Nightingale Wood

  ‘I suppose she can have it,’ said Mr wither grudgingly, ‘but tell her that the first time I find it in the house it must be destroyed.’

  ‘Yes, of course, dear; I will make that quite clear to Madge, and I am sure that she will see it never does come in.’

  But she did not feel at all sure.

  Her heart sank at the prospect of agitating scenes, with Madge rushing the dog out through the french windows as Mr Wither came in through the door, of the dog being smuggled up to Madge’s bedroom, and Mr Wither tripping over gnawed bones in the bathroom, of slippers destroyed and pools in prominent positions where Mr Wither would be sure to see them on his way to luncheon, of vets’ bills and bills for dead chickens, of Madge in hysterics because her father had decreed that the dog must die, of barking fits at three in the morning, and possibly batches of puppies twice a year.

  ‘It is good of you, dear; I do appreciate it so. And now do come into the drawing-room; it’s quite chilly in here. I shall tell Fawcuss to bring you a glass of port.’

  ‘I’m just coming; only going to draw the curtains. I don’t want anything.’

  Nevertheless, as he moved slowly into the drawing-room he thought with pleasure of the taste of port, and when the surprised Fawcuss brought some in, on an old glass tray that had belonged to his father, he said, ‘Ah, thank you, Fawcuss,’ and sipped it with an increase of comfort.

  Emmie’s a good wife to me, a very good wife, suddenly thought Mr Wither. And then, like a cold wind – What shall I do when she’s gone?

  CHAPTER VIII

  Saxon slept at his home. It was only a twenty-minute walk through the wood from the cross-roads to The Eagles, and Mr Wither saw no reason why Saxon should occupy a good bedroom, burning good electric light and eating a good breakfast under his employer’s roof in addition to earning a hundred pounds a year. A few days after Tina had got her father’s permission to have driving lessons Saxon was lying awake in the early morning, in his room.

  It looked over the wood: he could see the tops of the beeches from where he lay, his arms behind his head, covered in coarse and worn but very clean bed linen. He wore flannel pyjamas in the same state as the bedclothes; the whole room had this look of poverty and fierce cleanliness: even the windows flung back the early sunlight like sheets of crystal.

  He never slept well; he had not done so since he was a little boy. Too much (he supposed) went on in his head. People whom he called Fatbottoms slept all night, without ever planning what they were going to do the next day, and deciding the most efficient and quickest way to do it. At present he was sleeping worse than usual because he was worried. He was beginning to get sick of his job at The Eagles, and wanting to leave it, yet he had no prospect of any other. If he left The Eagles it must be to go to a better job, even if it was only a little better. He would not take a worse one; he would sooner stay where he was. Yet he was nearly twenty-three and he had been at The Eagles six months; it was high time that he made a move. He had learned everything that there was to be learned about driving and repairing Mr Wither’s make of car; now he needed more difficult, responsible, and better-paid work.

  The men at the filling-station where he had picked up his knowledge of cars and learned to drive had often asked him why he did not try for a job in Stanton, the fashionable and exclusive seaside town some twenty miles from Chesterbourne. There were lots of rich people there with cars who might give him a trial, the men said. Even Chesterbourne, one-horse hole though it was, had a professional and prosperous class that ran cars and chauffeurs; surely anything would be better than working for old Wither, a smart young feller like you.

  But Saxon did not want to leave Sible Pelden; he wanted to show all the people there, who remembered him as a ragged boy running about the countryside with a dirty home and a drunken father, that he was getting along fine these days, in a smart uniform, earning a good salary and putting a bit by for a rainy day. If he went even so far as Stanton to look for another job, no one would know him, or see that he was making good; if he went to London, he would be just about lost, like a pin in the gutter; London was such a huge great place. He had driven the old boy up to London once or twice; and though he knew how big London was, and could even remember figures (for he read his newspaper every day with serious concentration) about its population and growth, it had proper surprised him; it went on for such a long time, and that time was only a little bit of it. No, he wouldn’t try London just yet. Later on, perhaps. First he would show all the Fatbottoms who had been at school with him that he was going right ahead, and getting a better job each time he changed.

  But there were no better jobs to be had round Sible Pelden. Mr Spring’s chauffeur, Colonel Phillips’s chauffeur, Sir Henry Maxwell’s chauffeur were all married men with families, well dug in, who dared not die or try to get work elsewhere.

  There’s nothing doing round here, he thought, staring up at the still, hazy sky of early morning, with his cool grey eyes.

  Tina’s imagination and senses had not been seduced by a pair of fine shoulders on a lout. Saxon was that rarity, a beautiful young man without a trace of effeminacy. Beauty in peasants is usually spoiled, in the judgment of non-peasants, by coarseness of texture in hair and skin, but Saxon’s hair and skin were fine, like those of the mother who had passed them on to him, and neither his manners nor voice were coarse. His ambition and his impatient hatred of his dirty home and sodden father seemed to have given a fineness to his nature that showed in his body. His beauty first struck the glance, but what held it, so that it returned again to his face with pleasure, was his air of confidence, of knowing what he wanted and being sure of the way to get it; in short, character. His mind moved in one piece, practically and realistically, and this gave him a look of calm that was attractive. Men said he was a cool hand, and women, after the talkies had been for some years in Chesterbourne, said that he was fresh. Cool and fresh: the adjectives apply to so few human beings that it is not surprising Tina found his image haunting her heart.

  His good looks, and the memory that his father had once been a respectable, comfortably-off miller with land, gave him a feeling of superiority towards the hobbledehoys he led as a youth; he despised them while he ran with them, and this made his father’s gradual decline from decency and his beastly death sink the deeper into his son’s mind. Saxon had never been popular in the village; and when his father died and there was no money to pay the debts and the Cakers had had to move into a squalid cottage, the Sible Pelden people were more interested and I-told-you-soish than kind. Mrs Caker alternately grumbled and joked about her miserable poverty, and Sible Pelden did not like either attitude. The decent country women suspected her for being pretty, for being dirty, for buying diamond hairslides, for reminding them that her husband used to have his own mill; and the men, while they admitted that Saxon was deft, intelligent and hard-working, disliked his stuck-up ways. Some people said that it was a credit the way he had got himself on, dropped his loutish hangings-about at the cross-roads and found a job, but these were not many. Most of Sible Pelden said that he was a proper swell-head, adding that he would leave his mother next thing, as sure as they were standing there, because she shamed him with her slumocky ways.

  These were the Fatbottoms, the people Saxon wanted to ‘show’, by getting better and better jobs.

  But he was so much a country boy, so soaked and coloured by the atmosphere of those few square miles of Essex wherein he had always lived, that he could not strongly feel the pull of a wider world. He read about it in his newspaper and saw it on the pictures, but he had not yet felt it as a real place. His real place was Sible Pelden. He knew, with his cool common sense, that if he really wanted to get on he must leave the place and try for work where work was to be had, but there was a part of his nature that was not cool, and was still so young that it wanted to show off in front of old, contemptuous neighbours. This joined with his unconscious feeling that Sible Pelden was home, and kept him there.

  He
knew that he had this narrow streak of imprudence: he called it ‘letting go’ and blamed his dead father for it. It made him do silly things sometimes; like smiling at girls in the street or at Miss Tina, or at Mrs Theodore, as he had smiled the other day, out in the yard.

  Bang! on his door.

  ‘Saxon! Here’s yer tea.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  He got out of bed and took in the tea; his mother was already half-way down the narrow stairs. No tea was slopped in the saucer. So she had come to her senses about that, had she? He, who was neat as a cat, had once ticked her off for bringing up his tea slopped in the saucer, and ever since that day, weeks ago, it had come up with the cup swimming.

  Now she had come round; so she could have that half-crown put back on her week’s money.

  She don’t like me much, he thought, pulling off his pyjamas and putting them over the bed to air. She liked Cis best.

  Cis had died during their third horrible winter in the cottage, at eight years old, because she could not get enough warmth and food; and because Mrs Caker, telling the more prosperous neighbours about Cis’s illness in her grumbling voice with her eyes touched by laughter, did not make Cis sound as ill as she really was. Cis was a great one for a joke too; she was laughing a few hours before she died, while the doctor, fetched by Saxon, bent over her and said something funny.

  Bad to remember. I’ll show them. He began to splash in cold water; he would shave downstairs.

  His mother was proud of his good looks, because he got them from her, and she grumblingly admired the way he had got on, telling him that he was a proper comic and as artful as a wagon-load of monkeys, but they sometimes had terrible rows because he hated her dirty ways. He hated, too, with the distaste of the unawakened, her easy attraction for every man she met. It made him embarrassed and ashamed.

  He sometimes took a Chesterbourne girl to the pictures and kissed her good night for a quarter of an hour, but he had no regular girl, and had never got beyond kissing his irregular ones. What he liked was ladies; not ladies like Mrs Theodore who had worked in a shop and was therefore not a lady at all, but ladies like those who stayed over at Spring’s, who filled their lives with unknown and therefore romantic activities. He admired them because they had no need to work, and because they had a good time. He was not envious of them nor of the wealthy people in the neighbourhood, because he was coolly determined that he would one day be wealthy himself. He had not yet planned in detail how this wealth was to be gained but his whole nature was set upon gaining it; and showing it, when he had got it, to the Fatbottoms of Sible Pelden.

  Meanwhile it was a satisfactory start to have learned to keep himself and his room clean, to read the papers, steer clear of tarts, not talk Essex, and thoroughly understand the management and running repairs of a 1930 Austin saloon.

  All the same (fastening a suspender) I wish I’d got a man-sized job. This one’s getting me down, and I’m starting to let go. That smiling at Miss Tina, the other day, that was a fair let-go and a damn silly one too. Might have got me the sack, if she’d taken it the wrong way, and I only did it because it was a lovely morning, and I felt good, and she used to be such a pretty little thing. As for Mrs Theodore, she’s only a kid. That wasn’t like giving a lady the come-hither. She wouldn’t say anything, Mrs Theodore wouldn’t. Besides, she’s been married. She’s a pretty little thing, too. Must be dull for her, up there. Dull – Jeeze! Is it dull or is it dull!

  The young men of Chesterbourne had taken this rhetorical demand to their hearts, as had the young women; it would not be too much to say that it was heard everywhere. Am I hot or am I hot? Do I want a coffee or do I want a coffee? Was that rain or was it rain? Their elders said that they could not see anything in this silly way of talking. It didn’t, said the elders pathetically, make sense.

  I must get a better job, thought Saxon, running lightly downstairs with his waisted jacket over one arm, but he did not think it dramatically or tragically; he thought it with impatient common sense. Neither he nor his mother were tragic people; tragedy overtook them, but it did not deepen their natures, because it found no answer therein. The long-drawn tragedy of his father’s life had made Saxon, not bitter and humiliated, but self-respecting and ambitious.

  It would seem that Tina’s good taste in dress extended to her taste in young men, though it is doubtful if this would have been Mr Wither’s first thought, had someone said to him, ‘Your youngest daughter is falling in love with the chauffeur.’

  She herself thought that she was interested in Saxon only because there were no young men of her own class and fortune in the neighbourhood with whom to fall in love. If there had been a flock of nice, good, comely bachelors earning enough to keep a wife, with whom she could have danced and played tennis, Tina (who was rather a coward, though she was trying hard not to be, with the help of Selene’s Daughters) told herself that she would never have been so reckless as to be attracted by the portionless and peasant Saxon. Her senses might have been stirred by his beauty, but her common sense and her self-respect would have soon sat on that.

  But there were no men: there were just no what-you-would-call-really men at all, and her common sense, like all her other senses, was silently starving. Much chance it has of sitting on the others! she thought bitterly.

  There were men, of course, but they were darkly thought of by Tina as No Use. Colonel Phillips was sixty-odd and very married, Sir Henry Maxwell was fifty-odd and run by his mother, the rabble of three or four boys just down from, or going up to, the universities never stopped zooming past in noisy sports cars, so that it was impossible to imagine any of them troubling to climb out of the car and propose; and to them Tina seemed very old; she was not the type boys fall in love with.

  There was Victor Spring, of course, dazzlingly eligible: too eligible. It was hideously clear that the first thought of any unmarried woman on meeting Victor Spring must be, in the old song’s words:

  Oh, what a prize you are,

  Oh, if I only had you!

  And that was enough to make any sensitive woman shrink from Victor Spring as though he were the local leper. Not that they got much chance to shrink, for he seldom saw any of them. When he took women about, they were Phyllis Barlow or other stunners from London, who shot like stars down the humble familiar lanes by his side in his big car. He used Sible Pelden, it was dimly felt, like an hotel. Bed, breakfast; but out and away all day on exciting and expensive activities at which the neighbourhood could only guess.

  And even now, as Victor Spring lay in bed at a quarter to eight on this May morning, propped on his elbow while he sleepily gulped very hot tea, he was planning to see even less of Sible Pelden. He had a service-room in town where he could change and sleep if, as he often did, he wanted to spend a night in London; and he thought it would be a good idea if he had a whole flat. He was getting dissatisfied with Grassmere. The old place was all right, he supposed, pretty good in the summer when he could use the river and get his tennis; but it was a long way from London. It tied him. His mother, of course, never asked him about his movements unless they had people staying there; it was not she who tied him, but the thought at the back of his mind that he lived in the country. It was a nuisance. After all, they had lived at Grassmere for nearly thirty years; it was time they made a move.

  One of those new flats in Buckingham Square that were running up on the site of Buckingham House would be the thing; they were not finished yet, but three-quarters of them were already let. They were expensive. Let them be; something must be done with the money his interests were coining; and a man must have a place he could ask people to; people must be entertained and impressed.

  Grassmere, though large and comfortable, was not impressive to the moneyed eye, and Victor vaguely felt it. A family cannot live in a house for thirty years, even if that house is kept in perfect repair and solid luxury, without giving to their mansion an air of domestic comfort and stability which is not found impressive by the moneyed eye. br />
  What the M.E. likes is something very new, staggeringly expensive and just a shade precarious; not enough to scare off the M.E., but enough to hint that here is so much money that it must have been raked off a dirty deal into which the M.E. may have a chance of muscling. The M.E. prefers a place to look like a blend of a bar and a luxury liner, and that was the sort of a place Victor was thinking about having.

  But the disappointing truth is that this young god’s own tastes were not exotic. The very fact that he was only now planning to live in chromium luxury in London, at the age of twenty-nine and after some five years of enjoying a steadily increasing income, proves how well content he was with old Grassmere. He liked all the things his City friends liked; speed, women, spirits, golf, tips, scandal and smut, but he liked them in a non-flashy way because there was no flash in his nature. His father had been born in Derbyshire and his mother in Hampshire, and from both those places the Levant is a long, long way.

  He now began leisurely to get up, while his thoughts walked practically about in his head. He outlined some letters that he would dictate that morning; and felt irritation against General Franco and the Spanish Government because their civil war was hitting some interests that he had in a new line of small ships built for luxury cruising; then he wondered if he should advise his fellow-directors to lend money to a dubious company that wanted (ignoring the shrieks of the helpless residents) to build a pier and Amusement Park on to a seaside town in Dorset. He reminded himself to tell his secretary to change the two biscuits provided every day for his tea because he disliked coconut; and decided he would drive out that afternoon to look at a Victorian mansion near Hatfield, which his co-directors wanted to buy and pull down. On the site they would build a swimming-pool. When in doubt, build a swimming-pool, was their motto. But he must see the site for himself.