Once, years—oh, years and years—ago, when he had been aged twelve and on a visit to Grandfather, he had taken a gun to Redcar sands from Groby, over the moors, and with one shot he had brought down two terns, a sandpiper and a herring gull. Grandfather had been so delighted with his prowess—though naturally the shot had been a fluke—that he had the things stuffed, and there they were in Groby Nursery to this day. The herring gull stiff on a mossy rock; the sandpiper doing obeisance before it, the terns flying, one on each side. Probably that was the only memorial to him, Mark Tietjens, at Groby. The younger children had been wont to refer with awe to “Mark’s bag” for long years afterwards. The painted background had shown Bamborough Castle with lashings of foam and blue sky. It was a far cry from Redcar to Bamborough—but that was the only background the bird-stuffing chap in Middlesbrough could paint for seabirds. For larks and the like he had a cornfield in the Vale of York; for nightingales, poplar trees. … Never heard that nightingales were particularly partial to poplars!
… Nightingales disturbed the majesty of great nights. For two months out of the year, more or less, according to the nature of the season. He wasn’t decrying the beauty of their voices. Hearing them you felt like seeing a good horse win the St. Leger. No other things in the world could do it—just as there was no place in the world like Newmarket Heath on a breezy day. … But they limited the night. It was true that nightingales deep down in the spinney near where Gunning’s hut must be—say a quarter of a mile away—could make you think of great distance, echoing up through the deep woods. Woods dripping with dew beneath the moon. … And air-raids not so long ago! The moon brought air-raids and its shining was discouraged. … Yes, nightingales made you think of distance, just as the nightjar forever crepitating from twilight to dawn seemed to measure a fragment of eternity. … But only fragments! The great night was itself eternity and the Infinite. … The spirit of God walking on the firmament.
Cruel beggars, nightingales: they abused one another with distended throats all through the nights. Between the gusts of gales you could hear them shouting on—telling their sitting hens that they—each one—were the devils of fellows, the other chap, down the hill by Gunning’s hut, being a bedraggled, louse-eaten braggart. … Sex ferocity.
Gunning lived in a bottom, in a squatter’s cottage, they said. With a thatch like Robinson Crusoe’s bonnet. A wise-woman’s cottage. He lived with the wise-woman, a chalk-white faced slattern. … And a granddaughter of the wise-woman whom, because she had a cleft palate and only half a brain, the parish, half out of commiseration, half for economy, had nominated mistress in the school up the hill. No one knew whether Gunning slept with the wise-woman or the granddaughter; for one or the other he had left his missus and Fittleworth had tanned his hide and taken his cottage from him. He thrashed them both impartially with a hunting thong every Saturday night—to learn them, and to remind them that for them he had lost his cottage and the ten bob a week Fittleworth allowed such hinds as had been in his service thirty years. … Sex ferocity again!
“And how shall I thy true love know from another one?
Oh, by his cockled hat and staff and by his sandalled shoon!”
An undoubted pilgrim had suggested irresistibly the lines to him! … It was naturally that bitch Sylvia. Wet eyes she had! … Then some psychological crisis was going on inside her. Good for her.
Good for Val and Chris, possibly. There was no real knowing. … Oh, but there was. Hear to that: the bitch-pack giving tongue! Heard ye ever the like to that, sirs? She had had Groby Great Tree torn down. … But, as God was her maker, she would not tear another woman’s child within her. …
He felt himself begin to perspire. … Well, if Sylvia had come to that, his, Mark’s, occupation was gone. He would no longer have to go on willing against her; she would drop into the sea in the wake of their family vessel and be lost to view. … But, damn it, she must have suffered to be brought to that pitch. … Poor bitch! Poor bitch! The riding had done it. … She ran away, a handkerchief to her eyes.
He felt satisfaction and impatience. There was some place to which he desired to get back. But there were also things to be done: to be thought out. … If God was beginning to temper the wind to these flayed lambs … Then … He could not remember what he wanted to think about. … It was—no, not exasperating. Numb! He felt himself responsible for their happiness. He wanted them to go rubbing along, smooth with the rough, for many long, unmarked years. … He wanted Marie Léonie to stay with Valentine until after her deliverance and then to go to the Dower House at Groby. She was Lady Tietjens. She knew she was Lady Tietjens, and she would like it. Besides, she would be a thorn in the flesh of Mrs. … He could not remember the name. …
He wished that Christopher would get rid of his Jewish partner so as to addle a little brass. It was their failing as Tietjenses that they liked toadies. … He himself had bitched all their lives by having that fellow Ruggles sharing his rooms. Because he could not have borne to share with an equal, and Ruggles was half Jew, half Scotchman. Christopher had had, for toadies, firstly Macmaster, a Scot, and then this American Jew. Otherwise he, Mark, was reconciled with things. Christopher, no doubt, was wise in his choice. He had achieved a position in which he might—with just a little more to it—anticipate jogging away to the end of time, leaving descendants to carry on the country without
