by Rebecca West
9
WHEN I opened my eyes the next morning Mary had already risen and gone down to breakfast and to work, and the first thing I saw was Cordelia, still in bed, though usually she got up when she woke. She was lying flat on her back and reading a bound score which she was holding open in the air above her, her elbows digging into the mattress under the weight. She was really astonishingly pretty. Her red-gold curls were so bright and so soft, her skin was fairy-tale white, and there were parts of her face, such as her short and deeply cleft upper lip, and the little triangular flat bit under the tip of her nose, which were specially lovely and somehow tenderly amusing; and she was free from the troubled quality of our family, she looked just like other people. The sight of her gave me the same sort of pleasure as the gayest songs of Schubert. But a shadow of crossness ran over her eyes and mouth. She knew herself perceived, so she was staking out an excessive claim.
Of course she must be reading the score just to show off. None of us at that time could read scores for pleasure, simply because we could afford to go to very few orchestral concerts, and were not familiar enough with the instruments to conjure them up to the mind’s ear, although Mamma was bringing us on as well as she could, making us listen properly to every band we heard and taking us to the gallery when the Carl Rosa Opera Company came to the local theatre; and also Mamma had not had time to teach us how the different parts were written. I sat up and stretched over towards Cordelia to see what the score was. It was Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. That we had heard; all of us except Papa and Richard Quin had gone up to London to hear Joachim play it. It is so beautiful that I have always wished I could steal it and get a miracle worked to turn it into a piano concerto. But of course God Himself could not do that. The essence of a violin concerto lies in the conversation the violin carries on with the orchestra, in something much nearer the orchestra’s own voice than a piano. When the violin soloist brings his cadenzas out of the chords played by the orchestra and returns them to it, it is as if a part had spoken for the whole but had never been detached from it; whereas the piano part in a piano concerto is a detached comment, it is almost as separate as consciousness is from the rest of our minds. Lying there, I heard Joachim’s performance over again. Of course the concerto deserved to be played at a height to which practice could never take one, the height on which Mamma lived.
“You’re not thinking of learning this?” I asked Cordelia.
She acted being called back from a long distance. “Learning this?” she repeated absently. “Oh, yes, yes. I shall start studying it soon. I shall have to play it at some not very distant date, you see.”
I recognized “at some not very distant date” as Beevor English. Once again I thought that Mamma ought to stop all this. Irritably I jumped out of bed and went to the window to glare at the world. It had come back to me that Richard Quin was ill. I looked out on a garden that was doubly desolate, because nobody tended it and because it was December, and saw my father walking on the lawn. When it is said of people that they keep irregular hours it is usually meant that they stay up late and rise late in the morning, but that after all is a kind of regularity. My father kept such truly irregular hours that he was likely now and then to go to bed and rise earlier than his children. He had probably been up and about for a long time, for his thoughts were in full torrential flood, he was vehemently talking to himself, or rather arguing with an unseen adversary. Middle age, which was making Mamma frail and birdlike and even disguised her power, was making him look foreign, excessive, fevered. His skin had grown darker and was a pale tobaccoish brown, which might have been the work of tropical sunlight; and he was now so thin that his cheeks were hollow, and the fine line of his unusually high cheekbones was painfully accentuated. His eyes, of course, always burned.
Though it was cold he wore no overcoat, for he extended his contemptuous indifference to himself and his own sensations. The shapelessness of his old suit showed that, if his gambling prevented me and my sisters from having enough clothes, it kept him ill-clad too. But his grace counteracted his shabbiness. He walked as if he had no weight, as if no limitation affected him, as if he had only to command a thing for it to be. And that, I realized, was true in the world where people argued. He was always right. Had his adversary been real instead of airy he would have been wholly defeated. But what was the use of all this argument? As my father reached the end of the lawn nearest the house he threw back his head and stared up at me with unseeing eyes filled by a terrible vision. Surely he looked forward into time and saw it utterly desert. I watched him as he paced back to the farther end of the garden and halted, the chestnut grove bare and black behind him, to look downwards and speak scornfully and grind a heel on the wet grass. He might have been dispatching a small groundless hope.
His despair reminded me that I was very cold. I went downstairs to the basement and filled a can with hot water from a kettle on the range and mounted the stairs again to the bathroom and washed. Only by exercising much forethought and always having full kettles on the range were we able to keep clean at this time. There was something wrong with the cistern, and as we were also behindhand with the rent we could hardly ask Cousin Ralph to repair it for us. I dressed and had breakfast, which was always the same in winter: porridge made of coarse oatmeal, which Mamma had sent specially from Scotland, smothered in milk and an unusual abundance of golden syrup, because Papa was a follower of Herbert Spencer and that philosopher held, against the opinion of his age, that it was good for children to eat sweet things. I remember holding the syrup spoon over my plate and shutting my eyes and saying, “If it has stopped dropping by the time I open my eyes Richard Quin will be all right.” I went up to see him as soon as I had finished eating, and found Papa on the landing. We knocked at the attic door and Mamma opened it, staring as she did when she was very worried. Papa went and stood at the head of the bed and I stood at the foot, and Mamma was between us, holding a medicine bottle close to her, as if it were a charm. There was no doubt but that Richard Quin was very ill. He looked as if he were drowning under a wave of pain which had swept him off his feet, as if soon there would be a flood of pain between us and him through which he would not be able to speak loud enough for us to hear. But he turned his head first to Papa and then to me and smiled, a smile of such complete acceptance that it felt as if we had been drowning and he were in safety and had saved us. But he was not strong enough to smile so for long, he relaxed and was borne away from us.
Mamma said, “If only we knew what is the matter with him.”
Papa muttered, “It is nothing infectious?”
“The doctor says there are no symptoms of anything infectious, it is not scarlet fever or measles,” she answered, “and the others are all right. No, it is something strange.”
Papa looked down very tenderly on Richard Quin, whom he loved best of all us children, which was only right, our brother was by far the best amongst us, and he was silent. Evidently he was setting his mind to rove through the hazards of his own childhood, for he asked presently, “Have you been eating any poisonous berries in the garden?”
“There aren’t any,” I told him.
“No,” sighed Papa, after a moment’s reflection, “of course. Those berries do not grow here. They were at home, they were in Ireland. Down by the boathouse. The other Richard Quin and I made ourselves very ill once eating them, and so, I think, did Barry. But it was over there. Not here. Why are you laughing, Richard Quin? You impudent boy, why are you laughing at your Papa?”
Gasping, Richard Quin answered, “Funny Papa, who reads so many books and writes so many articles that he does not know that it is winter, and all the berries are shrivelled up.” As the words left his lips, he went to sleep.
We watched him sadly, till my mother left the room and beckoned to us from the open door. I went downstairs, and Papa and Mamma stayed on the landing. I turned to ask if Mamma wanted me to do anything for her, and saw that she had drawn near to him and had laid her hand
on his sleeve, and that he had lowered his moustachioed mouth to her cheek. They seemed shy with each other. I found that Mary had stopped practising and was in her room getting on with her Christmas presents, so I went down to the piano and had got through the routine of all the major and minor scales and arpeggios with which we began each day, when Mamma came in to ask me to go with Rosamund and do the morning’s shopping, as Papa had been sent for to go to the office and Constance was going to call in to ask the doctor to come again. She told me to buy herrings for our midday dinner, from which I now deduce that to add to her troubles she must have had no money in the house, for we had had herrings for dinner on the previous day, and on the day before that again. In those days they cost a penny each, and sometimes less. I do not wish to exaggerate our poverty, it is true that Mamma knew Papa’s monthly cheque would be sure to be coming and of this he always gave her enough to meet our day-to-day expenses. But any extra outlay emptied her pockets, and so Richard Quin’s illness meant that she told me to buy herrings again, and two cabbages and two loaves; and she did not add, as she often did when there was a shilling or two to spare, now that we were older and were sensible, “And if you see anything …” The missing words were, “that is at once worth buying and so cheap that we can buy it, for goodness’ sake bring it home.”
But Rosamund and I were not troubled about our family’s finances as we went to the shops. We were both sick with fear lest Richard Quin should die. This was nearly half a century ago, and we were much more familiar with the idea of children dying than two little schoolgirls would be today. Though infant mortality in our class had fallen so far by then that the death of a schoolfellow was a rare and shocking event, and I can remember only three such deaths in all my years at school, older people often talked before us of brothers and sisters, and of uncles and aunts, who had never reached maturity. We therefore knew that we were not exempt from fatality because we were young, that a grave might be dug not for a grown-up but for one of our kind. We lived, as children do, much by omens, and we were depressed when the fishmonger’s cat shook each of its forepaws and turned away as soon as it saw us, though it usually was very civil, and went out to the front of the shop, and sat down with its back to us. But as Rosamund pointed out, it was one of those stout, purse-proud cats often found in butchers’ and fishmongers’ shops, who, though they get lots of food given them, never see a live bird, and keep mice down by their mere presence, are not nearly as kind to human beings as ordinary cats who hunt and are cruel to birds and mice. We might have known that this was how that particular cat would behave to people in trouble, and we had some luck in the shop, for we got some whiting at the price of herrings, and we always liked having those, because they were served with their tails in their mouths. But we grew depressed again as we went back along the road, and noticed what had escaped us in our outward journey, that by some failure in routine never remarked before or after, the man with the long rod had not come on his round at dawn, and the gas-jet in each lamp was still alight. This gave the whole street a look of joyless waste, like Papa’s study when we came downstairs to breakfast and found that he had forgotten to turn the gas out when he went to bed.
When Kate opened the door she said she was glad about the whiting, because Mamma would like to give Papa a change though of course Papa would not notice, and as we heard Mamma’s voice coming from the dining room we went in to tell her the small cheering news. But as soon as I got into the room I came to a halt and my jaw dropped. Mamma and Constance were sitting one on each side of the dining room, looking with an air of clinical curiosity at someone whose existence I had entirely forgotten during the night: Aunt Lily, who was sitting in the armchair by the fireplace, smiling as if bravely suppressing a desire to be sick, with a white cardboard box on her knees. Its wrapping of brown paper had already been removed and had slipped to the floor at her feet.
“Come in, children,” said Mamma, in accents hollow in bewilderment. “A friend of yours has called to see you.” A convulsive expression with which I was familiar passed over her face. She found Aunt Lily’s dress and ornament, which were girlish and frivolous, as repugnant as Miss Beevor’s attempts at the romantic, perhaps more so, for Aunt Lily offered more targets. If Miss Beevor wore a mosaic brooch representing doves drinking from a fountain, Aunt Lily wore a necklace of enamel violets to enliven her tight-waisted coat and skirt, secured her large fawn beaver hat with a number of hatpins that had enamel cupids as heads, and several charm bracelets jingled from her wrists. I prepared a defence for use afterwards on the ground that if Cordelia had a Miss Beevor there was no reason why I should not have an Aunt Lily.
“Miss Moon tells me,” said Mamma, “that there is some idea of your going round to Nancy Phillips’s house again this afternoon.” She spoke wearily. Obviously this visit had taken her from Richard Quin’s bedside, and she could hardly keep her patience. “But I think she must be mistaken, it is so very soon, she cannot really be wanting visitors the day after a big party.”
“I did say I would go,” I mumbled, “but I forgot.”
“Say you are sorry then,” said Mamma, “for it was rude of you to forget so kind an invitation. But there is another thing.” The expression in her eye reminded me of a picture I had seen of a hind caught in a thicket. She looked so when the conditions of our life trapped her in hideousness, when she could not send a cheque to Cousin Ralph on the right date, when she had to see a dun. “Mrs. Phillips has sent you and Rosamund both presents.”
I could see what had happened. Mrs. Phillips had been awake for a long time when they brought in her breakfast, and she had told them to fetch Aunt Lily at once; and when Aunt Lily had hurried in, blinking and yawning in her dressing-gown and curlers, she had told her to go out and get some presents for those horrible children and take them over to their house and be sure, sure, to get them to come along that afternoon.
“But really,” Mamma went on, very close to tears, “I cannot let you accept them. They are much too good.”
“Oh, come now,” chattered Aunt Lily, “they’re just some little things we thought your clever kiddies would like.”
“They are far too good,” persisted Mamma, and this time Aunt Lily, persisting on her side, said, “What’s the good of Mr. Phillips being fortunate in the City if we can’t do a thing like this when we want to?”
Mamma quivered and was still. “These things are most beautiful,” she said. She did her best, but no member of her family would not have known that Mrs. Phillips’s offerings struck her as the extreme of hideousness, ostentation, and grossly wasteful expenditure. She said, “But, you see, we are not at all fortunate, and we could not return your generosity in any form. I cannot let Mrs. Phillips give my daughter and my cousin’s child these valuable presents, when we could not give a present of any sort to Nancy. It would be—”
But Aunt Lily cut into Mamma’s wail, wailing herself. Her charms and bangles, her large beaver hat, were for a second agitated by fear. “My sister will be ever so upset if I have to take those presents back.”
My mother melted. “I will explain it to your sister myself, if you wish it, Miss Moon,” she said. Her great eyes blazed at me, inquiring: Why have you involved me with this vulgar and silly woman, to whom I cannot even be merciless, because she is so pitiful, who presses these idiot gifts on us and will not let me go back to Richard Quin’s bedside? Aloud she followed the same train of thought more temperately. “But, dear me, how has all this come about? How did you pick out these two girls at that large party?” A ray of understanding showed its light. “Oh, did Rose play the piano?”
“Oh, no!” said Aunt Lily, with the promptitude of one who, with the best will in the world, cannot help telling the truth. “It was more than that. Anyone can play the piano. I can myself. All by ear, I can’t read a note of music. I wouldn’t have thought so much of that, I’ve always been able to vamp ever since I was a kiddy,” she added, suddenly smiling at Rosamund and me, to revive the supposition of a
sudden and strong mutual attraction between us.
“It was more than that!” repeated Mamma in bewilderment. “You wouldn’t have thought so much of that! Well, what was it that you thought so much of?”
