Cousin Rosamund (45 page)

For the savoury we had tiny little cheese soufflés, one for each of us. ‘What horrible noises I shall make in my stomach as I go home. When one is old one is Lear but the blasted heath is outside one. Words, words,’ he said, ‘one can do anything with words. “And thorns and nettles shall grow up in its houses, and the thistle in the fortresses thereof, and it shall be the habitation of dragons and the pastures of ostriches.” Isaiah could make one believe anything. “And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another. There hath the screech owl lain down and found rest for herself.” But it is nonsense. But we may take it. Isaiah takes it all back in the next chapter. I suspect him of being a disagreeable man. There is no zest in his destruction of salvation. This prodigality which your wife and her sister proclaim in their uniqueness would send in creatures that shall kill the thorns and nettles and by the excess of flowers that spring up under their tread, that shall pension off dragons, bridle the ostriches, teach demons and monsters to play various instruments, persuade the hairy ones to sing melodiously, and convert the screech owls to an audience and charge them a stiff price for admission. No brandy, thank you, but a Benedictine. I am an Edwardian and we were great drinkers of Benedictine. “A line shall be stretched out upon it to bring it to nothing, and a plummet into desolation.” Oh, it shall not be so.’

‘But the world will come to an end some day,’ I said.

‘Not like that,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘Oh, the actual end of the world will not be like that, I know,’ I agreed. ‘It will be splendid. But first there will be the thorns and the nettles and the thistles, and the hairy ones will cry out to one another. That cannot be avoided.’

‘Mad grasses,’ said Mary, ‘how good that tough way of saying weeds is. But one can stay indoors, and against the hairy ones one must stop one’s ears.’

‘No, one must listen to what they are saying,’ said Oliver. ‘They conspire against us. They would about this Judgment Day to which my dear wife seems to be looking forward with such anticipation.’

‘Surely it must come whatever the dragons and the demons and the monsters do,’ said Mary. ‘Anyway I mean to shut my windows. And, Morpy, please have we any money?’

‘It is all in that brief-case I left in the hall,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘But can’t you tell us now?’ I asked.

‘Oh, darling, I don’t expect it is as simple as all that,’ said Oliver, again obsessed by his idea of this other maleness, which by being inflexible and insisting on timetables and acceptance of standards created a complicated universe about itself.

‘No, there is no reason why I should not tell them now,’ said Mr Morpurgo, he was always willing to betray his own sex to women, it was his pasha-like nature. Tutting the little I know about your affairs, Oliver, together with my complete knowledge of Rose’s affairs, I think this household is on a sound basis, and I am sure that Mary has no reason to be anxious. I invested the money their mother got from the family pictures very fortunately, and I have been as lucky in investing their savings. I wish Rose would save a little more.’

‘I do not waste money,’ I objected.

‘Nobody really does that,’ he conceded. ‘It is very hard to imagine an action that falls into that category except lighting one’s cigarette with a five-pound note. It is almost impossible to spend money without getting something for it. Even if it gives one only a momentary satisfaction that is something for which only a miser would be unwilling to spend money. Nevertheless, the fact that you have never really gone without anything you wanted since you were a grown woman might, if you considered it carefully, have some effect on your conduct. And remember, dear Rose, that you and Oliver have a more expensive household to keep up than Mary who is, now that she lives in her water-tower, in the position where I would like Rose to be. If Mary were unable to give another concert she would be able to go on living exactly as she does now, on her income from her investments, and even still save a little, to make her income larger in the case of a rise in prices. Rose could not do that. She will have to save quite a bit more in the next two years than she has been saving before she is in the same position.’

‘But this is extraordinary,’ said Oliver. ‘You must have had great difficulties in doing this for them, sir. For they’re both horribly careless about money.’

‘Horribly careless,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and horribly lucky. I really should make no effort to control them in the actual handling of the money, apart from suggesting that they do not spend it like drunken sailors. But the idiot whom you married left ten thousand dollars in a San Francisco bank; she forgot about it for two years, she then remembered it suddenly in the worst period of the depression and got the banker to buy some stock for her at bargain prices. I think in ten years that stock will be worth a small fortune in itself. If she had invested the money at once, as I have taught her, she would have made not a fraction of it. Oh, leave them alone, it’s really safer.’

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copyright © 1985 by the estate of Rebecca West

cover design by Karen Horton

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0710-9

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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