This Real Night (18 page)

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Rosamund. ‘Your mother loved your father, and she didn’t trust him.’

‘Yes, so she did,’ said Richard Quin, ‘but all the same it seems strange. I can’t understand it. But anyway, Mr Morpurgo had told his wife something, and he had told her too that she must not let it out. Don’t you remember her asking, “What was it that Edgar was telling me about your husband? That he’d gone on a journey?” It was then he went quite white. So I said to make quite sure, “He has gone to Tartary,” and then - oh, don’t you remember? Mr Morpurgo said, “Yes, he has gone to Tartary”.’

His mouth was stopped by what it had said. I repeated, ‘Tartary? Tartary? But that’s in Asia. It’s where Marco Polo went. What’s that to do with Papa? When you said that I thought you were making fun of Mrs Morpurgo because she was so rude and stupid, it was like saying, Oh, he has gone to the North Pole.’

‘There’s another Tartary,’ said Richard Quin. ‘It’s an old word they used to translate Tartarus.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said, my voice a whisper again. ‘Tartarus was Hell. You can’t have said that Papa had gone to Hell.’

‘No, no, not that Papa had gone to Hell,’ he said, ‘I didn’t say that. But Tartarus — ’ He stirred, and pointed at the woodland on the opposite bank as if the place was there. ‘Tartarus wasn’t Hell. You didn’t have to be wicked to go there. The sons of the Titans were in Tartarus. It says so in the sixth book of the
Aeneid.
You did that last year, didn’t you? Well, don’t you remember? The sons of the Titans hadn’t done anything but anger the gods by being nearly as good as they were. A nasty lot, the gods. Anyway, Tartarus was part of the underworld, and one part of the underworld is as bad as another. Oh, how I hate death,’ he said, looking across the river, ‘how I hate death.’

‘If we were to be given life,’ stammered Rosamund, ‘we should have been given it for ever.’ Behind my back I felt his hand find hers.

‘But Papa had death on as good terms as it can be got,’ he told me. ‘At the end of that afternoon in Mrs Morpurgo’s house, when the rest of you went downstairs and he stayed behind and helped me to put away the books I had been looking at on the window-seat, he said to me, “You need not be too sorry for your father, he did not suffer at all.”’

Now it was certain, and tears ran down my face. ‘What shall we do?’ I said, shivering in my brother’s arms.

‘Why, go on as we did before,’ he answered.

‘I want to tear the world to pieces,’ I said.

‘If you did you still wouldn’t find him,’ he said, rocking me. ‘Papa has gone. He simply is not here. The whole world is the place where he isn’t. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning and think of that, and you’ll wake up the day after tomorrow and you’ll think of it again, and morning after morning it will be the first thing to come into your mind. Until it stops, and that itself I won’t like. But you must get it over. So now to learn to say to yourself, “It had to happen, he could not have lived for ever,” and keep repeating it. Say it, Rose.’

‘It had to happen, he could not have lived for ever,’ I said. ‘It had to happen, he could not live for ever.’

‘I would give anything to feel what you two are feeling,’ said Rosamund. ‘When my father dies, I will be sorry for him, as I would be sorry for anybody who dies. But I won’t feel this. You’ve had things that I’ve never had.’

‘But everything we have is yours,’ I said, speaking as generously as if it were not grief that I was offering to share, ‘and Papa thought of you as one of us. At the end, when he was getting tired of everybody, he still noticed you and Richard Quin.’ It seemed so natural now that as he went down to the underworld he should have turned and looked at these two, who were so very fair.

‘All the same,’ she stammered, ‘he was not my father.’

‘But when he liked nothing else, he liked to play chess with you,’ I said and stopped, seeing him as he was when he opened the drawing-room door, holding the long pale feather of his quill pen in his stained and wasted hand, and said, in a voice already sounding as if it came from a great distance, that his work was going badly, and he would be glad if Rosamund would give him a game. How thin he had grown, grieving over the world, which had not cared for him at all. I said, ‘How did he die?’

‘I didn’t ask,’ said Richard Quin.

I stared at him in astonishment. He appeared to be simply watching the river flow by; there was a fork of branches, it must have been half a willow tree, bobbing and canting on the main stream, as if it were choosing its way.

‘He’s always right,’ Rosamund reminded me in an undertone.

‘I didn’t ask,’ he explained, ‘because if people tell you things it never comes out right. Think how it always is at school. Something happens, they find some silly stuff written on the blackboard or some lab apparatus broken, and they run about trying to find out who did it. They never get what happens. You’re told boys were seen in the schoolroom in the late afternoon when they were really out in the slips, and masters think they left early when they left late, and even when that is tidied up you find that you are being praised or blamed for something you didn’t do. The thing is a secret, because every master and every boy is thinking of something that nobody else knows anything about. It always works out the same way, there is a grand pi-jaw, and you stand looking at the bar of sunshine on the floor-boards, and they go on and on, never coming near to what happened. Well, they’re always saying that school prepares us for life, and I don’t doubt it does. So, you see, if people at that place in Spain told Mr Morpurgo how Papa died, they’d get almost everything wrong, just because they weren’t Papa, who alone knew how he died his own, special death. And then if Mr Morpurgo told us what they told him, he would get a lot more things wrong, because he was not Papa, and not these people, either. Something might seem complicated which was quite simple; as simple as if he were lying in bed with a candle, and the wind blew open a window, and put out the light. Or,’ he sighed, ‘as if he had got tired and stretched out his hand and pinched the wick between his fingers.’

Together we three kept our eyes on the river. There must have been a heavy storm nearer its head waters. We had heard nothing of it here, but the driftwood kept on coming downstream. ‘We know all we need know,’ he said presently. ‘Everything about Papa had come to a stop, and now he has come to a stop too. That’s all you can get out of it.’

We were silent again, and then he broke out. ‘The awful thing is that I had hated him so! That I do hate him now. I have got myself into Tartarus. Virgil said that got you there. Hic quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat, Pulsativus parens. Pulsativus parens. I said to myself that if ever I met him in the street, I would beat him, beat him savagely for leaving us, for taking that packet of jewellery he found in the cupboard over the chimneypiece without making sure that Mamma and you girls had anything to live on when he had gone. I know Mamma did not mind, I know she told us that he was going away because a demon of ruin had got hold of him and he did not want the demon to take us too. But nobody should keep demons if they have a wife and children. That’s the last truth, there’s nothing behind that one. If I live to be a hundred I shall never find out that that isn’t true. So I could have beaten him, when I thought of him I hated him so much that it was like when you are going to be sick and you taste the sickness in your mouth. And the thing is that I was not wrong. Virgil thought so too, he put a lot of people into Tartarus who kept their money to themselves and didn’t give their own family what they needed, aut qui divitiis soli incubere repertis Nec partem posuere suis. I’m not wrong, it must be right that I should hate him, yet I wish I did not.’

Just then Rosamund made one of the murmuring sounds by which she sometimes intimated distress, which were not peevish yet made a complaint, like the coo of a dove, and were so brief and faint that one was not quite sure that she had uttered it, and hastened the more to find out whether she, who asked for so little, was actually asking for something now. ‘My head aches,’ she explained. ‘Do you think I might take down my hair?’ She spoke timidly, for in those days it was unthinkable that a girl who had put her hair up should ever renounce such a dignity, and to let it flow again would have been Ophelia-ish. ‘I shall never,’ she said piteously, ‘get used to having it up.’ She raised her arms to her head, arching her back, so that I thought of a caryatid, and slowly took out the hairpins and shook her heavy golden curls loose, one by one, while my brother watched her and forgot what he had been saying. Though these two had been together since they were children they often regarded each other with pleased curiosity, as if they had just met each other for the first time.

‘Now I feel happier,’ she breathed. ‘You do not mind? We are not likely to meet anybody on the way back. This is a public path, but it is one of our private places.’

‘You haven’t finished the job,’ he said. He was smiling, but he was still not himself, some part of him was glad of a discord. ‘You have left two curls pinned up, there, above your left ear, it makes it all look wrong.’

‘Oh, I am clumsy,’ she owned. ‘Isn’t it funny, I can sew so well, but I am clumsy. You do it for me.’ She knelt down in front of him and bowed her head. At first he did not seem to want to touch her, but he leaned forward and took out the pins, and then ran in his fingers deep into her hair and brought them up to the light, again and again. She raised her face, which was at once brilliant and dim, like the Pleiades. It might have been timidity, or slowness or apprehension, or reserve that veiled it. I think it was reserve, though her smooth forehead and the wide space between her eyes promised a candour more than was required, tending to stupidity. She said to his silence, ‘We must go back now.’

‘It is so odd that something not metal should be as bright as your hair,’ he said.

‘We must go back now,’ she repeated. ‘If we start now Rose will have plenty of time to wash her face and comb her hair before tea. If she scamps it Aunt Clare will see that she has been in a state and will wonder why.’

As I wiped away my tearstains, the implications of what she had blandly said came home to me: Mamma had not been told of Papa’s death. I cried out, ‘But if you haven’t told Mamma we must do that at once. We must, we must. Oh, it is wrong not to!’

When Richard, keeping his eyes on the river, shook his head, and Rosamund, still kneeling, turned on me the blind gaze of a statue, I could not believe it. ‘But it’s all wrong, it really is,’ I said. ‘Oh, I know that when we were little we thought that fathers and mothers could not be so much interested in each other as they were in their children because they were not related, but that was only because we were little and didn’t understand. That, what they had, being married, must be the strongest link, the strongest link—’ I could not find the words, and I thought it extraordinary that I should have to, surely they should see for themselves the point I was trying to make. But neither spoke, and he continued to look on the moving water, and her eyes were still blank. It was as if I were insisting on talking about something forbidden, which indeed I felt I was, and they were waiting in goose-fleshed shame till I had finished my blundering. Though they remained so still I had a sense of a slow pulse hammering through them. ‘Oh, however much we love Papa,’ I said, shutting my eyes and emptying myself, for the sake of getting to an end, ‘this is Mamma’s business more than ours.’

There was a moment before they stirred. Then Richard Quin said, ‘Yes. But she knows her business. Think how well she knows it. She knew exactly what was going to happen when you and Mary went to play to a really good piano teacher, she knew exactly what was going to happen when poor old Cordy went to play to a really good violin teacher. And I’m sure she knew better still what was going to happen to Papa when he left us, for there’s the link, you said so, it must be the strongest link.’

‘But if she knows it already,’ I said, ‘what’s the harm in telling her?’ But as I said that I knew it was so sensible that it could not be wholly true. ‘It’s a kind of sacrilege,’ I pleaded, trying to get nearer the truth, ‘for us to know and her not to.’

‘To talk to her about what she knows might be making her read aloud a letter which it had hurt her to read to herself when she first got it,’ said Richard Quin.

‘Oh, then you do think that he died a horrid death,’ I whispered.

‘No, truly I don’t, considering what he was. He wouldn’t be thinking of his death but of what mattered to him. Whatever that was. You know what he was, how he used to go out on the iciest winter day in a thin coat if Mamma or Kate did not stop him, and come back not noticing that he was blue with cold. And you know how Mamma had to make him eat. I think he probably never felt that he was dying. But his death may have looked horrid from the outside.’

I spoiled my face again with tears. ‘We guess and guess, and will never know,’ I complained. ‘The fault about this world is that the people who love each other are separate. It is terrible to care what someone else feels as much as if they were you, and not to know what they feel, because they are they and you are you. It is like being in prison, only the other way round, locked out instead of locked in, not to be Papa, not to be him when he dies, not to die along with him. This is torment, to strain against a barrier that can’t be broken and isn’t there, that is just separateness.’

‘Oh, but you’re wrong,’ Richard Quin, who was never awkward, spoke awkwardly. ‘You said it was the strongest link. That’s evidently what it is. There’s nothing like it. People who love each other,’ he said, in a sort of agony, ‘like that, like our father and mother, they are not separate. They flow together, they are not two people any more.’ We were back in our embarrassment, he had to force out the words, I had to force myself to listen to them. ‘So you do see, don’t you, that if we told Mamma, and she got Mr Morpurgo to tell her everything, we’d be making her look at Papa’s death from the outside, when she’s already looking at it from the inside.’

That of course was true. ‘Yes, yes,’ I sighed, and got up, and left him sitting on the tree-trunk, Rosamund kneeling among her spread skirts at his feet, and walked ahead of them back to the Dog and Duck, through a late afternoon already eveningish, we were so close to autumn. The sun had fallen below the crest of the heights above us, and the air was cold, the river nearly white, the reflected woodlands more black than green. I was not unhappy. Young people are uplifted when the scenery around them changes in harmony with what is happening to them; they take it as evidence that life is a work of art and is faithful to some design. I was indeed happier than when I had started out from the inn an hour or two before, in one important respect. After that day I did not weep for my father any more, and I was visited less and less often by the vivid images of him and the sound of his voice. This did not mean that I had become indifferent to him; rather was it that I no longer needed to remember him, because I was never in danger of forgetting him. When I think of what I am I see a high cliff honeycombed with halls and corridors, which are inhabited by children and young girls and women of all ages less than my own, who are my recollected selves, brought back to being every time I knew again the special satisfaction or despair, accomplishment or ignorance, which preserves each from the ruin of time. Since Richard Quin and I talked beside the flowing Thames, Rosamund so quiet at our feet, it has seemed to me that my father lives in these halls and corridors among my selves. We are still separate but we are companions. Yet he was never all I wanted, and I knew it. I have never had any difficulty in understanding how Dante spent his life consumed with love for Beatrice while steadily consuming the domestic affection of his wife, for I practised a like dichotomy. I walked through the dying day, through the summer, aflame with love for my father, but when the night thickened round the Dog and Duck and the fires were lit to keep out the autumn, I was as contented as could be, doing my filial duty by Uncle Len in his office.