This Real Night (12 page)
When he brought his attention back to the Phillips tragedy his reflections ran not so smoothly off his tongue. I gathered that in his judgment Queenie too had had hard luck, and might even be considered as the victim of actual injustice, in being tried as her husband’s poisoner. Without actually binding himself, he suggested that there might be some who would hold that if a criminal succeeded in committing a crime without being actually caught in the act, a police force with sound sporting instincts would give him or her best, and let the matter drop. ‘But mind you,’ he concluded, in a more definite tone, ‘Queenie had better luck than she had any right to expect when your Pa got her reprieved. Granted they got her into that court, the black cap was what she was bound to get. And as for what’s happened now, it’s no picnic for her to be sent to prison, and it’s for life, but life means twenty years, and less if she behaves herself, though that I doubt from what Milly says about her temper. But again that’s happened to a lot of people before her, and it’ll happen to a lot more after her. It’s no use,’ he said, in tones unshadowed by the least touch of humanitarian melancholy, ‘making a song and dance about what’s in the general run of things. Now finish up, love, it’s tea-time and there’s crumpets.’
It puzzled me that a man should be so respectful of social ordinance as to look on mayonnaise as the prerogative of his betters, yet differ so radically from society in his view of murder and justice and imprisonment. But I never fell into the error of supposing him to be hard-hearted, for though he grieved so moderately for Harry and Queenie, his heart ached for Aunt Lily, simply because she was plain. It cannot be exaggerated, the strength of his conviction that there was no place in the universe for women who were not attractive. Once, when we four girls, Cordelia and Mary and Rosamund and myself, got off the ferry and stepped on the landing-stage, I heard Uncle Len say to Richard Quin, ‘Well, there’s none of this litter needs drowning,’ in an undertone, since, strangely enough, litter was then a word never used in the presence of women. This was not quite a joke. Uncle Len was fond of children, and was always sad when there was a burial in the churchyard, and the coffin was small; but had he been assured that the dead child was an ill-favoured girl he would have shaken his head and sighed that for once it was all for the best.
But this was no brutal rejection of what did not please. It was tender concern for what would not be cherished. Once Uncle Len and I were passing by the window of the saloon bar, and we paused to watch Aunt Lily serving the evening spate of customers from the little village which, though it could not be seen from the river, sheltered two or three hundred souls in two streets and some alleys behind the rookery. The gaslight shone on a hairslide Aunt Lily had bought herself on her last shopping expedition to Reading: one of those pieces of jewellery which are made from the wings of tropical butterflies, a strident blue thing which would have put out of key even the pure colouring of a child. She raised her hand to fix it with the gesture of a happy coquette who had never failed to triumph, and the light fell strong on her profile. ‘A camel, a ruddy camel!’ groaned Uncle Len, going gloomily on his way to the sitting-room. ‘Sit down, Rose, love,’ he said, and lit his pipe. ‘Lil been asking you about Nancy lately?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But of course we haven’t seen her. We get letters from her, just as Aunt Lily does, but her uncle never lets her come to stay, though we have asked her again and again.’
He groaned again. ‘Lil frets for her all the time. It’s Nancy, Nancy, Nancy,’ he said. ‘It’s a shame.’ I was conscious that if I had not been there he would have said what kind of shame he thought it. ‘If Lil hadn’t been born with that ’orrible face on her, and that bag of bones as a figure, she’d have kids of her own and not be eating her heart out for that little perisher. And at least she’d have got a man. We’ve got no kids, but Milly’s got me till I go. God, I hope Lil don’t outlive Milly and me.’ He pulled at his pipe for a minute or two, staring desolately through the smoke. ‘And the little perisher’s plain too, ain’t she?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She has lovely golden hair, right down to her waist.’
‘But her face is nothing, not to go by her photograph,’ said Uncle Len. ‘A girl can’t get a man if she has to keep her back to him all the time.’
‘You’re wrong about Nancy,’ I said. ‘There’s something about her.’ But I could not explain what it was. That faint, tart sweetness, like the taste of raspberries, that air of being under a hostile spell and dissolving it by irony, I could not then define even to myself. ‘She’ll get married,’ I told him, barely believing it, but feeling that it ought to be true.
‘Not if that photograph’s telling the truth, she won’t,’ said Uncle Len, and drew angrily on his pipe. There was not only Aunt Lily to be pitied, there was another plain woman coming along in the person of Nancy. Indeed there was a whole world of plain women who ought never to have been born, who ate their hearts out for other people’s children, who would die alone.
Yet that was not the whole of his thought about women. It extended till it overlapped his thoughts about first causes. He had a high regard for my mother, whom most people would have called plain, for she had been made so shabby by misery that her improved fortunes could not restore her; she was an eagle, irrevocably stripped of half its feathers by the storm. He overlooked her plainness because he realised that she had a special value of a rare kind. This he discovered for himself.
Aunt Lily had gathered during her stay with us that Mamma had once been a famous pianist, and she had handed on this information to Uncle Len and Aunt Milly, but the love they bore her did not constrain them to believe everything she said. But on my mother’s first visit to the inn, however, they began to wonder whether there was not something in the story, and one afternoon as she walked on the lawn, watching the sun glint on the river, they called Mary and me aside to enquire further into the matter.
‘Lil tells a tale,’ said Uncle Len, ‘that the Shah of Persia sent for your Ma because he’d heard all the top-o’-the-bill pianists in the world play “The Blue Danube”, and your Ma left the whole field beaten at the post, so he sent for her to go to his palace, all expenses paid, out in the desert, to play it to him over and over again. I take it, granted that Lil’s got everything wrong, that that was the way of it when your Ma was a professional?’
The ratio between Aunt Lily’s stories and the facts on which they were founded was constant: she was always suggesting to the Creator that life might have been more dramatic, but never jettisoned His work altogether. We prepared to explain that Mamma had once stayed at the same hotel in Lucerne as the Shah of Persia, and one wet afternoon he had approached her because he had been told that she was a famous pianist, and asked her to play ‘The Blue Danube’ on the salon piano, and had made her play it over and over again, faster and faster, until by a fortunate chance it stopped raining. But Aunt Milly dismissed her husband’s question as unnecessary. ‘Oh, you don’t have to ask, Len. Look at the way she’s walking across the lawn this very minute, not taking one bit of notice of all the teas. Anyone could tell.’
Uncle Len nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said reverently.
Later I learned what they meant. The sight of my mother, walking as in solitude through the maze of tables on the lawn, her eyes set on the distant wooded hills that lay down together on the horizon, had taken Uncle Len and Aunt Lily back to the race-course, which had been the centre of their lives during their best years, when they had most vividly perceived events. There they had sometimes watched great men as they led their winning horses into the paddock or lowered their field glasses as their horses lost, and the greatest of these had borne themselves as if the multitudes were not there, as if they were alone on the bare downs. Even if they smiled it was to themselves. ‘And there was Lord Rosebery, as cool as a cucumber.’ My mother’s unawareness of her surroundings, which struck the suburb of Lovegrove as ridiculous, linked her in the minds of Uncle Len and Aunt Milly with these great men, and this was a sound perception. Like those great men, she was a public performer. They had made their speeches in Parliament, she had had her concerts. Alike they had had to learn as a first necessary technical trick the art of forgetting the spectators, though these might seem the essential factor of a public performance. Uncle Len and Aunt Lily had detected a discipline, and recognised a special sort of human being that won its place by ordeal.
This perception waked with a myth that lay deeper in their minds. When a woman was great she need not be beautiful, she could be what she pleased, for she had magic powers which were superior to beauty. There were only six pictures on the walls of the Dog and Duck which did not represent horses and jockeys. They were all portraits of the Royal Family. One was of Edward the Seventh, one of the new king, George the Fifth, and one of Queen Mary, and these hung in a vestibule, in simple oak frames, on a wall often obscured in wet weather by hats and coats on a hall-stand. The other three were identical pictures of Queen Victoria, which were very differently treated. They had been given gilded plaster frames and filled the place of honour in the public bar, the saloon bar and the private sitting-room. They were coloured and showed the Queen when she was old and stout, and her face plummy crimson under her crowned white hair. Her eyes looked voluntarily blindish, rejecting all impressions of the outer world as unnecessary to her anointed royal state; her mouth was pursed with something more mystical than mere obstinacy, as if she had just closed it after an oracular pronouncement and would say nothing now that the inspiration had gone from her. The square bale of her bosom was crossed by the sash of the Order of the Garter, which was blue, such a clear blue as should properly have been worn by a young girl. In no way did this icon fulfil the conditions laid down for ordinary women: there was here no concern to please, and no tenderness. That was natural, for this woman did not play her part in ordinary life. She was a ju-ju, she controlled the natural forces which permit us to live and condemn us to die. Uncle Len was no fool, and he knew very well that Queen Victoria had taken little part in the government of England, but he believed that while she was alive and had travelled from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle, from Balmoral to Osborne, she had, simply by living, simply by that ritual gyration, conferred peace and prosperity on the British Empire. If he had been told that during her reign the British people had grown taller and lived longer than in the preceding and succeeding reigns, he would have believed it. Well, Mamma was a ju-ju too. She did not need to be excused for lack of tenderness, for she was rich in all feminine attributes except elegance; but for her inelegance she was pardoned only because she was a wonder-working fetish.
We saw the extent of his confidence in her when his pursuit of knowledge brought him face to face with some particularly resistant problem. He knew that Mamma had excercised her mind on little but music and the affairs of her family, yet he expected her, and her alone, to know the answer to anything which struck him as really mysterious, though we, her son and daughters, were bound to have more information of the sort he wanted, since we had just made our way through the schoolbooks, which he was using as a map for the chase. Mr Morpurgo too should have been a help, and he was often at hand. When we were at the Dog and Duck he always drove over from his country-house and sometimes stayed the night. Richard Quin and I had been wrong in our prophecy of a divorce, and I think he found the inn as kind a shelter from the pain of going on living with his wife as we found it from the pain of going on living without our father. But even when he was there it was to my mother that Uncle Len turned for final enlightenment. Thus we learned how it had been in ancient Greece; first you put the troublesome matter to the philosophers and mathematicians, then you went off to consult the Sibyl.
‘Now, none of you go away for a minute,’ he said one day. ‘There’s loads of time for you to have a lark on the river before you have your dinner. It’ll be late at that. Leg of pork’s got to be cooked through. I’ve known them that met their death for not paying attention to that. Well, there’s something I read the other day that I can’t understand. It’ll be plain sailing for the lot of you, with your schooling and your music as well. It’s one of those short bits they put in the newspaper to fill up a column when the article ain’t long enough. I always read ’em, and very interesting they are. But I can’t get the hang of this one,’ he said, softly roaring. ‘I got it here.’ He took a clipping out of his little notebook. ‘“Architecture is frozen music.” What’s it mean, what’s it mean?’ he asked, each time roaring a little louder.
This time it had to go straight to Mamma. Even Richard Quin and Mr Morpurgo had nothing to say. Mamma said, ‘Yes, I’ve read that before. I can’t remember who said it. I should think it was someone who knew nothing about music, probably with the intention of pleasing a musician. Unmusical people often try to please musicians by talking about music just as people who have no children try to please people who have by talking about children, and in each case what they say usually falls wide of the mark. It is very strange and bound to create awkwardness,’ said Mamma, looking earnestly into Uncle Len’s eyes, anxious to give him the benefit of her experience, since it was information he wanted, ‘it is as if there are two great enclosures, and the people inside know they are inside, but the people outside do not know they are outside.’
This was not the kind of information for which Uncle Len had been hoping. He ignored it and repeated heavily, a vein standing out on his forehead, ‘“Architecture is frozen music.” Sure it don’t mean anything to you at all?’
‘Nothing whatsoever,’ said Mamma. ‘There is no use not telling you the truth, for truth is what you enjoy. But music is sound, and it is useless to think of it as anything else, and architecture is stone and bricks. A piece of music makes one feel something when one hears it, a building makes one feel something when one looks at it, and there’s an end to the connection between them. You must simply remember that whoever said it was trying to be civil to something or someone.’