The Gale of the World (32 page)

With steady fast movement Foxy moved in. Inky made a feint movement, changed direction and leapt over its opponent’s head. Equally quick, Foxy swung round and at a cry of “Banish Inky!” took the rabbit by the scruff and trotted away with it round the house.

“Don’t worry,” said Piers. “It’s a game they play. Come and see the end of it.”

They walked together through open double-doors at the end of a croquet lawn, and came to the kitchen door, followed by a
bedraggled
Inky. “He always has potato crisps with yeast after a ducking. Naughty Inky!”, addressing the rabbit. “You only bite my trousers in order to get flung in the pond and get extra food, don’t you, naughty Inky?” The kitchen door opened, a young woman came out.

“Beth!”

“Melissa!”

Surprise. Smiling faces. Happiness.

“When did you leave India?”

Explanations. “It’s a small world after all, isn’t it? Mel and Laura and I nursed together in Calcutta during the war, Lucy.”

Inky was striking the floor with hind-feet. “He’s angry because I haven’t added Bovril to his crisps,” she said.

“Gets away with it every time,” said Piers. “Well trained, aren’t you Inky,” as the rabbit went to bite his trousers. “Manners, Inky!”, whereupon Inky tried another way: he sat up and begged. A teaspoon of Bovril was flipped over the crisps, and the rabbit settled down to nibble.

“Foxy brought him in one morning, when he was small. I think Foxy knew we liked curiosities. Inky’s remained here ever since. He chases away ordinary grey rabbits, being a bit of a race-purist, I fancy.”

He put the kettle on the crook.

“How is Phillip? And the other children? Sit down, and tell me all the latest. How is Laura, is she happy with ‘Buster’?”

“Why not go out and sit by the cedar tree?” suggested Beth. “I’ll bring out the tea-trolley. No help needed, thanks, I can manage.”

And sitting in the shade of the cedar’s dark horizontal branches, while ring-doves coo’d among distant oaks and beeches, they enjoyed a tomato lettuce salad, with herb omelettes, radishes, and spring onions on tender green stalks. Then a plum cake, and farmhouse pot of tea in West Country style.

When Lucy and Beth went inside the house with the baby, Piers said to Melissa, “I suppose you’ll see Phil while you’re down there?”

“I hope to see Laura, too. I hear she’s learning to glide, with ‘Buster’ as tutor. But my first objective is to finish my advanced course of Diaphany, under Caspar Field.”

“Archie Plugge was here the other day. Apparently his boss sacked him. Archie had all sorts of tales about the place, some of which, when drunk I suppose, he ‘leaked’ to the reporters. I know nothing about Caspar Schwenkfelder, or Field as he now apparently wants to be called.”

When she did not speak, Piers went on, “Archie said
something
about Phil’s sister, now living at Lynmouth, but refusing to see Phil, or was it the other way about. I couldn’t really
understand
what Archie was saying, he was economising on his usual tipple, surgical spirit. Asked if he could stay here. I’m afraid we hadn’t a room ready.”

“Is Phillip writing?”

“I gathered not. Archie had a story of some local complications, but then again I couldn’t quite make out the details.”

Lucy had told Melissa that there had always been trouble between Phillip and Elizabeth. With complete belief in Diaphany, she decided to ask Lucy, later, to take her with her when she went to see her sister-in-law.

When they were on the road again, Lucy said, “Piers is all right at last, thank goodness,” as she thought contentedly that she would soon be seeing the boys; and on the following day, meeting
Rosamund at Minehead, from her school in Berkshire.

Meanwhile, the idea was that she and Melissa should stop the night at Molly’s, and go on the next day to Shep Cot, leaving Melissa on the way at Oldstone Castle.

Melissa believed that Diaphany was the only way to free the spirit, to bring light to the darkness of a torn and revengeful post-war world filled with neuroses and despair.

And while they moved east across the moor she was thinking. If only Phillip will believe that Diaphany is in line with all he has written—a means to free the spirit! Dear, dear Phillip, you have revealed to others the true way, but cannot heal yourself—without my help.

*

Melissa in her bedroom at Oldstone Castle: late afternoon shadows slanting to the east: the open window of the bedroom looking upon small sloping fields divided by stone banks: open moor beyond, rising to the sky.

At first, she had felt a great loneliness coming from the moor, which had drawn her to walk on the lower slopes where heather, ling, and dwarf furze with its dark yellow flowers were hot in the sun. The only living things she saw were rock-pipits, drab little birds of the wilderness: nothing else, no moving distant figure of man or dog.

Upon returning, she felt mournful, and went upstairs to lie down in her bedroom. There, upon her bed, she read Phillip’s editorial in
The
New
Horizon,
and thought that among those lost legions were her two brothers, killed in the Second World War. And lying there, she became aware of the scent of honey. Nigel had kept hives: could it be—Bees were passing the window. She got up to watch them. The air held a ground-swell of almost imaginary vibration: probably a secondary honey-flow to the hives within the walled garden. Molly had said that the July rains, followed by sunshine, had brought new blossom to the ling and the bell-heather.

While she stood there, a shadow moved across one of the distant small fields, then over another, silently sweeping across
stonewalling
, to be lost in dark brown heather of the incult moor. Looking up, she saw a glider about to bank for a turn.

The sail-plane seemed to pause in flight before going towards the sun. High in the sky above it, hung a fleece of grey cloudlets reminding her of the dapple on her nursery rocking horse. In her mind she saw her brothers, Giles and Nigel, wagering with
bulls-
eye
sweets, who could move Dobbin on his stand around the nursery floor without upsetting. The picture dissolved; giving way to lines of a poem by Walter de la Mare.

And, like clouds in the height of the sky

Our hearts stood still                        

In the hush of an age gone by                 

Nigel. British War Cemetery, Bayeux. Three years since he was left with most of his platoon in the long grass of a Normandy
bocage
during the breakout at Falaise. She read again the last part of
The
Lost
Legions,
printed in the magazine lent to her by Miranda.

A light-play, as of sun on August leaves,

A height-soft moan, wooden intermittent rattle,

And, as the scrollèd conflict eastward weaves

Feelers drooping darkly out of battle.

Giles. R.A.F. Cemetery. Runnymede. Battle of Britain,
September
1940, Biggin Hill.

Laura, now some miles away in Falcon One, was dazzled by
reflected
sunlight splayed upon the sea to the west. She was moving fast, at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Soon the glider was over the Atlantic. She saw diving birds sitting on the wrinkled sea far below, as she approached Lundy. A feeling of quiet sadness possessed her. It is always so, she thought, for those who reflect. The sun-god is going down to his grave. The genes of innumerable forebears speak through the poets.

“I shall look on the west, old Father Housman!” she shouted as the mercury fell.

It had been a day when her thoughts had turned perpetually from the visible to the unseen world—to the cosmos perceived from within, that world wherein the Imagination works to create the visible.

“O God,” she said aloud. “What am I doing here, in this
contrived
image of a bird! I am not a bird, I am a woman. I must be loved or I don’t want to live!” She became hysterical. “Blood of my blood, bone of my bone, where are you? Where are you, my bloody, bony comrade? The bed of blood and bone is best, you tell us; but what sort of a bed did
you
lie upon, old Father Housman? Your thoughts gnawing the image of that
undergraduate
love-of-your-life who went into the Indian Army and left you alone on the banks of the Cam? Is there ease for you, where you now lie, wearing the turning globe, my Shropshire Lad that never was?”

It is best to be beyond the sunset bar, she thought, as she turned back. But where could she go, when she returned?

Far below, gulls assembled on the sands were seed-pearls. As she watched, the pearls were scattered by a running speck; pearls sprouted wings and were flying low over waves to their roosts upon cliff-ledges of the two rocky arms enclosing the bay. The speck-like dog then raced, apparently, to its master, walking on the sands. Could it be Phillip? Could she land on the sands beside him? How was the tide?

A cohort of black swifts moved, screaming, past the glider. The birds began to ring above her, she could just hear their
whistling
above the hiss of air flowing over her own aluminium sails. She thought of the poem in Phillip’s magazine by the dead pilot. O, she could have loved that boy!

A longing to see Melissa came upon her. Lucy with her
children
had come out of the water-lift ascending the steep rocky face to Lynton that morning, and they had had coffee together. Lucy told her that Melissa was at Oldstone Castle. And so that afternoon, having climbed on a thermal from Porlock marshes,
Laura had sailed over the castle on a flight to the sea, into the setting sun.

Now she was set for the return—eager to see Melissa, to drink ale together in the Sun Inn. The altimeter registered five thousand feet. If she met with no disturbances she would be able to reach the launching meadow in one gradual descent.

A slight wind was now moving from land to sea, by which she gained another five hundred feet in a series of spirals before putting down the nose five degrees for a straight course. Thus it was that Melissa, a little over twelve minutes later—for Laura now had an air-speed of nearly seventy miles an hour—saw a head looking over the edge of the cockpit of the glider and a hand waving. She waved back. Molly had told her who the pilot was; and both girls felt an inner warmth that they had something to look forward to.

*

It is such a beautiful day, Phillip said to himself, as they walked through the wood on the path beside the East Lyn river.
Sunshine
glinted above the branches of trees, whose leaves echoed dreamily the sounds, varied and gentle, of water and rock. The smooth contented gliding over stones deep bedded below the surface, nothing to disturb the water-flow: little quarrels under roots, water returning in eddy, unable to leave a query, a question, a quarrel over rights—water must move on, oak-root must stay, bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: reinforcements come in freshets down from The Chains, but no change, the talking went on as before during days of low summer level. Froth gathered, slowly revolving; water had no patience, although in time water always wore away every stone, shifted every rock, undermining every dam and weir and tree that stood in its way.

But generally in summer much of this wilfulness of being never at rest is abated. Yet water is ever on duty; it dies when it does not move, dying without the bubbles of turbulence from which it absorbs oxygen to nourish all life under its surfaces, from plant and shrimp and limpet to small fish and thence all the way up the aqueous scale to the lordly salmon born in nearly all the three score headwaters of the Lyn. There the alevin is hatched—right up under The Chains, there it poises itself with head upstream while yet its yolk-sac is hardly absorbed, watching, watching water ahead … growing to be a parr, with brown trout markings; and in May of the second year of its life it changes to a coat of silver scales for its journey down to the sea, no longer than a
man’s hand: to return after a year or two of rich ocean feeding, the length of a man’s arm.

For if salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.

I am so happy, said Lucy to herself as the family wandered along the path above the East Lyn, on the way to Watersmeet, where a lesser stream joined the river, both hurrying to the sea. They were exploring. Lucy, Laura and Melissa walked together; while Peter, Rosamund, David and Jonathan were way ahead with the delightful new cousins, Miranda, Imogen and Roger, looking at all this wonderful new country with bright eyes, eager faces, and laughter.

Behind the three women walked Phillip, carrying an old army valise on his back, in which, like a papoose, baby Sarah was standing up, supported under her arms by straps out of which she tried continually to jump, in order to join the boys and girls far away under the beechen trees whose green leaves glittered at the top. He divined her feelings, and called a halt, to release a little white occasional quadruped.

They rested in the dappled light-shadows by the meeting of waters, Phillip saying to Miranda, “Here Shelley may have sat, and sailed paper boats down on the surface, with messages of hope.”