This Real Night
This Real Night
Rebecca West
Contents
T
HE DAY
was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly. I was sitting with my two sisters, Cordelia and Mary, my twin, and our cousin, Rosamund, in the drawing-room of our house in Lovegrove, which is a suburb of South London, on a warm Saturday afternoon in late May, nearly fifty years ago. It was warm as high summer, and bars of sunshine lay honey-coloured across the floor, the air above them shimmering with motes; and bees droned about a purple branch of viburnum in a vase on the mantelpiece. We four girls were bathed in a sense of leisure we had never enjoyed before and were never to enjoy again, for we were going to leave school at the end of term, and we had passed all the examinations which were to give us the run of the adult world. We were as happy as escaped prisoners, for we had all hated being children. A pretence already existed in those days, and has grown stronger every year since then, that children do not belong to the same species as adults and have different kinds of perception and intelligence, which enable them to live a separate and satisfying life. This seemed to me then, and seems to me now, great nonsense. A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. When one is quite little one labours under just such physical and mental disabilities as might be inflicted by some dreadful accident or disease; but while the maimed and paralysed are pitied because they cannot walk and have to be carried about and cannot explain their needs or think clearly, nobody is sorry for babies, though they are always crying aloud their frustration and hurt pride. It is true that every year betters one’s position and gives one more command over oneself, but that only leads to a trap. One has to live in the adult world at a disadvantage, as member of a subject race who has to admit that there is some reason for his subjection. For grown-ups do know more than children, that cannot be denied; but that is not due to any real superiority, they simply know the lie of the land better, for no other reason than that they have lived longer. It is as if a number of people were set down in a desert, and some had compasses and some had not; and those who had compasses treated those who had not as their inferiors, scolding and mocking them with no regard for the injustice of the conditions, and at the same time guiding them, often kindly, to safety. I still believe childhood to be a horrible state of disequilibrium, and I think we four girls were not foolish in feeling a vast relief because we had reached the edge of the desert.
We sat in the sunlit room as much at ease as if we had been flowers instead of girls. Our teachers still set us homework, but our books lay unopened on the table. We might look at them while we were dressing on Monday morning, just to avoid unpleasantness. I was lying back in an armchair with my feet on another chair, because I never tired of contemplating the narrow tube of my new long skirt. Mary had put up her hair for the first time that afternoon; for the last few months she had had, like me, a cadogan, as it was called in those days, a plait doubled up and tied at the nape with a bow of broad moire ribbon, but now we were venturing on proper grown-up buns, which were far more difficult to tether. So she was sitting with a lapful of hairpins, a comb in one hand and a looking-glass in the other, every now and then shaking her head and bending her long white neck over her reflection to see if her black hair had stayed sleek. One sees swans shake their heads like this, and then glide on above their images on the smooth waters. Rosamund was sewing a flounced petticoat for the Bond Street shop which bought the fine underclothes she and her mother made; but even for her, who did everything slowly, even to speaking with a stammer, she was taking her time. Once in a while she laid down her needle and put out her arm to the tea-table, which in our laziness we had not cleared, and took a lump of sugar. While she crunched it she lay back and chose one of the heavy golden curls which flowed over her shoulders, and twisted it round her forefinger, perhaps to tighten the rich spiral, perhaps just to admire it. Cordelia was mending her stockings, bowing her red-gold head with the pious and unselfish air she brought to everything she did: a stranger would have thought the stockings belonged to someone else. But she was not really as bad as she seemed. Had she been asked she would have owned that they were hers. She was a humbug, but it was a physical rather than a mental quality. Whatever she was doing her body put up a claim that it was of great moral importance.
Today we four girls would seem so insipid as to be disgusting. Rosamund and Mary were beautiful, beautiful beyond argument, like women in Tennyson, with eyes larger and more liquid than the ordinary, and all colours extreme. Rosamund’s hair the richest gold, Mary’s skin quite white; and Cordelia, with her short red-gold curls and her skin flushed as by reflection from a rosy lamp, was as pretty as could be. And I myself was not too bad. I was nothing like so good as the others, but the behaviour of male strangers was now constantly giving me assurances that I was nice-looking enough. If I went to the bank for Mamma with a cheque to cash the clerks seemed to wish that the business of giving me the money had been more of an effort than it could be made to appear, more of a testimony of their good will towards me. We liked this, and did not like it. We wished we were growing up into something other than women. It was true that the development of our figures made us look like some of the best statues, but that could do us no good, as there was nowhere we could live where we could go about without anything on or in Greek dress, and as it was it simply meant that our blouses and our bodices were more difficult to fit. As for the other consequences of our sex, fatuous was the word we most often used. We were all of us infuriated except Rosamund, who could accept any physical fact. Our robust health prevented them from being anything worse than an inconvenience to us, but it was fatuous, yes, fatuous, that we were to be so greatly and constantly inconvenienced because some time, years ahead, we might have children, which was indeed most unlikely. We grimly supposed we knew what marriage was. My father had recently left us; he had not died, he had deserted us, not from cruelty, we were sure, but because he could not do us any good by staying with us. He was a gambler, and my mother had had to fight continuously, like an infantry soldier in the kind of battles waged in those days, to keep a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. Rosamund’s father was a malevolent eccentric, a successful business man who was so averse to spending money except in the investigation of spiritualist mediums that she and her mother, Mamma’s Cousin Constance, had had to seek refuge with us. We realised that our experience was not typical, for certainly some people seemed to have reliable fathers. The homes of our schoolfellows often startled and pleased us by their air of stability, which plainly proceeded not only from their mothers but from the kind and sensible men who came in just after we had finished tea. But we doubted if these good Papas were not so by default. Our father had gambled, Rosamund’s father wasted his time and money sitting in the dark accosting the dead who were not there, because both of them disliked this world and were leaning out into that other world, the existence of which we are told to believe may exist by the half-hints dropped by chance and the supernatural; and they both knew a great deal about the world, for my father was a genius among writers and Cousin Jock was a considerable musician. It appeared possible that these other men were good fathers only because they knew too little of the world to grow frenzied against it. Also, though we despised Rosamund’s Papa, we deeply loved our own, and we knew that Mamma had bought with her misery an unhappy happiness which was greater than the ordinary kind. But this made us still more determined not to marry. She had committed herself to this marriage without knowing what it was going to cost her. If we who had seen her pay the price condemned ourselves to such misery, even for the same reward, there would be something suicidal about it, and that would be contrary to the desire to go on living which was her chief characteristic.
Indeed, marriage was to us a descent into a crypt where, by the tremulous light of smoking torches, there was celebrated a glorious rite of a sacrificial nature. Of course it was beautiful, we saw that. But we meant to stay in the sunlight, and we knew no end which we could serve by offering ourselves up as a sacrifice. We therefore wanted to go along the straight lines which seemed to run from our bodies to the horizon, keeping above ground all the way. Mary and I were all right. Throughout our childhood we had said we would be, and we were. We had been brought up to be concert pianists, like our mother, and now Mary had got a scholarship at the Prince Albert College in South Kensington and I had one at the Athenaeum in the Marylebone Road. Rosamund was all right, too. After the holidays she was going as a probationer to a children’s hospital in an eastern suburb of London; and she wanted to be a nurse as much as we wanted to be pianists. She sat and thought of wards and out-patient departments and bandages and uniforms with quiet, reflective greed, just as she crunched lumps of sugar. We were not sure exactly how Cordelia was going to be all right, though we knew she would be. Ever since she was quite little she had wanted to be a violinist, but she had played as people do in tea-shops; she really did not understand anything about music at all. Not long before it had been brutally revealed to her that she had no talent; but she had stood the shock so well that obviously she could not be defeated. Mary and I were astonished, all our lives we had been sickened by the glycerine flow of her playing, and now we found her behaving as she should have played, and showing as much vigour as any of us; and vigour was what we esteemed. The world was full of opportunities, and one required vigour to seize them, and if one seized them, one would be all right, one would be quite all right. Our reactions to life were so natural that, as I look back on us, we do not seem natural at all. We might have been four brightly painted robots. Then something very agreeable happened. Richard Quin, our schoolboy brother, ran in from the garden to say that the tulips we had planted had come out at last, and he was going to fetch Mamma to see them. Cordelia, who never believed that anything our family did could succeed, exclaimed, ‘What, have they really come up?’, and Mary and I answered fiercely, as if more than tulips were involved, that most certainly they had done that, we had been watching the green buds for days. Rosamund followed us down the iron steps into the garden, rather clumsily, because she was so very tall. Then Mamma and Richard Quin came out and we all stood by the round flower-bed on the lawn, looking down on the twenty-four tulips, twelve red and twelve yellow, and the thirty-six wallflower plants which surrounded them, and we felt deep emotion. They were a sign that we had broken a long enchantment. For the first time we were quite sure that we were able to do the things that other people could do as a matter of course. Our garden had always been pretty, for its many lilacs and syringas, and the chestnut-grove at the end of the lawn, had been planted by some dead owner as if he were setting a scene in a play; but there had never been any flowers in the beds except some old rose-bushes and irises which were no more than clumps of leaves. It had had to be like that so long as Papa was at home and was gambling everything away. Plants and bulbs were very cheap in those days, but while he was with us we could not bring ourselves to buy anything not strictly necessary. In our worst times Mamma had been down to our last shilling, and our better times never lasted so long that we forgot our fear of going over the edge of the cliff. Any spare money we ever collected we spent on going to concerts and theatres and the places which we ranked with these, like Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. There was therefore a very simple reason why we had no flowers in our garden: we had not the money to pay for them. But the poor hate to admit that they are slaves to their poverty, and invent mystical explanations for their lack of freedom. So we said to ourselves that it was a queer thing, flowers would not grow in our garden.
Then, the previous autumn Papa left us, and Mamma sold some pictures which she had known were valuable but had pretended were not, so that she could provide for us in just such an emergency as this, which she had, of course, always foreseen. Suddenly we were, so far as money was concerned, all right, or nearly so. And one day Cordelia and Mary and Richard Quin and I had gone to a nursery garden on the edge of Lovegrove, and had ordered some bedding-plants to be delivered in the New Year and had taken away some hyacinths and tulip bulbs to be planted at once. We had kept the enterprise a secret from Mamma, and that had been just as well, for the hyacinths had never come up. We had hated that, for it was fuel to Cordelia’s flame. But there the other flowers were, a small but complete victory. The scarlet and gold tulips rose from a circle of wallflowers far better than their descendants are today, for the growers had not then injected them with reds and yellows, and they were then a deep and tender brown, the brown of brown eyes; and we stood there lapped in satisfaction.
