The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘I’ve done most of the washing-up,’ I said pointedly. ‘But now you’re here I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘Righty-o.’ She glanced towards the stove. ‘You boil the kettle?’

  ‘Mrs Jarvis and I had some tea.’

  ‘Good, I’ve got a mouth like a— I’m gasping.’

  I turned away quickly so she wouldn’t see my smile. Even without the prior evidence, it was clear Dorothy would not have passed muster in my mother’s house, but I couldn’t help liking her.

  Mrs Jarvis wasn’t in the dining room, or her husband’s office. I found her in the drawing room at the front of the house. This room managed to be both glamorous and comfortable-looking in cream and pale pink. There were art books on a glass coffee table, a mantel-mirror with a frame of carved roses and songbirds, fat-cushioned sofas, an oriental lacquered screen and a gramophone on a purpose-built stand with dozens of records on the shelf beneath. Mrs Jarvis sat at a bureau in the bay window. Pieces of paper lay on the floor around her feet. It was obvious the bureau had been so full that, when opened, the papers had simply burst out. She turned doleful eyes towards me as I came in.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Griffe—’

  ‘Pamela,’ I said. It seemed natural with her.

  ‘Pamela . . . I can’t find a thing.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ There was an upright chair next to the door and I moved it so that I could sit beside her. ‘One step at a time.’

  I spent almost all day in the drawing room with Mrs Jarvis, and by the end of it we had filled two waste-paper baskets, paid the bills, made an appointment with the dressmaker and placed the grocery order (after a systematic audit of the kitchen cupboards and further throwing away which had Dorothy gawping in astonishment). I also reminded her about calling her husband’s god-daughter, which she did at lunchtime while I went for a walk. She had asked me if I wanted to have lunch at the house, but I preferred to go out. Apart from the cheery Dorothy the Jarvises employed one other person, a peripatetic cook – or ‘Chef’ as they called him – who (it was explained to me) prepared either lunch or dinner according to circumstances, or when they were entertaining. Mrs Jarvis was very worried about having placed the order without consulting Chef, but I pointed out that we’d confined ourselves to staples and necessities, those things any household would want in the store-cupboard, and that she could confer with him about specific menus in due course.

  Since Chef was obviously a person of some influence, I put my head into the kitchen before I took my midday break, to introduce myself. Dorothy was applying a carpet-sweeper to the floor of the corridor and made a face as I approached.

  ‘Going to say hello?’ she asked, and when I nodded: ‘Good luck, he’s a proper little ray of sunshine, I don’t think.’

  Chef, whose name I came to learn was Cecil Organ, was thin, pale and glum. His salad days had been spent as a sous-chef at one of the big hotels on the south coast, but the stress and strain of the job had made him ill. Surely nothing could have been less stressful than preparing meals for the distraite and undemanding Mrs Jarvis, but to look at him you wouldn’t have thought it.

  ‘Will you be in for lunch, then?’ he asked, giving the distinct impression that an affirmative answer would probably sound his death knell. But when I told him I was going out he looked even more downcast, as though I had just swelled the growing band of ingrates who spurned his cooking.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. The unspoken ‘suit yourself’ hung in the air.

  ‘Told you,’ hissed Dorothy as I came out.

  I glanced out through the glass-panelled rear door into the garden, and saw that someone had moved one of the chairs on to the grass, and left a gauzy shawl, or scarf, hanging over the back, which was towards the house. A small movement made me glance again; a pale hand appeared and flicked at something, an insect perhaps, or a leaf, on the ‘shawl’, which I now saw was the long hair of a woman reclining in the chair.

  When I came back after an hour, refreshed by my walk in the sunshine, and a sandwich eaten on a bench at the top of the hill, the woman was no longer there. It occurred to me as Mrs Jarvis and I ploughed through the contents of the bureau that afternoon that, whatever her husband’s proclivities, he had gathered about him a household consisting almost entirely of women.

  At five o’clock, as I was leaving, he returned home, and expressed his desolation at not having been present on my first day.

  ‘Mrs Griffe! I was delayed last night and it was simpler to stay with my friend in Hampstead. How have you been?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Mrs Jarvis and I have been busy.’

  ‘Good, excellent!’

  His wife came out of the drawing room and he kissed her warmly. ‘Amanda, darling heart . . . I understand you’ve had a good day.’

  ‘We have.’ She gave me a wan, doting smile. ‘Pamela is an absolute treasure, Chris. We must be sure to hang on to her.’

  ‘We will!’ he cried. ‘I knew the moment I met her that she was one of us!’

  They saw me off from their doorstep, beaming, arm in arm beneath the swallows’ nest.

  As I walked up the hill to the bus stop, I felt my first day had gone well. But whether or not I was ‘one of them’ was something on which I reserved judgement.

  Chapter Five

  I came to learn that while Amanda Jarvis’s helplessness was real, her husband’s was a charming affectation. In reality he was a shrewd, confident man. The Sumpter Gallery was successful in both artistic and commercial terms: it prospered, and the Jarvises were well off. Mrs Jarvis’s anxiety about bills was based not on an inability to pay, but on her own pathological fear of figures. In my mind, though never to her face, she soon became ‘Amanda’.

  There was a sort of game being played, of which I soon learned the rules. With Amanda it was not just acceptable but positively desirable to be firm and decisive. I was never less than respectful, but I took charge. In Mr Jarvis’s case, no matter what his apparent disorganisation, he was the one in charge. I was immensely grateful to his wife for not allowing me to meddle with his desk on that first morning. It amused him to characterise me as being fierce, and fearsomely efficient, and himself as slightly afraid of me, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I quickly realised that beneath the boyish charm lay a far tougher and more complicated proposition. In other words, my Osborne’s training stood me in good stead.

  Only once did it let me down, and that was enough. I happened to walk into the office when, unknown to me, his wife was with him and they were having what appeared to be an intense, personal conversation. I realised my mistake straightaway, but I hadn’t even had time to say ‘sorry’ and withdraw before he snapped:

  ‘Get out, will you, for God’s sake, are we to have no privacy at all?’

  For that instant his eyes were cold and his mouth mean. It was a shocking transformation. Amanda Jarvis didn’t so much as turn her head. A few minutes later she bustled out, still without looking at me. He summoned me back, all smiles and sweetness, but I never forgot that look.

  My work for him consisted mostly of routine tasks – correspondence, making calls, keeping everything in order and Jarvis himself running to time, of which the last was by far the most difficult. Often, artists would come to the house to see him, and I’d be introduced, and then left to my own devices while they talked in the drawing room or the garden. The artists, like the Osborne’s authors, were a surprising bunch. One of the most radically innovative and sought-after among them was Paul Marriott, a neat little man in a collar and tie who looked far less like the popular idea of a painter than Jarvis himself. Others (usually the less successful) played up to their role, affecting eccentric clothes, hats and, in the case of one woman, a clay pipe which stunk the place out. One or two were authentically strange and I couldn’t help but feel respect for these people who perceived a world so different from that which the rest of us inhabited. I sensed that the mysterious house guest, the woman whom I had glimpsed in the passag
e and in the garden, was one of these. Why else would she be so reclusive, so fearful of human contact?

  But artists apart, what made my job pleasurable, and interesting was Seven Crompton Terrace itself. Because I was working in the Jarvises’ home I became part of the ramshackle extended family of employees, friends and deserving cases they had gathered about them. And as I found my feet I acquired a sense of where and how I fitted into the social hierarchy of the household. Mine was in many ways a privileged position. I was an employee, but several rungs above Dorothy, and even the lugubrious Chef. My relationship to Amanda was almost that of paid companion, and I spent long hours closeted with Mr Jarvis in the office, from which Dorothy inferred I must be privy to all kinds of inside information.

  One day when I’d been there for a couple of weeks, as I was going out at midday I almost tripped over Dorothy on her hands and knees in the porch.

  ‘Steady on!’ she yelped. ‘Mind me!’

  She was scraping bird droppings off the tiles with a bone-handled table knife.

  ‘Wretched birds,’ she grumbled, chipping away. ‘Can’t see why they don’t get rid of them, horrible messy things.’

  ‘I think it’s nice having them there,’ I said. ‘Should you be using that knife to do that, Dorothy?’

  She looked at me as if I were mad. ‘I’ll wash it.’

  ‘I should hope so!’

  She got to her feet and peeked through the side window of the porch from which there was a view of Jarvis’s desk, to check that the coast was clear before asking:

  ‘So how are you getting on then?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ I prepared to be on my dignity, but Dorothy was a girl whose indifference to rank made that almost impossible.

  ‘What do you think of them?’

  ‘They’re charming.’

  ‘Isn’t he just?’ She grinned collusively. ‘I wouldn’t say no.’

  ‘Dorothy!’

  ‘He’s too many for her, don’t you reckon? She’s such a ninny she can hardly blow her own nose.’

  ‘That’s not true, and anyway you shouldn’t speak about them like that.’ I looked over my shoulder and spoke in a reproving stage whisper, but Dorothy was unabashed.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re out the back by now. Have you met the other one?’

  ‘What other one?’ I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew who she meant.

  She rolled her eyes upward. ‘Her upstairs. The lodger.’

  ‘Suzannah – no, I’ve seen her about,’ I said. ‘But we’ve not been introduced.’

  ‘Course you haven’t. You want to go up the top and take a look some time.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ I said, though of course I was now madly curious. ‘I don’t have any reason to go upstairs at all—’

  ‘You use the lavvy, don’t you?’

  ‘Dorothy, for heaven’s sake,’ I began, but I couldn’t stop myself from smiling and she pressed her advantage. ‘Course you do. Next time you go, if you get the chance, you nip up and see.’

  ‘But how would I know if she was in there?’ I protested, giving myself away completely.

  Dorothy winked. ‘Because I’ll tell you.’

  I collected myself. ‘Excuse me, I won’t have any lunch hour left at this rate.’

  ‘She’s a tramp, I reckon,’ said Dorothy. ‘Both kinds.’

  The day after that was a Saturday so I had to contain my curiosity, and hope it would die a decent death over the weekend. I decided to go and look at the gallery. It was remiss of me not to have done so before, but I had been so preoccupied with other aspects of the job that I’d entirely failed to focus on this, its raison d’être.

  Bowne Street, W1, was a narrow road off Hanover Square. It had the discreet and muted air of a place that did not need to advertise itself because those who mattered – the wealthy and discerning – would know how to find it anyway. The Sumpter Gallery was two-thirds of the way along, the name on a brass plate by the door. A single picture stood on an easel in the window, which was itself no more than a high, white box. The picture was of wavering concentric black circles disappearing into infinity. As I stared at it the circles seemed to move, like water going down a plughole, sucking me in, which was doubtless the artist’s intention.

  I confess I felt rather nervous. The outside of the gallery spoke of utter exclusivity. Would I be treated contemptuously, or even shown the door? I stood there dithering for a moment, but just then a couple came along and walked straight in, talking animatedly. They appeared smart and well-to-do, but not in the millionaire bracket. If they were nobility, it didn’t show. I could hear Matthew saying: ‘Come on, Mrs Griffe, you’re as good as anyone!’ I pulled myself together and went in.

  There was a small foyer, where a young man sat at a table, legs crossed, a book in his hand. He smiled pleasantly, said ‘Good morning’ and offered me a catalogue, which I took. ‘The gallery is that way,’ he said, pointing to double doors on my left.

  I went through. It was like the Elysian Fields! The gallery was a great white atrium. Light streamed through glass panels in the roof. Tall rectangular columns divided up the area, and around the walls the pictures were hung far apart, not competing with one another, but each the master and focus of its own space. Apart from the other couple I was the only person there. No disdainful curator was patrolling the room. I began to relax. I should have known that Christopher Jarvis would not have presided over a snobbish operation; he had his faults, but airs and graces were not among them.

  Having taken the catalogue, I didn’t look at it, but put it in my bag. I didn’t want to be tied by the printed page. I was not naturally adventurous in my tastes; till now I had only been to the National Gallery and the occasional exhibition at the Royal Academy. But the spacious, uncompromising beauty of this place took my breath away.

  About half the pictures were of the kind the Jarvises had in their dining room at Crompton Terrace – striking, abstract juxtapositions of shapes and colours, some of them sharp and angular, others sinuous like the painting in the window. The other half were more conventional – ‘representational’ was the word I’d heard used – and it was one of these which made me pause and stare.

  It depicted a female figure looking out of a window, a subject which might have been sentimental in other hands, but not here. The window itself occupied two-thirds of the canvas; the view beyond it was of grey streets and buildings, blurred as if by rain. The figure to the right of the window was tall and thin, her arms folded, her shoulders slightly hunched, a picture of tense unhappiness. I could not decide if she was waiting for someone, or watching someone depart. Or whether she was simply locked up in her own despair. The artist had used a limited palette of greys, blues and black to give his picture a wintry light, but the woman was in a flimsy, sleeveless dress. I longed to wrap a shawl around those hunched shoulders. But her expression and attitude, as well as being desolate, repelled sympathy: if she was lonely, I thought, it was because she was a recluse. She had brought it on herself.

  I gazed at this picture for some minutes before moving on. There was no other quite like it in the gallery, so in my naïve way I assumed it was the only one by that particular artist. There were some fine, uncompromising portraits, half a dozen landscapes of open countryside that reminded me of Pevensey, and a great many atmospheric interiors and finely executed still lifes.

  I remained at the gallery for over an hour, and before I left I returned to the woman by the window. The dramatic impact of the picture was intensified by my having looked at so many others. The woman’s isolation appeared even more deliberate; her figure seemed to vibrate with an angry hopelessness.

  As I was going I encountered my fellow visitors. The woman smiled at me.

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’

  I agreed that it was.

  ‘What do you think of the famous Stannisford?’

  I must have looked blank, for she pointed at the largest of the abstract paintings, which hung immediately o
pposite the entrance.

  I expressed myself lost for words. Her husband leaned towards me. ‘Me too,’ he said in a stage whisper.

  His wife nudged him. ‘He doesn’t care for it.’

  ‘Neither does this young lady!’ he chuckled. ‘Can’t you tell?’ I took the line of least resistance and agreed, and he was still chuckling as I went out.

  In truth I’d never heard of Stannisford, and had scarcely noticed the painting. I walked for about ten minutes till I came to a respectable small hotel, went into the non-residents’ lounge and ordered coffee. I took out the Sumpter catalogue from my bag and leafed through it till I found what I was after. ‘Nobody’ by S.R. Murchie, 1928; painted in oils, priced at £50. My instincts had been correct – there were no other pictures by Murchie in the exhibition. I made a mental note to ask Christopher Jarvis about the artist when I got the opportunity.

  After some shopping and a light lunch I went home. Louise must have heard my footsteps on the stairs, for she popped her head out.

  ‘Hey – how are you getting on?’ She held the door open. ‘Come on, I want to know everything!’

  She’d been delighted when I got the job, but with our very different hours I’d scarcely seen her in the intervening weeks. Now that I was used to Seven Crompton Terrace, her cluttered, colourful room struck me as less outré. We took up our positions, I on the chair and she on the bed, ankles crossed, head against the wall, cigarette in hand. She wore a long, loose mandarin tunic and trousers in olive green.

  ‘It’s going fine,’ I told her. ‘I’m enjoying it.’

  ‘The scarf worked, did it?’

  ‘Mrs Jarvis complimented me on it on my first morning. She actually asked me where I got it.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I couldn’t remember.’

  ‘Pamela! You should have said you had this terrifically stylish friend who knew it would suit you down to the ground and lent it to you specially because she knew the elegant effect it would create.’