The Power of the Dead (24 page)

Phillip couldn’t help saying, despite the knowledge that it was tactless, “I suppose you got an allowance for it, in part-exchange?”

“Oh, I didn’t bother. It wasn’t worth considering, so I just parked the Trodge and left it there.”

“Still, as you’re in the trade, I suppose you got fifteen per cent discount on the Crossley by showing your business card, so it amounts to the same thing.”

“I didn’t bother.”

Ernest by now was tired of being questioned.

With an effort Phillip persisted, “How much did it cost?”

“Oh, about six hundred.”

“Jolly nice motor, the Crossley.”

With this Phillip went back to the garden, working out the lost discount—15% of
£
600 was
£
90—as he struck at weeds, cutting some of the potato haulms. Didn’t Ernest realise that the money he, Phillip, had paid out to help save the Works had not been repaid? O, why had he ever been such a fool as to try and help them? Still, he had promised Grannie Chychester, and had tried to keep the promise.

“Are you coming?” asked Ernest through the hedge.

As he washed his hands under the pump he realized how Ernest must hate being mentally disapproved of. Was he like Hilary? Nobody liked being overlooked. Was that the origin of the witch’s
overlooking
,
the cursing of someone the black witch disapproved of? And yet, wasn’t he, in a way, being overlooked by the very name of Copleston? Why did he feel his stomach sink whenever he thought of the Works, of the stagnant Tamp, of old Ernest? Lucy was much nearer to Ernest than she was to him. They really had nothing to talk about, beyond the children. He had known it before his marriage, but had stifled his intuition. Lucy was kind, gentle, and—like Pa. No, it was his
own
fault, for not entering into
their
world.

He went to the car. Ernest was telling Lucy that he had joined a flying club, and was learning to fly at two guineas a flight.

At that rate Ernest would soon be broke again, and the same ghastly situation would arise. Was he resenting Ernest’s
extravagance
because it meant that his own work was wasted? Or
because, when the crash came, Pa and Ernest would, of course, have to come and live at Skirr Farm. Where else could Pa go, if there was no money?

“We thought of having tea first,” said Lucy’s happy voice.

He noticed that his hands were not properly clean, so went back to the pump, to soap them thoroughly, rinse them in the cold spring-water, and dry them slowly in the cool and shade of the outside wash-house, or laundry, with the hart’s tongue ferns growing out of the north wall.

Now he really must try to get to the truth of his own actions and thoughts. Was he growing like Willie—trying to alter the thoughts of others? Or more like Nuncle, who insisted on everything being done
his
way, the money-making way? Anders had not liked the last of the Donkin novels: like a fool he had sent it to him when only three-quarters written. Anders had argued with him about Donkin’s beliefs, declaring that he, Phillip, had not seen Donkin in the round. The fault of the novel, Anders had written, was that the author had not admitted the value of suffering as a divine or ordered means of regeneration, as the only way to truth.

Phillip had replied that surely suffering was not necessary if people would see clear and plain. The idea of this had come from Willie.

Back came the answer: We can learn only through suffering, which brings clarity.

There the argument had stopped, Phillip thinking that Anders thought like that because he had not been through the battlefields. Back to Pa and Ernest.

Both considered him to be interfering, and, no doubt, said among themselves that he was a bore. They wanted to be left alone to live in their own way. They did not want their lives to be ordered by someone else. Yet when they got into a muddle they had to be got out of it—at the nervous expense of someone else. Grannie Chychester knew it: she had suffered from it: that was why he always felt easy and clear with her. She understood. Pa and the Boys, and their blood-loyal sister Lucy, did not understand.

He longed for them to understand. So good—so kind—if only Lucy was understanding, what a happy, happy time they would have together. But as it was, he had to live more or less in a vacuum. And he was trying to pour her into the vacuum of his personal memory, or experience. He was trying all the time to alter her.

Lucy probably accepted that he was not what she had hoped for; and so her whole being was given to Billy and Peter. And his moodiness had affected Billy, who no longer went to him with happy cries of “Dada-dada.” Ah well, like his own father, he must make the best of a bad job. He must devote his life to writing. He would ask Hilary to end the contract, and go away by himself, find a cottage somewhere, and live alone.

“Tea’s ready,” Lucy called out, from the table in the shade of the mulberry tree. “Come if you like, but I don’t want to disturb you, of course.”

That was the trouble: she left him alone, she didn’t really care. And yet, how could she? How much did he
really
care for her? Only so much as she was convenient to him. Appalling thought!

He sat down at the weather-warped table, next to baby Peter in the high chair.

“Where’s Billy?”

“Oh, somewhere about,” replied Lucy, happily.

The klaxon of the new motor-car sounded.
Err-err,
err-err.
Phillip went to the gate. There was Billy sitting at the wheel, twisting it. He made to lift him out. Billy resisted.

“Uncle he said yes.”

“Well, Daddy he say no. It will spoil the steering if you try to turn the wheel while the car is standing still. Come on in, you’re going for a ride after tea.”

“Peter comin’, too?”

“I think we’re all going.”

The boy sat still. Phillip gave up and went back into the garden.
Err-err,
err-err
, went the klaxon. Lucy went out and said, “Such a nice tea for you, darling, then we’ll all go for a ride with Uncle, shall we?”

“Will Daddy come in Uncle’s car-car, Mummy?”

“I expect he will.”

Lucy held out her arms, and he yielded. She knew how deeply he loved Phillip, from his first conscious moments, the nurses at the Malandine Cottage Hospital had told her.

*

Phillip rode with them to the top of the downs, while feeling that he could not breathe inside that dark prison while the sun was shining outside. On the crest he asked Ernest, who had hardly spoken during tea or afterwards, to stop and put him down. He wanted to walk up to Whitesheet Hill.

Here, on top of the world, with the extended hump of the Chase rising along the southern sky, and the vale to the west, its human hopes enclosed within hundreds of dark hedges and taller hedge-timber—each family life bounded by a few meadows and pastures, ruled by them indeed—he saw his previous conceptions to be petty, and due to his own frustrated feelings scape-goated upon Pa and Ernest. Why be dissatisfied, when he had been given the chance to live the life he had always longed to have? He had felt that he did not belong to Wakenham; or belong anywhere, indeed; now he belonged to this country, he was no longer rootless. There in the church were the proofs of what he had always longed to have; the Maddison chapel with its effigies and memorials, eroded and defaced by Time; and it meant nothing to him. Indeed, in some way he could not determine, it was a petrifiction upon life—upon Hilary’s as well as his own.

And yet, what was the alternative? He couldn’t let down Hilary after all his kindness. He worried Hilary, he knew; even as Ernest, and that unsold Tamplin cycle car, now entirely hidden in nettles, worried him.

A string of small white clouds was stationary in the sky beyond the Chase. Below them, in his mind, he saw the blue waters of the Channel, and the summer wavelets on the sands of Malandine. Barley now seemed infinitely remote from his life; and yet, O God, she was ever-present.

He lay on the sward, with its scent of thyme, but no tears came. He was what he was; he must accept it; he
had
to live his secret life apart from the ordinary world. But that world had its claims; and he must not avoid them. Indeed, the secret world must sustain the ordinary world. In the application of that faith was freedom. O God, he prayed, help me to do the right thing.

He arose, feeling clear.

Now for a view upon the ordinary world. If the wander book sold well, as Anders said it would, it might solve his problem, as well as Hilary’s. There was not much future in farming, and land prices were dropping steadily. Those farmers who had bought their farms just after the war were finding it hard to make ends meet. Why live against the grain? Time was passing; he was already in his fourth decade. He must write, or perish. And
literary
success would mean that he could keep the land going. The problem was soluble.

Striding over the close grey turf, he found freedom in impersonal
ideas arising as though on the breeze which shook the carline thistles, and lifted the wings of linnets flitting before the wind. Wheatears ran ahead of him, pausing to watch before flying on with low measured flight, to drop again as though they had tired suddenly, or abruptly changed their minds. His life was like that: often broken across, impulse after impulse. As soon as the final Donkin novel was finished he had intended to begin his suburban trilogy, the central character his father, sympathetically presented in every aspect of that unhappy, irritable, dreaming man. But now he had virtually promised never to write about any of his relations—not even with love, and its hovering spirit, compassion.

London was to have been the villain of
Soot,
not his father. And yet, with the full focus upon truth, how could ‘London’ really be the villain? London was living soil which had been harmed, debased, made sour; its river polluted by the spirit of unenlightened commerce: but even as he decided upon that, were material, otherwise unspiritual, minds really to blame for what they did not know? Had the Luddites been right to smash the machines, which made the Satanic mills of William Blake? All life was impelled by trial and error; there was no absolute good or absolute evil. The steam-engine brought the wheat of the destroyed prairies, as Jefferies had written; and English wheatfields went down to docks and thistles; labourers starved while the finches rejoiced. The cheap food cry was one of genuine benevolence for those working in the mills, and the factories; whence the slums, the rookeries of the feared East End, and that shocking story once told by Father about Gran’pa Turney, and an out-of-work cab-runner at Liverpool Street station carrying his bag to London Bridge and being rewarded with a cigar stump.
Fear
of desperate, out-of-work men had been behind that act. For, at heart, Gran’pa Turney had been a kind, even generous man. ‘Must a Christ perish in torment in every generation because people have no imagination?’ Nuncle’s opinion of nearly two million unemployed, most of them ex-soldiers:
Those
fellows
could
get
work
if
they
wanted
to,
only
they
don’t
want
to
was matched by Pa’s complacent,
I’ve
no
use
for
the
fellow,
meaning Dick Sheppard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, who was ill with asthma, Martin Beausire had told him. Asthma was the disease of the sensitive, frustrated by what Arnold Bennett called
le
bloc.

Where then, could a regenerating point be found? In revolution, as in Russia?
When
I
hear
Beethoven
being
played,
I
want
to
stroke
people’s
heads
Lenin had said,
until
I
remember
that
today
heads
must
be
split
open.
Jesus had refused direct action at the Passover, and had gone to his death. So had Father Aloysius, on the Somme, shot while moving among the wounded. He could hear his voice now, against the distant hammer of machine-guns and exploding shells.
The
Virgin
and
Child
is
a
symbol
of
what
is
…
Love
is
in
the
world
always,
waiting
for
all
men.

What guts, to push the entire bloody war away in thought, and proclaim the spirit of love while tens of thousands lay dying in Noman’s Land. Such were the lights of humanity.

He strode on, joyfully. He saw human life clearly. Man was the dreamer; his seed drove him to dream. Woman was practical, the home-maker. The dream in man’s seed was for her; he dreamed first of her beauty, which could never be,
should
never be, totally possessed. Even with Barley he had felt at times lonely: perhaps all dream, the life of the spirit, must be in secret. And yet, when with her, he did not dream: or rather, living was dream itself: one was through to the other side of life, as it were, beyond the
barbed-wire
and the barrage, into open country, the war between heaven and hell was over.

Was the part of Barley which had fulfilled his nature, completed his life, the companionate male part of her in a female body? She
understood,
she was a friend first, a female afterwards.

Why
was he growing towards Lucy like Father to Mother? Lucy was always willing to help, to listen, to go for a walk, to do this or that—when she was free of the nursery—but he had to do all the talking. With Barley there was no need for words. She
knew.

With Lucy it was always the same: he had to be the leader, the explainer. She followed out of kindness, generous for his sake. Like Mother to Father. So Father had always felt that Mother was a burden; and his irritability was due to loss of nervous energy. Had he not shouted out once, during a row, years ago,
You
force
me
to
play
the
rôle
of
the
bully.