‘Do nightingales eat apples?’ Bobby Angrave asked idly. He was a small, dark and handsome youth, in his second year at Oxford.
‘Why should they be supposed to?’ Stirred to interest, Mrs Martineau leant forward in her enveloping shawl. Her eyes, glittering in the near darkness, seemed to light up the waxen skin which was drawn so fearfully tight over her beautifully modelled face.
‘It’s the meaning of the Greek word, more or less. Philomel – lover of the apple.’
‘I thought,’ Charles Martineau said, ‘that it meant lover of melody. Isn’t there a little poem? “Philomel with melody, sing in our sweet lullaby” – something like that.’ He spoke absently. Like his wife, he was listening for the next burst of song from the wood.
‘Perhaps it does. But take it that way and you’re in trouble between μελος and μηλον. You have to suppose some lengthening of the vowel.’
A moment’s silence followed this learned communication by Bobby. He had lately taken a First in Classical Moderations, and was understood to be devoting this part of his vacation – dutifully spent with his uncle and aunt – to the composition of a prize poem in some ancient language. Bobby was undoubtedly very clever.
‘And still they gaz’d, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.’
It was Diana Page who had broken the silence with this. It appeared to be her role to tease Bobby Angrave. But this time – or so Sir John Appleby thought, as he studied what could be distinguished of the company in the dusk – she had come up with her joke a little belatedly. The child – for Diana could be no more than eighteen or nineteen – was for some reason less than happy. Of course there was constraint abroad in the place. Their hostess, Grace Martineau, was very ill: she had passed beyond the point at which a woman might be expected to summon even a small and intimate house party around her. And the young do not take kindly to the spectacle of human dissolution. Perhaps it was nothing more than this that accounted for the glint of something like panic in Diana. And Diana was the greatest stranger present. She was here simply as the friend of Martine Rivière, Grace Martineau’s favourite niece.
‘There!’ Martine said softly.
From the heart of the wood the tremendous song was rising again. Eternal passion – Appleby thought – eternal pain.
Charne was a plain four-square Georgian house – about the right size, as Judith Appleby put it, for a Jane Austen baronet of ten thousand a year. Charles Martineau, although not a baronet, had presumably a good deal more than that. Martineaus had lived at Charne for generations, but Charles was the first of them to have slipped out into the world and brought back a fortune, as fortunes now go. The fortune wasn’t made greatly to appear – although when one took a good look round one saw that everything was unobtrusively perfect. Judith Appleby liked coming to Charne. Her people, the Ravens, held some sort of relationship with the Martineaus, as they seemed to do with a lot of people of the same sort. Charles Martineau commonly called her ‘cousin Judith’ – a form of address which was surely coming to take on an old-fashioned air. John Appleby, who hadn’t been bred to such places, liked coming to Charne too. This was chiefly because he liked Martineau. He seemed so utterly gentle a man that the fortune he had made presented itself as a puzzle. It is usually rather tough characters who come by anything of that sort. Perhaps Charles’ nature changed when he left Charne behind him.
‘Do nightingales sing only at night?’ Diana asked. ‘Poems and things make it seem like that.’
‘Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!’ Bobby Angrave produced this with a faintly ironical effect. It was a quotation, Appleby reflected, from the poem that had been running in his own head. Again – thou hearest! Eternal Passion! Eternal Pain!
‘No, my dear.’ Mrs Martineau seemed almost shocked by Diana’s ignorance. ‘Where there are nightingales, and one listens carefully, one may hear their notes all through an afternoon.’
‘But it’s in the evening that they rev up,’ Martine said.
‘That is true. And the other birds make so much noise by day. This nightingale – our nightingale – we have heard only by night.’
‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray
Warbl’st at eve, when all the woods are still.’
This was Bobby again, and it ought to have been harmless and agreeable. But it wasn’t, Appleby thought – or not quite. Grace Martineau could be sensed as stiffening in displeasure, as if she felt Bobby – her husband’s nephew – to be guying this new poem, and so guying the bird. And it was quite possible – one suddenly perceived – that Grace didn’t much like Bobby, anyway.
And Diana Page, too, seemed not pleased, for she launched another attack on the young man.
‘Fancy spouting poetry about the nightingale,’ she said, ‘when one can sit still and listen to it! And it isn’t even difficult. Anybody could go on producing nightingales till bed-time.’
‘Try,’ Bobby said. He seemed nettled by this juvenile assault.
‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake.’
‘Try again.’
‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird.’
‘And again.’ Bobby was now mocking.
There was a moment’s silence, as Diana hesitated. Mrs Martineau, barely visible, made a faint gesture of displeasure.
‘He sings each song twice over,’ Diana said, ‘lest you should think–’
Bobby interrupted with a shout of laughter – a sound too loud for the hour and place.
‘You silly goose,’ he said, ‘that’s the thrush.’
‘Well, I think it’s true of the nightingale as well. This one has sung tonight exactly as he sang last night. So there!’
Bobby Angrave stood up – deftly capturing, in face of this apology for an argument, the air of one who tactfully breaks off conference with a petulant child.
‘I think I’ll go and have a chat with the bird,’ he said. And he strolled off into the darkness.
There was another burst of song, to which they listened in silence. The nightingale seemed to have its station at some distance from the house. The glazed loggia in which they were sitting had been added to the east pavilion – one of two small Palladian structures which served to modify the cube-like severity of the house. In front of them – which was to the south – lay a broad terrace beyond the balustrade of which the ground dropped down shallow flights of steps to the ghost of a formal garden. You could see – or in daylight you could see – the outlines of intricately patterned flower-beds. Now, except for two great stone basins – and these were dry – the whole space was grassed over. It wasn’t untended; it had merely been thus simplified, you guessed, as the consequence of some instinct on Charles Martineau’s part to seek out the spirit of the time. It wasn’t possible to doubt that he could have had gardeners working about the place by the score. Indeed, you saw as you strolled plenty of evidence of activities beyond the scope of, say, an old man and a boy. But the immediate prospect from the front of the house was like this. If you looked down from an upper window, the forsaken garden might have suggested the obscure activities of prehistoric men, which the passing of millennia had all but obliterated. But perhaps it was designed to speak rather of the future. It was what Charne, a proud and elegant façade, was fronting and sailing into. That, roughly speaking, might be the idea. It wasn’t very obtrusively asserted. The great expanse of grass, if not shorn, was controlled by expensive machines. There were gravel paths, so that in walking around you would be as secure as the baronet’s wife and daughters would have been against getting your feet wet. If you peered, it would probably be to see that the gravel was very nicely raked.
All this was now fading in the summer dusk. To the east and north the wood curved round the house at only a near remove, and this was where the nightingale sang. You could climb through the wood by various paths to higher ground – passing here and there across a glade which in spring would be a sea of bluebells, and here and there beneath enormous senatorial oaks which had been part of a great forest once. There was a belvedere that looked down a long grassy ride into a vista closed by a church tower. There were several cave-like places, decked out in the eighteenth century as grottoes with shell-work and curiously eroded stones – retreats, you had to suppose, in the height of summers fiercer than ours. There was a spring, issuing from a rocky outcrop much embellished in the same age with tritons, dolphins and urns, from which a stream ran gently downhill and through a succession of small deep pools upon whose surface the water-lily leaves were never quite still. In the wood, in fact – as Appleby vulgarly put it to himself – you had all the works. But everything was contained in no great space, you would find upon more careful survey. Go through the wood, and in no time you were in the village. And the village was now no more than the fringe of the town. The town was creeping round Charne. Still just held invisible, it was nevertheless biding its time to strangle the place.
Appleby thought of Grace Martineau, a sick woman swathed in shawls, waiting too.
‘Perhaps we should move indoors?’ Charles Martineau said. He spoke – carefully – not to his wife, but to the company at large. ‘It turns chilly. And there may be damp in the air.’
Martineau had nothing of the hypochondriac about him. The notion of damp in the air was not one that would come to him naturally. He must live at present, Appleby thought, submerged in anxious care, knowing himself on the verge of loss.
‘No, Charles.’ Grace Martineau replied before any of her guests could. ‘Let us stay a little longer. This place keeps the warmth of the sun. And we must hear the nightingale once more.’
‘Yes, of course. But would you be the better for a rug? Shall I ring for Friary on this telephone?’
Mrs Martineau had turned on a low light. She could be seen to look at her watch.
‘But, Charles, it is Friary’s hour for his little walk.’
‘So it is. But the telephone won’t go unanswered because of that, you know. Perhaps–’
‘I am quite warm. I am quite comfortable.’ The pitch of Mrs Martineau’s voice had risen a little, so that for a moment her comfort was scarcely shared by her guests. But of this she seemed at once to be aware, for she signed to Judith Appleby to take a seat closer to her, and began to speak on a relaxed note. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘about Friary’s being like a clock?’
‘I know that everything is always very punctually conducted at Charne. And when things are like that, I suppose it is the butler who is responsible.’
‘Yes – but I am thinking of this little evening walk of his. It is something about which Charles is very indulgent; he says that an evening walk ought to be within the command of anybody who sees it as a rational pleasure.’
‘Is that how Friary sees it?’
‘My dear Judith, I don’t think I could swear to that. Friary dresses for it a little too fashionably. That is to say, he puts on a well-cut dust-coat over what we may call his professional attire, and makes his way through the wood to the village. I think he goes to the Charne Arms, but no doubt he is conscious of the beauties of nature on the way.’
‘That is what we like to think,’ Charles Martineau said. He seemed to be catching hopefully at some shift in his wife’s mood. ‘It is certainly why I sanction this regular withdrawal at an hour at which butlers are commonly required to buttle.’
‘I think it very nice of you,’ Judith said. ‘It’s not as if Friary can be regarded as in a category of indulged because ancient retainers. He’s surprisingly young. And he’s good-looking, too.’
‘Ah – I see the direction in which your mind is moving.’ Charles Martineau glanced at his wife, and laughed quite gaily. ‘It appears very likely that Friary may have affairs of the heart in the village. But we prefer to suppose – just to avoid anxious thoughts – that the sole purpose of his vespertine pilgrimage is brief relaxation within some favoured circle of superior habitués in the village pub.’
‘And if he is a wooer,’ Grace Martineau said, ‘he is certainly a brisk one. I’ve never known him not be back in the music room before anybody’s bed-time, and very much in command of his decanters and syphons.’
‘He comes back through the wood?’ Judith asked.
‘Oh, certainly. It is what I was going to say. You know the little belvedere? Well, I must confess to an absurd habit, if Charles will let me. Charles, may I tell?’
‘You may.’ Charles Martineau leant forward and lightly touched his wife’s hand where it lay, emaciated and fine-boned, on the arm of her chair. It was a gesture too unselfconsciously tender to be embarrassing.
‘It was our favourite place in the grounds in the early days of our marriage. We used to sit in it of an evening and gossip famously – about our reading, and the improvements we were going to carry out at Charne, and all our neighbours for thirty miles around. They were quite new to me, for the most part, because I had been brought up in another county.’
‘The belvedere was just the right place.’ Appleby, perhaps because amused by this last territorial touch, put in this cheerfully. ‘Seclusion – and at the same time a marvellous vista.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Martineau smiled with pleasure, and nodded gently. Whatever county she had been bred in, it was evident that her present part of this one was very dear to her. ‘Well, we have been taking, Charles and I, to going there again sometimes, just at about this time in the evening. You must none of you be offended if we vanish, perhaps tomorrow evening, perhaps the evening after. You will at least be in our thoughts.’
‘Grace means,’ Charles Martineau said, ‘that we shall be gossiping about you all quite shamelessly.’
‘As soon, that is, as we have got our breath – for the climb is a little hard. And it is only Friary who will stop us.’
‘Friary has instructions?’ Judith asked.
‘Oh, no. We like to think he knows nothing about it. But we see him pass – quite close by – and so punctually that it is like having a clock in the belvedere. Which is what I was saying when I started rambling. And then, you see, we come away, Charles and I. Usually together, but sometimes first one and then the other. For we like to show that we can be a little independent of each other still.’
Grace Martineau stopped speaking – and upon her last words there succeeded a silence it might not have been easy to break. Tactfully, the nightingale ended it with another burst of song. They listened until there came a pause.
‘You know, until quite lately, we used to have kingfishers by the stream.’ Mrs Martineau spoke, this time, in a low voice, as if for Judith Appleby’s ear alone. ‘I am afraid we shan’t see them again. But the nightingales have come back, as I have longed for them to do.’ She leant forward, and touched Judith’s arm. ‘There…you see?’
On one of the grassy paths issuing from the wood there had appeared the figure of Friary. His coat could certainly be distinguished as sitting well on him. He moved briskly and with a light tread. He might have been a son of the house, Appleby thought, who had been out and about some necessary business on the estate. One rather expected a hail from him or a casual wave.
But, of course, nothing of the sort occurred. With his gaze decorously averted from his distant employers and their guests, Friary turned right, and disappeared round the back of the house.