This Real Night (23 page)

It was not fair, this private golden age which had been given Richard Quin, where there were neither strangers nor trespassers, only friends and open doors. For he did not like people more than we did, he liked most of them less. He was to shock me by his indifferences to the sort of friendliness for which I longed, one night in the following spring, when we went together to a party given in a big dull villa by a girl called Myrtle Robinson, who had been in the same class as Mary and myself: a girl who was quite rich, because her father manufactured the Constantia Robinson brand of jams and jellies and pickles. It was a mark of Richard Quin’s power to go in and out of people without heed for the usual boundaries that he was invited, for he was the only person there who was still at school, and this was because some days before he had travelled down from London in the same railway carriage as Myrtle’s mother, a heavy, timid woman with white eyelashes, and had carried her parcels for her. But when he got to the house he was as irritably ungrateful as Papa might have been.

‘Why, what a waste of an evening this is going to be,’ he grumbled to me as we stood in the still congealed crowd of guests among the potted palms in the drawing-room. ‘When they are so rich, why can’t they have one single picture worth looking at? Nothing but gondoliers and cardinals. That’s a good oath. Gondoliers and cardinals, it sounds worse than what Othello said, goats and monkeys! And they haven’t any books. And there isn’t a pretty girl.’

‘Shut up,’ I muttered, ‘and anyway you’re wrong. That girl by the piano has beautiful golden hair.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen her, how dare she, with so plain a face? It is almost the colour of Rosamund’s hair.’ Rage shook him. He was frenzied because Rosamund was not there, because he had so little of her now that she had gone to her training in the children’s hospital in an eastern suburb, hard to reach from Lovegrove.

I said, ‘But you did choose to come.’

‘I know, I know,’ he admitted. ‘But all the same, it is a waste of time. There is so little time.’

For a moment he was quiet beside me, swallowing his resentment, and then he set about building a diversion for himself. I knew the signs. A tremor ran through him, as if he were a bird tired of his perch, and then he smoothly crossed the room by doing favours. In those days old people were always complaining of draughts; their years brought the mirage of a blasted heath into every room at every season. Myrtle’s grandmother lived with the family, a little bent old woman, whose face, brown and shrivelled like an unpeeled almond, seemed the tinier because the pleated white lawn and trailing black crêpe of her widow’s cap were so unusually massive. The corner where she sat in her wheeled chair had suddenly appeared to her as a cave of the winds, and Richard Quin found her a corner which he assured her was peculiar in its peace, and she believed him. Then he knelt and freed a girl’s shoe-buckle from the hem of her lace skirt, and when he stood up was brought by a single step to the spot where he wanted to be, where Myrtle’s mother shifted from foot to foot with her back to a window, fingering her moonstone necklace and smiling about her with unperturbed surprise, as if there were more guests than she had expected but there was enough in the kitchen for all comers. When she saw Richard Quin she said, ‘Oh, it’s you!’ and her smile became tender, amused and flattered. He must have been charming to her in the train. My brother affected to catch sight of something through a chink in the silver and blue brocade curtains behind her, put his eye to it, and cried out to ask her if she knew what the moon was doing to her garden. He seemed astonished because the moon was so big and yellow, though he and I had watched it rise over the trees at the end of our lawn, before we started for the party. Myrtle’s mother, as if pleased to please him, drew back the curtains and let him take them from her hands and open the french windows. The standard rose-trees on the edge of the lawn gleamed as if moonbeams were wet paint; at the foot of a gentle slope a lily-pond was zebra-striped with white light and black glass; a rose pergola behind it seemed cut finely in hard stone.

In those days young people did not stray into gardens during dances, at least not in Lovegrove. To sit out in a conservatory among potted plants that were not usually there, that had been hired for the evening, and listen to the dance-band (which was here the trio which played every afternoon in the tea-room at the Bon Marché in Lovegrove High Street) was considered a sufficient departure from the normal routine to make the situation as heady as it could safely be. But Myrtle’s mother, smiling now like a deaf person almost sure that the sound of music is again penetrating a long useless ear, made us free of the night my brother had revealed to her. Between the waltzes, the gallops, the polkas, the barn-dances, the Bostons, the one-steps, we walked in the moonlight, easy with each other as if we were disguised in masks and dominoes. Sometimes my partner and I passed Richard Quin and some girl, and each time I had to note how perfectly he had assumed the adoring and humble voice, now hesitant, now artlessly precipitate, which would reconcile a girl proud of being newly grown up to being paired off with a schoolboy. Then I met him no more, and the perspiring trio from the Bon Marché, Mr Krause, Miss Mackenzie and her sister Flora, ceased their good-natured thumping and supper was served. We took our plates of chicken mousse and our goblets of claret cup out into the garden, and found seats on the rustic benches and on the steps leading to the striped lily-pond, and my brother was with me again.

A thread of sweet sound was spun into the night. My brother had gone home during the last dance and fetched his flute, and was playing it in the summer-house behind the pergola. Above us the sweet hollow voice rose and fell, doubled back on itself and glided forward, ubiquitous, tracing a pattern among the stars and another within us, behind our breast-bones. Myrtle’s mother had been lumbering down the steps, breathily asking us if we had everything we wanted. Now she bent over me and sighed, ‘When he asked me, I didn’t think it would be as good as this.’ Moving as if she were a bear, as if her feet were soft rounded pads, and her limbs were thick and hardly jointed, she went down to the lily-pond and stood still beneath my brother’s music and the night sky. There was a rounded hedge of hair above her forehead, according to the fashion then set by the Royal Family; the moonlight seemed entangled in it. She looked up at us through the darkness, turning her illuminated face from side to side, as if she wanted to be sure that all of us received the blessing of her smile, which was ecstatic yet tentative, hardly convinced of the fullness of her own gratification.

The young man beside me had ceased to speak or move. He held his goblet an inch or two from his lips and did not drink. His name was Martin Grey, and I had met him several times lately, at dances and at tennis tournaments, and he had always sought me out. He had a sweep of fair hair across his broad forehead and deep grey eyes, and I had found him more interesting when he talked about sailing, which was his hobby, than I would have thought possible. So interesting that now, when my brother played, I knew that if he wanted to marry me I would be content to live with him all my life long and never leave Lovegrove. I would give up everything to serve him, and it would be no sacrifice, for it would be an ordinary life, and that was good enough, there was no need for an exceptional destiny. I did not love him, but I could do so if he would say he wished it. My brother’s music was proclaiming that there would be a huge vacuum in the universe, a hole that would swallow all, if we did not fill it with something that the notes defined with a clarity forbidden to words.

But the young man did not speak or move. It was not to be expected that he should. That sort of young man would find his wife among the more prosperous families in Lovegrove, whose daughters stayed at home after they left school. I knew well that that was the supreme attraction. It was no good at all for a girl to be clever, and not much good being pretty; ‘staying at home’ was what was irresistible. I was better off than some not in that case. Poor Eva Lowson, who had been one of the prettiest girls at our school, was now a cashier at the Bon Marché, because her father had ‘failed’, as they put it in those stable days when a man went bankrupt, so she had not been invited to the party. But all the same I was at a disadvantage compared to all the other girls sitting beside their partners in the warm moonlight, simply because I was known to be committed to a profession. I was not in the leper class with Eva, but I was, so to speak, wearing a nose-ring. I sat there beside Martin Grey, feeling a little cold and thinking how right the suffragettes were; and then I remembered that his father was the manager of the bank where my father had kept his account. There can have been no such real point of indifference between the Capulets and the Montagus. I burst out laughing and was afraid that Martin might ask me why, but he did not notice.

Down by the lily-pond Myrtle’s mother was suddenly abashed. Her fingers went to her moonstone necklace and it could be seen that she was wondering what she was doing out there, in front of everybody, all alone. She moved slowly, as if she thought delay would make her less visible, out of the moonlight into the flanking shadow cast by a knot of trees. Beside me Martin raised his goblet to his lips and began to drink. Till then I had been listening to my brother’s flute as if I were one of the strangers to whom he was playing, but now I knew that I was not. I was as much divided from the young men and women, simply because of what I was, as Myrtle’s mother was by her stout middle age. So now I listened to Richard Quin with the special knowledge that came of being his sister, and I was astonished by the simplicity of the strangers. They were melting under the influence of a tenderness which they believed to be in his performance, but was not there. They were inventing it because they needed it. The music promised sweetness which was for himself alone. He ached with a desire to be in another place than this, where he would find that sweetness. If he felt concern whether they found the same delight for themselves, it left no trace in the sounds he made. And he felt no such concern; from this and that, over the years, I knew he did not. There was this excuse for his indifference, he had already discharged whatever debt he owed to them. He could speak of what they desired and they could not. Without him they would have been voiceless. With him their need pierced the night like the reply to the ray of a star. Yet surely that was not quite right, surely one never discharges one’s full debt to other people. But again that cannot be true, if the payment one makes is large enough. I could not work it out.

I was angry with Richard Quin after the party ended. In the hall Myrtle’s mother stood beside her husband, who was as softly and slowly ursine as she was, and they eyed Richard Quin with wonder while they thanked him, as though they found him as prodigious a guest as a unicorn, and hoped that other legends also would come true; and under a rosy lamp they reverently watched him take me down the path. Outside the gate knots of young men and girls and chaperons were saying goodbye beside a line of cabs, and as we passed they cried out their thanks to my brother; and a girl’s voice cried out shyly and bravely, ‘Rose, because of your brother, we’ll never forget tonight.’ Our road home was folded round a hill, and below us Lovegrove lay dark as woodland within the yellow pattern drawn by the street-lamps, for our suburb went early to bed. Beyond, the lights of London were reflected on the clouds as a rusty glow. Richard Quin looked down on the landscape as if it were unpeopled space, and said, ‘Well, I got myself out of that dreary mess pretty well.’ His voice was shocking and beautiful in its coldness, like a glacier stream.

We did not speak again until we had come to our house, which slept like all its neighbours, but was theatrically illuminated by the street-lamp at our gate. The gas-light was not very strong, but the shadows it cast brushed the grooves in the pediment and the shadows under the veranda as if they were black paint laid on canvas, and the creepers might have been cut out of metal. ‘The curtain rises on a small Regency house standing in a suburban garden; the time is midnight,’ one of us said, I forget which. When we had opened the false-looking door and let ourselves into the creaking and obscure reality behind it, we took off our shoes and crept downstairs into the kitchen and got ourselves some milk from the larder, cool off the slate shelves. We always did this when we had been out with strangers. While we drank it we sat on the kitchen table, swinging our stockinged feet.

Richard Quin said, ‘That clock has the loudest tick. I can’t think how Kate can stand it.’

‘She says it’s company when we are out.’

‘What horrid company.’ He shuddered and went on with his drink. ‘I say, they used to make wine-glasses cloudy-white like a tumbler that has had milk in it, did you know? I saw some in the antique shop near the Town Hall. They might do for Mamma’s birthday. Not to use. There are only four. But they would look all right on the chimneypiece in the dining-room and they are Mamma’s sort of thing. But talking of time and birthdays and all that, you saw that poor old lady, Myrtle’s grandmother? Well, she was the original Constantia Robinson. The one the firm’s called after,’

‘Was she? How very strange.’ I added, ‘I mean, the widow’s cap.’

‘What was strange about that? Wasn’t it like anybody else’s who wears that kind of thing? They’re horrid things. I wouldn’t like my widow to wear one.’

‘Yes, it was like any other, I suppose. What I meant was that last year the firm was fifty years old, they had lots of advertisements about it. And it was she who started it. She made jams and lemon curd and pickles in her kitchen, after her husband had died and left her with three children. Well, fifty years is a long time. She has probably forgotten what her husband looked like. It must be so strange to put on something every day in memory of someone she might not recognise if he came into the room.’

‘She will have forgotten him if she didn’t love him and she will remember him if she loved him,’ said Richard Quin.