When Blackbirds Sing

by Martin Boyd

  About a month later the Wesley-Maudes came down again, for Maurice to say goodbye as he was on embarkation leave. Sylvia wrote telling her mother to ask Dominic to dine, and again he drove over from the depot with her father. Sylvia was on her guard this time, but Dominic was never on guard. He might behave conventionally, but when his passions smouldered, either with anger or love, it was evident. During dinner he showed that he was stimulated by her presence, and her mother heard some of the bantering exchange between them, and gave them a brief glance. Later, when the men came into the drawing-room, Dominic again sat by Sylvia who said: “You shouldn’t reveal yourself so clearly.”

  “What have I revealed?” asked Dominic.

  She was a little disconcerted. She was not yet prepared to go beyond allusion.

  She did not give him any more exclusive attention that evening until he was leaving, when she managed to say without being overheard: “Come to see me when you are in London. I shall need cheering up.” She gave him her address, adding: “Don’t forget it.”

  “If I do, I can ask Lady Dilton,” he replied.

  “No. Don’t do that,” she said with a touch of irritation. “It’s in the telephone book.”

  When next Lady Dilton saw her husband she said: “I think Dominic’s too interested in Sylvia. I shouldn’t bring him over while she’s here. She’ll probably be down quite a lot now Maurice has gone.”

  “That will be a bit difficult,” said Lord Dilton. “I thought of putting him on the establishment.”

  “Why? He’s young and healthy.” She affirmed the principle underlying the 1914 war, which seemed to be the survival of the unfittest. Lord Dilton did not like being told by his wife how he should exercise his military responsibilities, but so far he had not voiced this intention. Dominic himself might not like it. He had not left his wife and child on the other side of the world to come and settle down in an English country town. He had often kicked over the traces but he was touchy about his honour. He was both straight and unpredictable, which amused Lord Dilton and was one of the reasons why he liked him. Still, if there was the risk of a romance between him and Sylvia, perhaps Edith was right, and it would be safer to say no more about it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dominic continued to receive Helena’s letters, and his replies were more than ever like the schoolboy’s, except that instead of “our second eleven beat Weldon’s” he wrote: “Last night we were out on night-ops,” or: “This afternoon we were on the range.” He said no more about a return to Waterpark, and he told her that he had met Sylvia, who was married to a hussar, and living in London. He did not mention her a second time so Helena was at ease about the two things which had most worried her. She could write with more hope and spirit, trying, as she had begun, to keep before him their life together by giving the picture of its setting. He took his letters to his room to read, carefully absorbing every detail. Generally, he read them two or three times and he would sit lost awhile holding the letter and longing to be home. But he liked his army life. It interested him, and in an hour or two, or at any rate by the next morning the picture had become dim, and the life on the farm seemed to belong more to his past than his future.

  Though by now the opposing trenches were firmly fixed, like two jaws mangling the youth of Europe, everyone except possibly some senior officers who hoped for higher promotion, and the war profiteers, hoped that the war would be over within a year. Helena allowed a year as the furthest possible date for Dominic’s return. She put in plants that would bloom in a year’s time. She wondered, if she set a rosemary hedge, whether there would be anything to show by then. But she not only did things to improve the garden and the house. She managed the farm as economically as possible so that they would have something to spend when he returned. Trying to keep him within the orbit of her life, she asked his advice, though he seldom replied to her questions. He was one of those correspondents who absorb without feeling the need to comment on what they are told. Sometimes she wrote, underlined:

  Please answer:

  [a] It is hard to find men for the harvesting. Shall I get sheep and graze them? It would be good for the land.

  [b] Do you want maize on the river flat, or should I graze that too?

  If he had replied, even disagreeing, she would have felt that he was with her. If he had said: “No, don’t get any sheep. You’ll have equal difficulty finding shearers. Buy bullocks. It would be wasteful to use the river flats for grazing.” But he left the whole burden of management to her, when at least he could have shared the responsibility, if not the work. She tried not to blame him, as she knew that he could not express himself in letters, but she continued to feel that she was writing into a void. She did not know that her letters always created an hour or two of reverie and nostalgia in which he sent her all his love, though when the time came to reply he was back in the atmosphere of night-ops and rifle-ranges.

  At last, towards the end of 1916, he was put on a draft for France, and given a week’s embarkation leave. English subalterns generally went home for this, but Dominic had now no close relatives in England, beyond Cousin Emma, and Josie Wyckham, a first cousin who had married an English soldier a week or so before war was declared. He had recently been killed. Josie was living with his parents in Dorset, and Dominic did not like to suggest himself for a visit. He went up to London, to the little hotel in Mayfair. He called on Cousin Emma, which was not very exhilarating. She criticized his relatives in Australia for their indifference to the “right thing” and told him discreditable tales about his grandfather. She said that at first she had thought that Dominic would be “Australian”, but now she nodded at his well-cut uniform with approval.

  He then went to see Colonel Rodgers, who at last had been given a job at the War Office, but who had aged surprisingly in the last few months. He found himself quite unfitted for the office work of which it consisted. His memory was failing and a little later, after making innumerable blunders, he had to give up the job and return to Waterpark. The war was still his obsession and only topic of conversation. He said: “If only they’d give me a battalion at the front I’d be all right.” If they had, he would doubtless have massacred it.

  He asked Dominic to stay to dine at his club, and he moved the spoons and salt cellars about in battle formation. When they parted he said: “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Sylvia.”

  “I saw her at Dilton with her husband,” said Dominic.

  “You know he’s gone to the front? I shouldn’t go to see her.”

  The white-haired angry old man turned and went off to the smoking room to find someone to fight the war with. Still with his wasp waist, his angular bony limbs, his eyes larger in his lean face, he was more like an insect than ever. As a boy Dominic had accepted his oddity, almost hero-worshipped him. Now for the first time in his life, looking at the colonel objectively, he thought that he was rather dreadful.

  But with Colonel Rodgers and Cousin Emma he had exhausted his London friends, except Sylvia whom the colonel told him not to see. There were some more distant relatives, and that other colonel in the War Office, but he felt disinclined to look them up. For the first day he enjoyed the physical comfort of being on leave. It was nice to have his breakfast brought up by a pretty girl instead of being called by his soldier servant, and having to go across to the mess. He thought of asking the girl to go to the theatre with him; then he remembered Mrs Heseltine. He had lost her address but he remembered that her daughter was called Sherwood and lived at Wimbledon. He found her name in the telephone book and rang her up. The telephone was answered by Mrs Heseltine herself. She sounded surprised and not very pleased at hearing Dominic’s voice. She was hurt that after their close friendship he had waited months to get in touch with her. Anyhow she could not possibly see him now, as her daughter had had a baby only the day before. Before ringing off she relented a little and said: “Let me know when you’re next in London.” He did not tell her that he was going to France, and they did not meet
again.

  Dominic sat in his hotel bedroom with the prospect of six days before him, perhaps his last six in the civilized world, spent in mooning about in his own company. At first he had accepted Colonel Rodgers’ injunction not to go to see Sylvia, thinking it would be wrong to intrude on her when she must be feeling as he felt in the first week after leaving Helena. Now he saw it as a flicker of the colonel’s old jealousy. He took up the telephone and asked the girl at the desk to get him Sylvia’s number.

  Far from being in an abyss of depression, she sounded cheerful and very pleased to hear his voice.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  When he told her she asked if he was free for luncheon, adding: “I am.”

  She suggested that they should lunch at the Ritz, as it was convenient for both of them. She would ring up for a table. They arranged that she should leave her house at one o’clock, and that he should walk down Green Park to meet her.

  Dominic was a little disturbed that she had chosen the Ritz, again thinking of money that might go to Helena. As it turned out he need not have worried, as they could only eat as much as their food coupons allowed, and the Army authorities had fixed a modest limit to the amount officers might spend in restaurants.

  He met Sylvia just inside the gates of the Park near Buck-ingham Palace. It was cold, but bright and sunny. She was wearing a dark coat with a sable collar, and a black velvet hat, so that her fair skin and her golden hair shone out as in some Renaissance portrait. As at Dilton he was startled when he saw her. He had not imagined that she would look like this in the daytime. In the evening, in yellow silk and pearls, amid the golden lights of the drawing-room at Dilton, it was natural that she should appear exquisite. He did not expect her to have the same effect in Green Park. Her clothes were simple but the people who passed glanced at her.

  “This is fun,” she said, shaking hands. “When did you come up?”

  He told her that he had come on Sunday night, and that he was on embarkation leave.

  “Why didn’t you ring up before?”

  “I had to go to see old Cousin Emma and I dined with Colonel Rodgers.”

  “What, Uncle Marcus! How gay! Still, he always was my rival. And are you going to spend your leave with octogenarians?”

  “No jolly fear,” said Dominic. “Not if I can help it.” He felt as if he had suddenly woken up, as if weights were lifted from his shoulders, as if grey doors enclosing him were flung open to the sun. They laughed and walked back up the park.

  When they came into the Ritz restaurant they attracted notice, not only because of their good looks but because of the striking contrast between them: Dominic dark, arrogant and southern, Sylvia a pure gold product of the north. In a way this appearance was misleading, as Dominic’s arrogance was intermittent, not like Sylvia’s, an unchanging attitude; and her purity of intention was negligible, while his, confused and groping, remained constant. In spite of Sylvia’s alleged poverty—and her appearance was one that only a rich woman can achieve—she seemed to be an habituée of the place, and they were deferentially led to a table in the window.

  When they had ordered their food they looked at each other and smiled, partly with pleasure, but also with surprise to find themselves there. It was so improbable, and it was new ground for them. At no time had they been together away from Dilton or Waterpark. They had a sense of new freedom, that in some way they were redeeming a failure. When they had drunk a little wine they took up again that allusive bickering kind of conversation they had begun when he dined at Dilton, and which was a new thing between them. Before, when they had been engaged, their love was adolescent, alternately blissful and angry. There was nothing amusing about it. They were like a man who has lost some money which later is not only returned to him, but returned with interest.

  They were the last to leave the restaurant. In Piccadilly she asked him: “What are you doing now?”

  “I have to buy some kit,” he said.

  “Shall I come and help you?”

  “Yes, please do,” he exclaimed eagerly. He had the idea that everything to do with Sylvia was related to sophisticated pleasure. That she was willing to do anything so humdrum as to choose army kit made her appear more simply human, and also more accessible. They went along to those stores which provided everything necessary for a Mayfair boudoir or a Flanders dugout; and even linked the two in special hampers of foie gras and French plums to send to young officers in the trenches.

  She made him, as a matter of course, buy the most expensive things possible, and asked the shopman: “Are you sure this is the very best?” She really believed that by making him pay the highest price for every article, she was doing him a service, and later, when she had led him up to tea at Claridges, she said: “I don’t believe you would have chosen nearly such good things if I had not come with you,” which was true.

  Dominic justified himself by thinking that all the things he had bought were for the trenches, and that Helena would not want him to economize on them. But this was only a passing thought. He, too, had Sylvia’s taste for and expectation of the very best, though with him it reached beyond material things. The atmosphere that surrounded her was one most agreeable to himself. When he found himself in rich houses, both dignified and comfortable, where the best is normal, he felt that he was in his natural surroundings; though at home with Helena the idea of living in a palace like Dilton would have seemed absurd to him. Perhaps people of mixed blood have more varied nostalgias than those whose forebears were all of the same kind, living in the same place. From long generations of farming squires at Waterpark he found his deepest satisfactions on his own farm; from the Bynghams he inherited the impulse towards full-blooded bouts of extravagance; while from the Tebas he took his looks and his arrogance and his sombre passions, a taste for magnificence and the houses of the great. This is not romanticizing Dominic; he was already romantic, just as stark fact may often be. Sometimes stark facts made him act with the extreme of romanticism, as happened within a year.

  He walked back with Sylvia to her house behind Buck-ingham Gate. Its drawing-room was no bigger than the green bath-room at Dilton, but it was furnished from the more magnificent rooms of that house, with a kingwood and ormolu commode and Italian mirrors. He had only come in to see the house, but he stayed until seven, when Sylvia had to change to dine out.

  “I wish I could put it off,” she said, “but it’s impossible. Don’t you know anyone under eighty with whom you can spend the evening?”

  “I don’t want to see anybody else,” said Dominic. “It would spoil this afternoon.”

  They arranged to lunch again the next day, but at a different restaurant. Sylvia liked to be seen in public with Dominic, knowing that they were an arresting couple, but she was always discreet, and did not want to be seen with him twice in the same place. He said diffidently: “Am I taking up too much of your time?”

  “Oh, no,” she replied. “You mustn’t waste your embarkation leave. I shall regard it as war work.” He smiled but he looked a little hurt.

  The next morning, with too much time to spend, he dawdled towards their appointment, looking in the shop windows and was ten minutes late. If any other man Sylvia knew had kept her waiting, after a few minutes she would have gone away; but the privilege of behaving uncertainly, which was one of the few things that Dominic had won for himself, acted even with her, and she only said, half amused: “You mustn’t do this sort of thing you know.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Keeping a woman waiting in a public place, or anywhere else as far as that goes.”

  “Am I late? I’m sorry,” said Dominic, but he did not seem to realize the gravity of his offence.

  When they sat down in the restaurant she was about to give him a short lecture, but restrained herself. In her first London season she had hoped to become engaged to a very good-looking eldest son, but he had not come up to scratch. An intimate friend told her that she was too bossy with him. She ha
d said: “So often when one thinks one is being queenly, a reigning beauty, one is only being a governess; and a governess per se is never seductive.” Sylvia was determined not to make this mistake with Dominic, particularly as she thought it was improbable that he would take it well.

  In the afternoon she had to go to see an aunt at Hampton Court, a promise she had made some time ago. She asked Dominic to come with her, but when they arrived she told him to go through and walk in the gardens while she visited her aunt. She would not stay long.

  “It wouldn’t do for you to come in,” she said.

  “Why, don’t I look respectable?” asked Dominic.

  “You are certainly presentable,” said Sylvia, “but I don’t know that you look exactly respectable. Anyhow, she’s as blind as a bat.”

  “But isn’t she Colonel Rodgers’ sister? I ought to see her.” Dominic was full of these friendly loyalties.

  “She’s also Mother’s sister, and she’ll tell her we came together. You must take a brisk walk. I’ll meet you on the bridge in half-an-hour.” She entered a little iron lift, which creaked perilously up through space to the top floor.

  Dominic found his way out into the gardens, where the last leaves had fallen from the trees, and the borders were dug up and bare. He walked down towards the Long Water, and wondered why Sylvia, when she asked him to come down, had not told him that she did not want him to meet Mrs Pottinger, as her aunt was called—or rather, why Mrs Pottinger should not tell her mother that they had come down together. Though he often appeared erratic or worse to other people, in his own mind he was absolutely straight. When he concealed his actions or intentions, it was not from slyness, but simply because he forgot to mention them. Having been treated as a dunce when a boy, he always assumed that other people knew far more than he did, which showed even in his letters to Helena. But he hated the smallest deception between friends. He puckered his forehead as he thought that Sylvia had been a little sly. Then he found that for some odd reason this gave him a slight satisfaction. If her perfection had a slight flaw she was more accessible, though he did not yet know in what way he wanted her accessible. Anyhow it showed that she wanted his company, if only for the train journey. He went into the maze, and thinking of these things he lost himself, and was again ten minutes late in rejoining Sylvia, whom he found walking up and down beyond the bridge.