The Innocent Moon (52 page)

“Jolly well, thanks.”

“Let me take your pack.”

“Oh no, I can manage, thanks.”

He felt stiff and clumsy until she took his hand, when he thawed in a dream of sunshine beside her.

*

At night he was falling again, and when he cried out she came into his room, and sat on the bed, and lay with her cheek against his; and when he continued to tremble she got in beside him, to hold him to her, and he felt the delirious softness of her body giving warmth to his own. He had no desire to possess her, the joy was lyrical, as when he was lying beside the deep blue gentians in the grass where the snow had melted above the Col d'Aubisque.

“You are the truth of the gentian,” he said. “I love you, Barley. Will you marry me when you are older?”

“Yes,” she whispered. Then she was saying, “When I dreamed that you were dead, I did not want to live any longer.”

He kissed the bone of her cheek, and stroked her hair.

“You know, I still can't believe that this is true!”

“When I am eighteen, I'll come and live with you if Daddy won't give permission to let me marry you then.”

“But what will Irene say?”

“Mummie said it would be all right when I asked her. I told her when I saw you first that I was going to marry you one day.”

“You darling! If only you'd told me, too, it would have saved a lot of trouble!”

She laughed. “Sowing your wild oats, P.M.! I knew you had to do that first!”

“What fun to be together, always, Barley! My mother will love you, too.”

“Where does she live?”

“In south-east London. A place called Wakenham.”

“I hope I meet her soon. And I want to see all the places Donkin loved when he was a boy.”

“Oh, Barley, you are so sweet.”

They stood at the open window and saw the dawn over Spain, a blue shining light which cast in silhouette the loneliness of the peaks; and at another window they saw the snow upon great Ger, Gabizo, Monné and Midi de Bigorre in the height of the sky, infinitely remote and wan that life for ever was denied upon their rangèd loneliness. As they watched they saw the peaks beginning to flush. The dawn was in the room, in the warmth of her breasts, their softness, the enchanting joy of the pink blossom of their maiden beauty. She hung upon his neck, kissing him shyly on the cheek before leading him to his bed, to cover him as though he were her child, and with another kiss blown from her fingertips she was gone, and he was alone in the room with its fragrance of the flowers in the garden.

*

And now it was time to leave——

“Till the summer then, my dearest P
.
M.! I'll write to Mrs. Tucker and ask her to let me have Verbena Cottage again for August. Meanwhile, work hard—but not too hard!—and don't worry any more, will you? Your Barley shall come to you, with both our loves. Give my love to Devon, and write to us, won't you? Au revoir, dearest P
.
M.!”

He kissed the two women and got into a wooden carriage; and so through forests and by streams and rivers to Bordeaux, the midnight train to Paris, Bevan and Archie at the Hotel Lutetia in Montparnasse.

“You are a different man,” said Bevan, looking at Phillip.

“Cherchez la femme!” said Archie. “But remember—every woman has her price!”

“That sounds like the title of a
feuilleton
for
The
Daily
Crusader.
”

“As a matter of fact,” said Archie Meek, with satisfaction, “it is!”

“It must be the mountain air,” continued Bevan.

“Yes, dear Bevan,” replied Phillip. “And the gentians.”

At last, at last they were coming! And for the entire month of August! He read and re-read Irene's letter.

Four years to wait, what did it matter? Also—tremendous jubilation—as a writer he could work anywhere! He thought of a chalet in the mountains, stacks of split ash-wood under wide eaves; fishing for trout in rushing torrents; of goat's milk to drink and rye-bread, butter, and honey to eat. Barley in the holidays, peaks along the sky, the mountain flowers.

*

At last, at last he had a companion to walk with him above the cliffs. Jack O'Donovan—Julian Warbeck—Annabelle—none of them had ever gone the whole way with him to the spiked savagery of Valhalla.

“I used to wonder if I were a sort of Flying Dutchman. Nobody was ever really at ease with me, Barley,” he said, walking effortlessly beside her. They looked down at glass-clear water four hundred feet below. “Now we see it in play around the rocks, reflecting the summer sparkle, but below lie the bones of ten thousand drowned sailors. It's really a dreadful coast. You see, when the ebb-tide sets down Channel and the south-west blows up Channel, ships bound for Southampton and London River are pushed this way. In the old days of sail, many a Finnish windjammer and Chinese tea-clipper broke up down there. Fishermen at Esperence Cove say that the big crabs and lobsters have grown on corpses brought in by the tides. But the crabs
don't have it all their own way. There are lots of octopuses, which throttle them with their tentacles and peck into their shells, sucking out all the flesh.”

“We must go down and get some crabs, Phillip!”

“What, climb down here?”

“We can sail or row round from Esperence Cove! It's quite safe, on a calm day.”

She could see that he was apprehensive, and taking his hand said, “I'll look after you.”

A school of basking sharks lay a quarter of a mile out to sea. And walking on towards Valhalla, they saw seals swimming underwater among dim shapes of fish. They came to the craggy precipices of Valhalla.

“Barley, I do wish I had known you three years ago, as you are now, I mean. I used to go to the Doves Nest in the gallery at Covent Garden. It was wonderful, lying right up in the gods, on that semi-circular ledge which joined the curve of the ceiling, and listening to Beecham conducting his ‘grand' season, the first after the war. Tristan—Lohengrin—Parsifal—the Ring of the Niebelungs—Delius—Stravinsky—Charpentier—Puccini! If only you had been with me then!”

“We can still go.”

“Ah, but it wouldn't be the same.”

She was puzzled; she kept silent. Part of him was still remote from her; and she suffered a little, but held the feeling away from him.

“When I used to go down to the Embankment after the opera, there were rows of ex-soldiers lying on single sheets of newspaper laid on the paving stones under the arch of Waterloo Bridge. Others sat all night on the seats under the plane trees. They had no work, no homes, and I suppose no hope. But that wasn't ‘news' to my editor, Bloom. It was commonplace—a couple of million or so with nothing to do. It was, in a way, much better in the war. At least they had friends to muck in with then. I want to write about that time—but I don't seem able to get clear——”

Before and below her were fantastic shapes of rocks upheaved in layers by ancient fires, worn and fretted by air and water during thousands of centuries. To her it was a delightful place: she saw in the splinters and torn layers of rock the likenesses of petrified galleons, prehistoric animals, the profiles of shattered giants—all images of her childhood reading. To her now it
was a happy summer scene—ravens croaking above shifting winds, precipices echoing with wailing cries of gull and kittiwake, whose cast breast-feathers trembled in the warm breezes, caught in mats of withered stone-crop holding to flakes of schist embedded among the roots of thyme and sea-thrift——

“You look so sad, Phillip.” She patted the dry earth beside her. “Come closer.''

She kissed him; heard him sigh. Did he see only the sad relies of faded spring? If only he could feel that all days and seasons were equal! She had a clear feeling of being all herself, with neither body nor memory, but of beauty only, when she was with him.

He was thinking, If ever I were to lose her——

“You will be careful when you go up to the Col d'Aubisque when the snow falls, won't you, Barley?”

“You will be careful when you scorch at seventy on your Norton, won't you, Phillip?”

“I get the shivers even now when I think of how you might have tried to follow me that day—— If you had lost your foothold on that loose walling of the Corniche, last Easter, as I dreamed, I don't know what I should have done.”

“You should not have gone there, you bad boy! I shan't let you act the goat in future! Oh yes, I know you meant to be kind, by going over to see Annabelle.” After a pause she added, “Annabelle loved you, I think.”

“No—she was in love with love.”

They wandered along the cliff path, seeing the same world together. He looked down at a cove far below, and felt no fear. “And I used to be terrified of heights!”

She took his hand. “You are yourself with me, Phillip.”

“You take after your father, don't you?”

“I don't know, really. He is impatient with slower minds. I am not.”

“Do you love your father, Barley?”

She nodded. “Daddy was often cross with Mummie, but never with me.”

“I used to think that the Viking could never fit in with the Celt. My parents are so opposite. My father comes from Viking stock, my mother from small round-headed Gaultshire people, plus a bit of Irish.”

“You have the Irish colouring and temperament. Mummie's
Viking. Daddy's like you, a Celt. That's why I love you. It's in my blood.”

How frequently the tears came into his eyes! She could feel them now on her cheek, and thought that he had much ice in him to be thawed. She would give warmth, warmth to him for ever. She held him against her heart, she was all his friends.

*

Phillip's sister Doris and her husband arrived the following week, after a long and tiring journey from Romford in Essex, where they were now living. The journey took fourteen hours on their flat-twin Douglas motor-bicycle. Its maximum speed in top gear was about 40 m.p.h., but with the canoe-shaped side-car attached there had been much second-gear work, causing over-heating and the need to stop to cool down. Doris looked ill, Phillip thought, apart from the fatigues of the journey.

Bill was his usual kindly self, ready and willing to help in every possible way. He got up early and made a pot of tea before cooking breakfast with Phillip. He was always attentive to his wife's wishes; but his stuttering seemed to be worse.

One evening as they were walking over a grass field looking for mushrooms, the two girls at the top end and the men at the bottom end, Willoughby told Phillip that the marriage was one in name only: but he was—fingers to mouth to hide the contortion of speech—p-p-prepared to wait.

“I suppose she is still haunted by Percy's death. Good heavens, it's seven years since the battle of the Somme! I can't forget it, either. Do you ever think of the war, Bill?”

“Sometimes. But I don't think it is P-Percy being killed, so much as s-s-something to do with your father.”

The sun had gone down below the hills of Bodmin moor, fifty miles to the west-nor'-west. Phillip walked up the field to his sister. She was standing alone, looking at the sky.

“I think a sunset is sad, don't you, Phil?”

“I used to, but not now.”

“Ah, you're lucky! You're free, living down here.”

“It's a question of mental, not body freedom, I think.”

“Don't you ever think of Mother?”

“Yes, of course. And also of Father.”

“I wish Mother would leave Father. He's killing her, inch by inch.”

“Do you know Housman's poem, beginning,

“I don't know what you mean by that.”

“I wish you and Bill could be happy.”

“Has he been discussing me with you?”

“No. But I can see he's very nervy, and very fond of you. I thought perhaps that you could not forget Percy.”

“He must have been telling you something!”

“Doris, please listen. You're the bravest one in the family. I always remember how you stood up to Father, when you were very little, defending Mother. You said you had a big knife, and were going to kill him. How old were you? Three? He beat you, but you would not apologise. And you didn't cry. I was blotted out, I couldn't even cry. I was feeble, sapped by secret grief by that time. And so became ‘very naughty', and wild. And anchored myself, as it were, to an ideal—Helena Rolls. It was unreal love, all a figment of the mind. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I think so. But aren't you and Barley——?”

“Oh dear, it's rather hard to explain. I can confide in you, but you won't, or can't, confide in me.”

“There's nothing to confide, Phillip.”

“Doris! What would you want, if you could wave a magic wand and have it?”

“I'd like to have a house in the country, Mother with me, and lots of small children from unhappy homes to teach and bring up.”

“Don't you want children of your own?”

“I shall never be able to have any.” She turned away.

“Why not, Doris?”

“I'd rather not discuss it, if you don't mind.”

“Well, discussion is good for the soul, you know.”

She faced him. “Why didn't you ask Mother down? Don't you want her any more?”

“I thought she was going to Switzerland with Elizabeth.”

“Only because you haven't asked Elizabeth here.”

“Well, you know very well we don't get on, Doris.”

“Still, blood is thicker than water, you know!”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“Don't you want Barley to see her?”

“There's plenty of time. But apart from that, Elizabeth and I haven't a word to say to one another.”

“Have you forgotten Alfred Hawkins, and how you told Father that he and Mavis, as she was then, were lying in the grass of the Backfield? And what Father said to her, so that she ran away from home, and was found half-dead on the Hill, long after midnight?”

“No, I have never forgotten it. Father said to her, ‘I don't love you any more', and that, I suppose, corroded her.”

“It was the cause of her having fits! Father is—well, you know what he did to
you
! And now you stand up for him, at Mother's expense! I know, you see, how you agreed with Father over Mother's new sink! Now if you please, I'd rather not discuss it further. I've got a headache.”

*

It was a glut year for mushrooms. They ate them with bacon for breakfast, with rabbit stew for supper, with fish soup of wrasse, pollock, and codling caught off the rocks for luncheon. Doris bottled mushrooms in brine for the winter, to be taken home for her mother.

One morning there was a letter from Tabitha Trevelian saying that she was staying with an uncle and aunt at Dartmouth, and suggesting that she come over for the day and see him. He asked Irene what he should do.

“But why not, P
.
M.? If she refused you—how long ago is it, three years?—you have nothing to fear!”

“I didn't want her to feel, well—unhappy.”

“Then why not treat her not as an old flame but as an old friend, and say you very much want her to see Barley? If she's what you say she is, and I'm sure she is, then she'll be flattered.”

Spica arrived by 'bus. They picnic'd on the sands. Spica did not bathe, so Phillip sat with her when the others were in the water.

“You look frightfully well, I must say,” she told him. “What a beautiful girl Barley is! You're a very lucky man, and I hope you know it!”

“Somehow it feels too good to last, Spica——”

While Irene and Barley were preparing high tea in Verbena Cottage, he took Spica to see where he lived.

“I've always pictured it much as it is, Phillip. I expect Barley will want to make it a bit more comfortable for you.” She looked at the soap-boxes and other furniture. “Will you live here when you are married, do you think?”

“Oh yes, always. Barley likes it. I hope to buy it one day.”

She made as if to take his hand and said, “I'd like to make the wedding ring, if you'll let me. I'm working for a goldsmith now, did I tell you? What are Barley's initials? Would you like them engraved inside the ring with your own? Think it over, and let me know,” as they went back to Verbena Cottage.

Irene had made a mushroom omelette, and watercress sandwiches. The sun, still high in the west, shone into the room. Never, he thought, had he seen people so happy. It was sad that Spica had to go: if only they could sit there forever, laughing and talking. But the bus left at six. On the way to the stop Spica said, “I'll do a brown owl, too, if I can manage it—although it will be rather small. Your names perhaps—linked by a cross? Yes, that would be better, the simple thing is always right.
Phillip
X
Barley,
how about that? Well, goodbye. I have so enjoyed myself. You look a different man, you know, quite changed from the haggard creature I used to see at Folkestone.”