Authors: Rebecca West
Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Rose, I am thinking of your mother. This is her work. She turned none of the family away. She took in Lily, she held out her hand to protect Queenie, she was a mother to Nancy. So they were all still linked. Through Lily Queenie and Nancy came her, through Nancy Queenie has found -’ He broke off. ‘Let us go into the garden.’
‘First I must telephone to London,’ I said. ‘I must see someone this afternoon. I will go home and take some flowers in, then I must go and have my hair done. I will just have time.’
‘How collected you are,’ he said. ‘Yesterday you could not stop weeping. You wanted never to make any plans again. Now you are as you have always been.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I must be ill. I have been so many people in the last twenty-four hours, most of them quite idiotic. I still cannot think of anything or remember anything.’
‘It would seem to me,’ he said, ‘that you were thinking quite a lot systematically.’
When I had spoken to Kate and made my hair appointment with Miss White and got a taxi to meet me on the other side of the ferry, I said goodbye to the family and went into the garden, and waited till we saw the taxi drive up on the opposite bank.
‘You said that through Nancy Queenie had found something, and then you broke off,’ I said. ‘Surely you meant to say a husband. Why did you break off? Do you not think they are going to marry?’
‘Of course they are going to marry. But I did not want to say that Queenie had found a husband, for that might mean nothing. It might mean that she had found a husband which was as much use to her as’ - his hand performed the counter-caress it often gave his face, it traced the path of his self-loathing from feature to feature - ‘as many husbands are to many wives.’
‘You mean he will be a companion to her.’
‘No,’ he said. Then added coldly, ‘There is no substitute for sex. I would not be glad if she has merely found someone to play two-handed patience with her. When they looked at each other yesterday evening it was like something I have seen in the streets where a man picks up a streetwalker. That is a curious recommendation. But there is no use in any relationship between a man and a woman which is not one note in a scale, the lowest note of which is not just that, the sort of thing that makes a man go out into the street to look for a woman, that makes a woman stand in the night waiting for a man. It is a pity, but it is so. Or is it not a pity? No. Len can bear that it should be so. Oswald Bates cannot bear it. Len is right, of course.’
He had been speaking in a soft Oriental murmur. He came back to his ordinary voice to say, ‘There is your taxi.’ We strolled down the lawn towards the punt, and he said, murmuring again, ‘I was glad I saw their meeting. Now it seems possible I did witness some classic performance of the raffish kind, perhaps a vicious youth drinking champagne from a dancer’s slipper, and that will be just that, yet so much more. For of course that meeting we saw was much more than a man and a woman picking each other up for their last possibility of gratification.’
‘Yes, but what was it that happened?’ I said. ‘I could not understand. But it shook me, it is what is shaking me now, why I cannot think.’
‘We heard Mr Bates doing for Queenie what your mother would have done for her,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and what all the rest have failed to do. He took her seriously. That is the great thing one needs in the world. To be taken seriously. In practice one cannot get it from more than one person. How curious it all is. Goodbye, dear Rose. I hope whatever is going on goes well, and I cannot help seeing that something is going on.’
The house in St John’s Wood would be full of flowers, sent to me by friends and by people who had heard me play. But it seemed to me necessary that I should buy a great many flowers myself to decorate the house for that afternoon. I stopped the taxi at a florist’s a long way from my home, in North Audley Street, because I felt secretive about this purchase, and after some indecision, since, though it was a big shop, none of the flowers seemed quite good enough, I bought a great many gladioli. I spent a ridiculous amount of money, for far more flowers than I could possibly use. If I put them all in vases the place would have looked like the Chelsea Show. But I felt obliged to have tall glasses in the drawing-room, each holding some scarlet gladioli, some crimson, some rose, some orange, some of that kind that are nearly black. But they sold them only by the dozen of separate colours, so I had to buy five dozen. I hoped I would get into the house without Mary or Kate meeting me and questioning me about this imbecile purchase. They were actually hard to fit in the taxi, they were so long. As we drove past Lord’s the sight of the white girl praying on the tomb filled me with repulsion; it is not a good statue, she is coarsely made, surely she would not be given what she wanted. Yet there is something beautiful about the act of prayer, it lent her the beauty she did not possess in her own right, perhaps what she desired would come to her. What one does can surely make one more deserving than what one is. I wish I had not travelled to a country where there were laws I did not know, or perhaps no laws at all.
I had no time to turn my key in the lock of the front door. Kate opened it for me. I could hear someone playing in my music-room; whoever it was must have left the soundproof door open, and was not playing at all well. Kate explained that it was Oliver, who had telephoned that morning, and had on hearing that I would be back by half past eleven said that he would come then and not wait for the appointment he had made with me for the afternoon.
‘Oh, this has spoiled it all!’ I said, throwing my flowers down on the floor. ‘I will not have time to put these in the tall glasses in the drawing-room. And I had planned to have my hair done!’
‘Here is your brush and comb, I brought them down,’ she said. ‘Stand by the glass and I will give you a neater head. It is not as if your hair really needs washing.’
‘But it does,’ I said, ‘it does.’
‘No, no, you had it washed and set only three days ago,’ she said placidly. ‘When you said that you had made an appointment with Miss White for this morning I knew you must be in one of your states, though you have no more concerts.’
‘But the flowers,’ I said.
‘I will put them in water for you,’ she told me.
‘But I wanted only one of each kind in each glass.’
‘I could do things even more difficult than that,’ said Kate. ‘Now let me run a comb round the back of your neck, and you can run along.’
Where the three steps from the passage rose to the music-room I halted. The playing continued, and Kate had gathered up the five paper-shrouded sheaves from the floor and taken them into the housemaid’s cupboard where the vases were kept. There was nobody to stop me if I went out of the house. But I went up the first step and stood listening only, I thought, to protect myself by analysing to the full limit of justifiable contempt this obtuse playing. Oliver was pounding out the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Minor. The piano had been his second subject when he was at the Athenaeum, but his technique, and he must have had some, I supposed, had perished beneath the deadly influence of composition, which, except in the case of such rare and inhuman geniuses as Busoni, makes people quite unable to play the piano except in a crude utilitarian sense. A composer sits down at the keyboard and plays as if he were a strong man using a blunt tin-opener. They do not want to hear the music as the composer wants an audience to hear it; they want to exhaust its ideas and inform themselves how those ideas appeared to the composer at the moment of their inception, so that they can separate (as an audience should not be allowed to do) the matter from the manner. They unpick the work instead of sewing it together. It is a thing offensive to the pianists, unless the composer who plays is greater than the composer whose work he is maltreating. I could not think Oliver a greater composer than Mozart, though for an instant I found myself possessed by the insane hope that in some future work he might prove himself to be this. Then I asked myself what I, who played Mozart so well, by comparison with nearly every other pianist, was doing bothering myself with this man who insisted on spending his life composing so much less well than Mozart. I knew also that this was an idiotic kind of arithmetic, and then again that even by its idiotic laws I was wrong. I went up to the second step and stopped again. The difficult thing about the C minor concerto is that it is elegant and light in texture, yet is tragic, it records endurance of the deepest suffering, of the ultimate doubt. It is extremely difficult not to impair one or other of these qualities, which would seem to be incompatible, and would be so in any other composer’s work. The problem is presented in its most acute form in the second movement, where what old people call ‘a pretty little tune’ is the voice of sorrow itself, lamenting a loss which has really happened, which cannot be converted to a profit by looking at it in any different way. I was gritting my teeth at hearing this tune not even allowed to be difficult in its own subtle way, as it was poked out of the keyboard, when Oliver broke off and repeated, with a delicacy which I had not believed within his powers, the first four bars of the movement, in which the tune is first presented in all its prettiness. The third time he played it he achieved a certain colour of tone in the second bar which somehow solved the problem and established it on the level of classical dignity. I had never thought of this effect. Why had I never thought of it? Because I had a lower order of musical intelligence than he had. I might be a better pianist than he was a composer but to be a creative artist with any valid title to the name is a better thing than to be an interpreter. He was much my superior, and I tingled with pleasure. But all this was irrelevant, even had he not been a musician I could not have obeyed my almost irresistible desire to leave the house. I mounted the third step, and Oliver saw me through the open door.
He stopped playing and stood up. I went into the room and we faced each other, trembling.
A look of guilt came over his face and passed. He said exultantly, ‘Now I can love again.’
It struck me to the heart that he should put it in those words, but my deepest self said coldly that so long as I had him nothing else mattered. He came towards me and I became rigid with disgust, it seemed certain that I must die when he touched me, but instead, of course, I lived.
IN OUR BED
in the villa by the Mediterranean my husband slid from my body and said, ‘How I hate all Wagner.
Tristan and Isolde
is nothing like it, is it? It is so sharp and clear, and the
Tristan
music is like two fat people eating thick soup. Drinking thick soup,’ he corrected himself pedantically, and yawned, and nuzzled his face against my shoulder, and was asleep. I ran my arm down his straight back. When I had thought of his face in the train to Reading, it had seemed to me more right than nature could make it, it was as if a master craftsman had worked on it. His body was like that too. I enjoyed everything about being married, though I could not have endured it with any other husband but Oliver. I was amazed at lovemaking. It was so strange to come, when I was nearly middle-aged, on the knowledge that there was another state of being than any I had known, and that it was the state normal for humanity, that I was a minority who did not know it. It was as if I had learned that there was a sixth continent, which nearly everybody but me and a few others had visited and in which, now I had come to it, I felt like a native, or as if there was another art as well as music and painting and literature, which was not only preached, but actually practised, by nearly everybody, though they were silent about their accomplishment. It was fantastic that nobody should speak of what pervaded life and determined it, yet it was inevitable, for language could not describe it. I looked across Oliver at the window, which we had opened after we had put out the light and there was no fear of attracting mosquitoes. There was the sea, glittering with moonlight, the dark mountains above it, then the sky dusted with other earths, which looking at us might not know that our globe was swathed in this secret web of nakedness that kept it from being naked of people, chilly with lack of love and life, a barren top spinning to no purpose. Their architecture would be as fantastic but would not be the same, because there were not two of anything alike, every person was different, every work of art was different, every act of love was different, every world was different. It was a pity we did not know the end to which this wealth was to be put, but surely if this plenitude existed, and not the nothingness which somehow seemed to be more natural, more what one would have expected (though it is the one state of which the universe had and could have no experience), we might conclude that all would be well. I could believe that this precious intricate creature I held in my arms, who made love and wrote music, would never be destroyed.
I was amazed by the wealth that had suddenly come to me. I ran my hand over him again. It was a pity I had had to give up something to get this. Mary and I were not as we had been. It was a pity that I had learned this on the very same day that Oliver and I had learned we loved each other, for I could never deceive myself into imagining her recoil from my new state as lover to be simply material distance, but the forking of our several paths through our professions. I was alone that evening, for Oliver had telephoned his solicitor to ask him how we could get married as soon as possible, so that we could have the longest time abroad before the concert season began again, and the solicitor was going on his holidays and would not see him except after dinner. So I lay on the sofa in the drawing-room, wondering at the new properties of my body and my soul, and waiting till Mary came home, to see her pass with grace from the old world I had lived in till that day to the new world that had just received me. When she came in I was enraptured by the sight of her, for she had spent all her day shopping and tying up loose ends that could not be left till we returned, and she was not tired or fretted, she was serene as the swans that had glided by me on the dark waters the night before, her silk dress was not crumpled. She could make any transit calmly, even if it were as strange as this. But not a second passed after I spoke before I knew that I had made a vast miscalculation, and that the sum was not to work out so that my books would balance.