The Bird in the Tree

  She took a clean handkerchief out of her drawer and moved restlessly to the window, suddenly tormented again by the old pain that she always thought she had conquered, yet always found was not yet quite conquered; why must it be only the women of charm who can know the fullness of life? Then suddenly she saw her garden and the pain was gone. She leaned out of the window, smelling the fresh scent of it, seeing how the colours glowed in the sunset. “I live to the full,” she told herself. “All gardeners do.”

  She heard David’s bedroom door open and shut and heard him running lightly down the stairs to the dining-room where Ellen would be waiting for him with a beaming smile and the cocktail shaker, and she turned back to the room with a smile. Poor David! He loathed deceiving Lucilla about those cocktails, but if he didn’t Ellen’s heart would be broken so what on earth, he had once demanded of Margaret, was he to do? “Drink them,” she had advised. “It is better to deceive one old lady than to have to disappoint another.” Thinking of Lucilla and Ellen she smiled again. What beloved old ladies, but oh, what autocrats!

  She waited in her room until the gong went, fearful of bursting in upon Lucilla and David when they did not want her. She spent her whole life in terror of disturbing people when they did not want her, and so catching was her frame of mind that they too, when she entered anxiously upon them, were inclined to agree with her that, no, they did not want her. Lucilla had spent a large part of her life in unsuccessful endeavours to teach Margaret that people will generally take up towards you the attitude that you take up towards them; shrinking will be met with shrinking and friendliness with friendliness; but Margaret, painfully conscious of her own lack of charm, was too scared to put that theory to the test. So she held aloof always, afraid to give herself lest her gift should be scorned, and possessions that she most deeply prized, like David’s love, slid away from her.

  Yet as she opened the drawing-room door she utterly forgot herself in the picture that she saw. The drawing-room was always lovely in the evening light; even Margaret whose whole heart was in the garden could never see it at this time without loving it. The glow of the sunset lit it with an unearthly light that both deepened and softened the colours of rugs and chintz, and the flowers in the vases burned like flame. Even that great grim overmantel of polished wood was transformed, taking on the softness of velvet rather than the midnight murk of ice-cold water.

  And Lucilla, enthroned in her armchair, the Bastard at her feet with his chin resting on her shoe and Pooh-Bah beside her, the flames of the wood fire painting roses on the wide skirt of her purple silk dress, was as lovely as her room. Her cheeks were a little flushed because David had come, and her eyes shining in welcome to Margaret.

  “Margaret, darling, we’ve been wondering where you were,” she said, and stretched out her left hand in that desperate yearning of hers that Margaret should be able to enter with her into the lovely ease of family love. But Margaret could never do anything easily; she was as rigid as a scarecrow by the door and Lucilla’s hand, its hoop of diamonds shining in the firelight, fell to her side in a little gesture of discouragement.

  But David, standing where all the Eliot men always stood, in front of the fire so that none of the warmth could reach their female relatives (though to do them justice they did not think of this, Lucilla not having the heart to point it out) threw the evening paper quickly aside and went instantly to meet Margaret. He never forgot for how many years she had done for him all the things that it would have bored Lucilla to do; darned his socks, packed his box for school, ministered to him when as a small boy he was sick in the night; he did not forget, and he never failed to show her a punctilious affection that hurt her intolerably.

  “How are you, Aunt Margaret?” he asked, and bent to give her one very gentle but very dutiful kiss.

  How well he had done it, she thought. The flinging aside of his paper, as though he would not allow it to keep him from her for an instant, the swift movement towards her and the bend of his head to kiss her; it had all been done apparently in one graceful movement. . . . No wonder that as an actor he could earn more in a month than many men did in a year.

  But Margaret’s moments of bitterness were rare and soon gone. As she moved to the fire with David’s arm through hers she was exclaiming delightedly, as she always did, at his likeness to Lucilla. She had made the same remark for fifteen years and David would have felt his home-coming to be incomplete without it.

  And this time, she saw, it was truer than usual. Since he grew up David had always had Lucilla’s height and slenderness, her eyes and the vitally-growing yet smooth gold hair that Lucilla had handed on to him and to his father alone of all her children and grandchildren. But today for the first time Margaret noticed that the actual structure of David’s face was just like Lucilla’s; she noticed because his face had lost its youthful roundness and had changed in a few months from a boy’s face to a man’s.

  “You’ve got very thin, David,” she said, as they crossed the hall to the dining-room. “Have you been ill?”

  “Of course not, Aunt Margaret,” said David evenly. “No Eliot is ever ill. . . . Not unless he wants to get his own way with it like old Ben with his asthma.”

  “You’re tired?” pursued Margaret.

  “This last show did seem to run for a century,” admitted David.

  “Margaret, how beautifully you have arranged these flowers,” said Lucilla, and put a long slender finger under one of the purple petunia trumpets that Margaret had placed upon the dining-room table in a bowl that contained also yellow goldenrod, pink petunias and small scarlet dahlias.

  Margaret flushed suddenly, for she was well aware, though Lucilla never said anything, that her lavish autumn colour schemes were anathema to Lucilla. Then, looking up, she saw by the warning glint in her mother’s eye that she had been tactless again. She was forever being tactless. She ought to have remembered, for Lucilla had told her often enough, that when something had obviously gone wrong with one of the elder grandchildren they must not ask questions, or they would be told nothing. To Caroline or Tommy or Ben they could say, “Have you a pain? Did you have a nightmare? Are you missing Mother?” but when the grandchildren had grown up, as had now Stephen’s four children as well as David, one could not force their confidence. If one tried to they closed up like clams. One had to wait patiently to be told what was the matter with them. . . . Or perhaps alternatively not to be told, in which case one must pretend very hard to have noticed nothing at all. . . . Margaret sighed and upset the salt.

  David took instant and skilful charge of the conversation, directing it to the Chelsea flower show, to politics, to things that had nothing to do with Damerosehay. He talked easily and amusingly, setting himself to make Lucilla smile her lovely smile and win from Margaret her low rare laugh. Not tonight, said a voice that was beating like a little hammer in his brain, not tonight. Let it be the same as always tonight. Keep it the same as always. Tomorrow is time enough to tell them. Make them happy tonight. Old ladies are easy to deceive. They don’t guess anything. Make them happy tonight. . . . And Lucilla, with Margaret rather heavily following her lead, was so gay that he never guessed that of the two dramatic performances hers was even more accomplished than his own.

  The dining-room as well as the drawing-room faced the garden, but its windows were not so wide. It was dim and a little musty, panelled in dark wood and curtained and carpeted in a sombre crimson. The late Sir James Eliot, painted in oils, legally bewigged and gowned and framed in a gilt frame six inches wide, hung over the fireplace and looked down upon his descendants with the rather frigid kindness which had been so characteristic of him. The large sideboard was weighted with all the heavy Eliot silver and the mahogany table was polished until it gleamed like the shining ominous surface of some black bottomless tarn. The dining-room was Ellen’s especial pride, as the garden was Margaret’s and the drawing-room Lucilla’s. It was she who had chosen the carpe
t and curtains, hung Sir James and chosen his frame, it was she who polished the silver and the gleaming table. The dining-room was the only room at Damerosehay that David disliked. At all times he hated its darkness and heaviness, and tonight it seemed to him like some sort of stuffy shrine of Victorian family respectability. He felt as though there was no air in the room and as though the stolidity of it were pressing upon him like an actual physical weight. . . . That awful heavy silver and that ominous table. . . . He looked away from them and encountered the painted eyes of his grandfather looking at him from the wall. They were grey kind eyes in a heavy kindly face; they were exactly the eyes of his son George, the father of Ben, Tommy and Caroline and the divorced husband of Nadine. David abruptly drained the one glass of wine which the grandsons were allowed at dinner, and which they usually made last as long as possible, but he kept his eyes courageously upon his grandfather’s. He imagined that his grandfather had been just like George; professionally clever but insensitive in his personal relationships, just, kind, conservative, and a gentleman to the marrow of his bones. He, too, like George, would have always done what the code of his generation considered the decent thing, at whatever cost to himself and without it occurring to him that the code itself might need examination. Had he lived in the twentieth century and been faced with George’s problem, that of a middle-aged man with a young wife who had tired of him and was unhappy with him, he would have done what George had done, yielded to her pleading and arranged matters so that she was set free and called innocent while he, also innocent, must lose his children and carry about with him always the stigma of a divorced man. . . . Only in Grandfather’s day, of course, that wasn’t the code. . . . In Grandfather’s day the decent thing had been to whiten the sepulchre and carry on within it at whatever cost of truth and happiness. How stifling it must have been inside. A stifling hell. As stifling as this loathsome room.

  “Open the window wider, dear,” said Lucilla’s quiet voice.

  David flung it wide with a quick grateful glance at her. The room wasn’t really hot, he supposed, but the movement had eased his choking misery.

  “Is Nadine quite well?” asked Margaret conversationally.

  How like Aunt Margaret to ask that particular question at that moment! But he had control of himself again and answered easily, “Quite well, Aunt Margaret.”

  “And you see her often?”

  “Fairly often. But she’s busy, you know, with that shop of hers.”

  “That I should live,” said Lucilla tartly, “to have a daughter-in-law in trade!”

  Lucilla definitely disliked her daughter-in-law Nadine. She knew it was wrong of her but she couldn’t help it. She had disliked her on sight, when George had first brought her to Damerosehay, a lovely dark-eyed creature of nineteen, as sophisticated as Lucilla at not much younger had been unsophisticated, marrying a man twenty years her senior with an awareness of what she was doing that had been denied to Lucilla. Just why Nadine had married George Lucilla had never known. George, in spite of the Eliot heaviness, had been attractive at thirty-nine, straight-backed, tall and a V.C., but Nadine had not been the kind of girl to be swept off her feet by a soldierly figure and a bit of bronze metal won in a moment of heat that was not likely to occur again, and she had responded to George’s dog-like devotion with a laughing acquiescence that had not looked like love. Then why had she married him? He had no money worth mentioning. And why had she, who openly avowed she hated babies, given him three in quick succession? There might even have been others had not Nadine’s illness at Caroline’s birth put an end to all hope of further childbearing. Lucilla had never found any satisfactory answers to these questions, but when after nine years of stormy married life the break at last came, she vowed she had always said there would be trouble (though as a matter of fact she hadn’t, and was for some reason she could not explain to herself surprised at it) and was quick to lay possessive hands upon her grandchildren, Ben, Tommy and Caroline, lest worse befall them. . . . A merely temporary measure, she said, to tide over the time until Nadine and George came together again. . . . For she insisted that, for the children’s sake, the break should not and must not be permanent. She did not believe that it would be. The divorce she swept away as being a lying thing of no consequence; though she considered it both wrong and silly of George to have acquiesced in it. She had fought him with all her strength, but he had not listened. When what he considered to be Nadine’s happiness was at stake he could be as obstinate as he was brave.

  Nadine had submitted to this grabbing of her children by Lucilla with surprising meekness, in one so spirited; for after all they were her children, and she loved them. She had listened quietly, her sleek head bent, her quick tongue curbed, when Lucilla had held forth to her about the excellence of sea air for asthmatic subjects, the unsuitability of a London flat as a dwelling place for little children, and the impossibility of Nadine looking after her children properly if she were living her own life and running an antique shop, and when Lucilla had at long last finished Nadine had whispered meekly, “Yes, Grandmother,” and lifted her head and looked at Lucilla with dark tormented eyes that had haunted her mother-in-law for a week or more.

  No, Lucilla had never been able to understand Nadine, and blamed her lack of understanding upon Nadine’s Russian grandmother. There was no understanding the Russians; a tiresome people; all quite mad.

  But she had succeeded in capturing her grandchildren, and this had been some satisfaction to her in her sorrow for her son George, going back alone to India with bewilderment in his kind dog’s eyes and an undeserved stain on the name that James had handed down untarnished to his upright sons. . . . Yet still hoping against hope, they all knew, for reunion with his wife; still loving her intensely, longing for her, perhaps even believing that in giving her the freedom she wanted lay his best hope of winning her again.

  How she disliked Nadine! She brooded on the depth of her dislike while David talked cheerfully on about the Chippendale chairs that Nadine had picked up for a mere song. Nadine was clever, there was no doubt about that, and Lucilla hoped she was enjoying herself selling chairs and living her own life. It was that declaration of Nadine’s, that she wanted “to live her own life,” that had exasperated Lucilla beyond anything else in the whole wretched business. It was a remark frequently on the lips of the modern generation, she knew, and it annoyed her. For whose lives, in the name of heaven, could they live except their own? Everyone must look after something in this world and why were they living their own lives if they looked after antique furniture, petrol pumps or parrots, and not when they looked after husbands, children or aged parents? Lucilla didn’t know; and Margaret didn’t either when Lucilla asked her; nor Ellen. Nadine was beyond the combined comprehension of the three of them.

  “Unaccountable,” said Lucilla to herself, and cracked a water biscuit between her delicate fingers with the sound of a pistol shot.

  Then she thought that perhaps she was being uncharitable.

  “There is good in all,” she announced rhetorically to the room in general. “Another fig, David? Margaret? Then we’ve finished, haven’t we?”

  David came round to her and she was glad of his arm as she got up out of her chair, for though she was a wonderfully healthy old lady she found a little difficulty in getting up once she was sitting down, or sitting down once she was standing up. . . . It was because she was so tall.

  “But I’m not as tall as you, David,” she said, and she kept her hand on his arm as they went back to the drawing-room because his nearness made her so happy. But she wished he would tell her what was the matter. Had he, perhaps, told Nadine? At the thought that he might have told Nadine such a storm of jealousy shook her that she had to pray to be forgiven, her lips moving soundlessly as David brought her her footstool and Margaret plumped up a cushion that she didn’t want at all and pushed it down against her backbone in a position that was positively painful. “Tha
nk you, darling,” she said, and hoped it wouldn’t be long before Margaret made the excuse of letters to write to go and help with the washing up.

  It wasn’t long, for it was the nursery maid’s evening out and as well as the washing up Margaret had to see that the mess the children had made in the bathroom over their baths was mopped up before Lucilla had hers. “The Indian mail must go tomorrow,” she explained to David, and shut the door quietly behind her. Thankfully Lucilla withdrew her cushion.

  “Chess, Grandmother?” said David, and before she had time to answer he had lifted forward the little table with the old scarlet and white carved chessmen, that stood for the most part unused in the corner of the drawing-room between David’s visits because he was the only member of Lucilla’s family whom she considered had sufficient intelligence to play with her without doing himself an injury. Hilary tried sometimes but the stertorous breathing and the agonized writhings that were the outward sign of severe mental effort in Hilary terrified Lucilla. If people could not look nice when they thought, said Lucilla, then let them cease from thought, for evidently they were thinking more than was good for them. The great thing, in her opinion, was to look nice; especially during that hour after dinner when all sensible people assist the processes of digestion by aesthetic enjoyment which while taking the mind off what is going on inside is not sufficiently intellectual to draw away the blood from the part where it is most needed at the moment.