A Solitary War Read online

  “I’m still phosphorescent.”

  “What a lovely man it is,” said Dolly to Melissa.

  Chettwood was saying, “Do tell me, Phillip, is it true that there are so many seals on the sandbanks of the Wash that they take more fish than the professional fishermen?”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “And they shoot the seals?”

  “Yes, but the older seals usually disappear at the flash.”

  “Good for them. Well, your health!” said Chettwood, raising his glass.

  “Prosit!” said Phillip raising and draining his. He was happy, happy. “John, do you seriously think Hitler will attack the west?”

  “Well, Phillip, all I know is what comes into the office. The panzer divisionen have all been transferred from Poland, and are now aligned in depth behind the Dutch frontier.”

  “The Dutch frontier? Then it must be a feint. To lure the B.E.F. into the Low Countries.”

  “I know nothing about strategy. Indeed, I’m more interested in your seals. Are you factual when you say that they dive at the flash of a rifle?”

  “Not when on a sandbank, of course, where they have to flap off clumsily. But in the sea, when they have experience of men shooting at them, yes.”

  “I’ve only seen them at the Zoo. Will you write me about five hundred words on them, from the angle of the food they take? I’ll pay you fifteen guineas.”

  That would be a Christmas present for the family, he thought.

  Melissa said softly, “How is Lucy, and the children?”

  “They’ve gone to live in Gaultford with Tim.”

  “Who is looking after you, then?”

  “A possible partner and his woman friend. They’ve taken the farmhouse for a month on trial.”

  “Is he a farmer, sir?” asked the improver.

  “No, but he was a business man.”

  Another bottle of wine was opened.

  *

  During dinner at a table on the balcony overlooking the main café Dolly said, “Melissa’s done a picture of you two water-sprites. Debussy in paint.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “The only title I can think of is banal—‘Nocturne in Silver’. Dolly and I share a studio off the Fulham Road. ‘Boy’ Runnymeade came to see us the other day.”

  “Did you show him your picture?”

  Dolly said, “He wanted to buy it.”

  “Did you sell it?” Phillip asked Melissa.

  “It’s not for sale. I haven’t seen ‘Boy’ since that night. Can you tell me why this place is crowded so early?”

  “Most of the theatres have been closed since the outbreak of war.”

  “Wind up,” said Phillip. “Theatres kept going all through the last war. This place, too, was crowded.”

  “What was it like?”

  “The entrance hall was then a room of wall sofas, mirrors, marble-topped tables, and armchairs. The ceiling was lower. I remember Augustus John with his red beard, Epstein, a one-armed painter called ‘Badger’ Moody, and Aleister Crowley … but it was the soldiers and R.F.C. pilots I liked to watch. The whole war-time scenes, at home and out there, fascinated me.”

  “You are psychic. I knew that when I first read you,” said Dolly.

  “I’m a bore on the first war.”

  “No,” said Melissa, “you are not a bore, not to me, anyway. You see, I’ve felt, from my earliest years during the war, when we lived at Husborne, a sympathy and wonder for your generation. All the soldiers coming and going in my grandmother’s house, and the hutments in the park. And Mummy and all the others talking about the war. So many of the family in it, hundreds of cousins being killed, although I was too small to remember them. Later I read all the books I could get about it.”

  He began to feel the bodiless feeling coming upon him, which he had whenever he was with Melissa. Did the cause lie in the condition that his talent, such as it was, came only from mortification? Like the Flying Dutchman: dead? Why this incapacity to yield his personality, his essence, to this Donatello head and face, with its meditative balance of features, coral-pink lobe of ear under pale gold hair? He saw the depth of her eyes open to him, he could not hold his look, but turned away; and looking again, saw not the deeps of her eyes, but withdrawal, a closing of her spirit.

  “Where shall we go?” said Chettwood, when the bill was signed. “To the Late Joys of the Players Club? Or for a drink down in South Kensington?”

  Thither they went by taxi, Chettwood saying he was a member of two clubs in the district.

  “I see you still wear your Birkin badge,” he said, looking at the white-metal button-hole emblem of the Minotaur being attacked by Theseus with a short sword. “I hope you don’t have any trouble.”

  In the first club three dark young men with curly dark hair were standing against the bar. Seeing the badge, one nudged another and spoke without lip-movement. Phillip held himself relaxed and easy, prepared to ignore any provocative remarks. Then, as he had anticipated, one of the three men began by making remarks about Birkin in a loud, lisping voice.

  “How many seals do you think there are in the Wash?” Chettwood said to Phillip. He spoke with scarcely a movement of lips or eyes, a habit of self-control he had acquired to complete the day’s job in the stress and speed of a national newspaper.

  “I should think round about a thousand. There’s been some talk of machine-gunning them on the sandbanks.”

  “Who would do the machine-gunning?”

  “Perhaps the Army, or the R.A.F., in liaison with the Ministry.”

  “Ag. and Fish?”

  “Yes.”

  The three were listening. A hand went to a pocket.

  Seeing this, Chettwood said smoothly, “Let’s sit down over there,” and led the way to a table, while the three men looked openly in their direction.

  Chettwood went on in the same quiet, toneless voice, “You’d have no chance against a razor gang. Since the blackout the wide boys have spread over from the East End. We’ll finish our drinks and go. I don’t want to see anyone stroke you. You wouldn’t know what had happened until you felt something running down your neck. I fancy that badge of yours glitters too intently for them. Let’s try the more polite airs of the Medicean.”

  They went down the stairs and walked up the street, coming to a green door which opened to more stairs.

  “This is a better place. It’s run by an Irish painter called O’Callogan.”

  The studio was fitted at one end with a bar. The atmosphere was cordial and restful. Small tables laid for dinner à deux were lit by candles along one side of the room. Pictures were hung on the wall above the diners’ heads. There was a piano, where a young man was playing Lady be Good while half-a-dozen couples were dancing.

  O’Callogan came up, glass of whisky in hand. “Hullo, John, hullo Dolly, hullo Melissa.”

  While they were drinking at the bar and the girls were powdering, Chettwood said, “We had some enquiries about you in the office the other day, Phillip. As you know, we’ve been running a series of Blackout Stories, and for variety we reprinted your story of the blind trout at night. We published it some years ago, you may remember. A man from MI5 came into the office saying, “Where does this fellow Maddison live?’ I didn’t tell him, of course. Then he asked what you knew about crime in the blackout. I said, ‘Have you read his story in the paper?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve been asked to find out what he knows about crime in the blackout.’ I fancy they thought you might be able to give them information about the gangs. So I took him to the library and told him to read your story on the file. He came back calling his superior a so-and-so. Apparently he had been given a list of all the authors’ names. They’ll be checking up on Melissa’s picture next. What do you think of it?”

  He indicated the wall behind them with his eyes. Phillip went over with ffondent-Jones to look at it.

  “I say, sir, talk about Milton’s Comus, and his Sabrina fair, sitting ‘within the glass
ie, cool, translucent wave’.”

  A nymph and a man above a sea-bed, hair streaming in the tide-drift, heads close together as they swam naked among shells and thong-weed. Fish moving past without fear.

  “I see what you meant, sir, about being phosphorescent.”

  The drifting sea-floor in that summer night. The dark shore. Pale fire in rising wave-walls. Pure spirit of warm phosphoric night, Ariel and Miranda. Firmness of composition, lyric lines of poetry.

  “She’s good,” said O’Callogan, moving beside them. “That girl can paint.”

  “It’s real water movement.”

  “You should know, you wrote The Blind Trout. I’ve read it twice. Melissa, me darlin’, come here. Here’s a great man who admires your painting.”

  “Is it still not for sale?” asked Phillip, when O’Callogan had gone.

  Melissa said, “I painted it specially for you.”

  “Darling, Melissa!”

  They arranged to meet on the morrow, and he would collect the painting.

  *

  His bedroom was under the leads. There he drifted along the shores of darkness with Melissa, borne on a secret-tide of happiness; and on awakening the next morning found himself, almost with shock, in a submarine twilight. It took a moment before he realised that the windows had been painted. Then awareness that he was returning to the farm dulled him. He was forty-six years old, double her age. He must not see her again. His eldest son would be fifteen in a few weeks. Billy would be called up to serve with the Forces if the war of blockade ran its course—‘Germany must export or die, and Germany shall not die!’ What a wreckage life made of a man. For Melissa, there would be scores of young men of her own generation to choose from, once the war became real. He felt claustrophobic, and tried to open the blue-painted windows. They were screwed in the frames. Taking his clothes to the bathroom on a lower floor, he had a cold bath to brace himself. He dreaded the visit to South Kensington at noon. Another real-unreal meeting with Melissa. He felt optimistic after breakfast; this drained away; and just before noon when he climbed the stairs he was repeating to himself, I hope she isn’t there. He saw several people sitting at the bar, among them a slight form dressed in leather jacket, trousers, and a small Juliet cap. With a surge of joy he saw who it was, and went to her. She said, “I thought I wasn’t going to see you again.”

  “I felt I ought not to see you again. I dream of you.”

  “Every man I see with grey hair gives me a little shock. I am always looking for you.”

  “I wish I wasn’t going back to the farm.”

  “Could you give me a lift to ‘Boy’ Runnymeade’s?”

  “Yes! I suppose you couldn’t stay the night at the farm?”

  “I’d love to. I’ve got your daub in the cloak-room downstairs. It’s sentimental.”

  “The lyric is real life. The farm—the war—all material life is shadow.”

  He sent a telegram to Mrs. Carfax.

  BRINGING FRIEND FOR WEEKEND LITTLE RAY

  “Can’t you stay until Monday?”

  “Wish I could, but I promised to see ‘Boy’. I’ve got my class at St. George’s Hospital on Monday. That means the early train.”

  “So you’re a nurse.”

  “Going to be.”

  “I feel so very old—another war——”

  “Oh so very old! As old, or as young, as ‘the drifting sea-floor’——”

  “Where does ‘the drifting sea-floor’ come from?’

  “My favourite author. The eternal youth who wrote The Water Wanderer.”

  “I want to write about a wild grey goose. I’d like some tame geese, too, on our meadows.”

  “Will you want a goose girl?” Then she said, “You looked so afraid when I said that.”

  Chapter 7

  MELISSA’S VISIT

  When Phillip walked into the parlour with a young woman who looked on first appearance to be not more than sixteen years old, Mrs. Carfax was both surprised and disappointed. She had imagined the friend to be a man; and Billy’s small bedroom between her own and Teddy’s—the farmhouse had three bedrooms with coving ceilings and high latticed windows—had been prepared for the guest.

  There was a volume of Surtees by the bed-head table, a small decanter of whisky, which had belonged to Lucy’s Pa, a bottle of soda-water, and a tumbler. In the parlour Teddy had put a pint of whisky in a cut-glass decanter, the four sides of which were etched with the word SHRUB.

  This small decanter was one of a set of four, in a cubic walnut case once belonging to Phillip’s grandfather. There was a handmade key for the brass lock. Mrs. Carfax had decided that these objects would be safer in the farmhouse than in the workshop, which might be broken-in.

  Now, seeing who had arrived, Mrs. Carfax at once went upstairs to remove these objects, together with Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds.

  “This is Melissa Wilby,” he said to Teddy, adding, “She wants to breed geese.”

  Teddy said enthusiastically, “Why didn’t I think of that? The meadows are the very place for them! They are good for pasture, and geese live almost entirely on grass. It’s a good idea, you know; we might carry a thousand head, all told. Did you hear that, ‘Yipps’? Melissa wants to join the farm, and look after geese!”

  While Mrs. Carfax led the guest upstairs Phillip showed Teddy the painting. “Why, isn’t that you, without the grey hair?” he asked.

  “It’s an imaginative work, I fancy.”

  “You don’t have to use camouflage with me, you know, old boy. She’s a bon girl. Where did you find her, eh?”

  “Known her since she was a child. How have things been going?”

  “I’ve been getting on with the decorating of your cottage next door. And feeding the turkeys. There doesn’t seem anything else for me to do. I ploughed a few furrows, but the land was too sticky, Luke said. I wish the bloody fire didn’t smoke in here, it’s cold as hell at night, for the feet anyway. ‘Yipps’ feels the cold very much, she says. Well, Phillip, it’s nice to see you back. You’ll want some tea, I expect?”

  “We had some on the way, thanks.”

  “I’ve got a couple of mallard for dinner. You know, those dkyes are a wonderful place! I saw some woodcock, too, but didn’t get any—the light was failing.”

  Phillip sat with Melissa before the fire in his cottage. At seven o’clock, as was his habit, Teddy came to say that he was going down to The Hero to have a drink, and would they care to accompany him. They returned to the farmhouse to ask ‘Yipps’ if she would come too.

  “My dear man, I am much too busy! I’ve got the dinner to cook. It’s the maids’ afternoon off.”

  “Do let me help you,” said Melissa.

  “No, you go with the men and add to the gaiety of nations,” said Mrs. Carfax, giving her a brilliant smile. “Most of the work is done. No, I’ll lay the table. I know where everything is, thanks all the same. There’s only enough room for one at a time in the kitchen. It’s like the galley of a yacht.” She disappeared.

  “I’ll bring you something back,” Teddy called out. “We won’t be long, dear.”

  “Be back at eight,” came the voice from the kitchen.

  The bar-room of The Hero was warm and friendly. They sat in a little room of stools, tables, coal fire, oil lamps, and whist players using cards almost effaced by long handling between thumbs and split-nailed fingers. Old calendars on the walls; old broadsheets advertising horse-drawn implements seemed by their brown smoky ancientness to have been there undisturbed by any war. Among them was a lithograph of Edward the Seventh in the scarlet uniform of a field-marshal of the British Army. On the chimney breast of tapered brick was an older picture of Queen Victoria as a young woman, Albert her Consort standing beside her.

  Matt was one of the whist players. One gentle brown eye winked at Phillip. “Starlight’s calved,” he said softly. “Black heifer calf, doin’ well.”

  Phillip thought of Maurice Hewlett’s phrase, The country labourer i
s a gentleman, and whispered the news to Melissa. She gave Matt a smile. The stockman smiled back. Phillip could see that Matt approved. He was a creature of instinct. What did it matter if he would not wash his hands before milking?

  They left the inn to a chorus of Goodnights just before eight, to enter the farmhouse and see the long refectory table laid as for a squire’s dinner party. Yellow chrysanthemums in silver bowl, candles in silver sticks. Mrs. Carfax said that Penelope had given her the flowers. The bowl was engraved with the words Naval Occasions, Malta, 1906. Phillip had bought it at an auction with Lucy during the past summer at the house of an admiral’s widow. How sad that a whole human life should be so lost in time. The Irish glass shrub bottle, the rose bowl, Pa’s damascene-barrelled 16-bore gun—relics of three homes, three familes, the principals of which had vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared. He thought of Lucy, and sighed: but at least she was happy with Tim, with his crossed sword and scabbard on the wall of No. 2, The Glade, and Pa’s old clock set in the open jaws of the skull of a Bengal tiger on the chimney piece.

  After the mallard, with thin orange slices, chip potatoes, and creamed celery—after the Christmas pudding with brandy sauce and cream, mince pies also with cream skimmed from the four gallons of milk still being brought up to the kitchen door daily by Matt—after Stilton cheese and Romary biscuits—after the coffee—Teddy said, with beaming anticipation on his face, that he had a surprise for Phillip.

  He had found, he declared, under a heap of rubbish in the workshop, several bottles of port, and had brought one up in case Phillip wanted it. There were four other bottles down there, probably left behind by the previous farmer, who had gone bankrupt. “It’s good port, too, Phillip!”

  “Co’burn ’seventy-eight, Teddy. The last of Lucy’s father’s little cellar at Down Close in Dorset.”

  “I carried it carefully, on its side, so that the crust wouldn’t be disturbed.”

  Phillip had intended to keep the bottles for Billy’s twenty-first birthday.