Nightingale Wood (2 page)

Mrs Wither came in, but he took no notice of her because he had seen her before. She sat down behind the cups as a gong sounded in the hall, and Mr Wither heavily crossed the room and took his place at the other end, opening the
Morning Post
. Mrs Wither passed him a cup of tea and a bowl of patent cereal smelling and tasting exactly like all the other patent cereals, and three minutes passed. Mrs Wither sipped her tea, gazing over Mr Wither’s bald head streaked with two bands of hair at a blackbird strutting under the monkey-puzzle tree.

Mr Wither looked slowly up.

‘The girls are late.’

‘They’re just coming, dear.’

‘They’re late. They know perfectly well I don’t like them to be late for meals.’

‘I know, dear, but Madge overslept, she was so stiff after the tennis yesterday, and Tina’s just trying—’

‘Fiddling about with her hair as usual, I suppose.’

Mr Wither returned to his paper and Mrs Wither went on gazing and sipping.

Madge, their elder daughter, came in rubbing her hands.

‘Morning, Mum. Sorry I’m late, Father.’

Mr Wither did not reply, and she sat down. She was thirty-nine years old, a big woman in a tweed coat and skirt with strong features, a closely shingled head and fresh yet insipid colouring.

‘How can you eat that sawdust, Father?’ she inquired, beginning on eggs and bacon and speaking cheerfully because it was a fine morning and only ten minutes past nine; and somehow, at the beginning of every new day, there was always a chance that this one might be different from all the rest. Something might happen; and then everything would be jollier all round.

Madge did not see clearly into her feelings; she only knew that she always felt cheerier at breakfast than at tea.

Mrs Wither smiled faintly. Mr Wither said nothing.

Footsteps came draggingly yet hastily across the tiled hall, and in hurried Tina, her eyelids pink, her dull hair arranged in its usual downward wave on her forehead. She was a little person, with eyes and mouth too big for her thin face. She was thirty-five; and dressed with evident pleasure to herself in a green suit and a white ruffled blouse. The nails of her small fingers were painted pale pink.

‘Morning, everybody; I’m sorry I’m late, Father.’

Mr Wither uncrossed his plump legs in unexpected trousers of a natty checked cloth, and crossed them again, but did not look up. Her mother smiled at Tina, murmuring:

‘Very nice, dear.’

‘What is?’ Mr Wither suddenly fixed Tina with a bloodshot, drooping and pale-blue eye.

‘Only my new – only my suit, Father.’

‘New, is it?’

‘Yes – I – yes.’

‘What do you want to go buying more clothes for? You’ve got plenty.’ And Mr Wither returned to the City page.

‘Bacon, Tina?’

‘Please.’

‘One, or two, dear?’

‘Oh, one, please. No – that little one. Thank you.’

‘You don’t eat enough. It doesn’t suit you to be thin,’ observed Madge, buttering toast. ‘Can’t think why you want to diet at all; you look washed-out.’

‘Well, you can only go by how you feel, and I know I feel miles better—’

‘
Miles
better? How can you feel miles better?’ loudly demanded Mr Wither, putting down the
Morning Post
and staring severely at his younger daughter. ‘A mile is a measure of length. It cannot be used to describe a condition of the human body. You can be much better, or considerably better, or noticeably better. You cannot be
miles
better, because such a thing is impossible.’

‘Well then,’ Tina’s dry hands slowly ground over each other in her lap as she tremulously smiled, ‘I feel
considerably
better since I started the Brash Diet.’

Her smile showed irregular teeth, but sweetened her face surprisingly and made her look younger.

‘Well, all I can say is you don’t look it, does she, Father?’

Silence. The blackbird gave a loud sweet squawk and flew away.

‘Are you playing golf today, dear?’ presently murmured Mrs Wither to Madge. Madge, with her mouth full, nodded.

‘Shall you be in to lunch?’ pursued her mother – cautiously.

‘Depends.’

‘You must know whether you will be in to lunch or not, Madge,’ interrupted Mr Wither, who had suddenly observed in the City page a piece of news which had blackened for him a world that was never very fair. ‘Can you not definitely tell your mother whether you will, or will not, be in?’

‘ ’Fraid not, Father’ said Madge firmly, wiping her mouth. ‘Give us the sporting page, will you, if you’ve finished with it.’

Mr Wither detached the sporting page and passed it to her in silence, letting the rest of the paper drift listlessly to the floor.

No one said anything. The blackbird came back.

A purple-black and louring mantle of gloom now lay over Mr Wither. Before reading that piece in the paper, he had been as he always was at breakfast, and at luncheon and tea and dinner as well. But now (thought Mrs Wither and Madge and Tina) Father was Worrying; and the rest of the day would be darkened.

Mr Wither’s chief worry was his money, of which he had some two thousand eight hundred pounds a year. This was the interest upon a handsome capital left to him by his father from a private gas company, established towards the middle of the last century, in which the late Mr Wither had held most of the shares.

During his own working life, Mr Wither the younger, knowing little about gas but a good deal about frightening people and getting his own way, had bossed the gas company with some success: and at the age of sixty-five (five years ago) he sold his shares, invested the proceeds, and retired to relish his leisure at The Eagles, near Chesterbourne, Essex, where he had already lived for thirty years.

Mr Wither’s investments were as safe as investments ever are in this world; but that was not safe enough for Mr Wither. He wanted them to be
quite
safe; immovably productive, stable as rock and certain as nightfall.

It was no use; up and down they went, influenced by wars and births, abdications and airports. He never could be sure what his money was up to. He would wake up in the night and lie in the dark wondering what was happening to it, and during the day he prowled uneasily after it in the financial columns of the Press.

He was not mean (he often told himself) but he detested to see money wasted. It gave him strong pain to spend money without a strong cause. Money was not Given to us to spend; it was Given to us to save.

Now, as he sat gazing hopelessly at his half-finished cereal, he remembered all the good money he had been persuaded into wasting. How he had disliked paying away all those fees for the girls, during the ten years when they had tried to have careers! Pounds and pounds and pounds thrown away, good money sent after bad. Art schools and domestic schools, barbola work and secretarial college elocution lessons and journalism courses, kennel-work and weaving. None of it any use, of course; all of it wickedly expensive, and what could the girls
do
, as a result of all the money that he had spent upon them?

Nothing. Mr Wither considered them to be ill-informed and inaccurate in their speech, muddled in their thinking, and useless with their hands. He had a vague feeling that Tina and Madge, having been taught so much at so high a price, ought to have been, like Sir Francis Bacon, possessed of universal knowledge; but somehow it had not worked out that way.

‘What time did you say Viola’s train gets in?’ Tina asked her mother; she sometimes found the Wither silences unendurable.

‘Half-past twelve, dear.’

‘Just in nice time for lunch.’

‘Yes.’

‘You know perfectly well that Viola’s train gets in at half-past twelve,’ intoned Mr Wither slowly, raising his eyelids to look at Tina, ‘so why ask your mother? You talk for the sake of talking, it’s a silly habit.’ He slowly looked down again at his little bowl of mushy cereal.

‘I’d forgotten,’ said Tina. She continued vivaciously, at the silence. ‘Don’t you
loathe
getting to a place before twelve o’clock, Madge – too late for breakfast and too early for lunch?’

No one spoke: and she remembered that she had said the same thing last night at dinner, when the time of Viola’s arrival had been threshed out with a rousing argument about the times of trains between Mr Wither and Madge. She flushed slowly, and ground her hands together again. Breakfast was being awful, as usual. Never mind, her new suit was really becoming, and Viola was coming today; that would make a little change, and Viola’s presence might prevent Father from Worrying so much and so often, and Madge from arguing with him so rudely. Viola was not an exciting person, but anyone’s company, even that of a sister-in-law, was better than that of unadulterated Relations.

After reading a book on feminine psychology called
Selene’s Daughters
borrowed from a school friend, Tina had decided to face the facts about her own nature, however disgusting, nay, appalling, those facts might be (the book warned its readers that the truth about themselves might disgust, nay, appal them); and one of the facts she had faced was that she did not love her family.

She had not even loved her only brother, Teddy; and that
was
rather appalling, because, for three months, Teddy had been dead.

Viola was his widow, a bride of a year, who was coming to make her home with her husband’s family at The Eagles. Whenever Tina realized that she had not loved Teddy, it made her feel worse to remember that Viola, a very young girl with plenty of young men to choose from, had chosen Teddy and loved him enough to marry him. I suppose I’m unnatural, thought Tina. Of course, we never saw much of Teddy after he was grown up. He never shared his life with us, as some men do with their sisters and parents. All the same, I must be abnormal, not to have loved my only brother.

‘Want me to drive you up to the station, Mum?’ offered Madge, standing at the door.

‘You won’t be back in time, will you, dear?’

‘That doesn’t matter; I’ll come back, if you’d like me to run you up.’

Madge loved to drive the car, but as Mr Wither said that she did not know how to, she seldom got the chance.

‘Well, thank you, dear, but I’ve told Saxon now. He’ll bring it round about ten past twelve.’

‘Oh all right, if you prefer Saxon’s driving to mine.’

‘It isn’t that, dear. And I think Saxon really drives quite nicely now.’

‘So I should hope, after two cautions, a new mudguard and a fine.’

She went out whistling, and Mrs Wither stooped for the paper, but Mr Wither, as though absently, stretched out his hand for it, and she let him have it.

‘Are you going to practise, Tina?’ she asked, putting her hand on her daughter’s thin shoulder on the way to the door.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Ought to go out,’ pronounced Mr Wither, coming to the surface of his gloom like a seal for air. ‘Mooning indoors won’t do you any good,’ and he submerged again.

Mrs Wither went out.

Tina crossed to the window and stood for a little while, looking up at the brilliantly white clouds behind the black-green branches of the monkey-puzzle. The world looked so young this morning that it made her very skin feel withered; she was conscious of every creamed and massaged wrinkle in her face, and of her hardening bones; and all she longed for, and the only thing she cared to think about on this young, light-flooded earth, was Love.

Mr Wither went out of the room, crossed the cold blue and black tiles of the hall, and shut himself into his own snuffy den, a little room furnished with a worn carpet, a large ugly desk, financial books of reference, and a huge fireplace which gave out a hellish heat when lit, which was not often.

This morning, however, it was lit. Mr Wither had not made up his mind in a hurry about ordering it to be lit; he had thought the matter well over, and decided that the fire would not be wasted, though an alarmingly large quantity of coal must be burned if the hellish one were not to go out about half-past two in the afternoon.

Mr Wither intended to invite Viola into his den after lunch and have a little talk with her, and he thought that she might be easier to talk to if she were warmed. Women were continually grumbling about being cold.

It disturbed Mr Wither to think of a silly young girl like Viola having control of her own money. True, she could not have very much; when the money that her father had left her was added to the money that Teddy had left her, she could not have (thought Mr Wither, sitting upright in his baggy-seated old black leather arm-chair and gazing sadly into the furious fire) more than, say, a hundred and fifty pounds a year. But even a hundred and fifty pounds a year ought to be properly looked after, and Mr Wither and his financial adviser, Major-General E. E. Breis-Cumwitt, DSO, were certainly more fitted to look after it than was Viola.

If Mr Wither had had his way, he would have known how much money Viola possessed, but at the time of his son’s death, circumstances had conspired to keep him from finding out.

To begin with, Teddy had always been irritatingly secretive about money (as, indeed, he was about all his affairs) and his father, though he knew how much he earned, did not know how much he saved. Every fortnight or so, during Teddy’s lifetime, Mr Wither asked Teddy if he were saving money, and Teddy said, ‘Yes, of course, Father,’ and changed the subject. He refused to answer direct questions about How Much and What In; he retorted that that was his affair. Nevertheless, his father had assumed that he did save something.

Then, when he died suddenly of pneumonia, Mr Wither had been unable to go to the funeral (which took place in London, at Viola’s wish), much less investigate his son’s estate and take over its management, as he wanted to do, because he was at the time helpless with a sharp go of lumbago.

But he did know that there had been no Will, and this made him uneasy.

He wrote to Viola; he wrote two longish, earnest letters about the Money. He received in reply one short, vague little note saying that she was ‘going to stay with Shirley, a friend,’ and giving no address.