The Phoenix Generation Read online

  In February Phillip, who had revised the scenes of river, estuary, and sea-coast for his book, had the copies returned by Felicity.

  Dearest,

  Here are the landscape, riverscape, and seascape scenes, and wonderful they are, too. I am certain that the book, when you have woven in the story of the Blind Trout, will be a great success. The typing of them has been a great relief to my mind, perturbed otherwise by petty worries. I hope you will not allow them to distract you, but I think I should let you know that my mother is determined to adopt my baby, because I am still a minor, I suppose, and in her eyes in need of ‘care and protection’. So I went up to Somerset House to ask about adoption, and got the enclosed printed reply.

  I wrote asking if they could tell me if it meant much publicity, in a public court, etc., as I had been told by the Registrar at Marylebone that it was a simple matter, and they replied that they could not tell me about this, and I would be advised to ask the Clerk to the local court. Would you like to write to the Clerk (at Marylebone I suppose) or would you rather do it yourself when next you are in London, just to find out what the procedure is, as I imagine you would not care for a public business. I am sorry to bother you, but I thought that you and Lucy might want to adopt him after what you said about the registration of twins, but please just say yes or no. Of course I would make the enquiry quite impersonal, not mentioning any names or revealing that it concerns me personally.

  Love to you both, Felicity.

  P.S. My mother’s idea in adopting Edward is, I think, to leave me legally free of him should I want to marry later on. What do you think about it? I am rather confused, and personally want to keep my baby, but perhaps my mother’s way will be best for him in the end, if you do not like the idea (as you once expressed) of you and Lucy adopting him. Do say exactly what you feel about it, dearest.

  Phillip went to see his solicitor in Colham. He asked what he, as father of the child, could do to stop its adoption against the wishes of both its parents. The solicitor said he would seek counsel’s opinion, and then would write to Phillip. This opinion arrived three days later.

  Re. An unmarried mother’s dilemma to retain her infant while she is a minor.

  Under the Administration of Justice Act, 1928, the guiding principle laid down is that of the welfare of the infant. Any proposals of the putative father must be considered to the extent that they contribute to that welfare. His position as putative father might enable him to urge recognition, in the child’s interests, of the ties of blood and natural affection, but it does no more for him than that. So strong, but no stronger, is his position in equity, and he has no further rights, whether against the mother or third persons. So it comes down to this: the Court will consider if adoption is in the interests of the child, not because it is the putative father’s proposal, but per se.

  Deciding that it would be better to let his mother know about this natural child of his, Phillip wrote and told her. He asked her to respect the confidence, because ‘there is no point in upsetting other people’. He meant his father. Hetty, in distress, replied in a scrawled note in pencil.

  Dear Phillip,

  I can hardly tell you what horror and grief your letter has caused me, I cannot believe a son of mine would let down his young wife and children in this fashion, also I cannot understand why you should have brought her to Wakenham. It is such a hole-and-corner business, and what about Lucy? I have always been so fond of her. What is she going to do? No wonder she has not written to me. And she has no Mother! I think of your last school report, do you remember the remark of the Magister, ‘His standard of honour should be raised?’ Well, Phillip, on consideration I have decided to keep your secret but I hope it won’t be for long. Why doesn’t ‘she’ go to some of her own people?

  Your Mother.

  Phillip drove Felicity, baby in arms, to the windmill on Reynard’s Common. There was a cottage to be let in the hamlet, advertised in The Lady. It was built of red brick and had a small garden. Rambler roses grew over a decayed wooden porch. Felicity got the key from a neighbour. They lit a fire of sticks in the small brick hearth in the parlour. Smoke in skeins drifted out into the room. Obviously the chimney was blocked, perhaps by a jackdaw’s nest. They made rolls of newspapers and thrusting them up the chimney set fire to the base. More smoke poured down. He opened the window, and a pane of glass fell out, the putty having cracked and loosened. Suddenly the chimney roared and going outside he enjoyed the sight of an accelerating column of smoke ending in a burst of flame and shower of sparks ending in a minor explosion which burst the chimney pot and sent pieces rattling down the tiles. Neighbours had come out to watch.

  “Anyway the next tenant won’t require a sweep.”

  The kitchen was dark and dirty. Wallpaper curled away from cracked plaster. Sooty cobwebs drooped. There was an outhouse with a copper for boiling clothes, an earth closet at the bottom of the garden almost hidden by docks, burdocks, thorn-apples, and deadly nightshade.

  “A warlock must have lived here.”

  “I’ll do it up, and soon have the garden cleared and dug over. That is, if you approve.” She stopped herself adding “dearest”.

  “Well, it’s your cottage, if you’ll allow me to arrange the rent and reconditioning. Let’s go and have some bread and cheese and beer in the Greyhound.”

  Ale and cheese with bread and pickled shallots put heart into them. Phillip paid £5, half a year’s rent. Then upstairs again, and looking closer at the two small bedrooms. One had a cast-iron grate.

  “The very place for my favourite author.”

  “I wonder how much the whole place will cost to have done up?”

  “I shall earn it. And do some of the work myself.”

  “I hope you won’t lose heart.”

  She wanted to say, Darling, let me be your heart, and then I shall never again lose mine, but she said bravely, “I’ll never lose my heart again.”

  “I wish I could say the same thing.”

  “Oh darling, I wish I were the right one for you.”

  “You’re a good friend to me, Felicity.”

  “Let’s find out if there’s a mason in the hamlet, shall we?”

  “All right. The ground floor, at least, must be made waterproof before you can move in. Walls replastered where loose, after hacking off the old plaster. It’s loam and cowdung, by the look of it.” He wrenched off a cracked slab, it fell with a thud. “Now for that mason.”

  An out-of-work mason would start at once. He would keep the score, he said, by the hour. Could they provide the materials—cement, and hair-plaster? Sand was local, in the pits on the common, he would get that. “I’ve got me tradesman’s tools.” They motored into the town and returned with distemper in tins, a brush, a couple of sacks of cement, seven pounds of Medusa porcelain dust for water-proofing, a pail and shovel. That would do for a start.

  Felicity enquired of the mason if he knew of a bedroom to let. The mason said his wife had such a room. After seeing and approving this, Felicity said, “I’ll hire a bicycle, and go about looking for furniture at local auctions. It will be fun.”

  He unloaded cot, blankets, and other gear, and carried them into the downstairs room.

  “I’ll get the cot over to the mason’s cottage” she said, hoping that he would want to stay with her.

  When the unloading was done he said, “I nearly forgot. I’ve got some fan letters for you to reply to. You’ll find directions inside the parcel.”

  “Before you go, may we have one more look upstairs, all three of us together?” She held her face near the baby. He saw that she was crying.

  “It’s dull weather now everywhere,” he said.

  “Oh, Phillip, I’m a silly girl, but I shan’t be able to bear it if, you leave me.”

  He tried to comfort her, putting an arm around her, while supporting the baby with the other. “I’ll always be your friend, Felicity.”

  “Then there is someone else?”

  “Not
in the sense of an affair. And anyway, I’m tied, whether I like it or not, to my work.”

  “I wish I could be of more help to you.”

  “You are closer to my work, which is the real me, than anyone else I know.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “Of course you are.”

  She looked so young and bright-eyed that he kissed her. She put down the sleeping child and clung to him.

  “Darling, you are so sweet. Please forgive my base suspicions. If I lost you, I think I should not want to live.”

  “What about Edward?”

  “I’m being a selfish girl, darling. I’m all morbid and stupid today. Won’t you stay the night? You look so tired.”

  He stayed. He was happy for twelve hours. Then restlessness. He returned to Monachorum.

  *

  The snowdrops had gone to seed, the primroses were withered. Throughout the lengthening days of high cirrus and falling blossom, the throbbing notes of turtle doves came from the downland thorns as though the very flints upon the uncultivated arable were crying for love, Phillip felt, as he walked over the fields of his lost land. Even the nightingales’ songs coming from many points under the line of the downs were a reproach. Through his head ran again and again a line from Marlowe. And what is beauty saith my sufferings then.

  At the moment Richard had no such feelings.

  “I’m another man, Phillip.”

  Richard drew pleasure from meticulous sowings, from the straight rows of eschalots, lettuces, onions, carrots, and brassica seedlings. Morning after morning he spent within the walled acre. With loving care he avoided giving distress to the various small birds which had their nests about the secluded garden—goldfinch in fork of apple bush—whitethroat in the black-currants—nightingale among the nettles beyond one of his squared compost heaps—swallow on a purlin across the rafters of the potting shed—wren in the sleeve of an old jacket—blue titmouse in a hole in the wall against which an espalier pear had been planted a year before.

  Billy knew them too, sharing the secret with ‘Dickie’. Richard felt complimented, he told Hetty, on being accepted as an equal by the small boy, his grandson.

  “A child of love. Look at his shining morning face.” He went on, “And to think that we owe our presence here to ‘the wild boy’.”

  This unexpected reference to Phillip delighted Hetty.

  “Ah well, it all turned out for the best.”

  “When is he returning, do you know? I understand that he went to Wakenham recently, to write his book on a trout.”

  “Oh yes, Dickie, I had a letter this morning.”

  “Did you, b’jabers.” Richard had revived, for Billy’s benefit, some of the slang of his boyhood. “Still moving about, is he? What a restless creature he is; just the same when he was in the army. Well, what did he say, old girl? Or was it something private between you and your best boy?”

  Hetty hesitated. She had ever been a dissembler, for the sake of peace; but now she was unable to say anything. As a fact, even the thought of Dickie seeing the letter was bringing on one of her bilious headaches. Phillip had written to say that he was going to live alone in his field above Malandine in South Devon.

  “I put the letter down somewhere. How silly of me to mislay it.”

  “I expect it came from Hillside Road? I’ve half a mind, old girl, to go up and see how things are up there. The trouble is, I ought not to leave this blessed garden just now.”

  When Hetty had gone into the house the thought came to him, Who was there to eat all the vegetables he had grown in the shelter of garden walls? One of the flats, he understood, had been let to an engineer officer who was due to arrive any day now to supervise the building of new hutments on the old war-time site beside the Longpond. Lorries had already driven up, making ugly tracks in the grass, with bricks and other building materials. Only the previous afternoon, when he walked up the borstal to the Hanger, drawn by the sunshine of a still day, he came upon a gang of men with a tractor in the act of rooting up, with winch and wire rope, the hazel and ash stoles of the Coppice. Richard was told that there was to be a machine-gun firing range, and here the butts were to be built.

  “Hetty, it is simply awful what they are going to do. The entire countryside will be ruined. Well, I suppose we’ve got to face it. I’ll run up to town tomorrow and see how things are getting on at Number Eleven, Hillside Road.”

  *

  Felicity was sitting at a three-legged cricket table she had bought at auction for half-a-crown. A candle was burning in a battered brass candlestick on the table. No curtain was drawn across the casement window. It was a warm night, owls were calling. Felicity felt extraordinarily happy. In fact, she told herself, she had never really been happy in her life before.

  Her novel was flowing. She lived in its scenes, which were more vivid to her than anything in ‘real’ life, except Edward her son, sleeping in his cot beside her; and the man in the room adjoining her own, whose gentle breathing was audible. She told herself that now her life had suddenly changed, and so completely that never again would she think about Phillip other than as a friend.

  My heart has come back to me, she said to herself, as she sat at the cricket table, pen in hand, living in the images of words written in pencil upon the pages of a ledger souvenir’d from the B.B.C. when she had been one in the pool of typists at Savoy Hill. She felt slightly nervous every night when beginning to write, even anguished, for it was the story of a young woman who fell in love with a married man, whose personality the heroine was not able to share. Even when her heroine was in bed with her lover, she knew he was thinking of a younger, prettier and more enchanting girl than herself. The heroine’s feelings were further complicated because she wondered if she ought to try to make him passionate by action taught to her by the elderly man who had seduced her at the age of fourteen; but she was unable to bring herself to act thus, there was something forbidding in her lover’s attitude to sex.

  The heroine’s seducer had taught her to enter his bed at the foot, between the sheets, to move slowly up while kissing and caressing his body until she had drawn herself to his lips, to enter his mouth with her tongue. But the heroine was unable to act thus with her lover, although she believed still what she had been taught as a young girl ‘with one petal out’, in the words of her seducer, who had told her about the need of a man for stimulation which, he had declared, was the woman’s natural function in courtship.

  So the heroine was confused; as had been the authoress until recently, believing that Phillip was afraid of natural love: a fear originating from an act of his father’s in thrashing the young boy at the age of seven years for wanting to examine his sister’s body under the nursery table. And inevitably, later on, he had found emotional refuge, or desolation, in Wagner’s Tristan.

  And so, despairing that her true love would ever love her—never lose that part of him which had turned to stone—Felicity’s heroine had yielded herself, in abandonment of her dream of true love, to her original seducer, while imagining him, in bed with her, to be the hero: one who was possessed by the essences of the war-dead. Those haunted eyes, when first her heroine had met him, had made her long to cherish him and bring back all the sunshine that he had missed in his youth upon the battlefields of the Western Front. And the Great War was the epitome of lovelessness in Western Civilisation. This was a sub-theme of her novel. Her heroine saw herself as Persephone leading one back to life from the gentian-blue halls of Dis, in D. H. Lawrence’s last poem before he died at Vence in the south of France.

  Often the heroine had cried voicelessly to herself, in the loneliness of the nights in her cottage in the village of Lavenham in Suffolk (which Felicity had known as a child, when her father had been with her mother). At times her lover seemed to be struggling spiritually against the love which she wanted to give him: a circumstance which had had the effect, at times, of giving her physical cramps whic
h blighted her spirit. And having sighed through so many lonely periods, at last Felicity’s heroine had given in to the pleas of the one she tried to make herself believe was a kind and fatherly man.

  *

  It’s no good, Felicity said to herself, it’s sentimentality. I would never have gone back to Fitz. I’ll scrap it all, and recast it as a straight autobiography, and publish it under another name, while using made-up place-names. Besides, if ever Mother found out about Fitz, it would kill her. What shall I do?

  She felt depressed, and lit a cigarette. She was about to go downstairs to make herself a cup of tea when she heard the noise of a motorcar coming up the lane. She blew out the candle-flame and listened by the open window. The motorcar had stopped by the gate.

  Peering out, she saw the low outline of Phillip’s sports-car. Her blood seemed to gush into her head, making her dizzy for a moment. She managed to whisper, “I’ll come down and let you in.”

  At the door he said, “Are you alone?”

  “I was writing upstairs.”

  “I saw you blow out the candle.”

  He held her and buried his face in her neck. She felt relief, but restrained herself. “You’re cold, come in, and sit down. I’ll light a fire. I’ve got some kindling drying beside the hearth.”

  This was soon blazing.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I am rather.”

  “I’ll do some eggs and bacon for you.”

  She filled a cast-iron kettle from a jug and with a fire-pic hung it on an iron crook. “I got this from an antique shop the other day.”

  While he was eating hungrily, she said, “Well, this is a pleasant surprise. What brings you here?”

  “My father came up unexpectedly, and found Elizabeth and Doris at home. He left again without a word. I suppose he was bound to find out, sooner or later.”

  “He’ll get over it. Would you like tea, or coffee?”

  “Oh, tea, please.” He ate in silence. At last he said, “Is there anything the matter?”