WE WERE NOT surprised when the war came, for we had heard our father prophesying it all through our childhood. Because of what he had said we knew also that it would not be short, that, indeed, it would never end in our life-time. That State, he had told us, had taken so much power from individuals that it did not have to consider the moral judgments of ordinary human beings, it could therefore commit crime and was taken over by criminals who saw the opportunity, and who could use it for crime on a national scale, and would kill and rob not people but peoples. We had also been warned by our music. Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven. So we were not so sorely stricken by August, 1914, as many other people. Indeed we had our consolations. It was proved to us that music was not making a fuss about nothing, and that the faces of our parents had been distorted out of common placidity not by madness but by the genuine spirit of prophecy.
When the war broke out, we had just moved into a house in Norfolk we had been lent for the two holiday months by Sir George Kurz, a Jewish financier with an Austrian wife who had been a violinist and was very friendly to us. It was not their own home, they lived in a great seventeenth century mansion a couple of miles away, this was a small Georgian house on land they owned which they used to entertain those of their friends who, being musicians or painters or writers, would not want the bother of staying in other people’s homes. It stood high on the landward side of one of a cluster of hills that lay between a long sandy shore and the East Anglian plain. The air was salt, and when the wind was in the right quarter we could hear the North Sea beat on the sands, but we could not see it. Behind the house the turf rose steeply to a crumbling cliff. Our windows looked down on a bronze bowl of cornland, with one whitewashed village clustering round a grey church-tower where there was a gap in the hills, and the ribbon of the road which flowed across the bowl ran out into the blue distance of the flat farmlands beyond. We had thought we would like to be there, for it was part of our hosts’ kindness to leave two servants and that meant that Kate could go on holiday and Mamma did not have to worry about going to register offices. It was strange to find that we were going to suffer there a wound as sharp as that which had been inflicted by the loss of our father. The days of that glorious summer filled the bowl of cornland below us with light which turned the corn from bronze to copper, and filled the house with the darkness of fear. It was not for ourselves we cared; for only Mamma and Mary and I were there. It was for Richard Quin that we were afraid. Had we learned that we were all going to be killed we would not have been frightened, only awed, foreseeing a fiery translation, such as our music often prophesied and as Mamma’s being led us to regard as probable. But now one of us had to go forward towards death alone, and that the youngest of us.
He had been camping in Wales, and he was due on the 4th of August to drive across the country to us in the car he had bought with some money he had earned by playing with a dance band, a French sports model of a make that has long since disappeared. We spent the afternoon sitting in the garden, looking down on the ribbon of road which ran across the bowl of cornland. It was hot, and we would have liked to bathe a second time as soon after lunch as was safe, though the bathing was dangerous, as everything seemed to be at that moment, and we had to swim with a tiring caution. But in any case we did not like to leave Mamma. It seemed certain that the Germans were invading Belgium and that England would have to come into the war, though we could get no news later than what the morning papers had brought us. We could not ask the Kurzes, for they were away in Scotland, and we did not yet know any of the neighbours. Mamma would not have been well even if there had not been this extreme uncertainty. She had grown much thinner and had no strength, and she was often racked by storms of quick, shallow breathing. She had one while we were sitting on the lawn, just after we had had tea.
Recovered, her eyes always on the road below, she said, ‘I am so useless now. I have lost my sense of how things happen, of how they are done, of what they are. When you girls were down on the sands I walked in the orchard and I found myself looking at the apples and thinking, “What are those round things? Why are they hung on those bits of wood?” And when I turned round and faced the house it would not have seemed unnatural if they had flown away like birds that had settled, though again I would have believed it if I had been told that they were made of paper and had been fixed there with tacks by men in green aprons. My mind is on a train that is going out of the station and leaving my body on the platform.’ Suddenly she cried out, ‘Look, he is down there on the road.’
His car was an odd sharp violet-grey. The bright dot bumped across the bowl and passed out of sight as it turned up the lane which wound uphill to our house, it rattled and snorted into the carriage sweep. Richard Quin jumped out and we saw he was disturbed as we were. He stayed beside the car and called over the flower-beds an urgent enquiry, which we could not hear.
Mamma struggled to her feet and cried, ‘Is it war?’ But her voice was too weak to reach him. He jumped a flower-bed and ran to us across the lawn repeating his enquiry. She was trembling so violently that she would have fallen had it not been that Mary and I caught her in our arms. Gently we lowered her into her chair and waited to hear our brother’s announcement.
‘You cannot,’ breathed Mamma, ‘really be asking if there is a refrigerator in the house.’
‘I jolly well am,’ he said. ‘You see, Mamma, I started from Wales yesterday afternoon, and I slept last night at Warwick, and this morning I had got so far on my way that I was just three miles off Powerscliffe, and I had always heard that it was a nice old fishing-town, and I was still twenty miles from you, so I went there and had bread and cheese and beer in a pub down by the harbour. It was full of fishermen, and I asked them what the news was about the war, and they didn’t know, they didn’t seem very much interested, except in the risk there might be orders telling them not to put to sea. They were awfully good chaps. Then other chaps came in, members of an association of bank clerks who were camping out in the district and sailing. They were a bit more worried about the war. They were very nice too. Then two great big chaps came in and started playing darts with the fishermen, and they had a few drinks, and they seemed to get a bit tight, and then they began to bet the fishermen and the bank clerks a hundred to one that they could beat the lot of them at darts standing on their heads, So I knew they were tree-fellers.’
‘How did you know they were tree-fellers?’ asked Mamma, the war forgotten.
‘Once two of them came into the bar at the Dog and Duck and started making bets, and Uncle Len stopped them but let them stay in the bar and do their stuff and gave them drinks on the house,’ said Richard Quin. ‘You see, tree-fellers are wonderful chaps, they have to be practically acrobats, I’ve often wished I could take some weeks off and go and learn the elements of the job. When it comes to cutting down the tree-tops they have to do appalling things like lying along a narrow branch on their backs and sawing off the branch above them, and they often have to hang upside down and work, so it’s comparatively easy for them to play darts standing on their heads. You get down on your head and steady yourself with one hand and throw with the other, and swing up on to your feet between throws to get your blood back out of your head. The ones at the Dog and Duck showed me how, and I practised. Well, most people don’t know that tree-fellers can do this, and if they did nobody can tell a tree-feller from anybody else, so when they’re travelling across country from job to job they go into bars and have a few drinks and people think they’re tight and when they bet people that they can beat them at darts playing upside down they think it’s because they’re tight, and they take the bets, and of course the tree-fellers win no end.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ said Mary.
‘Nobody’s being fair,’ said Richard. ‘The people who take the bets think they’re going to get some money out of a chap who’s tight. And anyway tree-fellers have a very tough time, I wouldn’t grudge them anything. Their job takes them all over the country and they only settle down for a few weeks at a time, they have the roughest houses and it’s hard for them to marry, and when they get old they fall out of trees or get pneumonia and die in the infirmary. I don’t see why they shouldn’t take some money off people who are usually living much softer lives. So I didn’t give away these tree-fellers at first, but later I thought they were taking too much money off these fishermen or these bank clerks, and they kept on putting their own best men up and still getting beaten. Though nobody seemed very much interested in the war we were all drinking much more than we would have in the ordinary way. So I challenged them myself, and they thought I was tight, and they gave me huge odds, and I beat them, I was much younger, and they took me on again and again, and I always won, and then I wouldn’t take my winnings. By this time everybody was laughing and shouting, and the landlord kept on saying we couldn’t carry on like this in the bar, and they ragged him and when I said I had to go and I still wouldn’t take my winnings, then the tree-fellers went out and bought me a lot of lobsters and put them in the car, and it got to be a sort of joke, the fishermen rushed out and got some their wives had been boiling, and the bank clerks bought some, and I drove off, up to the knees in lobsters. So if there isn’t a refrigerator here we’re rather sunk. We can give some away tomorrow. But I’m too fagged driving to see to it this evening.’
‘There is a refrigerator,’ said Mamma. ‘This house makes its own electricity. The Kurzes are the kindest people.’
‘I have never had enough lobster,’ said Mary. ‘There may not be so many to give away tomorrow.’
‘Remember, children,’ said Mamma, ‘lobster is said to be very indigestible.’
‘Up to now,’ I claimed, ‘none of your children have ever eaten anything they could not digest. The only question is whether there will be any lobsters at all to give away tomorrow.’
But there were about three dozen in the car, and we even had difficulty in finding room for them in the refrigerator. We had a wonderful dinner; and afterwards, when Mamma had happily gone to bed and Mary sat down at the piano, Richard Quin and I walked on the lawn in the soft August darkness.
‘I wish women could go into pubs,’ I said. ‘Uncle Len lets us be in the bar at the Dog and Duck if there are not many people, and I always like it. And it must have been fun at Powerscliffe.’
‘It was a good rag,’ he said. ‘But it was odd, being with all those people, and feeling so damned cold and lonely. Where are the nearest houses I can leave the lobsters tomorrow?’
‘At that village where the road takes a bend by a church where the hills start.’
‘Oh, that’s near enough. I wonder what sort of people live there.’
We halted and looked through the night down into the landscape. Beneath us the bowl of cornland, frosted by the light of the young moon, looking larger than by day; and the indigo sky, not anything, simply a nothingness and a miracle in which the heavy stars were suspended. The village was a clot of brightness, and farmsteads on the high ground which we had not seen by day now shone like the eyes of wild things which thought it safe now to show themselves.
‘I can feel everything tonight,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I can feel how every stalk of corn grows up from those fields. I can feel how the light in that farm over there is heating the glass chimney of the lamp. I can feel how the stones in that church tower are locked together with mortar. I can imagine how the works of the church clock whirr and make a fuss before the hour strikes.’ He walked away from me and called his own name into the darkness, six or seven times. Then he came back, saying, ‘It’s funny, if you repeat your own name it soon begins to sound quite meaningless.’ But he called it out once more, straight up to the vault of the sky overhead, and might have again, if he had not broken off to say, ‘Rose, Rose, look at Orion. The stars are glorious now. It’s such a fat buttery light that drips from them in summer time. I would like to sit up all night and watch the constellations turning and sliding off the sides of the sky beneath the horizon. I’ve never done that. The trouble is that sleep is good too. Too many things in the world are good. When one enjoys something one is always missing something else. But sleep is very good. Let us sleep now.’
When the papers came at noon the next day and we learned that Great Britain was at war with Germany, we all had a glass of sherry, though we hardly ever drank, and Richard Quin explained to us that now we could settle down and have a good holiday, because he had applied for a commission in a regiment in which poor Mr Morpurgo had served in the South African War, and he thought he would get it, for Mr Morpurgo was helping him, but it would take some time. So we were there together all through that beautiful and horrible August, though not alone. We had invited some guests beforehand, and indeed expected Nancy Phillips to be with us for most of the time, for Cordelia had very adroitly put an end to the prejudice Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara had conceived against our household. She had remembered that Alan had a relative, a Cousin George, living in retirement near Nottingham, who had acquired a title. The Houghton-Bennetts had several titles in the family, and were proud of them, but were embarrassed by this one for it had been earned too easily. The others had come by way of Colonial Governorships or Army Service but Cousin George had been knighted because King Edward had visited the industrial town where he had been a Town Councillor at the time of an influenza epidemic, which had not spared the Mayor or the Deputy Mayor, so it had fallen to him to conduct the royal party round a new hospital. Cordelia and Alan visited this relative and manoeuvred him and his wife to accompany them in a call on Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, who felt that they had no right to stand between Nancy and such aristocratic friends. So she came to stay with us that summer, and was very happy, and fell a little in love with Richard Quin. We knew it when Rosamund came for the only weekend she was able to manage, as she had her proper holiday earlier in the year, and Nancy followed her and Richard Quin with spaniel eyes and said, without malice but with relief, ‘It is a pity they are not the right ages. If he had not been younger than her, they might have made a couple.’
But we were joined by other guests who were unable to make such remarks, who were so unrelated to us that they could never speak of our relationship, who could say nothing to us except what people dancing or weeping in the streets to the tune of history say to each other. Musicians we knew only little or not at all, who had intended to spend the summer in France or Italy or Switzerland, members of the strange army of friends enrolled by Richard Quin, some of the girls who had been at school or college with us, reported themselves to us for one reason or another and were invited, and came to sleep in our house, or in a great barn that stood high on the hill, or in lodgings in the neighbourhood which had been vacated by nervous visitors, as it was bruited about that East Anglia was the probable theatre of German invasion. Kate and her mother were suddenly with us, saying that they could not abide to be separated from us at this time, particularly as all Kate’s brothers had gone to sea, and they helped in the house, so the two servants left by the Kurzes were not dismayed, and everything was agreeable about this time of carnival which preceded the Lent that was to endure all our lives.
We were of course never without awe of the future, never without pity for the men who in the first and middle days of that month went out to die and in its latter days died their anticipated deaths. But we were very gay. We did not go to the seaward side of the hill again, for we were not far from the exact spot of the coast where it was supposed that any invading German force would make its landing, and the sands were taken over by the military. But we swam in a river not far away, and as soon as the Kurzes returned from Scotland they made us free of the lake in their part. Also we spilled over the fields, too, and helped with the exuberant harvest and all of us made music in our several ways. There came to stay with the Kurzes a grey-eyed young man named Oliver whom we recognised after a day or two as the composer whose works had been played at the concert in Regent’s Park where we heard we had got our scholarships. We were embarrassed at seeing him again, because he had given us inscribed copies of his songs, and we had lost them on the way home, not carelessly but because we were so excited, and we always felt that we ought to own up. With a fervour that was partly a desire to expiate this guilt we took up our flutes again and joined in the performance of a cantata he had written on the subject of Venus rising from the sea at a South Coast resort when the Mayor and the Corporation were opening a new pier and taking down to the depths with her the Town Clerk, who was the tenor. We liked his music, which had a deliberately thin quality which was a search for the economy which had gone from Victorian music and had not been brought back by Elgar. We thought we might have liked him, too, had he not been suddenly drawn from us as Richard Quin was to be drawn a week or so later. It turned out Oliver had liked coming to us much more than we had thought, when he said goodbye to Mamma and thanked her for the times he had been to our house he suddenly could not speak any more, and bent down and kissed her hand. Mamma cried over his bowed head, ‘And khaki is such a hideous colour, the old scarlet was far better.’
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.’
‘And the air up here is not merely cold,’ said Mary. ‘In London and Manchester and Liverpool the winter air has just had the warmth taken out of it and the damp put in, or it has been displaced by wind.’
‘Wind is just part of the enemy,’ I interrupted. The enemy in our household was what made cakes burn when they had been in the oven not nearly so long as the cookery book said they should be, what gave one a cold just before a concert.
‘But what we’re breathing now,’ said Mary, holding her arms out to it, ‘is the Hallelujah Chorus.’
We three moved on singing. Gerald murmured in my ear that his sister had a very fine voice, everybody had said that she ought to have it trained, someone awfully good who really knew what he was talking about had said that she ought to sing in opera, but she had married a very good chap, who owned thousands of acres in Yorkshire. After half a mile we came up against barbed wire and went back to the road, which curved and brought us to a dip in the ridge where there was a knot of cottages and a sturdy little church, hardly more than a tower, giving back blackish brilliance to the sun from its flint walls. It was old and had the look of a shepherd in his plaid. But when we went inside we found that somebody had made it new and not at all protective. There were pews of varnished pine, and olive-green rep hassocks and cushions, and only a plain cross on the altar. The walls were distempered drab, it might have been a schoolroom. We stood in the doorway and sighed.
Gerald de Bourne Conway said, ‘Ooh, isn’t it Protty?’
When he explained that he meant Protestant, I asked him if he wasn’t a Protestant, and he told us, tossing his head, that his father went mad if anybody called him that. ‘We’re Catholics,’ he said. ‘It’s awful cheek of the Romans to talk as if they were the only Catholics.’ He took a step into the church, and his nose wrinkled. ‘Smell the carbolic soap. I bet nobody’s ever swung a censer here. I bet they have Morning and Evening Service too.’
‘Why, what do they have in your father’s church?’ asked Mary.
‘He celebrates mass,’ he answered cockily. ‘I’ve served for him ever since I was six. You should see me in my cotta. Look, not a crucifix in the place. And not a bit of plate on the altar. And I bet they call it a communion table at that.’ Looking scornfully about him, he moved down the aisle. He had held his cap under his arm all the time we walked on the downland, and the wind had ruffled his hair. He looked too young to be a soldier, he might have been a schoolboy and this a class-room and the altar a master’s desk. As he went further from us mischief appeared in his movements, he might have been a schoolboy considering what he might do to spoil the classroom while the master was absent from his desk, whether he could pour something that stank into the ink-wells or scrawl with coloured chalks on the blackboard. We felt concern for him. His movements were too simple, it was certain that when the master came back to his desk he would know what offences had been committed and by which offender; and though it was the boy’s desire to damage his school, he was a schoolboy, and the proper place for him was school, he would miss the other boys if he were sent away. When his hand twitched towards a pile of hymnbooks, when his strutting brought him to the sanctuary steps, it was as if the master had returned and was a grave presence at his desk. But Richard Quin called softly, ‘Gerald, Gerald,’ and he tiptoed back to us.
Beyond the village the ridge broadened, and there were sentinels at the great gates of a park where yew-groves stood twisted and black and old on the sage-green winter turf, and in the distance cedars of Lebanon lifted their tiers of shade round a red-brick house with a white colonnade; and the best of the day was over. We had to be with other people after that. It had not mattered having Gerald with us, for he was part of Richard Quin’s spiritual uniform, as his Sam Browne belt was part of his military uniform; this was the recipient of pity without whom our brother would not have been complete. But these other people had really nothing to do with us. We were with them only because they too were being whirled to disaster by the turning earth, and they prevented us from concentrating on our brother, whom we desired to learn by heart. But they were kind. The Brigadier’s wife held a Pekinese under each arm, and as she had eyes like a Pekinese, and as her bust fell so loosely that the two Pekinese seemed extensions of it, she looked as if she were as curiously made as any tribeswoman that Othello had ever met; but she liked music, and had heard us play, and arranged for us to stay with her or one of the other wives whenever we could get away to see Richard Quin. So we went often, and Cordelia and Alan went down once or twice too, and everybody thought she was very pretty and gentle, but she did not really enjoy it. She paid a special visit to Lovegrove to tell us, not fiercely as she would have done before, but plaintively, and yet so insistently that it was still objectionable, that she thought it a great pity for Richard Quin to make such a friend of Gerald de Bourne Conway. People must think he could not be nice if he had such a terrible friend.
In this she was wrong. The officers and their wives understood that Richard Quin was simply protecting Gerald. They knew he himself was all right, because he was a good soldier. There was much in life that Army people evidently did not understand but about this sort of thing they were good. There was no use telling Cordelia this, for she still thought, though she was trying to be nice about it, that all her family was awful, and if we had convinced her that Army people had a shrewd eye for character she would have felt quite certain that they were doubtful about Richard Quin.
But Rosamund was able to come down to the camp with us twice, and each time it was like a big concert for Mary and me, Richard was so happy, and everybody admired her so much, though it was already obvious that fashion was turning away from her type. The new beauties of that age were fair by deficiency and jerry-built in figure, and cultivated an anxious, sickly rejecting stare and gape. But Rosamund was golden as honey, and abundant, and so strong that she never found it hard to lift any of her patients in hospital, and so good-natured that she could pass the spiritual equivalent of that test of strength when she went into society; and people seemed to be glad of her particular exhibition of the qualities they were condemning in general. Indeed it was hard to give them all the slip at the camp, and get out for a walk by ourselves; and of course we were never without Gerald, but that did not matter, he was just like a dog that was all right if it were checked the minute it barked too much and started jumping up, and Richard Quin always knew the right time to do that, and the right measure of comradeship and derision that would quiet him. So the boy did not spoil our walks at all. The last one we went all together, one February afternoon, took us to the high point of one of those ridges that run to the west of the Oxfordshire plains, where there was a ruined windmill by the side of the road. We rested there, looking down into the depth of the valley, where a long beechwood flowed as if it were a river, still dark with winter, soft as soot but brown, not black. The hillside pastures were greyish and needed spring to freshen them, but on some of the ploughed fields there was the green mist of the new crops. It was one of those days when the air is full of water that chooses to be not mist but glass, and the world is seen through a brightening lens.
‘You see, there is no winter in the country,’ said Richard Quin. He had his arm about Rosamund’s shoulder.
‘I say, look at those jolly old starlings,’ said Gerald.
The flight came low over us, cutting in between two telegraph poles on the road. We heard the creak of the small wings, then watched them fall below us into the valley, till we looked down on them. A thought suddenly ran through them, spreading from the leftmost bird to a last straggler far to the right, and halted them. They balanced on it, going up and down, like a ball bobbing in the jet of a fountain, then swept back on us, and flew above us across the ridge and down into the unseen valley on the other side. But then another thought pervaded the spread body of the flight, and they repented and whirled about, but got no further than the telegraph poles. There they wrote themselves as music on the wires, as close-pressed demi-semi-quavers, and bickered and fluttered. One starling soared up from his wire, flew some ten yards above the road, turned in mid-air as if to mark a decision and alighted on the top branch of an ash-tree. Other birds whirred after him with a consequential air. There was a faction that went, a greater faction that stayed, on the wires, obstinate, quiet as if their obstinacy would last for ever. Then one bird threw itself from the tree towards the clouds in a straight upward dive, and when the force of its surrender to the motion was spent it glided slantwise downwards through the air, as a diver glides slantwise upwards through the water. All the starlings on the wires and in the trees were instantly convinced, and soared up in the same line as the lone one had ventured when he was a dissident, who was now a leader. But they did not fall back, a sense of triumph lifted them still higher. They swirled down the hillside into the hidden valley and rose again, and banked and turned with an increasing intention over our heads and swirled down into the valley where the beechwood ran like a river, and then came up the hillside at us and were back again over our heads, like a roll of drums made visible. Then peace entered into them, they travelled without haste to a hilltop ahead of us, and drifted down into the bronze cloud of a hangar, as if they knew themselves deserving of rest.
‘What did that mean?’ asked Richard Quin. His arm tightened round her shoulders and he repeated, ‘What did that mean?’
She could not speak, she fluttered her fingers before her mouth, to show that she was choked by her stammer.
She got down once to see him when he was moved to Sussex. It was a pity that she could not get away to be with him for all the forty-eight hours of his embarkation leave, but she was only able to come to us in the evening of the second day.
By then it was late spring. There were only the three of us at home, Mamma and Mary and myself. That Easter Cousin Jock had sent for Constance, saying that he was alone and needed someone to look after him and would try to make amends if she returned, and she had stonily packed her bags and left us. She spent the day with us when she could, but that was not very often; and in the evenings the silence silted up in our house. Indeed, it was never quite dispelled even in the daytime, though there was much coming and going, for Mary and I had been asked by our colleges to do some teaching as their staffs had disintegrated under the demands of the war, and we gave many of our lessons at home. Mamma enjoyed this, for we often asked her in for advice, and though she was now too weak and too passionate to play more than a page at a time, she was able to scold both teachers and pupils with enlightening ferocity. But she was not quite so fierce as of old, at least towards the pupils, for of late she had begun to see young people as materially precious, to a degree that cancelled out their faults. She would frown as she listened to a girl of sixteen playing Beethoven and her hands would twitch on her stick, and then she would look down at the hands on the keyboard to trace the fault, and be taken unaware by the innocent flesh, the pliable fingers, the baby nails, and would simply shake her head and sing the phrase as it should have been played. But towards Mary and myself she showed no mercy, for though we were still young in years we were to her outside of time, she often expected us to remember things that had happened in her youth, it was as if it were now revealed to her that all of us had co-existed in eternity, and she could not understand that our portions of time overlapped like tiles on a roof. Her age alone was not great enough to account for this growing alienation from the arrangements of earth. The real cause was the illness which was day by day planing her body closer and closer to the bone. It had mercifully no other symptoms than this emaciation, and the dwindling of a concern for material conditions which had always been perfunctory. Her wild hair was still dark.
Miss Beevor came in early that afternoon, just after I had brought Mamma back to the drawing-room after she had helped me to convince a girl, who was arrogant in the way a good player ought to be in adolescence, that she was wrong in refusing to play Liszt because a composer who wrote that way today would be no good. Mamma said, ‘Richard Quin is coming back tonight on his embarkation leave, Bayahtreechay.’
Miss Beevor said, ‘Oh. But it will be all right. You are a lucky family. Look at Mary and Rose, and look at Cordelia’s wonderful marriage.’ She began suddenly to cry. Cordelia had never forgiven her, Cordelia had never asked her to her home. But she was crying over that only because she did not want to cry over Richard Quin’s departure to France.
Mamma said tartly, ‘It’s not such a wonderful marriage as that.’ She was becoming terribly frank, and had more than once lately revealed that Alan bored her. She did not really like the idea of men being civil servants, she thought they should not like so safe a way of life.
Miss Beevor said, ‘So long as he’s happy,’ and sat down, and brought out of her kid bag (it had Athens on it in poker-work, she had been on a Cook’s tour) her last piece of fancy-work and asked Mamma what was wrong with it. Mamma held it, and she put her head on one side, and said, ‘Come now, it’s not so bad as that.’
‘No. No. Not nearly so bad,’ said Mamma, with grave self-criticism. ‘Of course it’s not.’ Then tea came in, and they gossiped and bickered, and Mary and I went down to the kitchen and helped Kate with the supper. She looked very wooden these days. As we worked we saw in our mind’s eye the dark bright circle of water in a bucket filled to the brim and set on a scullery floor. But surely if Kate and her mother had seen that anything dreadful was going to happen to Richard Quin we would see it in her face.
When we went back into the drawing-room Mamma had fallen asleep. Yet there was a smoothness about her sleep, it was as if she were in a trance; and she awoke smoothly when Richard Quin came in and kissed her. She said, ‘It is ridiculous, you should be going now to Paris, then over the Alps to Italy.’ Sleep lay over our household like a quilt during that forty-eight hours. Richard Quin said he was tired, and we all went to bed early, and woke long after our usual hour. We took Richard Quin’s breakfast up to him, sure that he would be ready for it, since he was an early riser; in the summertime he had always lived an unobserved life before the rest of the world was about. But this morning he lay stretched in a deep dream, that made him sigh as we looked at him. We took the tray downstairs again and went to Mamma, who was awake, but drank her tea and turned away from us and slept again. We went quietly about the house and got everything ready for the day. We had put off all our pupils. At eleven he was with us, and we gave him breakfast in the drawing-room, and afterwards he walked round the garden with Mamma. Because we had never been able to afford flowers until Papa left us our patches of columbines and our clematises were always exciting. Then he got his flute and played some of his favourite music, and then he asked Mary and me to go over our duets for him. He loved Schubert’s Grand Rondo so much that he made us play it three times, and he said we did it better each time for him. ‘It is like fountains and ices and chandeliers and fireworks and diamonds,’ he said. ‘Oh, the fun of music.’ He was leaning on the end of the piano, he shuddered and passed his fingers down his face. ‘The Army’s really very good,’ he said, ‘better than you can think. But it’s been hard to live without music. It is like having one of one’s senses taken away from one. But go on, go on, quick. Play something else.’
We gave him a good luncheon, considering it was wartime. Of course he had excellent food in the Army, but we were able to give him some of the dishes he had always liked from childhood, like onions done in pastry like apple-dumplings, with kidneys inside them, and roly-poly with mincemeat instead of jam. Onions were scarce as they always are in wartime, but Uncle Len kept us supplied with them, and Kate’s mincemeat was doled out a little at a time and was keeping well. After luncheon Mamma said that she would rest, and Richard Quin went out to see his old head-master and the man and his wife who had shown him their racing pigeons, they had become great friends of his. He was back for tea, and afterwards he brought down some of his musical instruments, and we meant to play, but three of his friends who had been at school with him and could not go to the war came round to see him. One had been rejected on medical grounds, the two others were engineers. They looked at Richard Quin with wonder and dismay, and one said, ‘This is all wrong for you, old man, I can’t think of you except as amusing yourself.’ We left them and went to sit in the dining-room. On many other evenings we had heard the laughter and voices of our brother and his friends in another room, and we could pretend that this evening was as those. Soon Mamma retreated into the blank and upright slumber which had taken her to itself the night before; but she awoke at the right time to remind us that we should start him off on his way to dinner with Alan and Cordelia and the Houghton-Bennetts. We did not wait up for him, that would have been letting the occasion appear too plainly as what it was. But of course we heard him come in.
‘Shall we go down and make tea for him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘So often he has been up later than us and gone down to the empty kitchen and got something out of the larder, he will want to do it again.’
Later the lock of the french window below our room clicked, and we heard his tread on the iron steps and the gravel path. Without turning on the light we got out of our beds and crept to the window and knelt to look under the raised sash. We saw the red circle of his cigarette passing slowly from his lips to his hand, from his hand to his lips, the moth-glow of his uniform, as he stood under the trees at the end of the lawn.
‘Not everybody gets killed in a war,’ whispered Mary.
‘No, not even in this war,’ I answered.
We went back to our beds and, as on the night before, fell at once into a dreamless sleep, that ended suddenly, and brought us back into the real night of day as wide awake as if we had had no respite from it. The hours passed then as they had passed the day before, pleasantly and with an infinity of pain. We made music in the morning. Miss Beevor came in at noon, wearing her best terracotta velvet, and bringing a bottle of Madeira, almost the last of her Papa’s little cellar, so that we could all drink Richard Quin’s health together. We sat in a solemn circle in the sitting-room, and all got a little drunk on a single glass. Kate had been called in to take part in the ceremony, and she said suddenly, ‘I will leave the washing-up till late in the afternoon. There’s been too many breakages.’ And Miss Beevor got quite drunk. Suddenly she looked round at us and said with an air of surprise, ‘What a distinguished family. Richard Quin, I know everything will go right for you. How soon can you become a Major?’
He said with an air of concern, ‘Not until I have had six horses shot under me.’
She said, shuddering, ‘Oh, how cruel. But is that so even when you are not in the cavalry?’
We all laughed at her, and she complained we were dreadful to her, and laughed too, and said she must go home now, and she would walk on air, she felt so happy about us, we were all so wonderful. Mary and I took her out, and in the hall we ran into Mr Morpurgo, who had been asked to luncheon. She bent her great height over his pear-shaped plumpness and asked playfully, ‘Do you know what?’ His large viscid eyes, under which there was now a pouch of equal size, rolled up at her. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she told him triumphantly. He looked up at her with naked hatred, but she bounded on. In the doorway, however, she burst into tears. While she stood fumbling in the white kid bag from Athens, he came up behind her with the handkerchief which had been projecting in perfect folds from his breast-pocket.
‘I’ll have it washed and send it back,’ she sobbed.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Keep it, keep it.’
But as she got to the gate he called, ‘No, send it back, it’ll be no use to you because of the monogram. But I’ll send you a dozen with your monogram.’ As he turned back, he murmured to himself, ‘Better send two dozen. What is one dozen?’
He presented himself in the sitting-room in the character of an aggrieved man, and Mamma and Richard Quin hastened to comfort him. But his woes were not for us to remedy. His first complaint was the South African War had been his war and nobody thought anything of that nowadays, his second that two of the four men whom he employed to find him orchids in the forests of Asia and South America had been seized by the Allies and interned, one in India, one in the West Indies, because they were Germans. When we expressed interest and astonishment on hearing for the first time that he maintained this delightful embassade, he asked us, in the tones of the ant reproaching the grasshopper, how we thought that greenhouses were kept filled. Suddenly he opened the counting-house door and admitted us to knowledge of the details of his colossal expenditure, which became the more whimsical the further it travelled from the realm of necessity, for the more fantastic the results it sought the more certain it was that they could be achieved only by fantastic characters. What was worrying him about the orchid-hunter now interned at Calcutta was that the authorities might find out that the grim and taciturn botanist in their hands was a polygamist of immense range and persistence, who had wives all over the world, every one of them married to him by the most binding form known to her people. As Mr Morpurgo peevishly returned to the subject again and again, expressing forebodings they might stumble on evidence of the wife in Washington or the wife in Copenhagen or the wife in Malabar, and not understand that this thirst for impossible legitimacy ought to be overlooked in such a great botanist and courageous explorer, all of us lost ourselves in laughter. One of his ancestors must have been the professional storyteller of the bazaar in some town of domes and minarets, and he was turning back through the ages for his help.
But there came a time in the afternoon when there was nothing more to say. We had noticed with some surprise that Mr Morpurgo was wearing a wrist-watch, which was then not usual for a man of his age. He plucked it from his arm and gave it to Richard, saying that one of the things he would find as he went through life was that there was nothing more difficult than to find a reliable timepiece; and he abruptly left us. The watch was exquisite, profligate in its union of precious metal and craftsmanship, and Richard Quin was doubtful whether he ought to take it to France, though he loved it as he loved one of his musical instruments, his face was tender as he bent over it. But Mamma told him to take it, that of course it would get ruined, but that would give Mr Morpurgo pleasure too, he could get another one made, and he had so few pleasures. Richard Quin was glad when it was put like that, and went down to show it to Kate, and Mamma turned to us and said, wild-eyed, ‘If only Rosamund would come. She will be late. Can anything have happened to her?’ But then Richard Quin called to her to come and see something that Kate had given him and Mary said, ‘Rose, will you think me dreadful if I toss you to see who is to go to Victoria with Richard Quin and Rosamund, and who is to stay with Mamma? I can’t just say to you, “You can go.” I am sorry I can’t.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and took out a sixpence, and we knelt on the carpet and tossed it three times. I was tails and I always won.
‘That is all right,’ said Mary, rising to her feet. ‘Now I shall feel it was all in order that I couldn’t go.’
I remained on the floor, looking up at her in amazement. Never before had I realised how often Mary had said, ‘You can go,’ when only one of us could go to the ballet or to a concert or a drive. It is the measure of the distance at which everybody, even those who were most friendly, kept us, that constantly we received invitations that ran, ‘Can Rose or Mary come with me to this or that?’ We had no intimates who would feel it always natural to ask one of us, because they were closer to that one. But of these alternate invitations, again and again she had stepped back and given me the chance to enjoy a pleasure that was often great. I told her so, I thanked her, but she cried out vehemently, ‘No, no, it is not good of me at all. Usually these invitations mean being with other people, which is always a risk, so I do not want to go. This time it means being with Richard Quin to the last, so I minded. But all the other times, you saved me from something.’
She spoke with such passion that I stared at her as if staring would show me her deep hidden trouble. I said, ‘But that isn’t all, you like me to have the fun of going. So.…’ I paused, wanting to say, ‘I would like to know the other reason why you step aside.’ But she broke out, ‘Of course I do, and it is a fair exchange, you are so good to me. There is nothing, nothing in you of Cordelia.’
‘Well, I should hope not,’ I said. ‘But, oh, Mary, how happy we could all have been if it had not been for the war.’
‘Not only happy,’ said Mary, ‘Richard Quin would have been more than happy.’
‘Much, much more,’ I sighed.
I on my knees, she standing above me, we looked into one another’s eyes and shook our heads.
‘But not everybody gets killed in a war,’ she murmured.
‘See what Kate has given me,’ said Richard Quin, who came back into the room with one arm out of his tunic. His short sleeve was rolled up, and just below his elbow he was wearing a bracelet, made of a few small blue beads, strung at wide intervals on a braid of two or three twisted horsehairs. The beads were vivid but dull, they might have been cut from turquoise matrix. ‘I do not like taking it from her. She told me that I must never take it off, day or night. That means she has never taken it off day or night, herself. She wore it above her elbow, it’s just right for me here. It is too good of her to give it to me. I had to take it. It may be awkward wearing it, it looks strange. But she wanted me to have it.’
‘It is a strange thing to think of her wearing it all the time and none of us knowing,’ said Mary.
Mamma said, ‘It looks Egyptian.’
We all stared at it, seeing at the same time the bright dark circle of a bucket filled to the brim with water, standing on a kitchen floor. Mamma and Mary and I were all saying to ourselves, ‘She would not have given him her amulet if she and her mother had seen anything dreadful happening in the water. For then there would have been no sense in giving him a thing to keep him safe.’ Kate was so very sensible. She would have given him something else instead, like sweets or handkerchiefs, that would have been useful to him for a short time.
Mamma said, ‘I think this bracelet is very old. They find poor people wearing them in hospitals, you know. They are handed down through the generations. They don’t talk about them.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Rosamund was talking about it last time she was here. But I had heard of it before.’
‘It is a great honour to have it,’ said Richard Quin gravely, and rolled down his sleeve and put on his tunic. ‘Now I want to go to my room and look over my things. Shout up to me when Rosamund comes.’
But she did not come. We had expected her before tea, but at half past four she had not arrived. Mary and I went down to the kitchen and found Kate sitting with her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. We put our arms round her and kissed her and played with the pins in her cap, and Mary said, ‘Oh, dear, I wish it was all as it used to be, and that we could hear the muffin man’s bell ringing, and you could give us sixpences to go and buy some crumpets, as you used to when we were little and things had gone wrong.’
‘I wonder who buys the muffins,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve always found that, gentle or simple, crumpets are no use to them, now there’s no butter in the world.’
‘Come now, there’s some butter left,’ I said.
‘Some butter is no butter,’ said Kate. ‘Like eggs. If you have money you should be able to buy all the eggs and butter you want, or it’s just as bad as if there were none. I wonder what has happened to that muffin man.’
‘Yes, what can he be doing now that there is a war?’ I asked.
‘Richard Quin would have gone out and found him wherever he was,’ said Mary.
‘So would your Papa,’ said Kate. ‘God rest his poor soul.’
So she too knew that he was dead. We had never been sure of that.
Mary rubbed her face against Kate’s shoulder. ‘I wish Papa was here now,’ she said indistinctly. She rarely said anything so obvious.
‘People are where they ought to be,’ said Kate, ‘where they are sent. Some of my people are at the bottom of the sea, others are on it, and there it is.’
We were silent. Each, as we found out later, restraining herself from asking Kate if she were anxious about her kinsfolk who were at sea, so that we could guess from her answer if she and her mother had been looking in the bucket of water, and guess from that guess if she had looked for Richard Quin’s future too. But we knew that we should not traffic with magic, least of all now.
‘Miss Rosamund is very late,’ said Kate. ‘Shall I not serve tea? I think I will, as soon as the scones in the oven are ready.’
‘What, are there more scones in the oven?’ I asked. For on the table, between the chocolate and cherry cakes we had made out of our saved rations, a pile of scones was cooling on a wire tray.
‘Those are not good enough,’ said Kate. ‘Look at them, no lighter than you could buy in a shop, when I wanted to do them so well. But go and tell Richard Quin that tea will be ready as soon as he comes down.’
I found our brother standing in his room with a racket in each hand. ‘Has Rosamund come? No? I will come down in a minute but look, Rose, this is interesting. This is a brute of a racket, it always let me down. This is an angel. It plays the game for you. If I got tired, it never did. But I still don’t know what the difference between them is. They’re shaped the same, they weigh the same. A mystery, a mystery.’
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.