Authors: Rebecca West
There was a burst of laughter within. We had to ring again, and then it was a waiter who opened the door. We saw a very large sitting-room; Mary and I had been staying at hotels for years now but we had never had a sitting-room as large as this. At one end, where there was a fireplace stacked with flowers, about twenty men and women were standing about. We knew none of them except Cordelia and Alan, who stared at us angrily, as if something unpleasant were happening which was our fault. All these strangers were looking at a small fat man who stood in the middle of the room, exactly in the centre of a Persian rug, with his back to a table at which two men sat and ate among the coffee-cups and wine-glasses left by a large dinner-party. This little man was so small that the sleeves and tails of his evening coat were like fins and he was, indeed, fantastically marine in appearance. He had dark red hair that grew away from his forehead and low down on the nape of his neck, if a fish tried to wear a toupee it would slip back into this position. His face was flat but mobile, one could imagine it applied to the sea-bottom, the nose and mouth attracting by suction small organisms from the crannies of the rocks. We supposed him to be some sort of entertainer, and we supposed too that he had said something improper, as Cordelia and Alan looked so cross. There was at that time an odd fashion for entertainers who sang songs and told stories that treated with coy facetiousness habits that were in fact taken for granted by everybody present. But because we could not see Rosamund anywhere we listened to what he was saying.
‘In those days,’ he was telling his audience, in a rich foreign voice, ‘I was a poor young boy, and I did not know what to do, so I joined the Istanbul Fire Brigade.’ He turned for confirmation to the two men who were eating at the table. ‘Was it not so, Mr Ramponetti?’ Mr Ramponetti, who had the long, prudent, and obstructive face of a mule, paused reluctantly as he lifted a laden fork to his lips and impatiently nodded. The fat little man swivelled back to his audience, rays of light emanating from his collar-studs and cuff-links and a ring on his finger. ‘Mr Ramponetti was a poor young boy, too, and so he too joined the Istanbul Fire Brigade, and together we did many deeds. Ah, the poor little Moslem girls, how they used to run from the flames, blind in their veils. Come in, come in,’ he said to us. ‘Waiters, give these two young ladies champagne, give them all they want, and then listen, young ladies, I am telling the story of my life. Already I have told of my father and my mother, and how each for long believed the other dead, and we were all little children. My God, my God, you are Mary, and you are Rose.’ He came towards us and stretched wide his arms. ‘So I must kiss you, for I am Rosamund’s husband.’
We looked past him at Cordelia and Alan, and we saw that it was true. They looked at once angry and exultant.
‘You are one of my family now,’ said the little man. ‘My God, my God, I marry a beautiful woman, and my life becomes a rose-garden, with her she brings so many beautiful women. Already there is Cordelia, who is beautiful like a rose, and so is Mary and so is Rose, and they are as beautiful though they are not married, why is that, and I will kiss you as I kissed her.’ He gave us a smack that made the strangers about us laugh, and turned about and ran from us towards a door. He beat on it with both hands, crying, ‘Rosamund, Rosamund,’ before he remembered that he could open it by turning the handle.
On his departure the laughter and chatter of his guests fused into a fountain of something just decently short of derision. Like many of the most disagreeable occasions of adult life, this party made us feel we were back at school. These people were like the girls at Lovegrove High School when they gathered round us and asked about our music examinations and said how glad they were we had first-class honours, but said something else after we had left the room so that we always heard a burst of laughter through the closed door. Alan and Cordelia crossed the room towards us, and Cordelia said to us, with her white look, ‘Was it really quite impossible for you to change?’ We looked round and saw that all the women had very good dresses and jewels, and the men had the slow and bulky look that is given by certain sorts of riches. There was nobody there we recognised, though by now we knew many people in London. We recognised in Cordelia’s panic the respect she paid to people who were not of our sort. She would instantly think that, because we did not know these people, they must be our superiors; that they might be our inferiors would never strike her. From an armchair in the corner there rose Mr Morpurgo who came to us and without offering any greeting said, ‘He is not a Jew.’
We said to the three of them, ‘Where is Rosamund?’
Alan said, ‘She tore her dress, Constance is mending it.’
‘How is she?’
‘Very happy, I am sure,’ answered Cordelia, restored for a moment by malice.
It was a curious thing that even now when Mary and I were angry with Cordelia we wanted to hit her and pull her hair as if we were still little.
I lowered my voice and said, ‘Who are all these people?’
Alan shrugged his shoulders, Cordelia pursed her lips. Mr Morpurgo said, ‘They are all coming up. Some are City people, there are two Members of Parliament, and a lawyer or two, and some newspaper people. I have never met any of them before.’ He looked at them coldly out of this pouched eyes. ‘Some of them will get through. Some will not.’
Mary whispered in my ear, ‘But why did she ask anybody but us?’
‘She could not help it,’ I said. ‘You know she could not help it.’
The fat little man was back with us. He returned to his stance on the rug in the middle of the room, although he addressed Mary and me in an extremely personal manner. It evidently appeared to him as an advantage that the party was too small for any person present to remain unaware of what he was doing and saying. ‘My wife Rosamund is so happy that her cousins have come. “Oh, it is Mary. Oh, it is Rose,” she cries.’ He spoke the words in a falsetto voice and clasped his hands in a cloying attempt to imitate an ecstatic feminine gesture. ‘And how wonderful it is for me too to see these young ladies. Look, I have married the most beautiful woman in the world, and I say to her, and you know how you say anything when you love a beautiful woman and you are first married, “Your family shall be mine,” and I mean it, for which of us English is not good with our families? But it might be a hard vow to keep, for not all families are easy to be good with. But all my wife’s family are as my heart desires, they are nice, they are beautiful, look at these two young ladies, you can see how they are, and they are that and more. Do you know who they are? Look hard. For they are famous. They are the greatest pianists in the world.’
He said our names, and the guests murmured politely. They had of course never heard of us, they were the kind of people who never go to concerts; and that was perhaps as well, considering the idiotic description. But even so, a voice said, ‘Give the little girls a hand,’ and some people clapped, while others knew one another well enough to know it was all absurd, and tittered.
‘They play,’ said Nestor Ganymedios, voluptuously closing his eyes, ‘more beautifully than anybody has ever played since anybody invented the piano, not counting the harpsichord. Do I know, since grandfather’s cousin was Anton Rubinstein?’ He suddenly grew sad and his chin dropped on his chest. ‘Alas, that great man is dead. We must all die.’ Cheerfulness, however, immediately brought his head up again. ‘But many people are dead. Good God, when one thinks of it, all people are dead except those who are actually alive. It is an immense number, we cannot worry about them, let us think of Mary and of Rose, they are alive and they play everything. Continually they play in Berlin, no artists are better known in Germany, and from now when they come to Berlin they will stay with my dear wife and me at my house at Dahlem that was built for me by the great Schaffhausen. I tell you, it is a thing only I can say, my house which was built by the great Schaffhausen. For he builds town halls, and art galleries, he builds, and universities, and huge concert-halls, and a cathedral, yes, in Thuringia he has built a cathedral, but dwelling-houses he does not build. For why? They are too small, and he is a great man. So he will build none, until he meets me, and then he says, “For you, Nestor Ganymedios, for you I will break my rule and I will build a house.” And now there it stands in Dahlem, it is the wonder of all, there is a huge window of glass, people do not know what it is, they guess, a factory, a hospital, and these young ladies they will stay with me there, and so will all of you.’ Somebody said, ‘Right, Nestor, we’ll take you up on that, old man,’ and the little man flung out his arms, ‘You shall all come. Waiters, waiters, let there be caviare. But, my friends, it cannot be now. Not till I have returned from South America where I go to buy twenty-eight hotels.’
‘Twenty,’ said Mr Ramponetti, suddenly, from his seat at the dinner-table.
‘Why do you say only twenty?’ asked Nestor Ganymedios irritably. ‘That old man is eighty-seven, he will die soon.
Maybe,’ he said, growing chubby with optimism, ‘he is dying now, we will buy those eight hotels from his heirs.’
‘If you are eighty-seven you may be eighty-eight, you may be eighty-nine, you may be ninety,’ said Mr Ramponetti. ‘Otherwise how are there all those old men?’
‘But I am very lucky,’ said Nestor.
‘So too is Arturo Arahona,’ said Mr Ramponetti, ‘or he would not be eighty-seven.’
Everybody laughed. ‘Mr Ramponetti is very witty,’ said Nestor, beaming round the room. ‘He has what foreigners so much admire, the English phlegm. For like me he is English in spite of his name. But who shall say how a man gets his name? But we are quite English, Mr Ramponetti is very English. Though he came late he could have had what I gave you for dinner, the oysters, the mushroom soup, the sole, the duck, but he is so English, he would have only eggs and bacon.’ He looked affectionately at Mr Ramponetti, and bade a waiter, ‘Give my friends much coffee, and take round again the champagne and the brandy.’ Suddenly his eyes fell on us, he gaped, he struck his forehead, and wailed, ‘My God, my God, I have forgotten. Rosamund wants you to go into the bedroom to see her, she is with her dear mother, who is to live with us in Berlin, all my wife’s family shall be as mine. Her dear mother is mending her dress, so tall is my wife that she trod on the hem of her long skirt, and she bade me send you in to her. Go, go at once, she will not forgive me, for she loves you as if you should be her own sisters.’
There was but one Constance in the bedroom. She was sitting stiff-backed in a chair by the window. Her body had always been an effigy representing the kind of woman that she was, but it had never revealed what she was thinking or feeling at any particular moment. So she looked us full in the face and we looked back at her, and we learned nothing except that whatever course of action had brought her to this room, she would persist in it until it was achieved, for such was her habit, not to begin what she did not finish. But because there were many panels of looking-glass in the room, we saw six Rosamunds. Each was sitting with back a little bowed on one of the twin beds, and wore a dress of pale sea-green satin with huge, shining, spreading skirts. Its body was closely and deeply cut, and the shoulder-straps were narrow for her splendid breadth. But she did not look naked for she was wearing a diamond necklace so massive and so remarkable that it clad her as decently as if it were a scarf. She was breathing slowly, and with each breath the diamonds rose and fell, and in the mirrors a dazzling multicoloured brightness flickered over her breast and shoulders. Some hairdresser had seen that her beauty was outside the sphere of fashion and had piled up her hair into a helmet of curls, and one golden ringlet fell past her ear and rested on the diamond necklace. She hardly moved as we entered, and it was not possible for her to speak. She threw her head back to look at us better under her heavy lids, and we saw her stammer beating like a huge pulse against her mouth. But we knew why she had left the party. The curtains were pulled back, and against the glass, only faintly patterned with the reflections of the room, was the darkly shining Thames with its barges, and the innocent and trivial electric signs, and the south-side factories with their smoke-stacks wearing the red oval blotch of their reflected fires above them, and the Houses of Parliament, with Big Ben as a second moon; and these things made the London which she and we had known all through our childhood and our youth. That window made the room a refuge to her disgraced flesh.
I became aware that she had lied to us about our Atlantic crossing. She had known that we were planning to sail on the
Ile de France;
she had pretended that she thought we were travelling on the
Berengaria
simply in order that she might spend her one night in London too early for us to meet her husband. It did not matter. We sank on our knees beside her and put our arms round her and kissed her, and looked up into her face, and waited for her to explain.
But she said nothing, only smiled faintly and stroked our faces with her beautiful hands, which, now that she had stopped nursing, were as white as ours. She was wearing a huge diamond engagement ring.
Mary said, ‘I am sure he is very nice,’ but still she did not speak.
I asked, ‘Where are you going to live?’
She could just force out the words. ‘Germany. Always Germany.’
‘Oh, Rosamund. You are forsaking us. But we shall see you often?’
Surely the meaning of her expression was pure pain. We turned to Constance but her face was blank. It occurred to me that perhaps Nestor Ganymedios was a lunatic whose misfortunes Rosamund had resolved to share; that this suite and the diamonds were extravagances he could not afford, and that Mr Ramponetti was a rogue who was using his employer’s lunacy as a decoy. Then there would be poverty and humiliation, perhaps involvement with the law, to take her back to her accustomed destiny.
‘Tell us,’ begged Mary. But at that moment Nestor Ganymedios burst into the room, crying, ‘Come back, come back, my darling, the Lord is coming.’ He embraced her so roughly that his lesser weight rocked her backwards, and gave her such a smacking kiss as he had given us. ‘See, Mary, see, Rose, does she not look beautiful? You are now of my family, some day I will tell you what her necklace has cost, but I grudge nothing to my beautiful wife, though I know she has always been poor, and would have been content with cheaper presents.’ She rose slowly to her feet and gave him her hands, smiling. She could not have made it more plain that she wanted to be with him, that she intended to stay with him, that this was a marriage which would never be broken.