This Real Night (17 page)
She said suddenly, ‘Oh, there is Uncle Len. This morning he found that one of our boats had not been tied up properly and had been swept away, so he and Tom went off to find it.’ The two boats had just rounded the bend of the river where dark grey woods, sharp-edged against a pale grey sky, seemed now to meet and form a solid wall. The pot-boy was rowing and could hardly be seen in the fogged distance; his boat was just a dark shape which spurted forward, sped on till it flagged, then spurted on again. Uncle Len was standing in the stern of his boat, rooted to his solid midriff in the mists, which there a shaft of sunlight was touching with yellowish silver. He was backwatering with an oar, bringing his craft along as swiftly as the other, with a trick of the arm as delicate as he was gross, a trick which had the air of being a secret he could not have imparted even had he wished. I had seen him make many such movements. Of course he was a gipsy.
‘Run and tell Milly and Lily to start his breakfast,’ said Constance. ‘I came out to keep watch for them.’
I gave them warning in the kitchen and went down the village street to fetch his
Daily Mail.
Our happiness had slipped into its groove again.
O
UR HAPPINESS
at the Dog and Duck was so great that it was the first place where Mary and I felt any prolonged twinge of rebellion against our destinies. Usually we accepted the knowledge that we were pianists, not in the sense that we chose to play the piano, for that implied that we could have stopped if we had wished, but because we had been born so, as Hindus are born Brahmins or Untouchables, so we made no fuss about it. But at the Dog and Duck, when we had to sit practising at the piano Mamma had hired from Reading, we often sulked. I would rather have been on a bench in the garden, shelling peas or stringing beans into one of those big china bowls, white inside, dark cream and fluted outside, which are surely among the handsomest of household objects, until the ferry-bell rang and I put down my bowl on the grass and slipped on my padded gloves, and took the punt over, hearing first the lovely gush of the water as the pole parted it and went down to the one right place where it should strike the river-bottom, and then the delicate spit-spit-spit of the drops it scattered as it came up between my twirling hands. That was another grievance. Even in padded gloves, that was all the boating we were allowed to do. Richard Quin and Rosamund were good about taking us out on the river, but that was not quite what we wanted. They often took us into the arcade of some backwater they had discovered, not to be seen from the bank, nosing the boat in slowly so that the green crystal pavement was not shattered more than need be, until we came to the inner reach, which seemed sealed by greenness at each end, and we sat as quietly as if we were in church, nobody knowing that we were there, and the ruffled water settling to crystal again around us. But Mary and I could never be the showmen.
Our resentment really went deeper than that. Mary and I would have liked to have a life together on the river which would have proved us as close companions, sharing as many secrets, as Rosamund and Richard Quin. Also it irritated us that even the restriction on our rowing was not quite our own. Cordelia was infringing our rights in our grievance, by a fantasy which ignored the absolute certainty that she would never be a violinist. The great teacher who had heard her play had dispersed her hopes so brutally that even her iron resolution was convinced and broken, and she never touched her violin now. It was even shut up in one of Mamma’s old trunks; we could not think why Mamma did not give it away. But when she was asked if she would like to take out a boat she would assume her white, worried stare, which suggested that she was bearing in mind some important consideration wantonly ignored by everybody else, and she would look down at her hands and shake her red-gold head. This trick afflicted Mary and myself with a sense of panic. Cordelia was trying to live our lives, not because she had no life of her own, because there was concealed in her small, compact, delicate, biddable-looking body a self so gargantuan in its appetite that she wanted to snatch whatever good she saw on the plate of any other self. Music was our food, so she had tried to take it away from us. She had failed because it had ceased to exist as soon as she had laid hold of it. It wasn’t hers. But we could not have even the pleasure of feeling forthright indignation at her attempted theft, so impudently persisted in after the nature of things had proved that it was impossible, because we knew that what she was doing had another meaning, which deserved our pity. She had been hurt by her failure to be a violinist in the same way that Mamma had been hurt when Papa had left us. She had been married to something and had been deserted. But again we could not feel sorry for her in comfort, because our musical training by Mamma had left us with the belief that to play an instrument badly was as shameful as any crime short of murder. In our eyes, therefore, Cordelia had been miraculously rescued from mortal sin and ought to be rejoicing at her salvation. It is one of the major disharmonies of life that complicated relationships are not reserved for adults. The wind is not tempered to the lamb, shorn or unshorn.
Indeed a lamb may be delivered over to the blast at its strongest, just because it is a lamb, and subject to some mood peculiar to immaturity. One afternoon, when Mary was practising, I followed the towing-path that ran from the inn-garden through the churchyard and along the foot of the steep woodlands. Presently my eye was caught by a cast branch lying on the ground, the leaves of which were dusty-white on one side and the berries a bright dark crimson. Looking up I saw on the edge of the wood the low tree from which it had been broken, and I tried to break off another branch, the berries were so bright. But the fibre was tough, and to get a better purchase I climbed the rising ground behind the tree. But even then I could not snap it, and I tired of the effort, and looked over my shoulder into the wood and took some steps into its dusk; and although I had left my childhood I was immediately overcome by that sense of the world’s strangeness which visits children as intensely as if they were accustomed to be somewhere else. Since the wood was uphill it was very dark. There were some beeches, unaltered by being where they were; they raised against the sky layer after layer of green design, and so much light filtered through and between their leaves that their lower branches were as splendid as the upper. Those trees might have been standing free and clear in an open field. But the firs cut off the light, though they etched only a spare and spiky pattern on the sky, and their underbranches were bare and fretted with sordid shrivelled twigs, and the stunted hollies and hawthorns that grew beside them had the look of broken furniture in an attic. Here and there on the earth between there were deep cushions of emerald moss, but there were more brambles and much coarse, blanched grass, and there was an air of natural want, of vegetable shabbiness. It was odd that there was not a sound to be heard, for the treetops must have been thickly peopled with birds and squirrels, and I knew the ground that I walked on to be the ceiling of galleries and halls where rabbits and stoats and weasels had their homes. I listened to the silence till it became itself a sound loud as a trumpet, and as if it were calling me or some others I ran, either obeying it or fleeing from it, I did not know which, back to the edge of the wood. But my terror was only half-real, and it was pleasant enough to keep me from going right out into the open, so I stayed in the dusk, leaning against the trunk of the low tree with dusty leaves and bright berries, and I looked down on the river and saw it strange as the wood. It flowed with a haste so like an air of purpose that it was hard not to think it a great snake fully aware of what it was on its way to do. In the woods on the other side of the water, opaque with that dull green which is the sediment of summer colour after August has drained off its radiance, I saw a signal. One tree, and no other, had been touched by autumn and was bright gold. It must have been growing in a deep cleft on the hillside, for it was visible only from this spot; I had not seen it as I came along the bank. It was shaped like a blown flame, but that clear gold was the colour of light and not heat. In this childish mood, this retreat into legend and fairy-tale and dream, I saw this as a flag flown by some immensity, not a giant, for that would have been too ordinary, a mere magnification of my own kind, but by a cloud with a will, or the force behind one of the seasons. I clung to the tree-trunk, pretending that I believed that the world was made of the enlaced and breathing bodies of natural things, and that one among them was communicating with me by this tree, while at the same time I was thinking that I must bring the others here after tea. It was then that I saw Richard Quin and Rosamund standing just below me at the water’s edge, and heard him say, ‘It is a queer thing, colours do not seem as bright to me as they did when Papa was still alive.’
I let go the tree and slid down the bank and ran towards them, crying, ‘Papa isn’t dead.’
They spun round and faced me with exactly the same movement, straightening themselves and letting their clenched fists fall by their sides, and trying to hide the naked pity in their faces by putting on their blindish, indolent air. It was not, as I sometimes thought, that one was copying the other. They were so alike in nature that it was a wonder they were not the same person.
‘I didn’t see you, I didn’t see you!’ groaned Richard Quin. ‘Oh, I should have known you might be about, we are so apt to go to the same places.’
‘I am glad she heard,’ said Rosamund. ‘Now he won’t have to be the only one of you that knows. It has been so hard on him,’ she told me.
The three of us drew together on the path, and I found that I could only whisper, ‘Oh, Richard Quin, you might have shown me the letter.’
‘What letter?’
‘Didn’t he write a letter about it?’
‘No, there wasn’t a letter. Papa only wrote letters to the papers. Not to us. At first I only guessed. I thought you might have guessed too. You were there when it first came out, that day last spring. Don’t you remember? The day we were out in the garden showing Mamma the tulips. The hyacinths hadn’t come up, Rosamund didn’t plant them. Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, of course I do. But what are you talking about? We never mentioned Papa.’
‘No,’ said Richard Quin. ‘But Mr Morpurgo brought Mamma all those flowers. Such a lot of flowers.’
‘What are you trying to read into that? He is always bringing us flowers. Far too many flowers. Mamma is always giving them away.’
‘He never brought us quite so many before or since,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Well, people send flowers to funerals.’
‘She must sit down,’ Rosamund told him, ‘there is a tree-trunk over there.’
While they guided me I cried out, as if I were reproaching them, ‘I saw that golden tree too. I meant to bring you here after tea.’ I sat down behind them and rocked backwards and forwards, my elbows on my knees, my chin on my palms, while their hands stroked my hair and my face and my shoulders, very lightly, as if what I had heard would have bruised my flesh. ‘But you must have more to go on than that,’ I said, contemptuously.
‘I have, but that was almost enough,’ he said. ‘Think. Mr Morpurgo had been away, and he had come back different, and he said to Mamma that he felt happy because his wife was coming home, and he was ashamed of being happy, he felt as if he were being callous about something terrible that had happened. And he spoke as if he were begging Mamma’s pardon, as if she were involved in whatever it was that he thought terrible. What is it that could be terrible both for him and Mamma? Only one thing. I guessed then that he had been abroad to see Papa, and that Papa had died.’
The darkness in the wood behind us, where the starved holly and hawthorn looked like broken chairs and rickety tables, was the real world. ‘What, at that place that smelled of oil?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Where was it?’
‘In Spain, I think. Those horrible daughters of Mr Morpurgo’s had a box of Spanish sweets they said he had brought them. He would always bring back presents, whatever he had gone away to do.’
I thought for a moment of the atlas, but not to any purpose. We had never done Spain at school. ‘But Papa need not be dead. In a place like that they probably put people in prison for debt. Papa had been away from us for quite a time, he must have got into debt. Perhaps he is in prison.’
‘Nobody ever gives people flowers because someone belonging to them is in prison,’ said Richard Quin, ‘and if Mr Morpurgo had found Papa in prison he would have paid his debts and got him out.’
‘But he said it was a dreadful place,’ I persisted. ‘Perhaps if one went to prison there, they would not let one out, and one would just have to stay there. Like dying.’ I used it as the absurd ultimate, which is only brought in for the sake of argument, which does not really exist. But it existed. Its existence was proved by the faces of Richard Quin and Rosamund, which, now I looked at them, were not the same as they had been before, when there was no question of Papa being dead. The real world was indeed that strange world where a dark wood could feel poor and rivers had business, and nameless forces could set trees alight for a message that had no meaning. For there death could be; but in the ordinary world where one played the piano and did lessons and ate and slept there was no place for this thing that was not an object, nor an action, nor really a thought that one could think, yet surpassed in violence any storm and left a huge hole where something huge had been. There was a pain in my head because the two worlds were meeting there.
‘Oh, Rose, my silly sister, Rose,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Our father has died. But, you know, you must not grieve too much, such things are always happening. I was quite sure that they were happening to us, and of course there isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t, when we were at Mr Morpurgo’s house, and he got so angry with his beastly wife, because she asked Mamma where Papa was. Oh, I know he got angry with her about other things afterwards, but his fury began when she put that question. He could have killed her for it. And don’t you see, he’d told her to be specially nice to us about Papa. I don’t know if he had told her exactly what it was. I think that though he was so keen on her coming home he didn’t trust her, which seems so odd.’
