Nightingale Wood (15 page)

It would seem that Tina’s good taste in dress extended to her taste in young men, though it is doubtful if this would have been Mr Wither’s first thought, had someone said to him, ‘Your youngest daughter is falling in love with the chauffeur.’

She herself thought that she was interested in Saxon only because there were no young men of her own class and fortune in the neighbourhood with whom to fall in love. If there had been a flock of nice, good, comely bachelors earning enough to keep a wife, with whom she could have danced and played tennis, Tina (who was rather a coward, though she was trying hard not to be, with the help of
Selene’s Daughters
) told herself that she would never have been so reckless as to be attracted by the portionless and peasant Saxon. Her senses might have been stirred by his beauty, but her common sense and her self-respect would have soon sat on
that
.

But there were no men: there were just no what-you-would-call-really men at all, and her common sense, like all her other senses, was silently starving. Much chance it has of sitting on the others! she thought bitterly.

There were men, of course, but they were darkly thought of by Tina as
No Use
. Colonel Phillips was sixty-odd and very married, Sir Henry Maxwell was fifty-odd and run by his mother, the rabble of three or four boys just down from, or going up to, the universities never stopped zooming past in noisy sports cars, so that it was impossible to imagine any of them troubling to climb out of the car and propose; and to them Tina seemed very old; she was not the type boys fall in love with.

There was Victor Spring, of course, dazzlingly eligible: too eligible. It was hideously clear that the first thought of any unmarried woman on meeting Victor Spring must be, in the old song’s words:

Oh, what a prize you are,

Oh, if I only had you!

And that was enough to make any sensitive woman shrink from Victor Spring as though he were the local leper. Not that they got much chance to shrink, for he seldom saw any of them. When he took women about, they were Phyllis Barlow or other stunners from London, who shot like stars down the humble familiar lanes by his side in his big car. He used Sible Pelden, it was dimly felt, like an hotel. Bed, breakfast; but out and away all day on exciting and expensive activities at which the neighbourhood could only guess.

And even now, as Victor Spring lay in bed at a quarter to eight on this May morning, propped on his elbow while he sleepily gulped very hot tea, he was planning to see even less of Sible Pelden. He had a service-room in town where he could change and sleep if, as he often did, he wanted to spend a night in London; and he thought it would be a good idea if he had a whole flat. He was getting dissatisfied with Grassmere. The old place was all right, he supposed, pretty good in the summer when he could use the river and get his tennis; but it was a long way from London. It tied him. His mother, of course, never asked him about his movements unless they had people staying there; it was not she who tied him, but the thought at the back of his mind that he lived in the country. It was a nuisance. After all, they had lived at Grassmere for nearly thirty years; it was time they made a move.

One of those new flats in Buckingham Square that were running up on the site of Buckingham House would be the thing; they were not finished yet, but three-quarters of them were already let. They were expensive. Let them be; something must be done with the money his interests were coining; and a man must have a place he could ask people to; people must be entertained and impressed.

Grassmere, though large and comfortable, was not impressive to the moneyed eye, and Victor vaguely felt it. A family cannot live in a house for thirty years, even if that house is kept in perfect repair and solid luxury, without giving to their mansion an air of domestic comfort and stability which is not found impressive by the moneyed eye.

What the M.E. likes is something very new, staggeringly expensive and just a shade precarious; not enough to scare off the M.E., but enough to hint that here is so much money that it must have been raked off a dirty deal into which the M.E. may have a chance of muscling. The M.E. prefers a place to look like a blend of a bar and a luxury liner, and that was the sort of a place Victor was thinking about having.

But the disappointing truth is that this young god’s own tastes were not exotic. The very fact that he was only now planning to live in chromium luxury in London, at the age of twenty-nine and after some five years of enjoying a steadily increasing income, proves how well content he was with old Grassmere. He liked all the things his City friends liked; speed, women, spirits, golf, tips, scandal and smut, but he liked them in a non-flashy way because there was no flash in his nature. His father had been born in Derbyshire and his mother in Hampshire, and from both those places the Levant is a long, long way.

He now began leisurely to get up, while his thoughts walked practically about in his head. He outlined some letters that he would dictate that morning; and felt irritation against General Franco and the Spanish Government because their civil war was hitting some interests that he had in a new line of small ships built for luxury cruising; then he wondered if he should advise his fellow-directors to lend money to a dubious company that wanted (ignoring the shrieks of the helpless residents) to build a pier and Amusement Park on to a seaside town in Dorset. He reminded himself to tell his secretary to change the two biscuits provided every day for his tea because he disliked coconut; and decided he would drive out that afternoon to look at a Victorian mansion near Hatfield, which his co-directors wanted to buy and pull down. On the site they would build a swimming-pool. When in doubt, build a swimming-pool, was their motto. But he must see the site for himself.

It is no wonder that Victor had at the back of his mind a vague irritation about the inconveniences of living in the country, for the Spring Developments Association Ltd was gaily destroying the country, at the rate of some square miles a month; his irritation may have been the country getting back at him. He had no conscious scruples about the way he made his money; when artists and ancientry with one foot in the furnace attacked his company and others like it by threatening him with the dreaded secret police of the S.P.R.E. and the National Trust gang, he retorted that business was business and meant it. Yet he came of country stock, he was country born and bred, and perhaps his discontent with life in the country was actually a dim sense of guilt. If he went to live in London, he would not see the bungalows built by his company outside Bracing Bay creeping across the quiet and beautiful lands between Sible Pelden and the sea.

Anyhow, I’ll drop in at Buckingham Square and look at those flats on the way back from Hatfield, he thought, knotting a thick pale grey tie.

All his clothes were carefully thought out and perfectly executed, and gave the impression that it was not possible for any sane person to dress in any other way. He spent a good deal of money on his clothes, because he had so many activities and it was necessary to wear the correct clothes while doing any one of them, even while doing nothing, and none of the clothes, of course, were interusable. It was not possible to wear the golfing clothes for walking, or the punting clothes for tennis.

His clothes gave him quite two-thirds of his efficient, sophisticated and summing-up manner, which some people found alarming and women found attractive. No one saw Victor naked, except the masseur at his Turkish baths and certain obscure persons upon whom he chose to bestow that honour; and the masseur had no thoughts except that Mr Spring was in very good shape, while the thoughts of the other persons are not relevant to this story; but it may be said that Victor, naked, looked simple, warm-natured and kind, which (except when anyone missed a train or neglected to prune the roses) is exactly what he was.

The idea of a flat in town made him think of Phyl as he stood staring out of the window, softly whistling and clappering his hair with two brushes.

Old Phyl. What a dazzler she was, easy on the eye, the top, the smoothest thing yet. He reminded himself how much he liked kissing her, firmly pushing to the back of his mind a suspicion that she did not quite so much like kissing him. She was a sport, who never whined if she lost a game. But dammit, she hardly ever did lose. At least, she lost quite often to him but he had to go all out to prevent her winning. He did not like that. He liked a good fight with a man, but that was different. Phyl never seemed to tire, she might be made of steel. A woman oughtn’t to be like that. It was unfem— no, that’s absurd of course: sounds like old Phillips. But a man doesn’t like a woman to – oh well, I suppose some men don’t mind it, but I do, and she isn’t going to wear me for a mascot when we’re married, so the sooner that gets home the better.

I suppose we’d better get things fixed up definitely this summer. There’ll be the Bracing Bay business to get going in the autumn and I shan’t have time for that
and
getting married. Get engaged in July, and married early in September.

Through his mind drifted the phrase, ‘Oh, God, the whole ruddy works,’ but it never occurred to him that a wedding need not have the whole ruddy works. All his friends had groaned; but their weddings had been huge, gorgeous, reverberating, barbaric feasts. That was the only way of getting married. Besides, Phyl would expect it.

None of Victor’s set said that so-and-so was ‘in love’; they said he was crazy about, had fallen for, or was making heavy passes at, someone. He vaguely supposed that he felt like that about Phyl, but what he felt when with her was that mingling of irritation, admiration, and determination that she should not master him, that he had felt when he was sixteen and she a composed, elegant, dark child of eleven.

Oh, it’ll be all right when we’re married.

He slowly pulled on his jacket.

All I know is, I keep on putting off this business with Phyl, and that isn’t like me; I might try to get things fixed up with her when she comes down for the Infernal Ball (this was the name given by the local frivols to the Infirmary’s yearly benefit). She’s starting to get under my skin.

He went downstairs whistling.

She got under his skin like a spike of summer grass, he compared her to steel, and swore that he would not be her mascot. Admirable antagonism! Just what the late D. H. Lawrence, of whom Victor had not heard, would have ordered.

Half a mile away across the valley, Tina lay musing with arms behind her head, her large sad brown eyes staring through the open window. She looked prettier in bed than she did when dressed, because her nightgowns were softer in design than she permitted her day clothes to be; they were always white, decorated with narrow red or green ribbons. No one cared much how Tina looked, so she dressed to please herself.

Thoughts, quietly sad as she imagined the thoughts of the old must be, rose uselessly in her mind. They were all familiar to her, like worn paths; she experienced anger and boredom even while the well-known train unfolded. For so many years she had lain awake on spring mornings, while tea cooled on her little black lacquer bedside table, gazing through the curtains the maid had just pulled apart at the changing sky! Ten years ago there had been painful weeks when she waited in hope, her heart banging violently, for letters; and when they came she read into their friendly sentences meanings that were not there, and she had known, with her common sense, that they were not there, but had tried to deceive herself because she was so hungry to feel!

Other women – (oh, that path! it was very worn) – other women loved their families, or had their work. I did try to have a career; but a career just wouldn’t have me. And I don’t really see (another very worn path) why one should love one’s relations just because they are one’s relations.

We’ve never been a united family, that’s all. I suppose Mother and Father didn’t love each other properly or something; there doesn’t seem to be much love between all of us, anyway. I wish there was.

We don’t attract people, either.

For a little while her thoughts played with the half-forgotten pictures of men she had known at the Art School, who had told her she was charming or kissed her. Five times. Five men had kissed her. Well, six; only young Farquhar was drunk: I suppose that doesn’t really count, if one’s honest.

I wonder why (this path was so worn that she turned from it, in sick impatience, even as the thought came up) I’ve never had anyone in love with me? Other women do, not half as nice-looking as I am.

Of course, I’ve always wanted love very much; real love, for keeps, not just an affair, and I’m sure that puts men off. They hate you to be serious.

While she lay there with these old worn thoughts coming obediently into her mind, called there by habit and the familiar quiet of early morning, she was aware that at the back of her mind there was another thought that was not at all stale, but so fresh that it was nearly a feeling, with all a feeling’s delicious power to kill thought. She had not yet told Saxon that he was to teach her driving, and this morning she would speak to him about it.

Tina had stopped trying to be honest with herself, put
Selene’s Daughters
away in a drawer, and decided to be – not honest perhaps – but certainly sensible. Goodness and Doctor Irene Hartmüller only knew where she would end up, if she went on trying to be honest. Besides, there is a point at which honesty with oneself can become the mother to a wish; and she dimly felt this.

I’ve been too heavy, as usual, about the whole thing, she decided, sitting up in bed with soft lifeless brown hair falling against her thin cheeks. Just take it as a matter of course. Naturally I find him good to look at – stuck down here (thought Tina, vigorously common-sensible) without a man in sight for miles. She yawned, stretching.