The Phoenix Generation (20 page)

“Ernest, will you let me arrange for you an auction of the machinery and other things not included in the mortgage?”

After a reluctant silence Ernest said, “Oh, very well.” So the machinery, including a milling machine and a 3-inch lathe, together with the original wooden workshop, bolted on a brick sill, which Pa had built for his hobbies, went for auction and fetched nearly five hundred pounds. This sum, without a word of thanks, Ernest pocketed; and soon he was to be seen, by a surprised Phillip, coming down from his bedroom in Monachorum house wearing evening dress. For the first time in his life, at the age of thirty-five, Ernest was going to a dance; and a slap-up affair too, the County Ball. His partner was the girl he had met during the previous summer at a meet of the otter-hounds. More surprises were to follow: Ernest had bought a set of golf-clubs, and a jacket of Lovat tweed with plus fours.

“What about Lucy’s money, Ernest?”

“Lucy did not lend me any money,” replied Ernest, in an even voice. “What those thieves did with our family money is not my affair.”

“But you borrowed three hundred pounds on a second mortgage. The money came from Lucy, via the trustees.”

Ernest muttered, “I’m not responsible for what the trustees did.”

When next Phillip went to London he called at the solicitors’ offices. Yes, the trustees were, under the Act, personally responsible for making good any losses in a trust fund.

“So Ernest Copleston received five hundred pounds out of the sale of the effects of the place, did he? I’m glad you told me this. We can recover the three hundred from your brother-in-law, Mr. Maddison.”

“Well, as I told you about the sale of the machinery in confidence, perhaps nothing more should be done about my wife’s three hundred. Oh, by the way, did Mr. Copleston leave a will?”

The solicitor rang a bell. When the will was put before him he read it and said, “… the testator’s property to be sold and the proceeds to be divided among the four children. Otherwise we must get a valuation for probate, I suppose? From what I can
gather the old gentleman left very little. Would it be under a couple of hundred pounds do you think? In that case the estate will not be required to pay death duty.” Then he said, “I am personally very sorry for your brother-in-law. He arrived at this office every morning for three days, and sat outside in the
waiting-room
, and refused to budge. All he said was ‘I’m not going to go until those thieves have repaid me my money’.”

“They are an unworldly family. Well, thank you for what you have told me.”

“What will he do, have you any idea?”

“Oh, continue to live with us I suppose.”

Ernest was not happy at Monachorum. He mooned about the house, his face showing no feeling, as ever. Once and only once Phillip tried to ask him what was the matter. Ernest stood still, then after an interval said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

Lucy told Phillip later. Ernest had fallen in love, but neither he nor the girl had any money.

*

Phillip found it difficult to write while Ernest mooned about: and after Christmas he returned alone to the field, where the Gartenfeste had been built by a mason, a carpenter, and Rippingall and himself as general labourers. The upper storey, the old hay tallet, had been replaced by an oak frame. Windows and new roof timbers and upper floor were of Canadian pine. The lower room, below ground level, was lit by windows just above ground level, like the splayed slits of a German pillbox in the Salient. The walls and floor were of waterproof concrete. For warmth there were rush mats on the concrete floor. The walls were plastered. This underground room was heated by an open hearth with a chimney back which was part of a cast-iron hot-water boiler, fed from a tank in the loft. The boiler gave water to the scullery and also to radiators along one wall. Phillip had fitted the lower room with book-shelves, and the dug-out, with its grass-level views of sky and distant sea, gave a feeling of freedom and light.

There were many rabbits in the field. They gnawed the bark of the saplings, so Phillip put up posts with wire-netting cylinders round the little trees.

One January night, when he was alone in the field, it blew a gale, and in the morning when he climbed out of the dugout by way of the Columbian pine stairs to the loft above he saw that many of the little trees were lying dishevelled. Walking among
them he found that every other tree had been spun and loosened by the storm which, according to his portable wireless set, had raged directly across southern England, throwing thousands of great elm and oak trees all the way to London. Two days later the north-east wind brought snow, and in the morning the entire landscape was white, and the tops of the beeches in the plantation north of the field arose above a white cliff. The wind had carved it with flowing lines of sculpture. It was like the winter when he had learned to ski with Piers on the downs above Rookhurst: now a region, in memory, of defeat, scarcely to be recalled without the stillness of a sigh.

The skis were in the Gartenfeste. He took them down and ran beeswax over the runners with a hot iron. He was alone on the world’s top, leaning on ski-sticks, the points of his yellow skis elongating his feet. It was the first time skis had been seen in Malandine. A local photographer took his picture when Phillip called at the shop for a bread loaf. Soon he was on the way back to the world’s height, walking with plumping wooden feet most of the way, and up the steeper slopes nearly splitting himself as he made herring-bone tracks to prevent slipping backwards. It was good to feel fingers, numb with cold in the village, now glowing with warmth that filled his entire body with a feeling of being able to live for ever.

More snow fell at night. No stars were to be seen; he was entirely shut off in a world soundless but for the slight falling sighs of the flakes of snow. Towards midnight, while he crouched over flames in the open hearth of the dugout, the frozen winter of 1916, in the valley of the Ancre, came back in splinters of
soundless
terror, that those scenes were gone forever. He must go back to his home, to Lucy and the children, and sit with them around the hearth in the sitting-room.

The little trees, each about two feet high when last seen, had been hidden under humps of wind-streamed snow; but so heavy had been the second fall that only the top of the six-foot palisade gate was visible the next morning when he tried to open it. With rucksack on back he got through the hedge after some difficulty and ski-ed down the next sloping field in a travelling wave of snow until, attempting to skim over the hedge he was thrown over abruptly, one ski-point having caught in a twisted stem of furze. The ankle was painful. After disentangling himself he forced himself to trudge back to the sunken lane and follow the turns and bends down to the village. He went faster and faster, his head
and shoulders well above the hedge tops of the lane which
normally
were more than a man’s height below the fields on either side. In the excitement of gliding downhill with the keen wind thrumming in his ears, he forgot the pain in his ankle until, at the sharp bend at the bottom, it gave way and he slid sideways into a stone bank, with a snapping noise.

The ankle was not broken, but the point of one ash runner.
Unfastening
the rawhide thongs he abandoned both skis and started to hop to the village by the aid of the sticks. He spent the night in the cottage of Walter Crang, his neighbour of just after the war. The next morning he pulled himself into his open car and went home.

*

After a hot bath he sat by the fire in his dressing-gown, one foot in plaster, the other carpet-slipper’d. There was a glass of whisky untasted by his side, a writing pad on one knee. It was a
remarkable
moment. He had just written the first paragraph of his story of the blind trout. Suddenly the form had come to him!

The entire
locale
, or scene of the story, was transferred to that part of Kent, now London, which he had known in boyhood. The river was the Randisbourne, that once-fair stream which arose, bubbling and clear, from Caesar’s well above Reynard’s Common—the Randisbourne which had died as soon as it reached the hideous suburbs of County London. Weep for Adonais, he is dead. Here lies water whose name is writ in pollution.

The moment of inspiration, of shock, had been preceded by a mood of agitation due to apprehension, even fear. It was not easy to break the habit of years; and for years he had felt himself to be not sufficiently able to write such a book, despite the compiling of innumerable notes from other books by acknowledged masters, and every copy of the
Salmon
and
Trout
Magazine
from the first number at the beginning of the century to the present time.

The pure water-springs that filtered through the chalk beds of the North downs—falling first as dew or rain from the drifts of moisture in air moving in from the Atlantic and forming into cumulus, cirrus, nimbus, and other cloud formations over the contours of the land. He was a spirit of water echoing with a thousand genetic records and impulses of colour and light; all was guided from his being by the Imagination. At two o’clock in the morning he closed the manuscript book and pulled himself by the banisters to his writing-room. He lay there, warm with thoughts of
creation
, withdrawn from ordinary living, at last; knees drawn up, left arm round neck, one cheek of his head lying companionably
upon palm of one hand. Through the immense ossuary of the chalk of the North downs—only a few miles from polluted London—the gentle waters filtered, by trickle and drop finding their way through the flint beds deposited by floods which had abated millennia since—thus to congregate in dark water lakes which rushed from every spring-head to feed brook and rivulet born at the foot of each its hill.

*

He lay on his couch, seeing the stars through the casement until his imagination returned to water, flowing cold and clear past the green beds of waving crow’s-foot, the flowers shut against the rising of the sun; and with a sigh of release that at last the spring had broken out of his being, even as a rill from the dark and immemorial chalk beds of the downs, he fell asleep. And when the morning came, and Lucy in her dressing gown brought a tea tray and he saw two cups in their saucers, he said, “Oh, you look so sweet,” and later in the year she wondered, with hope, if she was going to have a baby.

*

Week after week he wrote with determination to allow nothing to stop the flow. Sometimes he took Rippingall to the cinema, a
fleapit
with wooden seats and flickering silent pictures, for the talkies had not yet reached the small country towns of the West Country.

Rippingall was an unexpected help. Phillip read what he had written to him after every stint, thus to see the story in perspective, instantly to detect false or inferior passages. He was working against time, too: the publishers had announced the book in their preliminary autumn announcements to booksellers.

“God, how time has flown. Tomorrow will be All Fools’ Day, Rippingall. That’s us, old soldier. Now be a good fellow and take this chapter to the post-box.”

The mail was due to be collected at the box near the
road-bridge
in an hour’s time. It was nearly five o’clock. Billy and Peter were just home from the village school. David was shouting
Good-ni’—Good-ni’—Good-
ni
’—which meant he wanted more milk. Rosamund in the kitchen was asking for her tea. Phillip was adding, in his new and regular Arnold Bennett manner, an entry in his Journal.