by Rebecca West
‘Between Judges and Samuel,’ I said. But she had found it. There was nothing I knew that she did not know. We had a common stock of information.
‘Listen,’ she said. “‘Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”’ She closed the book. ‘Oh, it is terrible,’ she said, and went out into the hall and fetched the rest of the flowers, and came back and sat with them on her lap, sorting out the narcissus and daffodils and tulips from several mixed bunches.
‘Why do you think it so terrible?’ I asked. ‘People say that it is strange because it is said by a woman to another woman, instead of to a man, but if one thinks of the men one meets at parties one can’t imagine saying it to any one of them.’
‘It is what every human being ought to be able to say to some other human being,’ Mary answered, ‘if life is to be worth living. But there is nobody to whom it can be said safely. One cannot trust anybody. Not anybody at all.’
‘Why are you dividing those flowers?’ I asked.
‘Because the narcissus have so strong a scent I do not want them in the same room as the lilac, and these big daffodils are wrong in this room. But you are right. It does not matter.’
At least we could work. There lay our great good fortune. Our love for music might have weakened now, but we were still under the compulsive power of our mother’s voice, angrily bidding us to the piano, angrily exposing our incompetence, angrily exhorting us to play better than she did, proudly supposing that we could. Mary continued to develop her special understanding of Beethoven and worked hard on Skriabin, I went on with Mozart and waited for every new piano composition of Stravinsky. It might seem strange that Mary, who was so coolly classical, should choose to interpret Beethoven and the ecstatic Skriabin, and that I, so much rougher and less controlled, should prefer the crystalline concertos of Mozart and the legalistic compositions of Stravinsky. But any serious interpretative artist seeks out the composer who lacks the faults he has learned to deplore in himself: the composer is to him a symbol of creation itself, and by lacking these faults he suggests a universe in which they do not exist, and in which there are therefore no moral or aesthetic problems at all, and indeed no problem except the technical difficulty of making the body execute the conceptions of the mind. We both eagerly attended the disclosure of Bartók’s genius which was going on at that time, though only a very few people wanted us to play his music. I also worked on some sonatas by Oliver, and joined with friends to play two quartets and a sonata for piano and violin of his.
Oliver was the grey-eyed man whose songs were played at that concert in a house on the Regent’s Park canal where Mary and I heard that we had got our scholarships; he had stayed with us that first summer of the war, in Norfolk, and we had seen him from time to time ever since, though he had suffered that separation from his friends which is the result of domestic tragedy. He had married a singer, quite a good contralto, and they had never been quite happy; and their unhappiness had not taken an easy course. She had left him for another man, and had not been happy with him either, and had got ill, and had come back to Oliver to die. He was now so taciturn that very often he did not follow a conversation to its end, but just got up and went away; and his music too never seemed finally written. But perhaps I felt this because it nearly coincided with my way of thinking. Had I been a composer, I would have written just this kind of music, and it was possible that my dissatisfaction with certain passages simply meant that, though our musical minds were alike, they were not identical, and in case he, being a composer, had to recognise limitations of which, as an interpreter, I was nearly unconscious.
But once our work was over we were faced again with the fact of Rosamund’s desertion, and nothing came to explain it or mitigate it. Mr Morpurgo had been right: she wrote to us hardly at all. We got some picture postcards from South America, but they were addressed in Constance’s large handwriting and inscribed with messages hardly more informative than R.I.P. They left our wonder where it was. They did not, it is true, confirm our doubts. To look on that handwriting, though it was steady, the a’s and o’s moonfaced as they always were, was to see Constance, old now and in a foreign country, unable to speak the language and galled at the failure, for she liked to be the mistress of every situation, and lodged in a hotel suite which she would not like as much as she had liked her flat in Baker Street. These were such postcards as one would sit down and write for the sake of company. When she had achieved one she would fumble among the tiresome foreign stamps to find the needed one, and go into the bathroom and hold it under a trickle from the tap. None of our family ever licked a stamp; it was to us an action of debauched unfastidiousness. Then she would go along the corridor to the mail-chute beside the elevators and watch the white card fall down behind the glass at the speed of suicide. Then she would slowly find her way back to the room where Rosamund sat at the window, her hands idle on her lap, because neither sewing nor knitting could make the moment better, her eyes fixed on the lizard-coloured mountains beyond the skyscrapers, because it was pleasant to contemplate any place other than that where she was. Mary and I saw such a vision of stagnancy whenever we took these postcards in our hands. But it might have been a peevish fancy, born of resentment. We were sure of nothing, not even of ourselves. But we were not without resources, we could take shelter under that nativity which grew like a flowering tree all that summer, shading us from all heat and distress.
Aunt Lily, seeing us as we came into the garden one late-spring day, turned towards the house and cried, ‘Milly, they’re here,’ and then turned to us and said, ‘She’s well,’ and Aunt Milly came out of the house, nodding and confirming the good news. ‘She couldn’t be better. Well, you dear girls, twenty minutes before lunch, duck and green peas, have a sherry?’ We four sat and preened ourselves and watched the river running by and felt friendly with time, as if we as well as Nancy were engaged in the creative process even when we were idle. Though, indeed, there was a good deal of activity going on in the Dog and Duck these days. ‘She says she’s going to have quite a family,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘so I’m making everything in pink as well as blue. First a girl then a boy.’ A pink pram-coat was lying on her lap, a horrible pink that made more horrible her horrible dress, which was the colour of pickled cabbage. Aunt Lily’s clothes were as regrettable as they had always been, in defiance of the vast commercial development that made it possible to buy cheap and inoffensive dresses in almost any part of England. Nothing like Aunt Lily’s raiment was exposed in any shop-window I ever passed, and it seemed possible that in hidden places, say among the peep-show machines at the back of the fun-fairs round Leicester Square, there were clothes-dens that catered for sartorial perverts.
‘She says she doesn’t care which it is,’ said Aunt Milly. That’s what’s so nice to see, she’s taking it all so easy.’
‘They came over on Sunday night,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘and she was as cool as a cucumber. Told us to get poor Mr Morpurgo to lay off with his specialists, she’d have one if the local man thought anything was wrong, and wouldn’t if he didn’t.’
‘And young Os is very good to her, and that’s a help,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘Very helpful. He was as excited as a kid when he came over, he had a great idea about a new type of Moses basket he wanted to ask Len’s advice about.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Uncle Len, coming out of the bar with Mr Morpurgo, bringing a tray of sherries.
‘Len, you are mean about young Os,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘It might have worked.’
‘Not unless the force of gravity acted quite different,’ said Uncle Len.
‘But he was trying to be a good husband,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘Oh, he tries hard over that,’ said Uncle Len, chuckling. ‘He keeps on telli
ng me that he’s doing all he can to make Nancy feel it’s a natural event.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t he?’ asked the two aunts, indignantly.
‘No reason at all, no reason at all,’ said Uncle Len. ‘Only it strikes me as a damn funny thing for a man to say when his wife’s having a baby. Well, I must be getting back to my customers, and I wish they’d move out.’
‘I wish I could understand why Len always picks on Os,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘It’s not like him, either,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Len’s a fair-minded man. But over Os he just gives way.’
‘I know why it is,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘And it isn’t what you think it is. You think it’s because Len is getting on and Oswald is young. You know you do. And of course we grow bitter. But there’s something deeper than that, and quite creditable to Len, though what he finds intolerable in Oswald is not Oswald’s fault. I suppose nothing is anybody’s fault. It is how we are made. But the trouble between Len and Oswald is that Len has a scientific mind, and Oswald has not, though he has a scientific degree.’
‘What do you mean, Len has a scientific mind?’ asked Aunt Milly. ‘He left Church School at ten, you know.’
‘That doesn’t matter at all,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘He has the scientific approach by nature. I know it, I have watched him with his puzzles for years now.’
‘But go on, that’s just his fun,’ objected Aunt Milly.
‘I think his fun might have been mathematics, if he’d had the chance. Remember he was a bookmaker, and a successful one, particularly considering he started from scratch. All bookmakers have to be mathematicians to some extent, you know. But I think Len might have been outstanding if he had had the advantages my own children have had. He has a real feeling for the theory of numbers, and he can manage most of all the books on the subject I’ve been able to find for him. He enjoys algebra, too, in a way that means a special talent. He has an instinctive realisation of these things, but Oswald only knows what he reads about them in books.’ He spoke with a grumbling connoisseurship, and would have gone on to further grumbling, had his eye not suddenly caught the pickled-cabbage dress. He was silent for a moment, then asked, ‘Lily, do you find it difficult to distinguish between blues and greens?’
We had often thought of that too.
‘Course I can,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Why do you ask?’
Mr Morpurgo swallowed. ‘I only wondered. I sometimes find it not too easy myself.’
‘Coo, I always can,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘But funny thing, someone else asked me the very same thing the other day.’
‘Write me down a dumb bunny,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but how can you know about such things except by reading about them in books? You said yourself, you bring Len books.’
There was a rabbinical streak in Mr Morpurgo which made him feel that he must teach. The books should come second. ‘If you are a scientist you think about the structure of the universe in a certain way which is not like the way of thinking we use in ordinary life. And if you can think in this extraordinary way then you can learn a great deal by reading books written by people who also have that same trick of thought. But the important thing is that you should start off with that unusual approach. Which you have, Milly. I have seen you cut out loose covers for the sitting-room armchairs without a pattern. That means that you know a great deal about the shape of things. You have, in fact, an inborn capacity for understanding plane geometry. You are a scientist too.’
‘What, me? Girls, is he teasing me? Look at the swans. Those are the ones that nest up by the bridge. Those last year’s cygnets of theirs are almost white. Well, Len and me scientists, I never did.’
‘Only me that isn’t anything,’ said Aunt Lily.
That is untrue,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You belong to the company of Mary and Rose. You, like they, are excluded from the world of science, and you, like they, are an artist.’
‘Well, I do think I could have been a dress-designer,’ said Aunt Lily.
Mr Morpurgo’s eyes bulged. He could not help but enjoy the remark, just a little, but he loved Aunt Lily so much that he wished she had not made it. But again he was so perfectly honest that he could not bear to give it the faintest shadow of assent. After a second’s thought he said, ‘Women think too much about dress. I meant something else. I meant that you were an artist in your relations with your family and your friends.’
‘I’d like to think it, but I’m sure I’m gauche, if that’s how you pronounce it,’ said Aunt Lily.
‘That duck will be charred if you don’t start the lunch,’ said Uncle Len, at the bar window.
‘Here’s Mr Morpurgo saying you and me are scientists and Lily’s an artist,’ said Aunt Milly comfortably, taking her time to finish her sherry.
‘No doubt he has his reasons,’ said Uncle Len, ‘but if he’s a man and a brother he’ll get your situpon out of that chair, and see to it that we get that duck before it’s a black bone. Milly, I mean it, shift.’ He leaned on his crossed arms and beamed over us, over his garden, over the river. ‘Not a thing wrong with today.’ But soon he began to chuckle. ‘Trying to make her feel it’s a natural event. I mean to say.’
For hours we did not think of Rosamund when we were with them, any more than when we were playing. She was not in our minds that afternoon, a week or two later, when we drove down to Nancy’s, without notice, for we suddenly found we had the rest of the day to ourselves. But we had forgotten that when we got there she would be having her afternoon rest. The little Welsh girl told us that we must sit in the drawing-room till four o’clock, or the master would be angry. But Nancy heard us, and rang, and called down to us in her endearing, light voice, which was just not thin, and told us to come up.
‘I must stay in bed till tea-time because of the fuss,’ she said, when we went into her bedroom. She was lying with her hands clasped behind her head and her lovely hair spread loose on the pillow. Now her face was as interesting as her hair. ‘But I have already slept. And I had such a funny dream about this fuss. It is the only part of this I hate. I dreamed the monthly nurse had moved in, and the baby was just going to be born, and Oswald was in a terrible flap, and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily and Uncle Len were all in the way being frightened. So I decided that I couldn’t stand it any longer, and that I would take some sandwiches and run away and hide and not come back until the evening. It seemed to me quite natural that the baby would have been born while I was out, and sensible of me to keep away till the hubbub was over. I went into the larder and found some very nice ham and cut some sandwiches, very carefully, spreading the butter very thick. I am always hungry just now, you know. And then I went to your house at Lovegrove and told you all about it, and you were very sympathetic, and we cut more sandwiches, you found some turkey in your larder, and we went and played on Lovegrove Common, and it was nice. It is funny, I have no idea how long I stayed with you after Papa died. It was just a patch of - of what? For I was very unhappy, yet you made me happy. And that reminds me. I have heard from my brother in Hong Kong.’ She found an envelope on her bed-table, took out a letter and spread it flat, and then put her hand over it. ‘Tell me what you have been doing,’ she bade us. We saw that there was something painful in the letter, and that she was moderating the pace of her approach to it, as a rider gentles his horse to a difficult gate.
Before we could answer she had grown bolder. She lifted her hand from the letter and said, ‘I wrote to Cecil reminding him that Mamma would be released in August, and asking him to write to her a welcoming letter, and make plans to come home on leave to see her soon. This is his answer.’
Cecil wrote that he did not think she had ever understood how awful the scandal had been for him. For one thing, he had been older and had realised more, and it had been worse for him, because he was a boy, and had had to go out into the world, while she could stay at home. He said he had had to remind himself as he wrote of her more sheltered position, which had saved her from the full impact of their mother’s crime. I
t was in any case hard for him to forgive an attitude which could mean that she had forgotten what a dear old sport Daddy had been. And anyway he hoped she was not losing her sense of proportion. There must be some places where people in the situation of their mother were taken care of, and it would probably be better for her and for the world at large if she were left in skilled hands. It could not be helped, he supposed, that Nancy had no real feeling for him or for his father.
‘It is so silly,’ said Nancy, ‘because it has been one of my great difficulties that I loved my father much better than my mother. But what am I to say to Mamma when she realises he has sent her no message?’
We did not answer because we did not know. After a minute Nancy folded up the letter and put it back in the envelope. She had fully realised we did not know the answer. Rosamund would have stammered some words that would have told Nancy what to write to Cecil which would soften his heart; but Rosamund was not here, she would never come back to us.
‘I do not think he is unhappy,’ pondered Nancy. ‘Ordinarily, of course, that is what one would think about a letter like this, that it was written out of misery, which always makes one silly. But this is a very collected piece of writing. It is just the kind of letter Uncle Mat would write, poor man.’ Gently she tore it up. ‘Not that I am angry,’ she explained, with her faint smile, ‘but I might come on it when I was feeling ill or tired, and then I might be angry.’ She felt for her hand mirror and restored her pale mouth with lipstick. ‘That is one of the difficulties of the job I am doing now. One does not have one’s own children. Cecil is Uncle Mat’s child, he has nothing to do with our papa and mamma, I am nearer them. But I feel that Aunt Lily had a hand in me somehow. And where did Cordelia come from in your family? And whose baby am I going to have? Perhaps I will have Cecil’s. But it does not matter, I will have several, amongst the lot of them one will surely belong to Oswald and me. And I understand I shall have an unreasonable liking even for the others.’