It Was the Nightingale (5 page)

“Only in a very small way, Georgie.” She looked at Phillip. “I had a brother who was one of the first Boy Scouts, and I remember reading about Tramp Signs in
The
Scout.
”

So do I, thought Phillip. The difference was that George had got the signs mixed up.

“But the best article so far is one on Drake! I sent it to
The
West
Country
News,
but they wouldn’t publish it. They wanted to
know the sources of my information when I said that the story of Drake playing bowls when the Spanish Armada was on its way, I mean Drake going on with the game when he heard the news, was only a yarn, without foundation in fact. I’ll tell you why, if you promise never to say a word! I argued it to myself this way. You know a south-west gale was supposed to be blowing when he was playing bowls and the news came? Well, it’s simple! Have you ever walked on the Hoe at Plymouth?”

“Yes, in the summer of 1918.”

“What was the weather like, calm?”

“Hot and still.”

“Exactly! You help me to prove my point! Have you ever played bowls? Well then, I have! And the old pater has, too, often! He agrees with me that you can’t play bowls on an exposed place like the Hoe when the south-west gale is blowing. Drake wouldn’t have been playing during a gale! Simple! But the
West
Country
News
were afraid to publish it!”

“Why didn’t you suggest the
possibility
of the story of the bowls being related to another occasion? Then you would have covered yourself.”

“You don’t understand, old bean.
The
West
Country
News,
like everyone else, is out to make money, and most of their money comes from advertisements. So you see, if they had printed my article it would have busted the story of Drake’s game of bowls; no one would want to go to Plymouth, Americans especially, and the hotels and boarding houses would suffer. They’d cease to advertise in the paper, which might face bankruptcy. So of course they refused my article!”

George opened a cupboard beside the fireplace, to reveal a dozen large bottles of whit-ale, with screw-tops, lying on their sides. He awaited Phillip’s praise for his skill.

“Wonderful sight, George!”

“They’ll be mature in August, old bean, just in time for my medical board! You must come over and help me sample them. I’ve enquired about the price of hutches for Angoras, and there’s a chap the old pater knows in Queensbridge who is willing to sell me some of his pedigree stock to start with!”

*

The Maddisons, a little tired of George’s preoccupation with his own doings—he was an only child—found another beach,
nearer Cornwall, where they went on the Norton, he driving carefully now that she was in her third month of pregnancy.

By now the milky moonlight had ceased to be fretted by the ventriloquial voices of corncrake and quail in the fields shut up with dredge-corn and hay. Among the stars pierced by the church steeple swifts screamed as they dived and turned in space. Walter Crang declared that the male birds slept on the wing.

Wild roses in the hedges were forming their yellow hips; more and more visitors were on the sands and by the quay of the town; and she was saying close to his ear, as they lay in bed at night, “I feel him kicking, darling.”

*

August 4, 1924. DEATH OF CONRAD was the headline in
The
Daily
Crusader.
Phillip avoided the others on the sands, and walked alone on the cliffs, his head filled by thoughts of the dead writer: noble Joseph Conrad, his secret sharer of many winter nights in the cottage. Now he had crossed the shadow line, having passed through the heart of his own darkness to—what? At least to the immortality of men’s minds! He felt the loneliness of life on the broken cliff he called Valhalla, high above the sea, and hurried home to his love, his love for ever and for ever.

They took up with the Pole-Cripps again, glad to be with them. “They’re both very kind, aren’t they?”

“We left you alone, Barley,” said Boo, in her modest and pleasant way, “because we knew that it was a wonderful moment for you both.”

Barley was walking beside her and wheeling the mail-cart in which lay the Cripps baby asleep, with sun-bonneted head lolling to one side and shaking to the jolts of the rough road.

“If it sleeps so much in the day-time, won’t it keep awake at night, Boo?”

“My dear, it’s a
he
,” replied Boo gently, with a sideway smile at Phillip as much as to say, Isn’t she a child? “Oh, please don’t apologise, my dear! It’s the most natural thing in the world for a young girl to call a baby ‘it’. Wait until you have your own!”

Barley’s cheeks went faintly pink. Boo whispered, “I had my suspicions, you know! I’m so glad,” before continuing in her smooth voice, “I’ve never seen a child who sleeps so much as Maundy does—he’s named after George’s uncle, did Georgie tell you? Do forgive me if I’m saying what you know already. Yes,
Uncle Maundy is something to do with the Government. Apparently he has the ear of Lloyd George, and helped him to find people to contribute to the party funds. But I’m perfectly hopeless at politics, I suppose we must have them though. Yes, Maundy’s as good as gold, we never get so much as a murmur from him at night, the precious!”

*

More summer visitors were now appearing on the sands, with jackdaws flying about the rocks waiting for scraps of food. One afternoon George’s parents drove over, by taxi, from Queensbridge, and they all had a picnic on the beach. The Reverend Detmold Pole-Cripps was a red-faced man who relaxed from the cure of souls by reading novels of crime and detection. He smoked dried colt’s-foot leaves in a large bent pipe because of his asthma, George told Phillip. Mrs. Pole-Cripps looked as though she had started life within the confines of a Midland industrial town. During tea she spoke to Phillip about the novel she had borrowed from the local library.

“I can’t say that I approved of it all, Mr. Maddison,” she began, in a voice holding a trace of dolefulness, “but I did enjoy the descriptions, which I thought beautiful. But that ‘Pauline’ of yours, well, I could hardly approve of her, could I? As for the love-scenes, they were hardly what one could call nice, were they? Yes, I read it after Martin Beausire, whose father is a parson in the Diocese of Exeter, as I suppose you know, had given it a review in
The
Daily
Crusader.
He objected to the slang some of the characters used, but I could allow that, but tell me, Mr. Maddison,
why
did you permit them to bathe, those two I mean, with no clothes on, although it was night-time? His Reverence”—she had referred to her husband like this when introducing Phillip to him—“read it after I’d finished it, for I wanted to be quite sure that I wasn’t being unfair to you, you see. Yes, his Reverence has written out a
critique,
for you to think about. Here it is, please put it in your pocket-book and read it only when we have gone.”

On starting to read this
critique
as soon as they got back to the cottage, Phillip thought that first impressions were not always the right ones. His Reverence was a dark horse, and knew literature when he saw it!

The
critique
was written on a half-sheet of paper in a tenuous, slanting fist. Barley looked over his arm holding the parson’s
prose, and when they had finished it both laughed so much that Phillip had to sit down with weakness.

The Pole-Cripps’ came over to supper one night, Georgie waving a catalogue. His enthusiasm was for a new kind of motor-car which, he said, was designed for country parsons. It was cheap, he declared, with spokeless wheels, solid rubber tyres, two-stroke engine, no gearbox and no diff.

“In place of gears it has friction plates, you see, old bean, like the Ford T-model in the old days. And with no diff to go wrong, it’s simple! No repairs! It simply skids round corners, you see!” He went on to say that he was going to try to get the old mater to buy one for the old pater. “I’ll tell her that I’ll garage it for nothing in my shed. I’ll be available then to drive her, free, gratis and for nothing, whenever she wants to go anywhere. Don’t you think it a bon idea? After all, old bean, why should she be rooked by a Queensbridge garage when she can have it done for nothing, and have me as unpaid shovver into the bargain?”

Georgie’s idea to save their Reverences needless expense materialised one morning when he entered the village in a cloud of blue smoke and a smell of burning oil. The new machine was a box-like affair with a pale-blue all-metal body and dummy radiator.

“Any fool can drive it,” he told Phillip, with his usual enthusiasm. “Nothing can go wrong.”

“Not even catch fire?”

“Oh, that smoke’s absolutely nothing, old bean. All you have to do down these steep hills if the brakes are a bit slow is to shove her in reverse gear. I admit that the friction plates get a bit hot like that, but it won’t hurt them.”

“Won’t they wear out quickly?”

“There’s nothing to wear out!”

*

The holiday season was approaching, and once again Phillip felt it a duty to share his freedom with his mother and sister. It was arranged that Hetty was to come down by herself, a week before the Willoughbys were due. Barley suggested that ‘Mother’ have a room in Mrs. Tucker’s cottage, fifty yards away.

“Don’t forget that Mrs. Tucker is an old gossip, so be careful what you tell her, Barley.” He meant her pregnancy.

“Her garden is one of the best in the village, so she’s all right.”

Barley began by praising Mrs. Tucker’s flowers, and this led up to her telling Mrs. Tucker how much ‘Phillip’s mother’ was looking forward to spending her fortnight with them.

“I wonder if you have a room to let? Mrs. Maddison loves flowers, she was brought up among the Surrey herb fields, now unfortunately a part of London.”

It was arranged; and the good woman, looking at her with a smile, said, “So you’m goin’ vor ’ave a babby, be ’ee? You don’t mind my saying thaccy, do ’ee now?”

“I don’t mind a bit, Mrs. Tucker. I’m interested how anyone found out. Do I look so much bigger?”

“Aw no, ’tes that you’m ’atin’ haphazard like! You’m ’atin’ blackberries before’m ripe! Then there’s that laver you brought back to ait!”

“That black stuff from the rocks? But I was told you all ate it here, fried with green bacon.”

“So us do, midear, but you’m ’atin’ blackberries too, don’t ’ee zee? ’Tes a sure sign!”

*

Phillip overheard his mother saying to Barley, “It is my dream coming true, dear. My son will have
his
little boy! Aunt Dora, one of my great friends, and I used to talk about Phillip before he was born, and we did so hope he would grow up to love all beautiful things, and to be a fine man.”

“Well, it came true. Phillip
is
a fine man, Mother.”

“I know he is, dear, and you have helped him more than you will ever know. He is so kind now, and considerate. Too much so at times, perhaps. You know about his trouble after the war, I suppose? Well, Phillip was shielding someone else. It wasn’t
Phillip who set fire to that building, but a bad companion who was with him. It doesn’t do to be too kind always, you know.”

She thought of her own husband Dickie, and how he had suffered as a young man from his father, and again from her father; but while he had the same steadfastness as Phillip, he had given way too early to his own feelings.

Hetty went back to London with what she told herself were perfect memories. Phillip was well and happy, his wife so very calm and practical. If only it were the same with Doris … she sighed as she thought of what her daughter had told her: that she could never forget Percy, her cousin who had been killed in the war, whose best friend had been Bob.

“It’s no use, Mother. As I’ve told you before, every time Bob wants to come near me, I see Percy in my mind, and then I can’t
bear
Bob.” So there had never been complete cohabitation between them—her mind refused any thought nearer the actuality of marriage. It was such a pity; if only Doris could bring herself to have a child, it might perhaps draw the young people together.

The wheels were now insistently audible in the carriage, her spirits were sinking, as the train ran on towards London, at the thought of returning home. Still, trials were sent to test us; she must always trust in God’s goodness, and pray to Him to help her husband and her children.

*

Phillip Maddison, Bob Willoughby, and George Pole-Cripps were walking together ahead of the others on the way to the sands. They stopped before a new bungalow, recently built on a field overlooking the Channel. It was square, red London brick with a pink asbestos roof.

“My God, what a horror!” said Bob.

“I don’t know so much,” replied George. They walked on until stopped again by a new notice board.

“‘Ripe for Development, Apply Mutton & Co, Solicitors, Queensbridge’,” quoted Phillip. “Ripe like these thistle seeds blowing away! I suppose land can be bought very cheaply now that farming is depressed.”

“That’s what my rich uncle said the other day, when he was staying the night with us,” said George. “He said it was a shame to spoil the beauty of this coast-line, but if beauty had to be spoiled, he might as well be the first to do it. If I can commute my pension,
after getting total disability, buying this land may prove a better investment than Angora rabbits. What do you think, Phillip?”