The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

  The note said: "Have taken dog out for you. Tommie Burns."

  Christine was not able to thank him before dinner. She walked round the deck once or twice, and looking through the smoking-room window, she saw him sitting with three other men drinking whisky in a haze of cigarette smoke. Why should she feel this curious stab of irritation? He was entitled to drink whisky with three men in the smoking-room. She realised that she had been half expecting him to ask her

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  to go to the bar for a cocktail. If she had been single he probably would have, but she was married now and could not go into bars with anyone but Vinson.

  She never had the courage to go into a bar alone, so she went into the main lounge and asked the steward to bring her a Martini. She had two, so that she could go down to dinner as late as possible when her table mates would be halfway through their meal.

  Mr. and Mrs. Warren, however, were too polite to get up and go before Christine had finished her dinner. Their daughter went, because she said she had a date with a dreamy boy, but the parents sat on, smoking all over Christine's food and telling her where their ancestors had come from and how long their family had been in Madison, Connecticut.

  After dinner Christine sat in an armchair in a corner of the lounge and watched the couples dancing and was bored. If Vinson were here they would Jbe dancing and having drinks together between dances, and looking like any of the youngish unremarkable couples who were scattered about the lounge among the fat and elderly and the few very young people like the Warrens' daughter, who was dancing with the dreamy boy with her bottom stuck out.

  Christine sat and thought about how, if she were single, she would be sitting here trying not to look as if she wanted to dance, and yet hoping that someone would come up and ask her. She had told Rhona that one of the best things about being married was that you did not have to look about for men any more, but although that was a relief it did take away some of the excitement of life, particularly on a journey like this. Shipboard life was a great setting for romance. Christine had never had a romance on a ship. Now she never would.

  Before you were married a journey like this would be an

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  exciting adventure, just as every party was an adventure, because you never knew whom you might meet. But when you had met the person you were looking for and had married him, then you were out of the running for excitement. One part of your life was finished. There could be no more adventures, and men did not look at you in the same speculative way.

  While she was thinking this and looking round the lounge at the people dancing on the floor and drinking at the little tables, the corner of her eye was watching the door for Tom-mie Burns to come in. She knew that the corner of her eye had no business to be doing that. If he should come in and talk to her — what was there in that? Margaret had probably told him to be nice to her, just as she had told Christine to be nice to him.

  When he did not come into the lounge all evening, she was disappointed. She remembered being disappointed like that on holidays long ago when she had sat in hotel lounges, wasting an evening in case a young man on whom she had fixed her eye should come in.

  She saw the Warrens open the door leading from the library, so she got up and went out of the opposite door. As she crossed the space outside the purser's office to go downstairs Tommie Burns came out of the bar. He was wearing a blue suit and a white shirt and his hair was slicked down, showing the square shape of his head, wide at the corners of the forehead.

  "I thought you were never coming out," he said. "I want to buy you a drink."

  "Why didn't you come into the lounge then?"

  "I was afraid you'd expect me to dance with you, and I don't — not properly, that is. Do you want a drink now?"

  "Well, I - "

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  "That's all right. I don't either. Let's go out on deck. I believe there must be a moon. Feverish young women and their escorts have been going out there and not coming back."

  "Not here/' he said when they were on the enclosed promenade deck. "Let's go up top/' Christine walked with him along the deck to the ladder and saw for the first time that he limped slightly. She had not noticed it when they were walking Timmy this morning.

  On the boat deck they leaned on the rail between two lifeboats and talked — not about themselves, not about anything in particular. It was just talk. It was cold, but Christine held herself from shivering in case he should take his coat off and put it round her. It was bad enough to be up here with him without that. Heavens, if Vinson had been on the boat and had found her here in such a setting, with the moon scudding in and out of the clouds and the phosphorescence tracking on the cleaved water far below, h^—

  "I think I should be going to bed," she said.

  "Thinking you should go and wanting to go are two different things," Tommie said. "What are you afraid of, Christine?"

  "Nothing. Why should I be?" She laughed, but it sounded affected.

  "You know what's going to happen, don't you?"

  "No — " She tried to push him away, but he was strong; taller than Vinson and much stronger.

  She held herself stiffly, her lips resisting his kiss.

  "What's the matter?" he asked. He had a shocking air of innocence, as if he were surprised at you for thinking wrong into something he thought right.

  "Well, you know" she said crossly. "I'm married."

  "So I've heard." He smiled gently. He was so unscrupulous that it was almost funny.

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  "I ought to slap your face and run screaming for the captain/ 1 Christine said, trying not to answer his smile.

  "He'd probably enjoy that. He's youngish and quite personable." Tommie moved in close to her again, standing so that she was pinned between him and the ship's rail. Below her the sea ran hissing past, back to England.

  "Oh, you're quite impossible/' Christine said. "I thought you were supposed to be just a nice respectable friend of Laurie's. My goodness, if he knew what you were like, he-"

  "No, he wouldn't. I daresay even old Laurie behaved like this when he fell in love with Margaret. It's just that things are speeded up on a ship. If you are going to fall in love with someone you do it quicker, don't you? . . . Don't you, Christine?"

  "I don't know/' she murmured feebly. "I don't know. . . ." She felt as if she had fallen over backwards and was drowning without a struggle in the phosphorescent sea.

  Christine had expected to wake next morning in an agony of remorse, but she did not. She woke to a tingle of expectancy, wondering for a moment what was going to happen that made it such a lovely day. She remembered waking to just this feeling years ago in one of the chintzy spare rooms at Jennifer's house the night after she met Jerry.

  She turned her eyes to the dressing-table, where Vinson's photograph regarded her as sternly as if it knew what had happened on the boat deck last night. No good telling it not to worry, that this was nothing to do with her and Vinson. The photograph had every right to worry. She was desperately worried herself.

  She rang for her breakfast — she was never too worried to eat — and took a long time over having her bath and dressing,

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  to put off the moment when she was going to find Tommie and get things straight between them. It was eleven o'clock by the time she^came out of her cabin, so she decided to go and take Timmy out first, to delay the meeting a little longer.

  Tommie was at the kennels, talking to Timmy through the bars. "I knew you'd be coming down/' he said, "so I thought I'd wait for you here."

  "You shouldn't be waiting for me at all" Christine said in the voice which she had made up her mind to use. "In any case, I'm only going to see you for long enough to say — " The steward came to unlock the kennel, so she had to stop saying it.

  When they had quietened down Timmy's first excitement at being free, Christine clipped the leash on his collar and they walked briskly up and down the small triangle of deck allotted for the exercise of
dogs, Christine began to say what she had planned, but Timmy kept pulling her from one side to the other, and it was difficult to be coherent.

  "You keep telling me you're married," Tommie said. "I know you are, and it's too bad, but talking about it won't make you any less married."

  "You don't understand! I'm happily married, that's the point."

  "Uh-huh." Tommie looked at her, his eyes remembering last night.

  Trying not to remember, Christine assumed a lecturing voice. "You ought to be safely married too, at your age," she said. "Why aren't you married, anyway?" It was a rash question, because you never knew what tragedies or disappointments lay in a man's past, and she got the answer she deserved.

  "I've never felt like asking anyone to marry a cripple," he

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  said. "I was engaged before the war, but when the Japs locked me up she was told I might be dead, and she married someone else. Just as well, really/'

  "Your —your legs?" Christine asked, remembering the scarcely perceptible limp.

  "Only got one of 'em/'

  Timmy pulled her away at that moment, and when she came back to Tommie they did not talk any more about his having lost a leg. They did not talk about her being married either. Christine did not want to be unkind. She felt sorry for him, and let him take her hand.

  When they had put Timmy back in the kennel again and were walking along a white corridor between closed cabin doors, Tommie took her elbow, looked quickly up and down, and kissed her. Christine could not deceive herself then that she was only feeling sorry for him, only wanting to be kind. It was nothing like that.

  "We never see anything of you now, Mrs. Gaegler," Mr. Warren said, sopping bread in his gravy. "Where do you get to? Maimie and I were looking for you last night to make up a fourth at bridge, and this morning I tried to find you to introduce you to some very lovely people from Maine I've just met. But you never seem to be around/'

  "Oh, I know where she is," said his daughter in an offensive singsong. "She's always around with that English fellow. Haven't you seen him, Pop? He's dreamy. Looks kinda like Spencer Tracy in his palmier days/'

  "No, indeed," said her father, blinking with pleasure at the idea of a new person to bore. "I don't believe I have met up with him. I should be very happy to know your friend, Mrs. Gaegler. Whyn't you bring him along to the bar for a cocktail tonight?"

  "Thank you," said Christine uncomfortably, "but 1 don't know if he — "

  "Oh, they won't want to waste their time with you, Pop," said the daughter rudely. "They've got better things to do, don't you know that?" She leered at Christine with her small ginger-lashed eyes.

  "Excuse me," said Christine, getting up. "I think I'll have my coffee upstairs." After she had left them she wished that she had not. It had been bad enough not knowing what to say to Mr. Warren to avoid being coupled with Tommie as two people who accepted invitations together, but it was worse that she had shown annoyance at the daughter's crass teasing.

  Now the whole family would begin to talk about her. Perhaps they would tell other people, and the other people would talk. How had she ever been foolish enough to get herself into such a situation?' She went to find Tommie to tell him that they must not see each other any more.

  "Short of one of us jumping into the sea," Tommie said affably, "I don't see how we can help it." He was practising deck quoits by himself on the windy sports deck, balancing himself adroitly with his artificial leg when the ship rolled. His sleeves were turned up and the muscle of his forearm made a beautiful strong shape under the golden brown hairs. Christine took her eyes away from it.

  They had two and a half more days together on the ship, and Christine spent quite a lot of time telling Tommie that they must not go on like this, but it made no difference to the behaviour of either of them. It was terrible and it was wonderful, but at New York Vinson would meet her and she would never see Tommie again. She had made him promise not to try and see her in Washington. She did not trust him at all, but she believed that he would stick to that.

  At New York there was a cable waiting for Christine. It said: "Homecoming delayed. Letter explanation at house. Love Vinson."

  Just "Love/' that was all. Nothing about how pleased he was that she was back in America and how sorry not to see her at once; but Vinson was never any good at conveying loving messages in letters, let alone in cables.

  Christine looked for Tommie on the boat and in the customs shed. They could have travelled to Washington together, could have had a few more hours together, but perhaps it was just as well that she could not find him. What was the use of a few more hours? They had said all that there was to be said last night.

  When she got Timmy out of the clutches of the authorities and had coped with customs and red caps, marvelling at her assured Americanised self who was so different from the bewildered English self arriving in New York last time, Christine took a taxi to Pennsylvania station and travelled the long train ride to Washington.

  When the taxi-driver who brought her out to Arlington had carried in her bags for her and driven away, Christine turned on the heating plant in the cellar and began to go all round the house taking the dust-sheets off the furniture. There was no point in doing that straight away, but she felt that she had to occupy herself with something, to try and take away the dead disappointed feeling of her homecoming.

  The little house was cold, and at the same time stuffy with disuse. It was very quiet. Still wearing her coat, Christine sat down on the stairs and thought about Tommie. He had fallen in love with her. He had loved her so much that he did not care whether she was married, nor whether she was honest enough to say if she loved him. She had been romantic and exciting to him. Now she was just any tired woman in her

  own home, taking off dustsheets and waiting for the radiators to warm up, and she was not exciting to anybody, least of all to herself.

  The bell rang. Mrs. Meenehan was celebrating Christine's homecoming by a ceremonious visit to the front door instead of one of her everyday appearances at the kitchen window.

  "I've got all your mail here/' she said, when she had got over the first exclamations of welcome. "I got the mailman to give everything to me."

  "Oh, you needn't have — "

  "'It was no bother, Catherine honey. I knew you'd want me to be in charge while you were away, and there's not a day passed but I've been round the house checking up. You ask Daddy."

  Christine took the letters, wondering how many of them Mrs. Meenehan had steamed open and stuck down again.

  "No, I won't come inside/' Mrs. Meenehan said, making Christine feel that she should have asked her in. "I'm just dying to hear about your trip and how you found poor old England, but you look plenty tired right now. We'll have a good long gabfest tomorrow. And where's the Commander? I didn't see him get out of the taxi with you."

  "He's staying in Panama a bit longer," Christine said. "I expect there's a letter from him here about it. Oh yes, here it is. Excuse me. I must read it straight away." She began to shut the door imperceptibly, so that Mrs. Meenehan, who was standing on the sill, might be pushed gently outside without knowing it.

  Timmy was on the lawn barking at the strangeness of everything. "I brought my dog back with me," Christine said, when Mrs. Meenehan was safely outside and the door was shut too far for her to step in again and start talking about the dog.

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  "Oh yes, I know," said Mrs. Meenehan. "I saw him. We've already made friends/' You never could tell her anything new.

  The telephone rang while Christine was reading Vinson's letter. "Hullo?" She answered it abstractedly, still reading. "Oh . . . Tommie, you promised you wouldn't ring up. Vin isn't here yet as a matter of fact, but if he had been — "

  "Well, he isn't, so why worry? When's he coming back?"

  "I'm just reading his letter. Let's see. . . . About two weeks, he says."

  "I see." The silence on the wire between them was just as if they had looked at each other.r />
  Every day Christine told herself that she would not see Tommie any more, and every day she told him that, but it made no more difference than it had on the ship. She knew that she must be careful in Washington, where the slightest hint of scandal would fly round the Navy wives like a torch set to oil-soaked stubble, but Tommie's rashness was infectious, and time and again she found herself doing the things that she knew were dangerous.

  She knew that she should not visit the house where he was living alone, but she could not stop herself going there. He gave her a key, and she was waiting for him every evening when he came back from the college. It was late when she drove herself home. As she turned in at her driveway she would see the light go off in the bedroom where Mrs. Meenehan had been staying awake to hear what time the car came back.

  One night Christine did not go home at all, and after that she stayed every night with Tommie. It did not seem to matter any more. Nothing mattered, except the diminishing time that was left to them.

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  Tommie had taken over the house vacated by the American Professor who had taken his place at Nottingham. The house was in Georgetown, the old part of Washington through which Vinson had driven Christine when she first arrived, and wished that he could live at such a good address.

  Christine thought what a waste it was that Vinson could never know that she had been living in Georgetown. Under other circumstances he would have been so impressed.

  There was nothing impressive, however, about the tiny red-brick house whose flat roof was scraped eerily by the fingers of trees on a windy night. It was the thinnest house Christine had ever seen. It stood alone, looking like a slice cut out of a terrace, with a junk yard on one side and a short alley of consciously "cute" little houses converted from slave quarters on the other. Because it stood on a slight slope it seemed to tilt a little, teetering in its thinness, as if it would one day fall across the entrance of the alley and imprison the embassy girls and colonels' widows who lived in the cute little houses.