The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s none of my business, of course, but are you also asking the Jarvises for a rise?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘Then . . .’ He opened one hand in enquiry. ‘Forgive me . . .’

  ‘They’re not in a position to pay more.’

  He displayed no reaction whatsoever to this, but I sensed my directness had done no harm, and went on: ‘I have plans. I need more space to live in. And I want to save and invest some money in a business of my own.’

  ‘In effect you’re asking me for an increase in pay so that you can put in place arrangements which will enable you to leave.’

  I could hardly deny it. ‘I suppose I am. In the long term.’

  ‘But then,’ he said, as if speaking for me, and to himself, ‘I couldn’t expect you to stay for ever.’

  ‘No.’

  We were in the white office. Ashe was sitting behind his desk, I was standing before it, in a traditional senior-junior tableau which put me at a slight disadvantage. Now he rose and stood with his back to me for a moment, looking down into the square.

  Without turning round, he asked: ‘Might I ask the nature of the business into which you’d be putting these savings?’

  ‘You may, certainly, but I’d rather not say.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  I made a split-second decision. ‘Except it’s a charitable venture.’

  ‘I see.’

  There was a short silence. I felt quite calm, but curious. I believed I had read the psychology correctly; Alan would have been proud of me. The last time I’d thought that, I had been overconfident, and suffered the consequences, but I had learned a good deal since then. Ashe turned.

  ‘Very well.’ His face was unreadable, his voice light and matter of fact. ‘I’m more than happy with your work, and your attitude to it. I am prepared to pay you a further two pounds a week.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Ashe.’ This small formality – the use of his name – conveyed as much extra gratitude as I was prepared to show. This was business, and we both knew it.

  ‘One word,’ he said, ‘about timekeeping.’

  ‘I apologise for being late the other afternoon. A fellow employee at the Jarvises’ was taken ill and I was helping out.’

  ‘Commendable. But not, if you please, in my time.’

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘In that case I shall implement the increase this week.’

  I must have been more nervous than I realised, because in the lift on the way down my whole body seemed to roar back into life, or another gear: my heart, my breathing, hearing, everything was amplified. I had forcibly to contain a great shout of delight.

  The car was parked outside and I expected to see Parkes, and to exchange our usual pleasantries, which had taken on more meaning recently. But the uniformed figure reading the paper behind the wheel was a stranger – a heavy-set man with a thin, clipped moustache. He glanced incuriously at me as I hurried away.

  I had to admire Dorothy: she was a strong, determined and resilient girl. Her physical health improved rapidly, but I sensed a protective shield formed by the scar tissue around her wounded heart. She was not quite so carefree and, though willing to gossip about other people, certainly not so ready to exchange confidences. Before, she had always delighted in drawing me out, or deploying her fiendishly accurate intuition at my expense – no more. It seemed as if, by exercising discretion herself, she was asking me to do the same, and I was happy to comply.

  I did, however, ask if she knew anything about Suzannah. She shook her head, thoughtfully.

  ‘After she went off with old ugly-mug Mr Ashe she only came back the once that I know of. . . I don’t know what he did with her, but I hope she was well paid for it.’

  I was struck by her turn of phrase. ‘Why do you say that?’

  Dorothy shrugged. ‘She looked poorly, didn’t she? Not that it means much in her case, she’s such a peaky little thing. I reckon she weighs less than my niece, and she’s only twelve.’

  I had to admit this was true, and yet – ‘You’ve seen her paintings, haven’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘Only what she did here. On the flaming wall!’ She rolled her eyes despairingly. ‘And that one of Mr Rintoul. It looked like him, I’ll give her that.’

  ‘She’s wonderfully talented. There are so many big ideas in that one small person.’

  ‘Interesting, that,’ agreed Dorothy. ‘You can’t judge by appearances.’

  This was one of those occasions when the cliché served perfectly. But I was still left wondering, like Dorothy, what Ashe had done with Suzannah.

  It was Georgina who, if she didn’t precisely answer the question, at least told me where Suzannah was.

  ‘Oh, she’s staying at Edward Rintoul’s while he’s in Paris,’ she said.’

  ‘Does Mrs Jarvis know? She mentioned the other day how worried she was.’

  ‘The answer to that is no. Suzannah doesn’t want any fuss.’

  ‘Fuss about what?’

  I was at the bureau in the drawing room, and Georgina was on the sofa with her feet up, looking at a magazine. Now she got up and came over.

  ‘Promise you won’t tell?’

  For the second time in a few days someone was trying to elicit a promise from me before I could properly make a judgement. But something in Georgina’s manner, so loaded with secrecy and excitement, made me say: ‘I promise.’

  She leaned towards me, and whispered, ‘She’s pregnant!’

  I felt dismay, and a queasy flutter of fear. But I was not surprised. Ashe had effected a change in me – educated, hardened, corrupted me, call it what you like. There was only one thing I wanted above all to know.

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘I think we can guess, don’t you?’ Seeing I wasn’t to be drawn, she said: ‘it has to be Ashe’s, surely!’

  ‘We don’t know that.’ This met with a grimace of disbelief. ‘Is anyone looking after her?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Ghastly, isn’t it?’

  ‘How did you find out?’ I asked.

  ‘Edward told me she was going to be there, and I went to see her. She’s like this.’ Georgina described, with her hand, a protruding stomach.

  ‘But did she say anything about it herself? Did she say what her plans were?’

  ‘She doesn’t make plans, you know her. She’s an artist.’

  ‘Where will she go? How will they live?’

  Before Georgina could answer, the door on the other side of the hall opened and Christopher Jarvis came out, marking the end of our conversation.

  The address of Edward Rintoul’s flat in Marylebone, off Baker Street, was on file in the office; I had typed out the odd letter to him. I decided to go straight round there after work. I knew that I was intruding, that I had no right to interfere, and that Suzannah might be angry, or simply not let me in. But Barbara’s fatal despair and, more recently, Dorothy’s situation, haunted me. Experience had shown that nothing came of nothing. Discretion had its place, but there were occasions, I reasoned, when valour was the better part of it, and this was one of them.

  Looking back, a sort of madness afflicted me for those few weeks in the winter of 1929; but it was a necessary, beneficial madness, which set the course for the rest of ray life. Without it, I’d never have found the courage to do what I did.

  Rintoul’s flat was a basement. He, or perhaps some previous owner, had set a large plant in a half-barrel in the area, and sinewy branches with a few desiccated hand-shaped leaves reached almost to pavement level. I went down the steps and knocked. The interior of the flat looked very dark, but after a moment the door was opened by Suzannah.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, it’s you.’ She walked away from the door, leaving it open, which I took to mean I could go in.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said, closing the door behind me. ‘I heard you were here and I was worried about you.’

  ‘How did you know?’

/>   ‘Do you mind if I don’t say?’

  I followed her into the large, dark room that I’d seen through the window. Inside, the dim winter light and the branches on the other side of the glass made it feel as though we were in a wood – or perhaps at the end of the garden at Crompton Terrace. It was also very cold, and I didn’t remove my coat. Suzannah wore one of her long patterned dresses, the hem at the front lifted by her obvious pregnancy, a shawl round her shoulders. The room was untidy and uncomfortable-looking, half studio, half living room, with a table in the window, some unmatched hard chairs and a black stove, which in spite of the temperature was unlit. I got the impression that this was not a room in which Suzannah had bothered to make herself at home, but then perhaps she never did.

  ‘Georgina . . .’ she said, sitting down on one of the chairs.

  I decided to neither confirm nor deny this. ‘Would you like me to try and light the stove?’

  ‘Is it cold in here? Yes, I suppose it probably is. One good thing about this condition is that it makes you warm. Do, by all means, carry on.’

  She watched me with a kind of detached interest as I removed the lid of the stove and checked for fuel; some coal was in there.

  ‘Matches on the table,’ she said. I fetched them, and gathered up some sheets of paint-spattered newspaper as well. I rolled these into long spills, twisted them and stuffed them through the panel at the base of the stove. Handfuls of dust and grit fell on to the rug, but when I put a match to the paper it caught cheerily enough, and I blew, like a human bellows, on the clinker until it began to glow red.

  When I replaced the panel, Suzannah remarked: ‘How clever you are, Pamela,’ as though I’d pulled off some astonishing feat.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  The stove, which needed clearing out, didn’t draw that well but its small red glow cheered the room up, and there were some candles in saucers on the mantelpiece which I lit as well.

  ‘That’s better.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She was so calm, so – I searched for the word – fatalistic. Maybe that was a state of mind brought on by pregnancy. But there was as well a disturbing contradiction between her heavy, swollen stomach and her little white hollow-eyed face, made still smaller by her cloud of elfin hair that in this dim light looked almost grey.

  ‘When is the baby due?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon. Two or three weeks, I think.’

  I found her vagueness terrifying. ‘Where will you go?’

  She gazed at me thoughtfully, as if deciding how much to say. ‘Into hospital, of course. It’s been arranged. Then it will all be over. The baby has a home to go to.’

  ‘You mean it will be adopted?’

  She nodded, closing her eyes as she did so. ‘Thank God! I’m so tired of it living inside me. I don’t want to be a house any more.’

  That was it, of course: she had expressed, in her odd way, what I had not been able to put my finger on – that she seemed invaded by her pregnancy, uninvolved. Occupied rather than preoccupied by it. Waiting, as she’d said, for it all to be over.

  ‘What will you do then?’

  ‘I shall be on my own. Completely on my own. That’s what I want more than anything, Pamela. I shall go down to the seaside in Sussex, and eat fish, and walk on the beach in all weathers.’

  ‘And paint?’ I asked. ‘You must paint again.’

  ‘I might. When the time’s right. When I’m ready.’

  ‘You know we all think about you,’ I said. ‘Amanda in particular would like to know that you’re well.’

  She gave a little sigh. ‘I can’t imagine why. There’s no need for me to be on anyone’s conscience.’

  ‘They’re good people, Suzannah. They’re fond of you.’

  ‘Good people?’ She frowned. ‘Are they?’

  ‘They seem so to me.’

  ‘I like them,’ she said. ‘And they’ve been kind to me. But it’s easy to be kind if you have no troubles.’

  ‘Easy to be selfish, too,’ I reminded her. ‘And they’re not.’

  She didn’t reply. I was glad I’d lit the stove, because I had the oddest feeling that without light, warmth, attention, company, she might simply fade away in this dingy, neglected underground place. It was now quite dark outside, and the impression of being in the middle of a wood was even stronger. All I could see of Suzannah was her three-quarter profile. It was eerie to think of John Ashe’s child being so near, enclosed in that frail frame. I could picture it crouched fiercely in its hot, wet sack, ready to burst into the world.

  ‘Where will the baby be going?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

  She shifted in her chair and looked at me. She was so thin; her eye sockets were so deeply gouged with tiredness that her eyes were no more than a glint in the darkness. Like the drunk Alan had been kind to in Edinburgh, Suzannah seemed to look out from the prison her pregnant body had become. Her voice when it came was no more than a whisper. Afterwards, I knew what she must have said, but what I heard at that moment was:

  ‘It will be ashes . . .’ And it sounded like a curse being cast.

  I never saw her again.

  When I told Alan about my plans for the future he was, as I might have expected, overwhelmingly generous in his support and enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s a splendid idea, Pam. Truly it is. And you’re splendid. Just so long as you realise you’ll have to face down a lot of hostility and criticism. Unmarried girls with babies are no better than prostitutes as far as some people are concerned. For instance, I don’t imagine your mother has much time for them.’

  ‘She’ll come round. It’s losing you she can’t forgive me for.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but you haven’t lost me.’

  It was true. If ever there was an example of love not altering when it alteration found, nor bending with the remover to remove, it was Alan, who would remain steadfast to the end. Indeed he seemed to love me even more for my quixotic ambition, and was unstinting with his help and advice.

  ‘You’ll need to have a good relationship with your local doctors,’ he pointed out. ‘And you’ll want to know exactly where you stand legally when irate parents and boyfriends come banging on the door. You’re also going to need strong locks, Pam, and an even stronger nerve. It won’t be easy. And remember, sooner or later these girls will have to leave and stand on their own two feet in a society that doesn’t think much of them. They must go, so others can come in. You’ll have to harden that heart of yours sometimes.’

  I blessed Alan for thinking me tender-hearted, when I’d been so hard on him. But perhaps Fate, or God, or whatever rules our destiny, did have my best interests at heart, because although I had turned my back on an adoring husband I had gained a faithful friend for life.

  I was still a long way from realising the dream. Every week I saved the full amount of my increase in pay from John Ashe, but it was to be a long, slow process.

  I say I never saw Suzannah Rose Murchie again after the meeting in Rintoul’s basement. And it was true that I never saw her in the flesh. But one afternoon close to Christmas, when John Ashe was in Manchester – or so I believed – I found the studio door unlocked.

  I went in and took down the folder of photographs from the shelf. This time, on my own and without his cruel scrutiny, I spared myself nothing. I turned each page slowly, and studied the faces of the women whose humiliation he had recorded. Because they were humiliated: even the most beautiful, the rich and famous (and there were several I recognised), grinning and posturing and imagining that they were in their glory, he had reduced to the level of his creatures. After the first few pictures I was no longer shocked by what I saw – this time I knew what to expect. What made my flesh creep with disgust and revulsion was the collusion of these women in their own debasement, and brutalisation. They thought they were playing, but they were playing on the end of a chain. Now I knew why some tribes consider that a picture steals a part of their soul. These pictures had robbed the women of all of theirs, and the
worst of it was, they didn’t know.

  Only one or two had retained something, a kind of dignity, and they had done it by admitting their humiliation. Their sad-eyed acknowledgement, gazing back at me, made me want to weep. Parkes was one – a tall, beautiful sacrifice; where was she now? And Louise, in her way, another. Naked on all fours, back legs splayed towards the mirror behind her, she glared furiously, snarling, into the camera. Ashe had wanted a picture of a vicious bitch, and he had got one. But at least her rage was real, and not a self-regarding pose. She had got out.

  Halfway through the folder I found an unsealed white envelope slotted between the pages. The envelope was crisp and fresh; I was sure it hadn’t been there before. It contained another photograph, which I took out.

  It was of Suzannah, naked, and taken not long ago. Her pregnancy sat on her stick-thin frame like a bulging parasitic growth. Her tiny breasts were pushed apart by its obscene bulk. There were no props in the picture – no drapes, jewels, plants, cushions – not even a rug on the floor. She sat on the edge of the wooden platform with her legs splayed, arms at her sides. I noticed with a pang that there were paint stains on her hands. Her head hung, though whether in shame or because she had been told to pose in this way it was impossible to tell. Her hair was dirty and wild. She looked abject. But the worst thing was that her protruding stomach had been used as a canvas. Someone, presumably Ashe, had painted a face on it, in the rudimentary way of a child: two dots for eyes, a larger dot for a nose, a straight slash for a mouth. The left-hand side of this face was covered in marks, wild scribbles of paint. For the first time I understood the full force of the word defaced. At the bottom of this obscenity the artist had scrawled the initials ‘S.R.M.’

  I replaced the photograph carefully in its envelope, and then between the same pages of the folder, exactly where I’d found it. Then I put the folder back on the shelf, among the others, and left the studio. I had been sitting there, looking at the pictures, for over an hour, without moving. The act of rising, and walking, made my head swim and I only just made the lavatory in time before I was very ill.

  On Christmas Day I was staying with my mother. I gave her a pretty scarf she would never wear, but always treasure. She gave me lavender soap and talcum powder. We had a roast chicken, and my mother’s special plum duff – one of my father’s favourites which to my knowledge she hadn’t made since his death. Our day was peaceful, orderly, restrained; and peace, order and restraint were what my soul craved.