Cousin Rosamund by Rebecca West

too, and Uncle Len’s hands went up in timid wonder to trace the wires that held them. It would have looked more beautiful had there not been so many memorials in the church. The north and south transepts and the little lady chapel were cluttered with them. A Tudor marchioness and her duchess daughter in their ermined crimson robes and their coronets knelt face to face on a high tomb, their heads bowed over their wide ruffs in recognition of God, their tie of blood, their rank; a Victorian statesman reclined under a coarse imitation of a Gothic canopy; two bearded and armoured brothers of the Renaissance age, who had alike been the King’s envoys and were alike killed in his wars, lay side by side; an Edwardian boy in knickerbockers prayed between his two labradors; a heraldic swan spread its wings on an obelisk enamelled with coats of arms. It did not matter that some of these memorials were beautiful, they were still an obstacle to the eye and prevented it laying on the shape of the buildings which signified the meaning of the church. They did wrong in their incongruity, for they were a reminder that life is committed to disorder because all men are not dead and do not die at the same moment. There might have been perfect order round me, had my father and my mother and Richard Quin and Mary and I been contemporaneous, none of us having to wait until the rest were born, none of us having to lose the others. Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present. Yet the altar could be seen as never before, because it was decked with white flowers for Nancy’s wedding, and the value of the wedding, which gave the flowers their power, lay in time. All the years that Nancy had lived till now she had not been Oswald’s wife; and the years that were to come she was to be his wife. That was the marvel of her wedding-day.
    Uncle Len had left me. Through the open door of the boiler-room I heard the sober and dutiful sounds of stoking; the deliberate, stubborn push of the shovel under the coal, the prudent, measured tipping-out of the load. I hurried to him. He had propped back the boiler door with an iron bar but it always gave. I held the iron bar in place. He wheezed softly, ‘Good girl.’ We went out into the churchyard and found ourselves in another night. The river had been unseen when we came in, a mere trough of darkness between the furthest graves and the nearest woods. Now a mist had risen from it, and suffused with moonlight flowed above it like another less substantial river. The tombstones did not shine like resurrected bodies, but glowed softly, like some bright thing that was sleeping. The wind had changed, and the sound of the falling weir-water was even louder than before. The past was irrecoverable. Nancy and Mary and Richard Quin and I would never be children again, eating mealy chestnuts round the fire after we had washed our hair, with our towels on our knees, in our little warm house; Nancy would go to meet her happiness and be borne away from it, and then would only for a short while persist in the memory of a few, and then the rumour of her would become as remote as the sound of waters falling over a distant weir, and then she would be wholly forgotten, there would be nothing left of her in any place. I wept. It was very cold, beneath my sweater my flesh was frozen for an inch below the skin, it was as if I were wearing icy armour. Uncle Len put his arm in mine and, whispering out of respect for the graves, said, ‘A cup of tea for us and back to our beds,’ and we went back to the wicket-gate. Above us the night sky, hard with vague light, faceted with stars, fitted over the horizon of the sensitive earth like an inflexible helmet. Beyond the gate Uncle Len paused and looked on the inn, frail as cardboard under the strong moon. Stroking my arm, he murmured the names of all that were sleeping under its