The Phoenix Generation (38 page)

“Felicity, this is what you must do. Take your mother into the rose garden. I heard the first nightingale there this morning. Rather shrill in the east wind, but a nightingale. Sit down on a rug, hold her hand, tell her how you love her, as your sister. Tell her you are a whole person, and why. Tell her it is a miracle, but your
father wasn't killed after all, a mistake was made. Only that—a mistake. Tell her what a good man he is now. Leave it there. Meanwhile mon père will be in the apple room, out of the way. I'll go and get Fitz, and invite him to see the premises, while you're with your mother.”

Fitz laughed when Phillip told him.

“Nora always said he'd turn up like a bad penny, sooner or later. So he's here, is he? She always regretted telling Felicity that her father was dead. You know, the old gel's had a rough time, from the start. No, she won't die of shock, she half suspects it, as a fact. This will help her, as it's helped Felicity. She's a different gel. What's the boy like? I haven't seen it since it was a baby.”

“Edward is like Felicity.”

“That will please Nora. She has a lot of pride in her family. Your wife took the baby's coming very well, I thought. I'd like to meet her one day.”

“Do come and stay when we are settled in. Everything is a bit rough at the moment.”

“Still, you've got it in you to succeed. And you bought on the ground floor. The war's coming all right. You'll see. Oh, I know how you view things, but the war psychosis is in the air. Hitler can't stop. It's happened before. It's the pattern of history. No man, no system can alter human nature.”

“Then we're all doomed.”

“Of course we're all doomed. Hitler's only a child of this age. When he's gone it will break out all over the world. First Asia, then Africa. We haven't had Armageddon yet. You're wise, you know, to get back to the land. ‘Only a man harrowing clods' will still be there when these modern dynasties have gone the way of all flesh.”

“Yes, I see you have the scholar's perspective. Now I must leave you for a bit, I must fetch Edward from school.”

While Mrs. Ancroft was enjoying Felicity's omelettes with
watercress
from the pond below the clear-water spring in the garden, Phillip made his way back to the apple room, holding Edward by the hand, and thinking of the last walk with his father on the buried Roman road across the downs. And Mother had feared an awful row! It was like that first Christmas Eve in the war. Go straight out to the German wire, levitated by the opposite of fear, and you are walking on water.

“Now, mon père, this child will lead you, I've told him what to do. Follow him.”

“Grannie, Grannie, I got you, an' I got Grandpa, an' I got Mummy, I got Lucy, I got Phillip, an' ever so many brothers, and I got a sister as well! Aren't I a lucky boy?”

*

When the blossom was on the white-thorn, and the turtle dove was come from Abyssinia to the Home Hills, the cottages were ready for the family. A bathroom had been built on, electricity installed. Four bedrooms, three rooms downstairs, and a kitchen. It was beginning to look like home.

“I think you are fairly well settled now,” said Brother Laurence. He looked calmly at Phillip. “Perhaps now you should have a rest, so to speak, from too many apprentices. You will be able to settle to a rhythm with your little family. Felicity and I both feel that you should be an undivided farmer, not hampered by amateurs. After all, you have learned your job, and we haven't. Felicity must be with her mother, to help and comfort her, now that she has made a new relationship with her. For myself, I hope to become a lay brother with the Carmelite Friars in Kent.

“But let us not lose touch, my dear friend. Do not look so sad, Phillip.”

“It is so lovely for the children on the marshes, Pip! We went there with Lady Penelope, who took us part of the way in her motor. She called here just after you had gone to do your broadcast in London, to ask if she could help in any way. She left this note for you. I think she is just a little worried that all your plans may disturb the wild birds. Such as the draining of the meadows, and afterwards ploughing them up. I told her that you loved birds, too.”

He opened the crisp blue envelope. The writer declared that she had been inspired by the books of W. H. Hudson to watch wild birds. She had also read what he, Phillip, had said about Richard Jefferies, but (she wrote)

He replied saying that she must not allow his coming to
interfere
in any way with her walks, and hoped that the bare-fallowing of the arable would not spoil the wildness of the place for her: that the idea of ploughing and re-seeding the meadows depended on a resurgent Britain and a long-term policy for farmers supplying the home market. Then he referred to what she had written in her letter about Hudson.

Occasionally he saw her aloof figure wandering over the farm, leading two large Russian wolf-hounds on a leash. Once, while he was writing in the caravan within the pine wood, he met her startled gaze through the window: instantly she looked away, and changing direction, disappeared slowly among the trees.
Sometimes
he caught glimpses of her by the grupps adjoining the meadows—dykes thickly overgrown with reeds, where warblers and other birds nested—and always accompanied by the narrow, white, angular borzois held in leash and one day they became friends.

Phillip’s friendship with Penelope became one of the reliefs of a strenuous life. It had its basis in warm camaraderie, in confidences he could share within the oasis-like security of the little boudoir room where usually she sat, or more usually reclined, on a couch by the fire. It became his habit to drop into her house after the day’s work, to be greeted by the graceful prancing of dogs, and, after calling out at the bottom of the stairway,
May
I
come
up,
to be invited into the small upstairs room with its open window and view of bird table, apple trees, and pantil’d roof. The invariable hospitality and graciousness with which his appearance was greeted—whether straight from work on the farm or from the compressions of the writing desk—was one of the stable things of his new life. The room, its walls azure as a starling’s egg, was the retreat of a quiet spirit which loved wild birds, and which above all else desired to see children free and happy as those very birds which flitted with such pure instinctive movements about the bird-tray on the window sill. Here was sanctuary, wherein the unspoken rule was, Be thyself.

Penelope at her best, which was nearly always, was unselfishness itself. For many hours she had listened to the diverse view-points of people sitting in her boudoir. Penelope was the resolver of disharmony. Never, since his friendship with Mrs. Neville, the mother of his boyhood friend Desmond—not heard of, or from, for nearly sixteen years now—had Phillip felt so at home, so free to talk exactly as he felt. The past dissensions with Lucy’s brothers; the loneliness of Lucy; the sale of the family property in the West
Country and the migration to East Anglia to make a fresh start—he had told Penelope everything, including his relationship with Felicity, and his views upon the condition of Europe; his visit to Germany, his admiration for the spirit of happiness and resurgence he had found everywhere there.

“
Everywhere
, Phillip?” had been her only comment to his enthusiastic descriptions.

“Well, everywhere
I
went, Penelope.”

She changed the subject. “Let me ring for some tea for you,” and when the tea came, with his especially large cup, they talked about the farm.

She realized that he must justify himself by achievement; was he always hearing, unconsciously, his father’s critical voice in childhood? She was glad he could expand in her presence: he had an audience; he could tell her about his plans to write a series of novels one day, when the farm was in order, and Billy would be able to run it for the family and he would be free to return to his hilltop eyrie in South Devon.

Sometimes Phillip wondered if it was a one-sided friendship: if he were taking for granted that what interested him was of interest to Penelope. Certainly she always seemed pleased to see him. Was he a bore, he asked her one day.

“That is the last thing I should say you were, Phillip, provided you always remain yourself.”

*

Penelope never spoke of her own marriage, beyond saying that she had been unhappy and that was all over. She was happiest in the open air, where the freedom of birds was as her own. She lived quietly in the old house with her dogs and her birds, looked after by a housekeeper, a cook, and a parlourmaid—to Penelope a simple household after the conventional orderliness of an ampler life in her father’s home.

Once, talking in the rattling sort of way she usually did when referring to her past life, she said, “My father was in the gutter when he started,” which he took to be a comparative
understatement
, since he had inherited the family cement factories; and from what she had said at other times, her father lived in a country house with a variety of gardens; and served by a model Home Farm with chromium-plated machinery and walls of white-glazed tiles. Its timbered park was grazed by a herd of pedigree,
tuberculin-tested
, agglutinised Ayrshires; the gamekeepers on its surrounding farms, and its lodge-keepers, wore livery. Penelope had mentioned
peacocks, water-garden, a dovecot, a gazebo—near none of which, apparently, could she breathe.

Anyway, she had run away from it all, to find happiness and a sense of freedom in that very wilderness of nature which in Phillip induced a feeling of loss of freedom: the Home Hills overgrown with tall and ragged thorns where the turtle dove throbbed in high summer noons: the eroded arable where happy flocks of goldfinches—the scarlet and yellow King Harrys—fed among the forests of the thistles: the swampy meadows: the ragged woods and coverts: the ruinous Old Manor, home of owls, daws, a kestrel, and every year a pair of redstarts.

To Penelope those meadows slowly reverting to bog were a delight.

“Do you know, Phillip, I think I heard a bittern there last winter? It was a strange note, not at all ‘booming’, as most writers say it is.”

“I heard it, too—the blare of an invisible bull with parchment lungs.”

“That is exactly what it
was
like! And have you heard the trilling chatter of sedge-warblers and reed-buntings in those
wildly-growing
osiers?”

At such moments Penelope’s face had the light of enthusiasm, while Phillip’s heart sank as yet again he thought of all the work that had to be done. The very things that she loved to see were to him at times the cause of near-desperation. Of course he could have written of more beauties than she saw herself; but he would be imitating his earlier self.

Where the thorn-hedges had spread, untouched by steel hook or slasher for twenty years, Penelope could listen with delight to the sharp rattle of the shrike, and watch a family of longtailed titmice swinging in loop-gossamer flight from twig to
berry-cluster
red against the pale blue sky of early autumn. Every walk on the decadent farm was for her an adventure: for on the meadows might she not see the slaty flap of the harrier when the sycamores below the hanger cliff were turning yellow. In the spring there was the happy bleating of snipe to be heard as they dived over the water-plashes amidst the rush-clumps of the meadow.

“In fact, Penelope, the Bad Lands in the days before the coming of the reformator was a wilderness in which you found your happiness—or consolation.”

“In freedom
only
is happiness, Phillip. And I prefer the farm’s true name—the Deepwater.”

“Do you know why it is called Deepwater?”

“Because it overlooks the only deep-water harbour on the east coast north of the Thames estuary. I’m told that Napoleon
considered
an invasion here because at all tides there was anchorage for his transports.”

*

Penelope’s small daughter went to a school where the choice of work or not to work was left to the pupils. Apparently these pupils called the masters by their Christian names and in all things pleased themselves. In summer time boys and girls slept side by side in little tents about the grounds. The community made its own rules. There were few private possessions, inhibitions, or repressions. No discipline other than that imposed by general agreement of the juvenile community was enforced.

Lucy visited the school with Penelope, and returned with a desire that all her children might go there. She said it was the kind of school she had dreamed about, there was real freedom and
everybody
looked happy.

“How about the founder and headmaster?”

“Well, he did look rather sad.”

“I don’t wonder at it. All his workshops mucked up by kids.”

“He looked as though he were not properly understood.”

“You should read Strindberg’s
The
Father.
”

On the first occasion that Phillip met Penelope’s child, during her holidays, she had looked at him with hostility as he peered in the doorway of her school-room where she was painting on a table.

“I suppose you come here after Mummie’s money?”

“On the contrary, your Mummie has invited me into her house in order to get mine. She keeps a Crown-and-Anchor board.”

“Soppy,” replied the child, continuing her angular painting. The next time they met Phillip gave straightforward answers to her questions, and found her friendly.

*

Lucy’s little girl, Rosamund, went to quite a different sort of school. The fees were one-seventh of those paid by Penelope for her daughter’s schooling. Rosamund’s school had only eighteen pupils, all small girls. The school was in a private house in a
side-street
of one of the coastal villages. It was run by two nuns who were dressed in light brown clothes. They were elderly spinster sisters. The children were not allowed in the garden except to work there. It was a small garden, but the playground, with a gravel surface, was smaller, and enclosed by a rusty iron-spiked
fence. The fees were
£
15 a term, which included board and lodging. The main meal of the day was almost invariably bully beef. Once when passing the village in his car Phillip had seen a wan face looking at him through the rusty railings, a dark little girl dressed in a brown uniform. With surprise he recognised Rosamund. So that was where she went to school. Usually merry and lively, this mite looked positively woebegone.

The nuns were dumpy and their vitality withdrawn by too many interior ruminations. Just like himself, in fact. His feeling was to avoid them when they approached as he was talking to Roz behind her cage, but summoning up an impersonal manner, he spoke cheerfully to them, saying that the fine keen air of the coast was so different from the relaxing atmosphere of the West Country. He shook hands with both through the railings, and then blowing a kiss to his small daughter, left with mingled feelings of regret, relief, and despair that he was so neglectful a father.

The visit had a sequel later on in the year. Through Lady Penelope, Lucy met a parson’s wife, Mrs. Frobisher, who invited them over, saying in her note that her sister was a great admirer of Phillip Maddison’s books, and all at the rectory would be honoured if they would dine with them one evening, with Penelope. Thither the three went, in Penelope’s motor.

Phillip enjoyed the party. He thought, I must take part in the social life of the district in future. The rector had been an athlete in his youth, a triple blue of Oxford University, Penelope had told them on the way there. He asked Phillip if he played golf, and offered to put him up for the local club, with its links beside the sea, near ‘Boy’ Runnymeade’s cottage. All was friendly, the young daughters were pretty, the older folks lively, the saddle of mutton had the flavour of the aromatic plants growing on the ‘mashes’ beyond the sheep-walks along the coast. The talk came round to the possibility of war, and Phillip’s opinion was asked.

“Now listen, my dears, very carefully to what Captain Maddison has to say,” said the aunt to her nieces. “In years to come you will be able to tell your children of this evening.”

No war, said Phillip, and heard himself giving the reasons which few had accepted hitherto.

“Birkin will be speaking at Fenton soon. Do please go to the meeting, Mrs. Frobisher, and give him a hearing.”

A silence followed this request. Then a young doctor, husband of the rector’s daughter, said to Phillip, “I hear you have a
daughter at school in Staithe. There used to be a sanatorium there, and many of the villagers now have tuberculosis. In fact, it’s in most of the cottages. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t send her anywhere near the village.”

At home Phillip said, “I think Roz ought to leave at the end of term, don’t you? I wish I had the money to send her where Penelope’s daughter goes, but all my capital is now laid out on the farm. Anyway, I’m not in debt, thank God. She’d be better at the village school, for a year or two anyway.”