Lucifer Before Sunrise (29 page)

In his journal Phillip noted other occasional facts, which might be of use to someone in the future: such as, the price of barley at Mark Lane Corn Exchange was now one hundred and ninety shillings a coomb or sack: and that had he, the Hare, left stacks standing, Tortoise like, for another three months, the corn would have fetched nearly
£
2,000 more, and he would have been well out of debt. If only Mr. Gladstone Gogney had never turned up at all with his little totty old steam engine!

*

He was doing no good at the Gartenfeste so he returned to the farm.

At the beginning of March it was still freezing, and barley rose to 210
s
. the sack. The water in the draw-well, with its chains and
oak buckets was not frozen; but it was suspect. During his absence David had suffered a sudden attack of ‘rheumatic fever’ and had lain in bed unable to move his head for pain. Again the wonder drug, Prontosil, fairly new at that time, had cured him, as it had killed
pneumonococcus
in Phillip. Those shallow village wells, fed from surface rains through chalk, held doubtful water. There were cracks and flint-strata through which seepings from cesspit and drain might trickle. Was this also the source of the septic throat that again afflicted him?

Lucy called the doctor. Phillip would never have bothered him, for himself. The family, if he died, would at least be free of the spectre of fear; and his insurance policies would provide ready money. The children could then be as untidy and casual as they liked. Better that, than another Maddison generation wrecked by a petty, inhibited tyrant.

Two bullfinches, in the pear-tree outside the bedroom window, were flitting in their spring-time colours. It was already the second week of March. They could not yet move on the land. But on one morning there came a change over the bleak and vacant view from Phillip’s window. The sun shone all day; the snow disappeared in the garden, and on the grass of the Home Hills. But at night the frost returned, and the silence.

Phillip’s weak throat was still painful, with a temperature every evening, but he was doing no good in bed; so on the Monday he got up, and asked Lucy if she would go with him to look at the farm.

Although as usual very busy, she arranged for Mrs. Valiant to take over what she had been doing, and together they went for a
walk—perhaps the third or fourth time together since they had come to live there. They went by way of the coast road and
river-bridge
to the causeway. He felt like a ghost of snow; feeble and patternless. The sight of the lambs was cheering. They looked lively, clean, and good. But Matt the shepherd-stockman looked worn-out.

“I’m tired, master. Boy Billy, he’s tired too, doin’ th’ hosses, an’ then on the dicker all day.”

“There’s nothing for it, I’ll take over the stables again.”

Phillip and Lucy went on to look at the newly-cut hedges, one under the Steep, the other above Brock Hanger wood. The work looked to be well-done. He took heart at their tidy and regular appearance. The wheat on the Hanger field was frost-grey, but living. How fortunate that they had sown it in September! The clover layers of Steep and Bustard were diminished by hares and pigeons; but the plants were
alive.
The bullocks in the Hanger Yard were still not ‘doing’, though they were not shrinking. The dwarfed roots had long been eaten. They were existing on pulp, straw, and hay. Their coats were staring. What could be done, with no other labour available, and the service cottages let to others?

They walked down to the premises, and there black depression returned upon Phillip. The cart-shed was chaos. Jute corn-sacks, so hard to come by, were chucked anywhere. Rats had made holes in the barley-meal bags still uncollected from the High Barn, despite Billy’s assurances that all the meal had been tipped into the rat-proof galvanised bins. The bins were empty, unused.

“Are people afraid to tell me the truth?” his scraping voice cried. “Can that be the explanation of the repeated evasions and mis-statements I must put up with? Oh yes, I can cast my mind back, and see a parallel in my own evasive boyhood! Does the pattern of life always recur, is there
no
progress? Whatever the cause, here is the effect!”

“I’m very sorry, Phillip, but really, it is not my affair, you know!”

“Please Lucy—please listen! Our stock is short of food. Here we are breeding rats on the grain which provides the most
expensive
meal in Britain—. These sacks have been here ever since the day of the last grinding, nearly two weeks ago! I was told that all had been carted round to the bins! Can’t anyone’s word be trusted?”

“I expect there is always so much to do.”

“How can you excuse such things? Look at those tunnelled, torn
sacks! What is the good of trying to improve this farm, if all creative work is destroyed as soon as it is achieved?”

“Well, I cannot help it,” said Lucy. “It really is nothing to do with me.” She added, “You know, you ought really to be in bed. Well, I must go, otherwise I shall not get my work done, then we’ll be more behind than ever.”

*

The next day Phillip was in the lower room of his cottage, standing among balls of binder twine, tins of paint and distemper, bags of nails, bolts and screws, sacks of self-hardened cement, plaster, etc., when a man whose face was vaguely familiar appeared in the space of the open door. He asked if Phillip had a caravan for sale. Phillip replied truthfully that he really didn’t know, to which the visitant retorted, perhaps equally truthfully, “Tain no odds to me wewer I buys it or not. What’s it wurf?”

“I’ve no idea. It’s a twenty-year-old Eccles caravan, solidly built, with steel sheets outside, and oak-ply wood within.”

“What I’m arter is a caravan ver ’ouse coupla lorry drivers. I comes from Lunnon—Stratford—East End. I’ve got five lorries a’ready on construction jobs.”

In other words, a small profiteer, as he would have been called in the first war. One of the small fry when compared with the large construction companies known as the Forty Thieves.

“I kin find work fer two more drivers, Irishmen, if I kin give ’m a place to live in. What will yer take for yer caravan?”

For years Phillip’s Uncle Hilary’s old caravan, which he bought from him, had stood in the Corn Barn, a silent reproach for its uselessness. Once he had vaguely planned to stand it in the Great Bustard Wood, and retire there to write about the Great War—that old dream—and go about barefoot, an anchorite away from it all. Or down by the River Wood. Fish for trout in that short length where the water ran more or less clear; and write. True, the
innkeeper
at Durston, a hamlet along the coast, was also a poacher of Phillip’s pheasants for the black market. He it was who had told some Czech soldiers of the trout in the pool at the bend at the end of the River Wood, and had lent them a shrimp net with which they had cleared out all the fish there; but it was an idea, to live down there by oneself, beside running water, a refugee from the farm, and the ghastly world of civvies all about one.

The caravan, of course, would have been broken into, the rods either smashed or stolen, and the couches probably soiled with human excreta—the impulse of men unhappy in military servitude,
coming from equally unhappy homes. It had happened to several boats moored in the marsh creeks, before all boats were taken away by order of the military.

So the caravan had remained in the Corn Barn.

Now this fellow wanted to buy it, apparently. Phillip said to himself apparently, because the fellow repeated several times that he didn’t trouble if he bought it or not. Phillip knew, from what Bert Close had told him, that two more drivers for two more old scraped-up lorries from a junk-yard would mean another
£
7 a day added to his income.

“I don’t trouble, I’ve ’ad six lorries a’ready on construction sites, I git a hundred and fifty quid a week for vem, and I never signed no cheque in me life, nor never goin’ to, what’s more. So vey can’t git me fer no tax.”

Obviously this tycoon lived in one dimension of the present only‚ thought Phillip. They’ll get you all right, one day.

Suddenly he remembered the man’s face. Before the war. An acre of land littered with old automobiles. He was a car-breaker, a knacker. His chief tool (professionally speaking) was a pair of pincers with handles a yard long, attached to cutters of chilled steel the shape of a crossbill’s beak. This fearsome implement could bite up the skeleton of a motorcar like a steel hyena.

Phillip had gone there for a spring to fit on the green trailer, to replace one broken by Luke, when backing the trailer. He had written the pattern of dialogue heard in the cess of wreckage fouling the grassy field. A bargain was being sought when he arrived.

An axle for eight shillings belonged to another world, that planet called Before the War. Nowadays there were little fortunes
in old rope and ancient iron; and big fortunes for the owners of lorries, if they could get drivers.

His visitor was persistent. “What’ll yer take fer ver caravan? Hundred nicker?”

“Well, I value it at about ten pounds. But I don’t want to sell.”

“Ow about a hundred and ten smackers?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Taint bust nowhere?”

“No.”

“Money ain’t narthin’ to me, y’know. I could put a five p’un note between brea’n’burrer and never know I ate it.”

“You must be rich, like Horatio Bugg, for he told me he could do the same all day and night. But seriously, wouldn’t a paper sandwich give you indigestion?”