The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  It was a long room like a schoolroom, with some fifty desks at which people sat with their legs twined round the chairs, hunched forward and sucking their pens as if they were struggling with a matriculation paper. At the teacher s desk sat a middle-aged policeman with grey hair and benevolent spectacles.

  Christine found an empty desk and sat down to look at the question paper lying on it, taken back all at once to the moment of panic at the start of school examinations, when all you had studied fled from you, and you hardly dared to look at the question paper for fear that the fiends had tricked you after all and were asking that impossible one about: "Compare the Medieval Guilds with modem Trade Unions. What was the main difference? Describe the influence of Christianity on both these movements."

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  The driver's permit test, however, was more like an elementary intelligence test for backward children. All you had to do was to put an X in the space opposite one of the three alternative answers to each question, so that provided you could read, it did not matter whether you could write or not.

  Some of the people round Christine did not look as if they could read or write. They sat at the desks hopelessly, as if they had come to the end of their powers and could go no farther. One man looked as if he had been there several days. His face was unshaven and his hair was on end from the amount of times he had pushed his pen through it. The floor round him was littered with cigarette butts. From time to time he fetched up great sighs, like a man in travail.

  One or two bright boys were finishing their tests and taking them up to the policeman at the teacher's desk, looking as smug as the loathsome candidates at school examinations who keep going up for more writing paper, when everyone else is struggling to think of enough to fill the paper they have been given.

  Christine determined to get full marks. The questions were mostly very simple, even if you had not read the book of traffic rules. One of them was: "If a streetcar stops in front of you, would you (#) Stop and wait for the people to descend? (fc) Blow your horn to hurry them up? (c) Drive on and make them get out of your way?"

  The desks were close together, and Christine saw the man next to her ponder a long time over this question, and finally put his X in the space marked (c). She wondered if he would get his permit. He looked as if he might want to be a truck driver, and would need it.

  When she had finished she took her paper up to the Policeman, who glanced through it briefly, made some cryptic calculations and came up with the score of ninety-five. She did not

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  think she had made any mistakes, but perhaps you were never given full marks, in case it looked like cheating.

  The policeman covered each of her eyes in turn and made her read some letters on a chart and tell him the colours of a set of red, amber and green lights. As they were placed in the familiar order of traffic lights, you could have got it right, anyway, even if you had been colour blind. Then he told her that she had a pretty English accent, lady, asked her if she was in the diplomatic service and passed her on to a window where she waited in line for a rattled woman with hair escaping all over a grey cardigan to take her papers.

  She sat with Vinson and waited half an hour for her name to be spelled out over the loudspeaker. The rattled woman could not trust herself to pronounce any name more complicated than Smith. Then she had to go to other windows and wait for other half-hours until she was finally given a fistful of papers and sent to take her driving test. There seemed to be more red tape and forms than in Socialist England.

  Vinson was inordinately proud of her for having got ninety-five out of a hundred. It was nice that he was pleased, but not very flattering that he had expected her to say that she would have mown down crowds at a streetcar stop.

  Waiting in the big car park where the driving tests were held, they watched a red-faced man in a very old Ford trying to park the car between two white posts, while policemen and examiners looked cynically on.

  ''Jesus," said Vinson. 'Those markers are awfully close. You'll never make it, honey/'

  "Of course I will. Just because I scraped a fender the other day by bad luck. YouVe never got over that scratch. Don't belittle me, Vin. You make me nervous/'

  "Don't be. Just take it easy. Don't lose your head. Make a

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  fresh try if you ball it up first time. Don't be nervous."

  "I'm not, but you're making me. Please, Vin, don't watch while I'm doing it."

  He promised not to look, but she felt that he was standing behind her watching when her turn came. It took her three tries to get the car parked properly, but at least she did not knock the poles down and run over a policeman's toe, as the man in the Ford had done.

  An examiner wearing a pair of blue jeans and an old leather flying jacket climbed wearily into the car with her and said, without looking at her: "Go ahead, lady. I'll tell you where."

  Christine had been driving for fifteen years, but with his jaundiced presence on the seat beside her and his turgid eye looking through the windscreen at the course she took she felt as if she had hardly been in a car before. It felt odd to be driving so primly and carefully, making exaggerated hand signals and letting every pedestrian in Washington pass in front of her.

  They drove round the city blocks for about ten minutes. Christine dared not talk to him, in case it was against the rules, as if you were trying to curry favour, and he did not offer any conversation except the statement that she was British and must be in the diplomatic corps.

  When they had finished the tour he got out of the car without saying anything, wrote something on his papers, gave them to her and went away without a word.

  Vinson came up with an anxious face. "I've passed!" she told him, and kissed him in front of everybody, which he did not like when he was in uniform.

  When Christine wanted to use the car she had to take Vinson to work in the morning and fetch him at night. She had already driven with him on the maze of roads that surrounds that mammoth temple of Mars, the Pentagon, and she

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  had got over her first alarmed surprise at the thousands of cars going from every direction along the roads that loop over and under each other like a fantastic model railway.

  She had not known what it was like at eight o'clock in the morning, however, when half the military might of America was converging on its desks to fight for freedom and democracy. The first time she took Vinson to work at the Arlington Annex, just above the Pentagon, she could hardly believe there were so many cars in the world, let alone merely going to work for the U. S. Government.

  From the jammed Key Bridge onwards you could hardly see the road for cars. They drove in a solid mass, and when they left Rosslyn and came out onto the rolling green open space that exists solely for the purpose of containing the crisscrossing loops and swirls of roads that are necessary to get people to and from the Pentagon there were cars everywhere as far as the eye could see. Cars rushing, cars crawling, cars going in every direction like ants with an unknown purpose, and cars drawn up in their thousands in cindered car parks, as if the biggest football match in creation was going on.

  She did not think she would ever find her way home. When she left Vinson at the Annex he told her to go back the way they had come, but all the roads looked the same to her. She missed a vital turn and found herself going round and round the Pentagon with no hope of ever finding the way out. You could not stop anywhere on the road, so she drove into a car park, took a deep breath and surveyed the landscape, trying to figure out a way back to the Key Bridge. But in this traffic system the road you should take probably did not run in the direction you wanted to go. It was liable to swoop upwards in a clover leaf to get you across the bridge over another road. She ventured out again and thought she was more successful. She had the river and the bridge in sight,

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  but the road took a sudden turn and plunge and she was tack again at the Pentagon, going round in circles.

&n
bsp; When she was a child she had been lost in the Hampton Court Maze. She remembered how she had run round and round, crying because she was lost to the world for ever. Crying and screaming had brought her mother then, but it would do nothing for her now. She went back into her car park, wondering if she would have to stay there all day until it was time to fetch Vinson.

  An Army officer drove up in a green Chevrolet and told her peevishly that she was in his parking space. His eyes looked bruised and bloodshot as if he had a hangover, but he told her how to get back to the bridge, and this time she managed it. It had taken forty minutes to drive out to the Annex with Vinson. It took her an hour and a half to get home.

  She was so unnerved that she did not take herself for the drive she had planned, but parked the car with the aid of Maxwell, who was cutting grass, and went back to bed and slept for the rest of the morning.

  She allowed herself plenty of time to go back and fetch Vinson. He had said to her once: "My wife must never be late. Nothing looks worse than a man waiting around for a woman/*

  "Except a woman waiting for a man."

  "You know youVe never had to wait for me." It was true. He was never late. Christine had always been late for everything all her life, but with Vinson she made great efforts to be on time. By luck she found the right road to the Annex at the first attempt and was there much too early. She backed the car into Vinson's numbered parking space and listened to the radio until it was nearly half-past four and she could begin watching the doors for her husband.

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  At exactly four-thirty the high glass doors opened. A woman came out, then two coloured men, a naval officer, three girls, and then suddenly a whole horde of people, who poured down the steps in a solid stream and made for the gate in the wire fence. They were also coming out of another door farther along the building, and that stream joined the stream from the main doors until there was a floodtide of hurrying people, some white, some hlack; girls, men, naval officers, cripples, hunchbacks, even a neatly clad dwarf or two. No rush hour that Christine had ever seen was anything like it. It was all humanity, jammed into one building and all gushing out at the same moment as if someone had opened a sluice-gate.

  She did not see Vinson at first. There were so many naval officers dressed like him, and so many with his slight build and springy walk. She had already waved to two strange men, and was wondering whether to wave to another who looked like Vinson from a distance, when his head suddenly came in at the car window, with his white teeth shining and his flecked brown eyes eager to see her.

  Driving home with him seemed so easy that she wondered how she had ever missed the way that morning. She soon learned her way to the Annex and back, but she always had to keep her mind on the road, If she let it wander while she was driving she was apt to find herself carried away on a curving branch road that might lead her back to Washington, or out to Alexandria, or descending again on the Pentagon to drive round and round that hopeless merry-go-round designed by someone far cleverer than the driver of any car.

  When she did not have the car she waited in the apartment for Vinson to come home. She always changed her dress and did her face and tidied away her ironing-board or her sewing, because, aldiough it pleased him to see her busy at domestic

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  tasks, he liked her to be unemployed when he came home, and ready to open the front door as soon as she heard his whistle on the stair. He had a special whistle for her, two rising notes, such as one might use to call a dog. He trained her to answer this promptly, and he got her so attuned to it that even when he whistled very softly she could hear it, as a dog will answer to a high-frequency whistle that the human ear cannot detect.

  Sometimes, when they were sitting with people, he would whistle very softly from across the room and Christine would raise her head and look at him, although the person to whom she was talking had not heard. Vinson liked to show off this trick in public. It made him feel like Svengali.

  Christine had to be ready in the evenings in case he came home punctually, but more often he stayed on to finish some work when the other people in his office had gone, and Christine waited, and worried whether the supper would spoil, and wondered whether, if she had a drink and cleaned her teeth afterwards, he would notice. He did not like her to drink alone. He liked her to wait until he came home and made his special brand of martini, which took a lot of trouble, and pouring back and forth from different jugs, but tasted no different to her from any other.

  She always looked forward to seeing him. Her days were often long and lonely, and she saved up small items of news for him during the day and planned how she would tell them to him. But sometimes, after he had kissed her and pressed her against the hard brass buttons of his tunic, when she started to tell him something she had been saving up, he made the wrong kind of answer, or interrupted her, and it fell flat. That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself — theirs as well as yours — and then, of course, they don't know their part.

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  Often Christine looked forward eagerly to chattering round Vinson in the kitchen while he went through his methodical motions of mixing Martinis, and often she was disappointed because he did not think the same things funny, or was not as interested as he should have been in what the man at the drugstore had said.

  Sometimes, when he told her a piece of news from his day, she heard herself making the wrong comment on it, and was immediately sorry, because he, too, might have been planning while he was driving home how he would tell it to her, and now she had disappointed him, and she knew how it felt.

  Such was Christine's life during these first months in Washington. When she stopped to think about herself she was surprised to find how quickly she had settled down. She had thought that life in America would be very strange for a long time. Although she was still frequently surprised by things she saw or heard, the new routine of her life was becoming so familiar that the old rhythm of her days in England was already like a far-off song, only half remembered.

  She was less bored and lonely when she began to make friends with her neighbours in the apartments. The woman who lived opposite was a large and amiable Hausfrau with short stiff blonde hair and a husband who could not sit down without grunting. They were called Mr. and Mrs. Pitman R. Preedy and they seemed to spend most of their time eating. Christine met the wife staggering up the stairs with brown-paper bags full of food, and often when the husband came home from work, he too carried a paper bag with a salami or a bottle of cream sticking out of the top.

  Mrs. Preedy was for ever making cakes, and sometimes she baked an extra one for Christine. In the course of a conversation across the hall from front door to front door, which was

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  how they usually talked, for Mrs. Preedy always said she had no time to step into Christine's apartment, and she never asked Christine into hers, Christine had told her that she never made cakes. Mrs. Preedy did not know that this was because Vinson did not like them. She thought it was because Christine did not know how to make them, and so about once a week Christine would answer the door bell to find a large iced cake sitting on her doormat, and Mrs. Preedy retreated to the shelter of her own front door, stretching her orange-tinted lips in delight at her good-neighbourliness.

  She was very sorry for Christine, because she had come from England. She thought that everyone in England was starving. The thought of the meat ration moved her almost to tears — and the toilet paper! A friend of hers had been to England, and the stories she had told her about that! She treated Christine as if she were an African native, newly come from some benighted jungle village. Once when she met Christine in the supermarket, buying quite ordinary things like milk and eggs and butter, Mrs. Preedy had said: "I think it's wonderful how you know what to buy. Do they have milk in England?"

  Christine never knew what to do with Mrs. Preedy's cakes. Sometimes she ate a p
iece for her lunch, but Vinson, who had liked her figure in England, had begun to notice that she was too plump in comparison with American girls, and she was trying hard to reduce, although she did not think it would suit her. She usually gave the cakes to Maxwell, and once, when she and Mrs. Preedy went out shopping together, Maxwell was sitting on the grass at the side of the apartments with the plate at his side and a large piece of cake halfway to his dusty pink mouth.

  Christine did not know whether Mrs. Preedy had seen, but the cakes continued to arrive outside her front door, although less frequently, as if Mrs. Preedy might be having a struggle

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  to make her good-neighbourliness overlook the incident.

  Vinson did not like Mrs. Preedy, although she called him Commodore and always asked politely after the navy when they met on the stairs. He said that the Preedys were not the type of people you expected to find living opposite you, and the apartments must be going down in tone. One Saturday morning when he was at home he had heard Christine and Mrs. Preedy calling loudly to each other across the hall about Mr, Preedy's gastro-enteritis, and he had called Christine inside and asked her if she was trying to disgrace him.

  When he said things like that to her he used a voice that reminded Christine of her headmistress at school and her matron in the hospital, and it made her laugh. Then Vinson was a little sad, and told her that it was only because he loved her and was proud of her that he wanted her so much to measure up to the right standards.

  "What standards?" Christine asked, still laughing at his pursed up mouth and serious, unblinking stare. "The standards of a commander's wife, I suppose you'll say/ 1

  "If you like."

  "Well, don't you ever be made an admiral, Vin. Fd never live up to it."

  "I sincerely hope that I shall some day. It's the crown of every professional naval officer's career. And you'll make a fine admiral's wife. I know it."

  "Oh yes," said Christine, making a rude face. "I'll wear pompous hats and be a wet blanket at junior officers' parties and stand in a corner looking down my nose at all the bootlicking women whose husbands want promotion."