Authors: Rebecca West
I began, ‘Nancy wants me to tell you that she has heard from Cecil. She wanted me to tell you because she still feels weak after the baby.’ My arm was round Aunt Lily’s waist. I felt her meagre skeleton adjust itself to withstand a blow, and her teeth chattered. I could not imagine how Rosamund would have told this story. I followed what I supposed would have been her line by saying that Cecil was very unhappy and had suffered much from the family tragedy; but what I said had no power. I did not myself grasp the precise mode of his unhappiness. I thought it probable that Nancy was right and he was not really unhappy but moved by an ungracious temperament to take advantage of what was clearly an exceptional opportunity for ungraciousness. My words were therefore only words and worked no transformation of the news I gave; and when I finished Aunt Lily groaned and struggled to her feet and clasped the newel-post.
‘The little bastard,’ she said. ‘Not that he was, mind you.’
I implored her not to upset Nancy, and she sobbed that she would not, she always remembered that Nancy was feeding the kid. She put her head against the wooden ball she hugged, and swallowed her sobs. I said, still without force, still knowing what I said to be so inexact that it could have no value, that Cecil had to be excused for not forgiving his mother because, after all, it was his father who had died. She burst into a torrent of whispered words, pointing a gnarled and useful finger, incongruously frivolous with scarlet nail polish, at the dining-room door, to remind us both that Nancy must not hear. What Queenie had done, she told me, was not just hard to forgive; it was impossible to forgive it. Her own blood often ran cold at nights thinking of Harry, who had never harmed a mouse, and how his insides had been wrung out of him by what she gave him, and he had grudged her nothing. She had been in the house, she had seen it. But we had all done the impossible thing and pushed on with the job. How could we leave Queenie alone with what she had done? It would be like leaving someone to freeze to death outside the door on a winter’s night, only she wouldn’t die. And my Mamma had made it quite plain to her that it had been a special sin to make away with Harry for the very reason that he wouldn’t lie quiet in his grave if anybody was persecuted just for doing him an injury. Why couldn’t the silly little shit Cecil come in with the rest of us on this? She clapped her hand over her mouth and asked me not to tell Len she had used that word, but muttered, ‘Oh, hush,’ as the dining-room door slowly opened.
Nancy looked out, immense shadows under her eyes. She swayed as she saw us and hung on to the door-handle.
‘Why, Nancy,’ said Aunt Lily, her voice cracking, ‘you look such a kiddy, and you’ve got a kiddy yourself now! Listen, Rose and me have had a bit of a pow-pow over young Cecil. Don’t you worry. Men grow up late. He’ll come round in a couple of years, and Queenie won’t be put out. She’ll wait. Now let’s see about the kettle, I’m dying for my other cup.’
I was still young, so I thought that after a certain period of time events, however violent, retired and lived on a diminishing emotional pension accorded by those they had affected. I knew this was not so in my own life. I was aware that my father’s desertion of me had never ceased to happen; when I went to Cordelia I knew that there was a Wilson Steer over the chimneypiece and a certain timid exquisiteness about her dress and the food, because there still rang in her ears the brutal comminations of a long-dead German violin-teacher, pronouncing her a barbarian. But I believed that other people were able to travel out of the orbit of experience, as easily as they could leave a town so far behind them that they could not hear its church-bells. I was surprised that the murder of Harry Phillips was still so appalling to his family that the return of his murderess was to them a domestication of horror, a confusion of this world with hell. The language of my friends was banal with a banality which was perfect, with a perfection which admitted no exceptions, which often wearied me, although I loved them as much as if I were forced to listen to a mindless tune in C major in two-four time strummed hour after hour on a poor piano. They cultivated also a banality of mood, a cheerfulness which might have proceeded from stupidity and which often was stupid, because it was automatic, which often prevented them saying what their courage and serenity and shrewdness had to communicate. Nevertheless I knew they were standing in a desert place, like people in the Bible who are being tried by the Lord.
It was about this time that Kate came into the drawing-room when I was eating sandwiches after a concert, and stood with a distant air, her hands folded in front of her spread skirts, as she always did when she was asking a favour. The proud intention of this stance was to present herself simply as a servant, and renounce all advantage to be drawn from our affection for her. Yet it was so she melted our hearts, for she was then most Kate, most a sailor dressed in skirts. The years were working on her, as they had long worked on Lady Tredinnick, to harden her out of unfemininity. But there was a difference, for Lady Tredinnick was becoming male in aspect, while Kate was changing into some sexless natural substance, say wood of a ship long at sea. She made her voice impersonal as if she were answering roll-call on deck; and she told me that because she had heard Mary and me say that we had not heard from old Miss Beevor for some time, she had been down to Lovegrove to visit the old lady, and had found her sad and ill. She wanted us to ask the old lady to stay with us.
‘What has tipped the balance is that the old half-Persian cat has died,’ said Kate, ‘and that now she cannot play the piano at all. Her fingers are too rheumatic. She has nothing to do but sit and think of your Mamma and all your family. It is such a life as not a dog should have. But you must understand that if we have her she will never leave. She will not come, of course, unless you pretend she is only to come for a short time till her bronchitis mends, and she will mean to leave. But she will never be well enough in her body or her mind to go back and live by herself. And she will be curst when she is old, she is fretty now. But I hope you will ask her to come.’
‘We would like it well enough,’ I said. ‘But you, Kate, would it not be too much for you? Can you arrange it with the help you have?’
‘It would be a kindness to me,’ she said. ‘It would take my mind off things.’
‘What things?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘The world is not going very well.’
There was a hangdog look about her. Surely she had done what my mother had forbidden and opened a door that ought to be kept shut. Surely she had been looking into a bucket full of water, whether after Rosamund’s visit, whether to assure herself about one of her sailor kin. I was afraid, I would like to have asked her, ‘Kate, Kate, is something terrible going to happen?’ But it was my mother’s voice that drove me to the piano every day, and my mother’s voice now spoke with abhorrence of magic. I remembered too a beating that had struck me now as curiously cruel. My sudden shocked realisation of its cruelty made me resentfully suppose that it must have been unnecessary. It seemed to me that many of the things I thought I remembered happening in my childhood could not have happened, and that we must simply have been imaginative children who made up fairy tales and painted the visible world with them so that we could not see things as they were. Surely I could not have raised a paper eighteen inches off the ground and kept it steady in mid-air by willpower alone? Surely dogs that had been long dead could not have played about our feet, surely the hooves of ponies ridden by my father and his brother in their distant boyhood could not have sounded on the stable cobbles? Surely I could not really have gone to a children’s party and put my hands on each side of a little girl’s face and did something that felt like casting my mind to the front of my head and tell her the number that she was saying to herself? Mary and I never spoke of these things now, and the life that went on around us was plainly lived on the assumption that they did not happen. But after all it was not only we four children at Lovegrove who had seen and enacted these marvels. There had been the evil things that had invaded Rosamund’s home, there had been the spill of salt from the chimneypiece in the kitchen when they were routed, there had been the hare that talked with us in the garden. But I remembered, with deep misery, that I had often read of poltergeists since, and it was always said that none ever troubled a house unless there was in the family a plausible and unscrupulous little girl or boy.
But really it did not matter if as a child I had practised magic, or not. I might be deluded into thinking that I had raised a paper from the ground and held it in mid-air by supernatural means. But I was not wrong when I remembered that Richard Quin had turned from me and wept when I made him watch me at this trick, whatever it was, and had grown sick and nearly died. For he had been a saint. For he had been a saint whose repulsion from evil had been absolute; and at that time I had been evil. I had used that other trick, thought-reading, to confuse poor Queenie. I had shown her that for me life was not so rigid as was supposed; and she, crazed by her hunger, had drawn the conclusion that it was in all ways more flexible. She had seen me knock down the wall between one child’s brain and another’s, she had believed that I could knock down the wall between the present and the future, and she had rightly divined that all walls would rumble down at a touch. She had not perceived that unless that touch is withheld, unless the walls are left standing, the universe collapses, we are back in chaos again. So she knocked down the huge wall running across eternity and infinity which is the existence of a human being. She killed Harry Phillips, and would not have killed him had I not imparted to her my false belief that if one can break down walls one should break them down, that if one can alter the universe one should use that power of alteration to its uttermost. I had not then learned that one must move delicately, since creation is plainly a last and desperate resort, a danger improvised to avert another of a more final kind.
Kate said, ‘You are so often out in the evenings. The evening is a sad time. The girls are good, we get on well together, but I have known them only a short time. If I had someone in the house I had known a long time and had to wait on them, it would be a great comfort.’
She was a hieratic being, intensely conscious of degree. As children we had always known when she was baking a birthday cake, though that rite was supposed to be performed in secret, for her demeanour was solemn as it would never have been had there been only scones or pastry for the oven. If I were right and she had peered sideways into the future, she had seen more than a personal tragedy; she had stood on the steps of a temple and looked down on a centrifugal flight of fire, that left the gutted palaces behind and leaped through the blackened city walls and spread over the scorched countryside to the horizons, which would also be ashes.
I said, ‘Of course she must come. Mary will think so too. Sit down and we will talk about how she is to come over and what room she is to have.’ A look of happy cunning came into her eyes. She believed herself to be in a beleaguered city, and she was smuggling in a sick old woman to whom she could be kind, as others would store up food and wine.
The catastrophe she had seen was too large to be poor Queenie’s destiny; yet that seemed catastrophic enough when I met her. I recognised her as soon as I went into the garden of the Dog and Duck, although her deck-chair had been put far across the lawn, right over by the gate into the churchyard, to be out of the way of the people who had come in for lunch. Her lank body was stretched out under a coverlet, her head was thrown back on a cushion, and one hand hung down and plucked at the parched summer grass; and the long lines of her body, her bared throat, and her dangling hand made the same diagram of avidity that I remembered from my childhood. She was motionless, but for the twitching fingers; and when I stood beside her chair I saw that her face too was still, though not tranquil. She was staring at the sky, and one hand held a crushed sprig of southernwood under her nostrils. It astonished me that she was so young. I should have known better, I was aware that Aunt Lily was her elder by several years and was even now not an old woman, and that she had been young when Nancy was born, and that her prison term would not have carried her past the early fifties. But I had only seen her in the bulky clothes which women wore in my childhood, and these made youth as lumbering as middle age; and I could not have allowed for the curious false youth bestowed on her by her imprisonment. Her strong hair was still black, the yellowish skin was still unlined. It was as if she had been laid by in a box.
‘You’re Rose, aren’t you?’ she said, in the slightly mocking tone, the careful but not quite accurate imitation of an educated accent, that she had used to Mamma and Constance so many years ago. ‘I’ve been reading about you and Mary.’ Aunt Lily’s album of press cuttings about us was open on the grass beside her deck-chair. ‘I’m sure I’m not surprised, you were always clever little kiddies.’
Her eyes went back to the sky. It was not I for whom she had been waiting. I had expected to find myself able to talk to her, because we were linked in guilt. But in that instant I knew that we had nothing to say to each other.
I was to learn that of all those who had waited for Queenie only Aunt Lily was to escape this paralysing conviction that it was impossible to communicate with her; and Aunt Lily owed that immunity to a terrier strain in her which enjoyed laying at her sister’s feet everything that had come into common use since she had gone to prison. The
Sunday Express;
shaped brassières; a crystal wireless set; flesh-coloured stockings instead of black; she did not wait to see what her sister made of them, she was off on a chase for the next marvel. That the others were daunted I saw that very afternoon. Aunt Milly brought out her mending and sat beside us, but soon went back to the house. Uncle Len came out with the wireless set to tell us that there would be the racing results, and meant to wait for them, but went back to the bar, though it was between hours. The trouble was that Aunt Queenie imposed her own pattern on the conversation, and it was a forbidding one. It was not easy for us to raise a subject; if it failed to interest her she looked about her with opaque eyes that made the world a desert, and oneself lost in it. She asked us questions, and when we answered them she made some comment that deprived of life everyone we mentioned and put every fact outside the context of reality, while at the same time we were confounded by our excessive sense of her own life and reality. She spoke to me of the people who had been kind to her and Nancy and Lily, with curiosity, wondering why they had done it; and all of them, even my father and mother, became waxworks arranged in some tableau illustrating charity. She said how glad she was that in spite of what she had done her daughter had a good husband and a nice home; and Nancy and Oswald became wax models in a shop-window displaying a suite of furniture. This transformation was the worse because there was a furnace breath about her, that would have melted any waxwork.