This Real Night (33 page)
He had been camping in Wales, and he was due on the 4th of August to drive across the country to us in the car he had bought with some money he had earned by playing with a dance band, a French sports model of a make that has long since disappeared. We spent the afternoon sitting in the garden, looking down on the ribbon of road which ran across the bowl of cornland. It was hot, and we would have liked to bathe a second time as soon after lunch as was safe, though the bathing was dangerous, as everything seemed to be at that moment, and we had to swim with a tiring caution. But in any case we did not like to leave Mamma. It seemed certain that the Germans were invading Belgium and that England would have to come into the war, though we could get no news later than what the morning papers had brought us. We could not ask the Kurzes, for they were away in Scotland, and we did not yet know any of the neighbours. Mamma would not have been well even if there had not been this extreme uncertainty. She had grown much thinner and had no strength, and she was often racked by storms of quick, shallow breathing. She had one while we were sitting on the lawn, just after we had had tea.
Recovered, her eyes always on the road below, she said, ‘I am so useless now. I have lost my sense of how things happen, of how they are done, of what they are. When you girls were down on the sands I walked in the orchard and I found myself looking at the apples and thinking, “What are those round things? Why are they hung on those bits of wood?” And when I turned round and faced the house it would not have seemed unnatural if they had flown away like birds that had settled, though again I would have believed it if I had been told that they were made of paper and had been fixed there with tacks by men in green aprons. My mind is on a train that is going out of the station and leaving my body on the platform.’ Suddenly she cried out, ‘Look, he is down there on the road.’
His car was an odd sharp violet-grey. The bright dot bumped across the bowl and passed out of sight as it turned up the lane which wound uphill to our house, it rattled and snorted into the carriage sweep. Richard Quin jumped out and we saw he was disturbed as we were. He stayed beside the car and called over the flower-beds an urgent enquiry, which we could not hear.
Mamma struggled to her feet and cried, ‘Is it war?’ But her voice was too weak to reach him. He jumped a flower-bed and ran to us across the lawn repeating his enquiry. She was trembling so violently that she would have fallen had it not been that Mary and I caught her in our arms. Gently we lowered her into her chair and waited to hear our brother’s announcement.
‘You cannot,’ breathed Mamma, ‘really be asking if there is a refrigerator in the house.’
‘I jolly well am,’ he said. ‘You see, Mamma, I started from Wales yesterday afternoon, and I slept last night at Warwick, and this morning I had got so far on my way that I was just three miles off Powerscliffe, and I had always heard that it was a nice old fishing-town, and I was still twenty miles from you, so I went there and had bread and cheese and beer in a pub down by the harbour. It was full of fishermen, and I asked them what the news was about the war, and they didn’t know, they didn’t seem very much interested, except in the risk there might be orders telling them not to put to sea. They were awfully good chaps. Then other chaps came in, members of an association of bank clerks who were camping out in the district and sailing. They were a bit more worried about the war. They were very nice too. Then two great big chaps came in and started playing darts with the fishermen, and they had a few drinks, and they seemed to get a bit tight, and then they began to bet the fishermen and the bank clerks a hundred to one that they could beat the lot of them at darts standing on their heads, So I knew they were tree-fellers.’
‘How did you know they were tree-fellers?’ asked Mamma, the war forgotten.
‘Once two of them came into the bar at the Dog and Duck and started making bets, and Uncle Len stopped them but let them stay in the bar and do their stuff and gave them drinks on the house,’ said Richard Quin. ‘You see, tree-fellers are wonderful chaps, they have to be practically acrobats, I’ve often wished I could take some weeks off and go and learn the elements of the job. When it comes to cutting down the tree-tops they have to do appalling things like lying along a narrow branch on their backs and sawing off the branch above them, and they often have to hang upside down and work, so it’s comparatively easy for them to play darts standing on their heads. You get down on your head and steady yourself with one hand and throw with the other, and swing up on to your feet between throws to get your blood back out of your head. The ones at the Dog and Duck showed me how, and I practised. Well, most people don’t know that tree-fellers can do this, and if they did nobody can tell a tree-feller from anybody else, so when they’re travelling across country from job to job they go into bars and have a few drinks and people think they’re tight and when they bet people that they can beat them at darts playing upside down they think it’s because they’re tight, and they take the bets, and of course the tree-fellers win no end.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ said Mary.
‘Nobody’s being fair,’ said Richard. ‘The people who take the bets think they’re going to get some money out of a chap who’s tight. And anyway tree-fellers have a very tough time, I wouldn’t grudge them anything. Their job takes them all over the country and they only settle down for a few weeks at a time, they have the roughest houses and it’s hard for them to marry, and when they get old they fall out of trees or get pneumonia and die in the infirmary. I don’t see why they shouldn’t take some money off people who are usually living much softer lives. So I didn’t give away these tree-fellers at first, but later I thought they were taking too much money off these fishermen or these bank clerks, and they kept on putting their own best men up and still getting beaten. Though nobody seemed very much interested in the war we were all drinking much more than we would have in the ordinary way. So I challenged them myself, and they thought I was tight, and they gave me huge odds, and I beat them, I was much younger, and they took me on again and again, and I always won, and then I wouldn’t take my winnings. By this time everybody was laughing and shouting, and the landlord kept on saying we couldn’t carry on like this in the bar, and they ragged him and when I said I had to go and I still wouldn’t take my winnings, then the tree-fellers went out and bought me a lot of lobsters and put them in the car, and it got to be a sort of joke, the fishermen rushed out and got some their wives had been boiling, and the bank clerks bought some, and I drove off, up to the knees in lobsters. So if there isn’t a refrigerator here we’re rather sunk. We can give some away tomorrow. But I’m too fagged driving to see to it this evening.’
‘There is a refrigerator,’ said Mamma. ‘This house makes its own electricity. The Kurzes are the kindest people.’
‘I have never had enough lobster,’ said Mary. ‘There may not be so many to give away tomorrow.’
‘Remember, children,’ said Mamma, ‘lobster is said to be very indigestible.’
‘Up to now,’ I claimed, ‘none of your children have ever eaten anything they could not digest. The only question is whether there will be any lobsters at all to give away tomorrow.’
But there were about three dozen in the car, and we even had difficulty in finding room for them in the refrigerator. We had a wonderful dinner; and afterwards, when Mamma had happily gone to bed and Mary sat down at the piano, Richard Quin and I walked on the lawn in the soft August darkness.
‘I wish women could go into pubs,’ I said. ‘Uncle Len lets us be in the bar at the Dog and Duck if there are not many people, and I always like it. And it must have been fun at Powerscliffe.’
‘It was a good rag,’ he said. ‘But it was odd, being with all those people, and feeling so damned cold and lonely. Where are the nearest houses I can leave the lobsters tomorrow?’
‘At that village where the road takes a bend by a church where the hills start.’
‘Oh, that’s near enough. I wonder what sort of people live there.’
We halted and looked through the night down into the landscape. Beneath us the bowl of cornland, frosted by the light of the young moon, looking larger than by day; and the indigo sky, not anything, simply a nothingness and a miracle in which the heavy stars were suspended. The village was a clot of brightness, and farmsteads on the high ground which we had not seen by day now shone like the eyes of wild things which thought it safe now to show themselves.
‘I can feel everything tonight,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I can feel how every stalk of corn grows up from those fields. I can feel how the light in that farm over there is heating the glass chimney of the lamp. I can feel how the stones in that church tower are locked together with mortar. I can imagine how the works of the church clock whirr and make a fuss before the hour strikes.’ He walked away from me and called his own name into the darkness, six or seven times. Then he came back, saying, ‘It’s funny, if you repeat your own name it soon begins to sound quite meaningless.’ But he called it out once more, straight up to the vault of the sky overhead, and might have again, if he had not broken off to say, ‘Rose, Rose, look at Orion. The stars are glorious now. It’s such a fat buttery light that drips from them in summer time. I would like to sit up all night and watch the constellations turning and sliding off the sides of the sky beneath the horizon. I’ve never done that. The trouble is that sleep is good too. Too many things in the world are good. When one enjoys something one is always missing something else. But sleep is very good. Let us sleep now.’
When the papers came at noon the next day and we learned that Great Britain was at war with Germany, we all had a glass of sherry, though we hardly ever drank, and Richard Quin explained to us that now we could settle down and have a good holiday, because he had applied for a commission in a regiment in which poor Mr Morpurgo had served in the South African War, and he thought he would get it, for Mr Morpurgo was helping him, but it would take some time. So we were there together all through that beautiful and horrible August, though not alone. We had invited some guests beforehand, and indeed expected Nancy Phillips to be with us for most of the time, for Cordelia had very adroitly put an end to the prejudice Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara had conceived against our household. She had remembered that Alan had a relative, a Cousin George, living in retirement near Nottingham, who had acquired a title. The Houghton-Bennetts had several titles in the family, and were proud of them, but were embarrassed by this one for it had been earned too easily. The others had come by way of Colonial Governorships or Army Service but Cousin George had been knighted because King Edward had visited the industrial town where he had been a Town Councillor at the time of an influenza epidemic, which had not spared the Mayor or the Deputy Mayor, so it had fallen to him to conduct the royal party round a new hospital. Cordelia and Alan visited this relative and manoeuvred him and his wife to accompany them in a call on Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, who felt that they had no right to stand between Nancy and such aristocratic friends. So she came to stay with us that summer, and was very happy, and fell a little in love with Richard Quin. We knew it when Rosamund came for the only weekend she was able to manage, as she had her proper holiday earlier in the year, and Nancy followed her and Richard Quin with spaniel eyes and said, without malice but with relief, ‘It is a pity they are not the right ages. If he had not been younger than her, they might have made a couple.’
But we were joined by other guests who were unable to make such remarks, who were so unrelated to us that they could never speak of our relationship, who could say nothing to us except what people dancing or weeping in the streets to the tune of history say to each other. Musicians we knew only little or not at all, who had intended to spend the summer in France or Italy or Switzerland, members of the strange army of friends enrolled by Richard Quin, some of the girls who had been at school or college with us, reported themselves to us for one reason or another and were invited, and came to sleep in our house, or in a great barn that stood high on the hill, or in lodgings in the neighbourhood which had been vacated by nervous visitors, as it was bruited about that East Anglia was the probable theatre of German invasion. Kate and her mother were suddenly with us, saying that they could not abide to be separated from us at this time, particularly as all Kate’s brothers had gone to sea, and they helped in the house, so the two servants left by the Kurzes were not dismayed, and everything was agreeable about this time of carnival which preceded the Lent that was to endure all our lives.
We were of course never without awe of the future, never without pity for the men who in the first and middle days of that month went out to die and in its latter days died their anticipated deaths. But we were very gay. We did not go to the seaward side of the hill again, for we were not far from the exact spot of the coast where it was supposed that any invading German force would make its landing, and the sands were taken over by the military. But we swam in a river not far away, and as soon as the Kurzes returned from Scotland they made us free of the lake in their part. Also we spilled over the fields, too, and helped with the exuberant harvest and all of us made music in our several ways. There came to stay with the Kurzes a grey-eyed young man named Oliver whom we recognised after a day or two as the composer whose works had been played at the concert in Regent’s Park where we heard we had got our scholarships. We were embarrassed at seeing him again, because he had given us inscribed copies of his songs, and we had lost them on the way home, not carelessly but because we were so excited, and we always felt that we ought to own up. With a fervour that was partly a desire to expiate this guilt we took up our flutes again and joined in the performance of a cantata he had written on the subject of Venus rising from the sea at a South Coast resort when the Mayor and the Corporation were opening a new pier and taking down to the depths with her the Town Clerk, who was the tenor. We liked his music, which had a deliberately thin quality which was a search for the economy which had gone from Victorian music and had not been brought back by Elgar. We thought we might have liked him, too, had he not been suddenly drawn from us as Richard Quin was to be drawn a week or so later. It turned out Oliver had liked coming to us much more than we had thought, when he said goodbye to Mamma and thanked her for the times he had been to our house he suddenly could not speak any more, and bent down and kissed her hand. Mamma cried over his bowed head, ‘And khaki is such a hideous colour, the old scarlet was far better.’