by Rebecca West
As she came near the river her eyes were on the dark flowing waters, but a shadow passed over her face and she looked at the table where we were sitting, at Mr Morpurgo and at the parcel lying among its wrappings, as if she had to take up a burden again. I did not trouble to wipe the tears from my face, she would not notice them, so distracted was she by the tedium of finding a response to another of the futile kindnesses that were being offered to her. She laid a hand on my shoulder and said my name, flatly as if it had no meaning for her, and said to Mr Morpurgo, ‘That thing you brought me, I would like to look at it again.’ With effort she added, ‘It’s so tasteful, so -’ In her search for another adjective she let her eyes wander into the distance, where they instantly became fixed, while she asked faintly, ‘Who’s this?’
She was looking at a tall old man with silver hair who had halted as he was about to enter the garden by the wicket-gate on the meadow side. ‘What’s he staring at like that?’ she said, her voice no stronger. ‘Why’s he coming in by that gate that nobody but the family uses?’ The carefully woven tissue of her reticence suddenly ripped. ‘What’s the old bugger think he’s playing at?’ she demanded, with fury, though she did not raise her voice.
‘Why, Queenie,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘that is Oswald’s father. He will have guessed that you are Nancy’s mother. He will have recognised you from the photograph she has in her drawing-room. He has always been anxious to meet you.’
She said words we could not hear, her tongue and her lips moving but making no sound, and remained quite still while Mr Bates strode down the lawn towards us. Mr Morpurgo stood up and put out his hand in greeting, but was ignored. As Mr Bates had approached his gaze had been set on Queenie’s face. Now he leaned on his staff and looked at her, and then asked, ‘Are you the woman who has been a great sinner?’
Queenie was trembling, but she did not lower her eyes or her chin. ‘I am the woman who is a great sinner,’ she answered.
He leaned on his staff for a long moment while their eyes burned into each other’s. Then he came closer to her and said, ‘Come with me and I will deliver you bound and gagged to the mercy of the Lord God,’ and he laid his arms across her shoulders. Side by side they went up the lawn and passed through the wicket-gate.
When I had gaped after them for some moments I started to my feet. ‘Come on, we must follow them!’ I cried to Mr Morpurgo.
His face had expressed such astonishment as mine, but he replied, ‘Follow them? Oh, no.’
‘But he may kill her!’ I exclaimed.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I do not think he will kill her.’
‘But the way he was looking at her,’ I stuttered, ‘the way he spoke to her! Surely he sounded dangerous!’
Mr Morpurgo’s black eyes rolled over to the opposite point of the compass from the wicket-gate, and rested on the company of swans that were patrolling the blackening waters before us. ‘Oh, no,’ he breathed, ‘oh, no.’ I felt suddenly no disposition to argue with him. It was not that I was careless of what might happen to Queenie, but it appeared possible that Mr Morpurgo was right. I felt in relation to her destiny and my own, that there was some element in the situation which for the moment I could not identify, but which guaranteed the safety of both of us. But perhaps this was merely the effect of the double sherry. I said to Mr Morpurgo, ‘What a pity it is we are sitting on this side of the river and not on the other, for over there we would see the reflections of the Chinese lanterns in the water, and it must be lovely,’ and felt my irrelevance. But Mr Morpurgo had left me. I did not care. I was alarmed to the extent to which I cared for nothing. I reminded myself of the horrible sanctimonious arrest to which I had seen Queenie subjected, but I felt no emotion. Presently Mr Morpurgo returned with another double sherry, saying, ‘Not for you, considering you have had no lunch. But for me.’ He drank it slowly, sometimes saying, ‘My God, my God,’ but with less and less intonation of distress.
‘When will they come back, do you think?’ I asked.
‘That no one could tell,’ he answered. Darkness fell round us, the swans grew still more spectral, the laughter and conversation of the diners at their tables under the Chinese lanterns sounded like a bird-song, and I was contented, though very tired. I folded my arms and rested them on the table. Something in the air was very sweet. ‘It is that bed of tobacco-plant,’ Mr Morpurgo explained, and I dozed, waking for a moment because he was laughing, slowly and softly. ‘Why are you laughing?’ I asked sleepily. He answered, ‘I am not exactly laughing. Well, yes, I suppose I am.’ My mind did not want to unravel his subtleties, I felt that all the essentials were so clean. I breathed, ‘How glorious those tobacco plants are,’ and went to sleep again. Then I felt Uncle Len’s hand on my shoulder and heard him happily fulminating over roast lamb and the first of the runner beans.
In the light of the parlour I stood blinking. The electric bulb in the lamp over the table seemed too strong, and the reflections from the polished glass and plate and the white cloth glared. I would have liked to go to bed at once without any dinner. I rubbed my eyes, and Aunt Milly gazed at me critically and nudged Aunt Lily. ‘You don’t look well, love,’ they said in unison.
‘She’s been crying,’ said Mr Morpurgo. He placed himself at the table with an air of appetite.
‘That’s what we thought,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but it’s not like you, Mr Morpurgo, to say a thing like that out loud.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
‘The tears came of nothing but hurt pride,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and she’s going to tell you a story of gangster life that may entertain you. But let her eat first. She’s had no lunch.’
‘No lunch? Silly girl,’ said Uncle Len. ‘That way madness lies.’
As we sat down at the table Aunt Lily asked, ‘But where’s Queenie?’
Over Mr Morpurgo’s face passed the expression he always wore when he enjoyed witnessing a drama that he knew he should not enjoy because it was so serious for its participants. He answered smoothly, ‘Gone to Nancy’s, with old Mr Bates.’
‘Glory, how did that happen?’ asked Len, the carving-knife in mid-air.
‘He came down to our table when she was with us,’ said Mr Morpurgo, sucking his secret knowledge like a jujube.
‘Was he civil?’ asked Lily nervously.
‘He was just right,’ said Mr Morpurgo. Obviously this was a monstrous assertion. Yet I found myself unable to quarrel with it.
‘Len, go on carving but for Pete’s sake turn the joint upside down and begin where you ought,’ said Milly.
‘Wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Len.
‘You go ahead and do as I say,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I’ve a feeling for joints.’
‘You make me nervous, looking at me with that thought in your eye,’ said Len.
‘I’m not looking at you,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘Looking at you when you are carving makes me think of something I once read about an explorer, his plight was horrible, they wrote, he had lost his compass and had no natural sense of the North.’
‘If old Mr Bates hadn’t been civil,’ began Aunt Lily, in a menacing manner, and stopped.
‘If old Mr Bates hadn’t been civil and you’d been round he’d have found he had lost his compass and had no natural sense of the North,’ said Len.
‘Why would Mr Bates have either?’ asked Aunt Lily. ‘He’s not an explorer.’ She took it well when everybody jeered at her, saying, ‘You know, ever since I’ve been a little thing people have laughed at me, because I’m so logical. But I can’t help it, it’s the way I’m made.’
There was then some thoughtful conversation as to whether there was or was not a natural sense of the North, which lasted until Uncle Len said, ‘But what about Rose’s story?’
I had no desire to tell it, not because it represented me as the victim of humiliation, but because I was no longer a part of it. I had this massive conviction at the back of my mind that some great event had taken place and the course of life was now altered
and clear before me, with the result that everything that had yet happened was unimportant. It was as if I were spending the night in a camp stuck by a broad river which was spanned by a huge bridge, built to a great height, span upon span, like the Pont du Gard, which I must cross tomorrow morning very early, to make my way along a road to the mountains where my life was to be, not because I had chosen to live there, but because my life had been transported there, without my consent, without my previous knowledge, by forces not to be resisted, not to be judged.
What did it matter what had happened yesterday in another continent? It was utterly beyond me why I should have this illusion of change that could fill my mind with images of vast architecture, of journeys from which there could be no return. If my double sherry had made me drunk its power must since have worn off. But then I had been a little mad all day. Why had I stood by the Thames and wept and said I wanted to give up playing, a step which now seemed to be hideous? I was conscious too that I had committed some other folly earlier in the day, which I now felt reluctant to remember. There was a singing in my ears and I found thought difficult. Yet I was not simply feverish. This sense of some enormous event, a huge pillar suddenly erected in the middle of my landscape, joining the earth to the clouds, was not a delusion. For as Mr Morpurgo sat eating his roast lamb he was hoarding just such a recognition of the tremendous. He was chubby but he was awed. At one point while I was telling Len and Milly and Lily my story of the night at Barbados Hall he took a jar of redcurrant jelly and forgot his intention to give himself a helping, and then passed into a sort of trance. What I had seen he had seen also.
So uninterested in my story was I that I had to tell it on technique, as one has to play when one is very tired. My hearers were all indignant and I had to force myself to accept graciously their sympathetic explanations, although what I wanted to do was to go upstairs to my bed and lie down on it and sleep until I had to start on my way next morning. I thought of myself as lying down fully dressed, so sensible was I of the need to start early.
‘Ah well!’ they all said at last, getting up and starting to clear the table. ‘People with every opportunity, that’s what I can’t understand’ - ‘Well, it takes all sorts to make a world’ - ‘I wouldn’t say that, there’s sorts that unmake the world.’ Then Lily halted. ‘Queenie’s not back.’
I looked in terror at Mr Morpurgo. Perhaps Mr Bates was praying beside Queenie’s dead body, which he had offered as a sacrifice to his vengeful God. But first Mr Morpurgo shook his head and then gave me a reassuring nod.
‘I’ll leave the back door open, then,’ said Uncle Len.
‘I hope he’s not give her the rough side of his preaching tongue,’ said Aunt Lily apprehensively. ‘Queenie’s so sensitive, if someone spoke unkindly to her, it wouldn’t be hard to break her heart.’
Again I sought Mr Morpurgo’s eyes. But again he shook his head.
When at last I got to bed, I neither slept nor was awake, I was still split in two. Surely I did not sleep, for I could look up at my ceiling and see the cracks on the plaster that drew something like an outline sketch of Paderewski. I could look out at the. dark tracery the wisteria round my blindless window drew against the stars, and sometimes I turned on my light, and sometimes I turned it off. But I neither thought nor felt, I was a suspended intelligence conscious of nothing but the persistent ringing in my ears and this sense that something had been settled. It was the law, the law had been established, it would be maintained. When ordinary sleep came to me, that sense of settlement came with me into my dreams, and when I woke, it was to know that disputation was over. I had to get to town as quickly as possible, and I rose at once and washed and dressed, I did not know the hour, for I had left my wrist-watch somewhere during the previous day, I had thrown time away. But the morning had the pearly light, I could hear the vacuum cleaner going in one of the rooms. They would all be about, I would probably not be able to get the potboy to take me over on the ferry and slip away without breakfast. But I would try. I padded softly downstairs, with my bag in my hand, and let myself out into the stableyard, where the potboy would probably be at this moment.
But I found Uncle Len there. He was comforting Oswald, who was shuddering as if he were cold, and wearing a raincoat, though the day was fine and warm. He had not shaved.
‘Come on, young fellow my lad,’ Uncle Len was saying. ‘What is it that’s making you look so sickish?’
‘It is what my father has done,’ said Oswald.
‘Has he definitely been caught out doing anything?’ asked Uncle Len. The implication of his speech might have distressed a less distracted Oswald, so plain was it that neither Oswald’s wounded feelings, nor the allegation that old Mr Bates had shown an unworthy side of his character, worried Uncle Len very much. So long as there was no question of the police being called in he would remain unmoved.
‘It’s this,’ said Oswald, taking an envelope out of his pocket. ‘We found it on the mat this morning, and I cannot believe it.’
Uncle Len put out his hand for it.
Aunt Lily pushed past me through the doorway where I was standing. ‘Len,’ she called shrilly. ‘Queenie hasn’t been back all night.’
‘What goings on,’ said Len, looking down on the letter he held in his hand.
‘My God, what’s Os doing here so early in the morning?’ asked Aunt Lily, and her suspicion made her scream. ‘I knew it. Your bloody father’s preached at her, and the sensitive little darling’s made away with herself.’
‘Naoh!’ jeered Uncle Len. ‘She’s been a sensible girl and chosen a fate worse than death. Or sort of. Let me finish reading this.’
‘I can’t understand Nancy not minding,’ said Oswald. Almost weeping, he complained, ‘It’s so undignified, at their age.’
‘It’s so undignified at any age,’ said Uncle Len. ‘Listen, dignity’s hardly the object of the exercise. I’ll just give you the sense of it, and you can read it yourself at your own pace. It seems your sister and Os’s pa didn’t get to Nancy’s last night. He took her to the house of Brother and Sister Clerkenwell and they wrestled in prayer all night, and he won her for the Lord God, and they are going to marry. And so they are going to marry, is how he puts it. Though how the Lord God and their marriage mix in together I don’t know, but read it for yourself and work that one out.’
Lily could not take the letter. She supported herself against the doorpost. ‘You mean Mr Bates is going to marry Queenie?’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘But are you sure,’ stammered Aunt Lily, ‘that he realises just how - how high-spirited Queenie’s been?’
‘Oh, Lil, you are a worrier,’ expostulated Uncle Len affectionately. ‘Of course he knows all about that. Everybody does. And the matter would have been bound to come out during this all-night prayer-meeting, I would think. Though I’ve no experience of this kind of night wrestling between a man and a woman. But what’s eating you over this, young Os? Here, pull yourself together and take the letter, Lily. Psst. Os. Step over here for a minute. And you come here too.’ He drew us towards the opposite corner of the yard and casting an eye over his shoulder at Lil, said, ‘Here, Os, if you’re worrying about her doing it over again, your pa’s safe. She was a lot younger then and this man Phillips was a good chap, but soft, who didn’t know how to keep her down. Take it from me, she’ll be all right with your pa. They’re the same sort really.’
‘But it’s not right at their age,’ said Oswald, obstinately.
‘Milly!’ shrieked Lily. ‘Milly!’
‘Why not? You should be glad they have the health and spirits,’ said Uncle Len. ‘God, you’re young, Os.’
‘Milly!’ Lily shrieked again. ‘Milly!’
Milly came through the doorway with a feather duster in her hand. Lily handed her the letter, she read it, said, ‘What of it?’ and went away again. I had had no idea till then how oppressive her matter-of-fact mind had found Queenie’s dramatic quality.
But
Lily sat down on a barrel and said to us, ‘But I can’t like it!’
‘Why not?’ said Uncle Len.
‘Why not?’ repeated Lily. ‘Well, what’s old Mr Bates to give her we couldn’t give her here? What’s she want to go off with him for? Though it makes her happy.’ She left us suddenly.
‘I hate this preaching,’ said Oswald suddenly, ‘when science has proved there isn’t a God. My father won’t sit down and learn anything. He sits and talks this rot about the Heavenly Hostages. And as for marriage, my mother ought to have been enough for him.’
‘Enough’s something you can’t be when you’re dead. Those racehorses I got pictures of, they were all enough for the sport of kings when they were alive, dead they weren’t enough for any but the cats to eat. It’s a horrid thing, eating,’ said Uncle Len, and suddenly lifted up his voice. ‘Milly! Breakfast ready?’
‘For how many?’ Milly replied from the kitchen window.
‘Bacon and eggs for four,’ said Uncle Len.
‘For five,’ said Mr Morpurgo from his window on the first floor. He had been leaning out of it for some time.
‘Not for me,’ said Oswald. ‘I couldn’t touch a thing.’
‘You’re squeamish over this wedding, aren’t you?’ enquired Uncle Len with clinical interest. ‘Try a nice fried egg and some real fat Wiltshire back.’
Oswald shuddered and said, ‘I got this taxi waiting. I’ll be late for school if I don’t hurry.’
‘Creeping like a snail unwillingly to school,’ said Uncle Len. ‘Well, ta ta.’
His hands on his hips, he watched Oswald go out to the taxi, then said to me, beaming maliciously, ‘Funny thing how you can turn up anybody that’s poorly by mentioning a fried egg. When I was in my first job as a bookie’s clerk I had a horrible boss, Hyams was the name. I could get my own back when he woke up with a hangover by saying, innocent as a lamb, “What, not a nice fried egg, Mr Hyams?” Now, I could eat a wolf this minute. I’ve always been one to make a good breakfast. And so have you, Rose. It’s been a great comfort, the amount you and Mary can put away. Come on and show us what you can do.’