This Real Night (27 page)

‘Have you thought any more, Mrs Aubrey,’ Miss Beevor began, ‘about the little outing we planned to have next week?’ This was her way of alluding to my mother’s suggestion that they should go to a concert together: a suggestion that was little less than saintly, considering the history of their relationship.

‘No, I left that until we could talk it over together,’ said Mamma. ‘Richard Quin, please go and get us
The Times.
’ The newspapers were still left in the study after we had had a look at them during breakfast, just as if Papa were still in the house and keeping a journalist’s hours, and waking at noon. Also since my father had held a crumpled newspaper to be as disgusting as muddy shoes, we handled them very gingerly over our bacon and eggs, and Richard Quin was smoothing out the rough print-cobbled pages of
The Times
when he brought it to Mamma.

‘Well, on Wednesday Max Vogrich plays the Mendelssohn G minor with the Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall,’ said Mamma after a moment’s study, in a calmly dismissive tone which was lost on Miss Beevor, who said that that would be very nice, adding ‘He has such a beautiful touch.’ I am not acquainted with the musical affectations of today, and it may still be that to talk of ‘touch’ was a sign that one was one of the lesser breed without the law, as we used to put it.

But Mamma who was listening only to imagined sounds, had gone further down the column. ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘the choir are giving the
St Matthew Passion
at the Albert Hall that very same night! Oh, how glorious. I never hear it with less joy than I did the first time I heard it, thirty years ago in Vienna!’ She blazed up in ecstatic flame, but almost immediately damped down the fires. ‘No,’ she said, kindly. ‘No. Perhaps a little heavy. But how extraordinary. Here’s something else. I did not know she came to London, I thought that when she played at that party she said she would not come to England again she was too busy, so many of the best French musicians won’t cross the Channel. They are so insular and nationalist. Not like the Germans. But here it is, Wanda Landowska is giving a concert at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday. And a delightful programme, delightful, Bach and Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin. A muddle but delightful. And all that harpsichord music is so interesting historically. Oh, Mary, and you too, Rose, you must hear her. After you have heard her play the pieces you have only heard on the piano, you will realise that quite a number of composers have been prophets, they have frequently written compositions which could not be properly performed, could not be fully realised, on the only instruments then existing, they were never truly heard till the piano was invented. Oh, you must hear her, children, we must all hear her—’ She had gone up in flames again, but as her burning glance swept the room it fell on Miss Beevor, and again the fires were damped. ‘Yes, children,’ she went on, ‘you must see to it you get to that concert. But I do not think I want to hear her again. You and I, Miss Beevor, will go to the Queen’s Hall and hear Max Vogrich.’

But Miss Beevor had become more sensitive to the family atmosphere than my mother imagined. ‘I would prefer we did not,’ she said sitting up very straight. ‘I would like to hear the
St Matthew Passion.
’

‘No, no,’ said Mamma, ‘it is so long, it demands such attention, now that I have to make up my mind about it I see I am too old for such feasts.’

‘If it is not to be the
St Matthew Passion,
’ said Miss Beevor, implacably, ‘let it be this young woman you have been talking about.’

‘No, no,’ said Mamma, ‘do not think of her either. Let us leave such things to the young, we will go to the Queen’s Hall.’

‘I do not want to go to the Queen’s Hall,’ said Miss Beevor. ‘I have been to the Queen’s Hall. On several occasions. I know that I am not a gifted musician. Nor a highly trained one. But surely it need not be taken that I am quite without musical taste.’

‘Oh, you are mistaken, Miss Beevor,’ sighed Mamma, with an instant adaptation to the needs of the moment so smooth as to be almost to her discredit. ‘I may be old, but that isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t brace myself to have one more evening with genius. So the Albert Hall and the
St Matthew Passion
it must be.’ For an instant she looked wildly about her. I have never known anybody who suffered such anguish if she hurt anybody’s feelings. She said, ‘So we should have a very satisfactory evening before us.’

Because we all wanted to laugh, and were also wrung by our mother’s recognition that she had wounded Miss Beevor, we began to clear away the tea-things. Rosamund sat where she was and sighed, ‘Oh, dear, tea at St Katherine’s isn’t like this at all,’ and Richard Quin said, ‘Have you really had enough?’

She shook her head and laughed, ‘Of course not. Is there such a thing as enough?’

‘How will you eat your honeycomb at hospital?’ asked Mamma. ‘Can you have your own things without having to give so many people shares that they’re lost to you? I know you would not mind, but I would like you to keep something for yourself.’

‘I do put things on the table,’ said Rosamund, ‘but not this. I wouldn’t share what Richard Quin gives me for anything. I’ll put the honeycomb in my locker, and draw my cubicle curtains, and eat it with a spoon when the food has been too dreadful, and after I’ve said my prayers at night.’

‘You can eat honeycomb with a spoon?’ exclaimed Miss Beevor. ‘Isn’t it dreadfully rich?’

‘Nothing is dreadfully rich to Rosamund and me,’ said my brother. ‘They’re rich, and rich is something right in itself. Rosamund could eat a spoonful now, after all that tea, couldn’t you, Rosamund?’

‘Oh, surely you couldn’t,’ exclaimed Mamma. But Rosamund laughed again and said that she could, and Richard Quin carved a spoonful out of the honeycomb and held it to her lips, and she looked up at him and stammered, ‘Thank you,’ and brought her mouth down to it. But he suddenly drew it back, crying, ‘I’ve thought of something better.’ He took up the cream jug with his left hand and poured it over the honey, and held it out to Rosamund, saying, ‘Yes, this will be better still.’

‘Oh, no, not cream with honey,’ our elders objected, ‘that will be far too rich. And after all that tea.’

But Rosamund swallowed it down, and threw her head back on her strong throat, and said dreamily, ‘That was lovely, the smoothness of the cream, the roughness of the comb, the sweetness of the honey.’

And Richard Quin, who had given himself another such spoonful, stood and looked at it with the same sleepy concentration: for a minute they looked too fair, too strong, too solid and monumental in their pleasure, for this small room, for us. But soon they went out together, taking the tea-things down to Kate, and they stayed away till Constance asked me to go and warn Rosamund that the cab would be coming soon to take her to the station. I found them sitting together in the dark half-way up the basement stairs, which was a place we often used for talking secrets: nobody could hear you upstairs, and somehow it did not matter about dear Kate. The two were not laughing then, and I had an idea that Rosamund might have been telling Richard Quin why she would not marry the doctor, though she liked him. It struck me that it was a pity that Rosamund was older than Richard Quin, they might have got on well if they had been married, and one could imagine the ceremony. For a minute my mind floated off into an area of images which suggested no words: the eyes on peacocks’ tails, the grooves in the glassy waters that pile up around the posts of a weir. As I gave my message the two turned their faces towards me and grew less remarkable, and we were together as we always had been.

When she was dressed, and Richard had got from Kate the case in which we had packed her clean clothes and the food, she went into the sitting-room, where Mamma and Constance were still talking to Miss Beevor.

‘You look a very grown-up young lady,’ said Mamma, looking up at her tallness. ‘You look more splendid than my girls, you look more like the people I used to play to, in big houses, in palaces. Are you sure you like nursing?’

‘I told Mary and Rose,’ said Rosamund proudly, ‘I nurse as they play.’ She tossed her head in parody of her own pride, and then the stammer began to choke her. But she insisted on saying, ‘There is one thing.’

‘One thing?’ said Constance, quickly but still placidly. She knew there was probably something that could be done to right it, whatever it was, provided one did not become excited.

Rosamund forced herself to say: ‘I cannot bear it when children die of burns.’

My mother looked away from her, out into the garden, where there was proceeding that liquefaction of colours which deepens and fuses the flowers and leaves and grass on summer evenings, under a sky of green crystal. She might have been calling on buried truth to disinter itself and come to our help. Constance picked up some needlework that she had set down on the table, and said, with calm acidity, ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no unbearable truths.’ Richard Quin put his arms round Rosamund’s shoulders and rested his head against the bush of her thick hair. She said, ‘Oh, well, if everything should stop, should come to an end, you know, one would remember that such things happened and mind less,’ and toured the circle of the elders, giving her smooth lips to their pleated cheeks, and was gone.

I went to my piano and made up for lost time by practising till it was quite dark, and then went into the sitting-room and found Mamma sitting there among the shadows, the gas not lit.

‘We have all had a lovely day,’ I said, and sat down beside her. ‘But, oh, Mamma, why are you crying?’. . . .

‘I was awful to Miss Beevor,’ she quavered. ‘I have lost the knack of dealing with her. I used to give her quite a lot of pleasure when she came here - and goodness knows I have not asked her nearly often enough, I think she is very lonely - by saying when she left, “Goodbye, Bay-ah-tree-chay,” but tonight I did not dare. She might have thought I was laughing at her, for she thought that about the
St Matthew Passion
. . . .’

I did not have time to comfort her properly, for suddenly Aunt Lily and Mr Morpurgo were with us, she hungry and tired and disturbed as she always was after such expeditions. He was tired too, and nervous lest Mamma should think he should have taken better care of his charge. On this occasion he had some grounds for anxiety, because this time Aunt Lily was in an unusually poor state. As a rule she returned in a state of garrulous and mendacious optimism, alleging that the head wardress had whispered in her ear telling her to keep her chin up, the King was considering giving Queenie a free pardon after the New Year, or Easter, or August Bank Holiday. But this evening she was squealing with misery, and turning and twisting her little bony body as if she had St Vitus’ Dance.

At supper she was silent for a time then put down her knife and fork and told us: ‘She’s lost her spirit. Queenie’s lost her spirit, and I know who’s done that. It’s a funny thing, but when I see that ginger-haired wardress I always find myself remembering the words “ruptured kidney”. I’ve only heard them once in my life and that was years ago. At the very first place where Queenie and I worked, when we were just girls, bits of the shell on our feathers, a customer made an awkward mistake. He thought one of the other customers wasn’t the welterweight champion for Middlesex, but his brother, who wasn’t there, he thought, but he was, and the other one who wasn’t was dead of the ’flu, but the matter wasn’t cleared up till he had asked the one he thought wasn’t to go outside to settle a difference, if I make myself clear. “Ruptured kidney” was what the coroner said at the inquest. I never thought of the words since till I saw that ginger-haired wardress. “I’d like to give you something, my lady, that’d leave you with a ruptured kidney.” That’s what passes through my mind every time I see that little ginger-haired so-and-so.’

‘That is only natural,’ said Mamma. ‘But eat your supper, what you need is to go straight off to bed.’

Lily repeated for the twentieth time, ‘She’s lost her spirit, her spirit’s gone.’

‘Oh, Lily dear,’ said Mamma, ‘are you sure what you notice is not just that your sister is being good and kind again. But if you think that she’s being ill-treated Mr Morpurgo will help you. He knows people at the Home Office; they will look into it.’

Not listening, Lily said, ‘I tell you, it’s all gone, the old Queenie. She sits there like a beaten dog. She never let out at me once the whole time we were there.’

‘Oh, my dear, eat and get to bed. When you have had some sleep things will seem different, and you may find you have something to balance against your misfortunes. You are so brave, you’ll be glad to see what a relief it will be to your sister if she doesn’t feel that she has to rage against you and can take the affection you give her.’

‘Who’s saying she was ever rude and unkind to me? Nobody ever had a better sister than Queenie’s been to me,’ wailed Aunt Lily, forgetting that most of the people in the room had at some time or other seen Queenie turn on her a glance remarkable in its inclusive contempt, which had suggested that had she cared to address the company present on her sister’s insufficient bust measurement, her slightly projecting teeth, or her unwedded state, she could have gone on for a long time. But Aunt Lily was not for the moment paying much respect to reality. She passed on to a representation of Papa as a Cockney version of a Greek messenger, describing the imprisonment of Queenie in terms of pity and protest which seemed unlikely, considering he had frequently expressed the opinion that she was damned lucky not to have been buried in Holloway Prison instead of being alive in Buckinghamshire. ‘Time and time again, I’ve heard your father say, and bless him wherever he is, and there’s many could bear me out, that he didn’t think we knew half of what went on inside Aylesbury Jail, I’ll swear on my Bible oath, he used to say, that your poor martyred sister’s suffering such torments as haven’t been heard of since they done them to Maria Monk, and I doubt as if she’ll ever get out of that hell-hole alive. And why should we care, asked someone. Someone who happened to be there, trying to be smart, you know, and your father answered quick as a flash, “Because she’s one of the finest women that ever lived and—”’