by Rebecca West
From that she averted her mind, and listened to the story the woman in black was telling with a passion which failed to make it interesting. It seemed that Jean-Pierre had made inquiries from his fellow-waiters as to the distinguished lady of a certain age, and had been told that she was often at parties, particularly those given at this house, and was herself in a small way a client of Willowes-Aumbrie. Jean-Pierre had greeted his grandmother on her arrival in London not only with the news that he had seen her beloved Madame Le Measurer, Mrs Morton, and thought her distinguished and sympathetic and all he had been taught from his cradle to expect her to be; but he was going to see her again the very next evening – which was now: this puzzling now. For he had heard her say to her hostess that she would be back in a month’s time for her birthday party; and he was booked to wait at that very party.
‘At first I looked you up in the telephone book,’ said the stranger. ‘I thought I’d leave some flowers and a note asking if I could call. But –’ she paused, and continued with an air of flinching delicacy, ‘I’ve forgotten London, and I don’t know any more where you would be likely to live.’ It struck Leonora that she did not like to say that she had found too many Mortons in the telephone book, and that the unrevealed incident which linked them owed an essential part of its power to infatuate her for between forty and fifty years to the rarity and vague picturesqueness of the name Le Measurer. ‘A good thing she doesn’t know the Le Measurers were nobodies, Huguenots who settled down as linen-drapers in the City during the nineteenth century and put their savings into railways at the right time and took them out at another right time. Oh, it’s all an illusion, somewhere she’s got it all wrong, it’s all going to be such an anticlimax for the poor dear,’ she mourned, but forgot to grieve when the poor dear said, ‘So all I could do was to ask Mr Aumbrie if I could take the place of the girl at the cloakroom, and though he didn’t like it he’s not, of course, in a position to refuse.’
There was nothing to do but wait. How wonderfully, Leonora thought, Coleridge had distilled the essence of boredom into the two lines, ‘The wedding-guest then beat his breast, for he heard the loud bassoon.’
From the manuscript book ‘Notes for Nicholas’: The woman in the powder-room had been a girl working in the house of Leonora’s (first) father-in-law and mother-in-law and she was dismissed because she was pregnant, at the time when Leonora and Nicholas were having a love affair.
Leonora felt unhappy because the girl was being dismissed for what she herself was doing. Nicholas felt even more unhappy. He said the Mother of God would forgive. (But I suppose she wouldn’t approve, she might want to punish the girl.) Nicholas said in astonishment, ‘She, of all people!’
Leonora never identifies the woman in the powder-room with this girl. But she recalls the girl when, during the night when she was dying, she recalls her love affair with Nicholas.
She did not hurry to the drawing-room, though she was so late, finding herself alone in the octagonal hall, which always enchanted her. Really, she must get herself to the drawing-room. But she had disarranged the hair at the back of her neck when staring up at the painted ceiling. With the nervousness of the old, who are always on a slide under the microscope of the middle-aged, using their last critical advantage, she used her mirror and her little comb, rehearsing the white lie she had to tell Patricia. In fact she had been sitting in front of her TV, watching the World’s Pair Skating Championship at Bratislava, and the Russians were the last in the programme. These ones were good, but not like the wonderful champions of five or six years ago. She could think of no event that could take precedence over this concourse of mythic creatures, but one could not say so, she would have to tell Patricia that she had had to dine in Richmond, and remember not to change it to Dulwich when she spoke to George. Several times she repeated, ‘Richmond, Richmond, Richmond,’ and braced her spine and raised her head to make her entrance.
As soon as Leonora Morton entered the great new white room, a woman said to her, ‘This is a far grander party than I expected, look at me, a short dress and no jewellery, and absolutely everybody’s here. Avril Waters is over there by the fireplace.’ Leonora, thinking peripherally while she took the shock, asked herself, not at all seriously, why it was that even now, when she and Avril were quite old, it should be natural for a woman to tell her at a party, ‘Avril Waters is here,’ and most improbable that anyone would say to Avril Waters, ‘Leonora Morton is here.’ While the temperature of her inner mind slowly rose as she remembered what Avril Waters had done to her, forty-eight years ago, her outer mind wondered coolly enough why this woman had been given precedence over all the women of her generation, by a judgement almost unanimous though nonsensical. She was beautiful, but not very. Her bones were flimsy and her mouth was constantly falling open with the gape of a fish. She was not nice. Strangers she met with the worst manners; it was then that her mouth was most apt to fall open, as if she really could not believe what she saw, what she heard. With her familiars she bounced like an Edwardian schoolgirl, she was full of larks and calendarish sentiments; she infected her friends with her silliness, quite distinguished men looked, when they were with her, nimble and jolly like morris dancers. She was also notoriously avaricious.
It was at this point that the knowledge of Avril Waters which she shared with all the world fused with her particular experience of the woman, and the memory, substantiated, proved not a mere fantasy, burned her memory like an ember held in the hand. The curious conspiracy to associate Avril Waters with brilliance was building up a dazzlement in front of her. She had, of course, found the brightest spot in the room, where light poured down from the sconces set close together and, with her still golden head duplicated in a mirror, she was acting out her legend before a group round-eyed as if they were watching fireworks. She looked well enough and was shining with diamonds, and Leonora thought to herself, her memory seeming the blacker in contrast with this gaudiness, ‘She should not have diamonds, she should have nothing.’ She took a glass of champagne from a tray and raised her eyes to the face of a friend whom she found standing in front of her. While she talked to him she said to herself, ‘Why should you hate her so? She did not mean to hurt you. She did not know that it was you in that room. She does not know it now.’ But that argument failed as it always did. Her mind insisted, ‘But after that everything went wrong.’
That, of course, was nonsense. On the contrary, after that everything had gone right. She had skipped out of an affair which could lead to nothing, and had pursued the direct path to the very pleasant situation in which she found herself in her old age, widow of a well-loved second husband, with two affectionate and handsome daughters who had married nice men and given her agreeable grandchildren, as well as a world of friends and a pleasant house. But these were the terms used by people when they talked of strangers. The truth was that though Avril Waters could not have ruined her life, since her life was not in ruins, her life had been ruined ever since that day in Paris. That became certain just at this very hour in the day. When the night looked in at any uncurtained window she looked back at it, and saw that when she came to die she would have had nothing out of life. The French windows of this grand house gave on a garden fresh from the nurseryman’s spade and hoe, its lawn as opaquely green as if it were painted, each annual in its bed and each rose and clematis on the walls in its exact prune. It was without the gravity which comes soon to any garden, the elegiac touch given by spreading creepers and the thickened shade under mature trees. Yet if no one drew the curtain soon enough, the garden would become unbearable in its melancholy. Pressed against the panes would be a message to her. She would know that when she came to the turnstile of the next world, there would be no money in her purse. If things had turned out differently, her life would have had an absolute value which would have made it last for ever. As it was, she would perish. Indeed, she had perished.
Yet her friend was saying, his eyes bright because he was a kind man and liked things to go
agreeably, ‘You’re looking well.’ And so she probably was. When Nicholas came back into her mind as the sight of Avril Waters had brought him now, she was always pricked with grief as sharp as if it had happened yesterday, but she also glowed, imagining herself once more the object of desire. That had been his great gift to her, and she had needed it. She was then thinking of herself as valueless and unprized, and was the more unhappy about it because people thought that what she was mourning was the death of her husband, and she felt a hypocrite because she could not tell them the truth. But she could not have grieved over the end of her marriage, for it had been too long in ending, and had changed as it ended. When she was nineteen, she had married Philip Le Measurer, a friend of her father’s, an officer in the same regiment, a widower in his middle forties. Bright images flooded her mind as she thought of that man, who was then so much older than she was, and now was so much younger, since he had died in his fifties, and she was over eighty; and they were all images of childhood. She had been in love with Philip Le Measurer ever since she was a little girl. He was a silent, handsome, slow-moving man, who lost his silence and became alert only when he was playing with children, and because his first marriage had been childless he had constantly visited Leonora in her nursery. Her Nanny had once said in her presence that ‘Major Le Measurer keeps his tongue in our toy cupboard’, and it gave her a happy sense of power over a grown-up. The immediate cause for their marriage was her father’s announcement that he was going to marry a woman whom both she and Philip saw with horror as the stepmother of the fairy-tales: a view in which there was a solid foundation of sense, for she would certainly have been disagreeable to Leonora, but which showed an infantile bias, for the woman was not whiskery and pointed in hat and chin but the sort of stupid bully, round in hat and head, whom men unaccountably trust, whom male hospital committees choose as matron.
She made a necessary escape from a real danger which was nevertheless quite imaginary as she saw it, into a world as sharp and brightly coloured in her memory as the hand-coloured picture postcards of the time. She had spent her honeymoon at the old monastery high above the Reckitt’s Blue Mediterranean, when the oranges were orange-coloured and the lemons lemon-coloured in the terraced gardens, and went home to a little white box in a small flowery Kensington square, purple with lilacs at the time of her return. They were just well enough off to look at the future confidently. After Philip had left the Army he had held a not very important post in a mining corporation; and though his family were far from rich they had possessions which were as good as money in the bank. Their estate was on the outskirts of a Dorset market-town, with a William and Mary house built of stone pale yellow as farm butter, and famous fishing, some of it let and some of it kept for relatives who came to stay. His father and mother were delighted that their son should have taken another wife and a young one; and they showed their delight by treating her as if she were the first of the children they might now expect to find in their house, and as good and pretty and well-behaved as they could have hoped. She spent all summer with them. The weather was perfect. Each limpid day was followed by another, and life was limpid too, with a purity unknown in the nursery, because there was no wild real childhood to break into despair and sin.
In August the First World War broke out. But not in its full force for her. Though Philip went back to the Army, she felt no intense fear for him. He told her that he would not get killed, and she believed him, and even after sixty years did not think herself a fool for her credulity, since about that sort of thing he had a way of being right. So she spent the four years of the war almost unperturbed in having her two daughters. It had been glorious when peace came. The little house in Kensington, the great house in Dorset, were real nurseries now, and the two children, she and Philip, and the grandparents chattered together in happiness from morning to night. What had they said to each other? She could not now recall one single sentence. But when she was thinking of Nicholas, her mind was his mirror, it reflected no other images. She only remembered that when they had all been together it had sounded like the hymns of praise which the birds sing to the dawn. There are no words to that either. Five years passed and they were still with their innocent and exultant chorus. Then Philip was taken ill, and he announced, just as certainly as he had told her he was not going to be killed in the war, that he was going to die.
He became silent again, and not even the little girls could give him back his speech. After he had been operated on the doctors told him that he was well, but he grew quieter and more indifferent every day. Presently he had to have another operation which left the doctors as pleased as they had been by the first. But he counted their assurances as nothing compared to the disposition he felt, when he went home to Dorset, to move out of his own room which had always been his into one far away from the other bedrooms, though he had not slept in it since he had had measles there when he was a boy. ‘This is too damn like the way a cat chooses a corner to die in,’ he told Leonora, speaking as if he were at one and the same time a vet kindly breaking bad news to the owner of a pet, and the doomed pet itself. It was the last characteristic thing he ever said to her. She thought of him as having really died only a few days after that: one of his daughters was thrown and rolled on by her pony, and though he tried he could not care. Looking back, it seemed to her as if after that there had been no fine weather, a drizzling rain set in. But he lived for nearly another two years, never seeming very well though once so nearly recovered that they went on holiday to France. But he behaved there like a man in a theatre-party sitting out a boring play out of politeness to his host, and shortly after their return he had to have another operation and then all of him was gone.
She had loved Philip, he had loved her, they had the good fortune to do nothing in all their married life to displease each other and a great deal which they both found pleasing; and she mourned him deeply. But her grief could not have abased her spirit, for happiness and loss happened in a world where her value was set high. What had made her such a broken-winged, shameful creature when she met Nicholas in Paris was an incomprehensible humiliation. The squat, magnetic little man named Gerard March. She had believed, Philip had believed, Philip’s parents had believed, all her world had believed, that Gerard March was in love with her. It was true that he had often been talked about in connection with other women, some of them very beautiful. But he was the first to mention them to her, in his deep, soft, virile growl, sadly as if they were concessions to his lower nature, while her power was over his higher nature. He talked perpetually about her to their circle of friends, always with adoration. He had asked Philip and her to his London house far more often than any other of his executives, he regularly had them to stay at his villa in Monte Carlo and on his yacht, and if he found himself alone with her during these visits he behaved with the choked tenderness of a lover who for creditable reasons cannot speak what he feels, but will not cease to feel it. Back in England he often sent her scribbled notes which told her he had been seized by a desire to communicate with her, it did not matter what, and sheaves of flowers came to the door with no anniversary to account for them. At Christmas the presents, particularly for the children, were sumptuous, even though they often came from a Bond Street shop not liked by the Le Measurers, who, when passing its windows, grossly splendid with gold fitted dressing-cases and crocodile handbags and what Philip called cad’s cuff-links, used to ring an imaginary handbell and say, ‘Unclean, unclean,’ which was part of an old family joke.
Philip Le Measurer had not liked March’s attentions at first. The homage sometimes took forms that invited comment; in defiance of the rules of precedence he always placed her on his right at his birthday dinner-parties, even if there was a Duchess there. ‘He never says anything?’ Philip had anxiously inquired. ‘When he talks of you to me I just think how queer it is that people think he’s ruthless and materialist, he seems to care so much for what you and I have got. It’s odd that he’s never married. But really the
things he does are a bit much. He doesn’t ever get tiresome when you’re alone?’ ‘No, indeed,’ she had said. ‘I would have told you if he had. There’s just this long drawn out impersonation of a Landseer dog.’ But as his last illness settled on him he began to speak of March’s devotion to her in another tone, and one night in their bed he said suddenly through the darkness, ‘When I am dead March will ask you to marry him, that’s quite certain, and if you like him at all you must accept him, for my father and mother are very old, and there’ll be nobody who can really take care of you and the children.’ The ghost of the warm and living love he had had for her walked dimly through the long, dim, weary sentence. She gave her promise with a laugh, telling him that he was not going to die, kissed him through the blackness and got a tired kiss in return. She supposed that he was being sensible enough. Philip always knew best; and Gerard March had been so kind during this long illness that she could not doubt his devotion. She should not want a second husband, but on the other hand, she could not conceive of life without one, since she had been married throughout the whole of her adult life.
But there had been some huge mistake. It happened that only half an hour or so after Philip had been found dead by his nurse Leonora had been standing beside the telephone when Gerard March rang up to make his usual daily soft, concerned inquiry. When she told him the news through her tears, he suddenly cried out in a high-pitched voice, ‘But the doctors said he’d live another ten years!’ Her tears stopped, she stared into the black throat of the telephone. But in a second it was bringing her his usual gruff compassion, couched now in biblical terms out of respect for the occasion; his father had been a Low Church parson. In half an hour he was there himself, casting his charm and strength and sympathy like a fur cloak, warm yet so fine as to be weightless. It had always been his great attraction that he seemed to promise security without making the slightest demand in return. The wreath he sent to the funeral was enormous, and he came all the way down to Dorset to sit in the front pew with the family, his smallness sunk down in a large overcoat, his bowed head nodding sadly in its depths. She was slightly disconcerted when he was the writer of one of those letters about Philip which old Mr and Mrs Le Measurer considered beautiful but which Philip would not have liked at all. Reading it, she remembered though she could not say why, Gerard’s sudden shrill explosion down the telephone, and was repelled. In spite of all that had surely been his real sweetness and kindness, in spite of the promise she had made Philip, she found herself not at all eager to hear from Gerard again. But she was astonished and disappointed when she did not. For one thing, she found it embarrassing that so many friends should ask, ‘And have you seen anything of Gerard March lately?’ and could hardly hide their wonder when she answered that she had not, and presently, with alarming unanimity, stopped putting that question.