This Real Night (28 page)

My mother, who had been swaying on her chair with fatigue, was suddenly still, and said, sharply, ‘For heaven’s sake, Lily, what is really the matter?’ I do not know how she knew.

‘I’m telling you,’ said Aunt Lily, cutting her tongue and lettuce with an air of defiance.

‘No, my dear, you are not,’ said Mamma. ‘Mr Morpurgo, why is Lily in this state?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘but poor Lily has been unhappy, very unhappy, all the way home.’

‘Didn’t any of them say anything to you?’ my mother asked him, and he shook his head sadly. He would be thinking that Mamma was thinking that Papa would have found out what had gone wrong.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Aunt Lily threw down her knife and fork and rested her elbows on the table and hid her face in her hands, and raised it to bawl. ‘She’s asked me to put flowers on his grave.’ As nobody said anything she wagged her tear-stained face at us, and pierced our dullness with a full scream. ‘His grave. Harry’s grave. Her husband’s grave. She asked me to put flowers on it, me that knew the minute the coppers came what she’d been up to.’

‘Oh, Lily, dear,’ begged Mamma, ‘do not scream, do not cry, get on with your supper and go off to bed. You are such a brave woman, and you do things no other woman could do, and then you make a fuss about things you really should be able to take as a matter of course.’

‘This ain’t a matter or course,’ protested Lily. ‘It’s disgusting. Flowers on his grave. It’s so unlike her. She done him in. We all know she done him in.’

‘Lily, just think. You are so intelligent, but you will not think. Can’t you see that if one had happened to kill one’s husband, or anybody else, it would be very difficult to find a way of telling him one was sorry except by putting flowers on the poor man’s grave? I really cannot think of anything else one could do in such a situation. Now, do be sensible and be glad that your sister is settling down into her real self, and have a good sleep tonight, and we will see about the flowers for poor Harry tomorrow morning.’

‘You’re too good,’ sniffed Aunt Lily, and took up her knife and fork again, saying, ‘I know I’m a silly girl. Always was.’ In a low voice, like a child talking to a companion who has come off just well enough but not too well in a family row, Mr Morpurgo said to her, ‘Give me time in the morning and I’ll drive home and get some flowers, so that they’ll be absolutely fresh.’ Lily answered with a nod and a watery smile, but then looked doubtful and said, ‘Thanks ever so, but, if you don’t mind, nothing fancy,’ and as he looked puzzled explained, ‘I mean, none of your giant South American doodahs. If this were a wedding it would have been a quiet one.’

The meal continued in silence. In other households it might have been supposed that one of the older children had been rude to someone and had been smacked down by authority; and as on such more usual crises the younger members of the party are silently convulsed by laughter. Mary and Richard Quin and I saw that Aunt Lily had been exhausted to a shock, that the part of her which was as serious and venerable as anybody we knew had recoiled from the darkness known as sin, but we also saw that Mamma had been very funny, and that twice over. First, when she paused before uttering the word ‘happened’ in the sentence beginning ‘if one had happened to kill one’s husband’. We all were aware that she had been about to say, ‘if one had killed one’s husband,’ but had thought it incumbent to introduce a word suggesting that the fatality might have been, to some degree, accidental in nature; and we were aware too that this was not only to spare Aunt Lily’s feelings, it was out of a far-flung politeness to all the killers of the world, of whatever time. She was making things no harder than they need be to Burke and Hare, Charles Peace, Tamberlane and Robespierre. She would have risked her own life to bring them to the scaffold, but she would never have insulted them. Her second absurdity was flattering to us, and all created things. When she said that she could not see any other way that a murderer could show his regret for his crime except by putting flowers on his victim’s grave, her glance had swept round the table and rested for a fiery instant on each of our faces. She really had thought that one of us might come up with a valid solution to that insoluble problem. As always, she was expecting more of life than its best friends would have claimed for it; but no look of disappointment, of discontent with the family she had borne and the friends she had gathered, passed over her face, and never had, except when my eldest sister Cordelia played the violin.

That exception came to my mind as I cast my eyes round the room to avoid seeing the repressed amusement that was giving the faces of Mary and Richard Quin an unnatural blandness. So it was that I noticed that the dining-room door was open, and Cordelia was standing in the hall outside, looking in at us all, but not moving. She had not taken off her outdoor things. A small black straw hat with a curved brim and a little veil round the crown was still perched on her red-gold hair and shadowed her perfect little face; and a long coat was fluted round her waist and then fell in pleats, making her sturdiness look as if it were fragility that could easily be snapped across. She had put down her gloves and her handbag, and her hands were crossed on her chest, her long fingers with their nails polished, but not varnished, according to the fashion of the day, intertwining just at the base of her little round neck. I could not see her expression but I assumed that, as she was looking at her family, it would be disagreeable. What are they doing now? she would be asking. What have they been doing while I have been away? How long is it before they will bring down ruin on themselves and on me? But she moved forward into the gas-lit room, and I saw that I could not have been more wrong. She was a gazelle, a lamb, a dove. She was meek. She greeted our guests and refused to take her place at table because she was not hungry, in a barely audible voice, and sat down in a corner of the room, still in her hat and coat. All this was odd, but I felt no curiosity, taking it for granted that this was simply another of her impersonations, which might be abandoned at any moment. But as soon as Mr Morpurgo had driven away and Aunt Lily had been put to bed, and I had gone to the room I shared with Mary and was undressing, Mary came in and said, ‘Something is going on. I went into the dining-room because I saw a light and thought Richard Quin hadn’t turned the gas off, and there were Mamma and Cordelia, and Cordelia was behaving as if she were telling Mamma the facts of life. She looked at me with infinite patience until I went away.’

‘It is too bad, Mamma has had such a long day,’ I said, and I was going to put on my dressing-gown and run downstairs and break up whatever silliness was going on, but just at that moment Mamma came into the room and sat down on my bed. She told us in hesitating and incredulous tones that Cordelia had had news which, Mamma said, would make us all happy, and indeed that was true. For some time past Cordelia had been talking a great deal about a girl called Angela Houghton-Bennett who had been a fellow-student in one of her courses at the School of Art, and who had asked her to her home on a number of occasions, though for one reason or another she never brought her back to our house, although Mamma said we must always try and return all hospitality. Now it appeared that Angela had a brother called Alan, and he had proposed to Cordelia, and would be calling tomorrow morning to ask Mamma for her consent.

Mary and I were stunned into silence, but Mary recovered and asked, ‘When are they going to get married?’

‘Sooner than usual,’ answered Mamma. It was then the custom for engagements to last a year or more. ‘His father has to return to the East for a long journey in the autumn and the family think it will be much nicer for them to marry before he leaves.’ She looked at us sharply and we looked back blankly. But she knew quite well she had spoken with a satisfaction of a kind she would not have wished to feel, and that we had noticed it. She said, gravely, ‘Of course I am pleased. Particularly as all this art business couldn’t really have led anywhere. So of course I am glad that she is going to marry.’

We asked how old he was and what he did, and she said, ‘He is eight years older than Cordelia, which is just right. And he is a civil servant, he is in the Treasury, and your father used to say that was where all the cleverest men went. And it is better still about his father. He was in the Indian Civil Service. Your father always said that that was the greatest service in the world. Oh, there are many reasons why we should be glad.’ Again she was putting a problem to us and we could not solve it for her. She was silently telling us ‘Reassure me. Tell me that I am not pushing Cordelia out of the house, tell me that I am not determined to get rid of her at the first opportunity. Tell me that I am considering this proposal for her interests and not for ours, that if I think him unsuitable for any reason I will be honest and ask her to hold back and consider the possibilities of happiness all over again.’ But we would not help her. We could not help her. We knew that Cordelia hated us, and we were still too young to have lost the child’s feeling, inherited from the primitive, that a person who hates can work a spell on whom he hates and destroy him. I remember the agitated, brief, fluttering goodnight kiss Mamma gave us as she left the room, with deep contrition, but still I knew that it was useless for Mary and me to try to give her what she needed.

Once she had gone we lay down on the beds and waved our legs in the air. ‘It will be wonderful to have nobody in the house who hates us,’ I said, but Mary had a more impersonal attitude to the news. ‘Why should anyone want to marry Cordelia? Anybody could see with half an eye she isn’t kind. I can understand why anybody should want to marry Rosamund, even if she weren’t beautiful. She’s kind. But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn’t do anything to people but blame them for things they haven’t done? It will be like spending one’s whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry for Mr Houghton-Bennett,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know him and I don’t care, really, not really, what happens to him so long as we don’t have to go on living with somebody who is perpetually cross. But, of course, I agree with you. It’s odd that anybody should want to marry Cordelia.’

‘And what is odder still is that I somehow don’t think people are going to want to marry us.’

‘Don’t let’s bother about that tonight,’ I said. But I knew what she meant, people said how wonderful we were but they kept at a distance. But all the same, I was right, it was too late to start thinking about it that night.

When we were dressing in the morning, we heard noises in the drawing-room below, and when we got downstairs we found Cordelia and Kate standing in the middle of the room, which looked quite different, for all the furniture had been moved. Cordelia was saying to Kate, ‘Now I think that looks a little better,’ and then she turned her white stars on us and asked, ‘Are you going to be in this morning?’ We said shortly that we would not, we had lessons and went off to have breakfast. Presently she came in and said that she was sorry if she had been rude, and added gravely, as if we were all in church, that she was going to marry somebody called Alan Houghton-Bennett, and he was coming about eleven o’clock to get Mamma’s consent, and she had hoped we would meet him. Because we knew that she was lying and was glad that we were going to be out, and because we had ourselves been lying in saying that we had lessons that morning, an atmosphere of false amiability was established. But we were shaking with anger, not only because of her desire to get us out of the house, which was after all as much ours as it was hers, but because of her new manner, which had changed a little, and not for the better, since the previous night. She was still meek, but her meekness was pretentious. Though she was a lamb, it was one which had got itself embroidered on a church banner. There was also a sort of pietistic prudery about her, which we suspected of alluding to a side of life about which we knew little but, in the light of that knowledge, did not greatly approve.

‘It’s as if she were the Virgin Mary,’ I said, ‘And as if what she is making a fuss about was not an engagement but an Annunciation.’

‘That’s putting it rather high,’ said Mary. ‘She reminds me more of Miss Higgins when she gave that special biology lesson that we couldn’t attend unless our parents gave written permission. Don’t you remember? Miss Higgins told us with magic lantern slides how a calf was born.’

‘Oh, I remember all right,’ I said, ‘we all agreed it would have been more interesting if the calf had told us with magic lantern slides how Miss Higgins had been born.’

We giggled and ran out into the garden and shouted up to Richard Quin’s window and got him down with us to play our private family elaborate form of catch-ball, breaking off to exchange more heartless jests at the expense of our sister. I blush to recall our savagery, but it did not last long, we were so sorry for Alan Houghton-Bennett and so certain of the dire outcome of his resolve to marry our sister. He turned out to be a likeable person, tall and good-looking, with grey eyes and black hair, intelligent in the way Papa had liked, and very polite. He appalled us by his vulnerability indicated by this obvious sincere politeness of his, this real regard for other people’s feelings. So far as we could see, he would have no defences against our awful sister.

There were only two grounds for hoping that he could survive. One was that she really loved him, and that seemed possible. Otherwise she could not have changed so completely; she worked on herself as drastically as a mezzo-soprano has to if she finds it necessary to change herself into a coloratura-soprano. That, of course, might not last. The mezzo-sopranos who have successfully converted themselves to the higher range must be very few indeed. But a second factor in the situation was her great enthusiasm for Alan’s family and his home, which might well be lasting. Sir George Houghton-Bennett was plump and balding and, except that the Asian sun had burned him as brown as Lady Tredinnick, he was exactly like any other elderly gentleman one did not remember very well, and his daughters Olivia and Angela were exactly like the girls one did not remember very well, and Lady Houghton-Bennett was exactly like millions of people since she was disguised by the hideous and individuality-destroying uniform imposed in those days on the middle-aged and elderly women of the prosperous classes. She had masses of hair done in the teapot style, on which there rested nearly all day long, even at her own table when she was entertaining guests, a large and heavy hat; her skirts were long and weighty and trailed behind her; her bodices were boned till they might as well have been cuirasses; her sleeves were vast from shoulder to elbow and then constricted to the wrist, and out of doors she wore high boots with high heels which made her stoop as she hobbled along. As she went about the day’s business, this gear (which was utterly unfeminine, which neither followed the lines of a woman’s body nor suggested the distinctive virtues of women) obliged her to bend and balance this way and that, with the result that her face was always distorted by a false peevishness. Moreover, though Lady Houghton-Bennett had a good mind, and used it, having written several useful handbooks for the use of British soldiers’ wives in India, teaching them something of the language and the everyday customs of the native population, she was now compelled to waste her time on such insensitive routines as ‘leaving cards’, which meant that she must spend an afternoon every month or so driving in her carriage to the houses of her friends and acquaintances, not to see them but to leave with the servant who opened the door her own and her husband’s visiting cards, which had to be distributed owing to a code of which I can now remember nothing except that it meant that one was going away if one turned up a corner of one’s card. The tedium of these rituals, together with the weight of her clothes, caused occasional failures in geniality; but like her husband and her daughters, she was remarkable for her good faith. They would not have gone back on a promise, and to them any contact with another human being, even so little as a ‘good morning’, constituted a promise, which could not be broken unless the other party to it made a disavowal. Even their concentration on fact, which was absolute and barred them from any understanding of the arts, was a way of keeping faith with the world about them. Of course Cordelia had to love people who had won so long ago and so finally the war against insecurity that we had waged all our lives. This was so particularly because the security attained was not only material but moral. They were as good as Mamma but in quite a different way: and as Cordelia had never been able to emulate Mamma’s type of virtue, this gave her a second chance and she was, quite humbly, grateful.