MARY AND I made real successes in the few years that followed Cordelia’s marriage. We were gold medallists, a great conductor gave us the chance to play with the best provincial orchestras, we were soon at the Proms, we never had to worry about filling the hall for our recitals. The only thing we had to worry about was the danger of getting tired and letting people come between us and our work for the very reason that they admired it. But the charm of our success lay in the fact that it was not unique, it was set in an age of success. Everybody and everything was developing according to some principle which commanded romantic perfection. I remember playing the Mozart Twenty-third Concerto at a Queen’s Hall concert one summer night when the intelligence of the audience made their listening a better performance than my playing; it was spiritualism, Mozart was there; and they applauded at the end as if the hall were burning about us and they must say what Mozart meant to them before they were buried in the rubble. Mary and I drove away to a party through a London which was moonlit and transfigured. In all the squares waltzes and one-steps and tangos were exhaled from porticoes wearing striped awnings like masks, and in the gardens dancers walked on the moon-frosted lawns, the moonlight shining with phantom coldness from the young women’s bare shoulders and bright gowns, and making breast-plates of the young men’s shirt-fronts. It would have been easy for assassins hired to kill these young men to hide behind the sooty trees and aim at those gleaming shirt-fronts, but no human being could be so pitiless towards their youth. At the great house to which we had been invited, we sat in a courtyard where the moonlight sobered an extravagance of flowers, and watched a black stage, and listened to music as different from the music I had played as a Mongolian face is different from a Western face, until yellow limelight shone on the stage and showed us a girl whose face was tragic though she wore the full tarlatan skirts which till then had been the livery of the least serious of the arts, who was light as a feather yet as grave as Hamlet. Then Nijinsky leaped from a window in the darkness behind the stage and halted an instant in mid-moonlight before he dropped into the yellow limelight, uttering with the speed of light a prophecy that he and we were to travel to strange places and often see nature transcending what we had been told were its limits. Every time we left our pianos the age gave us such assurances that there was to be a new and final establishment of pleasure upon earth. True that when we were at our pianos we knew that this was not true. There is something in the great music that we played which told us that that promise will not be kept, though another promise will give us more than that, but in its own time. That we did not believe this assurance which sustained most of our contemporaries added to our loneliness; but we could enjoy their achievements. And let there be no error, their achievements were enjoyable. This faith in the dispensation of pleasure was not a form of guilt, those who held it were not drunken or idle or cruel, and accepted kindness itself as a pleasurable act. Simply the world appeared to be whispering to its peoples that it was about to turn into a rose, into a jewel, into wine, and those who heard often responded by actions that were wholly delightful, though they are now seen to be appropriate.
We should have been perfectly happy, had it not been that Cordelia, instead of valuing Richard Quin for his loyalty to her, was vexed by a perpetual dread lest he was turning out badly. She was nearly her old self when she was moved by this fear. She was looking at Mamma with her old white stare when I came in on her one afternoon, and found her trying to find out what Richard Quin’s last school report had been.
‘But he will be leaving school in six months, Mamma,’ I can remember her saying, ‘has he no idea of what he wants to do?’
‘Well, he is sitting next month for a scholarship at Oxford,’ said Mamma.
‘But the headmaster has told you he will never get it, he is not working hard enough,’ said Cordelia, savage as she used to be.
‘If he fails, then he can take a year and rub up his piano and violin, and he is sure to get into one musical school or another,’ said poor Mamma.
There was a silence. We looked at Cordelia, daring her to say he was not good enough, in view of her own violin-playing. But we did not like to defend the plan that he should become a musician, because there was in fact in all his playing the anti-artistic quality of improvisation. He played as a bird sings, which is not the recommendation that the unmusical believe.
‘Surely he realises,’ said Cordelia desperately, ‘that he must earn his living? - that he cannot live on you?’
Again Mary and I were awkwardly silent. Cordelia was doing what she had always done, she was blaming other members of her family for weaknesses which were particularly her own. She was always asking us in front of people whether we had lost things, when it was she and she only who constantly left things in trains. Now she was suggesting that Richard Quin was going to be a burden upon us in a way which would be specially unpleasant in a man; and it was not for her to do that. We had got scholarships for our musical education, and had cost Mamma very little during our training, and now we were making money. But Cordelia’s classes in foreign languages and the history of art had been quite expensive, and she had never earned a penny; and on her marriage Mamma had made a little settlement on her. But she went on, and we began to feel miserable, for indeed we were ourselves beginning to be puzzled by Richard’s indifference about his future. It seemed that nothing in him was striving to have its way with him, as music had had its way with us.
‘Are you worried about him, Mamma?’ asked Mary abruptly.
‘Not in the least,’ replied Mamma.
‘That is the worst of this family,’ grieved the old Cordelia. ‘You take nothing seriously, you don’t realise things.’
‘No, dear,’ said Mamma.
‘I wish you could get Richard Quin to come up to town and have a talk with Alan’s father,’ said Cordelia importantly. ‘By the way, where is Richard Quin? It is six o’clock, do you not expect him home for tea?’
‘I do not really expect him,’ said Mamma, growing more and more placid. ‘He has so many friends.’
‘But a boy of that age should not just roam about, with nobody knowing where he is,’ scolded Cordelia. ‘He should come home to tea at regular hours, he should settle down to his homework, this is all wrong. I do not know where it will lead. It is the greatest misfortune that he could not be sent to a public school. I would,’ she said, with a sincerity which would have touched us had anyone else been speaking, ‘far rather that poor Mr Morpurgo had done nothing for me and spent all the money on sending Richard Quin to Harrow or Rugby.’ This was a great deal for her to say for Mr Morpurgo had given her her house, which she passionately loved, more than most people love their houses, more as a child loves a doll’s house.
It was just then that Richard Quin came in, carrying a teapot. The sight made Cordelia click her tongue against her palate, for it meant that he had been down in the kitchen getting Kate to make him fresh tea, and it was another proof that he was living an unmanly life among a crowd of women. He put down the teapot and kissed Mamma and waved a hand at the rest of us, and said, ‘I talked to a man on the bus coming back from school, and asked him what he had in his basket, and it was a pigeon, and he asked me to go home with him and see his pigeons, he had thirty-six. And do you know, there are lots of people in London who think of nothing but pigeons?’
‘Were they lovely?’ asked Mary.
‘Oh, far lovelier than you would think, I could hardly believe it when I held them in my hands,’ said Richard Quin, his mouth full of bread and jam. ‘And this man and his wife adored their pigeons, they were Seventh Day Adventists, and that means that they cannot drink tea or coffee or beer or wine or whisky, so instead they got drunk on pigeons.’
‘Is the coo pleasant when you are quite near them?’ asked Mamma.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Richard Quin, ‘and it is so funny to feel it rolling right through their bodies, it takes much more organisation than you would think, they use all of themselves for it. But the wonderful thing is how they fly. The man let me do it. Oh, not the best racing ones. They have to be let out of a loft and handled very carefully. But there were some which did not really matter, and he showed me how to send them off.’
He stood up behind the tea-table and the light shone back from him. ‘You pick up the pigeon as if it were a ball, and you throw it into the air, and when it is up there it starts flying. It is as if you were bowling and the ball became alive,’ He flung out his arm two or three times towards the ceiling, his curved hand quivering with the pleasure it remembered. ‘You would like the feeling, Mamma,’ he said, sitting down again to eat.
‘So I should,’ said Mamma, enchanted.
‘Well, I will take you along some day,’ said Richard Quin.
‘Wouldn’t he think it odd for someone as old as me to want to do it?’ Mamma asked wistfully.
‘No, no. You see, I told them a lot about you,’ said Richard Quin.
Cordelia asked impatiently, ‘And your lessons? What about your lessons? Will you not be late, starting your homework?’
‘Oh, that will be all right,’ he said.
‘Will it?’ she asked. ‘Have you any hope of getting that scholarship?’
Richard Quin’s eyes narrowed, he seemed to bite back a sharp answer.
‘Don’t you want to go to Oxford?’ Cordelia pressed.
His eyes were wide again. ‘Yes, very much,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you what I would feel if I could be sure that I were going to Oxford.’
All of us except Cordelia were surprised by his gravity, for he seemed to take no more thought for the morrow than the lilies in the field, which did not disturb us, since we knew that he was among the lilies and not among the weeds.
‘Yes,’ Cordelia persisted, her exasperation growing, ‘but are you sure you ought to go to Oxford? Would it not be better for you to try a musical career?’
He made a face at her. ‘How afraid you are, when you think someone is going to succeed in doing what he wants. A minute ago you were scolding me because I was not working hard enough for an Oxford scholarship, now because I say I want to go you tell me that I shouldn’t go to Oxford at all.’
She was disconcerted, for a minute she stared at him as if she at last understood something, but she hastily ran back into her anger, and cried at our amused faces, ‘You are all hopeless. It is not fair to the boy. Richard Quin, you must make up your mind about your future. I wish you would give up one of these evenings you are always frittering away playing games and come and spend an evening with Alan’s father.’
‘That is just what I arranged to do yesterday,’ said Richard Quin. ‘He has found out how well I can skate, and we are booked to go to Prince’s together one evening next week, so that I can give him some tips.’
Cordelia was ruffled by our laughter, and left us. In the hall she said meekly to me, after she had kissed me goodbye, ‘Forgive me for being cross with Richard Quin. But I am so worried in case he becomes a burden on you all.’ I was coldly silent. It would have been quite possible for Mary and me to borrow enough money to send Richard to Oxford on our existing contracts, and I was enraged, because she was again pretending, as in the days of her unprofitable career as a child violinist, that she was the stay of our household and the rest of us were imprudent and incapable of supporting ourselves. But she passed from my anger into a kind of trance. She stared at me, lifting a tremulous finger to her lips, and murmured, ‘And the disgrace,’ and went out into the darkness, hurrying back to Alan.
It happened that she did not hear at once that Richard Quin failed to get a scholarship but succeeded in winning an exhibition at New College, and had gone at once to Mr Morpurgo to ask him to lend the money to make up the difference between the exhibition and his probable expenses, so that he need take nothing from Mamma or Mary or me. Neither Mary nor I wrote to tell her, simply because we hardly ever thought of her except when she appeared before us. Mamma did not write either, but that was because she was growing noticeably remote and inactive. She played the piano less and less, and very often let a whole day pass without opening it. We were not sure whether she was ill, or whether what we saw was the result of age, for she had indeed married later than was the custom for women at that period and she was much older than the mothers of our contemporaries. We took her to a Harley Street specialist, but he could find nothing wrong with her, and as she did not seem to be in pain or to be worried about herself, we pushed our sense that she had changed to the back of our minds. But it was a sign of that change when, in spite of her resolution to keep Cordelia in our circle she did not write to her about Richard Quin’s success. And Richard Quin did not write himself, because her doubt about his future was the one point on which he was sensitive. We had never seen him downcast before, except about that one misfortune which could still draw tears to the eye of any one of us when we thought of it; the loss of our father. Every event except that had struck Richard Quin as either agreeable, or capable of being made so or nearly so, either by laughter or by his particular innocuous kind of finesse. But when Cordelia said that she did not think that he ought to go to Oxford and showed that she believed him worthless, I saw the light go out of him for an instant. It was almost as if what she thought were true, and she were forcing him to admit guilt which till then he had always falsely denied. So he did not write to her about his exhibition. But he met Rachel Houghton-Bennett by chance the day after it was all settled, and she passed on the news to Cordelia, who was with us by the middle of the afternoon.
We had even fresher news to tell her, but she would not listen to it. We thought this a pity, because it had pleased us all. About noon that day I had been standing in the hall reading a press cutting; we hated letters, we had not enough time for them, and we always kept them on the hall-table and read them when we had a spare moment. Our agents handled all our engagements, and we had had a telephone put in, so it worked quite well. Then I heard someone knocking, and I opened the front door, and found a tall pale girl, about my own age, standing outside. She said in a flat voice, ‘I hoped you were still living here,’ and I recognised Nancy Phillips.
I pulled her in and called to the others, and Mamma and Mary and Kate all came out, and we were so glad to see her that for a long time we never thought of moving out of the hall. She said she was well, and she would have been good-looking if it had not been for her lack of colour, and a doubtfulness which made not only her movements but even her features tentative and unimpressive. She had not had a very pleasant time since she saw us. It had been a great relief to her, she told us, to read about Mary and me in the papers, because so little had happened in her own life. It turned out that she had not been trained to do anything since she had left school and she had just been at home with Aunt Clara.
It was then Mamma seized her arm and said, ‘Take your hat and coat off. And do you want to stay the night? There is a bed for you,’ and Kate said, ‘There is a lot of food, I have much more now to cook with than I used to have.’
It had disturbed Mamma and the rest of us when Nancy was a schoolgirl, her idleness. It was so heartrendering. We were having such fun working, Mamma enjoyed our work as if she were living her youth over again, and if we often forgot to read our press cuttings Kate never did, and she liked it when people gave us flowers. But Nancy had neither work nor anybody about her who worked. She had, indeed, nothing. She knew it, she turned sad eyes on Mamma and said so, and confirmed it by her pallor, her listlessness. When Richard Quin came in for lunch, she marvelled to see how grown-up he was, and when we told her how he was going to Oxford, and she was really glad, and he thanked her for her gladness by kissing her, which pleased her very much, she looked like a child holding a shell to her ear to hear the sound of the sea.
At luncheon and afterwards she told us all about her life in Nottingham. She had not written to us, because her Uncle Mat still felt very bitter against her mother, he had loved her father so much. It had hurt him quite badly that she had insisted on writing to Aunt Lily, and she had never dared to tell him that she would have loved to see her. The trouble was not that she had been afraid of him, though he was a blunt man, indeed he prided himself on his bluntness, he was so blunt that he had not many friends. It was that he and his wife had been so good to her. They had two sons of their own, but both were married and one was in Melbourne and the other in Singapore, and so they had treated Nancy and her brother as their own children. Her eyes were wide with wonder at their kindness, but she did not seem to be remembering any scenes that had been shaped and informed by that kindness. I remembered how Papa had likened Uncle Mat to a bull, and it seemed probable that Nancy had experienced such tedium as might befall a young girl who had been adopted by a benevolent bull and cow. They had given her brother a good education, and he had trained as an accountant and had gone out to Canada, where he was doing well. It was terrible, the centrifugal force exercised by the kindness of this blunt man, which drove its recipients outwards over the continents. So Nancy had been quite alone with her uncle and aunt for the last few years. But they had done everything they could to prevent her feeling lonely, they had given her a wonderful coming-out dance, and had often taken her on holidays to stay at lovely hotels, all over England and Scotland.
‘I think they hoped that I would get married,’ she told us, ‘but, of course, I am not very attractive.’
She paused, and I wondered that Richard Quin did not tell her that she was graceful and had lovely hair, for he was clever at reassuring girls about their looks. Olivia Houghton-Bennett was very self-conscious because she was rather tall, and I have heard her murmur to him, as they went into a room, ‘Am I looking awful,’ to which he answered, with convincing hesitation, ‘Yes, you are, rather. But I think it is only because you are stooping and crawling about sideways like a crab, if you would stand up straight you would look ripping.’ But he made no attempt to reassure Nancy, and I saw why, when she went on: ‘And, of course, everybody knows who I am. Aunt Clara and Uncle Mat thought that nobody guessed, because they made us change our names. I have not been Nancy Phillips since I left this house. They made me call myself Nancy Kingston. There is some sense in it, my father’s mother, Uncle Mat’s mother, was Nancy Kingston before she married. All the same, it sounds a silly, made-up name. It is not mine.’
She ran her fingers distastefully along the table-edge in front of her, and let them drop in her lap. She was without employment, she had had her own name taken away from her, she had nothing.
‘And it was quite useless, too,’ she continued. ‘Everybody in Nottingham realised who we were as soon as we were brought there, and of course nobody wants to marry me.’ It was as well that Richard Quin had not told her that she was pretty, for if he had convinced her of it that would only have made her more certain that people did not want to marry her because she was the daughter of a murderess. ‘And I would not care, either, to marry anybody who thought it was nothing that my mother murdered my father.’
‘I am so glad that you have grown up a sensible girl,’ said Mamma. ‘That is quite the right way to look at it.’
‘It was an appalling crime,’ said Nancy, and yawned, as if she had thought over the quality of her mother’s deed so long that it now held nothing for her but tedium.
‘Appalling,’ agreed Mamma, ‘as your mother would be the first to admit.’
‘But would she?’ asked Nancy. ‘I always thought she pretended she had not done it.’
‘That was at first,’ said Mamma. ‘I think we would all have done that at first. But she is completely changed now. Nobody could look down on her as she is today.’
Nancy started, looked at her incredulously, and then was silent. She said, ‘So it is all right. I mean, there is a way of thinking about it. At Nottingham we never spoke of it, and it was terrible. You must tell me about this afterwards. I hope you do not mind me talking about this in front of you all, but it has been so hard for me, and you have always seemed able to understand anything.’
We all said she could talk about it all she liked, and Mamma asked if she would like some pudding, and Nancy said, ‘Indeed I would, I had this pudding when Aunt Lily and I were staying with you, and I have often told Aunt Clara about it but we could never get a cook to make it.’
This delighted Mamma, for it was a queer pudding you beat raspberry jam into and steamed in an open mould, not covered with a cloth or with a buttered paper, and nobody could get it right except her. Kate never acquired the knack. Then Nancy began talking about how we had all washed our hair and eaten roasted chestnuts by the fire, and all the silly jokes we had made, and as the meal came to the end she said, ‘I don’t want to rebel against Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, they’re quite elderly now, they were much older than my Papa, and they have been very kind to me. But I said I wanted to come up to London to the theatre with another girl, because I must do something about, about, you know, being who I really am. I must see Aunt Lily again. I really must. But that will hurt Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara very much, for they say she is working as a barmaid in just a common pub, it is not even as if she was employed in a proper hotel.’
‘But it is a heavenly place,’ said Mary, and we all said how lovely it was and how much we enjoyed going to the Dog and Duck, and how nice Uncle Len and Aunt Millie were.
‘So that is all right too,’ said Nancy. ‘Now what can I do about seeing my mother?’
‘I was coming to that,’ said Mamma, ‘but before we talk of that, let me say now - and you must listen, children. You three, you have had a great deal of success lately, and now you have Nancy back here, but it must not delude you into thinking things will always go easily. But come into the drawing-room, Nancy, and we will tell you where your mother is and we can talk over what would be the best thing to do.’
So we scattered, and Mary went over to practise in the music-room which Mr Morpurgo, at a cost which it is bewildering to remember, it was so small, had built for us as a Christmas present on the further side of the stables, and Richard Quin went up to his room. He still slept in the attic, though he could have had Cordelia’s room. He said he had been too happy there to leave it. I went to find Kate, and we were thinking what we would give Nancy if she stayed for supper, when Cordelia came in. I told her about Nancy, but she was not very much interested. She said, ‘How nice, dear, but where is Richard Quin?’
‘Oh, of course, you haven’t seen him since he got the news, you haven’t congratulated him,’ I said. ‘Come upstairs, he is in his room.’ I ran up before her, calling, ‘Richard Quin, Richard Quin, another sister to flatter you.’
We found him lying on his bed, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi open before him, and a Jew’s harp in the palm of one hand. It amused him to play phrases of real music on that humble instrument, lifting it suddenly to his lips as he read and twanging out the notes, twice or thrice, while he went on with his reading. He had that capacity for doing two things at once which enrages those who have it not. When we came in he did not rise but took up the Jew’s harp and welcomed us with the equivalent of a flourish of trumpets, but stopped half-way to free his mouth so that he could say ‘How pretty you look, Cordelia, in that black hat.’ And so she did, it was one of those silky long-haired beaver hats we wore then, and against it her red-gold hair and peachy complexion were delicious.
‘What are you doing lying down in the middle of the day?’ she asked. ‘You should be out of doors.’ She turned away to give herself reassurance by looking at her neat perfection in the mirror, and said vaguely to its depths, ‘Out of doors or something.’
Richard Quin’s face grew grey. He had expected that at last she would praise him.
‘And what is that you were playing? A Jew’s harp?’
‘I play it a lot,’ he told her, raising himself on his elbow and smiling and knitting his brows, as if he were anxious to please her but knew that there was practically no way of doing that.
‘What an extraordinary thing to do,’ she said, with her crossness. ‘They are horrible things, errand-boys play them in the streets. You do not play in the street?’
He fell back into the pillows laughing. ‘Only when I find I am passing Doctors’ Commons.’
‘Or the College of Preceptors,’ I suggested. These were all places that had amused us when we heard of them in our childhood.
‘Or Negretti & Zambra,’ said Richard. ‘In fact, I stand outside Negretti & Zambra and give them as much of the “Ruin of Athens” as I can get on a Jew’s harp,’ said Richard.
‘But Negretti doesn’t like it and knocks on the window with the curling-tongs he uses to frizz his long black ringlets,’ I said.
‘Oh, he likes it well enough, but it disturbs Zambra, who is always casting horoscopes,’ he said.
‘You are too old for this perpetual nonsense,’ said Cordelia.
‘We do other things as well,’ I said. ‘Mary and I play the piano a little, and Richard here has won an exhibition at New College.’
‘Yes, it is about that I want to talk,’ said Cordelia, vehemently.
‘Is there anything to say about it except that it is very pleasant?’ I asked.
‘I will not be an expense to anybody,’ said Richard Quin, gently. ‘I have arranged with Mr Morpurgo that he will lend me the money for the balance of my fees, and I will pay him back gradually.’
‘Gradually,’ said Cordelia, and gave a despairing laugh. ‘That is what I want to point out to you. It will be a huge debt. It would be disgraceful not to pay it back, after all that Mr Morpurgo has done for us. Do you really feel able to bind yourself to such a heavy responsibility? Do you really want to put your whole future in pawn?’
‘If I could raise anything on it, I certainly would,’ said Richard Quin. He lifted the Jew’s harp to his lips and, rolling his eyes, twanged out the opening phrase of ‘Se vuol ballare’ in The Marriage of Figaro, investing it with an air of low cunning and avarice. ‘Me Shylock, me Fagin - I can’t think of any other sinister Jews - me shady cousin of Disraeli, he must have had one. But, Cordelia, stop being an ass. I am greedy as Shylock, I grab at Oxford in my sordid, scheming way. But I also am wrong because I do not scheme at all, you are afraid I will go to Oxford and do nothing. I cannot take the wrong turning in two opposite directions. Tell me, what is it you really think is wrong with me? What do you really fear is going to happen to me?’
She raised her clenched hands to her mouth, and swayed, with bowed shoulders, and for a minute she looked, in spite of her youth and her loveliness, as desolate as King Lear wandering on the blasted heath. She recovered herself and said hastily and insincerely that he misunderstood her, that she did not think anything about him was wrong, she was only anxious because we had no father and Mamma had lived so much out of the world and it was so difficult for a boy to find his own way in life, she was moved only by her love for him. But she was so confused with foreboding, she could not finish her sentences. Richard Quin raised himself again on his elbow and watched her. ‘I wish you would tell me what you see me doing,’ he insisted. Both of us were aware that it was more than foreboding that troubled her, it was clairvoyance. Her eyes rested on a point in space where there was nothing, her breathing was disturbed, her lips were dry. But it perplexes me that he should wish to know what she was seeing, for she was plainly at odds with her gift, neither controlling it not yielding to it. I wondered if he had recognised some flaw in himself which only she among us all had detected, and sought now to see if it would bring him to such ruin as had befallen my father. I prayed that the ruin might fall on me instead, and in the moment of passivity that follows an ardent prayer, like the silence that follows an explosion, I knew that there was no flaw, there would be no ruin.
I went and sat on his bed and said, ‘But it is all right,’ and took the Jew’s harp and twanged a phrase at him, I have forgotten what, which also said, ‘But it is all right.’ He took it out of my hand and twanged back a phrase at me which I did not recognise and did not understand.
‘That horrible noise,’ said Cordelia, covering her ears.
He laughed up at her, and asked, ‘But tell me, tell me. What do you fear will happen to me?’
‘It is all so difficult,’ said Cordelia, pitifully. ‘Going to Oxford without any preparation, we have all been brought up so badly and at first there was no money, you will never understand, either of you, how awful it has been for me, because I am the eldest. Now there is really too much money, or rather it is coming into the house too easily, with Mary and Rose getting this extraordinary success with hardly any effort. I am so afraid that you will have no sense of proportion, and will get into debt.’
For a second he was silent. Then his bed shook with laughter. ‘It’s the eclairs the Warden won’t be able to stand.’
‘The eclairs?’ said Cordelia.
‘The millions of éclairs. Fresh every morning. Iced with the family crest.’
‘Oh, be serious,’ she begged.
‘The eclairs. Chocolate eclairs. Coffee éclairs. Never with custard inside. Only cream.’
‘Well, I should think so,’ I said, ‘éclairs with custard inside are a fraud.’
‘But not cream in the giant one. That’s the one I’ll get sent down for.’
‘What’s going to be in that?’ I asked.
‘A nautch girl. I’m going to have it hauled into the quadrangle on the night of my birthday, and she’ll dance naked, while Negretti & Zambra play the triangle and the flute—’
‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘They’re awfully proper.’
‘I’ll fool ’em,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I’ll put them with their backs to the giant eclair and stick a cobra in front of them, and you know how they forget everything when they get a chance of snake-charming.’
‘Stop this idiocy,’ said Cordelia. She rattled the end of his bed and cried out, ‘I don’t think you should go to Oxford at all.’
‘Cordelia,’ he begged her, ‘please, please be glad that I can go to Oxford. I cannot tell you how much I want to be there. I would give anything to be sure I would be there. In those gardens at New College. On the river.’
‘In the gardens. On the river,’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘You never think of work. Of being like ordinary people and getting the power to live ordinary lives. You only think of pleasure. Yes, yes,’ she told herself, holding her face between her hands, ‘that is how it is going to go wrong.’
‘How what is going to go wrong?’ he asked eagerly, and put out a hand to shake her when she did not answer. Then he looked on the baffled blankness of her face and dropped his hand and rolled back on the bed and began again, ‘Eclairs. Eclairs. There will be two giant éclairs. In the second—’
‘Be serious,’ prayed Cordelia, ‘be serious.’
But we heard Mamma’s voice calling from downstairs. ‘Rose. Is Cordelia up there with you? Bring her down to meet Nancy,’ and we heard Nancy crying, ‘Cordelia and Rose. What luck you are here today.’
I said to Cordelia, ‘Come on, you must see her, she will be hurt if you don’t go at once, she loves being back here.’
We went on to the landing and leaned over the banister, and there was Nancy’s face, drowned under the little house’s shadows like a flower covered by a flood, looking up at us.
‘You look very grand,’ she told Cordelia. ‘If I had met you in the street I would have known at once that you were a married lady.’ There was a pause while Cordelia laughed and preened herself. ‘Is your husband nice?’ pursued Nancy, with a simplicity that made us all laugh, and Cordelia told her that she must come to tea with her and find out for herself. Nancy wanted to know all about her house, and Cordelia told her until Mamma said, ‘Nancy’s neck must be breaking, come down and talk to her on the level.’
A cloud came over the kindness of Cordelia’s face, she looked back over her shoulder at the open door of Richard Quin’s bedroom. ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ she called, and returned back to complete her self-appointed task. I followed her, meaning to break out and protect him, by telling her that he was as well able as Mary and myself to survive her constant belittlement, and that he would get on at Oxford as well as we had done at the Athenaeum and the Prince Albert.
But in the few minutes we had been away our brother had fallen asleep. He was not shamming. His features were not defensively blank, his body was not deliberately and completely relaxed. His mouth was troubled, his brows were knit, he had let the Jew’s harp fall on the quilt, but his fists were doubled. He was lying awkwardly, he had not waited to arrange himself before he fled the waking world. But his face, sunk sideways on his pillow, was delicate and shining like a crescent moon, and his body was as if he were running and winning a race in a world with another dimensional system, where athletes could carry on a contest of speed horizontally and without moving from the same spot. I would have liked to stay with him, but it seemed not to be right. Cordelia made a movement towards the bed. She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them. But her hand dropped, and we stood looking down on him in silence. The cold light that fell from the winter sky through the high attic windows made him look very fair. We went out and left him sleeping in his narrow room, between the four sloping walls, hung with his musical instruments, his boxing-gloves and his fencing foils, his rackets and bats.