The Gale of the World (33 page)

“Did Harriet, his first wife, drown herself when he left her for Mary Woolstoncroft, Cousin Phillip?”

“I don’t really know, Miranda. Both were very young, little more than children.”

She sat unspeaking until he rose saying, “It is a wonderful picnic, Lucy, thank you all for such a lovely time. I must get back now and work, you do understand, don’t you?”

“Of course, my dear!” exclaimed Lucy. “You must do just what you want to do.”

Rosamund said, “
Do
stay, Dad!”; David said, “We do want you to stay, honestly, Dad, don’t we, chooky?”, to Jonathan who replied, “If he wants to write, he must go!”

Baby Sarah cried when he walked off; Miranda seemed not to have noticed his going as she knelt on the bank and peered down to see her own dark eyes staring up at her.

The three Bucentaur children Miranda, Imogen, and Roger were having a final romp with the goats, which soon were to leave for a wide and open valley west of Lynton as a gift from their father. The animals were tethered on a long picket line, while the children played a variant of the game known as French Cricket; King Billy, patriarch of the herd, had a picket to
himself
; he was liable to act ferociously when free, being at what Molly declared to be the dangerous age. The old goat was frustrated; he wanted to join in the game, but his nylon tether had proved uneatable. An additional irritant was the free presence of Capella, who was attempting to run off with the red leather ball in her mouth.

In past days, all goats had been free to join in the children’s games, which then became a sort of mad circus. Capella was the best ball-snatcher, bearing it away in her mouth, pursued by goats and children. The game caused so much laughter that Miranda had to bend down again and again, gasping while she spread fingers over her face at the sight of King Billy jumping about in a rage.

Watching the fun from her bedroom window, Molly told herself that Anda was still only a child, and that there was nothing serious between her and Phillip, who was surely only a substitute for paternal admiration and affection which every young girl needed for a balance of her emotions. Yes, Anda was still a child. Molly felt happy; not only were Lucy and Melissa arriving that afternoon, but Perry as well.

Miranda was excited: at dinner she was to wear the Edwardian ball gown in which Fred Riversmill had painted her portrait in the early summer. Yes, when the girl’s father was home again, all would be well! It was going to be a wonderful Festival week, like the happy summers before the war.

The play had been vigorous for Miranda, after the strain of
school examinations; now she was feeling the reaction. What would Daddy think of her? What would he say? Would he be pleased with the portrait? Supposing he wouldn’t allow her to keep Capella? And then the arrival of her father, driving his vintage Hispano-Suiza motorcar, caused her to bloom with
happiness
. She had, of course, the sense not to make any demands upon him until the right moment—

“Daddy” she called to him, as she was dressing for dinner, “may I have a word with you? I want to ask a favour. Please don’t be angry.”

“Why should I be angry with you, darling” he replied, going into her room, where she sat in an Edwardian chemise before the looking glass. “My word, you are a beauty!”, as she continued slowly to brush her long hair.

He knelt down beside his daughter, putting his arms around her to kiss, lightly and rapidly, the forehead, eyebrows, bone of each cheek, and side of the neck; thence to the base where little curling hairs grew out of a soft skin so tender and exciting, before a final communication with the lips while the hand, slowly
caressing
, went between silk and collar bone to the flesh on one breast, while he whispered, “You’re a beauty! I adore you, my sweet darling.”

Miranda, a little confused and trepidant, found herself
uttering
words she had meant to reserve for a future moment. “Daddy may I keep Capella? She will be terribly miserable without us all here, I know she will.”

“We’ll see, darling, shall we?”

It was not long before Molly was wondering about her errant husband’s attitude towards Miranda. She now had her own
bedroom
converted from a box room; and when late that night Peregrine went upstairs to kiss her good-night he remained so long that Molly trotted up to join them—to come upon him kissing the child’s breasts like a lover, while her head was turned away. So she waited in her own bedroom, behind the open door, listening.

When Peregrine returned downstairs Molly went into the box room, to find Miranda lying quietly in bed, crying.

“Darling, what is the matter?”

“Daddy says he has promised
the
whole
herd
to the Council, and a gentleman can’t break his word.”

*

Incest in some landed families was not altogether unknown in
former days of isolation in remote country houses almost feudal in their self-containment preceding the Great War. Papa stern and distant, Mama amiable but remote and punctilious; both frigid in the accepted moral code based on a strict Protestant religion and the law of entail. These conditions sometimes led to irregularities among the older female children of a large family still in the schoolroom, and sent, in long white frocks and white gloves, under big hats, always chaperoned by a French governess, to sedate parties in other houses in a waggonet in summer days, or the family coach at Christmas time with cockaded coachman and footman beside him, through narrow lanes and up slow winding hills to other houses lit up for festival.

In particular, Molly remembered the case of a housekeeper, long in service with Peregrine’s Uncle Rollo—who boasted, among other exploits, that he had eaten a stone of bullock steak a week —but who nevertheless, could not face up to the housekeeper and dismiss her because she had found, and kept, not only
billets-
douces
,
but a pair of his monogrammed pyjamas left in the bed of a young married sister.

The inclination to incest, as an escape from Victorian inhibition, seemed to run in some suffocating families. And the next morning, when Lucy went on to Shep Cot, Molly decided to send Miranda to ‘Buster’.

“We’ll need every available square inch for the cricketers’ wives, darling,” she explained to her daughter. “In addition we’ll require at least three bell tents for the unmarrieds, with camp-beds and blankets, and also a marquee, with trestle tables, and forms to sit on. We’ll be twenty three in all. Goodness knows what they’ll do for baths. They’ll need them, the place reeks of goats.”

Molly, Miranda, and Melissa drove into Minehead to hire the camping requisites for Cricket Week.

“As I said, we’ll need every bed in the house for the married couples, so I propose to put the bachelors—there will be six of them—two to a tent in the ponies’ paddock. The goats will be gone by then. That leaves five married couples, including your father and me, in the house. Goodness knows how we’ll all be able to fit in.”

“Why can’t Imogen and I sleep in a tent, too?”

“The ponies might get entangled in the ropes, darling.”

“But what about the ropes of the cricketers’ tents, if they’re in the paddock?”

“The ponies don’t know them, Anda. Supposing Bruno barged
into a tent for a lump of sugar in the middle on the night?”

“Bruno wouldn’t. He’d come to my tent.”

“Perhaps you could have your tent on the lawn. Goodness knows,” Molly went on inconsequentially, disturbed by a vision of Peregrine creeping down in the middle of the night, “how we’ll manage about baths.”

“They can bathe in the sea.”

“But the men can’t shave in the sea, darling. The water is so sticky.”

“Well, there’s the swimming bath. That’s fresh water.”

“It’s against the bye-laws to shave in a public swimming bath, surely?”

“They’ll want latrines dug, too, Mummy.”

“Darling, who will want them dug?”

“The bell-tent bachelors, of course.”

“Very well, write down posts and hessian screens.”

“In the Great War they used shell-holes. The ideal was to find one dry, fresh shell-hole, it was the only true life a tommy could get, Phillip told me, until he was either killed or wounded. Even then, at Passchendaele he would lie out alone, and die a lonely death—” She hid her face in her hands.

She is in love with Phillip, thought Melissa as she put her arm round the girl. Molly stopped the motor, a large black Daimler known as The Hearse.

“What odd things you two have discussed, darling.”

“The realities, mother dear, which are the basis of true history. It was the only privacy a soldier in the line could get, to be alone with the sky.”

“I can sympathise with that, Anda.”

They went on down to Minehead. There, when Miranda had gone to buy a stamp at the post office, Molly said “Of the three children, Anda is the one who needs
shape,
if you understand. She’s very intelligent and impressionable, and has too much to lose. The older she gets, the more complicated she appears to be. Usually gels grow out of their green sickness, but Anda—” She sighed.

Melissa wondered if Molly’s reticence was a cloak to hide Phillip. For Miranda had talked, talked, talked to her about him: what he hoped to write—how he might begin—what form the novel should take—all autobiography to be transmuted by what Keats called The Imagination—

Miranda returned with the stamp. “I must have left my letter
on my dressing table! I can’t find it in my bag!” They searched in the car: no letter. Later, when Molly had gone to the dentist, Miranda said to Melissa, “Do you mind if I speak about Cousin Phillip?”

“Do, my dear.”

“The letter was to Cousin Phillip, asking him if I had done anything to offend him. You see, he needs help.”

“In his work, you mean?”

“Yes, Cousin Melissa. He’s read to me all his war diaries which he kept while at the front, and wants to use for his novels. He’s got whole rows of Great War books at Shep Cot—German and French as well as English, including official histories of all the belligerents, for he says his novels must be wider and deeper in scope than his own very limited experiences. I’ve never heard or read anything like the battle scenes, and also those behind the line, Cousin Melissa. Only, you see, he daren’t start writing until he can see his way clear ahead for several years. I did so want to help him, as soon as I left school, but lately he has shut
himself
away, and during the last term he didn’t write at all except only once, saying I must concentrate on my exams.”

She turned away her head, then turned again to look into the older woman’s face. “Are you sure you don’t mind my
unburdening
myself to you like this, Cousin Melissa? I hope it isn’t ‘
blowing
back smoke in other peoples’ faces’, as Grannie would say.”

“No, of course not, Miranda. I
do
understand, and I’m
interested
in all you feel you can confide in me.”

“Phillip sees good in everyone, Cousin Melissa. He’s not
competitive
, like most men are. That’s a defect in life, he says, but a quality necessary in an artist. Fred Riversmill says he’s like Turgenev, seeing all sides of a question, so that some people think he’s not quite all there. Others think he is a fool, who refuses to see any evil in fascism. Of course he does, and did, but many opponents of fascism were just as bad in other ways during the war. And before the war, the self-righteousness of ‘the
intellectuals
’, Fred Riversmill says, led them to neglect the frightful social conditions at home, all the slums and unemployed people and starving little children—”

Miranda bowed her head, hiding her face in her hair.

*

“Molly! Why has my elder daughter gone to stay with ‘Buster’ as soon as I arrive?”

“To make a little more room for the cricketers, my dear.”

“But the other children are remaining here.”

“They won’t take up any room. They can share a tent on the lawn.”

“I asked particularly because, while in the Lynton club, I heard someone who looked like a boiled owl in spectacles, and obviously didn’t know who I was, talking about a writer to whom Miranda as well as other women, pay regular visits.”

“Didn’t ‘the someone’ tell you that I also ‘pay regular visits’ to Phillip Maddison—a connexion of ours—he married my Cousin Lucy Copleston? Cousin Phillip is as honest, and as clear, as the day.”

“I didn’t get that impression from Humbert Tarr, who came in later. When I asked him who this chap Maddison was, he told me he was a fascist with none too savoury a reputation.”

“The Brig is the last person to talk about that!”

“Anyway, I wouldn’t trust any man with Miranda.”

“But Phillip is
not
‘any man’. If anything, he’s a little too ascetic.”

“They’re usually the dark horses.”

“Anda has nothing to fear from Phillip. She’s got plenty of sense—more than you think perhaps.”

“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?”