“What exactly does that mean?”
He took an envelope from his pocket. “Read this! I happened to find it lying on the stairs and considered it my duty to open it.”
Molly read the letter, and put it in her handbag.
“Anda’s generation is different from ours, Perry. They are much more serious, for one thing.”
“Miranda is hardly a ‘generation’. She hasn’t come out yet, she’s still in the schoolroom. And I will not have my daughter talked about! Certainly not in that club as it is today. Anyway, where there’s smoke there’s fire. People only want to know others for what they can get from them. She mustn’t see that chap again. Will you support me in this?”
“Very well. Now I must get on with my work, if we’re to be ready for your Crimson Ramblers.”
Peregrine went down to be among his own sort at the Polo Club. It was empty. England has gone to pot, he told himself; and went on to ‘Buster’s’ to give his daughter a talking-to.
*
Breaking away from the partly maintained social façade of the ’twenties, Molly Gildart, débutante, had ‘kicked over the traces’ with others of her young London friends, to the distress of the pre-1914 regime. Peregrine Bucentaur had shared in the post-war dissolution of those who had been just too young in 1918 to take part in the Great War. Based on escapist excitation, the Bucentaur-Gildart marriage had not been a success. Inevitably Peregrine had gone his own way. His absences, while regretted by Molly, were a relief to her. Perry had a limited imagination; while she was musical, ‘adoring’, as ‘too, too wonderful’, both opera and ballet. She had her being in the works of Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, de Falla and the Russians—all lumped together by Peregrine as ‘a ghastly din’.
Peregrine was the elder of two sons. This absence of any feeling for the poetry of the human spirit was in-born; it simply wasn’t in his blood. He took after his father, a double reason for his mother’s dislike. So from the early years the mother had disliked her first-born. She had tried to avoid this dislike, but never succeeded in overcoming an aversion for the child. It had an instinctive origin. She had submitted to her husband, who had exercised his marital rights, or rites, without any attempt at courtship, even of a lascivious kind, during the honeymoon. The nearest he had got to any kind of communication with his bride was when, to end a period of boredom during the honeymoon when the Casino at Monte Carlo was shut one Sunday evening, he said, “How about coming upstairs and attending to the needs of nature, what?”
It was that invitation that had preceded the conception of Peregrine—the traditional name of the heir to the manor of Brockholes St. Boniface. This property had been acquired by the Crown, otherwise Henry the Eighth, during liquidation of the monasteries with the help of a lawyer called Thomas Cromwell. One of Cromwell’s myrmidons, an adventurer from Venice who was not above murder, had been awarded the manor in 1540. The arriviste Bucentaur had practised flattery at Court: praised the Royal musical compositions: paid tribute with a coachload of looted paintings by foreign masters—thus an honourable exchange among greater thief and lesser thief.
There was, however, a covenant with the copyhold: a score of pickled and smoked brock hams payable annually to the Court; these to be stuck with cloves and roasted under a baste of sugar. The hams of brocks, or badgers were an especial delicacy obtained from the ‘antient holes or holts’ tunnelled into the hillside wood known as Grete Bere.
If Peregrine’s mother had disliked him, while showing a marked preference for her younger son, his father made no bones about the misfortune to himself in having to put up with such an heir: one who was, in fact, exactly like himself. So the unwanted elder son had been forced to excel at games and all field sports: as it were to turn himself inside out—an extravert as the saying in the ’twenties ran—by fully entering upon an outside world wherein he had been capped for cricket (being an outstandingly good bowler) and on the football (soccer) field, a half-back who could be relied upon to break-up an advancing line of forwards by a technique of hacks, trips, and bargings. Further, in another direction, he had exploited the admiration of small boys for their usefulness in le vice anglais: an unnatural twist due to the selfish stupidity of his male parent.
Peregrine—the once heir to great possessions—and a beautiful wife. The first blow had fallen when his father died within the five-year span required for the abrogation of death-duties. All the quarrels following the making-over of the estate to Peregrine—dissensions over points of estate management (for the old man never truly abdicated his place as head of both estate and family) had been in vain. Death duties required that two thirds of the land be sold. And it was a time when land values were the lowest for one and a half centuries.
To recoup, Peregrine tried farming some of what was left in hand of the Brockholes property. He lost money, for corn did not pay, nor did stock-raising, nor the ewe flocks traditionally used to restore fertility to the malting-barley lands of North Somerset.
Farming in the ’thirties was a mug’s game, so Peregrine didn’t so much get out as drop out. He tried to restore his fortunes by odd schemes, such as selling apple-trees by advertising in newspapers—‘Get health and wealth by growing apples which Pomona Ltd. will buy from you at market value’. There was no market value for such apples: Peregrine knew that before he advertised his wares. He tried the same idea with mushrooms to be grown in suburban cellars. Edible Fungi Ltd. advertised for sale mushroom spawn mixed with dehydrated horse manure ‘to be delivered in plain sacks’. A few months later, it was pointed out in the Bankruptcy Court that ‘Edible Fungi’ was hardly an attractive style and title for trading purposes.
By this time Peregrine was a marked man. A suave gentleman with pomaded hair persuaded him to buy a disused cannery in Cornwall (the pilchard shoals having declined) combined with a slaughterhouse where DOG? CAT? FOOD Ltd. could can portions of fish with those of old cows for suburban pets. (It was later, following disclosures in the Bankruptcy Court, that a scandalous weekly called Keyhole declared that Colonel Peregrine Bucentaur was like all professional soldiers, an addict of ‘sadomasochistic-necrophilic practices, a hopeless worshipper of dead, dying, and miscarried small industrial concerns’. Anyway, the food-canning venture was doomed to failure before it started: no one, continued Keyhole, knew which tins were for dogs and what were for cats. ‘The ex-squire of Brockholes St. Boniface Abbey in Somerset had gone bust on his little fanciful habits of tinned death-worship.’
Whereupon Peregrine riposted by buying up Keyhole and closing it down after one issue’s blasting of the former proprietors, a trio of young writers. “That’s put paid to that clap, anyway,” he told his cronies at the bar of his St James’ Street Club.
Peregrine’s final bid to recoup was by hair pomade. Oddly, the idea had come from the first appearance of the gent who had been responsible for Dog? Cat? Food Ltd: to restore the illusion of youth to deciduous human scalps by a mixture of olive oil, honey and eau-de-cologne. He tried to get his Curzon Street hairdresser, Van Tromp, to stock it, without success. For Fertility Pomard attracted the wrong sort of hair, viz the bristles of flies, wasps and even bees crawling in summer upon senescent male skulls, the eyes in which stared wistfully at young women lying on the post-war sward of St. James’ Park.
Thereafter, a soldier of misfortune, Peregrine lived up to his name—the Wanderer.
*
Lucy said to Melissa, “The trouble lies with Elizabeth, I think. She has always been a cause of unhappiness to Phillip.”
“May I come with you when you go to see her?”
So Lucy took Melissa with her to Ionian Cottage. Half a dozen staring toy Pomeranian dogs scattered, fluffy jig-saw pieces, about the floors of kitchen and sitting room, barking with excitement for something new in their herded lives. Among them Elizabeth, also with staring eyes and pent-up spirit.
“Phillip let Aunt Dora die! She was lying frozen on her bed for weeks, and he never went to see her! He thought the will she
had made, in his favour, still stood, you see! He wanted the money, and allowed her to die. He didn’t know she had made a new will in my favour, otherwise he would have gone to see her.”
Melissa saw a distracted woman.
“Aunt Victoria, his god-mother, refused to go to our father’s funeral, well-knowing his ways. She called him ‘the black sheep of the family’. He is ashamed of us. He hates me, he pushed me in the nursery fire when I was a toddler, because he did not want me, the second child, to replace him in our Mother’s love!”
Lucy said, “It can be so difficult for the first-born, when another baby appears. The damage can be done in the first glance of a new baby in the mother’s arms. Mothers didn’t know, poor dears, in those days, what we know now.”
“Oh, I don’t believe in that Freudian Theory!” declared Elizabeth. “There is, after all, such a thing as heredity! Our father used to say that Phillip was a throw-back.” Her voice became distraught. “He was a little coward when he was young, and always got Peter Wallace to fight his battles for him. Worse still, he used to pick quarrels with boys, and to get Peter to hold the boy’s head under one arm and then to punch his face with his fist! He did it to a poetic boy, who used to come to see me, only to talk to me, and when he was found out, he told Father I had been lying in the long grass of the Backfield with him. from that day Father turned against me. It’s true, every word of it! You ask, and see what he says! Who’s that?”, for the little dogs were yapping at the kitchen door.
“It is I,” said the voice of Phillip, when the clamour of tongues had ceased. “My dog Bodger won’t hurt your Poms. May I come in?”, as he walked to the open door of the sitting room, and standing there, said, “What Elizabeth has just said is true about my early days.”
“Not only the early days, but now!” cried Elizabeth. “The excuse you wrote to me for not going to see Aunt Dora—I have kept your letter! was that all the roads were blocked after the blizzard. They were at first, until they were cleared. You never went to see if she was all right, did you? Had I known, I would have come down to be with her! I meant to, but we were snowed up in Dorset, the weather was simply awful, the electricity was cut off for days, the lines were down in the village. Then electricity was rationed, and I had to buy candles, but the shop rationed them, and soon they were all gone!” She turned to Lucy. “Look at him, staring at me like that! He knows it’s the truth! And he has been seen lying with a schoolgirl in the long grasses on Exmoor! Somebody saw them there, and told me! Get out of here! He’s only come to make trouble! He’ll kill me!” she appealed to Lucy. “You tried to divorce him, you know what he is!”
When Phillip had gone away, and the excited dogs were gathered about her, she said, “He upset you, didn’t he, my darlings?” Then to Melissa, “That one’s Fawley Prince. He’s blind. That’s why he stares so, he finds out what’s going on by smell and hearing. The neighbours said I should send him to the vet., because he’s too old to use at stud now, but I won’t have you put down, will I, Fawley Prince? There, he knows what I’m saying! He always barks when I tell him that,” and she gave the old dog a rusk. “He’s lost nearly all his teeth, but he’ll suck it until it turns to pap in his little mouth, won’t you, Fawley Prince?”
The old dog growled when a bitch lowered her head and moved towards the rusk. “He’s too old, you see, and cares only for food!”, laughed Elizabeth, a little shrilly. “In the old days Fawley Prince would let Fawley Princess have the bikky, wouldn’t you, darling?”
*
‘Bikky’—Bikky—biscuit—enchanted word first issuing from her father’s bearded, smiling lips when life was warm for ever and for ever.
Chapter 22
THE SUN IN VIRGO
And now that to which the children and their new cousins had so eagerly looked forward to was about to take place. Events of the Lynton Festival of the Arts included a tennis tournament; bowls; pony races; dressage on hunters; swimming races; cricket matches; and on the meadow across the river, a Parade to choose a Beauty Queen.
In addition, for the cultured—a minority which Osgood Nilsson declared to be non-existent—there was an afternoon lecture on ‘Lynmouth in Song and Story’ in the Town Hall, and six evening performances, in the same place, of Yeomen of the Guard. The articled clerk had sent a letter to Mr. Osgood Nilsson inviting him to appear among the chorus in his maternal grandfather’s Confederate General’s uniform; but no written reply was expected.
For the small and immature, a Magician had been hired to produce, among other novelties, strings of flags out of an ear and a rabbit from a top hat.
The local inhabitants were not forgotten. There was Ye Olde Englishe Fayre, where prizes were offered for Guessing the Weight of a Fat Lamb, Climbing the Greasy Pole, and tugs-of-war between the regulars of various cider and beer houses. The Festival was to conclude with the Presentation Ceremony of the Brock-holes St. Boniface Abbey herd of White Goats to the Lynton Urban District Council, followed by a cricket match between the home team, North Devon Savages, and Lt.-Col. Peregrine Bucentaur’s Crimson Ramblers.
A Grand Festival Ball was to take place on this final night at the principal hotel, whither the entrants for the title of Beauty Queen were to be drawn, standing up in carts, by members of the Boys’ Brigade. At 11.30 p.m. fireworks would officially end Festival Week; but many were looking forward to an unofficial Saturnalia afterwards which, generally speaking, would take place on the beaches, in motorcars, and under trees.
*
Lucy was in the caravan on the meadow below Barbrook, beside the gently tumbling West Lyn, smiling happily to herself as she glanced up from the pages of Bevis to watch Phillip playing with Sarah, unaware that he was trying to focus his sight upon the child’s face, willing himself to be happy, to resist any weak impulse to tell Lucy his fears. Bringing the child to her, he said, “Well, I suppose I must go back to the Cot and do some work. Au revoir, I’ll see you tomorrow. Come on, Bodger!”
The old dog, which had been tied to a tree lest it go too near Sarah, leapt around and gave a joyous bark. It had developed a habit of scraping its behind on the grass. Phillip, on taking it to the vet. had been told that the cause was not worms; but a developing cancer of the anus.
*
Melissa in her room at Oldstone Castle, was thinking, If I can win his sister Elizabeth’s confidence, she might agree to be processed; and so bring to the foreground of her mind the suppurating thoughts of a lost child, longing for a father-love that at adolescence had been withdrawn; and progressing from being clear to find herself able to accept objectively that it was a common human fault to transfer one’s own guilty feelings to the image of another.
She must see Elizabeth the next day: it was imperative that the blockage be cleared: and thereby, Phillip freed of self-mortification.
*
Laura looking at the Brig, feeling tenderness for him, seeing him as a little boy lost as she kissed his bald head as though he were her baby. He was crying; he, who had never surrendered in war, yielding all his life to her care as he thought weakly from the back of his mind. My little girl loves me, O God, my little girl loves me!
*
‘Buster’ Cloudesley in The Eyrie taking the Message bottle, dropped into the North Atlantic by his father before he was drowned, from a corner cupboard wherein it was kept with replicas of the Victoria Cross, Distinguished Service Order with two bars, Military Cross, and two French decorations, the Legion d’honneur and the Medaille Militaire.
There were times when, feeling wan, he put the bottle on the table beside him, and read the only letter he had received from either of his parents.
To the Honourable Hugh Carew-Fiennes-Manfred, c/o Messrs. Elkington and Elkington, Solicitors, Lincoln’s Inn, London; from Manfred Lord Cloudesley, his father, now derelict in the North Atlantic, the sun setting on the second Day of January, in the thirty sixth and last year of his life. Whosoever finds this bottle, please deliver as addressed.
Engine breakdo
wn, just before dawn this day, at 2,400 r.p.m. having just corrected course by S.S. Empress of Britain. The throttle control jammed or broke. I did my best to come to your mother and to you. I was working hard in New York, for all our sakes and thinking of the future. Now the future may be for you alone.
‘Buster’ closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. After resting in thought, he read on, although he knew the words by heart.
If my desire could be fulfilled, then believe that I am always your friend, even as you will be the friend of your dear children. One thing I would have you believe, if so you may with truth to yourself, and that thing I do know to be true in this the probably last phase of my life:
Fight neither in deed nor in thought, be calm within thyself, act only to balance mind with body, see thyself as the sun to the flesh. In hope and in trust of the sun I bid you farewell, and through you all the friends of this the earth; and in farewell I do but greet you, yet impersonally, in the laughter of the sun, the servant of the Father of Man beyond time and space.
‘Buster’ never quite knew what these words meant, but he had a rough idea what his father was driving at. He had meant well, anyway, although perhaps he hadn’t been the best of husbands to his mother. But by God he’d had guts, not only physical guts, but to fight against his own weakness.
Old friends of Manfred Cloudesley had told ‘Buster’ that he had seemed too frail for the touch life of a Guardsman on the Western Front, never quite hitting it off with the other officers in the Regiment. Not much good as a footslogger; but in the air, after a period of caution, and avoiding all possible flamboyance, he had made the grade. He had been a Guest of Honour, his host being Herman Göring at the Richthofen Club, Berlin, after the war.
“When would you care for supper, my lord? A cold collation is in the dining room.”
“Thank you Mornington. Where are the others?”
The Gale of the World Page 33