The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  "Vinson!" Christine hissed. "It's us!"

  "Hallo, hallo! Are you still on the line? Your name has been

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  picked to be a contestant tonight in the 'Stop the Music' radio programme. Do you care to participate?"

  Did she care? Christine stammered into the telephone. She could hardly hold the receiver.

  Non-committally, as if she were used — which, of course, she was — to offering someone the chance of winning sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier, a plastic rocking-chair, a stove with a lift-off oven door, a holiday for two in Nassau, the operator explained the rules of the contest, asked Christine if she was listening to the programme, and told her to continue to listen to the telephone.

  "If you hang up or leave the phone/' she said in her ritual voice, "you cannot be telephoned again/'

  Christine glued one ear to the telephone and the other to the radio. Vinson was leaning forward watching the radio as if it were the television. His face was flushed with excitement, and Christine's was on fire. §ixteen hundred dollars in cash! Now he need not grumble about her fare to England. They were finishing with another competitor — Mr. Duane P. Hamburger of Boise, Idaho, who had failed to guess an obvious tune and would only get a few cartons of cigarettes.

  Christine pitied Mr. Bamburger fleetingly, but hated him for getting a tune she would have known. The one she got might be — "Vin, listen!" They had started another tune. What was it? It sounded familiar. A girl sang the words, humming when she came to the title line: "Da da da da da." It was a relic from the past. Christine remembered doing homework to it when she was at school. What was it? Something like I'll never leave you ... I wont forget you . . . You'll always find me

  What was it? What was it? Oh, don't ask me, don't ask me this one, she prayed silently. If you should ask me . . .? I'll always-want you . . .? I never —

  "Stop the MUSIC!" bellowed the compare. A telephone

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  bell was ringing through the song. "Hallo . . . hallo . . . !" she heard him say through the loudspeaker, and then there was a clicjc in her other ear and his voice was coming through the telephone.

  "Is that Mrs. Gaegler of Arlington, Virginia? Hallo there, Mrs. Gaegler! How's everything in Arlington, Virginia? Pretty swell?" he roistered, although Christine had not been able to find the voice to answer. "Well ; that's fine. Just fine/' She could hear his voice coming out of the radio a fraction of a second before it came out of the telephone. "Now, Mrs. Gaegler, we want to give you a chance to win this wonderful jackpot of prizes. Can you name that tune we've just played?"

  "I — er — I — er could you play a bit of it again?" "Sure thing." The girl sang a phrase or two. "I'll Never Leave You," Christine blurted out. She was sure. The prize was hers. Sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier —

  "I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Gaegler. No. I'm afraid you haven't hit the jackpot this time."

  Christine rang off while he was promising her cartons of cigarettes. On the radio she could still hear him talking to her with undiminished bonhomie. She switched it off, very near tears.

  "Oh, Vin — " She turned to him for sympathy, but his voice was angry.

  "You idiot," he said, "losing a chance like that. Why didn't you get it? I thought you knew all the tunes. You've got all day to listen to that damn radio." "I didn't know it," she said miserably. 'Well, you ought to have." He stuck out his lower lip. "Did you?" He turned away from her as the television suddenly came

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  on again with a burst of sound, just in time for the commercial.

  He had no right to be so cross, but he was, and so was she — cross with herself as well as him. The glittering haul that had been dangled before her had been too tempting. It was not fair to tantalise people like that. They were doing it all the time. It was the modern American tragedy.

  She and Vinson were still a little cross with each other when they drove to New York the next day. Christine had to keep reminding herself that she was leaving him for several weeks, that she loved him, that he was her husband, that she would undoubtedly miss him as soon as he was not there.

  And then on the dockside, as she turned at the foot of the gangway and saw his face left behind among the crowd, and it had the look on it that he had not meant her to see, she did not have to remind herself of these things. She wanted to run back and say she would not go, that she would come with him to Coco Solo, Panama; but her legs took her on up the gangway, and when she went to the rail to lean over and wave, his face was back to normal again.

  All these things she thought of as she lay in her bunk and braced her tired body against the rolling of the ship. At night she took sleeping pills to make sure that she would not lie awake and go on thinking, but when she slept she dreamed of Jerry. She had not dreamed of him for months, but on the ship she dreamed of him every night. On the last morning she woke believing that he was still alive. When reality seeped back to her she lay for a while quite still, thinking that she might recapture the dream if she did not move. Then she realised that she was able to lie still, that she was not being shifted from side to side of the bunk. The sea was calm, the boat sailed evenly on, and outside her porthole the early-

  morning sun glittered on the sea and on an unpretentious coastline of low cliffs and little white houses. She had come home to England.

  Roger met her at Waterloo wearing his hairy winter overcoat that made him look like a bison. Sylvia had not come up from Farnborough because it was her ironing day. She also had Mr. Cope still in bed recovering from an attack of bronchitis.

  "To tell you the truth/* Roger said, as he drove his sedate black family car heavy-handedly along the Portsmouth road, "the old chap really has been pretty bad this time. Syl didn't tell you just how bad in her letter, because we didn't want to worry you. It was just after you . . . you know."

  "After I lost the baby, you mean."

  Roger cleared his throat. Although his jokes were often coarse, he was never free about mentioning the realities of such things. "Bad business," he said gruffly. "Damn bad luck. Awfully sorry and all that."

  "Thanks, Rodge." Christine felt miles away from him. She was glad to see him. He was uncomplicated and solid and just the same; but if she had thought that by coming back to England she could slip immediately into the familiar pattern of life, she was wrong. She felt out of place, a stranger in the car which was so small and upright and so very different from the one she was used to in America. Although she had been away from England less than a year, driving on the left was just as strange and frightening as driving on the right had been at first.

  "I tell you, my old woman and I were quite upset when we got your cable. We were in the garden at the time, putting in some bulbs for next year, and when Syl came back from the phone and told me, I must say it was quite a shock."

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  Roger remembered with some pride how he and Sylvia had stood among the garden tools and bags of bulbs and been upset.

  "Oh, look," Christine said. 'There's that lovely old pub with the thatch and pink walls. I'd forgotten about it."

  "You talk as if you'd been away for years."

  "I feel as if I had. I'd almost forgotten there were such things as thatched roofs and real beams. And hedges," she said, as they left the village and the country opened quietly out into its jigsaw pattern of little fields climbing towards the low hills. "You never see a cut-and-laid hedge in America. Oh, Rodge, how I do love England!"

  He grunted. He never responded very well to any outburst of emotion. He picked up his train of thought. "If only you'd been over here. We didn't like to think of you in one of those Yank hospitals. They tell me all the nurses are blacks."

  Christine laughed. "Only some of them. As a matter of fact, the coloured nurse I had on night duty was better than any of the others."

  "Well, I wouldn't like one of them to lay her great black hands on me, I know that," Roger said, with a shudder that ill-befi
tted the son of an empire-building race.

  "Most of the hospitals there are much better than anything we've got over here," Christine said.

  "Oh, naturally, my dear old soul, naturally. It's your country now, after all, so I'm sure everything over there is bigger and better than anything poor gone-to-seed old England has got."

  Christine looked at him in surprise. It occurred to her that he and Sylvia had decided that she would come back quite changed, praising everything American and belittling everything English.

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  She was right. Sylvia had a defence mechanism all prepared to take the wind out of any high-flown sails Christine might try to set. She had squandered the whole week's meat ration, had bought vegetables and fruit out of season to make a brave show for the homecoming, but she dispelled Christine's appreciation by saying with a sniff that was part sinus trouble, part sarcasm: "Of course this won't be anything to you. I daresay you can have this sort of thing every day."

  "We can't," Christine said, "because we can't afford it," but they did not believe her. She was the American, the visitor from the land of plenty.

  She had come back to refresh herself with the familiarity of her own family and country. She wanted everything to be as it had always been. She wanted to slip back without effort into the family group, but Roger and Sylvia held off a little warily, as if they suspected that she had only come back to patronise.

  Even the children treated her differently. They were at the age when a year can make a startling change in appearance and behaviour. They were not her babies any more. She could no longer wash their faces and hands for them, or retie the bow that always slipped off Jeanette's forelock. Jeanette was growing her hair now, and wore it scraped back unbecomingly into a barrette at the neck which never came undone. She was going to a new school, and had picked up all the high-school mannerisms. She talked very fast. She giggled a lot and hitched up her stockings. She made prissy mouths when anyone said something she thought was "feeble." She had taken up tennis and did not want Christine to bowl cricket balls to her on the lawn any more. She and Clement did not want to play any of the games that Christine used to play with them. They did not hang round her and treat her as if she was more fun than their parents.

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  She had gone away from them. She had deserted them, and now they held aloof from her a little as if they did not entirely trust her any more.

  She had brought chocolate for them, and American sweaters, and pistols and half a dozen boxes of chewing gum. They stayed with her until everything had come out of her suitcase, and then they went away to mull over their booty, abandoning her when she had no more to give, shamefully embodying the anti-New Dealers imaginary picture of Britain's reaction to dollar aid.

  Sylvia and Roger were more gracious about the presents Christine had brought for them, although Sylvia doubted whether the nylons would fit her now that her feet had swollen from so much running up and downstairs after poor Copey.

  Christine heard a lot about how difficult it had been to Manage when her father was ill. The maid had been on holiday, and the daughter of My Mrs. Hatchett, the morning woman, had elected to give birth to twins at the most inconvenient time, so that Sylvia had had to Manage on her own, with the erratic help of My Mrs. Hatchett's other daughter, who was a little weak in the head and could not be trusted with the children.

  You would not have thought that Christine had been away for nearly a year to marriage in a fascinating unknown country. Sylvia and Roger did not want to hear her news; they wanted to tell her theirs. Christine could have told them things that would make their eyes stand out of their heads, but they were too busy telling her about the crockery broken by My Mrs. Hatchett's unmarried daughter, the confinement of the other daughter (rumoured to be also unmarried), the ups and downs of the meat and cheese ration, the improvement of the lawn and the disappointment of the prize gladioli, the contest between Roger and the garage over the price of

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  reboring, and Roger's triumph in the local golf championships, in which he had defeated the famous Henry Slater — "My good sister, you must remember Slater. You've met him here. Chap with the handlebar moustache. Real Pilot-Officer Prune type. Hell of a chap."

  Only her father was genuinely pleased and absorbed in Christine's homecoming. Only her father wanted to hear all that she could tell him about America, and insisted on being assured that she was really happy in her new life.

  Since his illness Mr. Cope had become less irritable and argumentative. He was much older and more feeble; and although they had been apart for so long, Christine felt a more sympathetic intimacy between them than there had even been when they lived together at Roselawn.

  Mr. Cope had grown a short grey beard during his illness, and had not bothered to shave it off when he got better. His hair had become whiter, the smudges round his eyes darker, his mouth more vague and his skin more loose and crinkled as the flesh had thinned away from his sick bones.

  Christine got a shock when she saw him, propped up among snowy linen (Sylvia changed all her sheets twice a week and was for ever complaining about laundry bills), his glasses far down his nose, his hands idle on the counterpane, his eyes riveted on the door as if he had turned them there at the first sounds of her arrival.

  Christine's first thought was: How could I have gone away? How could I have gone away and left him? Although she knew that if she had stayed he would not have loved and needed her as much as he did because she had gone away. Mr. Cope had always been inclined to pin his faith on something that was not there, to think that everything would be all right if only ... to sigh for the things he had not instead of accepting the things he had.

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  Christine spent most of her time at Roger's house up in her father's bedroom talking to him. She told him everything about her marriage and her life in America — everything except the most important thing. She did not tell him that she could not shake off the depression that the loss of her baby had stabbed into her, nor that she and Vinson had reached the point when they both tacitly welcomed the opportunity to be apart for a while.

  The Alsatian lay on the floor between them with his strong head on his black-nailed paws, lifting a yellow eye from one to the other. He had lost the bounce and ferocity with which he had scattered rugs and terrorised postmen at Roselawn. He did not like Farnborough. The rabbit scents of the sandy countryside meant less to him than the more urban trail of smells that other dogs had left for him on Barnes Common. Since his master had been ill nobody would take him out, because he pulled like a plough horse on the leash and there were too many cars on the shiny black roads to take him out without one. .When he went into the garden there was always somebody to shout him off the flower-beds. The children were afraid of him, and he of them. He could not tell these things, but he showed them in his dull coat and lazy eye and his listless, almost sheepish manner. He and Mr. Cope had both become older and milder, and it made Christine feel closer and more affectionate towards them both.

  When she asked her father how he liked living at Farnborough, he surprisingly, with his new gentleness, did not complain, although from a few unthinking remarks he let fall it was obvious that there were many things that did not please him.

  Roger and Sylvia, on the other hand, made no secret of the things that did not please them about having Mr. Cope living there. Frankly, he and his dog were a nuisance to

  them, but since there was no alternative to the present arrangement there seemed to be no point in dwelling on its inconveniences. They did dwell on them, however, but in a martyred way, rejecting any alleviating suggestions, such as getting a nurse the next time Mr. Cope was ill, as the doctor said he might be if the winter was a severe one. When Christine said tentatively: "Perhaps I could have him out to stay with me for a while/' Roger said: "God no, that would kill the old man/'

  Having a sister who lived in America had in no way mitigated his prejudice against that country. He lost no opport
unity to jibe, and Christine found herself defending her adopted country with as much heat as she defended England if any American slighted it.

  Roger said that she had acquired an American accent, although she knew she had not. His new joke was to use what he thought was American slang, his idea of the transatlantic vernacular being culled from the earlier works of P. G. Wodehouse. He would say "Hot dog!" or "Twenty-three skiddoo! — as you say in America/' undeterred by Christine's assurances that they did not. He laughed when she said radio instead of wireless, and nearly killed himself when he saw her use her knife and fork in the American way she had learned from Vinson.

  He still talked about Vinson as if he were an improbable joke. He insisted on calling him Gaegler, and the children, taking their tone from him, referred to their uncle as Gaegler too.

  When Roger asked Christine: 'Where is the great Gaegler now?" and she said "Coco Solo, Panama," he bellowed with laughter, and the children chanted: "Coca-Cola! Coca-Cola!" wild with glee.

  "Shut up, Champ and Boots," Roger said. "Stow it, troops.

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  But I must say, Chrissie, it is a hell of a funny name. No one but the Yanks would have a naval station at a place with a name like that."

  After she had been at Farnborough for several days Christine went up to London to stay with Rhona. Rhona had a new house in Hampstead, which was very grand, with a curving staircase and a manservant to open the door; but Rhona herself was quite unchanged and just as glad to see Christine as Christine was to see her.

  "I've sent Dan up to Gleneagles for a few days' golf," she said. "I thought we'd have a better time without him. Darling, I am glad to see you. And youVe got so thin! You look marvellous. I'd know that was an American dress anywhere. I like your hair too. Come upstairs and let's start talking. We've got masses to say."

  They fell back at once/as they always could, into the intimacy of their early youth. They talked for hours together. They went shopping, they went to the theatre. Rhona gave a cocktail party for people Christine knew, and everyone said how wonderful Christine looked, and admired her new figure, which was gratifying, but made Christine think she must have been fatter than she realised before.