Nightingale Wood

by Stella Gibbons

  It is exciting, too, to be getting on for seventy years old when the happiest day of your life comes; for this day, with the church decorated with all those exquisite blooms (flowers are always blooms to Miss Cattyman), the crowd of familiar, excited faces, the music, the dressy smell of fine clothes and scent, the rustling and the whispers, is undoubtedly Miss Cattyman’s high spot. Howard Thompson’s daughter is being married to a rich, handsome and dashing young man, and this is all the more exciting because Miss Cattyman, fond though she is of Viola, never did think Viola would marry, let alone marry twice, and the second time so well! Vi was so quiet, a dear sweet girl, of course, but not lively, no go, and men do like go. Shirley (Cissie, really, never could think of her as Shirley) was the one the fellows all liked. It just shows you never can tell, that’s all.

  And after the wedding there will be Viola’s letters to look forward to; and later on, the babies. The babies will be more exciting than anything. Viola may colour up and say, ‘Good lord, Catty, I don’t know, you are awful,’ when the babies are mentioned, but Catty is sure that she is longing for them and certainly Catty is. Viola may laugh, but Catty has started knitting a matinée jacket.

  Victor is allowing Catty a hundred and fifty pounds a year. He is without a trace of meanness, he can afford it, and Viola has only to remind him that it was her letter about Catty that really brought them together, and he says yes. One of the natural considerations at the back of his mind is that the poor old trout won’t last long, anyway.

  However, the old trout does. The fire in Catty that loved watching Howard Thompson act, and could find drama in the daily routine at Burgess and Thompson’s, burns cheerfully for another twenty-five years, and when Catty dies peacefully of old age at just over ninety, she has had from Victor some three thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds. Her will is on a form bought at a stationer’s and witnessed by the landlady and her husband, and it leaves the two hundred pounds she has saved to Viola’s youngest daughter (‘my baby, because it is right the money should go back where it came’). Up to the week before Catty’s death Viola writes to her, and sends her picture papers that Catty is too blind to see.

  Nearly everybody in Sible Pelden is outside the church, except the realist-barman at the Green Lion. When asked if he did not want to go to the wedding, the barman spat and observed not him, he’d had enough o’ weddin’s to last him a lifetime, he had. But Mrs Fisher is there, as we have already seen, and Mr Fisher, and some of the servants from Grassmere, who have slipped away for twenty minutes from the preparations for the wedding breakfast. Little Merionethshire is standing on a tombstone and leaning on the shoulder of the tormented but adoring Heyrick, her print skirt and her black Welsh curls blowing in the wind. None of her Essex admirers gets little Davies in the end; she is called home to nurse her mother, and marries a local farmer.

  Doctor Parsham is in church, and the chemist’s ill-tempered son from Chesterbourne, who sent Viola two guineas for Catty with a long and rather wild letter about the foolishness and criminal folly of encouraging useless people to live and ending with a dark reference to personal unhappiness which Viola perfectly understands and giggles over. He has come because he must, though he feels as if he were biting on an aching tooth. However, he gets a kick out of sneering at the decorations and the barbarous, indecent bourgeois ostentation of it all. He stares round him with a bitter smile, and several women are talking about him in indignant whispers. Why does he come at all, if he isn’t enjoying it?

  Most of the people in the church are women. This wedding is not just the marriage of one Chesterbourne girl to Victor Spring. Viola is the type of all those girls in shops and offices, banks and cafés, Woolworths and Boots and Marks and Spencers, who have all dreamed, just a little, about a wedding with Victor Spring, and naturally, when she married him, they all feel that they must be there. Their wistful, envious, interested eyes take in the tiniest detail, the finest shade of expression, the last shred of meaning, in everything that happens. It is very tiring to be a woman.

  That is what Hetty is thinking, sitting in the front pew in a dress of white chiffon printed with sprays of lilac and a floppy hat that does not become her. She feels ridiculous in this get-up, but Viola has sentimentally insisted upon having her as bridesmaid, and as Mrs Spring also wants it, Hetty has given way. She still feels grateful, in her reserved ungracious way, to her aunt and Victor for having let her go to live in London with so little opposition, and she wants to show her gratitude.

  She is grateful because the life she now leads, though exhausting, frightening and unhappy, is absorbing and satisfying as she had never dreamed life could be. Of all the people in the story who have escaped from lives they hated, Hetty is the only one who has found ecstasy. This is because she is the only one capable of finding it.

  If ecstasy means to live to the full, she has this, and she knows it. She feels dimly, too, that the experiences now happening to her are so important that they will colour and influence her life to come for many years. Some day she will think that they were worth having, but at present she only knows that they are agonizing and cannot be escaped, and that they may end in darkness and despair. She must use her reserved, half-poetic, half-sceptical nature to its fullest powers and for the first time in her life she is doing so.

  Between Hetty and Donat Mulqueen a bitter, painful and difficult love is growing. It is the most miserable of affairs. Hetty, who has some common sense and detachment left, sometimes thinks what a depressing pair they must look, idling over Hampstead Heath or down Charlotte Street to the pub; an untidy plump pale girl and a gaunt, black-haired young giant almost in rags, dirty (she has given up trying to get him to wash, indeed, his example has persuaded her, never too sudsy, to cut down her own washing), the soles of his shoes flapping, and his body shaken by a terrifying cough that is half exaggerated and half frighteningly real. He has huge full grey eyes and the beautiful mouth that poets often have. Everywhere he goes he is stared at, which he pretends he hates, but in truth he loves to attract attention and hates himself for this love.

  He also hates himself for needing Hetty. Their lovemaking is like the snarling of two dogs; tenderness is unthinkable; there must be nothing but lust and merciless sincerity. Hetty, whose gentleness has always been rather due to good manners than to instinct, is rapidly losing what little she had, and tenderness she buries deep in her spirit, because he shrinks with such horror from any signs of it. His whole life is one agonized effort to harden himself. He has cast off his family. He is a Communist, and twenty-four years old.

  What is the matter with him? He does not know, and neither does she. She cannot get him to talk about himself. The glimpses she has had into his nature appal her; there seems nothing within but hatred and horror. She cannot forget an evening when they rode on the top of the bus to Richmond. They had both been silent, but at last she said something about the beauty of some leaves above a street lamp. Then he whispered, half turning to look at her, ‘Shut up,’ in a voice that turned her sick with despair and a strange shame.

  In spite of himself he has (so odd is human nature) a large number of friends. Hetty, who finds herself capable of a degradingly strong jealousy, learns from these that she is what they call with the fashionable candour ‘Donat’s first woman’. It appears that he has had some horror of sex, among all his other horrors, and Hetty has been able to put an end to this. All his friends (kind as it is possible for human beings to be, most of them desperately unhappy, very hard drinkers and talkers and not domesticated) congratulate her upon this achievement, but she can feel no emotion except this ceaseless desire to serve him, to keep him writing poetry, and to lend (or rather give) him what money she can, so that he will go on writing poetry.

  The room in Bloomsbury with the chimney pots, the coffee brewing and a contented Hetty curled up with a book has not come off. After a month at Aunt Rose’s, Hetty took herself off to a ratty, beetley attic next to Donat’s in an old house somewhere in the back streets
off Leicester Square, and here she lives in a sluttishness that does not trouble her at all. To tidy up takes time, and she wants all her time for wolfing books, dreaming violently, and putting Donat to bed when he is drunk, which is often.

  Guinness and Dewar, how these people drink! Hetty had thought that the Grassmere set drank plenty, but they are teetotallers compared to the set that goes, night after night, to the one or two public houses they use as clubs. All their parties flow with drink; they do not seem able to pass half an hour without a frenzied search for drink, they make long pilgrimages to one another’s dens for drink in hopes that A may have some when B has run out. No one could call them drunkards: they just drink. A good deal of Hetty’s money goes on drink for Donat and his friends. ‘My bloody little capitalist friend will pay,’ he says, and she does.

  Uncle Frank is very distressed about all this, but Aunt Rose says calmly, looking at Hetty with her fanatic blue eyes, that it is all unavoidable. Hetty is not the bourgeois, domestic, maternal type. She is the neurotic type that sacrifices itself to a man of genius, without holding anything back; a decadent and inevitable product of a social system based on Individualism, says Aunt Rose, looking up from a pamphlet she is writing against the Fascists. She must find herself – if she can – in her own way. Aunt Rose helps Hetty to hide from Aunt Spring the fact that she is no longer living with her relations, and sometimes drops a hard word of advice about Donat, that Hetty finds sound, and gives the young people carrier-bags full of food, or an occasional bottle that is appreciated much more. Hetty dislikes Aunt Rose, but thoroughly respects her. She is a little mad, but never a fool.

  Mrs Spring is beginning to suspect that things are very wrong with Hetty, because the girl is so silent and looks so pale and shabby, and years older, but she will not ask her what is the matter. Hetty has taken her own road, and must walk on it by herself. For over twenty years Mrs Spring has tried to alter Hetty; now she tries no more. Hetty’s failure to be like her dead mother has been the great disappointment of Mrs Spring’s life, and she feels more than a little bitter towards her niece. And with Viola so charming and everything that a girl should be – it is small wonder that Mrs Spring leaves Hetty to manage her own affairs. After all, she has always wanted to.

  Viola is the daughter for whom Mrs Spring has always longed, whom Hetty and Phyllis failed to be. Mrs Spring, surprised and dismayed at first by Victor’s lightning decision to marry a shopgirl with no money, finds herself, from Viola’s first afternoon alone with her, agreeably soothed and stimulated by the girl’s company. True, she is rather artless and young for her age and her clothes are dreadful, but she is so friendly, so fully sensible of her immense good fortune, and so much in love with Victor; above all, so biddable and without the wish to dominate and excel, that Mrs Spring’s good will is won. Her taste in dress, after all, can be influenced, her complexion, figure and style of hairdressing only need a little attention from experts and she will be transformed into the prettiest and most charming of young-marrieds.

  She seems to have none of the traditional fear and antagonism towards her mother-in-law, and asks her advice about her trousseau and the furnishing of her flat in the most flattering way. So beguiled is Mrs Spring, in fact, that it is not for some years that it dawns upon her how many of those small alterations that Viola made at her suggestion have been quietly altered back again to the way Viola first preferred them. Then, having become devoted to Viola and the children, Mrs Spring is more amused than annoyed and thinks of Viola as a clever little thing.

  Those Davises, for example. Mrs Spring had from the first quietly but firmly discouraged Viola from being friends with that loud-voiced, vulgar, showy Shirley Davis, who had nothing to recommend her but a fine head of red hair, and Viola had cheerfully allowed herself to be discouraged. It was not until Viola and Vic have been married three years and the second baby, Gloria, is on the way, that Mrs Spring, out one day in her car, sees Viola and that Shirley creature together in a taxi, laughing uproariously and plainly enjoying each other’s company very much.

  There was a funny little bit of deceit for you!

  But Mrs Spring is a wise woman, if only worldly-wise, and knows when to stop a molehill from growing, so she says nothing about these little rear-guard actions of Viola’s, and the Springs are a most harmonious and happy family.

  Lady Spring keeps her curls, her slenderness and her habit of saying, ‘I say, good Lord!’ when surprised. She never has any difficulty in remembering that she was once a dampish nobody, and she never ceases to enjoy, for they are the sweeter by contrast, the privileges and pleasures that her marriage has brought.

  It may here be said, to relieve probable anxiety, that Viola makes a serene success of being Lady Spring. As she had once said to Tina, long ago, that she would do, she leaves the housekeeping to an expensive and competent housekeeper, does not stint on wages, makes her maids comfortable and happy, and does not worry if the bills for electricity and alcohol are heavy. She takes Shirley’s advice about oiling the old war-horse and lets Mrs Spring imagine that she is having her own way, gives in to Victor on every occasion except when she feels that he would enjoy a little wifely opposition, and sets herself, with what intelligence she has, to be what he wants her to be.

  The task is made easy for her. She was already, before he married her, what he wanted a woman to be; and he is a good husband, romantic yet monogamous, taking great pride and pleasure in his four handsome, healthy children. He asks nothing of his wife but that she shall love him, dress well, and entertain his friends. She goes down very well with his friends; the coarse well-living men like her freshness and respect her virtue (they are all great prudes) and the women like her because she does not try to steal their husbands.

  She has no wish to. There is no one in the world like Vic; so handsome, so clever, so kind. He says the sweetest things to her, and she tells him how sweet she finds them (Phyllis would have knocked all the suppressed romance out of Victor in six months, and then have been aggrieved and astonished because he gave her grounds for divorce within a year) and they tease one another about still being sweethearts, and so do the children, whom Victor will not allow to become hard-boiled. The simple truth is that these two remain in love with one another all the days of their lives.

  But all this is years and years away: and now there bursts out the Wedding March, gayest and most triumphant tune in the world, and down the church on her husband’s arm comes Viola Thompson-Wither-Spring, diffusing a strong odour of Love in Paris from her pale lilac wedding dress and looking very pleased with herself, as well she may. Her husband’s bright brown head is bent a little towards her so that he can watch her happiness and all the women notice this and coo over it.

  It must be odd to be as happy as that, thinks Hetty, following them down the church between the ranks of smiling, moved, wistful faces. I’d sooner have my life than hers. I wonder if he’s drunk yet?

  The verger has swung back the doors of the church, and out into the sunshine and the laughing cheering crowd, the showers of confetti and silver horseshoes, goes Viola on Victor’s arm. All the birds of summer seem calling to welcome her, as though the landscape itself were singing (they love a land like Essex, flat and wooded and watery) yet it is not so much a singing as a busy chirruping, a subdued recalling of springtime among the trees whence the white stars of the pear, the dark pink crab-apple flowers and the cherry-blossom have long since fallen. All the birds of summer seem to be calling; but the courting season is over, and one voice is silent.

  GOOD BEHAVIOUR

  Molly Keane

  ‘A remarkable novel, beautifully written, brilliant …

  every page a pleasure to read’

  P. D. James

  Behind its rich veneer, the estate of Temple Alice is a crumbling fortress, from which the aristocratic St Charles family keeps the realities of life at bay. Aroon, the unlovely daughter of the house, silently longs for love and approval, which she certainly doesn’t receive from
her elegant, icy mother. And though her handsome father is fond of her, his passion is for the thrill of the chase – highbred ladies and servants are equally fair game. Sinking into a decaying grace, the family’s adherence to the unyielding codes of ‘good behaviour’ is both their salvation and their downfall. For their reserved façades conceal dark secrets and hushed cruelties …

  ‘A masterpiece … Molly Keane is a

  mistress of wicked comedy’

  Malcolm Bradbury, Vogue

  ‘Wickedly alive’

  Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times

  ‘Dark, complex, engaging … a

  wonderful tour de force’

  Marian Keyes

  JANE AND PRUDENCE

  Barbara Pym

  ‘Barbara Pym is the rarest of treasures; she reminds us

  of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life’

  Anne Tyler

  If Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates seem an unlikely pair to be walking together at an Oxford reunion, neither of them is aware of it. The couldn’t be more different: Jane is a rather incompetent vicar’s wife, who always looks as if she is about to feed the chickens, while Prudence, a pristine hothouse flower, has the most unsuitable affairs. With the move to a rural parish, Jane is determined to find her friend the perfect man. She learns, though, that matchmaking has as many pitfalls as housewifery …

  ‘Over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite. Even an umpteenth reading this weekend was punctuated by gasps of joy, laughter, sympathy and wonder that this lovely book should remain so fresh, funny and true to life’