When Blackbirds Sing (3 page)

Most of the passengers left the ship at Plymouth and went to London by train; partly because they were tired of the long voyage, but more because, having escaped the submarines, they thought it would be foolish to take a further and greater chance of being drowned, or of floating about the Channel in lifebelts. They were all ashamed of giving these very sensible reasons and made up excuses about appointments in London. Dominic disembarked at Plymouth because his father had asked him to look in at Waterpark, the ancient inherited home of their family, in which, for the past two generations, they had made repeated nostalgic attempts to live, always ending in a sudden flight back to the sunlight and freedom of Australia. These were sometimes due to loss of money, but the occasion of the last flight, about five years earlier, was the rather discreditable way in which Dominic had provoked the breaking of his engagement to
Sylvia Tunstall, the daughter of their nearest neighbours, the Diltons. He was now supposed to see how much the tenant’s continual demands for repairs were justified. Mrs Heseltine, who had little money and a cheerful fatalistic attitude to danger, went on in the ship.

When Dominic left the train at Frome, the once familiar station seemed strange to him. It was all dream-like, as if the air were less dense, or the law of gravity modified. There was a new station-master who did not know him. When he told him his name, recently so well known in the county, he showed no sign of recognition, but he told him where he could hire a motor-car to drive out to Waterpark, seven miles away. The driver of the car knew who he was, but did not give him any effusive welcome to his home town. Dominic felt lonely and flat. As they drove along the deep lanes the sense of being isolated and alien to his own countryside grew stronger. It occurred to him, too late, that when he arrived at Waterpark in a car piled with his luggage, he would not necessarily be made welcome by Mr Cecil, the tenant, whom he had never met. He had followed the long habit of his youth and, without thinking, had put his luggage in the car at Frome station. As a small child he had been met there by one of his grandfather’s carriages, and as a young man by his father’s motor-car. He felt one of those curious stoppages in his brain, which happened when he suddenly found that he had acted instinctively without regard to changed circumstances. For a moment he could not think what to do. He was just going to tell the man to turn back. He would stay at the inn at Frome and come out again the next day. The
man would think him mad, as people often did when to his own mind he acted sensibly.

Just then he saw the Dilton gates ahead of him, with the two stone greyhounds on the pillars. He told the driver to turn in. He did not doubt that the Tunstalls would welcome him, though he had not seen them for five years, and their last meeting, when he had practically jilted Sylvia, had been the most awkward possible. He judged other people by himself, and as he never nursed a grievance, he was sure that they would welcome him with the same affection, which, remembering only happy times, he felt as the car sped through the familiar park. He was sure that his arrival would be a pleasant surprise, and that with homely warmth, which had never been a Tunstall trait, he would immediately be restored to the family circle.

But when the car stopped below the steps of the huge late Georgian house there was little sign of welcome or even of life. The blinds were drawn in many rooms, and the front door had that indefinable look, perhaps from dust in the jambs, of being seldom opened.

Again he had the feeling of changed laws of gravity, and sometimes in later life he dreamed of this arrival at the forbidding door of Dilton, itself at this moment like something in a dream. But his feeling did not prevent him telling the driver to take out his luggage, and he paid him off. He rang, but it was a long time before the door was opened, and then not by the butler whom he knew, but by a parlourmaid. He asked if Miss Sylvia was at home.

“Miss Sylvia’s been married two years,” said the young woman, looking with puzzled disapproval at this
apparently foreign gentleman, and the luggage piled at the bottom of the steps.

“Is his lordship in?” asked Dominic.

“His lordship’s at the depot.”

“What depot?”

“Where he’s the colonel,” said the parlourmaid, slightly indignant at his ignorance.

“Oh.” Dominic thought for a moment. He had asked for the family according to the degree of attachment he had had for them. He realized he should first have asked for Lady Dilton, and did so now. “Will you tell her Mr Langton’s here?” he said.

She told him to wait, and she shut the heavy iron-studded door in his face. Like the people on the ship she thought that he might be a spy. In a few minutes he heard again the grating of the bolts and she reappeared, asking him to enter. Lady Dilton, her curiosity aroused by the parlourmaid, who had given his name wrongly, had come out into the vast empty hall. Dominic was standing against the light.

“Who is it?” she asked with the fretfulness of a large woman who is a little nervous.

“It’s me, Dominic,” he said.

“Oh!” She hesitated a moment, then added: “Come in.” She led the way back into the little drawing-room which she used mostly during the war, and turned to face him.

“Well, this is a surprise,” she said, without excessive geniality, but she shook hands. “I didn’t know you were in England.”

He explained that he had just arrived, that he had been
going to Waterpark, but passing Dilton he had come in to see them.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where is your luggage?”

“On the steps.”

She smiled with that grim smile which Dominic had sometimes provoked in her. When she had seen him in the hall she had felt indignation which had lain dormant since their last encounter. But it had only been a flicker, and now it died.

“You’d better stay here,” she said. “That parlourmaid’s a fool. All the men have gone into the army.” She tugged a bell pull and when the maid came she told her to take the luggage up into Mr Richard’s room. She explained that both her sons were in France.

“I suppose you have come over to fight for us,” she said. This made her more inclined to let bygones be bygones.

“Yes,” said Dominic, though it had not occurred to him that he had come over to fight for Lady Dilton. He thought that he had come so that he and Helena, or if he did not return, Helena and the baby, could go on living on their farm in New South Wales, and so that it would not be a German colony.

“Sylvia’s married?” he said.

“Yes, to Maurice Wesley-Maude.”

“Is he nice?”

Again Lady Dilton gave her grim smile. “He’s a gentleman,” she admitted. “I heard you are married too.”

“Yes, to Helena Craig.”

“Well, that’s a good thing.” Lady Dilton was uninterested in the identity of Dominic’s wife, but apparently felt that it made things easier now that both he and Sylvia were safely tied up elsewhere. They talked for a while about what had happened in their families since they last met. He asked about the tenants at Waterpark.

“We don’t know them very well,” she said. “They don’t shoot. I think the man reads books.”

Colonel Rodgers, her brother, who rented the dower-house at Waterpark, and who had tried, at the cost of much suffering, to found with Dominic, in his adolescence, a friendship based on a mutual passion for lethal weapons, was in London angling for a job in the War Office. She gave him the address of his club, and told him to be sure and go to see him. Sylvia had a tiny house behind Buckingham Gate. “They are very poor,” she explained. Dominic knew that Sylvia had an allowance of a thousand a year, and her husband presumably had some money, if only his army pay. “The house is no bigger than a box,” she went on. “Sylvia says it is smart. That is not a word we used in my younger days. Only vulgar people were smart.” She did not give him Sylvia’s address, and it was obvious that she thought it better not. All Lady Dilton’s subtleties and snubs were obvious. Anyone who cared to point this out could have brought about a collapse of her immense dignity, but most people whom she met were too intimidated, and her friends of equal position were too kind, or else behaved in the same way themselves.

At last she said: “I must get on with these wretched circulars. Perhaps you would help me?” For the first time in her life when she needed a secretary, she had not got one.

She gave him a list of names and addresses, and they sat down at opposite sides of a large regency writing-table, contentedly scribbling away. Sometimes she spoke to him rather crossly, saying that his writing was illegible, and that he ought to leave more space for the stamps. The intimacy of this made him contented. The awful isolation he had felt at times on the ship, in spite of Mrs Heseltine, had left him. Here he was in a house he knew, within an hour, back as one of the family, being scolded for his untidy writing. This was what he liked best, to be at ease in familiar places with people who knew him well, who knew the worst things he had done but had accepted them. Also in this house he had known hours of blissful happiness in the days when he was engaged to Sylvia.

They were interrupted by the entry of Lord Dilton in khaki. He looked surprised, and waited for his wife to explain and introduce the young man sitting opposite her at the table. Then he saw that it was Dominic, and as in his wife five years’ resentment awoke, flickered and died.

“Good God, Dominic!” he exclaimed, and shook hands warmly.

“He has come over to fight for us,” said Lady Dilton, thinking this might temper her husband’s possible annoyance, but he appeared delighted to see Dominic. He chatted for a few moments and then said: “I hope to goodness the water’s hot tonight. I’m afraid that you’ll be confoundedly uncomfortable here. We’ve no men and the monstrous regiment of women can’t stoke the boiler. Have they lit a fire in Dominic’s room? And is there one in mine?”

“We weren’t certain that you were coming,” said Lady Dilton.

“It’s better for me to have pneumonia than to waste sixpence worth of coal,” he said to Dominic. He only went on like this when he was in high spirits.

“It’s not the coal,” said his wife. “They get bad-tempered if they have to light a fire for nothing.”

“Is there a fire in Dominic’s room?”

“I don’t know.”

“If the depot was run like this house we’d soon lose the war,” he said.

They argued a little more as to where Dominic should have his bath, and finally agreed that the water in the green bathroom was generally hotter as it was nearer the boiler. Lady Dilton again pulled the bell rope and Dominic felt that the whole of the enormous house was buzzing with preparations for his bath. Lord Dilton said: “I must go down and find something for you to drink.”

Dominic lay in his bath in a state of contented relaxation of mind and body. This was the first freshwater bath he had had for over six weeks, since he left Melbourne. He disliked the smell of hot salt water, and here not only was the water fresh, but the soap had a delicious scent of aromatic leaves. He was glad that he had found the Diltons alone. He might have been embarrassed at meeting Sylvia, though he wanted to see her. The boys, now smart young guardees, might have made him feel too much a backwoodsman. The house itself was more friendly, with its slight domestic incompetence, than with its former grandeur.

He wondered if Sylvia had ever used this bath. He thought that she must have; in spite of the size of the house, there were few bathrooms, and they were converted
bedrooms. He wondered what it would have been like to have married her. If he had, they would now have been living in the dower-house at Waterpark, having turned out Colonel Rodgers. Perhaps she had used this bath. She had a lovely skin, and he thought with her golden hair against the pale green enamel she must have looked wonderfully beautiful. Back in this house, with the Diltons so kind, the atmosphere of those days was returning to him. He felt that he had missed something that should have been his.

He lay so long in the bath that he came down only a few moments before dinner was announced. Lady Dilton looked a little forbidding, as she thought that he was going to be late; but when he said: “The water was so hot that I couldn’t get out of the bath,” she glanced at him almost with affection.

They dined at a small table, a pool of light in the dim spaces of the dining-room, which increased the feeling of family intimacy. Lord Dilton had brought up a very special burgundy, which he and Dominic finished between them, as his wife drank only whisky. He asked Dominic what regiment he was going to join, and said that if he would like to get a commission in the territorials of which he was the colonel, he would be pleased to ask for him. They drafted their officers and men to the regular battalion in France when they were ready. “But perhaps you want something less humdrum?” he suggested. “Cavalry, eh? Their turn will come.”

Dominic said that his father had advised him to apply to the colonel of his grandfather Byngham’s regiment, so that he would not be quite unknown.

“I suppose you should do what your father wants,” said Lord Dilton. “But a Langton would not be unknown in a west country regiment.”

When he left to return to the depot he again referred to this, and told Dominic that if he changed his mind he would be very glad to have him as a subaltern.

In the morning Dominic continued to help Lady Dilton with her circulars. In the afternoon she had to go to preside over a committee and he asked if he might have some means of transport, a horse or a motor-car or a bicycle to go over to Waterpark. Only a bicycle was available, and he set out along the country lanes, through which he had so often ridden when he was in love with Sylvia.

He no longer had the feeling of yesterday, that the local air was not his natural element. He was reacclimatized. For him it was not true that the skies but not the soul had changed. Under these English skies the emotions he felt here were stirring again. As he turned into the avenue, still with its notice: “Wheels to Waterpark House only,” he captured for a moment something of the wild delight he felt when he rode back here, also on a bicycle, to announce his engagement to Sylvia.