Cousin Rosamund (12 page)

I was enraged. It was against nature that she should be happy with this man, who was a head shorter than she was, who was ridiculous in form, whose head ran down with almost no neck into his body, which dwindled from plumpness to his tiny feet so gradually that he was like a fish standing on its tail. And indeed she was not happy with him. She was ashamed and repelled, so deeply that she felt almost nothing else. The one emotion that had not been driven out of her by this distress was, against all reason, this resolute loyalty towards the cause of her distress. This man could have no such rights over her unless he were going to go mad or starve; and indeed there was already the froth of madness on his phrases.

‘There will be coming in at the door, he has telephoned from his house, one of the richest men in the world, let me not lie, let me tell the strict truth, one of the richest men in the universe, and he is coming to drink my wine and eat my caviare and see my wife, and he is bringing with him the little one, but he is the big one, that I have dropped in the Bosporus this afternoon, that my janizaries tied up in the sack. How I wish,’ he suddenly howled, ‘that you could wear more of your jewels, that you could wear all of your jewels, but here people do not know how to live. Come now, my rose of the world; but come first, Mary and Rose, my family, my own family, which shall be round me like the vine, come first. For my wife she must make the big entrance when the rich man is here.’

We did not really think that any new and important guests would come. The party was from one point of view just like school, and from another it was like certain musical parties. While we waited on our return to the room we got the feeling of the people, and they were certainly rich and might be powerful, but they were not supremely so. They were as Mr Morpurgo had seen them; and they had accepted Nestor’s invitations because it seemed to them possible that his strange strategic assault on them might have had some chance of success, and they would not yet disdain any connection which might be useful. But they felt no certainty, and they were careful to mock him a little in the sight of their own kind, so that, if he failed, they would be able to claim that they had never believed in him. They were taking out this insurance every moment of the party. As each lifted his glass of champagne from the waiter’s tray he smiled slyly over the brim at his neighbour, however slight their acquaintance; each listened to Nestor’s stories with the laughter that he asked for, but changed it to a grin when he looked away. Had these people been satisfied with their position they would have stayed at home. So I was sure that no prodigious millionaire was about to appear; and I was wrong.

After about a quarter of an hour two men came into the room who were certainly very rich. One was Lord Branchester, a tall lean man with silver hair, rather like Lady Tredinnick’s husband, but not leathery, for he had not been in the tropics, he was a private banker. We knew him because his wife liked music, and though they did not really understand it they tried very hard, and they were generous and were on the list of guarantors of all sorts of concerts and operas. The other was Lord Catterock, whom we did not know so well, but had often met, for he was always at parties. He was a little man who hunched his shoulders to look as if they were broad and had a huge mouth, and spoke with a strong American accent, because he had been brought up in Texas. He had made a fortune in oil and was supposed to be one of the richest men in Europe. He was disappointing. You could see him saying to himself, ‘I am so rich that I can behave as I like, nobody dares punish me,’ and he was perpetually advertising, by a whimsical expression, that he meant to use this immunity in some impish and entertaining way. But it never came to anything except some violation of good manners, a too abrupt departure, a noisy demand for some food or drink or companion not available, or a sudden boorish quarrel.

Mary and I had dined with the Branchesters just before we had sailed for America, but he looked into our faces blankly. A muscle was twitching in his lean cheek. Lord Catterock was grinning widely and saving to him, ‘Come on, man, come on,’ though in fact he was not hanging back, he was simply behaving as one does when one comes to a party late, and is not sure where one’s host may be. But Lord Catterock was organising this arrival with cruel intention. He met Nestor on the Persian rug in the middle of the room, and the two small men, by their terrible need for attention, made it a stage which everybody watched. Rosamund came out of the bedroom and stood unnoticed behind them. She had disguised her misery and was blank. It might have been supposed that she was a stupid and beautiful woman who thought and felt little more than that she was wearing a beautiful sea-green dress and a beautiful diamond necklace.

Lord Catterock belled in his deep Texan voice: ‘All my friends will tell you that I never leave my own home in the evening. But I broke my rule to come and see you, Mr Ganymedios.’

‘You are like me, Lord Catterock,’ said Nestor, forcing his voice down to Lord Catterock’s level. ‘Never do I leave my own home except to see a dear friend. It is a great thing to have friends.’

‘Friends,’ echoed Lord Catterock richly. ‘Only thing worth having in the world.’ The corners of his huge mouth began to twitch, the room was intended to notice this. ‘I’ve brought you a new one tonight. Come on, Branchester, where have you got to?’ Lord Branchester was still behaving like any other guest and was waiting quietly to shake hands with his host. But Lord Catterock gave a guffaw which was meant to be a giveaway, which suggested that the other man was hiding like a sulky child, and pulled him forward by the arm. He watched the handshake with self-conscious puckishness, and said in a roaring chuckle, ‘You’ll be the best of friends. It’s only that you gave him a bit of a surprise this afternoon. By God, you were surprised, weren’t you, Branchester?’

‘Yes, I was surprised,’ said the other.

‘By God,’ said Lord Catterock, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so surprised. And the whole shareholders’ meeting was surprised. You fairly stole a march on them there, didn’t you, Mr Ganymedios?’

‘I had my men dig by night and change the course of the stream,’ said Nestor modestly. Then his eyes and Lord Catterock’s met, and for a minute they were two small fat men mocking a tall thin one.

‘And mind you, it’s not easy to surprise Branchester,’ the huge mouth continued. ‘Though I once surprised him myself. Didn’t I, Branchester? Do you remember how I surprised you?’

‘I have not forgotten it,’ said Lord Branchester.

In my ear Mr Morpurgo murmured, ‘Excuse me, Rose, I must leave you, you will find me in the corridor, I need fresh air.’

‘I surprised him so much that he’s been on his guard ever since,’ Lord Catterock persisted. ‘Haven’t you, Branchester?’

‘I thought so,’ said Lord Branchester.

‘And, mind you, he took it in good part, and we’re the best of friends now, aren’t we, Branchester?’ There was no answer, and the huge mouth was irritably licked by a huge tongue; but after a second the Texan accent went on. ‘I’ve brought him here tonight to make friends with you. Nothing like a surprise to make a foundation for friendship. But it has to be trodden down before it makes a foundation.’ He repeated this, as if he were reading Today’s Great Thought off a calendar. ‘And by God that was a surprise and a half you sprung on him this afternoon. It should be a great friendship between you and him that starts today. A great friendship. Yes, yes. And you know,’ - he chuckled suddenly - ‘it surprised me too. I don’t think I’ve ever been more astonished in my life.’

Again the two short men giggled together.

‘But there’ll be no bad blood,’ continued Lord Catterock. ‘I can say that,’ he added with a judicial air, ‘for of course it cost me something to be astonished. I would have chosen that that meeting took a very different course. I would, indeed,’ he pronounced, shaking his head. But he sighed and threw off his momentary sadness, though he remained solemn. ‘But it’s no use resenting what you did, and I know it. We’ll all forgive you. It’ll pay us to forgive you. You’re a grand man, and this age belongs to you. You have special qualities, Mr Ganymedios, special qualities that our age respects. You’ve got the world at your feet, and I would give a lot to be you. I am an old man now, and my sun is setting. But yours is rising. A splendid dawn, Mr Ganymedios. Everything is coming your way. In a few years everything you want will be yours.’

‘In a few years?’ asked Nestor. ‘But I may have it already, everything I want. In a few years I may have more than everything I want, and that it will be good, it will be very good, it is perhaps that also that I want. But as for everything I want, I got the last piece of it four days ago, when I married the most beautiful woman in the world. Where are you, my dear, where are you, my Rosamund?’

Rosamund moved slowly forward, her blindish look on her. For just an instant the two men were amazed by her beauty, and by its kind. Then Lord Catterock assumed an expression that again he was hoping would be recognised by everybody in the room as puckish, which he retained while he paid her a string of compliments. He was savouring the joke which comes into being when any tall woman marries a little man. But Lord Branchester’s amazement passed coldly into nothing so kindly as obscene laughter. Yet he must have admired her very much, for he liked women to be good-looking, he had a special fondness for Mary, and Rosamund was the type he liked, for his wife, to whom he was devoted, resembled her. But wherever Rosamund went with Nestor, the more people admired her, the more they would despise her.

‘Forgive me if I cannot take my eyes off you,’ Lord Catterock was saying to her, stretching his mouth as if he meant to eat her, ‘but I adore beautiful women and I adore beautiful jewels, and that diamond necklace might even be said to be worthy of its wearer.’

Poor Rosamund bowed slightly, and Nestor, low at her side, cried out: ‘I was dying, here in this hotel I was dying, I had worse than double pneumonia, I had triple pneumonia, and when the doctor came in every morning he did not say, “You are going to die this evening,” I was so bad that he always said, “Surely you died last night?” and my Rosamund came to me as my nurse, and when she came into the room in her white cap and apron I said to myself, “Pray God she is a good nurse, for if she is a bad nurse I will die, and I want to live, to give her the diamonds, for on her the diamonds would look better than on the velvet case in a jeweller’s window,” and she was a good nurse, and I have given her the diamonds she deserved.’ Lord Branchester’s glance grew harder still. He was not the stuff of which martyrs are made. Being treated with contempt, he found some relief in thinking contemptuously of the good-looking nurse who, when her rich patient grew amorous, could turn the situation to her advantage.

Of course Rosamund was aware that he was despising her. I saw her grasp his error to its last false implications; and I knew she would grasp all the cruelties and treacheries of this horrible party. She could not be called observant. That would be too sharp a word. Simply she became conscious of everything which happened where she was, as a looking-glass reflects the objects within the angle of reflection. She would know that the people in the room regarded her as having sold herself to a freak of dubious origin and morals, and she would only have to look from face to face to realise what base variations of conduct each, according to his or her baseness, would ascribe to her. She would understand, as even we, with our ignorance of business, had understood, that her husband had committed a fraud, not less repulsively fraudulent because it was within the law, and that there was a depth of fraudulence below that. We did not know what Nestor Ganymedios had done at the shareholders’ meeting, but we were sure that it had not surprised Lord Catterock. He had not even troubled to sound sincere when he talked of his astonishment. He had been conveying to Lord Branchester: ‘The first time I cheated you I got you so thoroughly in my power that now I am cheating you a second time you dare not say a word in protest, and I can make you shake the hand of the little rascal from nowhere that I made my instrument.’ To every fine shade in the judas-colour with which the moment was suffused Rosamund would be as sensitive as Mary and I were sensitive to tones and half-tones and quarter-tones.

Our eyes met. I knew she knew that I was thinking: ‘No wonder we were not touched by this man when he said he would consider us as his family, for he is a cold-hearted little thief and liar.’ Her eyes left mine. They travelled slowly round the room. She can have seen nothing that she would like. Since the arrival of Lord Catterock and Lord Branchester the atmosphere of the party had been emptied of irony. The guests were now no longer taking out insurance in sly smiles. Their insincerity was not in a pure state. They looked at Nestor Ganymedios with an affected admiration, but felt under no necessity to reveal that it was affected. Now the time would begin when they would press on her without reserve friendship that she knew was worthless.

It was not fair that Nancy should have had so beautiful a wedding and that Rosamund should know such want as a bride. That night before Nancy’s marriage-day Uncle Len and I had stood in the wealth of light that fell from the winter moon and stars, giving even the graves their share of living glory, and had listened to the waters, pouring over a far-off weir, abundant as the moments of time; in the boiler-room his shovel had searched piously for its due burden among the loose coal, and would have counted no labour too great to serve his dear Nancy; and the inn where all our people slept had lain under the clear night as the centre of a great estate, stretching to the walls of the universe. But this room was hot and full of smoke; and the people who sat in it, half-seen, were a part not of life, but of its scum. I got up and went out into the corridor, and Mary followed me.

We found Mr Morpurgo walking up and down. He said, ‘I am so glad that your Mamma and Richard Quin are not here to see this.’

Mary said fiercely, ‘I wish they were, for they could tell us the explanation.’