When Blackbirds Sing (4 page)

Dominic was still adolescent in the sense that he retained the vivid perceptions of childhood. He was as excited by the Spaniards moving in golden patterns beneath the water as a child would have been. He had not, like so many boys with a more conventional education, had his ideas of “manliness” and his limits of allowable perception fixed at the age of fifteen. He was not one of the permanent or petrified adolescents, who have come absolutely to terms
with the surface of life; and who call themselves, with perhaps a regret for that lost glimpse of a greater reality, “old boys” until life itself is ended. He continued experimenting, emotional, searching for some kind of truth which he felt that everyone else possessed and which was the secret of happiness. So he remained adolescent, which at least gave him the chance of reaching a complete, and not merely an external, maturity.

He left his bicycle against the high stone wall which separated the garden from the avenue, and opened the wooden door in the wall, which curiously was the main entrance to the house.

He forgot the politeness due to the tenant, and he walked across the lawn to the bridge by the three oak trees. Beyond was the meadow path to the village, by which he had often gone to see Colonel Rodgers. Memories returned, disturbing him. He felt that he had missed something, had taken the wrong turning. It was late September. The morning had been misty, but now the sun had come through. In the long border against the wall were blooming michaelmas daisies, and the white Japanese anemones and the different kinds of yellow sunflowers which his mother used to arrange in such splendid bunches against the white and gold walls of the drawing-room. The chestnuts in the avenue were turning yellow, and across the meadow were golden patches in the elm trees around the church. The sunlight warmed the old bricks of the house, and there was absolute stillness, a tremendous sense of peace and of the peacefulness of the past, and he felt somehow that this peace was his natural element. He felt himself to be as much a part
of this old place as the three oak trees by the stream, the bricks in the wall. He leaned on the bridge, looking down into the stream, and remembering how close its intimate life had seemed to him as a child. He was disturbed by a voice behind him asking sharply: “Do you want anything?”

He turned and saw Mr Cecil, the tenant, though he was as yet unaware of his identity.

“Oh, good afternoon,” said Dominic. “I’ve come to see the house.”

“And do you often come to see other people’s houses?” asked Mr Cecil, with an air of amusement.

“Well, really it’s my house, or rather my father’s,” Dominic explained.

“You are one of Mr Langton’s sons?”

“Yes, I’ve come to see about the repairs.”

“Then you are very welcome.”

Mr Cecil shook hands. He led the way across the lawn, and learning which of Steven’s sons he was talking to, he told him that he had heard much about him from Colonel Rodgers, whom he described as “an engaging but reprehensible character”.

He took Dominic from room to room, a door-handle was needed here; a piece of skirting broken there; and the mysterious patch of damp had appeared again on the staircase wall.

They ended up in the drawing-room where the white panelled walls, with their carved and gilded classical motifs were almost entirely covered with shelves full of books. The library shelves were also full of Mr Cecil’s books, and he had taken the house because of that accommodation.
The room had a comfortable academic appearance, but all its grace and richness of colour were gone. It was the same throughout the house. It had more the atmosphere of a kind of clergyhouse than of the home of people who were engaged in a full-blooded enjoyment of life.

Mr Cecil’s conversation, when he had dealt with dilapidations, had a curious dry flavour that went with the appearance of the house. He mentioned the war, and said, as if it would be merely an interesting phenomenon: “We shall have a great recrudescence of violence when it is all over.”

“But that is what we are fighting against,” protested Dominic.

“You can kill men’s bodies with guns, not their ideas,” said Mr Cecil.

Dominic was bothered by this remark. The idea of pausing in the middle of a crusade to question its probable results was alien to him. He refused an invitation to stay to tea, saying that he wanted to see the church, and he had to return to Dilton before dark, as his bicycle had no lamp. He said goodbye, asking Mr Cecil to have the repairs done by a builder in Frome, as there was no longer an estate carpenter, and to send the bill to Steven.

As he wheeled his bicycle across the lawn, and took the meadow path to the church, he was a little depressed by the atmosphere of his former home. Whatever misfortunes had come on the family in this place, while they lived there it had always been a lively, friendly house. His depression was increased when he met a tall woman in grey tweeds and a man’s hat, who stopped him and said: “Are you aware that you are trespassing?”

“No,” said Dominic, surprised.

“How did you get on to this path?”

“I’ve been to see Mr Cecil at the house.”

“Did he give you permission to come this way?”

“He didn’t say I mustn’t. Are you the new vicar’s wife?”

“I am Mrs Cecil of Waterpark House.”

Dominic thought of replying: “And I am Mr Langton of Waterpark House.” Instead he explained politely: “I am just going to see the church.”

“Why aren’t you in uniform?” she asked.

“I’ve only just arrived in England.”

She looked sceptical, said: “Don’t dawdle,” and nodded goodbye.

He was thankful that he had not arrived last night with all his luggage.

He had never much liked going to church, but now the place restored his sense of belonging here, weakened by his meeting with the Cecils. This was largely because of the names of his forebears on the tombs, and the more heraldic than religious stained glass which his grandfather had put in their chapel.

He browsed about the church, giving the names on the tombs more attention than he had done before when he was a boy and had taken them for granted. There were several Stevens. It was odd to see his father’s name on these memorial plaques, and it increased his feeling of belonging. The roots of his family were here. The powerful influences of the place made him believe that it was impossible that they should live anywhere else.

He left the church and rode along the village street.

When he came to the dower-house, a small Elizabethan house in the village, although he knew that Colonel Rodgers was in London, he alighted from his bicycle and knocked at the low door, which was opened by Mrs Hawke, the Colonel’s housekeeper. She gave him a questioning look and then exclaimed: “Master Dominic! This is a surprise!” She sounded as if it were a more welcome one than it had been to Lady Dilton. “Oh, the colonel will be upset to miss you! He’s away in London looking for work. Come in and I’ll give you some tea. I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t give you tea.”

He stood again in the low dark-beamed sitting-room, the walls hung with the spears and swords, the battle pictures and the shrunken and mummified natives’ heads on the mantelpiece. Nothing had changed except that between the mummified heads was a large photograph of himself at the age of eighteen. He felt a longing to recover the life in which he used to visit this house, to be an integral part of the community. He was moved by the photograph of himself, to know that for the years he had been away, in which he had hardly given Colonel Rodgers a thought, he had been remembered.

Mrs Hawke brought his tea. She stood and gossiped while he drank it, and ate her good cakes, the same kind that she had always made, the taste of which telescoped his absent years. The names of the village people of whom she gave him news were like the flavour of the cakes. Young Jonas was in the army. Miriam, the Wakes’ girl had got into trouble, which Mrs Hawke put down to her going courting without a hat. She had gone to London, as usual leaving the baby with its grandparents. The old vicar was dead at last.

Dominic asked her about the Cecils.

“They!” she said contemptuously. “They do nothing for the village. You tell your father with proper respect he ought to come home again. Waterpark without Langtons isn’t Waterpark, that’s what I say.”

When he left Mrs Hawke he was certain that they should all return to Waterpark. In this secluded village, where the medieval pattern had hardly changed, lay their secure identity. They had taken the wrong turning when they left it. He had not taken the wrong turning when he married Helena, but he should have brought her to live here. As he rode back to Dilton he was full of the idea of their return.

He dined alone with Lady Dilton and told her that he wanted the family to come back to live in their original home.

“That would be a good thing,” she said approvingly.

She went to bed at ten o’clock. He sat up in his room, writing to Helena a long letter explaining how, after the war, they must all return to live at Waterpark, his parents at the house, themselves at a farm near by, as long as Colonel Rodgers was alive.

This was the first real letter he had written to her. In the weeks immediately following their separation, his misery had been so great that he could find no words to express it. He had only sent a note from Durban, and another from Cape Town, saying that it was a dull voyage and sending her all his love. Now this, his first real letter was full, not with longing for the scenes of their home, but of plans for her own transportation. And he was staying at Dilton, and he
did not tell her that Sylvia, to whom he had been engaged, was married and living in London.

He also wrote to his father, advocating a new migration. Steven received this plan with little enthusiasm, but he was amused at Dominic’s staying at Dilton. It was the last thing he would have expected, and therefore he should have foreseen it, as Dominic always did the last thing one would expect.

Dominic left Dilton the next day and arrived in London in the evening. On Paddington station they were lifting wounded soldiers into a train at the next platform. He stood watching them, as a child will sometimes stand, absolutely still and expressionless, fixedly looking at something which it has never seen before, storing it at the back of its mind. The porter interrupted him by asking what he should do with his luggage, and he told him to take it into the station hotel, where he spent the night.

In the morning he went to his bank in Threadneedle Street to collect his letters. There were about a dozen, nearly all from relatives in Australia. Two of them were from Helena, one from his mother, in which she told him not to forget to go to see old Cousin Emma, and one from Cousin Emma herself inviting him.

He sat on a mahogany chair in the bank and opened
Helena’s letters. The first which he read was dated about ten days after he left. It described in detail their life on the farm, and the antics of the baby. He read it more with concentrated interest than with emotion. If he had received it at Fremantle in the first stages of his voyage, every word would have given a twinge to his longing to be home. Now he was full of his plans to bring them back to Waterpark, and Helena’s aim in writing in this way, to keep vividly before him the picture of his home, was without a target. When she received his letter written from Dilton she was dismayed. Her other letter was written on the evening he had left. He read:

He sat for a long time holding this letter. A yard or two away men came in and cashed their cheques or paid
in others. One or two glanced at him curiously, thinking that he must have heard some dreadful news. Some of the anguish of his first week on the ship returned to him, and from this letter he received the vivid impression of his home life, which her detailed description had not brought him. He read the other letters in the bus going back to Paddington, but he did not take in their contents.

In the afternoon he walked across Kensington Gardens to Brompton Square to see Cousin Emma, not only as a duty, but because his father had said that she might be useful to him. She seemed to know all the generals, as her husband, nicknamed Coco, had been in the War Office, and had helped some of the most famous in their careers. She even referred to Lord Kitchener as “one of Coco’s boys”.

Like the Diltons, she appeared to have buried the hatchet, as Dominic had lodged with her while he attended a crammer’s, and their parting had been far from cordial. One of his few good fortunes was that people thought well of him in his absence. They remembered his good looks, his genuine desire for friendship, and his suggestion of smouldering passion, which was particularly attractive to women.

She looked at him critically and thought that he had become rather colonial. After a few enquiries about his parents and, as an afterthought, his wife and child, telling him that one of the latter was enough, she put him through a sort of catechism. She asked where he was staying, and told him that he could not go on living at a station hotel on the wrong side of the park. She gave him the address of a small inexpensive hotel off Curzon Street, where “people
of our sort” could stay. But her chief concern was the most socially desirable way in which he could serve his country.

He told her that he intended to join the regiment in which so many of the Bynghams, his mother’s family, had served. She thought that a good idea, as he would begin with some background. He said too that Lord Dilton had asked him to join the territorial battalion of the local regiment, of which he was colonel. She was impressed by Lord Dilton’s wanting Dominic, but she had been so involved in the life of the regular army that she considered being a territorial to be almost degrading. She told him to go to see another distant relative, a colonel in the War Office.