The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  Geoffrey came to the cocktail party. He had a white scar across his left eyebrow where the hair would never grow again. It gave him a slightly quizzical air, which made his face look less negative than before. Christine was more glad to see him than she expected. When she had lived in England she had never cared whether she saw Geoffrey or not. He was too familiar, and he was always there for parties if you needed an extra man; but now she was glad to see him just because he was so familiar.

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  Her life in America had been a succession of new impressions, overstimulating and tiring. Over there the unexpected was always happening. In England you knew what to expect, and could relax.

  It was good to talk to Geoffrey in the familiar disrespectful language they had always used. He came to the party straight from the office in striped trousers and a stiff white collar over a blue shirt, and left a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella and a folded copy of The Economist in the hall. That was good too. It reminded you that, however far away you went to change and strange emotions, you could always come back and find England just the same.

  Rhona was just the same too, although she was full of all the new things that had happened to her. Christine enjoyed her stay in the pretentious comfortable house where a maid ran your bath and ironed your nightdress every day. It was a welcome change from Sylvia's house at Farnborough, where fires were never lit until the evening and Sylvia was perpetually worrying about whether the meat had gone off or the maid had taken umbrage.

  Christine missed Vinson often. He had become a part of life that one could not shut out by going three thousand miles away, but at the same time she was glad that she was staying at Rhona's without him. Vinson would have enjoyed the luxury. He was unnecessarily impressed by things like manservants and expensive china, but although he had only met Rhona once he had formed one of his censorious opinions about her. If they had been staying in the same house he would have pretended to be more prudish than he was and Rhona would have pretended to be more indecorous than she was, and Christine would have had a difficult time between them. Vinson would have been jealous of her friendship with Rhona, and Rhona would have been incredulous at her wifely submission to Vinson. It was better to be there

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  alone. They would never have been able to talk like this if Vinson were there.

  Gossiping all day and half the night with Rhona, she realised how much she had missed an intimate friend in America. Lianne and Nancy Lee had been companionable, but you could not make a real confidante in such a short time. You needed to grow up together as she and Rhona had done.

  Rhona was in love again. She had been in love twice since the Hungarian film director, but this time it was the real thing. She never went very far with any of her affairs, and she did not sincerely contemplate doing anything but spend the rest of her life with the complaisant Dan, but Dan annoyed her very much at times, and so she found other men to divert her.

  "It keeps you going," she said. "Being in love is a wonderful thing to keep you going."

  "Yes, but doesn't Dan — ?"

  "Oh, he never knows. He's always dashing about on some scheme to make five thousand pounds. He's quite happy as long as I'm happy, and you know, I'm much nicer to him when I've got someone else on the stocks, so I reckon that makes up for it."

  Rhona's ups and downs with the Hungarian and his successors took a lot of telling, but unlike Sylvia and Roger, she was just as eager to hear Christine's news as to tell her own. Christine talked and talked and found that she was beginning to talk herself out of her depression. The things that she had brooded over alone because she could not tell them to anyone — especially not to Vinson — seemed much less when they were voiced and discussed with Rhona's carefree philosophy. She told Rhona everything, and if Rhona did not understand some of the finer points she at least knew how to minimise their significance.

  "You worry too much/' she said, "just like you always did. You're taking this marriage business much too seriously."

  "But, Ro, one must, if one's to make it work."

  "Oh, I know — but, all the same, you mustn't mind things so much. Gosh, if I brooded every time I had a row with Dan I'd be broody all the time. Take a little look at some other man, why don't you? I know you say Vin's so jealous, but why not give him something to be jealous about? It would do him a power of good, and you too. A bit of outside attention would set you up no end."

  "Oh, Ro, you know I never would. I don't want to, anyway. That's one of the best things about being married. You don't have to go around any more looking at every frightful man to see if he'd possibly do."

  "You could look just a little bit."

  "You know I couldn't."

  "I know. You're hopeless." They laughed together. Rhona was absurd. She never gave any advice worth taking, and yet the few days of talking and laughing with her did Christine far more good than any solemn discussion with someone who would take her problems seriously.

  Her depression began to lift. She prayed that it would not come back again when she got home to Arlington. She wished that she were not going back to the little house where she and Vinson had been unhappy. It would have been better to go somewhere new and start again. She did not ask herself whether she wanted to go back to America. She was going back. That was all.

  After she left Rhona she went to visit the book department at Goldwyn's. She had often thought about going back there as a married woman who had escaped. She had planned how it would be. They would all be pleased to see her, would stare at her new clothes, would tell her spicy bits of gossip

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  that had happened in the store while she had been away, would say: 'Things are not the same as they were when you were here, Miss Cope — Mrs. Gaegler, I mean."

  She went there on a busy afternoon, and at first she could not see anyone she knew. They all seemed to be customers. No, there was Miss Burman, just the same as ever, with the same brown dress and the same wisp of grey hair that fell into her eye as she frowned over someone's bill.

  Miss Burman was pleased to see Christine. "Well, look who's here!" she cried, throwing her wall-eye about at no one in particular. "My stars, you are a sight for sore eyes, Miss Cope — excuse me — Mrs. Gaegler. That takes some getting used to. And how's that handsome sailor boy of yours? That's right, that's right. Quite the yankee-doodle, aren't you? Mother? Oh, she's wonderful, thank you, dear. We had visitors to tea last week, and it tired her a little, but otherwise she's — Oh yes, certainly, madam. Excuse me," She blushed, and hurried away to her waiting customer.

  Christine stood looking round her and feeling like a customer. The woman with the cut-away nostrils who had taken her place as head of the department sailed up on pointed feet and gave her a brief handshake and said that Oh yes, she liked the department very much, although of course she had done a lot of reorganising since Christine had left.

  She went away and Christine stood for a moment vaguely, wondering if she had ever belonged here. Miss Burman had given her a nice welcome. She was just the same, but there was no Mr. Parker, no Helen, no Alice, no Margaret, and the cookery books were where the collected editions of poets used to be. She wished she had not come.

  When she went to see Margaret she found her engrossed in her baby, and much happier than she had been before. She and Laurie were short of money certainly, as they had

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  expected to be, but it did not seem to matter as they had expected it would. They were still managing to keep the ugly old house going. It was no more or less shabby than before. Laurie looked no more like a patient scarecrow in his clothes than he always had and Margaret looked just as neat and clean as ever.

  Christine had almost dreaded going to Margaret's home, partly because she did not want to see anyone else with a baby, and partly because she was afraid that Timrny would not recognise her. She had thought about him so often, and it would be such a snub if he had forgotten her completely.

  He knew her at once. He
was in the garden, and he heard her step on the pavement and rushed barking to the gate, flailing his tail and giving yelps of joy as Christine fumbled at the latch of the gate in her excitement to get in to him. Then she was in the garden, and Timmy was all over her — his tongue, his paws, his panting excitement — and she had to grasp his fur and hold him still so that she could wipe her silly tears off on his neck.

  Timmy never left Christine's side all the time she was in Margaret's house. "He's afraid you'll go away again without him," Margaret said. "Anyone would think we'd been cruel to him."

  "Oh, Maggie, I know youVe been wonderful — "

  "But he's your dog," Laurie said in his slow, pondering way. "You can never take that away from them."

  "Why don't you take him back with you this time"?" Margaret said. "You could take him on the boat, and I believe they don't have quarantine in America. They give them injections instead."

  "If only I could . . ." Christine thought of how the day before she left she had asked Vinson whether she could bring Timmy back with her. She asked it diffidently, almost

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  timidly. She had thought about asking it for a long time, but dreaded hearing what he would answer.

  "I thought we'd settled all that," he said. "Do I have to say no to you all over again? What's the point of bringing the animal over here when we may be gone from Washington soon? If they send me to the naval shipyard at Brooklyn well probably be in an apartment."

  "Oh, Vin, are they going to send you to Brooklyn? I don't think I'll like that. Nancy Lee says it's horrible. Must we go there?"

  "My dear Christine," he said in his professional naval officer voice, "the United States Navy assigns its officers where it needs them, not where their wives happen to want to go."

  When the time came for Christine to leave England she did not know whether she was glad or sorry. She wanted to see Vinson, but she did not like leaving her father, who had leaned on her during these weeks she had spent with him as he never had before. He looked so old and heavy-eyed, and she knew he was not happy at Farnborough. He had not been able to work for some time. Sylvia had packed away his dictionaries and manuscript paper and carefully sharpened pencils, and when he was not hunched in bed he pottered purposelessly about the place like a ghost that has lost its way and come to the wrong house to haunt. Christine had promised him that he should come to her in America when he was stronger, but although he said vaguely: "Yes, yes, I'll do that," she did not think he would ever get there. She wondered if she would ever see him alive again.

  It was not easy to leave England. Even a raw drizzly Sunday, with the undersized girls and pimply youths waiting in the rain for the cinemas to open, and the seedy coughing men waiting in doorways for the pubs to open, was a thing to be

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  clung to because no Sunday was like it anywhere else in the world.

  At the same time she found that she was looking forward to getting back to America. She had accepted it as her home now, and there were many things about it that she had missed. Cold all the time she was in England, she had missed the sensuous pleasure of opening a front door and stepping out of an icy wind into a warm bath of air. She missed her impeccable white-tiled bathroom and the shower which made it so easy to wash your hair. She missed the supermarket, and the man making bacon-and-cgg sandwiches at the lunch counter in the drugstore; the friendly familiarity of strangers on trains and buses, and the unreprcssed chit-chat of salesgirls and young men who came to mend the refrigerator and told you their life's ambitions. She missed the cars, the sweeping roads, the evening light on the white buildings of Washington, and Lincoln looking pensively into his watery mirror, with the golden reflection of the floodlit Monument coming across to meet him at night.

  She looked forward to getting back to Vinson. Without him she often felt alone, as she never had when she was single. His letters said that he missed her, and she knew that he weighed his letters carefully and never said in them what was not true. When they met, everything would be all right again perhaps. She would work to make it so. She wanted to get back to America to start again to make her marriage happy, yet she was half afraid lest she should fail and things should not be any better.

  And there would be Timmy to explain — Timmy, who was in a box in the guard's van of the train which took her to Southampton. The last time she had travelled this way she had been crying and too unhappy to look out of the window. On this journey she looked out all the time, her eyes trying

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  to hold the fleeting fields and hedges and naked elms, the garden plots dug neatly for the winter, a boy's bicycle flung down with the wheels spinning, drably dressed people glimpsed on a shopping street as the train rushed over a bridge, because she did not know when she would see England again.

  She was glad that she would have the boat trip before she met Vinson. It would give her time to get her thoughts straight. It was a nuisance about this friend of Laurie's who would be on the boat.

  "He's going to America to teach English," Margaret had said. "We've told him to look you up. Do be nice to him. He's rather a dear."

  Christine visualised a wispy professor with hair like candy floss being rather a dear in a soft-voiced unworldly way. She hoped he would not want to settle down next to her in a deckchair and tap his fingertips together and talk about Coleridge.

  In the customs shed a woman porter handled her luggage. She was broad and strong and shiny like the women who had gone out to help the rescue men in the Blitz, and when Christine paid her she tipped her broken-peaked cap jauntily and said: "Ta, ducks."

  A crowd of boys and girls from some youth movement were travelling with rucksacks and thick clumsy clothes. Christine looked down from the ship and saw them gathered round a flustered woman who was handing out tea and buns from a trolley.

  American voices were all around Christine on the boat in the turmoil of embarking. It was the last of England. When would she see another dowdy flustered woman dispensing tea and Chelsea buns, and when would someone call her "ducks" again?

  (Chapter (bignt

  Christine did not see Margaret's friend on the ship at first. She did not look for him, for she preferred to be alone, and the middle-aged New England couple who sat at her table with their opinionated teen-age daughter were boring enough without having to be bored by an English professor as well.

  On the second day out Christine was sitting in her deck-chair trying to read, but lifting her eyes more often to the sun-specked sea that dipped beyond the rail and to the procession of earnest walkers who paced their mile round the deck with their coats buttoned round their throats.

  One of the milers, a middle-aged man with a thick woollen scarf and sparse hair that lifted in the sea breeze, looked curiously at Christine every time he went by her chair. Presently he stopped after he had passed her and went to stand at the rail nearby. He glanced back at her once and then looked quickly away when he saw that she was watching him.

  This must be Laurie's friend. Soon he would summon the courage to come and speak to her, and she would have to be polite. She sighed and closed her book. She would not be polite to him for long, because it was nearly time to take Timmy out of the kennel for his morning exercise.

  "Excuse me," a voice said behind her. "You are Mrs. Gaegler, aren't you?"

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  Christine turned and saw a man with light-brown untidy hair, a strong English nose and an expectant smile. He wore a turtle-necked sweater under a thick tweed jacket, and flannel trousers that needed pressing.

  "The deck steward told me who you were/* he said. "I hope you don't mind. It's probably a bore, but I'm a friend of Laurie and Margaret Drew."

  "Oh yes," Christine said, surprised. "You're Mr. Burns/'

  He nodded. "It's funny?" he asked, for her full cheekbones were lifting into a wide smile.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "But — you see that man over there by the rail? Well, I've been thinking that he was Laurie's friend, and ex
pecting him to come and speak to me. I thought you'd look — well, more like a college professor."

  "I am one, I'm afraid." He stood and looked at her with his hands in his pockets, resting one leg. Although he had a rather ingenuous face, he had j bold sort of look, as if he did not care what people thought of him. "I've been teaching English literature at Nottingham University," he said, "and now I'm going over for a year at a college in Washington under some exchange deal. They offered me the chance, and I thought it couldn't be any worse than Nottingham."

  "Oh, you'll like Washington," Christine said. "I like it better than any town — except London, of course."

  "You live there?"

  "Yes. I'm married to an American naval officer."

  "I know," he said. "Margaret told me." He studied her face carefully for a moment, as if he was trying to memorise it. Perhaps he was, for on a crowded boat one often meets someone one day and fails to recognise him the next.

  Christine looked at her watch. "I'll have to go now," she said. "I've got a dog in the kennels and they only let you take them out at certain times." She unwrapped her steamer rug

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  and stood up. The middle-aged man by the rail moved away and started once more on his mileage, arms swinging, the slit of his overcoat flapping.

  "Could I come with you?" Laurie's friend said. "I'd like to see the dog."

  Timmy liked everyone, so of course it was not remarkable that he liked Mr. Burns, but he did put on a particularly gleeful show for him, and Laurie's friend knew how to talk to dogs.

  In the afternoon the ship ran into a small storm. Christine had eaten too much at lunch out of boredom, for the couple from New England were arguing with their fat daughter, who was winning hands down as she always did. When the ship began to move out of its throbbing rhythm Christine was afraid she was going to feel sea-sick, and retired to her cabin.

  She slept. When she woke and blinked round the cabin, as one always has to on a ship to remember where one is, she saw a note lying just inside the door. She looked at the clock as she got out of bed. She had missed her time for taking Timmy out. She would have to try and get round the steward downstairs, who was one of those difficult public servants who said: "I'd like to, madam. You know I'd like to help you, but if I let you break the regulations everyone else will be wanting to do the same."