When Blackbirds Sing (7 page)

Dominic sat in his hotel bedroom with the prospect of six days before him, perhaps his last six in the civilized world, spent in mooning about in his own company. At first he had accepted Colonel Rodgers’ injunction not to go to see Sylvia, thinking it would be wrong to intrude on her when she must be feeling as he felt in the first week after leaving Helena. Now he saw it as a flicker of the colonel’s old jealousy. He took up the telephone and asked the girl at the desk to get him Sylvia’s number.

Far from being in an abyss of depression, she sounded cheerful and very pleased to hear his voice.

“Where are you?” she asked.

When he told her she asked if he was free for luncheon, adding: “I am.”

She suggested that they should lunch at the Ritz, as it was convenient for both of them. She would ring up for a table. They arranged that she should leave her house at one o’clock, and that he should walk down Green Park to meet her.

Dominic was a little disturbed that she had chosen the Ritz, again thinking of money that might go to Helena.
As it turned out he need not have worried, as they could only eat as much as their food coupons allowed, and the Army authorities had fixed a modest limit to the amount officers might spend in restaurants.

He met Sylvia just inside the gates of the Park near Buck-ingham Palace. It was cold, but bright and sunny. She was wearing a dark coat with a sable collar, and a black velvet hat, so that her fair skin and her golden hair shone out as in some Renaissance portrait. As at Dilton he was startled when he saw her. He had not imagined that she would look like this in the daytime. In the evening, in yellow silk and pearls, amid the golden lights of the drawing-room at Dilton, it was natural that she should appear exquisite. He did not expect her to have the same effect in Green Park. Her clothes were simple but the people who passed glanced at her.

“This is fun,” she said, shaking hands. “When did you come up?”

He told her that he had come on Sunday night, and that he was on embarkation leave.

“Why didn’t you ring up before?”

“I had to go to see old Cousin Emma and I dined with Colonel Rodgers.”

“What, Uncle Marcus! How gay! Still, he always was my rival. And are you going to spend your leave with octogenarians?”

“No jolly fear,” said Dominic. “Not if I can help it.” He felt as if he had suddenly woken up, as if weights were lifted from his shoulders, as if grey doors enclosing him were flung open to the sun. They laughed and walked back up the park.

When they came into the Ritz restaurant they attracted notice, not only because of their good looks but because of the striking contrast between them: Dominic dark, arrogant and southern, Sylvia a pure gold product of the north. In a way this appearance was misleading, as Dominic’s arrogance was intermittent, not like Sylvia’s, an unchanging attitude; and her purity of intention was negligible, while his, confused and groping, remained constant. In spite of Sylvia’s alleged poverty—and her appearance was one that only a rich woman can achieve—she seemed to be an
habituée
of the place, and they were deferentially led to a table in the window.

When they had ordered their food they looked at each other and smiled, partly with pleasure, but also with surprise to find themselves there. It was so improbable, and it was new ground for them. At no time had they been together away from Dilton or Waterpark. They had a sense of new freedom, that in some way they were redeeming a failure. When they had drunk a little wine they took up again that allusive bickering kind of conversation they had begun when he dined at Dilton, and which was a new thing between them. Before, when they had been engaged, their love was adolescent, alternately blissful and angry. There was nothing amusing about it. They were like a man who has lost some money which later is not only returned to him, but returned with interest.

They were the last to leave the restaurant. In Piccadilly she asked him: “What are you doing now?”

“I have to buy some kit,” he said.

“Shall I come and help you?”

“Yes, please do,” he exclaimed eagerly. He had the idea that everything to do with Sylvia was related to sophisticated pleasure. That she was willing to do anything so humdrum as to choose army kit made her appear more simply human, and also more accessible. They went along to those stores which provided everything necessary for a Mayfair boudoir or a Flanders dugout; and even linked the two in special hampers of
foie gras
and French plums to send to young officers in the trenches.

She made him, as a matter of course, buy the most expensive things possible, and asked the shopman: “Are you sure this is the very best?” She really believed that by making him pay the highest price for every article, she was doing him a service, and later, when she had led him up to tea at Claridges, she said: “I don’t believe you would have chosen nearly such good things if I had not come with you,” which was true.

Dominic justified himself by thinking that all the things he had bought were for the trenches, and that Helena would not want him to economize on them. But this was only a passing thought. He, too, had Sylvia’s taste for and expectation of the very best, though with him it reached beyond material things. The atmosphere that surrounded her was one most agreeable to himself. When he found himself in rich houses, both dignified and comfortable, where the best is normal, he felt that he was in his natural surroundings; though at home with Helena the idea of living in a palace like Dilton would have seemed absurd to him. Perhaps people of mixed blood have more varied nostalgias than those whose forebears were all of the same kind, living in the same place.
From long generations of farming squires at Waterpark he found his deepest satisfactions on his own farm; from the Bynghams he inherited the impulse towards full-blooded bouts of extravagance; while from the Tebas he took his looks and his arrogance and his sombre passions, a taste for magnificence and the houses of the great. This is not romanticizing Dominic; he was already romantic, just as stark fact may often be. Sometimes stark facts made him act with the extreme of romanticism, as happened within a year.

He walked back with Sylvia to her house behind Buck-ingham Gate. Its drawing-room was no bigger than the green bath-room at Dilton, but it was furnished from the more magnificent rooms of that house, with a kingwood and ormolu commode and Italian mirrors. He had only come in to see the house, but he stayed until seven, when Sylvia had to change to dine out.

“I wish I could put it off,” she said, “but it’s impossible. Don’t you know anyone under eighty with whom you can spend the evening?”

“I don’t want to see anybody else,” said Dominic. “It would spoil this afternoon.”

They arranged to lunch again the next day, but at a different restaurant. Sylvia liked to be seen in public with Dominic, knowing that they were an arresting couple, but she was always discreet, and did not want to be seen with him twice in the same place. He said diffidently: “Am I taking up too much of your time?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “You mustn’t waste your embarkation leave. I shall regard it as war work.” He smiled but he looked a little hurt.

The next morning, with too much time to spend, he dawdled towards their appointment, looking in the shop windows and was ten minutes late. If any other man Sylvia knew had kept her waiting, after a few minutes she would have gone away; but the privilege of behaving uncertainly, which was one of the few things that Dominic had won for himself, acted even with her, and she only said, half amused: “You mustn’t do this sort of thing you know.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Keeping a woman waiting in a public place, or anywhere else as far as that goes.”

“Am I late? I’m sorry,” said Dominic, but he did not seem to realize the gravity of his offence.

When they sat down in the restaurant she was about to give him a short lecture, but restrained herself. In her first London season she had hoped to become engaged to a very good-looking eldest son, but he had not come up to scratch. An intimate friend told her that she was too bossy with him. She had said: “So often when one thinks one is being queenly, a reigning beauty, one is only being a governess; and a governess
per se
is never seductive.” Sylvia was determined not to make this mistake with Dominic, particularly as she thought it was improbable that he would take it well.

In the afternoon she had to go to see an aunt at Hampton Court, a promise she had made some time ago. She asked Dominic to come with her, but when they arrived she told him to go through and walk in the gardens while she visited her aunt. She would not stay long.

“It wouldn’t do for you to come in,” she said.

“Why, don’t I look respectable?” asked Dominic.

“You are certainly presentable,” said Sylvia, “but I don’t know that you look exactly respectable. Anyhow, she’s as blind as a bat.”

“But isn’t she Colonel Rodgers’ sister? I ought to see her.” Dominic was full of these friendly loyalties.

“She’s also Mother’s sister, and she’ll tell her we came together. You must take a brisk walk. I’ll meet you on the bridge in half-an-hour.” She entered a little iron lift, which creaked perilously up through space to the top floor.

Dominic found his way out into the gardens, where the last leaves had fallen from the trees, and the borders were dug up and bare. He walked down towards the Long Water, and wondered why Sylvia, when she asked him to come down, had not told him that she did not want him to meet Mrs Pottinger, as her aunt was called—or rather, why Mrs Pottinger should not tell her mother that they had come down together. Though he often appeared erratic or worse to other people, in his own mind he was absolutely straight. When he concealed his actions or intentions, it was not from slyness, but simply because he forgot to mention them. Having been treated as a dunce when a boy, he always assumed that other people knew far more than he did, which showed even in his letters to Helena. But he hated the smallest deception between friends. He puckered his forehead as he thought that Sylvia had been a little sly. Then he found that for some odd reason this gave him a slight satisfaction. If her perfection had a slight flaw she was more accessible, though he did not yet know in what way he wanted her accessible. Anyhow it showed that she
wanted his company, if only for the train journey. He went into the maze, and thinking of these things he lost himself, and was again ten minutes late in rejoining Sylvia, whom he found walking up and down beyond the bridge.

“You’re incorrigible,” she said. “I hurried away from Aunt Lizzie, saying I had an appointment, and one of her cronies has already passed me dawdling here.”

“I got lost in the maze,” he explained.

“But you oughtn’t to go into the maze when you have to meet someone.” She was being a governess, but with a half-amused exasperation.

“That’s the sort of thing I do,” said Dominic, partly apologetic, but more as if explaining an unalterable phenomenon.

“How on earth d’you get on in the army?”

“I only have to think about one thing at a time there. That’s why it suits me.”

“How many things do you have to think of now?”

“Only one.”

“What is it?”

“You,” he said.

He was smiling, and she laughed a little. He had said it for fun, for cheek, but it affected her more deeply.

In the evening they went to the theatre. During the war London enjoyed an uninterrupted season of four years, which spread from the rich through the whole community, enlivened by an excitement beyond peace-time imagination. Subalterns on a week’s or a fortnight’s leave, with six months’ or a year’s pay saved up in France, could live in a style they had never known as office workers. Everyone
was kind to them and offered them hot baths, and those whose homes were far off spent their time in theatres and restaurants, and in the company of amiable but avaricious whores. These brief pleasures they earned in months of muddy sleepless nights, always in the shadow of death.

Dominic and Sylvia went to a rather sordid play about fallen women, which was the subject of so many jokes that they had thought it would be light fun. But Sylvia disliked the drab setting and the play itself stirred up the puritanism which was one of the dormant ingredients in Dominic’s make-up. If the ultimate result of his actions was revealed to him he could not help taking it into account. Until they saw this play he had no clear intention of his relationship with Sylvia becoming more intimate. He thought that it was just friendship and old affection. The play made him think of the possibility, at the same time giving him a feeling of its sordidness, which was increased when he remembered her slight deception of her aunt that afternoon. They both felt a little flat as he took her back to Catherine Street. He said goodnight, and she did not ask him in. He said that the next day he was lunching with Cousin Emma. She made no comment but as she was about to close the door, she said: “Then come to tea at five.”

In the morning he went to the bank for his letters. There was one from his father saying that as he might have extra expenses going to the front he was sending him a hundred pounds. Steven’s real reason for sending this money was that he had had a letter from Lord Dilton saying how pleased he was to have Dominic as a subaltern, and what an excellent officer he made. Steven thought of Dominic’s difficulties as a boy, and although he had treated
him with the extremes of patient good intention, he now accused himself of not having understood him properly. He was also ashamed that his sons had to go to war, while his own life had been spent in absolute safety, and he had never fired a gun at anything but a partridge or a rabbit. The only gesture he could make was to send them money.

Helena’s letter mostly described the baby learning to walk on the verandah, which was shaded by a Gloire de Dijon rose, tangled with a vine and a peach tree. At the moment the three were a riot of flowers and fruit and when the afternoon sun filtered through them the colour was brilliant. When two potent but inconsistent ideas entered Dominic’s mind together, they caused a kind of jam or stoppage that was almost a physical pain. Helena’s letter wakened vivid images inconsistent with the life he had led for the past few days. While he read it he was entirely with her, longing to be back with her in that simple happy life on his own land. When he had finished he read it again, and then sitting on the mahogany chair in the bank, he fell into one of those dreams of home, and the clerk watching him again wondered if his news was good or bad.