Authors: Rebecca West
Mr Morpurgo came and sat down beside us, the pouches under his eyes enormous, as they were in times of adversity. He had brought a parcel with him, and he set about undoing it.
‘Cut the string,’ said Queenie, without ill temper. Simply she told him to cut the string. ‘Don’t go fiddling with it like that. It makes me nervous.’
Meekly he brought out a knife, though unravelling knots was one of his chief pleasures. She was touched and surprised by his compliance. She had perhaps been speaking to herself, as if she were still in a cell, and without expectation of having her own way. She explained that she was very nervous, as she could not sleep as well as she had done in there, and the food out here still worried her, she hadn’t got used to it. Mr Morpurgo said that he understood, and went on unpacking his parcel.
‘I shall be disappointed,’ he said, when he had finished, ‘if you do not find something here you like. One of my daughters chose them for me.’ It was just about that time that the French dressmakers who had come up since the First World War were bringing out their own scents. They sat on the brown paper on his lap, Chanel’s
Numéro Cinq,
Lanvin’s
Pétales Froissées,
Patou’s
Golliwog,
and two or three of the old Floris flower scents. ‘Which will you try first?’
She looked on them like a quiet wolf. ‘That was a kind thought. I have been longing for some nice perfumes. I haven’t dared ask, for everything seems too dear. But there were no smells in there except kitchen smells and disinfectants. How did you know that? It’s a funny thing for a gentleman to guess.’
‘I have noticed that you always have a sprig of southernwood or lavender or a walnut leaf in your hand,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘You are the noticing kind,’ said Queenie. ‘You ought to have been a detective. Some people might think that that’s no compliment. But if people do things that are wrong there have to be detectives to see they’re punished.’ She had pointed her finger at the Lanvin scent, and Mr Morpurgo had unpacked it. ‘I like that black glass,’ she said, and when he had freed the stopper she raised the bottle to her widely dilated nostrils. ‘There ought to be more detectives,’ she mused, her eyes going back to the sky, and she passed into a state of harsh meditation, which we did not interrupt until Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Nancy and Oswald have just come, I see them talking to Milly at the window.’
‘Since you’re both so kind,’ said Queenie, ‘there’s something you might do. I’ve noticed that Cecil’s never written and there wasn’t a message, and Nancy and Lily seem upset if anything we say seems likely to come near him. I would be obliged if you would take some opportunity to tell them that I don’t hold it against him. It’s right and proper that Cecil shouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.’
‘We will tell them,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘But, Mrs Phillips, it may not last.’
‘I should think less of him if it didn’t,’ said Queenie.
Nancy came down the lawn to her mother and laid her lips on a cheek that remained mere flesh under her lips, and Mr Morpurgo and I saluted her and went into the house to seek Uncle Len and Aunt Milly. On the kitchen table there lay a gingerbread, full of crystallised cherries and mixed peel and walnuts, baked that morning, and the four of us ate thick slices of it, going back to the comfort of sugar, as if we were children in a house chilled by grave adult events which we could not hope to have explained to us. As we ate our eyes were drawn to the window. Queenie was still stone, though there was much that might have softened her in this moment. The Thames landscape was as gentle as anything in nature. The river was breathed on by a summer wind, and the flattened and wavering reflections showed what the world would be like if it were slightly diluted, if edges were not so sharp. On a deck-chair in front of her, leaning far forward, sat Oswald, pouting like a baby, surrendering himself absolutely to her mercy as a baby to the breast, while he gave her the gentle domestic news which would have come pleasantly to the ears of the troubled girl in the enlarged photograph over his dining-room chimneypiece. Nancy was crosslegged on a cushion at their feet, faintly smiling. Her enormous cynicism was amused by the inappropriateness of her husband’s tendering offerings, the inappropriateness of her mother’s mineral reception of them. But her gentleness refused to feel despair. She looked about her at the shaven lawn, the moderate river, the tamed woodland, as if there were no desert anywhere. Yet Queenie remained stone, with all this gentleness about her.
It was to be supposed that it was prison which had turned her to stone. We watched therefore with hope and admiration her attempts to annul her imprisonment. During the first week or two she rested for most of the day; her body was shocked into excitability by the cessation of routine, and she was sleeping badly. She forced herself to eat good meals; she found a choice of long-forbidden foods not a gratification of appetite but a wearisome demand on her will and her digestion. Then she asked for some fashion magazines and those weekly papers which publish photographs of actresses and society women, and she huddled over them, lifting her wolfish eyes from time to time to compare what she saw with the women and girls who were eating at the tables on the lawn. Her gaze would stay with some of them only a contemptuous second, and on others would linger with a diagnostic fixity, and her judgment was never wrong. She had grasped what the contemporary woman looked like, as her sister Lily had never done. In a few more days she transformed herself into that image. She made up her mind easily enough to have her hair bobbed, but her face twitched when she learned what the new miracle of the permanent wave involved. But she steeled herself to sit in a little room, bound by antennae to the chandelier-like machine for three hours, as was then necessary. Then she went to London for the day with Milly and Lily, and in the evening they showed her off proudly, standing between their artlessness, wearing a straight and short dress and a cloche hat, and stamped with the hallmark of the fashion of the age. She was of course not really elegant. She was not the polished Malacca cane that Chanel made of a rich woman in those days. But she was a straight staff of dark wood.
Nancy, seeing her for the first time in her contemporary uniform, exclaimed, ‘Your name suits you, Mamma! There is something very regal about you.’
Queenie murmured, ‘Am I all right? I feel all wrong. I could look a sight more regal if I could wear a big hat. These little things squashed down on your head couldn’t help anyone. And there are no violets. No violets anywhere. We had such lots of them. The Parma violets were the best. They’re the paler sorts. We used to put violet essence on them and wear them on our furs in winter and put them where we pinned our feather boas to our blouses in summer. They gave a lovely finish to a turn-out.’ Her eyes were caverns of nostalgia. They roved and fell on her image in the mirror over the chimneypiece, and blazed with delight in the present. ‘But there,’ she said. She was not stone. She was full of gusto at ranging herself with the living.
She often rose and sombrely left us to go to church; and then she too was not stone. Once we went together to early communion. She walked through the wicket-gate with a certain disdain; the repentance which was harsh about her might have preferred our path not to follow easy contours among the tombs and the long summer grasses under the morning sky, but to run under vaults along distempered and scentless corridors, with a file of the punished shuffling before and after us. We were much too early. Fidgeting, she frowned about her at the grey church and its gilt and enamelled monuments, its richly coloured heraldic glass, blaming them for not being as haggard as herself to suit the gravity of what was to happen at the altar. When the vicar and his server came her hungry expectation brought her sharply down on her knees, and I could feel her faith as if she were playing very loud on some spiritual instrument like a cornet. At the altar rails her expectation was fed, and she walked victoriously when we left the church. The inn was now awake. Uncle Len was singing ‘He went on swinging her higher’ in the bathroom, and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily and the potboy were carrying on a dispersed trio from the bar, the coffee-room, and the staircase, concerning the best way to remove nicotine stains from table linen, the women’s voices old but fresh with undefeated hope, the boy’s voice fresh with youth. Queenie and I had the kitchen to ourselves and the secret we had brought back from the church.
I made the tea strong as she liked it. ‘One lump,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got my sweet tooth back yet. Well, that was nice. A lot of rot there being no God.’ She gave me a twisted smile before she drank. ‘Many’s the time I’ve wished there wasn’t.’ She drank deeply, wiped her mouth, pushed back her cup and saucer, put her elbows on the table and rested her brow on her hands. ‘How early it is,’ she said. ‘A day’s a long time.’
She was stone again. She knew we were not going to fill her day with what she wanted.
Later that morning Mary and I found her in her deck-chair on the lawn, tears on her cheek, ambushing with her hard gaze two boatloads of young people who were letting their craft swing round in midstream while they shouted and laughed and splashed water at each other. The sun turned the spray to silver, one of the girls had red hair that flamed.
‘This isn’t a very nice part of the river,’ said Queenie.
Mary was naively angry. ‘We think it very beautiful.’
‘I don’t mean that. It’s a lovely spot. I mean only the riff-raff come here. Look at them rowing in their braces. I never could bear to see a man rowing in his braces. I don’t think they would do that in other parts of the river.’
Mr Morpurgo spoke from behind us. He was often at the Dog and Duck these days, and never far from Queenie, though he was no more successful than the rest of us in keeping conversation with her alive. He said gently, ‘I believe there’s a hotel near Maidenhead where…’ He did not know what word to use. Just as the pause grew too long he found it. ‘Where the toffs go.’
‘Well, Maidenhead, I mean to say,’ said Queenie. Her swarthiness glistened.
Why should anyone think of Maidenhead with that degree of appetite? It was not a suburb taken over by the river and transformed into scenery for a masque, like Richmond, nor river-country, where the woodlands and the meadows are so green that they give the eye the same pleasure that the throat derives from a draught of cold water. Yet Queenie was so eager for the expedition that she dared not tell us so, but lay languidly in her chair, plucking at the parched grass, but looking at us with the gaze of a dog that wonders if its master is truly thinking of a walk. Mr Morpurgo said that we had better all drive to Cookham and take a launch to the hotel, which was, he remembered, past Maidenhead, at Bray. Hoarsely she objected that she had not the right clothes, and did not answer when I told her that we would go as we were. Her gaze ran down us not disrespectfully, conceding that our dresses and our shoes and stockings were good, but making no pretence that we looked as she would wish to look. She sighed, ‘Well, of course, it doesn’t matter,’ yet took a long time to get ready and came out in a state of considerable elegance, in a dress of a sort we all wore then, beige and cut straight as a chemise, and a little hat pressed down over the eyes. There were only occasional traces of her long enclosure. When the car started she took a pair of gloves out of her bag and drew them on and buttoned them. It would not have occurred to any woman of my generation to wear gloves when she was going on the river, unless she found herself playing a ceremonial part at Henley Regatta. I remembered how Papa had refused to take me out with him one day, when I could not have been more than nine, because I had lost my gloves, although the day was warm and nothing could have been involved except an obscure principle of propriety.
Queenie gave us a flashing smile as she went aboard. Yet it was not for the trip on the water that she had hungered. We passed into the long marvel of Cliveden Reach, the curled trench of woodland volute round its image in the river, all contained within the miracle that is a day on the river, the light above us pure because it reflected only water, the water shining purer because it reflected this pure light. Surely this was the opposite of prison, yet she gave it the briefest inventory-taking stare and lowered her eyes again to her left-hand glove, which she had buttoned wrongly and was rebuttoning.
Her glove arranged, she looked at the stream before us. ‘Isn’t it Saturday? I lose count now. There’s nothing to help one keep the date right in one’s head. Not the same meals coming up. But if it’s Saturday, why are there so few people about?’
Two eights were practising. In! Out! barked the coxes censoriously; the oarsmen, their flesh bronze against their white singlets, pretended that human beings are nothing but lever and fulcrum, pure as diagrams; the clean-cut boats cut clean lines through the water that gave back the pure light of the sky. A rowing-boat nosed into a backwater, another hugged the bank; the girl in one wore scarlet, the other a dark and penetrating blue. In a punt a girl wore another blue, the blue of anchusa. Each of these idle boats kept its own pace, none moving much faster than the current; the variations in their leisure were the more perceptible, the more delicious because of the metronomic bark of the coxes, the backward slide and dip of the oars, the forward and backward slide of the white singlets. The rowing-boat that was entering the backwater passed into shadow; the girl’s scarlet dress became crimson.
‘So few people? It is not yet lunch-time. We would not expect more.’
Queenie’s brows knitted. She sat straight-backed, her gloved hands stiff on her lap, curiously unrefreshed. On Cliveden Heights the woodland lay unexhausted under the noon, and on the water’s edge the willows were as green as if there were no smoke anywhere, and nothing on earth had yet been defiled. ‘Slower, slower,’ said Mr Morpurgo to the steersman in his glass box, taking the bright river under his pouched eyes, as deliberately he would take his Watteau drawing in his hands. Queenie liked it better when we came to the big houses. ‘There’s nothing nicer than red geraniums,’ she said, and exclaimed at the garden furniture. ‘In my days we only had hammocks, they were horrid things,’ she said. She liked the shining launches that were moored at landing-stages or gleamed in the shadow of boat-houses. This too was better than what she had known. But when the river narrowed and Mr Morpurgo said that we must line up for Boulter’s Lock, she cried out in hot and thirsty irritability.