The Man Who Didn't Fly

by Margot Bennett

  “The country life is wonderful,” he said, groaning a little.

  Hester turned her mind away from him. She saw that the blackberries had ripened early. She picked some, and ate them. She held out a handful, offering them to Morgan.

  “They might be poisonous,” he said. “You shouldn’t go eating berries.”

  “I thought you said you’d been brought up in the country. Where did you live, Morgan?”

  “I was born in London. My father—well, I’m too old now to talk about my father,” Morgan said, hatred flashing across his face. “He wasn’t a careful man about money.”

  “Lots of people aren’t, I suppose. Think of Harry.”

  “Harry! I don’t want to think about him. I always thought I’d like to meet a poet. Harry isn’t my idea of a poet,” he said accusingly.

  “Morgan, are you happy here? Are you sure you like living in the country?”

  “All those fields to look at! Yes, I like it. It’s quiet, you see, Hester, I’ve got to have quiet. My heart…” He sat down again.

  “Perhaps you should go to bed when you get home. And I’ll get Doctor Nelson.”

  “No.” He stood up, and they went on.

  About fifteen yards above the road, Morgan stopped and clutched Hester’s wrist.

  Three men were drooping along the road. They weren’t at all like the strangers who usually passed through the village, bent under rucksacks or excessively tweeded. They wore jackets of a markedly Edwardian style, trousers that were tight everywhere, and narrow, pointed shoes that seemed to be giving trouble.

  One of them sat down by the side of the road and began to dust his shoes with his handkerchief.

  “I limp so bad,” he said.

  “Smell the country air,” another advised bitterly. “You haven’t breathed so good since you was a boy at Southend.”

  “Five miles to the next pub,” the first said. “Turn right, turn left, turn right round, cross the field with the bulls, and I’d fight the field full of bulls to be back in Old Compton Street right now. What gave that foggy-boy the idea he was living here? Living! The country is the part of England they should dispose of, which is what I’m going to do when we get to that railway station.” He limped dejectedly behind the other two.

  Morgan stared after them down the road. Hester, looking at him curiously, saw that he was standing erect and breathing naturally. His heart attack appeared to be over.

  “Go on, Hester. Don’t wait for me. I think I’ll sit around and rest for a little,” he said in a strained voice.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked doubtfully.

  She was glad to leave him. She wanted to walk alone and think about Harry.

  She crossed the road and went into the woods on the other side, her mind moving irresponsibly around Harry’s appearance, changing his clothes, seeing that his hair was cut regularly and his shirt was always clean. She thought of the attic room as her father had planned it, with a white floor and green rugs. She furnished it with a desk and some clean paper, and set Harry to work, writing a more jocund version of “The Waste Land.” In the autumn they went to Italy and lived simply in a villa within reach of Florence.

  She came down on the road again and walked through the village. Poetry didn’t earn much money, but there was satisfaction in being heralded at literary lunches and making experimental dashes into the poetic drama.

  Moira Ferguson waved to her, and she smiled back from Stockholm, where the Nobel prizes were being distributed.

  “Come in and have some tea,” Moira said. “Joe’s raging against Harry, and it’s much nicer for him to have a new listener.”

  Hester made the correct social noises and then went in, although Moira Ferguson always made her feel immature and badly dressed. Joe treated her like a favourite niece, and the household was an entrancing but resistible specimen of the comfort associated exclusively with wealth.

  The grey stone house had once been a farm, but the farmer had been glad to move out and build himself a red brick bungalow. The barn had been converted to a servants’ flat; the dairy to a squash court; and where the pigs had lain, gasping with gluttony on the straw, was now a rose garden.

  Inside the house, in the corner by the fireplace where generations of farmers had sat mourning over night frosts, east winds, spring droughts, Uncle Joe now sat worrying about the weather. It was hot, it was hot even for August, and people were staying away from the cinemas he owned.

  “Do they care?” he demanded passionately of Hester. “In the winter they come begging, they stand in queues, they go to my managers with tears in their eyes, two, only two, they beg, even at seven-and-six. Now, in the bad times, they keep the half-crowns in their pockets and walk in the park instead.”

  “We have no money, Hester,” Moira said comfortably. “Just fancy, we are ruined.” She put a finger idly on the bell and a parlourmaid materialised with a tea tray.

  “Moira is always thinking about money. It’s the curse of the age,” Joe boomed happily. “We can’t afford to keep the servants, she says, but we have two, only two. We want a holiday, we go to Bermuda, Gleneagles, anywhere we like. Money, money, money, she says. We must save. She wants a new skirt. Go to Paris, I tell her. Get Dior, Balmain, one of those, to make you a skirt. No, we can’t afford it, she says. Now if I wanted to play the violin, I would hire Menuhin to teach me, but not Moira. She would go to Miss Botts down the street. Money!”

  “We could think about it more than we do,” Moira protested idly. “We have three cars. Two cars make sense. What’s the use of three?”

  “It’s no good keeping up appearances unless you keep up a good appearance. I can’t keep up appearances with a motor bike. Moira tells me I’m having a financial crisis. I remember having a financial crisis in Persia. I left it with forty-two thousand owing. I paid back every penny, except what I owed the Persians. Money! I never think of it.”

  Hester accepted her tea. She wanted to turn the cup over and see if the price was written on the bottom. Joe looked at her, grinning.

  “Twenty-five shillings each, about, these cups cost,” he said.

  “Uncle Joe, you are clever,” Hester said admiringly. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  “It’s a parlour trick,” Moira said contemptuously. “He can always tell when people are wondering what something cost. That’s the kind of thing they often wonder, in this house. They don’t ask about the Shropshire Fergusons, nor even the Berlin branch of the family. It’s always what it cost.”

  “But I wasn’t thinking how much the cup cost,” Hester protested. “I—I—”

  “You were thinking, perhaps, I would like it to be known how good our cups were,” Joe said. “You come here,” he added in a voice of immense sorrow, “to see how the rich live. You are a welfare worker in reverse. But you come to the wrong place, my child. We don’t live as the rich do. We are the little pigs who have built our house of paper money, and one day the wolf comes and he huffs and he puffs and he blows our house down. So inside the house we must tell ourselves we are very happy. But when the house is blown down, what can I do? Only one thing. I can drive a car. Perhaps when you are buried you look round on your way to the churchyard, and find I am driving the hearse.”

  Hester began to laugh. She liked Joe and the blasts of energy that came from him. Moira looked sulky and bored. It was possible she had heard the joke before.

  “I wanted to ask you, Uncle Joe, is Harry really your nephew?” Hester said cautiously.

  Joe swallowed his tea and crashed the cup on the table. He was as dismal as if he were staring through a series of empty cinemas. Moira looked at him angrily.

  “Harry came back to the London flat one night with Joe and said he was his nephew,” she explained coolly to Hester.

  “It was true. For the night, he was a relation,” Joe said.
r />   “And he was going next day. But he was very interested in music. We have a Hi-Fi in London,” Moira went on. “It’s too loud for the country.”

  “I don’t even know what Hi-Fi is,” Hester said.

  “You have a kind of horse-trough filled with sand and a box of knobs for the gramophone records,” Joe explained. “You hear every sound, even the tears rolling down the conductor’s cheeks. After you have Hi-Fi, there is nothing else, absolutely nothing, but to go out and hear the concert when it’s played. But Harry likes this Hi-Fi noise. He plays records every day. Carried away on the space-ship to the music of the spheres, he explains to me. But he’s not carried away. He’s anchored on the sofa. Why do I have this Hi-Fi, perhaps you ask? With my connections, how can I ask my friends to hear a clockwork gramophone?”

  “You see, Harry spent the first few days just listening to Hi-Fi,” Moira said, beginning to smile. “It seemed rude to interrupt him.”

  Joe scowled. “Then I begin to tell him, you’d like to go soon, Harry. This very evening, he says, but the banks are closed, can you cash a cheque? A very small cheque, Harry, I tell him. A very small cheque indeed. How much is it worth to me to get rid of Harry? Ten pounds, perhaps, I think, but he makes it twenty. He is about to go. Suddenly it is raining. His coat is at the cleaner’s, he tells me, and he’ll have to stay the night after all. So what happens?” He stopped, scowling at Hester.

  Hester smiled sadly. She wanted to leave, but it was hard not to hear everything about Harry.

  “What happens?” he repeated. “At three that morning I am playing Donegal Poker. I go to bed at six with Donegal Poker insomnia. It is true I have won, but all I have won is my own cheque back from Harry. The next day I have to see accountants, managers, lawyers—it is very difficult for me. But Harry is not difficult. He is happy. He is writing a poem. We mustn’t disturb him, Moira says.”

  “Poetry is a wonderful occupation,” Moira said angrily.

  “The next afternoon, at five, he goes—with another cheque, because the banks are closed again. At eleven he is back, with friends he wants to hear our Hi-Fi. Take the Hi-Fi, Harry, I say. Take it and go.”

  “The next morning I find him telephoning dealers, asking what they will give for a second-hand Hi-Fi. Now I want to get angry. Moira stops me. He’s a poet she says.”

  “He is a poet,” Moira said softly. Hester looked at her with the astonished glance of a woman acknowledging an enemy. A flash of contempt for Moira’s forty years crossed her face like a beam of light.

  “He is a poet in words. That is now of no importance. I am a poet of money. Words! We have too many words. Word poets talk all the time of love and death. People fall in love and they die, and no amount of poetic advice has ever helped them to do either of those things more successfully. They are interested in love for a few years, and later they are afraid of death. But they are always interested in money. Everyone, everywhere is interested in money all the time. There’s never been an age when people agreed so heartily to be interested all at once in the same thing. They’re crazy about money, even if it’s only to buy a bar of chocolate or a diamond necklace. This is how I am a poet in money. I’m not tied down to pearls and cigars. I have imagination and daring. I’m not frightened by six figures. I make beautiful combinations with banks and factories. I have just been buying more cinemas,” he added reflectively.

  “A poor poem, at the moment,” Moira commented.

  “I was telling you about Harry,” Joe said in a sombre voice. “In the end I say we are going to the country for a week. We lock up the London flat, I tell him. I am sorry, I say, but this time it’s goodbye. And what happens? He comes with us to the country here. I spend the first night in the quiet of this village playing Donegal Poker. I am lucky he doesn’t stay in London, break into the flat, steal my wife’s jewellery.”

  “Which is in the bank,” Moira said, yawning.

  “Because he is a bad man. I warn you, Hester, he is bad. He’s the kind of man who would pawn his grandmother’s crutches to buy a drink for a friend.”

  “Thank you for the tea,” Hester said in a furious voice.

  “You’re angry?” Moira enquired curiously. “Has Joe said something to offend you? Don’t take him seriously.”

  “I don’t think it’s right to say these things about Harry,” Hester said. “You shouldn’t say them, Uncle Joe. It’s not true. Whatever Harry is, he’s honest. You just don’t understand him.”

  “Have some more tea,” Moira suggested.

  “I don’t understand him!” Joe repeated in amazement.

  “No you don’t. He’s not one of the people who’s interested in money. He stands for something much finer than money. He doesn’t know about money, and because he doesn’t worship it as you do you think he’s no good. I agree with him. I despise money.”

  “But so do I,” Joe said. “My dear child, I couldn’t agree with you more. So there’s no argument. I won’t quarrel with you. You know, Hester, I’m not even rich. I owe much, Inland Revenue is after me, and I leave the rest to Harry.”

  He looked at her anxiously. She didn’t smile.

  “I’m a ruined man, Hester,” he said pathetically. “Television and the weather—I can’t survive them. I’m going to Ireland on Friday to buy some new cinemas, try to earn a little something.”

  “You told me you were going to Ireland to get away from Harry,” Moira said maliciously. She glanced at Hester, seeming to absorb and reflect again the knowledge that Hester was wearing last year’s clothes. “I don’t say I believe you. I should have thought the way you feel about Harry, something far away like India would have suited you better. A soupçon more cream, Hester?”

  “My wife doesn’t like Harry,” Joe explained. “She is only afraid to dislike him because he is a poet. We are both worried when we think we think of nothing but money. So we have Hi-Fi, and go to opera.”

  “Opera. Wagner is divine,” Moira agreed, yawning.

  Joe’s jowls sagged a little at the mention of Wagner.

  “Verdi, Bizet, now Bizet is something,” he said quickly. “Do they have Verdi and Bizet in India?” he demanded.

  No one knew.

  “I thought Bizet was very O.K. Then I saw that first thing of his. Enough. I didn’t like it. But the Russians—Eugene Onegin? Do they have Eugene Onegin in India or Australia? Europe is all I want.”

  “Is Ireland Europe?” Moira asked languidly. She rose and glanced quickly in the mirror. Her complexion was the cosmetician’s dream come true, as rich and soft as marshmallow, just tinged with Turkish delight.

  “How are you going?” Hester asked coldly. She hadn’t been deceived by the talk of opera. Joe hated Harry, and she wanted to leave his house.

  “I’m flying,” he said. “I’ve chartered a plane and it has three empty seats. Do you happen to know anyone who would like to share it?”

  Wednesday (4)

  Hester walked home through the woods without looking at them. There was a world inside her head, and it was filled with a dozen versions of a defenceless Harry overborne by enemies. England was a country that didn’t appreciate its poets until they were playwrights, or dead, but even so, she was astonished by the malice which her father, Uncle Joe, and Morgan had shown towards Harry. She knew that what they hated was not Harry, but their own failure to be as he was. Harry, in his innocence, was like a clear pool in which they saw their own pretences. She couldn’t endure any more attacks on Harry. She hesitated at the gate, and then turned away from the house and walked through the woods until she came to the ruined chapel.

  The chapel was roofless and derelict, but it had the melancholy romantic air that ruins so easily adopt. Nettles sprang through the cracks in the stone floor, but beneath this lay the bones of long-dead wool merchants, so that as well as its other charms, an implication of mortality lingered inside the broken walls.

/>   Harry was sitting on one of the fallen stones.

  “I came here to think,” he said in a guilty voice.

  “All right. I’ll leave you.”

  “Hester, please.”

  She sat down beside him.

  “I’ve been given a lot of advice about you today, Harry. Are you so bad?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m no good at all. You’d do the right thing to tell me to go now. But I can’t make myself go, unless you tell me. I can’t move, with love of you closing over the top of my head.”

  He knelt beside her and she put her hand on his shoulder. “So bad, Harry?” she whispered.

  “In every way. You only have to trust me, and I’ll let you down.”

  “It’s not true, Harry,” she said, beginning to cry quietly. “Anyway, you’re a poet.”

  “Yes, in a way. Yes, I am.”

  “So you wouldn’t be the same as other people.”

  “I’m telling you, I’m worse than other people. You’ve no right to make excuses for me. And if I’m a poet I’m too lazy to be a good one.”

  “I don’t believe it. You haven’t had a chance. You’ve had too much worry, with nowhere to live and no money.”

  “Listen, Hester. I’m trying to tell you. I’ve had plenty of places to live, but I’ve been thrown out of most of them. When I was sent down from Oxford my mother couldn’t bear it any longer. She threw me out too. I went to Australia. I wanted to be an old-fashioned remittance man, but she wouldn’t send me the remittance.”

  Hester made a weak attempt to laugh.

  “It’s nothing to laugh about,” he said angrily. “I had to work on a sheep station. It was hot.”

  “Hot?”

  “It was so hot the snakes used to get burnt crossing the floor of my hut. It was so hot the mosquitoes turned into fireflies. The kangaroos fainted with the heat. And I was in the middle of it all, hacking away with an axe at the prickly pear, digging with a spade to reach the artesian wells fifty feet below ground—so that the sheep could get a drink. And the nearest pub was ninety-five miles away. It was filled with bearded men who had never seen rain. They carried guns. They shot anyone who tried to make a joke.”