It Was the Nightingale (42 page)

*

They called on the Beausires. Martin greeted them with enthusiasm, both he and Fiona insisting that they stay the night.

“How do you like my new house?” asked Fiona.

“It’s lovely.”

“What did you think of Martin’s novel?”

“I felt honoured to have been chosen to sit for my portrait by a great
litterateur,
one of the
cognoscenti
!” he said with a straight face.

Fiona looked pleased. “Of course, it wasn’t
all
true,” she said. “But K. G. Wiggs wrote Martin a letter, saying it was a very good study of a genius.”

“The book, you mean, or the author?”

“Which author?”

“Well, both you and Poogs, of course!”

After a 7 a.m. bathe on the shingle they enjoyed an excellent breakfast and left just before noon for Brighton, where they had lunch in Sam Isaacs’ fish-shop; then up and over the downs, bumping upon a flinty road past a formless scatter of bungalows and suburban-type houses and empty wilderness plots of the housing estate formed on war-time slogans; and leaving behind this scene of his mother’s investment which had so exasperated his father, they ran down to Eastbourne and on to Hastings, where they had another bathe, declaring as they lay on the shingle afterwards that it was as good a day as that one on the Burrows when they had begun to know one another.

At sunset they stopped at an inn by a little village on a hill overlooking a coast of silted and lost little ports, with its associations with Henry James, Conrad, and other writers; and a poem on Night, read in
The
Oxford
Book
of
Verse
by a lady who bore the romantic name of the place where they were now staying. The inn had wisteria in full bloom growing over its front. Such quietness, such peace as the sun went down in an aquamarine sky.

“We’re only an hour’s run from Folkestone,” he said, at dinner. “I wonder if they have rebuilt the basilica at Albert, with the Golden Virgin on top. I meant to visit the Ancre valley last year, but somehow we never went that way.”

He looks lost, my poor boy, thought Lucy. She remembered how Pa had looked after Mother’s death, and wondered if she dare ask him to go for a walk with her, it was such a lovely evening.

“I’ll tell the maid to keep an eye on Billy, now and again.”

Leaving the child asleep in the bedroom they walked through the fields. Lucy took off her shoes and stockings in the dewy grasses, and he saw for the first time that she had feet like Barley’s; the two toes of each foot, being slightly longer than the big toe, made them broad-splayed. Their beauty drew his glance again and again as they returned in the twilight, she going on upstairs barefooted, holding shoes and stockings in her hand, lest she wake the child.

“The darling,” she whispered, leaning over the cot.

“I believe you love Billy as though he were your own son!”

“I do. Didn’t you know?”

“I thought once that you might not really like a step-son.”

“I would like him to have a little brother to play with,” she said, lowering her eyes before him.

“You don’t mind my still thinking about Barley?”

“No, of course not!” She added with a blush, “You see, I am not really conventional!”

*

Winchelsea—beautiful name, in harmony with the stars of the dusky summer night—Antares low on the horizon, cuckoo calling afar over the marshes, moths fluttering in the open window by which he stood, absorbed in the calm peace of the night. While he stood by the open window, watching the rim of the rising moon, a nightingale’s notes rang with startling clearness, as though the bird were in the room. It was singing in the garden immediately below. In the pause of the deep throbbing notes,
tereu,
tereu,
tereu,
another answered in the distance, and soon a third had joined in the singing, and a fourth far away across the fields. He thought of Keats, of Stravinsky nights in the Doves’ Nest above the gallery at Covent Garden; he thought of the poem
Heraclitus
in
The
Oxford
Book
of
English
Verse
; he thought of Willie, and the spring nights of the vanished world while the guns were flashing and ‘thy nightingales awake’ in the valley of Croiselles before the Hindenburg Line; he thought of ‘Spectre’ West; and of other faces in that hopeful June before the Somme; and it seemed as though his
heart had opened to all life through the friends he had known in the war.

Then to his side in the warm twilight a form moved, seeming strangely shorter; primitive with dark hair loose over dusky shoulders and breasts. The smooth-brushed head touched his tweed coat, leaning there a moment before his arm was taken above the elbow to enclose the head pressed against his ribs, as though for shelter, as though for claim upon his being. He leaned his cheek upon the dark head, his arm enclosed the warm shoulders, he held her there while her face was hidden in his jacket.

In silence she led him past garments lying on the floor—and Lucy usually so tidy—to draw him beside her on the bed.

Gould this gipsy be the modest and passive girl all of whose being he had thought to have discovered already? With tremulous anticipation he took off his jacket and hung it on a chair-back; then his other clothes, folding them calmly and neatly for the first time in his life, laying them on the seat of the chair the while a warm satisfaction of life spread through his being by which all thought was quelled. It was as though his blood knew what was wanted, beyond the antics of the brain, and was quickening with its own purpose. Without speaking he went to where she was lying, waving a foot in the air, and felt himself to be one with the night and the singing, and the stars beyond the window.

*

In the morning they walked upon the Romney Marsh, and he said they would go on to Folkestone on the morrow. They stayed that night at Rye, and the next at Lydd after wandering over the Denge Marsh. Then to Folkestone—where, avoiding the places he had known during and after the war, he said suddenly, “I want to go home.”

“Yes, dear, I’m quite willing. Do you mean to Speering Folliot?”

“Oh, no.”

“Well then, to Wakenham?”

He shook his head.

“Bless the boy, where then?”

“To Down Close. Perhaps the Boys are in a muddle.”

“Bother the Boys,” said Lucy. “Why can’t they look after themselves?”

“Young soldiers can’t, you know. I’ll tell you what—let’s go to Rookhurst and camp out on the meadow beside the brook until Midsummer! Then we’ll start farming, as Hilary wants us to!”

“How lovely!”

They went through the flat country of dykes and sea-walls to Dungeness, and lay about on the shingle by the coastguard station, idly listening to the piping of ring plover and the fragile breaking of summer waves on the shore.

He sat apart, watching the gentle girl playing with his son. When Billy put his arms round her neck and said “Billy’s mummy, Billy’s mummy,” he looked down at the pebbles for a few moments, before moving close, with head averted, to put his arms round them both.

Journalized:
Artois
—
Somme
,
1924–1925

Drafted:
Florida,
1934

Recast and rewritten:
Devon,
March
1961
—
July
1962

by Henry Williamson in Faber Finds

THE FLAX OF DREAM

The Beautiful Years

Dandelion Days

The Dream of Fair Women

The Pathway

The Wet Flanders Plain

A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT

The Dark Lantern

Donkey Boy

Young Phillip Maddison

How Dear Is Life

A Fox Under My Cloak

The Golden Virgin

Love and the Loveless

A Test to Destruction

The Innocent Moon

It Was the Nightingale

The Power of the Dead

The Phoenix Generation

A Solitary War

Lucifer Before Sunrise

The Gale of the World