Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  But when the footman opened the door Martin was not there. It was a shabby little room with an upright piano in a corner, and in front of the fireplace stood a stout and sallow girl of seventeen or so, dressed in crumpled bluish-pink linen, and holding a violin and a bow.

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said, scowling. ‘I thought you would never come. Why have you been so long? I am Avis Jenkinson. What, do you not know who I am? Didn’t that horrible woman tell you? Oh, I know I should not call her a horrible woman, for we are in her house. But I told her I would not come unless she telephoned you both and heard it was all right. You see, Martin Allen cannot come. He has had an attack or appendicitis and is having an operation tomorrow morning. I am supposed to play instead of him. Oh, do not trouble to stop looking like that, I know how awful it is. I should not ever have consented to it for a moment, but I wanted so much to meet you both, and I did make it clear that I would not think of it unless she telephoned to both of you and told you who my teacher was and you could telephone him and he would tell you how good I am. But of course she did not do it. Everybody here is a beast, and she is the worst beast of all. They have been such beasts I did not dare to go in to tea. But I suppose,’ she said bitterly, ‘by this time you think I am a maniac.’

  Oliver stood silent. He raised his right hand to his lips and bit the knuckles, then whispered to himself, ‘Jasperl.’ Then he shook himself, as if he were a dog coming out of the water, smiled at the girl, and said, ‘Let us sit down and then you can tell us all about it.’ She looked so awkward and bedraggled as she dropped into an armchair, one foot beneath her, that I had to ask, ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Of course. How would I know people like this? There are some professional musicians here, but they are as horrid as the rest. Of course I do not mind what they do to me, but I want to kill them.’

  ‘But there are three of us now,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, and we are the real people, and they aren’t,’ said Avis. ‘I have been telling myself that, ever since I got here, I have been reminding myself that in a hundred years’ time I shall be remembered, and they will be forgotten as if they had been sheep or horses. Spavined horses, they say in books, though I do not know what it means.’

  ‘But how did it all happen?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘I live near here,’ said Avis. ‘My father is clerk of the gasworks at Aysthorp and I went to the music summer school were Mr Allen has been. When Mr Allen had to go into hospital, because he had appendicitis, the people at the music summer school telephoned to Lady Mortlake, and she was in a panic, she wanted you to come to the concert whatever happened. It is something to do with someone called Lady Southways. Oh, it has nothing to do with music, Lady Southways likes you,’ she said, pointing her bow at Oliver in a censorious manner. ‘And Lord Southways has a lot of money and breeds wonderful racehorses, and Lord Mortlake is poor, or what these people call poor, and anyway I wish the Mortlakes were so poor that they would starve, and Lord Mortlake is trying to breed horses, and he has a mare that is very good, and he wants it to have a foal by a horse that belongs to Lord Southways, so Lady Mortlake wants to please Lady Southways by getting you here. She knows nothing about music, though she talks about it all the time. She went on and on about a concert of Beethoven’s later quartets, and I think Beethoven’s later quartets are jolly difficult to understand, don’t you? Don’t you? But she came to me just because they told her at the music summer school that Mr Allen had been practising Jasperl’s violin and piano sonata with me, she did not see how impossible it is that I should play it with you; I should not have said I would, of course, but she was so nice to me when she came and asked me to do it, and I did so want to be with you. So I came here, and I have been practising it, and I see how impossibly difficult it is, I cannot get the hang of it at all, everybody here has been foul, when I come into the room they stare at me and stop talking. I must have been mad when I said I would come, though really I am quite good, I am exceptional, my teacher would have told you so.’

  ‘Who is your teacher?’ asked Oliver.

  I shut my eyes. It seemed to me inevitable that she would answer ‘Silvio Sala’. For many years I had not thought of the poor old humbug who had sat in a gilt armchair, once part of a touring company’s Rigoletto set, between two panels of machine-made tapestry, representing Mascagni and Verdi, in a house on the Brixton Road, pretending to have been a professor at Milan Conservatory and charging Miss Beevor huge fees for lessons to Cordelia. Inevitably he must by now be in his grave. But this girl’s air of foredoomed failure was so great that I could not doubt a parallel between her fate and Cordelia’s; and it would not be a true parallel, for this girl had no last resource of loveliness, no alternative career. Her defeat would be absolute.

  But she answered, ‘I have two really. Kingsley Torbay and Pietro Pedrucci. But I like Kingsley Torbay better. There is almost nothing more that Pedrucci can teach me, and so he does not like me.’

  ‘What, you are at the Athenaeum?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I have a scholarship there. You haven’t been to a single students’ concert since I’ve been there,’ she accused me. ‘But if you had you would see that I am pretty much what you were when you were there, allowing for the difference between a violin and a piano. Why did you choose the piano? Surely the violin is a better instrument. I would be happy at the Athenaeum if it were not that nobody likes me much except Mr Torbay. But I expect they liked you.’

  ‘No, they did not like me much.’

  ‘Did you ever find out why?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘I wish, I wish people were not such beasts,’ the girl raged. ‘But how extraordinary they dared to be beasts to you. You must always have been good-looking. How horrible that I am going to fail you, for of course I cannot play this sonata.’

  ‘Play us something, anything,’ said Oliver, ‘then we will know where we are. Though I think I know where we are.’

  She sighed. Instead of a plain and harsh adolescent, she looked a pretty and timid child. She put her pad under her chin and picked up her violin and bow, muttered through her teeth, ‘I am no good, really,’ and began to play. I was right that she was foredoomed to failure. She would perpetually suffer the same defeat which was the lot of Mamma and Mary and myself and all our company of interpretative musicians. Her body could not produce the sounds which would make others hear the music which her mind knew the great composers had intended to convey; nor did her mind fully grasp what their intention was. But her body was so nearly obedient to her mind that it was aware of the extent of its disobedience and was ashamed; and she understood so much great music that she could see where she had a blank space on her map. She would possibly be a better player than I was. I could hear signs that she would ultimately possess that sublime lucidity which made Mary my superior.

  She lowered her bow and grumbled, ‘I played that like a carthorse.’

  I said, ‘Let us get one thing out of the way at once. You are our equal except in experience. You have not learned quite a number of things that you need to learn, but that is only because you have not had the time. Oliver here will agree, we are all three on the same level.’

  ‘That is quite evident,’ said Oliver in the casual tone that was needed, for the tears stood in the girl’s eyes. She had used mascara on them, with a marked lack of skill, and they were smudged already. ‘If anybody of your age could play the Jasperl sonata with insufficient rehearsal, it would be you. But you must not be disappointed if it turns out that the feat is impossible, and we call the thing off. It does seem like trying to go down Niagara in a barrel, the chances of being smashed and submerged are terrific. But let us get down to it.’

  ‘But that’s another thing,’ sulked Avis, ‘you cannot get down to it here. This piano is out of tune. They only call this the second music-room for an excuse to put me here. It is the schoolroom really, the footman calls
it that. Apparently Lady Mortlake has children, nobody remembered in time to say, “Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful!” There is a lovely music-room with a good Steinway, but they did not want me in there, there is a horrid little peer who plays the piano like a musical box and he is always in there.’

  ‘Show us where it is,’ said Oliver.

  ‘No, no,’ she begged. ‘They are too horrible. Yes, of course, I see that we must.’

  It was in one of the two classical wings: a large room with a tremendous chimneypiece, where Apollo was playing his lyre before an audience of gods and goddesses enthroned on mounting marble clouds, and grey and white walls embossed with flutes and trumpets and viols and harps in plasterwork, and high windows looking out between bluish silvery curtains to a lawn and a distant prospect of the park. One of these windows was open and swinging on its hinges, and the wind had sent some sheet music drifting across the carpet, which was also patterned with musical instruments. ‘Have you tried this Steinway yourself, Avis?’ said Oliver, going towards the piano. But he came to a halt. A slim man was sitting on the stool, his face pressed down on the keyboard, his arms clinging to the music-rest, his shoulders shaking. Oliver went back to the door and shut it noisily. But the man continued to sob, more noisily than before, and did not lift his head. Oliver crossed the room to the piano, Avis and I behind him. We were all insensible to the little man’s sufferings, partly because there was an indefinable air of habit about his paroxysm, but chiefly because we were no longer three human beings, we had become a rehearsal of Jasperl’s sonata, and we saw him simply as an impediment to our full being.

  We came to a halt beside him. Oliver was about to speak but paused in embarrassment. There was a circle of baldness on the little man’s head, and the long wisps of mouse-coloured hair that he had combed across it bore traces of golden dye. Oliver sighed and put a hand on his shoulder, and the little man sat up with a jerk, but did not look round. Staring in front of him he cried: ‘Of course you’ve come back. I knew you would. But it’s no use. I’ve finished with you. I couldn’t start again even if I wanted to. You’re hopeless. You’re so base. So utterly and so vulgarly base. If you hadn’t said you never wanted to ski with anybody but me, I wouldn’t have minded what you said to Lawrence at luncheon. But you did say it. And I never asked you to say it. You insisted on saying it. I remember putting my hand over your lips when you said it because I didn’t want you to commit yourself. It’s never been me who asked for assurances. It’s always you who gave them. Who thrust them on me. And I couldn’t help believing them, though everyone warned me against you, because I’m that sort of person. You should know that by now. And you should know what skiing means to me. And Kitzbühel. Our place.’

  Oliver said through his teeth, ‘Oh, God. Please, please, Lord Sarasen, get off that piano.’

  The little man swivelled round and gaped at us. ‘Please go away,’ he said fretfully. ‘How dare you interrupt us?’

  ‘But there is no one else here,’ said Oliver.

  The little man looked round the room and buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Please, Lord Sarasen,’ said Oliver, ‘we want this piano.’

  ‘And if it is Mr de Raisse you want,’ said Avis, ‘I think that’s him out in the garden, lying face down on a lilo by the herbaceous border.’

  The little man bridled, and rearranged his collar and tie, and swallowed, and suddenly sprang to his feet and ran through the open window.

  ‘God forgive us all,’ said Oliver. ‘The poor little beast. Now let’s get down to it.’ While I altered the stool he pushed forward a music-stand for Avis, who said, ‘I don’t understand about homosexual men. I know they’re supposed to be like women but they aren’t, really, are they? Their voices are higher than ours, and quite differently produced, and there’s the funny tone no woman ever gets, as if they had plush tongues. And women don’t move like that, look at him now, it’s like a loose-limbed corkscrew, not like a woman. And all that he was saying, no woman would talk like that, about giving assurances and believing them, and no woman would have got so excited just because that awful man de Raisse said to the flautist that he ought to go to Kitzbhel for winter sports. You wouldn’t, would you?’ she asked me, and turned to Oliver, ‘Do you understand about homosexual men?’

  ‘Afterwards, afterwards,’ said Oliver. ‘Rose, are you ready? But, Avis, aren’t you at all sorry for that pathetic little brute?’

  ‘No,’ said Avis. ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘You are a horrible brat,’ said Oliver. ‘But we will go into that later. Now for our dear Jasperl.’

  She had known that Martin Allen’s interpretation of the sonata was wrong, and had disregarded it, but she had not understood it any better herself. But her error partook of her magnificence. I had only known musical misapprehension rise to the empyrean on such strong wings once before, when I heard ‘Jardins sur la pluie’ and ‘Les Danseuses de Delphe’ and ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’ played by a schoolgirl who had never heard any Debussy, and played them as if they had been written by Beethoven during an attack of cerebral anaemia. Although only thirty-five years had passed between the death of Beethoven and the birth of Debussy this confusion of the two composers played such havoc with their essential qualities as a historian might equal if he ascribed to Napoleon the same motives for conquest as inspired Julius Caesar. Avis’s error about Jasperl was also temporal. She had not heard this kind of contemporary music, and though she had wit enough to see that Jasperl did not belong to the past she played the sonata as if it were jazz, as if it were an improvisation, whereas its character was, if anything, over-deliberate.

  She was furious with herself for her mistake, which she immediately perceived from my performance. ‘But wait,’ said Oliver, ‘you are simply leaving something out of your conception of the work. Once you get it in, the whole thing will become easy to you. You are used to music that has melody and an accompaniment to that melody. Here the melody has its own rhythm, and the whole work has its own very strong rhythm, which encloses the other as in a casket. We want the wild, adventurous thematic material, which is always lunging off into dissonance, to be kept in order by this overreaching rhythm. Listen. This is part of something which was written this year by Bartók.’ He played it to her twice. ‘Now this is something I wrote.’

  ‘Play it again,’ said Avis, and when he had played it twice she said, ‘But are you sure you have really anything to say there?’

  ‘Whether I have or not, you can’t give me a chance to say it at all, unless you give the overall rhythm its chance. And I may have nothing to say. I mean I may have nothing more to say. I know I once had something to say, but perhaps I have gone bad lately. But quite certainly Jasperl has a lot to say. Now try over that second movement, you will get the trick of it better there than in the first.’

  She began to understand, and we took her through the whole sonata.

  Then the door softly opened, and someone looked in, and softly closed it. Then it was opened again, quite noisily, and a voice called my name and Oliver’s. We pretended we did not hear, but in a minute they were standing in a crescent round the piano, a dozen or so of them, including three girls. We knew most of them. They belonged to a circle very prominent at that time, which was paradoxically at once rubbish, and as certainly not without value. Half of them belonged to families that were rich or aristocratic, and sometimes both, and the rest were the friends they drew from every class, either because they loved them or found them gifted in the arts. They were in all things paradoxical. Nearly all, except some of the younger homosexuals, had plain faces, with protruding eyes and receding chins and colourless skins, but their bodies were graceful, and they had slender wrists and ankles and a dancing walk. Individually each had an air of distinction. Yet, seen together, they recalled the poorest sort of touring theatrical company which one saw sometimes waiting at railway junctions if one travelled t
o a concert on a Sunday, tawdry and insecure. They spoke always in captious voices, as if their pride lay in their capacity for constant rejection; yet they enjoyed life, and they had to be admired for the strength of their enjoyment, which sent them all over Europe to see a beautiful church, a beautiful harbour, a beautiful people, or an innovator in the arts. They had a moral code so confused that the nature of the confusion could not be guessed. Their fastidiousness plainly did not exclude conduct from its range. They bore themselves with the confidence of those sure that they had guarded their honour, who value their honour.

  There were a number of things they would not do; but it was impossible to guess what these might be. I was often perplexed by these people and I was perplexed by them now. Amongst them, much loved, standing at this moment with his arms cast about the unreluctant shoulders of the most aristocratic of them, was a young man who had tried to sell me a Matisse which had turned out to belong not to him but to the elderly peer who had lent him his house while he himself was away on a world tour, and who would not have dared to prosecute him for theft. It was not that his friends did not know that he was a criminal in both the narrower and the broader sense, a thief and a betrayer of a vulnerable lover’s trust, for they often joked about his enormities. But there they were, enlaced with him, and it might be that tomorrow I should hear of them crossing the world, not necessarily in comfort, to admire a work of art which in technique and argument depended on honesty.