The Nightingale's Nest Page 3

  I had learned to ignore her studied lack of interest. She glared witheringly at the book’s cover. Roz glanced at me from beneath lowered lids. I told them about Jean, and Joe, about the women prisoners’ forced march at the hands of the Japanese, about Joe’s theft of the chicken for ‘Mrs Boong’, their post-war reunion in Australia, and the ice-cream parlour in the ‘bonzer town’ of Alice Springs. Neither of them gave the impression that they were paying much attention, but when I’d finished giving them this summary, Doreen tossed the book towards the end of the bed, and said laconically: ‘Go on then, read us a bit.’

  Her tone implied that she was doing me a favour. She didn’t know it, but this was true. As I began to read – the part where the women first meet their unlikely Australian saviour – my heart was full to breaking. I was no great reader-aloud; my rendition was straightforward rather than expressive. I trusted in the quality of the writing to do its own work. Every time I read to them, two or three times a week, I was almost unbearably moved to be doing so. But I was very careful not to let this show.

  Among those who came to be read to, Doreen was the constant, sometimes on her own, sometimes accompanied by one or two others. She always behaved as if it were the first time, the result of the merest idle curiosity on her part. I colluded in this, making sure that there was a fresh book on the bedside table each week whether or not I’d finished the last one. I laboured long and hard over the selection of these books. In the past couple of months we had read among others from Jane Eyre, Bonjour Tristesse, The Hound of the Baskervilles and (a particular favourite of mine and a triumph), The Secret Garden. I carried out a sort of ad-hoc abridgement of each text, careful to select passages which, when heard in sequence and linked by my explanations, would give the shape of the whole story.

  Occasionally, one of the others would get bored and leave. Never Doreen. She’d lie there until I’d finished, or had to stop. Only then would she get up, rub her face, mutter ‘ ’Night then,’ and go. In the whole time I’d been reading to her she had only offered one comment, which was that Edward Rochester was asking for a knee in the nuts. Naturally I colluded with her in the pretence that each occasion was random, an aberration. Any admission of mutual indulgence would mean the end of the readings.

  Tonight, both Doreen and Roz stayed until I closed the book at ten to ten.

  ‘Better end there,’ I said. ‘I ought to try and get a bit more work done.’ I didn’t mention the ten o’clock curfew – these rules existed but I tried not to be heavy-handed about them.

  Roz got up at the same moment as Josie appeared in the doorway, her coat already on.

  ‘Sean’s crying, darlin’. Don’t worry, he only just started!’ she added as Roz rushed past. ‘I’m off, goodnight.’

  ‘ ’Night, Josie.’

  When they’d gone Doreen swung her legs off the bed. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of being hung for a sheep, but crucified for a fucking chicken . . .’

  Nevil had made a hit.

  I made my rounds, saying goodnight to everyone, offering my opinion on Sean’s rash, fetching glasses of water, admiring photos and recommending transistors be turned off. I wasn’t as green as they thought me, I knew the radios and the lights would go back on once I’d left, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t ever going to be a martinet. We all had to get along.

  When everything was reasonably quiet I went downstairs and switched on the intercom. In spite of what I’d said to the girls I wasn’t planing to do any more work. I was elated by the success of the reading and tired, too: a lot had happened since I’d set out that morning to visit my mother.

  One of the reasons Doreen’s earlier remark had hurt was that I myself recognised the irony of my mother being in one ‘home’ while I operated one for other mothers in a different part of town. It was undeniably true that in her nineties she needed professional care of a sort I wasn’t equipped to provide; however it was also true that I would have found looking after her full time almost intolerable. I could put up with any amount of the girls’ rudeness, roughness and even occasional violence – I’d been to A and E half a dozen times on my own account – but my mother’s mental and physical deterioration tried me beyond endurance. Our relationship had been at best guarded and at worst vexed, but she’d always been tough. It was her decline I found hard to forgive.

  I felt terribly guilty about it. Guilty at not being a more loving daughter (though I tried my best not to let her see it); guilty that I was looking after others and not her; most of all, guilty that I was happy doing it.

  At least the onset of senility had made her more tolerant about the Woodlanders.

  ‘How are things with those women?’ she used to ask when she had all her marbles, usually as I was just about to leave. She didn’t just disapprove of the mothers, she despised them. And it was no good my telling myself that she hadn’t even met them, because I knew if that were ever to happen she would dislike them even more. In her eyes single mothers were no more than tarts, and their children bastards.

  ‘Doing fine, thank you,’ I’d reply, reminding myself that she was old, lonely, probably jealous.

  ‘It’s more than they deserve,’ she said. ‘You’re wasting your life.’

  ‘That’s not how I see it.’

  ‘People like that are no good. Scum, your father would have said.’ She often put this word in his mouth, though I could never remember, nor even imagine, him using it. ‘They take advantage of you and then they’re off.’

  ‘But Mum,’ I said, ‘that’s the whole idea.’

  That usually shut her up. One thing she couldn’t deal with was sarcasm, however mild. But I’d got no pleasure from having had the last word. There were often tears in my eyes as I drove away. I had no other relatives: when my mother went, I would be the sole remaining Streeter. We should have provided a source of comfort and companionship to one another. If she were to die tomorrow I knew that I would suffer excruciating pangs of remorse. But as time went by we had increasingly brought out the worst in each other.

  I saw now that there had been something symbolic in my return to Crompton Terrace. Not only had it broken the long return journey between my mother and Woodlands; it had also brought back to life that strange, wonderful, frightening and formative time. The time that more than my parents, my upbringing, even more than Matthew, had influenced the subsequent course of my life. The memories bloomed once more in my head.

  I walked out into the small back garden and lowered myself gingerly on to the rickety lounger that stood on the grass. It was a warm night. One or two of the girls’ bedroom windows still glowed orange behind their cheap curtains. A baby was snickering, in the early stages of waking to demand a feed. It was never completely quiet here.

  I slipped off my shoes to feel the grass under my feet, and tipped my head back. I would have lain down but I was not confident of the lounger, or my own ability to get back to the vertical without disaster. Out of reach of the city’s sulphurous orange glow there were still plenty of stars; the tail lights of an aeroplane, winking rhythmically; a calm, freckled moon.

  I resolved to write to my mother the next day – or soon, anyway. A pleasant, newsy, filial letter which it would be no shame for one of the carers to read aloud to her.

  I wondered idly what my original benefactor – the one who had made me rich beyond my wildest imaginings – would have made of the use to which I had put my tainted inheritance.

  Chapter Three

  When I was eighteen, the same age as the century, I went from sweetheart to widow in the space of a few days. I was a wife for just three heady, sleepless nights in the Esplanade boarding house in Pevensey.

  It was more romantic than it sounds (not that we needed romantic surroundings to do what we so much wanted to do) – a small whitewashed villa at the apex of the long curve of the bay, its windows gazing out to sea. In spite of its name there was no esplanade; the villa’s tussocky garden was separated from the shingle by no more than a b
leached wooden fence, and a gate with a giant hook-and-eye latch to secure it against the offshore wind. A little further along the beach to the west was the area where the fishermen kept their boats. Inland to the east stood the castle fortress of King Henry VIII. Behind us lay the small town, itself peaceful but alive with honest war effort and scarred, like every town, by terrible loss. I think that was when I saw for the first time how closely freedom and safety are linked, that one is not possible without the other.

  We were both virgins, of course, Matthew and I. Our marriage certificate was our licence to make love. We might not have been so self-controlled but for the war which had fanned our passion by denying us the opportunity to indulge it. We had met six months earlier, at a chapel hall dance, a week before Matthew left for France. I hadn’t been interested in anyone till then. I was a bright girl who’d got into the grammar school and was trying to decide what to do next. Marriage was the last thing on my mind.

  My parents were older than other girls’ parents, late marriers themselves, and my mother hadn’t had me till she’d turned thirty. They were solid, lower middle class and proud to have got there. My genial father, Gerald Streeter, had risen to be works manager at the Speedwell bicycle factory; my mother, Phyllis was a housewife of iron routines and terrifyingly high domestic standards. Their house in Catford, south London, gleamed. The only task she delegated – grudgingly, and only as a gesture to her husband’s managerial status – was the weekly wash, which a Mrs Budd carried out under her gimlet-eyed supervision. Though she never said as much, she certainly considered herself a lady in all but birth, but would have conceded that those born to it were more entitled to the term. That was in the nature of things. As a girl she’d had a pretty voice and taken part in amateur theatricals, which was how they’d met. She would never for a single second have considered the stage as a career. If Dad wanted to embarrass her, he used to say aside to me, but loud enough for her to hear: ‘I was a stage-door Johnnie, you know.’

  Mum liked to make him out to be a ‘typical’ man, part wide-eyed innocent, part satyr, part domestic tyrant, but none of these was remotely accurate. He was just easygoing and let her think, or say, or pretend, whatever she liked.

  He was quite unconcerned, too, about my lack of interest in the opposite sex. ‘Don’t you be in any rush, Pammie,’ he’d say, ‘you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’ Mum, while pleased I’d got myself a decent education, definitely wanted me to have an admirer – some nice lad with good intentions that she could have kept an eye on and spoilt with homemade cake.

  As it was, my parents didn’t even know of Matthew’s existence till he came back on leave. He asked for my father’s permission to marry me on their second meeting. In truth we’d probably have gone ahead anyway, but we weren’t two of nature’s rebels. We wanted everyone to be happy. I thanked my lucky stars that Matthew was the sort of man everyone instinctively liked and respected. Dad granted his permission at once, all gruff and pink-cheeked with emotion. Mum was thoroughly put about by the speed of it all, as though that in itself were somehow indecent. She had been deprived of the cake-consuming period of supervised courtship, but she could see we were dead set on it, and gave us her blessing.

  If I say Matthew was a ‘good’ person it might give the wrong impression – that he was dull and virtuous. I suspect that interpretation stems from childhood when the command to ‘be good’ means to be seen and not heard. I’m talking about something quite different. If I say that he charmed people that’s not quite right either, because charm is seen as something suspect or bogus, a facility employed to bamboozle the unwary. He hadn’t a mean bone in his body; his instinct was to like his fellow man, to get the best out of life and put the best in, to say yes if he possibly could, to give and not to count the cost. He wasn’t handsome, but he shone out. If he smiled at you, you were the better for it. If he shook your hand you were instantly warmed.

  When he kissed me I knew what bliss was.

  So it wasn’t so hard for my parents to let me go. We had a little ceremony at the Wesleyan chapel, alongside the hall where we’d first met, and a tea afterwards for which my mother at last got to make that cake – and what a cake! It was a triumph, so the occasion became almost as much hers as ours. In the afternoon we caught the train to Eastbourne, and from there to Pevensey, and walked hand in hand with our small suitcases to the Esplanade. A wintry sun shone on fine, sleety rain and made a rainbow over the marshes, so although we were starved with cold, we felt blessed.

  The landlady was called Mrs Doyle. If there was, or ever had been, a Mr Doyle, he was not in evidence. She was a handsome, kindly woman in late middle-age, heavily skirted and tightly corseted in the pre-war way, but also glossily made up and the very soul of discretion. She presided over our little honeymoon like a benign deity, there if we needed her, invisible if we didn’t. Her sole other guest was a commercial traveller whom we only saw at breakfast, but it was the measure of her quality that she treated him like a king as well.

  It was late March, by turns spring-like and freezing. We took long walks on the beach, and to the castle, but there was no question of us being turned out between breakfast and tea. She made us sandwiches for the middle of the day, to eat out or by the fire in the parlour which she lit in the morning and kept burning all day for our benefit. She was a wonderful plain cook whose food had the flavour and warmth that can only come from a person who loves cooking, and eating. There was nothing to do in the evenings in Pevensey, but that didn’t matter, because we went to bed early.

  Many times since then I’ve read a lot about how in our day ignorance and lack of experience made for sad, bad experiences of sex, to the extent that sometimes whole marriages were blighted. Well, we were both utterly inexperienced, but I can’t imagine that we could have had more mutual pleasure and excitement. Except, of course, that it would have got better with time, and time was what we were about to be denied.

  When, on our last morning, we said goodbye to Mrs Doyle, she was warm and friendly as ever, but betrayed no special extra emotion. We had been paying guests and she had treated us according to our youth and our newly-wed status. Doubtless, times being what they were, there would be plenty more couples like us and she would be just as good to them. I was glad she’d kept it businesslike. My own feelings were quite enough to deal with, without having to take account of someone else’s as well.

  As we walked to the station Matthew carried his own case and mine too, tucked under his arm, his other hand holding mine. I remember thinking that this was how it would be from now on: someone to share difficulties as well as pleasures. The Great War – how can a war be great, I ask you? – was about to reclaim my husband, and yet I refused to consider the possibility that ‘from now on’ might mean something entirely different.

  On the mainline train back to London engine smoke scudded between us and the cold, gleaming countryside outside. We both felt the shadow of imminent separation creeping across us, and we went quiet. I linked my arm through Matthew’s and laid my head on his shoulder, closing my eyes to keep the tears in.

  We went back to my parents’ house in Catford. In my bedroom, now legitimately ours, I sat on the bed and watched my new husband change back into a soldier. He had lovely skin, smooth and pale as marble, and reddish-brown hair that was a lighter colour, almost gold, under his arms and at the top of his legs. Till then, the war had not left a single mark on him. He was whole and perfect.

  When he was done he sat down next to me in his stiff, rough uniform and put his arm round my shoulders. He took my left hand in his, rubbing the thin gold ring with his thumb as if it were Aladdin’s wonderful lamp and could grant us our wish.

  ‘Well, Mrs Griffe . . . I do love you so.’

  I couldn’t speak. He kissed my hand, and then my mouth. Licked a tear off my cheek. ‘Don’t cry, sweetheart. Everyone says it won’t be long now. Then we’ll have plenty of time.’

  He was right. One week later he was dead, and I had a
ll the time in the world.

  We only had those few days, but they changed my life for ever. It wasn’t only grief that separated me from other single girls of my age: it was that I had joined the ranks of the widows. We had no rarity value; there were tens of thousands of us, each dragging her individual tragedy like an untidily packed suitcase, a disobliging memento mori for the as-yet unbereaved. Even my parents managed to give the impression that for me to miss Matthew too much, or to show that I did, would be something like bad form, when so many others out there were in the same position. And many of them, their tone gently implied, almost as if I should be comforted by the fact, had been married for years, and had children. It was as if my fledgling marriage to Matthew simply did not, could not, count for so much as all those longstanding ones, exemplary or otherwise.

  They didn’t mean to hurt me, but their thoughtless attempts to cheer me up made me bleed inwardly. In telling me that I was in some way fortunate to have lost Matthew before things went any further, before we had built a life together or got to know each other better, or had a family, or even had time to quarrel, they were driving home the very aspects of my loss which I found most agonising.

  When I was ten a woman from up the road, Mrs Coleman, had a stillbirth. I knew because my mother told me, in the slightly disapproving tone she reserved for matters of a highly personal nature. She must have thought it best for me to know because of the Colemans’ other children with whom I played from time to time. I remember coming in from school one afternoon and hearing voices in the front room. I recognised Mrs Coleman’s. As I crossed the hall she burst into tears. It was the first time I had ever heard an adult cry, and it stopped me in my tracks. Appalled but paralysed, I stood there listening.

  ‘John Anthony!’ she sobbed. ‘We christened him, he had a name, two names! He was our lovely boy, but no one talks about him, they all want me to forget, so they can forget, but I can’t!