The Innocent Moon (24 page)

“Wouldn’t you explore every avenue before shooting them? With your hand to the ploughshare? Steering a middle course? And leave no stone unturned?” asked Julian, derisively.

“Grrr!” replied Porky. “Grrr! Don’t you dare to talk to me, you damned no-good fellow!” Rapidly he repointed the waxed goat-horns of his moustache. “Grrr!”

“By God, your insolence is intolerable!” retorted Julian. “And to think that it was to preserve your type of highly uncivilised trash that we fought the Germans!”

“Grrr!” cried Porky, waving his walking stick in the air. “Who cares about your tinpot little war? You’re only a boy, a mere boy, a damned boy, get on with it, gooloryes, ans’ lemon every time! I saw
real
fighting, yes I did, at Rorke’s Drift, dear boy!” he said to Phillip.

“Rorke’s Drift?” retorted Julian. “Are you sure it wasn’t Chu Chin Chow?”

“Here, Phillip, dear boy, forget that no-good fellow!” spluttered Porky. “Drink up, everytime! Have another pint! Landlord, a quart for my friend! Drinks all round! Empty the damned barrel, gooloryes!”

Phillip made an excuse and left. For two days he avoided Porky’s cottage, he could do nothing, having no more money to give; then one morning, riding into Queensbridge, he saw Porky in new hat, overcoat and gloves sitting resplendently with his family in a hired Ford car. Porky waved the cheeriest greetings; he was once again the family man, the sober Porky Phillip liked: the kind and tender-hearted father, giving a warmth which made him happy. The car was packed with furniture, food, coal,
and gramophone records. The driver, a local lad, grinned at Phillip.

That evening Porky was once more in the Ring of Bells, with pocketfuls of money, standing drinks all round and reiterating his favourite quotation from Ella Wheeler Wilcox and solving all problems with a lemon. He had called on the parson to return a hundredweight of coal, driving a ramshackle vehicle drawn by a white horse.

“I’ve bought that white horse, dear boy,” he told Phillip. “It will follow me anywhere. When I die I’ll shoot it and have it buried in my grave, gooloryes, every time!”

The white horse was tied to the iron ring by the door. Porky declared that Phillip must be the godfather of his forthcoming child. He would listen to no modest disclaimer that he, Phillip, would be a poor godparent.

“Rot, my dear boy, get on with the goo’ work, like blazes!” At eight o’clock he insisted on taking Julian and Phillip to his cottage for supper. “Roast duck and green peas, dear boys! Come on, in you get, I won’t take no for an answer!”

Down the narrow lane they rattled. The moon was bright.

“Get on with the goo’ work; get on with it, dammit!” cried Porky, standing up in the cart and wielding a whip. The white horse, which appeared never to have felt curry comb or grooming brush, bolted. Round the corners the dung-butt whirled. Phillip began laughing.

“Laugh and the wheels whirl with you,” he shouted in Julian’s ear. “There’s a big bend in front!”

Behind them a boy on a bicycle was yelling something. Porky managed to pull up before the bend in the lane. The boy’s bicycle had no brakes, he hit the tailboard, pitched into the cart, picked himself up, gasped out that if they weren’t careful they would have an accident with feyther’s ’oss and butt, retrieved his bicycle and followed slowly, rising and falling and twanging on a damaged front wheel.

“Get on wi’ it, get on with the goo’ work, go-r-r-r-n”—to the horse—“go like blazes, my dear girl, get on with it!”

“To hell with this as transport! Laugh and the wheels whirl with you, certainly; but whip, and you whip alone! I’m getting out!” roared Julian, grabbing the reins. The horse promptly stopped, flinging them down together.

“Goddammit, dear boy! Show white feather, goolorno! Grrr! Why, bless my soul, Extinguished Service Order, dammit,
and you’re frightened of a trotting mare! Laugh, dear boy, laugh—answer’s a lemon every time—grrr!” He whipped the mare across the hip.

They rattled forward, and soon were in a canter. Phillip hung on, ready to jump as they serpentined down the lane. The dung-butt was first on one wheel, then on the other. Somehow they arrived at Esperance. Phillip’s legs were shaky. Chief Petty Officer Bessure, landlord of the Anchor Inn, was smiling. His cheque returned to him marked R.D. had been “put right”. Porky had exchanged it for another cheque, with a fiver added on for luck.

The landlord’s wife was haughty with Phillip as she showed him this new cheque for
£
110.

“Mr. Tanberry has always been as proper a gentleman in this house as ever pulled at a pint,” she remarked, adding significantly, “Whatever his fair-weather friends may choose to say about Mr. Tanberry behind that gentleman’s back!”

During the tea-smoking crisis Phillip had suggested to Mrs. Bessure that it might be wise to discourage Mr. Tanberry’s excessive generosity by giving him drinks on a cash basis only.

“Yes,” she went on, fat hands on the bar as she stared at him. “Some people as pretends to be his friends and drinks with him don’t spend in a year in this house what this
real
gentleman spends in half an hour!”

Phillip was beginning to experience a dark feeling in the village, similar to that described by John Crowe, the Cornish novelist-lecturer at the Parnassus Club, as ‘ingrowing toe-nails of the soul’. He wondered again who could have cut the tyres of the Norton left in the lane outside? As for Julian, he was known in the district as ‘the German’ by certain young farmers who had dodged the war and made fortunes from the high prices of food, such as eggs 4/– a dozen, a wild trapped rabbit 5/–, and cream at 5/– the lb.

“Drinks all round, get on with it, dear boys, drink up and have another!”

“Proper gentleman, Mr. Tanberry, a real gentleman the way he spends money!” crooned Mrs. Bessure.

Others present agreed. “Ah, he’s got it! That’s right! Proper gen’l’m’n!”

Phillip tried to make his pint last, but he was swept away in the spate of comradeship. There were twelve other men in
the bar. One hundred and eight pints of free beer—the landlord’s new 36-gallon barrel was more than one third down already. Proper gen’l’m’n! Proper! Aye Aye!!

In the midst of the party Porky’s son, who had told Phillip he had gone to seven schools in the past four years, arrived to say that supper was cooked and on the table. Porky ordered a ginger beer for the boy, who drank it in the doorway, just off licensed premises.

“Come on everyone, drink up! Landlord, fill ’em up, ans’ a lemon, what?”

The revellers stayed until closing time, when Porky led the way out into the moonlight, and missing his step fell into the stream, to be dragged out amidst cheers, his teeth chattering, face peaky and large nose bruised on a stone. “Gettin’ on wi’ the good work, boys!” he gibbered, making light of the fall. By this act he became, by tradition, mayor of Esperance, an office which would be held until some other tanglilegs toppled into the stream.

Mrs. Tanberry was crying when they went into the cottage. The duck on the table, put there and taken back to the oven half a dozen times, had been seized by one of the dogs, which had been chased by the rest of Porky’s pack up the hill in the direction of Turnstone.

Julian and Porky quarrelled, and Julian left, leaving Phillip alone with the boy, who looked resigned; and picking up a comic paper, soon became absorbed in its lurid pages, while Porky, with many excuses, tried to soothe his wife. At last Brenda was smiling, and going to the larder, returned with cheese, bread, and a large jar of Piccaninny pickles, which Porky proceeded to dollop on to all the plates.

“None for me, thanks all the same,” said Phillip, who was feeling the room shifting its proportion, a sign that he knew well of old. He managed to get outside, and after the inevitable reaction, lay down beside the stream until he felt well enough to return to the cottage.

“You look cold, Phillip,” said Brenda. “Let me heat you up a cup of hot milk.” When this was ready, he could not drink it; meanwhile the boys’ bedroom was being got ready for him. He went up the stairs, and saw with relief that there was a window he could open if necessary.

The next thing he remembered was Porky coming into the room with an open Bible, and reading into his ear something
about blowing hot and then cold … “Lo! I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

This lecture he connected with what Mrs. Bessure had said to him: afterwards he thought it rather funny in the circumstances, as he made for the window and opened it. And in the morning his tyres, the old cuts of which had been vulcanised in Queensbridge, were again pierced by a knife. When he got back to his cottage and told this to Mrs. Crang she said that they were a low lot in Esperance.

“Also they do say that Mrs. Tanberry’s baby, what be comin’, be yours, don’t ee zee, that’s why you gived ’er all that money.”

He called at the farm of Dora's father to buy eggs. Each of the two pockets of his service tunic held a dozen, which arrived at the cottage unbroken. The auction of lots of wood from the wrecking was held in one of the fields by the farm. Six out-of-work men were partners in buying, breaking up, and selling the wood. He bought two posts of teak about seven feet long and a foot square for
£
1
.
This was more than others had paid; but he was too diffident to bid during the auction, and accepted the price afterwards for this unsold lot without bargaining.

“You was had, I reckon,” said Mrs. Crang next door.

“Anyway the chaps who broke up the wreck are out of work. Good luck to them.”

“Still, you didn't ought to waste good money, you know!”

An amount of wood for which others had paid about six shillings was his for twenty. He paid another five shillings to have it carted to the cottage and tipped into the garden beside the scraggy currant bushes and patch of rising nettles.

“You paid too much for that wood, you know,” said Dora indignantly when he went for more eggs. “You look out for yourself, Mr. Maddison! No one else will, you know, if you don't!”

Their eyes met; their eyes fell. Faint colour came in Dora's cheeks. He thought that she looked sweet in her simple clothes, sitting by the open hearth of the farmhouse; her slender legs with big muddy boots, her hands, already rough with work, folded as though with resignation on her apron. Dora was like her mother, who was not very strong, a sensitive, quiet, soft-voiced woman with brown eyes. In the kitchen was a long table
where the blue-eyed farmer and his blue-eyed sons, and their hired man, sat down to eat. The date 1625 was above the chimney piece.

Phillip wondered; his previous hail-fellow-well-met attitude, projected impersonally, became quietness. Had they expected something from his visits? He had always been polite; nothing more. Did Dora imagine that he had come to court her?

A cat was asleep on the sofa, a shaggy bullock dog on the hearth. Three chickens chased a spider in one corner. He sat still beside the fire, in the plush chair fetched from the parlour. A lamb trotted about the room following Dora, who usually fed it with a bottle. The ewe had turned against it, said Dora. That morning they had cut off its tail, and its quarters were bloody. He was invited to stay to tea. Dora disappeared. Thumping feet overhead told him she was changing her clothes. Soon she came downstairs, smiling, faintly flushed, and told him that tea wouldn't be long. She was dressed in a green jersey, and wore underneath a pair of stays in which her slimness was lost. The very obtrusive stays might have been a gift from her elder married sister, whose husband had been killed in the War.

“Nice li'l maid,” Phillip's neighbour, Walter Crang, had said to him. “Proper little maid her be, a heart of gold, and a good worker.”

Now the friendliness between them was constrained. He saw her face redden. She seemed unhappy; and following her glance, he saw she was looking, anxious and ashamed, at the lamb with the bloody tail stump. “Dearie me, oh, look at thaccy now. Get on out, you dirty little bitch!”

Should he suggest that he have tea with them in the kitchen? Would this give the idea that he wanted a more intimate relation with the family—one step nearer Dora? He resisted a feeling to be breezy. Did they consider that he was excessively genteel? To have winced at the word
bitch
?

He was given tea in the parlour by himself, while the others sat at the long table in the kitchen and were unnaturally quiet. Had the sensitive mother observed his face when Dora had come downstairs, and again when she had rated the lamb? But it was not so much the word, as the sudden hardness in the voice that had checked his feelings, he decided as he left the farmhouse. And yet—the sixteen-year-old maid had used the word to the wounded lamb naturally, unthinkingly—even so, he could not help a feeling of mortification because she had spoken like that;
and so, because he had felt like that, he was checked; Dora had caught his feeling; and now the gossamers were snapped between them.

*

‘Brex' of
The
Daily
Crusader
was still taking his weekly guinea-and-a-half brief articles. He walked upon the cliffs, everything he saw was fresh and vital—enough for a dozen 100-word
Vignettes
of
Spring.

*

The blackthorn was out, dog violets blooming, celandines fading, magpie nests nearly topped with thorns, ravens were sitting. He lay happily in the sunshine above the grey-green seas rolling up the Channel, noting that the spotted wing-covers of the vermilion ladybird shone upon a leaf of green nettle under the dry-ditched wall of the last field before the cliffs; while in a wind-stunted brake of blackthorn the pleading note of the greenfinch was sad as though with long-drawn doubt and hopeless love. Was this what Julian had called Wordsworthian anthropomorphism—human feelings transformed to a bird? But the bird
did
seem unhappy: and very shortly Phillip was to witness the cause.

Over the great craggy precipice Phillip called Valhalla the gulls soared, glided, threw-up and fell crook-winged, blaking, crying, gabbling, hanging in the upblast of wind a few yards from his face, yellow-eyed and wind-ruffled. Daws winged their speedy blackness down the wind, shooting down and checking uneasily; buzzards sailed high, with sweeping leisure and then—crossing the sky at tremendous speed, swinging round into the wind to hang aloft—two peregrine falcons. Two shaftless arrowheads of iron, he thought, two black stars of the day,
cutting
into the blast. The wings were bent back, the heads blunt, tails short, thick, and stocky—they remained motionless, as though held there, at a thousand feet.

As he watched, greatly excited, a finch came from over the streaky, smashing sea, a frail dark mite flittering to reach the shore and sanctuary. The smaller peregrine, the tiercel or male, saw it, tipped up, shot down … and missed! He felt terror, as though the finch were himself, The larger falcon then stooped; she, too, missed. Their speeds carried them far below the finch, but within the time of one breaker following another to dash against the rock below the pair had shot up without wingbeat to their pitches a thousand feet above the sea. They zoomed up as
though shot from an invisible gun: the gun of the booming wind, which buffeted his ears, sought to lift his eyelashes, and sprayed salt on his lips.

The small bird struggled to the lower end of the headland, and crouched like a stone among the ragged clumps of sea-thrift. Then, after the peregrines had glided away, it flew up the slope of the land beside the precipice and joined the greenfinch in the blackthorn brake where dead branches were shaking and squeaking in the gusts.

It was the mate of the greenfinch, who mourned no more, but sat beside it, eyes closed in exhaustion after such terror.

Ever hopeful, Phillip showed this journal entry to Julian that night.

“What you describe,'' said Julian, “is merely a variation, personal only to yourself, of a well-known symptom of mental disease, described by many writers, including Dostoieffski. Your sister, I am told, is subject to fits. Does it run in the family?”

“How sympathetic you are,” said Phillip, almost bitterly. “Your words are salt, sown upon the earth.”