The Phoenix Generation Read online

  “Didn’t they say at the enquiry that there wouldn’t be any firing this side of the downs, Pip?”

  “Well, to be honest, it isn’t altogether a question of tanks or a firing range. It’s the fact that I’ve failed in what I undertook to do. As you know, Uncle Hilary bought back the family land my grandfather threw away, so that I could succeed him, and I—well—I threw it away, too. And I want to be near a trout stream, to watch fish, for my book. And I’d like to move nearer the sea, and I think I’ve found a house. It was to be a surprise, but I’ve told you before we get there. We’re on the way now.”

  “How lovely!”

  “It’s got plenty of room,” he went on with a stir of optimism, “and it’s all by itself in a hamlet called Flumen Monachorum. There used to be monks in the Abbey, but Henry the Eighth dissolved them. Lord Abeline lives at the Abbey, he’s the landlord.”

  Lucy blushed. Should she tell Phillip that George Abeline was her cousin, by marriage? No, it was not important.

  The elderly tenants were only too pleased that someone had come to look at the house. Over tea Colonel Gott said that he and his wife wanted to move nearer a town, the place was rather isolated for them, they had been thinking of going back to Cheltenham to be among friends. It was a jolly little place, he declared, not too difficult to run, and plenty of help was available in the hamlet. The bath-water was fed to a tank in the roof from a ram beside the river, and drinking water came from a well, as was usual in the district. They were shown round the bedrooms, five in all, and three living rooms in addition to kitchen and scullery. There were the usual outhouses, and drainage by septic tank.

  “There’s a couple of miles of fishin’, the rent is moderate, forty pounds a year, tenant paying rates, another twenty. The very place to study trout, if you want to write about them. I’ve read your book on the otter’s wanderings with interest, knowing the Devon moorland country more or less. We took this place and the fishin’ on a seven-year lease, two of which are yet to run. I’ll speak to the Steward, if you like, and may I tell him that you’re prepared to consider taking over the unexpired portion of the lease?”

  “Thank you, Colonel Gott.”

  Lucy and Phillip went away happy at the prospect of living in such a secluded place. They drove into the town, and visited the Steward, a solicitor to whom Phillip made a formal application to take over the remainder of Colonel Gott’s lease at Midsummer. For references he gave the name of Lucy’s father, his uncle Sir Hilary Maddison, and his bank.

  “I’ll put your application before his Lordship, who will want to see you, Mr. Maddison.”

  The following week, wanting to run-in the rebored engine, he set off for London to break the news to his parents. He took Felicity with him, she was going to stay at home for awhile. He said he was determined to begin the trout book, for which he had had the advance royalties more than a year ago. She had heard that before.

  “I don’t see why I can’t do the book on the trout at the same time as the war book, once I get into a routine. I’ll send a chapter of each to you every day, and not re-write one sentence. Then when I’m in full flow, you can come down. I mean, if you can live at home for awhile, you can also begin the novel you want to write, can’t you?”

  She remained silent: she felt depression growing upon her: this was his way of telling her it was over. She tried not to cry. A little farther on he stopped beside a wood near Andover and said, “Come on.” She trembled: she prayed she would not fail him by remaining tense, so that he would turn away from her. They lay on dry leaves. She was thrilled, by his sudden fierceness, and hearing from him the ‘three little words’ of the current revue song, felt herself becoming tumescent with a feeling of love beyond desire; holding him in her arms she felt that the earth was rocking, while involuntary cries came from her. And afterwards as she lay beside him staring at the sky beyond the canopies of the trees she was lapped in happiness that now her dream of having a child before she was twenty-one might be fulfilled. If she became pregnant she would go away without telling him, so that he would never feel burdened by her ugly presence, and have her baby alone in a remote cottage somewhere.

  They drove on to London in silence, and Phillip put her down by the underground station at Hammersmith Broadway.

  “Take care of yourself, dearest,” she said, hoping he would want to kiss her goodbye. But all he said was, “I’ll telephone you as soon as I know what I’m doing. I’m going to see my parents, who are coming to live at Fawley, then I’ll be at the Barbarian Club. Would you care to meet me there tonight?”

  “Oh yes!”

  *

  Phillip felt guilty when he saw how much his mother was looking forward to a new life, as she called it, among her children’s little ones. Had Lucy spoken to him about having Doris’ two boys when she went back to teaching?

  “Well, as you know, Mother, I don’t get on very well with either Doris or Elizabeth. Also—now please don’t be upset—Lucy and I may not be living at Rookhurst. You see,” he went on, speaking quietly to control a feeling of exasperation, “all the estate is sold, including Skirr Farm, so we’ve got to give up the farmhouse. Then the brook, and the Longpond, all belong to the Army authorities, and there’ll be officers fishing for trout there. So I must move, to be beside a stream, to observe fish, before I can write about them. But we’ll be quite near.”

  “Oh, I am so relieved, my dear son.”

  How like a child she was, she had never really grown up——

  “You see, Phillip, your father is a very lonely man, and looks forward to going for walks with you, where he walked with his father when he was a boy. He talks about the walled garden, too, and how he will be able to grow fruit again, against the walls. Now tell me all about Lucy, and Billy, and little Peter and Rosamund——Oh, I cannot tell you how I am looking forward to seeing them all together, and in that lovely country, Phillip. I am counting the days to next spring, when Father retires from the office! Oh, must you go so soon? Won’t you wait to see your father? He will be so disappointed. Yes, I’ll give him your love, my dear son. You are a good son to us, we can never thank you enough for inviting us both to live at Fawley.”

  “Oh, Mother! You’re doing me a favour, by occupying part of it.”

  *

  An old soldier wearing the riband of the 1914 Star arrived on a bicycle one morning when Phillip was looking over the new house with Billy. He had a most woeful expression, as though he had found himself homeless after some years of fancied security. This indeed was the case.

  “Sir, permission to speak to you. Rippingall, sir, at your service!”

  Phillip knew the soldierly address. He liked it. He took the old fellow into the house. After a cup of tea, he decided that he was that rare thing, a gentle soul. Also he was of a literary turn of mind, having read Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and other classical writers.

  Rippingall explained that he had been the gardener and house-parlourman to the old vicar of Flumen Monachorum, who had allowed for his occasional bouts of malaria; but the new vicar—“His Reverence bears the name of Scrimgeour, sir, I expect you know the gentleman, he comes from Liverpool, I believe”—had shown him no sympathy after one of his bouts, and had told him to go.

  Rippingall had a pinched, bluish look about him, and was so earnest in offering himself for work of any kind that Phillip took him on, especially when he told him that he had been a mess-waiter in a regular regiment of foot, and had also worked as a house-parlourman since the war. He could cook, wash clothes, keep accounts, paint, do a bit of masoning, carpentry, “and what not”.

  “Well, you’ve told me what you can do, so I won’t bother with what you can’t do.”

  “I am a trained soldier, sir, a trained valet, house-parlourman, cook, gardener, and what not, sir.”

  “Have you been in service other than the Rectory?”

  “Sir, I was valet to Captain Runnymeade for nine years,” replied Rippingall, giving him a salute, while the smart raisi
ng of the right arm revealed a half-bottle of gin in the pocket of his threadbare tweed jacket.

  “How often do you go on a blind, old soldier?”

  “Only when those who are, in a manner of speaking, my betters, become more or less critical of me, sir,” and he gave Phillip another salute.

  “How often is that?”

  “About twice a year,” replied Rippingall, trying to click heels which were worn down.

  Rippingall was such a success, the garden beginning to look so orderly, and Lucy so pleased, that Phillip wrote to Felicity, and asked her to come back. He was now, he said, sure that things would be different.

  *

  Billy had a passion for the tar-engine which was then working on the London road. It was a beautiful thing in his eyes, which shone whenever it was praised by his father when they passed it in the sports-car. But sometimes Phillip teased Billy about it, pointing out that it gave off an unpleasant smell, that it was sticky and never washed itself, that in fact it was a detestable if useful mass of congealed tar. This would enrage Billy, and his tea-things were liable to be pushed away, and a word shouted at his father that always displeased Lucy—“Bug off, Daddy, bug off.” Lucy would attempt to explain that Billy felt strongly about the tar-engine and that Phillip was upsetting him and also encouraging him to use silly words.

  “He is being inoculated against such words,” Phillip said to Felicity.

  At the tone of his father’s voice the child would show a confusion of feeling, as he glanced first at Lucy’s face, then not at his father’s but on the ground. He would pout, frown, go away by himself; and Lucy would return to her sewing, or her cleaning, or another of the duties which kept her working from early morning to late at night. Phillip would feel in himself something of the confusion of what the little boy was suffering, and return to his writing room, to potter about, doing anything but write, waiting to bring himself clear and as it were into focus again. Was it not good that the boy should swear and shout, if he felt like it, he demanded of Felicity, who had come into the room almost on tiptoe lest she interrupt his thoughts.

  “I did not teach Billy to swear. He picked up ‘words’ as Lucy calls them, from the other little village bipeds playing in the village street. One of the first things I heard him calling Lucy, with a happy smile, was ‘dirty old cow’.”

  Felicity laughed with delight. She looked so young, so fresh, so tender that he pushed her gently backwards into his leather arm chair and, kneeling before her, wound arms about her with that sudden impulse that always made her yield with beating heart and desire to bring him fully to herself—her wayward, her distraught, her innocent child.

  *

  “Parson Scrimgeour was a prison chaplain at Strangeways Gaol in Manchester, Lucy. He is obviously used to executions, for he said to me, ‘Why did you, of all people, write that horrible book, The Phoenix?’ So I turned the other cheek and gave as my own, Bernard Shaw’s reply on the first night of Arms and the Man, when the audience applauded wildly, and called for a speech. G.B.S. held up a hand. In the silence a voice from the gallery cried ‘Rotten!’ G.B.S. held up his hand again for the laughter to stop, and said, with the friendly, open manner of a man who has been trained and self-built in pain, ‘Yes, I agree with you, sir, it is rotten, but what are we two against so many?’”

  Lucy had heard that story many times, but all she said was, “I hope it made the vicar laugh.”

  “No, he didn’t get the joke. ‘So many?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Oh, only my bad joke,’ I replied. ‘Oh,’ he said. Then he asked me if I had seen the notice in The Ecclesiastical Times when it appeared a year ago. I said, ‘Oh, yes, my wife’s father saw the review before he read the book, and remarked, after he had read the book, “H’m, my son-in-law’s an ass”.’ Scrimgeour then gave me a toothy smile and said, ‘Well, do better next time,’ and asked me to play badminton in the winter at a little club he had got up, by permission of Lord Abeline in the old coach-house of the Abbey.”

  Out of friendship for the new vicar, who was not popular, Phillip went to church after they moved to the new house. Whether by chance or design, on his first Sunday the sermon was on the theme that Truth had been discovered among men already, and there was no need for further search in the world among individual writers and philosophers. Afterwards, while the vicar stood by the porch, to bow to and pass a word to the more established of his parishioners going out, he said to Phillip, who had remained in his seat hoping not to be noticed, “I haven’t the gift of words that you have, Mr. Maddison, but I did my best to make the Christian point of view clear.”

  “I listened with great interest, Vicar.”

  “It is up to men like you, who have gifts, to help influence others for good. I think your hero is wrong-headed, but I wouldn’t go so far as your respected father-in-law as to say he is altogether an ass.”

  “Oh, that was applied to me as a person, Vicar. At the same time, it is only fair to add that, as my father-in-law considers that the novels of Dostoievsky are unreadable and the music of Wagner a horrible noise, in a way perhaps he was paying me a compliment.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, I must not keep you, Vicar.”

  “No hurry, I assure you. How is Rippingall behaving himself? Well, I hope?”

  “Yes, he is in good heart, I think. He and I have already worked happily together for several weeks, drinking only tea.”

  “Oh yes, Rippingall goes ‘dry’ as the Americans say, but you’ll have to watch him all the same.”

  Monachorum House stood among trees, a couple of hundred yards outside the deer park of the Abbey, home of the landlord, built of chalk and limestone blocks and thatched. Pear, peach, and greengage trees grew against the south wall, with hollyhocks and sunflowers. It had paths of limestone chips, and two small lawns. Lucy loved it. Soon a cheerful cottage woman, glad to have extra money, since her husband earned little more than twenty shillings a week, took the place of Mrs. Rigg, who had promised to work for ‘Mr. Phillip’s mother’ when the old people moved down from London.

  The first guests at Monachorum were Piers, and his wife Virginia who had been living in Austria with her mother. Phillip did not ask questions, but he had the idea that there had been some trouble, but the two were now reconciled. The three went sailing together, Phillip now a member of the Yacht Club, from the quay of which they set out to distant parts of the bay, spending long sunny hours lying on the sand, talking and idling. Felicity joined them, bringing her pencils and pad, in case Phillip wanted to dictate; but Phillip told Piers that he would start writing seriously in the early autumn. Piers agreed that he would be better for a long rest, lying in the sunshine.

  “After all, you’ve had a pretty hard time since leaving the army, one way and another, and your batteries need recharging.”

  *

  The valley lay in a dream of sunshine, it was St. Martin’s Little Summer. Rosamund, lying in her perambulator, struggled against late morning sleep and the straps which confined her. She was weary of the shade of an apple tree. She wanted to be with Dad and the boys playing in the river water. She understood nearly all that was said, taking in expressions and sounds with her ears and translating life away from her pram as all-smiling, no shushing and no babydarlinggotosleeptheresagoodgirl. The sixteen-month-old girl screamed at times because she was strapped in when she wanted to climb over the side and walk away.

  When the apples began to drop the pram was moved to the lawn, beside an overgrown box hedge. The lawn was humpy, she could rock the pram. It was uneven because often the drainpipe from the kitchen was choked, and every time this happened Phillip had to dig up the lawn. Not only were the pipes choked at the open joins by the movement of earth worms, he told Lucy, but far too much muck went down the 4-inch-diameter pipes. Would she ask Miss Kirkman, the lady-cook (as she described herself) to try not to let any solid matter go down the kitchen sink?

  Baby Rosamund—‘Roz’ to her brothers—slept every d
ay, well wrapped, in the shade of the bushy box-tree, while Phillip tried to work up above in his writing room. He felt a dark eye half-concealed in hair topping the fat little naked body regarding him. While Dad was up there, Roz was content. And hearing the gurgling of the kitchen drain, and seeing a grey fluid spreading over the path below, she knew Dad would come downstairs and play with her. Before digging up nice wet grey mud.

  Rippingall now worked outside, in the garden. His headquarters were in a thatched summerhouse with open walls of rustic work. There, being of a literary turn of mind, he planned his cultivations and croppings for the year, writing many notes and reminders of what should be done. These details were interspersed with ideas for ‘Monograph on Trutta trutta, or the common brown trout’, which he planned to write in order to present it as a birthday present to help ‘Phillip my gentleman’.

  In the kitchen a local girl helped the lady-cook, who had been a governess in Brussels with a Belgian baron and his family. Miss Kirkman had advertised in The Lady, a periodical taken by the vicar’s wife, who had brought round, on her bicycle, a marked copy for Lucy to see. Miss Kirkman was overweight, reddish in colour, and overwhelmed by the primitive cooking stove—a paraffin-burning Valor Perfection—which filled the kitchen with fumes. Phillip thought that the genteel Miss Kirkman was best avoided. A rancid odour seemed to accompany her presence. This did not altogether originate, he thought, in the condition of the drainage pipes which lay, irregularly, under the lawn. They were field drains, of the kind laid in the nineteenth century under heavy land, without collars and unglazed.

  “Lucy, do ask Miss Kirkman to let only liquid go down the sink.”

  “I have asked her. She is careful, you know. However, I’ll speak to her again.”

  He said to Miss Kirkman, “I know it’s the fault of those field-drain-pipes. I’ll replace them when I’ve finished my book.”