It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  Phillip looked at the supposed Mrs. Beausire, remembering that Beausire’s mother had spoken of Martin’s wife as Ursula. “It will soon clear up! This country is like that, grey and wet and suddenly open blue and shining!”

  Martin’s mouth was open, his eyes half-closed. He held up a hand for silence. After hesitation, an enormous sneeze shook him.

  “There you are!” he turned to Fiona. “Why the hell didn’t you bring my aspirin bottle?”

  “I did, Martin. It’s in my suitcase.” She made as if to lift it from under her feet but Martin cried, “Don’t open the damned thing here, for God’s sake!” as there came a thunderous flapping of the hood. They were now going along the estuary road.

  “It’s the south-west gale,” explained Phillip.

  “Good God, do you think I thought it was an April shower?” said Martin.

  “I can taste the salt!” cried Fiona, her eyes shining. “How lovely!” She seemed to Phillip to be extraordinarily young, with fair bobbed hair and a slim figure. She turned greenish eyes upon him. “I hope it will soon clear up, as you said. Martin is tremendously looking forward to walking under your guidance. He wants to write a book about walking in Devon while he is down here, and has waited for simply ages to talk with you.”

  “As long as he doesn’t ask me about the human rat-runs of the publishing world,” growled Martin. “If I hear one word about Fleet Street or the Stock Exchange I shall get out and take the next train back.” Wrapping the collar of his greatcoat round his neck he appeared to go to sleep.

  Zillah soon had a fire going in the sitting-room, where a clean laundered cloth was spread on the circular mahogany table, with the supper things and a bowl of flowers. Phillip sat there until the guests came down from upstairs.

  “No fireplace in the bedroom,” grumbled Martin. “Fifi, get them to put in hot-water bottles.” He turned to Phillip. “Cold pork and cold prunes, is that the best you could do?”

  Phillip felt like saying that if he had come a week earlier there would have been a cockerel of six pounds including the bones for him to gnaw. Zillah came to the defence.

  “We didn’t know when you were coming, you see, Mr. Beausire, else we would have had the roast duck ready. It’s no good you blaming Mr. Maddison! When you didn’t come at five o’clock, Mother didn’t like to put it in the oven in case it got zamzawed like the cockerel Mr. Maddison ordered for you last week. It isn’t his fault at all!” she cried in a voice slightly higher than usual in her nervousness before these London visitors. She fired another shot: “Last time you wrote and said you were coming you didn’t turn up, you know!”

  “Oh, I expect it was my making a mistake in the date,” said Phillip. “You know how unreliable I am about letting you know when I’m coming back, Zillah!”

  “Well, you’re all here now, that’s the main thing!” the young girl announced. “I’ll bring along the soup. It’s Mother’s special soup, so mind you like it!”

  Fiona whispered to Phillip, “What a perfectly sweet baby asleep in the cradle in the kitchen! Who’s is it, the girl’s?”

  “It’s mine.”

  “But, Martin, you didn’t tell me that Phillip had a baby! What is it, a boy or a girl, Phillip?”

  “A boy. Please don’t say anything about it to the Mules.”

  They sat at table, Martin with back to the fire, writing a letter. Zillah brought in three plates of soup, Martin went on writing rapidly with a thick black fountain pen. Then putting it down, he tasted the soup. “My God, it’s Brown Windsor!”

  “That’s where you’re mistaken,” said Zillah, entering unexpectedly. “It’s Mother’s special soup. I hope you like it, there’s giblets in it.”

  “It tastes like mulligatawny to me,” said Fiona.

  “There’s some of that in it, but that’s not all,” replied Zillah. “Mr. Maddison likes it, don’t you, Mis’r Mass’n?”

  “Beautiful soup, Zillah. If Mr. Beausire doesn’t want his, I’ll eat it for him.” But Martin, having put aside his writing, was already sucking his down.

  “Anyone like another helping?” enquired Zillah, coming in later.

  “Would I not,” said Martin, in a clipped, donnish voice, as he took the dark-blue writing paper pad to dash off another line before looking up to say, “What’s that at the window?”

  A black and white face, with staring green eyes, was looking through the lower panes of the casement.

  “That’s Moggy, Mr. Maddison’s cat,” said Zillah, arriving with the soup tureen. “She always comes in at the window. I expect Rusty will be here in a minute. Rusty’s Mr. Maddison’s spaniel,” she explained. “Ever such a dear old dog. So’s Moggy a dear little cat. They go through a hole in Mr. Maddison’s door, they always know when he comes back, and wait for him in there. That’s more than we do, sometimes!” she cried, turning her head as she went out to give Phillip a soft glance, which Fiona noticed.

  “I believe Zillah’s the mother of the baby!” she whispered to Phillip.

  “Why not ask her?” suggested Martin, writing away.

  “Yes, why not?” said Phillip, “and earn half-a-crown from The People.”

  Although he had grumbled at the idea of cold pork, Martin soon ate his helping, and pushing aside his plate, continued the letter writing. How crowded his brain must be, thought Phillip: he must live under pressure the whole time.

  Having finished the letter, Martin said to Fiona, “Bed, Fifi my love,” arid led the way to the kitchen. Phillip, sitting by the fire, was relieved to hear his jovial voice, amidst laughter, for a couple of minutes before their footfalls went up the stairs.

  When they were in the bedroom, Zillah slipped in to say to Phillip, “I thought you told us Mr. Beausire had two daughters!”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Now he’s just told us that it’s his wife’s nineteenth birthday! Funny goings on, if you ask me! She seems so shy, Mother says. Of him, I mean. ’Tidden right, you know, to pretend you’m married if you’re not,” mixing school-lesson English with her native Devon dialect. “Is it, ‘Mr. Donkin’? Yes, it’s you in that book you wrote, I know it, and you can’t deny it. Can you? You and your ‘Pauline’! Wasn’t she someone you knew at Folkestone? Admit it, now! Tell the truth and shame the devil! Come on, Mis’r Mass’n!”

  There was a bump overhead. “My lor’, I hope Mr. Beausire’s not bangin’ his young leddy about! I’d give any man a thumping big bang if he tried any tricks on me, Mis’r Mass’n! Don’t you go treating your young leddy like that, will you?”

  She came close, creamy cheeks and vivid red hair, teasing him. Her face was so young and pretty that he kissed her. “S-sh!” she whispered, looking round. “Don’t let Mother or Dad hear you, or they’ll wonder what we’m up to, all alone in here.” She skipped out of the room.

  Martin had left the writing pad face down on the sofa beside his attaché case. Phillip thought it best to put the pad in the case, and picking it up, saw in one glance the first words written in the large, sprawling hand. Looking no further, he pressed the lock buttons and slipped the pad inside.

  Zillah returned. “Anything I can get for you, Mis’r Mass’n?”

  “No thanks, Zillah. I think I’ll go to bed. Good-night!”

  He left thinking that if he hadn’t seen the beginning of Martin’s letter he might have kissed Zillah again: thank heaven he hadn’t, in the circumstances.

  *

  In the morning the sun was shining. Martin was almost a different man.

  “We’ve had breakfast. We want to get out as soon as we can!”

  “I imagined you’d be sleeping late. Still, I can do without breakfast. Where do you want to go?”

  “It’s your country, you lead on and we’ll follow.” Martin delved into his attaché case, took out a stamped addressed envelope and put it in his pocket.

  “Where’s the post office?”

  “Mules will take it.” As Phillip had anticipated, Martin wanted to post
it elsewhere.

  “Shall we be going near a village?”

  “Yes, at Broccombe. By the way, there’s our otter hunt ball next week. Would you and Fiona care to come as my guests?”

  The association of the words hunt ball had a distinct effect on Beausire: he spoke like a gentleman. “My dear Phillip, it’s most kind of you, but we’ve both got to go back on Sunday.” He became himself again. “Hell! Back to that stinking little office, half as big as an early Victorian lavatory, literally no room to turn round in, the boy coming up every afternoon at four p.m. with a cup of cold tea half-swimming in the saucer with smuts and drowning flies. Let’s get out while we can, for God’s sake!” as Fiona joined them. “Where are you taking us, my lord?”

  “Up over the fields to the high ground and round the coast to Broccombe, if that will suit you.”

  The walk was at first enjoyable. Then it formed into the previous pattern: Martin continually asking questions about country matters, Phillip supplying the answers until he grew weary of Martin’s search for information and lagged behind for Fiona to catch up to him.

  It was now Fiona’s turn to seek information.

  “Tell me, Phillip,” she began, while Martin tore alone into the morning. “Is your partner at the otter ball the Girl Guide mistress that the Muleses told me about before breakfast?”

  “I haven’t had any breakfast, so I can’t really say.”

  “The Muleses say that you are interested in her, and that she’s a foreigner. Does she speak English?”

  “A few words, now and again.”

  “Where is the camp?”

  “Beyond those pine trees on the horizon.”

  “She’s been here before, so Zillah said.”

  “She came with me to view the site.”

  “Are you having an affaire with her? Why don’t you answer, Phillip? There’s no harm in having an affaire, is there?” persisted Fiona.

  “It depends on all sorts of things, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He walked on faster, then lagged for her to catch up, having recalled to mind Martin’s opening sentence in the letter he had written at the supper table the night before. Dear Ursula, I am down here alone with Phillip, being bored blue——

  “How old is this girl, Phillip?”

  “Oh, extremely old, like good port. You know, any port in a storm.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Lucy.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a foreign name to me.”

  Martin obviously had keen hearing, for he shouted over his shoulder, “‘Foreigner’ is a local name for anyone living a mile or two away. I told you that, coming down in the train!” He waited for them. “Both you and I are ‘foreigners’ to any Devon village chawbacon.”

  “Where does Lucy come from, Devon?” continued Fiona.

  “Her people live in Dorset, I think.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They’re gipsies, always on the move.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “I mean, of course, when they’re not ‘in residence’.”

  “What’s that bird flying over there, a goose?” demanded Martin, as they walked on, more or less in line.

  “That’s a heron.”

  “I thought herons lived by water?”

  “They fish in water, but not while in the air.”

  “Of course I know that, you ass, but what’s it doing here?”

  “Well, what are we doing here?”

  “But we’re not fishing, are we?” said Fiona.

  “Nor is the heron.”

  “If you can be serious for a moment, Fifi, I’d like to hear from Phillip why the heron is up here on the moor, with no water about so far as I can see.”

  “It’s probably flying from the Fuddicombe reservoir to the Speering Folliot duck-ponds, Martin.”

  “But why, Phillip?” asked Fiona, her eyes opened wide.

  “To catch fish to eat, obviously,” said Martin.

  “There are rainbow trout in the duck-ponds.”

  Noises of cawing floated down. “Why are those crows flying after the heron?”

  “Oh, just chivvying it away from their territory, Martin.”

  “But do crows own land, Phillip?” asked Fiona.

  “Of course they do,” replied Martin. “Everything owns land, or water.”

  “Fish, particularly lobsters, are very religious, Fiona.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Victor Hugo in one of his novels speaks of the lobster as ‘the cardinal of the sea’, doesn’t he?”

  “Did you know that, Poogs?” she said to Martin.

  “Of course I knew it. Everyone knows it.”

  “But why ‘cardinal’?”

  “Because it’s red. You’ve eaten lobster, you ought to know.”

  “The point is that it’s not red in the sea. It’s blue, except for the tips of its feelers,” explained Phillip.

  “Then why call it a cardinal, that’s what I don’t understand?”

  “Why do you wear a green hat, when your lips are red?” asked Phillip.

  “But I’m not a lobster! And I still don’t understand why, if a lobster is blue when in the sea, it is called a cardinal.”

  “A literary floater,” said Martin.

  “But surely lobsters live on the bottom of the sea? Tell me, Phillip, I really do want to know!”

  “There are many theories why the lobster’s feeler tips are red. Some say to attract fish, others that the red draws light through the water to renew sensitivity, possibly smell, or perhaps sense of touch while actually not touching, like wireless waves. All I know is that they are red at the tips. Victor Hugo made a slip when he called a lobster ‘the cardinal of the sea’. That’s all.”

  *

  Martin strode on ahead, visualising the scene of the next chapter of his novel, wherein the hero, misunderstood and married to a famous titled Society beauty, would go to Devon with his secretary, who was in love with him. The hero’s sense of correct behaviour and good form—Eton and Balliol—forbade him even to think of platonic love with the young woman; so they slept in separate cottages.

  Martin Beausire had been educated at a small public school for the sons of middle-class parents. He wrote his biennial novels in the train to and from Fleet Street; everything he did, everyone he met, was pot pourri for him. His aristocratic heroes existed, invariably lonely, in a world of nouveau riche cads, poor bounders, and middle-class thrusters.

  Having digested the cardinal of the sea, Fiona thirsted for more human information.

  “Where exactly in Dorset do Lucy’s people live, Phillip?”

  “Near Shakesbury.”

  “What is her name?” demanded Martin. “Copleston? That’s one of our West Country family names,” he explained to Fiona. “It goes back to the Conquest. The Saxon Booscers were here before them, of course, Cruwys’ Wessex Worthies mentions that we were hereditary food-tasters to the Saxon kings. Beowulf the Booscer was given an earldom by Ethelred the Unready.”

  “Poor chap, he deserved his title, always having to eat zamzawed food!” cried Phillip.

  Ignoring what he considered to be a Cockney exhibition of bad taste, Martin took another line. “Shakesbury! Good God, that brings back memories! I used to hunt the hare all over that country when I was an usher at Milborne,” he went on, his voice sounding terse under a stiff upper lip. “Before that swine Markton sacked me for saying I was condoning pederasty because I pleaded with him not to sack three boys for taking the usual adolescent interest in their own anatomy and its prospects.”

  “What is pederasty, Poogs?” asked Fiona.

  “Sodomy.”

  “But I’m no wiser now, Poogs.”

  “You don’t need to be.”

  “Wasn’t Milborne the scene of Warp and Woof by——” began Phillip.

  “If you want to talk about books and authors, talk to Fifi, she knows nothing about either,
” Martin replied, as he strode on ahead.

  “Tell me more about Lucy, Phillip. Is she very pretty? How does she do her hair?”

  “In ringlets.”

  “But that’s very old-fashioned, surely?”

  “It’s the fashion down here.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You should see the grocer’s wife, from Monday to Saturday. She regularly tears up her bedding in order to tie up her hair, which is about the same texture and quality as an Exmoor pony’s mane, into hundreds of little blobs. She does this in order to look smart in church on Sunday.”

  “But I can’t believe that Lucy wears her hair in ringlets!”

  “Either that or an Eton crop.”

  “But that’s the very latest West End fashion!”

  “Not down here. Ever since Cromwell forbade Christmas puddings, the basins have been used, with sheep-shears, to crop hair.”

  Martin’s cackling laughter arose in front. Phillip felt himself to be almost a wit.

  “Do tell me,” went on Fiona. “What colour are Lucy’s eyes?”

  “My God!” yelled Martin. “Never in all my life so far, which has been spent almost exclusively among half-wits, have I had to listen to such utterly footling questions! Here we are in God’s own country and all you can talk about is human hair!” He proceeded at five m.p.h. to increase his distance from Fifi.

  “When Martin’s not out in the open air, and the sun, he is never really himself,” she explained.

  “But he is in the open air and the sun!”

  “What I mean is that he was very depressed when he arrived yesterday, because it might rain all the time. But to be serious for a moment. Is Lucy’s hair really Eton cropped?”

  Martin stopped. He pointed into the sky. “What’s that bird?”

  “A buzzard.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Pounces on rabbits and rats. It’s a hawk, one of the short-winged species.”

  “Its wings look long to me.”

  “Does it take the farmers’ hens?” asked Fiona.

  “No, but it will sometimes wait on walled hedges to take rats which come after the corn for the farmers’ hens. Hello, I can see the Guides’ campfire smoke! They’re behind that wall, out of the south-west wind.”