Cousin Rosamund (5 page)

‘But why? How could we?’ we asked.

‘Because he is,’ said Rosamund. ‘Quite awful. It is not only that he looks awful, which he does. His ears stick out and he wears spectacles in a hostile sort of way, as if he had put them on all the better to eat you with, and Nancy says that she is going to try to get him to wear bicycle clips only when he is going to ride a bicycle. It is that he is awful, he has no manners, he contradicts everybody as soon as he sees them, the minute he meets you he will tell you there is nothing in music, and he will start explaining something to you. But he loves Nancy and Nancy loves him. To her he is never awful, and of course he is all right inside, it is only that he is frightened and ashamed. Also there is much of his father and mother in him, if he were not an atheist he would be a preacher of the Heavenly Hostages, and there is something abandoned about him, it is easy to think of him shutting his eyes and throwing himself down a high place, his mother threw herself down into drink, he has thrown himself down into hatred of drink and shame at his mother and love of Nancy. Oh, it will be all right.’

‘It does not seem quite as right as it did at first,’ murmured Mary.

‘You make him sound dreadful,’ I said.

‘But it is all right, as things go,’ answered Rosamund coolly, ‘and that is just what Nancy guessed, that you would judge him dreadful. She did not talk all this out plainly, of course. But she brought him to our flat, and he told me that I was wasting my life in nursing, he would bet anything I liked that I spent fifty per cent of my time looking after wretched creatures who never would have come into the world if only there was a sound system of eugenics. And he thought Mary was handsome but all that orchestral music was nonsense, he would rather hear a simple folk-song straight from the heart of the people. Nothing nice till he had been with me for quite a long time. Then he went away to spend the night with a college friend at Acton, and Nancy very timidly said that she was not sure how you would like him, because he had such very different tastes, and it turned out that she has worried a lot about it. Indeed,’ cried Rosamund, ‘she is afraid that she must choose between you and him. And of course she has chosen him. And that is right.’ She looked at us suddenly with her blind look. ‘She must go with her husband. That is more important for her than going with you.’ Her voice sounded almost harsh. ‘But she feels it terribly that she may have to lose you. She was so distressed about it that I gave her a sleeping-pill and put her in my bed and came along to see you tonight.’

‘But if he is going to be nice to her, we will do anything to please him,’ said Mary. ‘Though I wonder how we can do it. I do wish there were only the people one can talk to and the other people that one just has to make signs at and offer curries to. It is the cases in between which are difficult.’

‘Well, think of the only peaceful moments we have with the men who want to marry us,’ I said. ‘They happen when we talk to them about what they do. We will buy little books about science and find out what we can ask him to explain to us.’

‘I knew you would not let her go,’ said Rosamund, ‘and she will still need you. She will always need you.’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth she fell asleep.

Again I thought of how Richard Quin had suddenly slept, that afternoon long ago, so short a time before he had gone to war, and my heart contracted. Mary’s anxiety took another form. She asked incredulously, ‘Can she have gone to sleep as quickly as all that?’ and stood up to have a better look at her. But Rosamund’s breast rose and fell steadily and Mary said, ‘But of course she is not ill, she is so strong, she should outlive us all. It is just that she has had a long day. When is it that they get them up? Some frightful hour like half past six. And she has worked all day, and then goes home for her twenty-four hours leave, and she comes along to tell us this.’

‘And it is a good thing she did. We might have been awful to the little man if we had just met him with Nancy and he had been silly about music’

‘Yes, if we had not known about his mother we might have thought Nancy would be better off without him and shown it,’ said Mary.

‘But how good it is,’ I said, ‘to think of Nancy, who has always been on the margin of things, not because she deserved to be but because she just was, having a page to herself. Having a husband, a house of her own, children. Though perhaps she won’t. People often don’t nowadays. I’m sure Cordelia would if she could.’

‘None of us will have children,’ said Mary. ‘Our bodies will be pulled down into the earth and the thing will go on in a different way.’

A distant church clock struck the hour, and a minute later it was struck again by the Empire clock on the chimneypiece. Afterwards its tick-tock sounded loud and slow in the quiet room. When Rosamund sighed in her sleep and murmured, ‘No, oh, no,’ we heard her clearly, and moved softly to the windows and closed and bolted them, looking up at the stars, which now seemed solemn but not sad. The constellations had slid across the sky since we came back to the house; it had been Orion that was above us as we walked, now Canis Minor was overhead. I thought what a long day I too had had, in my easier mode, and I found that I now could think with pleasure of all I had done in Paris. It was always so when Rosamund was with us, she found whatever we had for the moment lost.

II

T
HE
D
OG AND
D
UCK
was at all times suffused with a sober and realistic contentment. The three people living there would not have claimed that life always went well for everyone, but they were conscious that for them it had gone much better than might have been expected. Uncle Len felt great satisfaction because the local police sergeant was his best friend, and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily were extremely pitiful to any draggled and rejected old woman who came their way. But when we went down that Saturday we found the little pub bathed in a rosier contentment. It would have been impossible to paint it justly without recourse to such symbolic devices as court painters used in celebrating royal weddings, without representing cupids supporting garlands above the thatched roof and Hera and her nymphs giving epithalamic blessings from a barge on the river. It was a very warm day, warmer than any we had had in the summer months, and we sat with Uncle Len and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily and drank tea at a rustic table on the lawn, while the river, full-bodied with autumn, bore past white limbs of driftwood and foundered tapestries of gold and scarlet leaves. Time had made Uncle Len red and impassive, a blood-houndish, meat-eating Buddha, and Aunt Milly had silver hair which made her feel she was like a French court lady in the coloured pictures given away with the Christmas numbers of illustrated magazines, and she too had grown solid to her base. Their gratification was stately; but Aunt Lily was still bony and fair, her ugliness continued to make its tactless allusion to the prettiness of a golden and slender young girl, and her joy was shrill and chattering.

‘It’s no use,’ she told us, ‘hoping that the lovebirds will be back soon. They’re looking at nests near the school and, bless them, they’ll take their time about it, billing and cooing,’ she added, in fidelity to her style. ‘Oh, I couldn’t be more pleased. Just because Queenie was unlucky when she tried it, there’s no reason why our family shouldn’t get married like other people. There, I’ve let it out.’

‘Hush yourself,’ said Uncle Len, heavily, ‘hush yourself.’ And Aunt Milly said, ‘Yes, indeed, you aren’t even sure. How do you know your pa and your ma weren’t married?’

‘Well, we looked everywhere when the house was sold up, and we never found no lines, we didn’t find any lines,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘and Pa was supposed to be away a lot because he was a railway worker, but I never saw him wearing a peaked cap. And there were lots of things. But I wasn’t lying, you two kiddies, when I used to tell your papa and mamma that we were brought up particular, because we were.’

‘You were brought up right, and your mam deserves great credit for it and we’ll leave it at that, if you please,’ said Uncle Len.

‘If things are bad it doesn’t make them any worse to go over them sometimes,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Mercy of God! What’s that down in the water just by the landing-stage?’

‘Wood,’ said Uncle Len. ‘A log of wood.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ said Aunt Lily darkly, rising to her feet and rushing down to the water’s edge.

‘You can count on Lil seeing a dead body afloat once every twenty-four hours until the river goes down next spring,’ said Uncle Len.

‘Well, she loves a bit of life,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘Hark at that, girls,’ said Uncle Len. ‘She loves a bit of life so she’s always looking out for dead bodies. I live with a couple of queer ducks, I do.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Aunt Lily shrieked from the landing-stage.

‘Look at her running back as if she were a slip of a girl,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘They’re healthy enough, my two queer ducks,’ said Uncle Len complacently, drawing on his pipe.

‘It was a bit of furniture, actually,’ said Aunt Lily, throwing herself down in her chair. ‘Looked like the back of quite a nice bedstead, funny what gets into the river.’ She lifted her hand to arrange her hair with an exact copy of the gesture which a beautiful woman, whose hair and hands were her particular beauties, might have permitted herself, when she felt the need of a compliment. Uncle Len surveyed her over his pipe with tender horror. In all the years that they had lived under the same roof he had never forgiven providence for having made her as she was. ‘Like a camel,’ his eyes compassionately said, ‘like a camel.’ She continued, ‘Mind you, girls, there’s to be no church wedding. Oswald doesn’t hold with it.’

‘Silly, I call it,’ said Aunt Milly, jerking her thumb at the church-tower above the tree-tops. ‘When there it is just next door, couldn’t be handier.’

‘It’s hard on the child not to have a white veil and a train and all that,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘Give over,’ said Uncle Len. ‘If there’d been a church wedding Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara would have snaffled it, and then you’d all have had to go up to Nottingham and you’d have been as happy as if you’d been locked in the fridge.’

‘Oh, I know it’s all for the best really,’ agreed Aunt Lily, smiling into the drowsy autumn sunlight, ‘but you must let me have my little grumble.’

So the morning passed by, as pleasantly as could be. We learned that Nancy and Oswald were so much in love they could not see out of their eyes, that with what she had and they earned they ought to be very comfortable indeed, and that he was bound to get on, he was ever so clever, as well as being a thoroughly decent young fellow; that for our mid-day dinner we were going to have boiled silverside and dumplings followed by quince and apple tart; that nobody could rightly say what the love-birds would like for a wedding-present, it depended on the nest they picked; and that it was going to be all right about Queenie, Oswald was willing to let Nancy have her at their home for part of the year. ‘For the rest of the time,’ said Uncle Len, his jowls hanging heavy, ‘or all the time, if need be, we’ll be glad to have Queenie here.’ Through sudden tears Aunt Lily called on us to marvel at his goodness. ‘He might be a brother to me and Queenie, the way he’s always been determined to make things right for us,’ she said, and she went on to explain that it would really be all right, for though Queenie had lost nearly all her remission time for tantrums, she was a changed creature, and there would be no difficulty about her doing a bit of sharing the nest with the young people. But of course it was to be hoped that they would have a family. ‘First a girl and then a boy,’ she recited. Then, just after we had stopped drinking tea and had begun to drink sherry, Nancy and Oswald came down from the house. They were both indeterminate in appearance, but their joy made bright vapours of them, for they were smiling at everything, as if they were a little drunk.

We ran to the happy phantoms and kissed Nancy, who looked a little frightened. Were we so awful, then, to people we did not like that she had reason for her fear that we would be horrid to Oswald? She said, ‘Oh dear, I wish we had known you were coming this morning, it’s dreadful that we weren’t here!’ But Oswald spoke up firmly, ‘Well, first things first, my dear. We couldn’t have stayed in even if we’d known. What we got to do is to find a house.’

‘Yes, Oswald, but this is Mary and Rose,’ said Nancy, laughing gently.

‘I guessed that. I know Mary, I recognised her from the concert. Music means nothing to me, so I had to look at you,’ he said, meaning it quite nicely.

‘We think you’re very lucky,’ said Mary. ‘We’ve a special reason for knowing what Nancy is worth, for we were friends when we were children, then she went to Nottingham, and we did not see her for years, and we missed her all the time.’

‘It was the most wonderful day when you came back,’ I said. ‘Do you remember how Cordelia and I looked down the stairs at you?’

‘Yes, and your Mamma was so nice to me,’ said Nancy. ‘Oh, Oswald, I do wish you had known their Mamma, it is a shame she died.’

Oswald showed no sign of sharing her regret that he had not known Mamma, and no sign either of wanting to know us, but since Rosamund had given us the key to his character he had engaged our hearts. He was no more than Nancy’s height, and though he was in his thirties he had the round head and snub nose of a small boy, and the stance and restless eyes of a small boy surrounded by grown-ups whom he did not quite trust. He was what was called in our family a Haowseholder; he did not drop his h’s or his g’s, but to him a house was a
haowse
and a mouse was a
maowse.
It is an endearing form of the Home Counties accent, and in him it was made specially endearing by the childish ring in his voice. At once he knew that it mattered very little that he did not make the expected polite remark or made an impolite one. He would learn. The less important kinds of knowledge would come to him, for he already possessed the others that were more important. When we parted from them to take up our hats and coats to Aunt Lily’s bedroom, we heard Nancy say to him, ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ and he answered, not mechanically and not in doting, but with grave appreciation of all she was, ‘Not wonderful like you.’ Their house would be like our house in Lovegrove.