The Phoenix Generation (6 page)

“It was G. K. Chesterton who wrote, I seem to remember, that Noah said, while in the Ark, ‘I don’t care where the water goes, so long as it doesn’t get into the wine.’ I live by a river—er—a trout stream—usually I walk—or—er—rather splodge by the river, looking for signs of life—I am almost duck-footed, and quack before meals——”

Richard told Phillip afterwards, when he called at Hillside Road, that he had to switch off because there were so many er-er-ers, and he could not bear the feeling that his son was so nervous.

When Phillip returned to Flumen Monachorum the slate was gone. In its place was a concrete slab, two days set.

“But I told you I wanted the slate left, Felicity. Damn it, wasn’t that enough? Why didn’t you remind the mason? Where is the slate?”

“He broke it up with his pick before I could stop him.”

Her face was made-up. She had been eating little or nothing for days, and drinking only a glass of lemon juice and water every morning, in the hope of losing some of the fat she had put on, almost to her horror: for she had been vain of her figure, and was now fearful of losing it.

“But it takes a lot to break up a slab like that. It could only be broken up by scores of blows. So what do your words mean, ‘before you could stop him’?”

“I was in my room, typing your notes about the river, and I didn’t hear anything.”

The new hearth had been much in Phillip’s thoughts during the cold wet drive from London. It had rained at Chiswick, he had not stopped to put up the hood, longing to get home, to relax before the new hearth, flaming with beech logs. She stood there, feeling numb that he was cross with her.

“Where’s Rippingall?”

“I’m afraid he’s not very well.”

Phillip went to the boiler room. There lay Rippingall, blotto. When he returned to the sitting-room Felicity said timidly, “Shall I get you some tea?”

“Billy at least might have helped. He knew.”

Billy and Peter, who had hurried out of the kitchen when the headlights had flashed across the window, sat beside his feet as he stood, still in soaked leather flying coat and fur collar, before the cold dull hearth. He felt a sense of shame at his outburst now, for his arrival had had the effect of making their faces so animated. He saw Billy hang his head, before the boy turned away pouting. Then Peter came and stood at his knee, looking up innocently into his face. Billy caught his father’s eye and frowned, before going out of the room.

“Dad,” said Peter. “It wasn’t Billy’s fault. Billy was up to school, Dad.”

The nursery door was ajar; it moved; he saw a face under tousled black hair looking earnestly at him out of very dark eyes. Rosamund was inspecting him, finger in mouth. The head
disappeared
, the door moved back, then round the corner came a crawling object which pulled itself up to his knees and stood there, continuing its stare. This object made a noise like
hur-hur
when he picked it up and, opening his coat, sat down with Roz on his knee and hugged her. She turned round and almost threw herself on his chest, burying her head in its warmth.

The concrete hearth was not entirely set. With a piece of stick he gouged the outline of a trout in the cold grey gritty stuff. There were stones in the concrete and some made the engraving unsmooth, and when he dug them out with Rosamund’s help, left the grooves rough. He worked on his knees, the child silent beside him, while Peter watched earnestly. When he had finished, observed all the time by the little girl, he looked round, uncramping his back, and saw that Billy had returned.

“Billy, I’m so sorry. I beg your pardon. Of course you were at school.”

“It don’t matter.”

And giving his father a mournful look Billy hung his head and again went out of the door. Phillip wondered how much of Billy’s attitude came from the fact that he had been told, some time before, by a woman who came to look after Lucy when she was ill, that Lucy was not his real mother.

But this was not the cause; it lay in his own inability to give the child the warmth of his body, in love. Oh God, was he passing on the
mort
cordum
to his son, as Lucy’s father had passed on the
mort
main
to
his
children? The dead-hand of laziness, of selfishness, of lack of imagination, which had been the cause of the once-great
Copleston family estates coming down to the derelict Works in the garden at Down Close? But who was he to criticise, he who had thrown away all but the house, that shell of a family, at Rookhurst?

“Billy, Billy, come and help me make a fire. Billy, Billy, come back, you are my best boy.”

“Billy is, y’know, too,” said Peter, staring up with his mild gaze.

*

It turned out to be a good hearth for burning wood, throwing out heat and giving contentment to legs stretched to the mass of beech ember and flame, while the kettle of cast-iron gently steamed as it hung from the serrated lapping-crook. Occasionally he grilled steaks and bloaters over the glowing embers, eating them beside Lucy and Felicity. Alas, that the mason’s hammer had cracked up that old slate slab. It had been a lovely thing, blue and gentle, hollow with so many stocking’d feet resting on it, and mellowed by fat-spreckles jumping out of a score of heavy frying pans and roasting spits of the past. The new concrete slab was without feeling: even the fish did not give it baptismal life: to Phillip, it was a symbol of post-war soullessness.

On New Year’s Eve he invited Rippingall to sit with them and share a couple of bottles of champagne. Except for the one lapse the house-parlourman had behaved impeccably; he had dug the garden, polished the silver plate (left to Lucy by an ancient spinster aunt—delicate Caroline spoons and forks, coffee-pot and teapot, salt cellars, pepper pots, candelabra, asparagus tongs, cheese-scoop, etc.) and ‘made himself generally useful in the house’, as Lucy told Pa.

When not on duty Rippingall was to be found in the boiler house, which he had fitted up with shelves for books, and pictures torn from old illustrated magazines of actresses, generals,
battleships
, and photographic scenes of the Great War. Sometimes the reedy strains of an accordion, muffled by the warped oak door, floated into the kitchen. Rippingall was singing to himself in a nasal voice as he boiled water over a methylated spirit lamp for his nightly mug of cocoa. He had a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and was a great reader. Phillip’s novels about Donkin, he declared, were the real stuff.

Rippingall, with the points of his moustache held in a fixed position by
pomade
hongroise
, was a man of gentleness, deep feeling, and understanding. After awakening from that drunken stupor
he had wept, saying that he had betrayed the whitest man he had ever known. He would devote his life to Phillip, if only given another chance; he would renounce liquor for ever. Poor Rippingall, said Phillip to Lucy, he must find life with an author even duller than living in the dark background of a vicarage, the incumbent of which was low church almost to Calvinist simplicity, believing literally in the constant war between Heaven and Hell; and with the temptations of Hell there could never be
compromise
.

*

Now it was the start of another year.

“Ring out the old, ring in the new, ring out the false, ring in the true …
‘for
God
reveals
Himself
in
many
ways,
lest
one
good
custom
should
corrupt
the
world’.
Rippingall, you old sweat, a man must break his principles now and again, to show that he is master of them. Who said that?”

“It sounds like Thomas Carlyle, sir.”

“I’ve never read Carlyle.”

“I must confess that I myself have but the slightest
acquaintanceship
with the Sage of Chelsea, sir.”

After that first lapse, Phillip made Rippingall sign an agreement that provided for his wages to be paid into a fund which Rippingall could use only at the age of sixty. Even so, he felt that he had let down Rippingall, allowing him only five shillings a week for pocket money. On odd occasions, chosen by himself, Rippingall got into his dress suit in the evening, and rewaxed the ends of his moustaches to points which, to the low church vicar, must have resembled the horns of the Devil himself. Never a glass of beer had he taken, true to his promise, since that one lapse.

“On this New Year’s Eve let us drink to Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, Rippingall. What a wonderful suit you are wearing. I wish I had one like that.”

“One of the Captain’s” said Rippingall. “He gave me, as was my perquisite, all his wardrobe when I relinquished my post at the Castle.”

Phillip understood that Rippingall had worked as valet and, at times, companion to ‘Boy’ Runnymeade. He had been his opponent at billiards, snooker, cards, chess and picquet, with the ultimate job of the day of hauling his master upstairs and
undressing
him on the bed—a confidential job, for Captain
Runnymeade
had a fixed dread of appearing drunk before the other servants. On leaving his service at the Castle, Rippingall had
taken with him a score or so of suits, shirts, shoes, etc. which had been replaced that year, as annually, by new patterns.

*

The next morning, in bowler hat, yellow goatskin gloves, whangee cane, and brown shoes patterned all over with holes and shining like glass, Rippingall, having brushed himself free of boiler-room dust and withered potato fragments, lit the remains of his cigar of the night before and set off to wish the Reverend Mr. Scrimgeour the compliments of the New Year. Rippingall wore the 1914 Star, with bar, on the lapel of his pepper-and-salt jacket.

“How do you do, everything all reet?” he greeted the parish priest, who was about to leave on his bicycle to go the rounds to some of his aged parishioners.

The vicar, moving his new Raleigh bicycle—a present from his congregation—between them across the front door to prevent entry, caused Rippingall to lurch to the other side, but he recovered his stance with the aid of the cane bent like a bow.

“Go away, you’re drunk again. Why have you come, you silly fellow? Been dismissed, as you deserve, no doubt. And do not smoke when you address me.”

“This——” replied Rippingall, removing the cigar from between yellow teeth and inspecting it “—is a weed, known first to Sir Walter Raleigh, whose name is spelt, but not pronounced, like your bicycle. Our West Country still shelters Rawleys, your reverence, not Rallys.”

“Go away, you impertinent fellow. And don’t puff smoke in my face. I told you never to come here again.”

“All reet, all reet,” retorted Rippingall with spirituous
amiability
. “I came to wish your reverence the compliments of the season, together with——” puff, puff—“a Happy New Year.” He added, “In my father’s house are many—bicycles——”

“Leave these premises at once!”

Rippingall spun round, recovered, and pointing the whangee cane upwards with one hand, removed the brown bowler with the other and said, “I will go——” puff, puff—“to
my father——” puff, puff—“who is in heaven.”

As January’s dull windows and leafless trees repeated themselves, so the form of Rippingall was in decline. Like most people of irregular sensibility, caused by an early malformation of the will and usually known as artistic temperament, Rippingall became untidy. He could be very smart indeed when in full starch, wax,
and tail; but his bedroom was a mess, his kitchen—for Miss Kirkman had left her situation before Christmas—in disorder. He was ail-anyhow. Phillip felt that he had let-down Rippingall, given him a formless example—almost nothing to live for. Lacking someone to keep him in order, by example, Rippingall was
reverting
to the bottle. His sink was a greasy mess of old tea-leaves and potato-peelings. Glasses came on the table with the water-stains of porridge and bacon-fat residue.

Phillip became more and more critical of Felicity and one day she departed, while he was in Colham, leaving behind a letter saying that she felt her presence was only a hindrance to him, and an obstruction to his writing.

*

Staring at the choked drainpipes under the lawn, the untidy cupboards, the chaotic woodshed and boiler-house, the scatter of toys everywhere in the day nursery—a room which Lucy said she liked to look “lived in”—Phillip told himself weakly that he needed order and competence about him so that he could do his writing, and keep on doing it, without strain. That work was for the future, the tidying up of human minds by ‘enacting a full look at the worst’, in the past; or rather the growing of young minds in a way entirely different from the past. What was needed, he told Lucy, was a revolution—but without bloodshed. Yet he knew that it must first begin with himself; while it seemed there was nothing to begin it with.

*

The newspapers told of struggle everywhere. Unemployed men, many without work since returning a dozen years ago from the Armies in France, Flanders, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, were sent from the Distressed Areas of the North to dig ditches in the South. Married men on the dole were paid 26
s
. a week, out of which rent at 7
s
. must be paid. Coal was 1
s.
6
d.
a bag of 112 lbs, while the poor family’s main meal of the week was based on what was known as a butcher’s shilling bag—a bit of mutton, portion of black
pudding
, and scraps of stewing steak: a meal for two days. The butcher threw in ‘a bone for the dog’, out of which broth was made, with vegetables.

Winter dullness held the valley. Frosts whitened the lawns. For three months sunshine ceased to enter the lower rooms of
Monachorum
House, which had dry rot under all floors. Then the top of the sun was seen again over the wooded crest of the Chase.

And every day at breakfast-time the sun’s curve rose a little higher over the hill. Missel-thrushes were in bold song, rooks speculating about their old nests. And with the primroses Felicity came back.

The exterior alterations to Fawley House had been completed. The bill exceeded
£
1,200. One roof still required new rafters and purlins and slates.

Every day a working party left Monachorum for Fawley, eighteen miles north on the Shakesbury-Colham road, and every night it returned. While Lucy and Felicity worked in the rooms of the old house, Phillip and Rippingall worked in the walled garden. During the back-end of the year it had been cleared, ploughed, harrowed, rolled and threeparts sown down to alsike, a pink-flowered plant of the clover family. This alsike, when dug in, would enrich the soil.

The remaining half-acre was for tillage. Here, thought Phillip, Father will want to spend his time. He must remove the ruinous green-houses and cold frames, and so give the old boy a decent start. A small potting-shed had already been erected near the two circular lily ponds. The cast-iron garden seats were scaled and repainted dark green.

All was now ready for Phillip’s parents to come down and occupy the ground-floor flat.

*

Hetty was living in a flow of excitement that soon she would be in the beautiful country near her son and his wife and the little ones; and with this feeling was an undercurrent of sadness, even of fear, that she would be leaving the house where her children had grown up—it was almost all of her life. More than thirty-five years in Wakenham: first in the little house in Comfort Road near the railway cutting, which once had been part of the
Sydenham-Deptford
Canal, where old Pooley, who was nearly a hundred
years old when she had gone to live there with Dickie, had once seen a salmon taken on rod and line, at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Thirty years of her life had passed in the house in Hillside Road: now she was about to say goodbye to all the landmarks of her marriage—the Hill, the trees, the church across the grass, the view of the Crystal Palace from the crest of the Hill. O, those far-off summer days, and Phillip flying his kite on what he called the Hillies!

And now everything appeared to have a life of its own, to be appealing to her to be allowed to remain as it had been when Papa and Mamma were alive, and living next door—and brother Hughie—sister Dorrie—her boys killed in the war. At such
revisitations
in memory Hetty prayed silently, as she stood in her
bedroom
with its wide brass bed, seeing the faces of the dead with instant emotion before the expunging of all personality under another vision of the white marble forests of the cemetery. Then she would laugh as she thought of the joke of Hughie, about the engraving of the church on the cover of the
Parish
Magazine
, newly built of red brick when they had moved into their own house. The church garden was still a wilderness of grasses tangled above the yellow clay soil.
Note
, the words declared below the engraving of the church on the blue cover of the Parish Magazine,
the
tower
is
not
yet
built.
And all the years had passed, and the church had never had its tower.

Once the church had been full every Sunday. Now it was more than half-empty. People had given up going to church since the end of the Great War.

She peered through the nearer of the two bow-fronted windows, watching her husband wheeling his barrow up Charlotte Road. Dickie still kept on his war-time allotment beyond the farther side of the cemetery. He was tidying up his rod of ground for his
successor
, whoever he might be, and thereby keeping himself in trim for the work ahead in the walled garden at Fawley. He had spent the past two days picking up flints and making a neat heap of them in one corner, and cleaning and digging the ground as a matter of routine; while all the time happy thoughts of returning to Rookhurst, the village where he had been born and bred, had given him secret satisfaction. He was aloofly proud, too, of his son’s success as a writer, and looked forward to ending his years happily in the dwelling place of his forefathers.

Richard had an idea of repaying his son’s generosity by inviting him to use the house in Hillside Road as his own whenever he came
to London. This was a happy solution to a problem which had been worrying him: what to do with the house. He did not want to sell it, nor yet to let it. The district was not what it was, a new class of people had been moving in during the past few years. Not that he felt that Wakenham was, or ever had been, in any sense a superior place to live in; but the newcomers generally did not care for gardening, and many were, moreover, distinctly untidy  in other ways. Motor-bicycles stood on the uncut grass of lawns, paper was left to lie about, paint was not renewed. Dinginess was the word for it. No, he would not want his well-kept house and garden occupied by one of those fellows who went about with cigarettes in their mouths and hands in pockets and thought so much of themselves that they never raised their hats to a woman when they spoke to her: the sort who invariably sat about in their rooms, and at table, in their shirt-sleeves.

He would ask the police to keep an eye on the house, and have the plate chest put in the bank. Master Phillip living there would keep the house alive. He and Lucy might want a holiday; it was handy for London, and theatres and restaurants; and since they would need a comfortable bed, he had ordered, in plenty of time, a modern one, with spiral springs and low centre of gravity, and walnut panels, from the Stores. That was to be his surprise; and when Hetty came to London to visit—whosoever she wanted to visit—she would find it the very thing for sound sleep, nervous little thing that she had always been.

*

Fawley having been put in order, Lucy and Felicity set about spring-cleaning at Monachorum. The swallows were back.
Stimulated
by the sight of these migrants, and by the habit of physical work, Felicity was confident that now she would be able to help Phillip much more than in the past. She must organise his writing room for him, as a start. Having watched him often enough pawing over the contents of a drawer, pulling out old envelopes, worn-out typewriter ribands, stumps of pencils along with shells, nails, odd stamps, German 1914–18 cartridges and bullets, and other relics supposed to be of use later on, she determined to free him of worry by tidying up his room, together with the cupboards, boxes, and contents of his kneehole desk.

*

Phillip sat in the shade of the cankered apple trees in the orchard, wearing dark glasses, writing pad on knee. A goldfinch had a nest in the fork of a branch. Voices floated from the house,
and the noise of water gurgling down the drain; the gurgling stopped, and he knew that once more the wretchedly inadequate field-drain pipes were choked. When the paper-boy brought the morning papers he got up to meet him, and returning to the
deck-chair
glanced through the London paper. By this act he broke his rule never to look at the papers until after the morning stint, of a minimum thousand words, was done.

On the front page was the news of a junior minister’s resignation from the Labour government. The name of Birkin was prominent. Where had he heard it before? Ah, at the Selfridge Election party. GREAT SPEECH TO THE HOUSE, ran the headline.

Phillip had read so far when Lucy appeared. “Are you busy?”

“I’m trying to formulate my thoughts, although it may appear I’m only reading the paper. No, that’s untrue, I’m not busy.”

“I’m awfully sorry to worry you just now, but Uncle Hilary has just telephoned to say that he and Irene are on their way here, and I’ve asked them to luncheon. Of course, the kitchen drain would choke now.”

“Where’s Rippingall?”

“I haven’t seen him, otherwise I’d get him to do it. The washing water is all over the path.”

It was eleven o’clock. There was an hour before they were due to arrive. He dug up the pipes and continued a trench through the turf of the lawn, then covered the trench, through which grey liquid was seeping, with nine-inch boards, bought recently to
extend the garage. Having washed and changed his shirt, for he had worked neurotically fast, he went back to his seat.

Footfalls were coming along the garden path. He dropped the paper and took up his writing pad, ready as an excuse should this be an unwelcome caller. It was. With distaste he saw the grinning face of A. B. Cabton, a writer originally sent to him by Edward Cornelian, the critic and publisher’s reader, during Phillip’s time as an improver on his Uncle Hilary’s farm. Cabton had shot birds in June with a walking-stick gun, also trout in the Longpond. After that visitation neither Phillip nor Lucy had heard a word from him.

“Hullo. How’s everybody? Don’t get up. Just be your natural self. How’s Lucy? Felicity still with you?”

“I thought you lived in Cornwall, Cabton.”

“So I do. But I thought I’d like a break. My novel is held up. You don’t mind if I fish in your river, do you?”

“Well, I don’t really want the fish disturbed, Cabton. You see—well—I’m studying them. I haven’t fished myself yet.”

“Studying them by reading the paper, eh? I saw you put it down and take up that pad. Why pretend?”

He took out a packet of Bonville’s cigarettes and tossed them at Phillip. “Thought you might like them.’’

“It’s good of you, but I have given up smoking.”

“Keep them, anyway. I get them for nothing, my sister works in Bonville’s. What about this fishing?”

“Well—I’ll show you a place later, at the end of my beat—I’m not watching that water particularly, just yet, anyway.”

Cabton sat down and picked up the cigarettes.

“Have you see Birkin’s speech in the paper, Cabton? It looks as though something will be started at last. May I read you a bit?” Without waiting for a reply, he read, “‘If then, this loan’—that is, a hundred million pounds to make new motor roads, using the unemployed, nearly three million, Cabton—‘if this loan cannot be raised in the City of London, let us confess defeat honourably and honestly; let us run up the white flag of surrender. Why is it right and desirable that British capital should go overseas to equip factories to compete against us, and by means of sweated labour to undercut our prices, to build roads in the Argentine or in
Timbuktoo,
while it is supposed to shake the whole basis of our financial strength if anyone dares to suggest the raising of money by the government of this country to provide work for the people of this country? In conclusion, let me say that the situation which faces us is, of course, very serious. Everybody knows that; and perhaps those who have been in office know it even better. It is not, I confidently believe, irreparable, but I feel this strongly, that the days of muddling through are over, and this time we cannot muddle through.”

“Hear, hear,” said a voice from over the fuchsia hedge behind the summer house. Phillip saw with exasperation the weak and vacuous face of Rippingall above the shoulders of Runnymeade’s old pepper-and-salt suit.

“Everything all reet, old dear?” Rippingall drew himself to attention and went on, with an attempt at clear articulation, “I have—just—seen—the ghost—of—the Rascal Monk—of—
Mona-Mona-Monaquorum
Abbey—sir.”

Deciding to treat Rippingall as though he was his normal self, Phillip said, “Come here and meet Mr. Cabton, old soldier. I want you to show him Fossett’s pool, where I’ve given him a day’s fishing, fly only, of course. Come and listen to Birkin’s speech of resignation.”

Rippingall walked on down the lane to the gate and came into the garden. Gravely he took off his brown bowler and bowed to Cabton, saying quietly, “Sir, Fossett’s pool—is haunted—by the Rascal Monk.” Then turning to Phillip he said, “Sir Olive Lodge—Physical Society. Sir, with respect, there are ghosts—in—the—old Abbey, sir.” He added as an afterthought, “It is said to be haunted.”