Cousin Rosamund (7 page)

Oswald said, ‘Oh, Dad, I wish we had known you were coming,’ very much as Nancy would have said the same thing to us. There was the same primary and sincere expression of goodwill, ‘We wish we had been able to prepare a welcome for you,’ and the same secondary and even more passionately sincere expression of fear, ‘We wish we had more time to build defences round our delicate happiness and protect it from your excessive and inconsiderate force.’

The fear was reasonable. Mr Bates said ominously that he feared he was intruding. Uncle Len answered serenely and comprehensively, ‘That you aren’t. Any relation of young Os here is welcome, and the house is full of cold meat,’ but Mr Bates was not appeased, and looking very hard from Nancy to Mary and from Mary to me, asked coldly, ‘Son, which is your young lady?’

‘Why, Dad, I would have thought you could have guessed,’ said Oswald happily. ‘This is Nancy, of course.’

Mr Bates said sadly, dipping deep into the bass, that he would have liked to embrace Nancy as a daughter, but there was an obstacle.

For a minute we were all quite still. We sweated with terror, for there was manifest in this man the indecency of the prophet. We knew that there was nothing he would not say, in words which could not be forgotten. Mary and I moved towards Nancy, and stood behind her. Oswald’s arm was close round her waist. The surveyor and his wife began to walk away, but Mr Bates arrested them with a gesture and a splendid, still deeper note. ‘Stay,’ he bade them. ‘I want all the kith and kin of these young people to understand my views.’

‘But this gentleman is not a relative,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘He is a surveyor who has very kindly been giving the young people disinterested advice about a house they are proposing to buy. Good evening, sir, we are very grateful to you and your wife.’

‘And who are you?’ said Mr Bates.

‘My name is Morpurgo. I am a close friend of Nancy’s mother, a remarkable woman.’

‘And so she is,’ said Uncle Len.

‘You’d throw anybody in the river who said she wasn’t, wouldn’t you, Len?’ said Aunt Milly, using her hand as a lens in an effort to see the last traces of the vanishing rainbow.

‘I would,’ said Uncle Len placidly.

‘I would throw anybody into the river,’ Mr Bates remarked ferociously, ‘who said that any woman was not a remarkable woman, and any man not a remarkable man, for God made every one of them and Jesus Christ gave His life for every one of them, and the Holy Ghost is within every one of them.’

‘Well, you can’t say fairer than that,’ said Uncle Len.

‘So I will not approve my son’s union with Miss Nancy unless he consents to have it blessed by God the Father and God the Son and the Holy Ghost in the true spirit,’ Mr Bates continued. ‘So let us have no nonsense about a registry office. The Foundation Chapel of the Heavenly Hostages, Ilfriston, Essex, it is going to be, December 14, eleven thirty sharp, Brother Clerkenwell and me officiating.’

Oswald took a step forward. ‘No, Dad.’

‘Yes, son,’ said Mr Bates firmly. ‘Marriage is not a sacrament, I grant you. Nowhere in the gospels is it ordained as such, and only the false churches still under the yoke of Rome, though they are ashamed to own it, keep up this pretence out of hatred for the pure gospel. There are but two sacraments named as such by Jesus Christ, baptism and the eucharist. Let us abide by His word, nor let us use Christian marriage as an excuse for fine garments and feasting. But let it be Christian marriage, let a man and a woman made by God ask His blessing when they join together the lives they received from Him. So the Foundation Chapel of the Heavenly Hostages, Ilfriston, Essex, December 14, eleven thirty sharp, as I just said, it is going to be.’

‘No,’ said Nancy, ‘it is not.’

‘A young girl like you cannot be joined together to a strange man like the beasts,’ said Mr Bates.

‘This is our marriage, not yours,’ said Nancy, faintly smiling, ‘and if you want Oswald to alter the arrangements it was for you to ask him, not to come here and tell us. But even if you had asked Oswald he would have had to refuse on account of me. I have nothing to do with the Heavenly Hostages, and Oswald is going to marry me in that church over there, you can see the tower over the tree-tops. I was brought up in the Church of England, wasn’t I, Aunt Lily? We always went to church in Lovegrove, didn’t we?’

Aunt Lily said, ‘Yes, indeed, dear old St Jude’s,’ and made a gesture as if she were waving a little flag from a charabanc.

‘And all the time I lived with Uncle Mat and my Aunt Clara in Nottingham she was a communicant at St James’s,’ Nancy went on. ‘Why should I suddenly leave my church and go to the Heavenly Hostages, about whom I know nothing? All these people standing here have done a very great deal for me. I could not begin to tell you what I owe them. But not one would ask me to take such as you, the very first time I have ever seen you, have demanded of me. If Oswald should tell me we must obey you I would not marry him, though I do love him. I would think him weak and silly and not able to stand up for himself even about things that really matter. So we will be married in that church, and we will be very sad if you do not come.’

‘That’s our last word, Dad,’ said Oswald.

Mr Bates made a vaguely apocalyptic gesture and looked up at the place where the rainbow had been as if he might have asked it for guidance had it still been there, down at the river as if he might yet be driven to walk on it. Magnificently he declaimed, ‘Well said, my daughter. Go on the way you have chosen for the Lord will bring you to salvation. In the end. And very gratefully will I attend your marriage.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nancy. She wavered for a minute and then made the bobbing curtsy which, years ago, in our dancing class at Lovegrove, we had been taught to make to our elders; and Mr Bates bowed to her over his staff and held out his hand. ‘Let us walk together in the garden for a moment,’ he said, and they moved away from us, and stood talking beside the sliding and leaf-strewn waters.

Oswald said proudly, ‘She understood him at sight, saw that the only thing to do with him is to stand up to him.’ But his face clouded. ‘How on earth,’ he asked, ‘did she come to forget that I’m against any religious ceremony at all?’

‘She was excited,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘It would startle any girl, him coming in like that,’ said Uncle Len.

‘We were all startled,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘Does it matter?’ said Mary.

‘Well, a lot of people know my opinions,’ said Oswald doubtfully.

‘But your dad did promise to come to the wedding,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘and that was nice of him.’

‘I shouldn’t discourage him now that he’s climbed down,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I take it that it doesn’t happen often.’

‘It was Nancy’s little victory,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘I don’t see how you can open up the whole thing again,’ said Uncle Len.

‘Put that way,’ said Oswald, ‘I suppose it’s better to leave things as they are. Give and take. It’s a good principle.’ His father called to him from the water’s edge. He had his arm round Nancy’s shoulder and her face was moved and bright, he could not be entirely a humbug, perhaps he was not a humbug at all. ‘They’re getting on well together,’ said Oswald cheerfully, and hurried off to them.

‘I wonder how she’ll manage to get the kids christened,’ said Uncle Len softly.

‘Hush, he’s no idea,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘Just think of Nancy going after what she wants,’ marvelled Aunt Lily. ‘There’s more of Queenie in her than you’d think.’

The three at the water’s edge were close together. Nancy raised her lips to the old man’s cheek, and then drew herself away, and came to us. Her face wet with tears, she told us, ‘He is nice really. He understands how hard everything has been for Oswald. I am happy, so very happy.’ She lost her power to speak, and walked away from us towards the house, but turned back. ‘About the church,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t just for the portrait and the wedding-dress.’

‘We knew that,’ said Mary.

She had to turn back a second time. ‘But it was partly that. That did come into it.’

Both Mary and I were so constituted that we needed a life of this character to run parallel with our lives. It was not only that we loved these people and loved them more year by year. It was that they were candid, and we were their familiars, and we could see how they worked on their circumstances, and how their circumstances worked on them, and how they were imposing form on the chaos that had been given them. Their achievement had great relevance to all that we had unquestionably of our own, which was our musical life. Musicians, by their own talents and their acceptance of tradition, impose meaning on the meaningless world of sound. It would take vanity of a sort incompatible with real music, incompatible with the self-criticism of Beethoven and Mozart, to suppose that musicians are the only servants of meaning, and that the process of art has no analogue in life. Mary and I were supremely happy in our work at that time. I had found a special happiness in having acquired a power, mastered by Mary a long time before, of putting myself in a bland and trance-like state of mind before I played, so that my hands and arms were controlled by my intellectual conception of what I was playing, without giving a chance of intervention to that treacherous element in the soul which hates the will and incites the muscles to frustrate it. Also we were both playing a great deal of Russian music, which had the charm for us that it represented a kind of music misunderstood by Beethoven and Mozart for a reason which cast a bright light on their greatness. For their Turkish marches showed that they had heard Asiatic music (as how should they not, since the Turks had been encamped outside Vienna less than a century before they were born, and had left the countryside encumbered with their camp-followers?), and that they had made not so much of it as we can, simply because they had not listened to their own music as much as we had, and were therefore not sufficiently aware of the definitive character of Western music to know what the dissimilarity of Asiatic music signifies. Infinitely less than Beethoven and Mozart, we were yet more than they were, because of the passage of time, the century and a half during which their music had spread through the world and entered into the very constitution of human beings.

That musical happiness would have been ours in any case, for our mother had given it to us; but we enjoyed it more because we knew these people at the Dog and Duck so well that in talking to them we fell into an analogue of the bland and trance-like condition which we found favourable to our playing. When we talked to them we always expressed the love we felt for them and never made the chilling remarks which the part of us undesirous of friendship sometimes tricked us into making to those who might possibly have become our friends. But we were also much better with strangers because of our beloved familiars. Our mother’s light had made us understand that our father’s darkness was not mere absence of light; even so the certainties of the Dog and Duck enabled us to be unperturbed by a world that was at that time always announcing its uncertainty. We never feared that our kind was dying, we did not doubt that the sacred patterned snake was still turning and twisting in the heat of the unexhausted sun.

But we might have lost the Dog and Duck had not Rosamund come to us that night to explain Oswald. Without knowledge of what his mother had done to him we would not have been prepared for his tiresomeness, and we might have shown our impatience and so lost Nancy wholly, and the others in part. For Oswald was very tiresome. It was not an exceptional event when, one November afternoon, Nancy having gone up to town to shop with Aunt Clara, I came into the parlour and found Uncle Len and Aunt Lily sitting by the fire, their eyes fixed, and their feet circling on their ankles, while Oswald, with uplifted forefinger, told a cosmic story.

I thought it as well to continue with the task which had been laid on me by Aunt Milly and search the garden for flowers. After I had cut some laurestinus I went to take some of the winter jasmine that was showing yellow round the bar windows, and as I put my scissors on the black and substanceless stalks I heard someone come into the bar, though it was still afternoon. One window was open, and I put my head in; and I saw Uncle Len, his red dewlaps heavy about him, take down a bottle of port from the shelf and select an appropriate glass from the tray below it, look at it, shake his head, and replace it with one of the few larger glasses kept in reserve in case someone wanted to drink wine. He filled it full, nodding in approval at his image in the mirror facing the bar, and raised it to his lips, but paused to say, with the solemnity of a man keeping a lonely tryst with truth, ‘B stands for Bates and for balls.’

It was not a moment on which I could intrude, and I meant to go away, but just then the door opened on Aunt Lily. She did not speak, but slowly shook her head from side to side, and clicked her tongue.

‘Here,’ said Uncle Len, and gave her too a draught of port in a wine-glass.

She raised her eyebrows and beamed at the special generosity but could not speak until she had refreshed herself. ‘All that,’ she said, ‘just for asking how the world began.’

‘For mercy’s sake, Lil,’ exclaimed Uncle Len. ‘Is that what started him off? You ought to have a better headpiece on you. That’s not a question that would bring a short answer out of Os.’

‘Oh, blame me, of course,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘but it’s a short question, and so it ought to get a short answer. That’s only logical.’

‘Logical?’ exclaimed Uncle Len. ‘Oh, Lil, that it’s not.’

‘What, a short question shouldn’t get a short answer? What’s not logical about that?’

‘Never mind,’ groaned Uncle Len. ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t.’ But they felt better as they drank their port, and presently he asked, ‘Has he finished?’

‘No. Milly took over listening when I left.’

‘We’ll get back,’ he said. ‘And it’s a little thing really, when you think how fond he is of Nancy.’

‘Yes,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘now we know she’ll be all right when we’ve gone.’

They emptied their glasses and dutifully left the bar, and when I got back to the parlour they had taken up their burden and were on opposite sides of the hearth, with Aunt Milly in the basket-chair in between, all wagging their heads reverently as Oswald, one elbow on the chimneypiece, brought his story to a confident close.