The Gale of the World (23 page)

“I'd like to very much.”

“You do that, Masson. ‘Auntie' wants to come too. And Mrs. Bucentaur, who's a cousin of ‘Buster' Cloudesley—you know, the bloke who lives in the woods up there, and does a lot of gliding. He was a stout fellow—badly hit after the Rhine crossing. Quite a decent bloke, Guardee-commando type. You must meet him.”

“I have met him.”

“His father tried to fly the Atlantic solo, and went down somewhere west of Ireland in the early 'thirties. His old soldier-servant, a chap called Corney, has a pub on the moor,
The
Marksman
. A real old sweat, very regimental and keeps his place in good order. He's psychic, too.”

Phillip thought, this will interest Laura, collaborating with ‘Buster' on his father's biography—if and when she returns from Prospero's supposed home, Corfu, to get away from her supposed Prospero. Oh, I must begin my novel of my parents' youth, and their secret marriage—

“Now be a good lad, Masson, and go and cheer up ‘Auntie'. You know what my mother calls her? Princess Eirēnē. She is, too. Reincarnation of the Greek goddess of peace. We're all
reincarnations
, old boy. We live again and again, death is only a rest for the poor old body we muck about so.”

*

Followed by Bodger, Phillip went down the street overlooking the river rushing noisily around boulders of all weights up to twenty tons, he supposed: all smoothed by constant
degradation
through the centuries, water-quarried from the gorge below the dark trees and moving gradually down to the sea, never for a moment free of the friction and abrasion of time. Rocks: a
building
up by fire; destruction to detritus by water: both elemental gods of the cave-men!

He knocked at the door of Ionian Cottage. Its paint was cracked, blistered, faded. Again the friction of unoiled bolts, squeaking key chain rattle.

“Hullo, Aunt Dora. I'm Phillip.”

What had been a ghost in lamplight was now an
Edwardian-clothed
skeleton with protruding teeth,
pince-nez
spectacles
covering
life-averted eyes.

“Pray come in, Phillip.”

There followed an elaborate reassembly of bolts, chain,
lock-tongue
at war with rust.

A kitchen-table, floor space taken up by cardboard cartons
filled with empty tins. Bread-board with dry curled slices of whole-meal loaf.

“I am fasting,” the voice piped remotely. “This is my
thirty-ninth
day. One of the evils of the past has been that the classes have all eaten too much, while the masses of working people have starved.”

She went on as to herself, “I am trying to cure my migraine by prayer and fasting.”

Bodger, who had been summing-up street-dog society, was now anxiously scratching at the front door.

“My dog is outside, Aunt Dora.”

“By all means let him come in.”

Bolts, lock, chain.

“Sit, Bodger! Good boy. He's a cross between foxhound dam, and terrier sire.”

“I'm afraid I haven't a bone for the little fellow.”

“Bodger's got no teeth now for bones, Aunt Dora.”

“Have you heard from your sister Elizabeth? She is supposed to have come some weeks ago, to make her home with me.”

She sat at the other end of the table, supporting brow on hand. Thin fingers of a poet shading weak eyes. “No one in the family told me of my brother Dickie's death. I heard it only from my bank manager.” She went on as though speaking to someone invisible, “It is all to be expected. My old home, Fawley, is gone. I suppose when my brother John died, the house died with him. Hilary is gone, too.”

“As I expect you know, Aunt Dora, Uncle Hilary sold the land to the War Department before the war.” When there was no reply he went on, “I bought land in East Anglia, and we farmed there during the war.”

She said tremulously. “Billy was killed, I am told by Elizabeth. Such a dear little boy. I was at his christening, when his baby brother was baptised with him. Lucy—” She took a deep breath, sighing inaudibly. “Divorce—no, no. It is not like the Phillip I knew.”

“We are not divorced, Aunt Dora. We are still friends.”

It was his turn to shield eyes with hand on forehead. Now she was able to look at him, to listen.

“Lucy is most magnanimous. I have made over all I haye to a trust, for her and the family. I am down here only to write—while my eyesight lasts. I may go blind.”

“Then you must fast, Boy. Fasting will cure all ills.”

The air was cold. A feeling of Time suspended. He walked home. Home! Everything would be the same when he got there. It was the same—kettle cold and fire dead, bed unmade, candle in dented Cromwellian brass stick, a late moth embalmed in the little crater out of which stood a bent black wick marking the grave of the mite who had mistaken its light for love.

And in the morning he awoke into a curious pallor. Through the casement all was white.

Snow fell with quiet resolution, drifting down gently, all that day; but in the afternoon programmes on the B.B.C. were
interrupted
with warning to shipping in Irish Sea, Rockall, Malin Head, Lundy, the Fastnetts, Dover and North Sea. A Force Eight wind was imminent. Long, high waves were rolling before waves of air streaking the dark sea. The six o'clock weather forecast, preceding the news, gave a special warning that in places the gale would increase to Force Ten. At eight o'clock programmes again interrupted by an announcement that a Force Twelve wind, of hurricane violence, was screaming its way from the North Cape, filling the darkness with foam and spray above a completely white sea. All coastal shipping was advised to make for roads and
harbours
.

At midnight the wind of the Furies was upon the moor—the Erinyes of Aunt Dora, who once had told him that the
euphemism
of the Eumenides, the kindly ones, was a placatory term, like a dog lying on its back before a snarling aggressor.

From Padstow Point to Harty Light is a watery grave by day and by night. Phillip lying in bed thought the casement would burst, chimney tun crash through ceiling, so he went downstairs, away from the low fire and its embers scattering, at particular buffets, over the lime-ash floor—constellations of dying
dwarf-stars
brightening in the draught under the door. But each spark, at its brightest, flashed out.

A sleepless, an exhilarating night. Towards dawn the wind-thunder had passed; and at first light he saw drifts six feet and more deep where the wind had eddied, leaving snow quietly to lie.

All Europe was covered by snow, announced the eight o'clock news, from Northern France to the Pyrenees. Passes in the Massif Central were now impassable; trains run to standstill, aircraft grounded; Alpine towns and villages cut off. By six o'clock the hurricane had run itself out; and a long drift of cold air crossing all Europe to the Iberian peninsula.

Was there snow along the Mediterranean shore, and Prospero's Isle stricken?

On the moor, small birds were dying, of cold and starvation. Phillip put on his skis and climbed to the southern sky, but the hummocks of The Chains were impassable. He returned, and made a way down the lane to Barbrook, but it was easier to walk, drifts varying with icy patches of shillet. The tarmac road running above the wooded gorge, following the course and descent of the river, gave good runs until the road steepened sharply to a drop of one-in-four, where he unclipped the goatskin thongs, and
leaving
sticks and skis over the low stone wall, went niminy-piminy, holding, stooping, sliding, down to the village. Men with shovels were digging away six-foot drifts in the main street of Lynmouth. They had not got so far as Ionian Cottage; so trudging, with difficulty to the post-office, he bought one tin of soup—all that was allowed—and began the slow, bleak return to nearly nine hundred feet above the sea. Bodger, left in the kitchen, was
shivering
on the sack when he returned. The dog did not move; only one eye was watching. Phillip gave him his supper, made up a great fire, and fried eggs and bacon for himself. Afterwards he danced to gramophone music, while Bodger pranced around.

*

Theodora Maddison lying on her bed in her day clothes covered only by a travelling rug, thin and discoloured, more than
half-a-century
old. She lay on her back, hands folded across her chest, legs crossed at ankles. She had ceased to inspire deeply, to as slowly respire. Even that effort exhausted her. She was beyond despair; she accepted, as she had accepted for years, that human life, and her life particularly, was fore-doomed to failure. She remembered how, six months ago, her sister Victoria had come to see her, ostensibly to take care of her, but had stayed only one day after learning that the Will left all to Phillip.
You
should
not
let
the
family
capital,
restored
by
Hilary,
pass
out
of
the
family,
dear
Dora.
It
is
your
duty
to
leave
your
estate
to
my
daughter,
your
niece
Adele,
after
my
tenancy-for-life.

The Will in Phillip's favour had been dated September 1916. Dora had, off and on during the Hitlerian war, been disturbed by her nephew's behaviour, as told to her by her niece, Elizabeth. So after Viccy's abrupt departure she had written to Elizabeth, saying that if she would come and look after her—“It will not be for long, dear child”—she would make a new will leaving all to her niece. Elizabeth had replied by telegram that she would come
very shortly, after she had disposed of her cottage and furniture in Dorset.

So Dora had made another Will.

Elizabeth had not come. Only her nephew Phillip had come. She had not been kind at his coming, and shown it, perhaps. That was inexcusable on her part. What ulterior motive had Boy for coming to see her? Indeed, he had had none! Poor, dear Boy: he was permantly exhausted by the First War. And she had rejected him—and on the word of that very stupid woman, Victoria. Poor Phillip, he had been the unhappiest small boy she had ever encountered. And despite that, he had made good and used his talent wisely.
The
Water
Wanderer
and
The
Blind
Trout
were already small classics. O, she had made a sad mistake! She must write to the Trustee Department at the Bank in Exeter, and revoke the will leaving all to Elizabeth. Boy must have, too, all the family papers on her mother's side, the von Föhres of Württemburg. If Boy wished to write novels with a family background, as Thomas Mann had done in
Buddenbrooks,
he would require every help. Thus, with happier thoughts, Theodora Wilhelmina Maddison, spinster, aged seventy three—Eirēnē, goddess of peace to Mrs. Piston and her associates—arranged the travelling rug around her body before drawing up her knees for warmth; and with one arm around her neck, as though in a caress of love she had found with a married man, only to renounce that love of one who had died in the South African War, she lay quiescent; and with thoughts of Aeschylus, Socrates, and Euripides she passed through the valley of the Erinyes, the Furies, and went down, down to her beloved Shelley in the glooms of the halls of Pluto.

*

Phillip want to the cottage on his next visit on skis to the village, and when there was no answer to his knocking, decided that Aunt Dora had gone away. He called again a week later; no reply. She must have gone away, perhaps to visit her sister Victoria in Bournemouth.

The bleak weather continued until early March, when the thaw came. The Lyn ran high with snow water. Salmon appeared in the tidal pool, but none faced the run up through cold and turbulent waters. One morning when he went for his mail, the postman said there were several parcels for Miss Maddison, did he know when she was returning?

The following day he agreed with the village constable that
a window should be forced. On going upstairs, the wasted body was seen to be lying under an old travelling rug.

An official of the Trustee Department of the Bank arrived from Exeter when death had been certified by the doctor as due to natural causes. The name of the deceased, an aunt of Phillip Maddison, author of
The
Water
Wanderer
, was published briefly in the Press.

Jonathan, in his hidey hole under the rafters of Birdy House saw, through a nesting hole made by a starling, the Silver Eagle draw up on the edge of the cobbled sidewalk below in the village street. He worked himself back from the pegged slates and stepping from joist to joist reached the trap-door and lowered
himself
on his rope; to slide down two rows of banisters and,
reaching
the ground floor, dash into the kitchen and cry, “Dad’s come! Cor, the starlings are what-you-call tisky!”

Jonathan spent many hours, when not at school, in the attic. The spaces under the eaves were now a-rustle, for the swifts had returned from Africa to their nests.

The starlings waged territorial war with them. Frightful
cruelties
went on behind the small entrance-exit holes. Thin high screams of swifts, flutterings, harsh cursings of starlings.
Sometimes
a narrow white egg dropped from under the guttering, the shell hole’d by thrust of starling-beak. Never a larger starling-egg, azure as clear summer sky between dawn and sunrise—a colour which should have belonged to the swift, thought Jonathan, since these mysterious birds, each a thin crescent of black, never left the sky at night to roost under the eaves.

“You mean they sleep on the wing, ’bor?” asked David,
imitating
the east anglian vocal lilt, and inevitable diminutive of neighbour.

“That’s right, ’bor.”

“Cor, that’s what-you-call funny, ’bor!”

“Ah, ’bor.”

Early one morning, before the sun had risen, Jonathan looked from his bedroom window and saw many black specks coming down out of the sky like a lot of gnats. He heard the swifts’ thin high whistles before he made out their scimitar wings. A flight peeled off from the main flock, and wheeled around the church
steeple half a mile away, where he had seen swifts entering through ventilation slats above the belfry.

“Perhaps they go up so high to sleep above the pull of gravity,” suggested David, seriously. He was a reader of little grey-paper books about flying saucers, space-ships from Mars, and other imaginative post-war literature generally regarded with amused tolerance by most adults.

But Phillip, enjoying a meal with his children at home for Whitsun half-term, didn’t regard such stories as laughable. “What is now achieved, was once only imagined,” he quoted William Blake. “Also, the Germans had blue-prints of rockets which could reach airless space so high that the pull of gravity doesn’t exist. Where men in special clothing and oxygen masks would walk in space, and erect platforms to support great curved mirrors which would be able to concentrate sunshine on parts of the earth, to work steam turbines for generating electricity.”

“Cor,” said David, listening with mouth open.

“Also, Hitler wanted to build a great barrage across the straits of Gibraltar, and use the tides for electricity for the top half of Africa.”

Jonathan listened with a remote look in his eyes. He wanted to tell what he had discovered about the swifts. “Dad,” he said, when his father had finished, “do you mind if I tell you
something
? Well, you see, the starlings are attacking the swifts. Before you came, I was lying down by the little slits of light, watching a starling pull a hen swift off her two white eggs. The starling had hold of one of the swift’s pinion feathers, and it tugged and tugged the swift through that hole under the eaves. When I went down I looked in the road outside our house, and found the mother swift lying on the ground, unable to get up. She was
oaring
herself along with her wings. I threw her up, but she spun down again, because one of her main flight quills was
missing
. Also, I found the two white eggs the starling had chucked out. Now the starling intends to lay her first egg in the swift’s nest.”

“What did you do with the swift?”

“It was crawling with lice, so I put flea powder on it, but it died of fear in my hand. So I brushed it and gave it to Eric our cat, who wouldn’t eat it. So I buried it under the pear tree with the old dried-up black pears still hanging on, for compost.”

The blossom on the gnarled pear-tree in the garden had fallen to form new fruit, nourished by Lucy’s hens in the orchard. Small
boys in the village were now at their annual rite of tearing-out nests in hedges, copses, and spinneys of level farmlands. Jonathan saw one boy with a long-tailed tit’s nest, moulded of grey lichen covering mosses, horse-hair, sere grasses and lined with hundreds of hen’s feathers—each feather borne cross-wise in a tiny beak against the winds of uncertain English weather. Jonathan told the boy that the birds would be grieving. The boy, with
pale-faced
inhibited desperation, punched him and made his nose bleed and Jonathan went home feeling sad and ashamed because he could never fight for himself.

“You will be interested to hear,” said Tim to Phillip, “that the prisoner-of-war camp is now empty, awaiting demolition. The Ukrainian soldiers have gone, some I think, to Australia. The Prussian doctor, who was on von Rundstedt’s staff, called to say good-bye with the English nurse, the other evening. Both asked me to thank you personally, on their behalf.”

“They were so glad to find somewhere to sit and talk together, the poor dears,” said Lucy. “Well, and how are you getting on? Have you made many friends, other than the Riversmills and Molly and her little family, I mean?”

“Oh yes. There’s ‘the Mad Major’, as some call old Piston, who was with me in the nursing home in nineteen-sixteen, and his mother. They’re both a bit cranky, but otherwise quite pleasant people. There’s an American writer, Osgood Nilsson, and his wife —he belongs to the Barbarian Club, I’ve had a slight
acquaintance
with him there for some years. And Molly’s cousin, ‘Buster’ Cloudesley, who you met at the farm. He’s an awful nice man—so balanced. Well, I must be off now, I suppose. I hope to call in and see Piers Tofield on the way back.”

Phillip had come to draw the family’s holiday caravan to the moor. Laura had written that she was returning from Corfu, and the idea was that she would live in the caravan, and there work on the biography of ‘Buster’s’ father, until the family came down at the end of July. Then she would return with her script to The Eyrie. No scriptual servitude, as she called it, during Saturday and Sunday. Then she and Phillip would explore the countryside, sandy shores and rocky headlands—even tramp across
Dartmoor
! This time, all was to be as regular as clockwork.

“You know my aunt Dora died, I suppose, Lucy?”

“Yes, my dear, we did. Poor darling; and how sad it must have been for you. What an awful winter it has been for everyone.” Lucy didn’t like to ask if Phillip was proposing to live in the
cottage. “Where was the funeral, at Lynton?”

“She asked in her will to be cremated, and her ashes taken out to sea. I was the only mourner, for Elizabeth couldn’t come, but she got someone from the Trustee Department of the Bank to represent her, and her interests. Aunt Dora left everything to her.”

“Oh.”

“She made another will just before she died, it appears. The Bank official practically ignored me. He took away all the family papers, including her German mother’s pedigree, grandfather Maddison’s diaries, her own diaries and letters, family
photographic
albums—in fact everything, before he locked the door and left.”

“I suppose Elizabeth was the sole beneficiary?”

“Yes. Doris was left out, as well as me. Anyway, she died in the winter, too. God, it’s like a Greek play—one is destroyed by a fault in one’s character. There was a post-mortem to determine cause of death, and apparently she died from iodine poisoning. She went from doctor to doctor until she got one to give her iodine injections to cure a non-existent goitre.”

“Poor Doris! She was always so stubborn, wasn’t she?”

“I saw how her obstinate streak built up when my father beat her for threatening him—she was then about four years old—‘With a big knife’, for making Mother cry. She wouldn’t say she was sorry, but continued to defy Father. He beat her again and again, but she would not give in. She was lost to life, or that part which is love, from that moment.”

“What will happen to her two boys?”

“Doris had her share in Grandfather Turney’s trust, when Mother died, and I suppose there’s her pension, it may be
commuted
to a lump sum. I don’t really know. I only knew about her death when Elizabeth wrote to me and told me that it was my duty, as head of the family, to provide for them.”

“Why can’t Elizabeth help? She’s got enough money, surely, from Father’s death, and now Aunt Dora’s?”

*

Tim had tested the towing bar of the Silver Eagle, and the automatic brakes of the caravan. Pumped up the tyres, greased points etc., while Lucy cleaned the interior, equipped with two beds, cooking stove (oil) and oil-lamps. Plates, cups, table things —blankets—all in order for when Phillip should come to take it down to Devon.

“Would you like Peter, David, and Jonathan to come down
and help you in the summer holidays, my dear? They could bicycle down by easy stages, avoiding main roads wherever practicable. It should take four days.”

“If you could fit up the boys with a button’d hip-pocket, each could take three pounds. That should see them through.”

“I’ll see that the pockets are in order, and that they have the money. Well, if you must go now, you must, I suppose. Can’t you stay another day, and rest? You look so tired, my dear. Come for a walk with us in the park. It’s so lovely there, now. The old dwarf oaks are said to have been standing there since Plantagenet times.”

He hesitated; then said he must go.

“Well, we’ll try and see you in the summer then, may we, the boys and Sarah and I?” She hesitated, while her cheeks coloured. “I rather think that Melissa wants to study at a place on Exmoor, where there’s a school for a new kind of spiritual healing. Perhaps you’ve heard of it—I think he’s a naturalised German, who lives at Oldstone Castle, I think she said.”

“I’ve just heard of it. Well, thank you for all your kindness. How good the caravan now looks!”

So while Tim got on with his precise lathe-work, turning ivory, ebony, and lingum vitae wood into little round boxes for
dressing-table
trinkets, Lucy and her sister-in-law wheeled their
perambulators
in the deserted park enclosed by the tall fences of barbed wire which had been the prisoners-of-war camp.

“I’m so glad for Phillip that he has made some friends down there, Brenda. He deserves a quiet and peaceful time after all he’s done. When I drove back to Banyards the other day, to see Mrs. Valiant, who used to work for me in the farmhouse, do you know what she said to me? ‘Pity the Captain didn’t have a
thousand
acres, and proper help. He looked after his men and his land well, everyone says that now in the village’.”

“He’s less nervy than he was, isn’t he, Lucy? He loves Baby Sarah doesn’t he? And she likes him. Isn’t she strong, and always laughing when she sees her father?”

“She’s got his long legs and feet, and his quickness, too. I expect she’ll grow up to be the friend Dad has always wanted—won’t you, Sarah darling?”

“Dad-dad!” cried the baby, struggling against straps to sit up, to find the father who had left while she was asleep.

*

Phillip on roads almost empty across the flats of the Brecklands,
passing abandoned R.A.F. stations of the concrete aircraft-carrier lying off the coast of a to-be United Europe as urged by Hereward Birkin. The little boys will be bicycling through this heathland soon, I should be with them, O my three-speed, monthly-payment Swift of long ago!

I think the first volume of my novels should start before I was born, in the late ’nineties, in North-west Kent, now a
brick-suffocated
suburb of London, otherwise The Smoke. All the
prototypes
but one are dead—my parents, uncles, aunts—their photographic exteriors guarded by my dear godmother-aunt Victoria Adele Frederika Lemon, who looked at my Donkin novels years ago and said to her brother Hilary,
Oh
so
dull
and
dreary
. You of course are right, dearest godmother; I am beyond you, my name is Ishmael. There are two securities for man: poetry and money. Poets have risen from their near-strangled selves: Pluto, or Pluton, your unappreciated sister Theodora told me, was at first a surname of Hades, god of the lower world; Pluton the God of money, deprived of sight by Zeus, therefore Pluton gives his gifts blindly, indifferent to merit. A man based on money alone is a man distorted. Poor dead Dora, all were indifferent to your
merits, except perhaps me. I told you a lie, that I was going blind.

Or was that prevision?—a little boy otherwise distorted, telling Blakian lies, angels in no-man’s-land among dead Europeans? Why are the trees of the avenue before me blurred? That
telegraph
post looks queer. Gould frost have split it, so that it appears to be oval? But the next one is concave—my liver, perhaps—the beer I drank last night with Tim to celebrate our getting on so well together? I had four pints; yes, it may be liver, I must drive carefully.