Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  ‘You do not believe me,’ said Nestor, ‘because always you have had money, you have had diamonds as you have had a wife. But this does not matter, if we cannot get the diamonds painted well but we have them. Take off the necklace, my dear, and let your beautiful cousins look at them.’

  Obediently Rosamund raised her hands to undo the clasp. ‘Look,’ said Nestor, ‘the most beautiful arms in the world.’ Her downcast face told us that she did not think the clasp would ever open. ‘I must help, little intricate things she does not understand as well as I do,’ he said. As he worked at the clasp he rolled his eyes at us over her head. ‘The nape of her neck is like a child’s.’ But he grew grave with respect as he felt the weight of the necklace in his hand. He put it down on the table in front of Rosamund, drew up a chair beside her, and cried out to us, ‘Come nearer. You shall not often see such a wonderful thing, even now, and you certainly never dreamed of anything like it in that little house at Lovegrove where all you four beautiful women were children. No, very surely there can have been nothing like this here,’ he chuckled, but broke off to look ever at Mr Morpurgo and wink, as one shrewd man at another, ‘and yet what a success-box was that little house! Remarkable, was it not, hein? Not one but has done well for herself one way or another. And now this little piece of good fortune, come close and see it. Do you understand such things, what is your name, Alan? I will explain it to you, for I could also have been a great jeweller. See,’ he said, rising to his feet, for he was too short to speak to us all unless he stood up.

  His zest had filled his mouth with saliva, so he had to stop and wipe it away; and as he stood with his handkerchief at his lips he looked down on his wife. She was to us misery made visible. Her eyes had gone into the feared distance, and her defeated body slumped within her clothes. ‘But I am a fool,’ he cried, ‘to buy this woman a diamond necklace! How beautiful she is without it! How specially beautiful are her shoulders.’ An impulse quivered through him, he resisted it for a moment, then it forced him down to her, his mouth munching. It seemed certain that he was going to bury his face in her shoulders and rub his babyish cheeks against the bare flesh. For only a second was she less aware of this than we were. Then disgust pulled down the corners of her mouth so that we saw the gums under her lower teeth, and pushed up her cheeks so that her eyes became slits. A twitch of her head showed that, like us, she knew exactly where his face was going to touch her, at a point below her ear, at the base of her neck, and we could feel abhorrence travelling over the skin of her body. Helpless, we watched her increasing nervousness and fear, and did not at first remark that he had drawn away from her.

  He was standing quite upright, holding out the necklace and laughing, ‘My God, my God, I love my wife so much that I nearly dropped it.’ She raised her head and smiled at him as tenderly as she had ever smiled at any of us.

  We got up and said that we must go, and asked when the boat train was leaving, so that we could see them off. But Nestor said, busy clasping the necklace on his wife’s neck, ‘It goes in the afternoon, but we will not be there. All I do is so important that I cannot make anything in the ordinary way. My secretaries yes, the boat train is for them, but Rosamund and I go with Mr Ramponetti in his fine car to lunch with the great Lord Catterock. But so it is, you cannot see Rosamund off, and you must kiss her and make your lamentations with her tonight.’

  The three of us went into the bedroom with Rosamund to get our coats, as Nestor was saying to Mr Morpurgo, ‘Will you not have a last glass of champagne while the women say goodbye, for we know they will be long, hahaha, the little ones. I would like to ask you many things, including whether you know of my grandfather, who was of Baghdad.’

  In the bedroom we took Rosamund in our arms and kissed her, although Cordelia was there, and we told her how much we loved her, and hoped she would be happy, and wanted to be with her when she came back. But her face under my lips, her body in my arms, was preoccupied to that total degree impossible in the mind. I could have drawn a sentence or two from her that would have shown regard for our plight, if I had forgotten the decencies and spoken of it. But her body had no pity, it said, ‘I have gone from you.’

  Cordelia, very pretty and neat in her squirrel coat, her red-gold curls combed so that she could go out through the foyer looking as she should, said, ‘Well, it has all been very nice.’

  I looked back into our childhood and cried out, ‘Rosamund, that time you pretended that you had told fortunes as well as me, and you were whipped too!’ And Mary said something I did not understand about a parcel. But, of course, she too must have had her temptations to traffic with evil, though she would have yielded less than I did, for I was the darkest member of the family. I cannot give certain passages of music their true grace. But dark as she was, and darker as I was, Rosamund had lent us her light.

  Cordelia said, ‘Come, we ought to go. Remember they are leaving tomorrow.’

  In our arms Rosamund was alive again, she kissed us with a real mouth, her eyes shone, and she tried to speak, though her stammer would not let her. ‘Lovegrove!’ was all she could say. Her firm flesh trembled with recollected joy, it was as if marble should feel happiness.

  Constance, coming into the room at that moment, repeated, ‘Lovegrove.’

  We asked ourselves again how she was taking this marriage; and again her smooth and colourless exterior remained simply an exterior. She slowly crossed the room, saying again, ‘Lovegrove,’ and sat down by the window. ‘It was a great privilege to be there, and many marvels happened to us. But do not forget that it all rested on a firm foundation.’ She had often reminded us of the sort of statuary that is found on Victorian town halls, and now she seemed as if she might be reading from such an inscription as is sometimes carved on these buildings. ‘Your Mamma took in Rosamund and me when we had nothing and she had little more. But neither she nor any of you children grudged sharing with us, though there was no margin. None at all. It meant less for all of you. More wonderful things happened in your house, but that was wonderful also.’

  Rosamund, choked with her stammer, nodded, and wound her fingers in ours.

  ‘When things are complicated,’ Constance went on, ‘it is often a help to think of something quite simple. I shall often think of the generosity of you and your Mamma, for it is the simplest side of what you did for us.’

  She was paying us and our mother a moral compliment without the smallest doubt of her right to do so; and she would have been aware if she had lost that right. She was right. She had had nothing when she came to us. But I remembered how, more than once, she made some slight, hardly visible error in her needlework that had threatened to make the finished garment just less than perfect, and she had gone out and bought new material at her own expense and started the work afresh. And this was how soldiers going back to the front used to talk. ‘I shall often think…’ There must indeed be some sanctification of this marriage. But at that moment there was a knock on the door, and Mr Morpurgo stood on the threshold. ‘Rosamund, I am sorry, but I think we should be going home. Mary and Rose have had a long journey, and it is late.’ Something that Nestor had said had made him very angry. He had been polite, of course, and Nestor did not know it, but stood behind him, as pleased as he could be. But we knew it, and so did Rosamund.

  Her eyes went to our faces, and we must have gone back to doubt. She grew grey, and said, ‘You are quite right, it is late, dear, dear Mr Morpurgo,’ and held out her arms to him. ‘Now it is goodbye,’ she said, and bent down and waited for his kiss.

  He gave it very coolly.

  She straightened herself, and looked round at all of us. For the first time in my life I saw her visibly wish to make a claim for herself, to take her own part, like the rest of us. She sighed and tried to renounce, but could not quite. She put her hand under the diamonds at her neck, so that they blazed, and her eyes went from face to face. It could not be that she was saying what she must be saying: ‘Whatever you may think of him he gave me these.’
And indeed she stammered words none of us could have predicted. ‘I should so like Richard Quin to have seen this necklace.’

  Mr Morpurgo stepped back. ‘Would you?’ he asked incredulously.

  She nodded, smiling at us all.

  Slowly he gave her another kiss, and Nestor asked, ‘Who is this Richard Quin?’

  ‘Our brother, who was killed,’ said Mary.

  ‘Ah, yes, she has told me of him, she tells me all, even the little sentimental things. But he was a young boy. Did he know about the precious stones? Had he taste?’

  ‘Marvellous taste,’ said Mr Morpurgo, and slowly we moved towards the door, and out into the corridor, and stood by the lift, and faced the knowledge that we were to have no knowledge.

  ‘But your address in Berlin. Quick, has anybody got pencil and paper?’

  ‘You do not need them. I left the address with Kate this morning.’

  ‘And Mr Ramponetti will tell you any day where we are. In each of my offices there is a huge map with many flags on it, and one red flag bigger than the rest. That is me.’

  ‘I am so glad you managed to see Kate.’

  ‘Of course I did, and we went down to the Dog and Duck yesterday.’

  ‘Was Nancy there?’

  ‘No. We missed her. We missed Miss Beevor too. You must give them all sorts of messages.’

  ‘I will send you a drawing, Rosamund. I think I know a man who could do it.’

  ‘I have many pictures and drawings, but we will take down one to give your portrait a place.’

  ‘Oh, goodbye, dear, dear Rosamund.’

  ‘Do not worry about her, I will be the best husband, and you will stay with us often in Berlin, and I will make you more famous than you ever hoped to be in Germany.’

  The lift dropped, and we were carried down in silence. While Alan and Mr Morpurgo looked for their cars we three stood in the foyer. ‘Now,’ said Cordelia, and stopped, because she was choking with tears. ‘Now. I hope you see that I was right all the time.’

  ‘Right? About what?’

  ‘Why, about Rosamund.’ We said nothing and her voice rose to a high whisper. ‘I always knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Why, this,’ she said. We looked coltish, and her foot drummed on the floor. ‘Why will you never admit that I was the only one at home who ever showed any common sense about anything? I was always right about everything. I was right about Rosamund. I would have expected her to do just this.’

  For a while she was silent, and we stared at the swing doors, waiting for the men. Then she broke out again, ‘Are you not ashamed? Are you not ashamed of always having put her before me?’

  We could not be angry with her. She was frightened, as we were, because Rosamund was acting out of character, and Rosamund’s character was the ground we lived on. Cordelia’s honesty made her recognise this, and she said, swallowing, ‘Not that she was not very kind to me when that horrible man pretended I could not play the violin and you all believed him. But this is dreadful. It is so hard on Alan. I felt so ashamed at having brought him here tonight to see one of our family and finding that Rosamund had done this awful thing. Oh, there you are, Mr Morpurgo. I saw you were as upset as I was, as we were. Now Mary and Rose are pretending that there is nothing wrong, but I feel so humiliated because of Alan. It is all right for Alan to have to treat Aunt Lily and Nancy as if they were members of our family, they are so unfortunate. But this man is so dreadfully the opposite, there is no question of feeling sorry for him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you want to know Aunt Lily and Nancy if they were fortunate?’ asked Mary, smiling.

  ‘You and Rose are hopeless,’ said Cordelia. ‘You see what I mean, don’t you, Mr Morpurgo?’

  ‘I should,’ he said, ‘I have known so many Jews who preferred to have no relations with their own people except as members of the Jewish Board of Guardians.’

  ‘You are teasing,’ said Cordelia. ‘I have nobody but Alan, really,’ she exclaimed, with a flash of anger, and walked away from us, but turned back after a step or two to say, ‘Come to dinner tomorrow night, if you can.’ Mr Morpurgo said he could not, though he always liked to dine with her, and we said we would try, so she told us, ‘Eight o’clock, and do try not to be late.’ It was a belief of hers, from which she derived much pleasure, that we were very unpunctual, though as public performers we had to cultivate a fussy sense of time. As Alan came through the swing doors she hurried to him for comfort; we saw him bend down to give it.

  We expected Mr Morpurgo to take us to his car. But he stood still. ‘Was it not rather neat, what I said then about the Jewish Board of Guardians?’ he asked us, dimpling, and did not move until we told him that it was not rather neat, but very neat. We knew why he was lingering. Like us, he wanted to get into the lift and go up to the suite we had just left and say to Rosamund, ‘Why have you married this man?’ But it was not a question that could be asked of any bride, no matter how good an answer she might be able to give; and Rosamund could have no answer at all within the limits of probability. To explain Nestor, she would have to say: ‘Do you not understand? We are two Signs of that different Zodiac, which follows the path of the sun not seen here but by other stars. We are now in conjunction, that is all our marriage means.’ Or again: ‘Be easy in your mind. It is only that we are two cards in a tarot pack, drawn by an invisible giant who is holding them close in his hand while he ponders some divination, naturally not to be read at a first glance, in view of the peculiar circumstances.’ When I thought that, I was thinking of magic as if I knew nothing of it, but when I remembered what I knew of it, I could believe that the explanation was indeed rooted in magical practice. Again it seemed possible that Rosamund was marrying this man because she had looked into the future and had seen him beggared or insane. But again I saw the altar decked with white flowers as I had seen it on the eve of Nancy’s marriage, as I stood alone in the church, which smelt as stone does at night, and in the boiler-room Uncle Len’s shovel lurched through the coal till it got its due burden and tipped it prudently on the furnace; and as I had seen it during the marriage, when the day, that commonly makes things obscure which are clear in the darkness, could not destroy the mystery of the cross and the table. I was aware that there is no wall between magic and the common law of operations of cause and effect; for if Rosamund had looked into the future and seen Nestor beggared or insane and had married him, against that day, she was performing the same sort of act as Nancy and Oswald, when they had taken each other for better or worse. The essence of the situation between Rosamund and Nestor was that they were husband and wife; and that situation would have been, whatever their circumstances, incredibly strange.

  We were foolish to stand there, asking questions that could not be answered in terms within our comprehension. We went out with Mr Morpurgo to the huge nest of his car, and settled down on each side of him, deep in rugs. It was so late that when we left the West End and approached our home there were no people in the streets, we might have been entering a zone deserted because of disaster. Outside the classical church opposite Lord’s the girl on the monument was praying obstinately under slanting shafts of rain. She reminded us of the existence of a technique that might have helped us if we had ever had time to master it. When we reached home Mary got out of the car first, and I found her standing quite still on the pavement looking up at the house, though she had the key in her hand; and I too stood still.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ asked Mr Morpurgo.

  ‘The house is dark except for the drawing-room and the hall,’ I said. ‘Kate is not in her little sitting-room in the basement. Usually she sits up for us when we come back from a tour.’

  ‘But it is very late,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and like all of us, she is older than she was.’

  ‘However late it has been,’ Mary said, ‘she has always stayed up for us before.’

  ‘You are tired,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘it has all been too much for you.’ He took the key from
Mary’s hand and went up the stairs to our front door, and led us in. ‘Look, your lovely room is waiting for you. They have put flowers in all the vases. Some I sent, but other people sent more, though you know what I am, I tried to send most. But too many people love you, I could not succeed. And there is the biscuit-box, and there is the milk in your electric saucepan. Everything you want. I will sit with you till you eat your biscuit and drink your milk.’

  ‘And for you,’ said Mary, ‘there will be a bottle of Perrier in the refrigerator.’

  ‘How well you know me,’ he said. ‘Yes, I feel myself a hot and greasy little man, when I am faced with the prospect of going to bed and seeing myself through the small hours I like to cool myself down with very cold water.’ He sat down heavily on the sofa and Mary went down to the kitchen. I stood by the hearth and took off my hat and looked through the door she had left open at the table in the hall, stacked with letters I would not want to read, because they were not from Rosamund. ‘She will write,’ I told him, speaking as if there at least we had gained a victory over fate.

  ‘She writes bad letters,’ he said. We let the clock make all the noise in the room for some moments. Then he sighed, ‘She will write no more than your mother does.’

  ‘What, is she going to die?’ I asked in consternation.

  ‘I did not mean that, it is not me who knows such things,’ he said. ‘But, like your mother, she has gone.’

  ‘Yes, like Mamma. And it was right that Mamma should go, and it is…’

  ‘Yes,’ he said mildly, ‘but she has gone.’