The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Do you know what I wish?’ she said, ‘I wish that next spring she will come back, and that I’ll come back too, and I’ll hear her singing away, safe and well.’

  Conscious of her new mood, I said nothing but in my heart I made the same wish, for all our sakes. The nightingale had become for us a sort of talisman, a harbinger of hope and peace.

  By the time Ashe returned from abroad, Suzannah had gone again. Though it was entirely typical of her I was a little hurt that she hadn’t told me she was going, or where. When I asked Christopher Jarvis, he was vague.

  ‘I understand she’s found accommodation with friends. You’ll have noticed she’s something of a gypsy, never in one place for long.’

  ‘She didn’t look well,’ I said.

  ‘You think so? My wife said that too, but I can’t say I noticed. Perhaps we men just aren’t so observant about these things. She’s never been a girl to look in the pink at the best of times. Not like Georgina . . .’ He began telling me about his god-daughter’s new beau who might, as he put it, be ‘the first real prospect’.

  At the next opportunity, I tried Amanda. We had been doing one of our inventories of the kitchen and were sitting in the drawing room, finalising a list for the next week’s orders and shopping. When we finished, I asked about Suzannah, and where she was living.

  ‘I don’t know, Pamela – I don’t know and I wish I did.’

  ‘Mr Jarvis said he thought she was with friends.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we tell ourselves. She flits about, you know . . . But she has very little money and no work so far as we can tell. I can’t pretend I don’t worry about her.’

  ‘Couldn’t she have an exhibition at the gallery?’ I asked, astonished at my own boldness. ‘Mr Jarvis admires her work, and so does Mr Ashe; it would probably do really well.’

  ‘It might,’ said Amanda doubtfully. ‘But she’d have to produce such a lot, and she works very slowly and haphazardly. I was amazed she took on the commission for Ashe, and in such a limited time . . .’ She frowned anxiously. ‘Perhaps that’s what it is, Pamela. Perhaps she’s just worn out. Ashe is a dear, but he’s awfully demanding. He wants what he wants when he wants it, if you know what I mean – well, of course you do, how silly of me . . .’

  The strange thing was that I didn’t, or not as it affected myself. The thought of Ashe as ‘a dear’ was pretty hard to take, but I had only once, personally, been the focus of his less obliging side. And I had merely picked up a sense of his anger, rather than witnessed anything he had actually said. As my employer I did not find him ‘demanding’ in the tyrannical way that Amanda meant. He was punctilious himself, and he liked efficiency and punctuality in those who worked for him, but he was not bad-tempered, impatient or unreasonable. In some ways he was easier to work for than the charming, disorganised Jarvises with their erratic life and poor timekeeping. But I knew only too well that there was a far, far blacker side from which I had so far been protected. I might be infinitely less worldly than most of the people I mixed with these days, but I was not so naive that I’d failed to understand the real nature of Ashe’s business. The nightclubs might well be successful, but not so profitable as to account for the wealth I had seen at the house in Piedmont Gardens. There was that other current that flowed, swift and dark, beneath the quiet orderliness of our working life in Soho Square, and the clue to its nature lay in the locked, red room.

  Before coming to Ashe Enterprises I had only ever read the words ‘vice’ and ‘prostitution’ in the pages of a newspaper, but now I was almost daily made aware of their existence. Vice washed against the walls of the building like the effluent from an overflowing drain. I may have sat perched above it, typing away in my neat, sterile office, but it was there and I could not ignore it. It existed in layers, strata that fed off one another from the bottom up. In the gardens opposite were the drunks and the tramps, the pathetic human rubbish, roaring and reeling in their separate world. On the pavements and in the doorways were the traders, the frontmen and women who murmured and cajoled, whose sidelong glances and inviting gestures seemed to brush against me in the street like cobwebs every time I walked to work. Beyond them huddled the dingy burrows and basements and backrooms where the first, lower, levels of business took place; where money changed hands for services which I could only imperfectly imagine. This was the area to which I was sure Ashe’s nightclubs belonged, for all their glamour and exclusivity. The books I had carried to his house were the official record of an elaborate and sophisticated deceit. Some small flaw, oversight or lapse in the deception had led to the summary dismissal of two men. I had begun to realise that Louise, by becoming Ashe’s latest mistress, had committed herself to the process, however willingly – her body was not her own any more.

  Away from Soho Square, in Mayfair mansions, home-counties manor houses and distant, glittering yachts, lived the rulers of this world, the fat spiders at the centre of their webs – motionless, but sensitive to every movement and nuance of change in their territory. Anything out of place, and a single quick, decisive movement would ensure that it never happened again.

  I flattered myself I was safer than most, but only because my area of responsibility was so close to the top, and therefore the risk that I tacitly accepted was greater. I also knew that none of this would ever be made explicit. I had been put on trust, and with every day that passed without questions asked, this complicity bound me to Ashe with hoops of steel.

  I kept my eyes open. I noticed things. Once or twice when I arrived in Soho Square early, and was walking round to kill time, I saw Ashe talking to the tramps in the garden. And not just talking, but sitting down with them, passing them things, pressing them by the hand and on the shoulder . . . It was like that other time, the day of Barbara’s funeral, when I’d come across ‘Mr Jameson’ in the crypt of St Xavier’s. I did not find these contradictions in his character comforting, but I was fascinated and repelled by them as I was by his face.

  The day before I was due to accompany Alan to Edinburgh, I made a discovery which meant that neither I nor Ashe could persist in the pretence of my ignorance. What was implicit became explicit in the most extraordinary way.

  I arrived at the usual time, but possibly my watch was slightly fast, for when the door of the lift pulled back I heard Ashe’s voice, talking on the telephone in his office. The door of the red room was half open as though he had left it either to answer or to make the call. Naturally I glanced in, at the same time as the person there moved forward swiftly to shut me out. It was the tall, striking, dark woman I’d seen before, quite naked apart from black silk stockings rolled above the knee, and a jet choker. Astonished as I was, my attention was caught at the same time by the woman’s clothing, discarded beside the chair that faced the camera. For there on the floor were the cap, boots, gold-trimmed green jacket and breeches of a chauffeur’s uniform. I had been right, on that first occasion, to feel I recognised the woman. It was Parkes – I saw the hostile, terrified animal panic in her eyes in the second before the door closed. My blood was thundering in my veins as I stood there in the hall, I felt as if I might faint.

  It might have been more discreet either to retreat, or to have advertised my presence to Ashe, but I did neither; I couldn’t think straight and my mouth was dry. Trembling with shock, my face cold, I tiptoed over to my room, removed my coat and hat, and sat down at my desk. I’d left the door ajar but felt too weak to get up and close it.

  I was removing the cover from my typewriter with shaky fingers when the door of Ashe’s office opened. He stepped into the hall, and paused.

  ‘Mrs Griffe, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Ashe.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  I heard the red-room door open, and close. No voices. In a moment the door opened once more.

  I glanced behind me through my own half-open door. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done. Ashe stood in the hallway. Beside him was Parkes, now in his smart lovat green uni
form. Both were entirely composed – far more so than me.

  ‘I’m sorry I was a little early,’ I said. ‘My watch—’

  ‘Never mind.’ He turned to Parkes. ‘I shan’t be needing you until seven.’

  ‘Very good, sir. Good evening, madam.’

  ‘Good evening, Parkes.’

  Our usual simple, formulaic exchange was suddenly freighted with importance. She, Parkes, had asked for my silence. And I had given it. I could never deny, nor forget, what I now knew, but neither would I disclose it. I had taken one more step into the web.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At ten o’clock the next morning, Alan boarded the Edinburgh train at King’s Cross. In spite of travelling with him, I felt alone, and that was strange, and confusing, as though I had become two people. Or perhaps as though I had always been two, but it hadn’t mattered until now, when suddenly they were at war. I could not even say that it was a case of head versus heart, because both my head and my heart spoke for Alan, for the importance of this day in his life and, by association, in mine; of our future together, of which we had been so confident that there had been no sense of urgency. But some other, unwelcome, part of me refused to let me respond as I should.

  Nothing about this long journey, the wonders of the Flying-Scotsman, our purpose in travelling, excited or interested me; my every smile and remark was a sham. A short while ago Alan had been my haven, my happiness, my soulmate, and he remained the same good, generous, honourable man as before – it was I who had changed. I longed to feel as I had then, but I was powerless to turn the clock back. My self was like some adamantine machine set on its own course, beyond my control. Against my will, I was moving away.

  In Edinburgh, the pathetic fallacy held good: autumn was further advanced. When we alighted from the train at six p.m. that Friday night the air was cold and the city’s grey stones heavy with their dark, melancholy history. The castle, high on its great rock, seemed forbidding. I felt small, mean and foolish with my curtain-ring wedding band and my shabby overnight case. But in truth it wasn’t the grandeur of my surroundings that shamed me, nor what we were about to do. What should have been a moment of pride, happiness and fulfilment was diminished by my own dishonesty.

  It was impossible to combat what I couldn’t understand. I think I hoped that by sleeping with Alan some alchemy would restore me to myself, and to him, that the deed would be father to the impulse. Only a year later and he, with his new knowledge, would have been able to tell me that this was impossible. How ironic that I was with the one man who might have been able to help me understand myself, who would have appreciated the need for me to go my own way until I found the right one. But I couldn’t confide in him because I didn’t know what to say, or how I’d say it.

  He had been to some trouble, too, which I knew he could not afford. Heaven knows what he must have gone without in order to pay for my train ticket, book a room at a small hotel, and take us there in a taxi from the station. He wouldn’t hear of anything else.

  ‘I’m playing the gentleman for once, Pam,’ he said. ‘So indulge me.’

  I did, because I had no alternative. ‘Playing’ the lady was exactly what I was doing. I had never felt less like one. As I stood at the hotel reception desk and watched Alan sign us in as ‘Dr and Mrs Mayes’, I thought of my mother, and what she would make of it all. Instinct told me that whatever rules of upbringing and conventional morality I was breaking by being here, she would disapprove of me far less for that than for my sickly infatuation with my other life in London. This, at least, showed (or should have done) evidence of proper and appropriate feelings; and Alan was indisputably her idea of the right man for me. Whatever our differences there was no doubt that my happiness was important to her. I even entertained the dreadful possibility that she might be beginning to live through me, a responsibility that would prove quite intolerable.

  The woman behind the desk glanced uninterestedly at the signature, and barely at all at us. She told us our room number on the second floor, and that the bathroom and lavatory were left out of our door and at the end. She said that we should have checked out by ten o’clock next morning. We replied, like good, slightly nervous children, that of course we would. A boy appeared from the back of the hotel and offered to take our bags, but we only had such a small one each that we declined, a faux pas which probably marked us out for the novices we were.

  There was no lift. I walked up the stairs with the heavy tread and even heavier heart of a condemned woman. Much, much later, when I was a very old lady, a song I heard on the radio declared that learning to love yourself was ‘the greatest love of all’ – the sine qua non of all other loves. It served to remind me of that evening in the narrow, dark house in Edinburgh, and how my hatred of myself amounted to a paralysis.

  Alan unlocked the door and held it open for me. The room was about the size of my parents’ bedroom, and dominated by twin beds with high wooden bedheads and shiny, brass-coloured eiderdowns. I made straight for the window opposite the door. It was closed and I tried to open it, without success.

  ‘It’s stuck,’ I said.

  Alan had a go as well, and also failed. ‘Perhaps we’re not meant to open it. Never mind, it’s not stuffy.’

  ‘But I need a little air,’ I said. He would never know how much I needed it – I felt stilled, breathless, as if I would die of suffocation.

  He kissed me. ‘Then air you shall have. I’ll go down and ask if there’s someone else who has the knack.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I sat down on the bed.

  ‘And you,’ he said, placing his warm hand on the back of my neck. ‘Just don’t worry about anything. It’s enough that we’re here, together.’

  The moment he’d gone tears oozed from my eyes. I was a widow, the survivor of a happy marriage, however brief – I had done all this before, so Alan could scarcely interpret my mood as one of maidenly anxiety. Perhaps it would simply appear as the natural diffidence of a respectable young woman in what was undoubtedly a risky and risqué venture. But that was not me, and never had been. I was in despair.

  He returned with the youth, who hauled and shoved at the window for a minute or two and declared it jammed.

  ‘Will it bother you much?’ he asked. ‘It’s gonna be cold tonight.’ He pronounced it ‘toneet’.

  Alan said it wouldn’t. What else could he do? The youth hovered, clearly expecting a tip for his failed efforts, and on not receiving one beat a sulky retreat.

  Alan sat down on the bed next to me. ‘Never mind. We shall be cosy. I’m going to unpack my few things, make myself at home. I might nip along for a bath before the rush – or why don’t you? That journey’s a beast.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘You do what you like.’

  ‘Very well.’

  I hadn’t meant it to sound so curt, so dismissive. When he’d gone to the bathroom I took off my shoes and lay back on the bed, on the slippery eiderdown. I tried to relax but I felt as stiff as an effigy on a mediaeval tomb. Everything about this situation and my surroundings conspired to paralyse me.

  When Alan came back and began at once to get dressed, talking cheerfully, and no doubt tactfully, of dinner, my relief was so intense that I almost bounded from the bed and set about smartening myself up. A reprieve had been granted.

  In the hotel dining room we were the focus of indulgent glances from fellow diners.

  ‘I bet they think we’re newly-weds,’ said Alan. He took my hand in both of his. ‘Let’s not disappoint them.’

  The food was nice, but I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry, and when I did get the food to my mouth it was hard to swallow, because my mouth was dry and my throat tight.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I seem to have lost my appetite.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ For the first time he allowed himself to look concerned. ‘You are all right, aren’t you? Because the last thing in the world that I want is to make you unhappy, Pamela.’

  ‘No,’ I l
ied helplessly. ‘No, honestly, I’m fine. Just too tired to eat, that’s all.’

  ‘The sad truth is, I’m starving.’ He laughed, and speared one of my roast potatoes. ‘May I?’

  My unhappiness was compounded by guilt. Alan, after all, was confronting the ordeal of a lengthy interview by the Admissions Board in only a few hours’ time. I knew how much all this meant to him, and how much preparation he had done, though he had never groused or complained about it. Yet his concern was all for me, when it should have been the other way round. And all the time I had the oddest feeling of being watched. I recalled the evening when I had met Alan just after work, and had glanced up to see John Ashe looking down at us from his window. It was exactly as though he could still see us now, and, as before, only I was aware of him.

  He had taken up residence in my head. Everything I did these days, I did in relation to him.

  Our night together was disastrous. When we got back upstairs Alan began by saying that we both needed our sleep, and that there was no hurry about anything. But only an hour later desire got the better of him and he slipped into my bed. He was tender, but urgent, and I was wholly unreceptive. I didn’t deny him, there was no sense in which he forced himself on me, but I was cold, dry and detached, longing for it to be over. That wish, at least, was granted – passion and inexperience made everything very quick. Afterwards he lay with his arms round me and his face tucked into my neck like a child, overcome by love and lost for words, while the tears seeped down my cheeks. Too late I managed to express some tenderness, or the sorrow which might be taken for tenderness, as I stroked his head and shoulders.

  After quite a while of lying entwined but hopelessly separate, he kissed me once more and whispered: ‘Thank you.’ It was almost unbearable.