Cousin Rosamund (15 page)

‘She writes bad letters,’ he said. We let the clock make all the noise in the room for some moments. Then he sighed, ‘She will write no more than your mother does.’

‘What, is she going to die?’ I asked in consternation.

‘I did not mean that, it is not me who knows such things,’ he said. ‘But, like your mother, she has gone.’

‘Yes, like Mamma. And it was right that Mamma should go, and it is…’

‘Yes,’ he said mildly, ‘but she has gone.’

Mary brought in the Perrier water and poured it out for him,’ and repeated, ‘She has gone.’

‘Well, it is glorious,’ I said.

‘It may be, but all the same, we are alone,’ she said.

‘We have each other,’ I protested, weakly.

‘But we are by nature children. We do not know how to live alone. Mamma and Rosamund and Richard Quin are by nature parents. They have gone away. However many there might be of us left behind, we are still deserted children.’

‘Yes, I am by nature a child,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘We may be children but we are not deserted,’ I objected. ‘They would have stayed with us if they could.’

‘It has been agony for them to leave us, but what difference does that make? We are none the less deserted children. The power that uses them has pushed us off alone on a raft.’

‘It will be hard to be without her help when Queenie comes out of prison,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘Yes, down at the Dog and Duck they are by nature children too,’ I said. ‘But we will just have to imagine what Mamma and Rosamund and Richard Quin would have done and act it out. And this may all be over by then. Something may have happened, she may be back with us.’ I repeated it confidently, ‘She may be back with us.’

Neither of them answered until Mr Morpurgo said, ‘That milk is boiling over.’

It was too hot to drink at once. We each took a biscuit. Mary wiped the crumbs from her mouth to ask violently, ‘Where does this man come from? What is he?’

‘His grandfather was of Baghdad, he tells me,’ said Mr Morpurgo, his mouth pulled down at the corners, ‘but more recently there seems to have been a Levantine connection. And he said something about Polish relatives. But one could not tell. He is not a Jew.’ Coldly he added, ‘I think he is what the Jews, who come from the same quarter of the globe, feared to become, and that is why they all took the tiresome precautions that add up to Judaism.’

We drank our milk, and the clock ticked. He burst out, ‘The creature is too ugly. He is ugly in such an ugly way. I always thought there was pitifulness in ugliness, like the pitifulness of death, but in him there is none.’ He ran his hand over his face and shuddered. Suddenly it appeared what divided him from his family. He loathed his wife because, being beautiful, she had found it possible to marry a man who looked as he did, and he felt his children to be strangers, because they were not ugly like himself.

‘But she has married him for a reason,’ said Mary.

He answered, ‘Oh, I know that. I have not forgotten your Mamma, and how it went with the people about her. And she would not have spoken of Richard Quin if this marriage was what it looked like.’ He thought for a long time; and he was surely thinking of his own marriage. He said, ‘I wonder,’ and stopped. Then continued, ‘Oh, we know that Rosamund is immortal among the mortals, and that incorruptibility has raised her above corruption. But we are not sure of it, we wish to know it as we wish to know that Big Ben will strike the hour. And anyway she is gone from us. My dear children, I must go home. I have a great trouble of my own. Shall I tell you what it is? It is not my own dear old chauffeur who is driving me tonight, it is the young one. I will not feel it possible to ask him if I may sit beside him as we drive home. I might feel it more possible if he were a Jew, but he is not. Why do I always have goys around me? But anyway I shall sit in the back of the car all by myself, and I shall feel, oh, you know how I will feel, for it is how you are feeling. Good night, my dears.’

We kissed him and helped him on with his coat, and opened the front door. ‘You must have noticed,’ he said, ‘how much I have been talking of Jewish things tonight. I am driven back on my last defences.’ We watched him go down the steps, looking up at the red moon that was appearing through two storm clouds, shake his head, and get into the car, the back of the car.

In the drawing-room Mary went and stood beside the sofa, and said, ‘She lay there that night she came to tell us of Nancy’s engagement. Oh, in this world of miracles, do one that is an act of grace, set her down there again, let us have her here. Let us keep her here. Let us see her hair first, then her face, then her hands, then her body, all of her, and let us keep her here for ever. But look, there is nothing. There is never anything but these demands, this harshness, this avarice for pain, never generosity.’ She went back to the fire, tried to pick up her cup of milk, but her hands were trembling, she had to set it down. ‘When we first went in and saw her sitting on the bed it was terrible. I understood why Lucretia had to kill herself.’

‘Yes, but she was glorious too,’ I said.

‘I wish such glory had passed her by.’

‘But she thinks nothing better than such glory. So did Mamma.’

She said softly, ‘Oh, poor Mamma! Oh, poor Rosamund!’ and wept. But she broke off and pointed to the open door, and said, ‘Hush!’

‘What is it?’

‘Kate has come out of her room. Do not let her find us crying.’

I could hear nothing. But Mary’s senses were almost more acute than mine.

‘Now she is coming downstairs.’

‘Yes, I hear that. But how slowly she is coming. Oh, but we’re wrong. I don’t think we really heard anything. Surely there’s not a sound now.’

‘She has stopped. She is standing quite still on the landing.’

‘Well, let us go and meet her.’

‘No, wait. Wait. Listen, she is going upstairs again.’

‘Yes, I can hear that. Now she is closing her door. Mary, what does it mean? Can anything be wrong with the old dear? Hadn’t we better go and speak to her?’

‘No. No. Oh, Rose, I am frightened. When I went down to the kitchen to get the bottle of Perrier, there was a wet circle on the scullery floor.’

‘You think she has been looking in a bucket of water as her mother used to do?’

‘Of course. Nestor and Rosamund came to see her this morning. She thought of him as we did, and she could not bear it, and looked in the water and saw the future.’

‘And because of what she saw she dare not face us. I understand.’

Mary took up her cup of milk with a steady hand and said, ‘There is everything in this universe except mercy,’ and began to sip it, but set it down again. ‘Surely this is nonsense. Are you sure you heard Kate on the stairs? Are you certain you did not merely think you heard her because I suggested it to you? After all, we are dead tired because of that tour, that voyage, that abominable party. It may simply have been that someone had put some floor-cloths to soak in a bucket that was over-full. All that we know is that Rosamund is what Mamma and Richard Quin are, she is eternal, she is part of what keeps the stars from rushing away from each other, and now she is doing something we cannot understand. Let us go to bed, we must get some practice in tomorrow.’

IV

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Kate herself brought up my breakfast tray, as she always did the day after we had come home, and at first I judged that there had been nothing in our suspicions. For she at once owned, with her stiff, ship’s-figurehead forthrightness, that she had not felt able to wait up for us the night before because she had been so upset by meeting Miss Rosamund’s husband. She had known we would be distressed when we found our cousin married to a heathen who was not a gentleman like our Papa, even though there must be a good reason for the marriage; and she had not wished to add to our distress by her own tears. But I had a later intimation that our doubts had been well founded. I told her of our stormy voyage, and she said she had guessed how it must be with us, for she had never seen so many seagulls about. Everybody knew, of course, that year by year more of them were settling down as river-gulls, but even so there had been such a flock of the creatures about, all acting like strangers, that she had been sure they were true seagoers, taking refuge from bad weather. There had been some on the garden-wall of the house opposite nearly all week, she said; and she went to the window to see if they were still there. So they were; and she sighed deeply, and said, ‘Ah, well. It is promised in the Bible, “And there shall be no more sea.”’ Nothing was more certain than that Kate would have been a sailor if she had been a man, and she would not have repeated that cruel text unless she had been brought up to tolerate it by foreknowledge of a storm which would not be weathered by one she loved.

Down at the Dog and Duck, I found a few days later, they had much to think of besides Rosamund’s marriage, for it was a year of floods. The Thames had not been so high for thirty years. I went in, waiting till men said ‘To you, from me,’ at angles of the passage, effectively enough for the piano to get by, and stepped over rolls of carpet to get into the denuded tearoom, where Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily were standing at the open french window, looking down at the river that was lapping the grass not three yards away. They were excited both by the peril to their goods and by the demented beauty of the inundated landscape. ‘Look at the ferry-bell hanging there!’ they said; the post was standing in the midst of the glassy rushing current, with no sign that it was supposed to be on the other side of the Thames and on dry land. The fields beyond were now a lake, steel-grey under violet storm clouds, and across it a line of willows, their budding branches a rich crimson, marked a submerged dike. In its lee thirty snow-white swans and their smoky cygnets rode at anchor, and were so still that they must have apprehended danger. But the sunlight was caught in the bronze woodlands on the banks that ran along the downward flow of the river, and I said, ‘Surely it’s going to be good weather now?’

‘Not blooming likely,’ they both wailed, and went on at once to talk of Rosamund’s marriage.

‘Mark you,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘That girl’s the victim of a plot. She couldn’t have married him, not him, if there hadn’t been foul play somewhere.’

‘What plot could there be?’ asked Aunt Milly, reasonably enough. ‘You’ve got it wrong. It’s that nursing that’s done it. I never thought it right for a pretty girl like Rosamund, and she taking everything so seriously, to go in for doing good that way. She’s just thought herself into such a state, always living in hospitals, and treating accidents, people who’ve been run over and lost a leg and got their faces smashed up, that she’s forgotten what ordinary people look like. She probably doesn’t even see this little chap the way we do.’

Inside the bar Uncle Len was wondering whether to move the grandfather’s clock. ‘I’m going to leave it till the last moment. It’s as heavy as the Nelson column and both times we’ve moved it before somebody’s set it down too hasty and there’s been a bill as long as your arm. Funny little fellow, that Ganywhatsisname. Now, am I a fool to leave that clock where it is, or am I not? But Ros knows what she’s doing, of course. No need to worry about her. I’ll leave that clock.’

‘Len,’ cried Aunt Lily, rushing into the room, ‘you said the river’s falling, well, it isn’t. It’s coming up while you look at it.’ She rushed out again, pausing to tell me, with a censorious air, ‘It’s so dreadful to stand and watch it turning against one like this.’

‘Bless her heart, she’s always wrong,’ said Uncle Len. ‘I’ll leave that clock where it is. No, hang it all, that’s the awkward thing about Lil. You can’t even rely on her always to be wrong. Once in a while she’s right, which throws one out. I’d better go look for myself.’

This happened to be one of the times when she was right. We spent the next few hours helping to move the remaining furniture and some stores and the lines, and making up beds in the stable lofts. As the January daylight failed Uncle Len came in and said, ‘Girls, we’re all going off to Nancy’s for a good high tea. I’ve telephoned, and it’s all right, she’ll be glad to have us.’

‘Oh, but there’s lots to do,’ whimpered Aunt Lily. ‘And there’s turning things off. You ought always to turn everything off, when things like this happen.’ She yawned and moaned through her yawn, ‘Always merry and bright.’

‘My feet are awful,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘but we ought to go on.’

‘No, we’re going to fold our arms and let the insurance take over,’ said Uncle Len.

‘But what they pay won’t make it any easier to clear all that mud off everything,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘Like brown toothpaste, it is.’

‘Pity you didn’t take that little place at Uxbridge,’ fretted Aunt Lily. ‘Anywhere inland. It’s so awful, watching the river turn against us like this, after everything.’

‘You can’t talk about the river like that, it isn’t logical,’ said Uncle Len. ‘It isn’t a person, it means no harm.’

‘Yes, but we’ve trusted it,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘We trusted it, that’s what makes the difference.’ She was nearly crying. I had forgotten that, really, they were all getting old.

‘Have a minute’s sit-down before you put your hats on,’ said Uncle Len, ‘and don’t miscall the river either. There’s a lot goes on Saturday nights in a town pub that never happens on the Thames. You should count your blessings.’

‘Blessings or not,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘my feet are like raw steak.’

‘I don’t feel like going out to tea,’ said Aunt Lily, defiantly.

‘Well, I do,’ said Uncle Len. ‘There isn’t anything I hate on earth like evenings when there are floods. When the sky goes black and comes down as low as these ceilings, and it’s doing that very thing now, and the water goes grey and shines and covers everything as far as you can see, and seems to raise up towards that damned sky, and you can feel the damp coming off the water and passing into your own breath, but you can’t breathe it out, it goes back into your chest, I could cut my throat. I’m getting out of the place till it’s all dark.’

‘But we’re too tired,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Let’s stop off at the Red Lion at Haxton. It’s half the distance to Nancy’s and they do a fish tea. We can put Nancy off.’