Authors: Rebecca West
‘Yes, it’s all so unnatural that there must be a meaning to it,’ said Nancy, glowing. ‘They always say so in church but you only half-believe it, but having a baby, it’s more extraordinary than anything they tell you in church. I don’t know what it all means,’ she proclaimed, ‘but I feel that I might know any minute now.’
Through the floor came a supreme
BOOM
boom boom boomboom boom-boom
BOOM BOOM BOOM
. We laughed so loudly that we had to gag ourselves with handkerchieves.
‘He
knows, he ain’t half telling Oswald,’ gasped Aunt Milly, and Nancy begged us, ‘Oh, please hush, there’s someone coming upstairs now, if it’s Oswald he’ll want to know why we’re laughing.’ But Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily said together, ‘No, that’s Len’s tread,’ and presently there was a knock at the door, and a hoarse voice, repelled by the apocalyptic, whispered, ‘For pity’s sake, girls, come down.’
But as soon as we opened the door Uncle Len forgot the distaste that had made his wattles blood-red, and he was with us in our contemplation of Nancy and her exultation, that was faintly bright, like moth-wings. He put his arms round her, but not close, and said, ‘Why, Nancy, what we’ve been hearing downstairs is what we’ve all been hoping and expecting, yet now it’s happened it seems so strange I can’t believe it.’
‘Yes,’ she said looking up at him, ‘that’s what I was telling them. It’s strange.’
It appeared possible that Uncle Len might weep, so I went to the dressing-table and took my comb out of my bag and ran it through my hair. I looked towards the triple mirror, and saw that it was reflecting this room in which there were five persons, and indeed six, if one counted Nancy’s child, as though it were empty. I was kneeling to the right of the mirror, and Aunt Lily and Aunt Milly were far to the left of it, and Nancy and Uncle Len were in the doorway, so the central panel of the mirror saw nothing of them, and the others, loosely screwed, had swung towards it and reflected only its reflections: the images of the broad bed, which was covered with that furrowed material known as candlewick, and a wardrobe of unpolished oak beyond it, and the edge of a green rug and a foot or two of parquet floor. The mirrors reflected my private truth. To me the room was empty. Nobody was real to me, as people had been real to me till then. I saw before me a man and three women whom I had known since my childhood, and I had no direct apprehension of them. I had to tell myself, ‘That is Nancy, she says she is going to have a baby, and from what I remember of her she should be very happy about that,’ but I had to work it out in my head, and when I had deduced her happiness I did not share it. I was in the same wretched state that I had fallen into once or twice before when I had had to play at concerts too soon after I had had influenza, and I found I had to get through the programme entirely on my technique and my recollection of the meaning that the music had had for me when I was well. Though it had been my opinion that music was as important as any other part of my life, I now knew it was better to feel like that when I was playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C minor in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh than when Nancy was announcing that she was going to have a baby; and my present sickness was graver than influenza. This room was empty for me because Rosamund was not here. For me all rooms where Rosamund were not were empty. I could not be sure whether this did not mean that henceforward I was to find all rooms empty. For there could be no room where Rosamund was if there were no Rosamund, and I had reason to doubt whether the Rosamund I had thought I knew had ever existed.
But of course she existed. When I left the house Nancy murmured to me, while the others were busy with their goodbyes, ‘Poor Rose, you have kept up so well. But I know you are hardly able to see or hear, you are so miserable about Rosamund marrying that little man they say is so awful. I was often like that when I lived in Nottingham.’ She was my friend, and it was Rosamund who had given me continued friendship with her, by making my impatience halt and understand how she had feared to expose her fragile happiness to my sweeping judgments; it must have been Rosamund who had told Nancy, herself too timid and too respectful towards my career to make the discovery, that I was impatient because I always feared to be overtaken by the darkness, and was not arrogant but pitiable. Rosamund had existed, and since she had not died must still exist. Nancy came closer to me and whispered, ‘The Heavenly Hostages like all children to have one Old Testament name and one modern one. If we have a girl, it will have to be Janet Ruth, Janet after Oswald’s mother, Ruth because I like that bit about “Intreat me not to leave thee”, though it has nothing to do with the rest of the story which is a dull thing about barley and landed property. But I will have another girl, I will call her Rose Mary. And, Rose, if we have a boy it is to be Richard Adam, Richard after Richard Quin. I think of him so often.’ Her face was glorious because she spoke of him. In my obsession I passed from delight in her love for him to recollection that Rosamund had said that she would have liked Richard Quin to see her necklace. She had sworn by his name. I was nearly happy as I drove my party back to the Dog and Duck, I could laugh with Uncle Len when Aunt Lily, who had been dozing on his shoulder, woke up and said, ‘Salads. She ought to eat plenty of salads now. Perhaps that’s the reason I’ve never been able to abide lettuce, me never being meant to have a family.’ All the rest of the journey he kept on chuckling and saying, ‘Straighten that one out if you can.’ That night I did not go back to London, but slept in one of the stable lofts, for Milly and Lily were fearful of the morning and I felt so well that I was sure I would be able to help them if, as they feared, the river was into the house by morning.
But I woke in wretchedness, and the view from my window was terrible to me. The effacement of the land by the steel-grey waters seemed the confirmation of some bad news I had heard in my sleep. Fortunately I did not need to stay, the Thames had fallen in the night, and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily had nothing to distract them from the cheerful business of telling the staff and the neighbours the news about Nancy. So I went back to my music-room in London and practising was an effective anaesthetic. But when I was too tired to work any more I again had the illusion that the room was empty; the house was empty; the city was empty; the world was empty. I had thought that I could go on living without my father and my mother and my brother, but now I was not sure that I was right. My power to do so was perhaps conditional. It had perhaps been given me by Rosamund, and might be taken back by Rosamund. For the first time I understood how people could kill themselves. When Mary came in that night, back from an afternoon concert at Bournemouth, I saw that she too was suffering from the hallucination of solitude. I had left the door of the sitting-room open as lonely people do; so I saw her from my seat by the fire as she came in, put down her attaché case, and laid on the hall table the flowers she had been given. Then she looked up the staircase as one does when one lets oneself into an unoccupied house and thinks, ‘How am I to make a home here? There are only the bare walls.’
When she saw me, she said, ‘Oh, Rose, you love white lilac, a nice woman has given me an armful of it,’ and came over to lay it on my knee. It gave me no special pleasure, though she was right, I liked it best of all the flowers we were given in the winter.
I thanked her and thought to myself, ‘Flowers are no great matter, I may do better for her than she has been able to do for me, by telling her about Nancy’s baby.’ But she could not make herself feel any great interest, though it delighted her to hear that if it were a boy Nancy was going to call it after Richard Quin. We sat for a minute in silence after we had spoken his name. I thought of the stars blazing in the black winter sky above the house. But when I went on to say that if the baby was a girl it was to be called Janet Ruth, she cried out, ‘Not Ruth. I wish she would not call it Ruth.’
‘She likes it,’ I said. ‘It is because of that passage about “Intreat me not to leave thee”.’
‘I hate that passage,’ said Mary. She pulled off her gloves and fell on her knees by the bookcase and pulled out our big Scottish Family Bible, that had Mamma’s people in it up to her great-grandfather, who was born when his parents were on the run after the rebellion of 1745.
‘Between Judges and Samuel,’ I said. But she had found it. There was nothing I knew that she did not know. We had a common stock of information.
‘Listen,’ she said. “‘Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”’ She closed the book. ‘Oh, it is terrible,’ she said, and went out into the hall and fetched the rest of the flowers, and came back and sat with them on her lap, sorting out the narcissus and daffodils and tulips from several mixed bunches.
‘Why do you think it so terrible?’ I asked. ‘People say that it is strange because it is said by a woman to another woman, instead of to a man, but if one thinks of the men one meets at parties one can’t imagine saying it to any one of them.’
‘It is what every human being ought to be able to say to some other human being,’ Mary answered, ‘if life is to be worth living. But there is nobody to whom it can be said safely. One cannot trust anybody. Not anybody at all.’
‘Why are you dividing those flowers?’ I asked.
‘Because the narcissus have so strong a scent I do not want them in the same room as the lilac, and these big daffodils are wrong in this room. But you are right. It does not matter.’
At least we could work. There lay our great good fortune. Our love for music might have weakened now, but we were still under the compulsive power of our mother’s voice, angrily bidding us to the piano, angrily exposing our incompetence, angrily exhorting us to play better than she did, proudly supposing that we could. Mary continued to develop her special understanding of Beethoven and worked hard on Skriabin, I went on with Mozart and waited for every new piano composition of Stravinsky. It might seem strange that Mary, who was so coolly classical, should choose to interpret Beethoven and the ecstatic Skriabin, and that I, so much rougher and less controlled, should prefer the crystalline concertos of Mozart and the legalistic compositions of Stravinsky. But any serious interpretative artist seeks out the composer who lacks the faults he has learned to deplore in himself: the composer is to him a symbol of creation itself, and by lacking these faults he suggests a universe in which they do not exist, and in which there are therefore no moral or aesthetic problems at all, and indeed no problem except the technical difficulty of making the body execute the conceptions of the mind. We both eagerly attended the disclosure of Bartók’s genius which was going on at that time, though only a very few people wanted us to play his music. I also worked on some sonatas by Oliver, and joined with friends to play two quartets and a sonata for piano and violin of his.
Oliver was the grey-eyed man whose songs were played at that concert in a house on the Regent’s Park canal where Mary and I heard that we had got our scholarships; he had stayed with us that first summer of the war, in Norfolk, and we had seen him from time to time ever since, though he had suffered that separation from his friends which is the result of domestic tragedy. He had married a singer, quite a good contralto, and they had never been quite happy; and their unhappiness had not taken an easy course. She had left him for another man, and had not been happy with him either, and had got ill, and had come back to Oliver to die. He was now so taciturn that very often he did not follow a conversation to its end, but just got up and went away; and his music too never seemed finally written. But perhaps I felt this because it nearly coincided with my way of thinking. Had I been a composer, I would have written just this kind of music, and it was possible that my dissatisfaction with certain passages simply meant that, though our musical minds were alike, they were not identical, and in case he, being a composer, had to recognise limitations of which, as an interpreter, I was nearly unconscious.
But once our work was over we were faced again with the fact of Rosamund’s desertion, and nothing came to explain it or mitigate it. Mr Morpurgo had been right: she wrote to us hardly at all. We got some picture postcards from South America, but they were addressed in Constance’s large handwriting and inscribed with messages hardly more informative than R.I.P. They left our wonder where it was. They did not, it is true, confirm our doubts. To look on that handwriting, though it was steady, the a’s and o’s moonfaced as they always were, was to see Constance, old now and in a foreign country, unable to speak the language and galled at the failure, for she liked to be the mistress of every situation, and lodged in a hotel suite which she would not like as much as she had liked her flat in Baker Street. These were such postcards as one would sit down and write for the sake of company. When she had achieved one she would fumble among the tiresome foreign stamps to find the needed one, and go into the bathroom and hold it under a trickle from the tap. None of our family ever licked a stamp; it was to us an action of debauched unfastidiousness. Then she would go along the corridor to the mail-chute beside the elevators and watch the white card fall down behind the glass at the speed of suicide. Then she would slowly find her way back to the room where Rosamund sat at the window, her hands idle on her lap, because neither sewing nor knitting could make the moment better, her eyes fixed on the lizard-coloured mountains beyond the skyscrapers, because it was pleasant to contemplate any place other than that where she was. Mary and I saw such a vision of stagnancy whenever we took these postcards in our hands. But it might have been a peevish fancy, born of resentment. We were sure of nothing, not even of ourselves. But we were not without resources, we could take shelter under that nativity which grew like a flowering tree all that summer, shading us from all heat and distress.