Authors: Rebecca West
‘Queenie’s very happy with Mr Bates, Fred I should call him, though it will never come natural if I live to be a hundred,’ she told me. ‘She goes to all his services, and she’s got her own job there, she helps with the hymn-singing.’
‘I did not know she sang,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, she’s got a fine contralto, a mezzo-soprano, whatever you need to sing Carmen, but she wasn’t one just to sing when there was no purpose to be served by it.’ It was true, there was an economy about Queenie. ‘When we were young she would always sing a tune if there was a jollification, then afterwards she let her voice be. But now she’s singing a lot. Funny, your music brought you and Oliver together, and Queenie’s singing’s helping her with Fred, but I played the piano not so badly, not like you, still I could always get through the Lancers, yet it didn’t bring me anything. Oh dear, I try not to feel bitter. I know it says in the Bible that one shall be taken and one shall be left, but there’s such a lot been taken, there’s Queenie, twice over, and Milly, and your sister Cordelia, and then Nancy, and now you, and there’s only Mary and me left, and Mary might go any time, and there’ll be only me. I don’t really mind, there’s lots of ways for me to share in your lives, but sometimes I worry, it’s as if there must have been something the matter with me, as if I must have been plain. But I don’t think I was. There was someone, you know, but he never wrote a line after Queenie’s trouble started. And I am bound to say he’d never been what you’d call assiduous. Just another bastard, I suppose. Excuse me, dearie, I suppose I can use that word now you’re a married woman. Let’s face it, I’ve been left. Well, it’s this way, and the way you’ve been taken means that you can’t come down so often, there’s no fighting against it. I would far rather lose you,’ she said incomprehensibly, ‘than really lose you.’
But their obvious fear that Oliver would feel unfriendly to them because he came of a different class was without foundation, and it would have been difficult to explain to them without offending them that, as he was composing a new symphony, he was not clearly aware of anything about them. They were amiable coloured shadows, creatures which lived for him only because I loved them and would have disappeared if I had tired of them, and Uncle Len became real to him only because of that weekly paper devoted to puzzles. Often Oliver and Mr Morpurgo and Uncle Len used to spend happy hours on a weekday, particularly at tea-time, eating sliced buns and drinking strong Indian tea by the fire working out ‘What then was the chance of X being dealt an ace out of the third pack?’ and Len would ask the others, ‘You with all your education, don’t you follow what’s going on?’ and they would shake their heads. ‘Funny, that!’ he once exclaimed. ‘I’d give my ears to have had the schooling so that I could understand what they mean when they say that modern physics shows us a universe our five senses can’t picture. That mean anything to you? Sometimes I think I get it. Sometimes I know I don’t.’ Mr Morpurgo and Oliver shook their heads. ‘Could you write music that made sense but nobody could hear?’ Len asked Oliver.
He was startled by the question. ‘Yes. Of course I could. I could write music that made a rhythm out of superimposed and competing rhythms which would give me enormous satisfaction to imagine but which no instruments could convey to any listener’s ear. But many composers have written music which, at the time they wrote it, nobody could hear because the instruments of their time could not reproduce it.’
‘So music’s always catching up on itself,’ Len reflected, ‘and maybe we’ll learn to think so that we can get a picture of this new universe. No, I don’t think that’s what they mean. I think they mean we won’t never be able to see what it’s really like, it’d need more than our five senses.’
‘There is something which may be relevant,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I have noticed as I have gone through life that the more people know the more they become incomprehensible to those who know less. People who are very good or very clever, I put it that way though of course to be good is to be clever in a certain way, people who are very good or very clever always seem to stupid people to be acting irrationally. Very often we call such people eccentric, off the centre when, since they know more of the whole than the rest of us, they are probably better able to judge where the centre is. There is always mystery above us. The appearance of mystery in the universe is therefore nothing new. It is a constant condition of our lives.’
‘I do not know why Christ got Himself crucified,’ said Oliver, who had fallen to scribbling a staff and some notes on an envelope.
‘You do not, and you are a Christian,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and I do not, and I am a Jew. But we may count ourselves happy, if we observe the argumentative despair of the Moslem peoples, whose saviour did nothing which the least of them cannot understand.’
‘I’d like to understand everything,’ said Len. ‘It seems more natural. Give me old Ptolemy. There is a nice system for you, a downstairs and an upper stairs, a floor and a ceiling.’
‘You are right, it would be happier if it were so,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The human race is not a beautiful spectacle if it is a pyramid with the top wrapped in mist and the base sunk in mud. But we must have faith.’
Oliver was lost in his music, Uncle Len’s eye had gone back to the puzzle magazine, Mr Morpurgo leaned over to re-read the puzzle. Aunt Milly brought in hot water and filled up the tea-pot.
‘Why don’t we have tea like this at home, Rose?’ asked Oliver.
‘This illustrates what I was saying a minute ago,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Rose knows that no palate enjoys the same tea over a long period of time. You have excellent China tea at home. You enjoy this Indian tea because it is a change, and enjoy your own tea more when you get back to it. The children learned many such things from their mother. But for a moment you wrongly suspected her of negligence, of not getting you the best tea, for the reason that you know much less about tea than she does.’
Nobody was listening to him but Milly and me. The puzzle was never solved. Oliver lost the envelope he had scribbled his notes on. Such are the hours which refresh the soul, which stoke the furnace for performance. There were such hours for me, though not for Oliver, under Nancy’s roof also. I rarely took him there because I could see that her quality was not apparent to him. He could sympathise with my love for Lily, partly because he saw her as the
ideal
Papagena in
The Magic Flute,
partly because I had told him how she had loathed her sister’s crime but had not let her loathing diminish her love, how she was so generous that, though she had come into our house as a refugee from misfortune, we were now all her debtors. But he could see nothing in Nancy but a dull, prettyish, provincial housewife, and I could find no words to express the feminine mystery in which her value lay. There was not a grain of glory in her house. It was a house like millions of others, and she did not move an inch from the routine followed by the millions of women who inhabited such houses. It was not in her power to do so, she had not a ranging fancy, and it would have puzzled Oswald. She should not have felt happy in this little world, for she knew that the belief in stability which was its foundation was unfounded. A father could be murdered, a mother could be a murderer; a brother could desert, an uncle could nearly kill by his gross kindness. She had missed not the least overtone of the discord in which her normal destiny had died. But she had transmitted her cynicism into something so different that it expressed itself in that faint smile which was always so delicious to me, which was sharp and yet sweet, like the taste of tart fruit lightly sugared, and she made every day pretty with trivial things, with care for her baby son, with chatter to her little Welsh servant, with visits to the shops to exercise small prudences and insipid preferences, to do nothing guilty, to make improvements what would otherwise have been not quite so good, till the sum, as I one day learned, was far vaster than the little world in which the accountancy was carried on. I went into her house one afternoon while she was still resting, and she called me up to her room, and I stood at the end of the bed while she rubbed her eyes and explained that she felt better for her sleep, that she had really been tired, Richard Adam had kept her awake nearly all night, and blew a kiss to me, and told me not to go away, she was still sleepy, but she would have to get up soon to take Richard Adam from Bronwyn. She closed her eyes again for a moment, and as she lay there, with her head thrown back on the pillow against her spread hair, her long and very white throat bare, her faint, teasing smile on her lips, I thought that she too should have known what it was to be desired again and again by someone better than herself, and it seemed a shame that it was only by Oswald who shared that bed with her. I wished that I knew as well as I knew her some woman who was really happily married, so that I could ask her, ‘Are you, too, frightened by the thought that your husband may die?’ But Nancy, before she rose, asked me that very question. Everything went so well that it was as if I had abolished misfortune by my marriage; for surely Mary would fall in love too and marry and would understand. But one day in the second winter of our marriage Oliver and I went to Bournemouth; I had an afternoon concert at the Winter Gardens, and Oliver was stuck in his work so he came too. It is a frightening place. Those fir trees have so much an air of having the last word. The houses have won a victory over the woods, there is not an inch of them that is not now town; but in the gardens the black branches remind the people in the houses of the hearse. But we were not frightened. I had a new crimson coat with a long collar of black moleskin, which delighted Oliver to the point of foolishness; he seemed to think I had designed it and made it as well as bought it. My rehearsal went well; my performance went well; it was pleasant with the special pleasantness that has no particular cause. In the train going home, under a plaid rug that he had bought as a young man and thought as a certain prescription for warmth, not having noticed that it had worn thin during the years, we dozed together in a warm adhesion. But when we got back to our home there was a light in the drawing-room windows, I thought it might be Avis Jenkinson; sometimes when she got in a great state she would suddenly come to see us; and Mary was waiting for us.
She smiled over my head at Oliver and said, ‘I am pretending that I have come to save Rose having a shock when she reads this thing in the morning papers, but I have come because I cannot sit alone and think about it in my tower. It is Lady Tredinnick.’
‘Oh, she is dead?’ I whispered.
‘Late this afternoon she climbed up to the roof of her house and threw herself out of the window. Her body caught in a tree. They could not get to it. They had to call the Fire Brigade. But she was dead. She had broken her neck.’
‘How did you hear?’ I asked, then turned and explained to Oliver, ‘She took us to our first dance. It was horrible but she was nice. She was so nice.’
‘I have a pupil who lives next door to the Tredinnicks, she rang up and told me that she could not come for her lesson, she was upset by the dreadful thing that had happened.’
‘At this first dance she told me about a wonderful white orchid that her husband had seen growing on a tree,’ I told him. ‘They could not get to it.’
‘Does anybody know why she did it?’ asked Oliver.
‘She had been getting more and more strange,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘We had missed the point. We had simply not seen what was the matter with her. She had not been getting more and more strange. Her world had been doing that, not she. Which of her sons was Austell?’
The one in the Treasury,’ I said.
‘He was brought up in the West London police court this morning,’ said Mary. ‘Did you not buy an evening paper? It is in all of them. He had been found with a soldier in a square somewhere near Knightsbridge.’
‘Oh, God! oh, God!’ I said. ‘So that was what she was afraid of.’
‘Yes. It seems so obvious now. I cannot think how we did not see it.’
‘But why should he do that?’ I marvelled. ‘Austell did not live with her. He had a little house in Westminster, she took me there once, a very pretty house with very good panelling and a vine in the garden. Why did he not take anybody he liked to his own house?’
‘You do not understand,’ said Oliver. ‘My God, it makes one sweat to think that it is mere chance one is not born like that. There are different kinds, of course, Lionel de Raisse would not do this. But this kind must have a stranger, and must run the risk of being caught. Caught, what a hideous word! And what a hideous thing! Think of being compelled by desire as intense as anything we know, to go with some snotty boy into the streets at night; and mating like an alley cat, like a stray dog, with the hope, the fear, that you find yourself under the beam of a policeman’s torch, and everything else in the world stripped from one, the light casting complete and eternal bankruptcy.’
‘Is that what some people want?’ said Mary. I had an uneasy feeling she thought it hardly stranger than what Oliver and I wanted.
‘It is in a way quite rich,’ said Oliver. ‘There’s the perverse joy of rejecting all the delicacy of life, the little house in Westminster, the panelled walls, the vine, the Guardi and the Gainsborough drawing, the soft-voiced friends, for a coarse boy and the open street. There’s the joy of forcing the world to punish one when it meant one no harm, there’s the joy, of course, of getting one’s poor little bastard of a partner into trouble too, of taking something so much lower than oneself that it would seem impossible to protect it, and railroading it into the police court and the cells. I have often wondered how it is that Jasperl has never tried this form of pleasure.’
‘My love, my love,’ I said, ‘you need not follow that damned soul into sins he has not yet committed.’
‘I am hungry,’ said Mary. ‘I have had no dinner. There is a very good cold supper waiting for you, I am going to share it. I asked Kate to put out some of that Pontet-Canet Oliver likes.’
On the dining-room table there was a bowl of cyclamens, great white ones like poised butterflies.