Authors: Rebecca West
Martin asked abruptly,. ‘Where is Madame Kehl?’
‘Living alone in a large villa in one of those little towns between Geneva and Lausanne, charming country but baked without salt.’
‘Should we not,’ said Martin, ‘be thinking out something that would be perfect for Madame Kehl?’
‘Nothing can be perfect for her now,’ said Oliver. ‘All one can do is to get some more music out of Jasperl.’
I said, ‘But how old is Madame Kehl? She does not sound as if she had come to the end of her life. She was young enough for her husband to be jealous of her, to think it possible that she might have had a love affair with Jasperl. Probably she will fall in love again, and forget both of them.’
The two men did not like me saying this. They did not take it as a simple statement of fact, and after a second laughed, as if I had made a pleasing show of spirit, a gallant feminist protest against unalterable conditions favouring the male. I thought how little I liked men, and said, not too agreeably, ‘Shall we try the sonata again? The second movement is still quite rough.’
The rehearsal had to stop a week before the charity concert, for Martin had to go off to run a music summer school. But this was in the West Country too, so we arranged that Oliver and I should go down to Barbados Hall the night before the concert, and meet Martin there, and spend the evening in a rehearsal of the Jasperl sonata. Lady Mortlake wrote all three of us letters saying she would be so glad to have us, she had admired us all for years, and although we knew she had probably not done so, she obviously had had the intention of being nice, all over four pages.
Oliver and I met on the platform at Waterloo, just about two o’clock. We had to take a very slow train, for the faster ones did not stop at the junction where we had to change to get to Barbados Hall. We arranged not to eat before we started, and I brought a luncheon-basket, with some of Kate’s special sandwiches, the ones with chopped chicken mixed with mild curry sauce, and smoked cod’s roe beaten up with lemon and a very little whipped cream, and some cherry cake, so that Oliver could eat it the way he liked. At first we talked about some records that a young American composer had sent us both, tone poems about the Great Lakes, very nice orchestration that showed he had studied in Paris, but nothing much to say, though that might come. Then we passed a wonderful nursery garden, and the train ran across Maidenhead Bridge, and we looked down on the reach where Queenie had found no houseboats, and I was too miserable to speak.
Oliver said, ‘Why have you suddenly stopped talking?’ and I was irritated, it had happened so often when he came to see us that he himself suddenly stopped talking, and got up and went away, too. Then came that stretch of railway where there are more nursery gardens. We began to eat, and looked out on fields of roses, the cross-looking little plants set far apart on the rich earth, in the midst of their crossness the small flowers so bright that it could be seen even at that distance whether they were red or yellow or white. It was the time when the herbaceous plants were in their prime, and a full brush had painted broad blue bands of delphiniums and purple bands of Michaelmas daisies. Blue and purple comes out of the earth everywhere as July goes towards August, and in the hedgerows there were chicory and mallow and thistles and vetch. They reminded Oliver of the fields round the house in Norfolk where we had spent the first summer of the war, we always thought of it now as the last summer.
‘That is one of the things I always remember about that visit,’ said Oliver. ‘Either there were an extraordinary lot of flowers there, or I had never noticed them before. And there were wonderful ones down on the sea-shore too. Your brother once took me to a part of the dunes where there were miles of yellow sea-poppies. You cannot think how beautiful it was, with such a restrained beauty. Not many flowers on each spiky plant, and the leaves a wonderful blue-grey, that sometimes melted into the tongues of water that lay among the dunes.’ He spoke as if he were sure that Richard Quin had taken nobody to this stretch of sand except himself. But of course he had taken Mary and me there as soon as he found it. I found myself saying to my dear brother, ‘Really, you should not have been so ready to please, you came near to pretending.’ But of course this was nonsense, he had no faults.
After that the railway runs for a long time beside a trout-stream and a canal, set in a pale green landscape like the background of a Rowlandson drawing; and Oliver and I found that both of us had again and again looked out at them, and resolved to take a train to the district the first free day we had, and walk along the clean buff towpath and over the clean grey bridges. Of course we had never had time. Our own country was covered for us with a nexus of work; to get a holiday we had to take refuge in another country, it was impossible for us to travel in England. But this present journey, though there was to be a concert at the end of it, was half-way to a holiday. As we munched, the great downs, stretched out like sleeping dogs, came up between us and the South. In a field an elm lay prostrate, that had been felled by a winter storm but had brought its root with it, sticking up like its feet, so that it still lived and had brought forth its summer foliage. Among its leafy branches children played and waved to the passing train. They looked like the children in children’s books, genuinely different from adults, and preoccupied with other interests, as our family had never been. I waved back to them, though the sort of child I had been, not yet dead in me, despised them. Yet I wondered if such children grew into adults happier than Mary and myself; and instantly noted that this afternoon I was almost happy.
So was Oliver. ‘It should all go well,’ he said. ‘I have had several letters from Lady Southways, and really they sound very good.’ He took them out of his pocket and read me passages. ‘It is funny how all rich women write letters in scherzo form, and funny too that they evidently want to give the effect of a scherzo played by a pianist of imperfect technique, for they always end out of breath. But you see what hope uplifts her, she sees herself as godmother to a prodigy, as Diaghilev to Nijinsky. And that is really what she will be, if we can get her to keep him for a couple of years, if we can get him to be kept for a couple of years without biting the hand that feeds him and infecting it with a specially deadly microbe, which he has obtained by seducing the wife of a pathologist who once had done him a good turn.’ He laughed and, folding up the letter, said, ‘But I do not really think this funny at all. Why, why, I ask myself, why,’ and he sang the theme out of the second movement of the sonata.
We had left behind the neat little river that kept company with the canal, now there ran beside us a broader and wilder stream. Our train halted where it widened beside the ruins of a mill. We looked out of the windows on the other side and found this was our junction. We had to hurry to get out our suitcases and the lunch-basket, and reach the little train that took us, through wet fields veined where they were wettest with drifts of late meadowsweet to foothills that were golden with the afternoon sun. This was the West, almost as foreign as France. ‘It might be true,’ said Oliver, looking out at the cottages that sat with clumps of hydrangeas like footstools at their feet, and wore late clematis and roses and fuchsias like excessive jewellery, ‘that here they knew of no other ways of killing cats but by choking them with cream.’
But there was no car waiting for us at the station. We both took out our letters to see if we had made a mistake, but no, we had been told to be at this station, at this hour. There was no taxi in the village, so we left our luggage with the porter and crossed the road to an inn, the Huntsman’s Horn. The innkeeper’s wife said that we could have tea in the garden, and we warned her that a chauffeur from Barbados Hall would be coming to find us. She smiled at us as if we held a secret in common, and offered to make us scones if we would wait, but we reminded her that we might be fetched at any moment. We found a rustic table facing a bed of dahlias that were now transfixed by the horizontal shafts of the late sun. Crimson and scarlet, orange and yellow, purple and lavender, white and grey, burned the great lamps of incandescent velvet; and while we sat staring the innkeeper’s wife came along the paved path, tenderly bearing something white in her arms, smiling down on it. She spread it before us with a transparent affection of the casual, and we looked down on the phantom of a tablecloth, covered from hem to hem with darns. It was a disconcerting exhibition of toil and thrift in the midst of this profligate floral splendour, this velvet that had not been woven, these lamps that burned no oil. But it was her treasure. She smiled so proudly that I said, ‘What a wonderful cloth,’ and she said, ‘Why, yes, it is. It comes from Barbados Hall.’ She had been a kitchenmaid there in the time of Lord Mortlake’s father and mother, and when she had left to be married Lady Mortlake had told the housekeeper to give her any linen that there was to spare, and she had found a wonderful damask tablecloth that had been used for big dinner-parties but had had some hot candlegrease dropped on it. The hole had been right in the middle, so she had cut it into four, and she was still using them, though that was forty years ago. She could well believe, she told us, that we had never seen lovelier linen.
We sat among the fiery flowers, and drank strong tea and ate bread thick with strawberry jam and Devonshire cream, and followed with our fingernails the pious intricacies of the network of darning cotton, and talked of music and that summer in Norfolk and what Richard Quin might have done if he had not been killed. A bumble-bee came about us, making the very sound time would make if it did not pass silently. Almost an hour had gone, and the chauffeur had not come for us. ‘Martin will be going mad,’ said Oliver, ‘we should have gone through the sonata at least once before dinner. I will go and find a telephone.’ But he called from the house that there was none, he would have to go to the rectory up the road. I waited happily, for I was engaged in an adventure, I was doing something quite unlike anything I usually did. I was not in our home at St John’s Wood, I was not going to a real concert, I was not at the Dog and Duck, which was now more troubled than my too empty home or any concert-hall, because of the unresolved misery of Queenie. I was moving in a free place where my movement would have no consequences, for in three days Mary and I would go on our holiday, and there would be no more reason for me to see Oliver until he wrote a new composition which I could play. And that might be a long time, for he had spoken of beginning another opera, though for some reason I felt that that might be a mistake.
Oliver came back a little disconcerted. He always had his pride that with him everything went smoothly. ‘It seems the car they sent for us broke down. We cannot be fetched until another car comes back and is sent out again. It will perhaps be another three-quarters of an hour before it comes. That is all right, though it seems a little strange, but what worries me is that I could not speak to Martin. Evidently the butler could not find Lady Mortlake, it was a pansy who spoke to me, I think it was Lionel de Raisse. He was very much concerned at the thought of you being left high and dry like this, but he really did not seem to grasp what I meant when I asked for Martin. But we will be all right, there is no reason to worry.’
The old inn-keeper came out and took us behind the dahlia-bed to show us his rabbits; blue Angoras, making a great show of sensibility. Just at the right time, when the light had left the garden, his wife hurried up the path, explaining that the Admiral who was the second husband of Lady Mortlake’s mother, and lived at the Dower House, had called in for some soda-water, and would be pleased to take us up to Barbados Hall, just as soon as he had fetched some medicine for his invalid wife at the surgery. ‘It will be nice for you,’ she breathed, ‘to be driven by one of the family.’ She made us feel like the donors of an altarpiece, elevated above their station by being represented in proximity to sacred personages, and, smiling, we waited for the instrument of our elevation on a bench outside the inn, our luggage at our feet, resting on a strip of cobbles, set shining grey in a network of blue shadow that edged the rose-red road.
‘That is a superb suitcase of yours,’ said Oliver. ‘An oddly superb suitcase, if I may say so. It is more what I would have expected of Lady Mortlake or Lady Southways.’
‘I bought it in Paris,’ I said. ‘It is the product of terror. When we were little our family luggage was awful, Japanese baskets that had broken at the sides, and pockmarked tin trunks. People used to laugh at us at railway stations, and the landladies at seaside lodgings used to sneer like Dickens characters when our things came off the cab.’
‘What, were you poor?’ exclaimed Oliver. ‘I never knew that.’
I stared at him. I felt as if he had lain indifferent on a beach while I drowned in the surf. ‘Of course we were poor. How could you know us and not know that we had been poor?’
‘I knew only that your mother was a widow, and that you had had an isolated childhood, and that you and Mary seemed unlike other people,’ said Oliver. ‘But you had that nice house in Norfolk, I supposed you were all right and always had been so. Weren’t you? You always seemed to have so much of everything. I told you, there were more flowers in the fields round that house than I had ever seen anywhere else.’
‘We had nothing,’ I told him angrily. ‘Oh, it was so dreadful for Mamma. We had less than nothing. There were always debts, duns came to the door, we had the most horrible clothes, and shoes were the worst thing of all, they were so dear that we always went on with the old ones long after they had begun to hurt. Ask Mary, she will tell you.’ I was enraged, but what I said was wide of the mark. I was angered not so much by his ignorance of our poverty as by his remark that Mary and I seemed unlike other people. I hated that he should share the obstinate persuasion of the world that there was something strange about us. But as I saw the pity on his face anxiety struck through me, I asked, ‘And you? What sort of childhood did you have? Were you poor?’