The Only Poet (44 page)

Leonora picked up the cue. ‘I'm so glad,' she breathed. If this went on she would have to sit down but goodness knew how long that would protract this huge and springing jet of misunderstanding.

‘My son's reason for sending Jean-Pierre to London and to Willowes-Aumbrie,' continued the woman in black, ‘was that he wants this new branch to have the same classic air as the mother establishments his grandfather and his father founded and we feel that London is the last capital where there remains some vestige of style. So when we open at Antwerp we hope to create an atmosphere which suggests that the clients will find, just round the corner, Buckingham Palace and its sentries.' Her eyes, which were the colour of certain topazes, suddenly cancelled their own hardness by tears, and she ceased to talk as if she were translating from a brochure. ‘So Jean-Pierre settled down in London for six months, and I took the opportunity to come over and visit him, and that wasn't simply an excuse, I'm very fond of Jean-Pierre and I miss him. I'm a great one for keeping my own about me. After all, as you know, I nearly had none. But I haven't been back here, not once since I left, and I really wanted to see it all just once again before I go. It's only the look of things I wanted to see,' she said, suddenly icy. ‘God is my witness that I had nobody over here to thank, for I had heard that you had gone to live in Africa for good. To tell the truth if you won't be offended, I thought you were dead, and don't laugh at me, I had planned to make sure whether you were for if you were I'd have had a Mass said for you, and so I will, if you go before me. But how glad I was when I got Jean-Pierre's bit of news.'

‘Why, what was that?' asked Leonora. She felt half-asleep. The woman's passion was reversing the world, she was now wondering not so much who the woman was as who she herself might be.

‘I must tell it my way, if you'll forgive me, I do realize I'm keeping you. But being you you'll like to know. Jean-Pierre met me at the Airport, so funny when you think that when I left there was no flying except for soldiers. Then he took me to my hotel –'

Leonora could not resist asking where she was staying. She always had a feeling that it was nice
to
know as much about people as if they were not real but were characters in a book one was writing.

Of course it was Brown's. ‘Then he took me out for some supper at the Savoy Grill, and when we'd ordered he said, “I've got a lovely present for you Granny.” It seems that he came to this house, this very house where we are this minute, and what a fine house it is, I can see nothing grudged in the past when that was right, and he was waiting at a dinner-party. From the very first he noted that there was one lady who came by herself and wasn't young, but very distinguished-looking. At one point it had interested him to note that the conversation had become general, which was the rule at dinner-parties in France and Belgium, but was not usual, he had observed, in England. Though it was difficult for a waiter to follow a conversation at table, he had gathered that this unusual unity of interest was caused by the pleasure everybody felt at a pleasant event in the family of the distinguished lady of a certain age. One of her sons-in-law had received from a learned society a medal which was the highest honour attainable in his profession, whatever that might be; and they were congratulating the distinguished old lady on this honour and the charming appearance her daughter had presented at the ceremony. Then someone asked her how it happened that this daughter had been given the unusual and tragic name of Cassandra, and she explained that this was the child of her first husband, in whose family it had been the habit for generations to call their eldest daughters Cassandra. She owned she could not imagine why, and had hoped, since Jane Austen's sister was named Cassandra, that they had some ancestress in common, and she added, in case someone present knew enough to give a clue, that her first husband's name had been Philip Le Measurer.

‘At that,' said the woman in black, trembling, ‘Jean-Pierre pricked up his ears. For I can assure you that I've brought up all my children, and my grandchildren too, to revere you.' She laughed nervously. ‘I didn't, of course, tell them exactly what you did for me. For us. My poor husband would have been glad to tell you as much, if he had had the privilege of meeting you. For certainly you saved him as well as you saved me. I don't know what Leon's uncle might not have done to him had it not been for you. He was a terrible man, with a cash-box where his heart should have been. So, though Jean-Pierre doesn't exactly know what you did for us, he realizes that it was something extraordinary and saintly, and he knew when he said, “I've found your Mrs Le Measurer” he was doing something like bringing down to earth my guardian angel to reassure me before I die.'

‘Why this is real. This is too frightful,' thought Leonora. ‘I mean something tremendous to her. What seems unchangeable in her is changed when she thinks of what she imagines I did for her. It's evidently the big thing in her life. And what a fool she'll feel when she finds she has mixed me up with someone else –' But it suddenly occurred to her that this was impossible. The Le Measurer family had long been thin on the ground, and the only other Mrs Le Measurer in living memory was her own mother-in-law, and the woman in black, who had an air of being even too good at sums, would certainly have realized that if old Maisie were alive today she must be well up in her second century. But then Leonora remembered poor Geraldine, the wife of Philip's younger brother, and at that she mildly blazed. Surely old age had not altered her so much that this woman, who had a head on her shoulders, could not see that she was far, far better-looking than Geraldine always had been and always would. Why, poor Geraldine was guilty of the supreme immodesty of having white eyelashes and not darkening them and her skin, however desperately powdered, had the high glaze of bathroom fittings. ‘Geraldine was quite nice, really awfully nice sometimes,' thought Leonora, ‘but it would be absurd of this woman to think I could be her,' and then, but without pleasure, she faced the fact that the woman had done nothing of the sort. She had to accept the only other alternative. She had indeed rendered this woman some service, which was vital to her happiness, but which had attached her own interest so little that she had clean forgotten it. ‘What an insult,' she whispered, almost aloud. She could not offhand think of a worse thing for one human being to do to another.

She was perhaps not well. The room seemed very hot, though a minute before she had wondered how it could be so cold in late spring. Perhaps this forgetfulness of hers was not so disgraceful, so important, so cruel, as she supposed, but she could not be sure. Her mind was as slow as if she were ill, and she longed to do what of all things she must not do, break down and end the matter by confession. But she decided: ‘I will get out of this somehow. There must be a loophole, there is always a loophole.' For that belief she had real reason. In various parts of the world she had faced attack from tiresome people, usually proclaiming themselves inspired by principle, but rendered unsympathetic by their taste for the handling of disgustingly unsubtle weapons. Her mind wandered off in meditation on the barbarism of the panga, simply a strip of sharp-edged steel. She was back again sitting between her two daughters on one of the twin beds in the bedroom she shared with Lionel Morton, who did not happen to be there, who should return from Nairobi any moment now. She and her girls each held a revolver. The floor was striped with the arrows of sunlight that struck down through the shutters; the stripes had altered their angle quite extensively since the three of them had first come into the room and locked the door. It must have been hours before they heard the sound of furniture falling over in the room below. ‘What did you do then?' people asked her afterwards. She had never given the truthful answer: ‘I pretended to be someone else.' Instead she said, ‘I hadn't to do much, the girls were so good.' That was true, then and afterwards. She never had to reproach herself for exposing them to an experience which had shattered them. Cassandra had languidly announced the day after, ‘I'd much rather spend the afternoon doing that than playing hockey at school,' and Harriet, perpetually ready to trump her elder's ace, had positively drawled, ‘Hockey, yes. Tennis, no.' They were imitating her they imagined, but in fact they were imitating her imitation of someone else. She must have imitated him very often; for even now, on any occasion when the extraordinary had to be treated as the ordinary, her daughters surprised her by speaking with Nicholas's voice, which they had never heard.

From that she averted her mind, and listened to the story the woman in black was telling with a passion which failed to make it interesting. It seemed that Jean-Pierre had made inquiries from his fellow-waiters as to the distinguished lady of a certain age, and had been told that she was often at parties, particularly those given at this house, and was herself in a small way a client of Willowes-Aumbrie. Jean-Pierre had greeted his grandmother on her arrival in London not only with the news that he had seen her beloved Madame Le Measurer, Mrs Morton, and thought her distinguished and sympathetic and all he had been taught from his cradle to expect her to be; but he was going to see her again the very next evening – which was now: this puzzling now. For he had heard her say to her hostess that she would be back in a month's time for her birthday party; and he was booked to wait at that very party.

‘At first I looked you up in the telephone book,' said the stranger. ‘I thought I'd leave some flowers and a note asking if I could call. But –' she paused, and continued with an air of flinching delicacy, ‘I've forgotten London, and I don't know any more where you would be likely to live.' It struck Leonora that she did not like to say that she had found too many Mortons in the telephone book, and that the unrevealed incident which linked them owed an essential part of its power to infatuate her for between forty and fifty years to the rarity and vague picturesqueness of the name Le Measurer. ‘A good thing she doesn't know the Le Measurers were nobodies, Huguenots who settled down as linen-drapers in the City during the nineteenth century and put their savings into railways at the right time and took them out at another right time. Oh, it's all an illusion, somewhere she's got it all wrong, it's all going to be such an anticlimax for the poor dear,' she mourned, but forgot to grieve when the poor dear said, ‘So all I could do was to ask Mr Aumbrie if I could take the place of the girl at the cloakroom, and though he didn't like it he's not, of course, in a position to refuse.'

There was nothing to do but wait. How wonderfully, Leonora thought, Coleridge had distilled the essence of boredom into the two lines, ‘The wedding-guest then beat his breast, for he heard the loud bassoon.'

From the manuscript book ‘Notes for Nicholas':
The woman in the powder-room had been a girl working in the house of Leonora's (first) father-in-law and mother-in-law and she was dismissed because she was pregnant, at the time when Leonora and Nicholas were having a love affair.

Leonora felt unhappy because the girl was being dismissed for what she herself was doing. Nicholas felt even more unhappy. He said the Mother of God would forgive. (But I suppose she wouldn't approve, she might want to punish the girl.) Nicholas said in astonishment, ‘She, of all people!'

Leonora never identifies the woman in the powder-room with this girl. But she recalls the girl when, during the night when she was dying, she recalls her love affair with Nicholas.

She did not hurry to the drawing-room, though she was so late, finding herself alone in the octagonal hall, which always enchanted her. Really, she must get herself to the drawing-room. But she had disarranged the hair at the back of her neck when staring up at the painted ceiling. With the nervousness of the old, who are always on a slide under the microscope of the middle-aged, using their last critical advantage, she used her mirror and her little comb, rehearsing the white lie she had to tell Patricia. In fact she had been sitting in front of her TV, watching the World's Pair Skating Championship at Bratislava, and the Russians were the last in the programme. These ones were good, but not like the wonderful champions of five or six years ago. She could think of no event that could take precedence over this concourse of mythic creatures, but one could not say so, she would have to tell Patricia that she had had to dine in Richmond, and remember not to change it to Dulwich when she spoke to George. Several times she repeated, ‘Richmond, Richmond, Richmond,' and braced her spine and raised her head to make her entrance.

As soon as Leonora Morton entered the great new white room, a woman said to her, ‘This is a far grander party than I expected, look at me, a short dress and no jewellery, and absolutely everybody's here. Avril Waters is over there by the fireplace.' Leonora, thinking peripherally while she took the shock, asked herself, not at all seriously, why it was that even now, when she and Avril were quite old, it should be natural for a woman to tell her at a party, ‘Avril Waters is here,' and most improbable that anyone would say to Avril Waters, ‘Leonora Morton is here.' While the temperature of her inner mind slowly rose as she remembered what Avril Waters had done to her, forty-eight years ago, her outer mind wondered coolly enough why this woman had been given precedence over all the women of her generation, by a judgement almost unanimous though nonsensical. She was beautiful, but not very. Her bones were flimsy and her mouth was constantly falling open with the gape of a fish. She was not nice. Strangers she met with the worst manners; it was then that her mouth was most apt to fall open, as if she really could not believe what she saw, what she heard. With her familiars she bounced like an Edwardian schoolgirl, she was full of larks and calendarish sentiments; she infected her friends with her silliness, quite distinguished men looked, when they were with her, nimble and jolly like morris dancers. She was also notoriously avaricious.