle Len’s eye had gone back to the puzzle magazine, Mr Morpurgo leaned over to re-read the puzzle. Aunt Milly brought in hot water and filled up the tea-pot.
‘Why don’t we have tea like this at home, Rose?’ asked Oliver.
‘This illustrates what I was saying a minute ago,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Rose knows that no palate enjoys the same tea over a long period of time. You have excellent China tea at home. You enjoy this Indian tea because it is a change, and enjoy your own tea more when you get back to it. The children learned many such things from their mother. But for a moment you wrongly suspected her of negligence, of not getting you the best tea, for the reason that you know much less about tea than she does.’
Nobody was listening to him but Milly and me. The puzzle was never solved. Oliver lost the envelope he had scribbled his notes on. Such are the hours which refresh the soul, which stoke the furnace for performance. There were such hours for me, though not for Oliver, under Nancy’s roof also. I rarely took him there because I could see that her quality was not apparent to him. He could sympathise with my love for Lily, partly because he saw her as the ideal Papagena in The Magic Flute, partly because I had told him how she had loathed her sister’s crime but had not let her loathing diminish her love, how she was so generous that, though she had come into our house as a refugee from misfortune, we were now all her debtors. But he could see nothing in Nancy but a dull, prettyish, provincial housewife, and I could find no words to express the feminine mystery in which her value lay. There was not a grain of glory in her house. It was a house like millions of others, and she did not move an inch from the routine followed by the millions of women who inhabited such houses. It was not in her power to do so, she had not a ranging fancy, and it would have puzzled Oswald. She should not have felt happy in this little world, for she knew that the belief in stability which was its foundation was unfounded. A father could be murdered, a mother could be a murderer; a brother could desert, an uncle could nearly kill by his gross kindness. She had missed not the least overtone of the discord in which her normal destiny had died. But she had transmitted her cynicism into something so different that it expressed itself in that faint smile which was always so delicious to me, which was sharp and yet sweet, like the taste of tart fruit lightly sugared, and she made every day pretty with trivial things, with care for her baby son, with chatter to her little Welsh servant, with visits to the shops to exercise small prudences and insipid preferences, to do nothing guilty, to make improvements what would otherwise have been not quite so good, till the sum, as I one day learned, was far vaster than the little world in which the accountancy was carried on. I went into her house one afternoon while she was still resting, and she called me up to her room, and I stood at the end of the b
ed while she rubbed her eyes and explained that she felt better for her sleep, that she had really been tired, Richard Adam had kept her awake nearly all night, and blew a kiss to me, and told me not to go away, she was still sleepy, but she would have to get up soon to take Richard Adam from Bronwyn. She closed her eyes again for a moment, and as she lay there, with her head thrown back on the pillow against her spread hair, her long and very white throat bare, her faint, teasing smile on her lips, I thought that she too should have known what it was to be desired again and again by someone better than herself, and it seemed a shame that it was only by Oswald who shared that bed with her. I wished that I knew as well as I knew her some woman who was really happily married, so that I could ask her, ‘Are you, too, frightened by the thought that your husband may die?’ But Nancy, before she rose, asked me that very question. Everything went so well that it was as if I had abolished misfortune by my marriage; for surely Mary would fall in love too and marry and would understand. But one day in the second winter of our marriage Oliver and I went to Bournemouth; I had an afternoon concert at the Winter Gardens, and Oliver was stuck in his work so he came too. It is a frightening place. Those fir trees have so much an air of having the last word. The houses have won a victory over the woods, there is not an inch of them that is not now town; but in the gardens the black branches remind the people in the houses of the hearse. But we were not frightened. I had a new crimson coat with a long collar of black moleskin, which delighted Oliver to the point of foolishness; he seemed to think I had designed it and made it as well as bought it. My rehearsal went well; my performance went well; it was pleasant with the special pleasantness that has no particular cause. In the train going home, under a plaid rug that he had bought as a young man and thought as a certain prescription for warmth, not having noticed that it had worn thin during the years, we dozed together in a warm adhesion. But when we got back to our home there was a light in the drawing-room windows, I thought it might be Avis Jenkinson; sometimes when she got in a great state she would suddenly come to see us; and Mary was waiting for us.
