Does he see only footprints of Willie leading to the wind’s oblivion? I must ask the sea, I must let myself drift, drift, for on such a day as this the ocean’s pulse is all gentleness. Each wave rises thin, and its leading edge falls gently, to tinkle its white drops upon my face and back. I have miles of sand to myself and only the ring-plovers and shore-larks to see my naked body. I am the wave, the sea-shell, I am known to Botticelli and Milton—
And sitting naked among little waves, she murmured to herself,
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou are sitting
Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save—
Now the sun had gone down below the smouldering rim of ocean, night was coming to the earth. Then as she wandered along the tideline she saw flames on the beach half a mile away.
There Phillip was kneeling, feeding drift-wood to the fire, thinking of the beacon built by Julian Warbeck in the night of the recovery of Willie’s body from the sea.
“Find Laura, Bodger! Goo’ boy—find Laura!”
He sat under the peering stars, the drift-wood fire burning yellow with salt in the wood, and was about to search for more fuel when he saw a dark form coming towards him, and he was comforted a little by Bodger’s cold nose touching his hand.
Chapter 20
TO THE WEST
Miranda brought to her mother in the kitchen a letter with a Suffolk postmark. “Who do you know who lives in Bussdall?”
“Oh, it will be from cousin Lucy, I expect, to say when she’s coming down with Melissa.”
“Who’s Melissa?”
“Lucy’s cousin, as well as mine, darling.” Molly always tore open envelopes. “They’re coming down with the baby the second week of August. Oh dear, just when we’ll be preparing for the cricketers.” She read on. “That’s better! Cousin Lucy and the three boys are going to camp out in tents and caravan. I do hope it won’t rain. August is usually a wet one on the moor, I’m afraid.”
Miranda looked to be downcast. “Penny for them, Anda.”
“Oh nothing.” The girl’s lips quivered. She was liable to tears, this ‘green girl’, for that was all she was, after all—“Darling, we all felt what you are feeling now, when we were your age. It will pass—”
“I don’t want it to pass! I want to go on helping Cousin Phillip, don’t you see?”
“Darling, we’ll be able to see him just the same. But I don’t think it advisable for you to go over by yourself any more.”
“But he needs help! And why doesn’t his wife live with him?”
“He’s a little difficult, I suppose.”
“That could easily apply to me. You know I don’t get on with anyone at school, except some of the mistresses, who are all older than I.”
“‘Older than me’ surely, darling.”
“Older than I am old, Mother.”
“Darling, you have a fine mind, we all recognise that.”
“Then why can’t I help Cousin Phillip? I know he wants me to.”
“Well, you have helped him quite a lot, haven’t you? But it’s more than that, Anda.”
“What do you mean?”
“Darling, you mustn’t become indispensable, so that Cousin Phillip will be unhappy when you have to do other things with your life.”
“What other things?”
“You may fall in love, and want to get married.”
“I shan’t want to get married. I love Phillip.”
“Of course you do, darling, we all love Cousin Phillip. But there are other things than affection and admiration, you know.”
“You mean that Cousin Phillip may be wounded like ‘Buster’ was?”
“That was never in my mind. Now tell me, what made you say that?”
“Well, one of the reasons why Laura isn’t always happy is because she loves ‘Buster’, and he’s practically a cripple. Well, Cousin Phillip isn’t.”
“Darling, I wonder if you know what you’re saying.”
“I know that Cousin Phillip doesn’t want Laura in his bed with him, because she’s frightened him off.”
“I wonder if you know what you’re talking about, Anda.”
“I know that she discourages him spiritually. And spirit and sex are the same things basically.”
“D. H. Lawrence—,” began Molly.
“I don’t agree with his theories. Most of the time he was fighting his wife because she wasn’t his mother.”
“Wherever do you get all these extraordinary ideas?”
“I read in the school library. Anyway, Lawrence’s theory about the sexes needing to fight is unsound. Laura says he used sex to get rid of his childhood repressions, because she does exactly that —when she can. She can’t with ‘Buster’, and Cousin Phillip doesn’t want her, so she’s in a mess most of the time.”
“A woman must be loved, you know Anda, to be happy. Physical love is ever so important to a woman, darling.”
“Age does not affect affinity, Mummie. And affinity is not infirmity. And I know Cousin Phillip is normal.”
“Miranda, have you let him make love to you?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s frank anyway, darling.”
“Dear Mother, you’re so sweet and understanding that I can tell you almost anything.”
Molly resisted asking what was being held back. “Darling, you will be careful, won’t you? There’s Cousin Phillip to think of, you know, as well as yourself.” She kissed an unresponsive daughter. “Of course we all love dear Phillip. He’s so gentle and understanding. But he belongs to an older generation. So we must both think of him, mustn’t we, and not let anything interfere with his writing, don’t you think?”
“But the point is, he and his writing are interfered with, all the time.”
“Then we must all leave him alone to get on with his work, surely?”
“It’s not you or me, I’ve told you—it’s Laura!”
“Well, as you said, he is not able to return her love.”
“I don’t wonder at it! She cows him, deprives him of spirit, so he simply daren’t start his novel series! The other day he took her to the coast, the Burrows of Santon, and what did she do? Just because he had many memories of the place, where Willie was drowned years ago—his cousin, you know, the one whom the Ogilvie girl, Mary, wasn’t it, was going to marry, only he was drowned. Phillip took Cousin Lucy there before he married her. Well, the point is, just because it is a special place for him, a sort of pilgrimage place, Laura leaves him flat, and goes off on her own, so that he was looking along the coast half the night, and finally lit a fire. Then she turned up.”
“Did Phillip tell you this?”
“No. I heard it from Cousin Hugh’s man, Mornington. She didn’t get home until after four o’clock in the morning.”
“Perhaps they enjoyed themselves by the fire, darling.”
“Then she never spoke a word to Phillip when he said goodnight. She’s paying him out for what her father did to her when she was young.”
“Miranda, what are you saying?”
“She tells everyone that her father raped her when she was small.”
“That was hardly her fault.”
“That’s not the point! And anyway, I don’t believe any father would do such a thing to his child. The point is that Phillip needs to feel that there are months and months ahead of him in the clear, before he dare begin his life’s work! He had a terrible time in the first war, he wasn’t cut out to be a soldier, but a dreamer, like Shelley and Francis Thompson. Even so, he forced himself to be a good soldier. Then in the last war they didn’t treat him well where he had a farm. They thought he was a spy—someone on whom to vent their own deprived feelings. Some workmen beat him up on the quay at Crabbe, and if that w
asn’t enough, Brigadier Tarr sent some commandos to fire live ammunition on his meadows without permission, and wounded him!”
“Yes darling, I heard all about it from Cousin Hugh. That sort of thing happens to many people in wartime.”
“Can’t you see how he felt when his first wife died when she was only nineteen? He’s never loved anyone since! Then his son, the child of that love marriage, was killed in the last week of the war! And now Phillip is like the Unknown Soldier, shut up in a tomb! And will remain so until he is rescued by true love, and can get back to the sun again, like Persephone from the dark blue halls of Dis!”
Miranda hid her face in her hair, and ran upstairs.
Molly was alarmed, she had never seen her daughter so distressed. She found her lying on the bed, in calm aloofness.
“You are a good girl, darling. A very good girl. I know you’ll be a good, steady friend to Cousin Phillip. Be his chum, but nothing more. Then, when you are older, perhaps—”
“Why are mothers afraid to let their grown children love?”
“They don’t want their children to be unhappy, I suppose. Or to make others unhappy. Cousin Phillip is so vulnerable. And as I’ve told you, he isn’t a boy, darling. He’s a mature man. He’s fifty.”
“Fifty-two. What does age matter if, as I said, there’s affinity? And what is affinity but attraction? Look at Daddy! Women still think he’s wizard.”
“He’s a butterfly, darling.”
“What’s wrong with that? Anyway, I suppose I take after him. I wish I could see more of him. Not only for a couple of weeks in summer and a few days at Christmas if he isn’t in Africa shooting big game. What went wrong between you two? Was it his women?”
“Not altogether, Miranda.”
“Then tell me. I want to know.”
“His father came home a cripple from the first war, and when he died, lots of death duties had to be paid. Then the second war meant higher rates and taxes, forcing Daddy to sell Brockholes to the Somerset Asylums Board.”
This was a reference to Brockholes St. Boniface Abbey, seat of the Bucentaur family since the Tudors.
“You see, Anda, Daddy thought, at least in the Second War, that he was fighting for his home, as Churchill said, and not merely for the tax collector.”
“Well, someone has to pay for the Gads’ War.”
“Wherever did you pick up that expression, darling?”
Miranda had heard it from Phillip, but she said, “Someone told me it was used by Lord Hankey when we started bombing civilians in Germany.”
“Well, to come back to your father. He’s never really settled down, and after the war he simply couldn’t face living in this poky little shack, as he called it.”
“I think it’s a wizard home, Mum. Even with the goats on top of us. I wonder why they smell more at night? The pong in my room is fairly strong sometimes.”
“They’ll all be gone, thank goodness, when Daddy hands them over to the Council.”
“May I keep Capella?”
“That’s for your Father to say, darling. He’ll be here with his Eleven fairly soon. I suppose we ought to be thinking about camp beds and tents for them.”
“Would you like me to see about it?”
“It would be such a help it you would, darling. I’m going into Minehead to shop this afternoon.”
The girl got off the bed. “Mummie, would you mind very much if I first rode over to see Cousin Phillip?”
“Of course not, darling. Do ask him to come over in his wonderful old motor, it will be so useful for collecting tents and things.”
“You won’t talk to him about me, will you?”
“There’s nothing really to talk about now, is there, darling? I’m so glad we had this out, it’s cleared the air, hasn’t it?”
“Well, sort of.”
“At your age, one takes one’s fancies so seriously, Miranda darling.”
“Like you did, mother dear, when you were seventeen?”
“Things were simpler then, darling.”
“Did you elope?”
“It wasn’t necessary. My papa gave his consent.”
“And if he hadn’t given it?”
“Well, until one is twenty-one, one’s father is the one to say, you know.”
“Say what, Mother darling?”
“If a child should want to marry before coming of age, when the law regards her or him as an infant, the father can withold his consent.’’
“If Daddy ever did that, I’d use my switch plan.”
“And what is that, darling?”
“As you said, Mother, we must think of Phillip.”
*
One day, as Phillip sat at the open door, mending a willow log-basket, the behaviour of some crows over by the farmhouse across the common—the constant cawing, black ragged shapes flapping up and dropping again—made him hasten over the heather to the gate. Four birds were flying down, and rising up again from a particular place on the opposite side of the hedge. Like all the moorland hedges, it was a raised bank of earth and stone, topped by beech, thorn, ash, bramble and furze. The bank was tunnelled by rabbits. Aaron Kedd, the smallholder who lived down the coomb, set his traps along the hedge.
Opening the gate, glancing down the bank, Phillip saw a lean crow hanging by a foot, head downwards. On seeing him, it flapped about. The leg was held by a gin-trap on a pegged chain. It was a thin, scared-looking bird, with comic eyes; and the other crows were its nestling brethren, which still flew about with their parents. It looked pathetic, and was too frightened to peck the human hand taking it out of the trap.
Phillip stroked its poll, while it gasped with open beak, and its three companions circled in the air above, cawing. He threw up the bird, which uttered a gawping cry and flew down the coomb, followed by its companions. Then Phillip saw the two old birds, flying high in the sky above their agitated young. After watching them away in the direction their young had flown, he went back to the gate, where Aaron Kedd was waiting for him.
“Thaccy be my bliddy craw you took out of my gin, and I’ll hev ’ee to Town for thievin’, you zee if I don’t!”
“Let me pay for it. Here’s a shilling.”
Kedd took the coin, and said in a less disturbed voice, “They bliddy craws, they’m all flamin’ thieves! My Gor’, wan last year found a yaw (ewe) of mine on her back, and before you could say knife, her pots (intestines) was pulled out yards and yards. Bliddy craws, they’m worse than thievin’ bliddy rats or magpies! And I’ll tell ’ee another thing! Thaccy young leddy what rides over vor zee ’ee, what do ’er want vor bring a goat wi’ her allus? The bliddy thing snatched at my flat-poll, ah I scatt ’er wi’ a long stick, di’n I tho! They gentry riding about think they can do what they’m a vancy for, but not likely! What for do ’er come yurr, I know why, and you can’t deny it, grabbin’ seaweed, that be your game! Us zees lots like ’er about in summer—”
He was left complaining to the wind, for Phillip was walking away. Back at the table, he wrote in his journal.
In spring and early summer my neighbour’s voice is to be heard on the wind as he works his allotment of five acres with a shaggy moorland pony, either harrowing with deep-tined cultivating harrows, or scuffling cabbages (‘flat polls’) and roots between the rows. The pony pulls strongly, eager to snatch at the oats growing at one end of the rows: then I hear the hoarse cries of the smallholder, hanging on to stilts of the wheeled hoe. “You booger, you! You flamin’ bliddy rogue, I’ll trim ee! Gr-r-r-t you! Come up you, aaa-aaa-ah!” But there is no call for an R.S.P.C.A. inspector, for he is all bark and no bite. Bitter years are behind him, he is lonely, his only reading is the Old Testament and The News of the World by candle-light in his thatched two-room cot.
A human hedgehog—a small man with no war to light his background, staring at life with sunken uneasy eyes under ferny eyebrows; the near-tortured face, the dyspepsia, the inefficient would-be market gardener who rents odd splatts or parcels of land and
grows in rotation, year after year, without muck from bullock, sheep, or pig, potatoes, potatoes, potatoes—his idea of the rotation of crops. There is an acre of ground on the common of which the humus was fully one foot deep. Thereon he has grown potatoes year after year, using only chemical fertiliser, until an exhausted soil suddenly gave up yielding. Even thistles do not grow today out of the sour, gritty, iron-stone subsoil, the fertility of which has become a box of coins under his bed—for he is the kind who distrusts all banks.
Undernourished and undeveloped, tortured by and from what he lacks—or lacked as a child, how can Aaron Kedd ever be made whole? The sleepless hours of darkness for him are ‘black monarchs which rule by torture’.
On the second day of the summer holidays, at the beginning of the fourth week of July, the three brothers—Peter, now seventeen years old, and still on the small, thin size; David, thirteen and not yet come to puberty; Jonathan, eleven, small and dark, spiritually aware with sharp sight and sympathy connected directly with insight—were strung out in a line of fifty yards, and pedalling, with heads bowed, on the left of the road, into a strong south-west wind. All three were thinly clad, the two smaller boys in reach-me-down, threadbare suits.
They were now in the fifth day of their journey. Owing to wind blowing from the south-west into their faces, they had so far covered little more than two hundred miles. At times the wind was so strong that they had to stand on the pedals to make progress.
It began to rain again, so they stopped under an oak-tree beside the road.
“Cor, I’m what-you-call tired,” said David.
“Ah, ’bor,” agreed Jonathan.
“How long before we reach Father?”
“Well, if the wind changes direction, we might get there tomorrow night, Jonny.”
“Cor, that will mean we’ll do a hundred miles in one day!”
“If the wind blows from little old Birdy House,” said David.
“We’ll have some fish-and-chips as soon as we get somewhere,” Peter promised.
The Gale of the World Page 29
