Cousin Rosamund (27 page)

I said, ‘Let us get one thing out of the way at once. You are our equal except in experience. You have not learned quite a number of things that you need to learn, but that is only because you have not had the time. Oliver here will agree, we are all three on the same level.’

‘That is quite evident,’ said Oliver in the casual tone that was needed, for the tears stood in the girl’s eyes. She had used mascara on them, with a marked lack of skill, and they were smudged already. ‘If anybody of your age could play the Jasperl sonata with insufficient rehearsal, it would be you. But you must not be disappointed if it turns out that the feat is impossible, and we call the thing off. It does seem like trying to go down Niagara in a barrel, the chances of being smashed and submerged are terrific. But let us get down to it.’

‘But that’s another thing,’ sulked Avis, ‘you cannot get down to it here. This piano is out of tune. They only call this the second music-room for an excuse to put me here. It is the schoolroom really, the footman calls it that. Apparently Lady Mortlake has children, nobody remembered in time to say, “Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful!” There is a lovely music-room with a good Steinway, but they did not want me in there, there is a horrid little peer who plays the piano like a musical box and he is always in there.’

‘Show us where it is,’ said Oliver.

‘No, no,’ she begged. ‘They are too horrible. Yes, of course, I see that we must.’

It was in one of the two classical wings: a large room with a tremendous chimneypiece, where Apollo was playing his lyre before an audience of gods and goddesses enthroned on mounting marble clouds, and grey and white walls embossed with flutes and trumpets and viols and harps in plasterwork, and high windows looking out between bluish silvery curtains to a lawn and a distant prospect of the park. One of these windows was open and swinging on its hinges, and the wind had sent some sheet music drifting across the carpet, which was also patterned with musical instruments. ‘Have you tried this Steinway yourself, Avis?’ said Oliver, going towards the piano. But he came to a halt. A slim man was sitting on the stool, his face pressed down on the keyboard, his arms clinging to the music-rest, his shoulders shaking. Oliver went back to the door and shut it noisily. But the man continued to sob, more noisily than before, and did not lift his head. Oliver crossed the room to the piano, Avis and I behind him. We were all insensible to the little man’s sufferings, partly because there was an indefinable air of habit about his paroxysm, but chiefly because we were no longer three human beings, we had become a rehearsal of Jasperl’s sonata, and we saw him simply as an impediment to our full being.

We came to a halt beside him. Oliver was about to speak but paused in embarrassment. There was a circle of baldness on the little man’s head, and the long wisps of mouse-coloured hair that he had combed across it bore traces of golden dye. Oliver sighed and put a hand on his shoulder, and the little man sat up with a jerk, but did not look round. Staring in front of him he cried: ‘Of course you’ve come back. I knew you would. But it’s no use. I’ve finished with you. I couldn’t start again even if I wanted to. You’re hopeless. You’re so base. So utterly and so vulgarly base. If you hadn’t said you never wanted to ski with anybody but me, I wouldn’t have minded what you said to Lawrence at luncheon. But you did say it. And I never asked you to say it. You insisted on saying it. I remember putting my hand over your lips when you said it because I didn’t want you to commit yourself. It’s never been me who asked for assurances. It’s always you who gave them. Who thrust them on me. And I couldn’t help believing them, though everyone warned me against you, because I’m that sort of person. You should know that by now. And you should know what skiing means to me. And Kitzbühel. Our place.’

Oliver said through his teeth, ‘Oh, God. Please, please, Lord Sarasen, get off that piano.’

The little man swivelled round and gaped at us. ‘Please go away,’ he said fretfully. ‘How dare you interrupt us?’

‘But there is no one else here,’ said Oliver.

The little man looked round the room and buried his face in his hands.

‘Please, Lord Sarasen,’ said Oliver, ‘we want this piano.’

‘And if it is Mr de Raisse you want,’ said Avis, ‘I think that’s him out in the garden, lying face down on a lilo by the herbaceous border.’

The little man bridled, and rearranged his collar and tie, and swallowed, and suddenly sprang to his feet and ran through the open window.

‘God forgive us all,’ said Oliver. ‘The poor little beast. Now let’s get down to it.’ While I altered the stool he pushed forward a music-stand for Avis, who said, ‘I don’t understand about homosexual men. I know they’re supposed to be like women but they aren’t, really, are they? Their voices are higher than ours, and quite differently produced, and there’s the funny tone no woman ever gets, as if they had plush tongues. And women don’t move like that, look at him now, it’s like a loose-limbed corkscrew, not like a woman. And all that he was saying, no woman would talk like that, about giving assurances and believing them, and no woman would have got so excited just because that awful man de Raisse said to the flautist that he ought to go to Kitzbhel for winter sports. You wouldn’t, would you?’ she asked me, and turned to Oliver, ‘Do you understand about homosexual men?’

‘Afterwards, afterwards,’ said Oliver. ‘Rose, are you ready? But, Avis, aren’t you at all sorry for that pathetic little brute?’

‘No,’ said Avis. ‘Why should I be?’

‘You are a horrible brat,’ said Oliver. ‘But we will go into that later. Now for our dear Jasperl.’

She had known that Martin Allen’s interpretation of the sonata was wrong, and had disregarded it, but she had not understood it any better herself. But her error partook of her magnificence. I had only known musical misapprehension rise to the empyrean on such strong wings once before, when I heard ‘Jardins sur la pluie’ and ‘Les Danseuses de Delphe’ and ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’ played by a schoolgirl who had never heard any Debussy, and played them as if they had been written by Beethoven during an attack of cerebral anaemia. Although only thirty-five years had passed between the death of Beethoven and the birth of Debussy this confusion of the two composers played such havoc with their essential qualities as a historian might equal if he ascribed to Napoleon the same motives for conquest as inspired Julius Caesar. Avis’s error about Jasperl was also temporal. She had not heard this kind of contemporary music, and though she had wit enough to see that Jasperl did not belong to the past she played the sonata as if it were jazz, as if it were an improvisation, whereas its character was, if anything, over-deliberate.

She was furious with herself for her mistake, which she immediately perceived from my performance. ‘But wait,’ said Oliver, ‘you are simply leaving something out of your conception of the work. Once you get it in, the whole thing will become easy to you. You are used to music that has melody and an accompaniment to that melody. Here the melody has its own rhythm, and the whole work has its own very strong rhythm, which encloses the other as in a casket. We want the wild, adventurous thematic material, which is always lunging off into dissonance, to be kept in order by this overreaching rhythm. Listen. This is part of something which was written this year by Bartók.’ He played it to her twice. ‘Now this is something I wrote.’

‘Play it again,’ said Avis, and when he had played it twice she said, ‘But are you sure you have really anything to say there?’

‘Whether I have or not, you can’t give me a chance to say it at all, unless you give the overall rhythm its chance. And I may have nothing to say. I mean I may have nothing more to say. I know I once had something to say, but perhaps I have gone bad lately. But quite certainly Jasperl has a lot to say. Now try over that second movement, you will get the trick of it better there than in the first.’

She began to understand, and we took her through the whole sonata.

Then the door softly opened, and someone looked in, and softly closed it. Then it was opened again, quite noisily, and a voice called my name and Oliver’s. We pretended we did not hear, but in a minute they were standing in a crescent round the piano, a dozen or so of them, including three girls. We knew most of them. They belonged to a circle very prominent at that time, which was paradoxically at once rubbish, and as certainly not without value. Half of them belonged to families that were rich or aristocratic, and sometimes both, and the rest were the friends they drew from every class, either because they loved them or found them gifted in the arts. They were in all things paradoxical. Nearly all, except some of the younger homosexuals, had plain faces, with protruding eyes and receding chins and colourless skins, but their bodies were graceful, and they had slender wrists and ankles and a dancing walk. Individually each had an air of distinction. Yet, seen together, they recalled the poorest sort of touring theatrical company which one saw sometimes waiting at railway junctions if one travelled to a concert on a Sunday, tawdry and insecure. They spoke always in captious voices, as if their pride lay in their capacity for constant rejection; yet they enjoyed life, and they had to be admired for the strength of their enjoyment, which sent them all over Europe to see a beautiful church, a beautiful harbour, a beautiful people, or an innovator in the arts. They had a moral code so confused that the nature of the confusion could not be guessed. Their fastidiousness plainly did not exclude conduct from its range. They bore themselves with the confidence of those sure that they had guarded their honour, who value their honour.

There were a number of things they would not do; but it was impossible to guess what these might be. I was often perplexed by these people and I was perplexed by them now. Amongst them, much loved, standing at this moment with his arms cast about the unreluctant shoulders of the most aristocratic of them, was a young man who had tried to sell me a Matisse which had turned out to belong not to him but to the elderly peer who had lent him his house while he himself was away on a world tour, and who would not have dared to prosecute him for theft. It was not that his friends did not know that he was a criminal in both the narrower and the broader sense, a thief and a betrayer of a vulnerable lover’s trust, for they often joked about his enormities. But there they were, enlaced with him, and it might be that tomorrow I should hear of them crossing the world, not necessarily in comfort, to admire a work of art which in technique and argument depended on honesty.

I always found them mysterious, and now they were presenting us with a mystery particular to this hour. They greeted Oliver and me with cries that were in part their own tribal version of the convention followed by Lady Mortlake, which at once pushed effusiveness to its extreme and mocked it, and were in part intelligent enough references to our recent work. But soon their conversation was muted, and they became, for them, curiously immobile. They were like the bright herd we had seen on the knoll, all looking one way, all braced by a common perception. But we understood them hardly better than deer and could not guess what was coming down the wind to them. Presently they left us, saying, with gaiety that rang as queerly as the laughter one hears as one goes along corridors to a swimming-bath, that they would see us later.

Avis said, ‘They wanted to say something to you that they did not want me to hear.’

They had indeed averted their eyes from her and had said none of the pleasant things that would have been natural in such circumstances, they had not asked us how we found our new colleague and given us a chance to compliment her.

‘Come on, you silly little girl,’ said Oliver. ‘They do not like you, and why you should mind that I cannot see. Rose does not waste her time regretting that she has never been elected Beauty Queen of Clacton-on-Sea.’

‘As a matter of fact I do,’ I said. ‘Passionately. But let us get on.’

The sonata went much better this time. At the end we sat back and Oliver smoked a cigarette, and nodded his head at us as if he were a pasha, and said: ‘But it must be late. Yes, it is late. I wonder when they have dinner.’

‘Not so late as this,’ said Avis.

We had to ring several times before anybody came, and then it was the handsome silver-haired butler, who was still flushed, not now by the sunset, but by the glow of slight intoxication. He was surprised to see us. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘You were not expected to dine. I’m afraid there is nothing ready for you, and the rest of the staff has gone to the Fire Brigade Ball at Aysthorp. There is nobody here but young Alice the kitchenmaid. This ball is our great social occasion, Lord Clancardine himself, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, attends it. My own wife would never miss it, she has gone every year since she was a kitchenmaid herself, bless her, poor soul. It is a pity,’ he said censoriously, ducking his head to see himself in a mirror and sleeking his hair, ‘that her ladyship never now honours us with her presence. The dowager Lady Mortlake always made it her duty, so long as she could get about. But who am I,’ he said, with an effect of impersonation, ‘who am I to cast the first stone?’ He was perhaps admiring some debonair guest he had admired while waiting at table.

‘What were we intended to do about dinner?’

‘Why, her ladyship thought you would be going with the other guests to the party Mr Oswald Sinclair is giving over at Great Barn,’ said the butler. ‘You were all invited, to be sure, and I thought you had gone and we had the house to ourselves, for I believed I saw Lord Rothery and his friends come in here to tell you it was time to be leaving.’

‘There has been a mistake,’ said Oliver.

‘You have not missed much,’ said the butler dreamily. ‘Mr Sinclair has not an inherited cellar. But it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He returned to the study of his image in the looking-glass, bowing as if in gallantry.

‘Can you get us something to eat?’ asked Oliver.

‘Nothing hot, I fear,’ said the butler. ‘None of the staff will be back till midnight, and please God they are later. The time will pass like a flash, I fancy.’ He remained for a minute suspended in a smiling reverie. ‘But you must have a bite. What a pity I did not know before! For young Alice the kitchenmaid and I cooked something for Mr de Raisse and Lord Sarasen. They have had a falling-out and have made it up again, so they had a fancy not to go to Mr Sinclair’s party, but asked if they could have a meal private like, in the pavilion beside the lake. So young Alice and I cut them some cold chicken and gave them some white burgundy, just the same as I had got up for Alice and me, and a bit of the raspberry cream we had for lunch, and a nice piece out of the Stilton just the same as I’d got ready for Alice and me, and we carried it over. Very agreeable it was, going down to the lake. I would have done that for you and the two ladies with pleasure, with greater pleasure, for after all it is the way we were all brought up. I would like to do everything I can to make people happy tonight. Who is the better for it if things go wrong? So I will put out some cold meat and salad for you, and what is left of the raspberry cream and Stilton, and some of the peaches, and this white burgundy, this Montrachet, all in the Parrot Room, for that is where we have our little late suppers. It is opposite the foot of the staircase that takes you to your bedroom, and you cannot miss it, but I will leave the lights on and the door open, so that there can be no mistake. This is a confusing night.’