Lucifer Before Sunrise (63 page)

Phillip made friends with a small boy whom he met on the sands. He might have been a younger Billy. He stared again and again at his blue eyes, the fair hair, the white skin only faintly discoloured by the sun. He was held by the sight of him; at times his feeling rose near to the point of instability.

This small boy, with his friends, played with Phillip a fast game, wherein Phillip, lying on the soft sand, attempted to catch one or another of the running children, circling him, by the heel. It was a tough and rough game when played with a dozen children who joined them, but soon they learnt to fall softly on sand, to
yield themselves in falling, and so all was fun. Skilful, too; a flick of the wrist, and your victim turned half a somersault. You must be gentle of course, as gentle as a loved dog taking food from your ringers.

The children worked with Phillip in his field, dragging broken trees to a bonfire site in the middle of the field. The boy’s chest stuck out like a four-and-a-half-gallon barrel, his bare feet with splayed toes dug into the soil of the field. He worked with an earnestness which Phillip had to check, for he was only seven.

The summer hours passed, the wind dried the trunks and branches until it needed only one match to fire the heap.

And on the night of V-J day the beacon leapt up in flame, one of hundreds burning across England because the war was ended in the East with the surrender of Japan. Eight children and three mothers came to the hilltop, drawn like moths to the flame, while the lighthouse lanterns flashed up and down the Channel like fire-flies.

*

That morning Phillip had telephoned the farmhouse in East Anglia to tell them of the bonfire. There had been no reply. Perhaps they were all at the village celebrations? Even so, he felt disquiet. He had telephoned later in the day. No reply. Yes, they must all be at the Banyards high-go-glee.

There was a barrel of bitumen on the top of his beacon and a lot of old sump-oil had been poured upon the fir branches. One of the three mothers of the eight children brought a bottle of Jamaican rum, which she presented to Phillip. He had one of Lucy’s fruit cakes in the hut, which he divided among the children; but the tots of rum were given to the mothers on a ratio of
fifty-fifty
; one for you, and one for me, one for you, now one for me, for of course a man must in such circumstances match Demon with Demon. When half the bottle was down his throat they saw the fault in his calculations, and he thought all England must be seeing the bonfire.

Next morning a few survivors cooked breakfast on the embers at the edge; for the heart of the beacon was still glowing.

*

When he went down to the village to collect the post there were two letters awaiting him. One was in Lucy’s handwriting, the other in Tim’s. The envelope addressed by Lucy bore a strange postmark. At first he did not dare to open it, having foreboding of what it might say. When he did at last slit the envelope,
carefully
lest the contents be cut, he was at first surprised by the
opening lines, that she was going to have a baby. She had not told him before, she wrote, because she did not want to worry him. Now she had made up her mind to go away with the children, for she felt she could not carry on any further. She had done her best, and failed; and he must have his freedom. She had not taken this step without long and careful thought. She had not given any address, she wrote, because it would simplify matters if he did not try to dissuade her. If he wanted to get in touch with her, he could write to her solicitors, at an address he would find in Tim’s letter.

Her brother’s letter declared that he was greatly concerned for Lucy’s health and indeed life, now that she was ‘in a delicate condition’, and so he had taken the step of finding a place for her and the children where she would be free of his influence.

Tim Copleston went on to say that, furthermore, he had the gravest concern for his sister’s money, but that can be gone into by her solicitors. For on his father’s death, he declared, Phillip had removed all the furniture and family relics to a place of his own, ‘to wit, your field Gartenfeste’; and had he, Tim, not returned when he did, he was pretty sure Phillip intended ‘to purloin the lot’.

Phillip could not understand how anyone could have believed what Tim had written. Was this a prelude to Tim seeking to have him certified as insane? His thoughts became wild and
self-destructive
; he thought of going over the Cliffs of Valhalla.

He recovered his nerve. A prepaid-reply telegram was sent to the farmer at Robertsbridge, who, a year previously, had visited the farm while Phillip and the children were shelling sunflower seeds. The telegram said that if the milking machine was still for sale, he would buy it.

His idea was to build up a dairy herd. The children would not have to work so hard in their summer holidays; he would need only ten acres or so of oats for the cows, and the rest would be grazing or fodder.

The reply came, the milking machine was still for sale. At once Phillip set out for Sussex.

*

For sixteen years this motorcar and he had been together. Once it was called, in the days between the wars, a sports model. What a phrase out of the dimming past, he thought … when one could ask for, and actually get, merely by tendering money, eggs-and-bacon at a restaurant, petrol at any wayside station; and in the shops were shoes, socks, suits of clothes, chocolate in boxes weighing pounds; and the sky above towns glowed at night in the
distance and the bathing beaches were not all wired, mined, set with a forest of poles, and closed.

Nowadays the Silver Eagle was an odd sight, with the little wooden box on the back behind the bucket seats and the bonnet concealing ninety-five synthetic horses at 4,500 r.p.m.—tax thirteen pounds a year for an agricultural vehicle. The race-horses had been put into a farm cart; but sometimes they kicked up their heels … as on that August day of 1945, when the motorcar ran at over seventy miles an hour along a surprisingly new concrete road built to the coast for the invasion of Festung Europa; which now was dust.

That speed was perhaps not wise, for the tyres showed the reticulations of age and the cracks of experience in the rubber-
and-canvas
walls. They might have broken, vehicle and driver with them—as good a climax as any, he thought: but the idea was to save the farm for the family by installing a milking machine.

At last—Robertsbridge. Up a lane. The farmhouse. The farmer and his sister.

“How is Elizabeth?”

“She never replied to my letters.”

After tea they packed the more delicate parts of the machine in the box body of the car and having arranged for the rest to be dispatched by railway truck, Phillip turned north with his load.

Now tarnished Eagle and he were moving at a sedate forty, noting how, every few miles, the corn harvest hues varied with soils and latitudes. So they reached the Gravesend ferry across Thames, to continue through Essex on the way north. In Phillip’s head was an echo of the advice of the Ministry of Agriculture official before the war: to build up a dairy farm, to seed down the arable to grass, kale, and other feeding stuffs; and produce
milk.
 

*

On his way through an unknown village he stopped to change a plug. There was an old house opposite, with
For
Sale
in one window. Like nearly all other cottages and houses, it looked as though the window frames and doors had not been painted for many years. He knocked, and was asked in. What was the price, he enquired; for all the way back from the West Country he had been thinking that any court action by Lucy would ruin what little was left of his reputation as a writer; to contest the action might mean no money for the education of the children. Another
alternative
was to sell the farm, make a trust of the money, with the income made over to Lucy.

Now he looked over Hill House with the least interest, after seeing that it had a deep well above which was an electric pump; large kitchen and larder; outhouses; half an acre of garden; six bedrooms, one with a powder closet, with heavy oak floors; three stairways; a fairly large hall with open hearth; a sitting-room, and two other rooms downstairs. There were two lavatories; a
bathroom
; a courtyard with coach house, and loose box. It seemed cheap at
£
1,000. And would appreciate in value, for the housing shortage would be acute when the Forces were demobilised. But what mattered was that this was a place where Lucy and the family could go, for it was to be sold with vacant possession.

“I’ll buy it.”

He wrote a cheque for one-tenth of the purchase price within half an hour of entering and leaving the main door, which opened on a pavement before a broad highway.

He was about to leave when the owner said he would like to ask his advice about a bird that he had bought, during the summer, from a man in the village. It was a dove, and it did not seem to like its food. He had paid thirty shillings for it, to please his wife, who was very fond of birds, he said. Bird seed of all kinds was almost impossible to get, he had paid thirty shillings a pound for his mixture.

Phillip looked at the bird, a wild turtle dove. Its food was a mixture of gromwell, charlock, and dock seed.

“It is mourning for its mate. Turtle doves are migrant birds, they die if they cannot return to Africa when the time for making the passage comes.”

“Then I’ve been swindled?”

He was a Londoner, who had left when the bombing started in 1940, and bought the house for little more than a third of the sum he had sold it for. Phillip asked him if he would sell the dove, saying that he knew where was another such bird, and the two would keep one another company. So he left with dove and wicker cage, and when a mile or so along the road set it free; and drove on.

At last, with trepidation, he came to the village, and entered a farmhouse vacant of voices, faces, all movement; until Mrs. Valiant, hearing of his return, hurried down from her cottage.

“Oh sir, missis be gone!” she said, tears running down her face. “Master Peter is still here, carrying on. They’re cutting the wheat on the far meadow.”

Phillip heard how, after Lucy’s departure, the drawers
contain
ing
her and the children’s clothes in the bedrooms had been left open. “Mr. Copleston came in his motor, sir, before Missis was ready. So she left in a hurry. Missis was crying, sir. Now sit you down, you look a proper tired man, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.” She went into the kitchen, and returned to say, “Before I forget, sir, Mr. Tim left this letter for you to read.”

Phillip went down to the end meadow to speak to Peter. The boy saw him and left the lorry he was driving. Phillip said, “Will you farm for your mother and yourself, perhaps with Uncle Tim, if I go away after making the land over to a trust, together with all the live and dead stock, so that when you are of age you will be the owner of the land, and part owner of the farming business?”

Peter’s cheeks became slightly pink. Then he said, “I don’t bestways think I’m any good, sir. I’m sorry, Dad.”

The dark green lorry was covered with chalk drawings and words on bonnet, mudguards, and body. Was that wild angular figure, with arms waving as he chases away soldiers, himself? And the scarecrow chained to a little grey donkey on wheels a self-portrait of Peter? Phillip recognised his rather childish writing.

“I didn’t know you had such a comic talent. You should be a writer, Peter.”

“Well, Dad, I think you’re our writer.”

“Thanks for staying, Peter. I’ll give you a hand, if you like. You’re in charge now.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Later, Phillip called on the owner of the Old Manor, who had long wanted to possess the land once part of the lordship of Banyards. Phillip named his price and the other said he would let him know as soon as he had telephoned a solicitor.

The barley was not yet fit. Phillip walked among whitening stalks and then sat under an oak tree, amidst goldfinches twittering in the thorn hedge while the heated air lisped and swirled in the rustling corn.