The telephone bell shocked, thrilled and sickened her. Not for me. Anyway, I don’t want him to ring, or anyone else. She ran down the seven treads to the landing below, half-covered in her wrap, and trailing a thin old towel.
“Yes?”
“Yes! It’s Phillip. It’s rather early, I’m afraid, but may I come round and take you as I find you?”
“That would be delicious.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“I think it’s because it’s suddenly such a beautiful morning. Isn’t it St. Martin’s Little Summer? I’ll get you some breakfast right away.” She put down the receiver, saying to herself, “O, my love—” Then, after waiting to prolong the vision, she leapt up the stairs to her room, and put on a record of Parsifal. O, I am Kundry, led back by your light to the Grail! I am all spirit now, I am Ariel, my master is coming!
She threw off the towel of Bombay cotton pinched from the hospital in Calcutta, adjusted her wrap and prepared breakfast. Would something happen to prevent his coming? Suddenly, with a sick feeling, she heard the door-bell ringing below.
*
Through the letter-box slit Phillip saw a tousled old woman coming along the passage. She said grumpily that Miss Wisselcraft’s room was at the top, so ring the top bell next time.
He went up three flights of brown linoleum. Three attic doors. On one a label with the words—held by drawing pins—Laura. Hello. He tapped and waited. The latch clicked, the door opened a few inches. He waited, tapped again, expecting word to enter. Hearing no movement he said, “Good morning.” Her voice said, “Come in.” He went inside, expecting to be greeted. She stood at the far side of a round mahogany table laid for two, about to put on a gramophone record. He felt blank.
“Parsifal—Klingfor’s Magic Garden,” she said softly, putting down the tone arm.
During waking hours of the night he had imagined her happy smiling face, her gaiety and frankness.
“I’m afraid I’m rather early.”
“I was in my bath when you telephoned. You came quickly.”
“I rang you from round the corner.”
“I thought so.”
Other visitors used that box, then. The gramophone became efflorescent with voices, love in hopeful bud. Klingfor’s Flower Maidens—
“Would you like some coffee?”
“Thank you.”
A portable Bijou typewriter stood on the table, a half-typed page under the roller. The room was heated by a gas-fire. On a cooking ring a tinned kettle steamed. In one corner the bed, covered by a flaccid counterpane.
When the record was ended she said, “I could see you summing it all up. Well, I rent this room furnished for thirty shillings a week, and I’m not a professional whore.”
“It’s a jolly nice room. High up. Faces south, too.”
She poured boiling water into two mugs. “It’s only sawdust, coloured by rust. I hope you can drink ersatz coffee.”
“I have it in my shepherd’s hut.”
“‘Buster’ was wondering where exactly it is.”
“North of the Lyn valley, rather high up on the map, near one of the so-called Hut Circles marked in Gothic letters.”
She gave him a mug of Kenyan coffee, and sat on a stool at one side of the gas fire, he on the other side in a lopsided wicker chair. He wondered if heavy men had sat in it.
“I bought it for half-a-crown in Soho market,” she said.
“You seem to read my thoughts, Laura.”
“Darling, I am with you.”
Stool, chair, bed and table were the only furniture, with a corner top from which was hung a curtain on rings.
“It’s enough for me,” she said. “How did you like living in that pill-box on your hill in South Devon—the ‘Gartenfeste’?”
“Melissa told you, I suppose.”
“Yes,” she said in her breathing voice.
“It’s blown up. That South Devon country was a battle-practice area. The Americans played hell with it. In some houses they slid down the stairs, using torn-out baths as toboggans. Then used them as latrines.”
“They must have been very unhappy. What made you think of Exmoor?”
“I walked all over it when I was a boy, just before the outbreak of the first war.”
“‘A la recherche du temps perdu’. Poor Phillip, must you always live in the past? That’s what Jane Williams wrote to Shelley, just before he was drowned. But I write in the idiom of the future —I leave out what most other writers put in. I get at the real, spasmodic thoughts of my characters, so that you can hear them breathing as they think words to themselves.” She moved across the shabby carpet and, kneeling, put her arms round him and hid her face against his chest. He stroked the dark hair, his fingers moving down the skull to the neck, then up again to touch with a finger the lobes of her small delicate ears. If eyes were the windows of the soul, ears revealed the perceptiveness of the spirit. She had ears like his mother’s, and his sister Elizabeth, that lost girl who had sought refuge in the Catholic Church.
Abruptly she stopped the music, saying, “I was brought up in a Catholic school. The nuns were like Gogol’s dead souls, festering.”
“I suppose we all live in the past, Laura.” He thought of Barley; and Laura became lifeless to him.
“Don’t you know your William Blake? He knew it all before Freud. ‘The genitals—beauty’.” She went away from him, saying, “O set me free! I must be free!”
“I’m sorry. I’m—I’m rather tired.”
“I don’t mean that! I’m not ready anyway. And I’m only good to sleep with anyone when I’m in love. You found that with Barley, didn’t you?’
“Yes. Head-devoted heart; Heart-devoted head. Tristan and Isolde. ‘True love is likeness of thought,’ wrote Jefferies. You see, Laura, wild animals’ bonds are natural. They work together, are devoted to one another, each has his or her job, and in season they love, to fulfil themselves, in service to their race or species.”
“‘We are born to die for Germany’—the motto of the Hitler Youth. Hitler and his mother-fixation, dreaming of the beauty of heroism and self-sacrifice. I have a photograph of Hitler, with the last of his faithful boys, outside the bunker in Berlin. He looks worn-out, but he is so gentle and kind to those twelve and thirteen-year-old boys.”
“Too gentle and kind, Laura. All that fell backwards in a rage of impotence upon himself, and so upon others. Now the faithful will be hanged.”
Laura said in a low voice, “‘Buster’ went to see the Commander-in-Chief, British Zone of Occupied Germany, Sholto Douglas. He told ‘Buster’ he’d been ordered by Bevin not to make any recommendations for mercy. Douglas is furious, and wants to chuck up his job.”
“Bevin threatened to bring down the Government in the autumn of nineteen forty three, when Churchill released Birkin from Brixton gaol, owing to Birkin’s illness! Bevin should have done his whack on the Western Front as a foot soldier.”
“It’s the politicians who start wars.”
“Or Geography. Geopolitics!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied shortly. Then, “‘Buster’ said he saw the Russian Generals when they called on Sholto Douglas—great square shoulders—granite faces —‘Buster’ said ‘God help us if they ever become our enemies’.”
“Don’t forget we’ve got the atom bomb Laura.”
“Oh, go to hell, you bloody Geopolitician!” She turned away her face; then slid to him and pulled down his head to hold to her breast. “No,” she whispered, “No, my master, no! ‘For, lo! The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land’.” She led him by the hand to a corner. “Lie you down on my bed, and I’ll play you something. Do you know, in Parsifal, where the Grail music glows and throbs as the pilgrims are going through the forest?” She knelt by the bed, hands on his shoulders, cheek to chest. “I am Kundry, you are Pars
ifal. Don’t let me die alone at the end! You know, Phillip, that poor girl didn’t want to be bad. She had no one to love her. If she had, she would have seen God plain. No, no, you must not swim with your eyes! You must not be like me.” She covered him with a blanket, and going behind a curtain, dressed in her day clothes; while Phillip lay on the bed, wanting to relax, but depressed because he did not feel able to make love to her—or want to.
She came to the bed, and almost hopped beside him. The way to the genitals, Blake’s ‘beauty’, was through a woman’s hair. Clasp her head, stroke her hair, feeling her sweetness. Such tenderness. How different from his other meetings with her years ago. Then she who was locked fast; now, unlocked.
“Have you ever been in love, Laura? I mean apart from the Sikh soldier?”
“Of course I’ve had lovers! But each time something in me seems to repel men. When I first left home I used to sleep with any boy who wanted me. Sometimes I didn’t even know his Christian name. In the morning I’d leave him, and never want to see him again. The man I really loved was that Sikh from the Punjab, who mistook Melissa for me. He was sweet. But in the end he wanted to own me, as his possession. So I broke it off. Like you, my real life is my imagination.”
“So is everyone’s.”
“Men want to own a woman. They want to be supported. A blood transfusion to keep them alive in their activities, careers, ambitions. I suppose what I want is a wife, like you want one. I can be friends with women—one is free, then. I really love Melissa, she’s free, too. She understands that women are people. She loves you. I know, although she never said so. Phillip, when you see her, you won’t tell her what I said, will you?”
He shook his head. She curled herself beside him. “Oh, I do love you so. Let’s go to sleep, and then I’ll get some lunch and we’ll go for a walk to Kensington Gardens, shall we? I go there most days. It’s so lovely, to be able to walk on grass.”
She sighed deeply, put an arm round him, and snuggled up, murmuring, “Your Ariel feels safe, O my master. And Kundry need not die now,” she sighed.
“Do you, too, want to die sometimes?”
“Often. O my love, you are the air I breathe.” A few moments later, “What are you thinking now. I can feel you thinking. You have shut yourself away from me.”
He was thinking of Billy, who had loved him, and how he had alienated Billy’s love, and was Billy crying out to him when he fell from his aircraft returning from Eastern Europe and knew he would never see his home again? And from Billy he thought of Jewish boys and girls, white-faced and quiet, being herded into gas-chambers; and of German boys being shot or hanged as the soul of Germany entered upon its dark travail, and accepted that all had been in vain, in 1945 as in 1918. The old battalions now a scatter of brown bones upon the Steppes of Russia, and the sandy plains of North Germany, as once upon the chalk uplands of Somme; melting into the wet, the treeless, the grave-set plain of Flanders. He must write; the only thing left to live for: a dedication known and accepted, even though leading to spoliation and dereliction of life ever since the miracle of that Christmas day in no-man’s land in 1914.
“What are you thinking, my master?”
When he did not answer she felt with her finger-tips the tears upon his cheeks, and a cry of knowledge subdued, and of pain, came from her.
“I know now! You are thinking of Billy, and others like him sacrificed by the old men who have died while living, and grown hard because they could no longer love! And so sent their sons to war! O, I cannot bear to feel you grieving!”
“You have the advantage of me, because you have read my books.”
She sat up and regarded him sharply. “I have the advantage of you! O God, I like that! You have haunted me for years, so that at times I have wanted to kill myself! And now you say ‘You have the advantage of me!’ Well take it, take me, beat me, rape me! Anything but this hypocritical gentle-Jesus stuff! I want your very essence, I don’t want your little-boy fears of my body, or your dreams of the boobs women have to carry around like pouter pigeons—for that’s all they are—I want to communicate with you, the true-self you—the free you—”
He was alarmed, for she had reverted to the dark aspect of herself that had repelled him in the past. For now she was not only angry, but her face seemed to have changed, particularly the eyes, which were round and protruding, and the mouth no longer gentle and pliant, but a thin line.
And as abruptly as she had reverted, her face became relaxed and gentle, then falling upon him she acted like a man, kissing and biting his neck, covering him like a man, holding his head by a handful of hair while giving little kisses on his lips and cheeks, before going limp upon him, and releasing a profound sigh followed by a murmur of “O, my master, why wasn’t I born a man, and you a woman, to take you now and make you my wife?”
“I hope you feel better Laura!” he said, mildly ironic.
“I do. I’ve restored the balance symbolically, if not bolically, between the sexes.”
“Now may I have the promised eggs and bacon?”
“You may, my master. Then let’s leave my turret room, and go and see the little boats on the Round Pond.”
“Well, for a little while, Laura. Then I must go back to Dorset for my father’s funeral.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, entirely without feeling.
*
Kensington Gardens. Small boys and retired Naval Officers sailing their craft on the Round Pond. Dogs racing over leaf-bestrewn grass. Laura seemed to melt in the mellow sunshine. He told her his plans for The New Horizon, and invited her to help him edit it, and to write for it.
“I’ll live with you and be your love, and we will all the pleasures prove, my Prospero. I’ll be your tidy secretary, sub-editor, reviewer, and general drudge. What fun it will be!”
“You’ll have to go up to London for a week every quarter, and cadge advertisements. The mag. will pay all expenses, and five pounds a week. How’s that?”
“Then may I keep on my room? The rent is thirty shillings a week.”
“Yes, if you can post off the copies from there, and make your selections as well. It can be The New Horizon office! How about it?”
“Yes, my master!”
“There’s just one little thing I should perhaps, tell you—in his last number Christie proposed that the atom bomb be dropped on Moscow.”
“Instead, the bomb fell on the magazine?”
“More or less. Christie gave me the unexpired portions of annual subscriptions, plus roneograph plates with names and addresses.”
“How much is the unexpired portion of subscriptions did you say?”
“I didn’t say. But it comes to nine pounds and eight shillings.”
“O my master, what an orgy we’ll have on that!”
Chapter 8
FAMILY REUNION
On the way to Bournemouth Phillip called at Field Place, the home of Piers Tofield. Would he be there? The lodge garden was untidy. Trees felled in park. Branches—loppings and toppings—left to rot among brambles, thistles, docks. Grassy drive, house unpainted, rows of moving whiteness in upper windows. When he stopped before the Palladian pillars at the entrance he saw hundreds of Wyandotte hens looking down from what appeared to be bedrooms. Was the house a ruin? He walked under a high stone wall, and entered the courtyard by the postern gate.
The remembered fountain was still playing in courtyard pond. Weeds between cobbles, fresh heaps of dung of heavy-draught horses. The open coach-house door revealed a black flywheel revolving in darkness. Thump—thump—thump, charging batteries in an adjoining room for electric light.
On doors of the buildings around the courtyard someone appeared to have experimented with paint: red streaks and green blobs—doodling art. On a large rainwater trough was the picture of a yellow steamship. Relics of soldier occupation; or Pier’s attempts to escape reality? There was a full garbage can outside the kitchen door, under a lean-to iron roof. He knocked.
Piers,
clad in deciduous tweeds, semi-buttonless jacket, loosely corrugated trousers, opened the door. Glittering, evasive eyes, peaky unshaven face, Etonian politeness. “Glad to see you again, Phil. Come in. You’ll find it a bit of a mess, but an improvement on Berlin, I believe. Only part of the roof has fallen in. I live in the kitchen, a comfortable wolf’s lair.”
After a cup of tea which was half whisky they went outside.
“The first floor is let off to a farmer, who asked me if I’d mind him ‘havin’ a foo guests’ to stay with him. Apparently he murders his guests periodically, for I hear squawks and other cries of distress at all hours before market day. The smell is somewhat over-powering upstairs, I’m afraid, for I haven’t so far removed the ‘manners’, as he calls the chicken dung—to the kitchen garden. I’ve plans to start it up again—always tomorrow, so far. The greenhouses haven’t much glass left, apparently the troops celebrated V.J. day by smashing all they could see. Can’t blame them, really, after all the boring years of home service. Good to see the old Silver Eagle again. My Aston isn’t mobile at the moment, needs a rebuilt engine among other things. Left it in London.”
The Gale of the World Page 8