by Rebecca West
‘We would like it well enough,’ I said. ‘But you, Kate, would it not be too much for you? Can you arrange it with the help you have?’
‘It would be a kindness to me,’ she said. ‘It would take my mind off things.’
‘What things?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘The world is not going very well.’
There was a hangdog look about her. Surely she had done what my mother had forbidden and opened a door that ought to be kept shut. Surely she had been looking into a bucket full of water, whether after Rosamund’s visit, whether to assure herself about one of her sailor kin. I was afraid, I would like to have asked her, ‘Kate, Kate, is something terrible going to happen?’ But it was my mother’s voice that drove me to the piano every day, and my mother’s voice now spoke with abhorrence of magic. I remembered too a beating that had struck me now as curiously cruel. My sudden shocked realisation of its cruelty made me resentfully suppose that it must have been unnecessary. It seemed to me that many of the things I thought I remembered happening in my childhood could not have happened, and that we must simply have been imaginative children who made up fairy tales and painted the visible world with them so that we could not see things as they were. Surely I could not have raised a paper eighteen inches off the ground and kept it steady in mid-air by willpower alone? Surely dogs that had been long dead could not have played about our feet, surely the hooves of ponies ridden by my father and his brother in their distant boyhood could not have sounded on the stable cobbles? Surely I could not really have gone to a children’s party and put my hands on each side of a little girl’s face and did something that felt like casting my mind to the front of my head and tell her the number that she was saying to herself? Mary and I never spoke of these things now, and the life that went on around us was plainly lived on the assumption that they did not happen. But after all it was not only we four children at Lovegrove who had seen and enacted these marvels. There had been the evil things that had invaded Rosamund’s home, there had been the spill of salt from the chimneypiece in the kitchen when they were routed, there had been the hare that talked with us in the garden. But I remembered, with deep misery, that I had often read of poltergeists since, and it was always said that none ever troubled a house unless there was in the family a plausible and unscrupulous little girl or boy.
But really it did not matter if as a child I had practised magic, or not. I might be deluded into thinking that I had raised a paper from the ground and held it in mid-air by supernatural means. But I was not wrong when I remembered that Richard Quin had turned from me and wept when I made him watch me at this trick, whatever it was, and had grown sick and nearly died. For he had been a saint. For he had been a saint whose repulsion from evil had been absolute; and at that time I had been evil. I had used that other trick, thought-reading, to confuse poor Queenie. I had shown her that for me life was not so rigid as was supposed; and she, crazed by her hunger, had drawn the conclusion that it was in all ways more flexible. She had seen me knock down the wall between one child’s brain and another’s, she had believed that I could knock down the wall between the present and the future, and she had rightly divined that all walls would rumble down at a touch. She had not perceived that unless that touch is withheld, unless the walls are left standing, the universe collapses, we are back in chaos again. So she knocked down the huge wall running across eternity and infinity which is the existence of a human being. She killed Harry Phillips, and would not have killed him had I not imparted to her my false belief that if one can break down walls one should break them down, that if one can alter the universe one should use that power of alteration to its uttermost. I had not then learned that one must move delicately, since creation is plainly a last and desperate resort, a danger improvised to avert another of a more final kind.
Kate said, ‘You are so often out in the evenings. The evening is a sad time. The girls are good, we get on well together, but I have known them only a short time. If I had someone in the house I had known a long time and had to wait on them, it would be a great comfort.’
She was a hieratic being, intensely conscious of degree. As children we had always known when she was baking a birthday cake, though that rite was supposed to be performed in secret, for her demeanour was solemn as it would never have been had there been only scones or pastry for the oven. If I were right and she had peered sideways into the future, she had seen more than a personal tragedy; she had stood on the steps of a temple and looked down on a centrifugal flight of fire, that left the gutted palaces behind and leaped through the blackened city walls and spread over the scorched countryside to the horizons, which would also be ashes.
I said, ‘Of course she must come. Mary will think so too. Sit down and we will talk about how she is to come over and what room she is to have.’ A look of happy cunning came into her eyes. She believed herself to be in a beleaguered city, and she was smuggling in a sick old woman to whom she could be kind, as others would store up food and wine.
The catastrophe she had seen was too large to be poor Queenie’s destiny; yet that seemed catastrophic enough when I met her. I recognised her as soon as I went into the garden of the Dog and Duck, although her deck-chair had been put far across the lawn, right over by the gate into the churchyard, to be out of the way of the people who had come in for lunch. Her lank body was stretched out under a coverlet, her head was thrown back on a cushion, and one hand hung down and plucked at the parched summer grass; and the long lines of her body, her bared throat, and her dangling hand made the same diagram of avidity that I remembered from my childhood. She was motionless, but for the twitching fingers; and when I stood beside her chair I saw that her face too was still, though not tranquil. She was staring at the sky, and one hand held a crushed sprig of southernwood under her nostrils. It astonished me that she was so young. I should have known better, I was aware that Aunt Lily was her elder by several years and was even now not an old woman, and that she had been young when Nancy was born, and that her prison term would not have carried her past the early fifties. But I had only seen her in the bulky clothes which women wore in my childhood, and these made youth as lumbering as middle age; and I could not have allowed for the curious false youth bestowed on her by her imprisonment. Her strong hair was still black, the yellowish skin was still unlined. It was as if she had been laid by in a box.
‘You’re Rose, aren’t you?’ she said, in the slightly mocking tone, the careful but not quite accurate imitation of an educated accent, that she had used to Mamma and Constance so many years ago. ‘I’ve been reading about you and Mary.’ Aunt Lily’s album of press cuttings about us was open on the grass beside her deck-chair. ‘I’m sure I’m not surprised, you were always clever little kiddies.’
Her eyes went back to the sky. It was not I for whom she had been waiting. I had expected to find myself able to talk to her, because we were linked in guilt. But in that instant I knew that we had nothing to say to each other.
I was to learn that of all those who had waited for Queenie only Aunt Lily was to escape this paralysing conviction that it was impossible to communicate with her; and Aunt Lily owed that immunity to a terrier strain in her which enjoyed laying at her sister’s feet everything that had come into common use since she had gone to prison. The Sunday Express; shaped brassières; a crystal wireless set; flesh-coloured stockings instead of black; she did not wait to see what her sister made of them, she was off on a chase for the next marvel. That the others were daunted I saw that very afternoon. Aunt Milly brought out her mending and sat beside us, but soon went back to the house. Uncle Len came out with the wireless set to tell us that there would be the racing results, and meant to wait for them, but went back to the bar, though it was between hours. The trouble was that Aunt Queenie imposed her own pattern on the conversation, and it was a forbidding one. It was not easy for us to raise a subject; if it failed to interest her she looked about her with opaque eyes that made the world a desert, and oneself lost in it
. She asked us questions, and when we answered them she made some comment that deprived of life everyone we mentioned and put every fact outside the context of reality, while at the same time we were confounded by our excessive sense of her own life and reality. She spoke to me of the people who had been kind to her and Nancy and Lily, with curiosity, wondering why they had done it; and all of them, even my father and mother, became waxworks arranged in some tableau illustrating charity. She said how glad she was that in spite of what she had done her daughter had a good husband and a nice home; and Nancy and Oswald became wax models in a shop-window displaying a suite of furniture. This transformation was the worse because there was a furnace breath about her, that would have melted any waxwork.
Mr Morpurgo came and sat down beside us, the pouches under his eyes enormous, as they were in times of adversity. He had brought a parcel with him, and he set about undoing it.
‘Cut the string,’ said Queenie, without ill temper. Simply she told him to cut the string. ‘Don’t go fiddling with it like that. It makes me nervous.’
Meekly he brought out a knife, though unravelling knots was one of his chief pleasures. She was touched and surprised by his compliance. She had perhaps been speaking to herself, as if she were still in a cell, and without expectation of having her own way. She explained that she was very nervous, as she could not sleep as well as she had done in there, and the food out here still worried her, she hadn’t got used to it. Mr Morpurgo said that he understood, and went on unpacking his parcel.
‘I shall be disappointed,’ he said, when he had finished, ‘if you do not find something here you like. One of my daughters chose them for me.’ It was just about that time that the French dressmakers who had come up since the First World War were bringing out their own scents. They sat on the brown paper on his lap, Chanel’s Numéro Cinq, Lanvin’s Pétales Froissées, Patou’s Golliwog, and two or three of the old Floris flower scents. ‘Which will you try first?’
She looked on them like a quiet wolf. ‘That was a kind thought. I have been longing for some nice perfumes. I haven’t dared ask, for everything seems too dear. But there were no smells in there except kitchen smells and disinfectants. How did you know that? It’s a funny thing for a gentleman to guess.’
‘I have noticed that you always have a sprig of southernwood or lavender or a walnut leaf in your hand,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘You are the noticing kind,’ said Queenie. ‘You ought to have been a detective. Some people might think that that’s no compliment. But if people do things that are wrong there have to be detectives to see they’re punished.’ She had pointed her finger at the Lanvin scent, and Mr Morpurgo had unpacked it. ‘I like that black glass,’ she said, and when he had freed the stopper she raised the bottle to her widely dilated nostrils. ‘There ought to be more detectives,’ she mused, her eyes going back to the sky, and she passed into a state of harsh meditation, which we did not interrupt until Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Nancy and Oswald have just come, I see them talking to Milly at the window.’
‘Since you’re both so kind,’ said Queenie, ‘there’s something you might do. I’ve noticed that Cecil’s never written and there wasn’t a message, and Nancy and Lily seem upset if anything we say seems likely to come near him. I would be obliged if you would take some opportunity to tell them that I don’t hold it against him. It’s right and proper that Cecil shouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.’
‘We will tell them,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘But, Mrs Phillips, it may not last.’
‘I should think less of him if it didn’t,’ said Queenie.
Nancy came down the lawn to her mother and laid her lips on a cheek that remained mere flesh under her lips, and Mr Morpurgo and I saluted her and went into the house to seek Uncle Len and Aunt Milly. On the kitchen table there lay a gingerbread, full of crystallised cherries and mixed peel and walnuts, baked that morning, and the four of us ate thick slices of it, going back to the comfort of sugar, as if we were children in a house chilled by grave adult events which we could not hope to have explained to us. As we ate our eyes were drawn to the window. Queenie was still stone, though there was much that might have softened her in this moment. The Thames landscape was as gentle as anything in nature. The river was breathed on by a summer wind, and the flattened and wavering reflections showed what the world would be like if it were slightly diluted, if edges were not so sharp. On a deck-chair in front of her, leaning far forward, sat Oswald, pouting like a baby, surrendering himself absolutely to her mercy as a baby to the breast, while he gave her the gentle domestic news which would have come pleasantly to the ears of the troubled girl in the enlarged photograph over his dining-room chimneypiece. Nancy was crosslegged on a cushion at their feet, faintly smiling. Her enormous cynicism was amused by the inappropriateness of her husband’s tendering offerings, the inappropriateness of her mother’s mineral reception of them. But her gentleness refused to feel despair. She looked about her at the shaven lawn, the moderate river, the tamed woodland, as if there were no desert anywhere. Yet Queenie remained stone, with all this gentleness about her.
It was to be supposed that it was prison which had turned her to stone. We watched therefore with hope and admiration her attempts to annul her imprisonment. During the first week or two she rested for most of the day; her body was shocked into excitability by the cessation of routine, and she was sleeping badly. She forced herself to eat good meals; she found a choice of long-forbidden foods not a gratification of appetite but a wearisome demand on her will and her digestion. Then she asked for some fashion magazines and those weekly papers which publish photographs of actresses and society women, and she huddled over them, lifting her wolfish eyes from time to time to compare what she saw with the women and girls who were eating at the tables on the lawn. Her gaze would stay with some of them only a contemptuous second, and on others would linger with a diagnostic fixity, and her judgment was never wrong. She had grasped what the contemporary woman looked like, as her sister Lily had never done. In a few more days she transformed herself into that image. She made up her mind easily enough to have her hair bobbed, but her face twitched when she learned what the new miracle of the permanent wave involved. But she steeled herself to sit in a little room, bound by antennae to the chandelier-like machine for three hours, as was then necessary. Then she went to London for the day with Milly and Lily, and in the evening they showed her off proudly, standing between their artlessness, wearing a straight and short dress and a cloche hat, and stamped with the hallmark of the fashion of the age. She was of course not really elegant. She was not the polished Malacca cane that Chanel made of a rich woman in those days. But she was a straight staff of dark wood.
Nancy, seeing her for the first time in her contemporary uniform, exclaimed, ‘Your name suits you, Mamma! There is something very regal about you.’
Queenie murmured, ‘Am I all right? I feel all wrong. I could look a sight more regal if I could wear a big hat. These little things squashed down on your head couldn’t help anyone. And there are no violets. No violets anywhere. We had such lots of them. The Parma violets were the best. They’re the paler sorts. We used to put violet essence on them and wear them on our furs in winter and put them where we pinned our feather boas to our blouses in summer. They gave a lovely finish to a turn-out.’ Her eyes were caverns of nostalgia. They roved and fell on her image in the mirror over the chimneypiece, and blazed with delight in the present. ‘But there,’ she said. She was not stone. She was full of gusto at ranging herself with the living.
She often rose and sombrely left us to go to church; and then she too was not stone. Once we went together to early communion. She walked through the wicket-gate with a certain disdain; the repentance which was harsh about her might have preferred our path not to follow easy contours among the tombs and the long summer grasses under the morning sky, but to run under vaults along distempered and scentless corridors, with a file of the punished shuffling before and after us. We were much
too early. Fidgeting, she frowned about her at the grey church and its gilt and enamelled monuments, its richly coloured heraldic glass, blaming them for not being as haggard as herself to suit the gravity of what was to happen at the altar. When the vicar and his server came her hungry expectation brought her sharply down on her knees, and I could feel her faith as if she were playing very loud on some spiritual instrument like a cornet. At the altar rails her expectation was fed, and she walked victoriously when we left the church. The inn was now awake. Uncle Len was singing ‘He went on swinging her higher’ in the bathroom, and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily and the potboy were carrying on a dispersed trio from the bar, the coffee-room, and the staircase, concerning the best way to remove nicotine stains from table linen, the women’s voices old but fresh with undefeated hope, the boy’s voice fresh with youth. Queenie and I had the kitchen to ourselves and the secret we had brought back from the church.
I made the tea strong as she liked it. ‘One lump,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got my sweet tooth back yet. Well, that was nice. A lot of rot there being no God.’ She gave me a twisted smile before she drank. ‘Many’s the time I’ve wished there wasn’t.’ She drank deeply, wiped her mouth, pushed back her cup and saucer, put her elbows on the table and rested her brow on her hands. ‘How early it is,’ she said. ‘A day’s a long time.’
She was stone again. She knew we were not going to fill her day with what she wanted.