A Nightingale in the Sycamore

by Jane Beaufort

  She had already been regaled with sherry before the meal started, and she declined anything further to drink with it. She had her coffee served to her in the lounge, but the dining-room before she left it impressed her with its originality, even if the colour-scheme was not one she would have chosen herself. In this case the carpet was black, and the curtains letter-box scarlet. She could not somehow imagine herself enjoying a hearty breakfast in such surroundings in the same way that she enjoyed a hearty breakfast at the Meadow House.

  When she returned to the lounge she tried hard to ignore the photograph on the occasional table, concentrating instead on a Dutch flower-piece above the fireplace. And it was while she was admiring it, and savouring her coffee, that she was surprised to hear voices outside the door. She thought at first it was Harwell admitting a visitor, but when the door was flung open she saw that it was not Harwell, and of the two people standing looking in at her only one was a complete stranger.

  Annette le Clair was still flourishing her key in her hand, and she called over her shoulder to the manservant, who had emerged a little belatedly from his kitchen premises:

  “I thought I wouldn’t disturb you!”

  She wore a daffodil-yellow suit of heavy corded silk, and she looked enchanting. Her hair was braided about her head in a way that called attention to its patrician smallness, and instead of appearing golden and smiting to-day, her eyes were deep and dark and mysterious like pansies. Behind her a tall man approaching middle-age, with slightly greying hair and distinguished features, the possessor of a most attractive voice, exclaimed:

  “Why, hallo! Who’s this? Harwell entertaining visitors on his own!”

  Annette smiled slowly, recognisingly, at Virginia.

  “It’s Miss Summers, isn’t it?” she said, moving into the middle of the room. “I was thinking about phoning you some time to-night, Miss Summers. How is Charles?”

  “Better—much better,” Virginia replied, disturbed because the man’s eyes, in addition to taking in all the details of her appearance, seemed to be twinkling at her a little. Annette introduced them, and he sat down in a chair near to her and offered her his cigarette-case. His hands were beautiful—almost as beautiful as Charles’s, she noticed—and he was impeccably dressed. He looked as if he was very well accustomed to backgrounds such as this, while still retaining a certain masculine forcefulness, and his name, it appeared, was Martin Sutherland.

  “So you’re the Miss Summers who has been taking care of Charles,” he said. “Lucky Charles!” he added, after a moment of thoughtfulness and continued study of her.

  Virginia felt the embarrassed colour steal up to her cheeks. She was almost painfully aware of looking shabby by comparison with Miss le Clair, who was almost too breathtakingly exquisite, while the faint perfume she used was so subtle that it actually did something disturbing to the senses. Virginia thought of the hasty dab of eau-de-Cologne she had applied to her handkerchief before she left, and hoped that the age of her grey flannel suit could not be worked out at a single glance, or even after several glances. She was, however, sure that the little round collar of the white blouse she wore with it made her look like an unfashionable schoolgirl.

  “Yes, lucky Charles!” Annette echoed Martin Sutherland in a faintly cooing voice, curling herself up like a kitten on a damask-covered settee. “Lucky that he wasn’t killed! How often have I told him not to drive so fast?”—She made a little gesture with her hands—“So often that it would seem he has always been bent on suicide!”

  “But not when he was with you, I’m sure, Annette,” Martin murmured at her smilingly. “No man would wish to commit suicide while he was with you.” She smiled back at him with slow charm.

  “You, Martin, are a flatterer,” she accused. “But,” she added, almost naively, “I like flattery, even when I am aware it is flattery.” She looked across again at Virginia. “Tell me more about Charles,” she commanded—“how exactly he is now that his temperature, it would appear, has settled at last! And,” with a bright sparkle of amusement which made Virginia feel as if someone had crossed swords with her and worsted her, “it was his temperature you were so very much concerned about on the other occasion when we met, wasn’t it?”

  “He has no temperature at all now,” Virginia replied, “and to-day he is up and sitting in the garden.” Annette clapped her hands.

  “Oh, but that is good!—that is wonderful!” she declared. “I will go down and see him—let me see, when can I spare the time to go and see him...?”

  “I’m sure Mr. Wickham will be delighted if you can spare the time to visit him,” Virginia heard herself saying with prim formality.

  Annette’s eyes positively gleamed at her this time. There was no disguising the amusement.

  “Oh, yes,” she said softly, very softly. “Charles, I have no doubt, will be delighted to see me!”

  “You don’t by any chance run a kind of nursing-home, do you, Miss Summers?” Sutherland asked Virginia. “Or was it purely by chance that Charles had his accident right on your doorstep?”

  “It was purely by chance.” Virginia thought secretly that they were both inclined to treat the subject of Charles’s accident a little lightly, and she added that it could have been disastrous for Mr. Wickham.

  Martin nodded more soberly.

  “I agree,” he said. “But Charles is not unlike a cat, you know, and he seems to have any number of lives. I have known him take risks before, and get away with them. He was probably travelling like the devil, for some whim of his own, just before he crashed this time, and as Annette has just said, he’s lucky to be alive.”

  “But it was not in order to meet le diable that he was travelling so fast,” Annette murmured, before demanding a cigarette of Martin. As he lighted it for her she blew a cloud of smoke right into his face, and looked at him with a mixture of provocation and meaning through it. “That much, at least, I do know!”

  Martin’s lazily amused glance flickered over her, grew noticeably admiring, and then, as he lay back comfortably in his chair, transferred itself to Virginia. He talked to her pleasantly in his attractive voice, and the admiration remained in his eyes.

  Annette rang the bell for Harwell, and when the manservant appeared, demanded fresh coffee. She gave her order as if she was quite accustomed to commanding Harwell, and in his manner towards her there was no suggestion that he resented her familiarity in his master’s flat. And when he went away to fetch the coffee Annette stood up and wandered over to the roses in front of her own prominent photograph and rearranged them.

  “I must come along here to-night and do something about these,” she said. “I’ll bring some fresh flowers for the dining-room, too.”

  She looked across at Virginia, something very odd and almost challenging in her glorious eyes. Virginia interpreted it as:

  “You may be looking after him at the moment, but I know all about him!—I am part of his life!...”

  Virginia felt suddenly that she wanted to make her escape, and she did so rather hurriedly.

  Harwell placed a suitcase containing a few of his master’s possessions in the boot of the car, and Annette and Martin stood watching from the window as she drove away from the flat. Martin had said, when they shook hands:

  “I hope we meet again, Miss Summers! Perhaps you’ll permit me to visit Charles when Annette finds time to do so?”

  “Of course,” she answered.

  Annette merely smiled at her briefly, said she would be seeing her soon, but did not offer her hand.

  Before returning to the Meadow House, Virginia decided to pay a fleeting call on Lady Wickham, and give her a few personal reassurances about her son. As she had expected, Lady Wickham’s small mews-flat was every bit as comfortable as her son’s, but the furnishings were more old-fashioned, and her lounge was full of mementoes of Charles’s early days. There he was with his first cricket-bat, standing side-by-side on the mantelpiece with himself in an Eton suit. As a baby he appeared to ha
ve been chubby, but dark-eyed and adorable, and as a young man of twenty-one he was enough to justify any fond mother’s pride. His first musical score was framed and hung on the wall, with its striped Regency wallpaper; and there were leatherbound volumes of press-cuttings which Lady Wickham reserved for the entertainment of her friends, and for her own pleasurable consumption during leisure hours.

  Lady Wickham herself was rather a surprise to Virginia, who had expected someone rather more matronly. She was extremely tiny, and extremely dainty, and in spite of her arthritis plainly submitted herself to the hands of beauty specialists and so forth quite often. Her hair was beautifully dressed, and treated to a delicate blue rinse which made the most of silvery curls, and her complexion was quite faultless. She had Charles’s arresting brown eyes, only in her case they were several shades darker, and provided a clue to her nationality. Her mother was an Italian, and her father part Italian, and she was only a quarter English—so that, Virginia thought, was the reason why Charles sometimes struck her as not quite English.

  There was a sleepiness in his eyes, at times—an indolence that hinted of a warmer clime than England.

  To complete a picture of middle-aged perfection, Lady Wickham was dressed with little regard for expense, and seated at her tea-table in her dainty drawing-room she looked elegant and completely at ease.

  She was particularly charming to Virginia, and grateful for her visit.

  “But for my crippling arthritis I would certainly have visited my son before this,” she tried to make Virginia understand quite clearly. “I have been a martyr to it for years, and I find travelling in cars quite painful. Every winter, of course, I go abroad, but the summers in this country are never quite kind to me. I often think I would be wise if I made up my mind to live abroad permanently.”

  Virginia murmured something appropriate, and her hostess looked at her more critically.

  “Somehow, you’re not in the least what I expected, Miss Summers,” she confessed. “I expected an older woman—perhaps middle-aged! Your voice is serious on the telephone, and you appear to have a great deal of common sense—much more than young people normally have nowadays. I felt quite safe in leaving Charles to your care.”

  “Thank you,” Virginia acknowledged the compliment.

  “But, perhaps if I’d known you were quite so young!...” Her smile softened the implication of her words, however. “And Charles is not impressionable—not really! He sees too much of women, young, old, all ages—in fact, they make themselves a nuisance to him sometimes! They embarrass him by falling in love with him, and that sort of thing.” She looked rather speculatively at Virginia. “I expect, having seen quite a bit of Charles by this time, you know what I mean?”

  Virginia admitted that she had a fairly shrewd idea. She actually felt suddenly a trifle sick and revolted—embarrassed him by falling in love with him! She felt the colour burning like a revealing banner in her cheeks, and hoped Lady Wickham’s eyes, resting on her, were not as shrewd as they looked. She remembered Iris, and her complete capitulation—her worshipping eyes whenever they dwelt almost hungrily on Charles, and wanted to rush home and make certain that Iris was behaving with decorum. She remembered Annette, hanging over the roses in Charles’s room—entering his flat at all hours of the day, apparently, and with his permission!—and recalled that cool challenge in her eyes when they had looked directly at herself. Annette was another, in spite of two husbands, an accumulation of wealth and a promising career ahead of her, who was prepared to fight for him if necessary!

  At least Virginia had proved herself sophisticated enough to recognise that in her eyes!

  And she herself...? Oh, no, she said silently, determinedly, feeling the sickness, nevertheless, spreading like a wave through her body. She started to gather up her gloves and handbag.

  “Must you go?” Lady Wickham said. “It was delightful of you to call—so kind!” And then, as Virginia rose: “You did say Charles is in the care of a trained nurse, didn’t you? And an excellent local doctor?”

  “They are both excellent,” Virginia assured her, but as she made her way out to the car she wondered exactly what type of young woman Lady Wickham was looking forward to as a daughter-in-law. For she undoubtedly would possess a daughter-in-law one day, and she felt secretly certain that Lady Wickham’s ambitions for her son were high.

  Annette, she was somehow just as certain, would not measure up to them... And anyone like herself would be right out of the picture! Hence the warning, “You did say my son is in the care of a trained nurse, didn’t you?”

  Lady Wickham would no longer rest easily in her bed at night if she thought that he was in the sole care of someone like Virginia!

  Virginia drove home slowly and thoughtfully. The day, although she had felt quite excited when she started off, had disappointed her. Apart from her excellent lunch provided by Harwell, and her meeting with Martin Sutherland—who had somehow struck her as a very pleasant and friendly type, although he was in close attendance on Annette le Clair—it had provided her with few high spots, and had actually fallen distinctly flat. She had even felt conscious of depression after leaving Lady Wickham’s mews-flat, and she was not often depressed.

  As she neared the river the day was flaming towards' a triumphant close. It had been very hot during the afternoon—almost stiflingly hot in London—and now the atmosphere was quivering with a kind of carefully stored-up heat. The trees beside the river were very still, for the breeze that had disturbed them earlier in the day had died, and behind them the sky was palpitating with colour, vivid streaks of flame and orange and flamingo-pink. The still branches of the trees looked black against such a sky, and there was already one star caught up in the branches of an apple tree when she stopped Charles’s car in the lane alongside the orchard wall once she reached the Meadow House. She thought that the star looked like a jewel winking at her.

  She put away the car in the garage, and then approached the house through the orchard. The long grass whispered caressingly about her ankles as she moved, and felt cool and pleasant after the heat and hardness of London pavements. When she reached the flower-garden the scent of the Madonna lilies was almost piercingly sweet, coming at her as if it had been lying in wait for her. It always did the oddest things to her, exciting her blood in some curious way, just as did the scents of tobacco plant and night-scented stock—especially when inhaled while the golden sickle of a new moon was climbing into the sky.

  But to-night there was no new moon, and the remains of the old one would rise very late, when the nightingales were singing in the thicket of sycamore trees at the foot of the garden. There was, however, plenty of light for her to see that the chairs she had set up that morning were still on the lawn, but they were empty. From the house, as she neared it, she caught the sound of music—someone was playing the piano.

  Her heart quickened its beats. Surely it wasn’t Charles playing at this hour? Even if the nurse hadn’t returned, he would hardly have the energy at this wrong end of the day to be playing, and with such tempestuous beauty—such a torrent of beauty!

  She stood outside the drawing-room window, listening. It must be Charles at the piano, for not even Pablo Enrico had that magic touch. The piano was pouring out its heart, just as the nightingales would do later on, and although Virginia in her amazement failed to recognise the composition, she did recognise that it was Liszt.

  Her heart beating so quickly that it interfered with her breathing, she stood listening for another full minute, and then slowly pushed open the french window. The sight that met her eyes checked the racing of her heart as effectually as a douche of cold water. She wasn’t even quite certain that she was seeing right. No one was on the piano stool, but a gramophone record was revolving on the turn-table of Iris’s portable gramophone, and Iris herself was lying like a slave at the feet of the man who was ensconced in one of the chintz-covered chairs. Even as Virginia stood holding on to the framework of the french window he bent a litt
le forward and drew the girl towards him, and her arms fastened themselves rapturously about his neck. Her face was upturned to him, glowing with adoration, her lips pleading to be kissed.

  And he kissed her while Virginia still stood watching, the shadows at that end of the room keeping her well hidden, and it seemed to her that the kiss lasted for a sickeningly long period of time.

  And then some sixth sense warned Iris that she and Charles were no longer alone, or else Virginia made a slight movement. Whatever it was, Iris looked petrified as she freed herself hastily and sprang up, and then she had the grace to blush almost agonisingly. After which she seemed to turn rather white.

  “Virginia!” she exclaimed. “Why did you have to creep upon us like that?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Virginia explained that she had neither crept upon them, nor had any intention of creeping upon them. She went across to the little table on which the portable gramophone stood and removed the record and closed down the lid of the gramophone. Iris said defensively:

  “I bought it! ... It’s a record of Charles’s. I’m going to start collecting them.”

  “Oh, yes?” Virginia returned. She looked at her sister. “In the meantime, you can go and put the kettle on, if you don’t mind. I’d like some tea.”

  Iris made her escape almost thankfully.

  Virginia turned to her guest. She had never really looked upon him as anything other than a guest, and although Colin insisted that she would be absurd if she didn’t make some reasonable charge—and he was inclined to think that an unreasonable one would meet the case better, and be a more fitting recompense—for the inconvenience she had had to put up with, she had no intention of acting upon the local G.P.’s advice.