The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Good evening! Charles Swynford-Hayes. You’ve come for the books.’

  ‘That’s right.’ After my last experience I thought I’d better identify myself fully. ‘I’m Mrs Griffe, Mr Ashe’s secretary.’

  ‘I know, I know, I can see that.’ His manner was as abrupt as Easter’s, and only slightly more genial. ‘They’re in my office. Come through.’

  There was no chance of the Apache being thought vulgar. It was half the size of the White Flamingo, and even in the semi-darkness looked rather shabby. Piggy’s office was stupendously untidy, but he must have looked out the relevant books earlier, because he was able to pick them up from the corner of his desk and give them to me right away.

  ‘Can I offer you something, Mrs Griffe?’

  ‘No thank you. I’m going straight on to deliver these.’

  ‘Soho Square or Piedmont Gardens?’

  I wanted to ask what business it was of his, but it wasn’t my place. ‘Piedmont Gardens.’

  ‘Give my regards to the divine Mrs Ashe, won’t you?’

  He must have known that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – do any such thing. ‘Right,’ I said briskly, not assenting so much as announcing my departure. ‘I must be off.’

  Piggy came with me to the door and opened it for me, but his gentlemanly gesture did not make me feel like a lady. Something insinuating in his manner made me glad to get away. Out in the street I reflected on the irony of this vain, unprepossessing individual making arbitrary judgements about who could or could not enter his poky little boîtes. Why did people put up with it? I could only suppose that it was an example of a place acquiring the value that it put on itself, since the policy obviously worked and the Apache was one of the most recherché clubs in town.

  The knowledge that I would never in a million years want to get into such a place gave me a sense of power. That, and my particular connection with John Ashe, to whom both these men were answerable and of whom, I sensed, they were very properly in awe.

  Piedmont Gardens was a square of opulent cream and white Georgian mansions, each with a flight of steps up to the entrance, and an immense pillared doorway. In the centre, protected by tall black iron railings tipped with gold paint, was the garden, an oasis of well-mown grass intersected by winding paths and shrubberies and shaded by immense trees. The Ashes’ house was in the centre on the northern side of the square. Wisteria grew up from basement level and hung in cloudy ringlets around the windows on the upper floors.

  I told the cab driver to wait, ascended the steps and rang the bell. Its silvery tinkle resonated in the spacious interior of the house. In my dull work clothes and clutching an armful of ledgers I must have looked more suited to the tradesmen’s entrance. The door was opened by a liveried butler who greeted me with immense dignity and courtesy and proceeded ahead of me across the wide hall with its black and white tiles to the drawing room where Felicia Ashe was waiting.

  My first reaction was: She’s not beautiful.

  My next: But she can make us believe that she is.

  In that moment I realised that beauty is not only a gift of nature, visible or invisible; nor even an artifice, the product of time, effort and money. It is also a talent – a charm, a spell, a conjuring trick. Felicia Ashe was thin as a boy and pale as a ghost, a wraithlike blank canvas to which had been added everything money, taste and confidence could provide. Her very voice proclaimed her power, for it was soft – a voice, I was sure, that never had to be raised because it commanded instant attention.

  ‘Mrs Griffe . . . You found us. Do, please, put those down.’ She indicated an exquisite marquetry table. There was something disdainful in the gesture as though she wished the unsightly, slightly dog-cared books to be set aside as quickly as possible.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ she asked.

  In many ways I would rather have left, but I didn’t wish to appear rude, and I was hypnotised by Felicia Ashe. She had scarcely taken her eyes off me since I entered the room; there was something cold and snakelike about that unblinking stare.

  I sat; or, more accurately, perched. The chair, with its curved back and stiffly upholstered gold brocade seat, was resistant and unwelcoming. My hostess draped herself lightly on the soft cushions of the sofa opposite and crossed her legs. The movement made a just-audible silken whisper.

  ‘It’s so nice to meet you at last,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard all about your efficiency.’

  I made a self-deprecating sound, though I knew it had not, in her rules of engagement, been much of a compliment.

  ‘You work for the Jarvises as well, I believe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, it was through them I met Mr Ashe.’

  ‘Mm. I believe I was abroad for that particular lunch party. In Beirut.’ She raised impeccably arched, plucked eyebrows. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Only by reputation.’

  ‘Oh dear, you sound a little disapproving.’

  ‘No, no, not at all – I believe it’s a—’ I floundered, and the eyebrows rose again. ‘A very colourful city.’

  ‘It is. If you ever have the opportunity, go. Now, tell me – how do you like working for my husband?’

  She must have known how awkward this question would make me feel, but then she was not in the business of putting me at my ease.

  ‘I like it very much.’

  ‘There’s no need to be polite, Mrs Griffe. You don’t find him intimidating? Lots of people do.’

  ‘No. A little, to begin with, but not now.’

  ‘Now you’ve got used to his face.’

  I felt a surge of loyalty towards Ashe, a loyalty that his wife was trying for some reason to undermine. I answered sturdily: ‘Oh, that took no time at all.’

  ‘How perfectly splendid.’ she said. ‘And is he a fair and reasonable employer?’

  ‘Absolutely. I have no complaints.’ This sounded somewhat half-hearted, so I added: ‘I’m very happy in my work.’

  ‘And how many people can honestly say that?’ she murmured, before nodding in the direction of the books on the table. ‘Had you been to any of those places before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A disobliging experience I should imagine – no, don’t demur, there is nothing seedier than a nightclub in daylight. “A successful nightclub is like an experienced tart, best after dark.” My husband’s observation, not mine.’

  I recognised that dangerous thing, an individual prepared on the face of it to slum’, but who could and would pull rank at the drop of a hat. Felicia Ashe was trying to provoke me into an indiscretion, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. I said, almost too quickly: ‘They were exactly as I expected.’

  She ignored this. ‘The best by far is the Calypso. The nastiest, and most exclusive, is the Apache. No one has the least idea what the qualifications are for admittance with the result that all kinds of people who should know better clamour to get in. Incredibly clever.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  Her black eyes rested on me. She was completely still except for the middle finger of her right hand which she tapped gently on the arm of the sofa. I gazed about the room. Seconds passed. She might have been reading my mind for at the very moment that I was about to say I must go, she stood up and pulled a bell-rope near the fireplace, dismissing me before I could dismiss myself.

  ‘Well, Mrs Griffe, I mustn’t keep you. I dare say you have things to do this evening.’

  There was a lemony quality to her voice which trickled scorn on whatever paltry things I might have to do. The butler came back into the room.

  ‘Canter, would you show Mrs Griffe out? And put those,’ she indicated the books, ‘in Mr Ashe’s study.’

  In the hall I glanced up. A gallery ran round the first floor, and I could see that the wall was covered in pictures. Presumably Suzannah’s were among them. How bitterly I resented the paintings I’d so instinctively and profoundly admired being hung out of sight in this dreadful woman’s house.

  I’d never been s
o glad to get out of a place. I asked the cab to take me back to the Tottenham Court Road and went straight to a cafe where I consumed buck rabbit and strong tea with the appetite of an Alpine mountaineer. It was impossible to imagine Felicia Ashe eating it at all. Having met her I was sure that Louise’s assessment had been right – she was not the sort of woman to keep a man like John Ashe entirely happy. But I was equally sure that she knew this, and that it was less than nothing to her.

  There were many occasions over the years when I was to be forcibly reminded of Felicia’s assessment of the Apache Club as ‘the nastiest and most exclusive’ in Ashe’s portfolio. I came to know such things – and about such people – that it still makes my hair curl to think about. If my mother had had the least idea of my responsibilities it would have driven her into an early grave. A theatrical knight, a cabinet minister, even on one memorable occasion, an Anglican bishop – let alone pillars of society and glittering members of the beau monde without number – were among those whose reputations had to be rescued, at a price, by Ashe’s weaponry of power and influence. A weaponry of which I was the agent. The suppression of unwanted scandal was the stock in trade of Ashe Enterprises and one of its greatest money-spinners. The fabled ‘discretion’ of the Apache Club’s management was of a fairly loose weave. Mine was the real thing – cast-iron and rock-solid.

  That day, and especially the meeting with Felicia Ashe, disturbing though it was, marked a turning point in my attitude towards my job. I hailed a taxi home without a qualm.

  Back at the house, I staked my claim to the bathroom by putting enough coins in the slot meter for two baths, and running far more hot water than was allowed. I soaked for half an hour before I felt properly clean, and relaxed. Then I sat in my dressing gown and did some long-overdue mending. I darned stockings, and reattached buttons, and adjusted a hem that had needed doing for weeks. Much as I usually disliked sewing, the everyday practicality of the tasks soothed me and took my mind off the peculiarities of the day.

  At nine o’clock, I went to bed and fell asleep almost at once. At three, I woke with a start, possessed by the idea that there was something of overriding importance that I had overlooked, and forgotten to do. But nothing came to mind, and by three thirty I was asleep again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On Thursday John Ashe was back at the office. He thanked me for the extra time I had put in and made no enquiries about what I had done. It was business as usual.

  I might have missed the short report on an inside page of Thursday’s evening paper, if Georgina’s return from junketings in Wiltshire had not been affected by the delay on the trains. But on Friday morning, in the naturally self-centred way of the young and fortunate, she was brandishing the page excitedly, keen to tell everyone what a ‘nightmare’ she had had getting into town.

  ‘I should have gone in the car with Alex,’ she told me excitedly. ‘He was desperate to drive me, but I’m not interested and I told him so. Then of course I had to take the train, and this had to happen! I mean, poor thing, it’s too awful, but why couldn’t she have stayed at home quietly and slit her wrists?’

  According to the report, the woman had hurled herself on to the rails at the end of the Salisbury line platform at Waterloo. An onlooker was quoted as saying: ‘She looked very neat and quiet, not in the least agitated, it came as a complete surprise when the poor creature jumped.’

  I knew immediately. It came back to me in a sickening rush – what I had forgotten to do that evening, and why. But I still telephoned the hostel in the faint hope that I had leapt to a false conclusion.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman on the other end, irritably. ‘That was her. She hadn’t been herself for months. We’re having trouble tracking down anyone – are you a friend?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ but it felt like the worst sort of lie, weak and self-serving.

  ‘Perhaps you could help out? It’s not really our responsibility to deal with this kind of thing, and I’ve already had the police and what have you. I had to identify the body,’ she added with a kind of grim pride.

  ‘How awful for you.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . If we could just get her room cleared for a start, we have a waiting list you know.’

  ‘I’ll come down,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Can’t you manage it before, only—’

  ‘No,’ I said, with a firmness I was very far from feeling. ‘I’ll be there on Saturday morning. Unless of course you manage to contact the family.’

  ‘We won’t have, because there isn’t any,’ declared the horrible woman triumphantly.

  I pleaded with Alan to come with me and he managed to get time off between the morning and afternoon surgeries. He would have no truck with my self-recrimination. We sat on Barbara’s bed in the hostel, while I wept and he held my hand tight, as if to stop me from drowning.

  ‘It’s awful,’ he agreed. ‘A tragedy. And you were friends. But it isn’t your fault, and you mustn’t tell yourself it is.’

  ‘But if I’d remembered, if I’d been there—’

  ‘She would have done this some other time. God knows I may never get the qualification, but I’ve learned enough about this sort of thing to know that it takes more than an outing with a friend to cure someone who’s really ill. And from everything you’ve said she’s been ill for years – nursing all that sadness from the past, bottling it up, being a loner.’

  ‘I was the only person she told – about the baby.’

  ‘She trusted you.’ Alan squeezed my hand. ‘People do, you may have noticed.’

  ‘Yes, and I let her down!’

  ‘Everyone forgets arrangements from time to time. Especially busy people, like you. She could have found some way of getting in touch – she could have come to you. She could have got cross with you, that’s what most people would have done, and you’d have said sorry and there’d have been an end of it. Friendship takes two, Pam.’

  I shook my head in despair. ‘This was different. She wasn’t well, so the responsibility was mine.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘She had parents. Still has, for all we know. And other people who knew her and probably saw her far more often than you did. Her employers, all the people who live here, for heaven’s sake.’ He stood up and pulled me to my feet. ‘Come on, Pam. We’re here to do something useful now, and I don’t have much time. Let’s get it done.’

  It was my father all over again, except that here there was pitifully little to sort out. Barbara’s few clothes we packed in her case for the Salvation Army. Her wash-things we threw away. A childish brush, comb and mirror set with pink backs decorated with flowers I kept; I imagined her having been given them by her mother before the great falling-out. We went through her small shelf of books, of which a couple were library books, due for return. From the remainder I took Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, because it contained a bookplate from her schooldays with her name on it – a reminder of a happier time. In the bedside drawer we found a scrapbook containing pictures cut from magazines and newspapers, even, I suspected, other books, since some were not photographs but illustrations. The pictures were of individual children – all boys – from babyhood to about seven years old. Each section of a few pages was headed by a year, written in black ink. It was a pretend photo album of Freddy, her lost son.

  The police had rescued the handbag she had been carrying when she jumped, and we saved the harrowing task of examining the contents till last. I think I’d hoped that there might be some clue, the key to the mysterious forgotten hinterland of Barbara’s life, but there was almost nothing. Perhaps that was the key – to an empty world. A handkerchief, spectacles (I never knew she needed them) in a hard grey case, a glass jar containing aspirin, a tortoiseshell comb, a train timetable and a tiny diary with its own pencil.

  ‘You should look at that,’ said Alan, it might tell us something.’

  The diary too was almost empty. There were a very few appointments – ‘Dentist’, ‘Library’ – and the initia
l ‘P’ here and there, with a place and time. Only one other date was marked, with the name Freddy. Her son’s birthday.

  The only entry for the day she had died was the letter ‘P’.

  I sat there numbly, staring down at the diary. Gently, Alan took it from me. ‘That’s that,’ he said. ‘Nothing there.’

  Arranging the funeral was not a lengthy or arduous business, but I felt better for performing a practical service for Barbara even this late in the day. There was more than enough in my savings to pay for a simple ceremony and the attendant costs, and I did so willingly. I supposed there would be financial affairs to be sorted out and hoped against hope that some long-lost mercenary relative of Barbara’s would come forward at the last moment to deal with all that.

  I knew she had not been in the least interested in organised religion, but it occurred to me that St Xavier’s, the church where she and I had had our picnic on that rainy day, and where she was known to the people behind the tea urn, might be the right place for the rest of us to take our leave of her.

  I went down on Sunday. The vicar was conducting morning service for about twenty people, but the omnipresent tea urn was still there, and the crypt open, and the pews at the back and sides were dotted with the church’s regular weekday patrons, coughing and murmuring, waiting patiently for the religious observances to be over. I aligned myself with neither group, but loitered in the south porch until the service was ended.

  The vicar, one of those who had been serving tea on my first visit, was a nice man, a shining advertisement for his faith. He heard the news about Barbara with genuine sympathy, but with a realism born of experience. He was only too happy that I had come to him.

  ‘I’d be glad to take a service for her,’ he said. ‘Such an interesting woman. She was always welcome here.’

  Just to hear him say that was, quite literally, a blessed relief. In a single sentence he had provided Barbara with a humane, adult, uncritical setting. She had not been entirely helpless in the face of her despair – she had found this place, and been accepted, and taken comfort from what she had found. It was almost enough to make one believe in a benign God and His self-sacrificing Son.