The Gale of the World (13 page)

Phillip was jubilant. The perplexity—a sort of double-dealing of the mind—over Laura was gone for the moment. He had
somewhere
to go that evening, something to look forward to! He took new interest in the river, seeing it as a score of separate streams bursting out of the great turf-sponge of the high moor: he must explore all the threads and runners which had channered
immemorially
the faces of the rocks. Salmon would now be moving up to spawn in little runners clear of silt, and bright with oxygen absorbed from the pure air. He had heard that sixty brooks, or waters as they were called, fed the East and West Lyn rivers in their confluent descents to the Severn Sea.

Shortly before seven o'clock that evening Phillip arrived at Willowpool. After a couple of glasses of sherry, Mrs. Riversmill drove them to Molly Bucentaur's. The last lane before they arrived was steep, and loose with shillets of stone. It was dark when they arrived. A diesel engine thumped upon the night air. Two rounded pillars of shillet and a seven-barred gate of oak. New, he felt, as he got out to hold it open. Mrs. Riversmill wanted to drive in backwards, the easier to get out again. He thought to guide her by standing between the nearside pillar and tail of the motor, to give soundings.

“Two feet clear of the post this side! Come on back! You'll clear it on that lock.”

There was a smell of goats upon the night air. The driver seemed to lose her nerve. “I can't see!” she cried. So he ran round and shone a torch downwards on the offside pillar.

“I'm not an idiot! I can see what I'm doing this side!”

He returned to his original stance. “All clear on your near-side.”

“What good's that to me? I can't see
my
side now you've gone away,” so he darted behind the car, and as she went back slowly, moved the beam first one side then the other.

“What's the good of that? You're just dazzling me! Why the hell don't you let me get in my own way? What are all those yellow eyes looking at me? Switch off your torch, you fool!”

“They're goats!” cried Riversmill.

The driver went forward, before reversing once more. There followed a scraping sound and a bump. The engine stalled. The driver yelled, “There you are, you see, you've mucked me up completely, so that I don't know what I'm doing! Why don't you mind your own business?” as she went forward again into the lane.

Something pushed Phillip from behind. It was a goat. He flashed the torch away from the car. Several other goats were
standing about. Bleats arose as a light was switched on to illumine the area before a white-washed cottage front. A door opened and a girlish voice said, “Do I hear sounds of revelry by night?” There was much bleating while many apparitions clustered around a spry young woman walking towards them, hair
au
page
boy
, rosy cheeks and smiling lips. She and the goats leapt nimbly aside as the car drove fast backwards and stopped with a lurch. “So glad you could come, my dears. And at last I have met ‘the water wanderer'! Tilly darling, how sweet of you to bring Cousin Phillip to our little shack! Freddie, did you paint the Glen, or was the light bad? Now do come in, everybody. No, not you, King Billy!” she cried, addressing a large horned goat. “Take your wives back to the paddock.”

She turned to Phillip. “The last of the Brockholes herd. How do you like Exmoor after East Anglia?”

“It's like coming home.”

“How is Lucy? I'm longing to meet her again—and the
children
. D'you know, I've never seen them? Time flies!”

“What a sight East Anglia is now,” said Riversmill. “Rows and rows of Halifaxes and Lan casters, all along a couple of hundred miles of the Eastern Counties, the perching places for rooks and crows. In some, squatters are living. Great cruciform runways a mile long each way, ruining the countryside.”

“Come into our shack!” she replied. To Phillip, “We built it ourselves, all cardboard and corrugated iron, tied together by string,” as they entered what to Phillip was a new, well-
proportioned
room, lit by concealed lights revealing panel'd walls,
parquet
floor, tables and chairs all of some pinkish wood.

“We threw two cottages into one, and knocked this up
ourselves
,” said the hostess, seen now to be white-haired with enamelled cheeks and lustrous eyes above mascara'd lashes. “I'm Molly Bucentaur” she said with a smile showing splendid teeth. “Lucy and I share a grandmother. So you and I are cousins!” she said, glowing before him.

“How perfectly splendid!” he replied, with sudden happiness.

“We've read all your books. Miranda, my elder daughter, knows every word by heart. I've promised to take you up after you've had a drink. Do help yourself from the sideboard.”

“What lovely wood.”

“It's Brockholes yew, Phillip. Bring your glass with you.”

She led him up open stairs. Within a bedroom two girls and a small boy were lying, each in a separate bed with reading lamp
at bed-head. The boy, seeing round his book who had come, immediately went under the bedclothes.

“Imogen, this is Cousin Phillip.”

The younger of the two girls continued to lie back, murmuring, ‘How do you do,' while her sister sat up, a mass of dark hair
falling
on shoulders and pyjama jacket which revealed the curves of a fully developed bust.

“I've brought Cousin Phillip! Isn't he good to come all this way to see us?”

A muffled “No!” came from under blankets.

“Yes!” cried the dark girl, as Molly turned to Phillip, saying, “Miranda's mad about anything to do with the Great War.” She turned to her daughter. “Well, I've captured your hero at last! No, Anda darling, I won't say any more, I'm going now.” With an arch look from the open door she said, “Don't let her tire you, will you, Phillip?”

“I feel like Parsifal among the Flower Maidens.”

“There, now, isn't that charming, Anda?” She returned to kiss her; then the younger daughter. The boy ducked the embrace, with a stern “Mother!”, as he leapt out of bed to hide beneath it. She playfully smacked his bottom, and left.

Phillip, standing with a smile near the dark girl, said, “Thank you for reading my books.”

“Well, you know, Cousin Phillip, you're a pretty good writer. You're the only English author I know who can present the truth objectively in all dimensions. ‘Buster' and I are agreed about that. He says that the folly of England's leadership throughout the past fifty years, which your writings illustrate in their own right, reminds him of Goethe's
Zauberlehrling
,
except that there remains no magician to undo the spell now leading the white races to ruin and their civilisation to extinction.”

“Unless the magician, or rather the prophet, is Hereward Birkin.”

“I haven't heard of Hereward Birkin.”

“You will.”

There was a pause. Then she said, “We've all read your
Water
Wanderer.
I've wept enough to ‘water heaven with my tears', over that book. Wasn't your otter really a woman, Cousin Phillip?”

She gazed at him with large brown eyes.

Molly said in the doorway, “Is she a swan, Phillip, or just a young goose?”

“Both are beautiful birds, perhaps she has something of the swan. And if all her generation has the fidelity of both swan and goose, the human race will cease to be predatory and cannibalistic.”

“
There
,
Anda, you heard what Cousin Phillip said? Isn't he a sweet man? I must flee. ‘Buster' has just arrived.”

The boy shouted, “Send up ‘Buster', Mummie, won't you, to say goodnight? I must know if he's got his new glider,” and disappeared.

“Gliding—they do that on the Dunstable Downs,” said Phillip.

“Do you glide, sir?”

“I want to, Roger.”

“How wizard!”

“I must go now, young cousins.”

Miranda held out her arms, hugged him, touched him on the cheek with her lips; then, a little overcome by her temerity, turned round to bump her pillow violently before sitting back in position as before the visitation.

*

That morning in London ‘Buster' had gone to see Laura. He found her tender, compassionate, a true friend. Even so, he said au revoir to her with relief. His wounds had been severe and terminal. He dreamed vaguely of some heroic occasion when he might lose his life by self-sacrifice. He found some relief in driving an open four-and-a-half-litre super-charged Bentley on full throttle across the Great Plain, while he ruminated upon an idea that had almost become a dedication since a meeting with Hereward Birkin, who had given him a copy of a book, composed in prison during the war, declaring that both Fascism and its opponent, Financial Democracy, had failed; and that the nations of Europe must unite, all grievances and revengeful feelings changed to brotherhood, in ‘Europe a Nation'.

‘Buster' knew the opening passage of Birkin's book by heart, after several readings, or rather incantations. “
We
were
divided,
and
we
were
conquered.
That
is
the
tragic
epitaph
of
two
war
generations.
Those
words
alone
should
adorn
the
grave
of
the
youth
of
Europe
—”

*

During the battle of the Reichswald, when he had been badly wounded, ‘Buster' was taken prisoner and treated with chivalry by the enemy. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, learning of the prisoner's name, visited him in hospital. to ask if he was related
to the Major Manfred Cloudesley who was one of his heroes of the Great War. “Such bravery, such courage in the air, Colonel!” He was delighted to learn that this Lord Cloudesley was Manfred's son. And the Führer had a high admiration for dutiful English soldiers, he declared. He had, indeed, offered to put the Wehrmacht at the disposal of the English, should the British Empire ever be attacked. Yes, he had made that offer, and when the English Government had declared war in September 1939, over a matter of the lost provinces in East Prussia returning to the Reich, the Führer had been as surprised as he was distressed.

Now and again, since the disastrous end of ‘the Brother's War', ‘Buster' had wondered if it would be possible, by employing gliders one moonlit night, to descend upon Spandau prison and rescue Rudolf Hess—who had been Göring's adjutant when his father had been shot down in October, 1918, over Mossy Face Wood—the Bois d'Havrincourt. It would be a gesture equal in magnanimity with that of the young Winston Churchill towards the Boer generals, Smuts and Botha, after the South African war.

The R.A.F., pranging Fresnes prison in France during the war, had breached one wall with bombs, in order to release partisan prisoners due to be shot …

Bombs useless for Spandau. Silence and moonlight, black gliders, the only possible tactics …

‘Buster' lifted his foot from the throttle until the engine of the Bentley was little more than idling along at 50 m.p.h. He
considered
: First, the General Idea. The guard duties were in
mutation
every month—Russian, American, British. Silence,
moonlight
. The British month. British guards. Gliders. Softly, softly, catchee monkey. His right hand brushed up his moustaches. Spandau prison was beside the road to West Berlin. Gliders might drop steel wires to fuse the electric fence. During some future International Gliding competition? Moonlight. That raw-
carrot-painted
monstrosity beyond (a) mesh fence, (b) electric fence, and (c) seven-yard high wall. Prison fifty yards back from road. Barred moon-glazed windows. Descent by parachute would be visible. Black gliders landing near the prison. Commandos. Get some of the boys together. Trusties. He could imagine no further; until—Ah, start a gliding club! Based on the marsh grazings behind the pebble ridge at Porlock! Likelihood of European
championship
being held in West Germany,
out
. Ah, gliding club with the Army of Occupation! H'm. He yawned, suddenly weary. No proper breakfast. Laura's vegetarian food—uncooked tomatoes,
chopped olives, sardines, black pumpernickel bread gave no staying power. Laura mortifying the flesh. God, if only he could give her what she wanted: what
he
wanted; an heir.

He pulled up before the inn at Mere and went in to drink beer at the bar with gentleman farmers who were ploughing up the Plain to grow barley to fatten calves for baby beef. There he had luncheon, including a fillet steak, and went on his journey feeling optimistic. He was staying the night at Molly Bucentaur's cottage up by Bewick down.

*

“Darling Hugh, do go up and say goodnight to the children. They're all
so
looking forward to seeing you. Roger wants to know if you found a new block for your motor, whatever that is.”

“Thanks entirely to Maddison, whom I met in the Medicean, I was fortunate in finding one in a disused maltings on the East Coast. It was one in a million chance. I spotted it, rusted up, in a corner. Probably the only unused Bentley four-and-a-half-litre block left in Europe.”

“Wasn't it frightfully rusty?”

“All the better for being seasoned. I rather fancy, when the new models of any make come again on the market, their engines won't last. A cylinder block of cast iron requires a couple of years, normally, to harden and weather in the open.”

“How clever of you to know such things, darling.”

“Entirely due to a chance meeting with Phillip Maddison.”

A voice called from the top of the stairs, “Cousin Hugh, don't forget to come up and say goodnight!”

“Yes,” said Miranda's voice. “I want to ask you something, Cousin Hugh.”

“I asked first!”, cried the boy, pattering on bare feet down the open stairs which led directly into the living room. He flung himself at ‘Buster', who turned half-sideways to receive the impact, while Miranda stood at the top of the stairs, wearing one of her grandmother's evening dresses of the early twentieth century. Seeing her there, Molly went up the yew-wood treads to lift her hair back upon the shoulders.

“What a picture!” exclaimed Riversmill, holding head on one side. “My God, I must paint her just as she is, Molly. That neck! Look at those shoulders—and the line of the collar bone!”