This Real Night (16 page)

‘Oh, yes,’ we said. ‘Oh, yes,’ but Rosamund cried plaintively, still lying back on her pillows, ‘Yes, it must have been horrid for him, but why did he have to make all that fuss?’

One of the candles went out, and Richard Quin turned to the chimneypiece and lit it again. As we watched him we saw in the brown depths of the mirror four other girls watching another schoolboy. ‘Oh, there was more going on than what we saw,’ he said mildly. The candle went out again, and he took a pen-knife out of his pocket and began to cut the wick. ‘Uncle Len,’ he said slowly as he worked, ‘and the man who tried to change the forged note knew each other quite well really. His name was Benny Rossi, and they started level, but he has gone down as Uncle Len has come up. He’s supposed to have something to do with bookmaking, but Uncle Len says that’s just a blind, and it’s better not to know what’s behind it. Anyway, he goes about with a gang and one of their dodges is that they pay at pubs with five pound notes, and get the change. Part of the game is that the notes aren’t even good forgeries. The publican is supposed to look at them and see that the people who tried to pass it are saying, “This isn’t a fiver and you know it, and we know it, but you’ve got to take it or leave it, and if you don’t take it we’ll smash up your pub.” So you see that what happened tonight was quite something to make a fuss about.’

We were breathless at the thought of such evil threatening our friends. ‘But what about the police?’ asked Cordelia angrily.

‘It seems they aren’t much good when this sort of hooligan comes along,’ said Richard Quin, absently giving a last twist to the wick he had been mending. As he spoke the calm of the night was suddenly broken by a clamour of birds. They were flying towards the inn from the woods down by the river; and they were shrieking like children in panic. It was so dreadful a sound that we could think of nothing else. ‘What is that?’ we cried. ‘Oh, listen, what is that?’

‘What is what?’ asked Richard Quin, his back still turned towards us. But now the birds were circling round the eaves, still shrieking, and not even his preoccupation could keep him from hearing them. ‘Oh, that. Why, a hawk is raiding a wood, and the poor creatures have wakened up in their nests to find that death was among them, and they are literally flying for their lives.’

A bird bumped against the window and scuffled for a clawhold on the ledge, and was jerked out into space again by the catapult of its terror. We all wailed, and Richard Quin said, ‘You must not mind so much, these things often happen.’ But he listened with us to the winged lamentation as it shrilled higher and higher above the house and keened into the distance, and the silence fell back into place. ‘Rosamund, Rose,’ he began again, ‘did you tell the others about the tumblers? No, I suppose not. Well, Mary and Cordelia missed something. Uncle Len smashed a tumbler on the bar so that the rim came off and left a jagged edge, and he threatened this Benny Rossi with it as if it were a dagger. Well, it seems it was the only thing he could have done. That’s how these gangs fight. If a publican won’t change their forged notes, they smash their tumblers, then each has his own weapon and he can cut people down their faces and slash their clothes and afterwards he just throws down the tumbler on a stone floor or on the cobbles outside in the yard and it breaks, and then there’s no weapon and no fingerprints for the police to find afterwards. So these hooligans haven’t anything to fear, and they just go ahead and make the place a shambles before anybody can even call the police. And though Uncle Len talked about being insured he was bluffing. Insurance is a wonderful thing, he says, but it never pays for all the damage, and if a pub’s once been smashed up decent people are apt to go somewhere else, and there’s the pub at the other end of the village, the Raven, and Uncle Len says that though it’s a wretched place, customers might go there if they were frightened to come here, and he can’t blame them. So when a gang comes along, you’re sunk, you’re absolutely sunk unless you know the trick of breaking tumblers on the counter and fighting with the broken glass, and getting into action as soon as they do. So you see, Uncle Len had to do what he did. He was angry about being called a diddacoy, but also he had to show that he hadn’t gone soft and could still fight when he was angry. So he couldn’t help it, he really couldn’t.’

We all said that indeed we saw, we exclaimed at the dangers that had encompassed Uncle Len, at the courage with which he had annulled them; all except Rosamund, who still lay back on her pillows. She was pressing her thumb against her lower lip, as she often did when she could not make up her mind. She was very babyish in some ways, this was very near sucking her thumb. While Cordelia was saying that all the same she could not understand why the police did not stop this sort of thing, Richard Quin moved to Rosamund’s bedside and stretched out his arm and ran his fingers deep through her hair and tumbled her heavy golden curls over her face. But under them it could be seen that she was keeping her thumb pressed against her lower lip.

He sighed as if he were too tired to talk any more, but went on: ‘Oh, you know, you have to admit it, Uncle Len is a great man, Wellington would have liked him. You see, he had to take hold of Benny’s tie with his right hand and smash the tumbler with his left. He had to do it that way, he couldn’t help it, because he was standing with the bar counter on his left; and he says he hadn’t the slightest idea whether he could do it or not. He had never tried it with his left hand, why should he? But if he hadn’t been able to do it, then Benny could quite easily have reached out and smashed a tumbler himself, for of course the bar was on his right. But Uncle Len had to risk it, just to show he was on top. Oh, he was wonderful.’

Rosamund took her thumb away from her mouth and shook back her curls and sat up in bed, clasping the sheet to her breast with one hand, and looked up at him with great clear eyes. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I remember that. Uncle Len broke the tumbler with his left hand.’

‘With his left hand,’ he repeated, coaching her slowness.

‘But that was terrible!’ she exclaimed in a sudden fluttering flurry. ‘Why, it is as if someone were to tell you, your whole life depends on whether you can thread a needle with your left hand. Oh, poor Uncle Len, poor Uncle Len!’

It was the kind of thing she understood. With her talent for serenity she would have ignored the existence of diddacoys, had she been a gipsy; and she would have avoided the attention of hooligans by the use of her talent for evasion, which was nearly but not quite the same as her talent for serenity. But when a man was asked to do something with his left hand which he was used to doing with his right, that evoked her pity. It was like the crisis in a fairy-tale, where the princess will be changed into a pig or a frog if she cannot fill a basket with wild strawberries in the winter woods; and it was to some such early world as that, more simple than ours and yet more strange, that she belonged. Now that she could sympathise with Uncle Len’s plight she was at rest, and she was totally restful, just as she had been totally hurt when Richard Quin had come into the room. They exchanged clear and shining and blank smiles, as if they were a prince and princess in a fairy-tale, looking forward to their featureless and eternal happiness. Richard Quin wanted nothing to spoil the moment of harmony which, though I was excluded from it, I knew to be exquisite. He turned about abruptly and blew out the candles, and said in a voice that trembled a little, ‘Goodnight, my silly sisters, goodnight, Rosamund.’

Through the darkness she stuttered, ‘Goodnight, Richard Quin. I am sorry I was so stupid.’

‘Oh, you were not stupid,’ he told her as he went through the door. Though he spoke tenderly the way he said it suggested that he meant either, ‘No, you were not exactly stupid, but you were certainly going along in that direction, but it doesn’t matter,’ or, ‘No, considering that you are stupid, I don’t think you were being particularly stupid.’ Surely that was rude, yet it was not rude between them, and I heard Rosamund settle down again in bed with a contented sigh.

Mary and Cordelia and I chattered for a little about the new Uncle Len that our brother had left painted on the darkness. Mary said that we must be sure to give him a really good birthday present, I wondered when his birthday was, Cordelia said she had it in her birthday book and expressed wonder that the rest of us did not keep up our birthday books, it was such an easy thing to do, and, as the present instance proved, so useful. There grew on me the sense that round my bed was the dark room, round my room was the dark house, round the house was the dark garden, the dark garden lay on the side of a dark hill beside a dark river which protected it like a moat, which was the Thames but also seemed as I sunk down into sleep to be Uncle Len, flowing so strongly from his unsuspected beginnings to his unknown end. As I was taken by my dreams, I no longer recollected what my brother had told us about Uncle Len as a story but rather as a long composition he had played us on the flute, on that second mouth set obliquely to the first which the fingers have to teach to speak. Once I woke up and thought I heard Mary crying, and I sat up and said anxiously, ‘What’s the matter, you ass?’ but it was laughter that was shaking her, and she gasped, ‘If it is true that everybody, absolutely everybody who’s called D’Arcy is a gipsy, then
Pride and Prejudice
is quite a different book from what we thought.’ I laughed back, ‘And how Elizabeth would hold it over him!’ and we slept again.

Then I woke up in the white light of early morning and lay looking round me with that sense of ease which anoints the young when they do not have to hurry out of bed to school. The rains of the previous winter had soaked in through a gutter and left a couple of stains high on the dado above the two windows. One stain was like the helmeted head of a woman, the other was like a spread hand. Uncle Len had said he would get down to a job on the plaster and mend the guttering outside as soon as the season was over and he had a moment to himself. He was indeed wonderful. He had been born of wild people, his childhood had been ruined and his youth disappointed, and if he had wanted to take revenge on the world he had the strength and cunning to do it, yet he did small things about the house as though he were a tame, weak man good for nothing else. Eager to see him, I got up; and lest I should wake the others I took my clothes in my arms and dressed in the passage, near the sealed door which was pierced on its hinged side by blanched fronds of wisteria. They were growing long and straggling, the last leaves on the spurs were tiny, we had nearly come to the end of this summer which had been happy although Papa had gone away. I went out of the silent part of the house into the small morning noises of the inn. Some horses were clopping their hooves on the cobblestones in the yard, men were calling to them, ‘Yup, yup,’ as if they were eating soup, and then all at once shouting in priggish warning, like schoolteachers telling one that one is going to knock over something when one is not, ‘Oh yo! Oh yo!’ Then the horses gave exasperated neighs, saying it was all a fuss and they could get on all right if they were allowed to do things their own way, and then there was a contented orderly scamper out to the road and the hoof-clops became softly resonant and died away. The kitchen door was ajar and I heard Milly and Lily exchanging remarks which were like the cawing of the rooks when they left the elm-trees in the morning or came back to them at night, which meant nothing yet were not meaningless, since they proclaimed loyalty to a routine. The kettle must be full boiling or the tea won’t be what you could call tea, yes, indeed, and the pot must be ’ot to the touch. All the people at the Dog and Duck dropped their h’s, not invariably but to impart emphasis. Horrible was always ’orrible, and surely ’orrible is much the more impressive of the two words. But I did not hear Uncle Len coming in with his caw and telling them for goodness’ sake to get on with it, or he wouldn’t get his breakfast before closing time. I went out into the garden and he was not there either. But Rosamund’s mother, Constance, was walking on the lawn at the river’s edge, a cup and saucer in her hand, and I ran to join her.

Constance was very like her daughter, yet was comic. Rosamund recalled classical sculpture, but Constance was like a statue, not a very good statue, imperfectly Pygmalionised. Her skin was smooth as marble and her calm was like marble too; and it seemed probable that under any sudden catastrophe she would simply keel over, her queenly stance unaltered, and it would then be our duty not to bring her brandy and rub her hands but to call on the officials of some museum who owned the tackle that could restore her to an upright position. But today she was not only comic, she was also exquisitely in harmony with the quiet grey morning, as she walked beside the glassy river, sometimes raising the O of her cup to her bland lips, while her large, perfectly shaped hand held the O of her saucer steadily level, and her wide eyes rolled slowly from side to side. As I called to her she set her cup back on the saucer and pointed to the window of the bedroom she shared with my mother.

‘Your Mamma is still sleeping,’ she told me when I reached her. ‘There is no doubt she is improving.’ We took some steps together, and she drank again. ‘She is slowly getting over the loss of your father. The first wild grief is gone,’ she said, in tones so flat that it seemed as if no such thing as grief could exist, ‘but she has to fight against what lasts far longer.’

‘What is that?’ I asked apprehensively.

‘Why, she misses your Papa coming in from his office and telling her what has happened during the day.’

‘Surely that can’t matter so much!’ I exclaimed.

‘It matters a great deal,’ she stated. ‘When a marriage comes to an end, whether through death or some such accident as has happened to your Papa, the wife is always distressed, whether she loved her husband, as your Mamma did, or not.’ She paused and thought, but gave no example. ‘Because he no longer brings her in the news,’ she ended. She raised her cup to her lips again, and seemed to forget that I was there. We strolled downstream, she veiled in her reflections, I remembering that if Mamma had been deserted by her husband, she was fleeing from hers. They would not suffer in vain, for I knew too much ever to have one of my own. The river was dimmed by broken mists drifting along the shining surface in hummocks and wisps, not so fast as the current, more nearly at our pace, and above us a struggling sun was pale as the moon. The summer, we said to each other, was nearly over.