The Gale of the World (34 page)

It was that invitation that had preceded the conception of Peregrine—the traditional name of the heir to the manor of Brockholes St. Boniface. This property had been acquired by the Crown, otherwise Henry the Eighth, during liquidation of the monasteries with the help of a lawyer called Thomas Cromwell. One of Cromwell’s myrmidons, an adventurer from Venice who was not above murder, had been awarded the manor in 1540. The arriviste Bucentaur had practised flattery at Court: praised the Royal musical compositions: paid tribute with a coachload of looted paintings by foreign masters—thus an honourable
exchange
among greater thief and lesser thief.

There was, however, a covenant with the copyhold: a score of pickled and smoked brock hams payable annually to the Court; these to be stuck with cloves and roasted under a baste of sugar. The hams of brocks, or badgers were an especial delicacy obtained from the ‘antient holes or holts’ tunnelled into the hillside wood known as Grete Bere.

If Peregrine’s mother had disliked him, while showing a marked preference for her younger son, his father made no bones about the misfortune to himself in having to put up with such an heir: one who was, in fact, exactly like himself. So the unwanted elder son had been forced to excel at games and all field sports: as it were to turn himself inside out—an extravert as the saying in the ’twenties ran—by fully entering upon an outside world
wherein
he had been capped for cricket (being an outstandingly good bowler) and on the football (soccer) field, a half-back who could be relied upon to break-up an advancing line of forwards by a technique of hacks, trips, and bargings. Further, in another
direction
, he had exploited the admiration of small boys for their
usefulness
in
le
vice
anglais:
an unnatural twist due to the selfish stupidity of his male parent.

Peregrine—the once heir to great possessions—and a beautiful wife. The first blow had fallen when his father died within the five-year span required for the abrogation of death-duties. All the quarrels following the making-over of the estate to Peregrine—dissensions over points of estate management (for the old man never truly abdicated his place as head of both estate and family) had been in vain. Death duties required that two thirds of the land be sold. And it was a time when land values were the lowest for one and a half centuries.

To recoup, Peregrine tried farming some of what was left in hand of the Brockholes property. He lost money, for corn did not pay, nor did stock-raising, nor the ewe flocks traditionally used to restore fertility to the malting-barley lands of North Somerset.

Farming in the ’thirties was a mug’s game, so Peregrine didn’t so much get out as drop out. He tried to restore his fortunes by odd schemes, such as selling apple-trees by advertising in newspapers—‘Get health and wealth by growing apples which Pomona Ltd. will buy from you at market value’. There was no market value for such apples: Peregrine knew that before he advertised his wares. He tried the same idea with mushrooms to be grown in suburban cellars.
Edible
Fungi
Ltd.
advertised for sale mushroom spawn mixed with dehydrated horse manure ‘to be delivered in plain sacks’. A few months later, it was pointed out in the Bankruptcy Court that ‘Edible Fungi’ was hardly an attractive style and title for trading purposes.

By this time Peregrine was a marked man. A suave gentleman with pomaded hair persuaded him to buy a disused cannery in Cornwall (the pilchard shoals having declined) combined with
a slaughterhouse where DOG? CAT? FOOD Ltd. could can portions of fish with those of old cows for suburban pets. (It was later, following disclosures in the Bankruptcy Court, that a scandalous weekly called
Keyhole
declared that Colonel Peregrine Bucentaur was like all professional soldiers, an addict of ‘
sadomasochistic
-necrophilic practices, a hopeless worshipper of dead, dying, and miscarried small industrial concerns’. Anyway, the food-canning venture was doomed to failure before it started: no one, continued
Keyhole,
knew which tins were for dogs and what were for cats. ‘The ex-squire of Brockholes St. Boniface Abbey in Somerset had gone bust on his little fanciful habits of tinned death-worship.’

Whereupon Peregrine riposted by buying up
Keyhole
and
closing
it down after one issue’s blasting of the former proprietors, a trio of young writers. “That’s put paid to that clap, anyway,” he told his cronies at the bar of his St James’ Street Club.

Peregrine’s final bid to recoup was by hair pomade. Oddly, the idea had come from the first appearance of the gent who had been responsible for
Dog?
Cat?
Food
Ltd:
to restore the illusion of youth to deciduous human scalps by a mixture of olive oil, honey and eau-de-cologne. He tried to get his Curzon Street
hairdresser
, Van Tromp, to stock it, without success. For
Fertility
Pomard
attracted the wrong sort of hair,
viz
the bristles of flies, wasps and even bees crawling in summer upon senescent male skulls, the eyes in which stared wistfully at young women lying on the post-war sward of St. James’ Park.

Thereafter, a soldier of misfortune, Peregrine lived up to his name—the Wanderer.

*

Lucy said to Melissa, “The trouble lies with Elizabeth, I think. She has always been a cause of unhappiness to Phillip.”

“May I come with you when you go to see her?”

So Lucy took Melissa with her to Ionian Cottage. Half a dozen staring toy Pomeranian dogs scattered, fluffy jig-saw pieces, about the floors of kitchen and sitting room, barking with excitement for something new in their herded lives. Among them Elizabeth, also with staring eyes and pent-up spirit.

“Phillip let Aunt Dora die! She was lying frozen on her bed for weeks, and he never went to see her! He thought the will she had made, in his favour, still stood, you see! He wanted the money, and allowed her to die. He didn’t know she had made
a new will in my favour, otherwise he would have gone to see her.”

Melissa saw a distracted woman.

“Aunt Victoria, his god-mother, refused to go to our father’s funeral, well-knowing his ways. She called him ‘the black sheep of the family’. He is ashamed of us. He hates me, he pushed me in the nursery fire when I was a toddler, because he did not want me, the second child, to replace him in our Mother’s love!”

Lucy said, “It can be so difficult for the first-born, when another baby appears. The damage can be done in the first glance of a new baby in the mother’s arms. Mothers didn’t know, poor dears, in those days, what we know now.”

“Oh, I don’t believe in that Freudian Theory!” declared Elizabeth. “There is, after all, such a thing as heredity! Our father used to say that Phillip was a throw-back.” Her voice became distraught. “He was a little coward when he was young, and always got Peter Wallace to fight his battles for him. Worse still, he used to
pick
quarrels with boys, and to get Peter to hold the boy’s head under one arm and then to punch his face with his fist! He did it to a poetic boy, who used to come to see me, only to talk to me, and when he was found out, he told Father I had been lying in the long grass of the Backfield with him. from that day Father turned against me. It’s true, every word of it! You ask, and see what he says! Who’s that?”, for the little dogs were yapping at the kitchen door.

“It is I,” said the voice of Phillip, when the clamour of tongues had ceased. “My dog Bodger won’t hurt your Poms. May I come in?”, as he walked to the open door of the sitting room, and standing there, said, “What Elizabeth has just said is true about my early days.”

“Not only the early days, but
now!
” cried Elizabeth. “The excuse you wrote to me for not going to see Aunt Dora—I have kept your letter! was that all the roads were blocked after the blizzard. They were at first, until they were cleared. You never went to see if she was all right, did you? Had I known, I would have come down to be with her! I meant to, but we were snowed up in Dorset, the weather was simply awful, the electricity was cut off for days, the lines were down in the village. Then
electricity
was rationed, and I had to buy candles, but the shop rationed them, and soon they were all gone!” She turned to Lucy. “Look at him, staring at me like that! He knows it’s the truth! And he has been seen lying with a schoolgirl in the long
grasses on Exmoor! Somebody saw them there, and told me! Get out of here! He’s only come to make trouble! He’ll kill me!” she appealed to Lucy. “You tried to divorce him, you know what he is!”

When Phillip had gone away, and the excited dogs were gathered about her, she said, “He upset you, didn’t he, my
darlings
?” Then to Melissa, “That one’s Fawley Prince. He’s blind. That’s why he stares so, he finds out what’s going on by smell and hearing. The neighbours said I should send him to the vet., because he’s too old to use at stud now, but I won’t have you put down, will I, Fawley Prince? There, he knows what I’m saying! He always barks when I tell him that,” and she gave the old dog a rusk. “He’s lost nearly all his teeth, but he’ll suck it until it turns to pap in his little mouth, won’t you, Fawley Prince?”

The old dog growled when a bitch lowered her head and moved towards the rusk. “He’s too old, you see, and cares only for food!”, laughed Elizabeth, a little shrilly. “In the old days Fawley Prince would let Fawley Princess have the bikky, wouldn’t you, darling?”

*

‘Bikky’—
Bikky
—biscuit—enchanted word first issuing from her father’s bearded, smiling lips when life was warm for ever and for ever.

And now that to which the children and their new cousins had so eagerly looked forward to was about to take place. Events of the Lynton Festival of the Arts included a tennis tournament; bowls; pony races; dressage on hunters; swimming races; cricket matches; and on the meadow across the river, a Parade to choose a Beauty Queen.

In addition, for the cultured—a minority which Osgood Nilsson declared to be non-existent—there was an afternoon lecture on ‘Lynmouth in Song and Story’ in the Town Hall, and six evening performances, in the same place, of
Yeomen
of
the
Guard.
The articled clerk had sent a letter to Mr. Osgood Nilsson
inviting
him to appear among the chorus in his maternal
grandfather’s
Confederate General’s uniform; but no written reply was expected.

For the small and immature, a Magician had been hired to produce, among other novelties, strings of flags out of an ear and a rabbit from a top hat.

The local inhabitants were not forgotten. There was Ye Olde Englishe Fayre, where prizes were offered for Guessing the Weight of a Fat Lamb, Climbing the Greasy Pole, and tugs-of-war
between
the regulars of various cider and beer houses. The Festival was to conclude with the Presentation Ceremony of the
Brock-holes
St. Boniface Abbey herd of White Goats to the Lynton Urban District Council, followed by a cricket match between the home team, North Devon Savages, and Lt.-Col. Peregrine Bucentaur’s Crimson Ramblers.

A Grand Festival Ball was to take place on this final night at the principal hotel, whither the entrants for the title of Beauty Queen were to be drawn, standing up in carts, by members of the Boys’ Brigade. At 11.30 p.m. fireworks would officially end Festival Week; but many were looking forward to an unofficial Saturnalia afterwards which, generally speaking, would take place
on the beaches, in motorcars, and under trees.

*

Lucy was in the caravan on the meadow below Barbrook, beside the gently tumbling West Lyn, smiling happily to herself as she glanced up from the pages of
Bevis
to watch Phillip playing with Sarah, unaware that he was trying to focus his sight upon the child’s face, willing himself to be happy, to resist any weak impulse to tell Lucy his fears. Bringing the child to her, he said, “Well, I suppose I must go back to the Cot and do some work. Au revoir, I’ll see you tomorrow. Come on, Bodger!”

The old dog, which had been tied to a tree lest it go too near Sarah, leapt around and gave a joyous bark. It had developed a habit of scraping its behind on the grass. Phillip, on taking it to the vet. had been told that the cause was not worms; but a developing cancer of the anus.

*

Melissa in her room at Oldstone Castle, was thinking, If I can win his sister Elizabeth’s confidence, she might agree to be processed; and so bring to the foreground of her mind the suppurating thoughts of a lost child, longing for a father-love that at adolescence had been withdrawn; and progressing from being clear to find herself able to accept objectively that it was a common human fault to transfer one’s own guilty feelings to the image of another.

She must see Elizabeth the next day: it was imperative that the blockage be cleared: and thereby, Phillip freed of
self-mortification
.

*

Laura looking at the Brig, feeling tenderness for him, seeing him as a little boy lost as she kissed his bald head as though he were her baby. He was crying; he, who had never surrendered in war, yielding all his life to her care as he thought weakly from the back of his mind. My little girl loves me, O God, my little girl loves me!

*

‘Buster’ Cloudesley in The Eyrie taking the Message bottle, dropped into the North Atlantic by his father before he was drowned, from a corner cupboard wherein it was kept with
replicas
of the Victoria Cross, Distinguished Service Order with two bars, Military Cross, and two French decorations, the Legion d’honneur and the Medaille Militaire.

There were times when, feeling wan, he put the bottle on the
table beside him, and read the only letter he had received from either of his parents.

‘Buster’ closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. After resting in thought, he read on, although he knew the words by heart.

‘Buster’ never quite knew what these words meant, but he had a rough idea what his father was driving at. He had meant well, anyway, although perhaps he hadn’t been the best of husbands to his mother. But by God he’d had guts, not only physical guts, but to fight against his own weakness.

Old friends of Manfred Cloudesley had told ‘Buster’ that he had seemed too frail for the touch life of a Guardsman on the Western Front, never quite hitting it off with the other officers in the Regiment. Not much good as a footslogger; but in the air, after a period of caution, and avoiding all possible flamboyance, he had made the grade. He had been a Guest of Honour, his host being Herman Göring at the Richthofen Club, Berlin, after the war.

“When would you care for supper, my lord? A cold collation is in the dining room.”

“Thank you Mornington. Where are the others?”

“Lying down in their rooms my lord, resting.”

“I’ll wait for them to come down. Do go out and see the sights, if you care to.”

“I thought of going to see the amateurs in the Town Hall, my lord. I had a season with the D’Oyly Carte company at the Savoy, in the old days. It will be interesting to see what the locals make of it. I understand the orchestra consists of one piano, one drum, one fiddle, and what looks to be what Thomas Hardy called a serpent, borrowed from the local museum.”

“We may join you later.”

“If I may say so, as a spectacle it should have its moments, my lord.”

‘Buster’ put the bottle back in the cupboard, and went on the terrace, to look up at the sky like the breast-feathers of a slain flamingo. “He hath outsoar’d the shadow of our night” he said to himself imagining Shelley writing his threnody
Adonais
on the death of Keats.
Buona
Notte
: Francis Thompson conjuring up from the vasty deep the dying voice of Shelley. But what written tribute have I paid to you, my father?

‘Buster’ was still sitting by the cypress tree on the terrace when he felt an electric chill passing down his neck to his spine. He touched the stone coping of the terrace, it was still warm. No leaves moved on the trees. He wetted a finger, held it up to
determine
the direction of any moving air. A normal slight loss of temperature all round the finger. No wandering night breeze. The air over land had the same temperature as that over the sea.

The spinal shiver was as though lifting the short hairs above the neck. Was that someone standing in front of him, a dim etching of Byron? My father, he thought, my father: the portrait by Orpen shows you to be on the small side, with Byronic shape of head, and something of Robert Burns in your face. O God, I wish I could remember my father. It all went from me when I bought that packet in the Reichswald …

‘Buster’ breathed deeply, respiring as slowly, to control
emotion
, to keep his mind calm as he went inside to switch on the B.B.C. news and weather report.

“A ridge of high pressure remains stationary over the North Atlantic east of the Azores, extending across Europe, and is likely
to maintain itself for the next forty-eight hours …”

The image of his father persisted. He tried to rationalize the idea of the essence of personal survival. There was Hoyle and his theory of a self-regenerating universe; even a falling raindrop created electrical energy by friction: an ion of life which might help to create a portion of flower or flesh.

According to Caspar, the electric encephalograph could record the brain’s pulses and recessions of energy; the mind was part of the physical tides of the salt, estranging sea. The instrument revealed harmony, dissonance, repulsion. The mind’s despair when a deep-seated nervous inhibition was approached was indicated in a zigzagging graph, of cerebral cells grinding through temporary obfuscated memory; brain-cells in disconnection through fatigue following stress. The extremity of despair bordered on insanity: settled despair due to chronic lovelessness; stalagmites hanging upon the sick mind, with its four miles of veins erratically
carrying
turbid blood to the millions of cells … an entire universe in miniature was built-in with every wretched little animal created on the planet, to be held together only by love—Mahler’s
Das
Lied
von
der
Erde.

What a way to die! The stricken Mahler, warned of imminent death, sitting down to compose his swan-song—the lyrical joy of nature, the enduring love of Earth Mother! Mahler went out, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but in high faith and gratitude!

The icy feeling returned behind his neck: the psychic shiver. Had Father come to him, from the salt estranging sea? A falcon, each flight feather set with barbs, barbules, and barbicells, could find its way by
feeling
across hundreds of miles of alien land and sea and land, drawn in spirit by love to its native eyrie, its home, its base of life. My father and I are one, he said to himself, and going to the gramophone, put on
Four
Last
Songs
by Richard Strauss, and sat in his armchair, eyes closed; imagining the composer to be making his adieux to the golden threads of his life, calling up the spirit of Wagner among them. He sat still while the record ran off the last grooves and getting up, tears dripped from his closed eyes. I must rescue Hess, old flier on the Western Front, and your friend, Father.

*

Peter paddling in his canoe around the small harbour, taking first Jonny then David as crew. When they had learned balance, not to shift their weight, Phillip let them go by themselves; but
only when the tide was coming in. “You have a go, Dad” said Peter.

So Phillip went out by himself, sending joyfully the light
canvas-and
wood craft through the water with alternate thrusts of a two-bladed paddle.

Why hadn’t he returned to the sun before?

The sea lay azure smooth under solar brilliance. Upon the high moor cotton-grass was in flower, as though in pattern with the cirrus cloudlets remaining unmoving in the height of the sky. Lucy was happier than she had been for years. She was living as in the summers of peace she had known when she was a girl, and in the early years of her marriage to Phillip. Dear Phillip, he had done splendidly for them all.

Of the children, Jonathan was particularly happy. His father had given him for his birthday his 7-foot, 2-ounce fly-rod, with a box of dry flies—Blue Olive, Palmer, Red Spinner, and other whisked-and-feather-winged Beauties, as Jonathan thought,
gloating
over them when he was not making his way up the Lyn, to cast horizontally and thus to avoid branches overhead, and to drop his fly lightly on run or eddy, watching that the fly did not drag on the enamelled silk line greased so that it should float. Fishing with dry fly in rapid, gloomy water needed a quick eye and wrist, for the Lyn, like all rivers large or small, flowing fast or gliding through level lands, was a confluence of many currents moving at varying speeds.

A fly floating with wings cocked aided by a delicate touch of grease, must resemble a living fly tremulous after a noon surface hatching, following its swim up as a nymph and now riding down upon the water-flow in a new and strange element of air. Let the line but drag its fly askew, even under water, and no trout would remain within its subaqueous stance, but dart downstream as from menace. And so with the adult fly in early evening—its
life-span
being but one day—when dropping her eggs just clear of the surface—the angler, with his tapered gut cast, must send her likeness to drop lightly, as though spent after love—when
snap!
the fish has leapt to take the lure.

Jonathan cast his fly so that it touched the surface, and rode down rocking lightly on the midstream current of his choice; or perhaps he cast over to the farther bank, holding high the rod point against drag … staring cat-like, he saw a dark neb appear momentarily in no more than a petty rocking of water under the shadow-dark Glen … with a wrist-flick he drove home the hook,
to wind-in swiftly to keep the pull on his line steady. The trout dashed downstream, the boy let-out line to be carried swiftly in a loop below the fish, which, feeling the pull from behind, went upstream. Now to reel-in the slack, keeping gentle pressure by the curved split-cane, and it was wound in, the net slipped forward from behind, as Dad had told him, and there was his first trout!