Cousin Rosamund (2 page)

The concert at the Queen’s Hall was not good, except for Mary’s playing. The conductor was bad, someone of whom it had always to be recalled that he was English and that England was having a musical renaissance and he had bored the orchestra. But Mary was superb. She was not strong enough to play the Emperor Concerto by strength; no woman except Teresa Carreño ever was. But she had a substitute for strength in her absolute justice. She had the timelessness of the great player, she played every note with the thought of every other note she and the orchestra were going to play strong in her mind. When she played it was with deep regard for that which went before and for that which went afterwards, though the logical connection would be hard to state in words. Both she and I had more than once had a mystical apprehension of how a musical composition would sound if time were annulled and the notes were heard neither in succession nor simultaneously; but the experience, which was quite incommunicable, was hard to remember when it was most needed, because the conscious intellect got in the way, and she was better at remembering it than I was. She had also to perfection that kind of accuracy, of slavery to the text, which is the sublimest liberty. When Beethoven wrote two slurred notes, she played them and was free as he was in his exercise of his choice to write those notes slurred instead of staccato, and she did not fall into the trap of altering them to something that pleased her own ear better. Her integrity of attention to the composer and the taste which governed the application of her technique made her the nonpareil of our generation. In the hot and draughty assembly of this world, she was the candle which did not gutter.

She played better than I had played in Paris, and without any of the adventitious aid which came from a composer saying, ‘Mais, mademoiselle, vous êtes trop mâle pour mon frêle oeuvre,’ and making the orchestra smile. Her single source of power was her musical genius. She derived no encouragement from the contacts with people which her art involved, and the fact that some of her audience took pleasure in her beauty annoyed her. She felt that she was obliged to appear physically in public in order to play, but that they had no right to take advantage of that necessity to pass a judgment on her for which she had not asked. It did not matter that the judgment was favourable, she still felt it a violation of her privacy. But she knew that her admirers meant no harm, so she was polite and even charming to them when they waited for her after concerts. When I got to the artists’ room I found her already white with strain, there were so many people there, and when I got rid of them by telling them that we had to go on to a party and had been asked not to be late, there were other people out in the street with autograph albums, two or three of whom were tiresomely talkative. I could have managed them by thinking vaguely of them and of something else at the same time, but Mary disliked these contacts so much and so feared to show it that she had to give her whole mind to them.

In the car I squeezed her round the waist, and said, ‘Cheer up. You played magnificently. And certainly the only good part of a concert is what goes on inside the hall.’

She said, ‘I do not like it even inside the hall. I hate the people clapping.’

I was upset by the passion in her voice. I said, ‘Well, we would both feel quite awful if we gave a concert and people did not clap.’

Mary answered, ‘I know that. But I would much rather nobody was there.’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said. ‘Think of all the poor little people who save up to give concerts at the Wigmore and the Steinway halls, and get very much what you are asking for, and don’t like it at all.’ She said nothing, and I repeated to the darkness of the car, ‘Don’t be an ass.’

She still did not answer and I was suddenly afflicted with the suspicion that she was extremely unhappy. I said, ‘Don’t you feel like going on to this party? I don’t mind going straight home.’

‘No, we are nearly there, we may as well try what it will be like,’ she said. ‘Though, of course, it will be like any other party.’

And so it was. A great house in Prince’s Gate had been filled with light and flowers and handsome and favoured people, wearing beautiful jewels and clothes, and we were welcomed to it, with the warm but conditional welcome that is given to guests who are invited because they are celebrities but who were born outside the clan. Usually we were safe, but we had learned, ever since we first met rich people through Mr Morpurgo, how bitterly some of their women resented the introduction into their world of women who could do all they did and could do other things as well and were praised for them. Their bitterness was strange, for it was such as Mary and I might justifiably have felt against them because their childhoods had been compact of comfort and security and ours had been poor and dangerous. But it was pleasant when all went well. Such parties were suffused with a soft and golden light, which accorded with the champagne we drank, or rather held in our glasses, for though it was pretty, we never thought champagne very nice. There were wonderful jewels to be seen, and this always delighted us, for Mamma had taught us to appreciate them from our earliest childhood, her long keen flight of eye had found whatever was precious in such jewellers’ shops as were in Lovegrove, and we had pressed our noses against the dingy shop-windows to see an emerald, a ruby, a diamond, and note its real fire; and as this was a very grand party the men were wearing their orders, those superb inventions, which truly look like the marks glory leaves when it lays a hand on its own. There were mounds and walls of flowers, and a chirrup of talk, like a wood at dawn, which suddenly stopped and gave place to a silence threaded with music. Our hosts were elderly, so we had the pure felicity of hearing the mindless and gymnastic voices of great opera singers bearing aloft without effort arias that performed the true operatic function of transforming crisis into enjoyment. At this time one was likely to come off worse at parties given by middle-aged or young hosts, for they were apt to entertain their guests with German
Lieder,
which seemed to us to have taken a wrong turn ever since the days of Brahms. Too often the solemn continuance of the accompaniment after the voice has ended might be the awed whimper of a bloodhound to whom a larger bloodhound has just described one of its deeper experiences. But that night we had a great tenor and a great soprano who showed us love and despair magically made brilliant and innocent as fountains and fireworks by Verdi and Rossini.

Everybody was nice to us. First we met an old man with a beautiful blue ribbon across his shirt front who took a liking to us and asked us questions about ourselves, where we lived and what we did with ourselves, with a kind and worried smile as if he would like to buy some people like us to keep as pets, but thought he would never be able to cope with the problems of management. Suddenly he told us how he had gone to the opera in Vienna when he was a very young man and had seen the beautiful Empress Elizabeth, and then a duchess called him away. It was like talking with a court card. Then we met people whom we knew well, a young peer and his wife who lived in a long grey colonnaded house set naked in a park under the wild skyline of the Wiltshire downs, the ordained setting for a tragic drama, and were framed to act tragic parts, each having wide eyes and parted lips that seemed to have been forced open by the sight of disaster, but who were in fact happy people who found satisfaction in little exercises of taste and simple skill, in dyeing feather boas found in an old trunk and using them to garland the less remarkable of their family portraits, or in spraying the leaves of the shrubs round their house with gold and silver paint when they gave a party. Among these pastimes they included the giving of chamber music concerts, which is perhaps not so surprising as it seems, for though chamber music insists more often than any other kind of music on the tragic interpretation of life, it has for the most part been composed and performed under the patronage of persons who were seeking only to be amused. But this couple’s conception of amusement was of such a nursery kind that it was surprising to find that it embraced Beethoven’s later quartets, and to find oneself, when one had taken part in them, regarded as if one had discovered some clever trick like a way of painting a modern chimneypiece so that it looked like a Victorian Gothic organ. They were with some friends of theirs: a photographer who made all his sitters look like fairy princesses, a fat old lady who wrote fairy tales, a painter who was a famous cultivator of dwarf daffodils, a young man who made copies of famous doll’s houses, and a physicist and his wife who bred a very small kind of pony. One of them told us about a very funny house he had found in a Spanish sea-port, built by the schoolmaster, which was even funnier than the famous house in the South of France built by a postman.

We were having quite a nice time when we were approached by two of those young men, to be found at all parties in that decade, who had got very drunk because they felt they were going to be killed in the next war. They were wrong, of course, for when the next war came they were too old to fight, but their error was strong enough to force them to actions which now makes it surprising that they were not killed in peace. Their flushed faces were cleft by wide grins showing their well-cared-for teeth, and we knew that they were going to be horrid. One was the nephew of the host so it was difficult. Their method of averting the holocaust they saw before them was to lean over the fat old lady who wrote fairy stories, and say, in unison that must have been rehearsed, ‘Ah, Aunt Fanny! Still sleeping with that handsome jobbing gardener? Such fun behind the raspberry canes on those warm drowsy afternoons….’

As we hurried into the next room we were faced by Cordelia. She was looking very pretty, she was indeed one of the prettiest women at the party. She raised her eyebrows in surprise and said, ‘Oh, we did not expect to see you here! Are you all right, do you know anybody here? How nice your dresses are! Alan must see you, but he is talking to his chief now. See, I am wearing the necklace you gave me last Christmas, doesn’t it look nice?’

We were too slow in answering her, for the sight of her had chilled us for a minute. We forgot that she had been exorcised of her demon, we feared that she would look at us with that white stare, which asserted that we were doing something disgraceful.

Hurt, she put up her lovely little hand and raised the necklace from her skin. ‘Am I not wearing it the right way?’ she asked, her eyes going from one to another of us. ‘Of course you are,’ I said, ‘we just didn’t speak for a minute because you are so perfect.’

‘You look as well as anybody here,’ said Mary, ‘and better.’

‘Ah,’ breathed Cordelia, happily, and she added, with solemn zest, ‘We dined with the Possingworths first.’

We said warmly that that must have been wonderful, but a flash of shrewdness passed over Cordelia’s face. She recognised that we had either never known or had forgotten who the Possingworths were, and that we were making an effort to please her in which there was no grain of spontaneity. We saw her swallow and gaze about her, frowning slightly, at the marble pillars, the mirrors and gilt plasterwork. It was her ambitious look, that we knew so well from our childhood. She was saying, ‘My sisters may be horrid to me, still I was poor and I am here in this great house, just as they are.’ But her lip trembled.

Mary said, ‘Forgive us if we are hardly here, we are shattered. Something horrid has happened,’ and she told Cordelia how the two young men had insulted the fat old lady, and Cordelia was mollified. But I was not quite sure that she really trusted us. She knew too well Mary’s resourcefulness. Alan came up to us and was agreeable, but Cordelia fell silent, and I could see her remembering all the occasions when she had gone out to meet us with affection and we had stepped back coldly. She was suffering. But I could think of no way to comfort her, for I was wondering why she was suffering, whether it was because she loved us and needed our love, or because she was angry at our refusal to admire her perfection. I found myself in a desert. Why should she love us if I were capable of that doubt?

A colleague of Alan’s brought up his wife to be introduced to Cordelia, a peeress who was an amateur of music. She said, ‘Oh, my dears, so wonderful, that third movement,’ and, though our group need not have dissolved, Mary and I passed on through the golden humming glow of the party in another room. There we saw Lady Tredinnick, who had taken us to that horrible first party and had made it up to us so often by letting us see her flowers in her Cornwall garden. She was standing alone, looking up at a picture, and we hurried to her quickly and happily. But when she turned round she was not like herself. Always before, although she was now elderly, evening had been able to annul that masculinity to which her earlier life in the desert had tanned her spare body, and she had put on full femininity with her jewels and her grand clothes. Tonight she looked like a man dressed up as a woman. But she had hardly given the evening its chance. She was less elegant than we had ever seen her, her hair was carelessly pinned up, and one or two of the fasteners under her arms were undone; and when we spoke her name and she turned round her face was not varnished with the imperturbability which a woman of her kind normally assumes at a party. She looked wretched; and she did not look less wretched when she saw us, but slowly said something approving about us, as if she were telling us not to misunderstand her inability to be as we had known her. Then she paused and became wooden. To break the silence, we spoke of the picture at which she had been staring. ‘Is it a Poussin?’ asked Mary. ‘We heard they had a Poussin.’

‘Is it a landscape?’ asked Lady Tredinnick. She turned round and looked at it as if she had never seen it before. ‘Yes. That is their Poussin. There is one very like it at Chatsworth, but that is far finer.’ Again she ceased to speak, and under her tiara, between her ear-rings, over her necklace, the face of an ageing proconsul brooded in despairing meditation, in which we could have no part. At that moment a young man came up to her and said, ‘Do you remember me, Lady Tredinnick? I know your sons very well,’ and we were made still more aware that our old friend had changed. She greeted him politely, but what she was saying could hardly be heard, and she looked like an angry and important old man, offended by the violation of some principle he had defended in Parliament and tested by huge administrative practice. For a second or two we stood suspended, while she inaudibly followed a gracious routine from which her face dissented. Then her voice entirely failed her. She tried to force some sound through her lips, and when it would not come she made a disclaiming gesture and strode away.