“You’re making it up!”
“I’ll spit through my hand and may it choke me if I am, miss. Major Piston said that the copyright belonged to Messrs. Jorrocks, or whoever it is prints the Bible, anyway the old lady took up a proof copy and our Lord gave it His blessing. It’s all right, you’ve got plenty of time for your bus.”
“And Mr. Maddison is really all right?”
“Looks very thin, miss. Doesn’t feed himself properly. So he can’t write, and it worries him. And others worry him, too, from what I hear.”
“What others?”
“Well, he’s an object of curiosity, if I can put it like that.”
“What are you trying to say? Has he got someone staying with him?”
“Not that I know of. I’ll meet your bus at Barbrook, it’s a lovely day, you’ll love riding up to the Hut Circles. There should be a thermal rising off The Chains by then—all that cotton grass drying—All right, keep your hair on, miss. I was about to say that if you look up you may see his Lordship going round and round like a falcon waiting on, as bird-watchers say. Are you still there? Hullo! Hullo! Oh, you’ve rung off, you bitch.”
*
The war-time bus, a single-decker, was slow and old. Gears grated, carden-shaft thumped, exhaust gases came through the floor. It was market day. The bus was filled with smallholders’ wives, many with baskets on knees, and shaggy drovers with sticks. What they said was unintelligible, weather-blurred speech amidst laughter revealing teeth rotten from acid-soil water. The man from Porlock who had stultified Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the innocence of incomprehension. Small hopes for Shelley, with his Declaration on Freedom, posted up in Lynton and Barn-staple, before being prosecuted for blasphemy. His children taken from him by law, driven to live abroad, to drown in the waters of Spezzia—
Hardy in September 1920, writing At Lulworth Cove a Century Back, where Keats had embarked for Italy in September, 1820—
“You see that Man?”
That man goes to Rome—to
death, despair;
And no one notes him now but you and I;
A hundred years, and the world will follow
him there,
And bend with reverence where his ashes
lie.”
Francis Thompson, in his Shelley essay—
Keats, half-dying in the jaws of London
and spit dying on to Italy—posterity,
posterity! posterity which goes to Rome,
weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful
inscriptions, over the tomb of Keats;
and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to
it all, since the dead boy, wherever he
be, has quite other gear to tend. Never
a bone the less dry for all the tears!
I am a puritanical harlot and my own posterity, I am weeping large-size tears for my own bones—my unwritten novels. Where, O where, am I going, and why? People are looking at me; looking away; back again. Two small boys on the cracked imitation-leather of the seat opposite are staring at me like a pair of constipated little owls. Stuffed with gurk-making greasy Devonshire pasties; staring like two forked-radish freaks with umbrellas and bowler hats and F.R.Z.S. after their names on a Sunday morning in Regent’s Park.
She stared back at them until their gaze dropped; then she said, “Do you like riddles? What is the difference between a constipated owl and a poor marksman?” When there was no reply she went on, “Don’t you know? Then I’ll tell you. I heard it on the Children’s Hour of the B.B.G. Well, speaking only for the poor marksman, he can shoot, but can’t hit.”
The owls stared, waited unblinking.
“I’m too high-brow, perhaps? Well then, are you mechanically minded? Yes? Then here’s another question for your Brains Trust —that’s you. Tell me if the thumping under this bus is due to a worn carden-shaft, or to a loose gear-box with chipped gears—or both?”
The larger of the two boys continued to look unblinking at her, then raising crooked elbows and shoulder-blades until the lobes of his ears were touching the collar of his jacket, he spread his hands in a slow gesture disclaiming all knowledge of what she was saying.
“They two boys be Frenchies, my dear!”
The over-weight farmwife across the gangway leaned sideways and said, while her bosom quivered with her words, “They boys be French boys, surenuff. Ay, they be. They’m on holiday like, come yurr vor learn our English.” She quivered over a basket and pulled out an apple turnover.
“Goo on, my dear, you ’ave it! You’m looking ’ungry like, you come a long way? You’m pale, my dear, now don’t ee deny your stummick, there be plenty more apples whoam!”
The food made her realise how hungry she was. The journey along winding valley lanes became pleasant, she was no longer isolated. Up and up the bus groaned and bumped its way, following the old coach road until it descended steeply to a village, with cottages on either side of a narrow road leading to the high moor. Grinding up in low gear, eye-smarting exhaust through the floor, steam from radiator. Her mind turning with the wheels, heaving them round—quicker, quicker—more and more desperately as the carbon-monoxide fumes polluted her bloodstream. Christ, let me get out, let me get out, and walk! Shoving herself past knees fat and knees nobbly, baskets and rush-bags, Laura jumped off and breathed deeply of sunlit air. And looking into the sky she saw ‘Buster’s’ glider, in a serene circle at three thousand feet. Thank God, thank God he was safe! And if anything had happened to Phillip, ‘Buster’ wouldn’t be gliding!
She got on the bus at the top, and sat happily looking through the window as it moved past a prospect of heathland, and afar, of azure sea and the distant coast of Wales below woolly clouds calling to mind Bards and Druids, and the magic of Merlin.
Then down, down, all the way down the valley of running waters, and there at the bend, where the bus stopped, was dear, dear Mornington holding the pony’s head, saddlery polished and even the irons shining.
*
Miranda crossed the northern slope below The Chains with Capella in attendance. Seeing smoke above Shep Cot, she laid the reins on the cob’s neck to direct it to the northern slope. Down, down a fairly steep descent, and so to a thread of water moving through swampy ground rough with clumps of purple moor grass and rush. Thus, unknowing, she crossed the West Lyn river at one of its sources.
The door of the cot was open. She found Phillip sitting by the open hearth whereon sappy oak logs hissed and fumed. He jumped up when he heard her, and took the reins to loop them through the rusty ring on the door post, saying gladly, “Do come in, dearest Coz! It’s lovely to see you!” while wondering if he dare hug and kiss her.
“I’ve baked you a plum cake, cousin Phillip. Have you finished the first number of the magazine?”
“Yes, and it’s gone to the Minehead printer. Sixty-four pages, to be sold at half-a-crown!”
He opened the parcel, to see a dark brown shrunken object that looked as if it had never seen a baking tin.
“My favourite cake! Do sit down.”
“I love this little milking stool, and the polished fire-dogs Cousin Phillip.”
“I’m going to rebuild the hearth, and bring the back forward four-fifths of the way up, and then sharply back, to limit the amount of cold air being drawn across the floor. You see, flames and smoke should enter the chimney proper through a narrow throat, like a pillar-box’s opening for letters. There’s room only for flame and smoke; no gate-crashing cold air.”
“We’ve had to have a plate glass put up below the lintol in ours, to stop it smoking. Didn’t you live like this when you first came to Devon?”
“Yes.”
“You appear to have travelled in a circle.”
“Yes, I’m now trying to round off my life.”
“Have you started the novel series?”
“My little galaxy is still nebulous.”
His eyes looked tired, so she said, “Surely a candle isn’t enough to write b
y at night? I mean, doesn’t it strain the eyes.”
“It does, rather. I’m thinking of having a small propeller fixed to an old motorcar-dynamo on a pole, to charge my car battery for extra light.”
“Cousin Hugh has an oil-engine to charge his batteries at The Eyrie. Have you seen his searchlight? It’s wizard. He’s got all sorts of gadgets.”
She began to feel nervous, her mind quested for something to say. They both said together, “Do you like gliding?” and laughed. Animated now, she said, “Did you see ‘Buster’ going over? He may be over again now! Come and see!”
Child-like, she took his hand and led him outside. There the silent movement was, slowly involving itself in a wide circle on wings that seemed calmly indifferent to all life below. Then those long and narrow wings appeared to fore-shorten, to shrink, as it banked at the. turn, to resume slow movement while appearing to be not so big.
“He’s rising fast!”
“Let’s go up to The Chains!”
Hand in hand they scrambled upwards, animals following, to reach, after nearly an hour, the crest; and there to see gossamers everywhere linking stalk and fluff of cotton-grass: myriads of silken lines from tiny spiders which had cast off into the warm airs of early afternoon. The sun’s rays were everywhere in reflection along the threads, which in multiplication appeared as a golden tunnel ever receding before them.
“Why, they’re little money spiders!” said Miranda.
Still holding her hand, he laid it for a moment against his cheek.
“Oh Miranda, if only I could write what I feel. I can see my father now, explaining that Linyphia, the money spider, releases gossamers from its spinnerets, which the wind bears up, taking the spider with it. Do you know where I last saw them, Miranda? And thought of my father, with all the love that I never had for him when I was a boy? It was in the chalk trenches of the Bird Cage, on the twentieth of March, nineteen eighteen, the day before the great German attack on a sixty mile front. It is all around me now!” he said, tremulously, his eyes strangely bright. “That morning of quiet sunshine, I sitting with ‘Spectre’ West, my Colonel, after an inspection of the Brigade battle-zone, which in a few hours was to be destroyed and overrun in the German assault. Their code name for it was Michael. I remember thinking,’ he went on like a man possessed by the most innocent thoughts, “how your shadow went everywhere with you, it was always with you, it fore-shortened when you were asleep, it arose with you when you got up, but when you were dead it did not last long, but broke up with you. How strange I should remember it so—I feel it with almost a shock! I can remember exactly how my thought seemed to flow like poetry—it remained your shadow until leaving you it was given back to the earth of your genesis, and then your earthbound self was drifting on like a gossamer, beyond the wooden crosses of the dead.”
He walked away from her, possessed by happiness, feeling that soon the impulse would come, and he would bring back all, all to life; then, returning, he saw tears in her eyes, and heard her say, behind the visor of her long dark hair, “It is all so beautiful.” She shook away the hair, and looking at him, said, “Darling Cousin Phillip, I’ll help you—I’ll do anything—so that you can write your novels!”
“Darling Miranda! You do help me, just by being you.”
A thin white thread fell from the glider and broke into a green ball of light. A whiteness fluffed above the flare, opening into a miniature parachute. An arm waved far above, and the glider was going away to the south.
“It’s a message, I’ll get it!” she cried.
HALLOWE’EN PARTY EYRIE TONIGHT BUSTER.
While they were going down to the common, they saw Laura on a horse outside the cot. When they came to her, Phillip gave her the little aluminium canister. “We’ve just collected a message for you from ‘Buster’, Laura.”
“Are you sure it isn’t another one from Shelley?”
“Well, it has just come down on this parachute. And there’s the glider up there.”
The kettle was simmering as it hung to the lapping crook. Laura refused a cup of tea. Miranda did not stay long; she was inwardly furious by the way Phillip was being treated. She mounted the cob, and saying, “See you both tonight at ‘Buster’s’,” rode away, followed by Capella.
The air seemed colder.
“Have you had any food today, Laura?”
“Food! Who wants food!”
Just as in 1939, when she had bicycled forty miles to the farm.
He filled the pot and poured a fresh cup for her. She pushed it away.
“I told you years ago you were a liar, and you are a liar!”
“What have I said?”
“It’s what you wrote! That you were going ‘to join your friend Plato’—your very words!”
“That poem was about Shelley! And it wasn’t—”
“You sent it to worry me! You wanted me to think you were going to drown yourself! You did! I know you did! O Christ, why do you haunt me? If I see a man in the street with white hair I want to follow him. I never want to see you again!”
She ran outside. He stood so still that a robin flew into the kitchen and perched on one of two boiled eggs cupped together on a plate. The bird slipped on a white dome, fluttering; tried again, stood balancing until, feeling heat under its toes, it flew with stitter-cry to Phillip’s shoulder. Laura watched through the window. Then she walked slowly to Phillip, holding out a finger to the bird. It flew out of the doorway. She put her arms round Phillip’s chest, and hid her head against his jacket. He stroked the dark hair above the white nape of neck bowed as though for execution, before bending down to cherish so vulnerable, so entangled a girl. She sighed, thrusting her face under the jacket flaps as though seeking shelter there for ever. She inspired slowly; and then releasing a deep breath, looked up at him with tender mouth and eyes.
“You don’t really love me, do you? Oh, I know the answer. No one can love me. I am a daughter of Chaos and Night. I shall send your poem to my half-brother Charon, down a tributary of the Styx.” And folding the poem, which was on a separate quarto sheet of paper, into the shape of a paper boat, she led him by the hand to the head-water of the Lyn where it flowed small and clear out of the bog.
“Shelley used to sail paper-boats, didn’t he? Perhaps I’ll be drowned one day, then you’ll be free to marry Melissa—or will it be Miranda? Or both?”
“You’ll be the one to marry.”
They went back to the cottage, where they ate the boiled eggs, followed by slices of whole-wheat bread with butter and honey.
“Oh Phillip, I am sorry. Why did you pretend you were going to drown yourself? I am sorry I was so awful to you. But when I was coming here, I lost the way, and found I was in another valley. I saw a cottage, which I thought might be yours, and went to knock at the door, leaving my horse’s reins over the gate. There was an awful black sow in the garden, eating a dreadful sort of brown fish, very thin, and covered with yellow clusters like toadstools. Then a man came to the door, and pulled me in by an arm, and Phillip, he began to masturbate himself, while shouting out what he was going to do to me! I screamed ‘Phillip!’, and he ran out of a door at the back. I ran away, and just managed to get on my horse, and seeing two figures against the sky, I made for them, and so came to this place. Is he a murderer, that man? Do you know who he is?”
“He’s called Aaron Kedd.”
“He’s sick, Phillip.”
“Of course. We’re all more or less sick.”
“All this whole moor is haunted!”
They sat on the corn-sack, before a blazing fire. She undid the buttons of his shirt and found a way in to draw fingernails up and down his spine before giving sharp jags, as though to stir him to action. He thought of Kedd and his onanistic jags, and wished she would not try to force emotion; then he thought of Miranda, and was still within himself.
“I know what you’re thinking of!” she complained, leaving him abruptly.
“I’m thinking that it’s All
hallows Night, and wondering who will be there.”
“What schoolgirls—or schoolgirl—you mean!”
She left him and went upstairs to her room. When after some minutes she didn’t come down, he went up and saw her writing in her foolscap-size diary. He sat beside her on the bed. She closed the book, and was a rather sad, voiceless creature allowing him to put an arm round her shoulder.
As they lay upon the bed, momentarily at peace, through the casement window could be seen the eastern line of the moor gradually dissolving in a gold lustre; and in dissolution coming alive with a light now denied to those gossamers which, as the sun went down to its Atlantic grave, were mere containers of the cold light of day’s end. And when Phillip had gone downstairs, Laura wrote words on a sheet of paper which she left on his bed in the next room.
This is a new beginning: the full moon is rising out of the east, to offer cold charity alike to your homeless ghosts of the living and my ruined saints of the dead; and from all these may we both be delivered, O Great Pan!
Chapter 13
HALLOWE’EN
Molly Bucentaur now felt happy that Miranda and Phillip were good friends. His coming had filled a gap in Anda’s life. The girl was intellectually mature far beyond her years. She had never been keen to be with others of her age. She missed a father, the well-named Peregrine—wanderer indeed, living for himself, anything to distract him from inner emptiness: from big game hunting in Kenya to salmon fishing in Norway—polo, deer-stalking, fox-hunting, and cricket—the complete extrovert. Perry, living on what was left of the family capital, coming home once a year, regularly, for cricket in summer; and then away again.
The Gale of the World Page 17
