Cousin Rosamund (32 page)

‘What, back so soon?’ she asked, kindly. She was afraid for us. Perhaps we had not been good enough for Barbados Hall, perhaps we had been sent away.

‘These ladies were sent for,’ said Oliver. ‘They were called away to play at other concerts.’

The innkeeper’s wife nodded. She was glad there had been no awkwardness. ‘You can’t have liked that,’ she murmured, ‘having to leave the lovely place so soon.’ She told us, as if to comfort us, that she would give us breakfast, though it was so early, and we took Avis into the garden to sit at the table under the apple trees where we had had tea. Oliver said, with a wonder which would have seemed excessive had I not felt it too, ‘Rose, it is not twenty-four hours since we were here.’ We sat down and rested our elbows on the table and drowsed in the sunlight, until Avis said suddenly, ‘Damn!’

We looked at her, and she swallowed. ‘Yesterday, at that horrible place, I knocked over a beastly table and broke something. I could not help it, they were all staring at me. Should I send a note saying I will pay for it?’

‘No,’ said Oliver, shutting his eyes again.

‘But they will say I am dishonest as well as clumsy.’

‘The thing will have been insured. Probably with two companies. Never think of it again.’

‘How can I help thinking of it? It was so awful.’

‘Think of those bloody people, remember how bloody they were, call them what Othello did. “Goats and monkeys! Goats and monkeys!”’

‘Goats and monkeys,’ I echoed sleepily, my face in my hands.

The peace of the garden was sweet about us. ‘There is honeysuckle somewhere,’ said Oliver. ‘Sniff it, Avis, and say, “Goats and Monkeys”. And the dahlias; surely they are more beautiful than they were yesterday?’

I said, ‘It is because we are here so early. Mr Morpurgo says that two hours of sunshine take away the genius of the colour in every flower but the rose. The night remakes it; but the genius is gone till the next day. That is why when his favourite flowers come to blossom he has himself wakened at dawn.’

‘Who is Mr Morpurgo?’ asked Avis.

For a minute I could not answer. Then the innkeeper’s wife came back and spread on the table a darned cloth from Barbados Hall, smiling slyly, knowing that this time we would understand, having seen Aladdin’s cave for ourselves; and Oliver was returning her smile with a deceitfulness I did not like. Then his hand went out to the sugar-bowl she had set down before him, and took out a lump: and I was revolted by the hair that grew from the third joint of his fingers, just above the knuckles. He had of course far less hair than many musicians had on their hands, but it would have been better if he had none. I could not help remembering that it was he who had taken me to Barbados Hall, and for an end which, now I thought of it in the morning light, revolted me. He should not have brought me into contact of any sort with that vile man, Jasperl. I fell back into the world of frightening fairy tales. It appeared to me that to play music written by such a man might spoil my hands, in which my sole value lay.

Oliver’s eyes, still smiling, held mine. ‘Tell Avis about Mr Morpurgo,’ he said, speaking with masculine impertinence, as if he had a right to give me orders. I told them how he had called at our house in Lovegrove long ago, to help us when we had lost our father, and how Mamma had come into the room, carrying a box of keys and had practically ignored him, because of her astonishment that she had in her house so many more keys than things that locked, and how she had not recognised him, and he had been hurt, and she had somehow put it right, by saying with what singers call attack, ‘Well, I knew there was no great difference,’ and he was entirely satisfied. But when I went on to tell how he had helped us with our careers, Avis cried out, ‘What, you had someone to help you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he was always there to help us.’

‘You and your sister did not get on just because you were geniuses? Then how will I ever be able to get on?’

Her anxiety was terrible. I had to give thanks for the idiot confidence that had inspired my youth. I could not think how to comfort her, but Oliver’s hand closed over hers, and he said, ‘Here comes a symbolic answer. Look at the trays they are bringing us. Bacon and eggs. Tea. Toast. Butter. Marmalade. We ordered all that and had a right to expect it. But there’s a glass bowl full of raspberries, and we said not a word about them.’

‘Oh, and cream!’ breathed Avis. Her house must be as poor as ours had been, we had talked of cream like that.

‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ said Oliver. ‘Remember that the Lord will provide. Good God, you are a tiresome noisy little thing. You start squealing long before you are hurt. Actually, Rose and Mary started their careers by getting scholarships like the one you are holding, and though Mr Morpurgo helped them by giving them such trifles as an odd music-room when they needed it, the trick was already done by the time he got there. Nothing could have stopped them. Nothing will stop you, unless it is your tendency to rampage and riot instead of getting on quietly with the business in hand.’

He was very kind, I should not have disliked him. But I was sick with loathing of him, even though he was in a trusting state of happiness that would ordinarily have disarmed me. When we had finished breakfast he asked me to pour him another cup of tea, though he did not drink it, just so that he could go on sitting at the table, pretending that breakfast was not finished, that our adventure was not nearly over. He scattered some crumbs on the grass a little way off and we kept quiet so that the birds would come; and as we sat we could hear in the next field the clatter of a reaping machine, the gentle tempered calls of its driver, the whinnying of the horses and the slow soft blows of their hooves as they turned just beyond the hedge, the diminuendo as the machine went off round the curve of an unseen hill, the crescendo as it came back again, the rhythm repeating itself over and over again, each time with a slight difference in pitch, as the swathe went further down the hill. Oliver listened to this reaping machine and watched it as if it were a special part of creation he had known for a long time and always liked; and when two wagtails strutted across the grass and see-sawed the black and white slivers of their bodies over the crumbs they might have been pets he had lured to him throughout a summer.

I wished I was back at the Dog and Duck. I wanted to see the familiar discord of Aunt Lily’s dress as she gave the bar its morning dues - the girl can sweep, it takes one of the family to dust - and watch her as, frowning with earnestness, she laid down her check duster that was good enough for the tables and the counters and piously applied a chamois leather to the glass on the prints of dead racehorses and jockeys because they were dear to Len. I wanted to see Aunt Milly, as she stood at the larder door and looked at yesterday’s joints and tapped her upper lip with her forefinger, and calculated what could be got off them for today, and sighed that Len had made a proper mess of that leg of lamb, but what could you do, there wasn’t a man alive who didn’t think he could carve. I wanted to see Queenie who as she came downstairs and sat down in front of her cup of strong tea, with four lumps of sugar in it, jutting her brows at it, knew nothing could let her taste sweetness in her mouth. She would have resembled a great figure from Racine, had it not been for some fact, which was perhaps simply the fact that she really existed. I wanted to see Uncle Len, padding through the garden to see how his roses were growing and if anybody had left any bottles and glasses outside, his red jowls dripping the irascible peace known to old bulls. I wanted to see Nancy and Oswald, holy in their mediocrity. I wanted to see Mr Morpurgo, who would certainly come in towards evening, for he rarely let a day pass without visiting Queenie. Before he went we would stand side by side on the riverbank in the next field, while he dropped his line to the dark waters, which mirrored our images and flowed on and on, out of sight. Everybody in the Dog and Duck had either never been able to live, or had done with life, or lived well within their means and was calm and kind. I wanted to be there, not here.

The innkeeper’s wife had brought the bill and Oliver had put his hand into his pocket, and was taking out silver, and I was embarrassed at the thought that he was paying for me and Avis, I could not offer to pay.

‘Now we must go,’ sighed Oliver with a regret which I felt to be idiotically presumptuous. ‘We must not lose that train.’

‘We will only be together till the junction,’ said Avis with angry grief. ‘There we will have to say goodbye, I take a bus. I suppose I shall never see you again.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Oliver. ‘Rose and I will take you home, and we will explain to your family how right you were in leaving Barbados Hall and refusing to play at that concert.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I cannot come.’

‘Oh, Rose!’ said Oliver. ‘Oh, Rose!’

Avis cried, ‘But it’s you they’d be impressed by.’

Oliver and I had to exchange an amused glance at that. But I loathed him. I was hardly able to speak, to force out the words, ‘I cannot possibly come with you.’

‘But why, Rose! Why?’

‘I must go back to that inn by the Thames we have often told you about.’ My words struck me as so final, so forbidding, that I relented them. I supposed that was because they must give offence. I did not want that. To make the moment seem more casual I took my powder-puff out of my bag and passed it over my face. My hand was shaking. I said weakly, ‘They will be expecting me.’

‘They cannot be expecting you this afternoon,’ he objected. ‘You had arranged to play at that vile concert.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it was always inconvenient for me to leave them.’

He was sulky for a moment, but it was not his way. He said quickly, ‘Rose, I have been stupid. You have put yourself out to help me with this Jasperl thing! Avis, you squalling little egotist, take note of this. Rose has been doing a job for me for weeks, and looking every day as if she liked it, and suddenly I see that it has been a burden to her, and she has done it all just because she is nice. Oh, Rose, forgive me!’

‘No, it is not that,’ I stammered. ‘Ask me to do something really difficult, I would do it, that was not difficult at all. I would do anything for you, any time. So would Mary.’ It embarrassed me to hear these too friendly words. But they poured out of my mouth. I was so anxious to dissimulate this nauseated loathing of him.

It made it worse that he believed me. ‘Look, Avis,’ he said. ‘As you go through the world of music you will meet goats and monkeys, they are not all kept at Barbados Hall. But you will meet friends. Here I have plagued Rose with a dreary job for weeks, for my own purposes, and kept her up late last night, long after you were asleep, listening to a story which I wanted her to hear, but which she had no reason to want to hear. And all this time I have disregarded the obvious fact she must have obligations and troubles of her own. In fact, I am an egotist like you, Avis, and have behaved in the beastly fashion of our kind, and here she says that she will do anything for me any time I ask. Come, we must go.’

Outside the inn, while Avis was fetching her violin-case, he said to me, ‘How Celia would have liked you, if she had known you better,’ and walked away, his eyes on the ground. I stood trembling with fury, and he turned back to say, ‘Not that she did not like what she saw of you, and of course she admired your playing, but you met her so seldom.’

I was still tingling all our journey to the junction. I would not have wanted Celia to like me, she was so polluted by this world of masculinity. It now seemed not so absurd to me that the Victorians had taken women who had slept with men to whom they were not married and shut them up in rescue homes. Marriage, inviolate marriage was the only way by which the traffic between men and women could be rendered tolerable. If two people went to a church in festive dress and took part in a pretty rite in the presence of their friends, and then shared the same house and always went about together, then one could think of these public things as all that was happening. But women like Celia forced the most reluctant mind to follow them to the private horror of their pollution. Why did she leave Oliver? To go into a room with Jasperl. Why? You know, you cannot help but know. It is the ugliest thing for a woman to know, for such pollution spoils women to the destruction of their essence, they become rubbish. Celia must have become rubbish when she had confused her life with Oliver and Jasperl, and though I would have thought it could do nobody much harm to be with Oliver, the germ of Jasperl was in Oliver, for Jasperl’s offence was to have carried masculinity to its logical conclusion. All this rank stuff, that made one remember stenches, must end in wickedness. Not only had Oliver brought Celia into the orbit of masculinity and thus been responsible for all she had done there, he had chosen to wrestle with Jasperl, to be smeared with the shine of what was worst in himself carried to a worse stage by a man with a worse self than him. He was not internally vile like Jasperl but he was now externally defiled.

I sat back in my corner-seat and shut my eyes and pretended I had gone to sleep. It was all right, for Oliver was quite happy talking to Avis. It would be a good thing if he married her. His kindness would help her solve the difficulties of her genius, and he would have something else to think about than Celia and Jasperl. The coarseness in Avis, her greasy skin and her greedy over-anxiety about her career, made me not regret it if she married, as I would (I now realised for the first time) have regretted it if Mary had got married.

Oliver said, ‘Rose, we are running into the junction.’ I did not open my eyes. I feared he might touch me, and my body stiffened in an agony that was not allayed when he did nothing of the sort. Simply he said, ‘Rose, poor Rose, you are so tired, but you must wake up.’ In spite of my violent disgust I was delighted with the words as if they had a specially intricate rhythm; yet of course they had none.

The Reading train was in the station, but it did not start at once. I had to spend some time standing at the window and looking down at Avis and Oliver, in a state of embarrassment because they were plainly so disappointed at my departure. This was new for me. I always wanted people more than they wanted me. It was my great sorrow that so few of all the men and women I met sought to be close to me. Evidently, this was something that happened as one got older. Of course I did not enjoy the act of rejection, but I knew it was inevitable, I was glad I had the strength to perform it. I belonged to others, to a small group that was forever complete and closed. These two people could mean nothing to me.