The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  er

  L he sun was shining, and a small breeze was spicing along Piccadilly when Christine came out for her lunch.

  She usually came out at midday, even when it was raining, instead of going up to the store canteen. You could never get a table to yourself, and whoever sat with you always wanted to talk grumbling shop about the customers or the management.

  Everyone at Goldwyn's seemed to have a grievance of some kind, although it was tine of the best London stores to work for, and many of the men and women had been there for yelfrs and years —some of them long past retiring age —for the management was good to its old faithfuls and let them stay on even when they were really past it, like poor old Miss Mattee in Model Gowns, who was always trying to sell people lace dinner dresses that were much too old for them.

  Christine herself had been in the book department for more than four years. She had started as a junior, knocking over piles of books and breaking the till about once a week in her efforts to serve customers briskly. Now she was head saleswoman and moved calmly about the alleys between the bright new paper jackets, knowing that book customers liked to take their time, unlike the thrusters who stampeded through the Notions with never a moment to spare.

  She knew every book in the place, and all about the new

  ones before they came out. She was said to be Mr. Parker's right-hand man — and heaven knows he needed one — and was sometimes asked in to take coffee when a favoured publisher's representative was in his office.

  She liked her work, as much as one can like any job that imprisons one from nine until five-thirty. She liked Gold-wyn's, but she was always glad to get away from it at lunch-time, even though it meant queuing for a table at any of the restaurants and teashops that fed the West End workers, who ate with one eye on their watches and a partiality for things like macaroni and suet pudding which were the most filling for the least cost.

  She was wearing her grey flannel suit today. She thought it made her waist look trim, although it made her stick out farther in front than she cared for. A generation ago she would have been admired as buxom. Now she was a little too plump, and streamlined salesgirls tutted at her in fitting-rooms when they could not close the zipper of a dress that was the right size for her height.

  She was thirty-four. She had silky brown air that would not stay set unless she pinned it up every night, and a full creamy face with a smile that seemed to have been carved onto it from birth.

  She was often teased about being too plump, and because her face reposed in a smile even when she was not smiling inside, she was supposed not to mind the teasing.

  Sometimes, when life seemed hardly worth going on with, as it does to women when they are tired, she saw herself as a figure of tragedy, like those pictures of veiled French widows walking behind their husbands' coffins at important funerals; but her face could never look the part, and people still thought of her as Good Old Christine. Always cheerful and good-tempered. Quite a tonic.

  -4-

  Christine liked the grey flannel suit because it gave her a good waist. She had been liking it for a long time, because she had accepted her aunt's advice that it was better to buy an expensive suit that would last than to keep buying trumpery-smart cheap suits that looked very dashing for the first few weeks, until they began to wrinkle at the elbows and sag at the seat. The good grey flannel had been what the tailor called a Classic, which meant that nobody would ever turn round in the street to look at it, but it would stand having its skirt taken up or let down according to the swings of fashion. It was up at the moment, because the "New Look" was already old, and women were no longer walking bell tents.

  The book department, partly due to Mr. Parker's laissez-faire administration and partly because it was cultural, which put the assistants on a closer level to the customers, was the only department in Goldwyn's where you did not have to wear black. With so many women going shopping without hats, tins led to some confusion as to who was an assistant and who was a customer, but that occurs in all book shops, and accounts for the distressed look of people who have picked up a book they want and are afraid they are going to have their elbows grasped by the store detective before they can find someone to take their money.

  With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs. Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along Piccadilly they were just ordinary women, quite meek, and obeying the policeman at the St. James's Street crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn's commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the Strand, had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant.

  Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel recherchd. They knew what was what. They demanded the best, and so they bought a hat which did not suit them nearly so well, were borne down one floor in the lift when they easily could have walked, and sailed out of the shop in a glory of ego, thinking that the false smile of Mrs, Arnold, who was in charge of Millinery, meant: There goes a lady who knows what she wants.

  So Christine had got the hat and was glad. She always felt safe when she wore this suit and hat. Unexciting, but correct. Even when she hazarded the supreme test of catching herself sideways in shop windows, she looked all right. It would not matter whom she met, as it would if she were wearing the green coat with the collar like a run-over cat, which her aunt said was quite good enough to go to work in and need not be given to the nuns until next year.

  Not that she ever did meet anyone in her lunch hour. Alice, who was her junior, was always meeting people and having small adventures at lunchtime. Even if it was only a man who had picked up her glove in the cafeteria, she made it sound exciting, like an adventure. Alice and the other junior, Helen, were always giggling in the classics section where customers did not go so much. If Christine came along they would stop giggling and pretend to be straightening books. Christine thought this should have made her feel very old, but it didn't. She was much happier now than she had been at the giggling age. She liked her authority in the book department. Sometimes, outside, she insecurely did not know how she stood in relation to the rest of the world. At Goldwyn's she was someone.

  Crossing Piccadilly and going through the narrows of Half

  Moon Street, sinister with bachelors' chambers and the brass plates of Indian doctors, she was nobody except a short plump girl who looked younger than her years, walking across Curzon Street and up Audley Street to have Welsh rarebit in an Oxford Street snackbar. She did not want adventure. She wanted just to walk in the sun and get the scent of hyacinths that someone had planted in the window-box of a little white house on the corner of South Street.

  A young woman in a camel's-hair coat passed her pushing two small children in a pram. Christine appraised them with interest to determine whether or not they were twins. She wondered, as she often did, what it would be like not to go to work, but to be married and not have to leave your house all day unless you had to take the children out or do some shopping.

  When she looked into the future Christine was a little troubled about not being married, but ordinarily she did not worry very much about it. Her friends did that for her, even the ones who were not happily married themselves and secretly envied her independence. She would like to be married, but not as much as her friends thought when they introduced her to loveless bachelors.

  Her aunt, who liked to have Christine at home, said that there was plenty of time and
the right man would come along soon enough, but as he had waited thirty-four years to do it Christine was beginning to wonder whether he ever would. She had her dream man, of course, with whom she stood at the altar sometimes when she was in bed at night and fancied she was prettier than she was. She knew the way he looked and the things he said. She would recognise him immediately if he came along, and then her life would start to be quite different.

  In Grosvenor Square the trees were hazed with curly bright

  young leaves. The grass was impeccable and knew no foot, and tulips like red and white United States Dragoons were drawn up round the base of the Roosevelt statue.

  People looked happier today. The women did not look as if their feet hurt, and here and there someone raised a smiling face to the sun, which had the first real warmth of the year. In the square there were girls with magazines and books and cakes in paper bags, as well as the old men who sat there hopelessly, whatever the weather. The old men did not look at the girls, but the girls sat at the far end of the benches and drew their skirts close.

  There were only one or two old men colonising in the Little America that Grosvenor Square had become since the war. Stately families had long since abandoned the tall houses that once broke the hearts and backs of servants, and nearly every door carried the plate of some government department. Besides the flag-flaunting Embassy, there were American offices on all four sides of the square. Roosevelt was in his right place in the middle of it all. He stood alone, as he never could in life, cloaked and immortal, and English people were surprised that some of the Americans they met did not think him as great as they did. When an Englishman meets a Republican he is as surprised about Roosevelt as an American is when he meets a Socialist who criticises Churchill.

  Christine walked to the north end of the square and saw that clouds were encroaching on the pale spring blue overhead. After lunch the sun might have gone in, so she decided to sit for a moment in its warmth and think about what she could possibly do with the neckline of the dress she would have to wear at the dance tonight. The green was at the cleaner's and the black had torn at the zipper last time she stepped out of it instead of pulling it over her head. She and her aunt had been saying for days that they would mend it.

  So it would have to be the spangled blue, which did something funny at the collar. It would be all right if she could wear an orchid or a rose to cover the fault, but Geoffrey did not bring you flowers — he thought it was honour enough to go out with him — and although Christine could have afforded a corsage, it would have made her feel pathetic to have to buy it for herself.

  She did not feel pathetic as she sat on a bench and widened her smile to the sun. She could not worry about the dress, It was not worth it, for although Geoffrey liked to talk as though he was a connoisseur of women, he never noticed what you wore.

  Two American women in red and yellow duster coats and hats like jockey caps were photographing each other against the Roosevelt statue. Three others, fur-coated and expensive, walked down to the Dorchester for lunch. Expatriates, sated with the incomprehensible sleeping age of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, they came here to reassure themselves with the knowledge that this American garden was the cleanest square in London, and to recharge their vitality with the sight of the big shining automobiles parked all round, which dwarfed the few English cars among them into insufficiency.

  They also liked to see the uniforms. You could not see English uniforms unless you went to the Trooping the Colour, or were lucky enough to be in the Mall when the faceless Lifeguards jogged by with scarlet cloaks and burning helmets, their black horses catching at the jingle of their bits as if they knew that so splendid a sight must be accompanied by music. But in Grosvenor Square the American officers came out of the naval headquarters on the corner of North Audley Street all glamorous in dark blue and gold, with chestfuls of rainbow ribbons that did not necessarily mean a hero.

  One of them walked past Christine. She narrowed her eyes to see whether, by blurring her focus, she could make him look like an Englishman. Coming towards her he could have been, but going away no Englishman could have owned that small round bottom, each side rising independently as though moved by wires from his shoulders. It was the walk that became so familiar during the war, when G.I.s in short battle-jackets roved round London and got all the best girls.

  The two girls in jockey caps finished their roll of film and moved away laughing, because one of them would send the pictures to her father and he would ask visitors: "Did you know my Eileen was once photographed with F.D.R.?" and then scatter their astonishment by showing them the picture of the girl and the statue.

  A robin hopped on the grass like a marionette. Christine thought about the Welsh rarebit she was going to seek as soon as the sun reached that waiting cloud, and the American naval officer, who was evidently out for his health, completed his tour of the square and sat down at the end of her bench, breathing deeply through his nose.

  'Would you care for a cigarette?" He had taken one out for himself, and before he lit it he held the packet towards her. If he had been in America he would have slid nearer to her along the bench, but as he was in England he kept his distance. English girls were always either suspecting you of evil designs or being frustrated because you did not have them. It did not occur to him that in Grosvenor Square she might be an American girl. Perhaps it was her shoes.

  "No, thank you. Very much. I don't smoke," Christine added, to show she was not snubbing him.

  "Nice day," he said, nodding conclusively at Grosvenor Square.

  "Isn't it?" she answered, thinking, as she always did when

  — jo —

  she talked to Americans, that her voice sounded mincing.

  She noticed that he had black, rather saturnine eyebrows that needed combing, and a mouth like James Stewart's that looked as if it might be going to blow a little bubble.

  The sun went behind the cloud. Christine stood up, thinking of food. Had they talked enough for her to say Goodbye?

  He solved that for her by throwing away his match and saying: "Goodbye," giving it an extra little sing-song syllable that sounded like a secret smile.

  Walking towards Oxford Street, Christine thought: Now Alice would make an adventure out of that. Then she wondered whether that big cameo brooch would do anything for the neck of the blue evening dress, and then she thought: But then if I'd been Alice Yd probably be having lunch with him by now. In the snackbar, opening her book and putting her knife into the still bubbling Welsh rarebit, she was glad that she was not.

  Half-past five took a long time to arrive. Some days it was upon you almost before you had time to turn around. On other days, when you were not so busy, it was a point in eternity, certain as death, but just as remote. In the middle of the afternoon Christine brought out a pile of books that were not selling, and told Miss Burman and Mrs. Drew and Alice and Helen to push them onto anyone who vaguely wanted just "a novel."

  Mr. Parker had made a mistake about these books. He had bought too many of them, against Christine's advice, and when he found they were not selling he had said to her peevishly: "What's the matter with all you people? You're letting that Black Monkey book hang about too long. You know what I always say —keep the stock rolling. Keep it moving. Make way for the new stuff." He picked up pens

  — ii —

  and moved things about on his desk, as if he were playing draughts.

  'We'd have sold it out/' Christine had said, "if you hadn't ordered too many copies. I told you not to, but you had to knmv better/'

  Because he was rather old and rather foolish, she often spoke to him as if he were an aged parent or a troublesome child. He did not mind. He had a daughter at home who spoke to him in the same way, and sometimes he thought he liked Christine better than the daughter, because although she bullied him, she backed him up when he had committed himself, and tried to put right his errors.

  Both women often said to him: "I told you so/' The daughter
would leave him to stew in his own mistakes, but Christine worked to help him out of them. So this afternoon she brought a pile of Black Monkey novels out of the storeroom, blew a little dust off them, arranged them at the front of one of the fiction counters and told her assistants to sell them.

  The reading public would be surprised to know how often it is sold books it does not want. Because it is allowed to wander round a book department, picking up and putting down and not being bothered unless it asks for help, it thinks it is not subject to the more obvious salesmanship of the other departments. But it is. A good bookseller can get rid of almost any book he has overbought, and Christine was a good bookseller.

  By the end of the day she and Miss Burman between them had sold more than a dozen copies of Black Monkey. Miss Burman was also an old hand, well known to regular customers, who liked to call her by name, and responded, when she said: "Now this is a book that you could appreciate, madam/' like lambs to the slaughter.

  Beginning to tidy up at five o'clock, Christine heard Helen say to a dithering customer with a neckful of martens: "Oh, you 'would, madam. Everybody's reading it. In fact, we've just had to reorder."

  Alice, tossing her pageboy bob around the place, did'not sell any copies of Black Monkey. She did not try to. Alice was self-engrossed and uncooperative. She would not last long in the book department, but would soon find herself in Art Jewellery, where she would be much more at home.

  Going into Mr. Parker's office with the special autographed copies of A Golden Journey to the East, which he insisted on locking in his safe at night, although it is doubtful whether they would have interested a burglar, Christine said: "That Helen. She's coming along nicely. I think she'll be quite valuable to us soon.''

  "She's awfully spotty," grumbled Mr. Parker.

  "It's her age. So was I when I was nineteen."

  'Were you?" Mr. Parker peered at her through the top half of his bi-focals. "Come to think of it, so was I. I hated being nineteen."

  Christine tried to picture him with all his hair, and a gawky body with red wrists dangling out of his coat sleeves. He was so hunched now into the acceptance of old age, slow and precise and sparing of his waning vitality, that it was hard to believe his juices had ever run copiously enough to force an overflow in pimples.