The Nightingale's Nest Read online

  ‘Are Maeve and Josie back now?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Hannah grimly.

  I got the picture. Wronged on two counts, Maeve would be incorrigible.

  We went in, and Hannah immediately ran upstairs on some unspecified errand, passing both baton and buck to me. The other Woodlanders were assembled in the kitchen for their tea. This was generally served at six, but the afternoon’s ructions meant that it was now well after seven and the natives were restless. The usual industrial quantity of fiery red Bolognese had been disinterred from the freezer and Josie, a formidable Barbadian of immense stature, was stirring a cauldron of the stuff, and another of spaghetti. The older babies, Kyle, Tina and Aaron, were glaring at each other in the playpen preparatory to being put in their high chairs. The little ones were in bouncers, on their mothers’ knees, or, in one case, being bottle-fed.

  The newly returned Maeve was sitting in the best chair, wearing her suture with queenly hauteur. Doreen was grating Cheddar into a bowl. A packet of Marlboros lay open and unattended on the worktop nearby – an olive branch of sorts, I surmised, unless Doreen planned to lure her adversary into making a move so as to trap her hand in the grater. Alex’s twins, thank God, were sleeping peacefully in their baskets, allowing their whey-faced parent to sit, whimpering, at the table with her head in her hands, her fingers thrust into her shock of piebald-bleached hair. The others – Janice, Roz and Hyena (a waif-like Russian girl whose ballerina-like beauty disguised a violent temper and a practised way with a penknife) – had the slightly smug air of women who had not been involved in the afternoon’s shenanigans and who there-lore deserved their tea and looked forward to it with relish.

  Roz was bottle-feeding Sean. If any of the Woodlanders knew that Breast was Best, they weren’t letting on. To a woman, they considered it ‘yukky’ and wanted to ‘keep their figures’. By which I suppose they meant their bustlines, since I’d always understood that breastfeeding encouraged the dilated uterus to contract more effectively . . . but what did I know? I’d never had children. I was humbled, almost awed by these fierce, fecund young women who’d deigned to accept my help.

  Janice was reading a hospital romance entitled No Cure for Love. Little Natalie lay on a changing mat on the floor next to her. Hyena held a fork before her face, poised between opposite forefingers; every few seconds she would release the fork and catch it again between her fingers with the effect, and doubtless the intention, of gratuitously adding tension to an atmosphere already seething with the stuff. In his bouncer her baby, Dasha, in an unconscious parody of his mother, squinted furiously at his balled fists. At ten weeks the squint showed no signs of improvement and I had made an appointment for them at the hospital orthoptic clinic.

  The kitchen swirled with cross-currents. An uneasy peace had been restored, but it was incumbent on me, as do-gooder-in-chief, to reinforce that peace by stroking each raffled ego, spreading praise and encouragement and demonstrating by my every word and gesture that everything had been entirely, incontrovertibly, my fault for not being present when I was most needed.

  This I could do: diplomacy, the restoration of the status quo by means of a little well-judged self-abasement, was my special talent. The local social services were probably correct in regarding Woodlands as at best the quixotic venture of a slightly dippy old bat, and at worst an extreme and dangerous example of loony liberalism, but what I lacked in managerial skills I made up for in crisis management. After decades of experience I could not always avert trouble, but I was jolly good at defusing it when it came.

  I greeted everyone, and apologised profusely for not having been around. The greeting met with silence, the apology elicited a grumpy murmur of agreement. Only Josie was genuinely pleased to see me though not wholly, I suspected, for reasons of friendship.

  ‘Nearly ready, Pam!’

  ‘Wonderful. I do hope you haven’t been waiting for me.’

  ‘No darlin’, it was that wretched hospital!’

  Thus prompted, I sucked my teeth sympathetically over Maeve’s stitches, and then picked up the Marlboros off the side and dropped them in her lap. She pocketed them without comment. In the complex dynamic of the house it was Doreen, the undisputed malefactor, who would require the most attention. Accordingly I stood leaning on the worktop, watching admiringly while she finished grating the cheese. Her domestic skills were sketchy, but it wasn’t hard to admire her: though unkempt, she was wonderfully handsome, with the strong, androgynous features of a Cherokee squaw.

  ‘Thanks, Doreen,’ I said. ‘That looks nice.’

  She pushed the board to one side and wiped her hands on her jeans. ‘Where were you earlier?’

  ‘Visiting my mother. She’s in a home in Winchmore Hill.’

  ‘It’s all homes with you, isn’t it?’ said Doreen. ‘All homes and no home.’

  Doreen had an unerring instinct when it came to inflicting pain. She could identify and exploit vulnerabilities in others the way some people could remember names, or eye colour. But stifling pain was another of my specialities.

  ‘This is my home,’ I said, and continued immediately, before she could place another shaft: ‘I gather Kyle’s been as good as gold all afternoon. He’s an absolute credit to you, Doreen.’

  She muttered something about that being nothing to do with her, and Maeve sniffed. Kyle pronounced a plague on all our houses by hurling a small metal spinning top which struck Janice’s Natalie a glancing blow on the head. Fortunately Janice had been too engrossed in the goings-on in No Cure for Love to see what happened and – perhaps because Josie had begun dishing out the spag bol – no one rocked the boat by shopping the culprit. Maeve picked up Natalie and passed her to Janice, and then collected Jackson and put him in the sought-after freestanding high chair. Again, though it was not her turn, no one challenged Maeve’s right to this privilege: her injury was qualification enough. The three small bowls of those babies who were on solids were apportioned and left to cool. Doreen took the first adult plateful and sat down next to Alex, who turned away, blenching.

  ‘You want some, darlin’?’ enquired Josie. Alex shook her head. Josie tilted the ladle invitingly. ‘Come on, honey, a little bit will do you good.’

  ‘Take it away, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘There’s no need to bring the Good Lord into this.’

  ‘He’d never touch it, it looks like shit,’ moaned Alex.

  ‘It good food, young lady!’

  ‘If you say so . . .’

  ‘I do. Here.’ Josie put a small helping down on the table in front of Alex, nudging her elbows with the edge of the plate to make her sit up. ‘Let me see you do your very best now. You want those twins to be motherless?’ Alex rolled her eyes in a ‘spare-me’ look. ‘Course you don’t,’ continued Josie undeterred. ‘They depend on you, Lord bless them.’

  The other mothers paid no attention to the substance of this exchange, but they had some respect for Josie, a mother herself and one who had proved that in spite of the age difference she could overcome any one of them in a straight fight. They allowed her to deliver herself of her homily and waited patiently for their spaghetti.

  Hannah returned after her well-earned breather and took her place at the table next to Hyena, who finally put down the fork.

  ‘OK,’ said Hannah, ‘own up. Who’s been putting what they shouldn’t down the upstairs toilet?’

  After supper, no one having confessed and the air growing ever more sulphurous with accusation and suspicion, I went to work with the plunger. In theory this type of making-good was the responsibility of whoever had caused the problem, but in practice I was a noted soft touch. Josie sometimes accused me of being afraid of the girls, but she was wrong. I wasn’t in the least afraid of them: I loved them. I experienced a kind of ecstasy of humility – something I’m sure Josie’s Good Lord never intended – in looking after them. If I was ever hard on one of them it was not because I wanted to be but because I felt I should.

  T
o my considerable relief the loo did not offer up its secrets, but after a minute or two the water level dropped sharply, with a rich gurgle, and then slowly stabilised. I knew that the drain’s revenge was merely postponed and that in a week or two we would have to call out Dyno-Rod whose representatives would remove the cover from the manhole in the back garden and with a sort of sardonic relish haul out the evidence for all to see. The mothers would watch with interest, unembarrassed, screaming with laughter and pointing, but I, the one to whom no taint of guilt adhered, would cringe, and remain well out of the way until it was time to write the extortionate cheque.

  I put some bleach down the bowl, scrubbed and flushed. As I stood there with the brush in my hand Roz appeared in the doorway, carrying Sean.

  ‘Is it OK now?’ she asked.

  This enquiry, I knew, constituted a confession. ‘Oh yes,’ I said heartily. ‘All back to normal.’

  ‘Since I had him I come on so heavy I have to use a sanny as well,’ she confided.

  ‘Not to worry.’ I replaced the brush and washed my hands. ‘Soon dealt with. But try and remember not to put it down the loo.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ She was already wandering off, with an air that said that was quite enough honesty for one day.

  Between then and ten-thirty lights-out the house gradually quietened. I’d always had the feeling that an evening routine was best for the babies and happily Josie agreed with me, so we tried to see to it that they had bottles, baths and ordered bedtimes, even those too young to sleep through the night.

  Dorothy and I lived at Woodlands. I considered myself to be on duty at all times; the other three were on a rota. Two people couldn’t really cope if anything seriously unpleasant blew up, but we always made sure that one of the others was on the end of the phone if we needed reinforcements. Given that there’d been an incident during the afternoon the law of averages suggested that there would be no more major disturbances that day. This wasn’t always true. Sometimes ‘a ruck’ as the girls called it would raise everyone’s temperature and the place would be like a hot spring, bubbling, smoking and periodically boiling over for hours to come. But based on experience I was reasonably optimistic for tonight.

  Josie and Hannah cleared the supper things, and Hannah laid the table for breakfast and put out the mugs for hot drinks before leaving. Josie and I had a general tidy-up and made ourselves available for help with the babies’ bedtimes.

  After that, most of the mums whose babies had settled went down to the games room. On a shelf below the window were piles of board games but they were used even less than the ping-pong table. I had recently invested, with rather greater success, in table-top football and a miniature pool table, but there was no escaping the fact that television was king. TV was the girls’ god, their relief, their relaxation, their escape. They didn’t just sink down in front of it, they sank into it. They were allowed to smoke in here, too, and babies weren’t allowed after eight o’clock; if they needed attention from their mothers it had to be upstairs. So I always felt I was seeing them as they really were, or as they had been before the fall, so to speak, just a bunch of young women lolling around, chatting, laughing, smoking, drinking tea, indulging in horseplay, leafing through magazines, but always with the magic blue-grey light flickering in the background.

  After looking in, I usually left them to it. They didn’t want me around, and there was always paperwork to do at this time of day. Blasted paperwork, the bane of my life! Finances provided a constant source of worry. I’d been, briefly, a rich woman when I sank my fortune into Woodlands’ predecessor all those years ago. No more. I’d made some wise investments which yielded an income and which impressed my bank manager sufficiently to allow me a huge overdraft, and as well as Woodlands I still owned my mother’s house, which I let to carefully vetted and approved students from a local technical college. But there was little doubt that when they eventually carried me out of this place it would be to a pauper’s grave, unless the girls in a late lit of sentimentality forked out for my send-off. We had a clutch of small grants and endowments from various charitable trusts and every autumn I put on my Jaeger suit and did the rounds, ensuring that old friends stayed faithful and new ones were encouraged. Unfortunately we weren’t the sort of good cause to attract the Lady Bountifuls. There would be no Woodlands Ball at the Dorchester, or Christmas Fair at the Connaught Rooms for us. We relied on the odd maverick benefactor and whatever goodwill we could drum up and we managed, just. Paying the staff constituted the biggest outlay and I was fortunate they were so tolerant. Delays always affected the youngest ones most keenly, and among them there was the quickest turnover: Hannah had done well to last six months but I wasn’t betting on another six.

  The mothers contributed a fiver a week, and over and above that it was what they could, if they could. We operated on an honour principle. Madness, really, but it did mean that something came in from them, and however little it was given freely. A very few of them had parents who helped, others were on benefits, one or two – usually those who would be moving on soon – had part-time jobs. We shopped for dry goods once a month at the Houndsditch Warehouse and for meat and veg at the scruffy local market off the high road. The mums bought their own toiletries and cigarettes and paid their way if they went out, though if they needed to do something important such as go to court, or the doctor, or visit a relation for some pressing reason, Woodlands pitched in. Correction, I pitched in. I was Woodlands. My fortunes rose and fell with those of this place. If I had started it as a business it would long since have gone to the wall. I was blessed with better health and strength than anyone had a right to expect at my age, and if ever there was an incentive to maintain both, this provided it when I went, Woodlands would too.

  Labour of love or no, that didn’t prevent the paperwork being a headache. Wolves still had to be kept from the door, records kept up to date, organisational problems solved, begging letters written, and complaints dealt with by letter or phone according to urgency. All that on top of unheralded visits from disaffected fathers, parents, employers and sadly, from time to time, teachers. I wanted to create a place of sanctuary for the mothers, but all too often I was caught in the crossfire between my charges – determined at all costs not to be grateful – and their families, friends and associates, equally determined to be under no obligation to some mad old biddy with more money than sense. Even the staff went about their business with a wary air, alert to the first signs of the ship going down. I walked a tightrope.

  I had a large room, a sort of bedsit, on the first floor. My one indulgence was an en suite shower and loo. This facility was in theory sacrosanct, but the rest of my room was not. I never locked the door. The mothers couldn’t lock theirs and I thought it right to be subject to the same regulations. Hannah had introduced a system of ‘red engaged’ signs which meant ‘do not disturb’, and they were free to use this if they wanted. The chair beneath the door handle employed by Doreen this afternoon was strictly discouraged.

  I generally left my door wide open during the after-supper period, for two reasons. One was in order to be visible, and accessible. So far in their lives these girls had been excluded, or had excluded themselves, from a great deal that most took for granted: family, education, sympathy, a moral code, the giving and receiving of affection. The very least that Woodlands could do was to include them; to embrace them and their babies no matter what. I told myself that it was not the least but the most important thing we could do – to provide an exemplar of grown-up reliability and dependable care.

  The second reason for my open door was self-interest. I hated the admin., and welcomed interruption. This evening it came at just after nine o’clock in the form of Doreen and Roz. Roz was the prettiest of the mothers in a conventional sense – fresh-faced, silky-haired, generally well presented, and baby Sean was plump, smiley and sweet-smelling. She and Doreen had struck up a close, odd-couple friendship. Josie sucked her teeth knowingly over this liaison, but I chose to t
ake it at its face value. If it made them happy and hurt no one else, it could only be a good thing.

  I knew why they were there, but there was a little ritual to be gone through just the same.

  ‘All right if we come in?’ enquired Doreen, doing so.

  I was working out rotas for both staff and tenants (as we called them) for the following month. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘nice to see you. Mind if I just finish this?’

  ‘Carry on.’

  Roz sat on the white wicker chair and Doreen lounged on the bed. ‘Sean and Kyle all tucked up?’ I asked, not looking up. It was like dealing with shy and potentially snappish wild animals – too much eye contact would be perceived as threatening.

  ‘Yeah. Little devils.’

  ‘End of a long day,’ I observed ambiguously, summing things up to everyone’s advantage. I filled in the last box in the week and pushed the pages aside, turning my chair to face them.

  Roz picked at her fingernails. ‘Sean’s got a rash.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry – did you show Josie?’

  ‘Yeah, she gave me some cream. He never had a rash before.’

  ‘It’s been so hot,’ I offered. She was a picture of anxiety, poor child, furrowed brow, pursed mouth, pick-picking away. ‘Would you like me to take a look?’

  Doreen gave a minute twitch of scorn which I pretended not to see. Roz said: ‘He’s asleep now.’

  ‘Well, he can’t be too uncomfortable. Would anyone like a biscuit?’

  ‘Biscuits in the room!’ Doreen rolled her eyes but they both had a plain chocolate Club anyway. With the biscuit half-wrapped like an ice cream in one hand, Doreen reached out to the bedside table and picked up a book.

  ‘What’s this then?’

  ‘A Town Like Alice. By Nevil Shute.’

  ‘Blimey – man or a woman?’

  ‘Man.’

  ‘Daft name.’ She riffled the pages disparagingly as if seeking, and failing, to find anything of the remotest interest. Which since she could barely read was certainly true. ‘What’s it about?’