Cousin Rosamund by Rebecca West Page A

roof, and said, ‘Funny to think of them, all lying there, funny.’ I looked up and my sight travelled between the stars to outer space, where there is no more universe. Nothing divided me from it. I was here, I was there, my father and mother and Richard Quin were there and were here, and Nancy would not be destroyed. The light and the silence blew their blast on the trumpet.
    We enjoyed the marriage better than anything that had happened to us since we were alone. The only sadness about it was that Mr Morpurgo’s youngest daughter asked if she might come, and of course Nancy and Oswald said that they would be very pleased, and she came and watched everything with a certain desperate attention. Also she wore her beautiful clothes carelessly, she slumped down inside them, as if she were not young. We realised that she was in trouble, that she would have liked to tell her father all about it, but she felt that she did not really know him. She was aware that he liked coming to the Dog and Duck, and she had thought that if she found out why, she would understand him better, and could break down the barrier between them. But it was no use. He kept on going where she was not, coming back to see how she was getting on out of kindness; and she was too miserable to make friends with us at once. This was one of the times we missed our mother, who would have flashed her eyes across the dull girl’s face and imparted some of her brilliance to it, and fused her with her father by the power of that electric force. But that was the one flaw in the day.
    A year later, on Christmas Eve, I met Mary walking along La Salle Street in Chicago, smiling at a memory, almost laughing. I said, ‘You are thinking of Nancy’s wedding,’ and I was right. That was a wonderful meeting. We had both been on tour longer than we liked. Mary had been playing in a Bach festival week that a millionaire was giving to six universities in turn, and I had been going the rounds of the symphony concerts with the French concerto I had played for the first time just before we heard of Nancy’s engagement. It had grown dear to me, I thought of it always as the Chestnut Leaves Concerto, for they had fallen bronze about me every morning when I went out for a walk before the rehearsals in Paris, and it built up a stoically pleasant place in my mind, a place such as the Champs Elysées might be; there were no houses there but only the arch at its crown and beyond the arch a wide-open eye, and the first splendid cold of the year. But it was exhausting to play, as all new music is, the audience’s incomprehension presses in as a resistant ambient, which has to be beaten back and dissolved by an act of will, a conscious care to explain as well as interpret. So I was tired, as Mary was for another reason, because she had to play only the greatest music for a long period, which meant participating in occasions when people who did not take music as musicians do were excited in a way the nerves could not ignore. Many nice people asked us to spend Christmas with them, for Americans are very kind, but we made a plot with our secretaries and agents and arranged to lose ourselves for three days, to say to the hosts we left before Christmas that we were going straight to the hosts who were taking us in after Christmas, and during the stolen three days to hide together and sleep and eat as we chose in a hotel by the lake in Chicago which we had both liked when we had stayed there on other tours.
    Mary got there first. When I arrived in the afternoon the bathroom was already hung with stockings. That is how one recognises the female interpretative artist: on their travels they cannot find themselves near a supply of hot water without immediately washing their clothes. She had left a note saying she had gone out shopping to replace some things she had lost. I found that I had left my manicure set in San Francisco, so I went out to get another, and so it was that I met Mary outside