Landlocked. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ Three

      On the morning peace was celebrated (or, as Mrs Quest saw it in her mind’s eye), Victory Morning, she was up before six. In order, she told herself, to have plenty of time to get Mr Quest ready for the Victory Parade. But she had slept badly, waking confused, every muscle tensed and painful, and with an aching head. It was not until she had gone out into the exquisite morning to pick up the newspaper where it had been flung by the delivery boy on the veranda steps, that she remembered the dream which had woken her.

      The sun on that May morning rose from wisps of rosy vapour and shone on Mrs Quest where she stood in her flowered cotton wrapper on her steps, in the middle of a garden shrill with bird song. She shivered, for while the great red ball was presumably pumping out heat on other parts of the world, here it was winter. The air, the sky, each leaf and flower, had a cool sharp clarity. The garden was steeped in cold. Frosty water gemmed the lawn. Dewdrops hung from the roses and from the jacaranda boughs until shaken free in bright showers by the birds who swooped from bird bath to branch, from shrub to lawn.

      Mrs Quest noted with satisfaction that the newspaper confirmed her sense of what was right by stating it was VICTORY DAY in Europe, and the black print was six inches deep. She had dreamed, hadn’t she? Oh yes, and her head ached from it. It had been a terrible dream.

      Her nights were always tense, peopled with regrets, fitfully menacing, unless she drugged herself. She had years ago justified the pills she took by the claim that she slept badly; her doses grew heavier, and still she slept badly – worse, she was convinced, than Mr Quest, who was her patient.

      Oh what a dream, what a dream! Mrs Quest turned her back on her garden, and went into the fusty living-room, where the little dog leaped on to her lap. Dear Kaiser, there there, Kaiser, she whispered to the animal’s pricked ears and wet muzzle. She let him out into the veranda, and walked around it into the kitchen. The servants were not in yet. Mrs Quest made herself tea, keeping her mind occupied with cups, water, sugar, planning: if I dress now, then I might get dirty again, if I have to do something for him – but surely not, I’ve got everything ready; yes, it would be more sensible to dress for the Parade now. The tea was ready, and the decision to dress taken. But Mrs Quest returned to the living-room, and switched on a coil of red electricity, and sat by it, shivering. Her old face was set with unhappiness. The little white dog bounded back – he knows how I feel, thought Mrs Quest, fondling the silky ears. She bent her face to the warmth of the dog’s fat back and remembered the dream.

      Her mother, reaching down from a high place which Mrs Quest knew was heaven, handed her three red roses … the old lady was crying, thinking of her mother, who had died young. She had not known her. All through her childhood and youth her mother had been mysterious, not only with the brutal pathos of her death in childbirth, but because of a quality that for a long time the young girl had sensed as dangerous. There was something about her mother never explained, never put into words, but there always, like a sweet and reckless scent hidden in old dresses, old cupboards. Some things had been said. She was pretty, for instance. She was clever, too, and gay. She was brave – had ridden to the hounds on a great chestnut horse, jumping fences where no one would follow her. Had been strong – she went to balls and danced all night, and then teased her husband to walk home with her through the dawn while the carriage came behind. But she had died, after all, leaving not only three small children, not only the sting of resentment earned by those who die with all their qualities intact but – what was the thing that no one put into words but which the young girl felt so strongly?

      Grown up at last, she understood that her mother had been beautiful. Not pretty. The grudging little word made her look again at the tall, cold, disciplined house she had been brought up in. Long-concealed pictures came to light and the dead woman was revealed to be beautiful, and with the sort of beauty not easily admitted by that house whose chief virtue had been respectability, described as a ‘sense of proportion’, as ‘healthy’.

      Did that mean her mother had been ‘morbid’, ‘selfish’, ‘wrong-headed’? The girl decided this must have been the case, even while she remembered that as a small girl she had started up in bed from a nightmare screaming: ‘They wanted her to die,’ and to the servant who came scolding in with a candle shielded behind a hand that smelled of hot dripping from the kitchen: ‘You all wanted her to die.’

      She knew, when she put her hair up, deciding that she would not be a Victorian young lady, but must fight her stern father so that she could be a nurse (which no real lady was, in spite of Florence Nightingale) that her childhood had lacked something which she craved. Beauty, she told herself it was, clinging to that word, refusing ‘morbid’ and ‘selfish’ and ‘right-minded’.

      But her life had gone – nursing. She had got her way, had fought her father who would not speak to her for months, had won her battles. She had nursed – as a young woman, then through the war, and then her husband. She had nursed all her life. But never had she known ‘beauty’. It seemed that her mother had taken this quality with her when she had died, selfishly – it was all her own fault, they said, because she had insisted on dancing all night when she was five months pregnant.

      And now Mrs Quest’s mother had handed Mrs Quest three crimson roses to which the old lady’s memory added the crystal drops of a winter’s morning. The beautiful young woman had leaned down, smiling, from heaven, and handed the daughter she had scarcely known three red roses, fresh with bright water. Mrs Quest, weeping with joy, her heart opening to her beautiful mother, had looked down and seen that in her hand the roses had turned into – a medicine bottle.

      Yes, the dream had the quality of sheer brutality. Nothing was concealed, nothing glossed over for kindness’ sake. Mrs Quest, an old lady, for the first time in her life gave a name to that thing her mother had possessed, which no one had spoken of, and which she herself had described as ‘beauty’. The beautiful woman had been unkind. Yes, that was it. She had been pretty and reckless – and unkind. She had had charm and a white skin and long black hair, but she was unkind. She would dance in memory always like a light burning or like the sunlight on the glossy skin of her wild chestnut horse. But she was unkind.

      Mrs Quest put her withered face close to her little dog who still shivered from the garden’s frost, and wept. She wept at the cruelty of the dream. Medicine bottles, yes; that was her life, given her by a cruel and mocking mother.

      Three days ago, on to the polished cement of the veranda had slid an official letter, bidding Mr Quest to the Victory Celebrations for the Second World War (in Europe) as a representative of the soldiers of the First World War. Mr Quest had been in a drugged sleep when the letter came. Mrs Quest, long before he had woken up, had worked out a long and careful plan that would make it possible for her husband to attend. She yearned to be there, on that morning of flags and bands, her invalid husband – the work of so many years of devotion – beside her, his illnesses officially recognized as the result of the First World War. But she had been afraid he would refuse. In the past, he had always laughed, with a bitter contempt that had hurt her terribly. Or, if he had gone, it had been (or so it seemed) only for the sake of the angry nihilism he could use on the occasion after it was over.

      In 1922 (was it?) she had stood by the Cenotaph in Whitehall with the handsome man who was her husband, and her soul had melted with the drums and the fifes and the flags of Remembrance Day. Afterwards Mr Quest had indulged in days of vituperation about the generals and the Government and the type of mind that organized Remembrance Days and handed out white feathers – he had been handed a white feather on the day he had put off his uniform after the final interview with the doctors who said he would never be himself again. ‘We are afraid you will never really be yourself again, Captain.’ He mocked everything that fed the tender soul of Mrs Quest, who had always needed the comfort of anniversaries, ceremonies, ritual, the proper payment of respect where it was due.

      But – and here СКАЧАТЬ