Cousin Rosamund (13 page)

We walked the length of the corridor and back, and Mr Morpurgo timidly asked pardon. ‘It is quite some time since your Mamma died. Sometimes I forget what her world is. But, of course, there must be an explanation.’

Presently Lord Catterock and Lord Branchester came out of the party, and walked past us. ‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ asked Lord Catterock. He got no reply and he asked again, ‘It wasn’t so hard, was it?’

‘No,’ said Lord Branchester.

Some people barred our way, and we had to stand beside the pair as they were waiting for the lift. ‘He’s an able fellow,’ Lord Catterock was saying, ‘and nothing will get him off the horse now he’s in the saddle. No use crying over spilt milk, you know. We all have to take a knock sometimes, particularly as we get older. Ah, we all lose our grip in time, Branchester. I’ve lost mine. Well do I know it, for I never should have let this little fellow spring this surprise on us.’

The party was breaking up, other guests came out. We went back, and Nestor took us by both hands, and waved us to a sofa in a corner where Alan and Cordelia and Constance were sitting. We stayed in silence while Nestor said goodbye to his guests. The last to go was Mr Ramponetti. ‘He is my London representative,’ Nestor explained, ‘and if ever any of you should want money suddenly, he will give it to you.’

‘And if ever he wants money suddenly,’ said Mr Ramponetti, grinning, ‘he will ask you for it.’

‘He is always a very witty man,’ explained Nestor, when he had shut the door on him. ‘A very strange character. His mother was an Albanian. But where is my wife? Where is my Rosamund? Rosamund, Rosamund!’ He ran into the bedroom and led her out by the wrist. ‘Strange girl,’ he said as she sat down in front of a little table covered with used glasses and coffee-cups and ash-trays, on which she bent her eyes with a curious intentness. She was perhaps telling herself that these were emblems of her new kingdom. ‘She was standing by the window, looking out over the river, with not a light in the room. She is poetical, she will like it when I take her to Istanbul and to Syria. The Syrian Riviera is superior to the French. But we have many other things to talk of than tourism.’

This should have been true. Yet there was a silence before Mary said, ‘Rose and I have been wondering what to give you for a wedding-present.’

‘How difficult a question,’ said Nestor, ‘since she will have all. I am giving her everything. What indeed can you give her?’

‘Give me your Mamma’s work-box,’ said Rosamund.

‘But Mamma never sewed. She could not, any more than we can. It is so bad for the hands.’

‘Yet she had a work-box,’ said Rosamund. ‘Her grandmother had given it to her. None of you thought much of it. It was not very pretty. It was mahogany and it had a band around it of inlay, and it stood on brass claws.’

‘I remember the thing,’ I said, ‘but it isn’t pretty at all. It’s a clumsy brute, we never had it anywhere where it could be seen. If you want anything that was at Lovegrove you can have anything you choose.’

‘I want that work-box,’ said Rosamund. ‘You kept it in the dining-room cupboard, under the shelf where you kept the table linen, and one day when I was helping your Mamma to put away a heavy cloth she took out the box and showed me what was inside. There are little ivory spindles and tiny scissors and a mother-of-pearl needle-case and a tatting-shuttle, and they had not been used for a long time, if ever. And your Mamma said, “When I was a real pianist I could not sew because of my hands, not that I am too busy, but I would like to have not just another life but so many lives that I could spend one being lazy, and could do embroidery and fancy needlework, and could sit for hours using these little things.”’ Rosamund laughed. ‘I like to think of that, of having so many lives that it would be safe to idle one away.’

‘I will fill your life so full that you will not want more than one,’ said Nestor, ‘and work, never think of it again. Poor child, I think she does not realise that someone has come to take her away from her nursing, as Alan has taken Cordelia away from whatever it was that she was doing, as someone will come to take Mary and Rose away from their piano-playing.’

‘I remember elderly ladies tatting when I was young,’ Constance told the silence in her flat, informative voice. ‘The movement was supposed to show off a pretty hand.’

‘All women look beautiful when they are sewing,’ said Nestor. ‘I have six sisters younger than I am, and they are all beautiful, and when my father and my mother had found each other again they had a house in Salonica, and on the flat roof my six sisters would be sitting, and they would all be sewing, and my heart would turn to water, they were so beautiful. Alas, that all this turned out not so good.’

‘Why, what happened to them?’ asked Alan, with a laugh that was supposed to show that he was not finding the situation brought on him by his wife’s relatives too much but was actually enjoying it.

‘Well, I am rich now, and I think I will always be rich, for I have seen to it that if I fall others will fall with me, and they will rather save me and save themselves. That Lord Catterock has got me, but he will see soon that I too have got him. But in the past I have sometimes been rich and sometimes I have been poor, and the condition of my sisters would not keep pace with my condition. They became marriageable without regard to my purse, and you cannot say to a woman’s figure, “Go back, it is not time to show yourself, lie flat till the rate of exchange is different.” So some of them are married to rich men, which should be so, and some are married to poor men, which should not be so. For poverty is a kind of sickness, one would not choose to be with the sick, and there is also a fitness of things, a beautiful woman should have a rich husband, if she is not a fool, a rich man should have a beautiful wife, if he is not a fool. Such harmony is in immortal souls, as our great Shakespeare says. But this marriage thing with my sisters goes better. The poorest of their husbands is sick, and I think he will die.’ He rose and went and stood in front of a mirror and took a comb from his pocket and combed his hair. ‘If he should die I will arrange it well and will marry her to a rich husband. That will be better, for this poor one is a most miserable man. Thinking of him I had the need to get up and arrange myself to see that I was not as he is. But enough, let us have more champagne and let us finish those caviare tartlets. You eat nothing, Rosamund. Eat something, my beloved, it would not suit you to be thin. You must not lose those fine shoulders.’

‘For our present,’ said Alan, ‘we have sent down to the boat a picnic-basket.’

‘A beautiful present,’ said Nestor, ‘just the present people should make to other English people. We shall use our picnic-basket much, when we go to our cottage on the Wannsee, for you do not know how fortunate Rosamund is, she will have two homes. I have told you how the great Schaffhausen would build only cathedrals and town halls but not dwelling-houses, they were too small, till he met me, and then be became humble, and built me a house at Dahlem. Well, coming to know me during the building of the house, he became more humble still and built me a cottage by the Wannsee. There I have a boat, a beautiful boat, and I am very skilful in navigation, I could also have been a sea-captain, and I will take Rosamund all the way to the Baltic by the waterways.’ Rosamund’s eyes were perhaps set on the end of that voyage; but indeed whenever he spoke for any length of time she stared into the distance. ‘It will be like Wagner, it will be like
Tristan and Isolde,’
Nestor went on, lowering his eyelids and dilating his nostrils, ‘only nobody will die, we will live and we will love, and we will take your picnic-basket, because you gave it to us. It will be dear to us for that reason, so we will never leave it behind, though of course the boat is fitted up to give all food and drink. Have more champagne, my new family, let us finish up the caviare.’

‘And what shall I give you, Rosamund?’ said Mr Morpurgo.

She said, ‘Give me a drawing of yourself.’

‘But I am dreadful to look at,’ said poor Mr Morpurgo, humbly.

‘No, you are not!’ cried Rosamund and Mary and I; and Rosamund added, ‘You see, it seems that I am to spend my life abroad, in Germany or else in South America. I must have a picture of you to take with me. Not a photograph. Think how Mary and Rose never look quite themselves in a photograph.’

Mr Morpurgo was about to answer when Nestor exclaimed, ‘How is it possible that I should have forgotten anything so important! No, not a drawing of him. But a portrait of my wife. Is it possible that not till this minute did I think that I must have, it is absolutely necessary, a portrait of my wife, life-size, and that diamond necklace, also life-size. Tell me, Mr Morpurgo, your pictures are worth millions, who can paint this beautiful woman and this beautiful diamond necklace.’

‘Rosamund should have been painted by Paulo Veronese,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘But naturally it must not be someone dead,’ said Nestor. ‘Above all it must be someone alive.’ But he struck himself on the forehead. ‘Yet, dead or alive, who can paint a diamond necklace? I have been many places, and museums I have not spared, and there are many pictures which show beautiful women as they are, but there are no pictures of diamonds which are truly like diamonds - never do you see a picture of a diamond which is so that you would buy a diamond of which it was the picture. How can that be? But why do I ask? It is plain. Artists do not think of diamonds. They are poor, particularly when they are young. When one is poor one does not think of diamonds. I know. I have been very poor, if I had had a coin to bite between my teeth would I have joined the Istanbul Fire Brigade? So I know that when one is poor one does not think of diamonds. There are days and weeks, and in bad times even months, when the thought of diamonds does not cross the mind, though not years, for the heart of man is full of hope. Only if one is rich can one think of diamonds all the time? Which of you in this room thinks often of diamonds except me and Mr Morpurgo? It would be waste of time. So it is with artists, they do not think of diamonds, they paint what they think of, they think much of women, for the poorest man must think of women all the time, so artists paint women and again women and again women, and they get much practice, and they learn to paint them very well. But they do not think of diamonds, and never they learn how to put them on the canvas as you see them on my wife’s shoulders, not shining blue and green and red but white all the time. To people like me and Mr Morpurgo it is hardly fair.’

Mary and I laughed, and stopped because our laughter made him look cross. Cordelia’s short upper lip became very short. Because of her training as an art dealer she took art very seriously.

‘There is another reason,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘No, believe me there is not,’ said Nestor. ‘I know. I know. It is only by accident that I am a businessman. All I could have been, musician or poet or sculptor or painter. Oh, how I wept the first time I saw Venice, and it is not unnatural, for among my mother’s brothers were all gifts. So I am very artistic and I understand what is in all artists’ minds.’

‘No, there is another reason,’ insisted Mr Morpurgo. He spoke in a bored but firm tone, as an Englishman might if, captured by Moslem enemies, he found himself under some necessity to assert his Christian faith. His ultimate loyalties went to Mamma and his pictures. ‘Painting sets out to do certain things and it leaves everything alone which interferes with its task. It does not represent various sorts of matter which are so arresting in their difference from all other sorts that it would be difficult to harmonise an exact representation of them with other objects in a picture.’

‘You do not believe me,’ said Nestor, ‘because always you have had money, you have had diamonds as you have had a wife. But this does not matter, if we cannot get the diamonds painted well but we have them. Take off the necklace, my dear, and let your beautiful cousins look at them.’

Obediently Rosamund raised her hands to undo the clasp. ‘Look,’ said Nestor, ‘the most beautiful arms in the world.’ Her downcast face told us that she did not think the clasp would ever open. ‘I must help, little intricate things she does not understand as well as I do,’ he said. As he worked at the clasp he rolled his eyes at us over her head. ‘The nape of her neck is like a child’s.’ But he grew grave with respect as he felt the weight of the necklace in his hand. He put it down on the table in front of Rosamund, drew up a chair beside her, and cried out to us, ‘Come nearer. You shall not often see such a wonderful thing, even now, and you certainly never dreamed of anything like it in that little house at Lovegrove where all you four beautiful women were children. No, very surely there can have been nothing like this here,’ he chuckled, but broke off to look ever at Mr Morpurgo and wink, as one shrewd man at another, ‘and yet what a success-box was that little house! Remarkable, was it not,
hein?
Not one but has done well for herself one way or another. And now this little piece of good fortune, come close and see it. Do you understand such things, what is your name, Alan? I will explain it to you, for I could also have been a great jeweller. See,’ he said, rising to his feet, for he was too short to speak to us all unless he stood up.

His zest had filled his mouth with saliva, so he had to stop and wipe it away; and as he stood with his handkerchief at his lips he looked down on his wife. She was to us misery made visible. Her eyes had gone into the feared distance, and her defeated body slumped within her clothes. ‘But I am a fool,’ he cried, ‘to buy this woman a diamond necklace! How beautiful she is without it! How specially beautiful are her shoulders.’ An impulse quivered through him, he resisted it for a moment, then it forced him down to her, his mouth munching. It seemed certain that he was going to bury his face in her shoulders and rub his babyish cheeks against the bare flesh. For only a second was she less aware of this than we were. Then disgust pulled down the corners of her mouth so that we saw the gums under her lower teeth, and pushed up her cheeks so that her eyes became slits. A twitch of her head showed that, like us, she knew exactly where his face was going to touch her, at a point below her ear, at the base of her neck, and we could feel abhorrence travelling over the skin of her body. Helpless, we watched her increasing nervousness and fear, and did not at first remark that he had drawn away from her.