The Phoenix Generation (33 page)

“Well,” replied Father Laurence. “I thought that
Wozzeck
was a great work, and I still think it is. It has compassion which
embraces
, and thereby transmutes, all the acts so frankly shown to us.”

“You can’t improve on Mozart and Bach.”

“Ah, there you have pure music, Becket, before the slide to the fall.”

“The fall? What fall?”

“One might say, the Faustian fall of Western Man. Mozart and Bach represent the flower of Western civilisation at the height of its splendour, as
The
Ring,
and even
Tristan
reveal the beginning of Europe’s decline. Art mirrors the age, don’t you agree, Phillip? Today we see art, as in a glass darkly.”

“You talk like Hitler, with his Museum of Decadent Art at Munich. Hitler will go to war to try and put the clock back, but all he’ll succeed in doing will be to smash up the whole bloody caboodle.”

Becket Scrimgeour turned to Phillip, and by the snorting
half-laughter
Phillip knew that some bawdiness was coming,

“Did you notice Cab ton’s trousers? He bought them in New York, he told me. He said he saw them advertised in
The
New
Yorker
as ‘The Manhatten Sportsman’s Pants with the Fly-by-night Talon Zip-i-addio defence machanism’. He’ll need them, on those sheepskins. This house is full of rats, my reverent bloody fool of a brother tells me. I hope they bite that bloody little squit Cabton!”

*

Stars glittered over trees. Dead leaf upon dead leaf was dropping in the deer park. The grass was white with hoar frost. Phillip had no bed to sleep in. He walked by the river, he would keep watch by his mother’s bier. He felt in balance with himself, as upon the frozen battlefield of that Christmas of 1914, a star-like presence bearing him up under the bright orb of the Flanders moon.

The Cabtons were sleeping in Phillip’s writing-room. He had explained to them that as Becket Scrimgeour and Brother
Laurence
were in the only spare room, he hoped they would not mind that his room had only a single couch-bed. Cabton, taking charge as soon as he had looked around, had removed the mattress and put it on the floor. Then he had piled the bed-frame with
sheep-skins
brought from his motorcar. “Gert and I are used to roughing it.”

Phillip had thought to walk about under the stars and see the dawn in, keeping vigil for his mother; but the image faded, the late November night soon dragged without purpose, like any ordinary sleepless war-time night; so he returned to his home and, wrapped in his grandfather’s coaching greatcoat, tried to sleep on the landing carpet.

It was cold, a draught was coming from under the closed door of the boys’ room. Rats began to trip up and down the bare oak treads of the stairs. They must have smelt the uncured sheepskins. They came through the broken floor above the cellar. There was a second colony of rats which entered the house by way of the bathroom hole under the waste pipe. Usually the bathroom rats went exploring on the ground floor, while the cellar rats went outside in the garden below the children’s night nursery for biscuits. Now both colonies were apparently after the sheepskins. Which was which, he wondered. One lot seemed to be playing, or courting, on the landing; the other lot to be running races above the ceiling.

He could not sleep. His brain, part-poisoned by the
bloodstream
polluted by the mixture of drinks in belly and gut, began to churn up past mortifications, miseries, thwartings, work undone, misjudgments: all the compost of the past which only by writing and transmuting would, he knew, move away out of his mind. The two grandfather clocks downstairs wheezed and struck four within a second of each other. This was a coincidence, for he had not wound them for years. Once they had been his pride, in those days of solitary living followed by the blissful year with Barley. He had washed their flower-and-bird painted faces twice a year, at the summer and winter solstices, and oiled the worn brass wheels and cogs, pinions, bearings; pulled up the weights before breakfast every morning. Rippingall had wound them up, after days of stagnancy, for the party. Mother was dead. He had longed for her death, to free himself; but death had brought no relief. Now, lying cold and sleepless, he entered the coffin to lie beside her, seeing but a brittle relict of herself lying there, part of the eternal patience of the earth’s suffering before its final dissolution.

Oh, Mother, I have been a bad son, I have not been kind to you: even the nurse had to write a line to me asking me to write to you. O Christ Almighty, even when she had moved ever so slightly in bed she broke her thigh-bone, which was rotten with the rays of radium needles used on a hopeless case. He saw her groins pocked by burst tumours: Passchendaele craters in miniature, the water turned yellow by British lyddite shells, the Salient pocked and
repocked
beyond the death of every worm and beetle as the shells spouted and respouted every ounce of putrid soil and flesh and litter of the parade grounds of Europe. That is true, anyway, for all wrong living in Europe erupted into the Great War. Oh, Mother, are you with those spirits of love and grace which are called angels?
I must not think of the letter of reality. One day I shall write a novel about your life and Father’s, I’ve been thinking about it for years and flinching from the task. At least it will not be critical and satirical as once I intended. If only I can write the simple natural truth it will be understood by everyone in the world. But shall I ever be free to write it? Mother, I hope I get cancer, I feel you want me to be with you in the grave. No, no, I am
allowing
myself to be possessed by bad spirits. I shall write my book with love and understanding, I swear to you I shall.

The vision went out of him as the clocks raced one another to be the first to strike six times. It was that damned Algerian wine which had given him such gurgling turmoil in his guts. It was what Becket Scrimgeour said the Foreign Legion drank before going
cafard,
or mad-smashing-killing. No more poison, wooden case of six bottles delivered free from a firm at Ratcliffe Docks for ten shillings.

Becket Scrimgeour was groaning and coughing downstairs in the children’s day nursery. Phillip thought of getting logs for the fire in the sitting-room, which seldom went out in the autumn and winter on its foot-high bed of ash, but he lay still, half-asleep, cold in the small of his back, clammy hot in legs, after many turnings over, enwound by the Ulster coaching coat which he had found, surprisingly mothless, in one of the big black coach-trunks in the Fawley lofts. At last the grey lifeless light of dawn. He got up, soused cold water on face and hands, and went down to the sitting-room fire. He got some logs, passing Rippingall curled on sacks in the kitchen. Two empty Algerian bottles lay beside him.

*

At nine o’clock Lucy, Felicity, and Melissa had breakfast on a polished refectory table. Brother Laurence had already shaved and bathed. Becket came in tousled, red-eyed.

“How did you sleep, Becket?”

“Bloody awful.”

“What happened?”

“Those cushions fell on the floor, leaving me jangling all night on the wire mattress.”

“I thought you were composing after the manner of
Schönberg
,” said the friar with a smile.

“How did you sleep, Cabton?”

“Not much better. You want to get rid of those rats.”

“Which ones?” asked Becket Scrimgeour.

“The trouble is they come in whenever they fancy the idea,” said Phillip.

“I was hardly asleep after the rat race when you put on the gramophone—this place is a madhouse,” said Mrs. Cabton.

“And when you stopped playing those records, I could hear you snoring,” added Cabton.

“Your rats seemed to be remarkably tame,” said the friar. “One sat up at the foot of my bed and washed its face.”

“That’s more than some of the guests here do,” remarked Becket.

“That’s the rat the children call Dippy Dan, mon père. Dippy Dan originally came after Garibaldi biscuits. He tried to take one whole down into his tunnel, which is too small. He spent a lot of time trying to drag it down, until gate-crashers came up and helped him, and themselves.”

After breakfast Melissa, finding Brother Laurence alone, asked him what he thought of Phillip’s books. The friar divined that she meant Phillip himself, and replied, “He has great natural faith, and a terrible honesty that his occasional sophistry or doubt cannot destroy, and a kind of child-like simplicity that is the only thing that saves us all from being downright wicked. And I have a steady respect for his work and faith in his future.”

“I am so glad to hear that, Brother Laurence. He needs friends more than most men, I think.”

“Friendship is the word, Melissa. He himself is a loyal friend, I know.”

Brother Laurence, driving an old Renault car which he called the Toad, left later with Felicity.

“That friar is bogus,” said Becket to Phillip. “I asked him what Order he belonged to, and he said ‘Laurentian’. I’ve never heard of it, nor has anyone else. I bet he sleeps with Felicity. I saw him kissing her this morning, in the sitting room.”

Yes, thought Phillip, all we say about others is a revelation of ourselves.

The Channersons departed after breakfasting in bed. The Cabtons remained for lunch, and stayed on for tea. Once again the old routine was to be heard from Phillip.

“What are your plans for your holiday, Cabton?”

“Oh, we never make plans when we are on holiday,” replied Cabton, with a lazy smile. “We believe in taking things as they come. Why don’t you try doing that, Phillip? You’re screwed up half the time. Why don’t you give yourself a break?”

“I think I’ll take your advice.”

*

Over the Gartenfeste a drift and delicacy of sleet was wandering down the wind. There was an expressed letter from his father forwarded from Monachorum, telling of the day and time of the funeral. With this letter was one from his sister Elizabeth who wrote that the doctors had experimented on poor Mother with radium needles although she was a hopeless case from the first. The specialists’ fees were nearly a thousand pounds: she hoped that Father would not try to get the bills paid out of Grandfather’s trust, which would now be shared by the three grandchildren. Would he speak to Father about it when he came up for the funeral, as ‘you are the only one of his family he likes. You are his favourite.’

He motored at once to London. Cousin Polly Pickering that was, turned up from Beau Brickhill. Her mother was too frail to come. Mrs. Bigge looked sadly out of her window as the coffin was borne to the motor hearse. Cousin Arthur and his sisters from Surrey came with their father, Uncle Joe. The large white face of Mrs. Neville was at her window in the flat below Hillside Road. The sides of the grave were smooth yellow clay. Phillip dropped the first handful of soil on the coffin. Mother was now with her father, her mother, her sister Dorrie, and Uncle Hugh. Uncle Joe, the last of that family, stood beside Phillip, looking humble and gentle. His sister Elizabeth wore the new black coat and skirt, payment for which she had demanded, Phillip thought, from Mother which he had covered by paying his cheque into Mother’s bank. He thought no more of it; obviously how to pay such respect to Mother had worried Elizabeth very much.
Anyway
, the money was only a slight return for all Mother had done for everyone in the family. He took his father aside afterwards and said he would like to help him pay the medical expenses; his father said, “Thank you, my dear boy, but it is my duty to do that. Will you come and have lunch with us at Beeveman’s in the High Street?”

“Father, I am so sorry, I must go back to London, do excuse me. I have some work to do. Thank you for inviting me, but I must go.”

He walked back to London along endless streets, thinking that he should have gone to lunch with his father and sisters, and not deserted them at the time of their distress. I might have drawn them together, now it is too late.

He went home the next day and learned that Rippingall had
wandered off. The emotions of the past weeks had exhausted him. He had drawn out his savings from the Post Office, and got drunk in Shakesbury, where he had been taken in by a war-widow. She had a pension, which she would lose if she remarried; after some hesitation and doubt she agreed—according to a letter from Rippingall to Phillip—to marry him.

Phillip wrote and wished him luck, and sent him
£
10 as a wedding present.