The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I believe you like her work, as I do.’

  ‘Very much – what I’ve seen of it.’

  A short pause followed during which I felt him looking at me, and I studied my hands, trying not to fidget. Then he said:

  ‘And what about my work – what you’ve seen of it?’

  It was the second time he’d probed me on the subject, and I was determined not to be drawn. Any power I had lay in keeping my counsel.

  ‘That’s not in the public domain. It’s not for me to judge.’

  ‘No, indeed.’ He sounded almost amused, but I knew better than to pick up on his mood. My defences, these days, were solid.

  ‘That’s what I like about you, Pamela – may I call you that?’

  ‘I should prefer Mrs Griffe.’

  He nodded. ‘What I like, and have always liked, about you is your ability to keep impersonal those things which should be so. It’s a rare quality, particularly among women.’

  ‘Business is business,’ I said. It was a clichéd response, and I dare say I looked the epitome of the discreet secretary perched there on the edge of my chair. Ashe couldn’t possibly have guessed how deeply, fiercely personal business had become to me, nor how wildly I was exulting in my concealment.

  ‘Precisely. Which is why I intend to ask you for something for which I’ve never asked anyone else. Woman or man.’

  I waited. It took all my concentration to keep my hands loose in my lap.

  ‘I ask for your loyalty.’

  ‘You already have it.’

  ‘Now, yes – I refer to the years to come.’

  ‘In other words, unconditionally.’

  ‘That is the word, yes.’ I didn’t answer, so he went on: ‘You see, Mrs Griffe, you are already in an extremely privileged position. There is no one in whom I can confide, except you.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that you had ever confided in me,’ I said.

  ‘No? But you’re closer to me than my wife.’

  It was an exact echo of a remark of Louise’s, which had made me laugh at the time. Still, I knew he never said anything without having previously calculated its effect. I could only hope he didn’t see how taken aback I was. In my anxiety to seem unperturbed, I answered almost too quickly:

  ‘I’m sorry if that’s the case.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise,’ he said, his voice softer and silkier with offence. ‘It’s not something over which you had any control, believe me. But as far as I’m concerned it’s an entirely satisfactory situation, and one I would like, with your agreement, to perpetuate.’

  ‘You want me to be your confidante?’

  ‘No. I would like things to remain as they are. Whether or not there is much work for you to do. I want you to remain – in place.’ How odd, I thought, that only days ago I was congratulating myself on being someone who no longer knew her place and now, it appeared, I had one, and was being invited to remain in it indefinitely.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said carefully. ‘What you’re asking is a big undertaking. I shall need time to think about it.’

  ‘Naturally. Take a week.’

  The whole conversation was so out-of-the-ordinary that I saw no harm in asking one more question.

  ‘May I ask – you’ll appreciate I have to know before reaching a decision – will I continue to be paid at or above the present rate? However much, or little, work I am doing?’

  ‘You mean – let’s see.’ He tilted his head quizzically. ‘Unconditionally?’

  I opened my mouth to answer, but he cut across me: ‘The answer is yes.’

  ‘And there is one more thing.’

  ‘The floor is yours.’

  ‘As you know, I have plans for a project of my own that I want to launch in due course. When I do, my position with you would have to take account of that. I should need the time and the freedom to do my own work, as well as yours.’

  ‘I shan’t be asking for any more of your time than you give me at present, though it might occasionally need to be more flexible. As for freedom, I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of it.’

  This was a lie, and he must have known that I recognised it as such. I had seen the red room, the photographs, Parkes, Louise – and Suzannah – more than anything, Suzannah . . . But we were engaged in a game of bluff in which, I sensed, I was very slightly ahead. I would say nothing. I, too, could be secretive.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’ll let me know this time next week?’ I nodded and he got to his feet. I did the same, and would have left there and then, but he went on: ‘I believe you told me this project of yours was some kind of charitable venture.’

  ‘It is, yes.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t the least desire to know more about it. But it occurred to me that you might be interested to know something about the good works of Ashe Enterprises.’

  ‘I didn’t—’ I began, but he cut in at once.

  ‘Know there were any? No, you wouldn’t. In fact I was misleading you slightly; they have nothing to do with the company, more a case of doing good by stealth.’ He smiled affably. ‘A miserable sinner’s bid for redemption.’

  I remembered seeing Ashe – ‘our Mr Jameson’ – in the darkened crypt, and again in the church quite recently. I waited.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘sit down for a few more minutes. I’d like to show you something.’

  I obeyed. He went into the other section of the room, where the portrait hung. Beyond me, the rest of the house was very still. I wondered where his wife was, and whether she had any idea I was here, or what had taken place between us.

  Ashe returned, carrying a framed photograph about eighteen inches by nine, and handed it to me.

  ‘ “C” Company,’ he said, sitting down. ‘The men of my regiment with whom I served during the war.’

  I looked at the rows of faces, mostly young, the sharply peaked caps lending gravitas to their solemn expressions. The officers, many of them no older, sat in the front row. A company of Matthews, ready for anything except what lay in store.

  ‘Which one is you?’ I asked.

  ‘I can understand your difficulty. It was a long time ago. I’m third row, sixth from the right.’

  I followed his directions with my finger, but when I got there I wouldn’t have known that it was him. Just another young soldier, straight-backed and clear-faced.

  ‘You weren’t an officer?’

  He didn’t answer; his eyes were still on the picture. ‘Can you see Lieutenant Christopher Jarvis?’

  I scanned the faces, and pointed. ‘There?’

  ‘Right first time. He hasn’t changed as much as me.’

  ‘You were friends?’ I ventured.

  ‘Comrades,’ he said, correcting rather than agreeing with me. ‘Brothers in arms. And fortunate – the majority of those men are dead.’

  ‘It was a terrible time,’ I said quietly. ‘A terrible waste. My own husband was killed in the war.’

  The minute I’d said this I regretted it, and was afraid that I had given away too much, but to my relief Ashe either didn’t hear or chose to ignore my remark.

  ‘The conduct of private soldiers in war is extraordinary,’ he said reflectively. ‘Their faith in their leaders, and each other; their courage, their capacity for humour and comradeship. The nobility of ordinary men and boys was endlessly fascinating to me. Inexplicable.’

  ‘You were one of them,’ I pointed out. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Never. I served and fought alongside them, but I was always an outsider in the ranks. Not well liked – but that didn’t bother me.’

  I handed him the photograph and he placed it carefully, face down, on the table next to him. ‘Since the war I’ve done what I can to help the less fortunate survivors. The ones who left part of themselves out there and hadn’t the strength to cope when they got back.’

  ‘I’ve seen you in the square,’ I said. ‘And in St Xavier’s.’

  ‘They do good work,
and I give them money to help them continue. Money’s easy to give if you have it. Rather less often, I give time.’ He was staring at me fixedly. I wished I still had the photograph in my hands, for something to look at. ‘You know, Mrs Griffe,’ he said, ‘there is very little that disgusts or shocks me. It’s an advantage that I begin each day by looking in the mirror.’

  I said nothing. He went on: ‘Consequently I make it my business to acquaint myself with men by whom other people are repelled – poor, deranged, drunken, crippled, filthy men, men that our society treats shabbily – on the grounds that some of them might have been in that photograph. Or another like it.’

  For the first, and probably the only, time I believed that he was seeking my approval. But I had no intention of giving it.

  ‘You must find that satisfying,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Right. I mustn’t detain you any longer, you’re a busy young woman.’

  He didn’t, as he had with the vicar, show me out himself, but rang for the butler. When he arrived, Ashe said: ‘I’ll see you in the office next Tuesday. Business as usual.’

  The study door was closed. The butler walked just ahead of me across the hall. The huge space was cold. There seemed to be no other lights on downstairs.

  The butler brought my coat and helped me on with it. He opened the door on to the street and stood holding it for me. A wave of icy air enveloped me as I put on my hat and tied my scarf. From some far-off room in the upper reaches of the house I heard, tiny but distinct, the sound of a baby crying.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I could hear a baby crying now, as I stood here in the scrubby, ill-kempt back garden of Woodlands; the desultory crying of an ordinary, healthy baby asking to be fed, or fretful because it had fed too quickly. The sound didn’t make my flesh creep, or fill my mind with terrible imaginings. On the contrary, it was a comfort, a sign that all was right with the world – the cry of a baby safe in its mother’s imperfect, loving care.

  Notwithstanding the trials and tribulations of the last few hours, I had achieved everything that I set out to achieve. What did it matter if the locals saw me as that daft woman who ran the hostel up the road? Their ignorance gave me a perverse satisfaction. They could never in a million years have guessed how my eccentric philanthropy was financed – and if they could, how astonished they would have been!

  I worked for John Ashe for another sixteen years, until his death just after the war. We became as close as two people could be who were not disposed to share the least intimacy. By the end, there was almost nothing I didn’t know about his business, or the people he dealt with. I knew the names of all the women he’d photographed, and of those who were his agents, running other women, and of the managers of his clubs up and down the country. I travelled, sometimes with him and sometimes on his behalf, and the people I dealt with saw me as his familiar. Several times I went to Paris, to the elegant appartement of M. Cabouchet who ran the Libellule ‘international escort agency’ – he was Ashe’s Gallic equivalent, as smooth as silk and not to be trifled with. Most of the others, even Dimarco, recognised my position and my influence, and I’m afraid I can’t pretend I didn’t play, in my own small way, on the resentful respect in their eyes. I learned to enjoy my little bit of borrowed power.

  No wonder Ashe had made a fortune. As I had observed, and he had as good as told me, the strength of his empire lay in its most intangible resource, human nature; particularly the pride, vanity and weakness of women. In all the years I worked for him I never saw him show the slightest respect for a woman. Oh, he could affect good manners towards women for form’s sake, but they were all grist to his mill – creatures, for him to use for pleasure, or profit, usually both. He didn’t like women, and I was sure he could never love one. No wonder he married an object – ‘the most beautiful woman in London’ – as brittle and cold as a diamond. She needed only what his money could buy. And for him that was a modest price to pay for the pseudo-respectability which marriage afforded. Louise was quite wrong to suppose that he was deprived of marital love. He neither sought nor wanted it. In that respect, theirs was the perfect marriage.

  You’ll notice I say ‘they’ when referring to the women in his life because in all modesty I make an exception in the case of myself. I’ve thought about it often over the years. He may originally have employed me out of curiosity. Perhaps I represented some sort of amusing challenge – a sensible, businesslike girl for him to explore and manipulate. There was no doubt that his powerful, pervasive influence had caused me to turn away from Alan. But after that I had somehow (and I can scarcely take credit for something I don’t quite understand) managed to defend my privacy and preserve my independence. My dream of a place of safety for women and children, and my dream of revenge, were one and the same. And because of them I not only survived, but in every sense prospered in his employment.

  Don’t misunderstand me, we were never friends. In fact, as I understood him more, I liked him less. His attachment to the city’s derelicts – by no means all of them war veterans – I found sentimental and self-regarding, more to do with himself than with them.

  Whatever he’d said about doing good by stealth I was convinced it was an exercise in vanity, which may seem an odd word to use of a man like him, but in his way he was the vainest man I ever knew. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I saw his other work as a kind of perversion. He associated with these men out of curiosity: to him they were specimens, who held a certain fascination for him but inspired no real pity. Besides, the money with which he endowed St Xavier’s and similar ventures was blood money – I’d seen the record of that suffering with my own eyes.

  In the late nineteen thirties he went to the States and came back two months later with a much-improved face. When I told Dorothy she said now that’s what she called charity work, it was about time he thought of the rest of us.

  I believed him when he said he had never been popular with his army comrades. There was no warmth in John Ashe – no pleasure in the small weave of life, no capacity for ordinary human happiness. Something had gone bad in him a long time ago and it coloured whatever he did. I suspected that as well as the pornography, prostitution and blackmail that made up his stock in trade he engaged in much worse things. When people left Ashe’s employment, they suddenly disappeared. It was eerie. But I never enquired about anyone because of a distinct sense that to do so was to endanger them further: my discretion worked both ways.

  In the spring of 1930, exactly a year after coming to work at Crompton Row, I made a down payment on a modest little terraced house in Queen’s Park, off the Kilburn High Road. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a boxroom; downstairs, a kitchen, and a parlour. Apart from the kitchen sink the only water came from a tap in the outside lean-to which also housed the usual offices. At the back was a small yard, in the front a postage stamp of ‘garden’ separated from its neighbour by a snaggle-toothed fence and from the road by a privet hedge. I made two growing-boxes out of old drawers, filled them with wallflowers and petunias and put one front and back. The flowers flourished at the front of the house, but grew straggly and sad at the back, where they didn’t get enough sun. The next summer I put them both in the front and had a wonderful show.

  I loved that house with a passion, and a devotion, that most women reserve for their husbands and children. It was mine – courtesy of the mortgage company, but still mine. I spent every free moment and spare penny on it. I cleaned and made curtains, and kept it neat as a new pin. My mother should have been proud of me, but if so she wasn’t letting on. When I finally persuaded her to come and visit one Sunday she was restless and unappreciative, as if she were there under duress and couldn’t wait to be gone. At lunch she pushed my unexceptionable meat and veg around the plate suspiciously, and as she sat in the front room her eyes were constantly darting around, making calculations and assessments, and her hands fingered things for quality and cleanliness.

  ‘So Mum, what do you think?’ I asked her.
In spite of everything, her approval mattered to me. But it was as if the sophistication and understanding she had displayed about my separation from Alan had been at the expense of tolerance in other areas.

  ‘It’s a bit big for one,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised you’d want all this to be rattling around in.’

  Her ‘all this’ made it sound as if I were living in the equivalent of the Brighton Pavilion, but I was determined not to rise.

  I said, as pleasantly and casually as possible: ‘I’m thinking of taking lodgers.’

  ‘What on earth would you want to do that for?’

  ‘I’ve had it in mind for some time.’

  ‘You never said.’

  I refrained from pointing out the obvious, that I knew what her reaction would be. ‘No – well, I didn’t know how soon I’d be able to get a house.’

  ‘But you don’t want to be doing for other people!’

  She kept on talking about what I did or didn’t want, as if she knew what that was better than I did myself. But to tell her now the kind of people I intended ‘doing for’ would be like a red rag to a bull.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll be very careful who I take. And I like the idea of being my own boss – not being answerable to anyone.’

  She gave a shrug that was like a sniff. ‘Strangers in your own home, Pam . . . They’ll be round your neck like a millstone.’

  I took deep breaths. ‘Anyway, I’m going to give it a try. But it’s quite a way off at the moment.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You never know, you might—’ She paused, and I knew exactly what she had been going to say. She’d been about to mention marriage, but in a somewhat tardy fit of tact she changed it to: ‘You might change your mind.’

  It was a relief when she’d gone, but I didn’t hold any of this against her. The contradiction, as she saw it, of my single domesticity discomforted her. She was still disappointed to see me on my own, and my contented self-sufficiency made her feel usurped. A married daughter with a well-run home was one thing. An unmarried daughter, out to business, most of whose life remained resolutely mysterious, but who still managed relatively dust-free skirting boards, was quite another.