Nightingale Wood (5 page)

It was a beautiful evening. The wind had fallen and the sun gone down behind coral-red clouds. The air was mild, and scented by new leaves. One star was out; among the woods, already dark, a thrush was singing.

It was all enough to break your heart and Viola began to cry.

Girls of nineteen may be put in two classes: those who assume that they will marry immediately and those who fear that they will never marry at all. Viola Thompson, only daughter of Howard Thompson, part proprietor of Burgess and Thompson, Ladies’ Outfitters, had belonged in the latter class.

She had a poor opinion of her own charms, and when Teddy Wither fell in love with her she was more embarrassed and distressed than flattered.

Teddy had gone into Burgess and Thompson’s one Saturday morning when he was home from London for one of his rare weekends, to buy himself a handkerchief. He had a cold, and his handkerchief had blown out of his pocket on the drive into Chesterbourne.

It is, of course, nonsense to say that just anyone will fall in love with just anyone else. Teddy had never loved anyone but himself, yet when he saw Viola, smiling with the other shopgirl as she tucked a thick pale curl away, he fell painfully and violently in love with her.

No one else but this tall, very young, not quite ordinary girl would do. He found out her name and besieged her with miserable letters asking her to go out with him. He gave up his room in London and stayed with his family at Sible Pelden in order to be near her. (This was a true sacrifice, for he did not like his family, and did not spend much of his time with them.) He sent her flowers. He took her home to tea at The Eagles, to his family’s surprise, annoyance and dismay. At last, trembling with passion, he implored her to marry him.

Viola did not like him very much. She was sorry for him, but she giggled when Shirley Davis called him Mr Therm, and she was never easy in his company; he stared so. She was happy living in three rooms over the shop with her father, a tall irritable man who would interrupt his bursts of bad temper with quotations from Shakespeare, scoop up his daughter, and rush the two of them off to the pictures, so that he could pick the film to pieces afterwards and swear that the Theatre, the Glorious, Ancient and Down-Trodden Theatre, was the only art.

He was an ardent amateur actor and a lover of Shakespeare’s plays. ‘Viola’ was not a sentimental accident but a favourite and familiar name bestowed upon a beloved daughter. Viola’s mother had died when she was born, and her father had brought her up, as Prospero did Miranda. When such a father and daughter are happy, it takes a more lovable man than Teddy Wither to lure the daughter willingly away.

But Viola’s father was knocked down by a young man driving a car, and died in an hour.

The young man was fined, and had some severe remarks made about him, and drove away from the court faster than ever because he was so cross: and after a while, Viola heard that her father had left her only fifty pounds.

Mr Thompson had often needed money to help the Chesterbourne Players. He would hire the costumes for a period play, or stage a special effect, or get a professional actor to work for three nights with the amateurs. The hall in which the Players played was old, chilly, and falling down; Mr Thompson put in a stove, and footlights, and had the roof repaired.

This went on for ten busy, happy years; while Mr Thompson’s share in Burgess and Thompson slowly passed, in return for ready money, into the hands of Mr Burgess, who was good at business.

And so Viola had only fifty pounds.

Then Shirley Davis (born Cissie Cutter, daughter of the town’s most prosperous hotel-keeper and dearest friend of the orphaned and miserable Viola) said that she ought to marry Mr Teddy Therm, it was the sensible thing to do. Viola’s two aunts, sisters of her father, said so too, and so did old Miss Cattyman at the shop. Teddy’s kindness (a little spoiled by jealousy of her dead father, which she did not then notice) was comforting, so she took the advice of all her friends and married him.

Everyone was relieved that poor Viola was settled except Shirley, that downright girl, who was sorrier for her friend than ever.

On the eve of Viola’s wedding Shirley, who was staying with her, had run down into the shop to find some white silk to mend something with. The little rooms over the shop where Viola had lived with her father were brightly lit and full of females, all talking at once and admiring the trousseau, on which some of the fifty pounds had been spent. But down in the shop it was dark, except where the dismal light from a street lamp shone upon dismantled stocking stands and shut drawers, rolls of rayon covered in dust-sheets, and stacks of Cosycurl knitting wool. A faint glazey smell came from a newly opened bale of Horrocks’s longcloth, and near it, sitting with her ankles curled round one of the customers’ chairs and her head down on the haberdashery counter, was Viola. She was crying.

‘Heart alive, girl, what’s up with you?’

‘Oh, Shirley, I’m so miserable.’

‘And I don’t blame you,’ retorted her friend, hitching herself up on the counter and beginning to swing her beautiful legs. ‘So should I be.’

‘Well, I do like that, considering it was you made me give in about it,’ mopping and sniffing.

‘Only because I don’t see what else you could do. But I didn’t know you’d feel so down in the mouth.’

‘Well, I do.’

Shirley did not assume that Viola was crying for her father. Her tears had a frightened sound.

‘He makes me feel sick,’ she whispered, staring through starry tears at the street lamp.

‘What, all the time?’

‘No, only when he kisses me. I hate being kissed. It’s beastly,’ she added.

Shirley stared down at her friend’s untidy head, glimmering ashily in the dim light. She was very disturbed and distressed. She said suddenly,

‘Look here, Vi, don’t go through with it. Chuck it all up and come and live with—’ she stopped herself from saying ‘Geoff and me’, and ended ‘near us’. ‘I’ll find you a room and a job.’

‘Oh, Shirley, I’d
love
it!’

‘His face – when you don’t turn up tomorrow!’ giggled Shirley, who did not consider that a short, plump man could suffer.

But the picture of Teddy’s face sobered Viola. He had told her so often that she was the only person that he loved in the world, that his life lay in her hands and it would break his heart if she ever let him down.

It would be wicked to let a person down when they felt like that about you: and as she stared longingly up at Shirley, she gently shook her head.

‘You aren’t thinking of marrying anyone else, are you, for mercy’s sake?’ inquired Shirley, slithering off the counter and relieved (though she still felt disturbed and distressed) that Vi, after all, was going through with it.

‘Me? Good lord, no!’

This was true. Viola had no regular boy when she met Teddy, and few admirers. She was too quiet for local taste, which admired Shirley’s thick red curls, clear pink and white skin, and ringing voice; and though she went to dances sometimes and met boys and thoroughly enjoyed such outings, she enjoyed going to the pictures with her father, or watching him act, quite as much. Boys did not notice her much, and she did not notice them. It was quite true that she was not ‘thinking’ of marrying anyone else.

Nevertheless, at the back of her mind, whenever she retired there for a reverie about a wedding, lingered the day-dream that one day she would marry Victor Spring.

All the girls who had grown up in Chesterbourne – the girls in Woolworth’s and the young ladies in Barclay’s Bank, the assistants in the two smart hairdressing shops and the tradesmen’s daughters, the shopgirls and the typists and secretaries, the young receptionist at the Miraflor Café and the waitresses therein – they all day-dreamed just a little, when they retired to the back of their own minds for a reverie about a wedding, of marrying Victor Spring.

He was the richest young man in the neighbourhood, he had the biggest car, the smartest house, the gayest parties. He was so good-looking that he made the heart, in that foolish old saying, beat a little faster, and was so charged with controlled energy and health that everyone felt more alive when he had been near.

All these local girls like Viola, who had grown up in Chesterbourne or Sible Pelden and found jobs there, knew all about Victor Spring, his widowed mother and his cousin Hetty Franklin, who lived with them. While the day dreamers were still at school, they used to see Victor, home from Harrow at Christmas, passing through the town in his father’s car on the way to some festivity at one of the local big houses. The glimpse of the handsome boy, self-assured, charming in his Etons and the legendary, absurdly becoming topper, went straight into their romantic pigtailed or shingled heads and lingered there for years.

No one remained virgin for his sake, no one drowned herself in the Bourne, they all grew up prepared to marry the publican, the tailor and the chemist as their mothers had done before them; but there was a continual soft current of feminine speculation and comment in Chesterbourne and Sible Pelden about the doings, the income, and possible bride of Victor Spring.

Viola had day-dreamed like the others, although she had never spoken to the young god. Even after she was Mrs Theodore Wither (and was not very happy, because after he was married to her, Teddy discovered that she was not so poetic and marvellous as he had supposed, and naturally this made him less fond of her) she sometimes found herself imagining a wedding in the old church at Sible Pelden, to which she and her father used sometimes to walk on Sundays, with herself in white satin and orange-blossoms; and, waiting for her at the end of the church as she came slowly down on her dear father’s arm was Victor Spring.

Then she would wake up with a shock, realizing that she
was
married and would never have a lovely wedding like that, with a handsome young man to look down lovingly at her and tell her that she was beautiful.

And as she was now a widow, moored firmly in the bosom of her late husband’s family, it did not seem likely that she would ever marry Victor Spring.

As she leaned against the window frame, crying because she was so lonely and missed her father so much, she could see through her tears and the thinly leaved trees the red brick and white woodwork of the Springs’ house, Grassmere, crowning the hill on the other side of the valley.

Between the two hills, each with a house, was a little wood. Its paths were dark with evening now.

She stared at the house, realizing that it was his, yet not actually thinking about him. He was not a real person to her; he was a dream. But he lived, and had lived ever since she had known about him, in a wonderful world where everyone was happy, and wore lovely clothes, and went to dances and shows every night and enjoyed everything.

How she longed to live in that world!

The house looked romantic as a fairy palace to her, as she stared across through half a mile of twilit air. How big and rich it was! There was a light in one of the upper rooms, strong and golden (all the lights at The Eagles were dim; Mr Wither said that bright lights were bad for the eyes).

This is a beastly, miserable hole, she thought, the tears running warmly down, and I’ve got to live here for
ever
, until I’m as old as Tina. I’ll never get away. Never.

Away on the other side of the valley sounded the long arrogant note of a car’s horn. It was Victor Spring’s great Bentley, bringing him back for the weekend, dashing homeward through the darkening lanes. Like the horn of the Prince who came to awaken the Sleeping Beauty it sounded, a thrilling, imperious call echoing through the little twilit wood.

CHAPTER III

On the same April morning that Viola came to The Eagles Mrs Spring, of Grassmere, sat in the morning-room glancing through the
Daily Express
and sipping her orange juice.

Victor had already gone to London. The house still quivered with his departure; virtue had gone out of it. It was left to women and servants until his return in the evening.

He had said nothing at breakfast, except that he would be in to dinner, and only once had he glanced out of the window because something, a gleam of improper white, had caught his eye. Daisies, five of them, on the green suede lawn which his gardeners kept perfect.

But he at once looked down at his paper again, without frowning. By ten o’clock the daisies would be gone; the gardeners would have worked round to them in their daily routine.

The house and its grounds resembled the first-act set of an old-fashioned musical comedy. The brickwork was a strong new red, the woodwork, of which there was much, a dazzling white. So soon as either material lost this freshness, Victor had it cleaned and repainted, for he did not so much dislike shabbiness as take it for granted that shabbiness could not exist; and every room in the warm, perfectly equipped mansion went through the same strict treatment.

If gin was spilled upon a cushion of bright plum-red velvet with a heavy silver fringe, then that cushion disappeared and another one, of black satin embroidered heavily with irises in fourteen natural shades and costing 49
s
. 11
d
., took its place. Should an ashtray in the shape of a winsomely begging Sealyham fall on the floor and chip an ear, away it went, and another, shaped like a coquettishly imploring Cairn, appeared in its stead, each having cost 37
s
. 6
d
.

Baskets of brightly gilded wicker full of seasonal plants in blossom hung above the pleasant veranda which ran the length of the house. A troop of dogs sprawled in the sunlight on the veranda floor, not troubling to glance at the open french windows because all five knew that, if they strayed inside, they would be heartily thrashed.

Below the three tennis courts a shrubbery of rhododendrons sloped to the banks of the Bourne, where Victor had a private landing-stage, and the house for his outboard, punt and little sailing-boat. Every now and then a white sail glided past above the dark green bushes or the patched one of a barge, the colour of a tiger-lily, loomed by on its way up to Chesterbourne.