This Real Night (19 page)
Richard Quin and Rosamund and Mr Morpurgo were there too, all at work round the table, with Uncle Len at its head. We were helping prepare his books for Michaelmas Day; and we were just not too snug to keep the figures clear in our heads, what with the warmth of so many bodies in this narrow slit of a room, the wood-fire and the paraffin lamp hanging from the ceiling. For in his office Uncle Len would not have electric light; this was perhaps because he was trying to make it as like as possible to some room he had known in his childhood, perhaps a caravan. He did not often invite us to enter it, and indeed it was nervous work when we did, for much of its space was occupied by an object dear to his heart which was too large for the room. He had inherited it from the bookmaker who had taken him in when he had left the Lambourn stables. This was a square glass box on brass legs, in which two stuffed stoats in white drawers faced each other in a boxing ring, a third in shirtsleeves standing by as a referee, while behind the ropes mounted three tiers of stoats in evening dress, representing the upper crust of the fancy as it had been fifteen years or so before. Much thought and manual skill had gone to the making of this work of art. It could be seen at a glance that one of the boxers was younger and less experienced than the other, and would never be his equal; something stupid was incised round his snout. Their postures showed to a T, Uncle Len told us, how a pug who knows his business draws an antagonist when he’s got a cross-counter in his mind, and he said too that they weren’t feathers nor welters but middles, and would stay in that class. The spectators were all portraits, and Uncle Len had identified all but four. Edward Prince of Wales nobody could have missed, if only because he was wearing the Order of the Bath, which Uncle Len admitted was unlikely, though this was supposed to show a slap-up night at the National Sporting Club not long after it had opened. I can still remember Barney Barnato, who had to be represented by a baby stoat, he had been such a very small man; and Sir George Chetwynd, who had faced the unknown artist with the problem of making a stoat look like a man who had looked like a horse. All these patrons of sport were portrayed with the affectionate derision which the poor then felt for the rich. It was as if the rich were pampered animals which the poor kept as pets, partly because they liked the clear eyes and glossy coats which come of pampering, and partly because it created a false assurance of security which, to the insecure, seemed richly comic. Also it was indicated, by a certain pride in the boxers’ stance, that they had that which put them above the business of buying and selling, though they were paid, the fee covered nothing but their time.
Though this work of art disclosed new beauties every time we studied it we had no eyes for it this evening. There was real work to be done. Rosamund was comparing invoices with the accounts to be paid or presented on September the twenty-ninth. Richard Quin was checking the catering ledger, I had the wages notebook, Mr Morpurgo was going over the bankbooks. Uncle Len himself was writing the letters that would go out with the accounts and the payments, in the large copybook hand he had learned from the bookmaker’s wife, who had made him sit down and start his pothooks and hangers when he was turned five foot six and weighed in at eleven stone.
The clock struck seven; the industrious silence spread again. Then Rosamund said tentatively, ‘Uncle Len.’ When he used his pen he had as grave an air of application as if he were mending a minute and valuable watch; one did not disturb him without due cause or too abruptly. ‘Look, Uncle Len,’ she went on, ‘on this slip from Howlands it says twenty cases of ginger beer, three short, to be made good. But I don’t think they were.’
‘Good girl,’ said Uncle Len. ‘I’ve thought that myself. A cross-eyed driver. It shouldn’t mean anything, but it often does.’
His pen scratched on. Presently Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Darcy,’ and when the pen had stopped he said again, ‘Darcy. Do you really want to put so much of your savings by as insurance? Investments would give you more control over your capital.’
‘Just let me finish providing for what I want to provide for,’ replied Uncle Len, ‘and then maybe I’ll stand myself a flutter.’
A shadow of pain passed over Mr Morpurgo’s face. ‘There are investments,’ he said, ‘that are no more a flutter than insurance.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Uncle Len. ‘But there’s Milly. If I die soon she’ll marry again. She’s kept her flesh. Well, the way I’ve fixed it she don’t get a lump sum that a Flash Harry could take off her, she gets an annuity, and if he left her after the honeymoon and she found his luggage full of broken flowerpots she’s only got to keep herself till the next quarter. And if he’s a good chap it’ll come in handy and make him fonder of her. Nobody ever liked a hen less because it lays eggs. You wait till I got Milly seen to, and done a bit for poor old Lil, and I’ll try some of your rough stuff in the City.’
Silence fell again. Then Uncle Len laid down his pen and fixed his eyes on Richard Quin, pointed a forefinger at him and said, ‘Boy.’
Richard Quin muttered - ‘and eleven and fifteen and eighteen, total a hundred and three, three shillings and carry five pound. Yes, Uncle Len.’
‘You got your whole life before you,’ Uncle Len told him, ‘mind you start thinking about insurance the minute you get your first week’s wages. You get on to it young and the premiums are next to nothing, and your future’s safe. Not a worry in the world, you haven’t, if you insure yourself early enough. I wish I’d done it. And Mary and Rose,’ he said, his voice weighted with apprehension, ‘they ought to insure their ’ands.’
‘How does insurance work?’ asked Richard Quin.
‘Insurance is a precautionary system which comes into being as soon as a society possesses enough statistical records of past experience to be able to make sound assumptions about the future,’ said Mr Morpurgo, and Uncle Len cut in, ‘There’s the Pru and the Pearl and the Sun, and the Norwich and the Union, and the Equitable, and the Scottish Widows. I fancy the Pru myself. Huge great place they got up there on Holborn, they couldn’t do no moonlight flitting.’ Thus they continued, each surveying the institution from the windows of his private world, till Richard Quin saw it clearly from his own and said, ‘I see, it’s a sort of game that turns out to be useful. I’ll have a go at it as soon as I can,’ and went back to his ledger. There was a red silk shade on the lamp above our head; the walls glowed with a rosy dye. We might have felt sad because the summer was coming to an end, but it was impossible for sadness to survive in this room.
T
HE DAY BEFORE
Mary and I went to take up our scholarships, she at the Prince Albert College in Kensington and I at the Athenaeum in the Marylebone Road, I went out and bought enough for both of us of the stuff we were allowed to use now we were grown up,
papier poudré
it was called, little books of absorbent tissues that we dabbed on our faces; only fast girls used powder-puffs. When I came back I went into the drawing-room and found Mary sitting at the table in front of a mass of dull sewing, my mother’s workbox beside her. She was putting our name-tapes into the things we would have to leave in the cloak-rooms at the colleges, our mackintoshes and shoe-bags, gloves and woolly scarves, and Cordelia was sitting opposite her, watching her with that detached and childish look she assumed when Mary and I were making preparations for our life as music students. She might have been pretending that she was not going with us because she was the youngest, instead of the eldest, and that her time was still to come.
‘See,’ she said, in a prattling tone, throwing me a snake of white cotton embroidered with red letters, ‘don’t Mary’s new name-tapes look queer? Mary Keith, Mary Keith, Mary Keith.’
‘Oh, dear,’ I breathed. Mr Kisch had made us do two things we did not much like. He had made us go to different colleges because, as he had hesitantly told me, Mary played better than I did, and I might be discouraged if I were always confronted with her superiority. I had obeyed because, to my astonishment, tears had come into my eyes when he was telling me this, and if I was such a fool as that I had better take warning. Also he had said that it would never do for two concert pianists to come out at the same time with the same surname, we would always be getting mixed up, so I was to keep my name, Rose Aubrey, and Mary was to take Mamma’s surname and be Mary Keith. There had seemed no harm in that; but now she was doing it I did not like it. Savages believe in a magic bond between things and their names, and I was savage enough to feel that now Mary and I were no longer both called Aubrey a membrane which had joined us had been torn through. I even imagined that the raw edge protruded uselessly between my shoulder-blades.
Mary stopped sewing. ‘I don’t like it either,’ she said. Two mutilated savages stared at each other, resentful because they had not been fully warned about the initiation rites, but not rebellious, since it was an initiation rite, the one entrance into real life. We knew we had to go through with it.
‘It’s horrible,’ I said.
‘What’s horrible?’ asked Cordelia. I did not answer, and she exclaimed, ‘Why, just Mary changing her name? I don’t see there’s anything so awful about that. She’ll have to do it if she marries.’
‘But that would be horrible, too,’ said Mary.
‘Nonsense,’ said Cordelia. ‘It happens all the time. Hundreds of girls get married every day and change their names. Something that happens every day can’t be horrible.’
‘You really are an awful ass,’ I said. ‘People die every day and death is horrible.’
‘That’s not at all the same,’ said Cordelia. ‘Marriage and death, what could be more different?’ Her fingers probed the depths of my mother’s workbox, and brought up an old white chiffon scarf. She cast it over her head and her little hands put in a hairpin here and there, and made it a bridal veil. Slowly, as if she were spinning out a pleasure as long as she could, she moved across the room and looked at herself in the square mirror opposite the window. She shifted and swayed until the composition of the picture she saw was quite right; her red-gold curls and small, pure, stubborn face, romanticised by the veil, in the centre of the glass, and as a background the french window festooned round its edge with little white stars of late clematis, and framing the sleepy, misted blue-green distance of the September garden.
I prayed tenderly, ‘Oh, God, please let her marry since you would not let her play the violin. Let her be able to fall in love,’ I added. Mary and I had frequently remarked to ourselves that we had never met any man with whom we could possibly have fallen in love, though Mary, who was always fair-minded, had pointed out that this might well mean that the men we met felt they could never fall in love with us. But then, in the isolation of a gambler’s family, we had met very few men. ‘God,’ I prayed, ‘let her meet some man who is really nice and young enough. What did you think was the good of letting her meet Mr Weissbach?’ But as I rebuked the Almighty the savage in me came to life again.
I felt shocked because it was obvious that Cordelia had played this game before the mirror more than once before. She had been able to find the scarf in Mamma’s workbox without looking for it, and she had known exactly how to put in the hairpins. But only a minute before she had given away her idea of marriage as a ceremony where one dressed up in order to cast off one’s true name, to desert one’s family. She had in fact been rehearsing treachery. I had to admit that there was no reason why she should feel full loyalty to us, for I never felt that she was really one of us. That was why I had not wanted to tell her how much I loathed Mary taking another name, it was like letting a stranger into a family secret. This was all wrong, for I was not quite loyal myself. When I had looked at the red name on the white tape, ‘Mary Keith, Mary Keith, Mary Keith’, I had feared lest Mary had been chosen to assume my mother’s name because she had inherited the larger share of my mother’s talent. I knew it was not so; it was because Mary Keith and Rose Aubrey sounded better than Mary Aubrey and Rose Keith. But I felt a bitter and idiotic anger, not against Mary but against my poor mother as if she could, had she wished, have gone to her lawyers and seen to it that she handed on her talent to us in equal proportions.
I was to wonder soon if I had not been disinherited altogether. At first I was not greatly drawn to Mr Burney Harper, who was my chief teacher when I went to the Athenaeum. He was seedy with professionalism, looking so much like a musician that he looked like a street musician. His dark red hair sprang from a centre parting in large soft waves, as if a giant handlebar moustache had been transplanted to his scalp. It was in fact a marmalade parody of Paderewski’s amber aureole. Too many picturesque touches, including an excessive resort to velveteen, made his suits seem like some kind of native costume. I greatly preferred the appearance of my former teacher, Mr Kisch, who had belonged to that elect tribe, the Jews of Budapest. His eyes were black fire among his finely incised wrinkles, the bones under his yellowing ivory flesh might have been put in by a fan-maker. But I observed very soon that Mr Kisch would have approved of Mr Harper’s teaching, which followed the same lines as his own, though it was differently expressed. ‘You ignorant little brat,’ Mr Harper would say, ‘you’re not holding that G in the left hand. Don’t you see you need it? This is one of the places where Mozart pops in a bit of grand opera into a piano sonata, and your right hand’s all right, it’s playing as if it were singing an aria with its ribs out to keep all the air in, but what’s opera without an orchestra? That G gives the harmonic background, it spreads on the richness, keep it on, on, on, you silly little cuckoo.’
But almost at the same time that I passed Mr Harper as all right, I became aware that he was not prepared to do the same by me. He said nothing comminatory. He was, indeed, very friendly. He told me little things about himself, mentioning quite often how lonely he felt now that his mother was dead. He had lived with her, and he never could get used to going home in the evening and not finding her by the fire. All the same, after each lesson he dismissed me with kind words which were quite spiritless. I did not expect praise, for that is the prerogative of amateurs, who have a limited objective in view. Once one is a professional musician one’s goal is set in infinity and one can never be congratulated on getting any nearer to it. All that one can hope from a professional (even if that be oneself) is an admission that one is in a state of motion, and when this admission is respectful it often takes the paradoxical form of a complaint that one is not moving fast enough. This seems inconsistent, but then to be a professional musician one must be schizophrenic, with a split mind, half of which knows it is impossible to play perfectly, while the other half believes that to play perfectly is only a matter of time and devotion. I was fairly certain that had I played to Mamma and Mr Kisch as I was playing to Mr Harper I would have rated the compliment of denunciation, that Mamma would have shrieked, not like an eagle defending its young, but like an eagle doubting if its young were worth defending or even rearing, and Mr Kisch would have shuddered in glittering peevishness. Their scorn would have meant that I was walking with them in the procession that would gloriously never arrive at its destination; but Mr Harper’s embarrassed indifference implied that so far as he was concerned I had never joined it. Weakly, I tried to tell myself that he disliked me and was therefore biased; but I knew the suspicion to be absurd. The fantasy of his appearance showed him to be so trustfully fond of people that he dared play at charades without feeling they would mock him; and even had some circumstances forced him to go against the grain and dislike somebody, he still could not have lied about their musical ability. His ear had an honesty his mind could not have overborne.