by Rebecca West
I found Nancy in the bathroom with Cordelia, they were gossiping over a tedious chore we children always had to do, they were washing all the hairbrushes and clothes-brushes in the house. It was horrid to give her the message, it seemed so natural that she should be in the bathroom, we did not mind her seeing how old the brushes were, she no longer asked us why all our brushes were not silver-backed; as I came in she had been looking at a clothes-brush and wondering how much longer it would last just as if she were one of us by birth.
Struck still, she said, “Aunt Lily is out, I won’t be able to say good-bye to her,” and turned blue-white.
“But your Uncle Mat will ask her to come and see you in Nottingham,” I said.
She said, “He won’t,” not with the howling despair we used sometimes to purge our fears, but with a shrewd hopelessness that was far grimmer. She laid the worn clothes-brush back in the suds, and set about drying her hands, but gave up, shaking her head. If one is unhappy and one’s hands are really wet it is a bother to dry them. Cordelia took the towel away from her and did it for her. Nancy said, “I don’t want to leave here.”
Cordelia said, “Oh, Nancy, we don’t want you to go. We wish you could stay. But you must have noticed that we are very poor. If you stayed here you would find yourself missing a lot of things you had at home.”
“Yes, it’s really awfully like a picnic,” I said. “Such fun, but one has to go home.”
“This is not a picnic,” said Nancy. “It is something I want to last forever.”
“Live with your uncle,” said Mary, “and come back here quite often, we will always want you.”
“Come back in summer specially,” said Richard Quin, who was suddenly there. “We go to Kew, and we do have picnics then, and tea in shops, with ices. I will always take you about with me. You have lots of things my silly sisters have not got.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to get back,” said Nancy.
“Oh, we will always know each other,” I said, and, of course, I was right.
Mamma called, and we dispersed, our family nodding confidently, Nancy as still as stone. Mary and I went downstairs to scrabble for Nancy’s shoes in the dark cupboard under the stairs, and presently Mary stopped and said, “Can you believe that Nancy is right and her Uncle Mat won’t ask even Aunt Lily to come and see her?”
“I think it’s probably true,” I said. “Nancy isn’t silly, you know.”
“But that is awful,” said Mary. “Nancy loves Aunt Lily. She is rude to her sometimes, but she loves her.”
“I know,” I said, and confessed, choking, “I am horrible, I am so sorry Nancy is going, but I did think too that when she was gone it would be easier about our practising.”
“I am horrible too, I thought of that,” said Mary, “but we are like that, and we cannot help it.” All the same we both settled down among the boots and shoes and wept, until we heard Nancy coming down the staircase above our heads, her feet lagging from step to step. Mary sobbed, “Well, anyway Papa and Mamma have had a little time to work on the beastly old man before he sees her,” and we got on with our hunt, drawing comfort from what now strikes me as one of the oddest paradoxes in our parents’ being. They were incapable of getting on terms with their fellow creatures on the plane where most of us find that easy. My mother could not dress herself to go out of her house tidily enough to avoid attracting hostile stares, she could not speak to strangers except with such naïveté that they thought her a simpleton, or with such subtlety that they thought her mad. She was never much more negotiable than William Blake. My father was unable to abandon to the slightest degree his addiction to unpunctuality, swarthy and muttering scorn, and insolvency, no matter how earnestly his admirers (and there were always new ones to replace those he alienated) begged it as a favour. Yet when people had passed a certain threshold in the lives of either Papa or Mamma, which they did easily enough by attaining a high pitch of desolation, both were able to exercise on behalf of these desolates a celestial form of cunning nearly irresistible. They were as tricky as a couple of winged foxes. They never had a conversation in the interests of those they were protecting which did not sensibly alter the situation in the way they wished, while those with whom they conversed remained quite unconscious of any propulsive force in their surroundings.
Uncle Mat, as we were to learn years later, set them a severe test. It had to be pointed out to him that when Nancy came down he had better stop saying over and over again, “Saw Harry only a month ago. As well as you and me. And a healthy man. Never been ill in his life. It’s no use telling me they won’t find something. Saw him only a month ago …” He had, so to speak, to be taught the facts of life in Nancy’s special case; to be induced to realize that the girl was the child not only of his brother’s wife, who was believed to have murdered his brother, but of his brother, who was believed to have been murdered; and that therefore she must be treated tenderly. I cannot think how Papa and Mamma succeeded in doing this, but certainly when we all gathered on the doorstep to wave Nancy good-bye Uncle Mat was bending on her a gaze that was more kindly than we could ever have hoped. I remember that gaze as proceeding from an eye embedded in crimson jelly like a bull’s; but that is perhaps because of Papa’s answer when we asked whether Uncle Mat had said anything about taking Aunt Lily up to Nottingham. He replied, “No. It would have been as foolish as to ask a bull to be kind to a horse.” He turned about and walked towards his study, but turned again to say, “Man is a political animal. But seeing what the animal is, what may politics become?” His door closed on us.
11
WHEN Aunt Lily came in at teatime she did not notice Mamma’s disturbed face, she was so eager to know if there was a letter for her. This was always the first thing she asked when she came down in the morning, and when she returned to the house after even the briefest absence. We had told her the times of the posts quite often, but she did not seem to take them in. This afternoon some letters had come for her but not, it appeared, the one she wanted. She was very tired, and this time she could not bear it that the letter had not come. Her face crumpled, and as soon as she heard that Nancy had been taken away she wept without shame, and it could be seen that she was lamenting both her griefs at once, the letter which had not come, the lost girl. But she was inordinately pleased because Nancy had left her the completed nightdress case, her “work,” as a present. Aunt Lily sat down and drank several cups of tea with the nightdress case spread out on the arm of her chair, breaking off every now and then to say, “It’s the thought that I appreciate, she’s such a thoughtful kiddy,” and, again, “All she had, and she left it as a keepsake for her poor old auntie,” and, yet again, “Well, like my own I always felt towards her, and like my own she feels towards me.” It did not escape us that there was a certain falsity, a greasy and posing self-consciousness, about these expressions. We had very often been sharply warned against sentimentality, and though we might have been able to define it only vaguely as the way one should not play Bach, we recognized it. But there was never any doubt that here the false merely overlaid the true. We had got accustomed to the idea that Aunt Lily had formed the vulgarest image of herself as having a heart of gold, and often wrote herself atrocious lines to be said in that character, and delivered them like the worst of actresses, yet had in fact a heart of gold. It is not unlikely that she owed this pollution to her pure self to her origins, for there had never been a population so doomed to excessive relish of themselves and their own emotions as the Southern English who dropped their h’s in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The music-hall comedians and the funny papers never left them alone for a moment. But we had pierced her affectations and knew she mourned Nancy as poignantly as our austere Mamma would mourn for us, were we taken from her.
Aunt Lily told us what luck she had had in the day’s business. They had been very nice at Jay’s, saying that the musquash cape had indeed been started but in the circumstances (she repeated that they used that
word) they would put it in stock and say no more about it; and Peter Robinson’s had been as good about two garments of the sort Mrs. Phillips had worn when she appeared in her drawing room, two matinées. But there had been two tea-gowns (I do not know how these differed from matinées) ordered from a shop in Bond Street, which was unfortunately not disposed to be nice about them at all, although Queenie had spent a small fortune there. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m only telling you, you can go on with the order if you like, but you won’t get your money, and don’t say I didn’t tell you you’d have to whistle for it, for I’m telling you straight.’” Mamma made the appropriate sounds, though her eyes were bright as stars because she was not there, she had withdrawn to some musical paradise for refreshment. “Mind you,” said Aunt Lily confidently, taking Mamma’s starry gaze as proof of complete communion, “I should have known, you can always tell, there’s not a creature in the place that hasn’t a French name, this manageress person calls herself Madame Victoire, they’re all Stephanie and Yvettes and Lisettes, and not one of them’s ever been nearer France than the Elephant and Castle. You can’t tell me. And it’s all false. So really you oughtn’t to be surprised when they’re low and tricky. That,” she said, taking a sip from the glass of sherry Papa had poured out for her when he came to help Mamma tell her the sad news, “that is what my Ma used to say. And whatever you could say about my Ma, you couldn’t say she didn’t know her way about.” She shook her head and gazed into the distance, and then asked, very childishly, very pitifully, “What was it I was telling you my Ma used to say?” And none of us found it quite easy to answer.
Richard Quin, who was lying on the hearthrug reading a newspaper, called out, “Mamma what is a pork-pie hat?” and Aunt Lily clutched at this straw, saying, “Fancy a sharp little boy like you not knowing what a pork-pie hat is, well I never. Can somebody give me a newspaper and a pair of scissors?” She cut it out with some cleverness and put it on her head and made a funny face, and we all laughed, and she went on to say, “And if there’s those who don’t know what a pork-pie hat is, there’s lots more that don’t know what a pork pie is. It’s a very rare thing, let me tell you, a good pork pie, and I can say so, for I’m one of the few people who can make one, though I say it myself.”
Richard stood up, advanced on her, crying, “A magic?”
“Well, cooking is,” she answered.
“Make me a magic pork pie, make me a magic pork pie with spell and onions,” he bade her, laughing.
“Well, I will, but there’s a whole lot of things you have to get in,” she warned him. “There’s conger eel, for one thing.”
“Conger eel!” exclaimed Mamma, coming out of her musical remoteness, as she was willing to do if just cause were shown.
“Conger eel. Conger eel. Conger eel,” cried Richard Quin, in triplicate.
“Yes, indeed, conger eel,” said Aunt Lily gravely, as if she did not want us to make a joke of something serious. “Veal and ham pie you can have without conger eel, that’s quite natural, but you can’t have a real pork pie without a nice bit of conger eel in it.”
Richard Quin clasped her knees and laid his head in her lap, chuckling, “This is lovely like the Arabian Nights,” while Mamma, gazing into the upper air at vast interlacing forms, like supple drainpipes, murmured, “Conger eels, conger eels,” and the name, by reiteration, became something else, even more extraordinary.
“You are a funny crowd,” said Aunt Lily, delighted at the sensation she was creating. “Everybody who can make a good pork pie knows that, though as I say there’s few enough of us who can. I never would have learned the trick, if it hadn’t been that old Uncle Joe Salter who did the cold table for the Admiral Benbow down at the Old Harbour took a fancy to me and showed me.”
Richard Quin seized on this superb supply of raw material for nonsense. “Admiral Benbow, he had a cold table, a very—cold—table—a table dripping with stalactites,” he chanted in ecstasy, shuddering and turning up an imaginary coat collar, “down by the harbour, the very old harbour the one they don’t use any more, it’s far too old and far too deep, and there’s the thing with two heads that eats the anchors, so nobody goes there now except Uncle Joe Salter, and Uncle Joe Salt, and Uncle Joe Saltest—Aunt Lily, Aunt Lily, do, do go on.”
“Hark at the child,” said Aunt Lily. “Goodness, I do wish old Uncle Joe Salter was alive to hear that, Uncle Joe Salt and Uncle Joe Saltest, he’d have died of laughing. But now, since you’re all so interested in pork pies, I wonder if I could make one tonight. Do you know if the girl’s got a good stock-pot going?”
Kate had indeed. And Mamma did what was almost unthinkable, she gave us permission to go out after dark, and presently Richard Quin and I were scurrying through the night beside Aunt Lily, who walked with excessive speed and frequently burst into excessive laughter, and threaded her way through alleys we had never noticed before, into little black shops where Aunt Lily demanded the ingredients necessary to a real pork pie with an air of adept cunning and troglodytish shop-keepers sold them to her with an equally zestful air of complicity. She paused to tell us that whereas there were a great many good butchers, ordinary butchers, a good pork butcher was as rare as an archbishop. After that she shot with an air of having dodged a barrier into an establishment where she found some good lean fillets of pork and some lard, which, we gathered from her unctuous explanation, was white as new snow because it came from the farm belonging to the father-in-law of the plump gentleman in a blue overall behind the marble counter. This increased Richard Quin’s sense of the magic inherent in a pork pie, and thereafter a pork-butcher wizard and his father-in-law, a jinn who lived in a haystack and wore a smock, constantly appeared in our games and stories. In a shop crusted like a bottle of port an old grocer with whitening eyes sold us what Aunt Lily certified as by far the best black peppercorns to be bought in the whole of London. There was a conspiracy of silence over the impossibility of obtaining conger eel. We pretended we had done all in order. Then we came back into the commonplace high street and hurried contemptuously by the people who were going to buy the usual things in the shops everyone knew about, and got back to the kitchen just about the right time to take off the bones that had been simmering on the range for gravy since morning.
At length Aunt Lily came to, as it were, her cadenza. She had to build the pastry she had made with the lard into a tower, we called the others down to look, and Kate stood behind us, her hands on her hips, nodding in professional sympathy. It was really very clever, because not only did Aunt Lily have to build the pastry into a tower, she had to fill it with pieces of meat and hard-boiled egg, and pour in some gravy, and put on a pastry hat just to fit, and as you have to make that sort of pastry by boiling the lard with some water and mixing it into the flour it was quite warm and soft, so that the whole thing might have fallen down if she had not been quick and careful. There was an easy way of making it by moulding the pastry on a jar, but Aunt Lily said that that was a mug’s game, and one had one’s pride; and she smiled proudly as she watched her hands perform the remembered trick. “Nancy never saw me do this,” she sighed. “Queenie would never let the children eat anything vulgar. Harry liked it, when he went out in his boat, but I could never get into the kitchen, with those blessed maids always hanging about.” She gave Kate a quick smile. “Not like you.”
“I know what you mean,” said Kate. “That’s why I am a general. I know what girls are like when there’s more than one kept.”
They nodded in understanding. We all felt safe in the warm cave of our kitchen.
“Haven’t any reason, now I come to think of it, to think Clara isn’t a good woman,” meditated Aunt Lily, her fingers still busy. “She’s from the North. They say North Country people are very homely.”
So we got through that sad evening; and we ate the pork pie the following day at luncheon and we thought it wonderful, though Aunt Lily suffered over it as artists do when they have to make compromises for the sake of their fri
ends, for Kate had reminded me that, like most children at that time, we were allowed no condiments, and she had been obliged to leave out the unique peppercorns. But she owned it was as good as could be expected, considering that omission. It was the last satisfaction she was to have for a long time, for a day or two later a policeman came to tell her that her sister had been found and was alive.
Queenie was at liberty so long because a bank of fog had fallen on the South Coast about the time of her disappearance, and hung over it for an unusual number of days. Not till it lifted did a policeman, standing in the early morning at the end of an esplanade of a seaside resort somewhere near Southampton, look down on the line of shacks and bathing-huts that ran along the sandy beach away from the town, and notice that from one chimney there was rising a column of smoke. It was still only February. The policeman went down and looked at the shack, which was one of those places which would now be called a café, which had then, oddly enough, no name, and was vaguely referred to as “a refreshments” or “a minerals.” But it was the same thing. In summer you could be served there with tea or ginger beer and buy oranges and bananas and chocolates; and there was always a mosaic of orange peel and banana skins and silver paper from the chocolates trodden into the sand about the threshold. The windows of this shack were boarded up, and when the policeman knocked there was no answer. He went back and sent a message to the station; and when he and the sergeant and another policeman broke in they found Queenie lying in the bar on a mattress set on the bare floor, among piles of chairs stacked on tables. Somebody had brought her bedding, and had every day fetched food and fuel to her. The owner of the place proved that it was not he, and it was never discovered who it was.
After Aunt Lily had heard the news she spoke nothing that was not brave and false and jarring, save once, in the course of a long monologue over her evening sherry, when she said, wandering into honest sadness, “Bread and corned beef and coal and milk, and the risk of prison. I know who that would be. Mind you, I’d never say. But fancy him caring for her after all these years. Particularly when she treated him the way she did. But there, some people can steal a horse, and others aren’t allowed to look over the gate.” She could not be jealous of her sister Queenie, whom she loved so dearly, but for an instant she, who was vowed to mildness, could not help wondering why the tigress should be set above the lamb.
