This Real Night (7 page)

‘From Frankfort!’ exclaimed my mother happily. ‘You are a Rhinelander! That explains why you and your daughters are called by charming French names. You are, of course, bilingual. That is what struck me when I was in Frankfort, it is a meeting-place for French and German culture.’

‘You have been to Frankfort then?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo.

‘I have played there several times,’ said Mamma.

‘Played there? What did you play?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo, in a tone of bewilderment, as if she suspected Mamma of being a footballer.

‘I told you, my dear,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘Mrs Aubrey was Clare Keith, the pianist.’

‘You must forgive me,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘I never remember the names of musicians except the ones like Paderewski. But you were saying you knew Frankfort?’

‘I had several very good concerts there,’ said Mamma, quite at ease, supposing that Mrs Morpurgo would like to hear pleasant reports of her native town, ‘and one most agreeable private engagement. I was engaged, secretly, to play a piano quintet at the golden wedding of a banker and his wife, and the composer was the banker himself, who had been a fine musician in his youth, and had given it up for banking. His sons and daughters had the charming thought of having his favourite composition played by professionals after the family banquet, and the old man was delighted. I have never forgotten the lovely room, yes, very like your drawing-room, and all lit by candles in great silver sconces, and everything reflected in great mirrors. And such nice people. I grew very friendly with one of the daughters and stayed with her once when I had played in Bonn. Oh, I envy you coming from Frankfort! It was a world which was infinitely distinguished without being aristocratic.’

Looking back, I see that my mother was speaking with the utmost simplicity of a society as she had seen it; but it was not unnatural that the remark should fail to please Mrs Morpurgo. Mamma did not perceive this and continued happily, ‘My children will tell you that I have often told them about Frankfort. There was such lovely eighteenth century everywhere, and not only in the houses, it seems to me that I remember a most beautiful bank, with a wonderful wrought iron staircase.’

‘The Bethman bank,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The first Rothschild started there, working as a runner. My wife’s family bank was beautiful, too. She was a Krossmayer.’

‘Oh, but I knew the Krossmayers well,’ said Mamma. ‘I visited them every time I was there; they lived in—.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Morpurgo.

‘Those were my wife’s cousins,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The house from which I abstracted my bride was in the—.’

‘Well, then I knew your parents, too,’ said Mamma. ‘The Krossmayers took me to their cousin’s home for a party, to drink that lovely kind of punch called the
Maibowle.
How strange, I must have seen there all those beautiful things we have just seen in your drawing-room. Dear me, I played a duet among those pictures and that china with your cousin, Ella Krossmayer. She would be your cousin? She was older than you, she might have been an aunt.’

‘My cousin,’ said Mrs Morpurgo.

‘I knew her best of the whole family,’ Mamma said in a tone of tender reminiscence. ‘We had a special sympathy because she loved music. Indeed, she hoped for quite a time that she might play professionally.’

‘Oh, surely not professionally,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, smiling.

‘Yes, though that may surprise you,’ said Mamma, missing the point. ‘But it is very easy for an amateur to be deceived by the politeness of relatives and friends.’ Cordelia moved her head sharply. ‘But Ella was a charming girl, and as I say, I have always remembered Frankfort as one of the most civilised places in Europe.’

‘It may have been so,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘I left it,’ she added, with discontent, ‘so young. But at any rate we had pictures that looked like pictures. I am sure,’ she said, turning to Mr Weissbach, ‘that you know in your heart of hearts that pictures should look like mine and not like yours.’ But he did not reply. His eyes were set on Cordelia’s red-gold curls, her candid sea-coloured gaze, her small straight nose with the tiny flat triangle just under the point, her soft but dogged pink mouth, her round chin, pure in line as a cup. Mrs Morpurgo followed the line of his eye and was arrested. Till then she had turned on us only vague, unfocused, sweeping glances, but she stared at Cordelia intensely and then grew sad; she might have been spreading out cards to read her fortune and come on the ace of spades. Suddenly humble, she looked round the table, as if begging someone to say something that would distract her. The sight of her daughters recalled her usual exasperation, and she looked again at my flawless and collected sister, and muttered to the governess, ‘Can you really do nothing to make the girls sit up straight?’ The governess raised her head with an air of resignation which was not meant to go unperceived. A silence fell, and as it grew oppressive Mrs Morpurgo flung at Mamma the questions, ‘So you have travelled? And your husband is a great traveller, too, isn’t he? What was it that Edgar was telling me about him, that he’s gone on a journey?’

Mamma’s eyes grew large, she opened her mouth but no word came out of it. I could not say anything, because I so vehemently wanted to kill Mrs Morpurgo.

Cordelia spoke, her white brows creased with a gentle frown. ‘Yes, Papa has gone away to write a book.’

‘And where has he gone?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo. ‘Where does one go, to write a book?’

Cordelia could say no more. She made a movement of her little hand, and looked about as if for mercy. Richard Quin leaned forward from his place at the end of the table, and said, ‘My father has gone to Tartary.’

Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Yes, he has gone to Tartary,’ and laid his hand for a second on my brother’s wrist.

‘To Tartary,’ repeated Mrs Morpurgo, busy with her lamb cutlet. ‘Is that,’ she asked, as if she were saying something clever, ‘a good place to write a book?’

Nobody answered her, and she looked up and saw that her husband was staring at her in open rage. She recoiled as if his hatred had a definite range and she wished to retreat beyond it, and sat turning from side to side her large, blunt, handsome head. She had gone further than she had wished; she had meant to be nearly, but not quite, intolerable. Again we could see her telling herself that she had not the slightest idea how she had overstepped the mark. Had she said something so very tactless? And if she had, how could it matter, when there was only this obscure woman, this unknown Mrs Aubrey, these tiresome girls, this schoolboy, to be offended? All this was just more of her husband’s nonsense. Her contempt for him reestablished itself. She shook her head to disembarrass herself of all these absurdities, and went on eating. But her hands were trembling.

The silence that had fallen once more was broken by a peal of bells, and another, and another.

‘Someone’s getting married,’ said Mr Weissbach, bravely jovial, ‘and making no end of fuss about it.’

‘I did not know we had a church so near,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘Did you never happen to notice,’ asked Mrs Morpurgo, ‘that St James was just round the corner?’

The bells rang on. A remark bubbled in laughter on Marguerite’s lips. Finally, she had to say it. ‘Why, these might be the bells at Captain Ware’s wedding.’

She had said it. Her two sisters covered their smiling mouths. They looked just like the most horrid girls at school. ‘Why should they be that?’ said Mr Morpurgo, absently.

‘Marguerite is talking nonsense,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, ‘she is talking about someone who is getting married in Pau, not in London.’

‘Yes,’ said Marguerite, ‘but this is the very day, isn’t it?’

‘Who is Captain Ware?’ asked Mr Morpurgo. He was like that. If he heard a name, any name, he liked to know all about the person who bore it.

Marguerite hesitated. Her sister’s shining eyes dared her to go on. Her own answered, ‘Oh, then, if you think I won’t, I will!’ She continued with the blandness of malice, ‘Why, he’s the handsome captain who’s been teaching us riding all the time we’ve been at Pau. We made great friends with him,’ she finished artlessly, ‘we were so surprised a fortnight ago, when he told us he was going to marry the daughter of the rich old man who owned our hotel. He hadn’t said a word about it, not till the invitations went out. We were asked,’ she said, as if that had been the cream of the jest.

The governess jerked up her head. She had ceased to look a humbug; and she uttered a sound that was not, ‘Hush,’ but a noble and vulgar ejaculation of disgust, such as I had once heard from a woman in the street who saw a drunken man lurch against a frightened child. The three girls had been staring down at their plates, the corners of their mouths twitching, not merely enjoying their victim’s pain, but acting their enjoyment so that she should feel a second pain. They were indeed very like the worst girls at school. But the governess’s expression of contempt, which sounded as if she had just checked herself from spitting, frightened the girls into a second’s rigidity. They turned to their father almost as if they were expecting him to protect them from her rage, but his eyes were set on Stephanie’s face. I think he felt horror because she had not shown herself different from her sisters. Then he looked at Mrs Morpurgo, who had been in an instant changed from persecutor to persecuted. She was not terrible any longer. She tried to go on eating, but found it hard to swallow, and soon laid down her knife and fork and sat quite still, her chin high and her lids lowered as people do, when they are keeping themselves from shedding tears.

‘I wish,’ he said to my mother, ‘that you could see my wife on horse-back. I have never seen a woman look better in a riding-habit. Not even the Empress of Austria. My dear Herminie, I am so very glad that you have come home, so that when I boast of you my friends can see that I am not exaggerating. Now, Weissbach, tell us about your Lorenzetti.’

After luncheon it seemed as if we were going to have a good time after all. We crossed the landing and went into a library, the first of a line of small rooms that ran along the side of the house. There Mr Morpurgo said to Richard Quin, ‘You would like to stay here and look at the books, wouldn’t you?’ Richard Quin nodded. He was quite white, which was strange, for usually when anything disagreeable happened, he did a conjuring trick in his mind and it vanished. But of course it would have been hard to annul Mrs Morpurgo and her daughters. ‘On that stand,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘there is a Book of the Hours with very lovely pictures in it. Sit on that stool and look at it. Or take anything you want from the shelves, and ring if it is too heavy for you to handle by yourself.’ He laid his arm round my brother’s shoulders and for a second I saw them as men together, men in over-womened families, who found comfort in each other. Then the rest of us went on through another room lined with cabinets full of porcelain figures, into a corner room, flooded with light from windows in the two outside walls, and hung with silk neither quite grey nor quite blue. There were some very comfortable chairs there, and we sat down and drank black coffee, which I did not think nice at all, out of little ruby red cups encrusted with gold which were very nice indeed. The three girls sat at the other side of the room in sallow and restless silence. Their governess was not with them. She had broken away on the landing, and we had seen her hurrying up the staircase to a higher floor, her elbows held well out from her body as she lifted her skirts to clear the steps, a kind of fish-wife vigour and freedom about her which she had not seemed to possess when she had first glided into the dining-room. Mrs Morpurgo took her coffee and drank it by the window, moving her head as if to see something in the street below.

Mr Morpurgo put down his cup and said to the footman, ‘Please set up the easel, but first ask Mr Kessel to be kind enough to come here,’ and told us with happy smugness: ‘You may think this a dull room, but it is designed to fulfil a special purpose. There is a cold light from the north and from the east, and the walls and the carpet are of no particular colour, so that an object can be seen quite clearly, without any reflected colours spoiling its own. And I brought you here because I want you to see some things from the collections my father and mother started. But I will not be the showman for some of the things you might like best, for Herminie knows more about them than I do. My dear, you had better show them my mother’s collection of Chelsea and Bow, you have far more feeling for that sort of thing than I have.’

Mrs Morpurgo whirled round. ‘Alas, there’s no question of that!’ she exclaimed. To my astonishment she was no longer pitiful, she was once more a brass band, she had not been abandoned to grief as she stood hiding her face by the window, she had been recovering her faculty for insolent surprise. ‘No, indeed! How I wish there were! But the girls and I have to go to a charity fete at Gunnersbury Park. The Rothschilds, you know,’ she explained to Mamma, meaning that she was sure Mamma did not know. ‘It’s in aid of all those poor horses somewhere. The Rothschilds are very fond of horses. I said I’d go so long ago that I can’t possibly not keep my promise.’ It appeared then that she was no more able to keep her private thoughts when they were to her own disadvantage than when they assailed other people. Her expression now made it plain that what she had just said was not true, that she thought her husband would perceive this, and that now she was improvising. ‘To tell the truth,’ she said, ‘I’m being punished for my dishonesty. I wrote from Pau saying I would be pleased to come to this wretched fête, thinking I hadn’t a ghost of a chance of being back here for months, because of Mamma’s illness, so that I’d seem good-natured, and have a perfect excuse when the time came, because I’d be out there in the Pyrenees, hundreds, or is it thousands, of miles away. But here I am, and Lady Rothschild’s telephoned twice since she saw in
The Times
that I was back again. I can’t, I really can’t, disappoint her,’ She paused, quite relaxed. But as Mr Morpurgo said nothing to break the silence, her handsome features broke their ranks again, she looked disturbed. ‘I suppose you’re not going to maintain,’ she said bitterly, ‘that we’re in a position to snub the Rothschilds? And we have to start early, it takes hours and hours to get out to Gunnersbury.’ She appealed to my mother for sympathy. ‘Isn’t it tiresome when one’s friends live neither in town nor in the country? One has to set out in one’s car for a journey one should go by train, but trains don’t go to such suburban places. Well, we must go now. I know you will understand, Mrs Aubrey. And so should you, Edgar.’ Again it was apparent that she was a little frightened by her husband’s continued silence. ‘I told you all this. Long ago. I really did. I told you that I had an engagement early this afternoon. Always, from the first, I said, “Luncheon, luncheon I can just manage, but I will have to leave immediately afterwards.”’