The Nightingale's Nest

by Sarah Harrison

  I had taken the first step towards realising my ambition, but it was a short one, and many more remained. In fact I was by no means sure what the next step was. All my time during the week was taken up with my work for the Jarvises and, increasingly, John Ashe. In order to help anyone, I – or someone – had to be there.

  When I’d been living in Queen’s Park for just about a year, Dorothy left the Jarvises to take up a job in a shoe shop. It was no better paid, but nearer to where she lived and one up, she told me, from domestic service. To begin with the whole household, including me, suffered shock, but things had never been quite the same since her ‘illness’ and pretty soon Amanda broke with tradition and took on a live-in couple, Mr and Mrs Speight. He looked after the heavy jobs, the garden, and the car, and she was housekeeper. They spent their time off at the old-time dancing club in Archway, and they didn’t mind the mural.

  They were a nice couple, but I missed Dorothy, and their arrival meant I had less to do at Crompton Terrace and spent more of my working days at the Sumpter. Since over the corresponding period I was doing more for John Ashe, that fitted in quite well.

  I’ve always been what you might call an open-minded atheist but every so often something happens to make me suspect the existence of a benign deity of some sort. One summer evening I heard a knock on the door and I opened it to find Dorothy standing there. She’d been promising to come and visit me for such a long time that I somehow doubted she ever would. And now here she was in the low evening sunshine, a smiling rebuke to my faithlessness.

  ‘Guess who?’ she said. ‘Well, I never . . . Aren’t you snug!’

  I showed her round my shoebox of a domain with considerable pride. I sensed her surprise that I was actually managing: she probably thought me as impractical as the Jarvises when it came down to it, that I was playing the dilettante when I helped out with chores. But unlike my mother, Dorothy was openly admiring and generous in her praise.

  ‘Tell you what, Mrs G,’ she said when we were sitting in the kitchen with tea and biscuits. ‘You’ll make some lucky man a lovely wife.’

  Knowing her as I did, I was pretty sure she was sounding me out.

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ I said cheerfully, ‘I keep house for myself.’

  ‘Want some help around the place?’ she asked.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Do you know anyone?’

  ‘Might do.’

  ‘It doesn’t pay much.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to.’

  ‘And it’s living-in, of course.’

  ‘Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said. By now I was certain we understood one another, and that her own involvement was under discussion. ‘I’d want to have another lodger pretty soon, so there’d be more work.’

  ‘A bit of work never hurt anyone.’

  I smiled. ‘When can you start?’

  She smiled back. ‘End of the month?’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  So Dorothy, bless her, hitched her sturdy wagon to my distinctly uncertain star. The relationship between us never changed, at least not outwardly. She never quite let go the manner of a slightly importunate, and impertinent, housemaid, and I kept something of the prim, businesslike secretary. This was because it suited us to do so. We were firm friends, but the maintenance of these superficial differences helped in the forming of a working partnership that was to last for what at this moment counts as for ever.

  Suzannah’s fate didn’t bear thinking about. Not long after she’d had the baby she died, alone, in rented rooms in Bermondsey. She had initially gone to her friends down in Brighton, but left after a few days, they didn’t know where to – like everyone, they were accustomed to her moving on when it suited her and without explanation. The Jarvises only found out some time afterwards; it had been a lonely death, the few, pathetic facts of which became blurred and confused by posterity. Apparently the post-mortem showed she had died of peritonitis (though Alan had said that in single girls that was often a euphemism for post-natal complications of some sort). Whatever the case, she must have been in terrible pain at the end, and still, somehow, turned her face to the wall.

  I assumed Ashe would want to know of her death since she was, after all, the mother of his and Felicia’s child. But when I told him, all he said was: ‘Really? I’m sorry to hear that.’

  As far as he was concerned, Suzannah was erased from the record. But I noticed that not long afterwards he acquired another of her paintings – he must have known the value would go up. The bleak, desolate nature of her death, and his icy disregard, made me all the more determined to succeed in my enterprise. It might be too late for Suzannah, but I had only just begun.

  Louise, on the other hand, flourished. In her case my early fears and gloomy prognostications proved unfounded. She was what is now known as ‘a survivor’. For years she lived as the pampered mistress of a series of infatuated and indulgent men, having in each case the good sense to move on to fresh fields before it became necessary to do so. She had a true courtesan’s mentality, and managed to bring a spirited independence to what was – materially anyway – a situation of complete dependence.

  Needless to say she was delighted with my plans, especially when she heard they were largely funded by John Ashe. She came to visit in a Bentley with a driver, her mink wrap, potty hat and vertiginous heels making her as rare as a cheetah in our road.

  ‘Oh, but it’s too delicious!’ she cried. ‘Does he have any idea what you’re doing?’

  I shook my head. ‘None. It’s not his business.’

  ‘It certainly is not! Here, I want to give you some money, too.’

  She opened her crocodile-skin bag, took out her wallet and handed me a sheaf of notes. I pushed them away.

  ‘Louise! Put it away, I can’t possibly take all that.’

  ‘Yes you can. You must! I want you to have an enormous mansion full of fallen women.’

  ‘They’re not fallen women,’ I said, but I was laughing, and she took advantage of this to press the money into my hand.

  ‘Please, Pamela – indulge me. And I’m going to give you more whenever I feel like it, too, so there. Bobby is absolutely rolling and completely besotted. Provided I buy the odd diamond bracelet to satisfy his ego, he doesn’t mind what I do with his money.’

  I did indulge her, of course. It was impossible to resist, when she took such pleasure from it all. Her occasional visits were like being called upon by a particularly exotic species of royalty – flighty, glamorous and amusing – and I justified my acceptance of her donations on the grounds that it would have been simply too po-faced to refuse. Besides, I was well aware that my philanthropy, to be in the least effective, had to take advantage of whatever was on offer.

  Dorothy was dazzled by Louise, and perhaps the tiniest bit jealous. She had no need to be. Neither friendship was conventional and I made no comparison between them. When I told her the story of the young man smuggled out of the house wearing Louise’s clothes she shrieked with delight.

  ‘She never!’

  ‘I promise it’s true.’

  ‘She’s always been a bit of a girl, then.’

  ‘She has. Like you, Dorothy.’

  ‘Me? I’m not that sort!’

  Those few words taught me a lesson I was to forget at my peril in the years to come. Bad luck was one thing, loose behaviour another, and it could never be assumed that the one was the offshoot of the other. Dorothy’s admiration for Louise was genuine, but it went only so far. In Dorothy’s eyes Louise, no matter how good a show she put on, was ‘that sort’.

  The distinction, I realised, was love. Dorothy, who I was certain my mother would have described as ‘no better than she ought to be’, had loved her faithless, pale-eyed Irish boy, in the same way Alan loved me. She had accepted him as he was, and accepted too her own powerlessness. She had not wavered. Whatever latitude she had permitted previous admirers, she had only given
herself to him, and had borne the consequences philosophically. Louise, scot-free and heart-whole, was another kettle of fish altogether. In all the years we were to work together, this difference remained constant between Dorothy and me: in my eyes the girls were victims, in hers they had slipped up. In this she was very like my mother.

  Our first girl, Leslie, seven and a half months pregnant, arrived when we were in the chaotic process of having a bathroom put on at the back. Leslie’s son, Martin, was delivered at home two days later, ‘not quite cooked’ as the midwife put it but still weighing in at a healthy seven pounds. The builder’s men must have thought us all quite mad, but Dorothy kept them sweet. Maybe word got round through them, because almost at once another young woman arrived on the doorstep, this time clutching the infant she’d refused to give up for adoption. Dorothy moved into my bedroom to make space for her. Six months on, she and I were sleeping on camp beds in what had been the front room and the little house was bulging at the seams.

  They say God protects drunks and little children. I had no right to expect divine protection of any sort, and Dorothy and I were abstemious, so the babies must have been the reason we got through those early years. I had not wanted to turn people away, but neither had I ever intended so swiftly to become the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, when I was still working for the Jarvises and Ashe. In 1937 I handed in my notice with the Jarvises, to their dismay and our mutual sadness. They were understanding, and even gave me a donation for the house. I still saw them from time to time and they always made me welcome and sent me invitations to whatever was on at the Sumpter.

  During the war the seamier side of Ashe’s business declined somewhat. Perhaps people had more important things on their minds. The clubs flourished, though; to these he added the organisation of entertainment for troops. He put on shows in big halls around the suburbs of London; mostly they featured scantily clad showgirls with the odd smutty comedian thrown in to give the appearance of ‘variety’. I dare say he thought of these shows as part of his ‘charity work’, but they didn’t impress me.

  Dorothy and I, with our shifting population of dependants, resisted evacuation and got used to nights in the tiny coal cellar and under the kitchen table and, as the war drew on, in the Anderson Shelter. I vowed that when the war eventually ended I would go all out to purchase a bigger place.

  In the snowbound winter of 1946, John Ashe crashed his car in terrible conditions on a lonely stretch of road around the Devil’s Punchbowl. He’d been on his way back from Brighton and, unusually, had been driving himself. His funeral at a crematorium in North London was sparsely attended. Mourners – if that was what you could call us – comprised Felicia, as thin and sharply elegant as Wallis Simpson in tailored black, their adopted daughter Beatrice, the Jarvises, a handful of domestic and business employees, myself – and Louise, unashamedly splendid in mink and pearls. There was no encomium of any kind, nor any hymns. Just the prescribed words, expressionlessly delivered, and the coffin disposed of. A formal wreath of white lilies ‘from Felicia’ lay on the coffin. Louise walked to the front of the chapel and placed a single buttermilk-coloured rose next to it. So like her, I thought, to revel in this moment when she gave less than a damn about Ashe; and just as well, too, that Felicia’s face was heavily veiled.

  The girl, Beatrice, who must have been about seventeen, was taller than her stepmother, but had yet to acquire her poise. She was slim and gangling in a too-dressy hat and tailored coat which made her look even more awkward. Something simpler would have suited her, and the occasion, better. When she and Felicia walked down the aisle at the end of the service I studied her face, trying to catch something of Suzannah there, but she seemed all her father’s – sallow and dark, with a brooding quality about her. She struck me as unhappy, and not only because of the occasion. I thought with a pang that Suzannah would have known how to dress this changeling child, and how wonderful she would have looked in the flowing, bohemian clothes her mother had favoured. To me, she seemed still that distant, crying baby that I’d heard years ago in the Ashes’ mansion; but she probably didn’t know the real reason for her cries, and they would never be heard now.

  I missed Ashe only in the sense that he had been a part of my life for more than sixteen years. It was huge relief to be free of the habit of secrecy that he had imposed, and no longer obliged to treat with the cruel, dark underside of the business which had made him rich.

  But it turned out I wasn’t to be free of it. In his will, John Ashe left me, without comment or condition, twenty thousand pounds: a fortune in those days and more than enough to buy the large property I needed, with some left over for myself, my mother, anything I wanted. It was stupendous! Still, even as I crowed and exulted, and Dorothy and I literally danced like dervishes in the kitchen, disturbing the babies, I knew that our pact still held: Ashe had purchased my future – and my silence.

  Alan had married early on in the war. I was pleased, both because it relieved my own conscience and because no one deserved happiness more than him. His wife, Heather, was a nurse when he met her, and the picture he sent me showed the two of them outside the kirk in Morningside, flanked by her beaming parents. One look at their faces showed what she was able to give, which had been beyond me. Like me, she was small and dark, but there the resemblance ended. Heather was pretty – ‘bonny’ was the word that sprang to mind – and over the next couple of years they had two children, Donal and William. Then I heard nothing for some time. He was always a better letter-writer than me and I was almost buried beneath the demands of the life that I’d made for myself. It had become accepted between us that two or three times a year he would write, and I would respond a good deal less fully, when time and energy allowed, usually around Christmas.

  I heard from him again in the strange, euphoric period following Ashe’s bequest. Heather had died. Alan, now a widower with two small boys to raise, was taking a new job at a private psychiatric clinic near Lancaster. He had found a housekeeper – ‘a motherly woman who will spoil the boys and be strict with me’ – and of his loss said only that ‘I can never replace her, just as I could never replace you’. If there was any sort of invitation, no matter how discreet, implicit in the letter I chose to ignore it, and after that our communications became even less frequent. In 1954 he got married again, to the housekeeper, Irene. He was lonely and the boys needed a mother: it was a marriage of solid, cheerful companionship, and the last I heard (in the Christmas card which is now our only connection) they were still contentedly together.

  I saw Beatrice Ashe only once again, a year after her father’s funeral. It was the purest chance. I was walking down Bowne Street, having visited the latest exhibition at the gallery, when I spotted her on the other side of the road, talking to a young man. The impression I got was of warm enthusiasm on his side, and chilling indifference on hers. Oddly, it was her I felt for. She looked so utterly out of place in the situation. The young man, hardly more than a youth, was confident, garrulous, full of smiles and swank. She had become something of a beauty but an unorthodox one, taller than her admirer, ill at ease with his attentions. She was an heiress, and must have had to put up with a lot of this kind of thing, but she seemed to have acquired none of the simple social skills for dealing with it. She scuffed her shoe on the pavement, folded her arms, unfolded them and thrust her hands into her pockets. At one point she glanced absent-mindedly over the road in my direction. She could not possibly have remembered me from the funeral, but I still froze and pretended to search for something in my handbag. When I next looked her arm was raised, hailing a taxi, and when it pulled up she climbed in with almost indecent haste, nearly trapping the young man’s fingers in the door as she slammed it shut. To avoid his entreaties, she turned her face to the window on my side as the cab pulled away, and for the first time, in her wary expression that was both fey and fierce, I caught something of her mother. It was like seeing a captive animal released – I was swept by a tremendous sense of relief, and pri
de, that after all Suzannah had been through she had not been completely subsumed by Ashe, but lived on in her daughter.

  That summer I bought a larger house and Dorothy and I and our whole establishment moved to a property not far from Woodlands, where we finally ended up. My policy of never turning really desperate women away, nor turning them out, had proved to be self-regulating. In most cases, once they had recovered themselves and learned to look after their babies (by no means the natural process I’d always imagined), they moved on after six months or so. But we were so busy, I wondered what on earth I had done with my time till now. I had somewhat recklessly taken on responsibility for people’s lives, and that meant I was never off duty.

  ‘You’re barmy,’ was how Dorothy summed it up.

  To which my reply was: ‘So that makes two of us.’

  As time went by, my visits to the Jarvises became more and more those of a friend than a former employee. They didn’t change – Christopher was still as debonair as ever, and Amanda as apparently frail and distraite. But as they moved towards old age the constitutions of both were a tribute to the leisurely existence they’d always led. A testament, if you like, to the health-giving properties of happiness, and living well. I had been replaced by a smart, pretty girl who had been a secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture during the war, and Chef had gone, so the Speights looked after all their domestic needs. They worked hard, probably reckoning they had expectations. To keep Mrs Speight happy, the kitchen acquired an electric cooker, and a refrigerator – Dorothy was astounded when I told her! The house guests came and went as usual, some getting older and crankier (Rintoul had knee trouble), the new ones young and ‘bohemian’, but no more averse to the Jarvises’ kindly patronage. Bob Sullivan had married a canned-food heiress, and they went to the States for the wedding, but Christopher Jarvis had enjoyed a couple of romantic passions since then, and the two of them had a wonderful time mixing with the American millionaire set. By then I’d formed the firm opinion that far from being silly or put-upon, Amanda was a natural sophisticate, who loved her erring husband and knew that if he was happy, so was she. If theirs was a lavender marriage, it was a sweetly scented one. When Georgina, belatedly after a series of miscarriages, gave birth to her daughter Daphne, they were the most doting honorary grandparents imaginable.