VI

IT WAS A DAY OR TWO afterwards that Oliver and I had to go down to the West Country for a charity concert, to be given at a house that was supposed to be very beautiful, Barbados Hall, just after Goodwood. There was so much reason why we should attend this concert, and there is so much of the accident in all events, that I did not think we would ever go. Oliver’s interest in the occasion was his passionate desire that I and a violinist named Martin Allen, who had been a fellow-student of mine at the Athenaeum, should play a sonata for piano and violin written by Kurt Jasperl, a Swiss composer in his early thirties. Why it was imperative that this should happen Oliver explained to Miss Beevor and Mary and myself one afternoon when he came in for tea. It was no trouble having Miss Beevor. She had to stay in bed perhaps one day in ten, which gave Kate something to distract her from growing melancholy. For the rest Miss Beevor was cheerful, and men liked talking to her.

‘Jasperl,’ Oliver said, to her rather than to Mary and me, ‘is consumptive, and he is just about to come out of a sanatorium after two years of treatment.’

‘Oh, poor young man,’ said Miss Beevor.

‘It would be appalling if he were to come out and throw away the strength he has got back by going out and taking some wretched teaching job,’ said Oliver.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Beevor, ‘the poor young man.’

‘If he could get one,’ added Oliver, ‘which is doubtful. You see, he has much against him. It is impossible to collect money for him in Switzerland or Germany or France, because his earlier compositions aroused keen controversy and were widely discussed, and were in fact quite worthless. They were cheap and nasty experiments in atonality.’

‘Tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor, looking across at Mary and me, over her tea-cup. She had made the journey all the way from Mendelssohn and Massenet to Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, and even to Poulenc, under pressure from our family, but she liked sometimes to make the point that travel can take one too far, that it may land one among the head-hunters.

‘The performance of these horrors had given him the reputation of a charlatan, whom nobody was going to be anxious to maintain. Moreover,’ said Oliver, a knot of trouble appearing on his forehead, ‘he is a violent and irrational man.’

‘Oh, tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor. She would have made a superb accompanist. ‘But perhaps it is part of his illness.’

‘No,’ said Oliver sadly. ‘He is just one of those people born with a taste for hurting other people. He enjoys contriving monstrous situations without issue. The last thing he did, which makes it impossible to collect money for him in Switzerland now and will make it impossible at any future time, I think, was quite bad. The wife of a rich industrialist, a Madame Kehl, who was herself quite a good musician, persuaded her husband, though he detested music, to subsidise Jasperl. But after a couple of years of this, it seemed to Jasperl that in giving him this money Kehl was showing signs of bourgeois complacency not to be borne. He also began to feel deep pity for Madame Kehl, whom he saw as tied to this bourgeois brute so insensible as to have kept him for two years, and he ended by imagining that he was in love with her. This was a pity from every point of view. He had a wife himself, and a mistress, and he had taken the mistress - and this is what makes collecting money for him anywhere in central Europe quite difficult - from a man called Pfleister who is one of the best known and best liked and most influential of German conductors.’

‘Oh, tchk, tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor.

‘His next step,’ said Oliver, with increasing gloom, ‘was to write a letter to Kehl refusing to accept any further benefits from a source so degraded, and expressing in inflamed terms his passion for Madame Kehl. And the trouble is that his genius got into this letter. He is a genius, you know. That is why I want Rose to play this sonata at Barbados Hall. He is a great genius. And, as I say, some of his genius got into this letter. Kehl was not only infuriated by it, he could not help believing what was said in it. Naturally this made him anxious to believe the worst of Jasperl, and he ran round Switzerland asking various critics and musicians what this chap was really like, and they all said that he had not a scrap of talent. They were quite right in saying so, on the basis of all they’d heard of his work. For those earlier compositions, they really were jackassery.’

‘Mmm,’ purred Miss Beevor.

‘The trouble was that Kehl drew from these quite honest and reasonable opinions a totally false conclusion. He knew his wife was really musical, and he thought the only reason she could have had for getting him to support Jasperl was because she was in love with him, since every musician he asked told him that the man was a charlatan. As she had never had any personal liking for Jasperl, and had indeed come to detest him during the period when she had to hand over her husband’s cheques to him, I imagine she could not have denied the charge more strongly. But there was that letter of genius between them. Ultimately they separated.’

‘Why do you take any trouble about this horrid man?’ asked Miss Beevor.

‘Because just about this time he began to write good music. He threw overboard his nationality.’

‘Ah, he found his keys,’ exclaimed Miss Beevor in rapture; and though this is an accurate enough rendering of a return to normality it made us all laugh.

Oliver went on, ‘He wrote a symphony, a violin concerto, and an opera which proved that he was a genius beyond all doubt. I think he may be better than Bartók.’

‘Well, isn’t he all right now?’ asked Mary.

‘No,’ sighed Oliver. ‘He specialises in never being all right. His symphony is so long that it is almost impossible to play it. A watch-manufacturer finally put up the money to get it performed in Geneva, and they started it much earlier than most concerts, but all except a handful of the audience had to go home long before it was finished, I think it went on till well after midnight. But that handful went mad about it, they were so excited about it they walked about the town singing and cheering until the police ran them in.’

‘I should have enjoyed doing that,’ said Miss Beevor, her glasses shining. ‘Think of hearing a piece of music that seemed like a revelation, and being so excited that you had to walk about making a noise in the streets. I dare say some of them didn’t even go to bed. Dear me, girls, it all makes me think of your dear Mamma.’

‘I wasn’t able to go to bed for hours after I had read the score,’ said Oliver. ‘But all the same the length writes the symphony off as a way of spreading Jasperl’s name and fame. The violin concerto is also too long, that matters a lot, for it is horribly difficult. So difficult that I think few soloists would risk it even if it were normal length.’

‘And the opera?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it is too short. It also has an extremely disagreeable libretto by a German poet. The very heavy principal part is written for a little girl of ten, which in itself raises a serious musical problem. But apart from that what happens to her is enough to keep the opera out of any opera-house. She is adopted by the childless wife of a farmer in Silesia, and the farmer rapes her in a hay-loft. An idiot farm-labourer informs the wife of what is going on, and she climbs the ladder and sets fire to the hay. She and her husband and her child are burned to death, and the curtain falls on a crowd of villagers rushing in and falsely concluding that the idiot farm-labourer is guilty of the crime and lynching him.’

‘But how unnecessary!’ breathed Miss Beevor.

‘Indeed, indeed, how unnecessary,’ agreed Oliver. ‘But the orchestration of the lynching is sublime. All this, however, gets Jasperl no further. These compositions cannot be performed, as you see, and it is difficult to read the scores. They have not been printed. It will be difficult to get them published, since Jasperl has this reputation of an excessively backward member of the avant-garde. It is hard even to read them in manuscript, for he copies his work himself, very inaccurately, and often refuses to lend them to those few who are interested, on the ground that they are unworthy. So there is nothing to do but collect some money for him, some of which he can spend on publishing these works, and maintaining him in the hope that he writes some more which will be easier to perform. And that is why I am taking Rose down to Barbados Hall.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Does it belong to somebody very rich?’

‘No, no. The Mortlakes have all they can do to keep the pediment and cupola over their heads, the wolf from the colonnade. But somebody rich will be there. The Mortlakes have to give this concert for some charity that is dear to royalty, I forget why. All sorts of, people who have been at Goodwood are going to it. And one of them is Lady Southways. She is an example of the connection between love and music of which we have often talked before.’

At that time a curious pattern of musical susceptibility was appearing among the women of the upper classes. In an earlier generation the most respectable peeresses and bankers’ wives played a tutelary part towards music; they were ranged in the boxes round Covent Garden opera-house as if virtue had an acoustic value. Now such a part was played by wealthy women with many lovers, who turned to music as soon as age began to take their lovers from them. It did no harm, though it was odd, after a concert to find that Beethoven and oneself had been for some members of the audience acting as surrogate for the duke who was the great lover of our day.

But it made Miss Beevor angry. ‘I call it disgusting. I read in the newspapers of Lady This and Lady That getting divorced again and again, and after a year or two there they are, popping up to tell Mary how wonderful her Skriabin is and telling how Stravinsky is, and what impudence and hypocrisy that is, pretending to understand always the most difficult music, when they have spent so much of their time in ways that cannot have helped on their musical education. And anyway it is all wrong. Music should be so elevating.’

‘But so is love-making,’ laughed Oliver.

It was strange to think that of the four people in the room only Oliver knew what it was like to make love.

He went on, ‘You are too hard on them, Miss Beevor. They are good old girls, only not at all vegetarian. And there is a similarity between love and music that makes them very generous in a certain direction. You must have noticed that there are really very few famous composers, compared with the number of famous authors and painters. The composers that are known to the mutt in the street are a very few - Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Bizet, Puccini, Elgar, you have the lot. It is a short list. We know more but they don’t. And there are apparently only a few great lovers, for when I ask about the pasts of my particular old girls, I am always told the same names.’ He mentioned the active duke, and gave other men. ‘It is a short list too, and I suppose it was a great credit to add a name to it. That Armenian painter who is going round London with every edible peeress, if you know what I mean, I suppose the first woman to discover his charm feels a certain pride. I always find these women take a great pleasure in putting up money for unknown composers, and I am sure they must be fascinated by the idea of adding a new name to a short list, associated with excitement and prestige. And that is how I have got hold of Lady Southways, who has promised to give me quite a reasonable amount of money for Jasperl, if she likes his music.’

‘But does she know one note from another?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I stayed with her in Scotland, when they performed my opera, The Useless Sacrifice, at Glasgow. She has a beautiful music-room, looking out on a firth, and she plays a great deal. One might say that her hands are always wandering over the keys; and really often they wander in directions which indicate some musical feeling. For example, when I was there she was constantly playing the piano score of Turandot, and all the wrong notes had the effect of making it sound more like Madam Butterfly than it actually is. Surely there is a certain sort of musical feeling there? It was, to be truthful, just that feat of transposition that gave me the idea that Rose and Martin Allen should play this sonata of Jasperl’s at Barbados Hall.’

Mary interrupted. ‘You are taking another slice of cherry cake, Oliver?’

‘Well, yes, I was,’ said Oliver.

‘But you crumble all the cake and pick out the cherries,’ said Mary. ‘That is absurd. The cake is quite good, I will go down and get Cook to give me some crystallised cherries, and you can eat as many of them as you like, without wasting the cake.’

When she had left the room, Oliver said, ‘How can it be that a sensitive woman like Mary does not see that eating crystallised cherries by themselves would not be at all the same thing as picking them out of a cake? But that is really the reason why I asked you and not Mary to play this sonata with Martin. I had better explain first why I asked Martin. This is one of the easiest of Jasperl’s compositions to understand, and dear Martin plays everything so that it sounds as if it were Brahms. The result should be something that will enchant the ears of Lady Southways. But I couldn’t trust Mary to be my accomplice in such a - well, one might call it such a light-fingered business. But you, Rose, you are a realist. You won’t object to taking part in what is really a parlour game, “In the manner of”, I think it’s called, when there’s such a good object in view. You won’t mind just for once playing the piano in the manner of Martin Allen, in order to keep Jasperl going.’

Just then Mary brought in the cherries, and he ate some out of politeness, but of course I quite saw it was not the same thing. And Kate followed Mary in to tell her so. She was quite cross. ‘I made the cake,’ she said, ‘and if anybody should mind your picking out the cherries I should, and I do not mind at all. They are quite different after they have been cooked with all the good butter and eggs and sugar. Anyway people sometimes like to push something away and say, “No, I will not have that.” When I take Miss Beevor her cup of milk when she is in her bed she always takes the skin off and says, “Ugh” and rattles her spoon on the saucer to get rid of it. But she wouldn’t like it if I took the skin off the milk before I brought it to her, she would not know where she was.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I wouldn’t mind,’ said Miss Beevor, and Kate said firmly, ‘Yes, you would, Madam.’ But Mary’s eyes widened and she laughed and exclaimed, ‘How stupid I am!’ It struck coldly through me that she was taking too much pleasure in this gloss on the process of rejection. It was as if I had suddenly seen the first signs that she was growing deaf and blind. We were not a big enough household to keep ourselves in perfect health. Kate and Miss Beevor were better than just Kate and me; but Mamma and Richard Quin should not have died, Rosamund should not have gone away.

‘How kind you always are to me, Kate!’ said Oliver. ‘You know I see through you, you are only teaching the children that they must let the little boy that has come to tea do anything he likes. I am really at fault, Mary was right, it was intolerable to crumble such a lovely cake. But forgive me, and help me: I want you and Miss Beevor to tell me what you think of this photograph of Jasperl. I took it on the sanatorium veranda. I wondered if I should send it to Lady Southways.’

Kate went behind Miss Beevor’s chair and they both peered at it.

‘Oh, not a nice face,’ said Miss Beevor. ‘Not a nice face at all.’

‘He is as cold and sharp as those snow peaks in the background,’ said Kate.

‘I do not think I would send this to Lady Southways,’ said Miss Beevor. ‘From what you say, she should be experienced in reading men’s faces, if anyone is.’ She handed the photograph back to Oliver and sat back, rubbing her glasses clean of the image they had just magnified. ‘But, you know,’ she broke out, ‘surely some of this modern music is really degrading and horrible.’

‘You forget,’ said Oliver with a smile, putting the photograph back in his wallet, ‘he has found his keys.’

‘And the man who fetches the laundry looks much the same,’ said Kate. ‘No modern music for him but he is a nasty beast.’

‘Let me see what he is like,’ I demanded. But Oliver did not seem to hear me, and said, ‘You see, Rose, to impress Lady Southways I have to rely solely on you and Martin doing your best at Barbados Hall.’ From his expression I knew what was now going to happen. Abruptly he stood up and said goodbye and left us. That was what always spoiled his visits, he suddenly got tired of us and went away.

I found our rehearsals amusing, though I felt ashamed, when I looked at Martin Allen’s good, kind, trusting face, which always, when he was playing, although he was entirely masculine, bore the expression of a woman tending domestic apparatus such as a sewing machine or a mangle. He got the sonata back into the nineteenth century all right, as he would have got the selvage seamed, the pillowcases fit for drying. But he did not approve of the enterprise, though he did not understand his own dubious aesthetic part in it.

‘What is the good of this?’ he asked Oliver, cutting in on his praise for our first finished account of the sonata. ‘You know that Jasperl will bitch everything up the first time he meets Lady Southways.’

‘Perhaps he never will see Lady Southways,’ said Oliver. ‘I doubt if she will go to Switzerland much now. She is too old for winter sports. I have thought of everything. And if she invites Jasperl to England, he will probably get into some altercation with the immigration officers and not be allowed to land. Oh, it should be possible to spin the thing along for a year, or even two years. And that will be perfect for Jasperl.’

Martin asked abruptly,. ‘Where is Madame Kehl?’

‘Living alone in a large villa in one of those little towns between Geneva and Lausanne, charming country but baked without salt.’

‘Should we not,’ said Martin, ‘be thinking out something that would be perfect for Madame Kehl?’

‘Nothing can be perfect for her now,’ said Oliver. ‘All one can do is to get some more music out of Jasperl.’

I said, ‘But how old is Madame Kehl? She does not sound as if she had come to the end of her life. She was young enough for her husband to be jealous of her, to think it possible that she might have had a love affair with Jasperl. Probably she will fall in love again, and forget both of them.’

The two men did not like me saying this. They did not take it as a simple statement of fact, and after a second laughed, as if I had made a pleasing show of spirit, a gallant feminist protest against unalterable conditions favouring the male. I thought how little I liked men, and said, not too agreeably, ‘Shall we try the sonata again? The second movement is still quite rough.’

The rehearsal had to stop a week before the charity concert, for Martin had to go off to run a music summer school. But this was in the West Country too, so we arranged that Oliver and I should go down to Barbados Hall the night before the concert, and meet Martin there, and spend the evening in a rehearsal of the Jasperl sonata. Lady Mortlake wrote all three of us letters saying she would be so glad to have us, she had admired us all for years, and although we knew she had probably not done so, she obviously had had the intention of being nice, all over four pages.

Oliver and I met on the platform at Waterloo, just about two o’clock. We had to take a very slow train, for the faster ones did not stop at the junction where we had to change to get to Barbados Hall. We arranged not to eat before we started, and I brought a luncheon-basket, with some of Kate’s special sandwiches, the ones with chopped chicken mixed with mild curry sauce, and smoked cod’s roe beaten up with lemon and a very little whipped cream, and some cherry cake, so that Oliver could eat it the way he liked. At first we talked about some records that a young American composer had sent us both, tone poems about the Great Lakes, very nice orchestration that showed he had studied in Paris, but nothing much to say, though that might come. Then we passed a wonderful nursery garden, and the train ran across Maidenhead Bridge, and we looked down on the reach where Queenie had found no houseboats, and I was too miserable to speak.

Oliver said, ‘Why have you suddenly stopped talking?’ and I was irritated, it had happened so often when he came to see us that he himself suddenly stopped talking, and got up and went away, too. Then came that stretch of railway where there are more nursery gardens. We began to eat, and looked out on fields of roses, the cross-looking little plants set far apart on the rich earth, in the midst of their crossness the small flowers so bright that it could be seen even at that distance whether they were red or yellow or white. It was the time when the herbaceous plants were in their prime, and a full brush had painted broad blue bands of delphiniums and purple bands of Michaelmas daisies. Blue and purple comes out of the earth everywhere as July goes towards August, and in the hedgerows there were chicory and mallow and thistles and vetch. They reminded Oliver of the fields round the house in Norfolk where we had spent the first summer of the war, we always thought of it now as the last summer.

‘That is one of the things I always remember about that visit,’ said Oliver. ‘Either there were an extraordinary lot of flowers there, or I had never noticed them before. And there were wonderful ones down on the sea-shore too. Your brother once took me to a part of the dunes where there were miles of yellow sea-poppies. You cannot think how beautiful it was, with such a restrained beauty. Not many flowers on each spiky plant, and the leaves a wonderful blue-grey, that sometimes melted into the tongues of water that lay among the dunes.’ He spoke as if he were sure that Richard Quin had taken nobody to this stretch of sand except himself. But of course he had taken Mary and me there as soon as he found it. I found myself saying to my dear brother, ‘Really, you should not have been so ready to please, you came near to pretending.’ But of course this was nonsense, he had no faults.

After that the railway runs for a long time beside a trout-stream and a canal, set in a pale green landscape like the background of a Rowlandson drawing; and Oliver and I found that both of us had again and again looked out at them, and resolved to take a train to the district the first free day we had, and walk along the clean buff towpath and over the clean grey bridges. Of course we had never had time. Our own country was covered for us with a nexus of work; to get a holiday we had to take refuge in another country, it was impossible for us to travel in England. But this present journey, though there was to be a concert at the end of it, was half-way to a holiday. As we munched, the great downs, stretched out like sleeping dogs, came up between us and the South. In a field an elm lay prostrate, that had been felled by a winter storm but had brought its root with it, sticking up like its feet, so that it still lived and had brought forth its summer foliage. Among its leafy branches children played and waved to the passing train. They looked like the children in children’s books, genuinely different from adults, and preoccupied with other interests, as our family had never been. I waved back to them, though the sort of child I had been, not yet dead in me, despised them. Yet I wondered if such children grew into adults happier than Mary and myself; and instantly noted that this afternoon I was almost happy.

So was Oliver. ‘It should all go well,’ he said. ‘I have had several letters from Lady Southways, and really they sound very good.’ He took them out of his pocket and read me passages. ‘It is funny how all rich women write letters in scherzo form, and funny too that they evidently want to give the effect of a scherzo played by a pianist of imperfect technique, for they always end out of breath. But you see what hope uplifts her, she sees herself as godmother to a prodigy, as Diaghilev to Nijinsky. And that is really what she will be, if we can get her to keep him for a couple of years, if we can get him to be kept for a couple of years without biting the hand that feeds him and infecting it with a specially deadly microbe, which he has obtained by seducing the wife of a pathologist who once had done him a good turn.’ He laughed and, folding up the letter, said, ‘But I do not really think this funny at all. Why, why, I ask myself, why,’ and he sang the theme out of the second movement of the sonata.

We had left behind the neat little river that kept company with the canal, now there ran beside us a broader and wilder stream. Our train halted where it widened beside the ruins of a mill. We looked out of the windows on the other side and found this was our junction. We had to hurry to get out our suitcases and the lunch-basket, and reach the little train that took us, through wet fields veined where they were wettest with drifts of late meadowsweet to foothills that were golden with the afternoon sun. This was the West, almost as foreign as France. ‘It might be true,’ said Oliver, looking out at the cottages that sat with clumps of hydrangeas like footstools at their feet, and wore late clematis and roses and fuchsias like excessive jewellery, ‘that here they knew of no other ways of killing cats but by choking them with cream.’

But there was no car waiting for us at the station. We both took out our letters to see if we had made a mistake, but no, we had been told to be at this station, at this hour. There was no taxi in the village, so we left our luggage with the porter and crossed the road to an inn, the Huntsman’s Horn. The innkeeper’s wife said that we could have tea in the garden, and we warned her that a chauffeur from Barbados Hall would be coming to find us. She smiled at us as if we held a secret in common, and offered to make us scones if we would wait, but we reminded her that we might be fetched at any moment. We found a rustic table facing a bed of dahlias that were now transfixed by the horizontal shafts of the late sun. Crimson and scarlet, orange and yellow, purple and lavender, white and grey, burned the great lamps of incandescent velvet; and while we sat staring the innkeeper’s wife came along the paved path, tenderly bearing something white in her arms, smiling down on it. She spread it before us with a transparent affection of the casual, and we looked down on the phantom of a tablecloth, covered from hem to hem with darns. It was a disconcerting exhibition of toil and thrift in the midst of this profligate floral splendour, this velvet that had not been woven, these lamps that burned no oil. But it was her treasure. She smiled so proudly that I said, ‘What a wonderful cloth,’ and she said, ‘Why, yes, it is. It comes from Barbados Hall.’ She had been a kitchenmaid there in the time of Lord Mortlake’s father and mother, and when she had left to be married Lady Mortlake had told the housekeeper to give her any linen that there was to spare, and she had found a wonderful damask tablecloth that had been used for big dinner-parties but had had some hot candlegrease dropped on it. The hole had been right in the middle, so she had cut it into four, and she was still using them, though that was forty years ago. She could well believe, she told us, that we had never seen lovelier linen.

We sat among the fiery flowers, and drank strong tea and ate bread thick with strawberry jam and Devonshire cream, and followed with our fingernails the pious intricacies of the network of darning cotton, and talked of music and that summer in Norfolk and what Richard Quin might have done if he had not been killed. A bumble-bee came about us, making the very sound time would make if it did not pass silently. Almost an hour had gone, and the chauffeur had not come for us. ‘Martin will be going mad,’ said Oliver, ‘we should have gone through the sonata at least once before dinner. I will go and find a telephone.’ But he called from the house that there was none, he would have to go to the rectory up the road. I waited happily, for I was engaged in an adventure, I was doing something quite unlike anything I usually did. I was not in our home at St John’s Wood, I was not going to a real concert, I was not at the Dog and Duck, which was now more troubled than my too empty home or any concert-hall, because of the unresolved misery of Queenie. I was moving in a free place where my movement would have no consequences, for in three days Mary and I would go on our holiday, and there would be no more reason for me to see Oliver until he wrote a new composition which I could play. And that might be a long time, for he had spoken of beginning another opera, though for some reason I felt that that might be a mistake.

Oliver came back a little disconcerted. He always had his pride that with him everything went smoothly. ‘It seems the car they sent for us broke down. We cannot be fetched until another car comes back and is sent out again. It will perhaps be another three-quarters of an hour before it comes. That is all right, though it seems a little strange, but what worries me is that I could not speak to Martin. Evidently the butler could not find Lady Mortlake, it was a pansy who spoke to me, I think it was Lionel de Raisse. He was very much concerned at the thought of you being left high and dry like this, but he really did not seem to grasp what I meant when I asked for Martin. But we will be all right, there is no reason to worry.’

The old inn-keeper came out and took us behind the dahlia-bed to show us his rabbits; blue Angoras, making a great show of sensibility. Just at the right time, when the light had left the garden, his wife hurried up the path, explaining that the Admiral who was the second husband of Lady Mortlake’s mother, and lived at the Dower House, had called in for some soda-water, and would be pleased to take us up to Barbados Hall, just as soon as he had fetched some medicine for his invalid wife at the surgery. ‘It will be nice for you,’ she breathed, ‘to be driven by one of the family.’ She made us feel like the donors of an altarpiece, elevated above their station by being represented in proximity to sacred personages, and, smiling, we waited for the instrument of our elevation on a bench outside the inn, our luggage at our feet, resting on a strip of cobbles, set shining grey in a network of blue shadow that edged the rose-red road.

‘That is a superb suitcase of yours,’ said Oliver. ‘An oddly superb suitcase, if I may say so. It is more what I would have expected of Lady Mortlake or Lady Southways.’

‘I bought it in Paris,’ I said. ‘It is the product of terror. When we were little our family luggage was awful, Japanese baskets that had broken at the sides, and pockmarked tin trunks. People used to laugh at us at railway stations, and the landladies at seaside lodgings used to sneer like Dickens characters when our things came off the cab.’

‘What, were you poor?’ exclaimed Oliver. ‘I never knew that.’

I stared at him. I felt as if he had lain indifferent on a beach while I drowned in the surf. ‘Of course we were poor. How could you know us and not know that we had been poor?’

‘I knew only that your mother was a widow, and that you had had an isolated childhood, and that you and Mary seemed unlike other people,’ said Oliver. ‘But you had that nice house in Norfolk, I supposed you were all right and always had been so. Weren’t you? You always seemed to have so much of everything. I told you, there were more flowers in the fields round that house than I had ever seen anywhere else.’

‘We had nothing,’ I told him angrily. ‘Oh, it was so dreadful for Mamma. We had less than nothing. There were always debts, duns came to the door, we had the most horrible clothes, and shoes were the worst thing of all, they were so dear that we always went on with the old ones long after they had begun to hurt. Ask Mary, she will tell you.’ I was enraged, but what I said was wide of the mark. I was angered not so much by his ignorance of our poverty as by his remark that Mary and I seemed unlike other people. I hated that he should share the obstinate persuasion of the world that there was something strange about us. But as I saw the pity on his face anxiety struck through me, I asked, ‘And you? What sort of childhood did you have? Were you poor?’

‘No, no,’ he said impatiently, ‘we were not rich, but we were not poor. But why were you so poor? How did it happen?’ He shook my arm to make me tell, but it was then that the Admiral came up in an old Daimler, driven by an old chauffeur, it might have been a chariot in a masque representing honourable old age. He hobbled out and introduced himself, and we were at once torn by that conflict which, for us, usually raged in the shadow of a great house such as Barbados Hall. The Admiral’s blue eyes were hard in the wrinkled waste of his old eyelids, he was hard and stupid and obsolete. There was impertinence in the candour with which he conveyed to us that, though it was not surprising that I was reasonably elegant and a pianist, since women were condemned to be entertainers of all sorts, it was surprising that anybody as masculine as Oliver should be a musician. But Oliver explained with perfect civility that from his earliest childhood he had never cared for anything but music, as he might have confessed to congenital asthma. The Admiral was so much nearer death than we were that it was not becoming for us to correct him; and indeed it is necessary that some people should be insensitive to music. All musicians know that a community in which everyone was susceptible to musical excitement would run mad. The old man’s deafness let sound speak its meaning in safety. Also he and the chauffeur, and all the crowd of servants one could divine behind him, had their own mystery. We drove into a park flooded by the setting sun, and on a knoll of golden turf, before a golden hanger, a herd of deer, bright brown, amber-bright, stood fixed in fineness, a line of attention running taut from each raised muzzle to the same point of the compass. ‘It’s easy to know what’s coming to them down the wind,’ called the chauffeur, and the Admiral gave a connoisseur’s chuckle and grunt. We had no idea what they meant. For these men the earth was covered with forms and embodied motives of which we were ignorant, as for us the air was a complex of sounds and articulated motives which they could not hear. They were also our associates in art, practitioners of a craft we could not undertake. Their kind had not built the house that lay in a sudden garden amid the deep folds of this part; but their kind had caused it to be built and had preserved it, as our careless kind could not. We reached it as the sunset blazed. The central wing had two storeys of deep red brick divided by stone pilasters; the brick was glowing, the stone was stained the colour of ripe peach flesh. In the windows flamed small reflected sunsets, their wildness bridled by good taste, for each window was so right a shape. Pilaster, strip of brick, pilaster, strip of brick, might have made too simple a pattern had not the pilasters burst into capitals under the eaves, capitals ornate as the heads of the heavier flowers, the stronger lilies or the Datura. On each side there was a wing in a later, classical mode, faced by a colonnade; the one not flushed by the sunset was lilac-blue. Time had not been allowed to spoil one square inch of this.

We could not drive up to the door, for there was a car in front of it. On the broad steps three menservants were coloured by the sunset like the stone, and might have been architectural details of the huge and highly decorated doorway. They looked at the Admiral’s car with a certain distaste, and the Admiral cut through our goodbyes with an enquiry as to whether we were quite sure that Lady Mortlake expected us to arrive tonight, and telling us that he had only wondered, and that he must be getting on, his wife had had a special salmon sent from Ireland, and some friends were coming in to share it at an early dinner. It might have been that there was the fog of a family quarrel in the air.

As we mounted the steps the butler remained standing against the carved framework of the door, his face and hands and shirt-front glowing in this remarkable identity of colour; he might have been a trompe l’oeil butler painted on the stone. We found it odd that his silvered handsomeness should be discomposed, that he should regard us with what seemed like open reproach, and should abruptly exclaim, ‘We would have fetched you!’ and should make no motion to usher us into the house. But just then there came through the door a woman whom I could not doubt to be Lady Mortlake, and not for a moment could we believe that she was there with the intention of welcoming us. She was dressed for departure, and she burst out of the house as if it were a constraining bodice and now her bosom could be bare and free. She looked at us with frank impatience because we were in her way, then recognised us, and after a hostile pause repeated our names loudly and with ecstasy. Some faces had shown behind her in the darkness of the doorway, and with a freshet of laughter these disappeared. It had been obvious that she had raised her voice for other ears than ours, that she had been giving what she knew would be a cue for that laughter, which was not good-natured, which she had known would not be good-natured. On us she turned the full brilliance of her appearance in a greeting far too cordial, to listen to it was like looking at a pattern material from too short a distance. Like many women of that time, she spoke with a cat’s voice, and overstressed certain words, introducing into each sentence an affectation of unbounded enthusiasm and a satire on all spontaneity. She explained to us that she had to rush to the bedside of a sick relative. To convince us of her regret she leaned towards us and we were lapped by waves of an intoxicating scent, surely more useful at the bedside of the well than that of the sick. She had not seen the Admiral’s car, so she identified the invalid as his wife, her mother-in-law. The doctors could not tell, it seemed, what was the matter with her.

‘Well, she has a special salmon tonight,’ said Oliver, but Lady Mortlake was not attending. She ran on into the orange light as if it were the sea on which she was embarking for Cythera.

We went through a circular hall, where gods and goddesses stood on pedestals round the curved wall. Some people had a second before been looking down from the gallery above, but they had stepped back. We went to our bedrooms, which were the usual thing one finds in old houses, big square boxes with Queen Anne furniture and needlework pictures and 1860 watercolours, and I gave the housemaid my keys and washed and made up, and was ready when Oliver knocked on my door. His room was just round the corner of the corridor, I had heard him singing the theme of the first movement of the sonata as I washed. We went downstairs and found the butler, and before we could ask him where Martin Allen was, he told us with a bizarre hauteur, as if he were acting a butler in a film, that if we followed the footman to the small music-room we would find the violinist. As we went along the corridor Oliver hung back and muttered, ‘I wonder what this means. She was going to a lover, of course.’ It angered me that he spoke as if I would not know that. ‘But to the girdle do the gods inherit. But there is something else wrong: I cannot understand why she should think we cared whether she was here or not tonight, our time will be taken up with the rehearsal. Still, Martin will be able to tell us.’

But when the footman opened the door Martin was not there. It was a shabby little room with an upright piano in a corner, and in front of the fireplace stood a stout and sallow girl of seventeen or so, dressed in crumpled bluish-pink linen, and holding a violin and a bow.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said, scowling. ‘I thought you would never come. Why have you been so long? I am Avis Jenkinson. What, do you not know who I am? Didn’t that horrible woman tell you? Oh, I know I should not call her a horrible woman, for we are in her house. But I told her I would not come unless she telephoned you both and heard it was all right. You see, Martin Allen cannot come. He has had an attack or appendicitis and is having an operation tomorrow morning. I am supposed to play instead of him. Oh, do not trouble to stop looking like that, I know how awful it is. I should not ever have consented to it for a moment, but I wanted so much to meet you both, and I did make it clear that I would not think of it unless she telephoned to both of you and told you who my teacher was and you could telephone him and he would tell you how good I am. But of course she did not do it. Everybody here is a beast, and she is the worst beast of all. They have been such beasts I did not dare to go in to tea. But I suppose,’ she said bitterly, ‘by this time you think I am a maniac.’

Oliver stood silent. He raised his right hand to his lips and bit the knuckles, then whispered to himself, ‘Jasperl.’ Then he shook himself, as if he were a dog coming out of the water, smiled at the girl, and said, ‘Let us sit down and then you can tell us all about it.’ She looked so awkward and bedraggled as she dropped into an armchair, one foot beneath her, that I had to ask, ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since yesterday afternoon.’

‘Alone?’

‘Of course. How would I know people like this? There are some professional musicians here, but they are as horrid as the rest. Of course I do not mind what they do to me, but I want to kill them.’

‘But there are three of us now,’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, and we are the real people, and they aren’t,’ said Avis. ‘I have been telling myself that, ever since I got here, I have been reminding myself that in a hundred years’ time I shall be remembered, and they will be forgotten as if they had been sheep or horses. Spavined horses, they say in books, though I do not know what it means.’

‘But how did it all happen?’ asked Oliver.

‘I live near here,’ said Avis. ‘My father is clerk of the gasworks at Aysthorp and I went to the music summer school were Mr Allen has been. When Mr Allen had to go into hospital, because he had appendicitis, the people at the music summer school telephoned to Lady Mortlake, and she was in a panic, she wanted you to come to the concert whatever happened. It is something to do with someone called Lady Southways. Oh, it has nothing to do with music, Lady Southways likes you,’ she said, pointing her bow at Oliver in a censorious manner. ‘And Lord Southways has a lot of money and breeds wonderful racehorses, and Lord Mortlake is poor, or what these people call poor, and anyway I wish the Mortlakes were so poor that they would starve, and Lord Mortlake is trying to breed horses, and he has a mare that is very good, and he wants it to have a foal by a horse that belongs to Lord Southways, so Lady Mortlake wants to please Lady Southways by getting you here. She knows nothing about music, though she talks about it all the time. She went on and on about a concert of Beethoven’s later quartets, and I think Beethoven’s later quartets are jolly difficult to understand, don’t you? Don’t you? But she came to me just because they told her at the music summer school that Mr Allen had been practising Jasperl’s violin and piano sonata with me, she did not see how impossible it is that I should play it with you; I should not have said I would, of course, but she was so nice to me when she came and asked me to do it, and I did so want to be with you. So I came here, and I have been practising it, and I see how impossibly difficult it is, I cannot get the hang of it at all, everybody here has been foul, when I come into the room they stare at me and stop talking. I must have been mad when I said I would come, though really I am quite good, I am exceptional, my teacher would have told you so.’

‘Who is your teacher?’ asked Oliver.

I shut my eyes. It seemed to me inevitable that she would answer ‘Silvio Sala’. For many years I had not thought of the poor old humbug who had sat in a gilt armchair, once part of a touring company’s Rigoletto set, between two panels of machine-made tapestry, representing Mascagni and Verdi, in a house on the Brixton Road, pretending to have been a professor at Milan Conservatory and charging Miss Beevor huge fees for lessons to Cordelia. Inevitably he must by now be in his grave. But this girl’s air of foredoomed failure was so great that I could not doubt a parallel between her fate and Cordelia’s; and it would not be a true parallel, for this girl had no last resource of loveliness, no alternative career. Her defeat would be absolute.

But she answered, ‘I have two really. Kingsley Torbay and Pietro Pedrucci. But I like Kingsley Torbay better. There is almost nothing more that Pedrucci can teach me, and so he does not like me.’

‘What, you are at the Athenaeum?’

‘Yes, yes, I have a scholarship there. You haven’t been to a single students’ concert since I’ve been there,’ she accused me. ‘But if you had you would see that I am pretty much what you were when you were there, allowing for the difference between a violin and a piano. Why did you choose the piano? Surely the violin is a better instrument. I would be happy at the Athenaeum if it were not that nobody likes me much except Mr Torbay. But I expect they liked you.’

‘No, they did not like me much.’

‘Did you ever find out why?’

‘No, never.’

‘I wish, I wish people were not such beasts,’ the girl raged. ‘But how extraordinary they dared to be beasts to you. You must always have been good-looking. How horrible that I am going to fail you, for of course I cannot play this sonata.’

‘Play us something, anything,’ said Oliver, ‘then we will know where we are. Though I think I know where we are.’

She sighed. Instead of a plain and harsh adolescent, she looked a pretty and timid child. She put her pad under her chin and picked up her violin and bow, muttered through her teeth, ‘I am no good, really,’ and began to play. I was right that she was foredoomed to failure. She would perpetually suffer the same defeat which was the lot of Mamma and Mary and myself and all our company of interpretative musicians. Her body could not produce the sounds which would make others hear the music which her mind knew the great composers had intended to convey; nor did her mind fully grasp what their intention was. But her body was so nearly obedient to her mind that it was aware of the extent of its disobedience and was ashamed; and she understood so much great music that she could see where she had a blank space on her map. She would possibly be a better player than I was. I could hear signs that she would ultimately possess that sublime lucidity which made Mary my superior.

She lowered her bow and grumbled, ‘I played that like a carthorse.’

I said, ‘Let us get one thing out of the way at once. You are our equal except in experience. You have not learned quite a number of things that you need to learn, but that is only because you have not had the time. Oliver here will agree, we are all three on the same level.’

‘That is quite evident,’ said Oliver in the casual tone that was needed, for the tears stood in the girl’s eyes. She had used mascara on them, with a marked lack of skill, and they were smudged already. ‘If anybody of your age could play the Jasperl sonata with insufficient rehearsal, it would be you. But you must not be disappointed if it turns out that the feat is impossible, and we call the thing off. It does seem like trying to go down Niagara in a barrel, the chances of being smashed and submerged are terrific. But let us get down to it.’

‘But that’s another thing,’ sulked Avis, ‘you cannot get down to it here. This piano is out of tune. They only call this the second music-room for an excuse to put me here. It is the schoolroom really, the footman calls it that. Apparently Lady Mortlake has children, nobody remembered in time to say, “Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful!” There is a lovely music-room with a good Steinway, but they did not want me in there, there is a horrid little peer who plays the piano like a musical box and he is always in there.’

‘Show us where it is,’ said Oliver.

‘No, no,’ she begged. ‘They are too horrible. Yes, of course, I see that we must.’

It was in one of the two classical wings: a large room with a tremendous chimneypiece, where Apollo was playing his lyre before an audience of gods and goddesses enthroned on mounting marble clouds, and grey and white walls embossed with flutes and trumpets and viols and harps in plasterwork, and high windows looking out between bluish silvery curtains to a lawn and a distant prospect of the park. One of these windows was open and swinging on its hinges, and the wind had sent some sheet music drifting across the carpet, which was also patterned with musical instruments. ‘Have you tried this Steinway yourself, Avis?’ said Oliver, going towards the piano. But he came to a halt. A slim man was sitting on the stool, his face pressed down on the keyboard, his arms clinging to the music-rest, his shoulders shaking. Oliver went back to the door and shut it noisily. But the man continued to sob, more noisily than before, and did not lift his head. Oliver crossed the room to the piano, Avis and I behind him. We were all insensible to the little man’s sufferings, partly because there was an indefinable air of habit about his paroxysm, but chiefly because we were no longer three human beings, we had become a rehearsal of Jasperl’s sonata, and we saw him simply as an impediment to our full being.

We came to a halt beside him. Oliver was about to speak but paused in embarrassment. There was a circle of baldness on the little man’s head, and the long wisps of mouse-coloured hair that he had combed across it bore traces of golden dye. Oliver sighed and put a hand on his shoulder, and the little man sat up with a jerk, but did not look round. Staring in front of him he cried: ‘Of course you’ve come back. I knew you would. But it’s no use. I’ve finished with you. I couldn’t start again even if I wanted to. You’re hopeless. You’re so base. So utterly and so vulgarly base. If you hadn’t said you never wanted to ski with anybody but me, I wouldn’t have minded what you said to Lawrence at luncheon. But you did say it. And I never asked you to say it. You insisted on saying it. I remember putting my hand over your lips when you said it because I didn’t want you to commit yourself. It’s never been me who asked for assurances. It’s always you who gave them. Who thrust them on me. And I couldn’t help believing them, though everyone warned me against you, because I’m that sort of person. You should know that by now. And you should know what skiing means to me. And Kitzbühel. Our place.’

Oliver said through his teeth, ‘Oh, God. Please, please, Lord Sarasen, get off that piano.’

The little man swivelled round and gaped at us. ‘Please go away,’ he said fretfully. ‘How dare you interrupt us?’

‘But there is no one else here,’ said Oliver.

The little man looked round the room and buried his face in his hands.

‘Please, Lord Sarasen,’ said Oliver, ‘we want this piano.’

‘And if it is Mr de Raisse you want,’ said Avis, ‘I think that’s him out in the garden, lying face down on a lilo by the herbaceous border.’

The little man bridled, and rearranged his collar and tie, and swallowed, and suddenly sprang to his feet and ran through the open window.

‘God forgive us all,’ said Oliver. ‘The poor little beast. Now let’s get down to it.’ While I altered the stool he pushed forward a music-stand for Avis, who said, ‘I don’t understand about homosexual men. I know they’re supposed to be like women but they aren’t, really, are they? Their voices are higher than ours, and quite differently produced, and there’s the funny tone no woman ever gets, as if they had plush tongues. And women don’t move like that, look at him now, it’s like a loose-limbed corkscrew, not like a woman. And all that he was saying, no woman would talk like that, about giving assurances and believing them, and no woman would have got so excited just because that awful man de Raisse said to the flautist that he ought to go to Kitzbhel for winter sports. You wouldn’t, would you?’ she asked me, and turned to Oliver, ‘Do you understand about homosexual men?’

‘Afterwards, afterwards,’ said Oliver. ‘Rose, are you ready? But, Avis, aren’t you at all sorry for that pathetic little brute?’

‘No,’ said Avis. ‘Why should I be?’

‘You are a horrible brat,’ said Oliver. ‘But we will go into that later. Now for our dear Jasperl.’

She had known that Martin Allen’s interpretation of the sonata was wrong, and had disregarded it, but she had not understood it any better herself. But her error partook of her magnificence. I had only known musical misapprehension rise to the empyrean on such strong wings once before, when I heard ‘Jardins sur la pluie’ and ‘Les Danseuses de Delphe’ and ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’ played by a schoolgirl who had never heard any Debussy, and played them as if they had been written by Beethoven during an attack of cerebral anaemia. Although only thirty-five years had passed between the death of Beethoven and the birth of Debussy this confusion of the two composers played such havoc with their essential qualities as a historian might equal if he ascribed to Napoleon the same motives for conquest as inspired Julius Caesar. Avis’s error about Jasperl was also temporal. She had not heard this kind of contemporary music, and though she had wit enough to see that Jasperl did not belong to the past she played the sonata as if it were jazz, as if it were an improvisation, whereas its character was, if anything, over-deliberate.

She was furious with herself for her mistake, which she immediately perceived from my performance. ‘But wait,’ said Oliver, ‘you are simply leaving something out of your conception of the work. Once you get it in, the whole thing will become easy to you. You are used to music that has melody and an accompaniment to that melody. Here the melody has its own rhythm, and the whole work has its own very strong rhythm, which encloses the other as in a casket. We want the wild, adventurous thematic material, which is always lunging off into dissonance, to be kept in order by this overreaching rhythm. Listen. This is part of something which was written this year by Bartók.’ He played it to her twice. ‘Now this is something I wrote.’

‘Play it again,’ said Avis, and when he had played it twice she said, ‘But are you sure you have really anything to say there?’

‘Whether I have or not, you can’t give me a chance to say it at all, unless you give the overall rhythm its chance. And I may have nothing to say. I mean I may have nothing more to say. I know I once had something to say, but perhaps I have gone bad lately. But quite certainly Jasperl has a lot to say. Now try over that second movement, you will get the trick of it better there than in the first.’

She began to understand, and we took her through the whole sonata.

Then the door softly opened, and someone looked in, and softly closed it. Then it was opened again, quite noisily, and a voice called my name and Oliver’s. We pretended we did not hear, but in a minute they were standing in a crescent round the piano, a dozen or so of them, including three girls. We knew most of them. They belonged to a circle very prominent at that time, which was paradoxically at once rubbish, and as certainly not without value. Half of them belonged to families that were rich or aristocratic, and sometimes both, and the rest were the friends they drew from every class, either because they loved them or found them gifted in the arts. They were in all things paradoxical. Nearly all, except some of the younger homosexuals, had plain faces, with protruding eyes and receding chins and colourless skins, but their bodies were graceful, and they had slender wrists and ankles and a dancing walk. Individually each had an air of distinction. Yet, seen together, they recalled the poorest sort of touring theatrical company which one saw sometimes waiting at railway junctions if one travelled to a concert on a Sunday, tawdry and insecure. They spoke always in captious voices, as if their pride lay in their capacity for constant rejection; yet they enjoyed life, and they had to be admired for the strength of their enjoyment, which sent them all over Europe to see a beautiful church, a beautiful harbour, a beautiful people, or an innovator in the arts. They had a moral code so confused that the nature of the confusion could not be guessed. Their fastidiousness plainly did not exclude conduct from its range. They bore themselves with the confidence of those sure that they had guarded their honour, who value their honour.

There were a number of things they would not do; but it was impossible to guess what these might be. I was often perplexed by these people and I was perplexed by them now. Amongst them, much loved, standing at this moment with his arms cast about the unreluctant shoulders of the most aristocratic of them, was a young man who had tried to sell me a Matisse which had turned out to belong not to him but to the elderly peer who had lent him his house while he himself was away on a world tour, and who would not have dared to prosecute him for theft. It was not that his friends did not know that he was a criminal in both the narrower and the broader sense, a thief and a betrayer of a vulnerable lover’s trust, for they often joked about his enormities. But there they were, enlaced with him, and it might be that tomorrow I should hear of them crossing the world, not necessarily in comfort, to admire a work of art which in technique and argument depended on honesty.

I always found them mysterious, and now they were presenting us with a mystery particular to this hour. They greeted Oliver and me with cries that were in part their own tribal version of the convention followed by Lady Mortlake, which at once pushed effusiveness to its extreme and mocked it, and were in part intelligent enough references to our recent work. But soon their conversation was muted, and they became, for them, curiously immobile. They were like the bright herd we had seen on the knoll, all looking one way, all braced by a common perception. But we understood them hardly better than deer and could not guess what was coming down the wind to them. Presently they left us, saying, with gaiety that rang as queerly as the laughter one hears as one goes along corridors to a swimming-bath, that they would see us later.

Avis said, ‘They wanted to say something to you that they did not want me to hear.’

They had indeed averted their eyes from her and had said none of the pleasant things that would have been natural in such circumstances, they had not asked us how we found our new colleague and given us a chance to compliment her.

‘Come on, you silly little girl,’ said Oliver. ‘They do not like you, and why you should mind that I cannot see. Rose does not waste her time regretting that she has never been elected Beauty Queen of Clacton-on-Sea.’

‘As a matter of fact I do,’ I said. ‘Passionately. But let us get on.’

The sonata went much better this time. At the end we sat back and Oliver smoked a cigarette, and nodded his head at us as if he were a pasha, and said: ‘But it must be late. Yes, it is late. I wonder when they have dinner.’

‘Not so late as this,’ said Avis.

We had to ring several times before anybody came, and then it was the handsome silver-haired butler, who was still flushed, not now by the sunset, but by the glow of slight intoxication. He was surprised to see us. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘You were not expected to dine. I’m afraid there is nothing ready for you, and the rest of the staff has gone to the Fire Brigade Ball at Aysthorp. There is nobody here but young Alice the kitchenmaid. This ball is our great social occasion, Lord Clancardine himself, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, attends it. My own wife would never miss it, she has gone every year since she was a kitchenmaid herself, bless her, poor soul. It is a pity,’ he said censoriously, ducking his head to see himself in a mirror and sleeking his hair, ‘that her ladyship never now honours us with her presence. The dowager Lady Mortlake always made it her duty, so long as she could get about. But who am I,’ he said, with an effect of impersonation, ‘who am I to cast the first stone?’ He was perhaps admiring some debonair guest he had admired while waiting at table.

‘What were we intended to do about dinner?’

‘Why, her ladyship thought you would be going with the other guests to the party Mr Oswald Sinclair is giving over at Great Barn,’ said the butler. ‘You were all invited, to be sure, and I thought you had gone and we had the house to ourselves, for I believed I saw Lord Rothery and his friends come in here to tell you it was time to be leaving.’

‘There has been a mistake,’ said Oliver.

‘You have not missed much,’ said the butler dreamily. ‘Mr Sinclair has not an inherited cellar. But it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He returned to the study of his image in the looking-glass, bowing as if in gallantry.

‘Can you get us something to eat?’ asked Oliver.

‘Nothing hot, I fear,’ said the butler. ‘None of the staff will be back till midnight, and please God they are later. The time will pass like a flash, I fancy.’ He remained for a minute suspended in a smiling reverie. ‘But you must have a bite. What a pity I did not know before! For young Alice the kitchenmaid and I cooked something for Mr de Raisse and Lord Sarasen. They have had a falling-out and have made it up again, so they had a fancy not to go to Mr Sinclair’s party, but asked if they could have a meal private like, in the pavilion beside the lake. So young Alice and I cut them some cold chicken and gave them some white burgundy, just the same as I had got up for Alice and me, and a bit of the raspberry cream we had for lunch, and a nice piece out of the Stilton just the same as I’d got ready for Alice and me, and we carried it over. Very agreeable it was, going down to the lake. I would have done that for you and the two ladies with pleasure, with greater pleasure, for after all it is the way we were all brought up. I would like to do everything I can to make people happy tonight. Who is the better for it if things go wrong? So I will put out some cold meat and salad for you, and what is left of the raspberry cream and Stilton, and some of the peaches, and this white burgundy, this Montrachet, all in the Parrot Room, for that is where we have our little late suppers. It is opposite the foot of the staircase that takes you to your bedroom, and you cannot miss it, but I will leave the lights on and the door open, so that there can be no mistake. This is a confusing night.’

The door closed behind him, and Avis cried, ‘I told you they had something to tell you that they did not want me to hear. They did not want to take me with them, they hated me so much that they even ditched you so long as they could leave me out. It is partly this awful dress, it is the wrong colour, and it is no use ironing it, it gets crumpled at once, the housemaid did it for me this morning, she is nice. It was a bad buy, but I have no time. I have to rush through my work, and there is nobody to look after me, I have to be squalid. And I have almost no money, of course my clothes are awful. But I do not think that is the only reason why people hate me. There is something else. What does it matter what it is, it means that I have brought something horrid on you. You will not want to have anything to do with me.’

But the butler was back with us.

‘If there is anything you want, say it now,’ he bade us, ‘for now I will lock the door to the kitchen quarters. I will lay you out the supper, but then I will turn the key.’

He looked hard at us and assumed a look of grave responsibility. ‘It is to protect the silver,’ he said. He scrutinised our faces and told us, ‘The Mortlake silver is famous.’ Then bowed and walked backwards, as if we had been royalty, then turned about, and made an eager scuffle to the door, rising on his toes, as if he were a king bee about to take off in a nuptial flight. Some consideration struck him, and he called across the room, ‘Is there anything more? I am muddled tonight, it is all the vexations. Her ladyship is terrible,’ he said to himself. ‘When she has a new one, such a pack. And I have only one thing on my mind.’

The door closed on him.

‘See, Avis,’ said Oliver, ‘see what a kind of universe we live in! Not the grim cage of hate which you imagine, but a lovely warm swimmy place, with stuffy little rooms in the kitchen quarters where young Alice the kitchenmaid can be fed on chicken and white burgundy and learn what is good for her. Now, what shall we do until our supper is ready?’

‘Go through the sonata once again,’ said Avis. ‘I am not hungry any more, now I know that supper will be there. Let us get it as right as I can do it, so that I can sleep. Last night I cried for hours and was all swollen. I do not look so awful as this usually.’

‘Rose, could you do it?’ asked Oliver. ‘Right. Then let us start, and, Avis, never let your sense of the importance of the rhythm leave you.’

We started off again, and knew the combination of tense effort and serene relaxation that is a good rehearsal. I thought as we came to an end, ‘What is the good of a performance? Why do we not retire at the first possible moment and simply play good music with our own kind?’ When it was over I was in that state of exaltation when the intelligence that lives in one’s hands and in the depths of one’s mind suddenly visits one’s lips, and I was able to speak to Avis of technical tricks that I had long practised without ever realising it. This ugly child; who thought only of herself, was so wholly committed to beauty, so selfless, that she made immense additions to the treasure I had been seeking to lay up for myself for twice her lifetime.

But soon there was a distant sound of banging on wood, and the clanging of a bell, and I went out to see if someone was trying to get into the house. I thought it might be that our fellow-guests had returned from their party and that the butler, in his desire for privacy and his slight confusion, had locked more than the door into the kitchen.

I went along the corridor past the circular hall by which we had entered the house. All the lights were extinguished but two torches held by bronze boys at the foot of the staircase, and the gods and goddesses cast on the curved walls huge shadows which the curve made comical, leviathan. At the door, on which some people were still beating, were the man whom we had found crying over the piano and another, in very beautiful dressing-gowns, one mulberry, one rich blue, who were pulling at the heavy bolts of the front door, and crying, ‘Darlings, we are doing all we can. But they’re frightful, too frightful!’ The bolts gave way so suddenly that the three people who had been beating on the door were precipitated into the hall. I stood behind the pedestal of Artemis and her hounds and watched with fascination because these people were not only performing certain movements and speaking certain words and creating an incident in the ordinary course of living, they were also acting the incident in the convention, or what we suppose to be the convention, of eighteenth-century Neapolitan opera.

The bolts were heavy, but the two men pulled them as if they were still heavier, as if they were of a weight such as would not have been put on the door of any house built later than the Middle Ages. The three people who fell into the hall affected to have lost their balance as would have been impossible unless each had been leaning all his weight against the door and had had only one toe on the ground. Recovering themselves, they rushed together and, engaging themselves in stylised embraces, made of their coloratura greetings a quintet. Their meeting, which could not have been less planned, was the more like a scene on the stage because the last person to fall into the hall was a famous beauty, Lady Phyllida Dane, whose natural fairness emitted as much light as any actress gone forth in make-up under the limes, and whose dress was of the particular greenish rose that any theatrical designer might have chosen to set off the mulberry and the blue of the two men’s dressing-gowns. The friends who accompanied her were both stock characters from early opera. One was a tiny and emaciated elderly woman with black ringlets, named Sukey Herzegovina, a pet of Lady Phyllida and her set, for whom she acted as interior decorator and fortune-teller and go-between. The other was pantaloon, an old retired diplomat called Sir Geraint Something-or-other. Without doubt he would be forced to marry Sukey in the second act, but it would turn out in the third act that it was all right because the priest who had performed the ceremony was really somebody’s serving-maid in disguise.

The quintet then developed into something so formal and so rich in invention that it actually recalled certain scenes in Cosi fan tutte. Standing to the left of the semicircle and crying out a sort of melody, Lionel de Raisse pinned Phyllida’s elbows to her side and cried, ‘Oh, darling, but you must stay the night, you must indeed,’ and she replied, ‘Oh, darling, we simply can’t, we are on our way to Carl,’ and Lord Sarasen and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint, standing at about the same position in the right semicircle, repeated this theme, with adaptations of the thematic material appropriate to their characters, for about the same number of bars. There was one delightfully anachronistic feature in the ensemble; I had been teased because Lord Sarasen’s manner of speech as he wept over the keyboard had aroused in me a musical memory which I could not quite identify, but I now realised that the plangent sweetness in his voice had the exact quality of the boy soprano’s rendering of ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’, which was the favourite record of Aunt Lily and Aunt Milly and Uncle Len, and, I believe, about a million other people at that time. But his barley-sugar smooth tenor twists and turns made delicious dramatic contrasts with Sukey’s refusals which were uttered in rapid triplets, denying extravagantly but keeping strict yet conciliatory time, and Sir Geraint’s falsetto runs, which were almost in the nature of an accompaniment. I felt some of the fascination they exercised on themselves and their friends, and did not, as I had intended, slip out of the shadow of Artemis and her hounds into the deeper shadows of the corridors and go back to my friends, but came out and smiled at the newcomers and greeted them before I went away. Lord Sarasen asked me if I had any idea how to get some food for these poor people who must be starving; he and Lionel had rung the bell and nobody had come. I explained that the staff were away at their revels but would be back at twelve, which could not be far off. I remembered how long Avis had worked, and how she had said that she had had no tea, and I turned back to them, and said, laughing, ‘If you find our supper in the Parrot Room do not eat it. Oliver and Avis and I have been rehearsing all evening. That Jenkinson child is a genius.’ ‘What, that dingy child?’ said Lionel de Raisse, and Lord Sarasen, the wings of the dove suddenly renounced, asked sadly, ‘Oh, do you think so?’ The newcomers caught an intimation that there was an issue between their friends and me, and for a second they stared at me like ill-natured children. But de Raisse and Lord Sarasen went on to talk about the possibility of getting food for his friends. In a trio Lady Phyllida and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint said that they had had an early dinner at Bracegirdle and that anyhow Carl would have champagne and oysters lying about the house. I left them laughing happily at Carl’s extravagance.

I went back to the music-room and found Oliver and Avis still busy with a problem that might be solved by an alteration of fingering. ‘What was all that, Rose?’ said Oliver, looking up. ‘Only Lady Phyllida Dane and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint,’ I said, ‘paying a call.’

‘Not staying here?’ asked Avis. ‘No? Oh, I wish I could have seen her. Is she really beautiful? I thought so. But if she comes here she is sure to be a beast.’

‘No, she is not a beast,’ said Oliver. ‘You really are a little ass, Avis. Phyllida Dane is a good girl, devoted to her plump little tea-cosy of a husband, and a great help to good causes. She takes a lot of dumb oxen to the ballet and to the right concerts that would just otherwise stand in the fields and low. Put your mind on your work and stop wasting your energy on your harmless inferiors.’

They did not need me. I went to a sofa at the end of the room and lay and watched them, and thought how well they were getting on together. I closed my eyes and set out on a backward journey through dreams to Papa and Mamma and Richard Quin. My heart ached as I found myself going through the dark corridor of that direction and I knew that when I turned this corner I would come on these three, but not on Rosamund, for though she was no longer in my life she was not dead. But I hurried on knowing that those who were safe in death would explain to me what had happened to her, and I was folded in one of those dreams so happy that they are not remembered on waking, for where they are experienced never sleeps, never wakes. I woke once to hear several cars drive out, and then the chatter and laughter of people passing the door. Our fellow-guests had come back from Mr Sinclair’s party. Sometimes the music Oliver and Avis were playing forced itself on me, as music does on sleep, not as sounds, but as ragged multicoloured streamers of light across the dark backcloth of the eyelid. I was at rest, I was not at rest, I was happy, I was distressed, that is to say I was alive. I shared in the peace of the dead, I was exiled from death in this state where I swayed on the balance, and then I was aware that two people were confronting me who were not dead, for they laughed, and laughter is the sign of our astonishment at this perpetual state of insecurity. I did not want to come back, but I was delighted at the faces of Oliver and Avis, they were so deeply familiar to me. I did not have to wonder for a minute who Avis was, though I had met her only that evening.

Oliver said, ‘I am pointing out to Avis that though you have been asleep and we have had our backs turned to you this last hour or more, nobody had crept in on all fours to steal your rings, so she need not think this such a house of evil. Now come on, we must find the Parrot Room and eat.’

We went through the corridors with our arms enlaced, as if we were all students, and Avis said, ‘This is a great adventure. Nobody at the Athenaeum will believe it when I tell them except Mr Torbay.’

‘It has been a great adventure for us,’ said Oliver. ‘Nobody will believe us when we tell them how well you play.’

‘My sister Mary will,’ I said. ‘She sits waiting for news of people like you. She reminds me of the religious people who long for more and more children to be born so that they may serve God. She wants more and more musicians to play the works of the great composers.’

‘Will I be able to meet her too?’ asked Avis, but took it for granted she could, and burst out, ‘Oh, it is all right now! I will always remember how horrible it was and that you came and it was all right.’

‘But I see no door open on a room with all the lights on,’ said Oliver. ‘Can that old villain have forgotten us?’

‘This should be the room,’ I said. ‘He told us it was exactly opposite the foot of the staircase. But the door is closed.’

Oliver opened it gently and felt for the light. ‘This is it,’ he said, and we followed him in, Avis exclaiming, ‘Every room in this house is better than the last! They do not deserve it.’

There could be no doubt that this was the Parrot Room. It was a vague and languishing little library, the sort of place where a charming but ineffective man might write a sensitive diary of his empty days, or two egotists meet for courtship that would lead to nothing, however far it went. The curtains were sea-green and shining, and the walls were covered with the kind of old paper which has a pile like plush, and were the colour of green distance, of grassy hills seen afar in summer twilight. Against three of the walls were low bookcases, painted greenish white and cut very delicately, so that the many-coloured inlay of books seemed to float in lines rather than be packed on shelves; and on the fourth wall was a mantelpiece of sea-green marble, patterned with a pale orange stone in starry shapes that made it seem insubstantial. The centre of the mantelpiece and each bookcase had its blanc de chine parrot, each caught in a different moment of raucous and ruffling comment. They were the only objects in the room that gave back highlights, that were positive and recalled the action of the will, the reaction of criticism. This was the Parrot Room to which we had been directed; and under the chandelier was a table with a white cloth and set with silver and glass and china.

Avis said, ‘Will it always have been like this? Or has she done it, though she is so horrid?’

But Oliver and I were looking at the table. Round it five chairs were set askew. The glasses held wine at different levels; on the plates were peach-skin, peach-stones, the buttery mess where somebody had scraped off the rind of a cheese like Camembert and Brie; there were emptied coffee-cups standing oh saucers full of wet cigarette-ash. On a butler’s tray set up against a bookcase there were more dirty plates, a dish with a chicken’s carcass on it, another with some aspic to show there had been cold meat there, an empty salad-bowl, a glass dish with some ooze of whipped cream in it.

‘We are like the three bears,’ I said. ‘Who’s been eating my porridge?’

‘They have left us some bread,’ said Oliver. And he fingered some bottles at the back of the tray, ‘But nothing to drink.’

Anger blinded me and choked me. ‘They have taken your supper. How dare they!’

‘What!’ said Avis, who had been touching the parrot on the mantelpiece with her fingertips and now turned round. ‘But they all went out. Why did they want our supper?’

‘I told them it was our supper,’ I raged.

‘But who were they?’ asked Oliver.

‘When Phyllida Dane and Sukey Herzegovina and Sir Geraint came Lionel de Raisse and Lord Sarasen let them in, and they wanted to give them something to eat,’ I explained, ‘and I said, “There is some supper for us in the Parrot Room, please do not eat that, we have had no dinner.” They knew!’

‘What a prep-school trick,’ said Oliver. ‘Oh dear, Rose, how can I get you something to eat?’

‘It is not me,’ I said, ‘but it is you, men always ought to have lots of food to eat, and Avis, she is young, at her age she should have lots to eat.’

‘I could not eat now,’ said Avis. ‘I want to kill them, I wanted to kill them before you came, now I want to kill them and torture them as if I were a Red Indian. How dare they eat your supper and make a fool of you, when you told them where the supper was? They did not like you, of course. They kept saying you were a virgin.’

‘Oh, Avis, and you did not protect Rose’s good name by saying that you had heard different?’ said Oliver.

She gaped and asked, ‘Oh, should I have?’ and I said, ‘It is all right, he is laughing at you. Oh, Oliver, do not laugh at us. This is really horrid.’

‘Yes, it is horrid,’ said Oliver, ‘because one does not know what to do. I feel it is absurd to be angry because three pederasts and a blonde and a procuress have eaten our supper. But I feel that if I am not angry I really am a little too docile for something that walks on two legs. I feel I shouldn’t have let this happen to you and Avis. But it is all so silly. Must we be angry?’

‘Must we be hungry is what we had better ask,’ I said. ‘Do you think that when that butler’s wife came home he forgot his care for the cellar and unlocked the door between the house and the kitchen?’

But the padded leather door down the passage was firmly closed. Avis said, ‘I told you they were beasts, why did you tell me I was wrong?’

‘We did not quite tell you that they were not beasts,’ said Oliver. ‘We suggested to you that they were not beasts to such an extent that you had to worry about them. But just at this moment they have been beasts enough to get us into a situation where we are thoroughly hungry.’

We walked back towards the Parrot Room, and hesitated at the door while Oliver asked us if we would care to eat the bread, and I exclaimed, ‘Oh, I remember now! There are some sandwiches we did not eat in my picnic-basket, and some coffee. Let us go up to my room, and we will eat them before we go to bed.’

‘That will make up for everything,’ said Avis.

‘It will make up for everything, and we will play our sonata tomorrow afternoon and go away.’

‘But I shall never see you again,’ said Avis.

‘Nonsense, we are saddled with you, and you are saddled with us, for the rest of our lives,’ said Oliver. ‘We know how good you are, because we are so good ourselves, and you know how good we are, because you are so good yourself, and we cannot get rid of each other. Now, up these stairs, for Rose’s sandwiches and bed.’

But when we came to the landing we stopped. Mine was the first room: and outside it were my suitcase and my picnic-basket, draped with my nightdress and my dressing-gown, and my sponge-bag and my beauty-box and my bedroom slippers on the floor beside them.

‘By God, it cannot be,’ said Oliver. He turned the doorhandle, but the door was locked. ‘But by God it is.’

‘Phyllida and Sukey and Sir Geraint meant to go on to Carl’s, wherever that is,’ I explained, ‘but Lionel de Raisse and Lord Sarasen wanted them to stay. Well, they have stayed.’

‘But are they all in one room?’ said Oliver. A suspicion crossed our minds. ‘My room is just round the corner.’

But as we went to see if what we thought had happened Avis caught us back. ‘If they wanted three rooms, they would take mine too,’ she said. ‘Mine is beside yours, oh, I cannot bear it if they have put my things outside my room. They are so disgusting. It is a hateful thing they have done to you, because you are a goddess, but your nightdress is lovely, your dressing-gown and everything is lovely, my suitcase is brown-paper, but my nightdress is cotton and my dressing-gown is flannel and it isn’t even clean. Oh, why did I ever come to be tortured like this?’

‘Oh, this is hell,’ said Oliver.

‘You are a silly little fool,’ I said. ‘How should you have decent clothes before you have earned any money? And even now when I go on tour I get my things in an awful mess. Come along and we will see.’

We went to the corner of the passage; and there was Oliver’s suitcase with thick silk pyjamas of a curious violet-blue and wine-coloured dressing-gown on it. It was odd to think of him doing his shopping. And in front of the next bedroom was Avis’ brown-paper suitcase and her poor things, thrown out with special contempt. She could not help crying, and I too found tears of rage on my cheeks.

‘I do not know what to do,’ said Oliver. ‘I should kick in the doors, beginning with yours, Rose. But when I had done that I would have to roll out whoever was in your bed, and I don’t think you would care to sleep in sheets warmed by Phyllida or Sukey.’

‘But how could they do this?’ I wondered.

‘Because they are all drunk,’ he said.

‘Yes, de Raisse and Sarasen were a little drunk when they let the others in,’ I said.

‘And there were three bottles of burgundy there, and a brandy-bottle,’ said Oliver, ‘all empty. Yet I would have thought this hardly old Geraint’s mark, even drunk. But let that be. We will find bathrooms to wash in, and I will carry down your cases and we will pick ourselves the most comfortable sofas downstairs.’

‘No, no,’ said Avis. ‘Let me carry my own things down.’

‘Let that be,’ said Oliver. ‘That is not what really troubles you. What do you want to do?’

‘Why, run at the doors, and kick the panels in, and then run at whoever I find inside and scratch their faces and pull their hair out by the roots and hit them till they fell on the ground and then jump on them,’ said Avis, ‘and there is something out of the Bible about bowels gushing out that I would like to happen to them.’

‘I am so angry that I would like to do that too,’ said Oliver, ‘and yet I do not want to do it at all. And neither do you. You simply want to go away and get on with your work. And that is all Rose wants too. But that makes us more Quakerish animals than we like to be.’

‘There is something,’ said Avis, and choked.

‘What is it, my dear?’ I said.

‘I do not want to play to these beasts tomorrow afternoon,’ she sobbed.

‘There is no question of that,’ said Oliver. ‘Neither Rose nor you can play here.’

‘We will go home and play together later,’ I said.

We made her sleep on a very fat sofa in a little library, and when she was settled under a rug we had found in the hall, we gave her the sandwiches that were left in the picnic-basket. We had to say we had had some while she was washing. She tried to prevent us seeing her flannel dressing-gown, which was indeed quite dirty. I could not wait till I got her home to Mary, who would see her through all this. Then Oliver found me a sofa in a long drawing-room and a tablecloth for a blanket, and we said goodnight. Since leaving Avis he had grown silent and looked unhappy; and beyond telling me how sorry he was he had let me in for this insult he made his goodnight brief enough.

After he had gone I shuddered with fury at the humiliation we had suffered, and was exasperated at the beauty of the room. There were vague pictures of mountains sloping to plains and fused by them in golden sunshine, temples on seas themselves swimming underneath seas of light, a heroic vision of earth, floating on walls made vaporous by raised plaster-work, which suggested a ghostly growth of flowers up an invisible trellis, and on the faint golden ceiling above me showed plasterwork and Venus and Adonis. I lay on golden brocade and there were deep falls of golden brocade at all the tall windows. There was something very displeasing in suffering such an extreme humiliation in these gorgeous surroundings. The fundamental flaw in the world was that there was no drama worthy of the setting at the Dog and Duck. Green trees, each shapely as if turned by some craftsman neat as a potter but in love with wilder shapes, leaned over the mirror of the Thames, and should have witnessed some serene consummation of the lives of Uncle Len and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily, but they had to stand still and be scorched by the fire of Queenie’s unassuageable and even unidentifiable longing. The house where Mary and I had our home should have seen some event that had never happened within its walls, that should have happened if we were to be quite sure that music was real, that it was an honest interpretation of life and not a legend to be told to distract our attention from intolerable features of existence. It was not right that these worthless dilettantes in this house, who were taking refuge from life in perversity, who were going further than perversity into the pure mischief of monkeys, should have the power to make me doubt the value of the world, the value of art. And there was not Rosamund to reassure me. I tossed and turned and put out the light.

Perhaps I slept a little. In any case I was awake when the door opened and the light was turned on. Golden light flooded down on the golden room from great chandeliers, faintly tinted. I sat up and saw Oliver standing at the end of the room in his dressing-gown. I noted the jut of his shoulders, which was strange, for they were not broad, yet he held them as men with broad shoulders do. I put on the reading-lamp on the table by my sofa and he switched off the chandeliers. I was a little cave of light in a hall of shadows, and he came to me out of the shadows. He looked wretched.

‘Were you asleep?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t think so. What is the matter? Have they done anything else?’

‘No, no. All quiet on the barbaric front.’

‘But there is something worrying you.’

He stood by the sofa, and sighed deeply. ‘Rose, Jasperl means something more to me than I have told you.’

The lamp shone strongly on his anguished face. I looked up into the darkness that hung about the upper walls, past the landscapes of sunny plains and mountains, of seas incarnadined by sunset, faintly glossed, to the ceiling, at the huge black shadow his standing figure cast across the golden brocade curtains. I had not thought Oliver was homosexual. He had spoken of men that were with mockery. But then homosexuals often mocked their own sort. I drew the tablecloth that was my coverlet more neatly round me, and straightened myself. I felt too tired to talk about this, and thought how peaceful it must be to lie quietly in a coffin.

‘You knew my wife? You knew Celia?’

I nodded.

‘She was very beautiful and she was a good musician and I loved her very much. And it was all right for a time. We could not have been happier.’ He sat down and turned the lamp away so that it shone on neither of us, only on a little marble sphinx that lay on the table. ‘Could we have been happier? That is one of the things I do not know. I am not sure whether she was ever happy. One is an idiot,’ Oliver said, ‘however little one is an idiot about other things, one is an idiot about love. I used to come into our house at Hammersmith and pass through the square hall we had, and in the middle of the hall there was a highly polished table and Celia used to put flowers on it, in a round dish, a little raised, so that it cast a big reflection on the shining wood. I remember specially that every spring she used to fill it with those very brown wallflowers and forget-me-nots, and when I came in I used to see the blue forget-me-nots reflected on the wood. When I wonder whether Celia was ever really content with me, I think, “Of course she was, just think how wonderful it was when I used to shut the door behind me and see the curved garland of reflection of those forget-me-nots blue among the highlights and the brown depths of the wood, and I felt I was home, that everything in the house was going to be like that. Of course we were happy!” But that is stupid. All that that meant was that Celia liked putting forget-me-nots in that particular dish, on that particular table, and that I liked the look of them when I came in.’

Rosamund had come back into my mind. It was no argument that she loved us, that she had liked to eat cream and honeycomb with Richard Quin, all people not dyspeptics like to eat cream and honeycomb, nobody had suffered from spiritual dyspepsia badly enough not to like being with Richard Quin.

‘But of course I have more reason than that to think that we were happy,’ said Oliver.

‘Yes, that I understand,’ I said.

‘But if you love anybody does it not last for ever?’ asked Oliver.

‘It does with me,’ I said.

‘It does with me,’ said Oliver. ‘You and I are the same sort of people. Celia is dead but I still love her. I cannot love anybody else.’

‘The person I love is not dead,’ I said, ‘but it would be easier if death was what divided us. But I could not love anybody new.’

‘When they take charge of you like that, they should not go away,’ said Oliver.

‘What do you mean? Was it not you who went away?’ I asked.

‘I?’ said Oliver. ‘I could not have left her any more than I could have cut off one of my hands or feet. What is it?’

‘Ah. I made a mistake,’ I said. ‘But it does not matter. Go on. Go on.’

‘I have to tell you all this because it is all so strange, and nobody else that I can think of would understand. I cannot think of anything you would not understand. I must have bored you a lot lately because I come and see you and derive a stupid satisfaction from the thought that if I told you what was troubling me you would not think me a fool.’

‘Oh, Oliver, my dear, I wish you had told me long ago. I would never think you a fool.’

‘Most people would. You see it was Jasperl who took Celia away from me.’

‘Jasperl!’ I looked about me, at the glowing suggestions of the sunlit plains and mountains, the flushed temples, on the darkness of the walls, the faint moulding on the darkness above that suggested the beauty of Venus and Adonis. ‘But he is so horrible.’

‘Yes. He is horrible.’

I wanted to cry out that Celia must have been horrible too. I had to bite my knuckles.

‘He is horrible as musicians are not. He is horrible as few really good artists of any kind are. He is horrible like a bad French painter living at St Tropez might be, with a wife and a mistress quarrelling in a small kitchen and their children, mixed with the children of a seduced servant, playing in a yard with ironmongery, dragging an old tin bath about. He has thick black hair with a wave like a woman’s and a jaw like a boat, and a huge Adam’s apple, and he mocks and leers.’

‘How could she?’ I breathed.

‘Am I so bad, Rose? Tell me frankly,’ Oliver asked.

‘You are quite good-looking and you are nice, you behave properly,’ I said.

‘I thought I made her happy,’ said Oliver. He stopped and pondered. ‘Looking back, I cannot believe it. Also we had enough money. I’ve always had this house, which I thought quite lovely. We could go away when we wanted. We had pleasant friends. What was it that I did not give her? But I could not give her what Jasperl gave her, for it was vile.’

‘Did she run away from you with him?’ I asked incredulously.

‘She went to Switzerland to give three Fauré and Duparc concerts,’ said Oliver, ‘and when she came back she was quite different. She made some excuse to go back to Switzerland quite soon, and this kept on happening, she was supposed to be giving lessons. She was unhappy. Anyone could have seen that. She enjoyed nothing. Yet she seemed well, even more vigorous than I had ever known her. But her work went off. I thought that was what was worrying her. She did not care about it any more. She sang quite without genius for the last four years of her life.’ He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘I would not have thought she could have existed without her genius. But there was a lot more than that. She suddenly stopped being well. She went to Switzerland and was away far longer than usual. Then she came back, utterly miserable. And I got an anonymous letter telling me that she had been the mistress of Jasperl. What made is specially disagreeable was that the letter came from Jasperl.’

‘How did you find that out?’ I asked.

‘I gave it to Celia at once,’ said Oliver, ‘and she recognised the writing. I realised that moment what was to be our tragedy. You never were at the Hammersmith house. There was a room at the back that was almost all window. I have a feeling that a grey river flowed through my head at that moment, carrying barges with it. I thought it unlikely that Celia had spoken of me in any way that would lead Jasperl to suppose I was not likely to give her an anonymous letter about herself. If he had not disguised his writing it could only be that he wished her to know that he had written it. He was, we both thought, trying to get rid of her finally. It appeared from what she told me that he had told her he was tired of her some time before. She had made not only her last visit to Switzerland, but the one before, in order to persuade him to take her back.’

He fingered the marble sphinx and fell silent.

‘Oh, Oliver! Oh, Oliver!’ I breathed.

‘I was at first terribly angry. I could not bear it that she had not told me. It seemed to me vile that I should have shared her with him. Not because I minded that, though of course I do, but because she minded it, I knew she had, looking back on it.’

I wished furiously he would not talk of such things. But his voice cracked with misery as he said, ‘I asked her why she had done this, and she said that Jasperl had asked her not to tell me. I said she need not have told me who her lover was, she could just have said she had a lover. Then she told me that she had put that to Jasperl, and he had forbidden her to tell me that she had a lover, even when she offered to give me lying details, so that I would think that it was someone quite unlike Jasperl. When I asked her what reason he had given for this monstrous prohibition, she said he had given none. It had seemed to her that if he told her to do something it was right for her to obey; and as we sat there in this window by the river, with this letter he had written to torture me and dismiss her, lying on a table between us, I saw that it still seemed to her a law of nature that she should do anything that he told her to do. I was in the presence of what I then called madness. I would not call it that now. But anyway the agony was something I could not understand.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘That is it, not being able to understand.’ This was far worse than Rosamund.

Oliver suddenly laughed. ‘How I should hate to tell this story to our forthright little Avis,’ he said. ‘By God, she’s good, isn’t she? But to get on, I stopped being angry with Celia, and I must have been fairly irritating to her, because I was patient with her as one is with people who are mad. We separated for a time. She cancelled her engagements and went to stay with some people in Italy, and I went over to America and stayed with old Lowenthal in New England. I was full of confidence, for a damn silly reason. I had got all his early compositions and I had quite rightly thought them worthless. This gave me a feeling of superiority. Then we started all over again in the Hammersmith house. And in six months Jasperl got her back again.’

I cried out.

‘Well, he would want to,’ Oliver said. ‘It is his aim, his constant aim, to hurt people. By getting Celia back he hurt me, and he had by now a considerable interest in me; and he humiliated her, and humiliated the German conductor’s wife with whom he had eloped in the interval, and then had all the fun of humiliating Celia again when he left her. As he did a few months later. That was a peculiarly horrible business. He had fallen ill with phthisis, and Celia had felt that she was of use to him, looking after him during his haemorrhages. She was very kind to people when they were ill. It also made some sense of their relationship. She was not just there to be the object of his sadistic passion, the subject of her own masochistic passion. She was his wife, his mother. At this point, and of course it was inevitable, he threw her out. He professed a sudden loathing for her which, he said, made him feel excited and ill, so that his doctors ordered that she must go away. This was at Lausanne. She did not leave the town at once, for there was no longer anybody to look after him. By this time all that horrible business of Kehl I told you about was over. But Jasperl did not send for her, and she decided to kill herself. It was unfortunate that she was one of those people who are compelled to read everything in print that comes their way, if a parcel came to us wrapped up in sheets of newspaper or pages of a book she would flatten them out and see what they were about. Somewhere she had read that some quite common medicine which is quite easy to get a doctor to prescribe is fatal, if one takes it over a period of a week or so and stops oneself from drinking anything. She got a prescription of the stuff and sat in a grim little hotel taking the dose and drinking almost nothing. If it had not been that her eye had caught this wretched piece of information I think she would still be alive, for she was so kind, she would not have hurt her family and me by causing the scandal of a suicide. Her family do not yet know either that she ever left me or that she killed herself.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ I said. ‘Did she kill herself? I heard only that she came back to you and got ill and died.’

‘She killed herself,’ said Oliver. ‘But it took a very long time. She got so ill that she fell into a coma and they took her to a hospital, and I was sent for. I was there for weeks, and then I took her home. But she had done the job, her kidneys were destroyed. She died dreadfully.’ He slipped forward from his chair and buried his face on the cushions of the sofa where I lay, just below my feet. I sat up and leaned forward and stroked his hair, and presently he raised his face and said, ‘During the time when she was dying she often spoke of Jasperl, but she never told me anything good or pleasant about him. When she was delirious and cried out for him it was not as if she longed for him, it was more as if he was a torment against which she was protesting. It was simply as if he were the disease from which she was suffering.’

‘This was madness,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said obstinately, ‘it was not. She had been horribly disfigured by her illness, but after she was dead her beauty returned to her. I stood by her body and I was intensely conscious that she looked as she had done until she went to Jasperl, but that she was gone from me; while she had been with me, unchanged, my wife, till the last moment of her life, though she had been puffed and swollen and slow. All these strange dealings with Jasperl had been carried on by the Celia that I had loved.’

I thought to myself, ‘Yes, what Rosamund has done she herself has done, she is not changed.’

‘Then, when I had buried her, I heard that Jasperl had written these new works, this symphony, this violin concerto, this opera, and I went to great trouble to get the scores. My motive was part curiosity. I had a feeling that perhaps I might find what she had seen in him. But I also was being base. I had derived great satisfaction when I first knew she had been Jasperl’s mistress in reading his early compositions and finding they were worthless. I am sure I hoped that those later compositions would be worthless too.’

‘I wish they had been,’ I said.

‘No, that would have done no good. It would have left the mystery of Celia’s love for him unsolved. And you know, Rose, that no good can be done by there being more bad music in the world. Even when I read the stuff and hammered out the important passages on the piano and realised that Jasperl had genius I was glad that it was so. But it added to my perplexity. I had loved Celia, Celia had seemed to love me, we had led a happy life together, she had lied to me and degraded herself and walked into a bog of cruelty for the sake of a man who had nothing good or even agreeable about him, who was a fiend out of hell. That was one mystery. Now there was another. To me music is contrary to hell, the annulment of evil, but this fiend out of hell was a better composer than I am.’

‘No, no,’ I cried.

‘As we stand now, he is the better of the two,’ said Oliver obstinately. ‘Rose, what does that mean? You see what the problem is. I don’t mean that I think music ought to help people to be kind to their mothers or pay the rent regularly, and I am sure that at the very moments when mutts are most sure that Bach was ecstasising over the Christian mysteries he was thinking of sound and nothing else. But music is what Celia and I were, and not what Celia and Jasperl were. And it is strange, it makes nonsense of it all if Jasperl is a great composer. Doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought of the person I loved as being the same as music, too. And all my doubts seem doubts of music, too.’

‘You know, I always knew you understood,’ said Oliver. ‘How strange we should have the same experiences. But I must tell you what I want to ask you. After Celia died I fixed about selling the house at Hammersmith and I went to Switzerland, and I sought out Jasperl. I did it to show that I did not believe Celia’s love of him was simply madness; and I did it to show I still believed in music. He was not sure when I found him that I had not come to kill him, so you can guess what he did. He stammered out that Celia had from the first pursued him and that his motive in sending her away, the first and the second time, was to send her back to her lawful husband, partly out of respect for holy matrimony, partly out of respect for my compositions, which he professed to admire. I think it may have been true that Celia pursued him. He was her destiny, the martyrdom to which her cruel God called her, it is possible that when she came face to face with him she followed him as an early Christian saint might follow a bishop whom she knew was to lead her to the stake, the grid, the lions of the arena. That is not, however, how Jasperl put it, but there were the three damned scores, unperformable, perverse, magnificent. I explained that I had not come to talk about Celia but to see how I could keep him alive and get him on to writing more music. He was miserably unhappy in a state sanatorium which was good enough for the ordinary patient, but no good for him. He could do no work. I got him out of that to a more comfortable private place, where he could have his own chalet and a piano and strum away as he pleased. I have been keeping him going ever since, and, Rose, I cannot do it any more. Not a day more.’

‘Of course you cannot,’ I said. ‘We must think of something.’ ‘Oh, Rose, he is so vile!’ sighed Oliver. ‘He cuckolded me, and I, the funny English cuckold, come over and save his life. Of course it is funny if such things are funny; and to Jasperl they are enormously funny. Or rather he pretends that he finds them so. He knows everything. He has chosen to be evil with his eyes open. He knows that in a marriage such as Celia’s and mine the husband is not a cuckold. That is the main difficulty. There are others. Twice I have had to go out to Switzerland, just to find him another sanatorium, because he has made himself intolerable to the quite decent and kindly people who were looking after him. But this is the chief source of trouble: that the man whom he cuckolded is now helping him. The jest chokes him every time I go to see him. I know he has roared over it with the nurse or the poor little patient who is the last seducee on the strength. His silly little wife has always shown that she is sorry for me. But once he is out of the sanatorium the temptation to carry the joke a little further will be irresistible. It will be fun for him to run up enormous bills, at hotels, with tradesmen, with wretched copyists, that will be paid by me, the funny English cuckold who grudges his dead wife’s lover nothing. Rose, Rose, I cannot bear it. For one thing, it gives Celia such a dreadful immortality. I should remember her for what she was at Venice on our honeymoon, what she was like in our house at Hammersmith, other people should remember her for her singing. She will be remembered in Switzerland, in Switzerland of all places, where they make milk chocolates and watches, where they ski and yodel, as the discarded mistress of a vulgar freak, as a suicide. I cannot bear it.’

Again he buried his face in the cushion by my feet, and this time he sobbed. ‘Come nearer to me,’ I said, and he moved along till I could let him rest his head on my arms, and presently wipe his eyes with my handkerchief. I said in my heart to the shadows in the angles of the walls and the ceiling, ‘Celia, if you are there, come back and tell him it is all right.’ It seemed to me she must be all right, for it was surely impossible that anyone would go such a strange journey, the measure of its strangeness being that it took her by her own free will away from Oliver, except to find some extraordinary prize. But it is forbidden, they do not return. At least he raised his head and said, ‘I wanted to stop giving him money and get Lady Southways to give it him instead. But we cannot play at that concert, we must go in the morning.’

‘I suppose we could stay,’ I said. ‘Avis would do it if we asked her. After all, it was not Lady Mortlake’s fault that this happened.’

‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘You know you are only offering to do this to help me. And it would be wrong. That Mortlake bitch should have stayed to see we were properly treated, she is no fool, she is quite well aware that she has her house full of rubbish that might misbehave. If we do not pack up and leave, we are going over to the side of Jasperl. I know what I have to do. I have to go on keeping Jasperl, but I want to do it without him knowing that I have anything to do with the money. He is so clever, he will guess if I send it through any of my friends. But you, you have played so much in America, do you know anybody who could impersonate an anonymous admirer and send him the money in dollars?’

I knew that Mr Morpurgo would arrange it through his American lawyer. I said, ‘Very easily. Tell me your bank and I will get somebody to do it in two days’ time. But do not give him too much. You are too good.’

‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘You do see this is something I must do?’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said. I wondered how I could show I still believed in Rosamund. ‘I see it might be the most important thing in your life.’

‘I have let it run on too long,’ he said, ‘it should be settled soon. He will be out of the sanatorium in a fortnight’s time. I have such hateful, civil, mischievous letters from him. I have one in the pocket of this dressing-gown now.’

‘Burn it,’ I said. ‘Take it out and burn it. Oh, please, Oliver. Celia would not like it to be there now.’

‘Celia is dead,’ said Oliver.

‘She cannot be so dead that she would want you to have that letter in your pocket,’ I said. ‘Nobody is as dead as that.’

‘I wonder what you mean,’ he said, but took out the paper and put it on an ashtray and burned it with his lighter. The flame went higher than one would think. It was a long letter. Our shadows wavered madly on the wall.

He continued to watch the ashes until they were quite grey. Then he raised his eyes and looked at me steadily and said, ‘You will see to the money, and I will write to Jasperl and tell him I will have nothing more to do with him. And I will never write to him or see him again. But that is the least thing you have done for me. Sitting with you in this room where we have never been before, where we will never be again, is like being out of life a night and knowing everything. I know why Celia had to go to Jasperl. She had a genius for love. I was all right. I could love. But Jasperl cannot love, he is the negation of love, he is hatred, he is nonsense, given time he would uncreate the world. His state was a challenge to her. She had to win his soul from Satan. She went to him as to a battlefield.’

After a silence he said, ‘I have kept you up for hours when you should be asleep, worrying you over a perplexity I never need have felt. If it comes to that I have been howling like a dog and not getting on with my work for years, because I have had no sense. I should have seen why she had gone to him if on that first day when I read the anonymous letter in that room- with the window on the Thames I had not forgotten that she was love itself. She could do nothing vital except for the sake of love. I have remembered it only sitting in this room with you.’

‘No, you knew it all the time,’ I said. ‘You said to me something about it being possible that your wife had pursued Jasperl, because he was her destiny, the martyrdom to which her cruel God had called her.’

‘So I did,’ he said, and thought for a while. ‘Yes, I knew it with my mind, as I might a fact about a stranger that I had read in a book. But now, sitting here, I knew it with my whole being, as I know that we were once happy. I never should have forgotten.’

I never should have forgotten how Rosamund had been the peer and companion of Richard Quin, how they had laughed together in an innocence that nothing could destroy. I never should have forgotten how, immune from perturbation by any external event, she held up my mother’s body as it ejected her soul. We smiled at each other.

‘Oh, dear Rose, I have been terrible to you,’ he said. ‘Bringing you down to this hell-hole. Telling you this beastly story of Jasperl, which I might well have kept to myself; and keeping you awake. But I was selfish. I wanted my soul saved. Well, you have done it. Now, will you be able to sleep?’

‘Indeed I will,’ I said. ‘Will you?’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Though, curiously enough, I should like to go out for a walk.’

‘So should I,’ I said, ‘but we dare not. I have a feeling that there is just one thing this household has still got up its sleeve, and that is to let loose big dogs on us. But I should go to the window and look out at the night.’

He found my slippers for me under the sofa and slipped them on to my feet. It seemed strange to have a man do that, but he seemed to find it quite natural and even to take some pleasure in doing it. We shook back a great fall of golden brocade and looked out at a smooth lawn deep in the bluish frost of moonlight, where one tall tree stood incandescent.

‘It seems to be in blossom,’ said Oliver, ‘but are there trees that blossom now?’ We stood for some moments side by side, and then he said, ‘And you, Rose?’

‘And I?’

‘You said there was someone you loved with whom you were not happy any more.’ He looked at me. ‘I would have thought that a man whom you loved would never leave you.’

‘Oh, it was not a man, it was not that sort of love!’ I told him impatiently. ‘It is my cousin Rosamund. But you have made me happy about her.’

‘Your cousin Rosamund? I remember her. Beautiful, golden-haired, stammered, so never spoke.’

‘Mary and I loved her more than anyone in the world. She was the nearest of all of us to Richard Quin, she looked after Mamma when she died. At any time she was utterly lovable. We thought her perfectly good, but she has married someone repulsive. Not like Jasperl. But dwarfish, and, we think, dishonest and queer. And very rich. But when you said what you had forgotten about Celia, I knew we had forgotten the essential thing about Rosamund too. She was good. When she married this man she must have done it for the sake of goodness.’

‘You are sure to be right. You would not have loved her so long without knowing her. And forgive me with saddling you with a faithless lover.’

‘I could never have a lover, faithful or faithless. I cannot love anyone except the people I have loved since I was a child. My father. My mother. Richard Quin. Who are dead. And Mary. And Rosamund. There are others I love, Kate, whom you know, and old Miss Beevor, and three people who keep a pub on the Thames called the Dog and Duck, and a girl called Nancy, and even they were all given me by my family. But for deep love, the sort you felt for Celia, I cannot get past those five people. I shall not ever love anybody else as I love them.’

‘I have only three. My father and mother, and Celia. Who are all dead. And I too know that there is the end of the list. I have lost my power to love.’

We looked out for some moments on the tree that blazed white on the white lawn under the liquid starry sky. I said, ‘I would not be any different. Would you?’

‘Not for the world. Yet it is a very curious fate, to have the book closed so early when other people read in it so much longer. But now go back to your sofa and sleep. I will call you early, I will telephone for a taxi and we will all get out of this bawdyhouse at the first possible moment and get breakfast at the inn.’