by Rebecca West
The tram car rocked up the Mound with the free, camelish motion of trolley cars, swung round the curve at the top, and shambled over George the Fourth Bridge, the bridge that fascinated us children because it crossed no river but canyons of slums. Cordelia and Mary and I would be sorry to leave Edinburgh. The castle on its rock made us feel we were living in a fairy tale, we liked climbing the slopes of Arthur’s Seat, which was so like a couchant lion that it seemed quite unscientific to suppose it could be a natural mountain, and it had to be admitted that it was probably wizard’s work. Also these dark slums below the bridge ran under the open, stately city to Holyrood Palace, where darkness and light met, and the white star of Mary Queen of Scots was forever in opposition to the black star of John Knox. My heart swelled at the thought that we must presently leave all this, simply because it was our doom always to leave. I could have wept. I stroked Mamma’s hand and smiled up at her as grown-ups like children to smile, and I knew from her face that she was thinking, Rose is a contented child. We got out at the head of Meadow Walk, and as we went down it we saw the dark blocks of the infirmary among the reddening trees. We knew a woman medical student who talked of it with awe, as a cathedral of healing. Cordelia sometimes wanted to be a nurse and train there, and when she thought of that her face grew noble and stupid, but stupid in a nicer way than it was when she played the violin. Cordelia would mind leaving Edinburgh more than any of us. All her teachers admired her, they did at every school she went to, they made plans for her, they told her she had only to go on in a straight line and she would be where they wanted her to be, which was where she, with her intense desire for approval, would want to be. Our doom was hardest on her.
I turned to Mamma and said, “Next winter we will not be as cold as we were here last Christmas!”
Delighted, she said, “Why, I believe you are eager to go to London!”
“We all are,” I said. It was strange, Mamma was said to have second sight. A Scottish nurse we had in South Africa had said so; on the beach at Durban Mamma had once lifted up her voice because on a blank sea she had seen a small steamer go up in flames and boats row out towards the shore, and it had all happened as she had seen, twenty-four hours later. But we children could always deceive her. Had it not been so, we could not have provided for her happiness half as well as we did.
We came to the grey terrace where we lived, and walked past the house where we had a flat, because we had to make some purchases in the shops round the corner. “It is odd to pass our own front door without going in,” I said, and Mamma said, “I feel like that about leaving the city where I was born.” But she went on, “How happy I am. Your pain is over and the dentist said that all your other teeth were good, and I am doing something I dreaded, I did not want to come in from the Pentlands all alone and do this sad thing about going away from our flat, but now it does not seem sad at all.” She was happy in the shops, too. She liked the act of spending in itself; and although we bought very little that day, just enough to give us something of a midday meal, the smallest tin of cocoa for me, a quarter of a pound of tea for her, a quarter of a pound of sugar, some milk which our dairy gave us in a little metal can with a hoop handle—even so there were parcels, there was a sense that there was more on our side of the line than there had been before, and there were civilities with the shopkeepers. “I do not owe a penny anywhere,” she said proudly as we came out of the grocer’s, and then came to a halt by a bakery window. After loitering for a while she said timidly, “Rose, would you think me very greedy if I bought a doughnut? I have not had one for such a long time. And these look so very light.” This modest demand touched me by its contrast with the wonderful things to eat which Mary and I would give her when we had become famous pianists. I urged her to have one, and got her to add to it a cake of another kind that had mincemeat in it and a Christmas look.
As we went up the stairs to our flat we saw that the door of the flat on the other side of the landing was open, and that our caretaker, nice fat Mrs. McKechnie, was standing on the threshold, between her bucket and broom, unwrapping a bar of soap. She came forward to greet us, and in the dark well of the staircase, as she was a bundle of sacking and was wearing a black bonnet, nothing of her was visible except the white patches of her round face and her huge hands. I stood and stared at her, fascinated by the chiaroscuro, while she and Mamma exchanged amiabilities. It was like looking at the Man in the Moon, her features were vast and only vaguely illuminated, but one could recognize the expression. She seemed to be regarding Mamma very tenderly, and her rich voice, an oatmealy contralto that always gave us great pleasure, was telling us that she was redding up the Menzies’ flat against their return from Rothesay and would be there all the afternoon, and if Mamma wanted her she had only to tirl the bell.
“A nice woman,” said Mamma, letting herself into the hall. “I will send her a good present after a month or two in London when I see how the accounts stand.”
We dropped the parcels down on the kitchen table, and Mamma lit the gas ring, and poured some milk into a saucepan for my cocoa, and I put her doughnut and the other cake on a plate. “I knew it,” said Mamma, “they have left everything beautifully clean. I was sure they were nice people. But look. The mice are terrible. These old houses are all the same. But how lovely they are. These high rooms take in every bit of fineness the day will give them. I must just go to the drawing room and see if they have been polishing Aunt Clara’s furniture.”
Some minutes passed before she came back and sat down with her elbow on the table, her head on her hand. My milk had boiled, and I had made my cocoa. I was putting on the kettle for her tea.
“I will not want all that water,” she said. “Pour some away. It will never boil. I was not born to have much of anything. Even an excess of water would be grudged me. It would never boil.”
She was very pale and she was trembling.
When I had put the kettle back on the gas she said, “What has happened does not really matter to us. I cannot explain that to you now. But in a way it is of no consequence at all, although it matters more than you can imagine. Aunt Clara’s furniture has gone.”
I left her and went into the drawing room. It was on the side of the house away from the street, and its two tall windows looked south over the public park known as the Meadows. There was now nothing in the room but our Broadwood upright piano, dragged out to the middle of the floor, and the worn rose-coloured carpet that had come from my mother’s home, and the three big copies of family portraits on the walls, and millions upon millions of motes dancing in the bright emptiness. There had gone the round table supported by the three entwined dolphins, the chairs upholstered in green silk patterned with gold bees, the high desk with the swan mounts. I went into the dining room and saw that the sideboard flanked with the two swaddled nymphs and the chairs with the brass inlay had gone too. Those were just the things I at once remembered. Probably I had forgotten a lot of other things.
I ran back to the kitchen, crying, “Mamma, shall I run round to the police station and tell them we have been burgled?”
“But perhaps we have not been burgled, dear,” she said stupidly.
“They must have taken the things away in a van,” I said. “Mrs. McKechnie may know something about it.”
“She will know,” said my mother. “I am wondering how to ask her.”
“How to ask her?” I repeated.
My mother got out of her chair, very stiffly, and went out into the hall and stood for a time with her hand on the knob of the front door, her other hand across her mouth. Suddenly she opened the door and went out and crossed the landing to the still open door of the opposite flat and called, in mimicry of a happy woman, “Mrs. McKechnie! Mrs. McKechnie! When did the man come for the furniture?”
The rich voice answered from within that the man from Soames in George Street had sent for it the very day and hour he had said he would, when he came with Papa to buy it, just after we had left for the Pentlands.
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br /> “Then that’s all right!” Mamma said heartily. “I thought there might have been a mistake but my husband’s managed it all most efficiently.”
When we got back into the flat we closed the door softly and Mamma stood shuddering in the hall. She muttered to herself, “He will have sold it for a fraction of its value. Oh, I am getting old and ugly, but it is not that. I cannot compete with debt and disgrace, which is what he really loves.” She lifted her arms to embrace a phantom, but they fell by her side.
2
A PARCEL came from a second-hand bookshop in Manchester, containing a book about Brazil in three volumes by a Frenchman called Debret, who had been there in the early years of the nineteenth century. We all liked it very much, it was full of lovely coloured lithographs. But Papa did not write to Mamma, so we got into the train at the Waverly Station without knowing what was going to happen to us when we got to London. It was our theory that we did not mind but positively enjoyed this uncertainty, and it was not too wildly untrue. In the night I woke up and looked across the carriage and saw that Mamma was in an ecstasy of courage. It was the fashion of the day for women to wear hats which, though not large, rode on their heads like boats and were moored by veils drawn over the face and made taut by a mysteriously contrived twist under the chin. Her veil was torn here and there, and the holes fell at awkward places. Her nose, which, now she was so thin, was very beaky, kept on poking through one of these holes, and she kept on jerking her veil into a different position by altering, never successfully, the knot under her chin. I suppose she had almost no feminine graces. But her lips moved with spirit, from time to time she tossed her head majestically, there was lightning in her eyes. She was rehearsing some scene of triumph that awaited us in London, and she looked like a gay eagle. Presently she took off her hat, she had kept it on so long only because it was part of the costume she was wearing in her dream; and she leaned back against the seat and fell asleep among her sleeping children, not tamed by her burden, interesting as a strolling player.
When we got to London Mamma managed our descent very slowly, considering how quickly it was her habit to move, and as she talked to the porter she looked about her furtively. We realized she had hoped that Papa would be waiting for us on the platform. Then she told the porter to take charge of our baggage for half an hour, because she felt she must give us tea and buns before we started our journey across the town to Lovegrove. The buffet was on the platform, and there were big glass windows. We found a table near a window and she sat with Richard Quin on her lap, giving him milk, while her eyes raked the crowd outside. Everybody looked at Richard Quin; although he had been travelling all night and the train, like all trains at that time, had been black with grime he was not at all dirty, and he was really very beautiful, with his large grey eyes and black lashes, and his white skin, and his hair that was fair above and dark below, and his air of tranquil amusement. An old lady came up and gave him a banana, which was then a very rare fruit, and he accepted it with a lovely coquetry. I could not see why Mamma worried so much about Papa when she had him.
At last Mamma sighed and said we must be going, and we started on the second and more dolorous part of the journey. We went in a stuffy cab to another station across the Thames, which we thought looked dirty, and took a train that was very slow and ran between horrid little houses, and we got out at a small wooden station high above the ground and went down shabby steps and had to wait till a cab was fetched, and then went a long drive and stopped at the newspaper office, which was in a horrid yellow-green brick Victorian house at a crossroads. It had the name of the newspaper in pale yellow letters on black horsehair screens across the bottoms of the windows, and we thought that ugly and vulgar. Mamma went into the office because she had arranged that the key should be left for her there, and she came out looking very tired.
“Had they heard anything about Papa?” I said.
“How could I ask?” Mamma sighed, and Cordelia frowned and shushed me. I think none of us felt brave any more.
But then the cab took us into a different sort of district, where there were trees along the roads and in the gardens, many trees, which astonished us, because we had believed that London was nothing but houses. The trees were just touched with gold, and the gardens were full of Japanese anemones and Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums, growing out of wet earth dark as plum cake. This was not like Scotland. It was a rich, moist, easy place. But then the cab took us into another horrid street of little red brick houses with front doors arched with yellow plasterwork and lace curtains hanging at mean little sharp-angled bow windows. We all grumbled, we had hoped we were going to live where the trees were. But it was all right. We had always known it was going to be all right. The houses came to an end and the road widened, and there were trees and flowers again, and the cab slowed down before a white villa which instantly pleased us. It never ceased to please me. I cannot so adjust my mind that I cancel my intention of living there someday, though it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War.
I cannot remember what I saw that afternoon, because I saw it too often afterwards. But here the road came to an end, running to a wrought-iron gateway, flanked by pillars on which two gryphons supported coats-of-arms, and set in a high brick wall. The gates were blind, backed with tarred boards, and this might have been frightening, but reassured, it proclaimed that everybody had gone, the place was private. On the right was a neat terrace of a dozen houses. Just before the gateway, on our left, was our new house. A neat plaque on its first floor gave the figures “1810” and it had the graces of its time. It had a portico to its front door and a veranda screening its lower windows of copper weathered to a wistful, smoke-soft blue-green, and twisted into exotic shapes to satisfy the Chinese taste. Above, the bedroom windows had a little pediment carved above each of them which gave them a certain distinction, and above them the attic windows were disguised by a balustrade adorned at each end with sentimental urns. But it had been newly painted, so my Mamma muttered, “That paint, what does it mean, who can have paid for that? Will that be the first bill?” And she flung out a tragic finger at a wide gate beside the house, ghost-coloured for lack of paint, and the red-purple tiles of the roofs that showed above it, the turret with a broken weathervane and a clock that was telling a shocking lie about the time. “What, are we to keep a carriage?” she said ironically. “Oh, this is far too big. What shall we do? What shall we do?”
“It will be all right,” said Mary.
“Of course it will be all right,” I said. “Let’s go in.”
We three little girls ran along the paced path, and Mamma slowly followed us with Richard Quin. “How good the boy is,” she said heavily, and put the key into the lock. She turned it and stepped inside and at once became rigid, her mouth falling open as if she were a fish, not to the advantage of her appearance. One of the doors opening into the little hall was ajar, and from the room beyond there came a scraping noise. She thought, and so did we, that a burglar had got into the house. Only for a moment did she hesitate, then she ran into the room, and Cordelia and Mary and I followed. My father was standing beside the chimney-piece, scraping with a penknife at the wallpaper where it joined the marble. For a second he persisted in this occupation, then he put down the penknife, opened his arms to my mother, and kissed her on both cheeks, and we stood in a half-moon round them, Richard Quin crawling about our feet. Mamma glowed, we all felt safe, rescued from the abyss, because we had our dear Papa with us again.
“But, Piers, how did you get in without the key? They said there was only one,” said Mamma. “This is the last thing I thought of!”
“I know a dozen ways into the house,” said Papa in the mocking voice that people hated so much. “This time I came in by the coach-house roof.”
“You know this house? It is—it can’t be the house where you used to stay?”
“Yes,” said Papa. “It is indeed the very same house where I used to stay with Grand-Aunt Willoughby.” He stoo
d back from the hearth, closed his knife, and slipped it back into his pocket. “Yes, it’s there,” he told us in parentheses. “There used to be a flat painted panel over this chimney-piece, and they’ve covered it over, I can’t think why. It was really good. We’ll get it clear later.” Fingering the closed knife in his pocket and giving one of his dark, oblique looks round the room, he went on, “Yes, this is Caroline Lodge, only nobody calls it that now. It was built for Grand-Aunt Willoughby by her rich son-in-law who lived in that big house behind the gates. It is a Theological College now. And this house belongs to my cousin Ralph. He has let me have it.”
“Oh, you and Ralph are friends again?” cried my mother.
“No, not noticeably,” said Papa. “But he has let me have it.”
“How good of him,” Mamma said, making the best of that. “But is it not very dear?”
“No, the place is falling to pieces, and nobody wants to live here now it is in the middle of a slum,” said Papa contemptuously. “But we are paying him something.”
“We must never be a day late with the rent,” said Mamma enthusiastically. My father made no response. “Oh,” she cried, looking about her, “it is pleasant to be here, and find you here, and now, children, let us go round the house and see where we are going to be so happy. Is there a nice room for your study?”
There was indeed. The little square room at the back of the house was Papa’s study, and the bigger room beside it was to be our sitting room. The removal men had set down most of the furniture there, but the grace of the room was still apparent. Here Mamma flung open the french windows, and we all stood by her on the top step of the broad iron stairs leading down into the garden, which was a square of lawn edged with flower-beds and ending in a grove of chestnuts, then brightened by their first gold and scarlet leaves. I remember those wild tints, for like my sisters I was looking at the scene with an exalted vision. We were experts in disillusion, we had learned to be cynical about fresh starts even before we had ourselves made our first start, but this house gave us hope. Indeed, it gave us back our childhood. Papa swung me up on his shoulder as he stood behind us, and I was proud, I was wrapped in delight, as if I knew no ill of him. It was not a warming pleasure, but it was glorious, it was like being cradled by the northern lights and swung across the skies. Mamma watched us in ecstasy, when our family life was as it is supposed to be on earth she was as if lifted to heaven.
