Cousin Rosamund (40 page)

I whispered, ‘Don’t let me forget this. Remind me of it if I lose faith in her again.’

‘I will. Rose, believe me, there is a gap in this story which may be filled in, or may not. But it is there. Now, come and swim. The water will be cold but it will feel so new, and the kingfisher may be flying about where the stream comes out among the red rocks.’

‘But she does not want to see us. I cannot get over that.’

‘Yes. She evidently does not want to see us. I will not pretend to you that I think there is any reason but her own decision that kept her from coming to our wedding. But for that decision there may be some compelling reason. My dear, there is no use trying to force the locks that are made of mind and soul. Come and swim in this cold morning sea, come and get born again.’

I did not try to reject Rosamund any more. But it was long before I felt in need of her; not, certainly, during the two months of our honeymoon, when all time, all space, was crowded by our love. The earth, the sea, the sun, the sky, and light itself were all our accomplices. We walked on the hill and the hot air tingled with sharp scents of the pines and the herbs underfoot; at noon we sat on the gritty heights of the ruined fortress and looked down on the wide sea, white under the noon, and the horizon was tense as a stretched bow; in the market, cool under a sanctuary tent, walled in by the honey-coloured stone houses, the fish lay silver and rose and dappled on the slabs, the meat was crimson, the vegetables were green and purple and red, the flowers were white and scarlet and blue and gold, the women sat by smirking like the midwives of creation; on the beaches brown bodies were supple, and at last their primary purpose was known to me, but was still a secret. At any hour of the day we swam, our skins encrusted with salt; if I ran my lips along his arm or mine I could taste the sea; there was no hour when it was not good to make love, but when the night fell there was a special harmony between creation and our state. It was so strange that this new ecstatic life ran parallel with the life I knew. There was a piano in the villa, of course we could not have gone there had there not been one, and I practised for my autumn season in a dream, yet competently, perhaps more aware of error than I was before, more confident that in my body I possessed an extraordinary machine. When we went back to London I would take a train and travel to a provincial town and play at a concert and be wholly absorbed in my music, with that absorption which I now saw proved music, and any art, to be a miracle for it is miraculous that man, born with the power to engender for himself an intoxicating excitement, should not have been satisfied with sex and should have set about, he, the created thing, patently not the divine creator, inventing another form of excitement, and should have made what could compete, what could tempt away the attention. But then I took my train back to London and there in our little house I found, still caged and at my command, this curious, resourceful, enveloping, renewing joy, the archetype of pleasure, the primal model. My wonder that there was not nothingness but existence was now infinitely increased, as I walked down the street and looked about me at the houses and the people I was filled with astonishment. Now I knew how extraordinary existence was, how stupendous its contrast with nothingness.

I was right in fearing that I had lost Mary, or at least I had lost some part of what had been between us. She had not gone away for a holiday at all, but had stayed in London and spent all her time furnishing her strange new house, which was indeed the strangest house I ever saw in London, so that she was installed there when Oliver and I returned. She had taken nothing from our house, though I had told her she could have what she liked, except the furniture and pictures which had been in her own room. I felt a chilly disappointment. I thought she had specially liked the clock in our drawing-room. It was as if what had been shared in our common life had had no value for her. I felt again the suspicion that she had been glad when I told her I was going to marry Oliver, because it gave her an opportunity to flee to her solitude which she preferred to me. When we met it was all right, she still loved me. She said, ‘Oh, how happy you are, you look as if you had been printed by a new process that got in all the colours!’ It was a surprise to her. I think she thought it possible that I might have decided during my honeymoon that I did not like being married, and made my way home. I think that she was only able to be glad that this had not happened by practising the sort of dichotomy that is often to be seen in the Protestant relatives of Catholic converts who would prefer them to remain in their new faith because it makes them happy, while regarding Catholicism itself with disapproval. This was not altogether pleasing to me, as I imagine the analogous position is not pleasing to Catholic converts; but I was in a worse position than they are, for they at least can explain their position by theological discussion, whereas I could not make the smallest reference to the essential factors which made me happy with Oliver. I could not explain to Mary that when Oliver and I were lovers it was as important as music; and it was nearly as impossible to explain to Cordelia that Oliver and I were of some importance, not, I mean, that we were important musicians, but that we were as important as other human beings are, for the reason that they are human beings. She gave a dinner-party for us on our return, wearing an exhausted expression, as if I had got into difficulties rashly swimming in a rough sea and she had had to go out and rescue me and had used the last drain of energy in dragging me up the beach. Frequently she spoke as if she had made the marriage, though there was not the faintest reason she should think so. She treated Oliver with notably less respect than she had shown before, often turning away from him before he had finished the end of a sentence; he must be not of the worth she had supposed since he had married me. Yet she too loved me, she like Mary was delighted that I was happy, she gave me not one wedding-present but several. She spared nothing to make this dinner-party, as I think she would have described it, brilliant. I am one of the people (and it is proof of the inarticulateness of the human race of which I am complaining that I do not know whether this is a rare or a common condition) to whom getting married had been as important an event as being born. But of my two sisters, who were my only living relatives, one carried in her mind inadequate pictures of a marriage, the other a distorted image of it; and I was unable, for reasons common to all mankind, to correct their misapprehensions. We cannot talk about our loves, we cannot talk about our own souls. It is remarkable that human intercourse is not more painful than it is.

My daily life went smoothly, more smoothly than before. Miss Beevor and Kate were so enchanted to have a man in the house that I felt humiliated when I realised how wrong I had been when I thought I had given them the essentials of a contented life. They had always enjoyed my good clothes, they liked Oliver’s even better. There was a greatcoat of his made of vicuna which they specially cherished, joining together to brush it with a carefully chosen brush, soft but firm, wrapped in a thick silk handkerchief, almost as affectionately as if it were a pet animal.

‘It is a pity,’ said Kate, one day, when I came into her sewing-room and found them tending this coat, ‘that your Papa could not have had such clothes! Richard Quin did not care about such things. But they went with your Papa.’

‘Oh, your Papa,’ sighed Miss Beevor. ‘Such a gentleman! But so,’ she added kindly, ‘is Oliver.’

I understood what it must have meant to my mother, who for all her genius and mystical accomplishment was a simple woman like these, when my father went away and she was deprived of domesticated vital principle, this unpredictable, extravagant, violent thing that was tamed enough to live in a house. Why, that might happen to me. I knew Oliver would never leave me, but he might die. I had my family’s knowledge of immortality, but that is never a complete consolation for mortality, and now seemed less so. Oliver and I could not but leave much behind with our flesh.

‘Rose, I declare,’ said Miss Beevor. She had looked up and seen my face in the glass over the chimneypiece.

‘What have you to cry about, Miss Rose?’ said Kate.

‘It struck me that Oliver might die,’ I said.

‘Not for a long time, I should say,’ said Kate. ‘But is it not good that you should have learned to cry for other reasons than that you are angry? They had terrible tempers when they were little,’ she told Miss Beevor, ‘all but Richard Quin, the blessed lamb.’

‘Oh, they were not so bad,’ said Miss Beevor. She could look back on our childhood without distress now. Cordelia had long forgiven her, and had her to a meal once every two months.

‘No, they were not so bad, but they were not so good,’ said Kate, ‘and will you tell me, does Mr Oliver like prawns?’

‘He says he does. I asked him when you told me to, and he distinctly said he did.’

‘But he always leaves them. I think he has mixed them up with something else. With Dublin prawns, perhaps. We will try. Your Papa was like that. He often got names wrong. But your Mamma was very clever at finding out what he meant. You must make an effort, Miss Rose.’

Literature was then delivering a heavy broadside against marriage, which was regarded as so unsatisfactory an institution that a divorce was no longer assumed to be a tragedy. If one knew the people who were getting divorced it usually turned out that there was some sadness attached; either there was some condition that had made for prolonged unhappiness, drunkenness or insane jealousy, or one partner had ceased to love a still loving partner; but the picture that was provoked by the news of a divorce was simply of the sensible cancellation of an arrangement that had appeared irksome. Yet everybody whom I met when I was still so newly married that they took note of my state showed a faith in marriage, gave signs that they thought it not an unreasonable hope that Oliver and I would be happy together for ever. The only exception was Lady Tredinnick. I had sent her a slice of my wedding-cake, and a letter in which I had tried to breach the gulf that had opened between us in spite of the affection Mary and I had always felt for her, because she had tried, vainly but generously, to admit us into the world of fortunate young girls, and because when she had failed, she had so sweetly tried to substitute another kind of gift by showing us her flowers. When she had stood by the daffodils in her Cornish garden she showed a loyalty to beauty that was disarming. She sent me a present, a Chinese vase, which I recognised; it had stood on the chimneypiece in her library in the Cornish home, and she had told me that it had been brought from Siam by one of her husband’s ancestors who had gone to the East with Samuel White in the seventeenth century. It was not a possession I would have expected her to let pass out of the family, and I could not doubt her continued affection for me, so I wrote to her and asked her to come and see us on our return from the South, but she made the excuse that she was still in Cornwall. Then one day, I was walking along the Brompton Road, on the side where trees grow and there is a sort of ledge along the pavement, I saw her some yards ahead of me. She looked an old woman not by reason of any signs of physical weakness; a wide black felt hat was crushed down on her head, forcing a knot of iron-grey hair which was disordered down on the collar of her long and shapeless coat. She was walking along very slowly, looking into the windows of the antique-shops which are so numerous in that street, and I was reminded of the evening at the party where Mary and I had first realised that our old friend was degenerated into awkward oddity, because she was so rude to an inoffensive young man. She had then stared at a Poussin and not known what it was till we spoke of it; she could not be observing anything of the objects on which she was setting her eyes, for she was spending as long on those that were trumpery as those that were precious, and it must have been that she was simply using them as places on which to repose her discouraged sight, as a lame man might support himself on posts set along the road without feeling any interest in those posts for their own sake. I spoke to her and, as she did not hear, touched her gently on the shoulder, and she wheeled about, her upper lip raised from her teeth; and a long moment passed when she stared at me and made sure who I was. The bones of her face were taking control of her ageing flesh; her nose was now very Roman, and the bridge shone white and her greying brows had settled in a fierce line, so that her eyes appeared to have no other expression but impatience and command. She looked not unlike the later pictures of the Duke of Wellington. ‘Why, it is Rose!’ she exclaimed, and then said with a nervous laugh, ‘I cannot think who I thought it might be.’ I told her how much I had hoped she would dine with us, and she said, ‘Ah, yes, you married Oliver. You will be very happy. No doubt,’ she repeated, without a shade of geniality, even with some rage, ‘you will be very happy.’ We walked alongside for a little while, trying to talk and then I went into a shop, so sure was I that if I went any further with her she would take the too plain path of evasion and turn into Brompton Oratory, though I knew she was not a Catholic. I was so disturbed I told nobody of this. But a few days later Mary met her and had the same impression of angry degeneration.

But this was the one note of hostility that my marriage evoked. I did not go so often to the Dog and Duck, for Oliver had more friends than I had had, and we had to visit them and be visited; but Len and Milly and Lily were so contented with my marriage that they could take all its consequences, even if they included less of my company. The first time I went down after our return from the South they found their own ways of telling me that. Uncle Len said to me, as he washed some glasses and I dried them, ‘You’re better off now, Rose. It’s more natural to be married, no matter who you are. And you were always the natural one of you three girls. From a child up. But you’ll have to fall in with this Oliver’s ways, and if they aren’t ours, well, we heard you take your vows at that church up your way, and if keeping them means we don’t see so much of you, there’ll be no hard feelings.’ Milly, sitting in front of her dressing-table, said, ‘In the long run it’s worth it,’ and ran a comb through her silver hair so that it rose like a coronet, and added, ‘Come down when you can, but your young man may have his ties and prefer them and you must respect them. When I married Len I threw a lot overboard that had belonged to the old days.’ Her comb primly lifted her hair higher still to the likeness of a crown, and I saw that she had nourished through the years the vision of a picturesque alternative career which she had sacrificed for the sake of an elevation that still seemed to her miraculous, and she considered this the mark of a creditable marriage. Aunt Lily, planting peach-stones in a flower-bed under the bar window, as she always did every autumn, never with any success, was more wistful.