This Real Night (3 page)

‘No, no,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘you must all come. For one thing, it is absurd that you should none of you have ever been to my house.’

‘But we have,’ said Mamma.

‘No, never,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. But that house in Eaton Place is not mine. It belonged to an uncle of mine who died some years ago, and my uncles and my cousins and I thought it saved trouble to keep it on. It is very handy when one or other of us want to close his town house, as it happened to me this winter, or if any of our relations from Paris or Berlin or Tangier turn up. Though as to that,’ he said, with the stern yet self-gratulatory air of a man who has struck on a thrifty notion, ‘the new Ritz Hotel is so pleasant that a suite there will really do them just as well. But my own house is quite a different matter. Look at the heading of the letter. I would like you all to see it, and never mind about Richard’s age. I want the whole of your family to meet the whole of mine, and anyway I don’t think he is more than a month or two younger than my Stephanie. If she is at luncheon there is no reason why he should not be there too. It may be a little dull for him but I hope Richard Quin will put up with that for once, to please me.’

Richard Quin sat back on his haunches, yellow tulips strewn all round him, and smiled brilliantly. ‘I would do anything to please you.’ It was not humbug. He liked pleasing people as much as he liked playing games.

‘It is important that he should be there,’ said Mr Morpurgo over his head to Mamma, with a mystical air. ‘Have you thought of it, he is the only son in both our families? Oh, do not look so doubtful about the whole occasion. All things are in order, or I would not have brought you the invitation. My wife and I talked it over last night. She and my girls and their governess have been away at Pau for the last six months to be with her mother, who has asthma, and lives there now. She came back for twenty-four hours to tell me that her mother was better and that she intended to bring the whole party home in ten days’ time.’ He laughed. ‘I told you she was impulsive. She could not wait to tell me the news, she said that she felt suddenly that she must see me, and there she was. And now she is off again. How much I like it when she and my girls are back! To be with one’s wife and children and to entertain one’s friends, there can be nothing better. And you are the very first guests we will entertain. Well, I must go, and we will all see each other a fortnight from today. I chose a Saturday so that there could be no question of school for any of your young people.’ He rose, smiling, as if he had something pleasant to think of and wanted to hurry off and enjoy it all by himself. His black eyes, bright with their secret, fell on a heap of red carnations which Mary had laid on a tray, and his plump fingers shuffled among them till he found one of the more splendid flowers, broke its juicy stalk, and put it in his buttonhole. But he looked down on the dark rosette and grew sad again. ‘When things go well,’ he said apologetically to Mamma, ‘one cannot help feeling cheerful.’

‘Why not?’ said Mamma.

He hesitated. ‘Surely it’s a kind of treachery’, he said, ‘to all the things that haven’t gone well.’

‘Such a ridiculous idea would never have come into your head,’ said Mamma, ‘if it had not been for all that cooking in oil.’

Mary soon found an excuse for not going with us, I thought rather unscrupulously, by converting what had been a vague suggestion into a firm promise and then pressing on one of Mamma’s most sensitive points. We all knew perfectly well which day we were going to Mr Morpurgo’s house, but Mamma did not mention the exact date till some time had passed, and then Mary started and exclaimed, ‘The tenth! Well, Mamma, you must tell Mrs Bates that I cannot play at the St Jude’s Charity Concert that afternoon.’ At once Mamma replied, as Mary had known she would, ‘What! Is that the same day? Can you get back in time? No, I suppose you cannot. Well, you cannot break a promise to play just to keep a social engagement. You must never, never do that. What a pity! I will write at once to the Morpurgos.’

I kicked Mary under the table, quite viciously, for we carried on a permanent quarrel over this issue of going out into the adult world. Mary thought that the people we would meet there would be just as tiresome as the girls and the teachers at school in Lovegrove, and that we should make up our minds to have nothing to do with them except play to them at concerts. There would be a few nice ones, just as at school there was Ida, who meant to be a doctor and had a mother who played Brahms quite well, but we would get to know these people anyway, they would be on the outside like us. And anyway, Mary said, we need not fear loneliness, for there were enough of us at home to give us all the companionship we needed. We were numerically quite strong. Now that Rosamund and her mother, Constance, were living with us for good, we were eight, including Kate our servant, who was completely one of us; and nine, if we counted Mr Morpurgo, and he seemed to have joined us; and if Papa came back we would be ten. What did we want with anybody else, Mary asked. But I held that it must be worth while exploring the territory outside Lovegrove because there must be people who were like the characters in books and plays. Authors could not just have made them up out of nothing at all.

This luncheon-party had raised this hope of mine in a most attractive form. It seemed certain that Mrs Morpurgo must be kind and noble, for her husband said she was beautiful, and no beautiful woman would have married such an ugly man, had she not valued goodness above everything. We were very fond of George du Maurier’s novels, and of
Peter Ibbetson
specially, and I saw Mrs Morpurgo as the saintly and gigantic Duchess of Towers. She would be a little different; because she was a Jewess her hair would be black and not copper-brown, as du Maurier says that the Duchess’s was. But like Mary Towers and all the great ladies du Maurier drew, she would be very tall, and would lean slightly forward, her brows clouded with a concern which was not irritable but tender, provoked by fear that since she was so tall she might have overlooked some opportunity for kindness. I thought Mary a fool for throwing away her chance of meeting this splendid person, and I told her so on the day of the party while she was doing up the buttons at the back of my best blouse. But when she had finished and I faced her I saw she was looking cold and fierce and this was a sign that she was afraid. She looked like that when any of us were ill. So I simply called her a fool, to make her think I had not noticed anything, and went downstairs.

In the drawing-room Cordelia was sitting on the sofa, ready dressed, even to her gloves, which the rest of us put on only at the last moment, because we disapproved of them on principle; and she was watching Richard Quin and Rosamund play a game of chess. She was frowning, although Richard Quin was as ready to start as she was, and Rosamund was not coming with us. It worried Cordelia that Richard Quin was always playing games, and indeed as he and Rosamund sat at the chessboard they had a spendthrift and luxurious air, perhaps for no other reason than that they both were fair and the sunlight was pouring in on them. Nowadays Rosamund wore her hair up when she went out, but though she looked more grown-up than any of us she did not enjoy doing grown-up things as we did, and the minute she got home she used to raise her long hands and slowly draw out the pins from her hair and let it fall loose, slowly, curl by curl, over her shoulders. As I came in Richard Quin struck the board and set the red and white chessmen sprawling, and leaned across the table and tugged hard at one of these loose curls.

‘You have beaten me three times running,’ he said. ‘That’s against nature. The rule is that I beat you, you beat me, for ever and ever, amen.’

‘It would be like that,’ stammered Rosamund, ‘if today you weren’t thinking of something else.’

‘You never concentrate on anything,’ Cordelia told him.

‘Rosamund, I shall never understand this business about chess,’ I said. ‘You always say you are not clever, and you never got any prizes at school except for needlework and that horrible domestic science, and they didn’t think it worth while even putting you in for the Matric. Well, chess is a very difficult game, and Papa is a genius, and Richard Quin would be clever if he ever did any work, and yet you can beat them both. How can you do that if you’re not clever?’

‘It is quite simple,’ said Richard Quin. He had kept her long barley-sugar curl to twist between his fingers. ‘Rosamund hasn’t got a mind. But she does quite well without it. She thinks with her skin. The people who examine for the Matric don’t like that sort of thing, they don’t hold with it, as Kate says, but chess is different. So long as you can make the moves, chess doesn’t care if, like Rosamund, you just have something shining instead of a brain.’

Without resentment Rosamund asked him, ‘Since I am like that, will I be able to be a good nurse?’

But Richard Quin looked past her at the opening door. Mamma came in and went silently to an armchair and sat down. Cordelia and I inspected her to see if she were properly dressed for the party, but Richard Quin asked sharply, ‘What is the matter?’ and we saw that her face was quite white and that she was twisting a piece of paper in her hands. It was as if Papa were still living with us.

‘Children,’ she said, ‘a horrid thing has happened.’

‘Oh, not today! Not today!’ exclaimed Cordelia. ‘Mr Morpurgo will be here at any moment.’

‘There is a man who has come here from time to time to ask for money,’ said Mamma. ‘It is his trade, and of course such people must exist, and there would be no need for them to exist if everyone paid their debts. Oh, children, you must always pay your debts. This man came here first to ask for the rent, but you must not count that against Cousin Ralph, the house-agent did it without telling him. I wrote to your Cousin Ralph, asking him not to do it again, and explaining that it was useless, that when I had the money I paid the rent. He answered me quite nicely, saying that he had not known about the bailiff and would see to it that we were not bothered in this way again. Then another time this man came to ask for the rent for those offices your father and Mr Langham took for that company that never was started, something to do with ostrich feathers. And there were other times, but I forget them.’

‘Well, if he’s here now, it can’t be for the same reason,’ said Richard Quin, who had gone to sit on the arm of Mamma’s chair. ‘The solicitor has had all the bills.’

‘He is in the dining-room now,’ said Mamma, ‘and he says we owe a printer ten pounds.’

‘Well, let us pay him off,’ said Cordelia, rising to her feet. ‘Surely we have ten pounds? I will run to the bank if you will write a cheque. But perhaps we have not got ten pounds. I suppose we still have very little money.’

‘Sit down again, dear, you give no help by standing, and it makes me nervous,’ said Mamma. ‘The trouble is that we do not owe him ten pounds, or even one pound. Or so I should think. I am sure that everything is settled, and this man has nothing to prove the debt but this piece of paper. Marchant & Ives, printers, Kingston, in October, to account rendered, ten pounds. I never heard of them, and I do not think that your father had had anything printed for a long time before he went away. That was one of the ways I knew he was ill, he was not writing any more.’

‘And the date is October,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Papa had gone by then.’

‘That means nothing, the months mentioned in connection with any of your father’s debts might be in any year, past or to come; your father was debt itself,’ said Mamma, quite without bitterness, simply as if she spoke of a storm. ‘But this thing is absurd. When this man came before, he had official papers. He always showed them to me, though I did not look. But now he has nothing but this dirty piece of paper.’

‘Then we’ll go and tell him that we’ll fetch the police if he does not leave at once,’ I said, sitting down on the other arm of the chair and kissing her.

‘You are all a great comfort to me,’ said Mamma, ‘but get up, dears, no furniture was built to stand such a strain, and you are missing the point. You see, he is just a poor old man. He has a grey beard, it used to be trim, now it is straggling, and his coat is dirty. I remembered him as quite neat when he came before. What can have happened to him? But what a foolish question, so many things may have happened to him. In any case I suppose the word has gone round among such people that we are paying all our debts, and he has thought of this way of raising money for himself.’

‘Let us turn him out,’ I said, ‘and I wish we could kill him.’

‘But why do you think Papa did not really owe this money?’ asked Cordelia. ‘When he owed money everywhere, why should he not owe money to this Kingston printer?’

‘I am sure this is not a real debt,’ said Mamma. ‘When I first went into the room I saw that the old man had been crying. It is not only that he is much more unkempt than he used to be, he seems years older. Also he looked at me sideways after he had been rude to me, to see whether I was going to give in, and his eyes were like an old dog’s. What can we do for the poor wretch? We cannot pretend that we really owe him ten pounds, that is too mad, and five pounds, too, is a lot of money.’

‘But how do five pounds come in?’ asked Richard Quin.

‘Why, I do not see how we are to offer him less than five pounds without letting him see that we know him to be a fraud,’ said Mamma. ‘And I feel so guilty, for I never thought of such people as having a life of their own; I saw them as coming into existence in order to plague me and then vanishing. But this old man certainly has a life of his own, and I think it is sad.’

‘Mamma, try to stick to the point,’ Cordelia implored her. ‘How do you know we do not owe him this money?’

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mamma, impatiently, ‘if it would not hurt his feelings, I would tell you to open the door and look at him. He is in utter misery. I wish there were something small in the room that was worth a little so that he could put it under his coat and take it away.’

‘No, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin. ‘No. We cannot stock our rooms with objects which are just the right size for putting under a coat so that thieves can steal them and thus not have their feelings hurt by the knowledge that you know they are dishonest. That really is too mad.’