Cousin Rosamund Read online

  Cousin Rosamund

  Rebecca West

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  I

  NOTHING was ever so interesting again after Mamma and Richard Quin died. I cannot think that any two human beings have ever been more continuously amused and delighted than Mary and I had been after Cordelia had married and we were left alone with our mother and brother and Kate. But though it was worse than hunger and thirst to miss the warmth and surprise and laughter we were excused the most cruel components of grief. We had not to ask ourselves where our dead had gone and to admit that their destination might be no further than rottenness, and to abhor the criminal waste. Our dead were like the constellations; we could not touch them but we could not doubt their existence. We knew them to be magnificently engaged, and though we could have wished an end of effort for them, we knew that their destiny was as native to them as music was to us. But we had to leave Lovegrove. Our house could have seduced us into the practice of magic; we might have re-created the past and inhumed ourselves in it.

  So we let Alexandra Lodge to a composer and his violinist wife, who were glad of the music-rooms, and Mr Morpurgo found us a house in St John’s Wood. Rosamund was still working in a Paddington hospital and would always have to be near Hariey Street and the nursing-homes, and had taken a flat with her mother near Baker Street, and we chose that particular district because of all North London it is most like South London. There is the same repressed woodland against which the masonry just holds its own, and at night the shadows of the branches lie in as undisturbed a pattern on the quiet pavements, and the street-lamps shine with the same soft yellow submissiveness under the weight of the quiet night, and the houses with their lit windows look like fortresses withstanding that night. We liked the long classical church that stands in a grove at the corner opposite Lord’s, with a girl kneeling on a monument among the trees, her long hair falling over her humble shoulders, her face upturned in the ambition of prayer. If we were driving home together at night we often stopped the car just there and looked through the railings at her and walked the rest of the way home.

  The house Mr Morpurgo had found for us was a union of two houses of the same period as our Lovegrove cottage, with the two coach-houses on each side enlarged into music-rooms. It was so large that Kate became a cook-housekeeper and had another servant and a charwoman under her, and often wore a black silk dress with a huge cameo brooch at her throat which made her look like the housekeeper in a Brontë novel. This delighted Mr Morpurgo, who approved our habit of wearing Empire dress in the evenings and had filled our rooms with exquisite Empire furniture and had chosen for us Empire stuffs for curtains and upholstery. Because our dresses were like stage dresses, and because the home he made for us was like a stage setting, we were in some danger of becoming more like objects than people. But indeed we had no choice about the clothes. When we first grew up clothes were quite beautiful, though they were nearly always too bulky, and they had a feature which helped all women to look elegant. Sleeves were then very elaborately made, by seamstresses who never touched any other part of the dress. They were cut in several long strips, which were designed to lend every arm favourable proportions. But as we grew through the late twenties, there rose the star of Chanel, who imposed on women the most hideous uniform that they have ever worn. The gravest of us had to go about by day in straight skirts up to our knees, with wide belts round our hips, and our heads buried in flower-pot hats that covered our foreheads, and by night in dresses that were as short and even more ridiculous in form. They were cut with square necks and plain shoulder-straps, so that at a dinner-party the women might have been sitting round the table in bathing-dresses; and they were often embroidered all over with heavy beads, so that the hem formed a sagging frill above the calves. But there was an alternative for the evening in the robes de style which Lanvin had just invented for Yvonne Printemps, and though these were eighteenth-century dresses their acceptance gave us permission to wear our Empire dresses. These were indeed beautiful, and old photographs show that they gave Mary’s swan-like beauty its full opportunity; and though I cannot look at my photograph and see it any more than I can look at my own image in a looking-glass, I can see that in those dresses I was an interesting spectacle. But to be that, and only that, often seemed a misfortune which continually threatened Mary and myself, though we were always rescued from it by a certain force.

  I remember very well a certain autumn day which illustrated our plight. I had gone to Paris for a most interesting concert at the Salle Gaveu. I had taken the opportunity to play some solos by the Russian composers, but the main purpose of the evening was the first performance of a concerto by Louis Besricke, who was still working in the Debussy and Fauré tradition though he indulged in greater technical complexities. Everything was paid for by a Jewish millionaire and we had more than the usual number of rehearsals, as many as even the composer wanted. On the first day it appeared that the interpretation of the concerto which I had evolved while working on it in London was not correct, and the bearded composer stopped me and said, smiling, ‘Mais, mademoiselle, vous êtes trop mâle pour mon frêle oeuvre.’ The orchestra looked at me with that tender and gracious amusement which a group of men can feel for one woman, though it is rarely felt by one man for one woman, and never by a group of men for a group of women. After that it was all a laughing and sentimental adventure, the rehearsals all seemed to last no more than ten minutes. But not only the rehearsals, the whole of each day was lovely. I used to leave my hotel early before anybody could telephone and walk along the rue de Rivoli, with the first tarnished chestnut leaves blowing over from the Tuileries Gardens, and along the Avenue Gabriel, past the Jockey Club and its tamarisk hedge, always looking through the trees at the Théâtre Marigny and wishing I could have been an actress as well as a pianist, just for the sake of playing at that theatre, and going up to the Arc de Triomphe by the Champs Elysées, then still noble and intact, with not a shop to be seen. There was even still standing that countryish house on the right, where great dogs were always softly belling behind the high garden walls; it had the air of a place where people were living out the long consequences of some violent action. I would go to my practising and my rehearsal inspired by this local excellence; and when I had done with music for the day the city refreshed me again, though not so much as in my lonely mornings, for my French contemporaries alarmed me. After the First World War it had become fashionable in Paris to be silly, and an appalling measure of French intelligence and spirit, and even some of its classical spirit, was devoted to establishing silliness as a way of life. Men loved men and women loved women, not because there was a real confusion in their flesh, such as Mary and I often noted in those with whom we worked, but because a homosexual relationship must be nonsense in one way, since there can be no children, and it can be made more nonsensical still. Where there can be no question of marriage there is no reason against choosing the most perversely unsuitable partner; and often we met gifted Frenchmen who took about with them puzzled little waiters or postmen or sailors, flattered and spoiled but never acclimatised. But it was much more frightening that people of talent injected silliness into their whole structures by taking drugs; for Mary and I, like most artists, knew that drink and drugs were our natural enemies. It was hateful, too, that many of the people who were most heartless in their loves, who took up these young men and gave them luxury and loneliness and a disinclination for their own natural habits, and who smoked opium or took morphine or cocaine and became walking nightmares of malice and fear, often became Roman Catholics, and made no effort
to purify themselves, though that effort would not have cost them much. From our childhood we had known the nature of darkness, we had seen Papa abducted by ruin, and we knew that all these people could have stopped what they were doing at any moment, had they chosen. These people thought we were held back from them because we knew less than they did, though of this we knew more, but they were friendly, and they liked our playing, so they asked us to their parties, and these were beautiful. They lived in huge white empty rooms, often with great windows opening on the night sky and the spread lights of the city. I went to two such parties on that visit; but I took greater pleasure in my visits to the villa by the Parc Monceau where the parents of the composer of my concerto lived.

  Monsieur and Madame Besricke were like a thousand other people in Paris, and they were apparently undesirable. They were superbly handsome but deformed by pretensions. The old man, who had inherited a moderate textile fortune and had been a poet and critic of some note, wore a Rembrandt beret and disarranged his classical features by an expression intended to convey that he was wise, witty, sceptical, tolerant, kindly and sensual; and his thin wife dyed her hair mahogany red, and wound scarves about her, and sometimes cooed and sometimes tapped her words on her teeth, to show that she possessed an immense range of emotions. It was as if Anatole France and Sarah Bernhardt had gone on living after the essence of them had died, growing old and dusty in the practice of their personal tricks. But running parallel with this stale affectation was a brilliant current of joy and honesty. They saw justly what was beautiful in their son’s music and character, and what had been beautiful in their other two sons who had been killed in the war. They saw what was beautiful in my work, and if I went there in a new dress they would make me stand in the light and told me what it did for my looks. They gave me the use of their memories, and through them I know what it was like to listen to the lectures of Ernest Renan at the Collège de France, hurrying to get there as if it were a theatre, and I went to many parties given long before I was born. And they constantly cried out to each other the names of places in France which it was imperative I should visit. The hours I spent with them were somehow like those evenings at home when we sat round the fire and ate chestnuts after we had washed our hair. It was warm and happy in these rooms which were crammed with the litter always collected by nineteenth-century French celebrities, that porridge of Genoese velvets and chips off Gothic cathedrals and Persian rugs and Renaissance bronzes and Limoges enamels and wild-beast pelts and North African silverwork and Greek marbles. Though most of these objects lost their quality and meaning in this hugger-mugger, the Renaissance bronzes and the Greek marbles remained themselves. The old people loved to see me taking pleasure in them; but did not know that for me they held an ironic significance. These bronzes and marbles were made in the likeness of the gods and goddesses, whom the ancients allowed to exist on condition that they understood everything men do and enjoyed everything. Now such images of tolerance adorned only the homes of the innocent aged; and in the white rooms of contemporaries, where the most bizarre transactions were carried on, the only permitted ornaments were those neutral objects, cacti and seashells.

  The concert was a success. I was not too mâle for my composer, and the next morning it was settled that I would play the concerto during the following year in London and Berlin and Vienna and New York and Boston. The composer had not been sure about it till the performance; he owned with a smile that he had not till then fully understood what he meant by it. The conductor and I smiled back at him, and then exchanged a secret smile, for neither of us had greatly liked the concerto till suddenly, as the music we made was heard by us and the audience, the truth was manifest in the hall. Then we had a lovely lunch at Voisin’s, with all sorts of rich things like foie gras that I would not have dared to eat before the concert, and then I took a lot of chrysanthemums to Monsieur and Madame Besricke, and we drank cherry brandy in little coloured glasses and they said that I was to come back soon, and then I took all the flowers I had been given at my concert to an old pianist who was dying in a house in Passy. Then I went to the hotel and put on an evening dress, so that I could go straight from Croydon to a concert where Mary was playing the Emperor Concerto. Then I was driven to the airport, too fast, for it was late, and people gave me more flowers and waved goodbye. As the plane mounted and the earth swung round us like a billowing skirt, I was filled with thirst for the sight and sound of my mother and my brother, and nothing that had happened to me in Paris retained any value. The one interesting phrase in a concertante by a worthless German composer ran through my head again and again, until we crossed the Channel, so quiet in that soft and sleepy blue that is the sea’s autumn wear, and it pierced my breastbone that I was travelling along a low passage of uninteresting air between the earth where my mother’s body lay and the outer space where I felt her to continue. But I could not feel my brother’s presence anywhere, then or when the bus took our plane-load from Croydon through South London, which was darkening, and we would have been going downstairs to see if we could help Kate with the supper, had our lives not perished.

  The concert at the Queen’s Hall was not good, except for Mary’s playing. The conductor was bad, someone of whom it had always to be recalled that he was English and that England was having a musical renaissance and he had bored the orchestra. But Mary was superb. She was not strong enough to play the Emperor Concerto by strength; no woman except Teresa Carreño ever was. But she had a substitute for strength in her absolute justice. She had the timelessness of the great player, she played every note with the thought of every other note she and the orchestra were going to play strong in her mind. When she played it was with deep regard for that which went before and for that which went afterwards, though the logical connection would be hard to state in words. Both she and I had more than once had a mystical apprehension of how a musical composition would sound if time were annulled and the notes were heard neither in succession nor simultaneously; but the experience, which was quite incommunicable, was hard to remember when it was most needed, because the conscious intellect got in the way, and she was better at remembering it than I was. She had also to perfection that kind of accuracy, of slavery to the text, which is the sublimest liberty. When Beethoven wrote two slurred notes, she played them and was free as he was in his exercise of his choice to write those notes slurred instead of staccato, and she did not fall into the trap of altering them to something that pleased her own ear better. Her integrity of attention to the composer and the taste which governed the application of her technique made her the nonpareil of our generation. In the hot and draughty assembly of this world, she was the candle which did not gutter.

  She played better than I had played in Paris, and without any of the adventitious aid which came from a composer saying, ‘Mais, mademoiselle, vous êtes trop mâle pour mon frêle oeuvre,’ and making the orchestra smile. Her single source of power was her musical genius. She derived no encouragement from the contacts with people which her art involved, and the fact that some of her audience took pleasure in her beauty annoyed her. She felt that she was obliged to appear physically in public in order to play, but that they had no right to take advantage of that necessity to pass a judgment on her for which she had not asked. It did not matter that the judgment was favourable, she still felt it a violation of her privacy. But she knew that her admirers meant no harm, so she was polite and even charming to them when they waited for her after concerts. When I got to the artists’ room I found her already white with strain, there were so many people there, and when I got rid of them by telling them that we had to go on to a party and had been asked not to be late, there were other people out in the street with autograph albums, two or three of whom were tiresomely talkative. I could have managed them by thinking vaguely of them and of something else at the same time, but Mary disliked these contacts so much and so feared to show it that she had to give her whole mind to them.

  In the car I squeezed her round the wais
t, and said, ‘Cheer up. You played magnificently. And certainly the only good part of a concert is what goes on inside the hall.’

  She said, ‘I do not like it even inside the hall. I hate the people clapping.’

  I was upset by the passion in her voice. I said, ‘Well, we would both feel quite awful if we gave a concert and people did not clap.’

  Mary answered, ‘I know that. But I would much rather nobody was there.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said. ‘Think of all the poor little people who save up to give concerts at the Wigmore and the Steinway halls, and get very much what you are asking for, and don’t like it at all.’ She said nothing, and I repeated to the darkness of the car, ‘Don’t be an ass.’

  She still did not answer and I was suddenly afflicted with the suspicion that she was extremely unhappy. I said, ‘Don’t you feel like going on to this party? I don’t mind going straight home.’

  ‘No, we are nearly there, we may as well try what it will be like,’ she said. ‘Though, of course, it will be like any other party.’

  And so it was. A great house in Prince’s Gate had been filled with light and flowers and handsome and favoured people, wearing beautiful jewels and clothes, and we were welcomed to it, with the warm but conditional welcome that is given to guests who are invited because they are celebrities but who were born outside the clan. Usually we were safe, but we had learned, ever since we first met rich people through Mr Morpurgo, how bitterly some of their women resented the introduction into their world of women who could do all they did and could do other things as well and were praised for them. Their bitterness was strange, for it was such as Mary and I might justifiably have felt against them because their childhoods had been compact of comfort and security and ours had been poor and dangerous. But it was pleasant when all went well. Such parties were suffused with a soft and golden light, which accorded with the champagne we drank, or rather held in our glasses, for though it was pretty, we never thought champagne very nice. There were wonderful jewels to be seen, and this always delighted us, for Mamma had taught us to appreciate them from our earliest childhood, her long keen flight of eye had found whatever was precious in such jewellers’ shops as were in Lovegrove, and we had pressed our noses against the dingy shop-windows to see an emerald, a ruby, a diamond, and note its real fire; and as this was a very grand party the men were wearing their orders, those superb inventions, which truly look like the marks glory leaves when it lays a hand on its own. There were mounds and walls of flowers, and a chirrup of talk, like a wood at dawn, which suddenly stopped and gave place to a silence threaded with music. Our hosts were elderly, so we had the pure felicity of hearing the mindless and gymnastic voices of great opera singers bearing aloft without effort arias that performed the true operatic function of transforming crisis into enjoyment. At this time one was likely to come off worse at parties given by middle-aged or young hosts, for they were apt to entertain their guests with German Lieder, which seemed to us to have taken a wrong turn ever since the days of Brahms. Too often the solemn continuance of the accompaniment after the voice has ended might be the awed whimper of a bloodhound to whom a larger bloodhound has just described one of its deeper experiences. But that night we had a great tenor and a great soprano who showed us love and despair magically made brilliant and innocent as fountains and fireworks by Verdi and Rossini.