The Gale of the World (31 page)

“She has almost forgotten the owl far away in the valley. She is entranced. She has heard the perfect hoot. She dreams of
wonderful
eyes, of the tenderest beak preening her feathers.”

There was now complete silence within the caravan, the door open wide to the night. Then with a slight bump on the painted canvas roof they knew the owl had arrived. They dared hardly to breathe: the quavering came again, startlingly near: they could hear the sighing away of the frail and tremulous note.

A soft answer from the caravan. Far away across the common, the other owl was calling. They hardly dared to raise their eyes from the plates before them. Then the owl fluted again;
hopefully
, thrillingly, trustingly. Was she awaiting her bird of paradise to fly forth from the cavern below?

The candle flame began to quiver. Jonathan, who was dark and Celtic, was silently a-giggle. Whereupon David, thirteen,
blue-eyed
and Germanic, assumed a clown-face, and stared at his brother, his own face owl-like. Hush, their father whispered, don’t disillusion the bird. What could they do? How get out of it?
Oo-oo-woo-loo-woo,
came the soft throbbing above their heads, as the egg-shaped swelling in the bird’s throat subsided. The owl in the valley had ceased to call. They began to shake with silent laughter.

Then David gave an imitation of a cuckoo. After awhile there was a reply from the owl on the roof; but a note of doubt was in the fore-shortened reply.
Cuck-oo
cried David again.

They waited. A less hopeful, a half-sad, melancholy note in the bird’s voice now. David let out another mellow
Cuck-oo.
Their laughter broke. Then they were sorry for the owl, until later there came a bubbling and wauling and baying across the common, where beech trees stood.

“Cor, I’m what-you-call glad to hear that, ’bor!” said David to Jonathan. “I reckon they’ll pair for life after that hullaballoo!”

They decided to sleep in the Cot that night, to be together. When the boys were in bed, David’s voice said, “This place is haunted, d’you know why? Dad’s got our grandfather’s bones, or the bits that aren’t all burnt up—you know, they burn up some people who prefer to be buried that way, first I mean, because they don’t like the idea of worms eating them up underground, I suppose.”

Phillip heard this talk as he sat by the hearth, there was no door to the bedrooms. He went upstairs with a copy of a book, and said to Peter, who was sleeping on the floor, “Read this passage aloud, please. I’ll put the candle on the floor beside you.”

Peter read slowly,

“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 lolloped 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!”