Young Phillip Maddison (53 page)

The Poluski Brothers followed, two men in lavender suits and felt hats, who did cross-talk. Phillip could not really understand the jokes. He was glad when the next turn came on, G. H. Elliott the Chocolate Coloured Coon, who danced very gracefully and sang as he danced
I
used
to
sigh
for
the
silvery
moon.
His voice went up and up, from baritone to contralto and then to treble, like a sort of whistling bird he was, gay like a green woodpecker in the beech glades of Knollyswood Park. Had Pype robbed the nests there? Had Milton cribbed? Oh, no matter; they were his pals. He would meet them again at the Old Boys' Meetings and
Soirees.
And there were his preserves, the Squire's by Shooting Common, and the new places in the valley of the Darenth. There would be Saturday afternoons from the Moon! It would only be like a sort of school over again! It was simply wonderful to be alive!

Phillip had not yet given any thought to the money he would receive: a fledgling still in the nest.

After the interval, the Lunatic Bakers. Tall men, obviously on stilts under their long white trousers, and tiny little dwarfs, tottered and tumbled, threw flour about and lumps of dough, assembled in pyramids only to quarrel voicelessly, shake and wobble and collapse, spring up again with expressionless floury faces and fall into ovens and out again into flour barrels, kicking legs, pulling off one another's trousers (women
shrieking
with laughter, why? for they had pants on underneath, surely women knew men wore long woollen pants as well as trousers?) and
bounding about all over the place. Phillip was so interested that he did not laugh.

After the Lunatic Bakers, Harry Tate and his motorcar. That was screamingly funny, the man in the loud check cap and big twitching moustache. Why won't the car go, Papa! After a lot of funny arguments with the chauffeur, the boy in the back in a top hat discovered the reason. The wheels were not round! Not round? They looked round enough. Ah, but they were not
going
round! It was terribly funny. Then the schoolboy tried to prove that the reason was that while the circumference of ordinary wheels was 3πr, his Father's wheels were 4πr! They had one-third more circumference than ordinary wheels! A mathematical joke! Fancy telling that to the Magister, phew!

Then with a sudden hollow bumpy feeling Phillip realised that he had left school …

At last, Marie Lloyd. The audience seemed to be going mad as the bewigged footman with the notice board came on. He felt frightfully excited. Then he saw a woman with what looked to be a big-corseted waist, a big hat with ostrich feathers in it, and a parasol. As she sang she looked sideways at the audience, her big teeth protruding. Sometimes she paused, and sniffed in a knowing way as she made suggestive remarks and pretended to wipe her nose on the back of her hand.
A
little
of
what
you
fancy
does
you
good!
He knew what that meant, and by the way she said it, it was rather like the women in the Rec. Then suddenly the rays of light from the arc-lamp in the box made her eyes glitter Cambridge-blue. They were like a turquoise: he saw only the sky-blue glint, which seemed somehow to make her more than a woman who was rather like a principal boy wearing fancy clothes instead of tights.

He stared, fascinated, a little frightened. After that blue eye-glint he was held to her every movement on the stage, as she sang in a rather hoarse voice, her big feather hat nodding, her parasol held out with its point on the stage as she stopped, showed her teeth sideways, wiped away a sniff with her hand, said to him (how had she seen him?)
Every
little
movement
has
a
meaning
of
its
own!
As she said it, there came the sudden and startling blue glitter of her eyes; and although she was ever so far away and below, Phillip was rather thrilled.

*

When he got home at nearly half past nine, Phillip took off
his muddy boots, put on slippers, and went down into the sitting-room. Father did not even ask him where he had been, or why he was late. He just turned his head in the armchair, from reading
The
Daily
Trident,
and said, “Hullo, old chap, had a good time?”

“Yes thank you, Father. Some friends and I have been walking over the Seven Fields, and on the way home we went to the Hippodrome to see Harry Tate.”

Father did not say anything further. Phillip sat down behind Father's chair, his usual place. He could hear Mother in the kitchen making sop for his supper. There was his book, given him the day before, lying on the table, near Father's elbow. It was the history of the School, by Mr. Graham. Every boy on leaving was given a copy.

Phillip thought, a little unsteadily, that never again would he sit among the Bagmen. Taking the book, he opened it at random. Head on hands, he read the first verse of the School song, which he knew by heart, from the six times he had sung it with the massed choir on Founder's Day, before all the parents (though Father had never come) in Hall.

Phillip turned back to the early pages, to the recantation of the Founder, lying in Newgate Prison, over three hundred years before.

What a dry book, Phillip thought; all unreal like the rest of history, which belonged to another kind of world altogether, when men were very cruel, and there were traitors, and people were being tortured, tried, beheaded, and killed in rebellions or wars, all the time. It was quite a different world now; all that was a thing of the past; men knew so much better nowadays.

He closed the book and put it away, before Mother could come in and, seeing it, talk about the old times which, for some strange reason, she could not see were uninteresting, like fossils.

Then resting his head on his hands once more, Phillip thought of his last goodbye to the Bagmen outside the Hippo. Never would they be all together again. It was over, his boyhood was over. He sat as one transfixed.

*

In the green russian-leather armchair Richard held the newspaper before him. He was not reading it. Quietly he laid it on his lap, and closed his eyes. Phillip's mention of the Seven Fields had brought pictures of the past before what he called the camera obscura of his mind. Only a little while ago, it seemed, he and Hetty were arriving at the keeper's cottage, for their brief honeymoon; and the woodcock had pitched beside them as they lay in Knollyswood Park, on the dry skeleton leaves of the year's end. He thought of Phillip's arrival, and the little chap suddenly smiling at him, as he nursed him at night through his illness—ah! he liked his Daddy then, why, the little chap had always wanted him to hold him by the hand, in his cot, for a minute or two, before he settled to sleep.

His eyes still closed, Richard drew in a deep breath, then released his thoughts in a long sigh, inaudibly, before taking up his newspaper again and reading about the empty houses the suffragettes were burning down, the windows they were smashing, the bombs they were leaving in public buildings, the acid poured into pillar boxes. Theodora—his own sister! What had come over the world? That a gentlewoman could so far forget all her upbringing, and sense of decorum, and associate herself with such dastardly behaviour? And that was the Theodora who, mark you, had criticised him for doing his duty in punishing Phillip for bad behaviour in the past. It was all of a piece! There was something very rotten in the State of Denmark!

Well, now the boy was off his hands. And with the workaday balance of his mind adjusted again, Richard poured himself his nightly cup of hot water, half an hour before his bed-time.

“I expect you feel ready for bed, after your long walk, Phillip. Don't forget to clean your teeth.”

“No, Father. Good night.”

“Good night, old man.”

Hetty came into the room, carrying her work-basket. She took out her darning needle, wool, and leopard-spotted large cowrie shell, which went inside the sock she darned—one of the presents of her brother Charley from Africa.

Richard looked up and smiled.

“Well,” he said, with a sudden air of ease. “How about a game of chess, old girl?”

*

October
1952
- August
1953
Devon.

THE FLAX OF DREAM

The Beautiful Years

Dandelion Days

The Dream of Fair Women

The Pathway

The Wet Flanders Plain

A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT

The Dark Lantern

Donkey Boy

Young Phillip Maddison

How Dear Is Life

A Fox Under My Cloak

The Golden Virgin

Love and the Loveless

A Test to Destruction

The Innocent Moon

It Was the Nightingale

The Power of the Dead

The Phoenix Generation

A Solitary War

Lucifer Before Sunrise

The Gale of the World