The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘That would be splendid. I think I need a patient, sympathetic guide for my first time.’ Something about what he’d just said caused our first moment of mutual awkwardness. Whether either of us blushed I don’t know, because for a second we avoided one another’s eye.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on. ‘You enjoy working for these Jarvises. It obviously suits you.’

  ‘It does. No two days are the same, and they are charming people, the complete opposite of my last boss. They trust me to get on with things, they don’t breathe down my neck, they’re appreciative. They even invite me to their parties.’

  ‘Is that where you met the artists?’

  ‘Yes, although one of them lives in the house . . .’ I postponed describing Suzannah Murchie until he had seen some of her paintings. ‘All in all it’s proved an excellent move.’

  He offered me some more wine. I refused, but my cheeks were already warm, and my inhibitions sufficiently loosened to say: ‘Actually, there is the possibility of another job if I want it.’

  ‘You mean instead of, or as well as?’

  ‘As well as.’

  He frowned slightly. ‘How would that work?’

  ‘It would only be a few hours a week, and Christopher Jarvis would maintain my salary at the same level. I trust him to do that because he was the one who suggested it.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

  ‘I’m not sure what to say yet,’ I said. ‘The person I’d be working for hasn’t spoken to me himself. But Mr Jarvis knows Mr Ashe is looking for someone, and is pretty sure if he put my name forward I’d be offered the job.’

  ‘So you’re simply trying to decide whether to apply.’

  ‘Not apply exactly . . .’ It was hard to convey to him the subtleties of my exchange with Jarvis. ‘I’m not sure there’s anyone else being considered at the moment.’

  ‘Two jobs sounds a lot to me,’ said Alan. ‘I have enough trouble coping with one. But you’re obviously tempted. What would you be doing?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure . . .’ I caught his incredulous look. ‘Not at this stage. I know Mr Ashe is a businessman, he owns nightclubs and things like that. I think I’d be helping out with the clerical work.’

  ‘Hmm. You want to watch out he doesn’t have you pushing overpriced watered-down champagne to unsuspecting customers.’

  I thought of my conversation with Louise, and laughed. ‘No chance of that!’

  ‘What about him – this Mr Ashe? Have you met him?’

  ‘Yes, at one of the Jarvises’ lunch parties.’

  ‘And what’s he like?’

  I hesitated. There was so much I could have said, but this wasn’t the right moment.

  ‘He seemed nice enough. He’s got a scar on his face from the war, which makes him look rather frightening, but he was very civil and friendly to me, when he didn’t have to be.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Alan had been gazing at me intently, and his voice was lower and softer than before. ‘He has good taste.’

  We parted outside the station, where he could catch a train and I could get on a bus.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed this so much,’ he said. ‘Can we do it again soon?’

  ‘Yes, please. Thank you for a lovely dinner.’

  ‘Well . . . homely. But it’s the company that counts.’

  We hovered. A handshake was too formal; anything more, too soon.

  ‘Will you be coming down to see your mother?’

  ‘At the weekend. Saturday night to Sunday night. Do drop in if you’re passing.’

  ‘I will if I may. And if you think she wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘We’d both like it.’

  As he moved away, he said, ‘None of my business, but I think you should take that job – nothing ventured nothing gained!’

  When I arrived next day the Jarvises were out somewhere with Georgina, and not due to reappear until teatime, according to Dorothy. She and Chef had been given leave to depart early, and in the early afternoon the house settled into a ticking, pregnant silence. Outside it was overcast and a halfhearted drizzle spattered the windows. I settled down to type out copy for the autumn catalogue from Christopher Jarvis’s careless, squiggly handwriting. I had no idea whether Suzannah Murchie – with or without company – was in her eyrie. When I heard footsteps on the stairs it was as much to break the silence as anything that I opened the study door and went out.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh, hello.’ She didn’t seem in the least surprised to see me, but then she had the advantage of me – she’d probably seen me arrive. She came along the corridor towards me. ‘I’m going mad up there. I thought I’d come down and listen to some music.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Mr Jarvis left some typing—’

  ‘I mean, would you like to keep me company?’

  I mumbled something about needing to take a break, but she seemed to take my assent as read, and walked past me into the drawing room and over to the gramophone. She took half a dozen records in paper covers from the shelf below and began looking through them.

  ‘What shall we have?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Classical? Or the other?’

  ‘You choose,’ I said. I was sure she’d decide anyway.

  ‘This is lovely . . .’ She took a record from its cover, put it on the turntable, wound the handle and lowered the needle. ‘Listen to this.’

  It was ballet music, Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Swan’. The swooping, swooning melancholy of the melody filled the room. Suzannah took a cushion off the sofa and lay down on the floor with her cheek pillowed on it, eyes closed. Feeling rather awkward and a great deal less at home I sat on the end of the sofa. But the beauty of the music seemed to enter my bones and in a minute I relaxed and leaned my head back.

  I thought she might have gone to sleep, but when the record ended she got up and removed the needle. While she made her next selection, I asked: ‘Have you completed Mr Rintoul’s portrait?’

  She nodded. ‘Bar a few finishing touches, but I like not to look at a picture for a while before I do those.’

  I couldn’t resist asking: ‘What about the surprise?’

  She sat down on a chair with the records on her lap. ‘It’ll be finished when I move on. Which will be fairly soon.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ I realised how accustomed I’d become to her presence up there.

  ‘Yes. I only ever intended to stay here while I painted Edward.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Well . . .’ She looked at me with those still, clear eyes as if assessing my trustworthiness. ‘I’ve taken another commission, so I may find myself a room somewhere near my sitter.’

  ‘Are you allowed to say who it is?’

  Her eyes remained on me, steady and stern, as if exacting a pledge.

  ‘John Ashe,’ she said.

  I was preparing to leave when Christopher Jarvis returned, and came into the study.

  ‘Pamela, are you off? How did you get on with the catalogue?’

  ‘I’ve done most of it, the pages are on your desk.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘Mr Jarvis—’

  ‘Yes?’

  I didn’t even have to take a breath. I had rarely been so sure of anything.

  ‘About working for Mr Ashe –’

  Chapter Eleven

  My mother disliked being under an obligation. When I next saw her, the first thing she said after accepting my filial kiss was:

  ‘There was no need for you to trail all the way down here, Pam.’

  ‘I wanted to,’ I replied, not quite truthfully.

  ‘I’m quite all right.’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ I said. ‘But I wanted to see for myself. You know what a worrier I am.’

  Both she and I knew no such thing, but my remark had the desired effect, that of putting all responsibility for the visit fairly and squarely on my shoulders
: it was my unnecessary worrying, not any need of hers, that had brought me down here.

  She looked pretty well, but tired. That wasn’t surprising. The house positively gleamed; she must have relished bringing it back under her control after its period of relative neglect at my hands. To my amazement she had even begun the process of clearing out my father’s things. His clothes lay in neat piles on what had been his bed. Knowing how she hated clutter, I asked if she was managing to sleep.

  To my further astonishment she told me: ‘I’ve moved into the guest room. It’s a nice room and it’s never been used to speak of.’

  ‘No . . . Well, good idea,’ I said.

  ‘One thing we could do while you’re here,’ she said a touch defensively, ‘is finish the job. The Sally Army’ll take away any stuff that’s going, and that room could do with a good spring-clean.’

  My heart sank, but I reminded myself that I’d come here to be useful. She’d made a wonderful plain stew for supper that night and we sat and ate it together at the kitchen table. One of my mother’s unwritten rules specified that only women, and not more than two at that, could eat in the kitchen, which is why she would have been appalled at my allowing Alan Mayes to eat his toast there. Conversation was a little stilted – we missed Dad’s presence almost more in this state of returning normality than we had in the wake of his death, when my mother had been ill. To ease things along, I said:

  ‘Perhaps we’ll see Dr Mayes.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘He said he might drop in to see us some time.’

  ‘To see us, or to see you?’

  ‘Both, Mum.’ I took the plunge: ‘But as a matter of fact he and I did go out together the other night. Just a walk and some supper, it was very enjoyable.’

  ‘Good.’ She placed her knife and fork together neatly. ‘Well, it’s a good thing you left that sherry behind after all.’

  There were no clothes left to sort; she had been through all of them. Everything was laundered, ironed and folded, even his socks and handkerchiefs. She was keeping his good overcoat to give to Mrs Coleman’s eldest son; I couldn’t believe he’d want it, but it was a kind thought, not to be discouraged. The rest we divided into two, for the Ex-Servicemen’s Mission and the Salvation Army. I walked up to the telephone that night after supper and called both organisations; both were happy to collect on a Sunday afternoon. I didn’t offer to deliver the coat to the neighbour; we left it hanging, spotless and mothballed, in the wardrobe. Next morning my mother announced that we’d better get on, and took me upstairs to what had been their room.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I want us to go through his drawer.’

  She took the bottom drawer from the bedside locker and laid it on the bed nearest the door, the one not covered in his clothes. If I needed assurance that it had been a good idea to visit, this was it. Here, I suspected, was one job she had been putting off. The contents had been Dad’s private cache, and she didn’t know what she might find there, so my presence would have a steadying effect.

  ‘Heaven knows what all these bits and pieces are . . .’ she murmured, stirring them with her hand. Beneath the vaguely disparaging tone I sensed her trepidation.

  ‘Let’s go through them one at a time, and see, shall we?’ I said. ‘Then we can decide what to do.’

  I found this collection of my father’s possessions heartbreaking, and could well understand why my mother had been steeling herself to go through them. They held no surprises or revelations, but their very mundaneness provided a portrait of Gerald Streeter’s life. There were his old army cap badge, buttons and shoulder tabs; some newspaper cuttings about his firm, and about the war; snapshots of my mother in an old leather wallet; a smart brush, comb and clipper set she had given him years ago and which he’d obviously thought too good to use; a yellowed ivory shoehorn; a packet of stiff collars and the studs to go with them; a box of cuff links; a dog-eared leather-bound prayer book and Bible that had been his mother’s, with her name in the front; an engraved silver propelling pencil and half-hunter watch, both presents for long service at work; a folding travel clock with a cracked crocodile-skin cover; a magnifying glass; an ordnance survey map of Kent; and, most moving of all to me, two poems I had written for him as a child of about ten, in the days when we’d been very close, a kind of unholy alliance which must have driven my mother mad.

  ‘Hm,’ she said with a little jerk of the head, reading. ‘I remember these . . .’

  ‘I do, too,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t know he’d kept them.’

  She didn’t look up. ‘He thought the world of you.’

  To smooth the moment, I read the one I held aloud.

  ‘ “My father has big feet and hands

  And brissles on his cheeks,

  He’s like a giant when he stands

  And makes the floor go creak.

  But he is not an oger

  Althow he might well be,

  The very best of fathers

  Is what he is to me.” ’

  I wanted to cry, but managed instead to pull a sceptical face. ‘Talk about sucking up . . . What’s that one about?’

  ‘Birds,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Here.’

  If the first poem had been my young self’s attempt to curry favour with my father, this one made a stab at a more philosophical vein. I refrained from reading it aloud.

  The birds hop about in the backyard

  And eat all the crumbs from the ground

  They peck and they flutter and chirrup

  And leave all their droppings around.

  [I could hear my mother’s voice in that line]

  Their babies are scraggy and naked

  The cat eats them up for his tea,

  But as soon as the birds take off on the wing

  They sing, ‘Look at us, we are free!’

  ‘Quite the poet,’ said my mother. ‘He’d definitely want me to keep these.’

  I noted the choice of words, and hoped that her feelings weren’t hurt. I wanted to say that if I hadn’t given her any poems it didn’t mean I loved her less, but that would have been more than she cared to deal with, and would only have embarrassed us both.

  I handed the poems back to her. ‘Do whatever you like with them, Mum.’

  We put the brush and comb, the collars and studs and the shoehorn with the clothes on the bed. The rest of the things we stashed tidily in a tooled leather stationery box on the shelf at the top of the wardrobe, just above his best coat. Then, while my mother made shepherd’s pie for lunch, I found an album with some empty pages in the cupboard under the stairs, and sat at the table to stick in the snapshots of her. She pretended to have no interest in them, and to be simply indulging me, but when I asked her for information for captions I could tell she was pleased.

  ‘What? Oh, that’s Margate. God in heaven, look at my dress.’

  ‘You look lovely, Mum.’

  ‘I look like a dog’s dinner, but it was the fashion.’

  ‘Where’s this?’

  ‘That’s me and your father at the works Christmas do. About twenty years ago. Alfie and whatsername, Ena, she liked a drink. Good heavens, I haven’t seen any of that lot for years . . .’

  The Salvation Army came while we were still washing up, and the Mission hot on their heels, which was a good thing – it left us no time for reflection or changes of heart amid the general to-ing and fro-ing. I was still out on the pavement and my mother still in the kitchen when Alan’s Morris chugged up.

  ‘You’ve come at exactly the right time,’ I said. ‘We’ve just said goodbye to Dad’s things.’

  ‘That’s a horrible job.’

  ‘Come in, Mum would love to see you.’

  He took my hand briefly. ‘You too?’

  ‘Me too.’

  He was perfect with her. ‘Mrs Streeter, how are you? I’ve got a free afternoon. Is there anything at all I can do?’

  ‘You didn’t come round here to work on your afte
rnoon off.’

  ‘No, well, I admit I came to see you and Pamela, but as I’m here . . .’

  ‘I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Does anything need doing outside?’ I asked her.

  ‘No,’ said my mother firmly. ‘If you feel like a bit of fresh air why don’t you take yourselves for a walk, and I’ll have the tea made when you get back.’

  When the door had closed behind us we couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I think we’ve been given our marching orders!’ said Alan. ‘Quite literally.’

  ‘She means well. It’s her way of giving us her blessing – telling us to go out and enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘Thank God it’s not raining. Where shall we go?’

  ‘I know: take me for a spin in your car.’

  He gave me a doubtful smile. ‘I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

  ‘It gets you about.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not fussy.’

  ‘Neither am I. Do let’s. Please.’

  ‘I give in.’ He opened the door for me and gestured like a chauffeur. ‘I’ll take you on a tour of the area, featuring the houses of the sick, the halt and the lame, and those with child or just delivered, how’s that?’

  The car was fine. True, it was a hard ride, and bumpy, and smelt slightly of petrol, but I’d never ridden in a private car before and I couldn’t have liked it more. Encouraged by my genuine enthusiasm Alan became confident and voluble. This, after all, was his domain, the one looked after by his practice, and his running commentary displayed as much pride in it and its inhabitants as any country squire.

  ‘That’s the twins, remember? Doing fine I’m happy to say . . . In there’s Mr and Mrs Dromgoole, what are the chances of one chronic hypochondriac marrying another? Ah, this’ll interest you, the young woman in that flat over the shop is completely blind, but she helps run the shop and looks after four children, I never cease to be amazed . . . Now up here we’re coming into private patient territory, they’re mostly Dr Cardew’s, but occasionally I help out . . .’