It is best to be beyond the sunset bar, she thought, as she turned back. But where could she go, when she returned?
Far below, gulls assembled on the sands were seed-pearls. As she watched, the pearls were scattered by a running speck; pearls sprouted wings and were flying low over waves to their roosts upon cliff-ledges of the two rocky arms enclosing the bay. The speck-like dog then raced, apparently, to its master, walking on the sands. Could it be Phillip? Could she land on the sands beside him? How was the tide?
A cohort of black swifts moved, screaming, past the glider. The birds began to ring above her, she could just hear their whistling above the hiss of air flowing over her own aluminium sails. She thought of the poem in Phillip’s magazine by the dead pilot. O, she could have loved that boy!
And when the swift floats high
On molten tide of sunset, silently
Together in the meadows do we lie
But never wed shall be …
A longing to see Melissa came upon her. Lucy with her children had come out of the water-lift ascending the steep rocky face to Lynton that morning, and they had had coffee together. Lucy told her that Melissa was at Oldstone Castle. And so that afternoon, having climbed on a thermal from Porlock marshes, Laura had sailed over the castle on a flight to the sea, into the setting sun.
Now she was set for the return—eager to see Melissa, to drink ale together in the Sun Inn. The altimeter registered five thousand feet. If she met with no disturbances she would be able to reach the launching meadow in one gradual descent.
A slight wind was now moving from land to sea, by which she gained another five hundred feet in a series of spirals before putting down the nose five degrees for a straight course. Thus it was that Melissa, a little over twelve minutes later—for Laura now had an air-speed of nearly seventy miles an hour—saw a head looking over the edge of the cockpit of the glider and a hand waving. She waved back. Molly had told her who the pilot was; and both girls felt an inner warmth that they had something to look forward to.
*
It is such a beautiful day, Phillip said to himself, as they walked through the wood on the path beside the East Lyn river. Sunshine glinted above the branches of trees, whose leaves echoed dreamily the sounds, varied and gentle, of water and rock. The smooth contented gliding over stones deep bedded below the surface, nothing to disturb the water-flow: little quarrels under roots, water returning in eddy, unable to leave a query, a question, a quarrel over rights—water must move on, oak-root must stay, bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: reinforcements come in freshets down from The Chains, but no change, the talking went on as before during days of low summer level. Froth gathered, slowly revolving; water had no patience, although in time water always wore away every stone, shifted every rock, undermining every dam and weir and tree that stood in its way.
But generally in summer much of this wilfulness of being never at rest is abated. Yet water is ever on duty; it dies when it does not move, dying without the bubbles of turbulence from which it absorbs oxygen to nourish all life under its surfaces, from plant and shrimp and limpet to small fish and thence all the way up the aqueous scale to the lordly salmon born in nearly all the three score headwaters of the Lyn. There the alevin is hatched—right up under The Chains, there it poises itself with head upstream while yet its yolk-sac is hardly absorbed, watching, watching water ahead … growing to be a parr, with brown trout markings; and in May of the second year of its life it changes to a coat of silver scales for its journey down to the sea, no longer than a man’s hand: to return after a year or two of rich ocean feeding, the length of a man’s arm.
For if salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.
I am so happy, said Lucy to herself as the family wandered along the path above the East Lyn, on the way to Watersmeet, where a lesser stream joined the river, both hurrying to the sea. They were exploring. Lucy, Laura and Melissa walked together; while Peter, Rosamund, David and Jonathan were way ahead with the delightful new cousins, Miranda, Imogen and Roger, looking at all this wonderful new country with bright eyes, eager faces, and laughter.
Behind the three women walked Phillip, carrying an old army valise on his back, in which, like a papoose, baby Sarah was standing up, supported under her arms by straps out of which she tried continually to jump, in order to join the boys and girls far away under the beechen trees whose green leaves glittered at the top. He divined her feelings, and called a halt, to release a little white occasional quadruped.
They rested in the dappled light-shadows by the meeting of waters, Phillip saying to Miranda, “Here Shelley may have sat, and sailed paper boats down on the surface, with messages of hope.”
“Did Harriet, his first wife, drown herself when he left her for Mary Woolstoncroft, Cousin Phillip?”
“I don’t really know, Miranda. Both were very young, little more than children.”
She sat unspeaking until he rose saying, “It is a wonderful picnic, Lucy, thank you all for such a lovely time. I must get back now and work, you do understand, don’t you?”
“Of course, my dear!” exclaimed Lucy. “You must do just what you want to do.”
Rosamund said, “Do stay, Dad!”; David said, “We do want you to stay, honestly, Dad, don’t we, chooky?”, to Jonathan who replied, “If he wants to write, he must go!”
Baby Sarah cried when he walked off; Miranda seemed not to have noticed his going as she knelt on the bank and peered down to see her own dark eyes staring up at her.
Chapter 21
ENTER PEREGRINE
The three Bucentaur children Miranda, Imogen, and Roger were having a final romp with the goats, which soon were to leave for a wide and open valley west of Lynton as a gift from their father. The animals were tethered on a long picket line, while the children played a variant of the game known as French Cricket; King Billy, patriarch of the herd, had a picket to himself; he was liable to act ferociously when free, being at what Molly declared to be the dangerous age. The old goat was frustrated; he wanted to join in the game, but his nylon tether had proved uneatable. An additional irritant was the free presence of Capella, who was attempting to run off with the red leather ball in her mouth.
In past days, all goats had been free to join in the children’s games, which then became a sort of mad circus. Capella was the best ball-snatcher, bearing it away in her mouth, pursued by goats and children. The game caused so much laughter that Miranda had to bend down again and again, gasping while she spread fingers over her face at the sight of King Billy jumping about in a rage.
Watching the fun from her bedroom window, Molly told herself that Anda was still only a child, and that there was nothing serious between her and Phillip, who was surely only a substitute for paternal admiration and affection which every young girl needed for a balance of her emotions. Yes, Anda was still a child. Molly felt happy; not only were Lucy and Melissa arriving that afternoon, but Perry as well.
Miranda was excited: at dinner she was to wear the Edwardian ball gown in which Fred Riversmill had painted her portrait in the early summer. Yes, when the girl’s father was home again, all would be well! It was going to be a wonderful Festival week, like the happy summers before the war.
The play had been vigorous for Miranda, after the strain of school examinations; now she was feeling the reaction. What would Daddy think of her? What would he say? Would he be pleased with the portrait? Supposing he wouldn’t allow her to keep Capella? And then the arrival of her father, driving his vintage Hispano-Suiza motorcar, caused her to bloom with happiness. She had, of course, the sense not to make any demands upon him until the right moment—
“Daddy” she called to him, as she was dressing for dinner, “may I have a word with you? I want to ask a favour. Please don’t be angry.”
“Why should I be angry with you, darling” he replied, going into her room, where
she sat in an Edwardian chemise before the looking glass. “My word, you are a beauty!”, as she continued slowly to brush her long hair.
He knelt down beside his daughter, putting his arms around her to kiss, lightly and rapidly, the forehead, eyebrows, bone of each cheek, and side of the neck; thence to the base where little curling hairs grew out of a soft skin so tender and exciting, before a final communication with the lips while the hand, slowly caressing, went between silk and collar bone to the flesh on one breast, while he whispered, “You’re a beauty! I adore you, my sweet darling.”
Miranda, a little confused and trepidant, found herself uttering words she had meant to reserve for a future moment. “Daddy may I keep Capella? She will be terribly miserable without us all here, I know she will.”
“We’ll see, darling, shall we?”
It was not long before Molly was wondering about her errant husband’s attitude towards Miranda. She now had her own bedroom converted from a box room; and when late that night Peregrine went upstairs to kiss her good-night he remained so long that Molly trotted up to join them—to come upon him kissing the child’s breasts like a lover, while her head was turned away. So she waited in her own bedroom, behind the open door, listening.
When Peregrine returned downstairs Molly went into the box room, to find Miranda lying quietly in bed, crying.
“Darling, what is the matter?”
“Daddy says he has promised the whole herd to the Council, and a gentleman can’t break his word.”
*
Incest in some landed families was not altogether unknown in former days of isolation in remote country houses almost feudal in their self-containment preceding the Great War. Papa stern and distant, Mama amiable but remote and punctilious; both frigid in the accepted moral code based on a strict Protestant religion and the law of entail. These conditions sometimes led to irregularities among the older female children of a large family still in the schoolroom, and sent, in long white frocks and white gloves, under big hats, always chaperoned by a French governess, to sedate parties in other houses in a waggonet in summer days, or the family coach at Christmas time with cockaded coachman and footman beside him, through narrow lanes and up slow winding hills to other houses lit up for festival.
In particular, Molly remembered the case of a housekeeper, long in service with Peregrine’s Uncle Rollo—who boasted, among other exploits, that he had eaten a stone of bullock steak a week —but who nevertheless, could not face up to the housekeeper and dismiss her because she had found, and kept, not only billets-douces, but a pair of his monogrammed pyjamas left in the bed of a young married sister.
The inclination to incest, as an escape from Victorian inhibition, seemed to run in some suffocating families. And the next morning, when Lucy went on to Shep Cot, Molly decided to send Miranda to ‘Buster’.
“We’ll need every available square inch for the cricketers’ wives, darling,” she explained to her daughter. “In addition we’ll require at least three bell tents for the unmarrieds, with camp-beds and blankets, and also a marquee, with trestle tables, and forms to sit on. We’ll be twenty three in all. Goodness knows what they’ll do for baths. They’ll need them, the place reeks of goats.”
Molly, Miranda, and Melissa drove into Minehead to hire the camping requisites for Cricket Week.
“As I said, we’ll need every bed in the house for the married couples, so I propose to put the bachelors—there will be six of them—two to a tent in the ponies’ paddock. The goats will be gone by then. That leaves five married couples, including your father and me, in the house. Goodness knows how we’ll all be able to fit in.”
“Why can’t Imogen and I sleep in a tent, too?”
“The ponies might get entangled in the ropes, darling.”
“But what about the ropes of the cricketers’ tents, if they’re in the paddock?”
“The ponies don’t know them, Anda. Supposing Bruno barged into a tent for a lump of sugar in the middle on the night?”
“Bruno wouldn’t. He’d come to my tent.”
“Perhaps you could have your tent on the lawn. Goodness knows,” Molly went on inconsequentially, disturbed by a vision of Peregrine creeping down in the middle of the night, “how we’ll manage about baths.”
“They can bathe in the sea.”
“But the men can’t shave in the sea, darling. The water is so sticky.”
“Well, there’s the swimming bath. That’s fresh water.”
“It’s against the bye-laws to shave in a public swimming bath, surely?”
“They’ll want latrines dug, too, Mummy.”
“Darling, who will want them dug?”
“The bell-tent bachelors, of course.”
“Very well, write down posts and hessian screens.”
“In the Great War they used shell-holes. The ideal was to find one dry, fresh shell-hole, it was the only true life a tommy could get, Phillip told me, until he was either killed or wounded. Even then, at Passchendaele he would lie out alone, and die a lonely death—” She hid her face in her hands.
She is in love with Phillip, thought Melissa as she put her arm round the girl. Molly stopped the motor, a large black Daimler known as The Hearse.
“What odd things you two have discussed, darling.”
“The realities, mother dear, which are the basis of true history. It was the only privacy a soldier in the line could get, to be alone with the sky.”
“I can sympathise with that, Anda.”
They went on down to Minehead. There, when Miranda had gone to buy a stamp at the post office, Molly said “Of the three children, Anda is the one who needs shape, if you understand. She’s very intelligent and impressionable, and has too much to lose. The older she gets, the more complicated she appears to be. Usually gels grow out of their green sickness, but Anda—” She sighed.
Melissa wondered if Molly’s reticence was a cloak to hide Phillip. For Miranda had talked, talked, talked to her about him: what he hoped to write—how he might begin—what form the novel should take—all autobiography to be transmuted by what Keats called The Imagination—
Miranda returned with the stamp. “I must have left my letter on my dressing table! I can’t find it in my bag!” They searched in the car: no letter. Later, when Molly had gone to the dentist, Miranda said to Melissa, “Do you mind if I speak about Cousin Phillip?”
“Do, my dear.”
“The letter was to Cousin Phillip, asking him if I had done anything to offend him. You see, he needs help.”
“In his work, you mean?”
“Yes, Cousin Melissa. He’s read to me all his war diaries which he kept while at the front, and wants to use for his novels. He’s got whole rows of Great War books at Shep Cot—German and French as well as English, including official histories of all the belligerents, for he says his novels must be wider and deeper in scope than his own very limited experiences. I’ve never heard or read anything like the battle scenes, and also those behind the line, Cousin Melissa. Only, you see, he daren’t start writing until he can see his way clear ahead for several years. I did so want to help him, as soon as I left school, but lately he has shut himself away, and during the last term he didn’t write at all except only once, saying I must concentrate on my exams.”
She turned away her head, then turned again to look into the older woman’s face. “Are you sure you don’t mind my unburdening myself to you like this, Cousin Melissa? I hope it isn’t ‘blowing back smoke in other peoples’ faces’, as Grannie would say.”
“No, of course not, Miranda. I do understand, and I’m interested in all you feel you can confide in me.”
“Phillip sees good in everyone, Cousin Melissa. He’s not competitive, like most men are. That’s a defect in life, he says, but a quality necessary in an artist. Fred Riversmill says he’s like Turgenev, seeing all sides of a question, so that some people think he’s not quite all there. Others think he is a fool, who refuses to see any evil in fascism. Of
course he does, and did, but many opponents of fascism were just as bad in other ways during the war. And before the war, the self-righteousness of ‘the intellectuals’, Fred Riversmill says, led them to neglect the frightful social conditions at home, all the slums and unemployed people and starving little children—”
Miranda bowed her head, hiding her face in her hair.
*
“Molly! Why has my elder daughter gone to stay with ‘Buster’ as soon as I arrive?”
“To make a little more room for the cricketers, my dear.”
“But the other children are remaining here.”
“They won’t take up any room. They can share a tent on the lawn.”
“I asked particularly because, while in the Lynton club, I heard someone who looked like a boiled owl in spectacles, and obviously didn’t know who I was, talking about a writer to whom Miranda as well as other women, pay regular visits.”
“Didn’t ‘the someone’ tell you that I also ‘pay regular visits’ to Phillip Maddison—a connexion of ours—he married my Cousin Lucy Copleston? Cousin Phillip is as honest, and as clear, as the day.”
“I didn’t get that impression from Humbert Tarr, who came in later. When I asked him who this chap Maddison was, he told me he was a fascist with none too savoury a reputation.”
“The Brig is the last person to talk about that!”
“Anyway, I wouldn’t trust any man with Miranda.”
“But Phillip is not ‘any man’. If anything, he’s a little too ascetic.”
“They’re usually the dark horses.”
“Anda has nothing to fear from Phillip. She’s got plenty of sense—more than you think perhaps.”
The Gale of the World Page 32
