by Rebecca West
But we went home quite early. Kate’s mother always gave us a lovely tea, and she did this time too, though she had not expected us. She had some lardy cake in the house, and she made us some West Country splits, and she said she expected us to finish a whole new pot of her raspberry jam, which she did not cook, she heated the fruit and she heated the sugar and beat them up together for half an hour, so that it tasted like fresh raspberries. At tea Kate’s mother told us with the comfortable steady sombreness of her daughter that a great trouble had fallen on England, but that nobody seemed to give it a thought. Mary said in an interrogative tone, “‘And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall,’” which is what Lord Tennyson said happened when the Duke of Wellington died. Kate’s mother said, “Yes, indeed, for it’s just as bad for those in private service.” We had thought she was talking of some national calamity such as Papa prophesied in his leader, but she was speaking as a washerwoman. It seemed that her life, the lives of all who practised her craft, had been made twice as difficult because gentlemen had adopted the heathen custom of wearing pyjamas. She could not understand why they had got this silly notion of wearing coats and trousers in bed when nightshirts were so much easier to iron, and she never hung a pair of the horrid things on the line without saying to herself, “Ah, since I come of a seafaring family I know what nasty savage parts you come from.” But she was not very unhappy about it, and soon she was telling us we could make lardy cake at home. We must go to the baker and buy a lump of his dough, and take it home and roll it out, and then fold it up as if it were a length of cloth we were going to send as a present through the post, and put in between each layer some lard and brown sugar and spices and currants and raisins, and bake it in our own oven, and remember to shake sugar over it just as we took it out. “Gentlemen always like it,” she said, looking at Richard Quin as if he were a specimen of some wild but valuable variety of animal on which she was lecturing. “You will find in every family that the mistress tries to have nothing low served up in the front of the house, but nothing will please the master better than to get hold of a good lardy cake or a piece of dripping toast.” Oh, wanton papas, letting Eastern gods into this green and pleasant land by wearing nightclothes hard to iron, and getting their hands greasy with coarse fare forbidden by refined Mammas …
We could not have had a more pleasant afternoon. When we got home we ran straight into the sitting room without taking off our hats and coats to tell Mamma how exceptionally lovely it had all been. She was looking very tired, and she sighed. “Oh, I wish I had been with you!” And indeed she would have liked it. She would have enjoyed sandpapering the Merciful Flora, it was a job that was half a game like making up an animal, she could have lost herself in it as she did in toy-making. “But though, of course, I was glad that your Aunt Theodora came, she stayed a little long.”
Cordelia said, “Do you mean that Aunt Theodora called this afternoon?”
“Did you not know?” said Mamma sleepily, passing her hands over her head. “I would have had to keep you in to see her if I had not already promised Kate you could go with her.”
“I never knew!” exclaimed Cordelia. “I never knew!”
I realized that she had been upstairs while Kate and Mary and I had made the few delicate arrangements necessary for our escape. “Cordelia,” I said in astonishment, “you wouldn’t rather have stayed in and seen Aunt Theodora?”
“Of course I would!” said Cordelia. Each of us was astonished by the other.
“But why?” I asked.
Cordelia was on the point of tears. “I could have told her about all the engagements I’ve got!” she wailed.
“But why?” I asked again.
“She would have been sure to be pleased.” She snivelled.
“But who wants to please that horrible old beast?” I raged.
“I cannot think why your Papa and I gave you the name of Rose,” said Mamma. “From the first we should have seen it was quite unsuitable. Please be silent.”
“Mamma,” I said, trying to be reasonable, “we have to have Aunt Theodora in the house, though I don’t want any of us to please her. Not to please her. It would be like wanting us to please Nero, or what’s the man who did all the murders, Charles Peace. None of us but Cordelia would want to please her. Cordelia is—” I paused, choked by the intensity with which I wanted to murder her.
Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
“Cordelia is such rubbish,” I concluded.
“Listen, Mamma,” exclaimed Cordelia, “you see how it is, I am the eldest, but none of them treats me with the slightest respect. All the other girls at school who have younger sisters make them obey them and fetch things for them, and that is how it should be.”
“But perhaps,” suggested Mary, “those other girls do not revolt their younger sisters by playing the violin and scooping all the high notes.”
“Aren’t you glad, Mamma,” asked Richard Quin, “that after having three little girls you had a little boy?”
“My lamb, you put it very well,” said Mamma. “Will you run down now and ask Kate to give you your supper, and you, Cordelia, go up to the bedroom, and you, Mary, go up to my room, and you, Rose, go into the dining room, and I will come in and talk to each of you separately before I tell Papa about this.”
I walked up and down the dining room while I waited for her. None of us had been at all impressed by her threat to tell Papa about us. He was interested in nothing about us except our looks and our capacity to absorb ideas. If he explained to us why all parties engaged in the recent South African War had been wrong, and our comments were intelligent, then he burned with love for us, and if they were stupid, he shook his head like a horse rebelling against the bit and went away to be alone. The trouble was that to all intents and purposes there was no man in the house. I decided to fill the need.
“Why are you giving an imitation of Henry the Eighth, or is it Napoleon?” inquired Mamma when I began. But I persisted. “Mamma, why are you so weak with Cordelia? It makes life impossible for all of us. And it will ruin her character. I can’t understand it. You seem to be doing everything wrong.” Suddenly panic seized me, and I was no longer the family solicitor, but a little schoolgirl. “If you do silly things, what is to happen to us all? Why do you let that awful Miss Beevor make a fool of Cordelia?”
“I have told you,” said Mamma. “Sit down, my dear. There are the raisins I bought this morning on that dessert plate. Bring it here and we will wickedly eat all the fat ones and complain at supper that they were not worth buying. I have told you why I cannot come between Miss Beevor and Cordelia, between Cordelia and her violin.”
“About them thinking they’re like Mozart and some wonderful teacher?”
“Mozart and César Thomson,” she grimly suggested.
“Well! That’s mad, and so it ought to be stopped,” I persisted.
“But I told you,” she said wearily, “nobody can prove them wrong. It is no use trying to tell these two that Cordelia cannot play. They will not believe it, they will think that we are trying to cheat Cordelia out of her just glory.”
“But the nonsense would end if you kept Miss Beevor out of the house,” I droned on.
“We cannot keep Miss Beevor and Cordelia apart now,” sighed Mamma. “People meet, and there’s an end to it. Have another raisin. If you roll the little withered ones between your fingers they taste sweet and rich like the big fat ones.”
“Can we never keep people out of the house if we want to?” I grumbled.
“Not so many come,” said Mamma. “Oh, I hope you have many friends, go to lots of parties, when you are grown up.”
“There is Miss Beevor,” I stormed, “and there is Aunt Theodora. We should keep them out. They are so bad for Cordelia’s character.”
“I should not worry about that, dear,” said Mamma.
“I must worry a
bout it,” I said solemnly. “Look what Cordelia said tonight. You know, Mamma, we had such a lovely time with Kate’s mother. Sam is going to repaint the Merciful Flora his next leave, so we got all the old paint off with sandpaper. And she baked splits for us and gave us a whole pot of raspberry jam and said we must finish it. But I am worried, it had a lovely flavour, and I know that Kate’s mother puts brandy in some of her jam. I hope this had none in it, or we shall not be able to claim the money Papa promised us.”
“What money was that, dear?” Mamma asked in surprise.
“Why, he is going to pay us each a hundred pounds when we are twenty-one if we can say we have never drunk anything alcoholic. It really matters about Richard Quin, of course, but Papa says he has seen girls at hunt-balls who drank champagne as if they were gentlemen, and he hears that nowadays they even drink port at dinner, which is terrible, so he said we could each have the money like Richard Quin if we earned it.”
“You should be grateful,” said Mamma, “for having a father so mindful of your welfare.”
“Oh, we are,” I said, “we are.” It crossed my mind that she spoke as if she were laughing at something, and I looked hard at her, but her face was smooth. So I went on, “Well, anyway, the jam was lovely, and Kate’s mother told us about pyjamas being heathen, and how to make lardy cake, and was very nice. And yet Cordelia said she would rather have been here telling Aunt Theodora about her idiotic engagements. Mamma, she wanted Aunt Theodora to approve of her. You can’t really want her to try to please Aunt Theodora. Look where trying Miss Beevor has got her, and Aunt Theodora is worse than Miss Beevor, she is just a cruel beast.”
“You must not say that, Rose,” said Mamma.
“But I must say it, because it’s true.”
“You must not say it,” said Mamma, “you must never say one word against Aunt Theodora. I do not know what would have happened to us two months ago if Aunt Theodora had not given me quite a large sum of money.”
I have recorded my opinion that children are a remarkable race, because they want so much to murder so many people and murder so few. But they have a bad criminal record. Though Mamma’s face always lit up when she was given the smallest present, it darkened when she spoke of Aunt Theodora’s generosity, and I knew quite well that the gift must have been made in some disagreeable fashion. I was right. My mother had been subjected to deep humiliation during the last few weeks. The gift had been proffered before it had been requested, with an air of rollicking bonhomie, and protestations that all the donor asked of the recipient was that the matter should never be mentioned between them. On their next meeting, memory of this lively prohibition had restrained Mamma until her emotions forced out of her a quick expression of gratitude, and at once it was intimated to her that this had come too late and was inadequate. There had followed visits from Aunt Theodora, during which there always came a period when she grew grave, fell silent, and sank in her chair, while her jowls and pouches drooped, and all of her was drawn downwards by her fear that she had wasted her bounty on an object impossible to arrest on its wilful progress towards doom. There were also summonses to Aunt Theodora’s house at Esher. There my poor mother had to sit over long luncheons, while Aunt Theodora found herself too depressed to speak, though afterwards she rallied sufficiently to ask my mother in driving tones whether she was really fully conscious of her situation. There were also letters. Aunt Theodora had for some time past stopped using the black-edged writing-paper of her widowhood, but she now brought it out again, to be covered with empty and solemnly impudent exhortations.
But I did not think of my mother’s martyred pride. I thought of my own conceit. I gasped. “Mamma, we shouldn’t have taken money from Aunt Theodora.”
“I had to do it,” she told me. She was speaking very softly. I suppose she could not bear to speak of it aloud. She went on nibbling raisins, innocently unaware that I was being disagreeable.
“But anything would have been better than that! Mamma, you had no right to do this to me! You should have told me! I am ashamed to think I have been living on Aunt Theodora’s money!”
She stared at me in astonishment. Her head dropped forward, but she held it high again. “You need not be troubled, dear,” she said. “Aunt Theodora’s money went straight out of the house. Nobody could accuse you of living on it now.”
“You could have done something else,” I raged. “You could have let Mary and me leave school, of course Cordelia would not mind, but we would far rather have gone to work in shops or factories and brought the money home.”
After a pause she said mildly, “But you and Mary must go on with your piano lessons.” It seems to me remarkable that she resisted the temptation to say, “You little fool, as if we could be helped by anything that you could do.”
I almost shouted, “You don’t really care about us! Not really! Or you wouldn’t have put us in the position of taking money from Aunt Theodora!”
She murmured, “My head is aching.”
“We must pay back every penny,” I said.
“Yes, dear, sometime, but we cannot do it now.”
“We must do it as soon as possible,” I nagged. “We should be saving every penny.” I pointed at her plate. “You should not have bought those raisins. We could have done without them.”
She looked down at the stalks and pips, the last few smallest fruit, which were the incriminating evidence of her small, innocent greed. She said, “I am sorry, dear, but you really do not understand. And you must leave Cordelia alone.” And she rose and left me.
We came together in spite of my brutish stupidity, because we loved each other, and by mere physical contact with her I was forced into a field of good behaviour, where I was better than I was of nature at this period. For I passed into a detestable phase. I felt that I was ill done by because I distrusted both my parents. I had long known Papa was wonderful but no good as a Papa; he should not have sold Aunt Clara’s furniture. But now it seemed to me that Mamma was no good either, because she would not stop Cordelia from playing the violin and because she seemed to be managing our financial affairs unwisely. I felt sure, of course, that in the end we would be all right. Mary and I never doubted that we would be all right. But we would have to have a framework in which to be all right, and about that I was no longer certain. I remember going out into the garden that autumn, into a warm and sleepy afternoon, and bending down to pick up a golden chestnut leaf that had fallen on a flower-bed, and finding that the earth underneath was very cold, I felt again the fear, of which we had once spoken with Papa and Mamma during the week between Christmas and New Year, and had often discussed since, only convinced it was scotched when the time came for us to look for the dyed eggs among the bushes on Easter Day: the thought that there might yet come a winter which would never end, which would never change to spring. Papa had said that might happen, but not for a long time. Now this thought frightened me, I conceived for the first time that the world might stop totally, and my mind ran past that, it seemed to me that what was called immortal, what survived of men and animals after they died, might also be mortal. I was truly aware of death for the first time, and I saw what it was as clearly as if someone walking beside me had spread out a large-scale map of it and held it before me as I walked, showing me nothingness and nothingness and nothingness, so that I could not fail to see where we were going. It was true that Mamma believed that there would always be a spring, but she was little and thin, much smaller than Papa, and this seemed to me to bear a discouraging significance, particularly when I lay in my bed between sleeping and waking. Then too I would see my brother Richard Quin as I had often seen him practising his flageolet in the stables, tiny under the high rafters, tiny in the empty distances. It did not seem to me that Mamma and Richard Quin could make the whole world go on working if it wanted to stop. I felt certain that I would be destroyed by death, and I wanted as much of life as I could get while I was still alive. In my eyes the life in my home was being impaired by my parents’
ineffectiveness. It would have been better, I thought then and afterwards, if only Rosamund had not gone away.
But we would have her back again soon. Mamma said it was very unlikely that Aunt Jean would live till the end of the year. The hope of having Rosamund with us for Christmas was a great encouragement to myself, and to Mary, who was unhappy too, though I do not know to what degree, for her smooth oval face kept its secrets, she never needed to resolve with her mind to practise reserve, for it was one of her physical qualities. We abandoned ourselves to the pleasure of our Christmas preparations, which were now principally concerned with Richard Quin and with Rosamund. For we were getting too old to play with our dolls’ houses, though actually we always kept them about; and ever since Richard Quin had been given his first fortress he had been creating a world of contending armies dominated by Alexander the Great and Wellington, who were united against Napoleon and Charlemagne; and it required a good deal of furnishing; and Rosamund lacked a great many possessions which we would have thought anybody related to us was bound to have. We had lots of pencil-boxes, all of them very nice, which Papa had painted with things like the battlemented churches and castles and blue hills from the backgrounds of Flemish and Italian pictures. But she had only one pencil-box, and that had been bought in a shop, we were so sorry for her. When Mary and I made our presents for these two we felt we were doing really necessary work, and the time would have passed quite pleasantly if it had not been for a very disagreeable experience we had just at the end of the school term.