This Real Night (6 page)
I had mistaken the cause of Mrs Morpurgo’s surprise. We had not come into the room by the wrong door. But her husband had come into the room, and had brought us with him, and she was surprised by that, because everything her husband did struck her as inexplicable. This I realised very soon, for Mrs Morpurgo had no secrets. She controlled her words well enough, saying the same sort of things that the mothers of our school-fellows said when we went to tea with them, but as she spoke the truth was blared aloud by the intonations of her commanding voice, the expressions which passed over her face, legible as the words on a poster, and her vigorous movements. ‘This is Marguerite,’ she told my mother, ‘and this is Marie Louise, nearly grown-up, just grown-up, which should I say? Just like your Cordelia and Rose. Oh, yes, terribly dignified, aren’t you, my pets? And here’s our baby, Stephanie. Is your boy as young?’ But her clear, protruding, astonishingly bright grey-green eyes were saying, ‘Well, I am doing what he wants, but why should he want me to do it? Who can these people be that he thrusts them on me?’ She went on, ‘Ah, then there are three months between them, but he is inches taller,’ and her accents asked, ‘What can possibly come of it if I am as nice to them as he insists? We have nothing in common with them, how am I to carry on a relationship even if I begin it?’ In the midst of a pleasant remark about Cordelia and myself, she bit her lip in annoyance and shuddered, ‘It is always the same,’ she might as well have said aloud, ‘he never stops doing this sort of thing, it is insupportable.’
Then her eyes flashed, she turned aside from us. ‘Edgar, my dear,’ she said, with the air of clearing up at least one tangle in this disordered world that was being created about her against her will, and seeing to it that he should not make one of his absurd accusations that she was the one who muddled things, ‘you may be surprised to see Mr Weissbach here, but he rang up just after you went out, and specially wanted to see you, because he’s just this minute come back from Italy, where he’s been picking up all sorts of lovely things, and I thought that as we were having Mrs Aubrey and her family to lunch, we would be delighted to see Mr Weissbach, too.’
A coldness came into the genial smile that lived brilliantly and all the time between Mr Weissbach’s neatly clipped moustache and pointed beard, and Mr Morpurgo put down his head as if his wife’s speech had had an echo and he were listening to it with scientific interest. The extreme fatigue with which Mrs Morpurgo had uttered the last phrase could not have more clearly intimated that as her husband had insisted she should waste time to luncheon, Mr Weissbach, who also wanted to waste her time, might as well waste the same piece of time. Mamma regarded her with the pity she always extended to people under a special handicap, one of the daughters giggled, the tick of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece sounded very loud. Mrs Morpurgo looked at her husband with the expression which could have been foretold. ‘Again you are behaving incomprehensibly,’ she wondered silently, running a firm finger over her lips in affected doubt. ‘Why on earth could what I have just said have annoyed anybody?’ Furiously she addressed my mother, ‘Will you not sit down?’ and drew her to a chair beside the fireplace, and remained standing beside her, sometimes rocking back on her heels, as if the strangeness of what was happening to her had actually thrown her off her balance, while she impatiently engaged her in light conversation. She was splendid under the light from the high windows. Her face was unlined. Her skin was smooth and radiant like the surface of fine porcelain. It seemed to have something to do with her difficulty in apprehension.
I was left with her two elder daughters, at whom I smiled, for they had aroused my respect. They had escaped the ugliness of their father but they had not achieved the handsomeness of their mother; for she was handsome. Though she made war on ease by every word she said, she promised ease by the cushioned firmness of her flesh, the brilliance of her flesh, her eyes, and skin and hair. But the girls were exquisitely neat in their blouses and belling skirts, even neater than Cordelia. It did not occur to me that this was because they were dressed by a lady’s maid, so I imagined them to be deft and fastidious and precise. I saw them preparing for the day in miraculously tidy bedrooms cleaned by the cool morning light, standing in front of cheval glasses and stroking their blouses into the right flutings at their waists, their narrow beds smooth behind them, almost undisturbed by the night. I was disconcerted when they answered me with smiles which were certainly reserved and perhaps mocking. Cordelia was having better luck, for Mr Weissbach was talking to her as politely as if she were a grownup; I had expected this in Mr Morpurgo’s house, I had supposed that there people would take it for granted that they should make much of everybody they met. Richard Quin had asked Mr Morpurgo about a miniature on one of the tables, and Mr Morpurgo was answering, ‘It is interesting that you should want to know who that is. My little Stephanie here is always fascinated by him. He was a Bavarian Marshal of Irish origin. Come here, Stephanie, and tell Richard Quin all you know about him.’ That, too, I had expected here, his happy, harmless pedantry, his enjoyment of knowledge which was as purely ornamental as flowers, unlike my father’s kind of knowledge, which was a stock of fuel for crusades. But Marguerite and Marie Louise, who continued to be silent and look as if I amused them, were not what I had expected. I had to own that Mary might be right. The world might have its resemblances to school.
Mrs Morpurgo suddenly broke off her conversation with Mamma to remark in the voice of desperation itself, ‘Surely luncheon is very late!’
‘No,’ said Mr Morpurgo coldly. ‘It is now three minutes before our usual hour.’
‘I could not have believed it,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘But it is strange, time seems to pass so quickly at times, and so slowly at others. Well, at luncheon,’ she said, with an air of clinging to a plank, ‘we will be able to listen to Mr Weissbach telling us of all the treasures he found in Italy. Treasures,’ she explained to us with a light laugh, ‘to Mr Weissbach and to my husband, not to me. Can you bear these stupid-looking stiff Madonnas and these ugly little Christs? And no perspective! What’s a picture,’ her upturned eyes asked not only her family and her guests but the gilded and painted ceilings, ‘without perspective? I tell my husband that my Marie Louise can paint a better picture than all his Florentines and Siennese. But he won’t believe me. He follows the fashion,’ she told Mamma. ‘I believe that some things are beautiful and other things are ugly, and that nothing can alter that. Nightingales and roses,’ she said to her husband, in accents suddenly sharp with hatred, ‘you’ll be telling me next there’s no beauty in them.’
‘Here is Manning to tell us that luncheon is ready two minutes early,’ said Mr Morpurgo softly and sadly.
When we left the room we were led across the landing to a room on the same floor, and he spoke from behind us, ‘Are we not to have luncheon in the dining-room?’
We all paused. The butler again reminded me of a Shakespearean courtier. Mrs Morpurgo replied, exercising again her faculty for surprise, ‘It never occurred to me that you would wish to lunch down there today.’
‘I should have liked to show Mrs Aubrey and the children the room and the Claudes and the Poussin,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘The Claudes and the Poussin, perhaps, but why the room? Is there anything special about the room, except that it’s very large?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo, wrinkling her nose. ‘But, oh, dear, oh, dear. Shall we all go back to the drawing-room and wait till they move luncheon down to the dining-room? It could,’ she said, as if inviting the headsman to use his axe, ‘be done. If, of course, you do not mind waiting.’
‘Our company includes six people below the age of nineteen,’ said Mr Morpurgo, pleasantly, ‘and there must be something wrong with them if they are not so hungry that snatching luncheon from under their noses would be sheer cruelty.’ Stephanie was hanging on his arm, and he suddenly drew her to him. He seemed to think she was the nicest of his daughters. Perhaps she was. She had been all right with Richard Quin. ‘Even this skinny little thing eats like a wolf. And Mr Weissbach and I have come to an age when we are fussy about our food and would prefer not to eat luncheon that has been kept waiting for twenty minutes. But next time the Aubreys come we must have luncheon in the dining-room. Will you remember, Manning?’
The room where we lunched was not suitable for our party. Evidently the Morpurgos lunched there with their children when they had no guests, and it was pretty enough; and it interested Cordelia and Richard Quin and me to see that the walls were covered with photographs and pictures which were not only of people. There were many horses and bulls and cows and dogs as well. The table was too small, for we now numbered eleven, having been joined by the daughters’ French governess, a woman in a black dress, who had the same look of gloating discretion as the butler. She sat with her head bowed, and this might have been partly because it was weighed down by a large chignon of chestnut hair; but she had also the air of hoping to evade attention lest she be brought into the conversation and say too much. This was so little subtle a method of avoiding notice that it appeared possible that she was not very clever. But this was not a clever household. Mrs Morpurgo had certainly chosen to have luncheon in these cramped quarters to express her impatience at having to entertain Mr Weissbach and us; yet she was astonished at the inconvenience she had brought on herself. She looked about her in annoyance and said, ‘How crowded we are! It is quite uncomfortable. Mrs Aubrey, I must apologise. Stephanie and your boy might have had luncheon together in the schoolroom, but I did not think.’
‘No, indeed, that would not have done,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘see, I have put Richard Quin at my left instead of Cordelia, because I have put Stephanie on his other side, so that she can learn how clever someone of her own age can be, and every now and then I am going to lean across him and tell her how shocked I am at the difference.’
Mrs Morpurgo took no notice but continued, ‘I must really apologise, everything went out of my head, I have had such migraine.’ Abruptly she fell into a reverie and only answered in monosyllables when Mr Weissbach spoke to her, and she might have remained sealed in a surly dream had she not been aroused by the odd consequences of his interest in Cordelia. He was sitting on Mrs Morpurgo’s right and faced Cordelia across the table; and he kept on speaking to Mrs Morpurgo of her possessions and her interests but shifting his gaze from her to Cordelia before the end of each remark, so that the possessions and interests seemed transferred to my sister. ‘I was only one day in Padua,’ he told Mrs Morpurgo, ‘but I took the opportunity to call on your charming cousin, the Marchesa Allegrini.’ His eyes had gone to Cordelia long before the Italian name was pronounced, so that it was as if my sister had suddenly acquired a Marchesa for a cousin. ‘Are you still breeding those charming little French poodles?’ Even in the course of so short a sentence the ownership of the dogs passed from Mrs Morpurgo to Cordelia. Mr Weissbach’s absorption in my sister was so extreme that it was soon noticed by Marguerite and Marie Louise, who raised eyebrows at each other across the table and giggled; and the French governess raised her head and hissed a rebuke. She was not a woman with a light hand. Mrs Morpurgo was drawn from her abstraction by the sound, and looked about her with an expression of fear lest something to her disadvantage might have happened while she had laid down her defences. She raised her head, confident that she had only to capture the attention of the room for all to be well. She said so loudly that everybody stopped talking, ‘Well, let us hear what treasures Mr Weissbach found in Italy to delight my husband, and not me.’
‘A Lorenzetti panel,’ Mr Weissbach said to Mr Morpurgo.
‘Which Lorenzetti?’ asked Mr Morpurgo.
‘Ambrogio,’ answered Mr Weissbach. ‘You are not a Pietro man.’
‘You blackguard, you,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘you would have thought me one if you had found a Pietro.’
‘Do you never think,’ said Mr Weissbach, ‘how painful it is for me to do business with someone who understands me as well as you do? But anyway, this is an Ambrogio, and the attribution is quite firm.’
‘To the dickens with the attribution,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Does it look like an Ambrogio? The two things should be the same, but with all you rascals getting so scholarly they often aren’t. An Ambrogio Lorenzetti! Well, anyway, it will be too dear for me.’
‘I would certainly think it too dear,’ Mrs Morpurgo told the table. ‘But my husband can have it his own way - the house,’ she said with distaste, ‘is his. All but my drawing-room. That drawing-room we were in,’ she informed my mother, as if to indicate that differences of rank mattered nothing, one woman could understand the other, ‘is mine, the pictures are mine. I might say that the century is mine, for everything in it is eighteenth century, and that was the age in which,’ she said, lifting her glass with a gesture which made too broad an attempt at refinement, ‘I should have been born. It was then that everything was perfect, and my pictures are nearly as perfect as pictures ought to be. You must look at them, Mrs Aubrey. A couple of Chardins. Three delightful Greuzes. An Oudry. A Largillière. A Fragonard. A too delicious Vigée le Brun, of my great grandmother. And though, of course, that’s late, a Prudhomme. My husband and Mr Weissbach can fill the rest of the house with their wooden-faced saints and madonnas, their cardboard landscapes with the trees coming straight out of the ground like telegraph poles. They don’t seem to care that anyway they are wrong in this house, which is, so far as it’s anything, in the Renaissance style.’
‘More or less,’ agreed Mr Morpurgo, smiling.
‘Oh, more,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, ‘there’s nothing less in this house; everywhere there’s more, and more, and more, and in fact too much. But why should I grumble? I can always go and shut myself up among the real pictures in my drawing-room, which I have known all my life. For I brought the whole room as it stands from my house in Frankfort when my father died.’