The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  The only thing was that his emotion was founded on a double error. He believed that she did not fit herself out at Chanel’s and Vionnet’s because she was true to her parents’ deliberate avoidance of vulgar expenditure. In fact what prevented her from shopping in Paris was her knowledge that Philip had not got that sort of money, and that anyway there were few people in Dorset who would not, had they seen her in a Chanel suit, think her under-dressed, or think her over-dressed had they seen her in a Vionnet dress; and as for her parents, the reasons that they lived in a house lent by a relative and travelled and entertained very little was that a heart ailment had forced her father to retire early. It was not tragic, they were happy enough reading and gardening and listening to music, and it was quite unemotionally that they said to each other every now and then: ‘We’ll be all right if we don’t run into debt’. They had meant just that, and nothing more. But how like dear Philip it was to make so much of what was simple hard-headedness and hail it as the restraint which was the attribute he valued most.

  Why, she wondered, did he overprice by so much that necessary but negative quality – that dangerous quality, which might only be disguise for a deficiency? There must be some deep reason, for he had pledged himself to his belief in it, he had laboured to cultivate it. Yet why was that? She could not imagine what he feared he might do if he let his nature have its head. There came into her mind a photograph she had once seen in a newspaper, showing a crowd moved by rumour to gather on a foothill near Los Angeles and wait for the Day of Judgement. She told herself it was all part of his humble resolution to make his goodness, which was already remarkable, still better. There were many facets of his personality which she could not understand because she was so far beneath his level. Yet there sounded in her ears, as clearly as if she had said the words to a deaf companion, ‘Philip would have liked me to wear a mink coat till it was bald’.

  That was the worst of being old. One had time to think over things which really required no further mental attention, only a sort of physical fostering made one familiar with them over a long time so that one could look at them from every angle, every useful angle, and judge them by their consequences over the decades, and one surely might have left it all at that. But suddenly one found that one held opinions which were nothing like what one had worked out through one’s lifetime, and these were sometimes subversive and ungrateful, and always, that was the treason, superfluous. It was no use starting chewing over things all over again. But she was so unsettled by what she had been thinking about Philip that she had to remind herself that her second husband’s attitude to money had been the exact opposite and had been just as irritating. Lionel had liked her to spend money – no, it was worse, he loved her to waste it. But his attitude was not so simple as that. It sprang from deep roots, being involved, she sometimes imagined, in a far-fetched fantasy about the abundance of womanhood, overturning her conscience. He enjoyed her having large bills and running up an overdraft in much the same spirit that he insisted on her keeping her hair long at a time when all her friends were bobbed and shingled.

  A distant pleasure warmed her, she was on the point of return to a long unvisited satisfaction, but she was too tired to make the long journey. She looked away from the cheval glass, closed her eyes and put her right forefinger between her lips and bit it, as she had done when she was a child and wanted to be somewhere other than where she was. Then suddenly she opened her eyes and turned about. The woman in the black dress had left her place beside the hangers and was standing close behind her and had just called her by the name of her first husband, who had died fifty years before.

  ‘You are Mrs Philip Le Measurer, aren’t you?’

  She supposed the woman was the child of someone who had worked for her father-in-law in the house in Dorset or who had possibly herself worked there when she was very young. But Leonora felt no curiosity about that. She was conscious of nothing except that the three words ‘Philip Le Measurer’ had pierced her with horror. Not that Philip’s name could raise any horrible image. Sometimes, even now, when she had passed in the street or seen in a group of young people at a friend’s house some boy not yet spoiled in skin or smile or look of candour, she had said to herself, ‘Philip was like that when he was forty’. What was so terrible about hearing his name was simply that it was so many years since it had been spoken. By now all his friends were dead; he had been twenty years her elder. Her two daughters had been eight and six when he died, and had married in their teens; ‘Le Measurer’ must be to them what they had burnt on to their pencil boxes with a magnifying glass when they were at school. She herself had remarried only four years after she became a widow, and had then passed into a world he had never known. The last time she had heard him mentioned was in a lawyer’s office five years or so before, when a young solicitor (grandson of the one she had started with) had read out the list of parties affected by the breaking of a family trust, paused to ask who Philip Le Measurer might be, and on hearing, crossed off his name without comment.

  She stood quite still, in her ears the humming which is the abstract sound of the night, and she ached because she had given Philip no son to keep his name alive. ‘But this is nonsense,’ she told herself, ‘we had our children as they came, and if I didn’t have a son it was because there wasn’t a son about for me to have.’ There was no occasion for self-reproach; but one must shudder in the pervading chill.

  But now the woman in black was surely speaking to her in the warm and soaring voice of affection. ‘Forgive me. I knew I should call you Mrs Morton. I’ve known for years you’re Mrs Morton, I cut the notice from the Continental Daily Mail. You’ll understand,’ she added huskily, ‘there’s nobody in the world whose life I ’d be more likely to follow than yours.’

  Leonora smiled insincerely and raised her eyebrows as if in eagerness to arrive at some recognition which she could trust to be delicious when it came. ‘No relation to that odious housekeeper I do hope,’ she thought, ‘but thank goodness, by now she must be dead and in hell.’ But then she felt a sharper twinge of curiosity. When one came to look at the woman in black she was not at all the kind of woman whom caterers sent out to take charge of the cloakroom at parties. For one thing, she was too old, in her middle or even late sixties, and for another her elderly good looks were being expensively maintained. Her black dress was no uniform, Leonora would not have minded wearing it herself for a lunch at, say, the New Berkeley, and her thick silver hair was arranged in the casual order which meant costly hours and carefulness from hairdressers who were respecters of persons. The jewellery, too, didn’t fit. The string of pearls would be worth little enough now, they had that look of being bought long ago, a reward for a first child, perhaps, but when this woman was young they would have stood for a large packet of stocks and shares; and she had combed forward two cushioning curls of hair in an effort to hide earrings which were really prodigious, the sort of thing one saw if one still crossed the Atlantic by liner, worn by the women at the next table in the restaurant, who were always much richer than oneself. She plainly had all she wanted in a material sense, though she was not, as people used to say, a lady. But that was only because she did not want to be taken for a lady. She was being industriously deferential as she explained how she happened to be in Patricia’s cloakroom. Leonora did not believe a word of it. Whoever she was, she was supported by a group, a family, an association, which had stopped at a lower step on the social staircase than Leonora’s own people simply because they were not going to risk their dignity by a dispute about their right to mount any higher, and anyway they were all right where they were. And they did not mind being deferential because they were used to exacting deference themselves.

  But her explanation, which was going on and on without actually explaining anything which Leonora wanted to know about this encounter, threatened an outburst of emotion which would crack the opaque varnish of her manner; and at this Leonora felt the sweat form on her forehead, for that emotion must be pu
rely illusory, product of a mistake which would have to be laughed off although it was probably not in the least amusing. Not a single word was enlightening. It seemed that this woman had come from her home in Brussels to London a day or so earlier, to visit her grandson, Jean-Pierre, who was going through the mill at Willowes-Aumbrie, and was, in fact, at this very moment carving at the buffet in the next room. He had, of course, had his full training already, in the original establishment in Brussels. But his father (who was, the woman in black explained, with what would have been a sob had she not been solid like an Ingres portrait of a Louis Philippe matron, their eldest child, yes, her first-born) was starting a catering business in Antwerp.

  ‘Our third,’ she said, and paused. Then started again, in a pure gush of pride and joy. ‘Our third. Not counting, not counting, the original establishment. Oh, Mrs Morton, I do want you to understand. It’s all been as successful as that.’

  Leonora picked up the cue. ‘I’m so glad,’ she breathed. If this went on she would have to sit down but goodness knew how long that would protract this huge and springing jet of misunderstanding.

  ‘My son’s reason for sending Jean-Pierre to London and to Willowes-Aumbrie,’ continued the woman in black, ‘was that he wants this new branch to have the same classic air as the mother establishments his grandfather and his father founded and we feel that London is the last capital where there remains some vestige of style. So when we open at Antwerp we hope to create an atmosphere which suggests that the clients will find, just round the corner, Buckingham Palace and its sentries.’ Her eyes, which were the colour of certain topazes, suddenly cancelled their own hardness by tears, and she ceased to talk as if she were translating from a brochure. ‘So Jean-Pierre settled down in London for six months, and I took the opportunity to come over and visit him, and that wasn’t simply an excuse, I’m very fond of Jean-Pierre and I miss him. I’m a great one for keeping my own about me. After all, as you know, I nearly had none. But I haven’t been back here, not once since I left, and I really wanted to see it all just once again before I go. It’s only the look of things I wanted to see,’ she said, suddenly icy. ‘God is my witness that I had nobody over here to thank, for I had heard that you had gone to live in Africa for good. To tell the truth if you won’t be offended, I thought you were dead, and don’t laugh at me, I had planned to make sure whether you were for if you were I’d have had a Mass said for you, and so I will, if you go before me. But how glad I was when I got Jean-Pierre’s bit of news.’

  ‘Why, what was that?’ asked Leonora. She felt half-asleep. The woman’s passion was reversing the world, she was now wondering not so much who the woman was as who she herself might be.

  ‘I must tell it my way, if you’ll forgive me, I do realize I’m keeping you. But being you you’ll like to know. Jean-Pierre met me at the Airport, so funny when you think that when I left there was no flying except for soldiers. Then he took me to my hotel –’

  Leonora could not resist asking where she was staying. She always had a feeling that it was nice to know as much about people as if they were not real but were characters in a book one was writing.

  Of course it was Brown’s. ‘Then he took me out for some supper at the Savoy Grill, and when we’d ordered he said, “I’ve got a lovely present for you Granny.” It seems that he came to this house, this very house where we are this minute, and what a fine house it is, I can see nothing grudged in the past when that was right, and he was waiting at a dinner-party. From the very first he noted that there was one lady who came by herself and wasn’t young, but very distinguished-looking. At one point it had interested him to note that the conversation had become general, which was the rule at dinner-parties in France and Belgium, but was not usual, he had observed, in England. Though it was difficult for a waiter to follow a conversation at table, he had gathered that this unusual unity of interest was caused by the pleasure everybody felt at a pleasant event in the family of the distinguished lady of a certain age. One of her sons-in-law had received from a learned society a medal which was the highest honour attainable in his profession, whatever that might be; and they were congratulating the distinguished old lady on this honour and the charming appearance her daughter had presented at the ceremony. Then someone asked her how it happened that this daughter had been given the unusual and tragic name of Cassandra, and she explained that this was the child of her first husband, in whose family it had been the habit for generations to call their eldest daughters Cassandra. She owned she could not imagine why, and had hoped, since Jane Austen’s sister was named Cassandra, that they had some ancestress in common, and she added, in case someone present knew enough to give a clue, that her first husband’s name had been Philip Le Measurer.

  ‘At that,’ said the woman in black, trembling, ‘Jean-Pierre pricked up his ears. For I can assure you that I’ve brought up all my children, and my grandchildren too, to revere you.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I didn’t, of course, tell them exactly what you did for me. For us. My poor husband would have been glad to tell you as much, if he had had the privilege of meeting you. For certainly you saved him as well as you saved me. I don’t know what Leon’s uncle might not have done to him had it not been for you. He was a terrible man, with a cash-box where his heart should have been. So, though Jean-Pierre doesn’t exactly know what you did for us, he realizes that it was something extraordinary and saintly, and he knew when he said, “I’ve found your Mrs Le Measurer” he was doing something like bringing down to earth my guardian angel to reassure me before I die.’

  ‘Why this is real. This is too frightful,’ thought Leonora. ‘I mean something tremendous to her. What seems unchangeable in her is changed when she thinks of what she imagines I did for her. It’s evidently the big thing in her life. And what a fool she’ll feel when she finds she has mixed me up with someone else –’ But it suddenly occurred to her that this was impossible. The Le Measurer family had long been thin on the ground, and the only other Mrs Le Measurer in living memory was her own mother-in-law, and the woman in black, who had an air of being even too good at sums, would certainly have realized that if old Maisie were alive today she must be well up in her second century. But then Leonora remembered poor Geraldine, the wife of Philip’s younger brother, and at that she mildly blazed. Surely old age had not altered her so much that this woman, who had a head on her shoulders, could not see that she was far, far better-looking than Geraldine always had been and always would. Why, poor Geraldine was guilty of the supreme immodesty of having white eyelashes and not darkening them and her skin, however desperately powdered, had the high glaze of bathroom fittings. ‘Geraldine was quite nice, really awfully nice sometimes,’ thought Leonora, ‘but it would be absurd of this woman to think I could be her,’ and then, but without pleasure, she faced the fact that the woman had done nothing of the sort. She had to accept the only other alternative. She had indeed rendered this woman some service, which was vital to her happiness, but which had attached her own interest so little that she had clean forgotten it. ‘What an insult,’ she whispered, almost aloud. She could not offhand think of a worse thing for one human being to do to another.

  She was perhaps not well. The room seemed very hot, though a minute before she had wondered how it could be so cold in late spring. Perhaps this forgetfulness of hers was not so disgraceful, so important, so cruel, as she supposed, but she could not be sure. Her mind was as slow as if she were ill, and she longed to do what of all things she must not do, break down and end the matter by confession. But she decided: ‘I will get out of this somehow. There must be a loophole, there is always a loophole.’ For that belief she had real reason. In various parts of the world she had faced attack from tiresome people, usually proclaiming themselves inspired by principle, but rendered unsympathetic by their taste for the handling of disgustingly unsubtle weapons. Her mind wandered off in meditation on the barbarism of the panga, simply a strip of sharp-edged steel. She was back again sitting between her two daughte
rs on one of the twin beds in the bedroom she shared with Lionel Morton, who did not happen to be there, who should return from Nairobi any moment now. She and her girls each held a revolver. The floor was striped with the arrows of sunlight that struck down through the shutters; the stripes had altered their angle quite extensively since the three of them had first come into the room and locked the door. It must have been hours before they heard the sound of furniture falling over in the room below. ‘What did you do then?’ people asked her afterwards. She had never given the truthful answer: ‘I pretended to be someone else.’ Instead she said, ‘I hadn’t to do much, the girls were so good.’ That was true, then and afterwards. She never had to reproach herself for exposing them to an experience which had shattered them. Cassandra had languidly announced the day after, ‘I’d much rather spend the afternoon doing that than playing hockey at school,’ and Harriet, perpetually ready to trump her elder’s ace, had positively drawled, ‘Hockey, yes. Tennis, no.’ They were imitating her they imagined, but in fact they were imitating her imitation of someone else. She must have imitated him very often; for even now, on any occasion when the extraordinary had to be treated as the ordinary, her daughters surprised her by speaking with Nicholas’s voice, which they had never heard.