This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  ‘I will not be an expense to anybody,’ said Richard Quin, gently. ‘I have arranged with Mr Morpurgo that he will lend me the money for the balance of my fees, and I will pay him back gradually.’

  ‘Gradually,’ said Cordelia, and gave a despairing laugh. ‘That is what I want to point out to you. It will be a huge debt. It would be disgraceful not to pay it back, after all that Mr Morpurgo has done for us. Do you really feel able to bind yourself to such a heavy responsibility? Do you really want to put your whole future in pawn?’

  ‘If I could raise anything on it, I certainly would,’ said Richard Quin. He lifted the Jew’s harp to his lips and, rolling his eyes, twanged out the opening phrase of ‘Se vuol ballare’ in The Marriage of Figaro, investing it with an air of low cunning and avarice. ‘Me Shylock, me Fagin - I can’t think of any other sinister Jews - me shady cousin of Disraeli, he must have had one. But, Cordelia, stop being an ass. I am greedy as Shylock, I grab at Oxford in my sordid, scheming way. But I also am wrong because I do not scheme at all, you are afraid I will go to Oxford and do nothing. I cannot take the wrong turning in two opposite directions. Tell me, what is it you really think is wrong with me? What do you really fear is going to happen to me?’

  She raised her clenched hands to her mouth, and swayed, with bowed shoulders, and for a minute she looked, in spite of her youth and her loveliness, as desolate as King Lear wandering on the blasted heath. She recovered herself and said hastily and insincerely that he misunderstood her, that she did not think anything about him was wrong, she was only anxious because we had no father and Mamma had lived so much out of the world and it was so difficult for a boy to find his own way in life, she was moved only by her love for him. But she was so confused with foreboding, she could not finish her sentences. Richard Quin raised himself again on his elbow and watched her. ‘I wish you would tell me what you see me doing,’ he insisted. Both of us were aware that it was more than foreboding that troubled her, it was clairvoyance. Her eyes rested on a point in space where there was nothing, her breathing was disturbed, her lips were dry. But it perplexes me that he should wish to know what she was seeing, for she was plainly at odds with her gift, neither controlling it not yielding to it. I wondered if he had recognised some flaw in himself which only she among us all had detected, and sought now to see if it would bring him to such ruin as had befallen my father. I prayed that the ruin might fall on me instead, and in the moment of passivity that follows an ardent prayer, like the silence that follows an explosion, I knew that there was no flaw, there would be no ruin.

  I went and sat on his bed and said, ‘But it is all right,’ and took the Jew’s harp and twanged a phrase at him, I have forgotten what, which also said, ‘But it is all right.’ He took it out of my hand and twanged back a phrase at me which I did not recognise and did not understand.

  ‘That horrible noise,’ said Cordelia, covering her ears.

  He laughed up at her, and asked, ‘But tell me, tell me. What do you fear will happen to me?’

  ‘It is all so difficult,’ said Cordelia, pitifully. ‘Going to Oxford without any preparation, we have all been brought up so badly and at first there was no money, you will never understand, either of you, how awful it has been for me, because I am the eldest. Now there is really too much money, or rather it is coming into the house too easily, with Mary and Rose getting this extraordinary success with hardly any effort. I am so afraid that you will have no sense of proportion, and will get into debt.’

  For a second he was silent. Then his bed shook with laughter. ‘It’s the eclairs the Warden won’t be able to stand.’

  ‘The eclairs?’ said Cordelia.

  ‘The millions of éclairs. Fresh every morning. Iced with the family crest.’

  ‘Oh, be serious,’ she begged.

  ‘The eclairs. Chocolate eclairs. Coffee éclairs. Never with custard inside. Only cream.’

  ‘Well, I should think so,’ I said, ‘éclairs with custard inside are a fraud.’

  ‘But not cream in the giant one. That’s the one I’ll get sent down for.’

  ‘What’s going to be in that?’ I asked.

  ‘A nautch girl. I’m going to have it hauled into the quadrangle on the night of my birthday, and she’ll dance naked, while Negretti & Zambra play the triangle and the flute—’

  ‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘They’re awfully proper.’

  ‘I’ll fool ’em,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I’ll put them with their backs to the giant eclair and stick a cobra in front of them, and you know how they forget everything when they get a chance of snake-charming.’

  ‘Stop this idiocy,’ said Cordelia. She rattled the end of his bed and cried out, ‘I don’t think you should go to Oxford at all.’

  ‘Cordelia,’ he begged her, ‘please, please be glad that I can go to Oxford. I cannot tell you how much I want to be there. I would give anything to be sure I would be there. In those gardens at New College. On the river.’

  ‘In the gardens. On the river,’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘You never think of work. Of being like ordinary people and getting the power to live ordinary lives. You only think of pleasure. Yes, yes,’ she told herself, holding her face between her hands, ‘that is how it is going to go wrong.’

  ‘How what is going to go wrong?’ he asked eagerly, and put out a hand to shake her when she did not answer. Then he looked on the baffled blankness of her face and dropped his hand and rolled back on the bed and began again, ‘Eclairs. Eclairs. There will be two giant éclairs. In the second—’

  ‘Be serious,’ prayed Cordelia, ‘be serious.’

  But we heard Mamma’s voice calling from downstairs. ‘Rose. Is Cordelia up there with you? Bring her down to meet Nancy,’ and we heard Nancy crying, ‘Cordelia and Rose. What luck you are here today.’

  I said to Cordelia, ‘Come on, you must see her, she will be hurt if you don’t go at once, she loves being back here.’

  We went on to the landing and leaned over the banister, and there was Nancy’s face, drowned under the little house’s shadows like a flower covered by a flood, looking up at us.

  ‘You look very grand,’ she told Cordelia. ‘If I had met you in the street I would have known at once that you were a married lady.’ There was a pause while Cordelia laughed and preened herself. ‘Is your husband nice?’ pursued Nancy, with a simplicity that made us all laugh, and Cordelia told her that she must come to tea with her and find out for herself. Nancy wanted to know all about her house, and Cordelia told her until Mamma said, ‘Nancy’s neck must be breaking, come down and talk to her on the level.’

  A cloud came over the kindness of Cordelia’s face, she looked back over her shoulder at the open door of Richard Quin’s bedroom. ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ she called, and returned back to complete her self-appointed task. I followed her, meaning to break out and protect him, by telling her that he was as well able as Mary and myself to survive her constant belittlement, and that he would get on at Oxford as well as we had done at the Athenaeum and the Prince Albert.

  But in the few minutes we had been away our brother had fallen asleep. He was not shamming. His features were not defensively blank, his body was not deliberately and completely relaxed. His mouth was troubled, his brows were knit, he had let the Jew’s harp fall on the quilt, but his fists were doubled. He was lying awkwardly, he had not waited to arrange himself before he fled the waking world. But his face, sunk sideways on his pillow, was delicate and shining like a crescent moon, and his body was as if he were running and winning a race in a world with another dimensional system, where athletes could carry on a contest of speed horizontally and without moving from the same spot. I would have liked to stay with him, but it seemed not to be right. Cordelia made a movement towards the bed. She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them. But her hand dropped, and we stood looking down on him
in silence. The cold light that fell from the winter sky through the high attic windows made him look very fair. We went out and left him sleeping in his narrow room, between the four sloping walls, hung with his musical instruments, his boxing-gloves and his fencing foils, his rackets and bats.

  VIII

  WE WERE NOT surprised when the war came, for we had heard our father prophesying it all through our childhood. Because of what he had said we knew also that it would not be short, that, indeed, it would never end in our life-time. That State, he had told us, had taken so much power from individuals that it did not have to consider the moral judgments of ordinary human beings, it could therefore commit crime and was taken over by criminals who saw the opportunity, and who could use it for crime on a national scale, and would kill and rob not people but peoples. We had also been warned by our music. Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven. So we were not so sorely stricken by August, 1914, as many other people. Indeed we had our consolations. It was proved to us that music was not making a fuss about nothing, and that the faces of our parents had been distorted out of common placidity not by madness but by the genuine spirit of prophecy.

  When the war broke out, we had just moved into a house in Norfolk we had been lent for the two holiday months by Sir George Kurz, a Jewish financier with an Austrian wife who had been a violinist and was very friendly to us. It was not their own home, they lived in a great seventeenth century mansion a couple of miles away, this was a small Georgian house on land they owned which they used to entertain those of their friends who, being musicians or painters or writers, would not want the bother of staying in other people’s homes. It stood high on the landward side of one of a cluster of hills that lay between a long sandy shore and the East Anglian plain. The air was salt, and when the wind was in the right quarter we could hear the North Sea beat on the sands, but we could not see it. Behind the house the turf rose steeply to a crumbling cliff. Our windows looked down on a bronze bowl of cornland, with one whitewashed village clustering round a grey church-tower where there was a gap in the hills, and the ribbon of the road which flowed across the bowl ran out into the blue distance of the flat farmlands beyond. We had thought we would like to be there, for it was part of our hosts’ kindness to leave two servants and that meant that Kate could go on holiday and Mamma did not have to worry about going to register offices. It was strange to find that we were going to suffer there a wound as sharp as that which had been inflicted by the loss of our father. The days of that glorious summer filled the bowl of cornland below us with light which turned the corn from bronze to copper, and filled the house with the darkness of fear. It was not for ourselves we cared; for only Mamma and Mary and I were there. It was for Richard Quin that we were afraid. Had we learned that we were all going to be killed we would not have been frightened, only awed, foreseeing a fiery translation, such as our music often prophesied and as Mamma’s being led us to regard as probable. But now one of us had to go forward towards death alone, and that the youngest of us.

  He had been camping in Wales, and he was due on the 4th of August to drive across the country to us in the car he had bought with some money he had earned by playing with a dance band, a French sports model of a make that has long since disappeared. We spent the afternoon sitting in the garden, looking down on the ribbon of road which ran across the bowl of cornland. It was hot, and we would have liked to bathe a second time as soon after lunch as was safe, though the bathing was dangerous, as everything seemed to be at that moment, and we had to swim with a tiring caution. But in any case we did not like to leave Mamma. It seemed certain that the Germans were invading Belgium and that England would have to come into the war, though we could get no news later than what the morning papers had brought us. We could not ask the Kurzes, for they were away in Scotland, and we did not yet know any of the neighbours. Mamma would not have been well even if there had not been this extreme uncertainty. She had grown much thinner and had no strength, and she was often racked by storms of quick, shallow breathing. She had one while we were sitting on the lawn, just after we had had tea.

  Recovered, her eyes always on the road below, she said, ‘I am so useless now. I have lost my sense of how things happen, of how they are done, of what they are. When you girls were down on the sands I walked in the orchard and I found myself looking at the apples and thinking, “What are those round things? Why are they hung on those bits of wood?” And when I turned round and faced the house it would not have seemed unnatural if they had flown away like birds that had settled, though again I would have believed it if I had been told that they were made of paper and had been fixed there with tacks by men in green aprons. My mind is on a train that is going out of the station and leaving my body on the platform.’ Suddenly she cried out, ‘Look, he is down there on the road.’

  His car was an odd sharp violet-grey. The bright dot bumped across the bowl and passed out of sight as it turned up the lane which wound uphill to our house, it rattled and snorted into the carriage sweep. Richard Quin jumped out and we saw he was disturbed as we were. He stayed beside the car and called over the flower-beds an urgent enquiry, which we could not hear.

  Mamma struggled to her feet and cried, ‘Is it war?’ But her voice was too weak to reach him. He jumped a flower-bed and ran to us across the lawn repeating his enquiry. She was trembling so violently that she would have fallen had it not been that Mary and I caught her in our arms. Gently we lowered her into her chair and waited to hear our brother’s announcement.

  ‘You cannot,’ breathed Mamma, ‘really be asking if there is a refrigerator in the house.’

  ‘I jolly well am,’ he said. ‘You see, Mamma, I started from Wales yesterday afternoon, and I slept last night at Warwick, and this morning I had got so far on my way that I was just three miles off Powerscliffe, and I had always heard that it was a nice old fishing-town, and I was still twenty miles from you, so I went there and had bread and cheese and beer in a pub down by the harbour. It was full of fishermen, and I asked them what the news was about the war, and they didn’t know, they didn’t seem very much interested, except in the risk there might be orders telling them not to put to sea. They were awfully good chaps. Then other chaps came in, members of an association of bank clerks who were camping out in the district and sailing. They were a bit more worried about the war. They were very nice too. Then two great big chaps came in and started playing darts with the fishermen, and they had a few drinks, and they seemed to get a bit tight, and then they began to bet the fishermen and the bank clerks a hundred to one that they could beat the lot of them at darts standing on their heads, So I knew they were tree-fellers.’

  ‘How did you know they were tree-fellers?’ asked Mamma, the war forgotten.

  ‘Once two of them came into the bar at the Dog and Duck and started making bets, and Uncle Len stopped them but let them stay in the bar and do their stuff and gave them drinks on the house,’ said Richard Quin. ‘You see, tree-fellers are wonderful chaps, they have to be practically acrobats, I’ve often wished I could take some weeks off and go and learn the elements of the job. When it comes to cutting down the tree-tops they have to do appalling things like lying along a narrow branch on their backs and sawing off the branch above them, and they often have to hang upside down and work, so it’s comparatively easy for them to play darts standing on their heads. You get down on your head and steady yourself with one hand and throw with the other, and swing up on to your feet between throws to get your blood back out of your head. The ones at the Dog and Duck showed me how, and I practised. Well, most people don’t know that tree-fellers can do this, and if they did nobody can tell a tree-feller from anybody else, so when they’re travelling across country from job to job they go into bars and have a few drinks and people
think they’re tight and when they bet people that they can beat them at darts playing upside down they think it’s because they’re tight, and they take the bets, and of course the tree-fellers win no end.’

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ said Mary.

  ‘Nobody’s being fair,’ said Richard. ‘The people who take the bets think they’re going to get some money out of a chap who’s tight. And anyway tree-fellers have a very tough time, I wouldn’t grudge them anything. Their job takes them all over the country and they only settle down for a few weeks at a time, they have the roughest houses and it’s hard for them to marry, and when they get old they fall out of trees or get pneumonia and die in the infirmary. I don’t see why they shouldn’t take some money off people who are usually living much softer lives. So I didn’t give away these tree-fellers at first, but later I thought they were taking too much money off these fishermen or these bank clerks, and they kept on putting their own best men up and still getting beaten. Though nobody seemed very much interested in the war we were all drinking much more than we would have in the ordinary way. So I challenged them myself, and they thought I was tight, and they gave me huge odds, and I beat them, I was much younger, and they took me on again and again, and I always won, and then I wouldn’t take my winnings. By this time everybody was laughing and shouting, and the landlord kept on saying we couldn’t carry on like this in the bar, and they ragged him and when I said I had to go and I still wouldn’t take my winnings, then the tree-fellers went out and bought me a lot of lobsters and put them in the car, and it got to be a sort of joke, the fishermen rushed out and got some their wives had been boiling, and the bank clerks bought some, and I drove off, up to the knees in lobsters. So if there isn’t a refrigerator here we’re rather sunk. We can give some away tomorrow. But I’m too fagged driving to see to it this evening.’