This Real Night (29 page)

But surely Cordelia did not have to love their awful house. This was a Victorian mansion high on Campden Hill, built of greyish brick; and within its walls Asia had taken its revenge against colonisation. It was full of brass cobras, elephants’ feet, teak furniture, Indian silver bowls and ebony and ivory screens; and Cordelia liked it. The first time she took Mary and myself there, and the parlourmaid left us alone in the drawing-room, she looked round at its horrible treasures and said to us solemnly, as if we were all quite little children, ‘Do not touch anything.’ Mary and I were stilled. We were not little children, but she was a little child, and she would never grow up, and the terrible fears of infancy would always be with her. She was afraid that her beautiful new toy, her marriage, would be taken away from her if her naughty little sisters did not obey the rules the fairy godmother had laid down. Puzzled by what she saw on our faces, she stared first at me and then at Mary. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked quite pitifully. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Mercifully, Olivia Houghton-Bennett came into the room at that moment, a little late because she had forgotten the time playing with the darling little kiddies (a word then used by all classes) in the East End Settlement where she worked three times a week.

‘She cannot help it,’ we found ourselves saying of Cordelia, after that, and we remembered how Richard Quin had been saying the same thing about her for years. It was strange how our brother, who was younger than we were, who was still at school, had been wiser than either of us for quite a long time, though wisdom was not his overt aim. He lived for pleasure, delicate pleasure, the easy exploitation of his body and his mind. Of this Cordelia had always disapproved, yet now she gained by it. Lady Houghton-Bennett and Olivia and Angela had instantly fallen in love with him, and, more than that, he was useful not only to them but their friends because he played excellent tennis, could sing and play and dance, and he grew into a sager kind of Cherubino. Thus it was that he was able to save us from a nightmare threat to the wedding-day. It would have been natural for the Houghton-Bennett girls and Mary and me to be bridesmaids, and indeed we would have enjoyed it, for it would have given us the chance to dress up without the horrors of going to an ordinary party. But Cordelia would be so certain that we were doing the wrong thing at the end of her train that she would be compelled, perhaps at the very climax of the ceremony, even at the moment when Alan was putting the ring on her finger, to turn round and seek us out with her white stare. When we hinted this to Mamma, however, she hinted back that she did not see how we could explain this to Lady Houghton-Bennett without intimating that we had found Cordelia a difficult sister, and Cordelia herself became like a distracted dove, ruffling its feathers, when we expressed our reluctance to follow her down the aisle. I think she feared that the Houghton-Bennetts would be put on the scent of our hopeless undesirability as sisters-in-law if we departed from the routine. It was left to Richard Quin when he was playing tennis with Olivia at Ranelagh to blurt out with apparent tactlessness that Mary and I suffered from agonising stage-fright if we found ourselves the object of public attention anywhere but on the concert platform. It made us feel sick, he said, and added that on one occasion we had actually been sick, and that he doubted whether, try as we might, we would be able to go through with it, and he thought it probable we would baulk at the last moment. He made this tale more convincing by inventing an anecdote about Liszt fainting when officiating as a best man at a friend’s wedding (Liszt of all people! But the Houghton-Bennetts would, he rightly supposed, not know about that). We followed on by half-finished sentences and anxious looks next day when our bridesmaid dresses were mentioned; and soon all was well and Cordelia had the look of a general who has altered and improved his disposition of troops.

She was a child. But not, we sometimes thought, a lovable one. We realised that, when she came into our room one night, quite late, when Mamma had gone to bed. She was wearing one of her trousseau dresses, which had just come from the dressmaker, and she said that she wanted our opinion as to whether the sleeves were not set in crooked. They were perfect. We told her that the dress was lovely, and that she would look lovely in it, as she did in all her dresses, and Mary asked, very gently for her, what was worrying her.

Cordelia’s voice failed her. She moistened her lips and whispered, ‘Sometimes I am afraid Papa will come back. Before the wedding,’ and she added, in a voice sharpened by dread of a threat that would overhang the years that would go on for ever, ‘or after.’

We could not answer. This was too pathetic. All of us, even Kate, were counting the days when she should leave the house; and all of us, if we had heard Papa’s key in the door again, would have been transported with joy, we might have turned into birds, and flown about.

I said, ‘But Cordelia, Papa is dead.’

‘How do we know?’ said Cordelia, her eyes full on my face.

‘We know,’ I said and Mary said, ‘We know.’

‘But we have heard nothing,’ said Cordelia, suddenly slipping into her old role of the only sensible person in the house, ‘absolutely nothing. It is not that I did not love him, I often thought I loved him more than any of you. Of course I would like him back. But Mamma has told Alan’s mother that Papa is dead, and if he turns up, what will they think?’

Mary broke the silence. ‘You know as well as we do he is dead.’

‘But how do we know?’ Cordelia asked, impatiently, angrily.

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘We know, for one thing, because Mr Morpurgo went away about the time that Papa left us, and he came back utterly wretched, and was especially kind to Mamma, and indeed kind to us all. What could that mean except that Papa was dead.’

Mary’s fingers slipped into mine. So neither of us added, ‘By his own hand.’

‘Well, if you think so, it is all right,’ sighed Cordelia. But after a minute she reverted to the role of the most sensible person in the house and said, ‘But could not we ask Mr Morpurgo?’

‘No,’ said Mary. ‘He loved him. Do go to bed.’

‘I will,’ said Cordelia. ‘I will be able to sleep now.’

In point of fact, Cordelia need never have given herself away to us, for the Houghton-Bennetts had dealt in their own way with the phenomenon of our Papa and there was no need for her to concern herself with him. Mamma was so obviously irreproachable that it never occurred to them that there could be anything scandalous about Papa. As we learned long afterwards, the Houghton-Bennetts had been misled by Cordelia’s reticence about her father, and Mr Morpurgo’s references to his long intimacy with him. They concluded that Papa had been a Jew and that poor Cordelia had been the victim of anti-Semitic teasing at school; and as the Cordelia they knew was vulnerability itself, this increased their protective love for her. They were, indeed, all at sixes and sevens in their estimation of us. It was obvious to us that the Houghton-Bennetts were behaving with extraordinary generosity in welcoming so warmly a daughter-in-law from a family with no social position and no fortune. What we did not realise was that though we had, all the same, something to say for ourselves, they had never grasped this. They knew nothing of music, partly because they were not musical and partly because they had been so long in the Far East; though like practically everybody else in the world at that time, they had heard of Paderewski, that was all they knew of the subject, and the fact that Mamma had once been famous could not enter into their minds, there was no place for it to go. When Olivia and Angela came to our house and we showed them Brahms’ signed photograph and boasted that he had given it to Mamma because he thought her the best woman pianist since Clara Schumann, they were unimpressed, though visibly touched at such importance being attached to such a drab souvenir, for the reason that their home on Campden Hill was rich with silver-framed photographs of Royalties and Viceroys and Governors and Rajahs; and they would hardly have credited that Mamma had some of those too, but they were kept in the trunks in the box-room. They thought of our home as humble, in the Biblical sense of the word, and as free from vainglory; and of Cordelia, whose blazing ambition had all but burned down our house, as the humblest of all. They doted on us as Wordsworth doted on his cottagers. Indeed, looking back on them, I think we were a relief to the Houghton-Bennett parents’ noblest part; for they looked on their son’s marriage as an affirmation of the claim that they owed debts to other than Caesar. It is ironical that at the same time we were feeling towards them like unscrupulous horse-dealers who have sold a dangerous horse to an urban simpleton.

But nobody could have believed that irony played any part at our sister’s wedding, it was so beautiful. They were married in St Mary Abbott’s which is a church of distances, and all the distances led to masses of flowers - Mr Morpurgo’s flowers - and Cordelia’s eyes were set on some sacred goal behind those flowers, until she neared the altar, and then her gaze marvelled at the candles and thanked the cross for all this beauty, and for more than that. For when she reached the altar, there could she take the vow of obedience which her whole being craved, since she was framed only to obey. She was submission, she was sacrifice, and nothing else. At the sight of her many people in the congregation were wiping their eyes, and we wept also, but our tears were inspired by the bridegroom, awaiting his bride, not knowing that he might as well await a river of lava.

It was terrible to see them standing side by side in the Houghton-Bennetts’ drawing-room, which really did not look so bad now they had taken out the enormous ivory model of the Taj Mahal and the ivory lily (with coral stamens and jade stalk and leaves) embedded in a black velvet panel and supported on a Burmese silver easel. We were exhilarated to see that no matter what the eternal truth of the situation might be, the festivity celebrating it all looked very pretty. The drawing-room and the staircase were crammed with people who were happy as people are at a wedding where the bride and bridegroom are romantic figures; and the air was alive with the curious exhalation of sound which rises from chattering people yet is so much more like a bird-chorus than human speech. It went so well that as soon as the reception line came to its end Sir George and his wife went and sat on a sofa, and whenever they did not have to talk to the guests, spoke to each other in laughing undertones, and it could be seen that they had been much in love, and were still so in their elderly way. We were slightly shocked by Mamma, for though she should have known better than anyone there this marriage would end in misery, she was certainly enjoying herself, and making her own success, for Aunt Constance had made her look quite ordinary by putting her into fancy dress and turning her into an early Victorian, with a coal-scuttle bonnet to hide her wild hair and shade her wild eyes, and a tight-fitting bodice and a full skirt that she could not make untidy. She had met an old lady and gentleman in whose house she had played when they were first married and she was young, and the three were sitting on a window-seat, and all might always have gone smoothly for her ever since they had last met. Rosamund and Richard Quin too, were taking the occasion in a light-minded way with Olivia and Angela and their friends. But, when we took a minute to reflect, outsiders who did not know might have thought we were enjoying ourselves; and that, we suddenly realised, was exactly what we were doing. Only Mr Morpurgo was looking sad, which surprised us, for we thought he had never seen through Cordelia. It was not till some days later that we discovered that his gloom was among the ironies of the occasion. He had not been in the least disconcerted by the marriage since Mamma had approved it and he took it for granted that she was right about everything. But the reception had shocked him by revealing what was in his eyes a world of terrifying poverty. He knew that many people were poor, and that our family had been poor until our father left us, but that was the result of failure: of inability to get to the top. Here, however, was a crowd of people who were all successful, and had for the most part been certified as such by this and that decoration and title, but their wives had not a Paris dress among them, and few of them had carriages or motor-cars, and they seemed undisturbed by finding themselves in a house where the furniture was ignoble and there was not an Old Master - not even, he pointed out to us afterwards, an Old Master
drawing
- on the walls; and what made it worse was that they owed their success to the exercise of gifts which he knew he lacked and esteemed far above those he possessed. He was so preoccupied by shame at the injustice by which the world had favoured him above his superiors, that I doubt if he had a moment to consider the possible future of Alan and Cordelia; and I have to admit that we forgot our prophetic gloom till it was time to go upstairs to help Cordelia into her going-away dress (which was a coat and skirt of pale amber facecloth in which she looked transparent, about to rise into the skies) and there our vision of them returned to us in full measure. True, she seemed to be changed. Always before, when we had done her up, to use a phrase which long ago lost its meaning, she had put it to us that we were ruining for ever whatever garment it was that we were buttoning or hooking or snapping, through that preternatural clumsiness from which she alone of all the family was exempt; but now she remained still under our fingers and thanked us. Also her goodbye kisses she gave us felt as if she had really been fond of us. But we knew the truth, and were astonished when we saw that Kate, who came down like a hawk on all our faults, wept under that kiss. But it was under Alan’s kiss that our eyes filled with tears. The honeymoon was to be spent in Florence, and we imagined him suddenly shocked into woodenness by his first discernment of our sister’s real quality, against a background of cypresses and campanili which should have been the framework of happiness.

But we were wrong. We could not have been more wrong. When Cordelia and Alan came back from their honeymoon they settled down in a little white box of a house, in a turning off the Victoria Road, in Kensington, and Mary and I had grimly said to each other that whenever Cordelia saw in the papers that there was going to be a concert at the Albert Hall we were likely to go to, she would ask us to come in for a meal, and it would be dreadful, for she would do it only out of a sense of duty. These invitations came, but soon we found we were eagerly waiting for them, we would have been disappointed if they had not come. Cordelia had not cast off the character she had assumed on the day of her engagement. She still had no will of her own, only a desire to please and find out what gave most pleasure. It might have been said she had no character, had there not been some of her old blacksmith-forge quality in her limitation of herself to amiability. She never ran an eye over us when we went into the house, and convicted us of untidiness and lack of the sense of suitability. She simply asked us our opinion on what she had last done to the house, which was indeed a marvel, not only to our eyes, which had so long looked on only poverty, but to any person looking back on it from this age which is called affluent. Like all young people of moderated means at that time, Alan and Cordelia employed two servants, a cook-general and a house-parlourmaid, and the place shone bright and clean as few households do today. The dining-room faced south, and the sunshine fell full on the table at lunch-time striking prismatic rays from the silver and glass, each piece of which was polished as highly as polish can go. The whole house was full of light, the furniture was rosewood and elegant and in winter the curtains were of padded white chintz with huge flowers on it and in summer of ruffled muslin. There were flowers about, and always nice things to eat. But all that was as nothing to the prevalent good will, the way they welcomed us, the way they liked us to stay as long as we could without running the risk of being late for the concert. They would even come out with us to the garden gate, to be with us as long as possible.