“What did you do with the swift?”
“It was crawling with lice, so I put flea powder on it, but it died of fear in my hand. So I brushed it and gave it to Eric our cat, who wouldn’t eat it. So I buried it under the pear tree with the old dried-up black pears still hanging on, for compost.”
The blossom on the gnarled pear-tree in the garden had fallen to form new fruit, nourished by Lucy’s hens in the orchard. Small boys in the village were now at their annual rite of tearing-out nests in hedges, copses, and spinneys of level farmlands. Jonathan saw one boy with a long-tailed tit’s nest, moulded of grey lichen covering mosses, horse-hair, sere grasses and lined with hundreds of hen’s feathers—each feather borne cross-wise in a tiny beak against the winds of uncertain English weather. Jonathan told the boy that the birds would be grieving. The boy, with pale-faced inhibited desperation, punched him and made his nose bleed and Jonathan went home feeling sad and ashamed because he could never fight for himself.
“You will be interested to hear,” said Tim to Phillip, “that the prisoner-of-war camp is now empty, awaiting demolition. The Ukrainian soldiers have gone, some I think, to Australia. The Prussian doctor, who was on von Rundstedt’s staff, called to say good-bye with the English nurse, the other evening. Both asked me to thank you personally, on their behalf.”
“They were so glad to find somewhere to sit and talk together, the poor dears,” said Lucy. “Well, and how are you getting on? Have you made many friends, other than the Riversmills and Molly and her little family, I mean?”
“Oh yes. There’s ‘the Mad Major’, as some call old Piston, who was with me in the nursing home in nineteen-sixteen, and his mother. They’re both a bit cranky, but otherwise quite pleasant people. There’s an American writer, Osgood Nilsson, and his wife —he belongs to the Barbarian Club, I’ve had a slight acquaintance with him there for some years. And Molly’s cousin, ‘Buster’ Cloudesley, who you met at the farm. He’s an awful nice man—so balanced. Well, I must be off now, I suppose. I hope to call in and see Piers Tofield on the way back.”
Phillip had come to draw the family’s holiday caravan to the moor. Laura had written that she was returning from Corfu, and the idea was that she would live in the caravan, and there work on the biography of ‘Buster’s’ father, until the family came down at the end of July. Then she would return with her script to The Eyrie. No scriptual servitude, as she called it, during Saturday and Sunday. Then she and Phillip would explore the countryside, sandy shores and rocky headlands—even tramp across Dartmoor! This time, all was to be as regular as clockwork.
“You know my aunt Dora died, I suppose, Lucy?”
“Yes, my dear, we did. Poor darling; and how sad it must have been for you. What an awful winter it has been for everyone.” Lucy didn’t like to ask if Phillip was proposing to live in the cottage. “Where was the funeral, at Lynton?”
“She asked in her will to be cremated, and her ashes taken out to sea. I was the only mourner, for Elizabeth couldn’t come, but she got someone from the Trustee Department of the Bank to represent her, and her interests. Aunt Dora left everything to her.”
“Oh.”
“She made another will just before she died, it appears. The Bank official practically ignored me. He took away all the family papers, including her German mother’s pedigree, grandfather Maddison’s diaries, her own diaries and letters, family photographic albums—in fact everything, before he locked the door and left.”
“I suppose Elizabeth was the sole beneficiary?”
“Yes. Doris was left out, as well as me. Anyway, she died in the winter, too. God, it’s like a Greek play—one is destroyed by a fault in one’s character. There was a post-mortem to determine cause of death, and apparently she died from iodine poisoning. She went from doctor to doctor until she got one to give her iodine injections to cure a non-existent goitre.”
“Poor Doris! She was always so stubborn, wasn’t she?”
“I saw how her obstinate streak built up when my father beat her for threatening him—she was then about four years old—‘With a big knife’, for making Mother cry. She wouldn’t say she was sorry, but continued to defy Father. He beat her again and again, but she would not give in. She was lost to life, or that part which is love, from that moment.”
“What will happen to her two boys?”
“Doris had her share in Grandfather Turney’s trust, when Mother died, and I suppose there’s her pension, it may be commuted to a lump sum. I don’t really know. I only knew about her death when Elizabeth wrote to me and told me that it was my duty, as head of the family, to provide for them.”
“Why can’t Elizabeth help? She’s got enough money, surely, from Father’s death, and now Aunt Dora’s?”
*
Tim had tested the towing bar of the Silver Eagle, and the automatic brakes of the caravan. Pumped up the tyres, greased points etc., while Lucy cleaned the interior, equipped with two beds, cooking stove (oil) and oil-lamps. Plates, cups, table things —blankets—all in order for when Phillip should come to take it down to Devon.
“Would you like Peter, David, and Jonathan to come down and help you in the summer holidays, my dear? They could bicycle down by easy stages, avoiding main roads wherever practicable. It should take four days.”
“If you could fit up the boys with a button’d hip-pocket, each could take three pounds. That should see them through.”
“I’ll see that the pockets are in order, and that they have the money. Well, if you must go now, you must, I suppose. Can’t you stay another day, and rest? You look so tired, my dear. Come for a walk with us in the park. It’s so lovely there, now. The old dwarf oaks are said to have been standing there since Plantagenet times.”
He hesitated; then said he must go.
“Well, we’ll try and see you in the summer then, may we, the boys and Sarah and I?” She hesitated, while her cheeks coloured. “I rather think that Melissa wants to study at a place on Exmoor, where there’s a school for a new kind of spiritual healing. Perhaps you’ve heard of it—I think he’s a naturalised German, who lives at Oldstone Castle, I think she said.”
“I’ve just heard of it. Well, thank you for all your kindness. How good the caravan now looks!”
So while Tim got on with his precise lathe-work, turning ivory, ebony, and lingum vitae wood into little round boxes for dressing-table trinkets, Lucy and her sister-in-law wheeled their perambulators in the deserted park enclosed by the tall fences of barbed wire which had been the prisoners-of-war camp.
“I’m so glad for Phillip that he has made some friends down there, Brenda. He deserves a quiet and peaceful time after all he’s done. When I drove back to Banyards the other day, to see Mrs. Valiant, who used to work for me in the farmhouse, do you know what she said to me? ‘Pity the Captain didn’t have a thousand acres, and proper help. He looked after his men and his land well, everyone says that now in the village’.”
“He’s less nervy than he was, isn’t he, Lucy? He loves Baby Sarah doesn’t he? And she likes him. Isn’t she strong, and always laughing when she sees her father?”
“She’s got his long legs and feet, and his quickness, too. I expect she’ll grow up to be the friend Dad has always wanted—won’t you, Sarah darling?”
“Dad-dad!” cried the baby, struggling against straps to sit up, to find the father who had left while she was asleep.
*
Phillip on roads almost empty across the flats of the Brecklands, passing abandoned R.A.F. stations of the concrete aircraft-carrier lying off the coast of a to-be United Europe as urged by Hereward Birkin. The little boys will be bicycling through this heathland soon, I should be with them, O my three-speed, monthly-payment Swift of long ago!
June 1914
I am the summer night upon the downs,
The rosy streamers of the rising sun,
And long tree-shadows reaching to far copses,
Where nightingales are weary of all dream.
> O sun, thou hast freed me from the wraiths of the night!
Riding down steep Biggin Hill, I am borne on
the air of morning,
One with the spectrum-glinting grasses
On the meadow by the lakes of Squerryes.
Where is that boy on a bicycle
In the sun of noon resting
Where wind the shadow-leafy lanes of Kent?
Afar the cuckoo calls, and nearer the quail cries
Anxious within the corn. The turtle dove
Flies to the brilliant flint-dust on the road,
And my life is for ever and ever.
I think the first volume of my novels should start before I was born, in the late ’nineties, in North-west Kent, now a brick-suffocated suburb of London, otherwise The Smoke. All the prototypes but one are dead—my parents, uncles, aunts—their photographic exteriors guarded by my dear godmother-aunt Victoria Adele Frederika Lemon, who looked at my Donkin novels years ago and said to her brother Hilary, Oh so dull and dreary. You of course are right, dearest godmother; I am beyond you, my name is Ishmael. There are two securities for man: poetry and money. Poets have risen from their near-strangled selves: Pluto, or Pluton, your unappreciated sister Theodora told me, was at first a surname of Hades, god of the lower world; Pluton the God of money, deprived of sight by Zeus, therefore Pluton gives his gifts blindly, indifferent to merit. A man based on money alone is a man distorted. Poor dead Dora, all were indifferent to your merits, except perhaps me. I told you a lie, that I was going blind.
Or was that prevision?—a little boy otherwise distorted, telling Blakian lies, angels in no-man’s-land among dead Europeans? Why are the trees of the avenue before me blurred? That telegraph post looks queer. Gould frost have split it, so that it appears to be oval? But the next one is concave—my liver, perhaps—the beer I drank last night with Tim to celebrate our getting on so well together? I had four pints; yes, it may be liver, I must drive carefully.
My sight must not blind me to what my fellow mortals see, or I shall find myself in Luthany, the region Elenore.
Here is Heathmarket, where I, a tall bony subaltern back from Flanders, found myself with the untried, the static Edwardian spirit of good form, within the presence of Rupert Brooke’s poetry, it was the summer of 1915. Bertram Baldersby, of Baldersby Towers, Berkshire, the senior subaltern who said I was an outsider, as I was, indeed.
Racehorses are still being exercised on grass, walking in file. They look to be thin, perhaps from rationing? Yet others are swelled, like those pictures of refugee children of Europe seen in newspapers, thin limbs and distended bellies. I am never really happy, something in me is pining, all the time. Poor Laura, too—she lives in the hell of childhood strangulation. We all put our hells on to others, she with a bewitching look. Cleopatra: I am dying, Egypt, dying. I have immortal longings for thee. Shakespeare was an angel of light, to divine the soul of woman.
Did poor, silly Bertram Baldersby suffer? He was killed later on the Western Front. He was rather like Brigadier Tarr—a lost child, seeking rest from torment, peace in the body of any young woman. Bald-headed, stumpy, pushing his middle parts of fortune against padded fork after fork: fashioned public school drink-jag’d lecher, feeling female breast with circular movement of hand and grinning, “Ring me up sometime, I’ll come hard on your call”. Wishful thinking, out of a torment of self-ruin? No communication with the feelings of others. He must suffer greatly—even a bird of prey tastes grief. Or are there some who enjoy killing for self-righteousness’ sake? Who say, The only good German is a dead German.
What say you, Wilfred Owen? Are you still haunting the Western Front, on guard, lest it happen again?
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever mourns in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Oh hell, I can’t see through the orbs of my own eyes, I have gone too far south, stupidly, unthinkingly, I have taken the road across the Great Plain. No, not Rockhurst; never more those hills of the morning, and the beaten-gold shimmer of the Longpond. For there I was defeated; and my dead have not yet buried the dead. Uncle Hilary, where are you now?
Suddenly exhausted, he drove on to the turf, to misspend the night by the monoliths of Stonehenge, huddled in his war-time flea-bag: an enlarged chrysalis, torn by the furies of its own failures.
Vapours of the night-brain were scattered by a dawn of great stillness and beauty, despite the lack of larksong, for all the ploughed acres of the Plain, sown to corn, had recently been sprayed by yellow D.N.G. weed-killing compound, to which sulphate of ammonia had been added by the scientists to justify their customers’—the fertiliser merchants—claim that the yellow chemicals increased harvest yields of grain. It did—by the addition of sulphate of ammonia—which caused the death of several men driving tractors pulling spraying machines whence issued noxious gases.
Phillip, after breakfast cooked on the paraffin-oil stove, wondered whether to go south and call on Aunt Victoria; or to continue on to the West Country. Should he ask her if she had referred to him as ‘the black sheep of the family’ when Father died? She wasn’t at his funeral, although it was at Bournemouth where she lived. He decided to stand up for himself for once and ask her that straight question.
*
“Well Phillip, this is a surprise. What brings you here?”
“I am wondering, Aunt Victoria, if it was my presence that kept you, firstly, from my father’s funeral, and then again, from Aunt Dora’s.”
“Why should you think that, Phillip?” the old woman replied, as her face became more pale.
“I thought that perhaps you regarded me as a waster, for I heard from my sister Elizabeth that I was the black sheep of the family, in the eyes of one of my father’s sisters.”
“What gave you that impression? Surely nothing of that kind was said by me when you were here last?”
“It was said to me before I came here, Aunt Viccy.”
“By whom, may one enquire?”
“My sister Elizabeth.”
“I am not responsible for what your sister may, or may not say, Phillip.”
“I see. Perhaps I did not hear correctly.”
“I should say that you were once the odd one out of the family. But that was some time ago, surely? Since then you have worked hard on your own land in East Anglia, and increased your capital into the bargain. You are not one, I should say, who waits for dead men’s shoes. Or should I say contrives that the shoes come a certain way?” She looked at Phillip with pale eyes. “While doing nothing to help take off the shoes of the dying.”
“On two occasions, Aunt Viccy?”
“On two occasions, Phillip.”
The old girl seemed to be cheering up, for she said, “I’m going to make some coffee. Will you join me?”
“Thank you, a good idea!”
“Have you had breakfast?”
“Yes, thank you. I am making for Dorchester, to lunch with a friend there. Then I’m going down to Queensbridge to see a doctor, who is a good eye man.”
Here I am, back in my boyhood, telling lies. I’m going north to Colham, to see if Piers Tofield is at his home, Field Place.
“If you want a really good man, go to Endicott here in Bournemouth. He still charges two guineas, as before the war.”
Over coffee and wheaten biscuits she said, “Did you know—has your sister Elizabeth told you—that I offered to name her in my will as the sole beneficiary of my estate, after the tenancy for life of Adele, my daughter and your cousin? And do you know what your sister replied, Phillip? She said to me, ‘But I am older than cousin Adele, and she isn’t likely to die before me’. Those were her very words, Phillip. I should tell you that my offer to
her included the use, rent free, of one half of this house, also I would pay all bills of housekeeping, including food, fuel, electric light, and rates. If Elizabeth became ill, I could look after her, and vice versa. But no! Elizabeth proposed that she be left a tenancy-for-life, the capital in due course to go to my daughter! That proposal was not acceptable, I told her. From me she went directly to my sister Theodora, and tried it on her. With success, this time. I’m telling you all this in confidence, mind!”
“Of course, Aunt Viccy. Still, I suppose there are other kinds of black sheep who aren’t interested in other people’s money? I am not Pluto, caring only for money. I don’t know who the god of poetry is, Apollo I suppose. He’s my sort.”
“But isn’t Pluto the god of the nether-world, Phillip?”
“Also of money—the same thing, Aunt Victoria. Zeus made him a blind giver of wealth, thus men were destroyed. And women too, I suppose.”
When Phillip left, he gave his aunt a kiss, much to her surprise, and it seemed, approval. “Do come in whenever you are this way again, and do not fail to let me know what Endicott says.”
*
Dr. Endicott. Light beam of opthalmoscope into left eye, then right.
“This eye is a lazy eye. The muscles are partly atrophied. Now the left eye again. H’m. You seem tense. Tell me about yourself.”
Dr. Endicott listened.
“I see. Well, hypertension, due to chronic frustration, can be one of the causes of opacity in the crystalline humour, tension of the globe, and possible deterioration of vision, due to a fibrous tissue behind the lens of the eye. You were temporarily blind in both eyes from mustard gas in 1918, you say. That could well be a contributory, if not altogether an initial cause of renticular fibroplasis.”
The Gale of the World Page 22
