Cousin Rosamund (35 page)

I could understand that, and I was glad as I was whenever I heard of Queenie being happy, for I was still quite well aware that I was responsible for Queenie’s crime. I might have been a child when I teased her with my power of fortune-telling and inflamed her with the idea that the universe is not so rigid as she supposed, had inspired her violent and impulsive mind with the aspiration to change it in such a way as would favour her desires; but I was a child who had been warned. I knew I was trafficking in forbidden things, and I knew there was a justice in the prohibition. I was a murderess by proxy; and I had condemned the woman who did the murder for me to a life of torment. Yet it seemed to me at that moment that had I been able to go back to my childhood I would not have been able to refrain from committing that crime. For that would have altered my childhood, which I loved so much that I could not bear it to be different in the smallest respect. If Queenie had not killed her husband the light from the gas-jet in our hall at Lovegrove might not have fallen on my father’s high cheekbones as it had when he brought in Aunt Lily after a day in court, and holding her by the shoulders, disregarded her babbled absurdities about the unfairness of the judge and told her softly, almost in a whisper, to go and lie down and not to talk, Mamma could wait till afterwards to hear about it all. Usually when I thought of my childhood it was Mamma who appeared with the solidity of real forms, Papa was only a dark presence, but now it was he whom I could nearly touch, and for whom I so longed that not to touch him was a sweet pain.

I had not noticed that Mr Morpurgo had left me, but we were drinking double sherries. I said, ‘But Uncle Len does not like women to have more than one glass of sherry,’ but Mr Morpurgo said, ‘It will be all right tonight. I will explain.’

I had had no lunch, so the world grew liquid as I drank. ‘How wonderful those scarlet snapdragons look in this light,’ I said.

‘And better still the mixed crimson and scarlet ones Len has in the beds beyond the bar,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Look at all that flaming and smouldering colour, that precise form to every flower, the splendid bravura lift to the first, inaugurating the design of later stems and lesser supporting growths, all that to be stored up in an annual, it is not possible, it is against the principle of the conservation of matter. Look, dear Rose, you will like them.’

I turned in my seat and, though I liked the sight, my heart still was sore; and then the potboy lit the Chinese lanterns that were hung above the tables and I became subject to the strange law by which the spectacle of lights burning by daylight, in agreeable surroundings where people have gathered together to take their pleasure, causes an aching hunger for the past.

I kept my face turned away from Mr Morpurgo so that he would not see that I had begun to weep again. But he knew, his gentle voice advised, ‘Look, Rose, at this company of swans, how they seem whiter than ever now the twilight is falling.’

I cleared my throat and said, ‘Here is Queenie.’ She had come out of the house and was strolling down the lawn, towards the river, not towards us. We were not in her mind, she was absorbed in her own lack of ease. She did not present her usual careful copy of elegance. Her hair (and how astonishing it was that it was still dark) was a little disordered, and as she came nearer we could see a streak of flour across her shirt. She was frowning, and her hands looked discontented. For a little time she had forgotten her misery in the work of baking, and now tea was over and no more scones were needed, and she was back again where she had started. There was no grey in her hair, she was unbowed, she walked loose-limbed like a girl, her face surprised with the virility of its sullenness. It was probable that she would live for many years to come.

As she came near the river her eyes were on the dark flowing waters, but a shadow passed over her face and she looked at the table where we were sitting, at Mr Morpurgo and at the parcel lying among its wrappings, as if she had to take up a burden again. I did not trouble to wipe the tears from my face, she would not notice them, so distracted was she by the tedium of finding a response to another of the futile kindnesses that were being offered to her. She laid a hand on my shoulder and said my name, flatly as if it had no meaning for her, and said to Mr Morpurgo, ‘That thing you brought me, I would like to look at it again.’ With effort she added, ‘It’s so tasteful, so -’ In her search for another adjective she let her eyes wander into the distance, where they instantly became fixed, while she asked faintly, ‘Who’s this?’

She was looking at a tall old man with silver hair who had halted as he was about to enter the garden by the wicket-gate on the meadow side. ‘What’s he staring at like that?’ she said, her voice no stronger. ‘Why’s he coming in by that gate that nobody but the family uses?’ The carefully woven tissue of her reticence suddenly ripped. ‘What’s the old bugger think he’s playing at?’ she demanded, with fury, though she did not raise her voice.

‘Why, Queenie,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘that is Oswald’s father. He will have guessed that you are Nancy’s mother. He will have recognised you from the photograph she has in her drawing-room. He has always been anxious to meet you.’

She said words we could not hear, her tongue and her lips moving but making no sound, and remained quite still while Mr Bates strode down the lawn towards us. Mr Morpurgo stood up and put out his hand in greeting, but was ignored. As Mr Bates had approached his gaze had been set on Queenie’s face. Now he leaned on his staff and looked at her, and then asked, ‘Are you the woman who has been a great sinner?’

Queenie was trembling, but she did not lower her eyes or her chin. ‘I am the woman who is a great sinner,’ she answered.

He leaned on his staff for a long moment while their eyes burned into each other’s. Then he came closer to her and said, ‘Come with me and I will deliver you bound and gagged to the mercy of the Lord God,’ and he laid his arms across her shoulders. Side by side they went up the lawn and passed through the wicket-gate.

When I had gaped after them for some moments I started to my feet. ‘Come on, we must follow them!’ I cried to Mr Morpurgo.

His face had expressed such astonishment as mine, but he replied, ‘Follow them? Oh, no.’

‘But he may kill her!’ I exclaimed.

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I do not think he will kill her.’

‘But the way he was looking at her,’ I stuttered, ‘the way he spoke to her! Surely he sounded dangerous!’

Mr Morpurgo’s black eyes rolled over to the opposite point of the compass from the wicket-gate, and rested on the company of swans that were patrolling the blackening waters before us. ‘Oh, no,’ he breathed, ‘oh, no.’ I felt suddenly no disposition to argue with him. It was not that I was careless of what might happen to Queenie, but it appeared possible that Mr Morpurgo was right. I felt in relation to her destiny and my own, that there was some element in the situation which for the moment I could not identify, but which guaranteed the safety of both of us. But perhaps this was merely the effect of the double sherry. I said to Mr Morpurgo, ‘What a pity it is we are sitting on this side of the river and not on the other, for over there we would see the reflections of the Chinese lanterns in the water, and it must be lovely,’ and felt my irrelevance. But Mr Morpurgo had left me. I did not care. I was alarmed to the extent to which I cared for nothing. I reminded myself of the horrible sanctimonious arrest to which I had seen Queenie subjected, but I felt no emotion. Presently Mr Morpurgo returned with another double sherry, saying, ‘Not for you, considering you have had no lunch. But for me.’ He drank it slowly, sometimes saying, ‘My God, my God,’ but with less and less intonation of distress.

‘When will they come back, do you think?’ I asked.

‘That no one could tell,’ he answered. Darkness fell round us, the swans grew still more spectral, the laughter and conversation of the diners at their tables under the Chinese lanterns sounded like a bird-song, and I was contented, though very tired. I folded my arms and rested them on the table. Something in the air was very sweet. ‘It is that bed of tobacco-plant,’ Mr Morpurgo explained, and I dozed, waking for a moment because he was laughing, slowly and softly. ‘Why are you laughing?’ I asked sleepily. He answered, ‘I am not exactly laughing. Well, yes, I suppose I am.’ My mind did not want to unravel his subtleties, I felt that all the essentials were so clean. I breathed, ‘How glorious those tobacco plants are,’ and went to sleep again. Then I felt Uncle Len’s hand on my shoulder and heard him happily fulminating over roast lamb and the first of the runner beans.

In the light of the parlour I stood blinking. The electric bulb in the lamp over the table seemed too strong, and the reflections from the polished glass and plate and the white cloth glared. I would have liked to go to bed at once without any dinner. I rubbed my eyes, and Aunt Milly gazed at me critically and nudged Aunt Lily. ‘You don’t look well, love,’ they said in unison.

‘She’s been crying,’ said Mr Morpurgo. He placed himself at the table with an air of appetite.

‘That’s what we thought,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but it’s not like you, Mr Morpurgo, to say a thing like that out loud.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

‘The tears came of nothing but hurt pride,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and she’s going to tell you a story of gangster life that may entertain you. But let her eat first. She’s had no lunch.’

‘No lunch? Silly girl,’ said Uncle Len. ‘That way madness lies.’

As we sat down at the table Aunt Lily asked, ‘But where’s Queenie?’

Over Mr Morpurgo’s face passed the expression he always wore when he enjoyed witnessing a drama that he knew he should not enjoy because it was so serious for its participants. He answered smoothly, ‘Gone to Nancy’s, with old Mr Bates.’

‘Glory, how did that happen?’ asked Len, the carving-knife in mid-air.

‘He came down to our table when she was with us,’ said Mr Morpurgo, sucking his secret knowledge like a jujube.

‘Was he civil?’ asked Lily nervously.

‘He was just right,’ said Mr Morpurgo. Obviously this was a monstrous assertion. Yet I found myself unable to quarrel with it.

‘Len, go on carving but for Pete’s sake turn the joint upside down and begin where you ought,’ said Milly.

‘Wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Len.

‘You go ahead and do as I say,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I’ve a feeling for joints.’

‘You make me nervous, looking at me with that thought in your eye,’ said Len.

‘I’m not looking at you,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘Looking at you when you are carving makes me think of something I once read about an explorer, his plight was horrible, they wrote, he had lost his compass and had no natural sense of the North.’

‘If old Mr Bates hadn’t been civil,’ began Aunt Lily, in a menacing manner, and stopped.

‘If old Mr Bates hadn’t been civil and you’d been round he’d have found he had lost his compass and had no natural sense of the North,’ said Len.

‘Why would Mr Bates have either?’ asked Aunt Lily. ‘He’s not an explorer.’ She took it well when everybody jeered at her, saying, ‘You know, ever since I’ve been a little thing people have laughed at me, because I’m so logical. But I can’t help it, it’s the way I’m made.’

There was then some thoughtful conversation as to whether there was or was not a natural sense of the North, which lasted until Uncle Len said, ‘But what about Rose’s story?’

I had no desire to tell it, not because it represented me as the victim of humiliation, but because I was no longer a part of it. I had this massive conviction at the back of my mind that some great event had taken place and the course of life was now altered and clear before me, with the result that everything that had yet happened was unimportant. It was as if I were spending the night in a camp stuck by a broad river which was spanned by a huge bridge, built to a great height, span upon span, like the Pont du Gard, which I must cross tomorrow morning very early, to make my way along a road to the mountains where my life was to be, not because I had chosen to live there, but because my life had been transported there, without my consent, without my previous knowledge, by forces not to be resisted, not to be judged.

What did it matter what had happened yesterday in another continent? It was utterly beyond me why I should have this illusion of change that could fill my mind with images of vast architecture, of journeys from which there could be no return. If my double sherry had made me drunk its power must since have worn off. But then I had been a little mad all day. Why had I stood by the Thames and wept and said I wanted to give up playing, a step which now seemed to be hideous? I was conscious too that I had committed some other folly earlier in the day, which I now felt reluctant to remember. There was a singing in my ears and I found thought difficult. Yet I was not simply feverish. This sense of some enormous event, a huge pillar suddenly erected in the middle of my landscape, joining the earth to the clouds, was not a delusion. For as Mr Morpurgo sat eating his roast lamb he was hoarding just such a recognition of the tremendous. He was chubby but he was awed. At one point while I was telling Len and Milly and Lily my story of the night at Barbados Hall he took a jar of redcurrant jelly and forgot his intention to give himself a helping, and then passed into a sort of trance. What I had seen he had seen also.

So uninterested in my story was I that I had to tell it on technique, as one has to play when one is very tired. My hearers were all indignant and I had to force myself to accept graciously their sympathetic explanations, although what I wanted to do was to go upstairs to my bed and lie down on it and sleep until I had to start on my way next morning. I thought of myself as lying down fully dressed, so sensible was I of the need to start early.

‘Ah well!’ they all said at last, getting up and starting to clear the table. ‘People with every opportunity, that’s what I can’t understand’ - ‘Well, it takes all sorts to make a world’ - ‘I wouldn’t say that, there’s sorts that unmake the world.’ Then Lily halted. ‘Queenie’s not back.’

I looked in terror at Mr Morpurgo. Perhaps Mr Bates was praying beside Queenie’s dead body, which he had offered as a sacrifice to his vengeful God. But first Mr Morpurgo shook his head and then gave me a reassuring nod.