Lucifer Before Sunrise (36 page)

Perhaps the applicant mistook this declaration for modesty; more probably he brushed it aside, for his next letter was as a wedge to prise open Phillip’s resistance. He declared that if only he would be given an interview, he was sure he would be able to convince him that he was the man Phillip was looking for. Phillip replied that, in his experience, literature and agriculture did not go
together
except in the meaning of departing together. Therefore he felt he must return the brochure, with thanks for letting an
ex-legend
see it, and regretted that he could not offer him a job. Then he rewrote the letter, leaving out about the ex-legend, because it appeared rude.

His correspondent replied that he was desperate. Another letter arrived with the news that he was coming to see Phillip. This was dreadful, for the letter was posted several hundred miles away. Farmers, this letter repeated, were insensitive men; and he needed someone different to talk to, an intelligent man like Phillip; who replied at once that he was most unintelligent: and moreover, he was most certainly a hard man, in the sense of being brittle, like cast or pig iron: that he was impossible to work with: and being extremely busy, he regretted that he would not be able to see the writer if he came.

“Could someone take this to the post, please, now, at once! I want to be certain it leaves with the afternoon van. Otherwise he may turn up.” He thought to send a telegram as well, although it might get there after the letter.

“I simply can’t face any more amateurs whose only motive in coming to the Convalescent Home is to skrimshank for the period of the war.”

“I’ll take both letter and telegram myself, and make certain,” replied Lucy, putting down her basket of rose-hip syrup, a
Government
free-issue for the infants of the village, which she was taking over to the Women’s Institute. Hardly had she gone, and while Phillip was glancing at the newspaper on the table, he saw a strange figure pass by the open lattice window. Then a gloomy face was looking into his, an exhausted voice was saying, “Hullo, I didn’t recognise you from your photographs, you look so much older.”

“The fate of ‘an ex-legend’. Do come in,” Phillip managed to say. “I must run to the post at once.”

The stranger did not appear to have heard. “I’m desperate. I must get a cottage. I’ve advertised in two farming journals, and got no replies. I’ve just seen a place a dozen miles away but didn’t
like the look of the farmer. He offered me a job, but I want to see your farm first. I like this coast, in fact I’ve always wanted to come here and study its wild flora. I want to write an ecological book on the sea-shore plant life.”

“Do sit down. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Phillip met Lucy on the way back. “Two artistic escapists
together
on a farm! Two half-farmers side by side, each seeing in the other the manifest defects of himself. It will be fatal if this inquiline comes. I knew it as soon as I glanced at the first sentence of his letter.”

“Oh dear,” said Lucy. “I really must go to the Institute, but I’ll give you some tea first.”

The stranger didn’t get up when Phillip went into the room, but continued to lie back in the saddle-bag chair.

“Well, as I wrote to you, I haven’t a cottage, I’m afraid. And it’s a dreadful farm. It’s rightly called, locally, the Bad Lands. Besides, a writer cannot work properly on a farm, and then do creative work in the evening. No man can do two full-energy jobs at the same time.”

“You apparently can, so why shouldn’t I? I’ve lived hard for six years, and worked on farms, as I wrote and told you, since the beginning of the war.”

He had the face of a tired, elderly man. Phillip was surprised to hear that he was in his early thirties. Over a cup of tea and some of Lucy’s wheat scones with butter and honey the inquiline
explained
that he had had a bad time as a child, and later,
unemployment
had left its mark on him. He had tried many jobs from school-mastering to selling artificial silk stockings from door to door. The tone of his voice was depressing. He talked in a clipped, throaty voice, and more than once Phillip had to apologise for his bad hearing. Did the visitor really think he was hard of hearing? He talked in his throat like a gull, but unlike a gull his mouth was hardly opened. Evidently he did not think of how his words came to a listener. He was self-absorbed: a self-encysted artist who lacked ameliorating self-criticism.

Lucy came into the parlour with a tray, then excused herself and departed for the happier atmosphere of the Women’s Institute, while the inquiline went on with his story.

“I got fed up before the war looking for work, so I did what you did years ago, cut away and lived by myself in the wildest part of Wales. Only I haven’t had the luck with my work that you’ve had with yours. Just as I was beginning to sell my work this war came
along, and I’ve had to do farm work to keep out of the services. Where I am now, on a hill-farm in Wales, my wife and I find it intolerable. We have to live cheek by jowl with the farmer, a typical capel fundamentalist, and I can’t say a word to him. He’s a hard man, interested only in religion and cash.”

“Farmers have to be interested in money to survive.”

“I don’t see why. Money isn’t everything. You of all people should know that.”

Phillip offered him some cake. It was a fairly rich cake, with the family’s weekly ration of currants in it. He ate appreciatively.

“Of course you ought to be living in that big flint house by the river. Someone directed me past it, a short cut to your cowhouse, which I looked into, and I should be living here.” He looked around the parlour. “You see, I don’t want a cottage in a row. I want one detached. I like to be on my own. You’ll understand that. You once lived in one next door to a labourer, didn’t you, at Malandine?”

How long would Lucy be? Phillip gave him the local paper and made an excuse to go seek her in the Institute hut across the road. There she was talking alertly with other women. She came to him cheerfully.

“What now, my man?”

“Lucy, do help me. I can’t bear him. When are you coming back? He’s determined to come here. Do give me moral support. I feel as though I’m being turned into salt.”

“Bother him. Why can’t he take No for an answer? There’s the Whist Drive tonight, and I ought to go and arrange——” She looked harassed. “But what
can I
say?”

“Very well. You get on with what you’re doing. I’ll try and put him off.”

In the parlour the inquiline was looking about him. He had a question to ask.

“Who lives in that cottage next door? Though, as I said, I don’t care much for living next to anyone.”

“My eldest son sleeps upstairs, and another son when he’s home from school. The smaller children use the room below as a
playroom
.”

“Probably my furniture wouldn’t go in there, anyway. It’s stored in Anglesey. That costs a lot, too. I’d like to look inside the cottage, anyway.”

“There’s not much point in seeing it, I’m afraid. As you can see, it’s entirely unsuitable. Untidy, dirty, a mess. I can’t get anyone
to be tidy. The farm likewise is a shambles—ploughs left out to rust, despite orders about greasing the breasts——”

The inquiline produced a tape-measure and began to measure the walls; then the height and width of the door; and the bedroom upstairs. “Your other cottages are up the street, aren’t they? Can I see them? Though as I’ve told you, I don’t much care about living in a row.”

“They are all occupied, so it would be wasting your time to go there.”

“Then this would appear to be the only one.” He looked at Phillip with desperation in his eyes. “I must have a cottage. I can’t stick that farmer another week. It’s hell, absolute hell, to sit in the same room with that Welsh moron. And from your letter, you seem to be in the same emotional fix with your cowman, who you say you can’t get to wash the cows down before milking, despite the water laid on from that artesian well. Well, I can’t get my farmer to let
me
wash the cows before milking! I could fit in here, you know—and as I told you, I’m very keen on this coast, and the marshes. How long was it before your work became known, from the time you started?”

“About seven years.”

“That means I’ve got another three to go—except for the war, of course. Until you’re famous, no one takes any notice of you.”

“You really do know livestock?”

“Yes, sheep, particularly. But I’ve experience of cattle.”

Without enthusiasm Phillip took him round the farm. In his company it looked to be in a double neglected condition. The sedges were once more growing thick in the grupps. The water was more than a foot above its draining-level. The hundreds of hours spent in pulling mud and roots might never have been. The meadows, which by now should be dry, were still swamps. And how numerous were the tough plants of last summer’s burdocks, with their hooked brown balls of seed which clung to his stockings so tenaciously that he was afraid of tearing away the wool. Feeling that his energy, such as it was, was being drained away, Phillip walked uneasily beside him until they came to the common, and thence to the sugar-beet being drilled on the Scalt. The cobbly seed-bed of dried-out chalky loam looked too hard, like a lot of walnuts pressed together. It had been rib-rolled before the seed had been put in. Phillip had ordered the rib-roll
after
drilling.

He called Billy aside, and asked him why. Billy said Steve had told him that the rolling would be better before drilling.

“On this chalky patch, which goes down so hard? But didn’t I say——”

Phillip spoke his mind, for then the inquiline would be able to see what an irritable creature he was.

“You see what I’m like——”

“It’s your men,” he replied. “I can see it. They’re no good. When I looked round your yards, I saw an old chap sitting down smoking. The sheep look terrible. Most of them have got
foot-rot
.”

“But there’s a lot of work in those yards, more than you think, I fancy.”

“I don’t think so. A good man ought to be able to do all what the old fellow does, also this yard up here”—they were looking at the beasts in the Woodland Yard—“and the sheep too. Their feet should be looked at and pared once a week. Oftener. Every day, in fact. That old man has only that crippled terrier dog, on three legs, to help him with the ewes. A shepherd needs a real dog, bred for the work. I have a sheep-dog, Dalua. I’ll bring him with me, also a spaniel I saved from a brute of a farmer, who kept her always chained in a barrel. I’ll do your stock for you, these up here and those down there, and the sheep. That old fellow I saw smoking can go on the arable, as you suggested. Personally, arable bores me stiff.”

*

That night, before supper, Phillip made a final effort to
discourage
, to put off, to counter, to avoid the insinuations of the inquiline, but his resistance was, as usual, low. Pressing the
advantage
, the inquiline announced that he had decided to come to the farm. Perhaps, Phillip thought, he might turn out to be what I need—or once needed.

Supper was an uneasy meal. Lucy was away at the Whist Drive. The guest made no effort to respond to remarks meant to lighten the gloom. It was the same afterwards when they sat by the fire. Why didn’t Lucy come back from the Whist Drive? At last she came. They drank tea, then saying she would make up a bed in Phillip’s cottage, she went away again.

During the morning the inquiline sent, and received, several telegrams over the telephone. Since the replies came there Phillip could hardly help knowing them. They referred to the possibility of other jobs, to which his wife in Wales was attending during his absence. In the afternoon he left, having made no offer to pay for the trunk telephone calls, and telegrams. Phillip said he would write to him; and he did write, telling him that after all he had considered it would not prove a success if he came to the farm; therefore, he should think no further of it.

To this letter came a reply by telegram saying the furniture was on the way, that he and his family were arriving in four days’ time. So Lucy and Mrs. Valiant set to work to clear, scrub, and clean the children’s cottage. And when the travellers arrived late one night by hired car from Fenton with their baby and two dogs Lucy greeted them with tea and a supper of boiled eggs. Towards
midnight
their furniture arrived. Phillip kept out of the way,
determined
not to interfere with further ‘good intentions’.

*

Matt, his old white terrier sitting beside him, was a sardonic figure watching Dalua the sheepdog fleeing like a grey shadow from all movement. The spaniel bitch growled at the men working at their hoeing-plots on the Scalt. At hoeing the inquiline was slow and inexpert, so he was taken off piecework. He was an apprentice on journeyman’s pay.

“Hur,” remarked Matt, who had gone back to the yards. “He’s buying his experience with the master’s money.”

A trained man could single a hundred yards in forty minutes. The speedy Steve could hoe that length in less than half an hour. The inquiline took the best part of a morning.

*

It was nesting time. The pheasants were laying. Phillip’s
next-door
neighbour, Charles Box, ruled the shooting over both the farms, so Phillip asked that the two dogs be not taken to work with their owner.