It Was the Nightingale (34 page)

“Well, I did mention that in a few years’ time I shall have several thousands a year, Father.”

“
What?
You had the effrontery to tell Mr. Copleston that?”

“Please give me a hearing, Father! My literary agent told me that in a few years’ time my books would be earning several thousands a year——”

“Oh-ho, so that’s it, is it? Here are you, a young fellow proposing to get married again and take on the responsibilities of another family when you have no steady job—and now you talk of a marriage settlement to shore up your pretensions! How much money have you saved up, may I ask?”

“I am about to take out an endowment policy for £1,000, and now I think of it, I might as well take out another for the same sum.”

Richard stared at his son before crying out, “Have you taken leave of your senses? How can you afford to keep up the premiums, without a regular income? Now may I ask for a reply to my question! How much money have you managed to save during the past four years?”

“Well, Father, to be truthful, nothing. But when I arrived in London three days ago——”

“Nothing saved up? What in heaven’s name is this foolishness in getting married again then? Or is it worse than that——” Richard broke off, trying to control rising agitation; but immediately gave way to the fixed idea about his son.

“Ah, I recognise the same old pattern of your character! I can see what you have been doing! Now let me tell you this——”

Phillip tried vainly to quieten him down, for surely the raised voice would be audible in the front room where Lucy and his mother were sitting together. “
Please
, Father, will you listen?”

“No, I will
not
listen! You will listen to
me
! I am telling you
that it is a case of my own father over again! He had extravagant tastes similar to your own! Salmon beats in Scotland, a partner in shoots he could not afford, fox-hunting—just like you, my boy——” Richard turned away in his distress. “Good God, it’s unbelievable! Here you are, without money and in with a fox-hunting set, wasting the best years of your life, and now you propose to get married on the flimsiest and most precarious basis of future expectations from writing books.”

Phillip felt an acid burning at the bottom of his throat. Unhappily he compared this reception of his confidences with Pa’s off hand remark that it saved a lot of bother having nothing for the settlement.

“Father,
please
will you listen?”

“By all means! But I must ask you to stick to facts. And there’s another thing I have to ask you about.” He went to a table and picked up the copy of Martin Beausire’s novel. “What do you know about this?”

“Martin Beausire is a friend of mine.”

“Oh is he! Well, it’s none of my business, you are, after all, of age, but I would call your attention to the fact that the so-called poet, or writer, in this novel lives at Speering Folliot like yourself, and makes his living by writing stories about birds and animals for the magazines. To some people it might very easily occur that the character is based on you!”

“It isn’t based on me, Father. I told him about Julian Warbeck, who has red hair, and Beausire’s concocted a character from that, I imagine. Anyway, it’s all a joke, written in the train, to and from Fleet Street. I read it, and thought bits of it very funny.”

“Oh, that’s what modern literature is, is it, ‘all a joke’. Well, all I can say is I don’t pretend to understand modern literature!”

He went into the garden, where cats dug up his straight lines of lettuce and carrot seeds; no sooner had he got rid of slugs by traps of the peel of half-oranges when beetles or flies came along. Sparrows tore his lettuces, mice exhumed and ate his peas; now they were talking of building in the Backfield behind the garden fence. He would retire before long, and dreamed of a cottage in the country, perhaps in his native Wiltshire—but Hetty’s having re-bought the house next door, to be with those two daughters of hers, had put a stop to that.

“Father, the day before yesterday I received over one hundred pounds for four days’ writing! At the same time I signed a contract with an American publisher for my next three books. I receive at once fifty pounds advance against royalties of the first book. On the day of publication I get a further fifty. That is for the U.S.A. For the English market I also receive advances, though not so high, for the same books from my English publisher——”

“Then what was all that about having no money in the bank?”

“I haven’t put it in the bank yet, for it hasn’t arrived. You see, my money comes in lump sums. Then there are the short stories. It takes me one day to write a short story, working very hard and close, of course; about three days to rewrite it, and shift it about to get the proper dramatic flow. For such a story I get about twenty guineas in an English magazine, and something over a hundred pounds in an American magazine. That isn’t very much, as things go. Top writers of short stories, such as Irving Cobb, get as much as five hundred pounds a story over in America. And I have two or three dozen stories in my head, ready to be written.”

“Then why didn’t you say that at the beginning, instead of that misleading remark about nothing in the bank?”

“You asked me for facts, and I told you the correct answer about my bank balance, Father.”

“I don’t think it’s at all fair of you to convey a wrong impression, anyway! You see, in the past I have had cause to feel not very sure of you, Phillip—oh well, we won’t talk any more about that.”

“I’m sorry I told inessential details first, and so upset you, Father. I’ve been a bit nervous, to tell the truth. I wrote my news stories like that when I first worked in Monks’ House, until a sub-editor told me to put the gist of the story on top, to give the reader the point of it at once, then to tell how it happened.”

“Well, I am relieved to hear it. I hope it will continue to be so. You are very lucky, you know, to have all these chances. And, if I may say so, to have found such a very ladylike young woman as Lucy. Now mind that you look after her!”

Why did most old people say that sort of thing, he wondered, especially those who had made a muck of their own marriages? And get quite sentimental over small children? He would treat Billy quite differently from the way most fathers used to treat their sons.

As though receiving this thought, Richard added, “You wait,
old chap, until you have the responsibilities of a family! Oh, by the way, I almost forgot to tell you: I had a visit from your Uncle Hilary this morning, and he asked me how long you were up for. He wants to see you particularly, I gather. He asked me to tell you to ring him up at his club, and leave a message when you would be free to dine with him one evening. You know his club, I fancy, the Voyagers?”

“Yes, Father, I had lunch with him there once, soon after I had left school.” Phillip had not forgotten the occasion, or how he had run away afterwards. “I didn’t bring my dinner jacket with me.”

“Well, perhaps it would be simpler to ask Hilary down here. He tells me that Aunt Dora is staying in London just now—would you like me to ask them down to supper one evening?”

Richard was now feeling buoyant; it had been his youthful dream to farm land; now his son would succeed where he had failed. He thought of a flint cottage, with a large garden, his pension arriving regularly every half-quarter, and a life of peace, under the hills of his boyhood.

*

Sir Hilary Maddison, K.B.E., C.M.G., Captain (retd.) R.N.R., who had bought most of the land at Rookhurst which had belonged to his grandfather and father, had also been imagining a not unsuccessful conclusion to his life in that he would be able to put back, if not the clock, at least a generation of his family upon the land he had seen, as a boy, come to nothing. Once he had hoped to have a son of his own, but his marriage had failed. His worry since the war had been, Who is to succeed me after my death? Of the heirs male bearing the name there was only Phillip.

Whenever he thought of that young man, he was chilled by doubt. There was something in his nephew which he couldn’t stomach, as he put it to himself. As a boy he had been cowardly and deceitful; as a youth he had shown himself to be evasive, and at times had done very stupid things. What the cause of this behaviour was—apart from pure cussedness—Hilary had no idea. No one had been more surprised than he to read in
The Times
’ list of
Decorations
and
Awards
, one day in the summer of 1918, his nephew’s name. Then, after the Armistice, Phillip had reverted to his old form of playing the ass, getting himself involved in a case of arson while the worse for liquor, and to find himself cooling his heels in prison.

How far was this instability congenital, how much due to a young fellow kicking over the traces? How much did he owe to his Turney blood—look at that fellow Hugh Turney, a bounder if ever there had been one, incapable of any real work, a profligate
dilletante.
Phillip was in some ways like him: he had stuck his job for only three months in Fleet Street—after writing amateurish articles on the light-car—and then had chucked journalism to write novels—rotten novels, according to his sister Viccy—while living in a labourer’s cottage in South Devon and growing a beard—wasting his life, in other words.

No: to put Master Phillip into farming would be chucking money down the drain.

And then, one day after golf, at Bournemouth—where his sister Victoria Lemon kept house for him—‘Valentine’, an author of romantic novels, told him that his nephew was writing ‘brilliant’ short stories in American magazines. Hilary was impressed to hear that for such stories anything up to two or three hundred pounds was usually paid.

“Your nephew has a real streak of genius, in my opinion, Captain.”

Hilary told his sister Viccy this welcome news. She remembered that as a boy Phillip had always been keen on birds and nature; indeed, she told him that she had given Phillip, when he was nine years old, a copy of
Our
Bird
Friends,
by Richard and Cherry Kearton.

“Our father, you know, Hilary, was also very keen on all things to do with the country.”

This remark set another course for Hilary’s imagination: the boy took after his grandfather, after all. However, while writing led to nowhere, the fact that the cobbler had stuck to his last for several years, and had some monetary success with it, did tend to show that he had it in him, if he liked, to put his shoulder to the wheel. ‘Valentine’, the
nom
de
plume
of the golfing acquaintance, said that writing, to be successful, needed concentration and the will to keep going; he had seemed a sensible sort of chap himself; and, after weighing the matter in his mind, as he put it, the 52-year-old Hilary, having heard from his brother John good reports of Phillip and his new wife-to-be, had decided to propose to him that he become the tenant of Skirr farm as a pupil under his land-steward for one year, with an annual allowance, to be
paid to Lucy, of £250. After that, if all went satisfactorily, he would become an improver for another year. At the end of that time they could review the situation, with the prospect of Phillip becoming the tenant of the Skirr holding, under a trust to be set up. This trust would include the estate of 1,200 acres in a ring fence, of which, after his death, his nephew would be tenant-for-life, subject to certain annuities to his sisters Belle, Viccy and Dora during their life-time. After that, it would be the turn of Phillip’s son, or sons.

*

Sitting round the mahogany table covered by a white cloth and set with family plate from the brass-bound oak box—these silver objects seen only once before by Phillip, at the end of July 1914, when Willie had come to live in Wakenham to work in the City—he thought that Uncle Hilary was agreeable but rather too fat, while Aunt Dora looked far too thin. She ate nothing, but sipped lemon juice and water; she explained that she had been fasting for a fortnight, to cure herself of chronic dyspepsia.

It was, for Phillip, an easy occasion. Neither of his sisters was present, both were still forbidden the house by Father; despite this, Mother looked fairly happy. Lucy, across the table, next to Uncle Hilary, was talking freely as he had never known her to talk before, although she had put her hand over the glass when he had gone round with the Burgundy (Australian variety, from Phillip,
via
the Victoria Wine Company in the High Street). Father was jovial, often laughing; while Aunt Dora was sympathetic and understanding.

It was a simple meal—Richard had decided not to rely upon Hetty’s cooking in that wretched gas-oven—of ham, tongue, salad with French dressing prepared by Phillip from a recipe learned in a Soho restaurant where he had lunched with Anders Norse, and mashed potatoes; followed by compôte-de-fruit and three kinds of cheese with brown bread, butter, and Thin Captain biscuits. Phillip noticed that Uncle Hilary had not drunk his glass of Australian Burgundy, although he had owned a fruit farm in Australia; Father likewise had refused a second glass, pleading that his interior economy would not stand it; so he had put away most of the flagon bottle by himself. By God, he was enjoying life! As old Julian used to say,
It’s
a
poor
heart
that
never
rejoices!

“Leave a little for the toasts, old man,” said Richard, as his son prepared to help himself to the last glass.

“Phillip will, I am sure,” said Hetty.

“Sure thing, I guess,” replied Phillip, with an American accent.

“Well,” announced Richard, from the head of the table. “I propose the health and long life of Lucy coupled with the names of Phillip, and of young William the heir!”

“Oh, I wish the baby could have been here!” said Hetty. “Well, your health, Lucy! And yours, my dear son, and your little son’s, too!”

“Thank you,” replied Phillip, remaining seated with Lucy as the others arose.

“Now you must respond, old man,” declared Richard.

Phillip got up. “Father and Mother, Uncle Hilary and Aunt Theodora, on behalf of Lucy, together with myself, I thank you for all your kindness and care shown us tonight. And, if I may say it, always in the past. Since I became a father myself, I know one thing—that a child is seldom, if ever, out of its parents’ thoughts.”