The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  Everyone laughed with her. She was evidently the buffoon, who always did things wrong. It was all right for her. People knew her and liked her and laughed with her. But what if they laughed at poor Mrs. Gae . . .

  "Mrs. Gaegler!" It sounded as silly as Christine had feared it would. Nancy dug her in the ribs, and she stood up, dropping her napkin and wishing that she held on to her handbag, to give her something to do with her hands.

  "Mrs. Gaegler's husband is at the Arlington Annex. Mrs. Gaegler comes to us from London, England, and" — the social secretary's voice dropped ghoulishly — "she's a bride!"

  What could one do? Where could one look? Christine put her hands behind her back, realising too late that this made her chest stick out too far, and fixed her eyes on a ventilator high up in the wall, while female stares stabbed her like darts from all over the room, and she imagined that she could hear whisperings from three hundred female tongues about this phenomenon who was a bride, and who came from London, England, and who had not got a hat. Were they asking each other if she was pregnant?

  In utter ignominy, she stood straight and stiff while other

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  names were called and other luckless girls stood up, but Christine felt all the time that every gaze was still riveted on this spectacle who came from London, England, and who had no hat and was either pregnant or too fat.

  When Vinson came home that night and asked her how she had enjoyed the lunch, Christine flung her arms round his neck and burst into tears against the hard shoulder board of his jacket.

  "Here, here, what's this?" He led her into the living-room. "What's happened? What's all this about?"

  "Oh, Vin, it was terrible. It was awful. They made me stand up, and everybody stared at me. I've never felt such a fool." She cried so much that she slipped off the sofa and sat on the floor with her wet face jammed against his khaki trouser leg.

  He was very kind to her. He tried to comfort her, but she could not make him see how awful it had been. "They wanted to have people get to know you, darling. You mustn't be so self-conscious."

  "No, no!" she wailed. "They just want to make a fool of you. They all stared and whispered, and I was the only one without a hat, and all those awful women — millions of them — nothing but women — and if you're newly married they stare at you to see if you're pregnant."

  "Well, honey, you don't have to worry about that."

  "But I am, Vin, I am!"

  She did not know why she had not told him before. She had only known definitely for two days. She was going to tell him, but, hugging her delight to herself, she was half afraid to share it with him, in case he was not pleased.

  He was very pleased. He was delighted. He forgot that he had said they could not afford to have a baby yet. They were very happy together, she kneeling on the floor with her arms

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  round his waist; but when she remembered about the lunch and began to moan to him again about it, he patted her and said: "I'm sure there was really nothing wrong. You just feel upset and hysterical because of your condition. I'm sure they were all very kind. They're a lovely group of women."

  "Maybe." Christine stood up. "Perhaps you're right." She did not think he was, but he did not want any more tears, and she did not think she could ever explain it to him.

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  (Chapter cfive

  INever having been an expectant father before, Vinson treated Christine as anxiously as if she were going to have the baby at any minute. She was reminded of the day when she had sat eating sandwiches with Margaret in Green Park, and Margaret had complained that Laurie treated her as if she were a rare curio.

  At first it was very pleasant to be told to put your feet up and to be made to sit idle in the living-room while Vinson cleared away the supper, but after a time his solicitude grew a little irksome. He would settle her into chairs as if she were a frail old lady. When they crossed the street he would take her elbow and almost lift her on and off kerbs. He would sit gazing at her contemplatively, just as Laurie had done with Margaret, as if trying to puzzle out the secret thing inside her that he had brought about, and he was always asking her, with a puckered brow, how she felt.

  She felt amazingly well, apart from the inconvenience of being sick every morning, and she wished that he would not keep asking. Her sickness worried Vinson so much, and she was so irritated by his standing outside the bathroom door and calling out: "Are you all right, darling?" while she was in extremis that after a while she took to getting up five minutes

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  earlier and getting her retching over before he woke up.

  He was so careful of her, so solicitous of her every whim, that when she spoke to him again about moving to a house with a lit:le garden, which would be a more suitable place for a baby than the hot little apartment, he surprisingly agreed.

  Christine had dreamed of a house in the country, but Washington was spreading its suburbs so far in every direction that there was no proper country within reasonable driving distance of Vinson's office. They bought a small house in Arlington, which was simply moving from one suburb to another. Many naval officers lived in Arlington. It was a suitable place for a commander to live.

  With the down payment made out of Vinson's savings, and the instalments on the house to pay every month, Vinson said that they were now living too extravagantly and would have to economise on other things. Christine did not see why they could not use some more of Vinson's savings to pay off their bills and to buy things she needed for the house, but Vinson was of the old-fashioned habit of mind that thinks savings are meant to be saved, not spent. Christine knew that she ought to think this was wise, but she had been brought up by Aunt Josephine to look on money as an expendable commodity, and it seemed to her a pity not to use it until you were too old to enjoy it, or dead before you could spend it.

  When Aunt Josephine had been left some money in a legacy, she had spent it all on giving Christine and her father a long holiday in Belgium. How sad it would have been if she had saved it up for the old age which she never saw. How much better that she had squandered it all on the trips to the battlefields in her long grey linen dress, the afternoon sessions of cream horns and grenadine at the Caf6 du Port, her reckless flings at the Ostend Casino, where she sometimes got so excited that she staked on black and red at the same time, and

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  her wild plunges at the trotting races at Breedene, where she would back any outsider because it had a noble face.

  Vinson, however, did not see life that way. With the baby coming, he now had an added reason for thrift, and since the money was his Christine had to learn to follow his wishes. She tried not to spend too much on the new house. If she made a suggestion which seemed to him extravagant, Vinson was liable to say: "We can't afford it. We're already eating too high on the hog. Fm sorry, but it was you who wanted to move to a house, don't forget, and now we've got to pay for it."

  Christine fought against the growing suspicion that Vinson was mean. You could not think such things about your husband. She would not let herself, but the unacknowledged thought hung about disturbingly at the back of her brain, like a child trying to get into a game where he is not wanted.

  Some of the curtains from the apartment did not fit the windows of the house, and those that did were old and not bright enough for the sunny little suburban home. Vinson, chewing a pen over the monthly accounts, said that he did not see how they could afford new curtains yet, so Christine persuaded him that to buy an electric sewing machine would not be an extravagance, but an investment, because she could then make curtains and slip covers and also clothes for the baby.

  Christine had done a certain amount of sewing at home on Aunt Josephine's ancient treadle machine, which had as much wrought iron on it as an old-fashioned mangle. Although she had never made curtains or baby clothes, she was sure that with the free lessons given by the sewing machine company, she would soon be able to make anything on her wonderful machin
e, which ran backwards as well as forwards and had enough gadgets to turn the archaic labour of sewing into a modern sinecure.

  Once a week she went down to the sewing shop and sat with five other fidgeting women round the teacher, who was a casual young lady with a polished forehead and straight blonde hair tied back with a bootlace. It soon transpired that the lessons were not really free after all. They got your money by making you pay three dollars for the scraps of cotton and lace on which you practised, and the young lady with the bootlace spent more time unsuccessfully trying to thread her machine than in teaching the fidgeting ladies how to use its gadgets.

  One by one the ladies dropped out — the fat matron who had trained her husband to pin up dress hems for her, the woman who boasted that she had a difficult figure to fit, the girl who had been sent to the lessons by her mother because she was going to get married, the breathless young wife who always arrived late and left early, and grumbled under her breath in the back row all the time she was there, like a Communist agitator trying to raise the rabble.

  Finally there were left only Christine and the Austrian girl, who could hardly understand anything the casual young lady told her. Then Christine decided that it was too hot to waste a morning watching the young lady with the bootlace trying to thread a sewing machine, and she, too, abandoned the ship and left only the Austrian girl, presumably sitting out the full course of lessons, patiently trying to discover what bias piping with the multi-slotted binder meant.

  Christine abandoned the complicated gadgets for hemming, buttonholing and tucking and just used her machine in the safe old-fashioned way in which she had used Aunt Josephine's. She always put it away before Vinson came home, because he liked her to be ready and unoccupied to greet him, not sitting whirring away, surrounded by bits of stuff and ends of cotton, with pins stuck all over the arm of the chair to spear his hand when he bent to kiss her.

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  She could often get the machine out again after supper, however, because Vinson, with a basement to use as a workshop, had evinced a surprising interest in home carpentry, and spent many evenings down there in creased linen trousers and a T shirt, banging away at bookshelves or adapting furniture that did not fit. He painted everything in or outside the house that was paintable, and when there was nothing left to paint he began to adapt one end of the cellar to be used as a nursery playroom.

  He became so absorbed in this that Christine did not see much of him in the evenings or at week-ends, but she rejoiced in his increasing interest in the house he had not really wanted, and in his happy preparation for the baby. When she went down to him with beer or iced coffee, she loved to see him working away there with a cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth and his brown eyes serious with the concentration of a craftsman. On Saturday mornings she did her washing at the big sink at the other end of the cellar, and they would toss friendly remarks across the noise of the portable radio, which he always automatically turned on but never listened to. It was very domestic. Christine was happy. She was going to have a baby, and she liked her house.

  It was not much to look at from the outside. It was merely a little square red-brick box with a steep tiled roof in a row of other little red boxes, with white-painted doors and windows, regularly spaced, with garages between. There were no houses opposite, only thick trees sloping down to an unseen creek, which ran brown with mud after the rain.

  Her house, like all the others, was built on a bank, so that the small front garden sloped down and the little back garden sloped up, and it was difficult to make flowers grow. Although Vinson said that pushing was bad for her, Christine worked hard on her steep lawn when he was out, with a mower bor-

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  rowed from a plain but pleasant girl next door, who had two plain children with shaved heads and bandy legs, and a long-nosed husband who was something in insurance and came and went at strange intervals, always in a hurry and always carrying a brief-case.

  Christine tried not to borrow anything from the woman in the house on the other side, who threatened to become too friendly. Her name was Mrs. Meenehan and her husband was a retired naval officer, which she considered gave her an unassailable entr6e into Christine's life. Mr. Meenehan, a contentedly henpecked man, had risen from the ranks and retired as a lieutenant-commander after the war. The high spot of his naval career had been the command of an elderly tugboat converted for war-time use as a minesweeper. Mrs. Meenehan was wont to refer to these days of glory as "When Daddy and I had command of the Walrus."

  Daddy seemed to do most of the work of her house, so she had plenty of time to spare, and was always creeping over the grass at the back of the houses and appearing alarmingly at Christine's kitchen window with a shout of: "Hi there, Cather-

  ine!'

  She had got Christine's name wrong the first time she heard it, and even when she heard other people calling her Christine she stuck to Catherine, as if she knew better. Christine wanted Vinson to put up a fence round their garden, so that Mrs. Meenehan could not make her cat-footed invasions, but it appeared that you were not allowed to put up fences or hedges on that property. The front gardens must remain just one long continuous slope of community lawn, broken only at mathematical intervals by the neat gravel garage entrances.

  The row of houses were alike inside as well as outside, as Christine found when she visited her neighbours, although the plain girl's house was shabbier and more untidy than hers,

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  and the Meenehans* house was an uneasy jungle of travel trophies exemplifying the less-pleasing tastes of countries all over the globe. The front door opened straight into the living-room, which had a pale polished floor and a small fireplace with a white-painted mantel. Since it was summer the fireplace of the plain girl and Mrs. Meenehan, and probably every house in the road, had one large, regular-shaped log sitting neatly across the andirons. Christine wanted to have flowers or a plant in her fireplace, but Vinson wanted a log, and so they had a log too.

  The living-room narrowed to a small dining space at the far end, and beyond that was the kitchen, which was fitted up like the advertisements in magazines, and was Christine's delight. Upstairs was the tiled bathroom, the front bedroom, and a smaller room at the back, which Vinson was redecorating for the baby.

  Often Christine went into this room with its smell of pale-blue paint and its nursery frieze round the wall and imagined the cot there with the baby in it, and looked down at her barely plumper figure and tried to realise that this was where the body in the cot was now. She had heard people say that when you were pregnant you had a great consciousness of motherhood, but she found that it did not come naturally. You had to make yourself feel like that deliberately, to remind yourself all the time that the life was already created, because it was so hard to believe. Although she felt a deep glow of happiness whenever she thought about the baby, she felt so unchanged that she sometimes forgot about it for hours on end when Vinson was not there to remind her.

  He was almost more conscious of the baby than she was. Although he did not like her to mention it in front of other people, he was always wanting to talk about it when they were alone. He was genuinely as pleased as she was, and he

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  took a deep and almost morbid interest in all the symptoms of her condition. She sometimes thought that it was a pity she did not have more interesting things to tell him. She had stopped being sick; and apart from tiring more easily and finding herself suddenly breathless if she talked too much, she felt quite normal. He still treated her with the utmost care. He made her lie down when she did not want to, he rushed out with a hat when she was in the garden, and he always called out: "Watch it there!" when he saw her feet coming down the steep cellar steps to him.

  Because he was so nervous about her he made love to her less often; and when he did, it was almost apologetically, as if he thought that by making her pregnant he had forfeited his right to anything else.

  Christine supposed that after the
baby was born he would settle down and become a normal husband again.

  Christine's pregnancy, combined with her pride in the new house, developed in her a more intense domestic energy. She was forever cleaning, or tidying cupboards and drawers or moving the furniture about. She was like a bird making a nest. Although it would be nearly six months before her baby was born, she was already driven by a restless urgency to get everything in order.

  Lianne came to see her one day, and found her standing on a chair washing the kitchen walls, which were perfectly clean. While they drank coffee together Christine took out the table drawer and began to polish the silver while they talked.

  "What's the matter with you?" Lianne asked. "You never used to be so crazily domestic/'

  "I can't help it. I just feel like that. I feel there's no time to get everything done. It's because of the baby. Didn't you feel like that with yours?"

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  "Hell, no/' Lianne said. "I was worse than I am now. I couldn't be bothered to do a thing except lie around with candy bars and the comic sections. When the apartment got so you could hardly get in the front door, Dick used to have to clean up."

  "That's odd/' Christine said. "I feel I have to work all the time. I feel like a French housewife. I get terrible urges sometimes to take all the bedding out and air it on the lawn."

  "For heaven's sake!" cried Lianne, startled. "Do you do it?"

  "I have to. I'd worry all day if I didn't. I worry all the time about little things that don't matter at all. I burst trying not to let myself worry to Vin, because it's so boring for him to have me talking all the time about floor polish and vacuum cleaners. I'm terribly worried just now about my vacuum cleaner. It's old and it doesn't seem to suck properly, but we really can't afford a new one. I don't know what to do."

  Lianne laughed at her serious face. "You sure are in a bad way," she said. "If you're going to get like this every time you're pregnant, I hope your family is limited to one. Snap out of it, girl. You're getting like these dreary naval wives who get you in a corner at parties and try to tell you their recipe for corn bread. I haven't come here to shake my head over your domestic problems. I've come to keep you up to date on the dirt at the apartments. The Deckers have got a new car, and Maxwell is having a hate against them because they won't let him clean it any more since he got water in the glove compartment. He misses you. He told me you were the first real lady he'd seen around those parts. And that red-haired girl — the one who was always hanging black lace scanties on the line, remember? — well, wait till I tell you what happened about her. . . ."