Free Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons Page B

attractive slant, were still beautiful; her little nose was pretty too. But she had hardly any teeth; dirt was grimed into her skin, and her expression was discontented. She had thick brown hair, badly cut in a bush and caught with a pink mother-o’-pearl slide; a dirty blouse was pulled tightly over her bosom, and the hem of an old-fashioned skirt made of very good but very dirty cloth dipped in pools of water on the stone floor. This was Me Skirt; she had worn it for twenty years, and hoarded it for years before that. It had the rounded hips and braided hem of the early 1900s.
    The deep blue eyes, swelling bosom, and a hint of laughter in her look, shining through the discontent, made her a woman that men would always want to talk to. She looked as though she would grizzle but take nothing seriously.
    ‘Nothen to him, it isn’t,’ she went on, bending again over the tin bath. ‘“ Why don’t you get up earlier ,” says he (mimicking). ’Cause I don’t care to trouble, mie lad, that’s why. When I am up, there’s no comfort, no prosperity nowhere. Never thinks I might like a drink up The Arms, never takes maye to the Pictures—’
    Slam! A bowl of steaming clothes went down on the greasy flagstones.
    ‘… aye, he’s ashamed o’ maye, that’s what it is. Maybe I have got a bit slumocky, had enough to make maye, t’ain’t as though I were old yet. I’m not old, nay, I’m not. If t’weren’t for the old man, where’d I be for a bit o’ company? Aye, much he cares. A bad son he is, bad and cunnin’. And who’d wash his seven shirts a week if I died? Seven shirts a week to wash ’n iron for him, and no prosperity nowhere.’
    While she wrung the last drops from a cheap shirt of pale blue cotton, the scullery door opened and a man, outlined against the bright forest landscape, stood looking into the little cell.
    ‘Mother, is my shirt ready?’ he asked crisply.
    ‘Aye,’ she answered, not looking round.
    It was the beautiful young chauffeur.

CHAPTER V
     
    For a fortnight nothing interesting happened.
    The weather, the sky and woods, grew steadily more lovely as the spring deepened, with its exciting feeling of promise that ends in the black-green trees and almost silent birds of August. But none of the people in this story could be satisfied with perfect weather and landscape; they wanted other things.
    Mr Wither said not a word more to Viola about their little talk. When she thought about this silence of his, she was disturbed for her future, and wondered if he would turn her out of The Eagles, and almost hoped that he would, because then she would have to go and live with Shirley; or go back to work in the shop and live with Catty or one of the aunts. She would not mind doing that, if she could go to town sometimes and see Shirley and The Crowd.
    Mr Wither, however, was not going to turn his daughter-in-law out. He did not think it necessary to tell her this, because he had never threatened to turn her out, and therefore did not consider that she needed reassuring; but his mind was made up. There she was; there she would have to stay. Mrs Wither had made it up for him. She agreed with him that Viola was a silly, extravagant and rather deceitful girl, but she gave a number of reasons why she should be allowed to stay. All the cousins would Say Things if she went, she did not really cost much to keep if one thought of their income (though I know that we are not rich, said Mrs Wither hastily) and she was, after all, their dead son’s wife. Also, she was company for Tina.
    Madge ought to be enough company for Tina, objected Mr Wither. Her own sister.
    Madge has her golf and tennis, dear, said Mrs Wither. She is not really much company for Tina. Tina is very fond of Viola, she said so the other day.
    Oh well, then. Mr Wither supposed that Viola must stay. After all, he seldom saw her except at meals, and though he would never forgive her for having deceived him about the money, she now gave him no