“No, Piston,” and Phillip put an arm round the trembling man.
“People think I’m part of a motorcar,” went on Piston, suddenly happy. “They forget that just as shrapnel was invented by a Major Shrapnel of the Gunners, so the piston was invented by a bloke called Piston. Oh, I know I used to say my name came from Pistor, some old Roman god, but that was camouflage, Masson. All nature is more or less camouflaged, ever thought of that?”
“Your mind is full of baffles, like a new silencer of a motorcar. I suppose we all baffle ourselves, one way or another, old chum.”
“Caspar Schwenkfelder removed all mine, Masson. I’m now clarified. I can let myself go right out of the body into the ether, laddie! Like a yogi. My mother’s been up to the Seventh Plane. The transference took place on Oldstone Down.” Piston’s voice was low. “I thought she was dead. She did die, I think. She had a message to go up there, so we went up in the car. She stood up in the heather, on a little mound she said was the remains of a Roman fort. Archeologists say the Romans never got so far west of Exeter. But Mummy saw them, the Romans, she was quite close to them. She could almost touch them, her hands were bound, she was terrified they were going to kill her. It was a wooden fort, a look-out place above the sea, to look out for Welsh raiders on their shipping going up the Channel. Mark my words, Masson, one day they’ll dig there and find Roman remains, pottery, perhaps coins. You’ll see, I’m right!”
“I did hear about some sort of flying saucer.”
“A ring of pure light, Masson. Saul saw it on the way to Damascus. Mummy was ‘out’, her heart scarcely beating, for over an hour. When she came back, her face was young and beautiful.” Piston breathed deeply. He had gone pale, he spoke in a low voice. “She had seen Jesus. She took my book with her. Not the actual paper and binding—that’s of the letter of reality—but the spirit of my words. What’s so strange about that? They can send pictures through space, by television, can’t they? Mummy saw Jesus—” His eyes ran tears again. He took Phillip’s hand. “Masson, old boy, she says you are one of the chosen ones. She does, honestly. She says you have an aura about you, only it’s dim at the moment. You’ve not come properly through yet.”
“I’ve been through, but come back—to nothing.”
“We all do, old boy.”
“Tell me about Schwenkfelder.”
“He’s a pioneer. He started as a psychologist, but found fault with Freud’s findings. Then he saw it was a growing racket—psychiatry, I mean. So he started at the beginning. Reading Blake, who saw an angel on a tree. A true poet, Masson, he sees like Jefferies, into the unseen world, which is the true world. Schwenk, as we call him, fought in the late war, as an airman. He had a little cash, and bought Oldstone, where his pupils come and learn the procedures of Ideopraxitism. That’s Greek for—well, ideas. Ideas are cart-horses; it’s what’s in the cart that matters. Then he changed the name to Diaphany. It means Light. I’d like you come to one of Ma’s séances, and see for yourself.”
“I’d like to very much.”
“You do that, Masson. ‘Auntie’ wants to come too. And Mrs. Bucentaur, who’s a cousin of ‘Buster’ Cloudesley—you know, the bloke who lives in the woods up there, and does a lot of gliding. He was a stout fellow—badly hit after the Rhine crossing. Quite a decent bloke, Guardee-commando type. You must meet him.”
“I have met him.”
“His father tried to fly the Atlantic solo, and went down somewhere west of Ireland in the early ’thirties. His old soldier-servant, a chap called Corney, has a pub on the moor, The Marksman. A real old sweat, very regimental and keeps his place in good order. He’s psychic, too.”
Phillip thought, this will interest Laura, collaborating with ‘Buster’ on his father’s biography—if and when she returns from Prospero’s supposed home, Corfu, to get away from her supposed Prospero. Oh, I must begin my novel of my parents’ youth, and their secret marriage—
“Now be a good lad, Masson, and go and cheer up ‘Auntie’. You know what my mother calls her? Princess Eirēnē. She is, too. Reincarnation of the Greek goddess of peace. We’re all reincarnations, old boy. We live again and again, death is only a rest for the poor old body we muck about so.”
*
Followed by Bodger, Phillip went down the street overlooking the river rushing noisily around boulders of all weights up to twenty tons, he supposed: all smoothed by constant degradation through the centuries, water-quarried from the gorge below the dark trees and moving gradually down to the sea, never for a moment free of the friction and abrasion of time. Rocks: a building up by fire; destruction to detritus by water: both elemental gods of the cave-men!
He knocked at the door of Ionian Cottage. Its paint was cracked, blistered, faded. Again the friction of unoiled bolts, squeaking key chain rattle.
“Hullo, Aunt Dora. I’m Phillip.”
What had been a ghost in lamplight was now an Edwardian-clothed skeleton with protruding teeth, pince-nez spectacles covering life-averted eyes.
“Pray come in, Phillip.”
There followed an elaborate reassembly of bolts, chain, lock-tongue at war with rust.
A kitchen-table, floor space taken up by cardboard cartons filled with empty tins. Bread-board with dry curled slices of whole-meal loaf.
“I am fasting,” the voice piped remotely. “This is my thirty-ninth day. One of the evils of the past has been that the classes have all eaten too much, while the masses of working people have starved.”
She went on as to herself, “I am trying to cure my migraine by prayer and fasting.”
Bodger, who had been summing-up street-dog society, was now anxiously scratching at the front door.
“My dog is outside, Aunt Dora.”
“By all means let him come in.”
Bolts, lock, chain.
“Sit, Bodger! Good boy. He’s a cross between foxhound dam, and terrier sire.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t a bone for the little fellow.”
“Bodger’s got no teeth now for bones, Aunt Dora.”
“Have you heard from your sister Elizabeth? She is supposed to have come some weeks ago, to make her home with me.”
She sat at the other end of the table, supporting brow on hand. Thin fingers of a poet shading weak eyes. “No one in the family told me of my brother Dickie’s death. I heard it only from my bank manager.” She went on as though speaking to someone invisible, “It is all to be expected. My old home, Fawley, is gone. I suppose when my brother John died, the house died with him. Hilary is gone, too.”
“As I expect you know, Aunt Dora, Uncle Hilary sold the land to the War Department before the war.” When there was no reply he went on, “I bought land in East Anglia, and we farmed there during the war.”
She said tremulously. “Billy was killed, I am told by Elizabeth. Such a dear little boy. I was at his christening, when his baby brother was baptised with him. Lucy—” She took a deep breath, sighing inaudibly. “Divorce—no, no. It is not like the Phillip I knew.”
“We are not divorced, Aunt Dora. We are still friends.”
It was his turn to shield eyes with hand on forehead. Now she was able to look at him, to listen.
“Lucy is most magnanimous. I have made over all I haye to a trust, for her and the family. I am down here only to write—while my eyesight lasts. I may go blind.”
“Then you must fast, Boy. Fasting will cure all ills.”
The air was cold. A feeling of Time suspended. He walked home. Home! Everything would be the same when he got there. It was the same—kettle cold and fire dead, bed unmade, candle in dented Cromwellian brass stick, a late moth embalmed in the little crater out of which stood a bent black wick marking the grave of the mite who had mistaken its light for love.
And in the morning he awoke into a curious pallor. Through the casement all was white.
Snow fell with quiet resolution, drifting down gently, all that day; but in the afternoon programmes on the B.B.C. were interrupt
ed with warning to shipping in Irish Sea, Rockall, Malin Head, Lundy, the Fastnetts, Dover and North Sea. A Force Eight wind was imminent. Long, high waves were rolling before waves of air streaking the dark sea. The six o’clock weather forecast, preceding the news, gave a special warning that in places the gale would increase to Force Ten. At eight o’clock programmes again interrupted by an announcement that a Force Twelve wind, of hurricane violence, was screaming its way from the North Cape, filling the darkness with foam and spray above a completely white sea. All coastal shipping was advised to make for roads and harbours.
At midnight the wind of the Furies was upon the moor—the Erinyes of Aunt Dora, who once had told him that the euphemism of the Eumenides, the kindly ones, was a placatory term, like a dog lying on its back before a snarling aggressor.
From Padstow Point to Harty Light is a watery grave by day and by night. Phillip lying in bed thought the casement would burst, chimney tun crash through ceiling, so he went downstairs, away from the low fire and its embers scattering, at particular buffets, over the lime-ash floor—constellations of dying dwarf-stars brightening in the draught under the door. But each spark, at its brightest, flashed out.
A sleepless, an exhilarating night. Towards dawn the wind-thunder had passed; and at first light he saw drifts six feet and more deep where the wind had eddied, leaving snow quietly to lie.
All Europe was covered by snow, announced the eight o’clock news, from Northern France to the Pyrenees. Passes in the Massif Central were now impassable; trains run to standstill, aircraft grounded; Alpine towns and villages cut off. By six o’clock the hurricane had run itself out; and a long drift of cold air crossing all Europe to the Iberian peninsula.
Was there snow along the Mediterranean shore, and Prospero’s Isle stricken?
On the moor, small birds were dying, of cold and starvation. Phillip put on his skis and climbed to the southern sky, but the hummocks of The Chains were impassable. He returned, and made a way down the lane to Barbrook, but it was easier to walk, drifts varying with icy patches of shillet. The tarmac road running above the wooded gorge, following the course and descent of the river, gave good runs until the road steepened sharply to a drop of one-in-four, where he unclipped the goatskin thongs, and leaving sticks and skis over the low stone wall, went niminy-piminy, holding, stooping, sliding, down to the village. Men with shovels were digging away six-foot drifts in the main street of Lynmouth. They had not got so far as Ionian Cottage; so trudging, with difficulty to the post-office, he bought one tin of soup—all that was allowed—and began the slow, bleak return to nearly nine hundred feet above the sea. Bodger, left in the kitchen, was shivering on the sack when he returned. The dog did not move; only one eye was watching. Phillip gave him his supper, made up a great fire, and fried eggs and bacon for himself. Afterwards he danced to gramophone music, while Bodger pranced around.
*
Theodora Maddison lying on her bed in her day clothes covered only by a travelling rug, thin and discoloured, more than half-a-century old. She lay on her back, hands folded across her chest, legs crossed at ankles. She had ceased to inspire deeply, to as slowly respire. Even that effort exhausted her. She was beyond despair; she accepted, as she had accepted for years, that human life, and her life particularly, was fore-doomed to failure. She remembered how, six months ago, her sister Victoria had come to see her, ostensibly to take care of her, but had stayed only one day after learning that the Will left all to Phillip. You should not let the family capital, restored by Hilary, pass out of the family, dear Dora. It is your duty to leave your estate to my daughter, your niece Adele, after my tenancy-for-life.
The Will in Phillip’s favour had been dated September 1916. Dora had, off and on during the Hitlerian war, been disturbed by her nephew’s behaviour, as told to her by her niece, Elizabeth. So after Viccy’s abrupt departure she had written to Elizabeth, saying that if she would come and look after her—“It will not be for long, dear child”—she would make a new will leaving all to her niece. Elizabeth had replied by telegram that she would come very shortly, after she had disposed of her cottage and furniture in Dorset.
So Dora had made another Will.
Elizabeth had not come. Only her nephew Phillip had come. She had not been kind at his coming, and shown it, perhaps. That was inexcusable on her part. What ulterior motive had Boy for coming to see her? Indeed, he had had none! Poor, dear Boy: he was permantly exhausted by the First War. And she had rejected him—and on the word of that very stupid woman, Victoria. Poor Phillip, he had been the unhappiest small boy she had ever encountered. And despite that, he had made good and used his talent wisely. The Water Wanderer and The Blind Trout were already small classics. O, she had made a sad mistake! She must write to the Trustee Department at the Bank in Exeter, and revoke the will leaving all to Elizabeth. Boy must have, too, all the family papers on her mother’s side, the von Föhres of Württemburg. If Boy wished to write novels with a family background, as Thomas Mann had done in Buddenbrooks, he would require every help. Thus, with happier thoughts, Theodora Wilhelmina Maddison, spinster, aged seventy three—Eirēnē, goddess of peace to Mrs. Piston and her associates—arranged the travelling rug around her body before drawing up her knees for warmth; and with one arm around her neck, as though in a caress of love she had found with a married man, only to renounce that love of one who had died in the South African War, she lay quiescent; and with thoughts of Aeschylus, Socrates, and Euripides she passed through the valley of the Erinyes, the Furies, and went down, down to her beloved Shelley in the glooms of the halls of Pluto.
*
Phillip want to the cottage on his next visit on skis to the village, and when there was no answer to his knocking, decided that Aunt Dora had gone away. He called again a week later; no reply. She must have gone away, perhaps to visit her sister Victoria in Bournemouth.
The bleak weather continued until early March, when the thaw came. The Lyn ran high with snow water. Salmon appeared in the tidal pool, but none faced the run up through cold and turbulent waters. One morning when he went for his mail, the postman said there were several parcels for Miss Maddison, did he know when she was returning?
The following day he agreed with the village constable that a window should be forced. On going upstairs, the wasted body was seen to be lying under an old travelling rug.
An official of the Trustee Department of the Bank arrived from Exeter when death had been certified by the doctor as due to natural causes. The name of the deceased, an aunt of Phillip Maddison, author of The Water Wanderer, was published briefly in the Press.
Chapter 16
BOY ON A BICYCLE
Jonathan, in his hidey hole under the rafters of Birdy House saw, through a nesting hole made by a starling, the Silver Eagle draw up on the edge of the cobbled sidewalk below in the village street. He worked himself back from the pegged slates and stepping from joist to joist reached the trap-door and lowered himself on his rope; to slide down two rows of banisters and, reaching the ground floor, dash into the kitchen and cry, “Dad’s come! Cor, the starlings are what-you-call tisky!”
Jonathan spent many hours, when not at school, in the attic. The spaces under the eaves were now a-rustle, for the swifts had returned from Africa to their nests.
The starlings waged territorial war with them. Frightful cruelties went on behind the small entrance-exit holes. Thin high screams of swifts, flutterings, harsh cursings of starlings. Sometimes a narrow white egg dropped from under the guttering, the shell hole’d by thrust of starling-beak. Never a larger starling-egg, azure as clear summer sky between dawn and sunrise—a colour which should have belonged to the swift, thought Jonathan, since these mysterious birds, each a thin crescent of black, never left the sky at night to roost under the eaves.
“You mean they sleep on the wing, ’bor?” asked David, imitating the east anglian vocal lilt, and inevitable diminutive of neighbour.
“That’s right, ’bor.”
“
Cor, that’s what-you-call funny, ’bor!”
“Ah, ’bor.”
Early one morning, before the sun had risen, Jonathan looked from his bedroom window and saw many black specks coming down out of the sky like a lot of gnats. He heard the swifts’ thin high whistles before he made out their scimitar wings. A flight peeled off from the main flock, and wheeled around the church steeple half a mile away, where he had seen swifts entering through ventilation slats above the belfry.
“Perhaps they go up so high to sleep above the pull of gravity,” suggested David, seriously. He was a reader of little grey-paper books about flying saucers, space-ships from Mars, and other imaginative post-war literature generally regarded with amused tolerance by most adults.
But Phillip, enjoying a meal with his children at home for Whitsun half-term, didn’t regard such stories as laughable. “What is now achieved, was once only imagined,” he quoted William Blake. “Also, the Germans had blue-prints of rockets which could reach airless space so high that the pull of gravity doesn’t exist. Where men in special clothing and oxygen masks would walk in space, and erect platforms to support great curved mirrors which would be able to concentrate sunshine on parts of the earth, to work steam turbines for generating electricity.”
“Cor,” said David, listening with mouth open.
“Also, Hitler wanted to build a great barrage across the straits of Gibraltar, and use the tides for electricity for the top half of Africa.”
Jonathan listened with a remote look in his eyes. He wanted to tell what he had discovered about the swifts. “Dad,” he said, when his father had finished, “do you mind if I tell you something? Well, you see, the starlings are attacking the swifts. Before you came, I was lying down by the little slits of light, watching a starling pull a hen swift off her two white eggs. The starling had hold of one of the swift’s pinion feathers, and it tugged and tugged the swift through that hole under the eaves. When I went down I looked in the road outside our house, and found the mother swift lying on the ground, unable to get up. She was oaring herself along with her wings. I threw her up, but she spun down again, because one of her main flight quills was missing. Also, I found the two white eggs the starling had chucked out. Now the starling intends to lay her first egg in the swift’s nest.”
The Gale of the World Page 21
