by Rebecca West
Mrs Morpurgo stared at him with protruding eyes.
‘I think Stephanie was in love with Captain Ware,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘There was nothing in it,’ repeated Mrs Morpurgo.
‘That is what I think, too,’ said Mr Morpurgo, smiling. ‘There was nothing in it. But my poor girl was in love with her riding master. And such things are nothing.’
She continued to look at him doubtfully, swaying backwards and forwards.
‘Herminie,’ said Mr Morpurgo, speaking slowly, with spaces between the words, in much the same manner that our mathematics mistress used towards her most backward pupils, ‘I assure you, there is no need to concern yourself with this business any longer, so far as I am concerned. There are some things so sad that when they happen to people one cares for one cannot be angry about them. I mean to forget that I ever heard Captain Ware’s name, and I hope Stephanie will soon forget it too. My only sorrow is that she will take longer to forget him than I will. For I know that such disappointments take their own time to heal.’
His wife still said nothing, and he sighed and went on: ‘Now come and sit down with us. I will send Manning to ask Mademoiselle to take the girls to Gunnersbury House without you, and I shall have the pleasure of your company, which I missed so much when you were at Pau.’
‘I cannot do that,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. She was perplexed. Surely there was a second meaning in what he was saying? She had better leave him as quickly as possible before she got caught up in his incomprehensibility. She bounced back into the part of a woman of the world. ‘Lady Rothschild will be expecting me, what’s the use of offending people, one’s got to live with them.’
‘People will eat strawberries and cream off glass plates in a marquee as well without you as with you,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘But Mrs Aubrey and Rose and I will not be nearly as happy sitting here unless you are with us.’
Mrs Morpurgo resorted again to her affectation of surprise. ‘I’m charmed,’ she told Mamma, ‘that my husband should have this passion for my company. But I wonder why it should choose to burn so fiercely just this afternoon of all afternoons, when my friends are waiting for me miles away.’
‘This point is,’ said Mr Morpurgo drily, ‘that this is indeed an afternoon of afternoons.’
She was the dull pupil again, staring at the blackboard.
‘Not,’ he said, more drily still, ‘that anything has happened which has not happened before. But we are going to behave as if nothing had happened, and as if Stephanie had not been more foolish than I have a right to expect.’
‘I have told you that there was nothing in it,’ she said again, perplexed.
‘Yes. Yes. I accept that,’ he said. ‘And now sit down, my dear. First I want to show the Aubreys some of our things, and then it would be kind of you to show them your pictures and your drawing-room, which I know they did not have the time to look at before luncheon. Then they will be going home to Lovegrove, and you and I can have the end of the afternoon to spend together.’
A look of fear passed over her face. ‘I have told you,’ she said, ‘Lady Rothschild telephoned to me more than once. She wants me to do something special, at this wretched fête.’
‘The end of the afternoon is always pleasant,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and we will talk of nothing troublesome. We will be beautifully vacant, like two horses in a meadow.’
‘Two horses!’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘That would be delightful, no doubt. And the Rothschilds would love us all the better for it. But we’re not horses, my dear Edgar, and we have duties horses haven’t got.’
‘You will not stay with me though I particularly want you to?’ asked her husband.
‘If I may talk of my plans,’ said Mamma, while Mrs Morpurgo shook her head, ‘I think that, lovely as your house is, and much as we are enjoying being here, we will not take up so much of your husband’s time as he proposes.’ Her face lit up with amusement. ‘I resemble Lady Rothschild in one respect, and in one respect only. I also live a long way off. I think we should be going home at once.’
‘No, not at once,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Your home is quite a distance away, but you have plenty of time, Clare. It is Herminie who is running short of that.’
‘Yes, I spend my days hurrying from pillar to post,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘That is what I am always complaining about, and I will not make things any better by breaking engagements.’
‘You have less time at your disposal than you realise,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Will you stay with me this afternoon or will you not?’
He had till then been speaking in quiet and even tones, but now his voice was thin and strained, an odd voice to come from so fat a little man. Now Mrs Morpurgo lost her perplexity, now she was sure of her ground. Requests coming from the bottom of the heart were things one refused. ‘I’ve already made it clear, dear Edgar,’ she said triumphantly, ‘that Gunnersbury House is where I’ve promised I’ll be this afternoon, and like all good women, I keep my promises.’
She turned away from us as if the pleasure she felt at denying her husband what he wanted were so strong that she herself recognised it as gross, and wished to hide it. She went towards the door, just as Mr Kessel shuffled back, faintly smiling, and holding a panel wrapped in a cloth, with an air of consequence. Mrs Morpurgo recoiled, crying archly, ‘What’s this? One of my husband’s treasures brought out for your special delectation, Mrs Aubrey? I hope you’ll find the right thing to say about it, or he won’t continue to adore you.’ As he so unaccountably does, her tone added. ‘Now, which of them is it, I wonder?’ she demanded. ‘I can’t wait to see!’ But that she could not do at once. The old man halted and hugged the panel closer, like a child whose game has been interrupted by a stronger and rougher child, and fears for his toys.
‘You’ve been very quick, Mr Kessel,’ said Mr Morpurgo, and rose and took the panel from him, and put it on the easel and drew the cloth away. He was no taller than the easel, and as his little arms spread out and settled the panel on the ledge he looked comically like an up-ended tortoise. Mrs Morpurgo shuddered in sudden rage. ‘Oh, your Florentines, your Siennese, your Umbrians!’ she exclaimed. She had cast away her affectations. This was honest hatred, eager to destroy everything that was dear to the object of its loathing. But the moment passed. She stood raising and lowering her eyebrows while Mr Morpurgo spoke of his picture. ‘Not a great masterpiece, I’ll admit it, though Weissbach wouldn’t. Not as great as the Simone Martini I showed you on the landing. Too much a piece of happy story-telling. But it’s lovely. Isn’t it, Clare? Look at that pale gilding I was speaking about. Those men in their gilded crowns, their horses champing beside them in their gilded harness, the woman and the child sitting in the broken house with gilded circles round their heads. And above the hills at the back there’s the night sky, and beyond it another firmament, that’s faintly gilded. It’s an exquisite way of underlining what one knows to be really important in the story, the power, the trappings, the real thing above it all.’
But we were interrupted by a cry from Mrs Morpurgo. Her hands were fluttering in a gesture expressing violated refinement, so wide that it included in its complaint the picture, her husband, and the ornate house about us. ‘I believe,’ she told her husband, ‘I really do believe that you only like these pictures because there is so much gold on them.’
‘No, you must go,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You really must go now. You must be off to Gunnersbury Park.’
‘Why?’ asked his wife. This time she was really surprised.
‘In pursuit of holy poverty, I suppose,’ he answered.
She could make nothing of that. ‘How you change!’ she said, in a teasing tone. ‘A minute ago you seemed about to go on your knees to me in your anxiety that I should stay here.’
‘But you have let your time run out,’ he said. ‘Now you must go.’
She repeated his words to herself several times; one saw her lips moving. True, he had not said that he was angry with her; but she could not h
elp suspecting that he was not pleased. She made herself gentle for his benefit, compliance soft on her face like the bloom on a peach. But he had set his eyes on the picture. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, said a second and absent-minded goodbye to my mother and myself, and left us. The doors of the rooms were all open, and I watched her walking away through the room where the porcelains were, through the library where Richard Quin was reading, through the antechamber beyond. Before she went out to the landing she stopped and looked back, small at the end of a long strip of shining parquet. All that could be grasped of her at that distance was her huge hat, her bright hair beneath it, and her forthright womanly figure; but even so her appearance seemed to promise melting ease and the forgetfulness of care; it was hard to believe that spending an hour with her had not been as agreeable as sailing under a cloudless sky on a calm sea. But she made a slight but ugly and argumentative movement of her head and shoulders, and swung about, her full skirts turning more slowly than her hips, and was gone across the threshold. I was sure that I would never see her again. My mother and Mr Morpurgo and Mr Kessel were contemplating the Italian picture in silence. We could hear Mr Weissbach and Cordelia talking in the next room: his quick questioning murmurs and full-bodied chuckles, the crisp yesses and noes with which she began each of her answers. Outside in the street the horses’ hooves clattered, the motor-horns hooted, the more distant traffic was a blur on the ear. I was sad as I had thought I would never be outside my own home.
Presently Mr Weissbach and Cordelia joined us. Bowing voluptuously from the waist he told Mamma that he thought her charming daughter possessed a real feeling for art, while Cordelia stood by and primly put on her gloves. ‘And about that Lorenzetti?’ he asked Mr Morpurgo. ‘I’ve kept the gallery open, on the off chance you cared to look in this afternoon.’
‘That was good of you,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I hate to wait, once I’ve heard of a picture. But I can’t look at it now.’
‘Why not go, Edgar?’ said Mamma. ‘You might enjoy it, and you need not think of us. We are going home.’
‘It isn’t that,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The fact is, I do not feel very well.’
‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Mr Weissbach, nodding. ‘Next week, perhaps. I’ll let nobody else look at it,’ he added, obviously wanting to be specially nice.
‘You always treat me well, Weissbach,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and I’m very grateful for the wonderful things you bring me. But today I’m feeling ill, and I have a great many things to attend to.’ They shook hands, and Mr Weissbach said something pleasant in German to Mr Kessel, and went away.
‘Sit down and look at my Gentile a minute longer, Clare,’ said Mr Morpurgo, and we all sat down again. But Mr Kessel said contentiously, ‘He is civil, Mr Weissbach. Always he is civil. And it is not every art dealer who troubles to be civil to wretched old Kessel. Never a word from Mr Merkowitz, never a word from Mr Leyden.’
Mr Morpurgo groaned, and then said, ‘I know, I know. But they are busy men, and they forget, they do not mean to be rude. I assure you they do not mean to be rude.’
‘Maybe yes, maybe no,’ grumbled the old man, and Mamma cried out in German, ‘Oh, Mr Kessel, Mr Morpurgo has a dreadful headache.’
‘Ach, so,’ breathed the old man. ‘Yes, they are busy men,’ he said a moment later, and then was quiet. We all stared at the picture: at the people who were dead tired at the end of a journey but so excited at what they found there that their fatigue did not matter to them. An unnatural and ecstatic wakefulness was painted into the night itself. Then Mr Morpurgo told Mr Kessel to take the picture away, gently and affectionately, telling the old child that playtime was over and it was time he took away his toys. Mamma stood up and thanked them both and said that now we must really go. We went out into the room where the porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs and fauns in leopard-skins, teapots and vases and tureens, stood in the white over-garment of their glaze on the lit shelves, and Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Nobody will be looking at them again today,’ and touched the switch, and the things lost their glory and were dull among the shadows. In the library we found that Richard Quin had tired of the Book of Hours, and had taken another great book over to the window-seat, but had tired of that too, and had laid it down and was staring out on the treetops in the square. He turned a sad face towards us and Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Take the girls downstairs, Clare, Richard Quin and I will follow, we must close the cases.’ Though it was the afternoon, it was as if he were shutting up the house for the night.
As we came to the head of the stairs we looked down on the butler and the footman in the hall below, whispering together in a knot. They dispersed and stood a little apart from each other on the black and white tiles, like chessmen on the board as the game comes to an end. While we sat on a Renaissance bench, rich but hard, waiting for the others, I could hear the quick and shallow breathing of the younger footman, who was standing nearest me. I wondered if he were still angry with old Mr Kessel or if the whole household knew that Mr Morpurgo was angry with Mrs Morpurgo. Of course the servants had been in the room during luncheon, and what had happened since she had probably conveyed to them by an expressive departure, by coming down the staircase with her huge hat bobbing on her large contemptuous head, by sweeping through the bronze doors as if they had not been opened widely enough to let pass her swelling indignation, her great sense of wrong. The menservants had some knowledge of the crisis, for they stirred sharply and then became rigid when Mr Morpurgo and my brother appeared on the landing. It was horrible that this poor little man should have to endure his sorrows before so many people; at least Mamma had not had to bear her troubles over Papa’s gambling in front of a crowd. I looked up at him in pity, but immediately my heart closed in the spasm of jealousy. At the turn of the staircase Mr Morpurgo and my brother had paused and exchanged a few words and nodded, as if they were confirming an agreement, smiled as if they liked each other the better for it, and made their faces blank as they continued their way down. My heart contracted. I loved Richard Quin, and I loved Rosamund, and I was beginning to love Mr Morpurgo as I had not thought I would ever love anybody outside the family, and I was glad that these three should love each other. But at the thought that Richard Quin had compacts with both Rosamund and Mr Morpurgo from which I was excluded I felt as if I were exiled to a distant place where love could not reach me.
My mother uttered an exclamation of surprise. ‘Why, Richard Quin is taller than Mr Morpurgo,’ she said. ‘How strange it is that a boy shall be taller than a grown man. But of course,’ she added, speaking quite stupidly, ‘it often happens.’ I thought this was an odd remark for her to make, since it was usually the fault of her conversations that it left the obvious too far behind. I put it down to her distress, which increased when Mr Morpurgo came towards us, and the butler, evidently thinking his master might be going back to Lovegrove with us, approached him and said to him in an undertone, ‘Mademoiselle wishes to see you as soon as possible.’ He looked up at the landing, and all our eyes followed his. There a figure had taken up its stand, with her head bowed and her hands clasped before her dark flowing skirts, and a threat in every line of pent-up emotion about to burst its dam. ‘Oh, no!’ groaned Mr Morpurgo, ‘Oh, no!’ Recovering himself, he told us, ‘She is an excellent creature.’
As soon as the Daimler had rolled us out into the square Mamma cried out, ‘Oh, children, and I thought this was going to be such a treat for you,’ and took off her hat. This was an extraordinary act for a respectable woman to perform outside her own house in those days and I expected Cordelia to protest, but when she said, ‘Mamma,’ it was with the air of one who wants to make an important announcement on her own behalf. ‘Not now, dear, not now,’ said Mamma faintly, grasping the speaking-tube. She made such a poor business of using it that the chauffeur stopped the car and asked, smiling, what he could do for her. It was Brown, the younger of Mr Morpurgo’s two chauffeurs. We preferred old McIver, who had been a coachman an
d used to click his tongue to encourage or check the Daimler, but Brown was nice too. He had thick brown curls and bright blue eyes and strong white teeth, and would have been handsome if he had not had a thick neck and a look of being full of blood.
‘Please do not drive us home,’ my mother begged. ‘Put us down anywhere. Anywhere! St James’s Park, that is near here, isn’t it? Put us down in St James’s Park.’
‘Yes, madam,’ said Brown. ‘But whereabouts?’
‘Near a flower-bed,’ sighed Mamma.
He drove us down Birdcage Walk, but we stopped him before we got to the flower-beds because we saw the lake lying silver behind the trees, and cool waters seemed an answer to Mrs Morpurgo. We thanked Brown and bade him goodbye and walked along the path, Mamma uttering little cries of relief and appalled recollection, until we found some little green chairs near the edge of the lake, just as some people were rising from them. ‘How lucky, when the place is crowded,’ said Mamma, sinking down, ‘and what peace, what calm! Oh, children, I would not have chosen to expose you to that! But I could not tell that such extraordinary things were going to happen, and perhaps it served a purpose. I suppose that sooner or later you had to learn that there are husbands and wives who do not get on together.’
She spoke with something of the smugness of a happily married woman considering the fate of her less fortunate sisters, and strangers might have been puzzled since she was a deserted wife. But I knew what she meant. My father had left her because he disliked not her but life; and though I was aware that sometimes they had long and aching arguments, for we had lain in bed and heard the tide of their low-toned words shift to and fro in the room underneath ours till late into the night, these were just disputes about the way to live. Neither had ever felt hatred against the other. My mother was right, she had not lost her fortune.