by Rebecca West
Later that morning Mary and I found her in her deck-chair on the lawn, tears on her cheek, ambushing with her hard gaze two boatloads of young people who were letting their craft swing round in midstream while they shouted and laughed and splashed water at each other. The sun turned the spray to silver, one of the girls had red hair that flamed.
‘This isn’t a very nice part of the river,’ said Queenie.
Mary was naively angry. ‘We think it very beautiful.’
‘I don’t mean that. It’s a lovely spot. I mean only the riff-raff come here. Look at them rowing in their braces. I never could bear to see a man rowing in his braces. I don’t think they would do that in other parts of the river.’
Mr Morpurgo spoke from behind us. He was often at the Dog and Duck these days, and never far from Queenie, though he was no more successful than the rest of us in keeping conversation with her alive. He said gently, ‘I believe there’s a hotel near Maidenhead where…’ He did not know what word to use. Just as the pause grew too long he found it. ‘Where the toffs go.’
‘Well, Maidenhead, I mean to say,’ said Queenie. Her swarthiness glistened.
Why should anyone think of Maidenhead with that degree of appetite? It was not a suburb taken over by the river and transformed into scenery for a masque, like Richmond, nor river-country, where the woodlands and the meadows are so green that they give the eye the same pleasure that the throat derives from a draught of cold water. Yet Queenie was so eager for the expedition that she dared not tell us so, but lay languidly in her chair, plucking at the parched grass, but looking at us with the gaze of a dog that wonders if its master is truly thinking of a walk. Mr Morpurgo said that we had better all drive to Cookham and take a launch to the hotel, which was, he remembered, past Maidenhead, at Bray. Hoarsely she objected that she had not the right clothes, and did not answer when I told her that we would go as we were. Her gaze ran down us not disrespectfully, conceding that our dresses and our shoes and stockings were good, but making no pretence that we looked as she would wish to look. She sighed, ‘Well, of course, it doesn’t matter,’ yet took a long time to get ready and came out in a state of considerable elegance, in a dress of a sort we all wore then, beige and cut straight as a chemise, and a little hat pressed down over the eyes. There were only occasional traces of her long enclosure. When the car started she took a pair of gloves out of her bag and drew them on and buttoned them. It would not have occurred to any woman of my generation to wear gloves when she was going on the river, unless she found herself playing a ceremonial part at Henley Regatta. I remembered how Papa had refused to take me out with him one day, when I could not have been more than nine, because I had lost my gloves, although the day was warm and nothing could have been involved except an obscure principle of propriety.
Queenie gave us a flashing smile as she went aboard. Yet it was not for the trip on the water that she had hungered. We passed into the long marvel of Cliveden Reach, the curled trench of woodland volute round its image in the river, all contained within the miracle that is a day on the river, the light above us pure because it reflected only water, the water shining purer because it reflected this pure light. Surely this was the opposite of prison, yet she gave it the briefest inventory-taking stare and lowered her eyes again to her left-hand glove, which she had buttoned wrongly and was rebuttoning.
Her glove arranged, she looked at the stream before us. ‘Isn’t it Saturday? I lose count now. There’s nothing to help one keep the date right in one’s head. Not the same meals coming up. But if it’s Saturday, why are there so few people about?’
Two eights were practising. In! Out! barked the coxes censoriously; the oarsmen, their flesh bronze against their white singlets, pretended that human beings are nothing but lever and fulcrum, pure as diagrams; the clean-cut boats cut clean lines through the water that gave back the pure light of the sky. A rowing-boat nosed into a backwater, another hugged the bank; the girl in one wore scarlet, the other a dark and penetrating blue. In a punt a girl wore another blue, the blue of anchusa. Each of these idle boats kept its own pace, none moving much faster than the current; the variations in their leisure were the more perceptible, the more delicious because of the metronomic bark of the coxes, the backward slide and dip of the oars, the forward and backward slide of the white singlets. The rowing-boat that was entering the backwater passed into shadow; the girl’s scarlet dress became crimson.
‘So few people? It is not yet lunch-time. We would not expect more.’
Queenie’s brows knitted. She sat straight-backed, her gloved hands stiff on her lap, curiously unrefreshed. On Cliveden Heights the woodland lay unexhausted under the noon, and on the water’s edge the willows were as green as if there were no smoke anywhere, and nothing on earth had yet been defiled. ‘Slower, slower,’ said Mr Morpurgo to the steersman in his glass box, taking the bright river under his pouched eyes, as deliberately he would take his Watteau drawing in his hands. Queenie liked it better when we came to the big houses. ‘There’s nothing nicer than red geraniums,’ she said, and exclaimed at the garden furniture. ‘In my days we only had hammocks, they were horrid things,’ she said. She liked the shining launches that were moored at landing-stages or gleamed in the shadow of boat-houses. This too was better than what she had known. But when the river narrowed and Mr Morpurgo said that we must line up for Boulter’s Lock, she cried out in hot and thirsty irritability.
‘This can’t be Boulter’s Lock! Where’s everybody?’
We had for company half a dozen rowing-boats and punts, full of boys in grey flannel trousers and girls in cotton frocks, and fathers and mothers and their children, sitting with their picnic-baskets and their Thermos flasks at their feet, and a couple of launches. The smaller of the two was steered by an old man with a long white beard and an orange homespun shirt, whose wife in a window-curtain dress with a long necklace of amber beads was setting out a meal of fruit and nuts and salads. The other belonged to plain parents and their six children, all in khaki shorts. Queenie said again, ‘Where’s everybody? Where’s everybody got to?’ It was as if she had gone to a theatre and found half the places empty, and demanded why this should be so, for fear she had made a mistake and booked seats for a failure instead of the popular play she had designed to see. It was odd to feel this about the river, or indeed anywhere in the open air.
‘Perhaps there will be more people in the afternoon,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I hope there will be. It’s nice to see a lot of people.’ He was not lying in expressing an opinion which he did not hold. He was looking earnestly into her face, and seeking to enter into her nature.
‘It isn’t only that,’ said Queenie.
He tried to understand what she meant and could not succeed. ‘I rather think,’ he said, at a venture, ‘that you’re disappointed because you remember things not quite as they were.’ His hand turned over on his lap. If it had been Mary or I who was troubled he would have slipped his fingers into ours.
But none of us dared to caress Queenie. She would have wondered why we were touching her.
‘I wouldn’t forget anything about Boulter’s Lock,’ said Queenie savagely. ‘Some things I remembered all the time. The Derby. The City and Suburban. We always went to that. And a ball at Covent Garden. And Boulter’s Lock. I used to go over them again and again.’
The lock gates closed behind us. One of the schoolboys on the domestic launch began to play a toy xylophone, pouting very earnestly as he struck each note, trying for the Londonderry Air. ‘That sounds very nice,’ Mary called to him, leaning over our rails, ‘but your G is flat.’
He sounded it and listened, and looked unconvinced.
‘No, play the scale, and you’ll hear it,’ said Mary.
This time he heard the falsity. ‘Oh, what shall I do?’ he said sadly.
‘Take it to a musical instrument shop and they’ll tune it for you,’ she answered.
His smallest brother, a red-haired little boy, thrust forward his contentious
little face and asked, ‘But what does it matter, the G being flat?’
Mary and I laughed. This was a frontal attack on the foundation of our lives. The bigger boy exclaimed in disgust, ‘Oh, you are silly!’ We really could have made no better answer. We smiled across at Mr Morpurgo to see if he had heard the joke and found that he was watching Queenie. She had turned greenish, and her clothes looked too young for her, and yet there might have been nothing of her except her clothes. She could have been an Aunt Sally propped up in her basket chair.
She said faintly, ‘It’s the water sinking, and these walls going up higher and higher round us. I don’t like it.’
Mary and I put our arms round her, but it was like trying to comfort stone.
Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Put your head back and look at the sky.’
She murmured, ‘Yes, that makes all the difference. This is silly of me. I made up my mind to the permanent wave, but the lock, I hadn’t thought of that. Naturally, when I was here before,’ she said, smiling grimly, ‘it didn’t strike me quite the same way.’ She breathed deeply till the lock gates slowly opened and we chugged out under the stucco bridge into the bright stream. That was silly of me,’ she breathed happily, ‘and now we’ll be seeing Skindles in a moment.’
As we drew nearer Maidenhead Bridge she looked down at her gloves to see if they were rightly buttoned. Her feet had turned inward as she sat, as the feet of the middle-aged are apt to do; she straightened her ankles and pointed her toes. An alert and modish look came on her as if she were an actress, experienced in her art but inexperienced in life, about to give a performance as a duchess. Also beauty reappeared in her, sallow and helleboric, but real. It was not possible to know what bugle was sounding the reveille in her ears. She looked to the left at Skindles, where there were some people lunching at tables outside the hotel, and others sitting nearer the water’s edge with glasses in their hands, and she gave them one of her hard stares and turned away. She had in her time been judged, and she judged. Then she looked to the right, at Murray’s Club, where there was a greater affluence of couples, most of them lunching, some dancing on a floor built round a tree. The crowds had the granular look of human beings casually assembled under strong light and not under the governance of any overwhelming emotion: a light sprinkling on the lawns of a wayward sort of sand. Perhaps Queenie, so inconveniently important and unique, had wanted to see trivial and undifferentiated specimens of her kind.
But she found no contentment here; and this was not the place which she had desired to see. Without disappointment she said to Mr Morpurgo, ‘This bit of river isn’t what it used to be. But I don’t think anywhere can be like what it was now that there’s so much people don’t care about any more. I don’t like it,’ she pronounced in her judicial tone, ‘the way it doesn’t matter now what women look like, provided they’re skinny and have their hair cut right. It’s a pity, you know, that Lil couldn’t have been young today. When we were girls you had to have looks, and she was out. But if she had her time over again now, she could get away with it, particularly if someone else dressed her.’ We slid under the bridge and her voice spoke under the arches with ghostly inhumanity. ‘It wouldn’t matter, that horse-look she has.’
Beyond, alders and willows on an island, and the circle of images round it, were a confusion of gentle greens, and the water that was their looking-glass was a kindly grey. It was good that there was tenderness in the world if only in colours. After that there was the curious railway bridge, grim and grudging in line, and painted a deep, absorbent crimson.
Queenie said, ‘This bit we are coming to is what I wanted to see, really.’ She spoke in her habitual, quietly hammered measure, but her beauty became extraordinary. She was more vulgar than before, she might have been posing to some mediocre artist who wanted to paint a gipsy, but her face was a light-house, like the faces of the young. Her eyes were brilliant darkness, astonishingly pure in their setting of lined flesh; her lips and teeth shone; she was not yellow any more, she glowed. It was strange that she should have cast off years and be flushed as if she might run further back towards her youth, simply because we were coming into the water that lies between the railway bridge and Bray Lock. For if the Thames can be dull, this is dull. On the right bank is a line of vapid villas in gardens spitted with notices that say ‘Private’ yet look like public recreation grounds. On the left bank there is only a towpath and the plains beyond. ‘Her memory has mixed it up with somewhere else,’ I thought. ‘The Temple at Henley, or Hambleden Mill and its cedar, or both, she has transplanted them and put them down here. Never mind, we can take her to see them where they really are some other day.’
But as we came out of the arch we forgot her. That is a strange saying, ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,’ for water, by its variability, perpetually excels itself. There had been an infinity of green images, printed on a grey mirror. Now there were no images, and nothing was grey. The midday sun rode in a high sky empty of cloud, and it poured down light on water shuddering under little winds. The river was milk-white and scaly like a fish, with a fleck of deep blue in every scale. We exclaimed in joy, and Mr Morpurgo said, ‘My Sisley.’ But Queenie wailed, ‘Where are they? Where are they all?’
Mr Morpurgo slipped from his seat and knelt beside her. ‘Oh, hush. Hush, my dear. Where are what?’
‘The houseboats. What’s happened to them? There were hundreds of them. All along the towing-path.’
We looked down the reach. There were some rowing-boats and punts and canoes and launches moored by the villas, and some craft on the stream. But there were no houseboats anywhere.
‘We passed some, by the islands,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, and nasty scrubby things they were,’ said Queenie. ‘But the ones I remember were lovely, and they went all the way along from Maidenhead Bridge to the Lock. Oh, don’t tell me I’ve forgotten. If there’s anything I got right, it’s this. I’ve seen them so often in my head. Some of them had funny names, like Dewdrop Inn.’
Mr Morpurgo called to the steersman. ‘Can you tell us, please, were there ever a lot of houseboats moored along this bank?’
The man turned round and faced us. He was as old as Queenie. His face was deeply engraved with discontent. ‘Yes, they used to go the whole way along to the lock. When I was a young man.’
‘Well, where are they now?’ asked Queenie, angrily. ‘Why did they move them?’
Mary took the wheel from him so that he could give his whole attention to this lament, this invocation. ‘They didn’t move them,’ he said. ‘They went out of fashion. They weren’t worth anything any more. Most of them’s broke up long ago. There’s a few left, for the sort that want them for cheapness. There’s some live on them to dodge taxes, and there’s queer people, riff-raff, you know. And there’s schoolboys and that. It’s a cheap way of having holidays. But people with money won’t look at them now.’
‘What?’ Queenie begged him. ‘Not Gaiety girls? Not stockbrokers?’
‘Oh, it’s a long, long time since we had any of them about.’
‘Do you mean that nobody has houseboats all painted white, with wire baskets full of red geraniums hanging along the front, and a deck where you sat and played the banjo in the evening?’
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard anybody play the banjo for years. They’ve got this new thing called the ukulele but it doesn’t sound so good over the water as the old banjos used to.’ He faced her anguish with a stolid discontent that confirmed it. ‘The river’s gone down,’ he stated in so flat a tone that it seemed as if he must be speaking of a material fact, and we all glanced away at the water to see whether it had suddenly fallen by some inches, and we had been wrong in supposing the Thames not to be tidal at this point.
Mr Morpurgo said to him, ‘Now we will go on to the hotel as quickly as possible, please.’ Then he knelt at Queenie’s feet. ‘Here is a clean handkerchief. Is there nothing else than houseboats that you specially wanted to see?’
&nb
sp; ‘Oh God!’ she said, throwing off her little hat and holding her head between her hands. ‘I knew I’d never go to one again, but I did like to think of them still being there.’
I stroked her hair, which was curiously strong and coarse, but I did not know what to say. ‘We will have a good lunch at this hotel,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I haven’t found out yet what you really like to eat or drink. And then we have the whole afternoon before us. Is there nothing else you want to see, Queenie? Where you would like to go, we can take you, Queenie.’
VI
IT WAS A DAY OR TWO afterwards that Oliver and I had to go down to the West Country for a charity concert, to be given at a house that was supposed to be very beautiful, Barbados Hall, just after Goodwood. There was so much reason why we should attend this concert, and there is so much of the accident in all events, that I did not think we would ever go. Oliver’s interest in the occasion was his passionate desire that I and a violinist named Martin Allen, who had been a fellow-student of mine at the Athenaeum, should play a sonata for piano and violin written by Kurt Jasperl, a Swiss composer in his early thirties. Why it was imperative that this should happen Oliver explained to Miss Beevor and Mary and myself one afternoon when he came in for tea. It was no trouble having Miss Beevor. She had to stay in bed perhaps one day in ten, which gave Kate something to distract her from growing melancholy. For the rest Miss Beevor was cheerful, and men liked talking to her.
‘Jasperl,’ Oliver said, to her rather than to Mary and me, ‘is consumptive, and he is just about to come out of a sanatorium after two years of treatment.’
‘Oh, poor young man,’ said Miss Beevor.
‘It would be appalling if he were to come out and throw away the strength he has got back by going out and taking some wretched teaching job,’ said Oliver.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Beevor, ‘the poor young man.’