by Rebecca West
“That reminds me. How’s Grandmother?”
Tania smiled triumphantly. “Ah, I’ve no need to worry about her. She’s in pain now, but she won’t be for long. It’s this treatment they are giving her. Something called radium. She didn’t like the treatment, she was frightened, that’s why, as I told Kamensky to tell you, I had such difficulty over my telephoning. But she’s bound to get better. But tell me about my father. This other Professor, not the one who telephoned to me, the one the stationmaster brought to you at the station, he took you to a hotel. What was it like?”
“Quite old. It had a beautiful ballroom in it. I looked in from the landing and they were getting it ready for a ball. Why am I telling you that?”
“When awful things are happening one’s sometimes grateful for the way the chairs and tables and carpets look. But he had a good bed, there were kind servants?”
“Oh, very kind. One nice one called Catherine. And the bed seemed comfortable enough, he lay and talked and talked. Oh, about all sorts of things. About the South. About a place where there were olive-terraces and wine-cellars running far out under the sea.”
“The Four Towers, Leon Galitzin’s estate. The Tartars built those cellars. Tartars in their white robes and their turbans. When I was little I thought they were captive jinns. Why should my father think of the Four Towers, at the very end? He was not often there.”
“Because he was talking about the Russians being a southern people as well as a northern. The descendants of the Greeks. Our great crimes. And then there was the olive-oil. The holy oil. He went on and on about that, reciting great chunks of the Office of the Holy Unction, and that other one—the Office for the Parting of the Soul from the Body.”
“Oh, dear God, dear God, and there was no priest.”
“Well, if there had been a priest about, he wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways. And Grandfather didn’t really worry about that.”
“He wouldn’t. He must have known he should have got absolution for his sins, but he wasn’t much given to self-reproach. Some people aren’t, but your father’s not one of them. That means there’s another thing I can’t tell him. He’s afraid I’ll ruin his career by divorcing him. But I won’t do that. All I feel is that I can’t live with him, and divorce has nothing to do with it. A woman can’t in England or anywhere else divorce a man because he left her old father to die in a strange place, with nobody there but their daughter, a girl of eighteen. And remember, it didn’t happen but it might have, the terrorists might have been there. That’s the real reason why I can’t go on living with your father any more. Laura, I tried to help you and my father. I couldn’t leave my mother, she was frightened, being ill in a clinic was new to her, and she was too ill to take something both new and painful. Whenever I could get out of her room I rang home again and again, and told them to find your father, and they tried at the House, and rang back to tell me the Whip said he’d paired, and then I humbled myself and rang up her house. But she wasn’t there. Then I was tortured. Somebody once sent me an anonymous letter, and I read the beginning and then tore it up. I’d read enough to realize last night that if I’d finished it I could have found your father. I was punished for obeying the rules I’ve been carefully brought up on. But go on about your grandfather.”
“There’s not much to tell, not that you can really tell. He recited these services by the yard, and then said he understood everything, and that he wasn’t God but man, and had made far too much fuss about having been disgraced by the Tsar, because nothing that happened to him, or anybody who wasn’t God, was of the slightest importance.”
“That’s the sort of idea we Russians enjoy.”
“He enjoyed it immensely.”
“Possibly we enjoy it because it’s true. But after that?”
“After that, I’ve told you. He asked, ‘Must we talk in the dark like gipsies,’ and the next moment he was dead. Then they gave me some supper—the Professor who had found us at the railway-station and a nurse he had got in. They were really very nice.” She paused, and would have given anything to continue smoothly, “So nice that afterwards they helped me send a telegram to the man in the train telling him the hour at which he could most conveniently murder Monsieur Kamensky.” But her certainty came back to her: if she said that, in seconds her mother would be starting to her feet, eagerly crying, “I must tell your father at once,” and then some witless, shrewd, conventional action of her father’s would grind on its way to her death, amid a number of French policemen competently mobilized by the British Embassy. She said, “Then I went to bed, but Monsieur Kamensky arrived, and he stayed in my room for hours while I told him all about it.”
Her mother sat up straight. “Was that—all right?”
Perhaps she knew everything after all. “Do you imagine,” Laura asked, “that it couldn’t have been?”
“Was it?”
“Quite. He just sat about and nearly cried and said how much he had cared for Grandfather, and I got sleepy and then some people barged into the room, and I asked him to go—”
“But really, I don’t like his having been in your bedroom. It wasn’t proper.”
“Oh, Mummie! They’d put up a camp-bed in the salon and the nurse was sleeping in an armchair. But really, Mummie!”
“Forgive me, I’m not very clever just now. The little Kamensky couldn’t have been kinder. He telephoned me this morning, and had thought of everything, he even reminded me that the nice wife of that blind man who comes here is a qualified candlebearer, and that it would be pleasant to have her as one of the two candle-bearers who have to recite the Psalter over your grandfather’s body. You know that the Psalms have to be read as soon as he’s brought here late tonight until he’s taken to the church the day after tomorrow for the funeral. The second candlebearer I don’t know, he’s sent from the church, but the Berrs have often been here, and, of course, they’re special people. If she reads the Psalms there’ll be some reality in that dreary ceremony.”
“The Psalms do twaddle on.”
“An angry savage in a tent, sometimes calming down when there’s been a good haul of desert antelope, and there’s been enough rain for the grass. Boring God like an ill-bred guest who will chatter about his own silly little misadventures to a host who has great affairs on his shoulders. How did we come to take this cross on our back, to repeat over and over again these barbarian curses and blessings, when our hearts are full of a clear image of the one we loved?”
“Sometimes you sound like your father.”
She shook her head. “Not at all. I am moderate, rational, ordinary.”
“I wonder why it is,” Laura said, “that when people make a statement such as you’ve just made, other people say to them, ‘Tell that to the Marines.’”
“Ask your father,” said Tania, absently. Tears came into Laura’s eyes and she wondered if when Berr came into the apartment his powers would be excited and released by grief to the point of working miracles, and that time would run backwards, and then start again and keep itself undefiled. Let Kamensky’s mother never have had him. Let the old days start again, let Tania and herself at this very moment be sitting on the terrace outside the drawing-room at home, watching the tennis-players tangle their feet in their own long shadows, while the windows of the houses opposite blaze with the reflected sunset, and let them be talking of a possible visit to Russia, which should be sooner rather than later, since Nikolai was so old and was never likely to leave his own country again. Let there be no Susie Staunton, but let that be done not by the simple racing back of clock-hands, but by some involvement with pain. She shut her eyes and offered up an enraged prayer.
“Don’t, don’t,” said Tania. “Don’t pray, I mean. We Russians are so frightful, dropping in on eternity all the time, without waiting to be asked. God must get so sick of us. Give Him a rest. Come and see the little dressmaker, she has your mourning almost finished, it only needs fitting.”
In the sewing-room, in air sour w
ith the smell of black cloth, Hélène was stitching a dress which flopped over her lap like a second grieving skirt, while a young girl and a sewing-machine were involved in a common fury which sent another dress twitching off the table towards the floor. Calm set in and the two women looked at them kindly. “This is our little Noémie, who’s come to help,” said Tania, stroking the girl’s dark curly head. It appeared she was the daughter of Hélène’s best friend, Juliette, who sometimes came over and stayed at Radnage Square. What a lot of people would miss it if that house belonged to some other family. The two of them took off Laura’s dress and till they brought her the new one she looked at herself in the cheval glass, and tried to master her annoyance at her breasts. She had to have them, it would be too odd if she did not. But they were silly things, and all the names for them—breasts, bosom, bust—were silly too, soft and credulous, as if they would believe anything they were told. They were certainly round and white and pleasantly hard, and the blue veins twisting prettily enough over the whiteness like sweet-pea tendrils. But they were tiresome additions to the useful body she had started with, and she had read somewhere if women’s breasts were bruised they might get cancer. It was absurd to be exposed to such a risk on the offchance one might some day have a baby, almost as absurd as the fatuous business of menstruation. But when the two women drew the black dress over her head she disliked it more than her body. It covered her from neck to wrist and ankles.
But her mother seemed not to be reminded of any other black dress. She said, “That’s very nicely made. Only this one dart needs alteration. It’s not as long as the one on the other side and it’s at a different angle. Hélène and Noémie are very clever at this sort of thing, we know, but what’s so wonderful is the way they’ve worked like beavers. Now the rest of it.” They draped over Laura’s shoulders a black cape bound with white and set on her head a cap of black net. “Oh, my dear,” sighed Tania, “how our hair won’t go into mourning. But otherwise it’s all perfect.”
She made no move to rise and leave now that the business of the clothes was finished. The two women started gossiping, out of charity, offering her their affairs as a distraction, muting their quality out of respect for the occasion, making life more childish and innocent than it is. Hélène and Juliette had been at school together, in the parish of Poissy, outside Paris, and now the girl was engaged to the son of one of their schoolfellows, Annette. They were going to be married in the old church, as old as old, at Poissy. It was a great joke, they laughed at it with reverently diminished laughter, because Annette was a twin and her other son had had twins. The young couple were looking for a house at Fontenay-les-Roses, where he worked, and it was being pointed out to them, that with this family tendency in view, they’d better choose a big one. Tania turned practical, asked whether they meant to rent or buy the house, and on hearing that it was to be bought with a legacy, told them they could use the services of the Diakonovs’ family lawyer, if they had none of their own. A phrase stirred in Laura’s memory.
“Mummie, who were the lacemakers? When Grandfather was near the end, he told me to ask the lacemakers not to sing so loud. He said he liked to hear them at their hymns, but they kept him awake.”
“Well, there were lacemakers on every big house in the country. The cleverest women did that. But enough of them to make a choir? Ah, I remember—but that was a long time ago. Something had driven him far, far back.”
‘What was a long time ago?”
“The trouble is I’ve forgotten. He told me about it several times but only when I was little. It was on the estate of someone who was quite elderly when he was a child, I think a grand-uncle of his. A river burst its banks, or was there a forest fire? Anyway a little village was destroyed and some dozens of serfs were homeless. The man who owned them couldn’t afford to rebuild the village, so whoever it was, your grandfather’s grand-uncle or whoever, bought the villagers, though he had too many serfs already, and put up some extra wooden houses and workshops for them. It turned out that in this particular village the people had been very clever. The men were good millers. Oh, it must have been a river that burst its banks, if the men were good at handling grain, they couldn’t have been forest people. And the women made beautiful lace and had divine voices. The estate-owner’s wife was musical, and she trained them. Yes, my father told me how he used to eavesdrop outside the workroom where they made lace, to listen to them as they sang hymns, and also they used to come into the drawing-room and stand round the door and sing to the guests. My father remembered the look of their bare feet on the parquet floor.”
“What happened to them all? Could one find their descendants, do you think?”
“Ah, no. They were dispersed even when my father was still young. The owner went bankrupt and the estate had to be sold.”
“Bankrupt, when he owned a lot of serfs?”
“Well, owning serfs didn’t stop people from going bankrupt. When the serfs were emancipated, it turned out that most of them were pledged to the banks. But where can that estate have been? And what was the disaster?” She stood up, picked up the black net and fitted it over her hair. “And now I remember something more. My father said the women were beautiful with slanting eyes and high cheekbones, higher than the Russians have, Asiatic high. He said there was Mongol blood there. But where isn’t it? It’s even here in this cheval glass so long as I stand in front of it. We both of us have a golden background to our skin, Laura. No, that doesn’t give us a clue to where the village was.”
She shuddered, said brief good-byes to the two women, bade them remember about the lawyer, and went out into the corridor and burst out: “Laura, we’re being swept away by a dark river. That village gone without a trace, we are like that. It’s our custom to have a Book of Remembrance, in which there’s written down the names of everyone united to a man by a bond of a certain strength, a certain good will. All his relatives, all his close friends, everybody whom he has helped, his blind, his lame, his idiots. When he dies it’s the custom to read this book in the church at the funeral. But it must not be read for my dear father, because he died in disgrace. A young officer might have to leave his regiment, a girl like you might be sent abruptly away from her place at court, if the name of a father or mother was read from that book at the service. We could read out the names of our beggars, but that would be to insult them, to state publicly that they cannot rouse respect enough to be taken seriously and persecuted. All I can do with that book is to hide it, and who knows, when it is safe for it to be found, nobody may recognize it for what it is, or care if they do.”
“Surely it doesn’t matter so long as we go on living after we’re dead,” said Laura.
“Of course it doesn’t. I am lying. I am a hypocrite. I’m talking nonsense about my father, whom nothing can hurt, when I am really thinking how I’m hurt, how the best of my life has been swept away by a dark river. Because of what has happened I can’t bear to remember how I have spent my life between my eighteenth and my thirty-eighth year. Laura, you are my pride, my treasure, I love you more than anything else in the world, but I can’t face thinking of how you came to be. It isn’t only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist. Life drains away from itself and goes into nothingness. Now I understand why in our services for the dead we sing over and over again just the two words, ‘Everlasting Memory, Everlasting Memory.’ But come, let’s see how the preparations are going on in the big drawing-room. They should be finished now.”
The room was as different from itself as the last few days of Laura’s life differed from that that had come before. Folding-doors she had never noticed had been closed, and nothing was left of the ordinary furniture in the remaining half except another veiled mirror over the chimneypiece. In the middle of the room, low on four rounded supports, was the empty coffin. It was not like an English coffin, it was broad at the head and tapered straight to the feet, and very shallow, and it was covered w
ith cloth of gold. It lay askew, the head turned towards the icon in the corner of the room, and at each end of it were two candlesticks, not yet lit, rising high above it, with lengths of white muslin like petticoats tied to them with black ribbon. Facing the icon across the coffin was a lectern, only a little more solid than a music-stand in an orchestra, covered with a piece of fine linen, with a large leather-bound volume resting on it. Close under the icon there was set a dark crucifix, nearly the height of a man, with a scarf of muslin twisted round it as if for decency’s sake. It could have been a critical onlooker, deeply involved but not taking control, not offering active help. The rites to be performed here should be useful enough to make any special intervention unnecessary.
Words that she had heard her grandfather speak and had instantly forgotten sounded in her ear again. He had told her it was her Christian duty to dissuade Chubinov from murdering Kamensky. It did not deeply distress her that she had disobeyed, for after all God killed everyone by decreeing the existence of death, and it would be unfair if He did not occasionally permit a human being to kill in self-defence. Certainly she ought to defend herself. Apart from her own desire not to die, which might be sheer prejudice, she could not go away, so irretrievably away, from her mother at this time. But Nikolai had told her a Christian duty was invariably disagreeable, and the aspect of this room, the pattern described by the tall crucifix and the low coffin set aslant, confirmed that she expected to do something which would cause her pain. She had already some vague notion of what it was, and had even known she was holding her thoughts back from their proper end. Now she admitted to herself that if Chubinov killed Kamensky and was caught she could not let him take the whole blame. She would have to confess to the police that she had asked him and aided him to commit the crime. The drunkenness of self-sacrifice ran through her veins, but the room kept her sober. She looked again at the flickering light of the icon, the veiled mirror, the tall cross, the coffin set askew, the lectern with its Psalter, the four petticoated candlesticks. They were not demanding self-sacrifice of her, but the same grim ingenuity which, placing these things thus and so, made possible the performance of the useful rite. Perhaps Berr would show her what to do.