“I’ll call for you in an hour’s time, Laura.”
Dinner at the Medicean: Laura running out half way through the meal. Having paid the bill, he followed. Driving in silence to Old Compton Street.
“Do tell me what’s the matter, Laura.”
“You know very well what’s the matter!”
“I do not know.”
“Good-night then—Buona Notte!”
Then she was running down the stairs, imploring him to come back and sleep in her room.
Both lying still in the single bed. Laura withdrawing, to lie on the floor. What a life! Alarm clock ticking like death-watch beetle, set for 7.30 a.m. Boat train leaving 9.30. The polar night’s huge boulder hath rolled this my heart, my Sisyphus, in the abyss … Edith Sitwell a great poet.
Breakfast. “You’re naturally upset by the change, Laura, but you’ll settle down in Corfu. Shouldn’t you eat something? It’s a long journey to Brindisi …”
No reply.
“Laura, please do try and help me—and yourself.”
And then, “It’s time to leave, Laura.”
Victoria Station. Her silence maintained while waiting in queue. Shuffling movement, barrier open, tickets please, leaving her to show hers while he dashed, carrying suitcase, to platform-ticket machine. Buy fruit—Canadian apples, oranges, bananas, grapes. Then up and down the long train to find her. 9.25. Where was she? Ah! Behind that window, face turned away.
“Here’s your case. Sorry I forgot about the platform ticket. I’m always terribly nervous, too, before I start a book, Laura. When the first draft of my novel is finished, I’ll join you in Corfu, Laura. And we’ll walk, and swim, and live in the brilliant sunlight of an Ionian spring.”
“Charming!”
“At last the oracle! Have some fruit. Almost like pre-war!”
“That must cheer you up. What’re the new tram tickets like? The nineteen fourteen ones?”
“Yes! How did you guess?”
Blue leaden eyes upon him. “Why are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Now be fair. Corfu was your idea!”
The guard was standing on the platform, green flag under arm. Phillip went to the end of the coach to say at the open door, “How much longer before the train leaves?”
“Two minutes, sir.”
“Laura, I must say good-bye now. ‘All partings are a little death’. I wonder who said that.”
“You did!”
“Tactless of me.”
“Oh no. You don’t say!”
Reversion to the semi-peasant girl from ‘silly Suffolk’. Guard taking watch-on-chain from fob. “Well, au revoir. Let us part kindly, Laura.”
No reply. ‘Silly’ Suffolk or saintly Suffolk, this was Medusa he thought, leaving the coach.
Guard closing door behind him, whistle to mouth … door flung open, recoiling against strap-hinge, Laura leaping to platform, Medusa snake-arms round his neck, “Oh Phillip, why are you sending me away from you? I love, love you. Promise you’ll look after yourself?”, unwinding arms to look into his face.
“Come on, miss! Take your seat, please!”
He almost said Buona Notte but changed to “Au revoir”.
Guard blowing on-your-way whistle, Laura hanging out of window-space, “I am with you always!”, palms of hands pressed against his narrowed face. He had to break her hold, push her back into the coach as the train drew smoothly away.
A last cry—“Don’t forget me!”, and he was standing there waving, waving—the train smaller and smaller round the curve.
Station Buffet. 10 a.m. Phillip sat by a cup of weak coffee growing colder on the table beside him, as he wrote in his journal. Before going to the warm room he had stood for some time on the empty platform, imagining the long train on its way to Dover—Paris—Rome—Brindisi—the rusty ferryboat over the wine-dark sea to Corfu.
“Is that your black open motorcar on the taxi waiting-place, sir?”
“Oh yes, I think it must be.”
“If you could take it away, sir.”
“Of course, officer! At once!”
London. Emptiness, pain; but—one must hold on.
*
The grass grows green upon the battlefields.
“Well, how very nice to see you!” said Lucy, blushing.
“Yes, by Jove, Phil, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you!”
“Things going well, Tim?”
“Oh, one mustn’t grumble.”
“How’s Brenda and the boy?”
“Oh, well, quite happy, I’m glad to say.”
“It’s half-term for Peter,” said Lucy. “He will be pleased! Rosamund’s due home tonight for three days, too.”
“Is this the baby? Heavens, how she’s grown. May I take her?”
“Of course, my dear! Do you know, Sarah is just like you! Same eyes, same nose, very energetic, and sees everything! I am so pleased. There now, isn’t she a darling?”
“What long narrow feet.”
“Just like yours, Pip. She’ll make a good horsewoman, too, with those long legs.”
“Another throw-back in the family—what bad luck for you.”
“Not at all, my dear, not one little bit at all!”
Lucy flushed again, conscious of her boldness in thus contradicting Phillip. “Have you had any food? Well then, how about a cup of tea?”
“By Jove yes, Lulu, just the thing before I go to the station to collect Rosamund!”
Tim had an old Morris car, for which he had paid £30 at the end of the war. Now it was worth £130, a thought that constantly gave him pleasure.
“Would you like me to put the Eagle in the garage, Phil? And if you’re not going to use it, I suggest you let me drain the water from the lowest point. There’s a sharp wind-frost most nights now.”
“Thanks, Tim. I must be getting back to Exmoor fairly soon—”
The open hearth burned well. His deep leather saddlebag-chair. Heavy, split oak logs from the farm. Upstairs room with the lattice casements and polished corn-merchant’s double desk—why not edit the magazine from there? And write his own stuff at Shep Cot? All his books in the two tall cases. No trouble about food. £22 in bank; he could write his monthly article for the Evening Telegram, arranged that morning at 25 guineas a time. Then, in March, to Corfu: novel finished, magazine established—
“I’ve promised to stay at Molly’s during her children’s half-term, Lucy.”
Miranda had written, Mummie asks me to say come over and stay as long as you like, dearest coz. We do so want to help with New Horizon. I can sort out the articles, and send the others back with a letter of thanks‚ to soften the blow of rejection. Please do not lose my address: the school’s back at Cheltenham. Please write soon. Always your loving Miranda.
P.S. Bodger is happy, Mummie says, but he seems to be waiting all the time for you and listening to motor engines.
*
“Well, stay a day or two if you feel like it, Pip. I’m sure Cousin Molly will understand. Why not telephone?”
“You mean from the public call-box down the street?”
“Oh no! We’ve had the telephone connected. It’s useful for Tim, about orders for his trinket boxes. You see, it saves him going to London to ask the little man in the Bond Street shop.”
Lucy and Tim’s ‘little men’ of that Dorset backwater of twenty years ago—
“Yes, I might be able to work up quite a good connexion, Phil. For a year or two, anyway, while the sellers’ market lasts. It all depends on that, and Lucy, of course, how long I stay here.”
You might include me in the list of credits, thought Phillip. After all, I’ve made it all possible.
“You see, Phil, it’s very hard to get a cottage now, all the Service people being demobbed, and I could get one of course, but that would mean working as a labourer on the land, and I certainly don’t intend to do that.”
“Ah.”
Phillip played with Sarah on the sofa. No stari
ng in face, or making forced noises. He looked away, to give her leisure to assess him, while making between his front teeth a curlew’s bubbling call as it floats, wings downheld as though in sheltering position for its imagined young in the rushes of The Chains, five hundred feet below. The bird in joy imagining its young.
Sarah liked what she heard and saw, and worked her legs to jump, frog-like. He pressed a thumb under each big toe, so that she could grip them.
“Homo Sapiens is a scandent mammal. The tree-grip is security. Isn’t it, little growing-up baby?”
She held up her arms, he held her on his shoulder, one hand for the grip of feet. She smiled and smiled; her face puckered when he put her down. He whistled, the hoarse-sweet cry of a male curlew. All was well again.
“How is my elder daughter?” Rosamund was now adolescent.
“She’s such a great help, Pip.”
“Mum, may I cook the supper?” asked Roz. “You have a rest by the fire. I’ve learned to cook at school.”
Peter came into the sitting room.
“Good evening, sir. I mean Father. Dad.”
“Good evening, young sir. I mean Peter. Son.”
Peter, a school prefect, with the assured gentleness of a good leader. His face had thin white scars where the dark and passionate Roz had, in fury of his slowness, clawed at his eyes because he had not understood what she, a small child, had failed to make clear to him. Now the budding girl had protective love for brother Peter.
“What do you want to do when you leave school?”
Faint colouring rising in cheeks. Hesitation. Then, “Oh, the Royal Air Force, I suppose, Dad.”
“David?”
“Royal Air Force, chooky.”
“Jonny?”
“Same, I suppose.”
Here was human warmth, a home; books in the library rising on shelves to the ceiling. A leather armchair, table, open fireplace; but it was not the wilderness. Wind rattled the leaded panes of the otherwise bare room in the south wing of the old house. Specks of sleet entered through the loose glass of one casement, with faint cries of wind, scarcely more than sighs. I must go before the snow comes, and snow-drifts lie beech-hedge high on roads of the moor. I must write; or perish. There might be a letter from Laura! No: I don’t want her to write to me—
The weather report on the B.B.C. that evening was alarming, if he was to get back to Shep Cot.
“The wireless says it’s beginning to freeze all over Europe, Tim. ‘A long sweep of Siberian air is beginning to move across the continent from the East’. That’s an entry I made this morning in my diary. I must leave first thing tomorrow, Lucy.”
“Well, if you must, my dear. But you’re perfectly welcome to stay here, you know.”
“By Jove, yes, Phil, do stay as long as you like.”
“Thank you, both. But I should go. I really must begin my novel series.” He sighed. “Just fancy. I conceived the idea in nineteen nineteen, intended to start in nineteen twenty-nine, and now it is nearly nineteen forty seven. Almost thirty years—”
He was staring in a strange way at the floor, and Lucy knew it was no good trying to stop him going. Then she remembered to ask about the magazine.
“Oh, we printed five thousand copies, and subscribers number about three hundred. Molly is going to use the metal stencil cards to address the wrappers. I arranged in London with the railway bookstalls to take four thousand on sale or return. That leaves five hundred which I hope to get booksellers in Devon and Somerset to take, also on sale or return. Though they’ll want a whacking discount, I suppose, sixty per cent or more.”
“You haven’t any with you, I suppose?” asked Tim, modestly. “I could have a display in the wide window of my machine room, which looks on to the main road through the village.”
“I’ll send up a hundred copies by rail, Tim. Thanks for your co-operation.”
“Not at all, not at all” murmured Tim.
*
The grey north-east was blowing, day after day, over the moor; but there was warmth within Shep Cot. Phillip had raised the hearth by three courses of brick. Simply laid them there end to end—no mortar—and this had limited the area by which gate-crashing cold air could pass over the floor and up the chimney. Also the diminished flame-space caused blue skeins of smoke to creep up close to the blackened back-wall; to slide, with occasional farewell hesitations and waverings, up into the hollow chimney square.
There were two tons—twelve loads brought in the box-body of the Silver Eagle—of five-foot long oak poles standing against the outside walls of the cottage.
Safe until Christmas. Now he must write his second Editorial for The New Horizon.
He walked about, picking up odd objects—sea-shells, an acorn, smooth red half-brick from the sea-shore, a stag’s-horn … waitting for an idea to drift, seed-like under parachute, from his mind.
Upon plain wooden shelves fixed to the kitchen wall stood lines of books, pick of his library of the 1914–18 war—British, German, French records, memoirs, personal accounts—together with a file of letters from the ghosts of that time—Desmond Neville, Lily Cornford, his parents, Grandfather Thomas Turney, ‘Spectre’ West and others of the Regiment; and his own letters from the Front, which Elizabeth had allowed him to take away after Father’s death, together with his trench maps: large-scale sheets red-threaded, like veins in the human body, with German trench-lines and serrated obstacles; simple blue lines, without particulars, for the British front positions. The Germans built to hold; the British to push forward from. Germany blockaded: Great Britain ruled the waves. Only a question of time—
Map sheets backed by linen, stained by rain, dog-eared, marked with indelible pencil for particular objectives—behind them the transport routes, locations of canvas horse-watering troughs, ration dumps of tools, wire, and ammunition; drinking water points where petrol-cans were filled; first-aid posts.
Ordnance Survey sheets of the 1916 battlefield of the Somme giving way to more Ordnance Survey sheets with trench-free, green and brown contours—virgin land—chalk downlands happily reached after the German retreat to the Siegfried Stellung in March 1917, all the muck and the shell-holes and the dead left behind and forgotten … until the Spring battles—Arras and Bullecourt, Monchy-le-Preux. And in June all the heavy stuff, the howitzers and great railway guns going north to Flanders. Map of battle objectives—green, red, blue, yellow lines, July 31st opening battle, Pilckem Ridge—the rain, rain, rain, all August, dry in September, the swamps of October in the Salient … that wonderful walk with ‘Spectre’ West up the duckboards past the Steenbeke and the line of 18-pounder field-guns sinking into the mud, to Kansas Cross and on up to the Gravenstafel ridge hidden from the German observation posts on the higher Passchendaele ridge. Then to the Roulers railway embankment, to find themselves through a gap in the German lines and the way open to the Passchendaele ridge! Then ‘Spectre’ was hit, and he had to make the return journey alone with a message for G.H.Q. as darkness came on. The exhilaration of four thousand British, French and German guns firing all together, the battlefield one vast cauldron of light, making you feel you were floating on sound-light forever and ever lost to the old pre-war world. And more by luck than judgment he found the way to the Menin Road and so down to Ypres.
*
Phillip, lying in bed, began to toss and turn, to mutter, and curse!—himself: shocked by his own weak conduct, as the mindcells revealed visual-oral pictures of Hell. Self-hate, self-pity no good. The artist must rule in life. If he died the life of his days would never be re-created, for now the Salient was all farm-land again—
19 July, 1919. Versailles. La Revanche. Clemenceau and the slogan, Germany is a lemon which must be squeezed until the pips squeaked. The blockade of starvation still on, German bread half-sawdust. French colonial troops in the Rhineland, rape of little Hans and Gretchen, child prostitutes asking for—soap. Civilians pushed from pavements, hats knocked off. Poles with a few hundred roubles coming from the
ghettoes of Warsaw, becoming mark-millionaires almost overnight.
Phillip, wet with sweat, shouting, “And the pips squeaked! Reparations took all the lemon juice! The victors loaned money to be repaid as further reparation! The pips screamed in halle and platz and burgerkeller and over the radio, and it all blew up again for lack of green-grass thoughts!” For God had not been allowed to come down from the scaffold to lay a healing touch upon the self-enslaved spirit of Western Man.
*
It was as though a blackthorn spine had pierced his left eye. So sharp was the pain that when he half-rose he upset the table. This was much worse than any former pain. Had the retina become clouded by the burst of a blood vessel? He tried to open his eye but it was held in stabbing pain. I am done for. While he sat there the dog’s cold nose touched his hand. It was reassuring; dear, dear Bodger!
He bathed the eye, after much flinching from raising the lid, in an eye-bath holding glycerine and rose-water. He could just see his way upstairs. But sleep was broken by perilous thoughts, so he got up; and having connected a long lead from the car battery to a 12-volt bulb suspended from the ceiling, began to scribble rapidly.
If there be any young writer, survivor of the Second World War, who aspires to write a War and Peace for this age, to him I send my thoughts this frozen January night.
Will you, eager writer of genius, with nothing to sustain you but the wings of your own spirit, to whom these thoughts go out this night, in your vision unimpeded and unimpaired by contemporary massed emotions, show truly the luminous personality of Adolf Hitler in a room with those who believe in him, who have faith that his clear commonsense will avoid a war which they know, and he knows, the Fatherland cannot sustain? And will you show this Lucifer, this light-bringer, in a scene of Tolstoyan scope and sweep, as one in those early years of the ’thirties possessed harmoniously by the highest spiritual force, gentle and magnanimous, yet also the man of cool calculation, of immense patience and understanding of all problems when he is talking with a young Englishwoman whose sensibility matches her physical grace, who is clear in the sense that, like Shelley, she saw him plain?
The Gale of the World Page 19