Cousin Rosamund (3 page)

I said to the young man, ‘Lady Tredinnick must be ill,’ and was astonished to find that he was not merely disconcerted, he was so horrified that the sweat was standing on his brow.

Mary said, ‘If we go downstairs, could you get us a drink?’ He took the chance to recover, and as we stood at the buffet he told us in a pleasant and even tone, though his eyes searched our faces in incomprehensible anxiety, of a journey he had recently made in Italy. It was time for us to go home, and he saw us politely to our car, but as he turned away in the darkness we saw him take out his handkerchief and draw it across his brow.

‘What do you think was the matter with her?’ I asked.

‘She was not ill,’ said Mary, ‘she was full of vigour. She was unhappy.’ We were silent for a moment, then Mary cried out, ‘But where was Nancy? She should have been at the concert. She told me she was in London. She always loves to hear me playing the Emperor Concerto, but she did not come and see me afterwards. She always comes and sees me afterwards.’

I said, ‘I hope she was not too upset when she went to see her mother with Mr Morpurgo last week.’

‘Oh, poor Nancy,’ murmured Mary, and, a few minutes later, she said, ‘Look, we are nearly at the church, let us stop the car and walk home. I know it is late, but I cannot bear being in the car.’

After the chauffeur put us down at the corner opposite Lord’s we stood for a time looking through the railings at the Grecian church, the dark tilted tombstones under the trees, and the girl kneeling in prayer on the monument. Mary said, ‘We are so helpless without Mamma. Nancy was safe while Mamma lived, and Aunt Lily too, and Queenie. And Mamma would have known what was the matter with Lady Tredinnick. But we can do nothing for them.’ She pressed her forehead against the cold iron and was silent for a while, then burst out, ‘What good are we?’

‘We are quite good pianists,’ I said.

‘And what good is that?’ she asked. ‘What good is that to Nancy? Or to Aunt Lily? Or to Queenie?’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said. ‘Mamma wanted us to be pianists, so it must be some good.’

‘She may have wanted that just out of pity,’ she said, ‘to keep us busy because we were not able to do what she and Richard Quin were doing. But no. Of course I am being foolish. Everything in real music has something to do with Mamma and Richard Quin, and almost nothing outside it has anything to do with them. By making us play she lifted us up into their world.’

For a time I was caught up in the memory of certain passages of music, and when my attention went back to her she was saying, ‘I love those people we knew with Mamma and Richard, I cannot care about anybody else very much. Can you?’

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said. ‘I like lots of people. Don’t you really like anybody at all?’

‘Yes, but not much,’ she said, and pointed at the praying girl on the monument. ‘Not more than I like her. Not as much.’

‘Oh, I like people a great deal more than that,’ I said. ‘And I think, I think, I could like them much more still, if they would ever let us get near to them.’

‘I do not want them closer to me,’ said Mary. Again we were silent and then she said, ‘What a pity it is that all of the people who want to marry us do so in such an unfriendly spirit.’

It was true that our suitors fell in love with us very quickly, before we could get to know them, and proposed to us angrily, as if we had stolen something from them and this was the only way they could get it back, and were so infuriated by our refusals that they never spoke to us again and glared at us across parties. We sometimes thought that we would not mind marrying musicians, but we could not have married anybody of our own grade as concert performers, we would never have seen them, and the people below us always thought of us as stars and were tiresomely respectful. Really we had long known that we need not think of marriage.

‘I wish we could have Rosamund to live with us,’ I said. ‘It would have been lovely if she could have lived with us and been our secretary instead of Miss Lupton, though she’s all right.’

‘I have thought of that so often lately,’ said Mary. ‘But of course it is impossible. Her nursing is as important as our playing.’

‘Anything she does must be more important than anything we do,’ I said. ‘I know quite well she should not come down from her level to ours. But one can’t help wishing it would happen.’

‘There is nothing really lovely left for us to wish for except that,’ said Mary. ‘Nothing as lovely as it all was when Mamma and Richard Quin were alive.’

There was no point in looking any longer on the churchyard and its trees and tombstones, its kneeling stone girl. We went on our way along the empty streets, between the dark houses, from yellow street-lamp to yellow street-lamp. I said ‘Oh, Mary, tell me this. Something worried me in the plane this evening when I was flying from Paris. Richard Quin was called Richard Quin after his uncle who was called by his first and second names to distinguish him from another Richard in the family. But who was that other Richard?’

‘Papa told me,’ said Mary, ‘but I was quite little, I do not remember.’

‘Cordelia might know,’ I said.

‘No, she will have forgotten entirely. She wants to forget everything to do with our family. She will get flushed and look stubborn and say that she never heard that there was any reason for calling him by both names, and that she always thought it was a great pity, it must have struck people as so odd.’

‘Well, it does not matter,’ I said. ‘But it makes one angry that so many things happen and drift away and we cannot lay hands on them again.’

We had turned the corner of the street in which we lived, and went along between the dark houses, kicking at the chestnut leaves that had fallen thick during the day. ‘How bright and cold the stars look,’ said Mary, ‘though it is only autumn. And how queer it is that if you or I were coming home, and the other of us were playing, the music would sound sad as we heard it in the street. Whatever the composer might have meant it to be, whatever we might feel as we were playing, it would sound sad. Do you suppose that the ultimate meaning of music is sadness? But, of course, you do not know the answer to that better than I do.’

The closing of the door made a loud noise in the sleeping house. There were many letters on the hall table, but we did not like letters. None of the people we loved wrote letters if they could possibly help it. We knew that Kate would have left in the drawing-room milk in an electric saucepan and some sandwiches so we went in there, just to make going to bed less bleak. As soon as we turned on the light we cried out in pleasure and hushed ourselves as quickly. Rosamund was lying asleep on the sofa.

‘Shall we wake her?’ I whispered.

‘No, no,’ said Mary.

She was lying as Richard Quin had lain that day, years ago now, when he had fallen asleep while Cordelia had gone out of his attic to speak to Nancy and then come back to go on scolding him about going to Oxford. She had as suddenly withdrawn from the waking world, without time to arrange herself. Half of her long corn-gold hair was still held by its pins, half of it streamed in its tight corkscrew curls over the wine and silver satin stripes of the sofa, and her dark green dress was rucked up round her tall and splendid body. Her face was calm, as his had been, but there was the same sense that she was running and winning a race in some co-existent world where dimensions are otherwise, and it is possible to win something like a race without moving from the same spot. It had not seemed right to watch Richard Quin as he slept, and it seemed wrong to watch Rosamund now. A word might have escaped her parted lips which would have taken us so far from our world that we would not know how to comport ourselves. It was strange to have those closest to us so enmeshed in distance.

We shut the door and debated. ‘She came early. Kate gave her supper on a tray, I saw the tray on the hearth-rug. Do you suppose she meant to stay the night? Probably not. But she must stay now. It is too late for her to go home. We must see if the spare room is ready. And we must find her a lovely nightgown. Oh, if we had not stayed so long at that silly party.’

But the bed in the spare room was turned down, and one of the fine lawn nightdresses that Constance worked for her was spread on it, and the ivory brushes and combs we had given her as a Christmas present the first year we had made real money were lying on the dressing-table. There was nothing for us to do except choose the better of the two vases of late roses that were in our rooms and put them by her bed.

‘Oh, how I want to wake her up,’ said Mary. ‘But we must not.’

‘Still, we can sit beside her,’ I said.

But she woke of her own accord as soon as we went into the room again. She opened her eyes and looked about her with a look of voluptuous pleasure, and rubbed her cheek against the satin cushion, and put up a finger to stroke it. Then she saw us and said sleepily, ‘What is it, that wonderful scent?’

‘Lanvin’s
Pétales Froissées,’
I said. ‘I brought some home this afternoon but we have lots, you shall have this bottle I brought.’

‘I should love it,’ she said, and her heavy lids fell again. ‘The wards don’t smell of anything from Lanvin,’ she murmured, and drowsed again. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, with her eyes shut. ‘Was it a nice house and were the people lovely and were the jewels and the dresses beautiful?’ We told her, and she murmured, ‘It must have been heaven.’

‘You must come with us to a party again,’ said Mary.

‘Yes, there is one next week given by some people we know well enough to ask if we can bring someone else,’ I said. ‘A good party, too, Carlton House Terrace, a view over St James’s Park.’

‘You darlings, I will try to come,’ she sighed. ‘It is the staircases I love, they look as if they went up and there was floor upon floor, and something gorgeous on each. How I would like to be a duchess.’ She seemed to sleep again, then started up. ‘Mary, Rose, I must wake up and tell you why I am here. It is about Nancy.’ She began to laugh, taking out the pins that were left in her hair, and letting her curls fall about her shoulders. ‘Oh, you will not believe it.’

‘She is all right then?’ said Mary. ‘I was so worried because she did not come to my concert.’

‘But she did,’ said Rosamund, ‘you need not be worried about her at all.’

‘Of course it is all right now you have come,’ I said. ‘Here is a box of marrons glacés, eat them all, you are worth it.’

‘These are the best marrons,’ said Rosamund, ‘the ones that have just a touch of ginger in the syrup. I probably will eat them all. But about Nancy. You cannot think how happy she is. You know that look she has always had, as if one were seeing her through water, as if she were floating an inch or two below the surface of a river? It has all gone, she is like anybody else.’

Mary and I cried out together, ‘She is going to be married.’

‘Yes, to the one man whom it is possible for her to marry,’ said Rosamund. ‘She came to tell me tonight, after she had been to your concert.’

‘But why did she not come to tell me?’ asked Mary. But she added meekly, ‘It is natural that she didn’t. Lots of people seem to feel that they cannot tell us things.’

‘You know, Nancy has been far more unhappy than any of us guessed,’ said Rosamund. She was speaking smoothly without a trace of her stammer. It was not often so. ‘She has always wanted to be married, of course. She should be married, too. She would be better at it than any of us. She will know as we will not what to do when her husband is out all day, she will do small things about the house that he will like when he comes home. And she has all that dammed-up affection which she has given to us, and which it is hardly fair for us to take, since to us she has, of course, been only an afterthought.’

She said it lightly and put another marron glacé in her mouth. Mary exclaimed, ‘Oh, no.’ We both wished Rosamund had not said it, but we knew she was right when she said, ‘Compared to what your Mamma gave her, we have all given her only our afterthoughts. But that is not quite the point. What has made her life in Nottingham so difficult is that Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara have given her so much of their attention. They have tried so hard to be good to her, and all in the wrong way. It appears that in Nottingham many families are not so well off as they once were. They used to make all that window-curtain lace and now the people who liked it buy cretonne and chintz instead. But Uncle Mat is very well off, and he is the managing director of a big engineering firm, and controls a department store that has branches in several Midland towns, and Nancy, you know, has quite a lot of money. She is not rich-rich, like the people who give the parties you go to, but she and her brother will each have nearly a thousand a year. They got all their father’s money, though he left most of it to Queenie. She could not benefit by his death. There is a law which sees to that. How terrible for her to marry a man for his money and to kill him in order to get her freedom, and get neither her freedom nor his money.’ She meditated for a while, stroking her golden head and looking into the distance, then went on with her story. ‘Everybody in Nottingham knew who Nancy was. Or she thinks they did, which is the same thing. And indeed Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara thought so too, and dealt with the matter in their own way. Nancy is quite sure, from something that happened, something so horrid that she would not tell me what it was, that Uncle Mat told people in Nottingham about Nancy’s money, and let it be understood that any young man who married her would not only get a well-to-do wife but would probably get a good job either in Uncle Mat’s engineering firm or in the department store.’

Mary covered her face. I said, ‘I remember Papa saying, when Uncle Mat would not ask Aunt Lily to come with Nancy to Nottingham, “You might as well expect a bull to be kind to a horse.” This is how a bull, poor thing, might try to be kind to a heifer.’

‘Nancy saw that,’ said Rosamund. ‘She is very fair, very forgiving. But it was even worse for her than it appears. For she understands herself much better than you might think, and she knows quite well that if someone said he loved her she would want to believe him so much that she would not be able to disbelieve him, she would not be able to stop herself from marrying him. Oh, Mary, Rose, this part of her story is horrid because she was ashamed to tell me that. Mamma was in bed, so she was alone with me, and we were just two stupids together, but even so she could bring herself to own that to me. How hateful it is that it is thought disgraceful for women to want to be loved, which only means they want to love.’