It Was the Nightingale (23 page)

“Goodnight, you great big beautiful doll,” said Phillip, kissing heron the cheek.

*

On the last evening, after supper—they had spent the day, by Chevrolet, at Hartland—Martin set about writing his weekly article, ‘From the Cottager’s Study’, for a syndicate of provincial newspapers. The heavy portmanteau was opened and five or six dozen books laid on the table. Then various book-pages torn from
The
Observer
,
The
Sunday
Times
,
The
Saturday
Review
,
The
Outlook
,
The
New
Statesman
,
The
Manchester
Guardian
Weekly
,
The
Weekly
Westminster
Gazette
were spread on the floor about his feet. He took a book from the table and mused upon a page or two before turning them over faster until he almost struck them.
Flip-flip-flip
—he appeared to Phillip to be musing rather than reading, while his tongue was slightly protruded and curled against his upper lip as though it had an irritation upon the tip.
Flop
—the book was dropped on the floor, while reviews by other critics were examined. An average apparently having been struck, Martin made a critical cottage pie. An hour and a half passed in which a dozen reviews were written. “Bed, Fifi!”

“What do you do with all these books, Martin? Keep them?”

“Good God no! Where’s your bookseller in Barnstaple?”

“There’s one up Cross Street.”

“Martin gets half-price for the best ones,” said Fifi. “But the one’s he’s marked he uses for lecturing, don’t you, Poogs?”

“Do you ever stop talking,” growled Martin. “Our train leaves at eleven tomorrow morning. You did order the taxicab to come early, as I asked you, I suppose, Phillip?”

“Yes, Martin. It will arrive outside at ten o’clock sharp. That will give you bags of time to dispose of the books——”

But Martin was already thumping upstairs to bed.

*

Phillip saw them off at the junction. Martin’s face seemed leaner as he stood by the open carriage door.

“I’ll see you again?” he said between his teeth. “Don’t heed my gruffness—we both love you. Come and see us at Worthing. Bring your adorable Lucy with you.” He jumped in as the whistle blew, and sitting down in a far corner, opened a paper.

Phillip stood on the platform, watching the guard’s van round the curve of the line. Dear Martin, dear Fifi.

He walked to the end of the deserted platform, and made up his mind to ask Lucy Copleston to be his wife.

*

For the dance Lucy had been invited to join the Master’s house party, and to his surprise Phillip received an invitation as well. A score of guests, most of them young people, assembled to dine in the tall room, once the refectory of a monastery. Footmen, wearing livery for the occasion, stood against the walls panelled in dark oak to the ceiling; faces glowed in the flames of branched candelabra on the long table.

Afterwards they were driven, in several motors, to the Assembly Rooms in the town a dozen miles away.

The hour after midnight seemed to pass very swiftly, both on account of the champagne he had drunk and because he seemed to have been talking, as he and Lucy sat at the top of some stairs, about everything except what he wanted to say.

At the end of an hour he was exhausted, and talking wildly; while Lucy sat there with pale face, unable to help a mood that was, by its very nature of exhaustion, not to be helped by words. At last he arrived at the unadorned point with, “Lucy, would it be awful if I said to you, ‘Will you marry me?’”

She replied, “Yes, didn’t you know already?”

“That it would be awful for you?” he laughed.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way!”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

She looked pale.

“Thank you,” he said.

They sat unmoving for a few moments. “Shall we go and have a drink?”

She said, “Yes, certainly.” She, too, was exhausted; she waited while he finished his whisky and ginger ale, and said she would see him in the ballroom in a few minutes.

“Oh, I’ve left my bag on the stairs!”

“I’ll fetch it.”

He hurried away. Where they had sat were a young man and woman, arms round one another’s neck, kissing. Lucky young people, not to be in love! They moved politely apart. He apologised for his presence, saying that his partner had left something there. Recovering the bag, he took it to her, thinking that he had not yet kissed her. Had he acted from his head only, and not from his heart?

While she was away he drank more whisky, and on her return took her to the supper room and gave her some food. They both cheered up; he danced with her, while happiness began to flow in to fill the vacuum of the past hours.

“Don’t tell anyone, will you?”

“No, my dear, I won’t.”

“You called me ‘my dear’!”

She looked at him steadily. “Well, aren’t you my ‘dear’?”

“Am I?”

“I only hope you won’t be disappointed in me. I’m not clever at all, you know.”

“Nor am I. I’m often a terrible fool!”

“We’ll be just ourselves, won’t we?”

“Not
all
the time!” he laughed.

Too soon
The
Post-Horn
Gallop
sent them racing with others round the floor. The dance was over!

“I wish it were just starting!”

“It’s been lovely!”

The next day, saying goodbye to the family at Arleigh, he set off with Lucy to her camp. She rode behind him on a cushion strapped to the carrier. They avoided the main area of the village
by taking a side-lane which came to the Great Field, where he stopped to tell her that the villagers thought him a little mad. Unknown to him, Lucy had absorbed his mood, which he had cast off in the telling of it; and when they arrived at his cottage she walked past the open doors of the neighbours unspeaking, her eyes on the ground. He left her in his kitchen with the gramophone while he went to enquire if Mrs. Mules would prepare an omelette for two.

That excellent woman at once asked who it was, and he said, “Miss Copleston, who is a Mistress of the Dorset Girl Guides.”

“Tidden true!” cried Zillah, with sparkling eyes. “I reckon you’re the Guide, Mr. Mass’n. Tell the truth and shame the devil, is it the same young lady?”

“Yes, it is,” he replied sharply, in his nervousness. “Do you mind?”

“I don’t trouble who it is!”

“Right, we’ll be down at one o’clock.”

“And mind you see that she turns up this time!”

The feeling of constraint remained when he returned with Lucy down the lane to the gravedigger’s cottage. Dreading possible remarks, he did not introduce her to either woman. It was therefore an uneasy meal, served almost in silence by Zillah, while Lucy kept her eyes upon the table.

Afterwards he took her to his cottage, and going round the back way for a word with his neighbour—“Don’t you think my friend is lovely?” he found Zillah already there.

“Copleston—well, us don’t think her’s much cop, her didn’t say good morning like a proper young leddy would!”

This was both hurtful and humiliating, and he tried to explain that his guest was shy.

“Shy!” said his neighbour. “What—be ’er too shy to say good morning? ’Er thinks ’er’s too grand for us, I reckon!”

It was useless to try to explain: he realized afterwards that he should have taken Lucy to see them then and there; but at the time felt hurt that they had so misjudged her. This led him to say to Lucy that “some people in the village are a bit narrow-minded”. Then he said, “If perhaps you could say ‘Good-morning’ to them——” and then was startled when she stopped, with reddening cheeks, and broke into tears.

“Lucy, please forgive me! It is every bit my fault!”

“I have let you down,” she wept, her head turned away.

“No, I was stupid and nervous! Of course, I should have introduced you in the first place. Really, it is all my fault.”

He was startled and dismayed by her tears, for she had told him that she had cried only once in her life, when her mother had died.

He walked beside her, while thoughts of his own failure made him numb, and apart from her. Lucy was similarly unhappy. In her modesty she had no feelings of superiority to the Mules, who had thought that she had scorned them as servants, and so beneath her. She should have said good-morning to them, she knew, but had waited for a lead from Phillip, because she was his guest. Now she felt that she had behaved badly, and had spoiled it all for him.

They walked back to the camp, seldom speaking. There they said goodbye, Lucy to walk on with feelings of grief at her own stupidity, Phillip to return, damning himself for having ruined her holiday.

That evening he went back to the camp, and found the site empty. He had forgotten that it was their last day. What must she think of him?

After a sleepless night he filled his pack, settled Moggy on top of his shirts, and with Rusty on the tank, set off for Dorset.

During the days that followed he never ceased to wonder at the happy feeling in the house above the river. He told himself again and again that he was very lucky to find himself the friend of the kind of family he had thought never to exist outside a picaresque novel. In that house, where Lucy looked after three grown-up brothers and an old father there was an ease and a kindness, an absence of fuss and social convention that were entirely new in his life. He learned from Lucy that they had very little money; and the unconcern about this seemed to him to be ideal. This was, if not Liberty Hall, at least Liberty Lodge. Meals were at no regular times. If one brother were absent, the others tossed Odd Man Out for his portion. If the absent one came in late, Lucy would drop whatever she was doing, and either cook something for him or cut bloater-paste sandwiches to be served with a cup of Bivouac coffee—the dark liquid from the bottle with the label of a kilted soldier in parade dress sipping a cup beside a camp fire. How poor they were he could not decide: certainly the house was full of objects and portraits denoting a different past.

He began to wonder if he could be of help to them. This feeling came to him on the fourth day of his stay, when as lunch-time approached he discovered Lucy in the dark larder, with Bukbuk the cat and four growing kittens mewing about her feet, while she gazed at the shelves, and after awhile said, “Bother, I don’t know what to give them. There just isn’t anything. Bukbuk has eaten the rest of the cold mutton. Oh dear, and she’s been at the rabbit pie, too.”

On the shelves, beside innumerable empty bottles and jam-pots, were two large cold potatoes on a plate; scraps of pastry around the dish of rabbit pie; the crater of a Stilton cheese within a blue-and-white Wedgwood cover; half a loaf of bread, and some mildewed crusts in a box.

“Bother,” she repeated. “I don’t know
what
they can have for lunch. There’s bloater paste, but they are going to have that for supper. Oh well, I suppose they’ll have to have potato soup.”

“Give me just ten minutes!”

He ran to the Norton, and leaping on, went into the town to return with several pork pies, a bottle of sherry, a Dundee cake, and four pounds of tomatoes.

Lucy had told him that the dining-room was being converted into an office (for what he did not ask) and so meals were taken in Mr. Copleston’s study, a small room with scaling blue colour-wash on the walls and filled with books to the ceiling against one wall, while along another stood a cupboard with guns behind glass, cabinets of shells, coins, and birds’-eggs. The third wall held family portraits and faded photographs, swords in cases, horned heads, and other relics of a sporting past.

By the window stood Mr. Copleston’s desk, with blotting pad almost covered with ink, paperweights, a spring balance, a brass duck’s head with ruby eye holding down bills, and a tray of faded pens.

On the round table, still covered by the table cloth, Phillip set pork pies and tomatoes, while Lucy pulled lettuces from the garden and washed them under the rotary pump. Phillip found some Waterford wine-glasses and polished them, afterwards setting them on the table. Lucy brought in a silver tray engraved with coat-armour, holding cream jug and sugar bowl; and after lighting the spirit flame under the kettle on the stand she went outside to beat a gong which hung near fox masks mounted on oaken shields along the passage wall, while Phillip examined sporting prints dating from the eighteenth century. Among them were engravings of a garrison hunt in Ireland; and the portrait of a young man with side-whiskers and sensitive face, who was, Lucy had said, her mother’s father. Cobwebs linked them. The stair-carpet was more earth than carpet, with several rents in it, and no wonder, for the Boys thumped up and down in nailed boots and shoes.

The gong sounded gently. They waited for a few moments, while he stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. “Perhaps Pa didn’t hear,” she said, taking his hand. “He’s a bit deaf.”

Phillip went to where Mr. Copleston was digging. “Lucy says lunch, sir!”

“Eh, lunch? Good idea!” He stretched his back. “One gets too beastly stiff, nowadays,” he muttered. Phillip followed him into the room. “Ha!” The old gentleman eyed the food. “Pork pies!” He sniffed appreciatively. “H’m,” he looked at the sherry, then at Phillip, with a genial look in his grey eyes. “Your doing, I suppose? Well, no objections from me! I’ll go and wash my hands.”

Phillip went to the door of the workshop, seeing the Boys at treadle lathes, apparently turning some brass parts. “Lucy says ‘Lunch’!”

The treadling ceased.

“Ah, lunch!” Ernest, the eldest, spoke as though to himself. He surveyed a slide-rule critically, and went on making notes on a piece of paper beside a blueprint.

“That’s absolutely splendid news!” exclaimed Tim. “Lunch, by Jove, Fiennes!”

Fiennes, fair of hair—his two brothers were dark, like Lucy—said nothing as he threw a file on the bench and left the workshop.

Phillip returned to Lucy. They waited happily while Pa came slowly down the stairs and seated himself in the chair at the head of the table. Phillip held Lucy’s chair for her, and then sat down beside her. Meanwhile Pa had been scrutinising the label on the bottle of sherry.

“Won’t do much work afterwards if I have too much of that,” he said, with a knowing look at Phillip.

Ernest came very quietly into the room. He was tall and bespectacled, with a sallow face, and still wore his dungaree jacket. He took his place without a word, then after staring at the pies, exclaimed “Ha!” with quiet satisfaction.

Fiennes came in next. He too said “Ha!” then added, “Pork pies, I see! Well, I’m hungry.” Finally came Tim, who exclaimed “By Jove!” enthusiastically. “Pork pies! Well, well, well! Jolly decent of you,” he smiled at Phillip, and sitting down, exclaimed “Ha!” to the sherry bottle.

“Long time since a bottle was opened in this house,” said Mr. Copleston. “May I offer you some of your own wine?”

“Thank you, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t a corkscrew.”

“Corkscrew, corkscrew,” muttered Ernest, with a preoccupied air. “Now where have I seen a corkscrew. H’m, there
was
one in the workshop somewhere. But someone took it.”

“That corkscrew, by Jove, yes,” said Tim, who looked to be about twenty years old. “I had it to try to get the bell-pull wire out of the wall. Now where did I leave the dashed thing?”

They sat still, as though ruminating, while Bukbuk, the small grey cat, came into the room with arching tail, followed by four kittens with similarly arching tails. While those around the table remained still, the cat with a chirrup leapt upon the edge of Lucy’s chair and stared at a hole in the cloth about six inches away from its nose. Was this some ritual? For the faces around the table-cloth were watching the cat with anticipation.

“Bukbuk,” said Ernest.

At this labial sound the cat put its head on one side, delicately lifted a front leg over the cloth, and with curl of paw tried to draw the hole towards it. It made several hesitant attempts to do this, before withdrawing the paw, and, looking at Lucy, opened its mouth to mew inaudibly. At that everyone laughed.

“You see,” explained Tim to Phillip, “Bukbuk is very fond of currants, and when we have any we put one on the table-cloth for her to take. A year ago, when she was a kitten, she mistook that hole for a currant, and whenever she sees that hole now she thinks of a currant.” They all laughed again.

“Pork pie, anyone?” asked Mr. Copleston, knife and fork poised. He looked at Phillip.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sherry,” said Ernest, with sudden quiet forcefulness, staring before him. “I—want—sherry!”

“By Jove, yes,” cried Tim. “Now where
did
I leave that dashed corkscrew?”

“Yes, where?” demanded Ernest. Phillip had observed a faded photograph of Ernest on the fireplace shelf: Ernest at three years wearing large straw hat, black button boots, white socks, sailor suit with skirt: Ernest with bashful reluctance facing photographer. Lucy had told Phillip that Ernest had so hated his public school near Shoreham in Sussex that he had run away several times, each time arriving home without a word of explanation, or of questioning from Pa, who thought that Ernest had come home for the holidays.

“Corkscrew wanted,” said Fiennes firmly, sitting still.

“Ha, yes,” replied Tim. “Now where the blinking blazes
did
I see that cursed corkscrew?”

Nobody left the table. At last Mr. Copleston, having apportioned the pies, opened a drawer in the gun-cupboard behind his chair and took out a nickel-silver whistle. He unscrewed it across the middle, and flicked one end. Screwing the sections together again, there was a corkscrew.

After putting a little wine in his own glass, he went round the table, filling the other glasses before his own.

“I say!” exclaimed Tim, “we ought to drink to the New Gas Engine!”

“Ah!” said Fiennes. Ernest was already sipping his sherry.

“We’re going to get an oil engine to work the lathes,” explained Tim to Phillip. “With a little dynamo, for electric light in the workshop. It will make a great difference when we are working an all-night session.”

“To the New Gas Engine,” said Phillip, raising his glass. Only Tim responded to this toast.

Phillip noticed that the top half of the window, which was open, was covered by a wire-netting frame. Seeing him looking at it Mr. Copleston said, “A confounded robin used to come in and take the food on our plates, but when his relations arrived as well and the little beggar spent the entire meal in chivvying them out again we thought it time to keep out the lot!”

After lunch Phillip washed up with Lucy in the scullery, then she took him to see the workshop, where Moggy had taken up her quarters inside a straw skep. Within the wooden building were many rows and shelves of tools—many kinds of saw, chisel, drill, hammer, gauge, plane and set-square. There was a mahogany cabinet containing a hundred and more steel bits for woodwork fixed on the wall behind what Tim had explained was a very fine Holtzappfel lathe for turning ivory, woodwork, and metal.

“This is Pa’s lathe,” explained Tim. “It is a marvellous example of engineering. Among other things, it can turn three hollow ivory balls, one inside the other!”

“It looks a wonderful piece of machinery. I haven’t seen one like that before.”

“There were only about ten in England. Pa bought it when a young man. It cost six hundred pounds.”

Lucy told Phillip that the Boys were making parts of sac-machines for an East Anglian firm, which sold them to “little men” who, having seen advertisements in various magazines,
bought the sac-machines together with all the materials for making batteries in their spare time, and then sold back the batteries to the East Anglian firm.

“Sometimes the Boys get rush orders and then they work all night. I don’t know what Tim would have done if he hadn’t thought of answering an advertisement in
The
Model
Engineer.
”

She went on to say that Ernest and Fiennes had been in the Merchant Service, as wireless operators, but when the shipping slump came they returned home.

“Did Tim run away from school, like Ernest?”

“Well, not exactly that, but he did spend the last year at Shakesbury grammar school playing truant, setting off in the morning on his bicycle and coming back at night. The head-master thought he had left, I suppose. He spent his time reading engineering books out of the public library, I believe. Anyway, he didn’t like school very much. Then Ernest and Fiennes apprenticed him to an ironmonger, but all Tim had to do for months and months was to weigh up small packets of nails, so after six months of that he didn’t go back any more.”

“Well, I hope they are doing well making sac-machines.”

“Oh yes, not too badly, you know. The new oil engine will save treadling, which is a bit tiring, especially when they work all day and night and then the next day as well, to try and get the orders done to time.”

“How much would it cost them to install an oil engine?”

“About sixty pounds. They’re trying to save up for one now.”

After watching the Boys hard at it, Phillip thought that he must certainly do some work himself. He had already scoured the scullery floor, now for the walls and ceiling. He would prepare them for distempering, then buy brush and materials. It would be a surprise for Lucy, who was away decorating the church with her father. He brushed and scraped the ceiling, then the walls, including the iron pipes and handle of the pump, washed and polished the windows; and looking in the larder, decided to tackle that while he was about it. The job would take two days in all.

The kittens of Bukbuk were playing in there; he lifted them out with his foot after noticing the messes in the corner and on the shelves. Some of these deposits were old and covered with mildew. The perforated zinc window was overgrown with ivy which made
the place dark and airless. The ivy must go, at least round the window frame.

Lucy came back and said, “How lovely!” While she was upstairs changing her clothes before going for a walk by the river he went into the dining-room to look at the books, as he had been invited to do. There was Kipling’s
Plain
Tales
from
the
Hills
; a Railway Edition, in green paper covers, of
Wee
Willie
Winkie
; P. H. Gosse’s books on the sea-shore, with hand-coloured plates, also Goldsmith’s
Birds
of
Britain
, and others on British Fishes. Ah, a first edition of Pickwick Papers! He remembered reading in
The
Times
Literary
Supplement
that this was valuable only in the original fortnightly parts—a pity. It was bound in tooled leather, with the bookplate of Pa’s father. Most of the books had this bookplate stuck inside the covers, with the family coat-armour and the engraved names of
Adrian
Ernest
Fiennes
Copleston
, with what appeared to be his original address,
Hernbrook
House,
Oxon.
There was a set of Sowerby’s
Wild
Flowers,
with tinted wood-cuts, each volume uniform, bound in calf, tooled with gold leaf; a first edition of
Treasure
Island,
one of a set of Stevenson; some first editions of Thomas Hardy; many novels by William Black; all Surtees’ first editions. The books on birds, which he looked at eagerly, were massive, with plates of eggs, many coloured by hand; three volumes on British conchology, with engravings also hand-coloured.