The Phoenix Generation (21 page)

A south wind was moving up the vale. Phillip, freed by the writing of the trout book, felt that the grass was shining with joy. It was visibly growing. He could feel the temperature rising. And he knew what to write next—his chapter would be entitled
South
Wind.
Soon those sensitive dwellers under water, nymphs of the olive dun, were swimming up the limpid surface of the river. Bulging rises showed up and down the water, the trout were taking them under water. As the current took the nymphs downstream they struggled to break from the pellicles and so to open new wings and arise into what to them must be a delirious dream-life. As soon as they began to hatch, the trout moved up to be just under the surface.

Staring down from the parapet of the bridge he saw only water a-swirl with the fishes’ rises. They were moving gently up on their air-bladders and taking the swimming nymphs just as they reached the surface. After each take the trout returned to its stance to watch for the next nymph floating down. Each trout had its special place in the food-stream, its own sky-light window below which it watched. This window, or area of visibility, is forward and above it, and is limited by the angle of refraction, which means that all outside a fairly steep slant is blank in the fish’s sight, he thought.

The bridge over the Flumen had three arches which stood on two piers built into the river bed. Each pier had a cutwater, the point of which lay upstream, to divide the force of current. From either cutwater there was a rebound, causing a cushion of water where all that came down in the current was momentarily checked.
These two cushions of water were therefore the best place to be in when any food was coming down, because a fish could stay there with the least effort. It could, while hovering, see any nymph arriving in either the right or the left stream of the divided current. So a big trout was usually to be seen there during a hatch of fly. The lesser fish got for themselves the next best places, in order of strength or size. If any fish dared to move into those places he was, if smaller, at once driven away.

Sometimes a small fish took up position in front of a big trout, but in swifter current beyond the big fellow’s window, where it could swim forward to left or right and seize nymphs floating down. Then the big trout would go hungry. The black trout, which Phillip thought was blind, had recently taken up its stance just above the bridge, on the edge of one of the cushions of water by a cutwater. It had a whitish mark on one flank, as from the grip of a heron’s beak. He thought it must be the original black trout, because there was no similar fish in the old stance farther up by the water-meadows.

Every day that spring the black trout was there, hovering as though wanly, waiting for nymphs to float down but seldom taking in food because three smaller fish were in advance of the cushion. It was blind, he decided, because its eyeballs had a greyish look about them. There it was, noon after noon during the midday hatch of fly, seemingly thinner and darker, a thread hanging from its vent, probably a link worm, part of a colony joined head to tail which absorbed, through the main head in the gut, most of the food the black trout took in its mouth. There it was, Trutta Niger, idling slowly with a split tail-fin, in the conventional best place although its economic significance, to use a dull business term, had changed. Had it sight, it would have been a cannibal, driven by starvation to feed on smaller fish.

He had stood on that bridge hundreds, even thousands of times. Today there were twenty-five unseen trout feeding in thirty yards of water; unseen because the water surface was reflecting white cumulus clouds an oar’s length above the bridge. But he knew every fish by its shape, movements, and pattern of red spots amidst the predominating black. Among these residents were some mere flicks in the water: these were fingerling salmon parr, still in
trout-pattern
coats but with three inky finger marks on each flank, which small trout did not have.

Another rise of fly was on. Sometimes half-a-dozen bulges appeared together: these trout were
nymphing
as it was called. He
stared and stared, and at last, as the low clouds thinned with rising thermals, he began to see one after another of the
twenty-five
residents in ghostly or shadowy outline, sensed at first rather than seen; a faint white line of dorsal fin; a group of spots within a phantom stream-line. He wanted to stay there during all the morning’s light and grace, forgetful of time and place, forgetful of the urgent need to finish the book, because there was little money coming in nowadays: he wanted to become thoughtless with the Spring: but he must return and write about the fluorescent hues of crow’s-foot bine, bankside flint, otter’s spiky hair, duck’s feathers floating down—all objects glowing with their own
mysterious
fluorescence in the darkness of the night.

*

The prolonged strain to force words on paper told on him. Often he had to leave the table and walk about to relieve
constricted
thoughts. The placidity of the Coplestons—Ernest and Lucy—emphasised the stillness of the valley in the heats of young summer. And feeling himself out of it—his master unable to continue the book—Rippingall went on the drink.

His tipple now was methylated spirit. This liquid was dyed blue by law, a horrid steely colour to Rippingall’s dreaming eyes, so he changed the colour to brown by the addition of brown boot polish; to which was added eau-de-Cologne from the bathroom, and a dash or two of Lysol disinfectant from Lucy’s Red-Cross cupboard.

From the summerhouse came snatches of song, all of a
melancholy
nature. And one evening Rippingall’s bedroom was empty. In the morning Ernest found him stretched out on the compost heap. Ernest stared at the sight for about a minute; then deciding that Rippingall was probably dead, he returned to the kitchen to cook himself some breakfast. Later on, while having a second breakfast with the family, Ernest mentioned casually that
Rippingall
appeared to have had a heart attack beside the compost heap. Phillip ran out at once with Billy and the other children, but the corpse had apparently evaporated.

“Rippingall’s a silly fool,” said Billy. “He’s his own worst enemy, like you are, isn’t he, Dad?”

“As long as I don’t become, in due course,
your
worst enemy, Billy——”

“You should not say such things,” said Lucy, to the boy.
Whereupon
Billy, feeling snubbed, disappeared. He was later found in the stable workshop by Ernest, in a dark cubby-hole he had
arranged under the pile of wood. His uncle fed him on bread and treacle, a tin of which Ernest had hidden on a ledge by the stable eaves. Only when Lucy became worried, lest the absent boy had fallen into the river, did Ernest say where Billy was.

Ernest lived most of his day in this stable workshop. There he ruminated before getting on with a bee-hive which was being made at Lucy’s suggestion. There was so much honey in the lime-trees in the park, and why not get some of it? Ernest thereby would be helping to earn his keep. The honey would save sugar and jam, some of it anyway, off the house-keeping money.

Every morning as the hour of twelve was tolled from the Abbey stable-clock across the park Ernest walked with measured tread to the kitchen to fetch what he called his elevenses—an egg beaten up in milk and sugar. Returning to his workshop, Ernest added a table-spoon of port from one of the bottles of Cockburn ’96 hidden from Phillip’s eye. There had been nearly three dozen of this old and crusted wine when Pa had passed away. Ernest had brought them to Monachorum in his motorcar and hidden them behind some old doors and planks of wood in the stables.

*

Ernest had a chronic dislike of his brother-in-law’s interfering ways. It was all very well, years ago (he wrote to his brothers in Australia) when Phillip had been trying to help get things going in the Works, but it should have been obvious to him even then that they had all been fed-up, and simply didn’t care what
happened
once the Works had stopped when the money had given out. Now it was beyond the limit when Phillip had taken the furniture and other things which had belonged to Pa at Down Close and stored them in the building he had put up in his field in South Devon.

Ernest did not explain in the letter that he had allowed someone to take one of Pa’s guns in lieu of twenty-five shillings owing for milk; or that he had let go a small Jacobean gate-leg table to another neighbour for a smaller bill of a few shillings. Nor did Ernest think it worth while to add that Phillip had gone to Mr. Solly, and then to Mr. Millman, the neighbours in question, and bought back the 16-bore Holland-and-Holland gun for five pounds, and the gate-leg table for thirty shillings, and given them to Lucy, telling her to keep the gun, and its fellow of the pair in the leather case, for Peter when he was of age. The pair of guns were worth forty pounds, since they had been fitted with new barrels, and the market value of the Jacobean table was five pounds. Ernest had
not had any of the Down Close household goods etc. valued for probate, nor had he, as one of the executors, held the auction which his father’s will had requested.

It was Ernest’s lackadaisical attitude which had driven Phillip to hire a van and remove, with Ernest’s help, the rest of the
furniture
, chest of plate, Waterford glass, china, pottery, pictures, and all the library, to be stored until such time as Tim or Fiennes might want their share, or its cash value, under the Will.

“After all, Ernest, Pa did leave a quarter each to the four of you in his will. And Lucy hasn’t had a thing.”

“Ah,” said Ernest, thinking with some satisfaction that the interfering ass, as Pa had called him behind his back, hadn’t got everything. Ernest had taken the gold studs and cufflinks, a bunch of crested seals, and what he considered to be a rather horrible amateurish painting in lurid colours of a religious scene, which Pa had once described as an ugly mess of libelled human figures verging on the ludicrous, which somehow had found its way among some other water-colours done by his father and brought from Oxon to Dorset when his old home was sold, after his respected parent’s death during the Crimean War.

“Utter rubbish, if you ask my opinion,” Pa had remarked on that occasion to his friend “Mister”, a neighbour who, like
himself
, had never done a day’s work, other than to pursue a hobby, in his life.

The offending water-colour had been thrown on top of the linen cupboard when Pa, learning that his father had left a private debt of
£
90,000 in addition to the mortgage on the Oxfordshire property, had moved to the small house called Down Close. There it had lain for years under the dust and spider-web wreckage of three decades; until Phillip, in a self-appointed clean-up of the kitchen before his marriage to Lucy, had brought it down. Having blown away some of the dust he saw the artist’s name
William
Blake
followed by the word
pinxit.
In some excitement he had run with his find into the garden to show her father.

“It might be extremely valuable, sir. After all, William Blake is a classic.”

“H’m, that thing valuable? I take leave to doubt it. More likely to have been done by the village idiot, one of the
under-gardeners
’ boys at my old home, and brought to the kitchen door for one of the kitchen maids he was courting.”