The Power of the Dead (14 page)

He found the rise of the Taw, a slight channel about four inches wide and six deep, a mere trickle of amber water, and followed
it until it broke its first bubble upon a stone of white granite made yellow by algae. Not far off was the Torridge, a diminutive pool hardly big enough to bathe a baby. What a place to baptise Billy! He sat awhile in the heather, his mind living other days, until the inevitable sigh of resignation, and return to the present.

Now he must go to the southern slope of the hill, and find the sources of Tavy, Teign, and Tamar. Yes, he must carry Billy up in the spring and touch his forehead with the water where perhaps Lutra had touched, Lutra who had known the warmth of her breast, but not Billy.

*

While he was eating egg-sandwiches beside Tim the rain, which had held off during the last part of their climb, began to fall again. All was now obscured by mist; they plodded back the way they had come, while the afternoon grew darker with clouds thickening about them. The motor-bicycle outfit was still by the gate, a welcome sight. Along the granite track with its plashy potholes they bumped, through rain that poured steadily during all of the return journey. Their clothes were heavy with water. The only stop on the way back was for petrol.

Lucy was out when they returned. He asked Mrs. Rigg where she was.

“She’s gone up to see Squire, sir.”

“Did she say when she’d be back?”

“After tea, sir. Shall I get ’ee something to ait?”

“No thank you, Mrs. Rigg. Is the fire in, for hot water?”

“Us’v run out of coke, sir. Th’vire be gone out.”

Phillip turned to Tim. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you a hot bath.” He added, “I should have ordered the coke myself. But one doesn’t think of such things when writing.”

“Ah,” said Tim. “Anyway, I’m quite all right, I do assure you.”

“I’ll lend you some clothes, and you can wash in the bathroom. Mrs. Rigg, will you fill the kettle on the lapping crook? I’ll build up a fire. It won’t take long, Tim. Go you up, my dear, and cast your sobbled clout, then zit you down yurr, by the vire, do! How about that for a farmer, Mrs. Rigg?”

“Aw, ’tes proper, my dear.”

When they had washed and changed their wet clothes, they had tea, sitting in the blaze of split beech logs, while Phillip thought what fun it would be if Tim, instead of going to Australia, were
coming to live at Skirr, and learn to farm. He would have a deputy, an adjutant; and be able to write more often, instead of being chronically shocked out of a state of dreaming with his eyes open, which wasn’t so bad a phrase, he thought, to describe the act of writing.

He was about to speak of this idea to Tim, but saw that he had dropped asleep in the heat of the flames; and going up to his room, he added to the notes which the rain had interrupted.

How to convey the
occluded
moor in rainy winter weather? How could he re-create, in words, the muffled silence—omitting the
cliché
muffled? Descriptive prose must be brief, it must startle with an immediate picture in the mind. It must feel cold.

Malory’s
Morte
d
’
Arthur
:
seven words of a necromancer, calling up the ‘tarn in the hills’, the ripples breaking on a sandy shore, sere reeds vibrating in the wind, amber waters ‘lonely as a cloud’. ‘Poets live on air’, and nourish one another.

No good. He went downstairs, and heard Tim gently snoring in the armchair.

*

The December month darkened with rain. Colder winds brought sleet, which wandered aimlessly over meadow, field, and down. The sleet foreran snow, which thawed; then from the north-east
whirled a blizzard all through a night and a day and a night. Telephone wires lay distraught; a man, with strips of sacking tied to above his knees, and a corn-sack over his shoulders, his
eyebrows
melting icicles, called with a message that the ewe-flock on Turk Farm was buried. Wonderful, blood-warming action
followed
: the war without fear and dereliction. Phillip was out until only two ewes remained unfound. This was the life.

“I ’eard a raven,” said the shepherd, “callin’ another lewside thak barrow by th’ ould thorn up Comberley. Reckon ewes be ther.”

Stars, and the keen air of eternity, walking beside Joby the Shep with crook and dog—men in the moon—lantern casting grotesque shadows as their foot-pressures squeaking with wadded snow. The wind was gone, stars glittered, this was the life—and he had
a
warm
room
to
go
back
to.

They found the ewes under a riven white-thorn growing out of the lee side of the barrow, burial mound of some ancient British chieftain. One ewe already had two lambs, the other was soon to give birth. He stared at the scene, eager for details; the ewe squeezing out its young head-first; the lamb slithering out, fish-like, seeming to be entangled in the jelly-like placenta streaked with blood. Entoiled in what was now cold slime, it rested while it breathed for strength. It became a fawn-head in the lantern light, piping weak cries in reply to the bass mutter of its dam lying still, save for slight head-movements, on her flank. There followed the first small struggle of the lamb to use its feet. It found them, struggled up, to sway on unfamiliar legs which had their own independent motions ending in collapse. It gave weak cries for help; answering mutter from the diaphragm of the ewe, urging it to come to her. The wet thing remained trembling on its knees; the ewe called again, encouraging it to use its own strength. ‘Take up thy bed and walk.’

Another effort; lamb struggling upon small cloven feet, to sway about, to appeal again, to be encouraged to ‘stand on its own feet’, thus to get to her.

Joby the Shep was encouraging the ewe. She gains strength from his feelings, she feels the shepherd’s kindness, she knows that her flanks are protected, she can go forward into the attack upon the world’s latent evil with confidence.
Krok-krok-krok
of raven under the moon.

The ewe passed on her love to the lamb.
Baa-baa!
It tottered
forward under its own stilt-like powers, going forward by instinct, that inherited spiritual resolve. Encouraged—the very word!—by that low mutter it grows in determination; it finds the dug; its exaltation shows in the throbs of satisfaction passing through its body and wriggling down its spine and out of its tail. Mother and child were joined in love; and all the time the shepherd’s dog, silent and still, eyes lambent in lamp-light, was flairing its nose for scent of fox or badger.

The next ewe, a dozen yards away, lay with her ‘double couple’ of two lambs. He didn’t like to ask Joby if ‘double couple’ meant that both had shared the same umbilical cord. The phrase was enough. The ewe had had her twins an hour or so, she was licking them to help dry their tiny pelts, the small curled wool of which looked like the burr of the walnut table top in Lucy’s boudoir.

“Us must bring them whoam, young maister.”

“Give me your orders, Joby, I am your ’prentice.”

“Yar’ll do, maister.”

It was now Joby’s turn to encourage the ewe. With a lamb in the crook of each elbow, he held them low while Phillip placed the lantern so that she could see them, for a cloud was over the moon. She lay still, calling them; but now it was time to enter a dimension created by man. She must forget her established shelter, her base of warmth, she must begin again. Her loneliness must be transcended; it must be shared, for her world was civilised. The shepherd walked slowly backwards, showing her the lambs, encouraging her to get on her feet. With a trace of protest, of weakness, of self-pity in her middle-range
baa-baa
she got up and after a moment of bewilderment took their scent, replied
confidently
to Joby’s bleating.

It was now Phillip’s turn to persuade the ewe with the single lamb. At first, perplexed by his scent, she was flustered. He touched her nose with the lamb, before withdrawing to walk backwards to make her get up. She arose in a flurry of wool and glinting water-drops of melted snow and ran to its bleat, eager now, bumping gently into the back of his knees as he carried the lamb beside Joby on the way to the lambing fold in the lee of the wood.

Sometimes the shepherd imitated the bleating of his couple snuggled under his shoulder sack to get his ewe to follow.

The fold, a double row of nutwood-hurdles, straw packed
between
them, was built in the form of a square. Within the square,
under a roof of more hurdles roughly thatched with barley straw, was a range of cubicles, or cubby holes, whence came the happy cries of lambs warm with their dams, tenants of a now familiar city. The newcomers settled in, their natures full of proprietary regard re-established within the security of the flock. Phillip’s ewe began to gnaw a swede root, after turning to give a happy sniff at the anus of her lamb. Then, snuffled in oat straw (Joby would have no barley rubbish within his fold) the newcomers lay with their lambs half hidden in their fleeces.

*

The writing
trauma
was disrupted at the dark end of the year. For Christmas they went to Down Close, Phillip to feel defeated by the same unreturned acid carboys, in their rusty cages, five of them worth
£
25; the Tamp, half embraced by brambles, becoming a skeleton under the Workshop windows; and Miss Calmady, good-natured, fat, and untidy, the front-half of her hair falling over her forehead, the back hair enwisped as a feather knot at the back of her neck. The garbage pails outside the scullery door were solid with ice. The dropped door of the derelict smith’s shop stuck half-open to allow a sight of rusty anvils, new bellows, tools, clusters of horse-shoes lying about. Broken china and glass, tins, rags, and decayed cardboard boxes littered the yard.

More snow fell on Christmas Eve and covered all gently with white. Trooping to church in the morning; Tim leaving to spend the rest of the day with Pansy and her mother. The Christmas festivities, otherwise the roasting of the turkey, had been postponed until Boxing Day. The previous evening Phillip had overheard the reason.

“I knows ’ee won’t mind if I spends me Christmas ’oliday with me friends up th’ lane, will ’ee, Master Tim?”

“By all means, Miss Calmady, by Jove yes, that will be quite in order.”

He had wanted to spend Christmas at home, before his blazing hearth; but Lucy, he knew, wished to be with her father and brothers; it was probably the last time the family would be together. After a partly silent and wholly indigestible lunch of the cold remains of a fragment of hard, overcooked cow-beef and acid yellow pickles, he went for a walk by himself, while thinking of his parents spending Christmas alone, since his sisters were still forbidden the house in that sad, drab suburb of London.

Usually the Coplestons had their Christmas dinner at night;
but at breakfast on Boxing Day Miss Calmady made a further request—Colonel Coperston wouldn’t mind, would ’a, if ’er went, after lunch, vor visit her sister in Shakesbury?

“Oh, not at all, not at all,” Phillip heard Pa’s prompt reply. “I suppose you’ll want to cook the turkey before you go?”

“Aw yaas, I’ll cook’n, if you’m a mind to eat’n midday, like.”

In due course, about one o’clock, Miss Calmady carried in a large dish and put it before Pa. The old gentleman stared at the sight of a 22-lb. stag-turkey complete with long skinny neck and baked head curled about a body awash with Beefo gravy. After this, in silence, arrived a tureen piled with potatoes hard-baked on one side and white on the reverse, followed by its twin piled with deliquescent sprouts faded of nearly all colour. Then Miss Calmady, wiping her large hands on her only ‘apern’, which she had worn ever since taking up her duties in the kitchen, wished a good time to be had by all and departed.

“I suppose we must be thankful for small mercies,” said Pa, peering at the monument. “At least she has plucked the brute.”

“Ah,” replied Ernest.

Then Billy, watching from a high chair the removal of the bird’s head, exclaimed, “’At pore dickybird might want ’is ’ade one day. You put’n back, Pa!”

“Ha,” said Pa. “Somehow I don’t think it will be needed.”

In the afternoon Phillip said he must go home to work.

After a pause Lucy said, “All right, we’ll come with you.”

“No need for that. I’m sorry, but I must work. The weather report says more snow.”

“Well, don’t blame me if there’s no hot water. I
did
order some coke, but it hasn’t come.”

“I’ll manage with wood.”

“I think I’d better come, too.”

They went back through a landscape heavy with unshed snow. He spent the evening sawing and splitting small logs with which to stoke the boiler. Then to his room, to take the manuscript from the wall-cupboard, with its rusty hand-forged strap-hinges, where he kept a few relics of Barley—a hair-ribbon, the wedding ring, the sand-shoes with the lace that had broken on the penultimate day of her life. He managed to write a few unreal paragraphs, each one slower than the last. What was the use of going on? Who would want to read such a dull account of rushes, heather, trickling water, ice, and draggled white blossoms of the cotton plant? His
life seemed to be ebbing away without purpose. He was nearly thirty-two years old: he had achieved nothing that he had set out to do.