by Rebecca West
“Yes, Mamma, I will never do it again,” I said.
“I know you won’t. But, Rose, life is so mysterious, and one knows so little about it. I was cross with you today because I thought if there was wickedness about, it might be why Richard Quin was so ill.” She looked at me with the simplicity of a child opening its heart to another. “Do you think that was very foolish?”
“No,” I said. “He is so good, wickedness must hate him.”
“I think so too. That is why I was frightened.” She sighed and looked about her at the shelves again. “So many books and none of them really to the point. To this point, I mean. Your Papa never keeps a book he does not think well of. Now to supper.” She suddenly cast her arms about me. “Oh, Rose, I hate being angry with you, you are the nearest to me of all you children.”
I asked in wonder, “Am I really, Mamma?”
“Yes, Mary is so far away, and Cordelia—”
“Oh, her,” I said. “No, I thought you loved Richard Quin best.”
“He is not mine, he belongs to Papa,” she explained. “Why, they are exactly alike.”
I was puzzled, for I could see no resemblance between my dark, glowering Papa and Richard Quin, who was bright as silver. Quite often it seemed to me that she knew things about Papa that we did not, though I did not see how that could be.
10
WE HAD a specially magnificent Christmas that year, though we were specially poor. For some reason that was left unstated Constance and Rosamund stayed with us all through the holidays; and they helped Mamma to make our dresses, which were the best we ever had; and Rosamund was beautiful to dress up. Richard was in good health by Christmas Day, and Papa had made for him an Arabian Nights Palace with looking-glass fountains in arcaded courtyards, and domes painted strange colours, very pale, very bright. When we saw it none of us could speak, and Mamma put her hand on his arm and said to us, “No other father could do this for his children.” Several times, I remember, she came and sat on the floor with us when we were playing with it, and exclaimed every now and then, “How does he think of such things? How does the idea come into his head?” Very soon I forgot the existence of Mrs. Phillips and Aunt Lily. But one morning all four of us, Cordelia and Mary and Rosamund and I, went into the best confectioner’s at Lovegrove, to buy some meringues for Richard Quin’s birthday tea; and because the assistant said there would be a batch of pink meringues coming up in a minute, we waited and watched the shop behind us reflected in the mirrored wall behind the counter. There was then something called “the confectioners’ licence” which played its part in suburban society; and the place was a cave of well-being, crammed with tables at which well-dressed women, with cairns of parcels piled up on chairs beside them, leaned towards each other, their always large busts overhanging plates of tiny sandwiches and small glasses of port and sherry and Madeira, and exchanged gossip that mounted to the low ceiling and was transformed to the twittering of birds in an aviary.
“Isn’t that the aunt who comes to school and takes Nancy Phillips home when her nose bleeds?” asked Mary.
“Yes, and that is Nancy’s Mamma,” said Cordelia. “She looks very fast.”
I found them in the mirror. They were not chattering. Aunt Lily had an elbow on the table and cupped her chin in one hand, while her other hand twiddled the stem of a wine-glass, and she coquetted with nothingness. Mrs. Phillips was pushing her empty glass back and forwards on the tablecloth, rucking up the linen. As I looked up her fingers closed tightly round the stem and she sat back in her chair, as if she had made an unalterable resolution. Her swarthiness still recalled people far darker than herself, sweeps and miners. She wore a beige beaver hat even larger than the huge invitation to the wind she had worn at our house, and a bird with a greenish iridescent breast stretched black wings across its width; and that the edifice did not waver was proof of her brooding stillness. Suddenly her hands jerked at the fur on her shoulders, a tie made of a dozen or so small brown pelts, and threw it over the back of the chair beside her. Then she was still again.
“Could you put aside what we want of the meringues,” I said to the shop assistant, “and then we could go away and come back?” But she told me they would be coming up at any moment.
Mary, her eyes on the mirror, said, “Mrs. Phillips’s furs—” and stopped.
“What about them?” said Cordelia. “They are sure not to be in good taste.”
“It is not that,” said Mary. “They look downspent.”
“Downspent?” said Cordelia. “There isn’t such a word.” Mary said nothing, and Cordelia got irritated. “What do you mean?”
“I mean downspent,” said Mary.
“I tell you there’s no such word,” fussed Cordelia. “We’ll look for it in Papa’s big dictionary when we get home, but we won’t find it, there’s no such word.”
“There ought to be,” said Rosamund.
As we stared in the mirror, the fur tie slid down the back of the chair and fell on the seat, with the despair of a delicate beast revolted by a gross owner. Mrs. Phillips was one of those people who are natural emblems. One thought absurd things about her which could not be true, which were confused with recollections of disturbing dreams till then forgotten. Her fur cannot have had any opinion about her. Yet we felt a vague unease, we stood beside the piles of cakes and wrangled as to whether one should make up new words, whether it must be taken that there was enough language to fit everything that happened.
About a week later, Rosamund and Mary and I were playing with Richard Quin on the sitting-room floor after tea. It was sad in a way, for it was the last night Rosamund was to be with us, she had to go home because her school started again two days later. Mamma and Constance were sitting by the fire, Constance doing some last services in the way of mending, Mamma comparing the fingering in two editions of a Beethoven sonata that had been bothering both Mary and me. We had the Arabian Nights Palace out on the floor, and we were happily quarrelling about the exact details of a story Papa had told us to fit a particular courtyard when Cordelia came in. She had been playing at a concert and she was still in her outdoor clothes. Standing in the doorway, pulling off her gloves, she said, “Do you know what I heard at my concert? Nancy Phillips’s father is dead. He died last night.”
All of us children were silent, except Richard Quin, who went on telling the story, but in a whisper. I saw and heard Mr. Phillips do and say all he had so blusterously done and said during our brief acquaintance, and I marvelled that it now appeared quite different. For the first time I witnessed the miracle which is worked on the dead, which puts them in the right, though they were in the wrong. I thought I would go and sit at Mamma’s feet in front of the fire for a little, but when I got up I saw that she had let our music books slide to the floor, that Constance had dropped her mending in her lap, and they were looking at each other without speaking.
I said, “I want a drink of water.” Rosamund followed me out of the room and we went downstairs to the kitchen. Kate was sitting at the table with The Daily Mail spread out in front of her, reading the serial. We took cups from the dresser and filled them at the sink. When one is a child, water tastes better out of a cup than out of a glass, it is the other way round when one is grown-up.
I said to Kate, “Nancy Phillips’s Papa has died.” I knew she would remember him, because she had seen him on the doorstep when he wanted to fetch the doctor for Richard Quin; but indeed she would have known all about him in any case, we told her all about the girls at school and she remembered them all.
“Oh, the poor man,” she said. “But soon he will be at rest, and he will miss all the hard things that are to come.”
Rosamund and I finished drinking our cups of water, and Kate folded up The Daily Mail. The January evening looked in, yellowed by light fog, at the basement windows. Somewhere along the street, where the small houses were, a barrel organ was playing.
“Would you like a penny,” asked Kate, feeling in her full skirts for
her pocket, “to take out to the organ-grinder?”
I shook my head at her over the rim of my cup. “It’s kind of you,” I said, “but I would rather not, unless you think the organ-grinder may need the penny specially.”
“No,” she said, “you can give it to him some other time.”
We rinsed out our cups, and did not know what to do next.
“We’re having stovies for supper tonight,” said Kate. “If you two could cut up the potatoes I should be glad. You can do it in front of the fire.” And we spent the rest of the evening doing that and other tasks she made for us. Mary, who had not known the Phillipses, could play with Richard Quin; we could not.
I was puzzled by the many signs which showed me that my mother and Constance were gravely distressed by the news about Mr. Phillips. Mamma had seen him for only a few minutes, and Constance had not seen him at all; and both of them knew more about death than other people. Yet when we came back from school the next day and sat down to dinner, and Cordelia reported that Nancy had not come back, and that the teachers had said they did not expect her until after the funeral, Mamma’s face was convulsed as by pain. But I myself, thinking of Mrs. Phillips, felt an aching in the front of my head, and saw against the dark wall which backs the mind’s eye a disturbing image of her as a court-card in a pack printed in earthy colours; her tight waist was in the centre of the card, her shoulders above were as broad as the hem of the spreading skirt below, her hungry face was here or there, above or below, her hunger pressing its claim everywhere.
When we came back from school that afternoon I ran upstairs, as we were always made to do, to take off my good clothes and change into an old dress and pinafore apron and wash my hands; and then I hurried down to get in my scales and arpeggios before tea. As I came round the turn in the stairs and looked down on the gaslit hall, I saw Mamma come out of the sitting room, she must have heard Papa’s key in the front door, for he was just coming in. She greeted him with the timid, lifting cockcrow in her voice that meant he had been cross last time he saw her, and that she wanted to give him a chance to be nice again; but he did not greet her back, though he did not look fierce. He said to her in a troubled voice, “The father of that girl whom the children know, the man who died the other day, was his name Phillips?”
“Yes,” said Mamma, shuddering.
“Did he live at the Laurels, St. Clement’s Avenue?”
“Yes, yes,” said Mamma.
Papa held out an evening newspaper to her. “There has been an exhumation order. There will be an inquest.”
Under our feet an unknown male voice said, “And his missus has gone. She’s skipped.”
I ran downstairs into the hall, and we three peered down through the open door of the steps leading to the basement. Kate and the laundryman looked up at us, their tilted faces drowned in shadow. He said again, “His missus has gone. She’s skipped.”
Mamma said to Papa, “Go, go at once. The child will be there, and that poor aunt. Bring them back if they want to come. You know how terrible people are.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “but I will go upstairs and put on some decent clothes, the police will be there.” He had a better overcoat than the old one he was wearing, Mamma had made him buy it, we had all helped to choose the stuff from patterns, he looked so well in good clothes that it was always an excitement when he bought anything.
He was down again very soon, and Mamma said, “Thank you, my dear. Mind you, in justice, he was a most irritating man. But, of course, that is no reason.” The front door closed, she called down the basement stairs, “Is the laundryman still there? I just wanted to thank you for telling us. You have done us a great service. Kate, give Mary and Cordelia their tea, tell them that Nancy and her Aunt Lily may be coming here, and they must be nice to them, because—” She halted in perplexity. “Tell them it is because—because people are saying things against Nancy’s Mamma, and she has got frightened and has run away.”
“Well, that is no lie,” said Kate.
“While you are seeing to tea Rose and I will make up the two beds in my room, and when you are ready come up and help me put up the camp bed for me in Richard Quin’s room. I cannot manage it alone.”
“There is no hurry, ma’am,” said Kate. “They will not want to go to bed at once. We have the whole evening to see to them.”
“And what shall I give them for supper?” Mamma mourned. “God knows I have to buy from day to day, and I have gone on so long I have forgotten how other people live, they will expect all sorts of things that are not in the house. They will be used to late dinner, with soup, and some cream or jelly or tart after the main course, and fruit, it will be terrible.”
“Why should you care?” I asked stoutly.
“I care because it will all be so strange for the child,” she said. “Losing her father and the police coming and then having to move out into a strange poor house.”
“But all that will not strike home till tomorrow,” said Kate. “Tonight they will hardly know where they are, and poached eggs and tea are the things for that.”
But Mamma had gone upstairs to the linen cupboard, where she fumbled in the poor light, muttering, “My sheets were good once, but they are all so old, I think there is only one pair which is not patched.” When we had made up the two beds in Mamma’s room, and Kate had neatly thrown and mastered the camp bed in Richard Quin’s attic, we went down and found Mary and Cordelia still having their tea in the dining room, sitting side by side and studying the evening paper, which they had spread out on the table between them.
They lifted solemn faces, and Cordelia asked, “Does this mean they think Nancy’s Mamma killed her Papa?”
We understood quite a lot about murders, chiefly because there were some famous cases in the bound volumes of Temple Bar in Papa’s study. We knew the whole story of Constance Kent, who killed her little stepbrother, and only confessed to it years later when she was in a sisterhood at Brighton; it was hard not to think of her wearing a nun’s draperies when she carried the little boy from his cot down the corridor to the outhouse, although of course she was only sixteen then. Sometimes, too, during the holidays, we used to take a bus to another part of South London, in order to have a walk on a less familiar common, and then we passed a villa with an Italianate tower where Mr. Bravo and his dashing golden-haired wife and the neat and silent widow who was her companion had composed an uneasy household until he died of poisoning.
Mamma answered, “Yes. But you know you are supposed not to read at table unless it is something by Papa that has just come in.”
Mary and Cordelia stopped looking at the paper, but it went on lying there. Mamma gave me my tea and poured out her own, but did not drink it.
“Oh, poor, poor Nancy,” said Cordelia.
“We will not be able to do enough for her,” said Mamma.
“She will mind, she has not the least idea that people are unlucky,” said Mary.
“But why is she coming to us?” asked Cordelia. “I always think of other people as having lots of relatives and friends to help them.”
“No, many families are as alone in the world as we are,” said Mamma. “The least thing starts it.” After a minute she added, “And this is not a little thing.”
We sat in silence, then Mamma said that I had better get on with as much of my practice as I could before they came. In the sitting room Richard Quin was playing on the hearthrug with a courtyard of his new palace. Mamma told him that he might go on in the meantime but must leave when Papa came back with some friends, and she sat down by the fire and listened to my scales and arpeggios. Presently she said, “Rose, you have not begun to learn how to play. You start playing legato, and then when your mind wanders from what you are doing your legato stops being a legato at all, it is as rough as a bathtowel. But when you tell your hand to play legato it should go on doing so till you tell it to stop, no matter if you are thinking of the moon.” Later I tried the third number of Beethoven’s Sonata in D
major (Op. 10), and when I got to the twenty-second measure of the first movement, she cried, “Rose, you are a musical half-wit. You have forgotten what I told you, you must supply the high F sharp there though it is not written. Beethoven did not write it because it was not in the compass of the piano as he knew it, but he heard it, he heard it inside his head, and you cannot have understood one note of what you have been playing if you do not know that that is what he heard.” Later, when I got to the second subject, she cried, “You are playing like an idiot. You are playing that appoggiatura not as a short one, thank God you are not such an imbecile as that, but you are not playing it as a long one either. It must have the strict value of a crotchet, otherwise the half-bar does not repeat the pattern of the four descending notes.” Later on she moaned, when I got to the bounding octaves. “Do you mean to say you cannot understand that though the weak beats are doubled by the left hand they must be kept weak, and the strong beats must be kept strong, although the whole thing is piano. I might as well have been teaching a chimpanzee.” I was disquieted by what seemed to be the unnatural mildness of these comments. Had Mamma been her usual self I would surely have heard that Beethoven would not have recognized what I had made of his work, that I had committed faults which nobody would commit if they had one drop of music in them, and that she blamed herself for having ever encouraged me to play. But she recovered her usual vigour when Papa brought in Aunt Lily and Nancy.
Any tragic scene in those days necessarily appeared grotesque, because of the clothes worn by the women. Aunt Lily looked like a wet bird, like one of those hens in the back gardens you see out of a railway train as it approaches a London junction. The rims of her eyes were red, so were her nostrils, and the bridge of her nose shone bare like a beak. Under her winter coat she wore a pongee silk blouse with a high collar, and one of the transparent bone supports had worked loose and stuck out at an angle, so that it seemed as if someone had been trying to dispatch her in the method appropriate to a hen, by wringing her neck. Today she would have the right to look like that, plain and distraught and like a hen, but she was compelled by the mode of the day to make herself absurd as a clown by wearing a hat the size of a tea-tray, which dipped and jerked and swayed as often as she did, which was perpetually. She had adjusted her hatpins carelessly in her distress, so every now and then her hat wobbled, and her hands flew up and tugged at it with a gesture which she herself felt to be clumsy and helpless, and tried to correct to elegance by shooting out her little fingers and crisping them. She could not stop talking, although it was evident that Papa, standing beside her almost as grimly as a policeman, wished she would. She asked Mamma if she could really want them to stay with her, had she thought that it would mean that the house would be watched, there would be coppers everywhere, poking and prying, and there was even one walking up the alley at the end of the garden, though that wasn’t to be wondered at, with poor Queenie and all, but they would come here too. My father told her firmly that he had settled all that with the police, but she did not listen, she went on twisting and turning as the endless coil of words spun from her mouth, while Nancy waited at her side, her eyes half closed, as if she had gone to sleep as she stood.