This Real Night (34 page)

After Richard Quin had gone the others lingered for only a few days. By the end of the week we were alone. Then we went and stayed with the Kurzes while Kate and her mother helped the two servants to restore the house to order. The Kurzes had beautiful pictures and furniture, but it was as if we were looking at them through deep waters; their two sons were with the British Expeditionary Force. Mercifully the house was requisitioned for a hospital, which gave them something to think about. When we got home we found that all our possessions too were now remote, divided from us by a chill clear barrier; and that here too the part was greater than the whole. The Kurzes’ great house had been dwarfed by the rooms their sons had left empty, and our house was nothing more than Richard Quin’s attic. Mary and I got on with our lives as well as we could. Our careers for some time continued. The First World War did not suddenly turn on civil life and strangle it as the Second did. Simply we saw a fungoid bloom of ruin slowly creep across the familiar objects among which we had been reared.

For the first twelve months we had to carry out existing contracts, and still went on tour through the provinces. But there was a mournful intimation in the restriction which was at once applied to our elders and betters. The great pianists of those days, Paderewski and Busoni, and Rachmaninov and Pachmann, would go to their favourite among the great London pianoforte makers as they arrived from the Continent to undertake an English tour, and would spend a morning choosing a friendly instrument, and would have it shipped from town to town. That practice was abandoned in the autumn of 1914 and was never to be revived. The rise in the cost of labour and freight after the war made it an extravagance that not even the greatest virtuosos could impose on his impresario. This was, I think, in view of the mystical relationship which develops between a pianist and his instrument, a far greater pity than can be demonstrated on technical grounds. Gradually such signs convinced us that for the moment the world was going to stop its readings from the
Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
Travel became more and more uncomfortable, our fees and our engagements alike grew less.

But we were fortunate in that our misfortunes came at a time when good fortune would have inconvenienced us. Before the war Mary and I could take any engagement away from home and know that Richard Quin would be with Mamma at night. But now that he was in the Army Mary and I had to scan our engagements to see that they did not clash, in case Mamma were left alone. Even when they did not, we eyed them mistrustfully, because they might mean that we would miss one of Richard Quin’s leaves. There was not anything we wanted to do but be as much with Richard Quin as we could manage. It happened that he liked the Army and it suited him, and each time he came he was more joyful and more of a man, and more deeply infatuated with some mastered technique. We would save up our meat coupons to buy him a duck, our sugar and eggs and butter and dried fruit and make him a really rich plum duff, and we would open one of the bottles of wine Mr Morpurgo had given us so that we could entertain, and dinner would last a long time, and afterwards we would sit round the fire, and Kate would come in and join us, and he would sit with his glass in his hand, finishing the wine, telling us all about gunnery, and how it was almost as much fun as music or cricket when one had got into the theory of it. Because of his bearing there was nothing lachrymose in our desire not to miss a minute of his leaves, it was a gay greed for pleasure. We felt, I remember, almost guilty, as if we were doing something improperly light-minded, when we accepted an invitation to play for a war charity in Oxford, one Friday night in the late autumn of 1915, because we were promised by one of the promoters that he would let us stay for the weekend in a lodge on his estate, which was not far from the camp where Richard Quin was stationed. We enjoyed such engagements, though of course a charity concert is not a concert, too many people are there for other than the private reasons which alone should drive one to a concert, for we always played on such occasions the lovely old fountain-spout duets such as Schubert’s
Reposez-vous, bon chevalier,
and
Notre amitié est invariable
and Grand Rondo, and Schumann’s
Ball-Scenen
and
Kinderball.
They soothed our audiences and us by their placid superfluity. Only in a secure community could pairs of people sit down at a piano to spend hours in perfecting performances of an artistic form in which nothing actually very important can be said, in which there is merely reaffirmed the pleasantness of the pleasant. At Oxford we played three such duets, and were then put into an old-fashioned carriage, a phaeton, I believe, and were driven along the moonlit High, all its towers and archways etched in silver and underlined with sooty shadow, into a countryside where the hedges were sharply bright as barbed wire. A turn of the road suddenly showed us the moonlight squandered over a broad river, which I suppose was the Thames, in which black bulrushes appeared to have huge clubbed heads as they stood sharp-cut in the shining water. We left it after a hundred yards or so, with regret, with a sense of guilt, it was so wrong that this beauty should lie so splendidly open to eyes that were not there. Then we followed a great brick wall for a mile or two till we came to high gates and a little polygonal Gothic lodge beside them, with the moon shining back from the panes on one of its sides. A sleepy woman with her hair in curlers opened the door, showed us a queerly shaped room where there were two beds, set at an angle, the shape was so very weird. She said, ‘Your brother came here this evening,’ and smiled at the recollection, and almost forgot to give us the packet he had left for us. It contained some salmon mayonnaise sandwiches and a note, ‘I leave these because you two are always hungry. In the morning walk over towards the camp when it is getting on for noon. It is two miles up the road. I will meet you.’

We woke the next morning to find that there was a light fog which blotted out all the gaunt arms of the trees about us. There was an air of suspended safety very like that period of the war, the arms were so very threatening, but they came no nearer. The woman brought us breakfast in bed, with strong tea and brown eggs and real butter, and told us to eat what we could, here in the country there was plenty. But there were no newspapers. We lay and pretended that a copy of
The Times
would come later in the morning which would tell us that the war was over.

Mary said, ‘Oxford looked nice yesterday. If Richard Quin ever goes there he will ask us down to dances.’

‘But you hate dances,’ I said.

‘It would be different with Richard Quin,’ said Mary. ‘He would have nice friends.’

Noon was a long way off. We lazed until the woman brought in a can of hot water, and first Mary and then I washed in a big china basin, our nightdresses dropped to our waists and tied up by the sleeves. By this time the sun was shining strongly just above the mist, which it changed to the colour of topaz. We were faintly dyed with it, we decided we were Redskins, and Mary begged being Wenonah because she could not bear being Laughing Water, a name we had decided when we were children was what Seidlitz Powders thought of themselves as being called, since there was no reason to suppose that things are not just as conceited as people. We went out of the lodge singing bits of Coleridge Taylor’s music, which made us think of the Albert Hall, and talk of the conductors we liked and hated, until the winter landscape captivated and absorbed us. There was this topaz mist, which closed in on us more closely on the left, where it rose in a wall just beyond a hedge whose bare black winter-bones were loaded with deep crimson berries, than on the right, where there was a beechwood, with lucidity stretching into the distance between its silver trunks. In and out of the hedgerow weaved fleets of very small birds, some of them bright yellow. In the wood there were pools of black glassy water, and at their bottom the sodden leaves were visibly rotting, were a soft vegetable paste, yet were distinct in every vein and every indentation. Here and there, high on the tree-trunks, were brackets of pale fungus, delicately fluted, and on the ground were clusters of toadstools, reddish and squat, like details out of the illustrations of comfortable books for children. We did not know that the country was so interesting in winter-time, we had thought of it as being like an opera-house, empty and dark; nor had we heard before such silence. This was an active principle. If we stopped walking it was too silent. We were not frightened, there was obviously nothing to frighten us. Only we feared that Richard Quin might not come to us out of the mist.

We came to a cross-roads, and Mary asked, ‘Did he say keep straight on?’

‘Yes, but he said nothing about a steep hill,’ I answered. The road before us mounted sharply and disappeared into the mist, which here had paled, had grown grey again. It was suddenly wet against our faces. We were standing by a gate that led into a field where there was a conical haystack, sliced in half, distraught straw sticking out of the cut surface, and an agricultural machine lying beside it, showing rusty metal teeth, and on the other side of the road a brick house turned a windowless wall towards us.

‘Let us wait here,’ said Mary. ‘We might miss him, it might all go wrong.’

There was a mist within the mist. Clouds of a grosser fog, quite white, showed through the general grey mass of moisture. Above, the dimmed sun was small and bright, like a new shilling.

‘How alone we are,’ I said.

‘I hear all sorts of things,’ said Mary. ‘Or is it the blood in my ears?’

‘It is the blood in our ears,’ I said. ‘Yet I am not sure.’

We stood still. A white cloud was driven past and through us. We heard, or did not hear, the lowing of distant cattle.

‘Richard Quin will not be long now,’ I said. ‘He is always very late when it does not matter, and very punctual when it does.’

‘He is here,’ she smiled.

He had come suddenly out of the mist on the steep fall of the hill, running and leaping, his head bare, his cap held in his hand. He had not seen us, he was shouting a song to himself as he ran, and twirling his cap on his fist to mark the time. We cried out to him, and he saw us, and we ran towards him, and he shouted a welcome. But it was not Richard Quin. We halted, and he cried out, laughing, ‘You quite thought I was Richard Quin, didn’t you? People often take us for each other, from a distance. But not close to.’ That indeed was true. His hair was fair-over-dark, like Richard Quin’s, but there was a greenish tinge in the fairness and in the hollow of his temples and round his nostrils, while Richard Quin’s hair was true pale gold where it was not dark, and shadows showed a blueness in his skin. This boy’s eyes, too, were more grey than blue, while Richard’s were more blue than grey; and his features were not so much delicate as finicking. But of course everybody was inferior to Richard Quin, and it was hard on anybody else to look like him and challenge comparison, so we looked on the stranger benevolently.

‘I am Gerald de Bourne Conway,’ he said, ‘I expect your brother has told you all about me. I’m his best friend. I don’t know what we could have done without each other, out here among the Philistines.’ Already, from these few sentences, we knew that he talked too much. ‘As soon as I saw your brother, I said, “There’s somebody who speaks my language.” You can always tell, can’t you? Your father was awfully clever, wasn’t he? So is mine. He got a first in Greats and the Locke Prize for Philosophy. And the Newdigate. Of course he’s wasted as a country parson. But it was a family living, and he was the youngest and didn’t inherit. So what could he do?’

We murmured agreement and gazed on him still more tenderly. Of course Richard Quin had found a cripple to carry on his shoulders, of course he had not abandoned his favourite sport of mercy. At the same moment we heard him singing in the mist, and our hearts contracted at hearing his real voice, and we shouted to him. He too came suddenly out into visibility, running and leaping, but correctly, classically, not like this fragile and flimsy copy of himself.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Richard Quin, after he had taken us in his arms, ‘but you know, there’s no technique for terminating an interview with the Colonel before the Colonel wishes it. I hoped we’d meet you almost as soon as you’d got started.’

‘It didn’t matter,’ said Mary, ‘but we had got becalmed. And in such a dull part of the country.’

‘Yes, isn’t it dull just here?’ said Richard Quin, looking round him. ‘There must be a lot of turnips somewhere near. Ah, yes, in that ramp over there. They give it out. But come on up that hill. At the top it’s fine weather.’

‘Fine weather?’ we echoed doubtfully. The mist was like a wet towel, we might have been by the sea.

‘Yes, that’s the odd thing about the country in winter,’ said Richard Quin. ‘It packs away the most extraordinary things.’

‘The most extraordinary things,’ said Gerald de Bourne Conway, emphatically, tugging as it were at Richard Quin’s sleeve, and begging to be treated as one of us. Richard looked at him kindly. ‘Gerald has told you who he is,’ he said. He might have been saying, ‘I would not care to tell you that myself. But for the moment I must take charge of him, you must bear with him.’ So we pleased Gerald by describing how we had taken him for Richard at first.

It was true what Richard had said, the hill rose to a ridge where there was a blue and silver day, and the sunshine was reflected strongly from the white cloud packs which filled the valleys below. We walked on either side of our brother, Gerald sometimes ahead of us and sometimes at our heels, like a young dog, and it was as if we had all the leisure in the world, and there was no fear.

Richard said, ‘I tell you, winter is the time to be in the country. Summer is spread all over the place, you hardly ever come on any pocket of private weather, except a shower here and there. But in winter one hillside will have the full sun on it, and on the next there will be a storm, and sometimes a whole district will stop being England and will look like Scotland and its hills will be mountains. And, look, winter in the country is a blonde, you never thought of that.’ He took us through a gate and we walked alongside the road on a patch of downland, and he showed us bare bushes bright as bone, and red leaves clinging to beech saplings, and bright orange willows, and the buds that were everywhere if one looked for them, though it was not yet Christmas. ‘And look down in the valleys, there are lots of fields which are being ploughed and got ready, and some with even a green fuzz on them,’ he told us. ‘Did you know there was such a thing as winter wheat? The truth is there is no winter in the country, there is always something growing.’