Cousin Rosamund (10 page)

‘Who is he?’ I said.

‘The patient she has been nursing at the Savoy since the end of November. But I cannot read his name.’

‘Can’t read his name? But her writing is so clear.’

‘Well, look. It can’t be that.’

III

J
UST AFTER
the New Year we each had another letter from Rosamund, telling us her plans. I was in Hollywood and Mary was at Mount Holyoke; and we were so disturbed that, though we hated talking on the telephone, it is hardly better than spiritualism, we spoke several times on long distance. We were not worried about her; the letters were completely inexpressive, but then her letters always were. She had, however, made a most unfortunate mistake. It appeared that Rosamund’s fiancé, whose name really was Nestor Ganymedios, as we had thought it could not be, had for some years made his home in Berlin, and he was therefore anxious to be married there, among his friends. She would have proposed that the marriage should take place as soon after our return from the States as would give us time to travel comfortably to Germany, but as it happened Nestor had urgent reasons for leaving on a tour of South America at the very time of our arrival. So the wedding was to take place a week before our return, and they would return to England three days before we got back and would catch a boat twenty-four hours after our arrival. She was sorry, but there was something important about signing a contract in Buenos Aires, and she asked us to dinner at the Savoy. The trouble was that she had made a mistake about the date of our return. She thought we were travelling three days earlier than we were, by the
Berengaria
instead of the
Ile de France.
This puzzled us, until we remembered that before we started there had been some idea that we might get off by the earlier boat, and we supposed we must have mentioned it to her. But it was not like her to have failed to check her belief by asking our secretary or Kate. Still, she was going to be married, she was going to make a home in a new country, she was going on a long voyage, and to prepare for any one of these things would have been enough to overwhelm her and her mother with business. Of course we could not expect her to alter her plans, so we caught the
Berengaria.
This was not easy for us. We were very tired, as one always is at the end of a tour, and for each of us it meant cutting out the few days of rest we would have given ourselves in New York, and going straight from the hall where we gave our last concert to a train which would get us to the dock in time; and we had to practise exhausting concentration to prevent our last performances being spoiled by our desire to get back to England.

It is always lovely to wake on the first morning of an Atlantic voyage. One is freed from what one did in the continent behind one, as if one had died; one feels certain that one will make no such mistakes in the continent that awaits one. When I opened my eyes there was in the upper air of the cabin the string of wrong notes with which I had defaced Chopin’s Sixteenth Prelude at Cleveland. But my bunk was rolling, the great seas were slapping the porthole, the ship was above and below and beside me, I was passing through an area where the clean ocean and the cleansing winds were at work on me. There would be no wrong notes when I played that prelude at the Queen’s Hall in a fortnight’s time. I felt no further remorse about them, my mother’s face ceased to blaze contempt at me as she heard them. I would play well at the Queen’s Hall and differently, for I would be a different person. By then I would have met Rosamund married, I would have met Rosamund’s husband. I wished Mary would wake up so that I could ask her if Rosamund had told her anything about Nestor in the letter she had got, for in my letter Rosamund had said almost nothing about him. But Mary was sunk in sleep. Fatigue had set such shadows on her eyelids and under her cheekbones that I remembered how ill she had been during the first years of the war, and I resolved I would try to make her drink more milk. Anyway it was not likely that there was anything more in her letter than in mine, for Rosamund could not put down on paper anything but the most immediate facts. It was hard not to be impatient, but I closed my eyes and let the waters rock me, and as a squall came up I remembered, as I had remembered in Chicago, how the elms by the Dog and Duck had groaned under the winter wind, while we dressed the bride for that minor wedding.

In the afternoon Mary shook me awake, to show me a radiogram from Berlin. ‘We are married. I love you. Rosamund.’ We slept all that day, though the stewardess made us eat some dinner, and we stayed in bed for the next two days, because we were passing through a full gale, and we were still too tired. It was always a pleasure for us to be on a boat. It was like retreating into childhood, not such a childhood as ours had been, hag-ridden by poverty and miracles and music, but the kind of childhood that is described in children’s books. We were in a warm and comfortable nursery, and we had a kind nanny who said we need not get up, as we had been doing too much lately, and brought us nice things on trays, and let us play with our toys. We lay and looked at the flowers people had sent us, which were lovely except for the microcephalous roses that American florists grow, with long stems and tiny flowers that make one worry about their intelligence quotients, and we read our letters, which were all friendly, and turned over the pages of the books other people had sent, and talked about Rosamund’s husband.

‘I wonder if he will be like the doctor,’ said Mary.

I too had been thinking of that summer afternoon long ago when Rosamund had stretched her tall fairness on the lawn at Lovegrove and lain with a long blade of grass between her teeth and, it might have been thought, the hesitance of awakening love muting her voice, her smile, her movements.

‘Robert Woodburn,’ I said. ‘But how do you know what he was like? She never brought him to see us, did she?’

‘No, but I always felt I knew all about him,’ said Mary. ‘Taller than Rosamund, fair like her, and quite perfect. Never cruel.’

‘But if he was like that, why did she not marry him?’

‘She never told me. I thought she might have told you.’

‘Rosamund would never tell me anything she did not tell you,’ I said. ‘Never once in all our lives have I felt, “Rosamund likes Mary more than she likes me,” and I would be apt to think that, because I know you are better than me. Rosamund would take precautions against either of us being afraid like that, not that you would have to be afraid about me.’

‘Why on earth should you think that I am better than you?’ asked Mary.

‘You should listen to our gramophone records some time,’ I said, ‘and look in the glass when we are both standing in front of it. You are just a little better than I am in everything. I do not mind, but I might have minded it if Rosamund had cared more for you than for me.’

‘All this is nonsense. I always feel you have something I have not got,’ said Mary. ‘But to get back to Robert Woodburn, he cannot have been perfect, for Rosamund did not want to refuse him. I came on her once being sad on her own account. It was so odd to find her caring about herself for once.’

I looked back on that afternoon in the garden at Lovegrove, and though I had had no lover, I felt sure that Rosamund had been in love. ‘Yes. Yet she was quite determined not to marry him.’

‘I wonder why. I feel he had not that queer thing about him that all men have who want to marry us.’

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘Why, enmity, of course,’ said Mary.

We were silent for a minute, and let the kind sea rock us. Mary took up a comb from her bed-table and brought her dark hair back to sleekness. I said, ‘And Nestor must be without that too.’

‘Yes. He will be quite perfect, as we thought the doctor was.’

‘How things turned out right! Do you remember how in Chicago on Christmas Eve we were frightened that we would run short of people? You see, here is someone wonderful.’

‘But in what way is he wonderful? It is maddening of Rosamund not to tell us more, but she cannot help writing bad letters, it is like her stammer.’

‘What can he be?’ I speculated. ‘Ganymedios, Ganymedios, have we not met people in Sweden and Finland with odd names like that?’

‘Yes, he might be a Scandinavian. Then he would be tall and fair like her.’

‘Mamma would be pleased. She liked men to be tall. She thought Alan tame, but she was proud of his height.’

‘This is all she hoped for,’ said Mary. ‘She did not expect us to marry. With us at our music, and Rosamund with the right husband, she has all she wanted.’

‘But do you think they will live where we can see a lot of them?’

‘Probably his family has moved to England, lots of Scandinavians do, and if they haven’t we could spend our holidays where they are. It will be all right, she will be much freer than when she was a nurse.’

On the last three days we got up and walked about the ship, though the weather was still very rough and many people stayed in their cabins throughout the voyage. We were so happy that we could not feel sea-sick. We had played really well in America, we were sure that we were going to play better in Europe, we had made a lot of money, the people we met had been nice to us and warm as they are not in England, and there was this immense pleasure at the centre of our lives. We were again to have a man in the family, as we had not had since Papa and Richard Quin left us; and that was in itself a precious recovery. Kate kept a man’s hat and overcoat hanging in our hall, and pretended it was to intimidate burglars, but it was really a complaint to the gods that we had had to eat our meat without salt for many years. We had not thought that we would ever see good salt on our table again. But this man who was now coming to us must be male indeed. We saw few proofs that there was any truth in the traditional view of the relationship between the sexes. Only at the Dog and Duck did we see a man who took it for granted that it was his duty to protect his women. Papa had done all sorts of things for Mamma but he had not protected her, and most of the men we met in our profession and at parties seemed not to have been fitted at birth with any apparatus for cherishing. We could believe that those who were homosexual had become so simply in order to evade any such obligation. But this man must indeed be ready to accept it, for when he took Rosamund away from her nursing and gave her a home where she could have children, he was protecting someone who was not helpless but was herself a protectress. The work was grander than was ordinary, and our imagination saw it carried out now in a long white farm on one of those rocky islands between Finland and Sweden, where the autumn maples burn red among the dark firs, now deep in the Swedish forest, in a baroque castle beside a lake on which they and their children would skate by torchlight, now in a tall and narrow eighteenth-century house in the ship-invaded elegance of Copenhagen. We obstinately set the scene of Rosamund’s happiness always in the North, perhaps because of the crystalline chill of Nancy’s wedding, perhaps because we were so greatly enjoying this winter voyage.

Every day it continued its peculiar pleasure. The Atlantic seas were so tremendous that often our prow hung on the crest of a huge wave while the stern hung in mid-air until another wave rolled on to take its weight, and during these seconds the substance of the liner quivered like frightened flesh. It was as if we were travelling on the backbone of some marine animal, which was about to break. We were not afraid then, nor when we found a glass door that enabled us to look obliquely across the deck at the approaching waves, which came on like black marble mountain-faces, veined with foam, so high that they cut off the sky. Then we could see, as well as feel, the successive moments of our danger and our salvation. For we would have been engulfed, had it not been that at the last moment the human intelligence which the shipbuilders had incorporated in the hull took notice and assumed control and made it ride the waves. But every day we were losing hours in fighting the gale, and we soon realised that we were going to get into London just in time for Rosamund’s party. There was always the hope that we would come into good weather in the Channel, and indeed for an hour or two the West Country smiled at us with the lying innocence of landfall, showing us cliffs and fields sweet as a nursery frieze, and the sea was gently green like spring pasture. Then another storm struck us, we lurched and hesitated into Southampton, it was evening, a hurricane howled round the Customs-sheds, everything took much longer than usual. Before we got off the boat, we knew that we would not be able to change for the party, before we got on the train we knew that we should not be able to get to the Savoy till half past nine or ten. We were not depressed or exasperated, we saw that the forces of evil were trying to prevent us from meeting Rosamund and her husband, and thought that natural enough, and we had beaten them, we were nearly there. We dined in the Pullman and gave ourselves sherry and a half-bottle of champagne, though usually we did not drink unless we were with quite a lot of people. When we got to Victoria our secretary, Miss Lupton, was there, and we left her to deal with the luggage and took a taxi to the Savoy. The lights were shining back from the streets, London had the snug look it wears when one comes home to it. We drove along the Embankment; the palely illuminated lion by the pub at Hungerford Bridge seemed childlike and modest beside the huge clamant electric fantasies of Broadway. About us we could divine miles and miles of little streets where people enjoyed moderate happiness in front of glowing open grates, and were unlikely to be guilty of cruelty or violence. When we reached the Savoy vestibule we passed through crowds which looked worn and innocent; American hotels at that time were frequented by people formidable not only because they were so gorgeously dressed, but because they were unacquainted with grief. When we waited with the page-boy outside Rosamund’s suite we were breathless; and it was a second or two before we realised that the buzz of a large party sounded behind the door.

‘What, will there be other people?’ asked Mary.

‘His family, his friends, I suppose,’ I said.