The Gale of the World (10 page)

“They’re not worth much, anyway! They’re in the sitting room. Come and see for yourself.”

There stood the mahogany bookcase remembered from faraway Hillside Road. Along the top shelves were the volumes, each in its dust cover, all in what collectors would call mint condition.

“They’ll be valuable one day, Elizabeth.”

“That’s what you say. I had a second-hand bookseller in
yesterday
, and all he offered me was ten bob for the lot.”

“I’ll give you fifty pounds for them. I’d like Peter to have them.”

“I may want to read them myself. But why do you talk of money at this time? That’s all you think about, isn’t it? And our Father lying in his coffin!” she cried with rising hysteria. “Is that all you came for, to try and get what belongs to
me
? You’ve got everything that matters—children—what have
I
got? No-one cares whether I live or die!
You’ve
had two wives! What have
I
had? The boy I loved, Alfred Hawkins, what happened to him? Yes, you may well look guilty! You got your friend Peter Wallace to thrash him, didn’t you? Poor little Alfie, who could not defend himself, who loved poetry, and watching butterflies, and looking up into the blue sky, while lying on his back among the grasses, in the Backfield! What happened to him? Do you remember? I do, if you don’t! You told Father I’d been lying in the long grass with him, meaning we were spooning, when we weren’t! Father turned against me from that moment! Alfie was killed in the war, and you came back. Alfie was ready to go, he was a pure spirit. You weren’t, and you know it!”

“Yes, I know it. I assure you I’ve thought about that, many many times.”

“Then don’t try and take those books away from me! I know you don’t like me, you never did like me! And you didn’t really like Father, either. Do you know what he said to me once while he was lying in the nursing home? ‘Do you think Phillip is ashamed of me, he has never invited me to stay with his family.’ Then he said, ‘I suppose that must be it, for I am not allowed to see my grandchildren.’ That’s what Father said, and that’s why Aunt Viccy called you the black sheep of the family! You heard her say that Phillip was the black sheep of the family, didn’t you Doris?”

“If you don’t mind, I prefer to remain out of it. And I must remind you that I haven’t yet seen the will.”

“I’ve told you, Father left everything to me!”

“Look here,” said Phillip, “we’re all over-wrought. Let’s go into Bournemouth, and have dinner. I don’t think Father would mind. In fact, I don’t believe he’s here. I remember my great friend in the army, ‘Spectre’ West, telling me how it felt when he was unconscious after being hit. He saw himself from the air, in clear azure space, looking down at his body lying there—it was on Passchendaele Ridge—and he was clear thought or an idea, only that, just looking down, the idea being,
That
isn’t
me,
it’s
poor
little
body.
I’m not adding to his words, I give you my word of honour. He told me that after he’d recovered in hospital.” He gave a shout. “Oh God!
That’s
where I got that from, in my dream of seeing Billy lying dead, among the Alps! That’s the source of what I believed was a vision the night before we heard he was killed!”

“There you are, you see!” cried Elizabeth, who had only half listened. “That’s what I felt about poor Dads—his eyes looked up as though hearing a voice from above—then he looked amazed. That was when his soul left the body!”

“Yes,” said Phillip, taking her hand. “I believe that is truth.” He put his other arm round Doris. “Now that we are clear, dear sisters, let us look after what Hamlet called ‘this machine’. Put on your coats, and we’ll dine together! I’ll drive carefully, I’m not tight, alcohol is a pure form of food.”

They went to the Wrangaton Towers, and sat among pallid elderly people. There was whale meat or jugged hare for the main dish. The jugged hare looked remarkably like a cat, he thought, after a double whisky and soda, laughing to himself.

*

Phillip, staring through closed lids, legs crossed at ankles, arms folded—crusader in stone upon a tomb of lost hopes. Father in the early ’nineties bicycling to see mother on his Starley Rover, up the Rise to Sydenham Hill and down past the Crystal Palace. Stolen meetings in the summerhouse of the garden at Cross Aulton; the shuttered light of the lantern. Father and his
butterflies
, the rare Camberwell Beauty seen on his rum-impregnated cloth strips pinned to one of the elms on the Hill, in the circular light of his beloved dark lantern. The secret register-office
marriage
; Grandpa Turney finding out, knocking down Mother;
departure
to Wakenham and the little house above the railway
cutting, once the Sydenham Canal. My birthplace. Father’s life one long grind in the City. Office shadow’d in summer, befogged in winter. Slow wilting of butterfly-dreaming youth to bitter parenthood and final aloneness. Always the Faustian dream of ideal love. Myra walking slowly away, after putting down her bunch of Michaelmas daisies. He felt a sudden desperate need to go to her. I want to be loved by you, Myra, I want to love you.

Coffin going down in the lift to the furnace, parson’s
conventional
words over. Yes, I’d like the ashes in an urn, please. Father’s holiday at Lynmouth towards the end of the nineteenth century, so happy with his elder brother John, and Jenny his wife. You were only a baby, Phillip, we were all so happy, Aunt Dora was with us, it was her cottage, before she moved lower down the hill to be by the river. She loved the song of the river on its way to the sea. I stayed in Ionian cottage just before the war. I must scatter Father’s ashes on The Chains of the high moor—

Grey shreds of calcined bone swept from one side of the oven —handful of Heraclitan grey ashes—mixed with coffin nails oxidised umber-red in furnace flames. German ashes in the suburbs of industrial towns,
after Churchills’ bombings; Jewish ashes at Belsen and Ravensbruck after Hitler’s retaliation—
phosphate
and potash for wheat and potato fertiliser. Better that than the common sewer. Wheatfields on the Somme uplands, after one million German-British-French casualties, gave heavy yields of corn between the two wars. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes—great Jacobean poetry, the Bible.

The parson surprised that I asked that the nails be left in. Christ on
the cross,
nailed by Pharisean Establishment. Love thy enemy in the desert, and your tribe is soon extinct. Ring out the old, ring in the new, for God fulfils Himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Hitler burned at his own stake. I must begin my novel series, or I’ll die.

“Thank you. Please send the bill to me. Here is my address.”

Father, I am sorry, truly I am. Is there revelation after death? If so, you will know all things, Father—

He felt to be at one with his father.

But not with Mother. And yet Mother was in spirit like
himself
—

*

He could not sleep. Elizabeth had said that as electricity was rationed, he must not switch on the light in his bedroom. He sat up in bed and wrote by his flash-light torch.

In the morning Phillip thought to present himself to his
godmother
, Aunt Victoria. He asked Elizabeth for her address.

“Don’t blame me if you get a cold shoulder. Have you
forgotten
that she looks on you as the black sheep of the family?”

One of the older, Victorian houses among pines. Garden a wilderness. Weedy carriage sweep, overgrown rhododendrons, door green with dusty algae. The bell pull. A jangle below.
Waiting
. Windows barely visible through branches of laurel. Then a curtain corner moved, glimpse of white face, curtain dropping back.

When there was no further movement he thought to write a note and drop it through the letter-box. Was seeking paper when a quiet voice said, “The door is screwed up, will you come round to the kitchen door, by the lower gate?”

He found the way to a pale and rather beautiful ghost, dignified and thin, composed. He bowed to the ghost, who
responded
with the least inclination of the head, and led the way to what had been, in the old days, the housekeeper’s room.

“Well, Phillip, this is a surprise.”

“I could not leave without calling to pay my respects, Aunt Victoria. I’ve never forgotten the book you gave me when I was a boy, ‘Our Bird Friends’, by Richard Kearton. It changed my life.”

“Oh,” she said; and after a pause, “I did not feel equal to going to the funeral of my brother Dickie.”

“I—I feel I should have come to offer escort, Aunt Viccy.”

At the mention of her familiar name she smiled wanly. “We were such a happy family when we were young, you know. Your
father was so kind to Dora and Effie and me, the younger ones. It was a
jolly
family, you must know. At least, when we were all together at Fawley.” She sighed. “You should jolly well have stuck it out there, you know, when your Uncle Hilary bought back the land, Phillip! Hilary looked upon you as the
heir.”
She looked at him steadily, “What is it in you, Phillip, that made you always so perverse, so ‘agin’ what ordinary decent people regard as the right thing?” She shook her head, and sighed. “Dora says you were the unhappiest small boy she ever knew, but
what
was it in you that got up against your father?”

“I think we were all just a little afraid of him. He was usually —well—irritable, and liable to be angry.”

“It was the lies, Phillip that upset him. He could never rely on Hetty’s word. She used to—what is the word—well,
prevaricate.
And you seldom told the truth to him, did you, Phillip? Come now, old chap, speak like a man!”

“I was a thief, a liar, a coward, and a mischief-maker on all planes, Aunt Viccy. Also I was, as you said just now, usually very unhappy.”

“But that surely does not
explain
everything? Many of us have been unhappy at times, and had our cross to bear, but we did not, well, we did not behave
oddly
on that account. You were always what your father called the
wild
boy,
you know, and caused him much grief and unhappiness. Punishment did not seem to alter you in any way.”

“I suppose I was what he called a ‘throw-back’. But the point is that the book you gave me helped enormously, in that I came to love the countryside, and particularly wild birds. They—they were almost my only love.”

“I must say I enjoy your country books, you are certainly at your best there, as a writer. But your Donkin novels I found dull and dreary. You should not try to write novels, you know. It is not your line. Hilary, Dora and Dickie are all agreed about that. But why, oh why, did you put in that Donkin’s grandfather died of drink? Surely that was muckraking, Phillip?”

“Well, you know, some people do take to drink. A wrong marriage—let me see now—how can I say it—well, a square peg in a round hole—”

God in heaven, what am I saying, I’m back in the Land of Victorian clichés.

“But
my
parents were ideally happy, Phillip, at least when we were young! It was the trouble with the land, you know, and
the depression of the ’eighties in farming, and the loss of tenantry. Papa had to forego rents, even then, the farmers had to give up. So mortgages had to be arranged. My father was by no means alone, you know; many other landowners were forced to sell their properties about that time. And my father’s family had held their land for more than five centuries. And yet, when Hilary bought a considerable part of it back, you virtually refused it from Hilary. Why, why, why?”

“I suppose because I’m a throwback, Aunt Viccy.”

“It comes from your
mother
, Phillip! I am sorry, but it is the truth. It was a case of mixed blood. The Jews, you know, have been the cause of the ruin of our country. Not that I hold with Hitler, he was an Austrian upstart, and took advantage of the defeat of Germany to impose his own evil will upon dissident elements, in alliance with the Catholics and Freemasons! Of course he used both on the way up, then turned against them when he had achieved what he set out to do. And what caused him to be a wild man, Phillip? Shall I tell you? It was his Jewish blood!” Leaning forward in her chair she said earnestly, looking almost with appeal into his face, “Once a Jew, always a Jew! The leopard cannot change its spots, remember.” Then she said, “Well, now tell me something cheerful about yourself, Phillip. Come on, show a leg, as Hilary would say!”

He thought to lie back in the chair, hold up a leg, and waggle it, but all he did was to say, “I don’t want to say anything to hurt
your
feelings, Aunt Viccy.”

“I see you have begun to learn your lesson, Phillip. Other people’s feelings are as important as one’s own.”

Well, well, well! he thought, feeling Tim’s face upon his own. “Well, Aunt Viccy, I have
tried
to know my
own
defects.”

“That is something, Phillip,” she said earnestly.

“My sort is really alone. And my needs are simple. I’ve got a shepherd’s cot on Exmoor, and shall earn my own living by writing, as I did in my cottage at Malandine after the first war. Well, I am so glad I dared to call on you.” He got up and kissed her on the cheek, summoning resolution against upwelling emotion to say, “I am taking Father’s ashes to scatter on the the Chains of Exmoor, he too was a wild boy locked up in duty, he was happiest alone in wild places.”