The Gale of the World (11 page)

*

There was just time to call at the bank, to see a copy of his father’s will made during his illness. A local branch, had,
accord
ing
to Elizabeth, been appointed executor and trustee.

St. Martin’s Little Summer appeared to be the time for the migration of souls in that town of the near-spent and the aged: for in the room marked
Trustee
Department
several people were waiting as in a dentist’s ante-room, but without bestrewn and dated copies of
Punch,
diminutive
Strand
Magazine,
and
Tatler.
A man, apparently a bank official, in his late ’twenties, and
wearing
a suit appropriately dark, was standing in one corner,
explaining
something to a customer. When Phillip’s turn came the official, before attending to someone else, gave him a copy of the will to read, together with some papers which related to money due to him from a trust made by his mother, the income of which capital sum having gone to his father for life, was now to be divided among her three children.

The will was brief and clear. It had been signed and witness’d three weeks previously. Cottage and all its contents, together with all moneys to Mavis Elizabeth Maddison. Nothing for his ‘little friend’ Myra. Having read the two-page document, Phillip signed the trust papers, to save time. The official was standing near him, but when some minutes later he gave the papers to the official he was told that the signatures were not valid.

“You signed your name without being witness’d. You must sign again.”

“I thought that as you were in the room—”

“I can’t see to everyone at once. You’ll have to write your signature again. No, not now, I am called to the telephone.”

When the official returned he said, “Your sister, Miss Maddison, has just telephoned to enquire if you have seen a copy of your father’s will. Now, if you will sign your name again, I shall be able to act in the capacity of witness.”

When this was done Phillip said, “I hope I was not out of order in asking to see the will?”

“You have, I understand, seen a typescript copy. If you wish to see the will, you should follow the procedure laid down by my department, and apply through your solicitor for a certified copy. The alternative is to wait until the will is proved, when a copy will be available at Somerset House in London. Good afternoon.”

Poor young clerk. Your hopeful flesh battered by the words, words, words of old flesh. Young flesh reserved from the services, denied freedom from civilian servitude. Better the chop than the slow mortification of an office saturated by the fears and anxieties of the living dead. Laura and himself. Laura crying,
I
must
be
free
—from the power of the past: the dead. Where can I go to be saved. Where can I die, and my body never seen again? The sea’s priestlike ablution—the salt, estranging sea—the deep, the green, the serpent-haunted sea.

That night when he saw Laura in her room in Old Compton Street he asked her if she would return with him to Exmoor.

“What now, Phillip? I’m afraid I can’t, I must look after Beth, my friend who is in trouble. I’m sorry. And I
must
finish my novel before I come to you. I’ll write to you. You will write to me, won’t you? And when I come down to ‘Buster’s’ place, you will be near, and we shall see each other, won’t we? I am with you, always.”

I wish I had kept my Norton motor-bicycle, my ‘Brooklands Road Special’ model, belt-driven with Phillipson automatic expanding pulley. Why did I let cousin Arthur swindle me out of it, he was my best friend in those days after the old war. God, it’s a quarter of a century ago that I and my lovely bike bounded up this narrow road for the first time, up and up to the Great Plain, with its barrows and beech hangers, grey grass and air of lonely space and almost primeval wildness. My hair was black in those days, I returned so hopefully to the West Country in 1919, just after the war. Then, two years later, Valerian Cottage with Julian Warbeck. What books would we write, what fame seek together! But Julian wrote his books, as they said in the pub, with a pint pot;
ergo,
Julian arrogant and quarrelsome. That marvellous summer of 1921! The footprints from the sea, I
followed
them with my head held low, playing a game, and they led across the sands to my first sight of Barley sitting beside her mother, their backs to a rock above the tide-line.

Long brassy summer of 1921, no rain falling between April and September. On the rough grazing above Valhalla
maggot-loosened
skins of mad sheep flapping as their feet rattled on hot shale scree, always moving on but never escaping the foetid buzz of blowflies. Flies were merciful on the summer battlefields. The Yorkshireman with arm blown off in wide no-man’s land between Croiselles and Bullecount in the Hindenburg Line. Wound cleaned of suppurating flesh by maggots. He lifting arm-stump above elbow void of proud flesh, happy to be back, grateful for ‘them fookin maggots’. I must write, write, write, for the night cometh.

Shall I turn south for Exeter, and the Channel Coast? Malandine Village and Barley’s grave? How shall I my true love know, from another one, save in words, words, words? Only by words shall I see myself again beside her, transformed, sharing
all day the unnumbered smile of ocean with Aeschylus, while we walked home above the wine-dark evening sea of Homer.

Or turn north to Lynmouth, and Aunt Theodora in her cottage beside the rushing Lyn? How old is she now—well over seventy. Perhaps she won’t want to see me, she turned against the Germans —her mother’s people—in the war. And against me too,
according
to Elizabeth.
She
knows
about
your
illegitimate
son,
by
that
girl.
So
did
Father.
That’s
why
he
left
you
out
of
his
will!
Still, I mustn’t let that stop me doing my duty. I’ll go by Minehead and Porlock and stay only a couple of minutes.

True love is like sunlight; it casts no shadow on the soul. The feeling between Laura and me is not love, it comes from the blue halls of Dis. Are we ‘dead souls’ seeking resurrection through the non-existing inner peace of the other? You say you have never been at ease with any man, Laura; nor have I with any woman save Barley. No, not really with Melissa. What was it that stopped me? Made all feeling blank? She offering her natural love,
revealing
the compassion of her body, all gentleness—and courage. For she was virgin. Yet I was never ‘withdrawn’ from Lucy. Because I did not love Lucy? I was sealed off
entirely
from Lucy, my selfish little ego practically raped her on the marriage night. My personality was decayed—scattered—in dark fragments. Is it the same with Laura? A woman corroded by fear, or despair, crying save me, save me, from fear of loneliness. Yet who am I to talk? Am I a disintegrating old man needing a young woman, almost any young woman who is comely—to sacrifice on my altar of fear?

If personality—essence—is reality, then I am but an apparition from the Western Front,
which
was
in
being
for
millions
of
other
youths
long
before
August
1914.
For we were the heirs of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ minds; our bodies purged their sins on the battlefield. We that were left grew old, for age to weary and the years to condemn, and at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, no-one to remember them.

And yet—in a way, yes—I enjoyed the war, by and large. For the war did not maim me, it released me. For it was the Greater Love War!

Down the hill: mind the sharp bend to the left: slow down to fifty: there on the right lies bleak Stonehenge. If only I was on my Norton, lying along the tank, arms spread to wide
handle-bars
, moulding my body to the breast-like swellings of these hills, bracing myself to accept the sudden plunging hollows lying all
Danäe to the stars. God, I had hope in those early days after the war!

The Great Plain like the Somme country: eroded landsherds —lychetts—lanchetts where flints had fallen from chalk-breaks in the turf acidulated by the centuries’ rains. John Masefield’s
The
Old
Front
Line
one of the great books of the 1916 Big Push. Machine gun nests on the landsherds of those wider downs above the Somme, Moonrakers and Back-to-Fores—Wiltshire Regiment and Dorsets—mucking the aerated wheat-fields of Piccardy.
Six-foot
subsoiling, all free—Somme cornlands in heart for a century, the composted lost heart of England. O my friends, come home, come home!—be with me, Baldwin and ‘Grannie’ Henshaw, ‘Spectre’ West and ‘the boy General’—Colonel Kingsman and the Iron Colonel—Lance-Corporal Hitler shepherding his
sixteen-year
students, arm-in-arm across the Menin road and through Sanctuary Wood, to be shot down in stumbling masses. Zandevoorde and the Brown Wood Line, and Cranmere yelling
Up
ve
old
Blood’ounds.
Jesu Christus, help me with your
compassion
to write my Greater Love War!

Onwards to the West, by Mere and Wincanton, Langport and Taunton, turn north down the valley under the Quantocks for Dunster with its brown-stone castle on a motte, or hill;
left-handed
to Minehead and the road winding through coastal meadows to Porlock. Here, petrol and oil for the Eagle, beer for the driver. Now I’m for it! Porlock hill and its two steep bends, the second said to be one in four, but more like one in three. Before the first turn, change to bottom gear. This turn is right-handed, it must be charged, one is well away up: now for the left-handed bend, looming steep as the wall of a house. The Silver Eagle takes it in its flight! And on and up and up, second gear now, third—faster—faster—change to top gear, passing the thousand-foot
contour
to see an embered sun, and the charred ruins of sulky nimbus strewing the world’s rim upon the Atlantic. The moon is over my shoulder, the hosts of heaven are there to greet me! Wonderful how much better an engine runs when the driver has had a pint!

Mechanical man and metal eagle flying along through heather and furze, seeing twinkling lights along the Welsh coast across the Severn Sea. The sun’s disgust mouldering to little pieces of dying ember. We are all more or less in ruin. Poor old Eagle, the
springing
isn’t what it was, shackle-bolts worn, shimmer in the
steering
: and suddenly they were descending from the moor, and there
was the Blue Ball Inn before them.
It’s
a
poor
heart
that
never
rejoices,
battle cry of Julian Warbeck, armed with a pewter pint-pot! That voice, out of the past.

Phillip longed to see old Julian. And having toasted the imagined arrogant face he went into Devon, round and about the snaking road until, abruptly, there was Lynmouth far down below. Now he was down, and turning right over the bridge. I haven’t seen Aunt Dora since before the war. Ionian Cottage, named after her beloved Greece visited during Edwardian days. It was somewhere beside the river. Can this be it? A wilderness garden, astrew with waste paper blossoms of dead summer days?
Unpainted
door and window frames, curtains seeming fixed behind dull bubbled glass panes. Sad. He tried to knock, the knocker resisted. It was set in rust. He tapped. Nothing. Wrenched free knocker, it banged unexpectedly loud and hollow. Had she gone away, died? Elizabeth would have told him. Rapped with his knuckles. Knelt to peer through letter box. A globe of light approaching, oil lamp borne by a ghost. A voice, weak as the pith of a reed saying,

“Is that you, Elizabeth?”

“I’m Phillip. Phillip Maddison, Aunt Dora,” he replied, still kneeling by the open letter-slit.

“I thought you were not coming until next month, Elizabeth. I must ask you to wait until I can set down the lamp.”

Bolts slowly withdrawn, slow rattle of chain, key squeaking. He stood up. The third family apparition he had seen that month stood beside four feet of
The
Times
Literary
Supplement
piled against the wall.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Phillip, Aunt Dora. Your nephew.”

“It is very late to call. I am just going to bed.”

“I’m so sorry. May I call sometime during the day—any day to suit you. I have come to live on the moor, near the hut circles.”

“Why have you come here?”

“I must not keep you, Aunt Dora. Goodnight.”

He drove over the high-arched bridge which spanned the river, and at once before him was the remembered hill which rose
left-handed
up and up through trees growing on the almost sheer sides of the glen footed by white foaming waters far below. He was making for Barbrook and the remembered narrow lane past a water mill which led to the heather common across which stood the shepherd’s cot. It was bottom-gear work, he must be careful
not to over-rev the old engine. He stopped past the sharp
right-hand
bend to Lynton, and leaned on the stone-wall, listening to the dull roar of unseen waters.

There was a strange, chuckling noise rising out of the glen, perhaps of multitudinous echoes from unfallen leaves among the oaks and beeches of that dark abysmal place, where Shelley had walked with Harriet Westbrook, a wife magnanimously married to save her from a harsh father—but not strong enough to save from a suicide’s death by drowning when the poet had gone off with Mary Woostonecroft to Italy—and his own death in the waters of the Gulf of Spezzia. Poor innocents all.

That dark chuckle coming up from the Glen: he remembered the same unearthly sounds arising from the Pass of Roncesvalles during that moonlit walk with friends, years ago, from Spain into France: the year he had found Barley. The same innocent moon was shining over the high peaks of the Pyrenees—which in the following year drew upon the estuary of the Two Rivers that great tide which drowned cousin Willie, a few miles from where I am standing now. This is my land and sea of ghosts, an extension of my greater phantasmagoria of the Western Front, where only the wan light by which poets live can transcend terrible nights of fire and flare upon that livid wound across Europe’s no-man’s land which drained, then, and once again as now, all Europe.

“It’s all too much for me alone!” he shouted to the wind. “How can I hold to the old war in one head,
and
the terrors of mass-man of the second war! Blood calling to blood, not for resurrection, but for revenge! And when the whole world may be destroyed, become as the moon, the tottering lady of Shelley’s prophetic imagination.”

*

Farther on, at the head of the glen, now a small coombe with lesser trees of willow and alder beside rock-white waters glittering with the pale fires of the crookback moon, Phillip came to the grey stone straddle of a pack bridge. In his exhausted state he missed the way, by turning left-handed over the bridge
instead
of to the right: to find before him a sheer stony lane, no more than an ancient sled-track, rising on naked rock to the appalling summit called Beggar’s Roost. If the engine blew up, it blew up. Slithering and slewing at full throttle, with tyres
nearburning
, he flogged the engine in a skidding slow crawl, sometimes crab-wise, to the summit, and over the last hump, stopped to the
thundering boil of the fanless-engine. The Silver Eagle relied on speed into rush of cold air through honeycomb of radiator, to cool block bored for the six cylinders and pistons. He waited until the boiling ceased, and only then did he dare to press the starter button. Was the magneto burned out, or the platinum points of the contact-breaker? Or the spring? His heart waited. The engine fired! Onward slowly: chassis springs laid, resilience gone, steel become iron. Even steel dies, returning to ancestral crystals.

*

Sirius shaking rainbow fires over the black line of the moor, so he must be going south, but whither, dimly knew. Down and down, skidding on shillets, coming to another pack-bridge over one of the many brooks, or waters, breaking down from the northern slopes of the moor. Uphill once again, until he topped the rise and descended to a wider, wooded valley noisy with swift confluent streams. The stars swung round, Orion was bright before him over the roof of a grist-mill.

Round a rising bend, and abruptly a chess-board of window lights in what appeared to be a castellated building. And driving on slowly in second gear, he came to the end of the stony track, and by the dim farmhouse on the left knew where he was. Dare he risk the springs—or engine sump—over the heather and furze of the remembered common? What if he hit a concealed rock? Why hadn’t he reconnoitred the way during his first visit? Very slowly, in bottom gear, engine little more than idling, driving on hand-throttle, feet on clutch and brake pedals ready to stop. And so, without mischief, he passed the site of a group of Bronze Age hut circles, beyond which stood the shepherd’s cot.

And there was a pale glow upon the heather. He watched the rising of the eclipsed and fretted ruin of the moon while recalling with melancholy its shaded rim seen rising over London rooftops from Laura’s attic window—then with the shock of memory cried “Bloody fool!” at himself. For, standing beside her, he had started to tell her how he had seen the same moon when full, rising out of the Flanders plain to silhouette the Bavarians coming up in masses to attack Messines ridge on Hallowe’en, 1914. He meant to tell her how the moon
had
been an object of terror, of his world lost … but no longer—because he had met
her:
that when she came down to the shepherd’s cot it would be shining with a gentle, companion light, for both of them, warm flesh and clear spirit together. But she had broken away, crying
You
are
dead
and
don’t
know
it
while pulling open
the door to run down into the street. He had followed her, walked beside her on the pavement, she unspeaking all the way back to her street door; let herself in with her key and leaving him outside.