This Real Night

by Rebecca West

  He knew so many people. Though Mary and I have been well-known for some years now, we did not know nearly so many people as he did. On the station platform two young men and a girl came up to him and joyously claimed acquaintanceship. We never found out who they were, but they had met him at a performance of the Messiah so we went up to the far end of the platform by the signal-box and sang the Hallelujah Chorus softly until our train came in. Handel thought that the world was all right. The men in the signal-box smiled down on us over the levers, they thought we were convinced the world was all right. Mercifully Richard Quin’s friends did not get into our train, they were going to London Bridge while we, of course, were going to Victoria. We did not tell them why we were going to Victoria, and the unapprehensive cheerfulness with which they bade us goodbye was convincing, was comforting. But indeed our journey was so ordinary that nothing extraordinary could possibly lie at its end. There was surely some evidential value in the benevolent, untroubled glances the other passengers turned on us. A man who was a little drunk leaned forward and asked abruptly ‘Are they both your sisters or neither?’ and everybody laughed and was friendly. Surely there were no real dangers. We chattered as happily as if our fellow-passengers had given us absolute proof of this, until Rosamund asked Richard Quin how it was that he had no baggage with him. He told her that Gerald de Bourne Conway had gone straight from camp to London and was taking his baggage with his own to Victoria; and in speaking of the boy his face grew grey and tired. He went on to tell Rosamund that he had visited the boy’s home, and she asked hesitantly what it had been like, as if telling him he need not answer if he did not choose. But he told her. ‘What you would expect. A vast damp vicarage, with bottles hidden everywhere, there was even a cache of them in the chest of drawers in my room. And lots of framed family trees.’ A silence fell on them. Evidently he had told her things about Gerald I did not know. We got to Victoria too early, so we went down into the underground and came up again at Westminster, and strolled for a few moments between the Houses of Parliament and the Abbey. A blue river mist made the grey stone look soft as feathers but blurred the details and left only the historic outlines, so they looked evanescent and eternal. We went back to Victoria, and were still too early, and felt a great distaste for this place where we had to wait. The space round the station had become one of those areas which, like cemeteries and the corridors of hospitals, are swinging on a turntable between the worlds. There was the implacable and unadmirable façade of the station, drawing to itself a black jointed stream of taxis and motor-cars, and unconnected myriads of men in uniform, deformed by the weight of the kitbags on their backs, of women and children scurrying by their sides, those also deformed, by the weight of grief and stoicism. Within there was a limbo where these people clung together before the men turned and went stooping towards the gates that led to the platforms and the night. Above a great dimly lit illuminated clock said that this was the hour. The occasion was the annulment of life, for what is life but being able to move according to the will? But all the people who got out of the taxis and cars, all the men bent under their kitbags, were doing what their will would never want them to do, which it would never let them do, were it not in the custody of something outside them not certified to be wise or loyal. The clock said that there was not time to start that argument, but there was time for us three to talk a little longer. We turned back to the underground station and stood for a time unhappily among the crowds hurrying in and out along the hideous rounded corridors, that were like huge tiled intestines. Then we saw a soldier and a girl turn aside from the corridor a few yards ahead and knew they must have found a recess where they could say goodbye. We followed them into a short passage running to a closed iron door, and we stood a few yards from the soldier and the girl, who were silent in each other’s arms. There were old posters on the rounded walls, one advertising a concert of mine that had taken place a year ago. The white light shone back from the tiles, we all looked very pale.

  Richard said harshly to Rosamund, ‘I want to live. Oh, God, how I want to live.’

  She answered, speaking bitterly, as I had never heard her speak before, ‘No. Not to live. To live happily.’

  He nodded. ‘No. Not just to live. To live happily. That is something you know very well. Poor Rosamund.’ He felt for her hand and raised it to his lips.

  ‘To live,’ Rosamund insisted, more gently, knitting her brows and smiling obstinately, ‘just as lots of other people have lived, and nobody has said they should not.’

  ‘Just that,’ he agreed fiercely.

  They were silent while their hands twisted and slid together. He said, ‘I want … I want.…’ He wanted so many noble things, I wondered which he would name now.

  He said, ‘I want to swim. And lie in the sun.’

  ‘I want to swim and lie in the sun,’ she repeated, as hungrily. ‘With you. With Mary and Rose. With the Mammas on the beach. And Kate.’

  ‘How lovely it is,’ he said hopelessly. He was looking at the walls as if he could see through the tiles and their scruff of old posters to all he desired. ‘How lovely.’

  ‘Do you remember the honeycomb you brought home for tea the day Miss Beevor was there?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, we shocked them by eating it with a spoon.’

  ‘Drenched in cream,’ she reminded him. They laughed together quietly, greedily.

  I watched them in bewilderment. Richard Quin’s gaiety was valuable because he was grave in his heart, he pondered such solemn secrets. I had thought he would share some of these with me before he went. But he would only stare into Rosamund’s eyes and talk of honeycombs and cream.

  He said, ‘I am so afraid, Rosamund. You cannot think how afraid I am.’

  Rosamund stopped laughing and her blind look came on her. She shook her hand free of his and then grasped it again more hungrily, as if to say that he must press closer on her palm and fingers, must bear down on her flesh to come nearer to the blood and nerves and being. Then her stammer came on her, she opened her mouth and her tongue flickered from side to side. But she was able to force out the words, ‘Sweeter than honeycomb.’

  A memory or an anticipation ran through Richard Quin like fire through tow, and it burned Rosamund too. When it had died down both turned to me, and by the kindness of their faces I felt protected.

  ‘I will say goodbye to you two here,’ he said. ‘Dear Rose, look after the Rose of the World. And believe me when I say that I shall be all right. In the same strictly truthful sense that it’s true that the two angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal. No fancy, no frill. Not symbolically, not mystically. Just all right. Now I must go and find Gerald. What shall I do,’ he asked, with sudden fatigue, in an almost childish voice, ‘if Gerald is not there. But he will be there. He is sure to be there. Now shut your eyes, Rose, and do not open them to look after me.’

  As I stood in darkness his mouth came down on mine; and then he was not there.

  IX

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, ten days after Richard Quin had gone to France, Mary and I were awakened by a loud noise from Mamma’s bedroom. We ran to her and found the room in darkness and switched on the light. She was standing by the chest-of-drawers, where she kept her underclothes, looking down into an open drawer, an overturned chair beside her. She had shrunken so much during the last year or so that her straight cambric nightdress seemed an empty little tent.

  We put our arms round her and said, ‘Mamma, what are you looking for? Get into bed and we will find it for you.’

  ‘Don’t be tiresome, children,’ she said, ‘I am pressed for time. And turn off the light. I do not need it.’

  ‘But, Mamma, what are you trying to find?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Turn out the light,’ she begged. ‘I tell you I do not need it.’

  ‘But you overturned the chair,’ I said.

  ‘A chair might as well be that way up as any other if nobody wants to sit on it,’ she answered crossly, ‘and I do n
ot want to sit on it. And turn out the light. It hurts my head.’

  We turned it out, and into the darkness there entered the tall figure of Kate, who said, ‘It is very late, Ma’am, and you should rest, you will need all your strength. What are you about?’

  ‘I want to be sure that everything is clean and tidy,’ said Mamma.

  ‘All is clean and tidy,’ said Kate. ‘Everything is in its place. You would be better in your bed, Ma’am.’

  ‘I do not like to lie there,’ sighed Mamma, ‘not knowing how things are.’

  ‘They are well enough,’ said Kate, and drew back the window-curtain. ‘See, they are well enough.’

  Both looked down into the sleeping street as if there were more to be seen there than the pale primrose lamps, the cat that slowly trod the middle of the road, the blind houses. ‘Yes,’ said Mamma, and turned aside, and Kate let the curtain fall. We heard the bed settle slightly under her tiny weight, and presently her breathing told us that she slept.

  The next morning it was as if we had dreamed this. But Mamma stayed in bed for breakfast, which she hardly ever did, even now. Nor did she rise for luncheon. She looked not much frailer than usual, and said that she did not feel ill. The only strange thing about her was that she lay in bed with her arm stretched out so that the palm of her hand rested flat on the wall. I had never seen her do this before and I felt shy about asking her why she was doing it. At three o’clock I opened the front door and took in the telegram telling us that Richard Quin had been killed in action. I gave the boy a shilling and the money for a telegram to Rosamund. Then I went to the top of the basement stairs and called for Kate, and her white face glimmered in the dusk below, and she asked, ‘Was that it?’

  I said, ‘Yes. But I suppose you knew.’

  She answered, ‘No. My mother and I did nothing, out of respect for your Mamma’s wishes. But to be sure there was nobody in this house who did not know he was going further than France.’

  I looked down into the darkness of the stairs as if it were the water in a bucket, and her faint face might float and waver and change into a revelation. But all that was good in me knew that it was not lawful for me to have more certainty than the bare news of my brother’s death. I turned away and went to the music-room and found Mary practising. On our way back to the house we paused in the garden, our arms about each other’s waists, and looked at the grove of trees at the end of the lane, and remembered how we had seen the red circle of our brother’s cigarette pass from his lips to his hand, from his hand to his lips, eleven nights before.

  When we went into Mamma’s room she took her hand away from the wall and asked, ‘Was that it?’ Then she said, ‘Oh, my poor son, the youngest of them all,’ and laid her hand on the wall again. It was as if she were listening through her flesh to distant sounds. She cried out violently, ‘If only death were death. If we could sleep and sleep and sleep. I do not see why we need to be brave for ever. Think shame that in this war there is no discharge. Yet what is asked of Richard he will give.’ She pressed her hand close to the wall, her eyes vast, her mouth gaping. ‘If he can go on giving it cannot be too much to ask. You have me there,’ she gasped, and her eyelids fell, her lips closed, her hand dropped, and she rolled down among the bedclothes towards the end of the bed.

  Kate came forward from the doorway. Her strong arms lifted my mother back to the pillows with a seaman’s gesture; so might a drowning man be plucked from the surf. Mamma opened her eyes and bade one of us go at once to break the news to Cordelia, saying that she would be more troubled than any of us. This puzzled Mary and me, for we thought it unlikely to be true, and indeed we felt impatient at being forced at this of all times to remember a relationship which had never seemed quite real and now seemed disagreeably fictitious. To be Richard Quin’s sister was to adore him, she had not adored him. I said I would go, but Mary followed me out into the passage and said that we must toss for it, we had tossed up for the right to go with Richard Quin to Victoria, we would take our chance on this too. But she won, I had to go.

  I found Cordelia sitting in her neat little Kensington drawing-room, idling, which was very rare. There was some embroidery lying on the table beside her, and a novel from the Times Book Club, and her French and Italian books, but she was leaning back in an armchair by the fireplace, her hands folded, her eyes fixed on the red hawthorn tree by the gate in her front garden.

  This inactivity was so unlike her that I said, ‘I suppose you know?’

  She answered, with a return of the irritability which had been characteristic of her as a child, but which had gone from her since she had become a Houghton-Bennett, ‘You suppose I know what?’

  But of course she had known. She was merely denying our family heritage. But when she heard me confirm the news, I perceived that our mother had spoken the truth when she had said that Cordelia would be more troubled than any of us. She cried in agony, ‘Killed, not missing?’

  ‘No, just killed,’ I said. She clung to me, weeping, and I was very sorry for her, and I kissed her, but soon felt doubtful. It was not pure grief that was making her hide her face on my shoulder, that was shaking her with sobs. I thought it probable that she was thinking of some way of regarding our brother’s death which would justify her in saying, ‘It is worse for me, because I am the eldest.’ When she raised her head to say, using a favourite formula of hers, ‘I suppose Mamma does not realise it,’ thus putting forward a claim that she alone was facing reality, I found myself about to utter the sentence, ‘You should be happy in realising that now Richard Quin will never go to Oxford.’ But a memory of my brother exorcised the evil spirit in my mouth. For I had been looking past her out of the window, and the red hawthorn caught my eye, and I remembered that day when she had told us three that she did not know the colour the hawthorn tree would be when it bloomed, and we had looked coldly at her, unkind about all that she did, as she had been unkind in our childhood about all we had done, and how afterwards Richard Quin had rebuked us for our unkindness. I told her something of this, trying to leave out the accusatory point, even letting her suppose that perhaps Mary and I had been jealous because she had married first, though this was quite untrue, and trying to recall justly my brother’s goodness, to invoke it, so that it might descend on us and end this dreadful alienation. I felt him help us, but he failed to complete the miracle. Though Cordelia and I were easier together, there was still something apprehensive in her sorrow which I could not understand and which she would not explain to me. There soon seemed not much reason why I should stay with her any longer. When I told her that I must go back to Mamma she asked if I had had any luncheon and got me some cold meat, and as I ate it I saw that she was looking at me with that white look which meant that she was frightened. I laid down my knife and fork and said, ‘What is it?’ She answered, irritable again, ‘What is what?’ At the gate, standing on a dry red pool of fallen hawthorn petals, we kissed goodbye. When I was fifty yards away I heard her running after me. On her face, as she came nearer, I saw the white look. I thought, ‘At last she is going to tell me why she is afraid.’

  But all she said was: ‘The Times. There should be an announcement of his death in The Times. Shall I get Alan to send it in?’

  Disappointed, I agreed, and went on my way quickly back to Lovegrove. When I got home Mamma seemed to be asleep, though all that day, and each time we went in to look at her during the night, her hand was pressed against the wall. In the morning she sat up and ate breakfast, but said to me across the tray: ‘I told you some time ago that my mind had forgotten the connection between a number of things, that when I walked in an orchard I had to tell myself that the round things hanging on the trees were apples. That has got much worse lately, all through spring I have had to remind myself that those green things that kept on appearing on the trees are leaves. But now my body is getting foolish. The various parts of me have forgotten what they have to do. My spine is stupid about supporting my neck, my neck is stupid about supporting my he
ad. I do not believe this is just because of Richard Quin. I think I must be very ill, and to make things right I suppose I ought to see a doctor.’

  I telephoned, as I thought, to our doctor, and left a message; but there came a stranger, who told us that our doctor had been called up, heard what we had to say and he examined Mamma, and expressed incredulity. It did not seem possible to him that she had, till two days before, risen each morning for breakfast, helped us to give music-lessons, and had gone shopping and received visitors, for she was showing all the symptoms of some grave disease, in an advanced stage. He was not certain what disease it was; it might be this, or it might be that, but he had no doubt that it had progressed beyond any possibility of cure. The condition of her heart alone would prevent her from surviving more than a few weeks. Then there burst on us one of those horrible things that happen in wartime. The doctor was elderly and had, as he told us, returned to practice from retirement simply out of a sense of duty, and of course he was overworked. He perceived that my mother was a brilliant and beloved person, who in a reasonable universe would never have died. He was, no doubt, sickened, as all of us must be in wartime, by the enormous victories gained by death. To relieve his feelings he turned on Mary and me and told us that he was aware that we were celebrated pianists, and that he was forced to the conclusion that we had been too busy pursuing our careers to notice our mother’s sufferings, for it was no use telling him that she had reached this stage of her malady in a couple of days. We wept, but only because we had just lost our only brother, because we were going to lose our mother. We knew that the old fool would see as soon as he went home and looked in the case-book that only a fortnight before we had called in our doctor to see if another visit to the specialist would do Mamma any good, and that he had reported her as well enough. Men were like this, moody, unjust, showing their perturbation at misfortune by adding to it; all men but Richard Quin, who had left us. The doctor asked us what arrangements we could make for nursing her, and told us that nurses were very hard to get. I told him we had a cousin who had nearly finished her hospital training, and he suggested that we should get her to apply for leave on compassionate grounds, since our mother would probably need careful nursing.