This Real Night (32 page)
‘So that is all right too,’ said Nancy. ‘Now what can I do about seeing my mother?’
‘I was coming to that,’ said Mamma, ‘but before we talk of that, let me say now - and you must listen, children. You three, you have had a great deal of success lately, and now you have Nancy back here, but it must not delude you into thinking things will always go easily. But come into the drawing-room, Nancy, and we will tell you where your mother is and we can talk over what would be the best thing to do.’
So we scattered, and Mary went over to practise in the music-room which Mr Morpurgo, at a cost which it is bewildering to remember, it was so small, had built for us as a Christmas present on the further side of the stables, and Richard Quin went up to his room. He still slept in the attic, though he could have had Cordelia’s room. He said he had been too happy there to leave it. I went to find Kate, and we were thinking what we would give Nancy if she stayed for supper, when Cordelia came in. I told her about Nancy, but she was not very much interested. She said, ‘How nice, dear, but where is Richard Quin?’
‘Oh, of course, you haven’t seen him since he got the news, you haven’t congratulated him,’ I said. ‘Come upstairs, he is in his room.’ I ran up before her, calling, ‘Richard Quin, Richard Quin, another sister to flatter you.’
We found him lying on his bed, Mark Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi
open before him, and a Jew’s harp in the palm of one hand. It amused him to play phrases of real music on that humble instrument, lifting it suddenly to his lips as he read and twanging out the notes, twice or thrice, while he went on with his reading. He had that capacity for doing two things at once which enrages those who have it not. When we came in he did not rise but took up the Jew’s harp and welcomed us with the equivalent of a flourish of trumpets, but stopped half-way to free his mouth so that he could say ‘How pretty you look, Cordelia, in that black hat.’ And so she did, it was one of those silky long-haired beaver hats we wore then, and against it her red-gold hair and peachy complexion were delicious.
‘What are you doing lying down in the middle of the day?’ she asked. ‘You should be out of doors.’ She turned away to give herself reassurance by looking at her neat perfection in the mirror, and said vaguely to its depths, ‘Out of doors or something.’
Richard Quin’s face grew grey. He had expected that at last she would praise him.
‘And what is that you were playing? A Jew’s harp?’
‘I play it a lot,’ he told her, raising himself on his elbow and smiling and knitting his brows, as if he were anxious to please her but knew that there was practically no way of doing that.
‘What an extraordinary thing to do,’ she said, with her crossness. ‘They are horrible things, errand-boys play them in the streets. You do not play in the street?’
He fell back into the pillows laughing. ‘Only when I find I am passing Doctors’ Commons.’
‘Or the College of Preceptors,’ I suggested. These were all places that had amused us when we heard of them in our childhood.
‘Or Negretti & Zambra,’ said Richard. ‘In fact, I stand outside Negretti & Zambra and give them as much of the “Ruin of Athens” as I can get on a Jew’s harp,’ said Richard.
‘But Negretti doesn’t like it and knocks on the window with the curling-tongs he uses to frizz his long black ringlets,’ I said.
‘Oh, he likes it well enough, but it disturbs Zambra, who is always casting horoscopes,’ he said.
‘You are too old for this perpetual nonsense,’ said Cordelia.
‘We do other things as well,’ I said. ‘Mary and I play the piano a little, and Richard here has won an exhibition at New College.’
‘Yes, it is about that I want to talk,’ said Cordelia, vehemently.
‘Is there anything to say about it except that it is very pleasant?’ I asked.
‘I will not be an expense to anybody,’ said Richard Quin, gently. ‘I have arranged with Mr Morpurgo that he will lend me the money for the balance of my fees, and I will pay him back gradually.’
‘Gradually,’ said Cordelia, and gave a despairing laugh. ‘That is what I want to point out to you. It will be a huge debt. It would be disgraceful not to pay it back, after all that Mr Morpurgo has done for us. Do you really feel able to bind yourself to such a heavy responsibility? Do you really want to put your whole future in pawn?’
‘If I could raise anything on it, I certainly would,’ said Richard Quin. He lifted the Jew’s harp to his lips and, rolling his eyes, twanged out the opening phrase of ‘Se vuol ballare’ in
The Marriage of Figaro,
investing it with an air of low cunning and avarice. ‘Me Shylock, me Fagin - I can’t think of any other sinister Jews - me shady cousin of Disraeli, he must have had one. But, Cordelia, stop being an ass. I am greedy as Shylock, I grab at Oxford in my sordid, scheming way. But I also am wrong because I do not scheme at all, you are afraid I will go to Oxford and do nothing. I cannot take the wrong turning in two opposite directions. Tell me, what is it you really think is wrong with me? What do you really fear is going to happen to me?’
She raised her clenched hands to her mouth, and swayed, with bowed shoulders, and for a minute she looked, in spite of her youth and her loveliness, as desolate as King Lear wandering on the blasted heath. She recovered herself and said hastily and insincerely that he misunderstood her, that she did not think anything about him was wrong, she was only anxious because we had no father and Mamma had lived so much out of the world and it was so difficult for a boy to find his own way in life, she was moved only by her love for him. But she was so confused with foreboding, she could not finish her sentences. Richard Quin raised himself again on his elbow and watched her. ‘I wish you would tell me what you see me doing,’ he insisted. Both of us were aware that it was more than foreboding that troubled her, it was clairvoyance. Her eyes rested on a point in space where there was nothing, her breathing was disturbed, her lips were dry. But it perplexes me that he should wish to know what she was seeing, for she was plainly at odds with her gift, neither controlling it not yielding to it. I wondered if he had recognised some flaw in himself which only she among us all had detected, and sought now to see if it would bring him to such ruin as had befallen my father. I prayed that the ruin might fall on me instead, and in the moment of passivity that follows an ardent prayer, like the silence that follows an explosion, I knew that there was no flaw, there would be no ruin.
I went and sat on his bed and said, ‘But it is all right,’ and took the Jew’s harp and twanged a phrase at him, I have forgotten what, which also said, ‘But it is all right.’ He took it out of my hand and twanged back a phrase at me which I did not recognise and did not understand.
‘That horrible noise,’ said Cordelia, covering her ears.
He laughed up at her, and asked, ‘But tell me, tell me. What do you fear will happen to me?’
‘It is all so difficult,’ said Cordelia, pitifully. ‘Going to Oxford without any preparation, we have all been brought up so badly and at first there was no money, you will never understand, either of you, how awful it has been for me, because I am the eldest. Now there is really too much money, or rather it is coming into the house too easily, with Mary and Rose getting this extraordinary success with hardly any effort. I am so afraid that you will have no sense of proportion, and will get into debt.’
For a second he was silent. Then his bed shook with laughter. ‘It’s the eclairs the Warden won’t be able to stand.’
‘The eclairs?’ said Cordelia.
‘The millions of éclairs. Fresh every morning. Iced with the family crest.’
‘Oh, be serious,’ she begged.
‘The eclairs. Chocolate eclairs. Coffee éclairs. Never with custard inside. Only cream.’
‘Well, I should think so,’ I said, ‘éclairs with custard inside are a fraud.’
‘But not cream in the giant one. That’s the one I’ll get sent down for.’
‘What’s going to be in that?’ I asked.
‘A nautch girl. I’m going to have it hauled into the quadrangle on the night of my birthday, and she’ll dance naked, while Negretti & Zambra play the triangle and the flute—’
‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘They’re awfully proper.’
‘I’ll fool ’em,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I’ll put them with their backs to the giant eclair and stick a cobra in front of them, and you know how they forget everything when they get a chance of snake-charming.’
‘Stop this idiocy,’ said Cordelia. She rattled the end of his bed and cried out, ‘I don’t think you should go to Oxford at all.’
‘Cordelia,’ he begged her, ‘please, please be glad that I can go to Oxford. I cannot tell you how much I want to be there. I would give anything to be sure I would be there. In those gardens at New College. On the river.’
‘In the gardens. On the river,’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘You never think of work. Of being like ordinary people and getting the power to live ordinary lives. You only think of pleasure. Yes, yes,’ she told herself, holding her face between her hands, ‘that is how it is going to go wrong.’
‘How what is going to go wrong?’ he asked eagerly, and put out a hand to shake her when she did not answer. Then he looked on the baffled blankness of her face and dropped his hand and rolled back on the bed and began again, ‘Eclairs. Eclairs. There will be two giant éclairs. In the second—’
‘Be serious,’ prayed Cordelia, ‘be serious.’
But we heard Mamma’s voice calling from downstairs. ‘Rose. Is Cordelia up there with you? Bring her down to meet Nancy,’ and we heard Nancy crying, ‘Cordelia and Rose. What luck you are here today.’
I said to Cordelia, ‘Come on, you must see her, she will be hurt if you don’t go at once, she loves being back here.’
We went on to the landing and leaned over the banister, and there was Nancy’s face, drowned under the little house’s shadows like a flower covered by a flood, looking up at us.
‘You look very grand,’ she told Cordelia. ‘If I had met you in the street I would have known at once that you were a married lady.’ There was a pause while Cordelia laughed and preened herself. ‘Is your husband nice?’ pursued Nancy, with a simplicity that made us all laugh, and Cordelia told her that she must come to tea with her and find out for herself. Nancy wanted to know all about her house, and Cordelia told her until Mamma said, ‘Nancy’s neck must be breaking, come down and talk to her on the level.’
A cloud came over the kindness of Cordelia’s face, she looked back over her shoulder at the open door of Richard Quin’s bedroom. ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ she called, and returned back to complete her self-appointed task. I followed her, meaning to break out and protect him, by telling her that he was as well able as Mary and myself to survive her constant belittlement, and that he would get on at Oxford as well as we had done at the Athenaeum and the Prince Albert.
But in the few minutes we had been away our brother had fallen asleep. He was not shamming. His features were not defensively blank, his body was not deliberately and completely relaxed. His mouth was troubled, his brows were knit, he had let the Jew’s harp fall on the quilt, but his fists were doubled. He was lying awkwardly, he had not waited to arrange himself before he fled the waking world. But his face, sunk sideways on his pillow, was delicate and shining like a crescent moon, and his body was as if he were running and winning a race in a world with another dimensional system, where athletes could carry on a contest of speed horizontally and without moving from the same spot. I would have liked to stay with him, but it seemed not to be right. Cordelia made a movement towards the bed. She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them. But her hand dropped, and we stood looking down on him in silence. The cold light that fell from the winter sky through the high attic windows made him look very fair. We went out and left him sleeping in his narrow room, between the four sloping walls, hung with his musical instruments, his boxing-gloves and his fencing foils, his rackets and bats.
W
E WERE NOT
surprised when the war came, for we had heard our father prophesying it all through our childhood. Because of what he had said we knew also that it would not be short, that, indeed, it would never end in our life-time. That State, he had told us, had taken so much power from individuals that it did not have to consider the moral judgments of ordinary human beings, it could therefore commit crime and was taken over by criminals who saw the opportunity, and who could use it for crime on a national scale, and would kill and rob not people but peoples. We had also been warned by our music. Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven. So we were not so sorely stricken by August, 1914, as many other people. Indeed we had our consolations. It was proved to us that music was not making a fuss about nothing, and that the faces of our parents had been distorted out of common placidity not by madness but by the genuine spirit of prophecy.
When the war broke out, we had just moved into a house in Norfolk we had been lent for the two holiday months by Sir George Kurz, a Jewish financier with an Austrian wife who had been a violinist and was very friendly to us. It was not their own home, they lived in a great seventeenth century mansion a couple of miles away, this was a small Georgian house on land they owned which they used to entertain those of their friends who, being musicians or painters or writers, would not want the bother of staying in other people’s homes. It stood high on the landward side of one of a cluster of hills that lay between a long sandy shore and the East Anglian plain. The air was salt, and when the wind was in the right quarter we could hear the North Sea beat on the sands, but we could not see it. Behind the house the turf rose steeply to a crumbling cliff. Our windows looked down on a bronze bowl of cornland, with one whitewashed village clustering round a grey church-tower where there was a gap in the hills, and the ribbon of the road which flowed across the bowl ran out into the blue distance of the flat farmlands beyond. We had thought we would like to be there, for it was part of our hosts’ kindness to leave two servants and that meant that Kate could go on holiday and Mamma did not have to worry about going to register offices. It was strange to find that we were going to suffer there a wound as sharp as that which had been inflicted by the loss of our father. The days of that glorious summer filled the bowl of cornland below us with light which turned the corn from bronze to copper, and filled the house with the darkness of fear. It was not for ourselves we cared; for only Mamma and Mary and I were there. It was for Richard Quin that we were afraid. Had we learned that we were all going to be killed we would not have been frightened, only awed, foreseeing a fiery translation, such as our music often prophesied and as Mamma’s being led us to regard as probable. But now one of us had to go forward towards death alone, and that the youngest of us.