This Real Night (2 page)

‘Oh, the scent, the scent of those wallflowers,’ said Mamma, her voice girlish, though she was so old and thin and worn. She was not our mother but our sister, as she always was when she felt great pleasure.

I put my arm round her waist, and marvelled again over what we all felt to be oddity in our relationship with her. We were now all taller than she was, and we could look down on her protectively, as she had looked down on us only a short time before. We were as amused at this as if it had never happened in any other family. I would have been very happy, had not happiness always brought me its opposite at that time. Mamma had now enough money, all of us girls were sure of our futures, and Richard Quin would always be able to look after himself. We could now grow flowers like other people, and do anything they could. But it had not been so until Papa went away, and it was as if we had got these things in exchange for him. I wished I could make it clear to God that I was ready to do without them for ever if only Papa would come back to us. But my grief at the loss of him was already not as acute as it had been. But that was another grief, for it proved me callous. Yet I took advantage of my callousness, I looked at the tulips and listened to what the others were saying, knowing that I would soon forget to think of Papa; and so I did.

‘We must give each other bulbs and plants for Christmas and birthday presents,’ Mary was saying, ‘and then we can fill up the other beds.’

Cordelia said, ‘We will be quite old before we have enough Christmases and birthdays for that,’ but she was happy, too, she spoke her bitter words without bitterness.

‘No, dears,’ said Mamma, ‘you need not charge yourselves with that; of course we must be careful until you are all settled, but even as it is I can afford to set aside something for the garden.’

She had been poor for so long that even when she said she had money for something it sounded as though she were afraid that she had not. We faintly felt Richard Quin to be a little brutal when he said, ‘Then make it enough to run to a jobbing gardener once a month, instead of waiting to call him in until the tradesmen have to hack their way in with axes - with machetes—’

‘With franciscs,’ I said.

‘What nonsense you children talk,’ said Mamma. ‘What are franciscs, in Heaven’s name?’

‘Think, Mamma, think,’ I said, ‘you do not come to school to have your heads crammed with facts, you come to school to learn how to think—’

‘How I hate that one,’ said Richard Quin.

‘What, do they say that in boys’ schools, too?’ asked Mary.

‘Of course, there is a sort of very low thieves’ slang, do not use it in the house, common to both men and women teachers,’ said Richard Quin.

‘A francisc is a battle-axe used by the Franks,’ I explained. ‘If you had only thought for a moment, dear Mamma. . . .’

‘Barongs,’ said Mary, ‘I hope the tradesmen use barongs. They make such a nice sound as they cut through the weeds, barongg, baronggg.’

‘The tradesmen use machetes, I tell you,’ said Richard Quin. ‘They bring “a dozen machetes to minch the whale”.’ That was in a book of Elizabethan travels we had liked. He went on, ‘Yes, Mamma, I know you think it is a good thing to get your pallid children into the open air—’

‘All grown-ups feel that children ought to be brought up as merry peasants,’ said Mary.

‘I wonder if Weber invented that expression,’ said Mamma. ‘I always like to see it in the cast of
Der Freischütz.
’

‘Mamma,’ said Richard Quin, ‘let us stick to the point. I cannot mow the lawn regularly, if I am to play all the cricket and tennis I should, as well as pass my Matric at more or less the proper time, and Cordelia is not strong enough since her illness, and when Mary and Rose do it nothing is gained except that one sees how a lawn looks when it has been mowed by two gifted young pianists who think of nothing but their art. You really should try to look at it from the lawn’s point of view.’

‘The poor lawn,’ said Mamma, ‘like a woman who goes to an incompetent hairdresser.’

Our laughter was more than the little joke was worth. But we were very happy. I was standing between Mary and Rosamund now, our arms were enlaced, we swayed as though we were light as branches and the wind could move us.

‘Dear me,’ sighed Mamma, ‘it is so many years since I went to a hairdresser.’

‘Well, go,’ we all incited her, very assured about this matter, because we had just begun to go to hairdressers instead of washing our hair at home. ‘There is no reason why you should not. Silly Mamma, of course you should have your hair done like other Mammas.’

‘No, no, children,’ she objected, poverty claiming her again.‘It would be a waste of money. I am old now, and it does not matter how I look, and it is so easy to twist it up myself.’

‘Not half so easy as you suppose, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin.

‘I am having my hair cut tomorrow morning,’ said Cordelia. ‘I will make an appointment for you.’

‘Why did we never think of this before?’ marvelled Mary.

‘You and the lawn,’ I said, ‘the proper people will attend to you and you will both be beautiful.’

‘No, lawns renew themselves,’ she said, ‘and Mammas do not.’

‘Never mind, other Mammas believe they renew themselves by going to the hairdresser, and you can too if you try,’ said Richard. ‘And anyway you are perfect.’

‘Ponce de Leon, court hairdresser,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, how sweet these wallflowers smell, it is a wonderful scent, so heavy and yet so fresh.’

‘Such a pity the hyacinths did not come up,’ I said, ‘they have an even richer scent.’

‘Why do you speak of it? We planted them the wrong way, of course,’ said Cordelia. But again she spoke without bitterness, it was simply that she could not break her habit of depreciating everything we did. Her head was thrown back and she was smiling at the sunshine. ‘Sand. I read somewhere that one should always put sand under bulbs.’

‘The man at the market garden said nothing about sand,’ said Mary, but without passion. Today we would not quarrel.

‘It was so small a purchase he would not bother to tell us,’ said Cordelia, but she was still smiling.

‘I know why the hyacinths did not come up and the tulips did,’ said Richard Quin. ‘We planted the hyacinths, and Rosamund planted the tulips.’

‘Of course,’ we exclaimed, ‘that would be it.’

‘No, no,’ stammered Rosamund. ‘It cannot have been that. Planting a bulb is quite simple. You just put it in the ground, and it comes up.’

‘Nothing is quite as simple as that,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, the scent, the scent, it comes in waves.’

It was then, I remember, that my happiness became ecstatic, that I felt again impatience because one cannot live slowly as one can play music slowly. Yet what was happening was the vaguest possible event, a matter of faint smiles and semi-tones of tenderness. A woman in late middle-age, four young girls and a schoolboy were looking at two common sorts of flowers and were not so much talking as handing amiable words from one to another, like children passing round a box of chocolates. I could not imagine why the blood should sing in my ears and I should feel that this was the sort of thing that music was about. But the moment passed before I could explain its importance to myself, for someone called from the house, and we looked round irritably, angry because our closed circle was broken.

But it was Mr Morpurgo, and of course we never minded him. He was Papa’s old friend, who had always looked after him, even when Papa had behaved to him so strangely that they could not meet again, who had made him editor of the local newspaper in Lovegrove. We had never seen Mr Morpurgo till Papa went away, but since then he had often visited Mamma and had given her great help in restoring her affairs to order; and our impoverished childhood had given us a certain connoisseurship which appreciated the care he took to intimate that he was kind, not because he was sorry for us but because he liked us, particularly Mamma. He came across the lawn with the hesitation we had learned to expect of him. First he sent us a bright smile across the distance, then his face darkened and his step wavered, as if he could hardly bear to present his body to people whom his mind found attractive. He was indeed a very ugly man. His mournful face was sallow, his immense black eye-balls rolled too loosely in their bluish whites, and the pouches under his eyes drooped down to his cheeks, which drooped down towards his drooping chins; and under his beautiful neat clothes his little body was sagging confusion, as if an umbrella with all its ribs broken had been tied up to make a bundle. But we no longer thought of his appearance as a departure from the normal, rather we took it as a sign that he belonged to a species sweeter and more subtle than ordinary humanity: that he was not Mr Morpurgo but a morpurgo, as he might have been a moose or an ant-eater, and that that was a good thing to be.

Mamma exclaimed, ‘How good that you have come back! Your secretary frightened us by writing that he did not know how long you were going to stay on the Continent,’ As he took her hand she gazed at him with concern, and indeed he was very yellow and mournful, even for him. ‘But how ill you look! I know what it is. You have been staying in some place where they cooked everything in oil!’

He repeated, ‘Where they cooked everything in oil?’ For an instant he kept an awestricken silence. ‘How strange it is that you should have guessed that! Yes, they certainly cooked in oil. It was a harsh coast, and they were disobliging people. If they had had all the butter in the world, and all the lard too, they would have sent away for oil, and if it had been delivered to them fresh they would have kept it till it went rancid, just to have the right disgusting fumes pouring out of their disgusting kitchens into their disgusting alleys. But I am unfair. They were simple people and meant no harm. The fault lay in the business which took me among them. It gave me,’ he said, looking piteously at Mamma, ‘a horror of the place. But at least it was all over sooner than I had expected, and it is quite at an end. So now we will forget it. There is no point in not forgetting it,’ he told himself peevishly. ‘So I have tried to find some distraction in bringing the Aubrey family some flowers, and I find them looking at their own flowers, which are more beautiful than any I could bring you.’

‘You are laughing at us,’ said Cordelia.

‘No, I am speaking the plain truth,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You will not hear from me any humbug about crusts being better than caviare, in any department of life. Clare, your children will only be building up disappointments for themselves if they do not realise that as a general rule costly things are far, far nicer than cheap ones. This is true in a garden as in anywhere else. The superiority of orchids to Virginia stock is so great that you would have to degrade your minds not to perceive it. All the same, it is true that nobody can bring a friend flowers more beautiful than that friend has in his own garden, for the reason that a growing flower has an iridescence which a cut flower loses in an hour. Your tulips have a light on their petals which the ones I have brought you must have lost on the journey, and if you look inside you will see a powder on the anthers and the stamens’ - we were afraid he was going to pick one to show us, but of course he did not - ‘which started to drop off mine while the gardeners were carrying them up to the house. So I have brought you flowers that are not as good as those you have already, and I have done something else that is wrong. I have brought you too many. Look at my chauffeur, standing at your window, carrying twice his own weight in carnations and tulips and orchids, his controlled Gentile face taking care not to show his opinion of my excess. And there are more in the car. I always overdo things,’ he complained, looking round for sympathy.

We had never heard him make so long a speech, and his querulousness sounded as if he were talking to prevent himself from doing whatever it was that men do instead of bursting into tears. We gathered closer to him, and Mary said, ‘But we like that. You can’t bear the idea of there being only one of anything nice, and the further you get from that stingy number the better you are pleased.’

‘But this time it is going to be inconvenient,’ grumbled Mr Morpurgo. ‘Your poor Kate will be looking everywhere for flower vases. I will go and buy some.’

‘No, no,’ begged Mamma. ‘You will buy far too many’.

‘You see!’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You know what I am.’

‘Come indoors and sit down quietly and have some tea while the children put the flowers in what they can find,’ said Mamma. ‘Really, Edgar, I am worried about you. To be troubled because you think you have brought too many flowers - too many flowers! - it is quite absurd. You must be ill. I tell you, it is all that cooking in oil. But we will find you some plain biscuits for tea.’

So Mr Morpurgo huddled in the biggest armchair, looking as if he were much in the wrong, while we fetched vases and jugs and ewers, and filled them with his prodigious flowers until Mamma said, ‘Now it looks like fairyland,’ and he sighed, ‘No, it does not, it looks like a flower-show.’ Then he took an envelope from his pocket. ‘Please read this letter from my wife,’ he said, and when she had taken it from him he smiled, as if glad to remember that in one respect the world was going his way.

But my mother soon laid down the letter and said, ‘It is very kind of your wife to say she wishes to know me. It is really extraordinarily kind of her, particularly at such a time as this, when she has just come back from Pau, and must have so much to do. But I would never think of intruding on her. She must have so many friends, and it must be pure kindness which makes her invite me. She cannot possibly have any real desire to meet anybody as uninteresting as myself.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘you were a celebrated pianist, and you are a remarkable woman. Also,’ he added, ‘you are the wife of an old and dear friend of mine. Of course my wife wants to know you. If she did not she would be stupid, and very distant from me, and she is not that. She is very intelligent, and very handsome, and very impulsive and warm-hearted.’

‘It is natural that your wife should be all those things,’ said Mamma. ‘Still, she is being far too kind. Why, she says she wants all of us. But we are such a troop! And Richard Quin is only a schoolboy, he is far too young to go out yet.’