Cousin Rosamund (30 page)

‘Most people would. You see it was Jasperl who took Celia away from me.’

‘Jasperl!’ I looked about me, at the glowing suggestions of the sunlit plains and mountains, the flushed temples, on the darkness of the walls, the faint moulding on the darkness above that suggested the beauty of Venus and Adonis. ‘But he is so horrible.’

‘Yes. He is horrible.’

I wanted to cry out that Celia must have been horrible too. I had to bite my knuckles.

‘He is horrible as musicians are not. He is horrible as few really good artists of any kind are. He is horrible like a bad French painter living at St Tropez might be, with a wife and a mistress quarrelling in a small kitchen and their children, mixed with the children of a seduced servant, playing in a yard with ironmongery, dragging an old tin bath about. He has thick black hair with a wave like a woman’s and a jaw like a boat, and a huge Adam’s apple, and he mocks and leers.’

‘How could she?’ I breathed.

‘Am I so bad, Rose? Tell me frankly,’ Oliver asked.

‘You are quite good-looking and you are nice, you behave properly,’ I said.

‘I thought I made her happy,’ said Oliver. He stopped and pondered. ‘Looking back, I cannot believe it. Also we had enough money. I’ve always had this house, which I thought quite lovely. We could go away when we wanted. We had pleasant friends. What was it that I did not give her? But I could not give her what Jasperl gave her, for it was vile.’

‘Did she run away from you with him?’ I asked incredulously.

‘She went to Switzerland to give three Fauré and Duparc concerts,’ said Oliver, ‘and when she came back she was quite different. She made some excuse to go back to Switzerland quite soon, and this kept on happening, she was supposed to be giving lessons. She was unhappy. Anyone could have seen that. She enjoyed nothing. Yet she seemed well, even more vigorous than I had ever known her. But her work went off. I thought that was what was worrying her. She did not care about it any more. She sang quite without genius for the last four years of her life.’ He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘I would not have thought she could have existed without her genius. But there was a lot more than that. She suddenly stopped being well. She went to Switzerland and was away far longer than usual. Then she came back, utterly miserable. And I got an anonymous letter telling me that she had been the mistress of Jasperl. What made is specially disagreeable was that the letter came from Jasperl.’

‘How did you find that out?’ I asked.

‘I gave it to Celia at once,’ said Oliver, ‘and she recognised the writing. I realised that moment what was to be our tragedy. You never were at the Hammersmith house. There was a room at the back that was almost all window. I have a feeling that a grey river flowed through my head at that moment, carrying barges with it. I thought it unlikely that Celia had spoken of me in any way that would lead Jasperl to suppose I was not likely to give her an anonymous letter about herself. If he had not disguised his writing it could only be that he wished her to know that he had written it. He was, we both thought, trying to get rid of her finally. It appeared from what she told me that he had told her he was tired of her some time before. She had made not only her last visit to Switzerland, but the one before, in order to persuade him to take her back.’

He fingered the marble sphinx and fell silent.

‘Oh, Oliver! Oh, Oliver!’ I breathed.

‘I was at first terribly angry. I could not bear it that she had not told me. It seemed to me vile that I should have shared her with him. Not because I minded that, though of course I do, but because she minded it, I knew she had, looking back on it.’

I wished furiously he would not talk of such things. But his voice cracked with misery as he said, ‘I asked her why she had done this, and she said that Jasperl had asked her not to tell me. I said she need not have told me who her lover was, she could just have said she had a lover. Then she told me that she had put that to Jasperl, and he had forbidden her to tell me that she had a lover, even when she offered to give me lying details, so that I would think that it was someone quite unlike Jasperl. When I asked her what reason he had given for this monstrous prohibition, she said he had given none. It had seemed to her that if he told her to do something it was right for her to obey; and as we sat there in this window by the river, with this letter he had written to torture me and dismiss her, lying on a table between us, I saw that it still seemed to her a law of nature that she should do anything that he told her to do. I was in the presence of what I then called madness. I would not call it that now. But anyway the agony was something I could not understand.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘That is it, not being able to understand.’ This was far worse than Rosamund.

Oliver suddenly laughed. ‘How I should hate to tell this story to our forthright little Avis,’ he said. ‘By God, she’s good, isn’t she? But to get on, I stopped being angry with Celia, and I must have been fairly irritating to her, because I was patient with her as one is with people who are mad. We separated for a time. She cancelled her engagements and went to stay with some people in Italy, and I went over to America and stayed with old Lowenthal in New England. I was full of confidence, for a damn silly reason. I had got all his early compositions and I had quite rightly thought them worthless. This gave me a feeling of superiority. Then we started all over again in the Hammersmith house. And in six months Jasperl got her back again.’

I cried out.

‘Well, he would want to,’ Oliver said. ‘It is his aim, his constant aim, to hurt people. By getting Celia back he hurt me, and he had by now a considerable interest in me; and he humiliated her, and humiliated the German conductor’s wife with whom he had eloped in the interval, and then had all the fun of humiliating Celia again when he left her. As he did a few months later. That was a peculiarly horrible business. He had fallen ill with phthisis, and Celia had felt that she was of use to him, looking after him during his haemorrhages. She was very kind to people when they were ill. It also made some sense of their relationship. She was not just there to be the object of his sadistic passion, the subject of her own masochistic passion. She was his wife, his mother. At this point, and of course it was inevitable, he threw her out. He professed a sudden loathing for her which, he said, made him feel excited and ill, so that his doctors ordered that she must go away. This was at Lausanne. She did not leave the town at once, for there was no longer anybody to look after him. By this time all that horrible business of Kehl I told you about was over. But Jasperl did not send for her, and she decided to kill herself. It was unfortunate that she was one of those people who are compelled to read everything in print that comes their way, if a parcel came to us wrapped up in sheets of newspaper or pages of a book she would flatten them out and see what they were about. Somewhere she had read that some quite common medicine which is quite easy to get a doctor to prescribe is fatal, if one takes it over a period of a week or so and stops oneself from drinking anything. She got a prescription of the stuff and sat in a grim little hotel taking the dose and drinking almost nothing. If it had not been that her eye had caught this wretched piece of information I think she would still be alive, for she was so kind, she would not have hurt her family and me by causing the scandal of a suicide. Her family do not yet know either that she ever left me or that she killed herself.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ I said. ‘Did she kill herself? I heard only that she came back to you and got ill and died.’

‘She killed herself,’ said Oliver. ‘But it took a very long time. She got so ill that she fell into a coma and they took her to a hospital, and I was sent for. I was there for weeks, and then I took her home. But she had done the job, her kidneys were destroyed. She died dreadfully.’ He slipped forward from his chair and buried his face on the cushions of the sofa where I lay, just below my feet. I sat up and leaned forward and stroked his hair, and presently he raised his face and said, ‘During the time when she was dying she often spoke of Jasperl, but she never told me anything good or pleasant about him. When she was delirious and cried out for him it was not as if she longed for him, it was more as if he was a torment against which she was protesting. It was simply as if he were the disease from which she was suffering.’

‘This was madness,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said obstinately, ‘it was not. She had been horribly disfigured by her illness, but after she was dead her beauty returned to her. I stood by her body and I was intensely conscious that she looked as she had done until she went to Jasperl, but that she was gone from me; while she had been with me, unchanged, my wife, till the last moment of her life, though she had been puffed and swollen and slow. All these strange dealings with Jasperl had been carried on by the Celia that I had loved.’

I thought to myself, ‘Yes, what Rosamund has done she herself has done, she is not changed.’

‘Then, when I had buried her, I heard that Jasperl had written these new works, this symphony, this violin concerto, this opera, and I went to great trouble to get the scores. My motive was part curiosity. I had a feeling that perhaps I might find what she had seen in him. But I also was being base. I had derived great satisfaction when I first knew she had been Jasperl’s mistress in reading his early compositions and finding they were worthless. I am sure I hoped that those later compositions would be worthless too.’

‘I wish they had been,’ I said.

‘No, that would have done no good. It would have left the mystery of Celia’s love for him unsolved. And you know, Rose, that no good can be done by there being more bad music in the world. Even when I read the stuff and hammered out the important passages on the piano and realised that Jasperl had genius I was glad that it was so. But it added to my perplexity. I had loved Celia, Celia had seemed to love me, we had led a happy life together, she had lied to me and degraded herself and walked into a bog of cruelty for the sake of a man who had nothing good or even agreeable about him, who was a fiend out of hell. That was one mystery. Now there was another. To me music is contrary to hell, the annulment of evil, but this fiend out of hell was a better composer than I am.’

‘No, no,’ I cried.

‘As we stand now, he is the better of the two,’ said Oliver obstinately. ‘Rose, what does that mean? You see what the problem is. I don’t mean that I think music ought to help people to be kind to their mothers or pay the rent regularly, and I am sure that at the very moments when mutts are most sure that Bach was ecstasising over the Christian mysteries he was thinking of sound and nothing else. But music is what Celia and I were, and not what Celia and Jasperl were. And it is strange, it makes nonsense of it all if Jasperl is a great composer. Doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought of the person I loved as being the same as music, too. And all my doubts seem doubts of music, too.’

‘You know, I always knew you understood,’ said Oliver. ‘How strange we should have the same experiences. But I must tell you what I want to ask you. After Celia died I fixed about selling the house at Hammersmith and I went to Switzerland, and I sought out Jasperl. I did it to show that I did not believe Celia’s love of him was simply madness; and I did it to show I still believed in music. He was not sure when I found him that I had not come to kill him, so you can guess what he did. He stammered out that Celia had from the first pursued him and that his motive in sending her away, the first and the second time, was to send her back to her lawful husband, partly out of respect for holy matrimony, partly out of respect for my compositions, which he professed to admire. I think it may have been true that Celia pursued him. He was her destiny, the martyrdom to which her cruel God called her, it is possible that when she came face to face with him she followed him as an early Christian saint might follow a bishop whom she knew was to lead her to the stake, the grid, the lions of the arena. That is not, however, how Jasperl put it, but there were the three damned scores, unperformable, perverse, magnificent. I explained that I had not come to talk about Celia but to see how I could keep him alive and get him on to writing more music. He was miserably unhappy in a state sanatorium which was good enough for the ordinary patient, but no good for him. He could do no work. I got him out of that to a more comfortable private place, where he could have his own chalet and a piano and strum away as he pleased. I have been keeping him going ever since, and, Rose, I cannot do it any more. Not a day more.’

‘Of course you cannot,’ I said. ‘We must think of something.’ ‘Oh, Rose, he is so vile!’ sighed Oliver. ‘He cuckolded me, and I, the funny English cuckold, come over and save his life. Of course it is funny if such things are funny; and to Jasperl they are enormously funny. Or rather he pretends that he finds them so. He knows everything. He has chosen to be evil with his eyes open. He knows that in a marriage such as Celia’s and mine the husband is not a cuckold. That is the main difficulty. There are others. Twice I have had to go out to Switzerland, just to find him another sanatorium, because he has made himself intolerable to the quite decent and kindly people who were looking after him. But this is the chief source of trouble: that the man whom he cuckolded is now helping him. The jest chokes him every time I go to see him. I know he has roared over it with the nurse or the poor little patient who is the last seducee on the strength. His silly little wife has always shown that she is sorry for me. But once he is out of the sanatorium the temptation to carry the joke a little further will be irresistible. It will be fun for him to run up enormous bills, at hotels, with tradesmen, with wretched copyists, that will be paid by me, the funny English cuckold who grudges his dead wife’s lover nothing. Rose, Rose, I cannot bear it. For one thing, it gives Celia such a dreadful immortality. I should remember her for what she was at Venice on our honeymoon, what she was like in our house at Hammersmith, other people should remember her for her singing. She will be remembered in Switzerland, in Switzerland of all places, where they make milk chocolates and watches, where they ski and yodel, as the discarded mistress of a vulgar freak, as a suicide. I cannot bear it.’