Authors: Rebecca West
Again he buried his face in the cushion by my feet, and this time he sobbed. ‘Come nearer to me,’ I said, and he moved along till I could let him rest his head on my arms, and presently wipe his eyes with my handkerchief. I said in my heart to the shadows in the angles of the walls and the ceiling, ‘Celia, if you are there, come back and tell him it is all right.’ It seemed to me she must be all right, for it was surely impossible that anyone would go such a strange journey, the measure of its strangeness being that it took her by her own free will away from Oliver, except to find some extraordinary prize. But it is forbidden, they do not return. At least he raised his head and said, ‘I wanted to stop giving him money and get Lady Southways to give it him instead. But we cannot play at that concert, we must go in the morning.’
‘I suppose we could stay,’ I said. ‘Avis would do it if we asked her. After all, it was not Lady Mortlake’s fault that this happened.’
‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘You know you are only offering to do this to help me. And it would be wrong. That Mortlake bitch should have stayed to see we were properly treated, she is no fool, she is quite well aware that she has her house full of rubbish that might misbehave. If we do not pack up and leave, we are going over to the side of Jasperl. I know what I have to do. I have to go on keeping Jasperl, but I want to do it without him knowing that I have anything to do with the money. He is so clever, he will guess if I send it through any of my friends. But you, you have played so much in America, do you know anybody who could impersonate an anonymous admirer and send him the money in dollars?’
I knew that Mr Morpurgo would arrange it through his American lawyer. I said, ‘Very easily. Tell me your bank and I will get somebody to do it in two days’ time. But do not give him too much. You are too good.’
‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘You do see this is something I must do?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. I wondered how I could show I still believed in Rosamund. ‘I see it might be the most important thing in your life.’
‘I have let it run on too long,’ he said, ‘it should be settled soon. He will be out of the sanatorium in a fortnight’s time. I have such hateful, civil, mischievous letters from him. I have one in the pocket of this dressing-gown now.’
‘Burn it,’ I said. ‘Take it out and burn it. Oh, please, Oliver. Celia would not like it to be there now.’
‘Celia is dead,’ said Oliver.
‘She cannot be so dead that she would want you to have that letter in your pocket,’ I said. ‘Nobody is as dead as that.’
‘I wonder what you mean,’ he said, but took out the paper and put it on an ashtray and burned it with his lighter. The flame went higher than one would think. It was a long letter. Our shadows wavered madly on the wall.
He continued to watch the ashes until they were quite grey. Then he raised his eyes and looked at me steadily and said, ‘You will see to the money, and I will write to Jasperl and tell him I will have nothing more to do with him. And I will never write to him or see him again. But that is the least thing you have done for me. Sitting with you in this room where we have never been before, where we will never be again, is like being out of life a night and knowing everything. I know why Celia had to go to Jasperl. She had a genius for love. I was all right. I could love. But Jasperl cannot love, he is the negation of love, he is hatred, he is nonsense, given time he would uncreate the world. His state was a challenge to her. She had to win his soul from Satan. She went to him as to a battlefield.’
After a silence he said, ‘I have kept you up for hours when you should be asleep, worrying you over a perplexity I never need have felt. If it comes to that I have been howling like a dog and not getting on with my work for years, because I have had no sense. I should have seen why she had gone to him if on that first day when I read the anonymous letter in that room- with the window on the Thames I had not forgotten that she was love itself. She could do nothing vital except for the sake of love. I have remembered it only sitting in this room with you.’
‘No, you knew it all the time,’ I said. ‘You said to me something about it being possible that your wife had pursued Jasperl, because he was her destiny, the martyrdom to which her cruel God had called her.’
‘So I did,’ he said, and thought for a while. ‘Yes, I knew it with my mind, as I might a fact about a stranger that I had read in a book. But now, sitting here, I knew it with my whole being, as I know that we were once happy. I never should have forgotten.’
I never should have forgotten how Rosamund had been the peer and companion of Richard Quin, how they had laughed together in an innocence that nothing could destroy. I never should have forgotten how, immune from perturbation by any external event, she held up my mother’s body as it ejected her soul. We smiled at each other.
‘Oh, dear Rose, I have been terrible to you,’ he said. ‘Bringing you down to this hell-hole. Telling you this beastly story of Jasperl, which I might well have kept to myself; and keeping you awake. But I was selfish. I wanted my soul saved. Well, you have done it. Now, will you be able to sleep?’
‘Indeed I will,’ I said. ‘Will you?’
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Though, curiously enough, I should like to go out for a walk.’
‘So should I,’ I said, ‘but we dare not. I have a feeling that there is just one thing this household has still got up its sleeve, and that is to let loose big dogs on us. But I should go to the window and look out at the night.’
He found my slippers for me under the sofa and slipped them on to my feet. It seemed strange to have a man do that, but he seemed to find it quite natural and even to take some pleasure in doing it. We shook back a great fall of golden brocade and looked out at a smooth lawn deep in the bluish frost of moonlight, where one tall tree stood incandescent.
‘It seems to be in blossom,’ said Oliver, ‘but are there trees that blossom now?’ We stood for some moments side by side, and then he said, ‘And you, Rose?’
‘And I?’
‘You said there was someone you loved with whom you were not happy any more.’ He looked at me. ‘I would have thought that a man whom you loved would never leave you.’
‘Oh, it was not a man, it was not that sort of love!’ I told him impatiently. ‘It is my cousin Rosamund. But you have made me happy about her.’
‘Your cousin Rosamund? I remember her. Beautiful, golden-haired, stammered, so never spoke.’
‘Mary and I loved her more than anyone in the world. She was the nearest of all of us to Richard Quin, she looked after Mamma when she died. At any time she was utterly lovable. We thought her perfectly good, but she has married someone repulsive. Not like Jasperl. But dwarfish, and, we think, dishonest and queer. And very rich. But when you said what you had forgotten about Celia, I knew we had forgotten the essential thing about Rosamund too. She was good. When she married this man she must have done it for the sake of goodness.’
‘You are sure to be right. You would not have loved her so long without knowing her. And forgive me with saddling you with a faithless lover.’
‘I could never have a lover, faithful or faithless. I cannot love anyone except the people I have loved since I was a child. My father. My mother. Richard Quin. Who are dead. And Mary. And Rosamund. There are others I love, Kate, whom you know, and old Miss Beevor, and three people who keep a pub on the Thames called the Dog and Duck, and a girl called Nancy, and even they were all given me by my family. But for deep love, the sort you felt for Celia, I cannot get past those five people. I shall not ever love anybody else as I love them.’
‘I have only three. My father and mother, and Celia. Who are all dead. And I too know that there is the end of the list. I have lost my power to love.’
We looked out for some moments on the tree that blazed white on the white lawn under the liquid starry sky. I said, ‘I would not be any different. Would you?’
‘Not for the world. Yet it is a very curious fate, to have the book closed so early when other people read in it so much longer. But now go back to your sofa and sleep. I will call you early, I will telephone for a taxi and we will all get out of this bawdyhouse at the first possible moment and get breakfast at the inn.’
W
HEN I WOKE
I could not think where I could be. I was so delighted to be there. Even after I had remembered I was still ecstatic. My arms folded behind my head, I lay and watched the framework of light round the dark and stolid window-curtains, and thought of the morning outside which I conceived to be hazed with heat under a pale dome, the trees and hills standing half-created, mere outlines. There came back to me knowledge of the human hideousness that had come my way before I went to sleep; the insults to which we had been subjected in this house hardly affected me, for Oliver’s story was so much more strong. Celia’s singing was loud in my ears; it was almost all I remembered about her. She had an extremely pleasing legato which she took with her into quite difficult music, and much more besides. Indeed her voice was of the sort that suggests immortality, that promises to sound somewhere after a singer and audience are dead. Yet she had lost her voice before she died. I was grieved by that and by my failure to divine Oliver’s unhappiness, and I looked forward to telling Mary his story and getting her to help me with plans for his distraction. But at the same time I was thinking of none of these things. I was absorbed in my sense of the morning that would receive me and bathe me when I should leave this house. I got up and stretched and laughed at nothing to the four corners of the shadowed room, and went through the corridors, which were still dark, for the curtains had not yet been drawn, to the cloakroom where we had washed the night before. I did not mind that the water was cold, although I always made a great fuss if that happened at home. When I came out into the corridor Oliver and Avis were coming towards me. She was carrying her violin-case with just such a mother-and-child concern as Cordelia used to show; it is not fair how one should be taken and the other should be left. Oliver was kind, it showed in the way he walked beside this girl, his arm was curved, he knew well she was clumsy and would knock into something, and he did not count it against her, he only tried to save her the humiliation. They were both as happy as I was. It seemed they had learned from an early-rising footman that a lorry was taking milk-churns to the station, and the driver was waiting for us now. But first Oliver and I went into the little library, which had not yet been set to rights, and was still a sea-green tent of brocade curtains, enclosing the smell of tobacco and the exhalations from the half-inches of wine in the glasses on the disordered table. I wished we could have gone straight out into the morning. But the delay was necessary, we pushed away the chairs the diners had left askew and spread our cheque-books among the dirty coffee-cups and glasses and plates, of which those that were smeared with peach-skins were peculiarly sordid, and we wrote out cheques for the benefit of the charity we were now not going to serve by playing at the concert. The four
blanc de chine
parrots looked down on us from the heights of the greenish bookcase with an irony that was too apposite, for it was hard to write these cheques without feeling a vulgar satisfaction at being able to buy one’s way out of this barbaric household in currency they recognised.
We left the envelope on a table in the round hall. Then Oliver and Avis took me through a passage with a vaulted roof, which had an amusing echo, and we came out into a courtyard built of the same blonde stone as the pilasters on the house, with that air of the classical drama, of Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida and Sejanus, which people of the past often thought appropriate to stables. As Avis climbed up on to the high lorry, cradling her violin, I said to Oliver, ‘You should write an opera about some lovely stables.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘about an elopement frustrated by some respectable horses who would not draw the coach in which the guilty pair were fleeing.’ I could have got on the lorry by myself, but he lifted me, gently but so strongly that I shot up from his arms and was suddenly beside the churns. He looked after women so well that he might have been an American. I was foolish ever to have suspected that he was homosexual. ‘An opera with instrumental choruses of neighing horses,’ he said, jumping up beside Avis and me. ‘What instrument do you suppose?’ We thought the cor anglais, though perhaps one would have to put something inside it, to get the right equine tone, as one puts tissue paper across a comb to get a harmonica effect.
We lumbered through an archway carved with trophies, into the full morning which was not as I had expected, but was also glorious. The world was rough and golden, like Rosamund’s hair when she first awoke. The turf in the park, bleached and glazed by the dry summer, gave back the yellow sun, but every low tuft had its shadow because the sun was still not high, and when we went out into the open country the standing crops were more yellow than green, and chalk-laden red fallow lands were luminous; but nothing was smooth, each of these fields was broken by the short shadows of what grew close to the ground, or the long shadows of the trees, or the hedges distorted images of themselves which they dropped on their westward side. This was not the strong light I had imagined, pouring down from a zenith blanched with its strength, blinding the eye to all but essential forms. Yet I felt myself bathed in such a light. I was in a trance, sealed from the world, yet I followed Oliver’s pointing finger and saw the rabbits loping far out in the open fields. Even more definitely than when I first awoke, I was living a twofold life.
We found that there was no sense in taking the same train as the churns, it only went to the junction to meet a train that was going west, and we wanted to go east. We could just as well wait till the next train, which left in two hours and a half’s time. There was a curious pleasure in watching Oliver settle all these details. As we came out of the station we saw the innkeeper’s wife standing at her front door, shaking a mat, and we hurried across to her.