This Real Night (37 page)

He came downstairs happily, but after tea we were all distressed, for still Rosamund had not arrived. At last he sighed and said bravely, ‘Rose, put on your hat and coat, we must start without her.’ Then he kissed Mary, who said, ‘Oh, Richard, if only we could go to the war with you,’ and he said, ‘Yes, my dear, we would hold you up above the trenches and use you as a decoy.’ Then he kissed Kate, who said, ‘There will be no sense in cooking while you are away,’ and he kissed Mamma. She said nothing, but Richard answered her, ‘No’, he said, ‘you do not understand this. Think, if it were you and not me who were going to the front, how you would love it. But I should be appalled in that case. Realise what that means. Honestly, I am looking forward to going to France. You know how I love playing games. Well, I find gunnery quite a game. Mamma, Mamma, you must not be sad about me, because I have to do this and I am ready to do it. I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them. Well, it is like that now for me. You do understand that, don’t you? The only thing that would make me miserable would be if you didn’t.’

‘Yes, yes,’ murmured Mamma, ‘but do be careful, dear.’

We were all delighted by this injunction to a soldier going forth to fight in a World War, and in a chorus of laughter went out to the hall. As we opened the front door we heard the sound of someone running along the quiet street.

‘Dear Rosamund,’ said Richard Quin.

It might have been expected that she would be distressed by having had to miss so much of Richard’s last day at home and being so late, but when she met him at the gate and threw herself into his arms she was flushed and joyful. She held her cap in her hand, the pins had dropped from her hair, which was nevertheless not in disorder, for it had fallen into the firm barley sugar curls that had hung on her shoulders when we first knew her. Her cape was swirled about her by a light evening wind, but she was as little discomposed as an actress who has a train to manage on the stage. Her gaiety was rich and complete and unembarrassed by the horrible occasion. It was nearly shocking. Yet it was what he needed. He hugged us both tightly by the arm, one on each side of him, and we ran along to the station, as if Lovegrove were our private garden and we could romp as we liked. Under his breath he sang the aria from
The Marriage of Figaro
which Figaro sings when Cherubino is going to war, and weaved talk through it. There was no difference between the youth of Cherubino and the youth of Richard Quin, and it was delightful to pretend that we were in an opera, that Richard Quin would go to the war again and again for hundreds of years and never get there.

He knew so many people. Though Mary and I have been well-known for some years now, we did not know nearly so many people as he did. On the station platform two young men and a girl came up to him and joyously claimed acquaintanceship. We never found out who they were, but they had met him at a performance of the
Messiah
so we went up to the far end of the platform by the signal-box and sang the Hallelujah Chorus softly until our train came in. Handel thought that the world was all right. The men in the signal-box smiled down on us over the levers, they thought we were convinced the world was all right. Mercifully Richard Quin’s friends did not get into our train, they were going to London Bridge while we, of course, were going to Victoria. We did not tell them why we were going to Victoria, and the unapprehensive cheerfulness with which they bade us goodbye was convincing, was comforting. But indeed our journey was so ordinary that nothing extraordinary could possibly lie at its end. There was surely some evidential value in the benevolent, untroubled glances the other passengers turned on us. A man who was a little drunk leaned forward and asked abruptly ‘Are they both your sisters or neither?’ and everybody laughed and was friendly. Surely there were no real dangers. We chattered as happily as if our fellow-passengers had given us absolute proof of this, until Rosamund asked Richard Quin how it was that he had no baggage with him. He told her that Gerald de Bourne Conway had gone straight from camp to London and was taking his baggage with his own to Victoria; and in speaking of the boy his face grew grey and tired. He went on to tell Rosamund that he had visited the boy’s home, and she asked hesitantly what it had been like, as if telling him he need not answer if he did not choose. But he told her. ‘What you would expect. A vast damp vicarage, with bottles hidden everywhere, there was even a cache of them in the chest of drawers in my room. And lots of framed family trees.’ A silence fell on them. Evidently he had told her things about Gerald I did not know. We got to Victoria too early, so we went down into the underground and came up again at Westminster, and strolled for a few moments between the Houses of Parliament and the Abbey. A blue river mist made the grey stone look soft as feathers but blurred the details and left only the historic outlines, so they looked evanescent and eternal. We went back to Victoria, and were still too early, and felt a great distaste for this place where we had to wait. The space round the station had become one of those areas which, like cemeteries and the corridors of hospitals, are swinging on a turntable between the worlds. There was the implacable and unadmirable façade of the station, drawing to itself a black jointed stream of taxis and motor-cars, and unconnected myriads of men in uniform, deformed by the weight of the kitbags on their backs, of women and children scurrying by their sides, those also deformed, by the weight of grief and stoicism. Within there was a limbo where these people clung together before the men turned and went stooping towards the gates that led to the platforms and the night. Above a great dimly lit illuminated clock said that this was the hour. The occasion was the annulment of life, for what is life but being able to move according to the will? But all the people who got out of the taxis and cars, all the men bent under their kitbags, were doing what their will would never want them to do, which it would never let them do, were it not in the custody of something outside them not certified to be wise or loyal. The clock said that there was not time to start that argument, but there was time for us three to talk a little longer. We turned back to the underground station and stood for a time unhappily among the crowds hurrying in and out along the hideous rounded corridors, that were like huge tiled intestines. Then we saw a soldier and a girl turn aside from the corridor a few yards ahead and knew they must have found a recess where they could say goodbye. We followed them into a short passage running to a closed iron door, and we stood a few yards from the soldier and the girl, who were silent in each other’s arms. There were old posters on the rounded walls, one advertising a concert of mine that had taken place a year ago. The white light shone back from the tiles, we all looked very pale.

Richard said harshly to Rosamund, ‘I want to live. Oh, God, how I want to live.’

She answered, speaking bitterly, as I had never heard her speak before, ‘No. Not to live. To live happily.’

He nodded. ‘No. Not just to live. To live happily. That is something you know very well. Poor Rosamund.’ He felt for her hand and raised it to his lips.

‘To live,’ Rosamund insisted, more gently, knitting her brows and smiling obstinately, ‘just as lots of other people have lived, and nobody has said they should not.’

‘Just that,’ he agreed fiercely.

They were silent while their hands twisted and slid together. He said, ‘I want … I want.…’ He wanted so many noble things, I wondered which he would name now.

He said, ‘I want to swim. And lie in the sun.’

‘I want to swim and lie in the sun,’ she repeated, as hungrily. ‘With you. With Mary and Rose. With the Mammas on the beach. And Kate.’

‘How lovely it is,’ he said hopelessly. He was looking at the walls as if he could see through the tiles and their scruff of old posters to all he desired. ‘How lovely.’

‘Do you remember the honeycomb you brought home for tea the day Miss Beevor was there?’ she asked.

‘Yes, we shocked them by eating it with a spoon.’

‘Drenched in cream,’ she reminded him. They laughed together quietly, greedily.

I watched them in bewilderment. Richard Quin’s gaiety was valuable because he was grave in his heart, he pondered such solemn secrets. I had thought he would share some of these with me before he went. But he would only stare into Rosamund’s eyes and talk of honeycombs and cream.

He said, ‘I am so afraid, Rosamund. You cannot think how afraid I am.’

Rosamund stopped laughing and her blind look came on her. She shook her hand free of his and then grasped it again more hungrily, as if to say that he must press closer on her palm and fingers, must bear down on her flesh to come nearer to the blood and nerves and being. Then her stammer came on her, she opened her mouth and her tongue flickered from side to side. But she was able to force out the words, ‘Sweeter than honeycomb.’

A memory or an anticipation ran through Richard Quin like fire through tow, and it burned Rosamund too. When it had died down both turned to me, and by the kindness of their faces I felt protected.

‘I will say goodbye to you two here,’ he said. ‘Dear Rose, look after the Rose of the World. And believe me when I say that I shall be all right. In the same strictly truthful sense that it’s true that the two angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal. No fancy, no frill. Not symbolically, not mystically. Just all right. Now I must go and find Gerald. What shall I do,’ he asked, with sudden fatigue, in an almost childish voice, ‘if Gerald is not there. But he will be there. He is sure to be there. Now shut your eyes, Rose, and do not open them to look after me.’

As I stood in darkness his mouth came down on mine; and then he was not there.

IX

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night, ten days after Richard Quin had gone to France, Mary and I were awakened by a loud noise from Mamma’s bedroom. We ran to her and found the room in darkness and switched on the light. She was standing by the chest-of-drawers, where she kept her underclothes, looking down into an open drawer, an overturned chair beside her. She had shrunken so much during the last year or so that her straight cambric nightdress seemed an empty little tent.

We put our arms round her and said, ‘Mamma, what are you looking for? Get into bed and we will find it for you.’

‘Don’t be tiresome, children,’ she said, ‘I am pressed for time. And turn off the light. I do not need it.’

‘But, Mamma, what are you trying to find?’ asked Mary.

‘Turn out the light,’ she begged. ‘I tell you I do not need it.’

‘But you overturned the chair,’ I said.

‘A chair might as well be that way up as any other if nobody wants to sit on it,’ she answered crossly, ‘and I do not want to sit on it. And turn out the light. It hurts my head.’

We turned it out, and into the darkness there entered the tall figure of Kate, who said, ‘It is very late, Ma’am, and you should rest, you will need all your strength. What are you about?’

‘I want to be sure that everything is clean and tidy,’ said Mamma.

‘All is clean and tidy,’ said Kate. ‘Everything is in its place. You would be better in your bed, Ma’am.’

‘I do not like to lie there,’ sighed Mamma, ‘not knowing how things are.’

‘They are well enough,’ said Kate, and drew back the window-curtain. ‘See, they are well enough.’

Both looked down into the sleeping street as if there were more to be seen there than the pale primrose lamps, the cat that slowly trod the middle of the road, the blind houses. ‘Yes,’ said Mamma, and turned aside, and Kate let the curtain fall. We heard the bed settle slightly under her tiny weight, and presently her breathing told us that she slept.

The next morning it was as if we had dreamed this. But Mamma stayed in bed for breakfast, which she hardly ever did, even now. Nor did she rise for luncheon. She looked not much frailer than usual, and said that she did not feel ill. The only strange thing about her was that she lay in bed with her arm stretched out so that the palm of her hand rested flat on the wall. I had never seen her do this before and I felt shy about asking her why she was doing it. At three o’clock I opened the front door and took in the telegram telling us that Richard Quin had been killed in action. I gave the boy a shilling and the money for a telegram to Rosamund. Then I went to the top of the basement stairs and called for Kate, and her white face glimmered in the dusk below, and she asked, ‘Was that it?’

I said, ‘Yes. But I suppose you knew.’

She answered, ‘No. My mother and I did nothing, out of respect for your Mamma’s wishes. But to be sure there was nobody in this house who did not know he was going further than France.’

I looked down into the darkness of the stairs as if it were the water in a bucket, and her faint face might float and waver and change into a revelation. But all that was good in me knew that it was not lawful for me to have more certainty than the bare news of my brother’s death. I turned away and went to the music-room and found Mary practising. On our way back to the house we paused in the garden, our arms about each other’s waists, and looked at the grove of trees at the end of the lane, and remembered how we had seen the red circle of our brother’s cigarette pass from his lips to his hand, from his hand to his lips, eleven nights before.

When we went into Mamma’s room she took her hand away from the wall and asked, ‘Was that it?’ Then she said, ‘Oh, my poor son, the youngest of them all,’ and laid her hand on the wall again. It was as if she were listening through her flesh to distant sounds. She cried out violently, ‘If only death were death. If we could sleep and sleep and sleep. I do not see why we need to be brave for ever. Think shame that in this war there is no discharge. Yet what is asked of Richard he will give.’ She pressed her hand close to the wall, her eyes vast, her mouth gaping. ‘If he can go on giving it cannot be too much to ask. You have me there,’ she gasped, and her eyelids fell, her lips closed, her hand dropped, and she rolled down among the bedclothes towards the end of the bed.