Authors: Rebecca West
‘This can’t be Boulter’s Lock! Where’s everybody?’
We had for company half a dozen rowing-boats and punts, full of boys in grey flannel trousers and girls in cotton frocks, and fathers and mothers and their children, sitting with their picnic-baskets and their Thermos flasks at their feet, and a couple of launches. The smaller of the two was steered by an old man with a long white beard and an orange homespun shirt, whose wife in a window-curtain dress with a long necklace of amber beads was setting out a meal of fruit and nuts and salads. The other belonged to plain parents and their six children, all in khaki shorts. Queenie said again, ‘Where’s everybody? Where’s everybody got to?’ It was as if she had gone to a theatre and found half the places empty, and demanded why this should be so, for fear she had made a mistake and booked seats for a failure instead of the popular play she had designed to see. It was odd to feel this about the river, or indeed anywhere in the open air.
‘Perhaps there will be more people in the afternoon,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I hope there will be. It’s nice to see a lot of people.’ He was not lying in expressing an opinion which he did not hold. He was looking earnestly into her face, and seeking to enter into her nature.
‘It isn’t only that,’ said Queenie.
He tried to understand what she meant and could not succeed. ‘I rather think,’ he said, at a venture, ‘that you’re disappointed because you remember things not quite as they were.’ His hand turned over on his lap. If it had been Mary or I who was troubled he would have slipped his fingers into ours.
But none of us dared to caress Queenie. She would have wondered why we were touching her.
‘I wouldn’t forget anything about Boulter’s Lock,’ said Queenie savagely. ‘Some things I remembered all the time. The Derby. The City and Suburban. We always went to that. And a ball at Covent Garden. And Boulter’s Lock. I used to go over them again and again.’
The lock gates closed behind us. One of the schoolboys on the domestic launch began to play a toy xylophone, pouting very earnestly as he struck each note, trying for the Londonderry Air. ‘That sounds very nice,’ Mary called to him, leaning over our rails, ‘but your G is flat.’
He sounded it and listened, and looked unconvinced.
‘No, play the scale, and you’ll hear it,’ said Mary.
This time he heard the falsity. ‘Oh, what shall I do?’ he said sadly.
‘Take it to a musical instrument shop and they’ll tune it for you,’ she answered.
His smallest brother, a red-haired little boy, thrust forward his contentious little face and asked, ‘But what does it matter, the G being flat?’
Mary and I laughed. This was a frontal attack on the foundation of our lives. The bigger boy exclaimed in disgust, ‘Oh, you are silly!’ We really could have made no better answer. We smiled across at Mr Morpurgo to see if he had heard the joke and found that he was watching Queenie. She had turned greenish, and her clothes looked too young for her, and yet there might have been nothing of her except her clothes. She could have been an Aunt Sally propped up in her basket chair.
She said faintly, ‘It’s the water sinking, and these walls going up higher and higher round us. I don’t like it.’
Mary and I put our arms round her, but it was like trying to comfort stone.
Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Put your head back and look at the sky.’
She murmured, ‘Yes, that makes all the difference. This is silly of me. I made up my mind to the permanent wave, but the lock, I hadn’t thought of that. Naturally, when I was here before,’ she said, smiling grimly, ‘it didn’t strike me quite the same way.’ She breathed deeply till the lock gates slowly opened and we chugged out under the stucco bridge into the bright stream. That was silly of me,’ she breathed happily, ‘and now we’ll be seeing Skindles in a moment.’
As we drew nearer Maidenhead Bridge she looked down at her gloves to see if they were rightly buttoned. Her feet had turned inward as she sat, as the feet of the middle-aged are apt to do; she straightened her ankles and pointed her toes. An alert and modish look came on her as if she were an actress, experienced in her art but inexperienced in life, about to give a performance as a duchess. Also beauty reappeared in her, sallow and helleboric, but real. It was not possible to know what bugle was sounding the reveille in her ears. She looked to the left at Skindles, where there were some people lunching at tables outside the hotel, and others sitting nearer the water’s edge with glasses in their hands, and she gave them one of her hard stares and turned away. She had in her time been judged, and she judged. Then she looked to the right, at Murray’s Club, where there was a greater affluence of couples, most of them lunching, some dancing on a floor built round a tree. The crowds had the granular look of human beings casually assembled under strong light and not under the governance of any overwhelming emotion: a light sprinkling on the lawns of a wayward sort of sand. Perhaps Queenie, so inconveniently important and unique, had wanted to see trivial and undifferentiated specimens of her kind.
But she found no contentment here; and this was not the place which she had desired to see. Without disappointment she said to Mr Morpurgo, ‘This bit of river isn’t what it used to be. But I don’t think anywhere can be like what it was now that there’s so much people don’t care about any more. I don’t like it,’ she pronounced in her judicial tone, ‘the way it doesn’t matter now what women look like, provided they’re skinny and have their hair cut right. It’s a pity, you know, that Lil couldn’t have been young today. When we were girls you had to have looks, and she was out. But if she had her time over again now, she could get away with it, particularly if someone else dressed her.’ We slid under the bridge and her voice spoke under the arches with ghostly inhumanity. ‘It wouldn’t matter, that horse-look she has.’
Beyond, alders and willows on an island, and the circle of images round it, were a confusion of gentle greens, and the water that was their looking-glass was a kindly grey. It was good that there was tenderness in the world if only in colours. After that there was the curious railway bridge, grim and grudging in line, and painted a deep, absorbent crimson.
Queenie said, ‘This bit we are coming to is what I wanted to see, really.’ She spoke in her habitual, quietly hammered measure, but her beauty became extraordinary. She was more vulgar than before, she might have been posing to some mediocre artist who wanted to paint a gipsy, but her face was a light-house, like the faces of the young. Her eyes were brilliant darkness, astonishingly pure in their setting of lined flesh; her lips and teeth shone; she was not yellow any more, she glowed. It was strange that she should have cast off years and be flushed as if she might run further back towards her youth, simply because we were coming into the water that lies between the railway bridge and Bray Lock. For if the Thames can be dull, this is dull. On the right bank is a line of vapid villas in gardens spitted with notices that say ‘Private’ yet look like public recreation grounds. On the left bank there is only a towpath and the plains beyond. ‘Her memory has mixed it up with somewhere else,’ I thought. ‘The Temple at Henley, or Hambleden Mill and its cedar, or both, she has transplanted them and put them down here. Never mind, we can take her to see them where they really are some other day.’
But as we came out of the arch we forgot her. That is a strange saying, ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,’ for water, by its variability, perpetually excels itself. There had been an infinity of green images, printed on a grey mirror. Now there were no images, and nothing was grey. The midday sun rode in a high sky empty of cloud, and it poured down light on water shuddering under little winds. The river was milk-white and scaly like a fish, with a fleck of deep blue in every scale. We exclaimed in joy, and Mr Morpurgo said, ‘My Sisley.’ But Queenie wailed, ‘Where are they? Where are they all?’
Mr Morpurgo slipped from his seat and knelt beside her. ‘Oh, hush. Hush, my dear. Where are what?’
‘The houseboats. What’s happened to them? There were hundreds of them. All along the towing-path.’
We looked down the reach. There were some rowing-boats and punts and canoes and launches moored by the villas, and some craft on the stream. But there were no houseboats anywhere.
‘We passed some, by the islands,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, and nasty scrubby things they were,’ said Queenie. ‘But the ones I remember were lovely, and they went all the way along from Maidenhead Bridge to the Lock. Oh, don’t tell me I’ve forgotten. If there’s anything I got right, it’s this. I’ve seen them so often in my head. Some of them had funny names, like
Dewdrop Inn.’
Mr Morpurgo called to the steersman. ‘Can you tell us, please, were there ever a lot of houseboats moored along this bank?’
The man turned round and faced us. He was as old as Queenie. His face was deeply engraved with discontent. ‘Yes, they used to go the whole way along to the lock. When I was a young man.’
‘Well, where are they now?’ asked Queenie, angrily. ‘Why did they move them?’
Mary took the wheel from him so that he could give his whole attention to this lament, this invocation. ‘They didn’t move them,’ he said. ‘They went out of fashion. They weren’t worth anything any more. Most of them’s broke up long ago. There’s a few left, for the sort that want them for cheapness. There’s some live on them to dodge taxes, and there’s queer people, riff-raff, you know. And there’s schoolboys and that. It’s a cheap way of having holidays. But people with money won’t look at them now.’
‘What?’ Queenie begged him. ‘Not Gaiety girls? Not stockbrokers?’
‘Oh, it’s a long, long time since we had any of them about.’
‘Do you mean that nobody has houseboats all painted white, with wire baskets full of red geraniums hanging along the front, and a deck where you sat and played the banjo in the evening?’
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard anybody play the banjo for years. They’ve got this new thing called the ukulele but it doesn’t sound so good over the water as the old banjos used to.’ He faced her anguish with a stolid discontent that confirmed it. ‘The river’s gone down,’ he stated in so flat a tone that it seemed as if he must be speaking of a material fact, and we all glanced away at the water to see whether it had suddenly fallen by some inches, and we had been wrong in supposing the Thames not to be tidal at this point.
Mr Morpurgo said to him, ‘Now we will go on to the hotel as quickly as possible, please.’ Then he knelt at Queenie’s feet. ‘Here is a clean handkerchief. Is there nothing else than houseboats that you specially wanted to see?’
‘Oh God!’ she said, throwing off her little hat and holding her head between her hands. ‘I knew I’d never go to one again, but I did like to think of them still being there.’
I stroked her hair, which was curiously strong and coarse, but I did not know what to say. ‘We will have a good lunch at this hotel,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I haven’t found out yet what you really like to eat or drink. And then we have the whole afternoon before us. Is there nothing else you want to see, Queenie? Where you would like to go, we can take you, Queenie.’
I
T WAS A DAY OR TWO
afterwards that Oliver and I had to go down to the West Country for a charity concert, to be given at a house that was supposed to be very beautiful, Barbados Hall, just after Goodwood. There was so much reason why we should attend this concert, and there is so much of the accident in all events, that I did not think we would ever go. Oliver’s interest in the occasion was his passionate desire that I and a violinist named Martin Allen, who had been a fellow-student of mine at the Athenaeum, should play a sonata for piano and violin written by Kurt Jasperl, a Swiss composer in his early thirties. Why it was imperative that this should happen Oliver explained to Miss Beevor and Mary and myself one afternoon when he came in for tea. It was no trouble having Miss Beevor. She had to stay in bed perhaps one day in ten, which gave Kate something to distract her from growing melancholy. For the rest Miss Beevor was cheerful, and men liked talking to her.
‘Jasperl,’ Oliver said, to her rather than to Mary and me, ‘is consumptive, and he is just about to come out of a sanatorium after two years of treatment.’
‘Oh, poor young man,’ said Miss Beevor.
‘It would be appalling if he were to come out and throw away the strength he has got back by going out and taking some wretched teaching job,’ said Oliver.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Beevor, ‘the poor young man.’
‘If he could get one,’ added Oliver, ‘which is doubtful. You see, he has much against him. It is impossible to collect money for him in Switzerland or Germany or France, because his earlier compositions aroused keen controversy and were widely discussed, and were in fact quite worthless. They were cheap and nasty experiments in atonality.’
‘Tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor, looking across at Mary and me, over her tea-cup. She had made the journey all the way from Mendelssohn and Massenet to Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, and even to Poulenc, under pressure from our family, but she liked sometimes to make the point that travel can take one too far, that it may land one among the head-hunters.
‘The performance of these horrors had given him the reputation of a charlatan, whom nobody was going to be anxious to maintain. Moreover,’ said Oliver, a knot of trouble appearing on his forehead, ‘he is a violent and irrational man.’
‘Oh, tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor. She would have made a superb accompanist. ‘But perhaps it is part of his illness.’
‘No,’ said Oliver sadly. ‘He is just one of those people born with a taste for hurting other people. He enjoys contriving monstrous situations without issue. The last thing he did, which makes it impossible to collect money for him in Switzerland now and will make it impossible at any future time, I think, was quite bad. The wife of a rich industrialist, a Madame Kehl, who was herself quite a good musician, persuaded her husband, though he detested music, to subsidise Jasperl. But after a couple of years of this, it seemed to Jasperl that in giving him this money Kehl was showing signs of bourgeois complacency not to be borne. He also began to feel deep pity for Madame Kehl, whom he saw as tied to this bourgeois brute so insensible as to have kept him for two years, and he ended by imagining that he was in love with her. This was a pity from every point of view. He had a wife himself, and a mistress, and he had taken the mistress - and this is what makes collecting money for him anywhere in central Europe quite difficult - from a man called Pfleister who is one of the best known and best liked and most influential of German conductors.’