A Nightingale in the Sycamore

by Jane Beaufort

  But, on the night of Charles’s first concert at the Arcadian Hall, Annette returned to town in triumph. Virginia did not see her until it was all over, although she glimpsed Charles’s mother, with a party of friends, in the best seats. Lady Wickham looked absolutely regal in pearl-coloured lace, with diamonds sparkling at her ears and at her throat, and with a mink stole draped about her shoulders. Her friends were obviously friends of long standing, and most of them, Virginia discovered afterwards, were spending the night at Brown’s Hotel. Lady Wickham had patronised Brown’s since the days when she used to visit London before her marriage, and when she had always been accompanied by her own mother. Now, when her friends came to visit her, from Italy, and from other parts of the world, and she was unable to accommodate them in her own somewhat miniature flat, she always secured them a room in her favourite hotel, where the atmosphere was still very much to her taste.

  On the occasions when Charles was playing in public she was always surrounded by a bevy of friends. Naturally as she recognised, her son had his own circle of acquaintances, and if, like oil and water, they didn’t always mix extremely well with her own, she was fully prepared to concede his right to his own friends. Young women like Annette le Clair made her feel a little anxious sometimes, but even to Annette she could be quite charming. To Virginia, when she caught sight of her with Martin Sutherland, she was just a little distant, but her smile was gracious nevertheless, for she felt that she owed Virginia something.

  Virginia was so conscious of being keyed up inwardly, of such a pathetic pent-up longing to catch her first glimpse of Charles, that it made her unusually silent, and she even looked a little pale with excitement—as if it was she, instead of Charles, who was to delight a large audience. And she had no doubt at all that Charles’s audience would be highly appreciative.

  Iris, who was with her and Martin, was not nearly so excited, but she was prepared to make the most of the evening. This was something new for her, and she loved the mingling with fashionable people—particularly elegant women like Lady Wickham, whom Virginia pointed out to her. Iris stared hard at Lady Wickham whenever she had the opportunity, awed by her diamonds and her mink, and no longer in the least surprised that Charles was as he was.

  The hall was very full. To Virginia, perhaps because she was feeling so unaccountably nervous, it also seemed very warm and airless. But when Charles made his first appearance on the platform, and her hands started to grip themselves tightly together in her lap, she made the discovery that they were cold—almost icily cold.

  Charles, to-night, seemed as remote from her as the stars. He looked remote—remote and removed from everyone. He was impeccably dressed, in white tie and tails, and his hair gleamed beneath the lights, and displayed little tendency to do anything but lie in a disciplined fashion against his well-held head. Impossible now to recall how wild and tumbled it had often looked when he tossed restlessly on his pillows, or ran impatient fingers through it. Impossible now to believe that she, Virginia, had sat beside him through the whole of a long night-time and impressed every feature of his face on her memory!

  When he took his seat at the piano, he and the magnificent instrument seemed to complement one another. They became a kind of arresting whole.

  He played Liszt and Chopin, but Virginia, although she was familiar with their works—particularly their piano works—and had a programme, was never very clear about what it was he did play that night. Or perhaps she decided that it didn’t matter what it was he was playing, and that it was enough that he was playing.

  She knew that his execution was faultless, and that there wasn’t a whisper in the hall; but, more than that, as soon as his fingers touched the keys, her nervousness and her tension fled away from her, and she felt like a bird released from a cage. Her spirit soared upwards—upwards to the roof of the hall, and an exquisite delight took possession of her. It was a delight that brought the colour rushing to her cheeks, caused her eyes to bum, her heart to swell, her throat to feel as if it must burst, and her fingers that had been so cold and stiff to grow warm and restless with wonder.

  When it was all over, she sank back against her seat and was too dazed even to applaud. When Martin moved out into the aisle she followed him, and was aware that Iris followed her, but why they were moving, and where they were moving to, she hadn’t any clear idea. She felt like one bemused, living and moving in a trance, and for the life of her she couldn’t emerge from it to talk and smile at Martin and her sister naturally.

  Outside, in a sudden stimulating rush of cooler air, she saw long lines of cars moving away from the kerb. She saw Annette le Clair, in a filmy white dress that made her look like the fairy on the Christmas tree with a stole that looked like white ermine about her shoulders, and her golden hair in a cloud about her, stepping into a particularly opulent limousine, a man beside her whom Virginia had never seen before, and a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. The car moved away, and Lady Wickham, leaning on a slender ebony cane, crossed the pavement and entered another impressive vehicle hired for the purpose of conveying her back to her Knightsbridge flat.

  As Virginia watched her go she wondered what her sensations were after listening to her son and hearing the tumult of applause that greeted him at the conclusion of his recital.

  Was she burning with fierce maternal pride, Virginia wondered? And decided that she must be.

  Martin took hold of Virginia’s arm and guided her to his own car. He put Iris in the back, and Virginia sat beside him. Virginia was still too dazed—too conscious of being away up in rosy clouds of ecstasy—to have very much interest in where they were going, but she did recognise the front of a vast and impressive hotel when they arrived there.

  Inside, they ran straight into Annette, clutching Charles’s arm. Annette, with her flying white draperies and her mermaid’s hair, was looking positively radiant, but Charles still had that detached—that almost “set apart” look he had had on the concert platform. He also looked a little pale, unless it was by contrast with the severe black and whiteness of the rest of him, and handsome enough to justify Annette’s almost passionate attachment to his arm.

  Annette was chattering gaily, in mixed English and French, and she greeted Martin with enthusiasm. The impression she managed to create was that it was she who had recently received the plaudits of the crowd, and her excitement was so great that Virginia realised she probably fancied she had been doing so.

  Charles took Virginia’s hand and looked at her in a detached manner when she tried to tell him how much she had enjoyed his performance. Her voice was almost trembling, and she had difficulty in finding a voice at all, when he first turned and let her see how cool and remote his eyes were. She could hardly believe that they were Charles’s warm and mocking golden eyes. His fingers held hers for the briefest possible length of time, and then let them go.

  “I’m glad you did enjoy it,” he said, and then said something in a pleasant manner to Iris.

  Both girls were made to feel that they were acquaintances he had made during a phase of his life that was already almost forgotten.

  The rest of the evening to Virginia was just a sea of faces, of rather noisy voices, of introductions that meant nothing, popping of champagne corks, and drinking of toasts, Annette she fully recognised was at her most scintillating, and after a time even Charles seemed to come slowly back to life, and to begin to take an interest in what was happening about him. It was just as if he realised suddenly that for many weeks he had been a prisoner, but now at last he was back amongst the kind of people with whom he felt at home, in a setting that was familiar to him.

  It wasn’t only Annette who hung round him and fawned on him. There were several attractive women, and that they were eager to pour out admiration over him was only too obvious. But Annette was the one who really succeeded in keeping close to him. And every time she looked at him her eyes flashed all sorts of unspoken messages and promises at him, and there was no doubt about it, where he was co
ncerned she felt distinctly possessive. She even looked openly resentful when anyone claimed his attention for too long, and was petulant and pouting—but ready on the instant to forgive—when he turned back to her again.

  Virginia began to feel slightly sick. All this was so unlike the Arcadian Hall, and yet Charles’s interests were to a certain extent bound up with people like this, otherwise he would not be composing music for one of Annette’s shows. And he would probably make a great deal of money out of the show. Also, of course, there was Annette herself, and, as he had admitted, what Annette thought and felt and wished to do was of the utmost importance!

  But Virginia remembered Pablo Enrico’s talk of Charles’s operetta, and she wondered whether he would ever get on with it.

  During the whole of the evening Charles scarcely addressed more than a couple of sentences to Virginia, and he never once had anything in the nature of private conversation with her. When she felt that the hour was growing impossibly late—or, rather, early—she asked Martin to take her and Iris home, and as Charles was very much preoccupied at the time they slipped away without exchanging good-nights.

  Martin left them at the door of the flat—for some reason Virginia felt certain he had enjoyed the latter part of the evening as little as she had—and as soon as they were alone Iris, noticing how white and tired Virginia looked, offered to make coffee. When she returned with it on a tray she looked at her sister a little curiously.

  “Well,” she exclaimed, “that was quite an evening, wasn’t it?”

  Virginia smiled wanly.

  “Quite an evening!”

  Iris sat on the rug at her feet and looked up at her.

  “Do you think Charles will marry Annette?” she asked. “She’s obviously angling for him, isn’t she?”

  “It looks rather like it,” Virginia admitted.

  “Rather like it?” Iris stirred her coffee vigorously. “My dear Jinny, it’s almost painfully obvious!” Iris was thoughtful for a moment, and then went on: “But, she isn’t his type, you know!—she really isn’t his type. Charles is the temperamental kind who, when and if he ever does marry, needs a quiet background against which his own lustre will never be likely to be dimmed. And he’s temperamental in a way that Annette will never understand. His wife will have to be quite a lot of things to him, including a soothing sedative and a tower of strength when the occasion demands. I was watching him to-night, after his concert, and I thought he looked drained and defenceless somehow. I don’t think he really wanted to be whisked off to that party.”

  Virginia’s eyebrows ascended.

  “But he seemed to enjoy it!”

  “Did he?” Iris looked sceptical. “That wasn’t the impression I somehow received.”

  Virginia looked at her rather wonderingly.

  “Then you must have a great deal more perspicacity than most of us,” she observed. She thought, with a sudden, wild hopefulness, could her nineteen-year-old sister be right, and had Charles merely appeared to enjoy the party? Had the fact that he had been cool and distant to herself merely meant that he was, as Iris put it, feeling “drained” after his concert? He certainly had looked rather pale! But, then, it wasn’t very long since his accident, and as well as the coolness he had displayed towards her there had been a definite impression that he had little or no time for her any longer.

  She sighed, and the hopefulness died.

  Iris studied her shrewdly, and then made a confession.

  “Shall I tell you something, Jinny?” moving nearer to her on the rug. “There was a time when I thought I was going to fall head over ears in love with Charles—in a big way, if you know what I mean!—but I cured myself! Do you know-why?”

  Virginia looked at her dumbly.

  “Because it was suddenly borne in on me that, even if he ever fell in love with me—and I knew he never would!—I couldn’t live with a man like that! Not all the rest of my life! It would be too devastating, too swamping! I like to retain my own individuality, not merge it in someone else’s personality! And that’s what Charles’s wife will have to do—and put up with seeing other women falling for him all the time! That’s one thing I couldn’t do!”

  Virginia was silent, staring at the dregs of her coffee.

  “And that’s another reason why I’m sure Annette will never fill the bill! She’s too possessive. It just wouldn’t do to be possessive and fall in love with Charles!”

  Virginia said rather flatly:

  “Shall we wash these things up before we go to bed?”

  “No.” Iris rose and stretched herself and yawned. “Let’s go to bed. I feel almost as exhausted as Charles.” And then she stooped and peered anxiously into her sister’s face. “Don’t you fall in love with him, will you, Jinny?”

  The next day Iris went off to be interviewed by someone who was going to give an expert opinion on her powers as an artist, a man whom Martin had put her in touch with. She carried a portfolio of her drawings under her arm, wore her black suit and her hair in the recently abandoned pony-tail and was full of high hopes for the future.

  “Wish me luck,” she said to Virginia, before she left. “And you won’t mind if I have lunch with Meg, will you? Or if I’m a little late back to-night?”

  “Of course not,” Virginia answered. “So long as you’re not too late back,” she added.

  She didn’t bother about lunch for herself that day, but had a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea in the kitchen. In the afternoon she popped out to do some shopping, and when she returned she curled up in a comfortable chair near the window with a pile of mending on her lap. As usual there were several pairs of stockings belonging to Iris which had been snagged here and there, and Iris had caught her foot in the hem of a nightdress and practically ripped it off.

  Virginia was careful to ensure that no threads of cotton, or any odds and ends from her work-basket, fell on to the immaculate pearl-grey carpet of the lounge. She was constantly doing her best to ensure that the flat was maintained in perfect condition, and somehow she hated to see it even slightly disordered.

  It was not a feminine flat, and it was Charles’s flat, and she loved it because it was Charles’s flat. She loved the severe masculinity of it, in spite of the somewhat bizarre colour-schemes—with the exception, that is, of the lounge, which she found very restful—and the absence of unnecessary adornment. Charles’s superb Bechstein piano she dusted twice every day, loathing the very thought of a speck of dust on it, and although she very seldom touched the keyboard—she had a curious feeling that to do so would not merely be presumptuous, but almost an act of sacrilege—she occasionally ran her fingers caressingly along it, and thought of Charles’s fingers doing the same.

  His cocktail-cabinet in a corner, although it was amply stocked, she never touched. His books she looked at, but always put back carefully in the same position they had occupied on the bookshelves when she had finished with them. She had sternly forbidden Iris even to touch the books, because Iris was rather careless about reading material, and committed that most heinous crime—the crime of turning down leaves to mark a place.

  Iris was occupying Charles’s bedroom, because somehow Virginia had felt that she couldn’t bring herself to occupy it. To he where Charles had lain, night after night—perhaps thinking about Annette! To watch the dawn light creeping under the heavy oatmeal silk curtains, that matched the oatmeal coloured carpet, and see her reflection in the thick plate-glass of the wardrobe mirrors, where Charles’s reflection had so often been given back to him, when he was going out dressed for a concert, for the evening, for a weekend in the country—possibly partnered by Annette, or someone as charming as Annette!

  “No, no, no!” Virginia had said to herself—she couldn’t do it. She loved Charles so much that there were some things she couldn’t do.

  But she could take a kind of general delight in his flat, and as she sat with her sewing on her lap she looked about her with a pleased eye, and decided that even if Charles walked in a
t this moment, at least he could not accuse her of neglecting his property. Whatever he did to the Meadow House, she would hand back his flat in the same state of perfection that it had been handed over to her.

  She was sighing a little—sighing because the day must arrive when she would have to hand back the flat, and then Charles would probably go right out of her life—when a car drew up before the entrance to the block of flats, and her heart gave a kind of wild leap as she recognised it as Charles’s. Charles himself alighted and passed inside the entrance, and she realised, when she heard the lift gates clang, that he was probably on his way up in the lift. She waited for him to let himself in with his key, but when he did not do so, and the bell shrilled instead, she stood up with suddenly trembling limbs to go to the front door and let him in.

  Charles stood looking at her with a most curious expression on his face when she got the front door open. There was the merest suggestion of a smile on his lips, but his eyes were grave—quite grave.

  “May I come in, Virginia?” he asked.

  “Of course.” She stood aside for him to enter, hoping he could not possibly hear the wild beating of her heart. “Of course.”

  He hung his hat up on the hall stand, deposited his gloves on the hall table, beside the silver salver on which so often his letters had reposed, and visiting-cards been brought to him, and then waited for her to lead the way to the lounge. When she had done so, and they were both seated—she making a hasty effort to conceal the work-basket, and her sewing, beneath her chair—she knew that his eyes were glancing round him with a kind of open approval.