This Real Night (38 page)

Kate came forward from the doorway. Her strong arms lifted my mother back to the pillows with a seaman’s gesture; so might a drowning man be plucked from the surf. Mamma opened her eyes and bade one of us go at once to break the news to Cordelia, saying that she would be more troubled than any of us. This puzzled Mary and me, for we thought it unlikely to be true, and indeed we felt impatient at being forced at this of all times to remember a relationship which had never seemed quite real and now seemed disagreeably fictitious. To be Richard Quin’s sister was to adore him, she had not adored him. I said I would go, but Mary followed me out into the passage and said that we must toss for it, we had tossed up for the right to go with Richard Quin to Victoria, we would take our chance on this too. But she won, I had to go.

I found Cordelia sitting in her neat little Kensington drawing-room, idling, which was very rare. There was some embroidery lying on the table beside her, and a novel from the Times Book Club, and her French and Italian books, but she was leaning back in an armchair by the fireplace, her hands folded, her eyes fixed on the red hawthorn tree by the gate in her front garden.

This inactivity was so unlike her that I said, ‘I suppose you know?’

She answered, with a return of the irritability which had been characteristic of her as a child, but which had gone from her since she had become a Houghton-Bennett, ‘You suppose I know what?’

But of course she had known. She was merely denying our family heritage. But when she heard me confirm the news, I perceived that our mother had spoken the truth when she had said that Cordelia would be more troubled than any of us. She cried in agony, ‘Killed, not missing?’

‘No, just killed,’ I said. She clung to me, weeping, and I was very sorry for her, and I kissed her, but soon felt doubtful. It was not pure grief that was making her hide her face on my shoulder, that was shaking her with sobs. I thought it probable that she was thinking of some way of regarding our brother’s death which would justify her in saying, ‘It is worse for me, because I am the eldest.’ When she raised her head to say, using a favourite formula of hers, ‘I suppose Mamma does not realise it,’ thus putting forward a claim that she alone was facing reality, I found myself about to utter the sentence, ‘You should be happy in realising that now Richard Quin will never go to Oxford.’ But a memory of my brother exorcised the evil spirit in my mouth. For I had been looking past her out of the window, and the red hawthorn caught my eye, and I remembered that day when she had told us three that she did not know the colour the hawthorn tree would be when it bloomed, and we had looked coldly at her, unkind about all that she did, as she had been unkind in our childhood about all we had done, and how afterwards Richard Quin had rebuked us for our unkindness. I told her something of this, trying to leave out the accusatory point, even letting her suppose that perhaps Mary and I had been jealous because she had married first, though this was quite untrue, and trying to recall justly my brother’s goodness, to invoke it, so that it might descend on us and end this dreadful alienation. I felt him help us, but he failed to complete the miracle. Though Cordelia and I were easier together, there was still something apprehensive in her sorrow which I could not understand and which she would not explain to me. There soon seemed not much reason why I should stay with her any longer. When I told her that I must go back to Mamma she asked if I had had any luncheon and got me some cold meat, and as I ate it I saw that she was looking at me with that white look which meant that she was frightened. I laid down my knife and fork and said, ‘What is it?’ She answered, irritable again, ‘What is what?’ At the gate, standing on a dry red pool of fallen hawthorn petals, we kissed goodbye. When I was fifty yards away I heard her running after me. On her face, as she came nearer, I saw the white look. I thought, ‘At last she is going to tell me why she is afraid.’

But all she said was: ‘
The Times.
There should be an announcement of his death in
The Times.
Shall I get Alan to send it in?’

Disappointed, I agreed, and went on my way quickly back to Lovegrove. When I got home Mamma seemed to be asleep, though all that day, and each time we went in to look at her during the night, her hand was pressed against the wall. In the morning she sat up and ate breakfast, but said to me across the tray: ‘I told you some time ago that my mind had forgotten the connection between a number of things, that when I walked in an orchard I had to tell myself that the round things hanging on the trees were apples. That has got much worse lately, all through spring I have had to remind myself that those green things that kept on appearing on the trees are leaves. But now my body is getting foolish. The various parts of me have forgotten what they have to do. My spine is stupid about supporting my neck, my neck is stupid about supporting my head. I do not believe this is just because of Richard Quin. I think I must be very ill, and to make things right I suppose I ought to see a doctor.’

I telephoned, as I thought, to our doctor, and left a message; but there came a stranger, who told us that our doctor had been called up, heard what we had to say and he examined Mamma, and expressed incredulity. It did not seem possible to him that she had, till two days before, risen each morning for breakfast, helped us to give music-lessons, and had gone shopping and received visitors, for she was showing all the symptoms of some grave disease, in an advanced stage. He was not certain what disease it was; it might be this, or it might be that, but he had no doubt that it had progressed beyond any possibility of cure. The condition of her heart alone would prevent her from surviving more than a few weeks. Then there burst on us one of those horrible things that happen in wartime. The doctor was elderly and had, as he told us, returned to practice from retirement simply out of a sense of duty, and of course he was overworked. He perceived that my mother was a brilliant and beloved person, who in a reasonable universe would never have died. He was, no doubt, sickened, as all of us must be in wartime, by the enormous victories gained by death. To relieve his feelings he turned on Mary and me and told us that he was aware that we were celebrated pianists, and that he was forced to the conclusion that we had been too busy pursuing our careers to notice our mother’s sufferings, for it was no use telling him that she had reached this stage of her malady in a couple of days. We wept, but only because we had just lost our only brother, because we were going to lose our mother. We knew that the old fool would see as soon as he went home and looked in the case-book that only a fortnight before we had called in our doctor to see if another visit to the specialist would do Mamma any good, and that he had reported her as well enough. Men were like this, moody, unjust, showing their perturbation at misfortune by adding to it; all men but Richard Quin, who had left us. The doctor asked us what arrangements we could make for nursing her, and told us that nurses were very hard to get. I told him we had a cousin who had nearly finished her hospital training, and he suggested that we should get her to apply for leave on compassionate grounds, since our mother would probably need careful nursing.

He made everything sound infinitely tedious, as if henceforward we would have no time to talk to Mamma and help her to bear things, because of a multiplicity of organisational duties, onerous in themselves, which we would find specially onerous because of our moral and mental deficiencies. He also suggested that though he was going to get a specialist down to see Mamma it would be onerous for him and he would only be able to carry out the project because of his superiority to us, and would find it particularly grievous because, of course, owing to our lack of interest in her welfare, this attention would be fruitless, since it had been left too late.

As soon as he had gone I wrote to Rosamund and to Constance, too, and Mary went out and posted the letters, while I went up to see Mamma. ‘I wonder if that doctor is gloomy about anything in particular,’ she asked, ‘or if it is just the breed, as they say about Labradors. I wish we had not had to have a strange doctor, but do not worry about what you can do for me. It will make no difference, this is the end.’ She turned her head aside, sighing, ‘My son, my son,’ and closed her eyes. But she opened them again to look sharply at me and say, ‘All this is no reason why you should neglect your practising.’

We sat beside her bed in a house that had changed for ever. The silence that had been silting up in the rooms ever since Richard Quin went away now filled it as an invisible solid. It was not to be dispersed by any noise. Now Richard Quin was nowhere but he was everywhere. He was standing on the lawn, he was on the pavement outside the gate, he was even lying on his bed in his own room. But always his face turned away from us, he refused to have anything more to do with us. Yet we felt guilty because we were not doing the thing, whatever that might be, which would bring him back to us and let him smile and live again. Nothing was the same, even our music. Now when we played we listened for a statement that was made to us without the intention of the composer, that was made, indeed, even by scales and arpeggios. The sounds affirmed our knowledge that Richard Quin was everywhere, was nowhere, was failing us, had been failed by us; and yet they said that though these things were true there was another truth. But the silence rushed in on the sounds, before we could hear that truth. We listened with idiotic intensity, for it is known that this message is never more explicit than that. But we were asking for news of our mother as well as our brother.

It seemed less natural to us that Mamma should die than Richard Quin. We could all of us remember a time when he had not existed, so we had realised that he was not a permanent part of the world. But Mamma had always been there, it seemed to us that she was as little likely to leave us as the ground under our feet. And we could do nothing for her. She was grieving over the death of Richard Quin, but she knew so much more of what was happening to him that we could not grieve in company with her. She sometimes lifted her thin pleated eyelids and cried out things about him and what he was doing that we could not understand, we could not even remember them, they were so far beyond the frontiers of our experience. We could hardly help her physically. She needed often to be lifted up in bed, for any attitude soon grew painful, and, light though she was, we could not lift her. Her body had become so sensitive that she could endure the touch of others only for a second; and it needed Kate’s strength to seize her and shift before she wailed in pain. The doctor never called without remarking that we were indeed unfortunate to be of so little use in what he called the sickroom; for what he had seen in the case-book had not altered his opinion of us at all, he had to medicine himself by dislike of us.

On the second day after we had heard of Richard Quin’s death Mr Morpurgo came to see Mamma. We did not tell him that the doctor said that she was dying, for his face was swollen and he talked as if he were in church. When he came down from her room he said sulkily that she was better than he had supposed she would be, then asked for her doctor’s telephone number and sighed, ‘We must have lots of specialists.’ He sat with us for a little time but could not speak. On the doorstep he kissed us both for the first time in our lives, and muttered thickly, ‘I have no right to be this age when your brother was so young.’ Again we could do nothing. We could help him no more than we could help Mamma. I saw the life of these days as a flagon of grey glass, filled with salt water, with collected tears. The occasion of our grief was classically decorous, our brother had died for his country. But our grief was useless. Salt water, spilled on the ground, does not feed what grows there, but kills it.

We could not master any part of this time and make it kinder. There was always the doctor. He brought down not the specialist my mother had visited often before, but another stranger, who had evidently been told that Mary and I were feckless and selfish, and that Kate was clumsy, and who called Mamma little lady. He took care to rub into us the specialists’ verdict, and called often, not so much to help Mamma as to remind us. It was infuriating to think how easily, had it been peacetime, we could have disengaged ourselves from this hearselike and denigrating man; but any war constantly inflicts on the peoples involved variations of the torture practised in the French Revolution by which naked persons unknown to each other were bound together and cast into the river, and we could not get another doctor. Mercifully Mamma could outwit much of her pain. When a sudden thunderstorm hurt her head, she could find relief in wondering why a sound that she had loved all her life should now give her pain. She began to master the sensitiveness of her body by speculating about its causes. She was interested in her emaciation, saying sometimes, ‘I have found a new bone.’ But suddenly that resource left her. On the fourth morning she asked if the announcement of Richard Quin’s death had yet appeared in
The Times,
and we gave her the newspaper, which we had not looked at ourselves, for we could not steel ourselves to it. We had had our names in the newspaper because of pleasant things that had happened to us, it should have been like that for him.

She had got us to put on her spectacles. They fell from her face as she clutched at the newspaper with both of her hands, trying to tear it and as she failed she threw herself back on the pillows, crying in harsh, endless, animal rage. Before we had given her the newspaper, she had not been quite our mother, she had been the wax model of our mother, made on a smaller scale, and coloured more like the sheets than like flesh. Now she was a monkey that had been shot by a hunter.

I could not take her in my arms because that would have hurt her. I stood quite still and prayed that we might all die. The newspaper had fallen from her bed on the floor and Mary picked it up.

Mamma sobbed, ‘To take his son from him.’

Mary handed me the newspaper, saying, ‘You should not have let Cordelia hand in the notice. There is nothing she cannot turn to harm.’