The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  "The sales were two months ago," Christine said. "You live in a world of your own. I'm sorry, but I told you I was going out. To that dance with Geoffrey."

  "Dreadful creature," said her aunt. "He has no sex."

  "That makes no odds. He's my cousin. Oh dear," she said dutifully, as Aunt Josephine raised her head and made her face look stricken. "I'm sorry. Have I hurt you?"

  Aunt Josephine was supposed to have been engaged to a first cousin forty years ago. The cousin had spurned her and married a girl with money, and this was Aunt Josephine's "tragedy," sacred in family history, a thing to be respected; not unmentionable, because however great her distress and shame at the time, she was now proud of it. Her blighted love was one of her treasured possessions, like her amber beads and the family Bible which her father had entrusted to her instead of to her brother. You could refer to it, but you could not speak of it lightly.

  "I'm sorry," Christine said. "It was different with you, of course."

  "Yes." Aunt Josephine fetched up a sigh. "It was different

  with me."

  "Well, anyway — " Christine changed the subject before her aunt could start off about: I remember the dress I wore that night he told me. ... "Well, anyway, I'm discouraged about what to wear. Did you by any chance mend the zipper of the black velvet?"

  Aunt Josephine clapped her hand to the side of her head

  -24-

  with a sound like wood chopping. "My darling, I forgot! How could I have forgotten? 0

  She was always forgetting things. Names, telephone numbers, engagements slipped through her mind like water. If you particularly wanted her to do something, you had to write it down on the pad that hung in the kitchen, called "the Housewife's I MUST/' but she forgot to look at the pad.

  Christine and her father were used to her bad memory, but Aunt Josephine herself was constantly surprised by it, although she had been forgetting things for as long as Christine could remember.

  'Til have to wear the blue then/' Christine said, "and I look like a milk-churn in it. Not that it matters with Geoffrey. He's too busy thinking about what he looks like in his midnight-blue dinner jacket."

  "Then why worry?" said Aunt Josephine comfortably.

  "Oh, but then, you know — " Christine turned her head away. "Other people see you, and one ought always to . . ."

  Like any unmarried girl — and some married women — she was never without the idea, at the start of any party, that this time, tonight, she might meet someone who . . .

  Party after party went by, but she never did. Sometimes she thought she had, but they always turned out wrong.

  But the ritual of bathing and dressing and grooming yourself for a party excited you all over again to the possibility of someone who . . .

  She fiddled about for a long time with the neck of the blue dress, pinning it this way and that, trying the cameo brooch in different places until the draped collar was marked by pin-holes and a smudge of lipstick from her little finger.

  The front-door bell rang while she was still fiddling, and the Alsatian rushed through the hall with his booming bark, his

  -25-

  nails rattling on the polished boards. Christine was getting desperate about the dress, beginning to think that she would have to make some excuse to Geoffrey and tell him she could not go. The bell rang again. Geoffrey was always punctual. He was a stockbroker, successful, according to his views, and he attributed his success to things like being punctual and knowing head waiters at the right places, instead of to the fact that he had inherited a ready-made job in his family firm.

  The bell rang a third time, the Alsatian nearly went mad, and Christine's father called out: "Front door!" although he was in the drawing-room, only a few yards away from it.

  "Let him go," said Aunt Josephine, coming into Christine's room. "He behaves as if he had a staff of servants. Why, my dear, how beautiful you look." She loved Christine and was as biased about her appearance as if she were her own daughter.

  "Oh, I don't," wailed Christine. "This dress looks awful. The neck has always been wrong, only I hadn't the guts to walk out of the shop after trying on so many."

  "Let me lend you my spray of roses. You could catch it up underneath them and it would look all right."

  "Oh, I can't. I mean - artificial flowers-well, I know they're awfully pretty, but I — "

  Aunt Josephine went away to get them. She liked artificial flowers, and the fact that young people thought you could not wear them did not shake her. She came back and held the floppy red silk roses against the neck of the blue dress.

  Christine wriggled and then stood still, surprised to find that the roses did not look at all bad. They looked obviously unreal, which was their saving grace. The taboos of girl friends and odd quirks of prejudice culled through the years died hard. You could wear Woolworth pearls and get away with it, but you could not wear artificial flowers. Or could you?

  -26-

  Til wear them," she declared. "I think they look all right/'

  With her tongue between her teeth she pinned them on. Aunt Josephine went away sighing, because she had offered a favour by lending the roses, but Christine seemed to be doing her a favour by accepting them.

  Geoffrey was in the drawing-room with Mr. Cope when they went down. Aunt Josephine was carrying the puppy, to protect it from the other animals. It nuzzled against the flat woollen bosom of her dress and licked the red V of her skin.

  Geoffrey was sitting in an armchair by the fire with his fingers laced and one leg swung loosely over the other. He was a tall, thin, sandy-haired man with obtrusive glasses and a little hedge of moustache over his pink upper lip, which hung slightly over the lower one. His hands were long and dainty and his evening shoes sharply pointed. He was not effeminate, yet he was as unmasculine as it is possible to be without being a woman.

  He stood up when the two women came in and said: "Greetings," to Christine, and: "I hope I see you well," to Aunt Josephine.

  Christine's father was standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets and his trousers stretched tightly over his fat little stomach. He was a short, irritated-looking man with a pushed-out lower lip and dark shadows round his eyes. One side of his thin hair was long, so that it could be brushed over the bald top of his head. He grunted at Christine, because he had not seen her yet today. He had been working when she came in, and he did not get up until after she left in the morning.

  He turned and looked at the six-hundred-day clock, which swung its leisured pendulum of four gilt balls in a glass case on the mantelpiece. "What about dinner, Josephine?" he asked. "This working man is hungry."

  "But Geoffrey has only just come," his sister said, stroking

  -27-

  the puppy. "He must have a glass of sherry before he and Christine go out/' Her tone reproached him for not having thought of it before. She was his elder sister and had been reproaching him all his life for this and that. He did not mind.

  Geoffrey said: "Thanks very much, Aunt, but I don't drink sherry/' He meant: Not the kind of sherry you probably have in this neck of the woods. He thought Christine's family very suburban, and only asked her out when he could not get anyone else.

  "Well, then, we'll have gin," Christine said. "Go and get me some ice and I'll make Martinis." She went to the squatting bow-fronted cupboard where bottles were kept among piles of old gramophone records, and began to pour gin and vermouth into a shaker.

  Geoffrey went out to the kitchen, made a face at the cats and half raised his foot to kick the growling fox-terrier. He got out some ice cubes, with concern for his dinner jacket, and went back into the drawing-room, where his aunt and uncle were having some kind of a small argument.

  Christine dropped ice into the shaker and put on the top.

  "For God's sake!" said Geoffrey. "What are you doing? You never shake a Martini."

  "Why not?" she asked, still shaking.

  "Because you don't. You just stir it with a spoon or a rod. Y
ou should make it in a glass jug, anyway."

  "Geoffrey, you're so sophisticated/' said Aunt Josephine damningly.

  "Don't be silly," Christine said. "They taste just the same. They're mixed now, anyway. Here, try one." She poured three glasses. "Daddy?"

  "No, thank you," he said, glancing behind him again at the clock. "It would spoil my dinner."

  -28-

  "They're supposed to give you an appetite," she said. She brought her glass and her aunt's over to the fireplace and they all sat down.

  Aunt Josephine raised her glass, which looked very fragile in her large rough hand. "God bless us all/' she said.

  "Cheers," said Geoffrey uncheerily. He sipped at his drink with questing eyebrows, to show he knew the difference between a good Martini and a bad one.

  His uncle and aunt continued their argument. It was something about the standing charge on the water rate, and had been going on at intervals for days. Argument was their main form of conversation. They both enjoyed it, and neither of them ever won, because the other would never accept defeat.

  Geoffrey finished his drink and stood up. "I think we'd better get weaving," he said. He had been in air force public relations during the war. "I booked the table for eight-thirty."

  "We must finish whatVin the shaker." Christine went over to the cupboard, taking short steps, because the blue dress was too long. She hoped she would be able to dance in it.

  Aunt Josephine put her glass down on the edge of a table, where it teetered and dropped just as Geoffrey put out his hand to catch it neatly before it reached the floor. "Fielded, sir," he told himself.

  "Thank you," said his aunt, unconcerned. "No more for me, Christine. I had better go and eat, since your father's so fidgety."

  "I am not fidgety," he said. "I merely like to get my dinner at the proper time, which, God knows, seems to be an impossibility in this house."

  "You are fidgety," said his sister decisively. "Come and get my key from me, baby dear, before you go. I'm not going to get up to open the door at the foolish hour you young things

  -29-

  will probably come in." She sometimes had the fancy to treat Christine as if she were nineteen instead of thirty-four. Ordinarily Christine did not mind, but with Geoffrey there it made her feel silly.

  Her father and aunt went out of the drawing-room, their voices raised in the hall, because the Alsatian had scrambled the rugs in his infuriated attack on the front door. There were always disputes about the animals.

  When they were in Geoffrey's car, humming along towards the river, Geoffrey driving with hands low on the wheel, nonchalant, and flipping the smooth gears through with the crook of his fourth finger, he said: 'There's always so much argument in your house. It must be damn dull to live with."

  "It's just a habit," Christine said. "I argue, too, like mad, when I can be bothered. So does Roger. Daddy says that Granny died arguing with the doctor about whether she was doing to die. You must be a throwback to one of our Quaker ancestors."

  He did not answer. He was in his high-flown, rather distant mood. Christine did not think she was going to like him much this evening.

  They made desultory conversation during dinner. Geoffrey raised a lot of fuss about whether the sole was fresh and the champagne cold enough. He paid more attention to the waiters than he did to Christine.

  After the champagne they had a glass of brandy and then another, and Christine liked herself better. All the drink in the world could not make her like Geoffrey very much, but it could make her feel gay inside, so that she would be able to enjoy the dance and feel a shining part of the music and the assured women and the dresses and chatter.

  The dance was at Geoffreys club in St. James's Square. He did not leave her at the door while he parked the car, but made

  -30-

  her go with him to find a place for the car and then walk back. After all, she was only his cousin. She meant nothing to him except a presentable partner to take to the dance. He had asked two other of his scant female acquaintance before he asked Christine.

  As they went through the entrance, which looked more like a station hotel in the Midlands than one of the best clubs in London, he was at pains to impress her with the honour of being allowed to enter by these portals, instead of having to use the hdies' entrance at the back, as she would on every other day of the year.

  "Isn't that wonderful?" Christine said. She was directed past some notice-boards and marble urns to a dark room behind the staircase, which was being used as a ladies' cloakroom. Her coat was taken across a trestle table by a depressed woman in black, who had a small gas fire on her side of the table. The rest of the room was very cold, and full of goose-fleshed women eydng one another and trying to see in the shadowed mirror.

  Christine resettled Aunt Josephine's roses and combed her hair, which had blown about walking from the car park. She looked rather nice. It seemed a waste.

  Upstairs, where the club's president and his overstuffed lady received them on a marble landing, it was also cold. It was an interval between dances. They went through to the bar, which was ift the members' library.

  There were to be two other people in Geoffrey's party. "Sure to find them in the bar," he said. "When in doubt about old Hubert, always look in the nearest bar."

  Sure enough, old Hubert was drinking champagne with a skeleton-thin girl in a steel-grey dress which she never would have bought if she had seen her bare back view in it. Her shoulder-blades stuck out like wings above her knobbled spine.

  Her hair had grown raggedly from what might once have been a petal cut, and she had cold, fanatical eyes. She was introduced as Miss Something. Christine never did find out her name all evening.

  It was a very dull dance. Geoffrey danced well, and so did Christine, but you could not hear the band at one end of the long narrow ballroom, there were too many people on the floor, and Christine's dress was too long.

  "What's the matter with you?" Geoffrey asked, hanging his upper lip down at her. "You keep falling over your feet/'

  "It's not me, it's you/' she lied. "You shouldn't try fancy steps if you don't know them properly." She tried taking her left hand off his shoulder and holding up the skirt of her dress, but that made her feel like a dowager, so she put the hand back again. She had used too much hand lotion and some of it had come off on Geoffrey's coat. She hoped he would not notice.

  Supper was the best part of the dance. They had lobster and chicken and peach melba and a lot more champagne. Christine remembered pre-war Commemoration suppers at Oxford, and the night people threw pellets of bread at her and Jerry, because they would not talk to anyone else at the table. When she got home she would be silly and look again at that dreadful picture of the dance guests taken after sunrise on the lawn of Magdalen College. She looked all right, being only nineteen, but Jerry looked rumpled, shadowed with beard in the six-o'clock light.

  Geoffrey hardly talked to her, except to ask why she took a second helping of lobster when she was already too fat. He was bored with her and thought it was a waste to spend all that money on a ticket for just a cousin. He and Hubert talked together most of the time. Christine made one or two abortive attempts to talk to Miss Something, but she appeared to be

  -3*-

  interested only in the works of Christopher Fry, and was eating as if she had not had a square meal for weeks, which was what she looked like.

  Afterwards, they went to the ladies* room together. Christine wished that her make-up would last the whole evening, as other women's seemed to. She put on more powder, and Miss Something, who used no make-up except a purplish lipstick which had come off on her teeth during supper, stood by and watched her coldly, a bead Dorothy bag dangling uselessly from one skinny arm.

  Christine began to wonder when it would be time to go home. She danced once more with Geoffrey, but then he got on to whisky and the serious business of drinking and could not be persuaded to leave the bar. She sat in a leather chair and thought about having to
get up early to go to work. An ancient friend of her father's took her away to dance. He joggled her round the room and his breath smelled of catarrhal old man.

  When she got back to the bar Geoffrey said, loose-lipped and goggling behind his glasses: "Come on, we've been looking for you everywhere. Go and get your coat."

  But they were not going home. They were going on to a smashing night-club, where good old Hubert had a bottle of the best. Christine started to murmur that she had to work tomorrow, but Geoffrey thought it was silly that she was a shop girl, and paid no attention.

  They were all in Geoffrey's car, and his driving showed that he was fairly drunk. Christine's foot kept shooting out to brake on the floorboards. This annoyed him and made him screech his tyres more than ever.

  The night-club was a small cavern, with listless people drinking at tables in the dark, or draped against each other on the dance floor, which was made of lighted glass bricks.

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  Geoffrey's party sat at a sofa table, and Hubert's bottle was produced after a lot of delay and argument with the perspiring waiter. Christine did not like whisky, but there was nothing else to do but drink it and watch the half-dozen girls who came on to the floor wearing a few ostrich feathers to kick their legs and thrust their naked navels about.

  While a woman with false bosoms was crooning, Hubert announced that Miss Something did not feel well and was going to be taken home. He got up with her in the middle of a song and people shushed at the disturbance they made.

  Geoffrey did not want to go. He was slumped against the back of the seat with his receding chin on his crumpled shirt front, and might or might not have been asleep. When the cabaret was over Christine pinched him and suggested going home. He sat up, said: "God no, the night is young," took a gulp of whisky and slumped back again. Christine felt too tired and hazy to stir him up again. She sat in the dark with her elbows on the table and a lot of smoke in her eyes and let her thoughts drift. Presently she was aware that a man at the next table was talking to her.