Nightingale Wood (11 page)

It appeared that he had stopped at a shop in the town because Hetty wanted to fetch a book she had ordered. He had told Hetty that she could stay in the bookshop for ten minutes, but Hetty had stayed twelve, and that had made them late.

Twice, in half an hour, Hetty had held up Miss Barlow’s plans, and prevented her from moving as quickly as possible on to the next pleasure. Miss Barlow liked her life to be a steady movement towards pleasure. While she was having one, she was thinking about the next and what she should wear while she had that.

What a little beast she is, thought the elder girl coldly, looking at the bun of hair sticking out untidily under Hetty’s hat. Thoroughly selfish, unattractive, and spoilt. I think, as soon as Victor and I are married, a good long cruise would be the best thing for Miss Hetty, since she’s so fond of travel books. She might pick up a husband that way – though I doubt it, she’s so affected. There’s nothing men hate so much as affectation.

Miss Barlow’s own success with men (eight full-blown offers of heart, hand and fortune in five years, and numberless hints at undying devotion repressed by loyalty to marriage vows or lack of money; storesful of flowers, sweets, jewellery and minor articles of clothing, to say nothing about a ceaseless stream of invitations to dances, races, and shows) was due, she thought, chiefly to her lack of affectation.

The word had a special meaning for her, wide enough to cover all behaviour different from her own. Thus it was affected to love reading, to like being alone, to play games professionally, to dress in the extreme of fashion. The steady pursuit of conventional pleasures, none of them lasting very long and all of them costing a good deal of money, was Phyllis’s ideal of how life should be lived.

It was taken for granted by the Springs and by Phyllis’s family, a nest of rich stockbrokers, that she and Victor would one day marry, for they had kept up a half-attracted, half-irritated friendship since their Harrow and Roedean days, but each was always so busy making money or pursuing pleasure that so far they had had neither the time nor the inclination to undertake the bother of getting married.

There was also the question of children. Phyllis, at fifteen, had decided that she would never have children. Children, both before and after, made one look a sight. Victor wanted children. They had never talked about this, but each had gathered the other’s views. There would be all the bore of threshing that out, too. In short, the longer they put off getting formally engaged, the pleasanter life would be. Meanwhile, they saw each other often at the flat of Phyllis’s parents in London, where there was much entertaining all the year round, and every summer Phyllis came for many weekends to Grassmere, where the Springs usually had friends staying.

Mrs Spring liked Phyllis’s company, for they had the same interests and the same solemnity about the details of entertaining, house-decorating, and dress; but it cannot be said that Mrs Spring was fond of Miss Barlow. She felt in the younger woman’s apparently candid nature a desire to boss, and to excel, that she did not like. If any woman had to boss and excel at Grassmere it should be Mrs Spring, not Miss Barlow. Victor did both, of course, but his mother did not mind that. Victor was a man, and one did not mind being outshone by a man.

Nevertheless, Phyllis would make a handsome, wealthy and suitable wife for Victor, and after she was married she would probably change her mind about children: girls often did. A handsome grandson, just like Victor, would be delightful!

Mrs Spring was lying on a long chair on the veranda under a light rug, watching the sudden rainstorm beating on the pewter-coloured river at the bottom of the lawns. There were some other people staying in the house but they were out motoring. She did not feel well today, and was trying to be sensible about it, but this was difficult, for she had so much that she felt good health might just as well have been thrown in. Hetty, now, and Phyl, and Victor, they were all three as strong as horses, and took their health for granted.

‘Hullo, Phyllis,’ she said, looking up as the three came towards her. ‘How nice you look. (Hetty! Your hair!) I expected you half an hour ago; was the train late?’

‘The train was all right,’ Miss Barlow unslung the fox from her neck, smiling down at Mrs Spring, ‘but Victor was late.’

‘Three minutes.’ He said it over his shoulder; he was fiddling with the wireless.

‘And on the top of that,’ continued Miss Barlow, cautiously pressing the waves on her dark head, ‘he stopped to give some people a lift.’

‘Oh? Anyone we know?’

‘The Withers,’ put in Hetty, who had slumped into a chair.

‘The—? Oh, those people at The Eagles.’

‘We had to turn the car round,’ went on Phyllis lightly, ‘and take them
right
back to their front door!’

‘Whatever for?’

‘It was raining,’ drawled Hetty. ‘I asked Vic to stop. The younger Miss Wither and her sister-in-law had gone out for a walk and the rain came upon them unexpectedly, I gathered.’

‘The sister-in-law?’ interrupted Mrs Spring. ‘That’s the brother’s widow. He died about a year ago. She was in a shop.’

‘The sister-in-law was?’ asked Hetty.

‘Yes. Some place in the town – Thompson and something. What’s she like?’

Mrs Spring, though now a wealthy woman with the interests of her type, had been born in a small town in Hampshire, and had the small-town woman’s interest in a local personality, however unimportant.

‘If she were groomed,’ said Hetty slowly, pensively staring down at her shoes, ‘she would be a beauty. She is the ethereal type, like one of Greuze’s girls, with that fine-textured skin and silky hair that men always admire.’

‘One of whose girls?’ said her aunt fretfully. ‘I wish you would pay more attention to your own grooming, never mind other people’s.’ She stood up, with determination, for she refused to play the invalid in front of guests unless they were old acquaintances like Phyllis Barlow, and at any moment the Randalls would come in.

Phyllis said nothing. When tactless men asked her if she did not think Rosemary or Diana a swell doll, Phyllis said heartily that she did, though she did not. But she never on the other hand made the mistake of over-praising women to men, because she knew that men saw through that game: they were not so stupid as they were supposed to be. Victor went out of the room.

‘You’ve got your old room, Phyllis,’ said Mrs Spring. ‘It’s just been done up.’

‘Oh good!’

‘The wallpaper’s a sort of pale Futurist, all mixed, you know, and there’s a Hunting Scenes chintz,’ continued Mrs Spring.

‘It sounds marvellous; I think I’ll go up and look at it.’

‘There’ll be a drink when you come down. Some people are coming in. Now, Hetty,’ as Phyllis went out, ‘that’s how I want you to look one day. Phyllis has perfect taste and wears her things beautifully.’

‘Why?’ droned Hetty.

Mrs Spring stared at her.

‘Why? What do you mean, why?’

‘Why does she wear them beautifully?’

‘How on earth should I know? Because she does, I suppose. It’s a gift … and you haven’t got it.’

‘Oh.’ Hetty was eating, rather than reading, large slabs of a very thin book of contemporary verse each page having a thick wodge of print, without capital letters, starting at the top and running nearly to the bottom. Her eyes were very close to the book and she frowned with concentration.

‘Hetty! Do put that down and go and make yourself fit to be seen. The Randalls will be back at any minute. Your stockings are twisted and your hat’s on straight; it ought to be right over one eye. What have you got hold of there, for pity’s sake?’

‘
Ashes of Iron
.’ Hetty began to bite a finger-nail, absently but with the ghost of a malicious smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

‘What?’

‘
Ashes of Iron
. It’s the name of a book. Poems.’

‘Rubbish,’ muttered her aunt, moving uneasily across the room to the wireless, making a little face of weariness and pain. ‘What on earth does it mean?’

‘I don’t know, but one has to read it and try to find out,’ said her niece sternly, going towards the door with the book carefully cradled in one hand.

Mrs Spring switched on the wireless and music, of a sort, slowly grew in the big luxurious room.

I don’t want to write, of course, mused Hetty, running upstairs two at a time, and anyway I know I can’t, but really, if one was a genius (as I suspect this
Ashes of Iron
man is) one could be it here without a soul (I err; I should say, without a body, for souls they have none) suspecting. Never heard of Greuze, never heard of Donat Mulqueen and
Ashes of Iron
! I might be Donat Mulqueen myself, for all they realize.

She went into her bedroom and shut the door.

She had a sitting-room too, but she liked her bedroom better because from it she could see the river. Not a corner of the orchard could be seen, and of course the waste land at the back of the vegetable garden was tucked well away at the side of the house, but the river had poetry; it was better than the unshadowed lawns, the neat beds of blazing flowers.

Her room was big, light and pleasant, with conventionally charming furnishings that had been transformed by Hetty’s own odd, vivid and sure taste. Watts’s
The Minotaur
, Van Gogh’s
Cornfield with Cypresses
, a group of natives by Gauguin, looked strange but attractive against the pale pink wallpaper considered suitable for a virgin’s sleeping-place by Mrs Spring.

Bookshelves stood against the four walls. They were shapely and well made, but were all second-hand; Hetty had picked them up on visits to Chesterbourne. She liked her shelves to have personality, as well as the books on them, and though it would have been simpler to order shelves to be fitted round the room, or to buy those bookcases that grow with the growth of their library, she had stood firm against the amusement of Victor and the irritation of her aunt, and had the shelves she wanted.

She let down her thick lank hair and began to brush it, standing in front of the mirror and gazing dejectedly across the now sunlit lawns. The world was so beautiful! so crammed with romance, excitement, horror, irony! In every part of it, except at Grassmere near Sible Pelden in Essex, there were to be found truths that were stranger than fiction, and more satisfying. There were causes to live for, work to be done, philosophies to be examined, religions to be inquired into and rejected, and an ocean, a bottomless ether, of talk to be poured out at somebody – no matter who; someone else young, preferably, who would argue and know a little more than oneself but have the same kind of searching, eager mind. There were people to be taught, wrongs to be righted, there were politics and history and economics …

I know just how Florence Nightingale felt.

Why won’t they let me go to college, and then try to get a job?

What’s the use of a finishing-school, full of useless lilies of the field in crepe-de-chine underclothing, who’ve never heard of Donat Mulqueen?

Swiiiish! went the stiff brush, down the thick locks. Wait till I’m twenty-one! Only another year.

There was a sharp tap at the door, which opened before she could say anything and admitted Miss Barlow.

‘What do you want?’ demanded Hetty. She casually put on a dressing-gown, for she still had the fierce modesty of extreme youth, and she hated the fastidious glance that Phyllis had given at her neglected, schoolgirlish underclothing.

‘Just want to see if you’ve got anything new and interesting to read,’ said Miss Barlow lightly, ‘and we haven’t seen each other for such ages that I wondered how you’ve been getting on all this time.’ She began to wander round the room, humming. ‘Not engaged yet?’

‘Go to hell.’ Hetty went on with her brushing.

‘You don’t mean to say that you’ve
read
all these?’

No answer.

‘Come on, Hetty, don’t try it on with me. I’ve known you since you were twelve. You don’t really read all this stuff, you know, and understand it. Why, there are things here that Victor wouldn’t understand.’

‘Quite.’

‘It’s just affectation. Pose.’

Hetty went on brushing with longer and longer sweeps. Her scalp tingled from the force of the brushing.

‘Poetry …’ Phyllis pulled out a book roughly, and opened it. Her heart was beating a little quicker than usual, not unpleasantly. She liked excitement, especially when it came from baiting somebody.

She began to read dramatically:

No truce with the I, the ravener,

eater of bare nobility—

‘What
utter
rot! Why, it doesn’t even make – here – shut up, you little beast!’

Hetty, hairbrush raised, charged at her, seized her by the shoulders and, with the full force of a sturdy body superior in weight if not in strength, barged her out of the room and, after a scuffle in the passage, slammed the door.

‘Bitch!’ observed Hetty, resuming her hairbrushing with a trembling hand. She murmured after a moment:

No truce with the I, the ravener,

eater of bare nobility, big-mouth—

then shook her head impatiently, broke off, and began again in a low dreamy tone, gazing out across the green lawns:

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow

Of Adria towards Venice …

Gradually, as the words left her lips, her expression grew calm, save for the old resentful look in the blue eyes, and when she went down a little later she was as usual.