The Bird in the Tree

  But she didn’t want to play chess with David tonight. She wanted him to tell her what was wrong with him, now at once, so that she need not endure the misery of uncertainty all through the long hours of the night when, in any case, she never slept very well because old people never do; especially when they have brought six children and eight grandchildren into a world that is not as good to them as they thought it was going to be.

  But he wasn’t going to tell her tonight; perhaps he was never going to tell her. He was determined to do everything just as usual and she, too, must do everything just as usual because he wished it. . . . Increasingly, as one got older, she found that one did things because the young wished it. . . . She pushed her lace ruffles back from her wrists, bade David light the lamp that stood beside her and turned her attention to the delicate kings and queens, prelates and nobility and humble horsemen whom David’s quick fingers were arranging in battle formation.

  A sudden panic possessed her. Was there going to be a battle between her and David? Was the great love that had always been between them going to be strained by bitter disagreement? Was the peace of Damerosehay, that had been utterly unsullied all these years, to be soiled and torn at last? The far murmur of the sea, coming very faintly through the utter stillness, sounded to her like a mutter of warning. David generally beat her at chess, for he was cleverer than she was, and generally she rejoiced in his greater power, rejoiced to feel his mind grappling with hers, bearing it down, subduing it. But tonight, in the grip of this fantastic panic, she wanted to beat him. . . . She wanted most desperately to beat him. . . . Her hand was trembling as she stretched it out to move the first pawn.

  Presently she found herself studying her grandson almost furtively. The daylight had faded now but as he leaned forward over the table the one lamp threw his face into vivid relief above the black of his dinner jacket and against the shadows of the darkening room. He was much thinner than he had been, as Margaret had already noticed, and that made the character of his face more apparent. There was something of fanaticism, she thought, in the hollows at the temples and the deep shadows round the eyes, and the line of the jaw was harder than she had realized. He was thinking and his lips were folded so tightly in concentration that the smiling curves of them were lost in a straight line that was a little ruthless. She suddenly did not recognize his face. This was not the boy she had known but a man capable of passion and of action that was strongly willed. She looked at him intently, almost weighing her chances against that face. Then he made his move and leaned back, lost in the shadows, and she tried to get a grip upon herself. It was nonsense. It had been just a trick of the light that had made him look so changed and so hardened. She would think no more about it. She would attend to her game. . . . Yet when she made her next move it was a false one.

  “Grandmother!” exclaimed David half-an-hour later. She was losing all along the line. He had never known her put up so poor a fight. He looked across at her, startled, and saw that her blue eyes were piteous in her lovely, heart-shaped face.

  “No, David, no!” she cried, and caught his hand as he was about to lift a crowned queen upon the road to victory. “No! Don’t let’s play it out! I don’t want you to win. I think I’m tired tonight. Don’t let’s play it out.”

  “Of course we won’t,” said David, and kissed the hand that clung to his. “But you still had a chance to win you know.”

  “No,” said Lucilla. “No chance.”

  “Yes, you had,” said David. “Listen.” And lifting the table away he stretched himself beside the sleeping dogs on the rug before the fire, his arm across her knees, and lectured to her softly but inexorably upon the royal game of chess. Instantly the years rolled back and she was reassured. So had all her sons and her grandsons, stretched upon that same hearth rug, lectured to her through so many years; instructing her ignorance about tadpoles, cricket, submarines, howitzers, communism and the habits of ants; and always she had listened so patiently, expressing astonishment, ignorance and agreement just at the points where these emotions were expected by the lecturer. So familiar was this situation that her ridiculous panic left her. David was still only a boy after all. There could be no real quarrel between them; nothing that mattered. “Yes, dear,” she said as she had said a hundred times before, relaxing comfortably in her chair. “Yes, I see what you mean. Yes, indeed, I quite see.”

  Then the Dresden china clock struck shrilly, the dogs awoke and blinked at the firelight and bringing his lecture to a graceful conclusion David rose to his feet. “Ten o’clock,” he said. “Time for us to visit the children and then you must go to bed, Grandmother.”

  And again Lucilla was uneasy. Not by a hair’s-breadth was he deviating from the accustomed routine. Nothing was he leaving out. It was almost as though it was for the last time. “For the last time,” whispered the flames in the wide hearth, and a shower of bright sparks fled up the chimney as a log crashed and fell apart. The sudden glow sent a ripple of light up over the dark carved overmantel and it seemed to Lucilla to move and sway.

  “It is so funny,” she said to David as she lowered the lamp by her chair, “but I always feel as though that overmantel were the prow of a ship. You won’t remember but I felt it the very first time we ever saw it.”

  “A ship?” said David, looking up in the half-dark at that massive brooding presence of dark wood.

  “Yes,” said Lucilla, “and sometimes there seems to me to be a man up there too.”

  David only laughed as he slipped his arm through hers and drew her away towards the door. He did not tell her that as a little boy he had always been frightened of that overmantel, nor that tonight, for the first time, he had been conscious of some presence in the room that was just at the moment inimical to him. His profession was one that took toll of the imagination and the emotions and he had learnt to discount “queer feelings.” They came when one’s emotional experience had strained the mechanism of the nerves too severely. . . . That was all. . . . He shut the drawing-room door behind them and picked up from the hall table the little shaded lamp that Lucilla carried when she said good night to the children.

  Every night before she went to bed Lucilla visited each sleeping grandchild in its bed to see that all was well with the child and to pray for its safety through the coming night and through the life that stretched before it. So had Lucilla’s own mother brooded nightly over her children, and her mother before her. Lucilla understood that the custom was dying out now, but she still kept to it. And David on his first night at home always went with her because it amused him. Lucilla did not mind his amusement, for it was not mocking; it was merely the laughing delight that all her actions and remarks seemed to arouse in her family. She did not know why they found her so deliciously funny, but she was glad that they did, for she knew that the people who can be loved and laughed at together are the most adored.

  They went slowly up the shadowy dark stairs, Lucilla going first with David’s arm through hers and the dogs following after, her silk skirts falling from stair to stair with a whispering murmur and the dogs’ paws padding very softly, with little clicking sounds as their nails touched the polished boards on each side of the narrow strip of carpet. How familiar it was, thought David; their shadows leaping on ahead of them as the lamp he carried illumined the well of the staircase, the faint scent of wood smoke, oil lamps, damp and dried rose leaves that always pervaded the house, the feel of Lucilla’s silken sleeve under his hand and the soft cool breath of air that came from some window open to the marshes and the sea; these things stabbed him with their sweetness. Odd that such trivial things could have such a hold upon one.

  Caroline slept in a dressing-room that opened out of Lucilla’s bedroom, the same little room that David had had when he was a child. She slept tidily in her white cot, the sheet turned down neatly over the pale blue blanket and her right cheek turned confidingly to the pillow. Her favourite doll Gladys lay beside her a
nd her other dolls lay in a precise row at the foot of the bed. She was flushed by the depth of her sleep and looked prettier than she did when she was awake. Her eyelashes, lying on her cheek, were like curled golden fans. David, standing at the foot of the cot with the shaded lamp, looked at her sombrely as Lucilla bent over and skilfully withdrew Caroline’s left thumb from her mouth. For a moment the small hand lay where Lucilla had placed it, tidily upon the sheet, then it moved upwards and the thumb popped back again where it had come from, without the incident having in any way disturbed the depth of Caroline’s slumbers. “Hopeless,” murmured Lucilla, and folded her hands upon the top rail of the cot to pray for Caroline. Then she glanced up, expecting to see the usual gleam of amusement in David’s eyes. It was not there. His eyes looked like cold blue stones in his set white face.

  Ben and Tommy slept together in a little room looking out on to the flower garden and called “the chapel room” because on each side of the main window were two others filled with stained glass. One showed a man carrying a little child upon his shoulder across a waste of turbulent water towards a quiet shore where a cornfield grew, and it was a rather striking picture. The waves, sweeping in stylized swirls that were queerly reminiscent of the carving in the drawing-room, were full of dark menace, and behind them the sky was heavy with storm; only one ray of sun pierced the dark clouds to touch the cornfield to gold. The man who struggled through the waves seemed scarcely able to keep his feet, big burly fellow though he was; he gripped a great staff with both hands and the veins on his bare arms stood out like cords, his face was grey and strained with exhaustion and his back was bowed as though all the pain of the world weighed upon it. But the child was not afraid. Enthroned upon the man’s shoulders he rode secure above the waves. He seemed to know that he was safe in that man’s care and his smiling face was like a white flower against the storm clouds behind his head. . . . It was, the Eliots supposed, a picture of Saint Christopher and the Christ Child. . . . The other window showed a strange jumble of beasts of all sorts running through a forest; very happy beasts, full of jubilation; the garden of Eden, Lucilla thought, but Ben said it was the animals let out of the ark, and pleased about it.

  Tommy’s bed, after slumber had claimed him, looked like a jumble sale. Everything that was dear to him he took to bed with him; his engine, his boxes of tin soldiers, his water pistol, his notebook with the numbers of cars in it, various pebbles and bits of wood which he liked for some reason or other, and the remains of a perfectly revolting fur hearth rug with which he played at Robinson Crusoe when he woke up in the mornings. Could these possessions have remained in neat rows, as Caroline’s did, his bed would have been a more pleasing sight, but he was a restless child and within ten minutes of falling asleep he had kicked everything, including his bedclothes, into such confusion that it was difficult to tell what was what. “It’s no good my trying to do anything,” said Lucilla, sadly regarding her grandson’s tousled head, which had slipped from its resting place and was pillowed on the engine, his out-flung uncovered arms and the curly toes protruding from beneath the covers. “If I try to straighten him out he only bites me. . . . In his sleep, of course, the darling.”

  She touched Tommy’s riotous curls tenderly but with caution, lest he bite, and turned to Ben, who slept with the head of his bed pushed under the stained-glass window of the man carrying the child across the water, because he was so fond of it. . . . The man’s face reminded him of his father, whom he missed quite dreadfully, though no one knew it. . . . Ben slept tidily, like Caroline, lying high on his pillows in case he should cough, one hand under his cheek and the other lying palm up upon the covers, the fingers a little curved. His physical delicacy revealed itself very clearly when he was asleep. The shadows under his eyes looked enormous, intensified by the thick dark lashes lying upon them, the mouth relaxed in sleep drooped poignantly at the corners and in the curved fingers there was something that beseeched.

  “It’s not fair, Grandmother,” whispered David suddenly and a little fiercely. “It’s not fair on the old boy. He’s too old now to be looked at when he’s asleep. Sleep shows too much. It’s not fair.”

  Lucilla looked at David in surprise. She had always known there was a special link between David and Ben. . . . They were a little alike and understood each other. . . . But she had not known that David felt quite so deeply.

  “He has always been delicate,” she said gently. “Nervy, frightened about things. The eldest so often is. I want him to have only happiness and peace all through his childhood, to settle his nerves.”

  But David, holding the lamp high, was no longer looking at Ben but at the window above his head. “Like him, don’t you think?” he muttered.

  “The child? Like Ben?” said Lucilla. “Yes. A little. He has that look of peace that Ben has when he knows he is safe.”

  David sighed twice, with difficulty, almost as though he were Ben oppressed by the asthma, and led the way rather abruptly back to the passage.

  Lucilla’s room was next to the boys’ room and over the drawing-room. It too looked out over the garden, and beyond to the marshes and the sea. It was a noisy room when the storms were sweeping in, but Lucilla did not mind that. She was never afraid of natural things, winds or lightnings or the flooding of great waters; they might deal out death now and again but they had not got it in their power to poison life; it was the things that poisoned that she dreaded, war and disease and the canker of creeping sin.

  But there was no wind tonight. When David lit the candles on her dressing-table the flames burned steady and straight, illumining her lovely room with its four-poster hung with blue flowered chintz curtains, the dim blue shabby carpet, the old kidney-shaped dressing-table with its chintz petticoat, the miniatures of children and grandchildren over the mantelpiece, and the old Spanish crucifix of ebony and ivory that hung above the prie-dieu in the corner.

  “What a lovely shape candle flames have,” said David, looking at them. “Living so long with electric light I had forgotten. Like a perfect laurel leaf, or hands set palm to palm in prayer. ‘And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.’ ”

  “You’re getting absurdly fanciful, David,” said Lucilla.

  “No, only quoting Shakespeare. Do you remember when you came all the way up to town to see me play Romeo for the first time? Do you remember the party we had afterwards? You liked that. You behaved as though you were eighteen. I don’t know what Aunt Margaret would have said if she’d seen you.”

  “I’ve liked all the good times I’ve had with you, David,” said Lucilla. “Now I come to think of it I don’t believe you’ve ever done a single thing that made me really unhappy.”

  David was still looking at the candle flames and had his back to her.

  “We like the same things,” went on Lucilla. “Beautiful things, and funny things. . . . And Damerosehay. . . . That reminds me, David; I made my will for the last time the other day and I left Damerosehay to you.”

  David swung round as though she had struck him, the colour blazing up into his white face, and as though he had struck her she put out one hand and clung to the bedpost so tightly that her fingers were white and bloodless, though she kept herself erect with head held proudly.

  “You can’t,” he said hoarsely. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?” she asked, and her voice was very cold.

  “Hilary—George—Stephen. Your sons must come first.”

  “I have consulted them,” said Lucilla, and she was still very cold and rather distant. “They are willing and glad that it should be yours. You were brought up here. It is your home as it never was theirs, and you love it more than they do.” David was silent and she forced herself on again. “You are successful in your profession. They tell me that as you get older you are likely to be increasingly so. You are the only one of the family who is likely in the future to have enough money to keep it up. And I know that you will always ke
ep it as a refuge for the children whom perhaps I’ll never see—your children—Ben’s—it was for the children that I bought it.” Again she stopped and forced herself on. “And you love it so, David, you love it so. . . . David, what in heaven’s name is the matter with you?”

  David laughed and came to her. “Nothing,” he said, his cheek against hers. “Nothing except that I’m tired. It’s absurdly early but I’ll go to bed I think.”

  “You’ve your usual room?” asked Lucilla dully. “That funny little room you’re so fond of?”

  “Of course I have. It’s the best room in the house for making one feel sleepy. The sound of the wind in the rushes is so peaceful; and then you don’t know any more until you hear that plover in the dawn.”

  He still stood with his cheek against hers. Lucilla felt that if he didn’t stop talking and go away, or alternatively sit down and tell her what on earth was the matter with him, she would scream. She was at the end of her tether. “Go to bed, darling,” she said, and gave him a little push.

  “Good night,” he said. “Sleep well.” Then he kissed her and went away.

  Lucilla crossed the room with trembling knees, sank into her fireside chair and pulled the old-fashioned bell long and passionately for Ellen. She was distracted; quite incapable of undressing herself. Why could children never tell one anything? “Sleep well.” How could she possibly be expected to sleep well when no one told her anything?