Free Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons Page A

presently she passed the white gates of the drive.
    She walked slowly, staring, and wondering what the people who lived there were doing. He would be in London, of course; but she could hear laughter and cries and the soft energetic thud! of balls on overstrung rackets coming from the tennis courts, the whirr of a mowing-machine and the joyous yelping of a young dog. Happy house! where everyone was busy and entertained all day long!
    This road was lonely, but presently she came to a crossroads, one of which led to the main road from Colchester to Bracing Bay, and here there was a settlement of iron shacks, kiosks and a filling-station, with one or two little cottages so plastered with TEA notices and NEW-LAID EGGS notices and CIGARETTE notices and LADIES and GENTLEMEN notices that their formerly decent faces could barely be seen. Two taller cottages, without any notices, standing half-retired in the green shades of the wood, caught her glance, and she sauntered along the path which led to them.
    They were joined together, two grey little buildings with peaked roofs and ‘St Edmunds Villas 1893’ on a scroll across their front. One was empty and falling to ruin, with broken windows and a sealed door round which the spring grass was blowing. The front door of the other stood open before a patch of glowing green grass thinly sown with the cool purple-blue heads of bluebells.
    Viola lingered to admire the flowers, and to stare into the house’s little parlour. An attempt had been made there at elegance; the walls had recently been re-covered with a cheap buff-coloured paper, and two or three dim old watercolours and photographs were sparsely arranged on them as though someone had just learned that over-crowded walls are unfashionable. A shiny new wireless cabinet, made of cheapest varnished wood, stood in one corner and pieces of bright blue material had been arranged over the shabby seats of the horsehair chairs. Two rugs from Marks and Spencer’s, the colour of mud, covered the most worn parts of the carpet.
    Even to Viola’s casual glance the little parlour looked depressing and mean. The only pretty thing in it was a bunch of Solomon’s Seal stuffed into a Woolworth vase on the round Victorian table, and even the long leaves and thick white bells of these were limp, as though dying for water.
    As she lingered staring, the door into the parlour was jerked open. Someone came in, glanced sharply at her and slammed the front door. Embarrassed, she walked on.
    The woman who had slammed the door hurried back into the scullery, whence came a cloud of smelly steam; and presently a low dismal sound began, which gradually increased until words were distinguishable. Even at this stage the noise could hardly be called talking; it was rather a sort of grizzling through parted lips while the hands of the grizzler were hard at work.
    It was Mrs Caker, complaining about everything.
    ‘… proper mucky, they are, worse’n worse every week. If I weren’t afeared o’ losin’ the work, I’d speak to she. Aye, mingy owd cat, she is, sendin’ blankets out ter wash ’stead o’ to the larndry, and her dog’s pillow-covers … disgrace, that’s what they are, disgrace. Aye, if it weren’t for the money, that’s what I’d do, for sure, on’y how’m I ter know he won’t walk out of the house one day and leave maye wi’ on’y the washin’, an’ where’ll I be then? Proper hard he is, an’ cunnin’. Wish I know’d what he gets … ah, wish I knew! The maids up there might know; count I might ask ’em, on’y they’re soo high an’ mighty. He might tell maye, his own mother, aye, he might. ’Tis his dooty, for sure, to tell maye.’
    She stood upright, straightening her back with a little moan.
    A green woodland light fell through the dirty window of the scullery, and gave a ghostly look to her face as she glanced up. She had been a very pretty woman, and her large blue eyes, delightfully set in her head with an