The Phoenix Generation (4 page)

“Very well. I can see I am in the way, so I'll say goodnight all, and leave you to enjoy yourselves.” He pushed back his chair and toppled over.

“I can tell you one thing,” said Piers, when ‘Boy' was back in his chair. “I saw this farm boy once doing a very fine stroke of business in the market. Made a good profit, too, over Rosebud. She was beautiful. What did she cost you, Phil? A tenner, wasn't it? Quick work, I must say, and worth every penny of it. Don't you agree, Gillian?”

“She was a pet. A love. She was simply too, too sweet,” sang Gillian, and, draining her glass, she gave a loving glance at Runnymeade across the table.

“You're a dark horse, Maddison,” said Runnymeade, smiling to himself. “Why didn't you bring Rosebud?”

“She was looking after two other suckers at the time.”

“I don't get you. Who or what is this Rosebud?”

“An Ayrshire heifer I bought at market.”

When the laughter had ended, Runnymeade said, “Pay a dividend, and tell us more about this Rosebud.”

“I bought two calves at market. They were starving. For all animals to be sent to market is tragedy. Market Hill at Colham is a place haunted by lost love, anguish, and fear. So I bought a cow from a milkman, so bagged up, as they say, that——”

“A milkman bagged up, did you say? Or was he baggered up, possibly a euphemism for the familiar state of all farmers today?”

“In a way, yes. But it was the cow who was in pain. She hadn't been milked that morning, in order to show off the size of her bag.”

He told them about the honest milkman, how Piers and Gillian waiting apart gave him a calmness to know that the cow was good, as was the milkman's word. It was all a true play of social instinct, he said, feeling foolish.

“God bless my soul,” said Runnymeade. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I suppose a ballet could be written around the incident—‘The Honest Milkman'?” said Piers.

“Good God,” said Runnymeade, “And that's how you spend your time. You're a do-gooder, Maddison.”

“You're a do-gooder, too. Look at your wonderful party.”

Cheers and handclapping seemed to depress the host. Phillip knew what he was feeling: the loneliness of the would-be artist, the dream of happiness that was built on the broken inner self. The mockery, the touchiness, the semi-scoffing attitude toward others were but signs of inner despair. He felt affection for Runnymeade.

“Are there any more animals on your goddam farm, Maddison?''

“I'm afraid not. I lost my land through my own stupidity. Ideas pass, the land remains.”

This simple statement caused silence. He was conscious of sympathy from the feminine young men at the end of the table. They had been listening to the talk with absorbed interest. Then one of their number took a mouth-organ out of his pocket and began to play a melancholy tune, improvising as he went on, bringing in bass notes to represent the noises of market. Suddenly the tune lifted into life, and another of the feminine young men got up and began to dance with hardly a sound of feet on the oak floor. Another joined him, throwing off his jacket, and another, until they were passing to and fro in the candlelit hall with a suggestion of the grace of swallows meeting and turning and circling over a lawn when the glass is falling and the gnats are flying low because of damp membraneous wings. Phillip felt tears coming to his eyes as he sat, hands folded as though meekly on his diaphragm, with a feeling of being borne above life, aware of Stefania moving her feet out of her low-heeled shoes and floating down the other side of the table, giving him the passing glance of a dove among swallows. The other girls joined in. He felt the part-
communicable
truth of the moment: of Rosebud and her gentleness, her grief for her own lost calf, her love given to the two calves he had bought: of Runnymeade, also aching under his bravura for lost love.

They were miming the story: Rosebud was being danced by Stefania, the Honest Milkman by a male dancer, the calves by two girls. The others made the market-day crowd, all in silence, through motion: the flow of feeling transformed to
movement
.

Then everybody was clapping and laughing—except Runnymeade, who sat at the head of the table, leaning back a little in his chair, his manner of faint mockery that of a man
wilfully apart, watching in a surrealistic world of cubes and angles, Phillip dancing with Stefania.

As for Phillip, he felt himself to be moving on air while holding and being upheld by air.

*

The morning star had risen in the east when, feeling his way down a dark passage with feet and hands, a swirling vehicle of acidity remaining after two bottles of champagne, he was aware of Runnymeade's voice, now petulant, now pleading, now angry, repeating the same words again and again—behind the closed door—
Beat me—beat me—Goddamit, why don't you beat me!
—ending the pleas with a crash. What was Runnymeade doing?—his
conscience
demanding punishment?—and for what? God, how easy it was to lose one's true self … and with a pulling movement of hands along the wall he counted to twenty-three before stopping, to proceed again with caution, until he found and overcame the obstacle, sought and found the glass handle of the ‘throne'—a large glass knob cut with a score of facets. He had observed this potential bolt-hole, making a mental map-reference to it as it were, on the way down to dinner.

He turned the cut-glass knob; and after a timeless period of surgent repentance on his knees lifted the plug and left the hide, his bearings beyond tight-closed eyes fixed upon the length of the passage, particularly the step—
up
this time—now twenty paces on—slowly——

He tripped and fell over. The jolt upset everything—he must go back to the cut-glass handle—he was conscious of someone helping him up, leading him into candle-light. A voice was saying
Drink
this.
Fizzy stuff. His legs were lifted and he was floating on a bed; but not, thank God, with saliva coming into his mouth for the dreaded return.

Later, he knew that his forehead was being sponged with cold water. The candlelight revealed an oval face enclosed in a white bathing turban. He felt better.

“Stefania, how very kind of you.”

“How do you feel, ‘Farm Boy?'”

“Better, thank you.”

She sat on the side of the bed and looked at him.

“Why do you men drink? I know what ‘Boy' is looking for—his mother. But what are
you
looking for?”

“I don't drink much, as a rule.”

“But you are looking for something. Isn't Felicity enough, and
your writing? You are sad about your farm. Why? Tell me. Do you know what it is? If so, tell me. Don't be afraid of me. I have known many men—I have known Nijinsky, yes, I still know Nijinsky. There was a contradiction in his life that overwhelmed him, just as there is in ‘Boy', only a different contradiction. I try to help him. I try to help you. Tell me, ‘Farm Boy'.”

“All life is a search for ‘le spectre de la rose'.”

She looked at him again and said, “You are a poet, as well as a Farm Boy.”

“‘As a necromancer raises from the rose-ash, the ghost of the rose'—I must raise
my
‘spectre de la rose'—or die.”

“You will die in any case, ‘Farm Boy'. Who was she?”

“My first wife, who died at nineteen, having a child. The wrong way round. Feet first.”

“Did the child live?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the child now?”

“Lucy—my second wife—looks after him. She loves him more than I do. With a true, human love, which I lack.”

“Go back to Lucy, and love your son, ‘Farm Boy'.”

She kissed him on the forehead, and he returned to Felicity's room, got in beside her, and fell asleep.

Felicity lay in her bed, unmoving. She was thinking, or rather feeling, that she had lost Phillip. She had seen him returning along the passage, and entering the bedroom of the beautiful, the graceful Stefania Rozwitz, whom she adored. If only her mother had allowed her to train as a dancer, as she had wanted to when a child.

Phillip went to London to make a complaint about the engine of his car. The Portland Street salesman was suavely repetitive.

“The Motor Association engineer’s report made it clear, surely, sir, that the oil-flow needed only a little adjustment. The regulating screw on the oil-pipe to the overhead valve tappets needed a turn or two, I thought I heard him say.”

“I fancy that is what
you
suggested.”

“Really, sir? But I’d not seen the car before, it only came in that morning. Have you tried adjusting the oil screw, sir?”

“Oh yes. There’s no compression in one of the cylinders. You can hear the air hissing past the piston when you turn the handle.”

“A broken ring, perhaps, sir. If you’d like us to take off the cylinder head for you, and can spare a couple of hours, I’ll get a mechanic to draw the piston.”

Phillip went back that afternoon. The front cylinder was badly scored. “The gudgeon pin apparently came adrift, sir. It looks like a rebore.”

“How much will a rebore cost?”

“We might do it for ten pounds. She’ll require new pistons, of course. Shall we say fifteen pounds for the job?”

“I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to pay for the entire job, since I bought the ’bus as it was. Caveat emptor, you know.”

“That’s very sporting of you, sir. I’ll tell you what, we’ll throw in the pistons. How about a tenner for the job, sir? By the look of the toe-mark on the floorboard by the accelerator pedal, the last owner caned your engine somewhat.”

When the work was done he drove home at thirty miles an hour. The dipstick showed clean oil, and none used. He must take Lucy for a drive, at once.

“You look after the house while we’re gone, Felicity. I’m going
to take Lucy to look over that house at Flumen Monachorum we saw on the way to the Yacht Club last Saturday.”

Felicity felt unhappy because Phillip did not invite her to come, too. Had he forgotten what he had said to her? ‘We’ll go over together, and if the place is all right, I’ll take it, then well bring Lucy and let it be a surprise for her.’

Now she watched them driving away, and felt forlorn. He did not really love her. Was he in love with Stefania Rozwitz? Had he slept with her that night of the party?

*

“Lucy, d’ you think Mother will mind if we move some miles south of Fawley, now that they’re going to live there when Father retires?”

“Well, all Mother’s letters have been about how wonderful it will be for her to be so near the children.”

“But Skirr farmhouse is sold, as you know, with the rest of the estate, and we’ve got to give vacant possession by Michaelmas. And frankly, I don’t fancy living in one of the flats at Fawley, right on top of my parents.”

Lucy thought that this was perhaps not the time to tell Phillip that Mother had written to her, asking her if it were possible that she, Lucy, might take Doris’ two little boys, so that Doris could go back to her old job of teaching in London, and spend her holidays in the country with them. Mother had said in her letter that, when she and Father came to live there, it might result in a reconciliation between Father and Doris, now that the marriage between Doris and Bob Willoughby had failed.

Lucy would love to have Doris’ two little boys, it would be so good for Billy and Peter to have some cousins to play with. After all, Fawley was big enough, and there was plenty of garden, and the downs behind. But Phillip did not get on with either of his sisters, Elizabeth or Doris. So Lucy said nothing about the letter from his mother.

“I don’t want to live at Fawley. The downs will be out of bounds, tanks churning up the turf. Instead of rooks cawing there’ll be the crack of tank cannon, and splintered trees.” He thought of Bourlon Wood in the battle for Cambrai in November 1917, and drove on slower than before.

“Didn’t they say at the enquiry that there wouldn’t be any firing this side of the downs, Pip?”

“Well, to be honest, it isn’t altogether a question of tanks or a firing range. It’s the fact that I’ve failed in what I undertook to
do. As you know, Uncle Hilary bought back the family land my grandfather threw away, so that I could succeed him, and I—well—I threw it away, too. And I want to be near a trout stream, to watch fish, for my book. And I’d like to move nearer the sea, and I think I’ve found a house. It was to be a surprise, but I’ve told you before we get there. We’re on the way now.”

“How lovely!”

“It’s got plenty of room,” he went on with a stir of optimism, “and it’s all by itself in a hamlet called Flumen Monachorum. There used to be monks in the Abbey, but Henry the Eighth dissolved them. Lord Abeline lives at the Abbey, he’s the
landlord
.”

Lucy blushed. Should she tell Phillip that George Abeline was her cousin, by marriage? No, it was not important.

The elderly tenants were only too pleased that someone had come to look at the house. Over tea Colonel Gott said that he and his wife wanted to move nearer a town, the place was rather isolated for them, they had been thinking of going back to Cheltenham to be among friends. It was a jolly little place, he declared, not too difficult to run, and plenty of help was available in the hamlet. The bath-water was fed to a tank in the roof from a ram beside the river, and drinking water came from a well, as was usual in the district. They were shown round the bedrooms, five in all, and three living rooms in addition to kitchen and scullery. There were the usual outhouses, and drainage by septic tank.

“There’s a couple of miles of fishin’, the rent is moderate, forty pounds a year, tenant paying rates, another twenty. The very place to study trout, if you want to write about them. I’ve read your book on the otter’s wanderings with interest, knowing the Devon
moorland
country more or less. We took this place and the fishin’ on a seven-year lease, two of which are yet to run. I’ll speak to the Steward, if you like, and may I tell him that you’re prepared to consider taking over the unexpired portion of the lease?”

“Thank you, Colonel Gott.”

Lucy and Phillip went away happy at the prospect of living in such a secluded place. They drove into the town, and visited the Steward, a solicitor to whom Phillip made a formal application to take over the remainder of Colonel Gott’s lease at Midsummer. For references he gave the name of Lucy’s father, his uncle Sir Hilary Maddison, and his bank.

“I’ll put your application before his Lordship, who will want to see you, Mr. Maddison.”

The following week, wanting to run-in the rebored engine, he set off for London to break the news to his parents. He took Felicity with him, she was going to stay at home for awhile. He said he was determined to begin the trout book, for which he had had the advance royalties more than a year ago. She had heard that before.

“I don’t see why I can’t do the book on the trout at the same time as the war book, once I get into a routine. I’ll send a chapter of each to you every day, and not re-write one sentence. Then when I’m in full flow, you can come down. I mean, if you can live at home for awhile, you can also begin the novel you want to write, can’t you?”

She remained silent: she felt depression growing upon her: this was his way of telling her it was over. She tried not to cry. A little farther on he stopped beside a wood near Andover and said, “Come on.” She trembled: she prayed she would not fail him by remaining tense, so that he would turn away from her. They lay on dry leaves. She was thrilled, by his sudden fierceness, and hearing from him the ‘three little words’ of the current revue song, felt herself becoming tumescent with a feeling of love beyond desire; holding him in her arms she felt that the earth was rocking, while involuntary cries came from her. And afterwards as she lay beside him staring at the sky beyond the canopies of the trees she was lapped in happiness that now her dream of having a child before she was twenty-one might be fulfilled. If she became pregnant she would go away without telling him, so that he would never feel burdened by her ugly presence, and have her baby alone in a remote cottage somewhere.

They drove on to London in silence, and Phillip put her down by the underground station at Hammersmith Broadway.

“Take care of yourself, dearest,” she said, hoping he would want to kiss her goodbye. But all he said was, “I’ll telephone you as soon as I know what I’m doing. I’m going to see my parents, who are coming to live at Fawley, then I’ll be at the Barbarian Club. Would you care to meet me there tonight?”

“Oh yes!”

*

Phillip felt guilty when he saw how much his mother was looking forward to a new life, as she called it, among her children’s little ones. Had Lucy spoken to him about having Doris’ two boys when she went back to teaching?

“Well, as you know, Mother, I don’t get on very well with
either Doris or Elizabeth. Also—now please don’t be upset—Lucy and I may not be living at Rookhurst. You see,” he went on, speaking quietly to control a feeling of exasperation, “all the estate is sold, including Skirr Farm, so we’ve got to give up the farmhouse. Then the brook, and the Longpond, all belong to the Army authorities, and there’ll be officers fishing for trout there. So I must move, to be beside a stream, to observe fish, before I can write about them. But we’ll be quite near.”

“Oh, I am so relieved, my dear son.”

How like a child she was, she had never really grown up——

“You see, Phillip, your father is a very lonely man, and looks forward to going for walks with you, where he walked with his father when he was a boy. He talks about the walled garden, too, and how he will be able to grow fruit again, against the walls. Now tell me all about Lucy, and Billy, and little Peter and Rosamund——Oh, I cannot tell you how I am looking forward to seeing them all together, and in that lovely country, Phillip. I am counting the days to next spring, when Father retires from the office! Oh, must you go so soon? Won’t you wait to see your father? He will be so disappointed. Yes, I’ll give him your love, my dear son. You are a good son to us, we can never thank you enough for inviting us both to live at Fawley.”

“Oh, Mother! You’re doing me a favour, by occupying part of it.”

*

An old soldier wearing the riband of the 1914 Star arrived on a bicycle one morning when Phillip was looking over the new house with Billy. He had a most woeful expression, as though he had found himself homeless after some years of fancied security. This indeed was the case.

“Sir, permission to speak to you. Rippingall, sir, at your service!”

Phillip knew the soldierly address. He liked it. He took the old fellow into the house. After a cup of tea, he decided that he was that rare thing, a gentle soul. Also he was of a literary turn of mind, having read Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and other classical writers.

Rippingall explained that he had been the gardener and house-parlourman to the old vicar of Flumen Monachorum, who had allowed for his occasional bouts of malaria; but the new vicar—“His Reverence bears the name of Scrimgeour, sir, I expect you know the gentleman, he comes from Liverpool, I believe”—had shown him no sympathy after one of his bouts, and had told him to go.

Rippingall had a pinched, bluish look about him, and was so earnest in offering himself for work of any kind that Phillip took him on, especially when he told him that he had been a
mess-waiter
in a regular regiment of foot, and had also worked as a
house-parlourman
since the war. He could cook, wash clothes, keep accounts, paint, do a bit of masoning, carpentry, “and what not”.

“Well, you’ve told me what you can do, so I won’t bother with what you can’t do.”

“I am a trained soldier, sir, a trained valet, house-parlourman, cook, gardener, and what not, sir.”

“Have you been in service other than the Rectory?”

“Sir, I was valet to Captain Runnymeade for nine years,” replied Rippingall, giving him a salute, while the smart raising of the right arm revealed a half-bottle of gin in the pocket of his threadbare tweed jacket.

“How often do you go on a blind, old soldier?”

“Only when those who are, in a manner of speaking, my betters, become more or less critical of me, sir,” and he gave Phillip another salute.

“How often is that?”

“About twice a year,” replied Rippingall, trying to click heels which were worn down.

Rippingall was such a success, the garden beginning to look so orderly, and Lucy so pleased, that Phillip wrote to Felicity, and asked her to come back. He was now, he said, sure that things would be different.

*

Billy had a passion for the tar-engine which was then working on the London road. It was a beautiful thing in his eyes, which shone whenever it was praised by his father when they passed it in the sports-car. But sometimes Phillip teased Billy about it, pointing out that it gave off an unpleasant smell, that it was sticky and never washed itself, that in fact it was a detestable if useful mass of congealed tar. This would enrage Billy, and his tea-things were liable to be pushed away, and a word shouted at his father that always displeased Lucy—“Bug off, Daddy, bug off.” Lucy would attempt to explain that Billy felt strongly about the tar-engine and that Phillip was upsetting him and also encouraging him to use silly words.

“He is being inoculated against such words,” Phillip said to Felicity.

At the tone of his father’s voice the child would show a
con
fusion
of feeling, as he glanced first at Lucy’s face, then not at his father’s but on the ground. He would pout, frown, go away by himself; and Lucy would return to her sewing, or her cleaning, or another of the duties which kept her working from early morning to late at night. Phillip would feel in himself something of the confusion of what the little boy was suffering, and return to his writing room, to potter about, doing anything but write, waiting to bring himself clear and as it were into focus again. Was it not good that the boy should swear and shout, if he felt like it, he demanded of Felicity, who had come into the room almost on tiptoe lest she interrupt his thoughts.