The Power of the Dead (37 page)

“Your uncle?”

“That’s right. General Ironside, usually known as ‘Tiny Tinribs’.”

This produced another cackle of laughter among the beer drinkers.

“Fact, ‘Bosun’.”

“Whippin’ water,” remarked the landlord, taking a pull at his beer and rum.

“Don’t take any notice of ‘Bosun’,” repeated Mrs. Tinker. “Would a fry do for your supper, sir? Mr. Phillip and Mr. Piers usually likes a fry when they comes yurr. I’ve got some green bacon, and a bit of pig’s liver, and eggs.”

“Splendid, midear. My favourite shackles. You an old soldier, Tinker?”

“’Im?” jeered Mrs. Tinker. “The nearest ’e got to the Army was sellin’ fish to the sergeants’ cook-’ouse when the Australians was yurr in the war. Yes, you, you old toad!” raising her arm for an imaginary back-hander at her husband continuing to grin good-humouredly at her.

“I be a Navy man, I knows nothin’ about the Army.”

“You know it be true! You took one of me best stackings for to put in that slaked lime you stole from they builders, and poisoned all they fish in the Longpond!”

Mr. Tinker’s reply was to turn round, reach for the rum bottle, and pour another half-quartern into his beer. After taking a swig he said in a voice so low that it appeared as a plaintive murmur, “I’ll tell ’ee what, midear, you be like this yurr noo factory cider, all gas.”

“Now, now, ‘Bosun’,” said Bill Kidd in a warning voice. “Naughty—naughty.
Honneur
aux
dames
, shipshape and Navy fashion. I’ll have another whisky, make it a half quartern. I never drink ‘drops’, which should be called ‘drips’. And fill up all glasses.”

The face of Mrs. Tinker reappeared beside the curtain. “‘Bosun’ did use poison, you know, major.”

Mr. Tinker roared, “I nivver used poison, I tell ’ee! ’Twas burnt lime, and that be chalk, ban’t it? And ban’t the river full of chalk a’ready? So what’s the difference?”

“’Twas chloride, you know it was. You stole it from the camp, you told me you did. You spoiled one of me best stackings, you did. And you knew very well that in the war none was to be bought into market.” The face gave way to the noise of frying.

“You can forget your lime, your stew-fed rainbows, your
pitchforks
, gaffs, and carving knives,” said Bill Kidd, waggling a finger at Mr. Tinker. “Leaning over the old bank and then saying you were
tickling
trout—yes, with a kitchen fork tied to a lump of wood! You can’t tell Bill Kidd anything about poaching. Nor about dry-fly fishin’.”

Holding up his wrist Bill Kidd made as if to throw a fly,
crouching
with elongated head sunk between shoulders, his dark eyes moving rapidly in the sallow face as he worked an imaginary
split-cane
rod.

“Watch this, midear! See that rise over there? He’s sucking in olive duns just below the alder branch. I’ll put a curl in the end of the cast. Don’t move!” He leaned forward tensely. “Watch the fly riding down.” He made a sucking noise with his lips. “He’s taken it.” With a jerk of the wrist Bill Kidd drove the barb into one bony corner of the trout’s jaws. “Number fourteen hook, sneck-bend, in the yellow bone of the corner of the jaw, penetrating one-sixteenth of an inch. It’s enough to hold him. Gently does it. Let him tire himself out, but ’ware that
weed-bed
below. Keep his head upstream—after a couple of minutes he’s ours—now watch this, ‘Bosun’—don’t lift your rod point too far—gently, gently, does it. Now slip the old net forward from under the tail and lift him out.”

“Whippin’ water, that’s all it be, whippin’ water! Kids with bent pins an’ worms do just as well.”

Having swallowed his whisky, Bill Kidd said, “See this moustache? Shall I tell ’ee for why I wear’n like this, ‘Bosun’? I’m by way of being a pal of the Kaiser, now in Holland chopping logs for his hearth. I was taken prisoner on April the thirteenth, nineteen eighteen. For an entire day our Division had held up the German advance across the old Somme battlefield. As far as I was concerned the Kaiser was still a Field-marshal in the British Army, and when he came specially to see my lads at Kortrai—that was after we’d been pinched through that yellow-bellied order to retire—never mind where it came from—as I was telling you, I was presented to the Kaiser, who shook hands with me, and congratulated us on our stand at Combles, three
weeks before. Without a word of a lie, ‘Bosun’, he as good as said they’d lost the war then. Fact, my lad! So don’t let anyone get away with any adverse remarks about Kaiser Bill.”

“Square ’ead,” replied Mr. Tinker, taking a draught of his special mixture. He added, as his nose emerged from the pewter pot, “I don’t give a flip for no Kayser, see?”

*

The sward of the downs rising before Phillip was faintly purple with the setting sun. Out of breath after hastening to the summit, he sat down to rest; but, disturbed by his thoughts, soon got up to hurry onwards. Above the last red waves of sunset hung the evening star, a pearl left by the ebb of day. He must think only of his work.

Now for a plan. The first book of the trilogy must retain the original title of
Soot,
or,
The
Irritable
Man
. It must, as first conceived in 1919, be unflinchingly realistic. Never mind what the family would think, each one cowering within its little ego of fear. Once completed, the trilogy could be set aside for publication after his death.

First write the trilogy; then see. It must be entirely free of romantic fancies, or self-denying gentility. He would start after Nuncle’s visit. Perhaps Nuncle would sell the estate to the War Department. Then he would be free. They would move nearer the sea and the Yacht Club. As he walked on, he saw himself lying on the banks of a trout stream, peering and watching; writing only in the mornings; enjoying the blue water of the harbour with Piers who had promised to put him up for the Yacht club.

*

The spaniel, who had not had a proper walk for a long time, was racing after a jack hare. It crossed the scent of another, and raced after it, giving tongue. His master stood still, listening. In the light of the moon half risen over the rim of the downs he saw the two hares moving in opposite directions. That had been like his life so far: the hares were two ideas and he was like Rusty, who after panting up to him turned away to hunt the scent of one hare backwards, hunting heel as the term was. In a way he himself was always hunting heel.

Other star-points were now visible in the deepening pallor of the sky. He was relieved to come to the cattle-track leading down to Colham. This walk was, he reflected, almost the only one he knew, and it was his third year in the district. He had walked
round the estate only once. Shades of the old days of walking at least a dozen miles every day. Ah, Malandine, when the world was young. He was now old: by next April he would be thirty-four.

Descending to the northern outskirts of the town, he came to the Rising Sun just as eleven o’clock was striking from some clock in the neighbourhood. Bill Kidd’s car was standing in the stable yard, near a lighted side-window. Figures were visible behind the lace curtain. Voices. The same old cross-talk.

“Where’s the skill in blowing the pools in the Stour with acetylene and water inside screw-top cider bottles?”

“Whippin’ water, I tell ’ee, that’s all it be.”

“Look here, ‘Bosun’, I’ll bet you five pounds to a bottle of whisky there isn’t a trout in any chalk stream anywhere that I can’t take out with a dry-fly, and damn all your night-lines, stockings of lime, and other novelties! One day I’ll take you on my uncle’s water——”

“You mean Sir ’Ilary?”

“I meant ‘Tiny Tinribs’, General Ironside to you.”

Craftily the publican said, “Thought you said you was a baronet’s son? I knows of only one wan round yurr, and that’s Tofield, and you ban’t no relation, else us’d’v heard of it.”

Phillip moved away from the window. What he had heard settled every doubt concerning Bill Kidd. He lived his fantasies instead of putting them on paper. What was the difference,
fundamentally
? None. He turned for home, feeling depressed.

The moon was up, he lingered with the voices of corncrakes, and a solitary quail, coming through the milky light over the fields of grass and corn. Lucy showed no surprise when he arrived home about two o’clock. She was still up, sewing on the sofa drawn up to the dying fire.

“Had a nice walk, Pip?”

She lay on her side to ease the weight of a kicking embryo. “I could just make out the chalk quarry on Whitesheet Hill, from the downs,” he said, sitting on the end of the sofa. “I wonder if there were ever any Saxons in Flanders. The troops always pronounced ‘Wytschaete’ as ‘Whitesheet’. And this was a Saxon stronghold, wasn’t it?”

“Uncle John will be sure to know.”

“I must go and see him in the morning. How is he?”

“He looks rather thin, poor dear. Before I forget, I’ve left you some cold bacon sandwiches on the kitchen table.”

He returned with the sandwiches, and said, “What do you think of Felicity?”

“Oh, I like her. So do the little boys.”

*

Soon after dawn a vehicle got up to look like a motorised farm van with a bundle of hazel spars tied to its bonnet strap and a wad of thatching reed beside the driver and two other wads covering the rear seats moved slowly and almost silently—the cut-out being closed—up the bramble-grown track to the Longpond. Near the spring-head it crossed over the small bridge which carried the original drive to the derelict house.

Within the hollow of the walls the driver parked his vehicle, and with a pair of field-glasses returned on foot to the bridge where, kneeling down, he leant his elbows on the parapet and examined the landscape.

The glasses were by Zeiss of Jena. These, with other souvenirs, had been looted from the Kommandant’s office immediately British troops following the Armistice had arrived at the guard house of the
Kriegsgefangenenlager
where he and others had been imprisoned during the last six months of the war.

Satisfied that the valley was empty of human figures, Bill Kidd walked back to fit together the joints of an 11-foot split-cane trout rod, after which he threaded a fine plaited silk line through the snake-rings and attached to the end a tapered gut cast to which was tied a single sneck-bend No.10 hook.

Hundreds, thousands of mayflies were hanging upside down on branch and twig of the overgrown willows. He impaled one near the tail whisks so that it remained alive and fluttering upon the hook. Then pulling loops of the extremely thin magpie silk line, he let the gentle airs of sunrise float the lure over the water.

“Cor stone the crows,” he muttered in his excitement of seeing a large black-fin and part of a tail near the descending lure. Allowing the fly to touch the water, he lifted the point of the rod again and again, dapping the insect until a large olivine neb arose and sucked it in. After a pause, the rod point was smartly lifted, and Bill Kidd told himself that he was into one of aldermanic proportions as the rod bent in an arc and the check on the reel screamed with line drawn out.

When Bill Kidd left about 7 a.m. nine large trout were
concealed
under the thatching wads at the back of the car. He sold the fish in Colham to a fishmonger recommended by ‘Bosun’ about
the time that Sir Hilary Maddison had finished packing for an early start from Pembrokeshire.

The London newspapers were on sale in the town of
Haverfordwest
every day after 10 a.m. On the morning following the news of the Grasmere award on his wireless set Hilary had bought a copy of every paper on the station bookstall—a small wooden shed with lock-up shutters—and looked through them while sitting in his motorcar. At first he had felt a little satisfaction in the
prominent
space given to the name of Maddison. There it was, in the fourth leader of the
Telegram.
But when he came to the penny papers this feeling changed to astonishment, then to exasperation. The damned young idiot, posing as the heir to ‘a considerable estate in the West Country’ and ‘married to a niece of Lord Kilmeston.’ The Fawley property was little more than a holding originally established by a scion of the family whose seat was in Durham. The Durham estate had been sequestrated during the Civil War, and later restored by Charles the Second. Master Phillip was getting too big for his boots, evidently; and he was
not
the heir: he was a probationer, to whom by now it should have been perfectly clear that unless he made good within a stipulated period he would not succeed to a life-tenancy.

Hilary called daily for his letters
poste
restante
at the main G.P.O.; he had collected them before buying the newspapers, but had not yet opened them. They lay, neat and compact, within the cubby hole in the dashboard of his second motorcar, the Wolseley 2-seater. Now he took them out, and with a feeling of
constriction
selected an envelope with a French stamp addressed to him in surely too neat a handwriting—the dots between the letters after his name so correctly placed, as though the writer had to make up in added respect for adverse news within——

He sat back, overcome by dread, then by fear, and finally by a pessimistic thought that he might as well be dead. Irene
Lushington
had refused his offer of marriage. He knew it, he knew it. He had not asked for her love when last he had seen her in London;
only for her care, and, possibly in time, her affection. All he wanted, he had said, as they sat in his drawing room of Claridge’s (usually when in London he stayed at one or other of his three clubs, the Voyagers, the East India, and the Flyfishers’) was a home somewhere where he could feel that he really belonged. A man’s home, he had said, meant the grace, the beauty, and above all the happiness of a woman.

He would prefer to live in the East, perhaps in China—Shanghai he had known romantically as a young man—but the choice would be hers; he would live wherever she wanted to live, and the marriage settlement should be on her own terms, subject to her grandson Billy inheriting the Fawley property.

Irene liked Hilary, up to a point. Beyond that point, she was shut-away from him. When driving her to South Devon, after the christening of her grandson, she had been drawn to his
loneliness
, for he had told her restrainedly about his long-ended
marriage
: being aware that to have put his ex-wife in a poor light might have aroused defensive or at least curious thoughts about himself in relation to Beatrice. And although he did not know this, Irene was already on his side; for Phillip had told her about the attempt of his aunt-by-marriage to get into his bed one night—the only night he had stayed at her Hampshire home after returning from Flanders early in 1915, while Uncle Hilary was at sea.

No; what had led Irene to have reserved thoughts about Hilary was his unfeeling attitude at her daughter’s grave soon after they had arrived at Malandine. The weed-grown mound, set with a brief marble stone on which was carved a reaping hook encircling a rose-in-bud, had made Hilary critical of Phillip, whom she loved for his sweetness and sympathy towards others.

“If he cannot think to arrange an annual payment with the parson to have the grave kept in order, how can he look after twelve hundred acres and all that goes with the property? You see, Irene, I can never be sure of my nephew.”

When he met Irene again in London, Hilary, after dining with her at the Savoy, had taken her to a play at the small and intimate Fortune Theatre. It was a comedy by Frederick Lonsdale. Hilary had wanted to see Cochran’s revue,
One
Dam
Thing
After
Another
, but Irene had already seen it, so they saw
On
Approval
; and
afterwards
they returned to sup at the Savoy.

At the next table sat a party of young men and women discussing a play about the war. Irene heard only words here and there, but
among them, with a start, she heard Phillip’s name mentioned. A man with a clean-shaven, meditative face, said, “If anyone can do it, it will be Phillip Maddison. That article in the
Crusader
on the opening of the battle of the Somme will be a classic. I heard him talking one evening in the Barbarian Club. There is
something
in that young man dead beyond resurrection, but he holds the entire war in the palm of his hand.”

When the party at the next table had left, she had asked the waiter who they were, and learned that the speaker was Captain Reginald Berkeley, the author of a play called
The
White
Chateau
.

“Did you hear what he said about Phillip, Hilary? I read what he wrote about the Somme in the
Daily
Crusader
. Someone cut it out and sent it to me at Laruns. It was deeply moving.”

Hilary had replied shortly, “The sooner he forgets the war, the better for himself and his prospects.”

“What they were saying was high praise, Hilary.”

“Possibly; but have you looked at his novels? I found them an unreadable hotch-potch. In any case, it’s too soon now to write about the war. Let him wait until all the history books have had their say. After all, I heard my father once say that Tolstoi wrote about the Napoleonic era in
War
and
Peace
more than fifty years after the event.”

There had been a feeling of blankness when they parted that night, Hilary driving her to her club; but the next day when she had telephoned early to thank him for her evening he had offered to see her off at Victoria on the boat train. He was at his best, bringing her flowers and a light luncheon basket. As the time for the train to leave drew near, they felt that they were going to miss one another. Just before the whistle blew, without premeditation she leant down to offer her cheek for a kiss, while he reached up also without thought and kissed her gently. There were tears in her eyes as she sat down; while Hilary, having raised his bowler hat, turned away with the idea, enchanting and sad, that she must love him.

From that time he was preoccupied with the thought of what his sister Viccy would feel if he married again. Despite, or
perhaps
partly because of, their father’s defects, and certainly because they had all loved their mother, the three Maddison brothers and four sisters had always been devoted to the idea of themselves as a family.

His sister Viccy might not live long. She had had one operation
for the dreaded
carcinoma
, when her womb was removed. One could never be certain that the malignancy was no longer in the blood stream.

Hitherto Hilary had been fairly content to spend the summers in his caravan in Wales, ‘far from the madding crowd of trippers’, as he thought of it. Since the war, ribbon-building was increasing behind and along the coast centred on Bournemouth, a pleasant enough place to spend the winter, in his home efficiently run by Viccy. But should anything happen to her——

And now there was brother John. The doctor had said that he should be X-rayed to determine the condition of the chronic bronchitis.

These considerations had led Hilary to write to Irene and ask her to marry him. And now, within the envelope, was her answer. He dared not open it. He put it in his breast pocket beside his wallet, and looked at his remaining mail. Nothing from Phillip; and according to
The
Times
, the mayfly was up all over southern England.

He returned to the post-office, and sent a telegram to his nephew; and then, going into the Mariners Inn, ordered a pint of porter, which gave him sufficient energy to open Irene’s letter. At the first glance he was shocked; then depressed. He ordered a large whisky, and thus encouraged, read the letter in a different light. There was hope after all. She would like time to think it over: she was going on a cruise to India with a woman friend, and would let him know in the autumn, when she hoped to meet him and talk things over, because, she said, she had a persistent feeling that she might not be able to be all that she knew was expected of her.

The next day, on receiving his nephew’s reply to his telegram, Hilary packed his rods and kitbag and set off for Colham.

On arrival there he went to see the family doctor about his brother’s condition, to learn that there was some obstruction in the bronchus. A sputum test had revealed absence of tubercle.

Hilary went on to Rookhurst and made his first call at Fawley. There he offered to arrange matters with a London nursing home.

“Thank you, my dear brother, but I think I’ll return for a spell at the Shakesbury home. After all, my old doctor has the case in hand. But I have little doubt that my time has come. We must keep it from the others. One does not want Phillip and Lucy to be worried.”

“You’re going to be all right, John. You’ll pull round now that the weather is set fair, after all this wet we’ve been having. I’ll come and see you again tomorrow, old chap, and hope to bring you a trout for your luncheon. Also, I would recommend stout, to build you up. It’s about the finest tonic there is, when one is run down. I’ll bring a bottle or two tomorrow from the farmhouse.” If Master Phillip hasn’t finished it by now, he thought.

*

As he was going down to the village Hilary passed a hatless young man with what appeared to be a walking stick carried under one arm like a gun, and an army valise on his back. Just before the car came level the man turned abruptly and held up his hand for the driver to stop. Hilary was put out by this, and when the young fellow, who had a swarthy face, asked him if he knew where Skirr Farm was, he replied shortly, “Yes. It’s half a mile down this road, about a hundred yards past the church, on the left. Do you want to see anyone there?” He meant to add, “If so, I’ll give you a lift”; but when the young fellow, who wore a pair of new brown leather leggings with ill-fitting khaki breeches, and a jacket he appeared to have outgrown, replied, “Yes I do, but I’ll find it all right,” Hilary drove on.

*

In preparation for Sir Hilary’s visit, Haylock had asked the bailiff that the small boat, stored in the barn, be carted to the Longpond and there submerged near the pier. It was carvel built, and the seams needed swelling. As soon as the drakes were seen on the water, the keeper had the boat hauled up on the bank, there to be drained and cleaned before refloating.

Early the following day, on his rounds, he had thrown a pail of water into the boat, to keep the caulking damp.

Hilary arrived that evening; and after breakfast the next
morning
Phillip went with him to the pier, which consisted of a broad elm plank on sunken posts; and having seen his uncle aboard with Haylock, returned to the farmhouse.

The Longpond curved near its middle length. The boat, sculled gently backwards, moved towards the bend. Hilary sat in the stern, casting his fly on the water. Suddenly he said, “Haylock, I see a man up there, fishin’. Who is it?”

Haylock reversed one paddle, so that the boat swung broadside on. “No idea, Sir Hilary.”

“Do you know if Mr. Phillip has given anyone permission to fish?”

“Not so far as I’m aware.”

They both stared at the stranger, who continued to dap his fly as though unaware of the boat’s presence.

“Take me to him. I made it plain that on no account was this water to be fished until I had paid my visit.”

The fisherman was standing near one of the willows sprawling over the water. When Hilary looked at him again, to his surprise the fellow, whom he could have sworn had been without a hat when first seen, was wearing a deerstalker stuck with large salmon flies, of the kind fished in Norwegian rivers.

“How d’you do, Sir Roland,” he called out. “You’re just in time for the rise. I thought it was Piers at first. Is he comin’ out this mornin’?”

“And who may you be?”

“I am Major Kidd, late of the Gaultshire Regiment, Sir Roland. I say, surely these rainbows are stew-fed?”

“I am Sir Hilary Maddison, I own this water, and no-one has been given permission to fish here.”

“But this is Benbow Pond, isn’t it, sir?”

“No. The Benbow Ponds belong to Sir Roland Tofield, my neighbour. They’re three miles down the valley.”

“I offer you my apologies, sir. It also explains why I’ve been puzzled. You see, Piers said the fish were brownies, but these big’ns are rainbows. And that fact’s been puzzling me, for as you know,
Salmo
gairdneri
usually dies off in landlocked water during the first spawning season.”

“Rainbow trout grow quickly here, the food is plentiful. Have you killed any fish yet?”

The stranger was seized with a paroxysm of coughing. He bent double in apparent agony, a hand pressed into his midriff. “Gas,” he managed to gasp. “Phosgene—got it in Oppy Wood——”

In his time Hilary had had to deal with lascars from East India, larrikins in the docks of Sydney, dagoes from Port Said, and bums at San Francisco: and in the attitude of the man before him he felt something of the underdog, the fly boy, the four-flusher.

“Did Sir Roland Tofield give you leave to fish his water?”

“Well, sir, I would hardly have fished otherwise? An Old Wyck knows his manners.”

“An Old What?”

“I took my first trout from the Test at Winchester, sir, from the Common Water. On a dry fly, of course.”

“You were in College at Winchester?”

“Yes, before the war, sir.”