“Thank you, Peter. It means that everything you see about you is something that was first only imagined. A clock—this candle —this room—the blankets and pillows, were imagined before they could be made real.”
“Sort of invented, Dad” said David.
“Exactly! And trees and grass were invented, and animals and birds.”
“You mean ‘evolved’, sir?” asked Peter.
“Yes. They didn’t come about suddenly, but gradually. Their evolution, or change, took place under a plan, a haphazard plan if you like, but the Idea was there first, or, as Keats the poet wrote, the Imagination. Love was evolved, too—the love of a cat for her kittens, a bird for its eggs, the cockbird for the hen he has married —married by the Imagination. So love is a great force in the world, and as for men, we are social animals, like some birds and animals in flocks all over the earth and in the sky. Richard Jefferies, who wrote what you’ve just read to us, loved the air and the countryside so much he couldn’t bear the idea of being buried when his turn came to die, and longed to be burned on a hilltop, his ashes scattered. And your grandfather, who had to work in London year after year, also loved the country. So I thought we’d have a pyre on The Chains, and cast his ashes into the flames. Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“Yes, Dad!” they cried together.
“We’ll build the funeral pyre when Mother comes down.”
Lucy and Melissa started west from Suffolk one morning at five o’clock, to journey upon empty roads with the sun behind them, and to have the cool of the morning. For weeks rain had been falling every day. Now the weather had changed. The day had risen with the sun to be one of great heat: a windless shining upon field after field of laid corn.
Melissa had spent the past four months undergoing a rebuilding of the flesh of part of her face, and a course of Diaphany in a Surrey country house. This course had been arduous; not only all the terms used in an entirely new idiom, almost a language in itself, but the approaches to questioning patients was as original as the language, which was a conglomeration of new—some critics said fanciful—theories expounded by an adaptation—the critics declared mongrelisation—of Greek and Latin words. At best it was jargon, they declared.
The founder answered these objections simply. “All technical terms are jargon. The ordinary human mind is cluttered with jargon. We unclutter it. We help it to see plain.”
To Melissa, all was plain: Faith, Hope, and—Clarity.
*
The vapours of the night, which had gathered upon the sodden fields, were risen by noon to be high cloudlets, like a scatter of pale breast feathers of some slain heavenly bird thought Melissa, as she sat beside Lucy driving the little Ford 8 saloon car.
The baby was asleep in her cot secured upon the back seat. It was nearly noon when, in the distance, the tall spire of a cathedral came into view, as they ran down the road from the downs, crossed the river, and followed the road between water-meadows to Salisbury.
There Lucy drove to the car-park, and sat with Melissa, quietly resting for a few minutes, both windows open under a high sun.
“Shall we drive on and see Piers?” said Lucy, “or would you like to eat our sandwiches here?”
“I’m happy to do anything you like, Lucy.”
“Well, Phillip did write and say Piers would be glad to see us, so perhaps we should drop in.”
Phillip’s letter had said also that it was delightfully informal at Field Place, “Just as it was years ago at Down Close when I first knew you, and you were living there so happily with Pa and the Boys.”
“Do you think it might make our arrival at Molly’s too late for you to go on to your family?”
Lucy began to have doubts. Perhaps Mel had some reason for not wanting to see Piers? How silly of her: of course it must be the scars down her cheeks, where she had been slashed by a demented Indian soldier-patient in a Calcutta hospital during the war. The scars were still noticeable, despite the skin-grafting. Why hadn’t she thought of it before!
While she hesitated, Melissa, who had divined Lucy’s thoughts, said, “I’m not unduly sensitive about my appearance, Lucy. Really, I’d love to see Piers again.”
“Perhaps we can have a picnic on the way there? It’s so lovely on top of the downs.”
As she drove up to the Great Plain it was to Lucy almost a home-coming. Far away to the south lay the heights of the Chace, with its dissolved blue shimmering of tree and drove. Somewhere below lay her old home of Down Close; while, to the north, under other downs, was Skirr farmhouse to which she had gone as a bride, Phillip driving his motor-bicycle, she in the sidecar with little Billy. Twenty one years ago! Now it was all part of the summer day—a happy summer day—for since Lucy had been on her own, she had seen her relationship with Phillip, and particularly her own shortcomings, in perspective. Phillip to her now was one who had had always far too much to do, while insisting on doing his very best in all he undertook, at the same time never being able to say no to anyone in trouble. So he was almost always in a muddle, she considered, in her simplifying way. She hoped he was happy at last, able to write without too many human disturbances. And O, if he needed her, she would be always by his side!
There was communication between them, for Lucy said, “Phillip deserves peace and happiness, if anyone does.”
Melissa said, turning bright blue eyes upon her cousin, “I am so happy to be with you again, Lucy! And to be back in this lovely country. Nothing has changed, really! You look just the same, and I begin to feel that I am me, once more.”
Other contours of the Plain were ahead; they stopped on the crest of the down to sit by a tumulus. Harebells azure as the sky moved with the warm airs arising from cornfields spreading away and below them.
“The whole Plain has been ploughed up, Lucy!”
Wheatears were gravely watching them from the old grey sward of the tumulus before abruptly breaking away in flight as though in search of a lost world.
The baby awakened. Melissa took her in her arms, but the baby wanted to walk, she struggled to be free of gentle lip-to-cheek kisses. She pulled off her woollen socks, and standing still, put one foot forward, but when she tried to move the other foot to beside the first, she had to sit down. Then, between the two women, little hands held by larger hands, Sarah was borne lightly across to the tumulus to climb up, up, up to where blue hill-butterflies and wild bees were at the honey of thyme and hawkbit.
They rested for half an hour; then on across the westward slopes of the Great Plain spreading away and below; another sea of adolescent corn lately pressed flat by the wet waves of the wind. And down a familiar road descending in curves before the right-handed turn to the Colham road, and so to Field Place. Whatever had happened to the house?
The grey Palladian circumstructure had gone, and among its ruins stood a small Jacobean farmhouse.
“Of course, Phillip said it had been pulled down. What a relief it must be to Piers!”
The walled garden still stood, and as they drove nearer they saw Piers with a gardener pushing a hand-cart filled with lawn cuttings to add to a compost heap outside a gate leading to the high-walled kitchen garden. Beyond was the gardener’s cottage, by which small children were playing.
Piers greeted them warmly, and took them to see his work in the walled garden. The fountain was in play, greenhouses had been re-glassed. The stable clock struck eleven; it was half past two; but it was going. “Must adjust that,” said Piers. He was lean and sun-burned, his eye clear as they walked along weeded paths to a postern gate leading to mown but still mossy lawns, divided by clumps of rhododendrons and a cedar tree before the modest remains of what had grown to be a mansion but now had returned to a seventeenth-century barton.
While they sat on the grass, a black rabbit ran to Piers and got up on its hind-legs.
“Inky’s begging for bread and butter. He doesn’t like finding the cupboard bare, so watch out!”
Hardly had he said that when Inky lollop
ed forward and was about to bite Piers’ trousers. Then another animal which had been lying, throat to grass, a dozen yards off, crept up, body held low, towards the rabbit. It looked like a fox, but was slightly larger, with darker coat.
“Father a fox, mother a spaniel,” Piers explained. “Inky, a cringer if ever there was one, is inclined to get rid of his inferiority complex by attacking passive objects like young chickens and children.”
Sarah was crawling on the grass. The rabbit lolloped to the child. “Manners, Inky!” said Piers, sharply. The dog put itself between Inky and Sarah. “On guard, Foxy!” Whereupon the fox-dog put its head under the rabbit, tossed it aside, and lay flat, yellow eyes fixed on the rabbit. “Foxy is our Chief of Secret Police. Foxy thinks, don’t you Foxy? When wild rabbits invade the lawn he starts rolling, getting nearer and nearer to one before springing up and catching it. No, he doesn’t kill it, but takes it to the courtyard pond and drops it in. Does the same with Inky, usually, when he tries to bite. On guard, Foxy!”, for Inky was again lolloping towards the baby. “Now watch!”
With steady fast movement Foxy moved in. Inky made a feint movement, changed direction and leapt over its opponent’s head. Equally quick, Foxy swung round and at a cry of “Banish Inky!” took the rabbit by the scruff and trotted away with it round the house.
“Don’t worry,” said Piers. “It’s a game they play. Come and see the end of it.”
They walked together through open double-doors at the end of a croquet lawn, and came to the kitchen door, followed by a bedraggled Inky. “He always has potato crisps with yeast after a ducking. Naughty Inky!”, addressing the rabbit. “You only bite my trousers in order to get flung in the pond and get extra food, don’t you, naughty Inky?” The kitchen door opened, a young woman came out.
“Beth!”
“Melissa!”
Surprise. Smiling faces. Happiness.
“When did you leave India?”
Explanations. “It’s a small world after all, isn’t it? Mel and Laura and I nursed together in Calcutta during the war, Lucy.”
Inky was striking the floor with hind-feet. “He’s angry because I haven’t added Bovril to his crisps,” she said.
“Gets away with it every time,” said Piers. “Well trained, aren’t you Inky,” as the rabbit went to bite his trousers. “Manners, Inky!”, whereupon Inky tried another way: he sat up and begged. A teaspoon of Bovril was flipped over the crisps, and the rabbit settled down to nibble.
“Foxy brought him in one morning, when he was small. I think Foxy knew we liked curiosities. Inky’s remained here ever since. He chases away ordinary grey rabbits, being a bit of a race-purist, I fancy.”
He put the kettle on the crook.
“How is Phillip? And the other children? Sit down, and tell me all the latest. How is Laura, is she happy with ‘Buster’?”
“Why not go out and sit by the cedar tree?” suggested Beth. “I’ll bring out the tea-trolley. No help needed, thanks, I can manage.”
And sitting in the shade of the cedar’s dark horizontal branches, while ring-doves coo’d among distant oaks and beeches, they enjoyed a tomato lettuce salad, with herb omelettes, radishes, and spring onions on tender green stalks. Then a plum cake, and farmhouse pot of tea in West Country style.
When Lucy and Beth went inside the house with the baby, Piers said to Melissa, “I suppose you’ll see Phil while you’re down there?”
“I hope to see Laura, too. I hear she’s learning to glide, with ‘Buster’ as tutor. But my first objective is to finish my advanced course of Diaphany, under Caspar Field.”
“Archie Plugge was here the other day. Apparently his boss sacked him. Archie had all sorts of tales about the place, some of which, when drunk I suppose, he ‘leaked’ to the reporters. I know nothing about Caspar Schwenkfelder, or Field as he now apparently wants to be called.”
When she did not speak, Piers went on, “Archie said something about Phil’s sister, now living at Lynmouth, but refusing to see Phil, or was it the other way about. I couldn’t really understand what Archie was saying, he was economising on his usual tipple, surgical spirit. Asked if he could stay here. I’m afraid we hadn’t a room ready.”
“Is Phillip writing?”
“I gathered not. Archie had a story of some local complications, but then again I couldn’t quite make out the details.”
Lucy had told Melissa that there had always been trouble between Phillip and Elizabeth. With complete belief in Diaphany, she decided to ask Lucy, later, to take her with her when she went to see her sister-in-law.
When they were on the road again, Lucy said, “Piers is all right at last, thank goodness,” as she thought contentedly that she would soon be seeing the boys; and on the following day, meeting Rosamund at Minehead, from her school in Berkshire.
Meanwhile, the idea was that she and Melissa should stop the night at Molly’s, and go on the next day to Shep Cot, leaving Melissa on the way at Oldstone Castle.
Melissa believed that Diaphany was the only way to free the spirit, to bring light to the darkness of a torn and revengeful post-war world filled with neuroses and despair.
And while they moved east across the moor she was thinking. If only Phillip will believe that Diaphany is in line with all he has written—a means to free the spirit! Dear, dear Phillip, you have revealed to others the true way, but cannot heal yourself—without my help.
*
Melissa in her bedroom at Oldstone Castle: late afternoon shadows slanting to the east: the open window of the bedroom looking upon small sloping fields divided by stone banks: open moor beyond, rising to the sky.
At first, she had felt a great loneliness coming from the moor, which had drawn her to walk on the lower slopes where heather, ling, and dwarf furze with its dark yellow flowers were hot in the sun. The only living things she saw were rock-pipits, drab little birds of the wilderness: nothing else, no moving distant figure of man or dog.
Upon returning, she felt mournful, and went upstairs to lie down in her bedroom. There, upon her bed, she read Phillip’s editorial in The New Horizon, and thought that among those lost legions were her two brothers, killed in the Second World War. And lying there, she became aware of the scent of honey. Nigel had kept hives: could it be—Bees were passing the window. She got up to watch them. The air held a ground-swell of almost imaginary vibration: probably a secondary honey-flow to the hives within the walled garden. Molly had said that the July rains, followed by sunshine, had brought new blossom to the ling and the bell-heather.
While she stood there, a shadow moved across one of the distant small fields, then over another, silently sweeping across stonewalling, to be lost in dark brown heather of the incult moor. Looking up, she saw a glider about to bank for a turn.
The sail-plane seemed to pause in flight before going towards the sun. High in the sky above it, hung a fleece of grey cloudlets reminding her of the dapple on her nursery rocking horse. In her mind she saw her brothers, Giles and Nigel, wagering with bulls-eye sweets, who could move Dobbin on his stand around the nursery floor without upsetting. The picture dissolved; giving way to lines of a poem by Walter de la Mare.
And, like clouds in the height of the sky
Our hearts stood still
In the hush of an age gone by
Nigel. British War Cemetery, Bayeux. Three years since he was left with most of his platoon in the long grass of a Normandy bocage during the breakout at Falaise. She read again the last part of The Lost Legions, printed in the magazine lent to her by Miranda.
A light-play, as of sun on August leaves,
A height-soft moan, wooden intermittent rattle,
And, as the scrollèd conflict eastward weaves
Feelers drooping darkly out of battle.
Giles. R.A.F. Cemetery. Runnymede. Battle of Britain, September 1940, Biggin Hill.
Laura, now some miles away in Falcon One, was dazzled by reflected sunlight splayed upon the sea to the west. She was movin
g fast, at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Soon the glider was over the Atlantic. She saw diving birds sitting on the wrinkled sea far below, as she approached Lundy. A feeling of quiet sadness possessed her. It is always so, she thought, for those who reflect. The sun-god is going down to his grave. The genes of innumerable forebears speak through the poets.
Comrade look not on the west:
’Twill have the heart out of your breast;
’Twill take your thoughts and sink them far,
Leagues beyond the sunset bar.
Oh lad, I fear that yon’s the sea
Where they’ll fish for you and me,
And there from whence we both are ta’en,
You and I shall drown again.
When you and I are spilt on air
Long we shall be strangers there;
Friends of blood and bone are best,
Comrade, look not on the west.
“I shall look on the west, old Father Housman!” she shouted as the mercury fell.
It had been a day when her thoughts had turned perpetually from the visible to the unseen world—to the cosmos perceived from within, that world wherein the Imagination works to create the visible.
“O God,” she said aloud. “What am I doing here, in this contrived image of a bird! I am not a bird, I am a woman. I must be loved or I don’t want to live!” She became hysterical. “Blood of my blood, bone of my bone, where are you? Where are you, my bloody, bony comrade? The bed of blood and bone is best, you tell us; but what sort of a bed did you lie upon, old Father Housman? Your thoughts gnawing the image of that undergraduate love-of-your-life who went into the Indian Army and left you alone on the banks of the Cam? Is there ease for you, where you now lie, wearing the turning globe, my Shropshire Lad that never was?”
The Gale of the World Page 31