Cousin Rosamund

by Rebecca West

  ‘You are sure to be right. You would not have loved her so long without knowing her. And forgive me with saddling you with a faithless lover.’

  ‘I could never have a lover, faithful or faithless. I cannot love anyone except the people I have loved since I was a child. My father. My mother. Richard Quin. Who are dead. And Mary. And Rosamund. There are others I love, Kate, whom you know, and old Miss Beevor, and three people who keep a pub on the Thames called the Dog and Duck, and a girl called Nancy, and even they were all given me by my family. But for deep love, the sort you felt for Celia, I cannot get past those five people. I shall not ever love anybody else as I love them.’

  ‘I have only three. My father and mother, and Celia. Who are all dead. And I too know that there is the end of the list. I have lost my power to love.’

  We looked out for some moments on the tree that blazed white on the white lawn under the liquid starry sky. I said, ‘I would not be any different. Would you?’

  ‘Not for the world. Yet it is a very curious fate, to have the book closed so early when other people read in it so much longer. But now go back to your sofa and sleep. I will call you early, I will telephone for a taxi and we will all get out of this bawdyhouse at the first possible moment and get breakfast at the inn.’

  VII

  WHEN I WOKE I could not think where I could be. I was so delighted to be there. Even after I had remembered I was still ecstatic. My arms folded behind my head, I lay and watched the framework of light round the dark and stolid window-curtains, and thought of the morning outside which I conceived to be hazed with heat under a pale dome, the trees and hills standing half-created, mere outlines. There came back to me knowledge of the human hideousness that had come my way before I went to sleep; the insults to which we had been subjected in this house hardly affected me, for Oliver’s story was so much more strong. Celia’s singing was loud in my ears; it was almost all I remembered about her. She had an extremely pleasing legato which she took with her into quite difficult music, and much more besides. Indeed her voice was of the sort that suggests immortality, that promises to sound somewhere after a singer and audience are dead. Yet she had lost her voice before she died. I was grieved by that and by my failure to divine Oliver’s unhappiness, and I looked forward to telling Mary his story and getting her to help me with plans for his distraction. But at the same time I was thinking of none of these things. I was absorbed in my sense of the morning that would receive me and bathe me when I should leave this house. I got up and stretched and laughed at nothing to the four corners of the shadowed room, and went through the corridors, which were still dark, for the curtains had not yet been drawn, to the cloakroom where we had washed the night before. I did not mind that the water was cold, although I always made a great fuss if that happened at home. When I came out into the corridor Oliver and Avis were coming towards me. She was carrying her violin-case with just such a mother-and-child concern as Cordelia used to show; it is not fair how one should be taken and the other should be left. Oliver was kind, it showed in the way he walked beside this girl, his arm was curved, he knew well she was clumsy and would knock into something, and he did not count it against her, he only tried to save her the humiliation. They were both as happy as I was. It seemed they had learned from an early-rising footman that a lorry was taking milk-churns to the station, and the driver was waiting for us now. But first Oliver and I went into the little library, which had not yet been set to rights, and was still a sea-green tent of brocade curtains, enclosing the smell of tobacco and the exhalations from the half-inches of wine in the glasses on the disordered table. I wished we could have gone straight out into the morning. But the delay was necessary, we pushed away the chairs the diners had left askew and spread our cheque-books among the dirty coffee-cups and glasses and plates, of which those that were smeared with peach-skins were peculiarly sordid, and we wrote out cheques for the benefit of the charity we were now not going to serve by playing at the concert. The four blanc de chine parrots looked down on us from the heights of the greenish bookcase with an irony that was too apposite, for it was hard to write these cheques without feeling a vulgar satisfaction at being able to buy one’s way out of this barbaric household in currency they recognised.

  We left the envelope on a table in the round hall. Then Oliver and Avis took me through a passage with a vaulted roof, which had an amusing echo, and we came out into a courtyard built of the same blonde stone as the pilasters on the house, with that air of the classical drama, of Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida and Sejanus, which people of the past often thought appropriate to stables. As Avis climbed up on to the high lorry, cradling her violin, I said to Oliver, ‘You should write an opera about some lovely stables.’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘about an elopement frustrated by some respectable horses who would not draw the coach in which the guilty pair were fleeing.’ I could have got on the lorry by myself, but he lifted me, gently but so strongly that I shot up from his arms and was suddenly beside the churns. He looked after women so well that he might have been an American. I was foolish ever to have suspected that he was homosexual. ‘An opera with instrumental choruses of neighing horses,’ he said, jumping up beside Avis and me. ‘What instrument do you suppose?’ We thought the cor anglais, though perhaps one would have to put something inside it, to get the right equine tone, as one puts tissue paper across a comb to get a harmonica effect.

  We lumbered through an archway carved with trophies, into the full morning which was not as I had expected, but was also glorious. The world was rough and golden, like Rosamund’s hair when she first awoke. The turf in the park, bleached and glazed by the dry summer, gave back the yellow sun, but every low tuft had its shadow because the sun was still not high, and when we went out into the open country the standing crops were more yellow than green, and chalk-laden red fallow lands were luminous; but nothing was smooth, each of these fields was broken by the short shadows of what grew close to the ground, or the long shadows of the trees, or the hedges distorted images of themselves which they dropped on their westward side. This was not the strong light I had imagined, pouring down from a zenith blanched with its strength, blinding the eye to all but essential forms. Yet I felt myself bathed in such a light. I was in a trance, sealed from the world, yet I followed Oliver’s pointing finger and saw the rabbits loping far out in the open fields. Even more definitely than when I first awoke, I was living a twofold life.

  We found that there was no sense in taking the same train as the churns, it only went to the junction to meet a train that was going west, and we wanted to go east. We could just as well wait till the next train, which left in two hours and a half’s time. There was a curious pleasure in watching Oliver settle all these details. As we came out of the station we saw the innkeeper’s wife standing at her front door, shaking a mat, and we hurried across to her.

  ‘What, back so soon?’ she asked, kindly. She was afraid for us. Perhaps we had not been good enough for Barbados Hall, perhaps we had been sent away.

  ‘These ladies were sent for,’ said Oliver. ‘They were called away to play at other concerts.’

  The innkeeper’s wife nodded. She was glad there had been no awkwardness. ‘You can’t have liked that,’ she murmured, ‘having to leave the lovely place so soon.’ She told us, as if to comfort us, that she would give us breakfast, though it was so early, and we took Avis into the garden to sit at the table under the apple trees where we had had tea. Oliver said, with a wonder which would have seemed excessive had I not felt it too, ‘Rose, it is not twenty-four hours since we were here.’ We sat down and rested our elbows on the table and drowsed in the sunlight, until Avis said suddenly, ‘Damn!’

  We looked at her, and she swallowed. ‘Yesterday, at that horrible place, I knocked over a beastly table and broke something. I could not help it, they were all staring at me. Should I send a note saying I will pay for it?’

  ‘No,’ said Oliver, shutting his eyes again.
/>   ‘But they will say I am dishonest as well as clumsy.’

  ‘The thing will have been insured. Probably with two companies. Never think of it again.’

  ‘How can I help thinking of it? It was so awful.’

  ‘Think of those bloody people, remember how bloody they were, call them what Othello did. “Goats and monkeys! Goats and monkeys!”’

  ‘Goats and monkeys,’ I echoed sleepily, my face in my hands.

  The peace of the garden was sweet about us. ‘There is honeysuckle somewhere,’ said Oliver. ‘Sniff it, Avis, and say, “Goats and Monkeys”. And the dahlias; surely they are more beautiful than they were yesterday?’

  I said, ‘It is because we are here so early. Mr Morpurgo says that two hours of sunshine take away the genius of the colour in every flower but the rose. The night remakes it; but the genius is gone till the next day. That is why when his favourite flowers come to blossom he has himself wakened at dawn.’

  ‘Who is Mr Morpurgo?’ asked Avis.

  For a minute I could not answer. Then the innkeeper’s wife came back and spread on the table a darned cloth from Barbados Hall, smiling slyly, knowing that this time we would understand, having seen Aladdin’s cave for ourselves; and Oliver was returning her smile with a deceitfulness I did not like. Then his hand went out to the sugar-bowl she had set down before him, and took out a lump: and I was revolted by the hair that grew from the third joint of his fingers, just above the knuckles. He had of course far less hair than many musicians had on their hands, but it would have been better if he had none. I could not help remembering that it was he who had taken me to Barbados Hall, and for an end which, now I thought of it in the morning light, revolted me. He should not have brought me into contact of any sort with that vile man, Jasperl. I fell back into the world of frightening fairy tales. It appeared to me that to play music written by such a man might spoil my hands, in which my sole value lay.

  Oliver’s eyes, still smiling, held mine. ‘Tell Avis about Mr Morpurgo,’ he said, speaking with masculine impertinence, as if he had a right to give me orders. I told them how he had called at our house in Lovegrove long ago, to help us when we had lost our father, and how Mamma had come into the room, carrying a box of keys and had practically ignored him, because of her astonishment that she had in her house so many more keys than things that locked, and how she had not recognised him, and he had been hurt, and she had somehow put it right, by saying with what singers call attack, ‘Well, I knew there was no great difference,’ and he was entirely satisfied. But when I went on to tell how he had helped us with our careers, Avis cried out, ‘What, you had someone to help you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he was always there to help us.’

  ‘You and your sister did not get on just because you were geniuses? Then how will I ever be able to get on?’

  Her anxiety was terrible. I had to give thanks for the idiot confidence that had inspired my youth. I could not think how to comfort her, but Oliver’s hand closed over hers, and he said, ‘Here comes a symbolic answer. Look at the trays they are bringing us. Bacon and eggs. Tea. Toast. Butter. Marmalade. We ordered all that and had a right to expect it. But there’s a glass bowl full of raspberries, and we said not a word about them.’

  ‘Oh, and cream!’ breathed Avis. Her house must be as poor as ours had been, we had talked of cream like that.

  ‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ said Oliver. ‘Remember that the Lord will provide. Good God, you are a tiresome noisy little thing. You start squealing long before you are hurt. Actually, Rose and Mary started their careers by getting scholarships like the one you are holding, and though Mr Morpurgo helped them by giving them such trifles as an odd music-room when they needed it, the trick was already done by the time he got there. Nothing could have stopped them. Nothing will stop you, unless it is your tendency to rampage and riot instead of getting on quietly with the business in hand.’

  He was very kind, I should not have disliked him. But I was sick with loathing of him, even though he was in a trusting state of happiness that would ordinarily have disarmed me. When we had finished breakfast he asked me to pour him another cup of tea, though he did not drink it, just so that he could go on sitting at the table, pretending that breakfast was not finished, that our adventure was not nearly over. He scattered some crumbs on the grass a little way off and we kept quiet so that the birds would come; and as we sat we could hear in the next field the clatter of a reaping machine, the gentle tempered calls of its driver, the whinnying of the horses and the slow soft blows of their hooves as they turned just beyond the hedge, the diminuendo as the machine went off round the curve of an unseen hill, the crescendo as it came back again, the rhythm repeating itself over and over again, each time with a slight difference in pitch, as the swathe went further down the hill. Oliver listened to this reaping machine and watched it as if it were a special part of creation he had known for a long time and always liked; and when two wagtails strutted across the grass and see-sawed the black and white slivers of their bodies over the crumbs they might have been pets he had lured to him throughout a summer.

  I wished I was back at the Dog and Duck. I wanted to see the familiar discord of Aunt Lily’s dress as she gave the bar its morning dues - the girl can sweep, it takes one of the family to dust - and watch her as, frowning with earnestness, she laid down her check duster that was good enough for the tables and the counters and piously applied a chamois leather to the glass on the prints of dead racehorses and jockeys because they were dear to Len. I wanted to see Aunt Milly, as she stood at the larder door and looked at yesterday’s joints and tapped her upper lip with her forefinger, and calculated what could be got off them for today, and sighed that Len had made a proper mess of that leg of lamb, but what could you do, there wasn’t a man alive who didn’t think he could carve. I wanted to see Queenie who as she came downstairs and sat down in front of her cup of strong tea, with four lumps of sugar in it, jutting her brows at it, knew nothing could let her taste sweetness in her mouth. She would have resembled a great figure from Racine, had it not been for some fact, which was perhaps simply the fact that she really existed. I wanted to see Uncle Len, padding through the garden to see how his roses were growing and if anybody had left any bottles and glasses outside, his red jowls dripping the irascible peace known to old bulls. I wanted to see Nancy and Oswald, holy in their mediocrity. I wanted to see Mr Morpurgo, who would certainly come in towards evening, for he rarely let a day pass without visiting Queenie. Before he went we would stand side by side on the riverbank in the next field, while he dropped his line to the dark waters, which mirrored our images and flowed on and on, out of sight. Everybody in the Dog and Duck had either never been able to live, or had done with life, or lived well within their means and was calm and kind. I wanted to be there, not here.

  The innkeeper’s wife had brought the bill and Oliver had put his hand into his pocket, and was taking out silver, and I was embarrassed at the thought that he was paying for me and Avis, I could not offer to pay.

  ‘Now we must go,’ sighed Oliver with a regret which I felt to be idiotically presumptuous. ‘We must not lose that train.’

  ‘We will only be together till the junction,’ said Avis with angry grief. ‘There we will have to say goodbye, I take a bus. I suppose I shall never see you again.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Oliver. ‘Rose and I will take you home, and we will explain to your family how right you were in leaving Barbados Hall and refusing to play at that concert.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I cannot come.’

  ‘Oh, Rose!’ said Oliver. ‘Oh, Rose!’

  Avis cried, ‘But it’s you they’d be impressed by.’

  Oliver and I had to exchange an amused glance at that. But I loathed him. I was hardly able to speak, to force out the words, ‘I cannot possibly come with you.’

  ‘But why, Rose! Why?’

  ‘I must go back to that inn by the Thames we have often told you about.’ My words st
ruck me as so final, so forbidding, that I relented them. I supposed that was because they must give offence. I did not want that. To make the moment seem more casual I took my powder-puff out of my bag and passed it over my face. My hand was shaking. I said weakly, ‘They will be expecting me.’

  ‘They cannot be expecting you this afternoon,’ he objected. ‘You had arranged to play at that vile concert.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it was always inconvenient for me to leave them.’

  He was sulky for a moment, but it was not his way. He said quickly, ‘Rose, I have been stupid. You have put yourself out to help me with this Jasperl thing! Avis, you squalling little egotist, take note of this. Rose has been doing a job for me for weeks, and looking every day as if she liked it, and suddenly I see that it has been a burden to her, and she has done it all just because she is nice. Oh, Rose, forgive me!’

  ‘No, it is not that,’ I stammered. ‘Ask me to do something really difficult, I would do it, that was not difficult at all. I would do anything for you, any time. So would Mary.’ It embarrassed me to hear these too friendly words. But they poured out of my mouth. I was so anxious to dissimulate this nauseated loathing of him.

  It made it worse that he believed me. ‘Look, Avis,’ he said. ‘As you go through the world of music you will meet goats and monkeys, they are not all kept at Barbados Hall. But you will meet friends. Here I have plagued Rose with a dreary job for weeks, for my own purposes, and kept her up late last night, long after you were asleep, listening to a story which I wanted her to hear, but which she had no reason to want to hear. And all this time I have disregarded the obvious fact she must have obligations and troubles of her own. In fact, I am an egotist like you, Avis, and have behaved in the beastly fashion of our kind, and here she says that she will do anything for me any time I ask. Come, we must go.’