Nightingale Wood (14 page)

‘Worse,’ muttered Mr Wither. ‘Much worse.’

‘Oh no, dear. Not so infectious – and Saxon could nurse it if it did.’

‘Spurrey was much impressed with Saxon.’ Mr Wither roused himself, speaking a shade less gloomily. ‘Said what a smart boy he was, and how well he drove. He’s very dissatisfied with his own man. Says he’s getting old.’

‘Well, so is Mr Spurrey; I thought he looked
very
old this afternoon,’ said Mrs Wither spitefully, ‘and I should think his memory’s failing and he imagines things.’

‘Nonsense. Sound as I am.’

‘Well, dear … about Madgie’s dog. Don’t you think you could let her have it? She’s such a good girl.’

Silence. Mr Wither gazed gloomily at his feet, which he could not see because the room was in darkness.

‘Couldn’t you, Arthur?’

‘Madge has everything she wants,’ he said at last. ‘A good home, pocket money, liberty. I never interfere with her playing all those games, though I’m sure they can’t be good for her.’

Mrs Wither sighed. She knew, as a woman and a mother, that the splendours enumerated by Mr Wither were not enough. What Madge needed was something to love. But it never entered her head to tell her husband so. Not only would he not have understood, but it would have been the kind of thing that one does not say. There were ever so many things like that; most things, in fact.

There was another long pause. The sound of gay distant music somewhere across the valley floated into the dark room, making Mrs Wither feel depressed. She shivered.

‘I suppose she can have it,’ said Mr wither grudgingly, ‘but tell her that the first time I find it in the house it must be destroyed.’

‘Yes, of course, dear; I will make that quite clear to Madge, and I am sure that she will see it never does come in.’

But she did not feel at all sure.

Her heart sank at the prospect of agitating scenes, with Madge rushing the dog out through the french windows as Mr Wither came in through the door, of the dog being smuggled up to Madge’s bedroom, and Mr Wither tripping over gnawed bones in the bathroom, of slippers destroyed and pools in prominent positions where Mr Wither would be sure to see them on his way to luncheon, of vets’ bills and bills for dead chickens, of Madge in hysterics because her father had decreed that the dog must die, of barking fits at three in the morning, and possibly batches of puppies twice a year.

‘It
is
good of you, dear; I do appreciate it so. And now do come into the drawing-room; it’s quite chilly in here. I shall tell Fawcuss to bring you a glass of port.’

‘I’m just coming; only going to draw the curtains. I don’t want anything.’

Nevertheless, as he moved slowly into the drawing-room he thought with pleasure of the taste of port, and when the surprised Fawcuss brought some in, on an old glass tray that had belonged to his father, he said, ‘Ah, thank you, Fawcuss,’ and sipped it with an increase of comfort.

Emmie’s a good wife to me, a very good wife, suddenly thought Mr Wither. And then, like a cold wind – What shall I do when she’s gone?

CHAPTER VIII

Saxon slept at his home. It was only a twenty-minute walk through the wood from the cross-roads to The Eagles, and Mr Wither saw no reason why Saxon should occupy a good bedroom, burning good electric light and eating a good breakfast under his employer’s roof in addition to earning a hundred pounds a year. A few days after Tina had got her father’s permission to have driving lessons Saxon was lying awake in the early morning, in his room.

It looked over the wood: he could see the tops of the beeches from where he lay, his arms behind his head, covered in coarse and worn but very clean bed linen. He wore flannel pyjamas in the same state as the bedclothes; the whole room had this look of poverty and fierce cleanliness: even the windows flung back the early sunlight like sheets of crystal.

He never slept well; he had not done so since he was a little boy. Too much (he supposed) went on in his head. People whom he called Fatbottoms slept all night, without ever planning what they were going to do the next day, and deciding the most efficient and quickest way to do it. At present he was sleeping worse than usual because he was worried. He was beginning to get sick of his job at The Eagles, and wanting to leave it, yet he had no prospect of any other. If he left The Eagles it must be to go to a better job, even if it was only a little better. He would not take a worse one; he would sooner stay where he was. Yet he was nearly twenty-three and he had been at The Eagles six months; it was high time that he made a move. He had learned everything that there was to be learned about driving and repairing Mr Wither’s make of car; now he needed more difficult, responsible, and better-paid work.

The men at the filling-station where he had picked up his knowledge of cars and learned to drive had often asked him why he did not try for a job in Stanton, the fashionable and exclusive seaside town some twenty miles from Chesterbourne. There were lots of rich people there with cars who might give him a trial, the men said. Even Chesterbourne, one-horse hole though it was, had a professional and prosperous class that ran cars and chauffeurs; surely anything would be better than working for old Wither, a smart young feller like you.

But Saxon did not want to leave Sible Pelden; he wanted to show all the people there, who remembered him as a ragged boy running about the countryside with a dirty home and a drunken father, that he was getting along fine these days, in a smart uniform, earning a good salary and putting a bit by for a rainy day. If he went even so far as Stanton to look for another job, no one would know him, or see that he was making good; if he went to London, he would be just about lost, like a pin in the gutter; London was such a huge great place. He had driven the old boy up to London once or twice; and though he knew how big London was, and could even remember figures (for he read his newspaper every day with serious concentration) about its population and growth, it had proper surprised him; it went on for such a long time, and that time was only a little bit of it. No, he wouldn’t try London just yet. Later on, perhaps. First he would show all the Fatbottoms who had been at school with him that he was going right ahead, and getting a better job each time he changed.

But there were no better jobs to be had round Sible Pelden. Mr Spring’s chauffeur, Colonel Phillips’s chauffeur, Sir Henry Maxwell’s chauffeur were all married men with families, well dug in, who dared not die or try to get work elsewhere.

There’s nothing doing round here, he thought, staring up at the still, hazy sky of early morning, with his cool grey eyes.

Tina’s imagination and senses had not been seduced by a pair of fine shoulders on a lout. Saxon was that rarity, a beautiful young man without a trace of effeminacy. Beauty in peasants is usually spoiled, in the judgment of non-peasants, by coarseness of texture in hair and skin, but Saxon’s hair and skin were fine, like those of the mother who had passed them on to him, and neither his manners nor voice were coarse. His ambition and his impatient hatred of his dirty home and sodden father seemed to have given a fineness to his nature that showed in his body. His beauty first struck the glance, but what held it, so that it returned again to his face with pleasure, was his air of confidence, of knowing what he wanted and being sure of the way to get it; in short, character. His mind moved in one piece, practically and realistically, and this gave him a look of calm that was attractive. Men said he was a cool hand, and women, after the talkies had been for some years in Chesterbourne, said that he was fresh. Cool and fresh: the adjectives apply to so few human beings that it is not surprising Tina found his image haunting her heart.

His good looks, and the memory that his father had once been a respectable, comfortably-off miller with land, gave him a feeling of superiority towards the hobbledehoys he led as a youth; he despised them while he ran with them, and this made his father’s gradual decline from decency and his beastly death sink the deeper into his son’s mind. Saxon had never been popular in the village; and when his father died and there was no money to pay the debts and the Cakers had had to move into a squalid cottage, the Sible Pelden people were more interested and I-told-you-soish than kind. Mrs Caker alternately grumbled and joked about her miserable poverty, and Sible Pelden did not like either attitude. The decent country women suspected her for being pretty, for being dirty, for buying diamond hairslides, for reminding them that her husband used to have his own mill; and the men, while they admitted that Saxon was deft, intelligent and hard-working, disliked his stuck-up ways. Some people said that it was a credit the way he had got himself on, dropped his loutish hangings-about at the cross-roads and found a job, but these were not many. Most of Sible Pelden said that he was a proper swell-head, adding that he would leave his mother next thing, as sure as they were standing there, because she shamed him with her slumocky ways.

These were the Fatbottoms, the people Saxon wanted to ‘show’, by getting better and better jobs.

But he was so much a country boy, so soaked and coloured by the atmosphere of those few square miles of Essex wherein he had always lived, that he could not strongly feel the pull of a wider world. He read about it in his newspaper and saw it on the pictures, but he had not yet felt it as a real place. His real place was Sible Pelden. He knew, with his cool common sense, that if he really wanted to get on he must leave the place and try for work where work was to be had, but there was a part of his nature that was not cool, and was still so young that it wanted to show off in front of old, contemptuous neighbours. This joined with his unconscious feeling that Sible Pelden was home, and kept him there.

He knew that he had this narrow streak of imprudence: he called it ‘letting go’ and blamed his dead father for it. It made him do silly things sometimes; like smiling at girls in the street or at Miss Tina, or at Mrs Theodore, as he had smiled the other day, out in the yard.

Bang! on his door.

‘Saxon! Here’s yer tea.’

‘Thanks, Mum.’

He got out of bed and took in the tea; his mother was already half-way down the narrow stairs. No tea was slopped in the saucer. So she had come to her senses about that, had she? He, who was neat as a cat, had once ticked her off for bringing up his tea slopped in the saucer, and ever since that day, weeks ago, it had come up with the cup swimming.

Now she had come round; so she could have that half-crown put back on her week’s money.

She don’t like me much, he thought, pulling off his pyjamas and putting them over the bed to air. She liked Cis best.

Cis had died during their third horrible winter in the cottage, at eight years old, because she could not get enough warmth and food; and because Mrs Caker, telling the more prosperous neighbours about Cis’s illness in her grumbling voice with her eyes touched by laughter, did not make Cis sound as ill as she really was. Cis was a great one for a joke too; she was laughing a few hours before she died, while the doctor, fetched by Saxon, bent over her and said something funny.

Bad to remember. I’ll show them. He began to splash in cold water; he would shave downstairs.

His mother was proud of his good looks, because he got them from her, and she grumblingly admired the way he had got on, telling him that he was a proper comic and as artful as a wagon-load of monkeys, but they sometimes had terrible rows because he hated her dirty ways. He hated, too, with the distaste of the unawakened, her easy attraction for every man she met. It made him embarrassed and ashamed.

He sometimes took a Chesterbourne girl to the pictures and kissed her good night for a quarter of an hour, but he had no regular girl, and had never got beyond kissing his irregular ones. What he liked was ladies; not ladies like Mrs Theodore who had worked in a shop and was therefore not a lady at all, but ladies like those who stayed over at Spring’s, who filled their lives with unknown and therefore romantic activities. He admired them because they had no need to work, and because they had a good time. He was not envious of them nor of the wealthy people in the neighbourhood, because he was coolly determined that he would one day be wealthy himself. He had not yet planned in detail how this wealth was to be gained but his whole nature was set upon gaining it; and showing it, when he had got it, to the Fatbottoms of Sible Pelden.

Meanwhile it was a satisfactory start to have learned to keep himself and his room clean, to read the papers, steer clear of tarts, not talk Essex, and thoroughly understand the management and running repairs of a 1930 Austin saloon.

All the same (fastening a suspender) I wish I’d got a man-sized job. This one’s getting me down, and I’m starting to let go. That smiling at Miss Tina, the other day, that was a fair let-go and a damn silly one too. Might have got me the sack, if she’d taken it the wrong way, and I only did it because it was a lovely morning, and I felt good, and she used to be such a pretty little thing. As for Mrs Theodore, she’s only a kid. That wasn’t like giving a lady the come-hither. She wouldn’t say anything, Mrs Theodore wouldn’t. Besides, she’s been married. She’s a pretty little thing, too. Must be dull for her, up there. Dull – Jeeze! Is it dull or is it dull!

The young men of Chesterbourne had taken this rhetorical demand to their hearts, as had the young women; it would not be too much to say that it was heard everywhere. Am I hot or am I hot? Do I want a coffee or do I want a coffee? Was that rain or was it rain? Their elders said that they could not see anything in this silly way of talking. It didn’t, said the elders pathetically, make sense.

I must get a better job
, thought Saxon, running lightly downstairs with his waisted jacket over one arm, but he did not think it dramatically or tragically; he thought it with impatient common sense. Neither he nor his mother were tragic people; tragedy overtook them, but it did not deepen their natures, because it found no answer therein. The long-drawn tragedy of his father’s life had made Saxon, not bitter and humiliated, but self-respecting and ambitious.