The Bird in the Tree

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Good-morning, darlings,” she said evenly, lifting her face to be kissed, “did you both sleep well?”

  Margaret said that she had. David talked hurriedly about the weather. “Perfect,” he said. “Shall we have a ‘heart to heart’ in the garden this morning, Grandmother?”

  “Heart to heart” was a phrase used in the Eliot family to describe that type of conversation which was only possible with Lucilla; only to Lucilla dared one show those hurts of the mind and spirit that any other touch than hers would have only lacerated further.

  Only today, for the first time, David was not looking for healing from Lucilla, only a deepening of his pain. Their eyes met and their mutual apprehension lay between them like the first shadow of an opening rift.

  “After Caroline has had her lessons,” said Lucilla with a touch of severity. She allowed herself to show no favouritism. Little Caroline should not be deprived of her daily hour of instruction even though David was threatened with tuberculosis. . . . Lucilla had made up her mind while she drank her coffee and ate a piece of toast (somehow she had not felt able to tackle her boiled egg) that David had tuberculosis. The great-grandmother’s decline was probably that and it was a disease that was rather liable to attack actors, she had heard, because they had to breathe so deeply in such vitiated air. He should go to Egypt, she decided, and she would go with him for a few months. It only took her two minutes to decide what clothes they would both need. Lucilla was like that. An acquaintance had only to sneeze, or to smile at a member of the opposite sex, and she would have the funeral or the wedding planned down to the last detail. Her prevision was good mental exercise but rather exhausting.

  Yet after breakfast she was able to switch her mind completely off David and fix it upon Caroline. That was Caroline’s right, and her duty as a grandmother. They sat side by side upon the drawing-room sofa, Lucilla dressed in one of her severe but beautifully-cut black frocks that showed off to perfection her white hair and her lovely hands, and Caroline in a buttercup yellow smock with knickers to match. Her short bare legs were not long enough to dangle over the edge of the sofa seat, they stuck straight out in front of her as though she were a doll with no knee joints. Her straight bobbed hair, which had been well brushed by Ellen and polished with a silk handkerchief, looked like a smooth red-gold bell about her thin earnest little face. She sat very upright, her hands clenched firmly upon the covers of a battered blue book which she held very close to her button nose, and read aloud to her grandmother about a Cat who ate a Rat and afterwards, feeling replete, no doubt, Sat upon a Mat. She was working very hard. Her toes, visible through the lattice-work of her sandals, were curling and uncurling with the violence of her mental effort and her hands clutched the book so hard that the knuckles showed white through the sunburn. Yet her voice was a very small murmuring voice, almost religious in its tone, as though she were saying her prayers. Caroline was a true scholar. She stood before the mystery of wisdom with a single and a reverent mind.

  Lucilla also was working hard. With her hands folded in her lap she listened intently to every word spoken by the murmuring little voice, carefully correcting the intonation and explaining the full and glorious meaning of such words as Brave, Save and Wave, Light, Sight and Bright. She tried very hard to teach her grandchildren how to extract the last drop of beauty out of all the small things of life, words and scents and sounds. Many little joys, weighed against the few heavy griefs and existence, could give some sort of balance to the scales and preserve the sanity of life.

  “It is the Light of the sun,” she explained to Caroline, “that gives us Sight to see the Bright world. When the sun sets it is as though we had gone blind. We see nothing any more.”

  David, sitting just outside the drawing-room window under the ilex tree with The Times, lowered it and listened. “The bright world.” It was unusually bright this morning; one of those cloudless autumn days that seem to burn like a flame, not hot but brilliant, the last leap of the fire before the ashes and the dying sparks of winter. The garden lay like a mosaic of colour all about him and upon every bush lay the silver filigree of spiders’ webs hung with dewdrops. In spite of the deep blue of the sky and the bright gold of the mounting sun the whole garden was still jewelled with dew. But it did not dim the colour, it gave to it a clear still purity that was strangely healing. David felt a sudden overwhelming affinity with this bright world of Damerosehay. It was his own place. He knew a quick surge of joy, as though his spirit leapt to meet it, and then a stab of pain and a darkening before his eyes, as though it receded from him and the lights went out. . . . Only a cloud over the sun, but it had given him a jar. . . . It had shown him what he would feel like when this was no longer his place.

  The lesson in the drawing-room was apparently over. Levering herself forward Caroline slid off the sofa, showing a lot of knicker in the process, pulled down her abbreviated skirt with a maidenly gesture taught her by Ellen, kissed her grandmother and put her book away in the bookcase. Then she took her doll Gladys from the corner of the sofa, trotted out into the hall and through the garden door into the garden, smiled at David but refused to speak, and disappeared into the recesses of the garden. She would not be seen again until nursery dinner. This was her hour, her own secret hour, and what she did with it no one knew.

  Lucilla, taking her sunshade from the hall stand, followed Caroline out into the sweet sunshine. She put up her sunshade and walked slowly towards the ilex tree. David got up to meet her.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  — 4 —

  They walked up and down the lawn together, moving with the unconscious grace that was habitual to them both, their long lean shadows dark upon the dew, and David told her, simply and straightforwardly as he knew she would wish to be told. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then she said, “I think I shall have to sit down, David.”

  They went back to the chairs under the ilex tree that Obadiah had already set for them, a deck chair for David and an upright wicker one for Lucilla, who hated lounging, and sat down, and in spite of his unhappiness David remembered with a jerk of grim amusement that Jeremy’s skeleton, if Obadiah’s story was true, was just about exactly underneath them. Then he looked at Lucilla and suddenly went white, for her face was like the face of a dead woman, some stranger, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. He passed his hand quickly before his eyes, as though to shut it out, and when he looked at her again she was Lucilla once more; but a much older Lucilla. It must have been some trick of the light that had made her look like that; the light or his thought of Jeremy. He found that his hand was shaking and stuck it savagely into his pocket.

  “I see,” said Lucilla in a hoarse exhausted voice. “So that’s what it is.”

  She did not say anything else and she seemed unaware that in spite of the shade of the ilex tree she was still holding up her sunshade. She looked at him and he forced himself to meet her eyes. They were blazing with anger.

  It was far worse than he had thought it would be. He had thought he knew all the arguments that she would use, the arguments of a Christian and of a Victorian woman to whom family unity was very dear, and he had steeled himself to hear them, and now she said nothing at all. There was nothing but her silence and her anger and the ageing of her beloved face. The tension between them was almost unbearable.

  “Grandmother,” he said desperately, “you look as though I had committed a crime, when all I have done is to get engaged to a woman I love who by the law of the land is free to marry me.”

  “The law of the land,” repeated Lucilla dully. He waited for her to speak to him of the law of the Church, but she didn’t, and he had to go on, talking for the sake of talking, uncertain if she heard a word he said.

  “Listen, Grandmother,” he said, “I want to tell you how I feel about this. I want to make you understand.”

  He told her of the nature of the love that had grown between himself an
d Nadine, of its power and depth and beauty, and of his other love that was as strong, his love of truth. He tried to make her understand what he felt about this truth, that it was a thing that should live in one’s inner life, compelling outward things to its own likeness and not suffering their shape to impinge upon its beauty. Now and then she bowed her head as though she had understood, but he could not be certain. When he had finished he waited again, ready to hear her point of view; but she seemed not to have one.

  “And so you see, Grandmother,” he said at last, “that I cannot inherit Damerosehay.”

  “Why not?” demanded Lucilla harshly.

  He stared at her in astonishment. Surely she could not, her opinions being what he knew they were, still consider him a fit heir for Damerosehay.

  “I am waiting,” said Lucilla, “to hear why you think you cannot inherit Damerosehay.”

  “Because I did not think that after this you would want me to.”

  “Why not?” asked Lucilla.

  Then he saw her meaning. She knew why not but she wanted to see if he did.

  “Because, Grandmother, you will not want to leave your most precious possession, that you made to preserve the family unity, to a man who is dealing such a blow at that unity. It would be an insult both to the family and the place if I lived here. At least that is what I expect you to feel, Grandmother. You will feel, too, that I am smashing forever any chance that Nadine and George might come together again, that I am injuring the children and breaking the law of the Church of which I am a member. And it isn’t only you who will feel this, all the others will too, Margaret, Hilary, Stephen and his children. And, of course, George. And George will feel much more. Whoever Nadine married he would feel it, but her marriage to his own nephew will hurt him unspeakably. Damerosehay is the family home, it is where we belong, our own place, in a way it is the family. If I cut myself off from one I must cut myself off from the other.”

  “There is no need for me to say anything,” said Lucilla, still in that harsh dry voice. “You have expressed my point of view perfectly, quite as well as a minute ago you expressed your own. I heard what you said about your own. I heard and understood.”

  “I could say a little more on my own side,” urged David. “I could tell you that even had I never existed Nadine would not go back to George. A divorce is a far more final thing than you realize. And I could tell you, too, that she would never stay single; she’s not that sort; if it were not me it would be some other man. And as for religion, Grandmother, you know that I don’t feel bound by that. You brought me up to be a churchman but I’m not one now. I keep the law of the land but not the law of the Church.”

  Lucilla sighed and moved a little restlessly. David’s loss of the faith she had taught him was a trouble to her, though she had not given up hope that he would find it again.

  “As for the other thing,” went on David, “the distress that I shall cause you all, well, I’m sorry, Grandmother. I’m bitterly sorry. I don’t mind so much about the others, but to hurt you is damnable. Yet I must do it. If I’m to be honest I must do it. I must serve the truth as I see it. You understand that, don’t you, Grandmother?”

  “What I understand, David,” said Lucilla, “is that your infatuation for Nadine has blinded you to every consideration of honour and duty, and even sense. I see what you mean about truth, and I know that you mean to be honest, but I think that unconsciously you are using your ideals to justify action that you would take in any case. What is possessing you, David, is not a passion for truth but a man’s utterly selfish longing to possess the beauty of a very lovely woman.”

  David flushed angrily. “Selfish?” he demanded. “My love for Nadine? Grandmother, I don’t believe you know what love is. How should you? You were just a girl when you married Grandfather. I expect you were always just the affectionate Victorian wife. I expect—”

  “That will do, David,” interrupted Lucilla. “I believe that I know far more about love than you do. And more about truth. One day I’ll tell you; not now, I’m too angry. Yes, angry. With you and with Nadine, but especially with Nadine. She should have stopped it before it came to this. She is years older than you, a woman of the world while you are a mere romantic boy.”

  David’s simmering anger blazed out. “No man is a boy at twenty-five,” he flashed. “And there’s only five years between Nadine and me. What’s five years?”

  “In middle life, nothing,” said Lucilla, “at your age, everything; all the difference between inexperience and maturity. You would never be happy with Nadine, David.” Suddenly she stretched out her hand and put it on his. “Now we are both angry,” she said. “That must not be. We have always loved each other so much. Nothing must spoil it, David. Not even this.”

  “No,” said David wretchedly, his anger evaporating, and he held her hand in both his, twisting her rings round and round as he had done when he was a child. “No. But what can we do, Grandmother?”

  He spoke in bewilderment, like a small boy, and Lucilla was quick to take advantage of his weakness. “Do you feel that after all these years you owe me anything?” she asked. “That I have the right to ask some little sacrifice of you?”

  “Yes, Grandmother,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  “Then you will do nothing for a few weeks,” said Lucilla. “You will not write to George or say anything to anyone of your intentions. You will stay here quietly with me for a little while, you and Nadine.”

  “Nadine?” he asked sharply. “Grandmother, that would be impossible. Nadine and I here together—it would be unbearable. I hadn’t even meant to stay myself. I had meant to go tomorrow.”

  “We will both write to Nadine,” said Lucilla inexorably, “and ask her to come down. I shan’t bother the two of you. Just once I will tell you both what I feel, but only once. You shall go about together as much as you like. Just for two weeks. Not longer. I don’t merely ask this, David, I demand it. I have the right.”

  “Very well,” said David, but his mouth set in a hard line and he no longer caressed Lucilla’s fingers. She withdrew her hand.

  “I’ll go in,” she said, and got up. But she was not so steady on her legs as she had expected to be and David went with her to the garden door.

  “Grandmother,” he implored, “these next weeks are only going to be bearable for the three of us if we keep the thing to ourselves. Don’t tell Aunt Margaret. But above all don’t tell Ellen.”

  Lucilla hadn’t been going to tell Margaret, whose distressing efforts to be tactful, did she know, would obliterate the lot of them, but she had been going to tell Ellen. She had always told Ellen everything. It cost her a hard struggle to say, “Very well, David, not Margaret or Ellen or, of course, the children. But I must tell Hilary. He is my eldest son and I lean upon him.”

  “I don’t mind old Hilary knowing,” said David, and suddenly thought of his steady, sensible uncle with a sense of relief, as though struggling in a dangerous sea he had felt firm ground beneath his feet. “I don’t mind Hilary knowing anything.”

  “I am all right now, David,” said Lucilla. “Don’t come in.”

  He stood at the door and remorsefully watched her slight figure go slowly up the stairs, then he turned back towards the ilex tree. He thought he saw a dark figure moving in the drawing-room, yet when he looked through the window there was no one there. Later, once more under the ilex tree with The Times, he saw Ellen in the dining-room, polishing the table with a display of energy such as he had never witnessed before.

  But he could not stay under the ilex tree. Every murmur of birdsong in the old garden, every movement of the little wind that had come in from the sea now that the tide was turning, seemed a reproach. He strode down the garden, through the oak-wood, and down to the harbour where the sun was bright on the water and the white wings of the yachts were unfolding in the rising wind. He took his own little boat, that Obadiah ha
d got ready for him, and sped down the creek to the sea. Out there, if anywhere, alone with the sea and the wind, there was freedom from tormenting thoughts.

  Lucilla, seated at her bedroom window, saw him go. She sat very still, her hands folded tightly in her lap. The shock of what David had told her was wearing off now and she was moving through anger to pain. She had not been so desperately unhappy since David’s father had died. It was so unexpected. As always with one’s personal disasters the thing that had happened was the one thing that she had not thought of. She tried to tell herself that perhaps this marriage would not be the appalling disaster that she thought it. It was perhaps true, as David had said, that the breach between George and Nadine was too deep now to be healed. David and Nadine seemed really to love each other and by the law of the land David had every right to marry her. And David would be a kind stepfather to the children; though she could not but feel that it would upset Ben terribly to see David in his father’s place. She said this over and over again to herself but yet she could not be comforted. What had happened was a tragedy to her because it meant the total overthrow of all for which she had worked for twenty years. It meant the disunion of the family and, to her, the death of Damerosehay that was the symbol of it. No, more than twenty years, for most of her married life she had been working for her children’s unity, making for it sacrifices of which they had never dreamed, and Damerosehay, before it had come into existence as an actual physical fact, had always existed in her mind as a sort of spiritual country in which she held them all secure. She felt she was confronted now with the ruin of her life’s work, and no greater tragedy can confront a human being.