The Gale of the World (18 page)

“Perhaps you should wait until Miranda leaves school.”

He spent two days going the rounds of publishers. Thirty-two houses, some new-started by printers whose paper supplies were not rationed, promised to write to him … the usual polite dismissals. He telephoned Laura.

“Will you dine with me at the Medicean tonight? I’m going back tomorrow.”

“I’m already dining there with someone else,” a very quiet voice replied.

“I see. Well, goodbye.”

“Good-bye.”

*

Hitherto Phillip’s letters to Laura had sustained the wilting bloom of imagined, or romantic, love in the little attic room in Old Compton Street. Not the flower of her life—that was her art, her dream, for, like Phillip, she had her being almost entirely in the imagination. Phillip was the sap rising to the flower of her spirit, the bloom by which she felt a glowing happiness, as she created an imaginary world by the art of words. But all blooming expends the resources of the plant. When sap ceases, blossom wilts. Then thoughts of death blight the being.

With each letter Laura was renewed—the force of sap was the force of love. Darling, darling Phillip! When her book was
completed
she would go to him in his cot. The morning might be dull and dead outside; Phillip was the sun, shining in her mind. Unlike ‘Buster’ he was not ruined to love, only alienated. His love would heal her, give the fulfilment she had always longed for. Those two had both had terrible experiences in their different wars.
Neither seemed able to forget. Would Phillip be free, even when he had written his war novels? O God, whenever he spoke of his war she felt a chill, as of fog over the face of the sun. Gould she be good for him, if she resented even the look on his face
whenever
he thought about his friends of that faraway time?

Sometimes Laura saw herself as wholly selfish. I want his sperm and his essence for myself. I need him to companion my genius. I
know
I am a genius. Or is it self delusion? An evil genius, a Medusa, as some man I took to bed once told me? Medusa, with hissing snakes in her hair? No, no. I am Kundry, awaiting redemption from Parsifal. My writing is a search for the Holy Grail. If I did not believe that, I should want to drown myself, like Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook. O, Phillip, darling sensitive Prospero, your Ariel is coming to you!

Many times she had imagined the two little rooms, in Phillip’s words ‘up over Timber Hill into Blanket Field’, over the kitchen in Shep Got; one room for her and her work—entirely private. Phillip in the other room.

Where would they sleep? Upon a heap of bracken on the kitchen floor—under blankets woven of local sheep’s wool—before a log fire in the great open hearth. Like Sigmund and Sieglinde in Hunding’s cottage! And the morning sun would blaze upon them lying together, utterly relaxed. And they would run out naked and lie in the stream below the coombe and let it take them down, down in its clear bubbled run. And through the eastern window at night the moon would slant on his face beside her while he stroked her hair, and she, with a finger, traced the outline of brow, cheek, chin before winding her arms snake-like around him while he held her in the safety of night glowing with darkness under the stars.

One thing had come of ‘Buster’ dining as Phillip’s guest at the Barbarian Club during the London visit to publishers’ offices: a house-parlourman for The Eyrie. The new man was, in ‘Buster’s’ words, “an addition to the gaiety of nations.” Mornington had been engaged on Phillip’s recommendation, and he had turned out to be, ‘Buster’ told Molly on his return to Exmoor, a jewel: willing to turn his hand to anything—sawing logs, cooking,
repairing
roofs, gardening, an expert mechanic. He had been almost everything, according to himself—cowboy, gold miner, actor, opera singer, secret service agent, pearl-diver, barman, racing
motor-driver
, and night-porter at the Barbarian Club.

“And it appears to be true, that’s the excellent part of Mornington! Phillip? I have an idea he didn’t manage to
persuade
any publishers to take space, as they say, in his little magazine.”

*

Later in the month, there was an outbreak of measles at Miranda’s school, and those girls unaffected were sent home for a week. Miranda arrived much excited by a book someone had given her at school. Molly took the excitement to be a sign of possible infection, and put her daughter to bed and the book into a hot oven, just in case. It was called
A
Cosmic
Concept
of
a
Fifth
Gospel,
received
from
the
Unknown
Soldier
of
the
Great
War
, and came out of the oven with brown edgings upon the leaves.

“It says that a revelation will come on Oldstone Down this
summer
by a message from the Seventh Plane. The book is by Major Piston, whose mother runs a boarding house in Lynmouth called Shelley’s Cottage.”

This was reassuring for Molly. The craze for poetry, etc., would soon pass.

“I must read it, Anda darling. But don’t you think Major
Piston is just a little teeny-weeny bit bogus? Like that Caspar Something at Oldstone Castle?”

“Oh, Mummy! I
know
Major Piston’s sincere! He was blown up on the Somme, and in hospital at Lynton the same time as Cousin Phillip! His old mother is a very sweet person, and also a medium. They are both spiritually based, and don’t eat meat or even fish, nor does anyone who stays at Shelley’s Cottage.”

“That doesn’t mean that Major Piston isn’t deceiving himself, darling.”

“William Blake wrote, ‘What is now achieved was once only imagined’. Major Piston says that the universe is based on an expanding Idea. Why shouldn’t the expanding Idea include communication with other planets, or worlds? All things are related.”

“But he says his mother has ridden about in flying saucers—as though they were taxis, darling.”

“How do we know there aren’t any? Mrs. Piston received a message to await the coming of someone from the Seventh Plane an hour before dawn on Oldstone Down last year. She was taken up in a flying saucer and told that the coming of a stranger, who will be an old soldier of the Great War, will reveal a way to heal the world. I think I know already who it is.”

“She was obviously meaning her son, darling.”

Molly of course knew that her daughter had Phillip in mind. She was greatly relieved that Anda’s feelings for Phillip, like those for that Piston creature, were no more than a green girl’s
imaginings
.

“Darling, I’m not doubting the sincerity of you or anyone else. But most people do deceive themselves, you know. Perhaps not philosophers, but then how many understand what they’ve written. How hot your head is. Just a moment, my pet. I’ll get a thermometer.”

She took her daughter’s temperature. “It’s normal, thank
goodness
.”

“Then may I ride over to Shep Cot and see Cousin Phillip tomorrow?”

“If you want to, darling. Ask him to come over and see us. I’ve asked him several times, but he’s only called in once, and then he couldn’t stop. You may be more successful. Tell him we can always give him a bed. He’ll have to take us, goats and all, as he finds us. What will happen to the goats if your father doesn’t come in August hardly bears thinking. They eat everything, including
a cricket ball I gave them to play with. I simply daren’t have any laundry drying outside.”

The next day Miranda set off on her cob for The Chains, accompanied by Capella. She loved that sky-wide tract of land on the top of the moor. On fine days you could see the dull blue tors  of Dartmoor humped along the southern horizon. There the air was seldom still, shaking white blossoms of cotton grass like wisps of wool straggled by the rains. And the Atlantic ocean lying distantly away to the west—a scatter of pale gleams below cumulus clouds billowing whitely in line above the unseen estuary of the Two Rivers.

She halted her cob beside a tumulus on the highest point of The Chains, and when she saw the sun-shafts pointing to the sea, she thought of Donkin drowned. Phillip had written that book, about his cousin Willie. Would he be writing if she called again? What had Mummy said to him—‘not to let her be a nuisance?” She felt suddenly inadequate. Phillip was so clever, he knew everything; she knew only what she had learned at school, and read in books. It was terrible!

What could she do? She turned away from the west, and looked across the pale almost milky blue of the Severn Sea, calm with St. Luke’s Little Summer. It was what ‘Buster’ called soaring weather: there was another squadron of clouds becalmed above the mountains of Wales. Then, looking east, she saw a glider rising in circles beyond Dunkery beacon. ‘Buster’! She felt excitement, then optimism; and touching the cob with her heels, went in the direction of the unseen cot lying below the northern slopes of The Chains.

*

‘Buster’ Cloudesley had seen bubbles of warm air arising to colder levels above the Black Mountains, where they hung
condensed
as vapour. It was a rare, clear day: thermals would be ascending from the warmed vegetation covering the great sponge of the moor, to become clouds floating as on summer days, galleons in line astern, come to anchor.

With his new man beside him, he drove the Bentley down to the Porlock marshes, where a runway had been made behind the ridge of grey boulders above the line of high tide. There was not really sufficient length for a fool-proof take-off. Safety depended on the speed of towing over a limited runway: the acceleration of the 4½-litre supercharged engine.

The wind was from the west: ideal. Mornington, on a trial
run, was splendidly efficient. The glider rose to six-hundred feet well before danger of the motorcar shunting: ‘Buster’ released the nylon tow-rope and was on his own. For some minutes he circled in wafts of westerly sea-airs, neither gaining nor losing height; then, chancing his arm, he went inland towards the wooded slopes covering rising ground, and rose on the uptrend. Over the trees he found warm air streaming up from the topmost leaves, and soon was circling well above those northern slopes of the moor covered by acres of warm heather. Up—up—four
thousand
feet on the altimeter, and still climbing. He thought of the Azores, of the far Falklands, of the deep, the green, the
tiger-haunted
mountain forests of Brazil. O, life was always wonderful, away from the inhibiting life of houses, the map-like earth so clean and orderly! He felt to be one with Laura, in the altitudes of mind. Theirs was indeed Shakespeare’s ‘marriage of true minds’, without impediment.

No overcast to act as a wet blanket to
Falcon
One
. Looking round and above him, he counted seven ravens crossing the sky; and heard, above the sibilance of air past sails and cockpit, the throaty croaks of joy of five young with their parents. The
cock-bird
did a half-roll on black wings, recovering immediately. The flight-leader waggling his wings, signal to dive! He heard the throaty chuckles of joy, from cock to hen, when the young birds, as one flight, dived and rolled. By God, it was like his father’s war! Now that Laura was coming, they really must get on with Manfred’s biography. Thirty seven Hun aircraft shot down; eleven wounds; two books of verse published, and four gongs before he was twenty one … and while trying to fly home to his wife in Cornwall, from New York, falling into the drink. And two years later, 1932, his last message, in a bottle, rolled upon the shore near Lyonesse …

The ravens were playing in the blue halls of the wind. It was one of those days when Nature let down her hair. And now, by heck, the ravens were making for a flight of buzzards soaring in tiers on outheld wings, one hawk above the other, simply for the hell of it! If he could find a convolution of thermals he might—with luck (for it was always luck with gliding) reach 10,000 or even 15,000 feet! The real big stuff was done in thunderheads, with a possible 60–100 m.p.h. lift—and the risk of getting caught in an associated down draught, and hurtling down with a cracked frame, wings torn off as neatly as lesser kestrels, in thermals over the Bitter Lake, nipped off the wings of advance parties of locusts
migrating in their swarms. Paired-wings of locusts twirling down like silver sycamore seeds.

The ravens were now in line astern, ignoring the buzzards; probably making for a dead sheep somewhere on the moor, thought ‘Buster’, climbing steadily in wide spirals. Now the
buzzards
were diving into the oak-woods they shared in mew-
and-snarl
with carrion crows. He watched the crows flying up to harry the hawks, for there was perpetual war between the two species of predators. Harrying black anger pursued mewling mottled
flap-wings
until, evasive action was taken among the trees.

Two days later, when Laura read Phillip’s reply, together with a poem on the drowning of Shelley which he had enclosed, she fell into despair, from which she found relief only in the thought that she must go to Exmoor before it was too late. The poem could only mean that he, too, wanted to die. To drown himself! Oh no, let it not be too late! She ran down the stairs and out of the house to the post-office, and sent a telegram telling him the time of her train’s arrival at the junction; unaware of the fact that Phillip had told them at the post-office to keep all letters and telegrams until he called for them.

In the train she read an article in
The
Saturday
Evening
Post
by a sergeant of the U.S.A. Army, one of the hangmen at
Nuremberg
, who declared that he had been waiting months to get his hands on Herman Göring, for the pleasure of watching his slow death by strangulation. The print was so vivid that she felt she could not breathe, and left the carriage to stand by an open
corridor
window. In her mind was printed the photograph of the hangman: fat and
revengeful
as Göring had been in similar revengeful, self-righteous moments. An eye for an eye—O God, when would it stop, blood calling to blood in revenge down the ages—

She sought refuge in Phillip’s letter, feeling strange beauty in the poem he had enclosed. Darling Phillip, he was a medium, truly in rapport with the dead. Was a wiser, older Shelley
speak
ing
through him? She re-read the poem slowly; and then the letter—

The poem was psychic! Phillip was seeing his own death in Shelley’s! She stood by an open window in the corridor,
imagining
her hand opening the door—her body throwing itself out—

At last, at last, with a sick feeling, she arrived at the Junction, to leave her hold-all outside the telephone box and telephone The Eyrie. Supposing there was no answer? Everyone away, round the coast, searching for Phillip’s dead body? With a shock she heard the voice of the late night-porter of the Barbarian Club, while her heart boomed in her ears.

“I expect your hearing my voice down here is a bit of a surprise, Miss. I left the Brotherly Barbarians a matter of a week ago, to take up my new post with his Lordship.”

“I’m so glad to hear your voice, Mr. Globe-Mornington!”

“Equally glad to hear your voice, miss.”

“Is everyone all right?”

“Right as the weather, miss. His Lordship is out gliding, or
should I say up gliding, though that sounds a bit silly doesn’t it. You’re coming here, I hope? Splendid news, miss!”