LITMIR.BIZ

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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 comes something odd that Mrs Quest was quite aware of herself. There was something in her that liked her husband’s mockery, that needed it. Something older, more savage, more knowledgeable in the tidily hatted matron who let her eyes fill with tears at The Last Post waited for and needed the old soldier’s ribaldry. Three days ago, when she had taken the official letter to him, she had expected him to laugh.

      But he had lowered faded eyes to the government letter, and remained silent, his lips folding and refolding as if he was tasting something from the past. Then he looked up at his wife with a face adjusted to an appropriate humility (a look which appalled Mrs Quest, so unlike him was it) and said in a voice false with proper feeling: ‘Well, perhaps if I wrap up, how about it?’

      Mrs Quest had been shaken to her depths. Perhaps for the first time she really felt what the nurse in her had always known, that her husband really was not ‘himself’. Not even intermittently, these days, was he himself, and for hours they had discussed in every painful detail how it could be possible for him to attend the ceremony, while his face preserved the terrifyingly unreal expression of a man who has given his all for his country and now submits in modesty to his country’s thanks.

      There were two main questions involved. One was, sleep or the absence of it. The other: Mr Quest’s bowels. But the problem was the same, in effect: it was impossible to predict anything. The point was, Mr Quest’s body had been so wrenched and twisted by every variety of drug, that drugs themselves had become like symptoms, to be discussed and watched. It was not a question of Mr Quest’s having taken so many grains of – whatever it was, which would have a certain effect. A sleeping draught, an aperient, might ‘work’ or it might not, and if it did work, then it was unpredictably and extraordinarily, and information must be saved for the doctor, who would be interested scientifically in what surely must be unprecedented, from the medical point of view?

      The Parade was at eleven, and would be over by twelve. During this hour Mr Quest would be in a wheel-chair with his medals pinned to his dressing-gown – permission had been obtained for him to appear thus. But he must not fall asleep. And he must not …

      They had discussed the exact strength of the dose appropriate to make Mr Quest sleep all night yet wake alert enough to face the ceremony. It had been decided that seven-tenths of his usual dose would be right, if the doctor would agree to give a stimulant at ten o’clock. As for the bowels – well, that was more difficult. An enema at about nine-thirty would probably do the trick.

      So it all had been planned and decided. And Mrs Quest, last night, kissing her husband’s cheek as he sank off to sleep already in the power of the drug that would keep him unconscious till nine next morning, had looked young for a moment, fresh – tomorrow she would be at the Parade, and she would be taken by Mrs Maynard, who had been so kind as to offer them a lift.

      For this, the Maynards’ offer, Mr Quest had been duly grateful, and had not made one critical comment. Yet he did not like Mrs Maynard, he said she put the fear of God into him, with her committees and her intrigues.

      Mrs Quest had noted, but not digested, her husband’s compliance. She had told Mrs Maynard that they would be ready at ten-thirty. Mrs Maynard had been ‘infinitely kind’ about drugs and arrangements.

      To get Mr Quest to the Victory in Europe Parade had taken the formidable energies of one matron, and the readiness to be infinitely kind of another. But of course he wasn’t there yet. He was still asleep.

      Seven in the morning. Mrs Quest, having decided that she might as well get into her best clothes – did nothing of the kind. She dressed rapidly in an old brown skirt and pink jersey. The bedroom she still shared with her husband was dim, and smelt of medicines, and he lay quite still, absolutely silent, while she banged drawers and rummaged in the wardrobe and brushed her hair and clattered objects on the dressing table. Partly, she was deaf,

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