It Was the Nightingale (3 page)

Barley looked up as he came in. “Hullo, old boy, I've been showing Jules ‘la petite loutre'.” She put the cub back inside her blouse.

“Aren't you coming up to feed it?”

“It's been fed. Jules wants to show me some of his rare French Colonials.” She remained seated while Jules continued to look
over her shoulder, pointing out this and that stamp, while she turned the pages and appeared to share his interest.

Feeling out of it, Phillip went to the bar and ordered a calvados, swallowing the fiery liquid before going back to the dining-room door. The boy-waiter was now seated beside her, the two blond heads close together. He returned to the bar, drank another calvados, and then walked into the street. It was ten minutes before he returned, to find her waiting for him.

“I didn't order dinner, not knowing how long you'd be.”

He seated himself on the other side of the table. Hitherto they had sat side by side.

There were a few local Frenchmen dining in the room, commercial travellers judging by the tucked-in napkins and the absent-minded speed with which they swallowed their food.

Jules gravely examined Barley as he stood awaiting the order. Phillip could not decide. Had she left undone the top button of her V-blouse on purpose?

“Steak for you, with watercress as usual, old boy?”

“What would you like?”

“I think I'd prefer a herb omelette tonight.”

“Aren't you hungry?”

“Not very. But you have a steak—you've done all the work.”

This wasn't true; she had a blister from changing over the belts, the gradients had varied frequently upon stretches of the journey.

“What wine would you like with your omelette? A Graves? A Chablis?”

“I'll have Vichy water, I think. Where did you get to, just now?”

Was Jules hanging on his answer?
Old
boy—yes, he was that. Was her remark intended to show up his greater age? He gave the order; Jules brought the Vichy bottle, and waited beside her again.

“M'sieur! Du vin?”

“Vin rosé, s'il vous plaît.”

He drank silently. The dishes came, expertly placed by Jules. She seemed not to be hungry; she waited, holding her fork as though playing with her food, while he ate the steak and swallowed glasses of wine as though they were water.

“What's the matter, Phillip?”

“Nothing. Why should there be?”

She pretended to eat while she waited for him to finish his steak. Then she said, “D'you mind if I go up now? I've got a bit of a headache. It's the vibration, I think.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You won't mind my leaving you?”

“Not at all.”

He stood up, she left, he sat and ordered a large cognac. Headache—or heartache? But he must not allow imagination to—and yet, in the past, all his forebodings had turned out to be real. Eveline Fairfax—Spica—O for God's sake, not Barley. He finished the bottle and thought to walk into the dark night; but hesitating in the foyer went upstairs to their room, anticipating its emptiness.

She was in bed, only the top of her head visible.

He undressed and washed slowly, and got in his side of the bed, to lie apart from her. At last he could bear it no more, and touched her shoulder with his hand. She patted the back of his fingers, and said, “Go to sleep—you're tired out, you know.”

“Don't you want me?” he said at last.

“Of course I want you. But tonight we ought to sleep.”

“Is it anything I've done, or said?”

“No, of course not.”

He lay awake beside her, suffering. She didn't want him. She was thinking, perhaps dreaming, of the eager youth. He lay still minute after minute, breathing through his mouth to make his breathing inaudible. At last she turned over.

“What
is
the matter, Phillip? I can
hear
you thinking. Tell me, what's the matter?”

He told her.

“Oh darling! How clumsy I am! I am so terribly happy, you see! I feel like—well, like Juliet set free from the vault. I suppose I shouldn't have put ‘la petite loutre' there, but Jules was so eager for me to see his collection, and anyway the cub is used to sleeping there. Also I thought that probably Jules had no one to talk to about his stamp album.”

“You're not growing tired of me?”

She took him in her arms. “Oh, my poor boy, so you thought you had lost ‘Anky'! Never, Phillip, never!—never!—never! I can
never
change towards you, or grow tired, not one smallest fraction of me!” She leaned over him and kissed one eyebrow. “Oh, how could you think that I might ever change? I owe you
everything—it was you who first opened my eyes to poetry, and the feeling that ‘everything that lives is holy'.”

It was his turn to pay tribute. “And I wasn't really alive until I knew you. I could never be my real self with anyone before I knew you.”

*

On the way south they ran into flocks of sheep. The dust of the movement of thousands of lean animals, with long ears and tails, hung on the air. Among the ewes were rams with spiralled horns held well above the flocks.

They sat in Bédélia on the road verge, hearing the
tottle-tonk
of bells, the short clatter of cloven feet in the dust amidst the barking of dogs. Boys with black shaggy hair and dark eyes passed by them, in charge of donkeys which seemed loaded almost to back breaking point. Goats were among the sheep.

“They're going up to the snow-line grass,” she told him. “The shepherds call this the ‘transhumance'. They live in huts, and eat the flesh of male kids, and drink goat's milk, all the summer.”

The long-haired goats looked uneasily about them, uttering plaints of discomfort.

“I always heard that goats and sheep didn't mix.”

“They don't as a rule, but they all go up to the mountain pastures together.”

“I suppose this summer migration goes on all over Provence?”

“All over Europe, I think, where there are mountains. D'you see the ticks on the ewes' ears?”

“They look like rivets, close together. How do they get them off?”

“They don't, there are too many.”

“When are the lambs born?”

“In the autumn, in the lowlands. Some on the way down. The shepherds have to look out for wild boars, and foxes. Lammergeirs, too—eagles.”

“In England they usually have their lambs in January, when the ewes are on the turnips. How would you like to be a farmer's wife? I've still got a chance of going in with Uncle Hilary.”

“I'd love it! But wouldn't it clash with your writing?”

When the flocks had passed he sat still listening to the sound of bells breaking upon the distant air like the blooms of mountain
flowers below the snow-line. “Your word
transhumance
exactly describes it, Barley—the soft bells—cold air in the sunshine, water running from the edge of the snow everywhere—the fritillaries and the gentians pushing through the flat grass—the great empty caves of the valleys below one.”

“I was thinking of the Col d'Aubisque just then, too. I was seeing your footsteps as I followed them a year ago—it was a shock when they vanished at the avalanche. I felt awful, I thought I had lost you. It was just a year ago today.”

“And at night we both dreamed the same dream about each other! And do you know, Barley, I think I must have shouted to those two peasants, when I had climbed up from below Le Corniche, just about the time you got to the end of my tracks! I shouted out that my companion was dead before I could think. It must have been transference of your feeling to me.”

*

At noon they rested among aromatic bushes growing on a piece of waste land beside the road. The low stems gave a springy couch without injuring the bushes. Near them the scrub had been cleared by a past fire, so that out of reddened stones on the black ground lowly plants were growing. Each flower of the harsh soil was served by butterfly or bee.

“Did you notice that the horns of those rams were like the twists on the heads of Greek pillars? I wonder if their descendants came originally from ancient Greece? Did the Greeks come so far west?”

“The Ionic columns, you mean? Some of the Greeks spread across Italy. It's possible they may have reached here.”

“How do you know about the Greeks?”

“Daddy told me.”

They knelt to examine the flowers.

“I suppose if this stony soil were dressed with rich sheep dung, the plants and bushes would degenerate, Barley?”

“Yes, they'd grow more leaf and stem than blossom. Like the Romans, they'd grow soft and decadent.”

“Did your father tell you that, too?”

“He used to talk to me about farming. He was looking forward to buying a farm in England when he retired from the Bench. He was keen on breeding sheep, and also to improve pastures by breeding new strains.”

“He must have been keen on botany, then.”

“Yes, he was.”

He stared at her, his fond possession. And yet she remained always herself. She was part of him, also apart from him. If there were such things as solar bodies, what spiritualists called astral bodies, she was surely his bright other self. If he should ever lose her …

“I wonder if people like you are born direct and clear, or does it come from a good early training, otherwise schooling?”

“I hated school.”

A brown and yellow bee was crawling over the florets of wild thyme. They watched it gathering honey, then he said, “Were you much bothered because your parents didn't hit it off together?”

“I was brought up by my amah, and never heard Mummie and Daddy quarrelling.”

“Were they very unhappy?”

“Only sometimes. Their minds didn't think the same way, or rather Mummy's mind didn't see the same things as Daddy's did. He was quick, in both mind and body, and Mummy's slowness used to annoy him. He was older than Mummy, too, about twenty years, I think.”

“I really shouldn't be asking inquisitive questions like this.”

“Why not? I can tell you things as easily as I can think them to myself.”

“Then I really must be a part of you?”

“Have you only just found that out?”

He looked at her face, examining it as though for the first time. “Do you know, Barley, I think that if ever I loved you utterly, so that everything you were, and everything you did, was of the greatest importance to me, I should lose all ambition to write the greatest novel about the war.”

“Then I hope you never will, for I don't want to be a piece of blotting paper, old boy!”

“You blot up a part of me already, you young devil!”

“Yes, you old devil!” she laughed, moving out of his reach. Then seeing the shadow of loneliness on his face she crawled towards him and pulled his shoulders towards her, so that they were parallel with her own.

“Look at me, Phillip! Look at me! That's better!” She put an arm round his neck, and kissed each of his eyes in turn. “You
think I've changed towards you, don't you? Come on, tell me exactly what you really think!”

“Sometimes I don't know.”

“You mean, these last few days?”

“I have sometimes wondered.”

“Well, I
have
changed towards you.” She held him with her hard young arms. With her cheek against his she repeated, “I have changed towards you, but in one part of me only.”

“You mean—physically?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you had.”

She pushed him back gently and lay on his chest, then lifted her head to kiss him lightly upon his face, planting little kisses while making a sort of humming noise from her diaphragm. “Nice little man!”—kiss kiss kiss—“dear little man!”—kiss kiss kiss—“clever little laddy”—kiss kiss kiss—“he's going to be a daddy!” and then she buried her face against his heart, murmuring, “Now you know, so be kind to me.”

*

Bédélia was moving with its secret shadow along a track through a flat region of reed and water, where pink reflections drew out from flamingos, and distant boats seemed to be sailing above the horns of wild cattle in the marshes.

Here the Rhône had rolled fragments ice-broken from the Alps until its flow was checked by its own rush, so that the river had sought many courses to the sea.

They had arrived at the Camargue—with its strange primitive life of fen-men and water-beasts—wilder and wider and more mysterious than the country of
Dick
o
'
the
Fens
and
Bevis,
in those days when, thought Phillip, there had been romance, but little true living, in his life. Now he had got through to that ‘other side' which all poets whom life had ‘mumbled in its jaws' had dreamed of, but never achieved. How fortunate he was, he thought for the hundredth time, as he listened to nightingales singing among the osiers, and larks above in the sky.

“‘If I cannot achieve immortality, at least I can think it'. Like Jefferies, Willie never found true love, otherwise he would have been calm, I think. I'm damned lucky to have found you, Barley.”

“What happened to that girl who loved your cousin, Mary someone?”

“Mary Ogilvie? She still lives in her mother's house on the Burrows in North Devon. I ought to go and see her sometime. Poor star-crossed lovers.”

“Is that your expression? It's not bad.”

“It's Shakespeare's, from
Romeo
and
Juliet
! You're an uneducated moon-calf!”

“Yes, because you were my tutor, don't forget! Tell me about Juliet.”

“She tries to cling to her love, while feeling herself to be on the edge of doom. She tries to keep Romeo just a little longer, when the dawn breaks. ‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear'; but he replies, ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn, no nightingale'. The mortmain of hate destroyed them. But here we are, alive, listening to lark and nightingale together.”