This Real Night (22 page)

Mary started to tell me that I would have to pour some hot water into the teapot, there was such a thing after all as tea that was too strong, but I had to put my fear before her at once. ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe we’re going to find it as easy to be as much of a success as we thought we were. Half the people at the Athenaeum play as well as I do.’

I was so anxious that my voice cracked. But Mary’s face remained as bland as cream. ‘Yes, I know. Half the people at the Prince Albert play as well as I do. But we needn’t worry.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because nobody except us seems to notice that we don’t play particularly well. They don’t see through you at the Athenaeum, do they? Nobody’s shown any signs of seeing through me yet.’

‘But some day they must,’ I persisted.

‘Well, they’ve had a term and three-quarters to do it in,’ said Mary. ‘If they were going to find us out they would have done it by now.’

‘But the critics and the conductors?’ I asked, and my voice cracked again.

‘The chances are they won’t either. My teachers are just as much taken in by me as the students. Aren’t yours? What about Mr Burney Harper? And maybe we’re not really taking them in. Possibly we have a slight advantage over the other students, though I don’t know what it is, and I don’t believe it amounts to much. Anyway, we’ll have got it from Mamma. Do fill up that teapot. I really have over-done it, it tastes like ink.’

My confidence was restored, though it chilled me that she was talking of herself and me, of our teachers and our fellow-students, as if we were all dead and she were reading about us in a book, not a real book but a text-book, a volume of the encyclopaedia. I asked her no more questions and she said, ‘Do go on, Kate. Rose, this is a lovely serial. The hero’s serving a sentence in Portland Jail instead of his twin brother, at first because there was a mistake and afterwards to save somebody’s honour, and now he’s escaped and stolen a boat and rowed out to sea, and the warders have taken another boat and are rowing after him. Go on, Kate.’

‘That I won’t,’ said Kate. ‘Who would have thought it, it opened so well, but it is nonsense, it is wicked nonsense. While you two have been talking I have looked at the end of the instalment and the Honourable Rodney is rowing straight into Portland Race. I have been reading these stories since I was a kid, I had to read them to my granny because she could not read though she never owned to it, and I know that tomorrow we will be told how he got across Portland Race and made his way to freedom, because the warders dared not follow him into the Race, and wicked rubbish that is. My father always said no craft was ever built that could live in Portland Race, and that stands to reason. Why, to look down on it from the distance is terrible. The sea boils there like the water in that kettle, only it is colder than ice, the current fetches up from the bottom the cold stuff that has never felt the sun, and draws it down before it’s warmed, so when the poor man’s boat capsizes the waves will worry him like a dog and freeze him to death, and that’s a frightful way for a poor man to die who has been sent to prison for no fault, and I won’t read of it.’

‘But that won’t happen,’ said Mary. ‘You’ll see, Kate, the writer won’t kill him. You said yourself you knew that he would be saved in the next instalment.’

‘He cannot be saved,’ said Kate, ‘not if he gets caught in Portland Race.’

‘But this is only a story,’ I said. We were concerned, for though she was speaking quietly she looked as she had done when her eldest brother’s ship had been posted overdue for forty-eight hours, and she did not know he had been left ashore sick at Lisbon. ‘The convict is not real.’

‘Portland Race is real enough,’ she answered obstinately.

‘Well, it says in the Bible that in the end there shall be no more sea,’ said Richard Quin, who was with us in a mud-stained jersey, his cheeks bright with the cold and one of the games he played.

Kate went down on her knees to help him off with his heavy football boots, but would not let him have it his way. ‘True enough,’ she said, ‘but it will be a great pity and nothing gained, for two wrongs do not make a right.’

‘Don’t worry, it is probably a mistake in the translation, and the right text is that there shall be no more Portland Race, and some half-gales for the sake of excitement, but no whole gales, and just the sea left with all its wickedness taken out,’ said Richard Quin, and took the bun that Mary had just put on her plate.

‘Pig,’ she said, ‘I meant that for myself.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Richard Quin, ‘but he for God only, she for God in him.’

‘Don’t dare say that beastly impudent line even in fun,’ I said.

‘It’s a nice line really,’ said Richard Quin. ‘It sounds just like a flowery compliment if you say it in pidgin English.’ Bowing, he laid his hands on his chest and narrowed his eyes and squeaked the words, and they did sound good Li Hung Chang. ‘But you girls are wrong about Milton. I’ve meant to speak to you about it for quite a long time. I know he was frightful to his wives, and what I think is just as bad is that he kept on writing his friends poems which showed he didn’t care a rap about them, he had nothing to say about them, Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son, Cyriack whose grandsire on the Royal Bench, Fairfax whose name in Arms through Europe rings, and all that touch; and as for Lycidas, you couldn’t write about a real friend’s death that way, there isn’t any horror of death. But all the same Milton knew all about words, on words he was all right, he really was.’

‘Words,’ sniffed Mary, ‘words,’ and I jeered, ‘Words, what we like is meaning.’

‘Oh, you do, do you, you couple of dotty musicians,’ he jeered back, ‘what you like is sounds that in that sense don’t mean anything at all, not in the way words do when they’re used in a newspaper. Poetry is like music, it gets at meaning in another way, you needn’t snigger. I know more about it than you do. I’m going to be a writer.’

‘Well, write if you like, but don’t stick up for Milton,’ said Mary, and I said, ‘No, because he couldn’t have meant anything good, because he was a horrible old hypocrite, keeping his wives just as slaves who could write down his poetry and writing that thing all about freedom called Areowhatever—’

‘Children, you must not quarrel,’ said Kate, ‘not even in fun—’

‘This isn’t fun,’ I said. ‘Kate, you don’t know what a hog Milton was, a perfect hog—’

‘You may not have heard both sides,’ said Kate.

‘But do you really want to be a writer like Papa?’ I said doubtfully. It had seemed so contentious and dusty compared to music.

‘No, not like Papa,’ said Richard Quin, shaking his fair head stiffly, as my father would have shaken his dark head, had he wished to dissociate himself from his father. ‘Not politics. Poetry. Yes, I know quite well what I’m going to do. I shall start by getting into Oxford, I can manage that though it’s true I haven’t worked, and then I shall get the Newdigate Prize for Poetry—’

‘This is the first time I’ve ever heard you say you wanted to get a prize,’ said Mary.

‘Well, I don’t really want the Newdigate,’ said Richard Quin, ‘not what you’d really call “want”, but one must begin somewhere.’ He took my cup of tea, and of course I did not mind, though I said I did, and pulled his hair.

‘Be quiet, all of you,’ said Kate, ‘I hear your mother’s key in the door. Put on the kettle, one of you. No, fill it with fresh water, that water has been boiled up twice and would do for you but not for your mother. She will need a good cup, too, she always does when she has been to see Miss Beevor. Her maid is a good sensible child from an orphanage, I have talked to her in the fishmonger’s, but poor Miss Beevor would not know how to train her. Oh, ma’am,’ she said to my mother, ‘go upstairs and I will have your tea ready in a minute. You look,’ she said censoriously, ‘very tired.’

This was not true. She said it only because she thought that my mother’s benevolence must be limited like the money in her purse, and that some day she might pay it all out and there would be nothing left. In fact my mother was flushed with happiness. ‘I would rather have it down here with the rest of you,’ she said. ‘How beautiful that fire is, with the coals pressed together like that and glowing. They are just the colour of those pink roses we have by the gate. Do you know, I really like Miss Beevor. I like her very much.’

We all cried out in protest, and Richard Quin said, ‘Oh, Mamma, don’t go on forgiving everybody as if you were St Francis, we like you better than him.’

‘Lots,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t believe the birds liked being preached to.’

‘What, did St Francis preach to the birds?’ asked Kate. ‘Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to cats.’

‘Yes, it has to be admitted that there he chose the easier way,’ sighed Mamma. She pondered for a moment, then, overcome by the horror that any public performer must feel at the thought of a completely unresponsive audience, she exclaimed, ‘Preach to cats! No, one must not ask the impossible, even of saints.’ Her mind, doubtless because she was thinking of what cats do to birds, swept us anxiously. ‘You must not be cruel to unfortunate people, particularly when there is no reason for it. Miss Beevor is a generous woman,’ she announced, in glowing indifference to our mockery, ‘as fast as I say I like the composers she likes, she says she likes the composers I like. I know both of us are lying,’ she owned, ‘but really no harm is done, the score remains as it would have been if we were both telling the truth, and it is very pleasant of her.’

I broke into laughter at the further joke she did not see. Did Miss Beevor, I wondered, signal that she was about to make concessions to what she considered Mamma’s depraved musical tastes, by stilling a jerking foot and swallowing? But nobody asked me why I was laughing, for this was one of the fortunate evenings which every united family enjoys from time to time when its members, returning from the day’s occupations, find such amused delight in recognising each other’s oddities that strangers might suppose them to be meeting for the first time after years of separation. There was, however, a shadow on my pleasure. I had been disconcerted when Mary had met so calmly my doubt regarding our gifts as pianists. It was as if I had put out my hand and touched her and found that she had been changed to ivory. This was absurd if I had really been seeking from her a reassurance about our futures, for she had given me that. But I had in my heart of hearts been hoping that that was just what she would not do. I would have liked her to answer, ‘Yes, it is true, we are not remarkable. It is absurd to think that we can ever make our mark as great concert pianists, though we will do enough for teachers. So we need not work so hard, and it will not be wrong for us to leave time in our lives for other things.’ But apparently I had two hearts, for when I imagined her giving that answer I knew that I would have been just as disappointed. It had not merely been the insanity of a moment, that impulse I had had to accept Mr Burney Harper’s anxiety about my technique as a final dismissal, that equally strong impulse I felt a minute later to accept any technical discipline that he might impose on me. I was like a sea pulled by two moons. This must mean a boiling of the waters, tides that rushed up and carried away structures meant for living in, and then receded till earth that should be covered lay naked. I wanted to play the piano, and I did not want to be stretched on the rack of that calling. This was my secret, which I did not dare to speak, for fear of undermining life as I knew it.

I had another secret, which I now suppose was part of the other. I wanted to make friends. We had friends, of course, at the Dog and Duck, and we had Mr Morpurgo; but they were not young and they joined us to no others. I wanted, so much that I wept at night, to be part of the general web, to be linked with boys and girls and men and women who were not yet what they would be in the end, and would disclose themselves in plays, and would let me act with them and find out what I was. But nobody wanted very much to be with any of us except Richard Quin, who constantly attached people of all ages to himself by simply meeting them, so that we were surprised, when we went for walks with him through Lovegrove, by the number of grown-ups who nodded and smiled at him, by the number of houses which were not just sealed boxes for him.

‘I don’t know who the bald-headed old man is, but the other one, the upright old thing with the red face who waved his cane, that’s Surgeon-Major O’Brien. He was in the Crimean War, in all that row about Florence Nightingale. He is still angry with her as a meddler. But he is a good old stick.’

‘How did you get to know him?’

‘Oh, easily. I play the flute sometimes for the vet’s wife, who wishes her husband was something literary and thinks of Papa as a sign and a wonder, and has a club for chamber-music and once met the Dolmetsches. They live next door to the Surgeon-Major. They spoke of him and said how funny it was to hear him talk of that Nightingale woman. His cat was ill, so I offered to take along its medicine. I often go in and see him for a minute or two, he’s very lonely.’

Or it would be, ‘I wonder why anybody built a house in the Chinese style right in the middle of an ordinary road.’

‘Silly, the Chinese house was here long before the others. They are built on what used to be its grounds. You must come in and see the inside, it is strange too. The people are nice, they would be glad to show it to you, they are proud of the place. Their grandfather was a naval man who built it when he came home from the China station, but their father lost all his money in railway shares, you know there was once a boom and a panic afterwards. So he had to sell the gardens, but could not bear to give up the house. And the grandson who lives there now loves it too, though he is far too poor to live there, really, for the father was like ours, he kept on getting ruined, da capo, da capo.’

‘But how did you get to know them?’

‘I was curious about the place, so I asked the postman who lived there, and he told me that the owner was the cashier who takes in the money at the Gas Company offices. I got Mamma to let me take along the money one quarter, and made friends with him. I told Rosamund, I forgot to tell you.’