The Gale of the World (27 page)

For a couple of days after his efforts Nilsson remained on the drink. His lush voice was to be heard every evening in the bar of a local club. From encountering Fred Riversmill, the painter, there, he got the substance of his second article: the decadence of the arts, due to the war and ‘Churchill’s England’ still under rationing of food, gasoline, housing and other shortages.

This second article was easy to do: Nilsson had been in London off and on during the war, and knew how to shape his subject after years as a foreign correspondent.

It was while lying in bed one morning, looking idly at an old volume of
Who
was
Who
, while chain smoking and drinking pints of tea, that Nilsson got an idea for his third article. He shouted for his wife.

“Now give your mind to this, Rosalie. How comes it that the father of ‘Buster’ Cloudesley—Manfred, twenty second Baron Cloudesley—survived so long as a fighter pilot—from 1915 until 1918—without becoming a casualty? He must have survived through cunning: one, by never taking on any missions but safe ones; two, by concentrating for his kills on cold-meat
artillery-observation
buses, slow two-seater camera jobs; and three, by always keeping well up in the sun, so that the Heiney crates he took on never had a chance to attempt evasive action. A matter of cold-hearted calculation for the acquisition of gongs. Six enemy aircraft got you a British Military Cross; six more, and you put up the riband of the Distinguished Service Order. D’you hear what I’m saying? Well, another dozen, and you sewed on a silver rosette denoting a bar each to M.C. and D.S.O. What then? Well, easy. The ‘Knight of the Air’, as the British quaintly called their noble ace, had a conscience under the usual British phlegm of the upper classes. He was a show-off. It says here his last act was due to bravado, which was awarded the Victoria Gross. This is down here, printed just as I said. The editor of Who’s Who must have known something, I guess. And I’m going to find out just what it was.”

At this point Nilsson became depressed. His thoughts hovered around his own secret, sheered away from further probing: it touched a damaged nerve-cell of his own need to keep going against an unforgettable, unforgotten memory of drunken father bullying mother until—darkness absolute—his father shot himself while pretending to clean his gun.

He was about to go downstairs for the whisky bottle when Rosalie said, “The peal are running, they tell me! You’ll go fishing now, if I know my good Os!”

*

Phillip and Laura, out for a walk, saw Nilsson spinning for
sea-trout
at the harbour mouth beyond the harbour, where the Lyn merged with sea-waves of the lapsing tide. Nilsson had had no strikes for more than an hour, and was about to chuck it, having
decided the fish didn’t like a mixture of salt and fresh water: they wanted to run straight through to the fresh, and would do so when the tide turned.

He reeled-in his line and waved to Phillip before picking a way over slimy pebbles exposed by the low-tide. Despite rope-soled shoes he made slow progress; and when, on reaching easier shingle, he continued to move towards them with a limp, the cause was visible. A yellow-red unhealed wound several inches long beside the bone of one leg. When he observed that Phillip had seen his wound, Nilsson stopped, looked down at the leg and said to the girl beside Phillip, “I got that flying on S.E.5a in Egypt during the first war with your Royal Flying Corps. I guess I crashed while training, so never saw combat action. And let me tell you—this is interesting—I’ve tried nearly every doctor in the U.S. and Europe for a cure, from penicillin to serum from seal-bite, but the wound won’t heal.” He put the leg further forward so that they could examine it.

“I guess that’s a record. So hows about a drink? Come help me move my trailer to park it beside the East Lyn, then we’ll sit down and talk, like Isaak Walton and Cotton. You’ve written a mighty fine book, Phillip, in
The
Blind
Trout
. You know something? I took a two-pounder on a dry-fly in the alder pool last summer—he was pretty black—how’s that for a record in a stream that holds three-ounce average trout?” Anticipating glow came upon the broad face. “And I’d like to hear your views on Exmoor
becoming
a Nature Reserve under State control, like our Yellowstone Park way back home.”

Having sat herself beside the driver, Laura turned to Phillip entering the back and said, “This is rather fun!” He felt happy, and began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” asked Nilsson.

“Oh, I’m so pleased to be driven by someone!” He felt like saying that Nilsson’s car should be under State control, as being the only fully-stocked lepidopterous nature reserve driven by petrol north of the Equator.

For the worn corduroy upholstery was a breeding, feeding and cocoon-cradling ground almost entirely given over to little drab moths and their crawling offspring. The lower spaces below the seat were also a repository, or depository, of ancient newspapers, many still in their wrappers with foreign postmarks and stamps upon them. Some were in process of conglomeration almost
geological
, being several strata deep, pressed firmer by the muddy
boots of what appeared to be innumerable workers on wet land; but were the results of wading while fishing, and being driven home asleep in the back of the car by his good wife.

Not all the lepidoptera, however, had their origins in nature. Some were works of art. A passenger was liable to leave his
temporary
seat impaled by a No. 12 sneck-bend steel hook,
fantastically
dressed as for some miniature fancy-dress dance in feather, bristle, silk, varnish, and wire. The gut of silkworms, drawn out and gone brittle, trailed after the minute barbed hook, which impaled itself usually in trouser seat or jacket sleeve. Osgood Nilsson’s tweed hats, jackets, and often trousers trailed these relics of deception: he was journalistically famous as a fisherman,
sometimes
guilty of poaching, in waters salt, acid, and alkaline, in lake and river of nearly all those places of the world which he had covered for his assignments. Now his travelling days were over. He lived and wrote and enjoyed himself—with periods of black
depression
—by the sea-coast of Devon: a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life, swaying between the two sides of an uneasy and egocentric nature.

Laura, sitting in the front seat, was affected by the condition of the upholstery. She felt the state of the car to be the condition of Nilsson himself—upholstery dilapidated; glass of one headlamp shattered, the other lamp still retaining the tar-marks of
blackout
days—tyres worn to the canvas—blue smoke issuing from a perforated exhaust box. Fumes came through the rusted holes in the floor. Suddenly she felt she couldn’t breathe: she must get out! She sat there while the automobile ground slowly up a long winding, narrow lane, rising above red cliffs, leading to the
northern
escarpment of the moor.

Phillip saw that the driver was holding steering wheel with both hands at twelve o’clock. What if one of the front tyres burst? And now—O my God!—Nilsson had removed a hand to search for a cigarette! Again, for his lighter … while the trailer-caravan slewed sideways, the rear wheels of the motorcar spun … and there was only a narrow grassy bank between road-edge and
precipitous
descent to tiny white wave marks on the rocks far below.

“Your accelerator pedal seems to have stuck,” he said, over Nilsson’s shoulder. “You ought to switch off.”

“Nuts!”

Phillip prepared to seize the wheel, to control an inevitable wobble should the steering wheel spin out of Nilsson’s hands. What a fool he was to have come! He had been wary of Nilsson
from the first meeting in the bar of the Barbarian Club—wet smiling lips vague blue eyes, alcoholic
bonhomie
, exhibitionism of festering leg—

“Stop, stop!” screamed Laura.

Nilsson turned his head and began to say something in his fatty voice when Phillip seized the steering wheel and said quietly, “Would you like me to drive, Nilsson, then you could talk in comfort.”

“Think I can’t drive?”

“No, I don’t. But your car can’t respond.”

The rusty springs were loose in the shackle-bolts. Moths,
stimulated
by the vibration, were flitting and crawling about.

“There’s a dog-fight going on in the back here, clothes-moths versus earwigs.”

“Earwigs can’t fly.”

“Yours can, anyway.”

“They’re not mine, you zyme. They’re British earwigs. You think I can’t drive, is that it? Well, what’d’you know!” He trod hard on the accelerator, and kept his foot down. The vehicle bumped and lurched, and made skidding progress up through pot-holes revealing red ironstone metalling under broken tarmac.

“Stop!” Laura cried again. “I’ll walk!” She struggled to turn the door handle.

“Won’t open,” Nilsson said, laughing.

The bank was now higher, they were nearing the crest. In silence they arrived at the Marksman, a pub standing in a lower valley. It had a thatched roof partly covered by corrugated iron rusting beside sodden clots of thick green moss. No repairs had been done since long before the war.

Within was a long farmhouse table, and benches made by some hedgerow carpenter, both deep brown from tabacco smoke and spilled ale. The lime-washed ceiling was yellow-brown and flaky. Above the bar hung an oil-lamp with a reflecting cowl like a dustbin lid. Nilsson greeted the landlord with “Corney, you old hero”, and invited a white-haired figure with reflective eyes who had stooped under the low lintel of the barrel room to drink with him.

Nilsson became mellow after several glasses of whisky, his voice bland as a slice of fresh-cut ham as he began to talk about himself —fifth generation of middle-west Swedish emigrant, his Osgood grandfather a general of Confederate forces, his grandmother who had danced with the President at the White House—evidence of
which he exhibited by bringing from a breast pocket an old
photograph
of a man with whiskers and drooping moustache wearing a sort of frenchified uniform jacket with kepi, sword, scabbard, and shapeless trousers.

Phillip had observed, more than once, the exhibition, or fetish, of the Confederate general. It usually led to Nilsson declaring to his listener, “You haven’t got a general on your pedigree! You’re a man of no family! You’re nothing but a zyme.”

One of his scapegoats was Piston, who was foolish enough, when he met Nilsson in one or other of the village pubs, to bear with his tormentor. Piston invariably took it meekly, hoping that nothing worse would follow: how he had swung the lead,
pretending
to be shell-shocked after the Somme, and got out of the army with a disability pension—confidences that the foolish fellow had once entrusted to the alcoholic Middle Westerner.

“Now tell me, Mr. Corney. Come here, come on, come nearer, come on, and drink up. Fill the glasses—never mind those two beer-drinkers—they’re nothing—they’re zymes—now give me the low-down, Corney. I’ve heard that Manfred deserted his wife when she was going to have a baby—to follow a young German girl to my country—is that so, Mr. Corney? Tell me what
happened
.”

Phillip, who had remained quiet so far, suddenly shouted, “I’ll tell you what happened! In the words of the poet Barry Cornwall writing of Thomas Lovell Beddoes!—‘He’s dead; he died young: as the great will die; as summer dies, by drought and its own fevers burned to death’.” Then getting up, he went out.

“He’s a zyme”, said Nilsson. “Now tell me about Manfred and the Fräulein, Mr. Corney”

“Well sir, you know that people talk wildly when they don’t know what’s true.”

“Then he didn’t go after the Fräulein?”

“She was gone back to Germany before he sailed for New York, sir.”

“I’ve checked with his Manhattan publisher—Homer, the
President
of World Books, is still alive. Manfred sailed in the early ’thirties, didn’t he? I was interviewing Gandhi then, I guess, in India.”

“Yes sir?”

“Were you with him when he sent back his decorations to King George the Fifth at Buckingham Palace?”

“I posted them myself, in a box, to the
War
Office
,
sir.”

“Why was that, Mr. Corney?”

“He told me he wasn’t entitled to them.”

“Ah! Ah!” cried Nilsson, like a crow, “That’s it! I knew it! You mean he faked his combat reports?”

“No, sir. Too many green huns was cold meat. My gentleman said it was robbing an incubator.”

“Were you with him when he commanded Sixty Squadron?”

“No sir, it wasn’t Sixty. That was Bishop’s little lot. But all young Jerries from ’seventeen onwards was easy meat, so to speak. So was our own green huns. Up with the rocket and down with the stick, sir. Flamers most of’m. Seventeen and eighteen-year old, they was.”

“So his conscience at last drove him to take on his equals, was that it?”

“You’ve got it, sir. He wanted to test himself on ’is own and hedge-hopped over Jerry’s lines to Mossy Face Wood and shot up two of the Richthofen’s little lot as they was taking off. Then he climbed and taunted the others to come up. It was a proper dog-fight, sir. My bloke was hit in the left arm, then in the leg, and again in the shoulder. He kept firm’ burst after burst until the blood was in ’is eyes, sir. They reckon he’d got seven when Goring put paid to ’im with a bullet through ’is engine, and my bloke crashed. Seven he got—nine counting the two cold meat ones—over Mossy Face that day. He got the Gross for that.”

“Victoria Gross?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Mr. Nilsson, you can check this with the official records,” said Laura. “I am no longer content to listen to your sadistic shriving of conscience upon a dead man!”, and she got up to follow Phillip out of the room.

“Hold your horses!” cried Nilsson. “Fill the glasses, Mr. Corney! Now tell me, Mr. Corney, did you see anything on the night he went down in the sea, on his way back solo from New York and Gander?”

Laura returned. Mr. Corney stood at attention, while looking straightly at Nilsson. “As true as I’m standing behind this bar, I saw his Lordship’s black greyhound that he had put down a couple of years before he went to America! I saw the dog
standing
in the kitchen as clear as I see you now as when I was
sitting
by the hot-water boiler.” He looked at Nilsson and then at Laura. “I saw him as plain as I see you gentleman and lady
standing
there before me!” He began to tremble as he faced Nilsson
again. “I swear my oath on it, sir! I was in the kitchen, by the boiler, and all doors shut. Then the black greyhound come through the wall, ears up, lookin’ for ’is master. Then it was gone.” He stopped, wiping eyes with back of hand. “That dog, sir, was put down before my master went to America! God A’mighty, may I die now if I speak the untruth! I knew then—I know now —he was gone down. I’d been listening to the wireless—he’d been seen by the
Empress
of
Britain
, flyin’ back to her Ladyship.” With piteous face, he appealed to Laura. “Every word is true, miss!”