Lucifer Before Sunrise (50 page)

Further west, beyond the City, uniforms were everywhere, of many nationalities, as in Phillip’s war—but no, not quite Phillip’s war: for he had yet to write the novels to establish the right to call it his. The uniforms this time were of khaki, the basic pattern, at least for the legionaries of Europe and Empire, was British. Basic uniforms—basic English—the language of diplomacy of the future, even as New York would be the financial centre of Europe?

*

A minor reason for Phillip going to London was to see, at his cousin’s request, Arthur Turney. Phillip had had little to do with him since, many years before, cousin Arthur had bought Phillip’s Brooklands Road Special Norton motor-cycle, the first model to be built at the Birmingham factory after the 1914–18 war. Their friendship had lapsed after Arthur had repudiated payment on the grounds of having been swindled by Phillip, in that he had sold his B.R.S. model to him in poor condition … this after Phillip had
ridden it to Surrey from Devon and left it with Arthur in perfect running order.

Arthur Turney had, in fact, smashed it up and sold the wreckage, without telling Phillip, who had been fond of Arthur; now he
replied
to his cousin’s letter, saying he would see him if he would agree to send the
£
20 he owed for the bike to the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund. Arthur agreed.

That evening Phillip met him at his club, and found him looking to be almost the same—his hair only slightly greying at the temples —and slim as all those years ago. Over dinner Arthur told him that he had a girl-friend who would soon be conscripted into the Forces, unless she went to work on the land. He wanted to find a farm within reasonable travelling distance of London, he said, where he could visit her during week-ends.

“I hope to marry her—if my wife will consent to divorce me.”

His marriage was not happy, he said. His wife had long refused to have a child, but after many refusals, had at last consented to allow him to adopt one.

“I loved that child, but after a year of trial my wife insisted the boy be returned to the Orphanage because, she said, he might have in him the seeds of dishonesty.”

“The seeds?” said Phillip. “Or the seed-bed?”

“Well, there’s no need to quibble. Anyway, I took him, in tears, back to the home. You see, he’d learned to call me Daddy. He cried for me at the Orphanage. So my wife agreed to re-adopt him. After another year she insisted that he be sent back again. Later still, I met this girl, and we fell in love. She wants children.”

“Ah.”

Phillip spent a night at Arthur’s flat—part of the girl’s married sister’s home in a village off the Great West Road. The sister’s husband was with the Eighth Army, having served all through the North Africa campaign. Both girls had their parents living with them, in another flat of the house.

The father had been a business man in India, of the sort called a T.G.—Trading Gent—by Rudyard Kipling in
Plain
Tales
from
the
Hills.
Among other things he said to Phillip that he regretted that the Communists marching to Downing Street, during the past winter, ‘didn’t get their hand on Sir Hereward Birkin’. “He should have been lynched, the dirty traitor.”

“He’s not a traitor, and he’s a friend of mine, sir.”

“Then I don’t think much of your judgment.”

Later, when they were alone, Arthur told Phillip that he had slept with this soldier’s wife until he had met her younger sister.

“I’ll be glad to get Alice away from her parents. She’s ready to come, if you will accept her on your farm.”

In the morning Phillip asked him if he had sent the
£
20 cheque to the R.A.F. Benevolent Fund.

“Well, to be frank, I was going to send it after I’d heard from you that you would take Alice.” When Phillip said nothing, he went on, “So I may as well tell you that her parents don’t feel altogether happy about her going to your farm. You see, she’s only eighteen. And as her father told you, her brother-in-law’s now with the Eighth Army in Italy. I wish you hadn’t contradicted what he said about Birkin. It would have been more tactful not to have replied. You see, your reputation is not altogether in your favour, people know all about you, and how you’re overworking your children on your farm, and—other things, such as, to be frank, that illegitimate son of yours, by your one-time secretary.”

How strange it seemed—and what a relief in shabby, broken London—that there should be a Royal Academy in war-time! Now that fear had partly gone from faces, as the fall of Germany was
inevitable,
perhaps it was not so strange. Surely it was not only
himself
alone who felt the strangeness, the semi-freedom, the
semiease
upon the sunlit pavements of London once again?

In Burlington House Phillip met a young West Country writer, whose farming journal he had read, with delight in its wit, when the book had been published a year or so previously. The young poet farmed upon a promontory at the verge of the battering
Atlantic, and appeared, from his talk, to have had more
adventures
than were recorded in the book. His appearance and mind and outspoken remarks had inevitably suggested to some of the more active insensitives in his district that he must be a spy. Below his farmlands was a cove between rocky outcrops, whereon much flotsam become jetsam when flung up his beach by grey snarling combers. Tins of coffee in boxes had been relict there; barrels of red wine trundled up the beach of stones, to stagger down again after each retreating wave, liquid calling to liquid until a rope held the barrel gurgling. Bits of balloon fabric like fish-skin floated in with a forty-gallon drum of petrol. Wine in England when the restaurant cellars held only beds! Petrol when nearly all the rubber wheels had ceased upon the roads of the Island Fortress! The poet drank the hogshead, while his tractor drank the petrol, and for this the farmer-poet was reported, brought to court and sent to prison, where he wrote a ballad which later Phillip read in
The
New
English
Weekly
‚ and thought much of, with special reference to ‘my dear Mauberley’ who also had been in prison.

The two amateur farmers had arranged to meet in London at the Academy. The spring sun was shining in the streets and through the glass in the roof of Burlington House as they shook hands.

“How’s your farm?” said Hare No.1.

“Taken over by the local Agricultural Committee. My wife fell ill with tuberculosis, and is in hospital—my only labourer,” replied Hare No. 2.

The farmer-poet appeared to have something else on his mind, beyond a wife’s haemorrhage and lost land. “Can you tell me how to get money to Mauberley?”

“Mauberley?”

“You know. One never knows where hidden microphones are. He is very ill, in prison.”

Phillip was wondering why Birkin needed money in prison. Then he noticed an old man with a small microphone in his ear looking at a picture. At the mention of the name ‘Mauberley’ he appeared to edge back from the picture and move nearer to where they stood. By this time in the war Phillip had come to be unsure of everything concerning himself. When people occasionally asked leading questions about his ideas on the war, latent hostility in their voices, he did not reply because he could not, like the dead, reply.

“Haven’t you any ideas about how to get money out of the country?”

Could this poet be an
agent
provocateur,
an M.I.5 man fixing his arrest? A stool pigeon?

“I don’t think I have any ideas.”

“I must find a way to send him money.”

Why, Phillip thought again, money to ‘Mauberley’ when Birkin was still in Britain? He had been released from prison some months before, and now was under house-arrest somewhere. Just before he had left gaol Phillip had had a card thanking him for ‘steady courage’—a misappraisal, he thought, for he thought of himself by nature timid, like a hare; and at times, no doubt, as
ineffectual
and silly.

“Are you sure ‘he’ is abroad?”

“Yes. He’s in an open-air prison, guarded by Negroes. Frozen by night, scorched by day. In chains.”

It seemed stranger than ever. The man with the ear-microphone moved nearer. Phillip led the way out of the Academy; they went to sit in St. James’s Park. The new leaves of the plane trees rustled. Water glittered. Bomber aircraft resounded in the sky. When they had gone Phillip said, “Are we talking of the same man?”

“I was wondering if we were.”

“Who is ‘Mauberley’?”

“I thought you knew Mauberley is the hero of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. He is Pound himself. Ezra is in prison at Pisa. His new Canto has been smuggled to me. Here is the manuscript.” He showed Phillip a large envelope filled with pages scribbled in pencil.

“They may hang Ezra. I must help him. Dollars, if possible.”

How ironic that dollars were required to rescue the poet who had damned Money, or usury, as the source of all human ills. A
superficial
thought, he knew; but O, brave Ezra Pound!

*

Before Phillip went down to the West Country he called to see his sister Elizabeth at her office in the City. She was pale and had a harassed look. He wished he had brought some eggs with him, and butter; for, she said, she was lucky to get one egg
a month on her ration card, and the butter ration was only two ounces a week.

“I live with an old couple in Highgate who won’t allow me to hear Beethoven on the wireless. It’s their set, you see, and so I can’t take it to my room and hear music by myself.”

As always when in Elizabeth’s company, Phillip felt himself to be diminished to the old nervous state he had known, and escaped
from, in his parents’ home before he left to live in Malandine after the first war.

“I’m going down to South Devon now,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t stay to take you out to lunch. The train leaves in less than half an hour from Paddington.”

“Oh, aren’t you lucky! I pine for the country. I used to get away nearly every week-end to Sussex,” she went on in a strained voice. “I stayed with a farmer and his sister, but she was jealous of me, afraid that he wanted to marry me, you see! But she needn’t have worried. When I told him that Aunt Belle had left me four thousand pounds, and he said I could invest it in his farm if I liked, I knew at once that all he cared about was my money! And I had thought he was keen on me, I was very fond of him, too—and all the time it was my money he wanted!”

“Well, I understand how you feel, but if you really care for him——”

“I did, until he wanted my money! So I’ve never been back there, no fear!”

“Your money invested in a sound farm would bring in a good yield nowadays, Elizabeth.”

“So that’s it! I suppose
you
want my money to bolster up your old farm?”

He said patiently, “Farmers are in clover now, Elizabeth, with guaranteed prices.”

“That’s what my friend tried to tell me, but I’m too old a bird to be caught with salt on its tail!”

Phillip thought that he hadn’t heard that remark since he was a small boy. It had been one of his father’s sayings, extended to all kinds of occasions, including his excuses—falsehoods as he called them—before punishment with the cane.

The idea, or thought of Father, seemed to raise his image, for Elizabeth said “Have you heard about Father’s goings-on? He thinks he’s going to marry a young girl, he’s waiting for her to grow up!” Dry laughter. “Aunt Vicky wrote to me, saying this girl has the run of his house, he even allows her to play his
radiogram!
And you know how particular he is! No one was allowed to play his records when
we
were children! Yes, Vicky is quite
disturbed
. She says Father will marry this girl when she is eighteen, and then she’ll get all his money!”

“Have you seen Doris lately?”

“Not for some time. She doesn’t know about Father. She did ask me down to Cross Aulton, but I don’t want to hear her talk
about Bob Willoughby. Why doesn’t she divorce that awful
husband
of hers? I
knew
there was something wrong with him the first time I heard that awful stutter. I knew the marriage would fail, and told Doris so, but she wouldn’t listen!”

“Bob had a bad time on the Somme, you know, when cousin Percy was killed beside him.”

“Oh, I don’t believe all those stories about the last war being responsible for this and that long afterwards! Look at you! You had a good time, really, you told me so yourself, taking things all round. I suppose you’ve forgotten?”

“Well, I must not keep you, Elizabeth. I hope things improve for you—but we’re all in it—these are the dark days.”

“You can say that, when you’re going down to Devon!”

*

Beyond the village of Malandine, notice boards with red-painted lettering declared it was a Forbidden Area. Unexploded mines, grenades, and shells were lying about. Phillip had, some time
before,
received notice that his field was commandeered by the War Department, and had assumed that this was because he was an
ex-18b
detainee. What he had not realised was that a considerable area west of Malandine, and the foreshore below the village, had been used for some time as a practice battle-ground for the
much-advertised
invasion of Europe.