This Real Night (15 page)

Without turning her head, Rosamund said, ‘Do stop talking about it, Rose.’

‘Yes,’ said Cordelia, ‘you keep on saying this word, and for all you know it may mean something quite disgusting.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Rosamund, keeping her face to the wall, speaking quite loudly, ‘that it can’t matter twopence what it means. How can it be of any importance whether a horrid little sneak-thief calls Uncle Len a disgusting name? Yet there was Uncle Len, making a fuss about nothing, as my father does, and—’ She checked herself and for an instant drew the edge of her sheet across her mouth. We all know that she had been about to add, ‘and as your father did.’ But she went on, her voice shaking, her stammer gone and replaced by a fluency that was far more painful, ‘I didn’t think Uncle Len was like that. I was sure he was different. I thought he would get on with what he was doing and not be like the others and keep on finding out reasons why everything has to be horrible when it might be all right, if only they would keep quiet. Why couldn’t Uncle Len have let that man call him a diddacoy and walk out of the bar? He would have gone out and driven off if Uncle Len hadn’t stopped him, just because he had to make a fuss.’ She rolled over on to her back, stretched up her round white arms, and cried to the ceiling, ‘I want everything to be nice. Oh, I hate men,’ and let her arms fall, and turned back to the wall.

The naked hatred in her cry appalled me. It had always before been we who were excessive, not her. Who was to moderate us, if she exceeded us? I appealed to her, ‘But you like Richard Quin.’

‘I love him,’ her muffled voice said angrily, ‘but it is a shame he has to be a man, he should not have been born a man, what will happen to him in a world where men are so awful?’

‘Oh, he’ll be all right,’ I said, speaking angrily because I was afraid.

Mary, angry too, snapped, ‘I am sure that whatever Uncle Len did wasn’t wrong.’

‘Of course, of course,’ I said. But I must have spoken without assurance, for Cordelia then began the performance with which she met all catastrophes, and putting on her white, responsible look, made a claim that she had foreseen all this, and that it would never have happened if anyone had listened to her. She said that after all the Dog and Duck was only a public-house, and though the rest of us had insisted that because it was in the country everything would be different, she had warned Mamma that something disagreeable might happen. This performance was always startling because it was hallucinatory; she had had no doubts concerning the Dog and Duck and she had had no such conversation with Mamma, but her eyes were grave and glassy with sincerity. There was no way of arguing with such nonsense, so we always threw things at her; this time Mary threw a pillow at her, and I just missed her with a copy of the
Strand Magazine,
and we told her that if there was anything wrong with the Dog and Duck it was that she was in it. But Rosamund cried, ‘Oh, blow out the candles, blow them out now! My head aches, I must go to sleep.’ She spoke as if sleep were a horse that she would mount and ride away the instant darkness fell, and I thought this absurd, if she had a headache like mine. For the useful hysteria of youth, which protects the unformed mind from too much distress, was working on me. I was not thinking of what happened in the bar; it was present to me only as a dimly seen image, as the Man in the Moon leering down on a sodden waste of brown mud, because I was preoccupied by a pervasive pain which made the bones of my face feel tender and my eyes smart, and there were twinges like toothache inside my skull. But Rosamund was right. I sunk my face in the pillow so that if I should sob nobody would hear me, but I had not time to sob before I slept.

Then suddenly I was awake. We were all sitting up in bed because there had been a knock on the folding doors. They slowly opened and Richard Quin said softly, ‘Is anybody awake? Can I come in?’ He was a narrow shape against a trembling pallor, a haze of light above his head. The curtains had not been drawn in the room behind him, so it was lit by the diffused radiance of the moonless night and the great chandelier glimmered above like beetlewings and cast a vague illumination on his fair hair. We whispered, ‘Come in, come in,’ but for an instant he paused on the threshold, forgetting us, turning towards the window. Out in the garden a young owl had hooted. ‘So like a flute,’ he said. Then he came into our darkness. ‘Rosamund, Rose, are you all right? Uncle Len was so worried about you. He said you would be ’owling your ’eads off. And that was a beastly thing that happened in the bar. You two others were well out of it.’

There was the little cough of a struck match and its brightness wavered and spread. He stood between my bed and Rosamund’s and asked, ‘You are all right, you two? You are all right?’ I answered, ‘Yes, we are quite all right,’ but Rosamund said plaintively, ‘Oh, it was horrible.’ That was something I could never understand. If one was asked, when one had a cut and a bruise, whether it hurt, surely one had to say that it did not. But Rosamund never recognised this obligation though she was at least as brave as I was; if a runaway horse ran up on the pavement or an iron shutter fell from a shop front, Rosamund simply moved away and looked particularly bland. But I had noted that when our doctor said to her, ‘Does this hurt?’ she opened her large blue-grey eyes very wide and answered, ‘Oh, yes, it does,’ and it was as if she were making him a present by her confession of pain; and he always behaved gratefully, as if she had given him something nice. Now, as Richard Quin looked down on her, she lay back on her pillows and did not hide her face though it was wet with tears; and he drew in his breath between his teeth, but went on looking down at her as if she were a field of flowers.

He sat down on her bed and said to the rest of us, ‘Listen, it’s late. But I do want to tell you something extraordinary that Uncle Len’s just told me. It’s really why this awful thing happened in the bar. Do you know, Uncle Len’s a gipsy.’

All of us except Rosamund bounced with astonishment on our beds. ‘A gipsy!’ It was as if he were no longer in the house but was moving about in the night outside, in this intractable light which could not be subdued by the darkness.

‘Yes,’ said Richard Quin. He went on hesitantly, as if the story had been told him in a foreign language, and he was not sure how to translate it. ‘He says that everybody named Darcy is a gipsy. His mother was a Beckett and one of his grandmothers was a Lee. He said that a bit like someone in Shakespeare talking about nobles. Great Earl of Washford, Waterford and Valence.’

‘Lord Talbot of Gordrig and Urchinfield,’ I said.

‘Lord Strange of Blackmere, Lord Verdun of Alton,’ said Mary.

‘The thrice victorious Lord of Falconbridge,’ said Richard Quin. ‘We’ve left out a line somewhere, but never mind now. Anyway, Uncle Len was born in a caravan on Holmwood Common in Surrey. A lot of the Darcys live there. But he ran away when he was ten years old.’

‘Why did he do that?’ we wondered. All of us but Rosamund were sitting up now, hugging our knees. ‘Wasn’t it fun to be a gipsy?’ asked Cordelia. I thought it odd that she of all of us should put that question.

‘That’s exactly what I said,’ Richard Quin told us. ‘But Uncle Len says that if you are a gipsy and you have to run away, and he had to, you can’t run away to other gipsies. It can’t be done. But you’ll have to hear the whole story. You see, when Uncle Len was ten years old his father and mother died. They went off with a lot of the Darcys and the Becketts to a horse-fair and left Len with the caravans because he had a stomach-ache, and when they got back they all fell ill, one after the other, because there had been something wrong with the water at the pump they used when they were at the fair. Several of them died, and his father and his mother were the first to go. So they sent him away to his mother’s sister, and she had married beneath him. That is, her husband had nothing to do with horses. Uncle Len says his father knew more about horses than anybody he’s ever met since. But his aunt and her husband lived near High Wycombe and made cane seats for chairs. It didn’t sound too bad to me, for they made chairs out in the beechwoods where the felled timber has been left to season, and the gipsies finished them off with the wickerwork there too. But Uncle Len says it was a terrible comedown after the horses, and he felt like an old woman wooding. That’s what he said. He says the gipsies always send old women into the woods to gather firewood because even a gamekeeper wouldn’t like to stop an old woman getting some sticks to keep herself warm. It would be a mean trick if everybody didn’t know about it so that it’s really a kind of joke. Well, he couldn’t stand it. So he ran away and worked as a stable-lad over at Lambourn. He got on very well there, but the worst thing happened.’

‘Oh, what?’ we asked.

‘He got too big and heavy to be a jockey,’ said Richard Quin. ‘By the time he was thirteen there wasn’t the least hope. But he wanted to stay with the horses, so he went to work for a bookmaker. He had great luck for the bookmaker was very nice and so was his wife, that’s her in the enlarged photograph in the silver frame on the sitting-room chimneypiece, wearing a big hat with feathers in it, and all those buttons down her bodice, and a big cameo brooch. They were like a father and mother to him, and they made his fortune. They left the business between him and a cousin in Swansea, and he ran it for her, and when she died he sold his share in it and came here. He says he’s been very happy, but it still hasn’t been as good as being a jockey. But he says that as it is he wouldn’t change places with the King of England, and anyway by now he’d be too old to ride and he’d probably be here anyway. Still, he sometimes wakes up in the night and thinks of what it would have been like to ride a Derby winner. And it worries him a bit that he’s not with his own people. That’s why he doesn’t talk about being a gipsy. But he wouldn’t be anything else and he wouldn’t deny his father and mother for anything in the world, that’s why he wouldn’t let that man call him a diddacoy.’

‘Is a diddacoy someone who lives in a house?’ asked Mary. ‘I thought they called them gorgios.’ We had all read Borrow. ‘Oh, no,’ said Richard Quin. ‘If it just meant that it wouldn’t matter being called one. Gipsies don’t mind people who live in houses, they just think they’re rather simple, but they know the world couldn’t get on without them. Gipsies seem very reasonable people.’

He paused, and my heart ached. He had had a talk with Uncle Len such as I had never had. Richard Quin and Uncle Len; Richard Quin and Mr Morpurgo; Richard Quin and Rosamund; each was an alliance from which I was excluded. ‘But a diddacoy,’ Richard Quin continued, ‘a diddacoy’s a sham gipsy. He’s someone who’s got thrown out of his cottage because he couldn’t do his job or because he’s been in prison, and so he leaves his village and goes and squats on a common, and he tries to live like a gipsy, but he can’t. To begin with, all proper gipsies belong to gipsy families, and they all know who they are. That’s why, if you’re a gipsy and run away from your family you can’t just join another gipsy family. They’d know who you were, they’d have to send you back. And then gipsies can do, really do, all sorts of things. They do all this wickerwork, this basket-weaving, and they’re better than any other blacksmiths at some kind of ironwork, and they’ve this great gift for horses. Uncle Len says nobody understands horses like a gipsy, and that’s natural, he says, because a horse and a gipsy have minds that work the same way. A horse gets frightened at what it doesn’t understand, and so does a gipsy.’ He fell silent, and laughed to himself. Now again there were several young owls hooting, but further away, down in the woods by the river. ‘Why, there’s the proof,’ he said, ‘that Uncle Len really is a gipsy. He thinks that people who are not gipsies aren’t frightened by what they don’t understand. Well, anyway, gipsies can do some things really well; and there’s another thing.’

He paused. Uncle Len had told him something that he was finding it hard to tell us. It could not be a secret, or he would not be repeating it; but when it was spoken of they had been as close as if they had been talking secrets. I said, ‘Go on, go on.’

‘Gipsies do steal,’ he said. ‘Uncle Len owned it. They steal.’

‘Oh, Richard Quin,’ exclaimed Cordelia, ‘you didn’t ask him if gipsies stole!’

Richard Quin was silent for an instant, then he whistled four bars of music, as if he had gone away from us all into a dream. But they were four bars of music which he specially liked and used as a spell to avert despair. Indeed Cordelia was terrible. We were learning that someone whom we loved nearly as much as Papa and Mamma was quite a different person than we had supposed; but she had felt forced to interrupt, because of her fear that Richard Quin, who never blundered, must be a blunderer, since all our family except herself were always blundering. We all looked at her in puzzled anger, and she looked back at us, puzzled but not angry, simply puzzled because we were puzzled, her eyes wide, her short upper lip raised above her teeth.

He went on, ‘It’s only natural, you know, that gipsies should steal. Moving round a country you get a notion that the whole place is your own property, and when you find things belonging to people who aren’t as good as you are, you can’t help believing that you have a right to them. Say there’s an awful lout of a farmer, there doesn’t seem any harm in taking his chickens and eggs. But of course it’s wrong. Uncle Len doesn’t remember his father stealing anything at all except once or twice, when there was a reason. But diddacoys are different. They’re rubbish from any rathole. They hardly know their own names, lots of them have just nicknames. And they haven’t any trades. They can’t do basket-work, not properly, they don’t know where to find the right willows and if they do they can’t cut them, and they can’t do ironwork, and if they get hold of a horse now and then it’s just scrub stuff. And diddacoys steal because they have to, for a living. It isn’t like the way gipsies steal, there really is a big difference, if you think over it. So when a gipsy thinks of a diddacoy it’s like looking at yourself in one of those distorting mirrors they have on piers. So, you see, Uncle Len had a right to be angry when that man called him a diddacoy.’