It Was the Nightingale (9 page)

*

In the private ward Barley was lying, with earthenware hot-water bottles covered with red flannel against her feet and her ribs, and a flat rubber bottle wrapped in a towel on her stomach. In her state of collapse, following the haemorrhage which had filled the uterus while in the midwife’s bedroom and broken out when she was lifted upon the stretcher, it was impossible to get into the vein at the elbow joint through the skin, so the vein was
cut down with a scalpel and exposed. A canula was inserted into the vein, with a yard of rubber tubing attached to the canula. At the other end of the tubing was a glass funnel, with a sterile gauze laid in it to strain the blood as it was poured in from a height. The mixture of Phillip’s blood in a solution of sodium citrate passed slowly through the gauze, it moved down slower and slower until it ceased to enter the vein through the canula. The pulse had stopped.

*

The matron was speaking to Phillip, sitting up on the couch.

“Your wife is asking for you. Now you must be calm, and give her all your assurance, Mr. Maddison. You must be prepared to see a change in her, but above all, she needs your help. So be calm, and trust in God.”

He followed her to the private ward, and saw figures by the bed, red rubber pipes and glass-ware, an oxygen cylinder with more pipes and a mask—detached from the head lying back on the pillow, the bloodless lips, the pale sunburn on the hands lying on the counterpane, the eye-lids curiously shrunken, the pale brow, the wan face composed as though beyond resignation, come to a quietude of its own and far away from the Barley he had known in sunlight. He knelt by the bed, biting on his teeth to keep back his thoughts as he took the hand with Spica’s ring upon one finger and held it against his unshaven cheek, feeling it to be cold; and leaning over the bed, he stroked the brow, and laid his cheek against her face, and heard the whisper of “I’m—so—sorry——”

He held both her hands, pressing them with his own while willing life into her, his own life to be emptied into her while trying to force all his life into thought to give her strength.

Someone lifted him up from his knees beside the bed, a man in darkness who had come to the end of the world.

*

The baby, a boy of seven-and-a-half pounds, was left in the Cottage Hospital, and Phillip went back to Malandine to pass the day somehow—walking about, picking up dog and cat and otter in turn, appealing to them as though they were human, climbing to the bedroom to find it exactly as it was before, descending again to see everywhere relics with power to wound anew with their love and tenderness—her small sand-shoes, one with the broken lace; the brown felt hat, with the elastic still sewn to keep it from blowing
off, the school hat she had worn at Victoria Station when she had flown to his side from the boat-train;
I
am
all
your
friends
; and now she had gone away for ever. No, no! She was in the room, she was with him in his tears, she was bright in the darkness, she was love, telling him he must not grieve, she was watching over him, and his son, their son, who was, did he remember, to be called Willie for she had felt sure the baby would be a boy.

But what had he done? She had asked him, and asked again, to go to see cousin Willie when he was in trouble; and he had demurred—the fatal blank in his nature. She had
known
; he had denied her intuition, as he had denied his own, accepting the unimaginative assurances, based on laziness, of the midwife’s mother. He was to blame, not that wooden woman; from a sense of cursed gentility, of bogus good manners, he had denied his clearer vision, and so was entirely to blame for her death.

No, no, her wraith seemed to be saying, you must not blame yourself: or was his mind prompting his own ideas? He closed his eyes and on his knees prayed for simplicity and clearness, saying phrases heard idly in church long ago, among them,
Father,
into
Thy
hands
I
commend
my
spirit.

Mrs. Crang’s supper, cooked for him, a plate of baked rabbit with potatoes and sprouts lay on the table; he could not eat it; he gave it to the animals, who between them cleared up all except the sprouts, which he could not throw on the fire, it seemed too unkind, but took out and buried in the freezing compost heap at the bottom of the garden; and walking down to the sea, saw the morning star rising above the crags and pinnacles of Valhalla.

*

Hetty came down the day before the funeral, and he was glad that his mother was staying with him, for she had loved Barley. She loved the baby, too, and holding it in her arms said, “He is just like you, Phillip, your eyes were very big, too.” Then to the baby, “You’re going to be a friend to Phillip, aren’t you, Sonny?” The use of this name moved him, for Barley had sometimes called him ‘Sonny’, a name which had always stirred a faint impatience in him when Mother had used it: but now …

When his mother was going back, as the train was moving out of the station, and he walked beside the carriage, he was crying voicelessly,
Call
me
Sonny
again,
just
for
once
—but all he said was, “I’ll come up soon, and see you again, Mother.”

He ordered a small stone of white marble, with her name on it,
Teresa
Jane
Maddison,
aged
19
years,
and below, carved from the stone, a device of reaping hook severing a rose bud from the stem.

*

George and Boo were invariably kind, always welcoming his visits. George could not do enough for him, giving up his chair by the fire, always cheerful and ready to tell stories about the village people, the old pater, and others; but Phillip did not hear what George was talking about, he shut himself away from the slightly derisive attitude of George towards others—behind their backs. No imaginative life in George, no divining truth—only kindness. He was remorseful when away from George, yet could not bear his presence. Even Boo was a sort of echo of George.

He met friendly faces in the village, for Barley had been liked by everyone; nevertheless he must leave the place, he must go, he must give notice: burn all they had shared and made together in the dark little cottage. He must go away—leave it all—move to another district—but where? Where? He thought of Willie’s first cottage beside the disused lime-kiln as a refuge; he must go there; he could not spend another night in Valerian Cottage. He went there on his motorbike, and mooned around only to return again, to find Rusty waiting for him, and Moggy: but no Lutra.

There was a hole dug beside the pig’s-house where the otter had been kennel’d, and another hole inside.

“Us zeed’n go!” said Walter Crang. “’A called to ’n, but ’a took no notice. Reckon ’a be zomewhere down the stream, maister!”

He walked down the stream towards the sea, calling and whistling, urging Rusty to pick up the otter’s scent, saying repeatedly, “Find Lutra! On to’m, Rusty! Where’s Lutra? Find’m, find’m! Good boy, Rusty, find Lutra!”

She had loved Lutra, feeding him first with pen-filler, nursing him against her heart, nourishing the cub back to life, giving him her care, her love—he must find Lutra—someone might kill him——

The night was dark, he walked with hands held out before him; and suddenly, in front somewhere, Rusty barking hysterically, then yelping with pain. What had happened? He ran, coming to the dim line of the stream bank, where he stopped,
heard hissing and yikkering, the clank of metal on stone—Lutra in a rabbit gin!

The otter recognised his scent; there followed a period of wild contorted leaping, of blowing and hissing while Lutra bit on steel, leapt into the air and fell short when checked by the chain, to lie there gasping. He pulled off his jacket and threw it over otter and gin, but it was impossible to get the trapped animal to keep quiet. He was bitten through the flesh of his left hand while trying to hold down the head and kneel on the spring, to release the serrated jaws. Abruptly the struggle was over, the otter gone.

He ran back for an electric torch, to search around the area of trodden grass. There were two horny toe-claws near the gin. He followed the course of the stream, and found Lutra’s footmarks on a mud scour over which he had passed. He saw blood in the marred print of the off-fore foot.

Below the scour the water ran fast into the reedy mere behind Malandine beach. He whistled and called. Only curlews feeding on sandhoppers along the tide-line answered him as they flew away in fear.

*

Phillip left for London, to stay with his young cousin Arthur at Cross Aulton in Surrey. They shared a large double brass-and-iron bed in an attic den. When alone during the day he made himself write a story about an African baboon, and then another about a hunted hare. In the evenings Arthur walked with him on the North Downs, Phillip trying to put away his thoughts, to exhaust himself so that he might sleep.

“Father and Mother would be very pleased to let you have the attic room to yourself, Phillip, if you would care to live for a time with us. There’s the tennis club, with twenty hard courts, if you care to join. I’d be very pleased to put you up for membership.”

While on the Downs he longed for the security of the attic room at night, sharing a pair of divided headphones while listening to dance music from the Savoy Orphean and Havana Bands on the crystal set from 2LO; and later music from France, weak reception but something to hold off the gaping blackness of his mind. After the
Marseillaise
on its worn record at 1 a.m. he was left with the faint crackling of stars and meteorites; and the soft snoring of his cousin. He lay heavy with grief until, feeling the oppression to be unbearable, he got up quietly and went downstairs,
put on his trench-coat and in slippers walked down the road and so to the Downs, past the high walls of the lunatic asylum, which did not always shut out screams and cries echoing his own pain in the darkness.

Reaching, beyond the new houses, the thin sward on the chalk, he lay down to let the heavy feeling behind his life fill all his limbs, and by breathing slowly and deeply tried to raise her spirit from the grave, to open the closed eyes of the thin face in the coffin, in imagination going down in the earth to be close to her, to pray to be dead beside her, to become tubercular again as he had been when first he had gone to Devon, and to lie beside her in a gush of his own blood as she had died. This dreadful vision did not last; he knew it for a tissue of grief, to be stripped off; but it recurred until one night in April he heard a nightingale singing. Then his tears broke.

Afterwards he thought, Was it not singing for the honour of life, which was maintained by love? Breathe deeply, slowly, trust in the spirit of poetry, think of the great generations of the dead, of their incurious serenity within the azure of the sky. Remove dark thoughts of defeat by clear thought, accept the light of the sun by day, and the stars by night!

He got up, and cold in every limb, went back to the house, knowing that his duty was to think no more of himself, but of his mother, Irene, his sisters, Bob Willoughby—and the helpless baby. He would go to see Irene, and then to—the battlefields. ‘Speak for us, brother, the snows of death are on our brows.’

*

“I’ll come back again, Arthur, if you will still have me. I won’t stay so long next time, I know I’m utterly boring.”

“No you’re not, Phillip. Please come back and live with us. May likes you, so does Topsy. So do I. We’ll go for more walks, and I’m sure you will like the tennis club socials.”

*

Once again it was Easter, the
rapide
slowly creeping around Paris: long movement through the night, endure, endure, said the wheels. Life is a spirit, and God is love; endure, endure.

He walked up and down the platform in the sunrise at Bordeaux, up and down while waiting for the slow train for Pau with its wood-burning engine. Then he was sitting in the same yellow-varnished carriage with straight wooden back and hard seat.
Slowly, with much puffing of the forced draught, it drew into Pau. Another wait for an older engine to Gan. At last, at last Arudy; and then his heart seemed to be labouring with the engine hauling the carriages up the valley of the Gave d’Ossau, while he felt upon him the cold turbulence of the snow-waters; and with a shock saw the board of
Laruns.

On the wooden platform stood Irene, her hair silvered by her ears, smiling as before, but when the smile ceased he saw that her eyes were set as though beyond him, while yet seeing him.

“You must be very tired, P.M.”

“Oh no,” he said, and stepping out on a left foot that suddenly wasn’t there, fell upon the board-walk.

“Oh, poor P.M., isn’t that your wounded leg? I should have warned you of the steepness!”

“Just a momentary cramp, Irene.”

When he had had tea, she said, “Tell me about my grandson. Is he fair like his mother, or dark like his papa?”

“The hair was dark, but is now becoming fair. And he has his mother’s eyes.” It was a breaking moment: the pale face in the coffin, the eyes unsunned.

“I am simply longing to see my grandson!”

He sat with Irene through most of the night, playing Tchaikowsky and Grieg and Dvorak on the gramophone, drinking brandy and coffee and eating relays of bread and
saucisson
; he held her in his arms and laid his cheek on her head, comforting her, the ice within melting into tears as at times it seemed that Barley was near, looking directly at him, as though her will-power were being directed into and for him, so that the sense of loss was kept at a distance, as if life were a dream and beyond the dream she was alive and it would be natural to see her walking into the room, when she would never leave him again.

But—the truth was that his weakness, his cursed diffidence had led to, if not directly caused, her death, as it had that of Lily Cornford; and in lesser degree, he had betrayed Willie, Spica, Annabelle, and Sophy. He must have been talking aloud, for he heard Irene saying, “No, no, P.M.! You must not think like that, my dear! It would be the last thing Barley would want. Life must be faced, it must go on, Phillip.”