The Phoenix Generation (22 page)

Phillip had gone all the way on his motor-bicycle to Malandine, returning with a copy of the
Nonesuch
Blake
and shown Pa some
of the plates. “H’m, I must admit they all look equally horrible to me.”

“Would you like me to take it to Sotheby’s, or Quaritch, for an opinion, sir?” “Oh, I don’t suppose it’s worth the journey,” and Pa had returned to his rockery. Later, doing the cross-word puzzle of
The
Morning
Post
, he had said to his eldest son, “Phil’s an interfering ass.”

Ernest, remembering that talk years ago, now had an idea the picture might be valuable. So he had rolled it up in brown paper and concealed it with the bottles of Co’burn port. So far he had not bothered to do anything about it, although he was always half-meaning to take it up to London. The thought of Phillip was ever in the way, so there the picture remained, the lair of a black spider with eight long, thin racing legs. This insect was a female, and had rolled her eggs within a ball of white silk and fixed them to the girdle of Nobodaddy, resplendent with crown and jewels and the staring eyes of a late-eighteenth-century British Jehovah.

*

Escaping from the mental mildew of Ernest’s presence (as he thought of it) Phillip was mouching around his field one afternoon, happily and thoughtlessly greeting each growing tree with a touch of fingertips, when he came upon, less than a shoe’s length from his advancing foot, two partridges squatting side-by-side on the ground. The birds sat in brief shadow of a
pinus
insignis
planted two years before. One bird faced west, the other east. The
variegated
and dun dead-leaf feathers of their right wings touched. They continued to squat still, looking rather puffy while Phillip stood, left foot still raised, without movement.

He froze in that position, daring only to blink his eyes. At the shift of stance they would fly away. Were they two hens sharing a nest? If only he had brought his camera. He stood there while a horsefly settled on his bare leg; he was wearing only shoes and khaki shorts. Lowering a hand he rolled the fly, its proboscis boring through three layers of skin, shapeless. As it fell the birds burst into action with grating cries, while a shower of chicks fell from under their wings.

One bird—perhaps the cock—dropped down half a dozen yards away and began to scramble through the grass. It uttered cries as though it had broken a wing, which was trailing. Phillip, still standing still, watched the sunlight-dapple-pattern’d chicks
clambering
laboriously over long cock’s-foot grass stems. Soon their
cheeping ceased. They were invisible. He did not try to find them, he feared to tread on them, he dreaded to see one of them die of fear in his hands.

He lifted his feet backwards. The cock followed him for nearly forty paces. When Phillip turned away to the Gartenfeste the cock retreated to its look-out on an ant hill. It made no attempt to conceal itself. It stood there, head held high, looking at him. When he walked faster it flew up with loud beats of wings—like a
clockwork
wooden bird and—dropped into a hedge bank and with head still high on lengthened neck gabbled at him.

Phillip strolled away. The bird flopped off the bank and followed him through the long grasses. He walked on faster. The bird pursued him, half-running, half-fluttering through the wilderness grasses of the old summer. He stopped and said, “You should know by now that I am harmless, Perdix perdix. You are only showing off.”

When the bird continued to gabble he whistled like a curlew, a cry surely familiar since these birds of moorland and sea-shore often flew over the hill on their way to pick up sandhoppers on the tidal sands below. Apparently the whistle was recognised, for the jockling cries ceased, and the cock partridge disappeared. Later it stood on guard upon its anthill.

Phillip went into the dimmed basement of the Gartenfeste and sat at his table, pen in hand. But nothing would appear in image before his mind. Silently he rested his head on his hands, feeling his life to be a vacuum. He sat there until he heard the clip-clop of iron shoes from the lane to the north, between the hedge bank and the dying beech plantation. Then into his mind came the image of Barley. What zest and calm she had brought to the sensuous world. Never for a moment with her had he felt weariness other than that of an earned relaxation. Writing was but a
substitute
for living, an escape from non-living. Still, the book must be finished: every word extracted from the wan shade of being, from the stored brain-cells of visible memory. He took up his pen. An idea came into his mind; he dared not force it; he got up and went outside, holding to the vague half-feeling which had
preceded
it, a voice crying in the wilderness of life.

He was lying on his back when he heard the clink of the gate staple. He listened. Slow taps of horse’s feet. He lay still,
pretending
to be asleep while seeing through his eyelashes the outline of Melissa against the sky.

She waited. He ceased to pretend, and rising on an elbow
pointed to the cock partridge on the ant hill. “That old bird usually clucks at
me
, Melissa. But not at you.”

“I expect he knows a horse is harmless.”

She lifted a leg over the cob’s neck and slid to the ground. She took off her felt hat, shook her curls free, concealing her slight discomposure. Many times during the fifty-mile trek from
Monachorum
she had imagined this moment of meeting, feeling his arms around her and his soft kiss upon her cheek.

“How is the book going?” She felt foolish as she heard herself adding, “Lucy told me you were here. I’m only passing by, hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“I write a few words, then come into the sun to recharge my battery.”

She unstrapped a leather-covered box from the saddle bow. “I brought some sandwiches. Have you had any lunch?”

“The sun feeds me.”

The partridge’s head was now down on its shoulders.

“Does he keep guard while you are writing?”

“He feels your innocence.”

My poor boy, she said to herself, you’re dreadfully thin, you need me to look after you. She had ridden along the coast, staying two nights on the way with some of her many family relations.

“I had supper with Lucy the other night. She and the children look very well.”

“They feel free when I’m not there.”

She ignored this, thinking, I must not react to his mood, he hasn’t been able to feed himself properly.

“So this is your strong-point,” she said, at the heavy-nailed oak door of the Gartenfeste.

“Do come in. You see these thick concrete walls below ground? They keep it cool even in the hottest weather. But it’s a winter hide, really. I’m getting a propeller fixed to a car-dynamo on a pole to charge a battery for electric light. Then I can live
underground
‘hiding from the shock of day, like the tribes in Himalay’ in Francis Thompson’s
Mistress
of
Vision.
”

Looking at him steadily she said, “And William Blake wrote, ‘Drive your plough over the bones of the dead’.”

“Oh dear, am I about to hear that old word ‘morbid’?”

She turned away. “I must see that Tortoise isn’t eating your lettuces.”

He followed her into the sunshine. “Melissa, I’m sorry. I was rude. I know what you mean. But it isn’t that any more.”

She put her arms round his neck and kissed him, holding her lips against his cheek. She moved away when he did not respond. He seemed to be afraid of her.

“I’ve been working rather hard, I’m still petrified.”

“Shall we go for a walk?”

They went down to the sea-shore, leaving the cob in the field. He was no longer afraid of the absence of himself. With her beside him he felt to be one with the people bathing and playing games on the sand; that he, too, belonged to the sun and the happy faces. While she searched for sticks, he made the fire to boil the kettle.

“Daddy wants to live in East Anglia. ‘Boy’ Runnymeade’s given up the Castle, too, driven away by the R.A.F. bombing range.”

The news of her departure was a shock. He heard himself saying, “W-when my trout book’s finished, I had an idea of m-moving, too.” He dared to ask, “Will you go with your parents?”

“I thought of getting a job in London. I’ll be living with Mummy, at first. Later on, I may share a flat with a friend.” She hesitated before saying, “Where will you go, d’you think?”

“It depends, really.”

People on the sands were pointing to the sky. They looked up and saw a silver shape moving slowly in from the west.

“The
Hindenburg,
from its Atlantic journey!”

He could see the red emblem, the black swastika. The great airship seemed part of the summer sky, a cloud phantom.

There was a man sitting near, blue reefer jacket and white flannels, panama-hatted.

“Isn’t she lovely?” Phillip said to him.

“Shouldn’t be allowed to come over British waters like that, in my opinion. They’re only spying, taking photographs for the next war.”

“Don’t you think they might be feeling rather proud of showing their new airship to the English?”

“Rattlin’ the sabre, I call it.”

“But surely Hitler wants to be friends with us? Like all other ex-Service men who fought in Flanders and France?”

“Well, you ask my opinion, so I’ll give it. I’m damned if I’d trust the Germans a second time. My father was killed in nineteen seventeen.”

The man, who looked to be about thirty, sat down again with
his back to the grey shale rock, and picked up the picture paper whence he had got his opinion.

Melissa, observing the strained look on Phillip’s face, said, “I read your piece in the
Crusader
about the Silver Jubilee drive of the King and the Queen in South London.”

“Do
you
read the
Crusader
?”

“Why shouldn’t I? You write in it, don’t you? I loved your story about the little man and the King—‘Put it there, George’.”

“It was true.”

“Aunt Cary told me H.M. wasn’t at all keen on the drive, telling ‘May’ that people didn’t really care whether they saw him or not. Aunt Cary was Lady-in-Waiting, and followed in a carriage. You must have been very near him.”

“Oddly enough he remembered me, among the other reporters, from some occasion or other during the war.”

“‘Some occasion or other!’ Is that how you think of a levée at Buck House? How did the King remember you? What did he say?”

“When the procession got to Nine Elms, the railway depot near Battersea, a row of coalmen was drawn up, in leather caps and shoulder guards. There was that small dark man, a Celtic type, at one end.”

“Was that you, camouflaged?”

He drew a dried sprig of seaweed over her knees. “Don’t stop,” she said. “It gives me a thrill.”

He dropped the sprig. “Well, I saw the little man staring at the King going slowly down the row, and when he came to the little man he stopped and stared for a moment at the little man’s wide-open brown eyes.”

“Are you sure they weren’t blue?”

“Then the little man shot out his hand and said, ‘Put it there, George’. It was absolutely spontaneous. The King held out his hand and shook his hand warmly. Someone heard him saying to the Queen as they got back into the carriage, ‘That chap liked me, May. It’s made my day’.”

“‘That chap liked me’” she said. “I wish that other chap did.”

“That other chap does.”

When the man in the dark blue jacket had moved away, she picked up the dried sprig of seaweed, and stroked the sand.

“Is the other chap sincere, I sometimes wonder. Does he
really
think that Hitler is not preparing for war? Does Hitler know
himself? Or that one side of him is ruled by the death-wish of his destroyed childhood, or rather of his mother destroyed by his father.”

“Are you talking about me or Hitler?”

“Both.” She dropped the sprig and pulled a burning stick from the fire.

“I didn’t think you were a disciple of Freud.”

“I’m not. I see it all in my own father, the same contradiction, I mean. He would have destroyed Mummy, if she hadn’t been strong and forthright, and chucked her marriage.”

“I’ve wondered why Lucy hasn’t done the same thing. Hitler’s ‘revolution to destruction’ is only the macrocosm of my domestic microcosm. The loveless youth, self-built, driving himself hard, followed by prolonged dilly-dallying periods of idleness, which cause frustration, and destructive criticism … of others.”

She looked at his face and was moved by its gentleness, and said, “Do you really believe that about yourself?”

He felt her warmth stirring in him, and thought, This young girl, whose mother trusts me—and yet,
can
I yield to her? What is there left in me to give? Perhaps I am physically impotent. He took the embered stick from her, and blew upon it, before returning it to her, saying, “D’you know the old saying, ‘Remember, stir not a dying ember’,” while keeping his gaze on the sand between them.

She felt herself swelling with pity for his thin, sharp look. She said casually, “I’m staying a few days with Aunt Flo at Turnstone, won’t you come and have supper with us? I don’t believe you get enough to eat.”

“Well, thanks all the same, Melissa, but I must keep on with the book until it’s finished. It’s now or never. I know how a spawned-out salmon feels.”

She longed to hold his head to her breast, but thought as she had told herself several times before, Keep your hands off this man you little fool. She got up. “I must get back to Tortoise. I hope he hasn’t eaten any of your young trees.”

*

The writing of the book, owing to long hours and a poor and irregular diet, involved so continuous an anguish that he spent forty minutes of every daylight hour of that summer loafing in the field, to renew the energy to continue. He left the field only to buy food, usually when he had gone a whole day without any. Never since Malandine in the old days—Malandine with its now
crowded and almost alien sands—had his mind been relaxed. Long periods of idleness were nervous strains because he had not been working. He felt dread behind this drive to finish the book: the night was coming—the deep darkness of men’s polluted minds making another war inevitable in Europe, and perhaps throughout the world. He had tried to reveal what this mental darkness was in the Donkin novels, but it had not been acceptable; he had failed; the feeling of failure was never far away from his being. He could never get away from that feeling. So there had never been any true enjoyment of life, because there had been no mental freedom. By August he was writing very slowly, on an average a word a minute. He began the day’s work about 9.30 a.m., after wandering about barefoot in the field in his pyjamas, and stopped at any time between 5 p.m. and midnight. He was ill-organised, working sometimes until an hour past lunch-time, then eating bread and cheese which he did not want to eat. He sat in the sun, wearing only shorts and coloured glasses, typing nowadays because of cramp in his writing hand. Day after day he sat
half-naked
in the sun beside a young pine tree, tapping intermittently, ice-cold in the sun of summer. He made every excuse to get up from the chair—to watch spiders in the grass, to catch blue-bottles and green Spanish flies and put them in spider webs—these strong flies which would otherwise blow their eggs around the vents of sheep to become maggots in the hot sun and gnaw their way into and under the fleeces. Or he stared at lizards in the sere bleached grasses of cock’s-foot clumps, or hoe’d the small lettuce patch behind wire-netting against rabbits. Then to return and type
another
sentence, writing against time: for the book, promised for publication that autumn, was already announced.