POST 20

 
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In the garden, Camilla joined Tom and Philip, hanging on to her brother's arm, whispering.  Tom was pleased when Philip pushed her gently off and she went away.  Radiantly beautiful women embarrassed Tom, and demonstrations that were not girlish but assuredly womanly embarrassed him fearfully.  Besides, that sort of thing with his sister...  Tom caught Constance's eye.  She was doing overmuch beaming and grimacing in Philip's vicinity perhaps.

         Philip looked affectionately at Tom and Tom could not help feeling flattered and pleased as well he might.  "What are you going to do?  Have you decided?"

         Tom looked back at his graceful cousin in his old civvies and laughed excitedly.  "I know exactly, exactly."

         "Not much exactness ever comes out in your letters;  it's mostly waffle."

         The present-stated degree of exactness of Tom's knowing had much to do with his eagerness to engage Philip's whole attention again.  Tom had felt a distance between them over the last year.  "Brought up on Molly Absecond's Thursday Meetings," here Tom thrust back his head housewards, "you'd expect me to know wouldn't you?  You can't mix up poetry and philanthropy and conversation and kindness and Fabianism and communism and uninformed abuse and letters to the newspapers as she does and call that politics."

         "Don't be too sure about it," Philip said mildly after a moment.  "In any case, everything's not as sure as it was.  Anyway, I'm not really talking about your politics.  I'm talking about your imminent call-up."

         "Oh that!  I'll stay out of it as long as I can, completely if I can.  Anyway, come what may, I finish my degree and go dead seriously into politics.  Labour Party centre.  I've told you.  History of the working-class movement in this country to be properly interpreted.  Get a proper language.  Much overdue."  But he was at a loss to fill up the silence.  "Don't you agree?"  Even that remark about language failed to rouse.  As Philip said nothing, Tom took the opportunity to kick the very old football up the garden, watching it soar and land dead.  "You know, make the Labour Party real for us, work like hell...  "

         Constance sighed with a frustrated desire to shine in some way;  explode perhaps.  Bleak House.

         "No, I'm talking about your imminent personal fate.  You're going to be called up.  You never talk about that in your letters."

         "You seem to have...  I don't know, changed your attitude about a lot of things," said Tom, running out of ready talk.  "I wish you wouldn't keep on saying imminent.  Used to be a pleasure to talk to you!"

         "Are you going to be as much of a man as your father?" Philip teased.  Like Frances, Tom sometimes did not notice teasing.

         "My father?  Holy cows!  How does he come into it?"  Philip seemed to allow a lot of time for Tom to answer the question for himself - which Tom failed to do.  "What do you mean?" he asked piteously.

         "How are you going to find out anything about yourself?  Or your father?  By graduating and marrying Frances at twenty-one and going into politics?  Or what?"

         Constance flushed.  Now that was interesting.  Philip had noticed Tom had he?

         "I shan't be marrying anyone at the age of twenty-one I promise you.  And my warrior instincts are well in hand.  We don't all have to arrive at maturity through primitive heroism and killing.  Buzz off, Con.  Fran's too good for either of us."

         "That's something else you're quite sure about is it?  What war is?  What maturity is?"

         "What?"

         "You don't have to learn?  Luckily some of us are born mature with mature opinions on who should be fighting whom in Korea and everywhere else no doubt, as long as it's not you apparently, as you were telling your father the other night."  Oh good!  He remembered something from the other night.  "Some of us are born to be leaders of opinion?  Fine."

         You had to hand it to Tom that he remained cool and was able at this point to display genuine political subject-turning talent.    "You've got an old idea of war from the British Army," he said largely.   "Take Korea.  All you need these days is plenty of modern equipment and more firepower than they've got.  When the Americans really get started in there, they'll reduce the whole thing to law and order in no time.  Nothing to it.  As a matter of fact, I don't think I can possibly go into the Army.  Nothing to do with bravery.  I'd die of the tedium."

         "You've got a funny idea of war...  And who mentioned bravery?" Philip laughed.  "And who are you, not to die of tedium?  Better men than you have had much worse stretches of wilderness opened to them for their exploration, beyond anything you could imagine.  They learn to possess their own souls.  You have to be tough, of course."

         Tom was astonished.  "Well, bloody hell.  You have changed your mind about a lot of things.  And your vocabulary!  You're like the rest.  The Army will do me good, make a man of me, widen my outlook.  I know!  Those who can read are allowed to talk to those who can't.  Teach them the rule book.  Two solid years of time-wasting boredom and barbarism...  ."

         "Extraordinary ...   about barbarians," Philip said.  "There might not be any barbarians except for your snotty way of looking at things.  Your closed door.  I should have thought a couple of years in the democratic army would have fitted in well with your socialist principles.  Or don't other people, and variety, interest you?"

         "You don't fool me, Phil.  You've got the weight of the old traditional family skeletons.  Indian Civil Service.  Army.  Brigadier Barny Harisonn, VC.  Oh, I admire it," Tom said, fairly circumspectly, having in common with Philip another soldier grandparent on the Kellory side, "but it's over.  Honour, patriotism, colonial tradition.  Springs of glorious action they were, not springs of thought.  India's only a start Phil.  The Empire's going to come down round your ears.  And with it, the Army as we know it.  You must try to keep up with the new times as best you can."

         But it was Tom who seemed old-fashioned, so tremendously full of certainty, and closed-up;  and Philip who seemed, despite his desire to stay in the Army, modern, curious, tentative and uncertain.  Constance seemed to recognise Philip's uncertainty as not unlike her own.  It was that particular kind of uncertainty, she reassured herself, which came from recognising more about life, not less, than Tom did.

         The birds sang in the trees and in the silence there was no other sound and it was at this point that Tom first realised the obvious disconnection between his view that a war had to be fought in Korea for democracy and his own disinclination even to go into the Army.  (So far as Constance had taken pains to gather it seemed that despite their comfortable agreement on so much else, on Korea, Frances was with Aunt Molly for the North, communists;  while Tom, on balance was with his father for the South, democrats.  She kept trying to remember that.)

         "Look here," Tom said belligerently, "my believing in force in Korea and being bored by the Army is no contradiction.  There's the importance of political thought and political thinkers you don't pay attention to...  "

         "Ah!  I hoped you might get round to it.  Well then, the freedom of a country's thinkers depends on its armed services, on its being able to defend itself and its thinkers, that's you I suppose, when attacked.  I don't think that will change much in the near future.  You evidently consider your ideas are being attacked, at least?"

         Constance wondered how she would ever again be able to interest him.

         "You have to serve your time, so what are you going in for?  That's all I'm asking.  I'm trying to help."

         "It's all one to me.  You'll be back at Oxford.  Nothing for you to worry about."

         "I?  But you know I'm not going back."

         "Ah, but you're not serious.  What about your thesis?  Not going back at all?"

         "Probably not, unless they take me, or somebody will, as an old man!"

         "National Service rotted your brain, or something?  I don't believe it.  I thought you were supposed to be ambitious."

         "Oh, I'm ambitious!  My ambitions have changed.  I've started the first part of my new education where I hope to go on with it."

         "You must be out of your mind."

         "No.  I'm somewhere near speaking the truth."

         "Education!  Army!  You've just got a taste for bloody paradoxes, that's all.  Oh, it's well-known.  Frances always says that.  Have you actually signed on?"

         "It's in hand."

         "Are you bent on getting to this er..?"

         "Korea?  Not so easy.  Meanwhile I've been offered a job as Instructor at a battle school."

         "Oh fine, fine!  Marvellous news I must say.  Go on then.  Go!  And more fool you."

POST 19

The Kensington side-road was white and still;  one or two parked cars, nothing moving.  The sky was deep blue.  The house was surrounded by ancient trees and grown over by dusty shrubs.  It had for an entrance twelve-foot wrought-iron gates of oriental design set crookedly open in rust between pillars of stone with lamps on them.  For aesthetic reasons they had never gone the way of less imposing ironworks into the war effort.  This house had no glare on it.  The dark brick soaked up light.  The sun inflittering through old lime trees revealed now an unexpected window, now a broken sill, now the crutches on which this stout looking though clearly fragile house was propped at one side.  Loverdale House.  Sad lovers.  Constance, with a cohort of her Presences, as many as had ever assembled, stood there and they could not make up her mind to go in.  It reminded her of landmines and bombs.  Frances, when she caught up, had no inhibitions.  She flounced forward up and round the drive between banks of overgrown shrubs, some in half-hearted and dusty flower, and made her way to the front door.

    "Molly!  Down the side, my dear.  Front is all nailed up."  Philip's father, Geoffrey Harisonn, muffled in foliage at an upstairs window shouted down.  The side! 

    Choked with weeds and where the props were.  It was dark there, not a shaft of a glare.  Frances, after her confrontation with the nailed-up front door, came purposefully round the side after them.  She passed them, delicately swinging for speed round the props, and led the way.  All right for her.  She was going to confront Philip now.  It was well-known, in that devious way Frances had of making things well-known, that she was at last and once more in the relationship of masterful altercation with Philip Harisonn since last Thursday.  It was Constance now whom the idea of Philip made very nervous.

    She slipped straight into the nearest seat which happened to be the long stool of the grand piano by the garden window.  On the piano was a huge bowl of fleshy flowers.  Cover!  Sarah put her hand briefly on Constance's neck.  "It's all right," she said. "the house isn't going to fall down.  You can stop crouching!"

    The house of course is going to fall down.

    Greetings exchanged.

    "Hello, Mrs. Harisonn," said Frances, looking into those deep violet eyes.

    "Philip is in the garden," said Laekia Harisonn, although Frances had not asked her.  Frances did not budge.  "He's a fool.  See if you can get some sense out of him, Frances."  Constance craned her giveaway feet onto the piano stool as Frances went seriously to get some sense out of Philip.

    "Hello Constance," Laekia called.  "I can see you!"  Laekia fluttered her spiky fingers, silver nails;  "Well, the Evanwoods to come;  and Dr. Streeter.  You, please dear Molly, speak to Geoffrey.  Father and son.  They've just had a quarrel here.  Philip has been very bad to his uncle Matthew.  Geoffrey's disappointed and worried about Philip.  We expected him to go back to the University.  And it's all come to it that he shall stay in the Army.  And now war in Korea!"

    Constance suddenly remembered, with astonishment at forgetting, that Philip, of course, had connections with the Army and World Affairs.  It now seemed a very good thing that none of them had any idea of that scene in her bedroom.

    "He's certainly chosen his moment, just as you're off.  And what will happen to the house?" said Molly.

    "Lap of gods," said Laekia.

    "It's always been in the lap of the gods," said Aunt Molly, "At the moment it looks to me as if they've stood up and dropped it."  She had never been able to associate Laekia with possession of Loverdale House.

    Sarah and Frances gone, Molly off to greet Geoffrey, Constance examined, under the piano, the gold-threaded design round the bottom of Mrs. Harisonn's yellow silk sari, paid minute attention to the beautiful gold sandals, the painted pointed toenails and was not in the least surprised that Philip should be in love with his half-sister Camilla who was as dark and beautiful as her mother.  Laekia rustled out through the sitting-room door.  Constance put away Army and world affairs and prepared to let passion and love take their place;  as how could they help it? 

    In the garden there was no Philip, but there was Tom, and what Frances did,  possibly as her first move in the coming encounter with Philip, was to greet Tom extravagantly, and rear about, like a bolting lettuce in a high wind, at his very first remark.  Manfully resistant to this girlish play, Tom stood there, his unignorable chest and stomach thrust out, smirking.

    The room to herself.

    Constance scrutinised it;  the inside less prone to collapse than outside.  The puffy deep armchairs had pale dimpled cushions with bits of looking glass embroidered into them, the melon silk lampshades like faded footballs;  carpet and curtains alike ballooned here and there dinged with yellow and gold.  Safe.  Constance breathed more easily, walked about the spacious room awfully gently.  She was saving herself for the first sight of Philip when, hearing she had arrived, he rushed in to find her alone.  On the mantelpiece, marble and white, stood a gold stopped clock and a few carvings of pillow-fleshed gentlemen in the lotus position with tiny maniacal grins on their shiny bald heads.

    "Hello, Mrs. Sage."  A woman bumping a trolley over the carpet which had swollen under and behind the door came awkwardly into the room.  A strand of Mrs. Olive Sage's suspiciously orange-black hair, which was not plentiful, fell forward as a hairpin pinged over the sugar bowl.  The sugar tongs plong-ed to the floor and disappeared under the table.

    "Have a crawl and pick them up, there's a dear girl," said Mrs. Sage straightening up breathlessly.

    "Have you seen their teeth?  Come and have a look," said Constance fingering a navel reflectively.

    Mrs. Sage stood undecided.  She was the victim of an easily-roused curiosity and very responsive to tried friendship.  Shedding and cursing another hairpin she came where she was bidden and examined the little fat thing under Constance's hand.

    "Showin his pearlies, isn't he?"  Mrs. Sage moved along, not too fast.  "This one's my favourite."  A larger piece, something spikily different in copper gilt and jewels, all four arms and ferocious private parts.  "He's a bit thinner, which I prefer," said Mrs. Sage.  "He's their God of Love you know.  He's the Dancer.  All that stomach muscle.  He gets more exercise I suppose.  Mr. Philip showed me."  Constance transferred her finger.  "Have you seen Mr. Philip's new Chinese pictures?"

    "No, what are they like?" asked Constance, face to face with a rare copy of a rare print from the Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.  She watched Mrs. Sage being pleased with the picture.  It was pleasing;  both Mrs. Sage being pleased, and the picture.  One pale plump young man playing a Chinese-type mandolin, one pale plump one, his instrument laid by, listening, one arranging flowers, all equally engaged in the pursuit of Being, as were also and very much, the banana palms.  "Ch'in Ying," Mrs. Sage read out, setting back her head to get the reading distance, "Passing A Summer Day Beneath Banana Palms."

    "I know why he likes that."  Constance was full of insight and therefore happiness.

    "He told me" Mrs. Sage dropped her voice, "before they had the you know quarrel about the war business.  Everything is of the same, all the people, all the plants, and all the musical instruments, everything equal."

    Oh yes, poet's eye and everything equal value.  But there was something else as well, and Constance knew what it was.  His taste for an intense and unearthly quality of spiritual outback that Camilla's great beauty also suggested.  That she was his half-sister was for Philip only one thing about Camilla, and not the most important, the picture said.

    "He's a great duck anyhow," said Mrs. Sage, perhaps feeling from the silence that Mr. Philip needed defending.  "Even if he do give them the dickens sometimes.  Very rude to his uncle, Mr. Kellory.  I was surprised.  Both such nice-natured people.  Still, they never did get on, those two."

    "Is Susan here?" Constance said, distantly - partly because she had come over feeling plainfaced, solid of flesh and unbeautiful;  partly because Mrs. Sage's whispering disturbed her.  I hope Susan is not here.  Constance admired Mrs. Sage, but Mrs. Sage's daughter Susan she did not.  At the end of the long garden rose up a lixiodendron tree with its pretty summery leaves.  Something funny had come over Mrs. Sage's voice.

    "Naughty girl wouldn't come.  Too high and mighty and with good friends too.  Charity this and condescension that.  I'm going to have explanations with her when I get back.  Your sister Frances is very upset."  All this savage and distant, came to Constance from under the table-cloths.  Mrs. Sage after the sugar-tongs.

    "Aah!  It's easy to upset Frances," said Constance.

    "Suz better mark my words."  Mrs. Sage spoiled the room coming out backwards, crawling with a lock of hair over her face.  "I don't know why your Aunt Molly or anyone else takes any notice of her."  Mrs. Sage checked the trolley and went out muttering.

    Poor Susan, life spent having explanations and marking her mother's words.  Serves her right.  Constance looked away up the garden, not quite so secure in her own lovely fate as she had been.

    Behind her, in the sitting-room, Mrs. Laekia Harisonn lifted the lids of two massive silver pots and stood praying, or sniffing, in the way of the rising steam.

    "Modest, well modest," she said.  Her violet eyes were steamy pools.  "Before the war, you know, never less than five kinds."

    "What were they?" asked Philip.

    "Assam, Darjeeling, Nilgiris my favourite, Malacco...

    "Earl Grey, Queen Mary Blend," put in Mrs. Sage.

    "But here just two pots of plain ration tea, infused in silver, but democratic for all.  Democracy its best flavour in the end, eh Mrs. Sage?"  Mrs. Harisonn seemed wistful.  She asked Mrs. Sage to join them in their leave taking.

    "I had better clear up here quickly so I'm ready to go early, Mrs. Harisonn, thank you very kindly," said Mrs. Sage.  "Susan just a bit off.  Nasty headache.  Working hard."

    "Give my love to Susan," said Philip.  "I'm sorry to have missed her.  I'll have to come down and see her and Robert before I go back.  I particularly want to see Robert.  He missed his call-up, didn't he?"

    "For which I am truly grateful poor lad.  I lost his father.  One's enough," said Mrs. Sage, coming out rather strongly, though quietly and privately, considering company.

    "How's Terminus?  I haven't been in Terminus for ages.  Is it still a great place?"

    "Oh, it's not um" said Mrs. Sage, pleased.

    "It's a great place if you can afford to be spiritual about it.  You don't have to live there," said Laekia.

    "Perhaps" said Philip stiffly, as if he'd said enough to Laekia for one day.

    "Yes.  You can practise more-spiritual-than-thou", said Laekia, obviously not under the same inhibition.

    Regulating her breathing, smoothing her hair, encouraging anodyne thoughts like stop grimacing to assuage the pain of her smile, which had got stuck, Constance was getting over the shock of Philip's sudden appearance in the flesh of open neck, old tweed trousers, not quite such a flawless appearance.  He had smiled and nodded to her and put his hand on her head certainly, but Sarah was there by his side at the time.

    "I like Terminus too," Constance said now;  though how to dissociate this remark from looking as if she was condescending to Olive Sage and resisting Laekia when she was only encouraging Philip to look at her, she did not know.  She did like Terminus, although it was very wrong to do so.  It was something she and Philip had always had in common.  He had never avoided the Old House.

    "Little volcano you have there, Mrs. Sage," said Laekia in reference to the recalcitrant Susan.  "Have two of my own."  Laekia addressed herself to Philip.  "They are forces of nature, the young.  Philip and Camilla, do they belong to us I ask myself."

    "They don't," said Molly Absecond.

    Laekia's fine plump fingers pointed their way through the five hundred little links of a gold collar.  Philip was not amused.  "Going to the war!" said Laekia.  "His poor father!"

    Mrs. Sage, safely generalising, knew so very exactly what was meant.  She lost the run of a couple of plates and caught them in time.  The three ladies departed in a not very business-like manner to the kitchen.  Philip took himself off without a word.

    It was going to be one of those days when absolutely nobody paid any attention whatsoever to Constance Yokeham.  Might as well be invisible.

POST 18

Up early, carefully dressed for school the next morning, a fragile, restrained breakfast (as befitted one's new status as a potential Tower), Constance, her mind as clear as the blue sky, just breathed the summer air on the way to school, smiling at strange old ladies, toddlers, policeman, practising road courtesy, so that when, two or three times, it came, during the day, to the homework question, a certain set of contradictions took up her mind.

The desire to, as it were, confirm the teachers in their life's work, to be that star pupil with whom they shared gladly their life's involvement with the subject taught, came into conflict with the necessity (in fulfilling the confirmation) to tell a number of lies about the failure to produce any homework. There was something here in this particular department of failure and bad faith, that Constance occasionally felt very bad indeed about, and because of that she did not normally persist in investigating it, in case she caused herself pain. Today, the lies did not feel good at all, did not cohere with the radiance of her feelings, the experience she had had of Philip, in fact. She felt unusually apologetic and ashamed of herself.

Rather surprisingly, the results of having gone too far with Philip - quite unlike the fantasies inspired by wanting to go too far with Matthew - were won entirely to the cause of virtue. (This always was to be the case. Constance wanted to be of good character for Philip, Matthew she just wanted.) Homework dedicated entirely to Philip Harisonn - at some cost to syntax and mathematical calculation - took place during the following days. Describe as accurately as possible the causes of the Asiatic monsoons. Darling Philip, when I think of your early childhood in India. India. (Your ghastly sister.) Ah, the onset of those delicious south-west winds at the beginning of June, the imprisoned heat of the land, the inthrust of sea air into the hot interior, the formation of the great ascending air-currents. Why is Carbon Unique? Dearest Philip, if I am to speak of covalent bonds and stable linkages, my thoughts inevitably, I will be graphite to your diamond. Describe in 500 words The Rout of San Romano, by Paolo Uccello. I cannot make up my mind whether I should want you to be on those magnificent chargers, thrusting your spear about, right and sinister, in front of the picture, or whether I should prefer you to be lying with me tucked away in that quiet empty field on the left under the hedge, under the sun. I say you should be with me. The picture says, No. You must have a front place, you must be a principal character. `The motion picture art of Charlie Chaplin will inevitably make a Japanese laugh as heartily as a Dane'. Is this true? Discuss. As my friend Lieutenant Philip Harisonn has often said, the Chinese sense of humour is very different from ours. There is no tradition of Socratic thought in Chinese history...

It was all good health, great efficiency, the longing for some virtuous but inarticulable consequence from having gone far too far. Desk-clearing, room-cleaning, book-checking, joyous song broke out. One joyous verse of song jazzed up a bit. "To-mo-row shall be my-y-y dancing day. I would my tru-ue lo-ove did so chance to-oo see the legend of my-y play, to-o call my true lo-ove to my-y da-ance. Si-ing O my love, O my love, my love, my love..."

This annoyed Frances. That kind of thing was bad enough at Christmas, and repetition upon repetition got her serial-time thoughts badly tangled.

As Constance explained, it was not she, the sympathetic complaint-receiver, who was making this disturbance, but an independent spirit, the song itself, perhaps, who kept it up, kept itself up, perfecting itself; sometimes without her knowledge, or indeed her permission. Frances's head and temper got worse. How, being the cause of what seemed a real nuisance and being contrite about that, one could still feel so virtuous and unremittingly full of song was a mystery, but the song went on through the delight of all the cleansing activities, frequent baths, manicures and the care of blouses.

Her somewhat advanced though frequently short-stopping plans to seduce Philip when next he should appear or she appear unto him, were firmly based on the image of his preliminary phone-call - where, that is, he had not time to write; although there was a chance he might have time, three days, well two days, but that chance not, as it were, being taken up by him, did not seriously undermine the firmness of the expectations that without delay, let him only set foot in London, the telephone would ring; a plan to meet would evolve - a little vague at the moment as to detail in the expectant imagination, not for a lack but rather a plethora, a superabundance of detail, which made it difficult to know where in time to allocate, to expect, what delicious and virile development of the passions. There would be, would there perhaps? that invitation to supper declined by Frances?

In the event, the call came from Philip's step-mother. They were invited, everyone, to Loverdale House to say goodbye to her and Philip's father before they left London to go to New York and the United Nations.

"You sure they said Loverdale?"

"Where else do you expect them to be?"

"I don't know. I hate that place. I don't know why. I just do. Philip won't be there, I don't suppose?"

"He'll be there all right. I've spoken to him on the telephone," Frances said.

So much for the letter from Philip followed by a phonecall. Constance had not, either, envisaged a crowd scene. She and Philip would have to manage as best they could. Obviously, he had to clear things up with Frances first. But after that.

Barny, the hungry cat had returned again, its third visit. Because she liked cats, man to man without loving them, and would have liked to have a cat, but mainly because it was, to her, Constance, Philip's cat, she had been surreptitiously feeding it with scraps under the hedge at the side of the front garden. Frances who claimed to hate the `vicious brutes' had noticed Barny first this evening, from the top window, and leaving her work, actually leaving her work to do so, had rushed down the house like thunderbolts pursued by lightning, and chased him away with curses.

Constance went out later to find him, but failed.

POST 17

He showed no signs of leaving.

"Oh, I don't know," he sighed. And came to look over her shoulder to see the view perhaps where she stood looking out of her tiny window at next-door's blank wall. He put his hands on her shoulders.

"I don't know. I don't know."

"Don't shake me to death," she whispered.

"Of course not." He pressed his front thoughtfully and unconsciously to Constance's back as though she was his shield. His arms came over her shoulders, his hands on her crossed arms, their feet started to move in united stiff-leg sway, very slowly, from side to side an inch at a time. An old game. He was thinking. Constance was inclined to believe that the pressure of his stomach against her back because done unconsciously was more vital to him that his abstraction into thought. But she did not envy Frances the disturbing attentions of this divided heart.

Her nightgown was very thin. The coldness of his belt-buckle was getting warm against her back.

Philip went on thinking and there was something about this mental space between them more than Constance could very well stand. His body was hard and cool, the belt and buttons and rough stuff, and the smell of him clean and severe was nostalgic and maddening, giving rise to perfect fantasies of lust. The time had come for a little creative interference in that distant self-possession. She too was possessive, and inspired. She could not help herself.

"I'm being a wall to you," she whispered.

"Oh wall," he whispered down her back, "full often hast thou heard my moans". She shivered from her neck right down the backs of her legs, and closed her eyes. "I'm being a wall to you," he whispered again. "Women grow on the sunny side of the wall", he breathed behind her ear.

"Who said that?" She turned her face slightly into his shoulder from an inability to keep still. Comfortable this shoulder.

"Don't know."

"Within this wall of flesh there is a Soule counts thee her creditor," she said softly, the effect of flesh on mind prompting the resurrection there of lost wisdoms.

He hugged her gently, responsively, consciousness returning to his flesh; and slightly, from the inside, the wall cracked. She turned round in his arms and he did not loosen them. In the candlelight his eyes were dark and beautiful and his pale face flawless. She watched his lips.

"O w'wall, thou sweet and lovely wall..."

She put her fingers across his mouth and stopped it. "In this same interlude, it doth befall, That I, one Constance by name, present a wall: And such a wall as I would have you think That had in it a cranny'd hole or chink, Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, Did whisper often very secretly." She looked at him through her fingers, at his forehead, his eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth. "This loam, this roughcast and this stone doth show That I am that same wall: the truth is so: And this the cranny is, right and sinister, Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper."

She had him there, transfixed. Her hands as gentle as flowers on his face, she joined a small ring with her fingers and thumbs and through the ring, touching his mouth, she kissed him full on the mouth. Both of them trembled.

To relieve herself of the pain of the following silence and wonder and the warmth of his hands hard on her back, she said in a shrill loud voice she could not control "If I blow my horn hard enough will the wall fall down on Jericho?"

He let her go then, slowly, with an amused look that seemed to but did not quite in fact offer up a spy-hole through the wall behind which he kept his world. "I give you the wall," he mocked, one arm thrown out. "The cleaner, safer side of the pavement."

"We'll see!" she mocked back.

"Ah, Con! Dear me!" He drew her back to him again. "Dear me, dear me..." He buried his head in her neck, hugged her to him, and then kissed her so gently that there was no doubt that he meant it. "You're a tower, not a wall," he said, and put his hands up round her throat. "You're going to be..." There could be but one turn of events now, and the idea made her frightened and helpless in his hands.

"It's all right, it's all right, Con," he whispered. "I really have to go now." But he did not.

He caught at her as she swayed a little.

"I'm all right," she said, but she could not look at him.

He kissed her, his eyes lingering longer than his lips, and sat her down gently on the bed. "Goodnight, Con. Sleep well."

She lay on her bed for hours, missing him.

Well, there were messages here, but she had no idea what they were, except that she was going to take it that he had said more than he knew. She had certainly said more than he knew.

His stutter these days was reserved largely for Camilla apparently, and that was a relief.

POST 16

Constance trudged upstairs to the third floor. She had had a marvellous evening. Life was full now of ongoing possibilities once Philip returned on leave at the end of the week; and strains of Delius, awfully quietly, it being midnight, came from Sarah's old upright in her room. All that counted.

But it also counted that she, Constance, had done no homework again. And she had forgotten to bring up a light-bulb for her bedroom and she could not work in bed by candlelight and she was worn out in any case. She passed her bedroom door and went on to the top sitting-room she shared. She regarded with profound distaste the books thrown about all over her desk. Fran's - she had inherited their father's leather-topped brass-handled, mahogany affair rescued and restored from the wreckage of the Old House - was as usual impeccably tidy, with actual pens and pencils and ink in the pen-and-ink stand, and reference books on guard at the ready. Sarah's desk was empty.

Down in the bathroom, Constance, made happy once more by her courageous decision to abandon all thoughts of homework, it was only punitive post-exam homework anyway, examined her newly-washed face above the damp neck-rim of a faded nightgown. It was a shiny, waxy white face, huge dark old eyeholes, red eyes, grey hair, referred to politely but not politely enough as ash. Plain. Good chin-line if you could keep your head half-cocked like that all the time and not a bad nose in the Greek fashion always providing the upper lip rested halfway down the chin. Dirty feet! Gym tomorrow! She yawned and her eyes were just filling copiously with tears of tiredness when a really galvanising racket broke out directly above in Sarah's room. Sarah and Philip no less, in unison, parts and counterparts, solo and duet, andante and allegro, con brio, without discretion, let or hindrance, were singing an old, all too recognisable song, and sending it chiming round the house. Not only was it loud, it was also lewd, Philip having written the words for Sarah, Sarah the music for Philip when they were children. They had based their childhood love-affair on it just at the time Sarah's first lover, Mervyn Evanwood, proposed himself, years ago, as Master of Ceremonies at a sitting-room concert. Astonishing words. Poem of Hate for Sarah Yokeham and Mervyn Evanwood. And he has flown as frail men should, as blows the dogrose off the wood. Breath held, as between wonder and lightning, waiting for the storm to burst from below, Constance hummed and danced upstairs, whirled and hopped onto the landing, wiping her washed, wet feet on the carpet and joining ecstatically in her own childhood once more. Last verse.

I hate you singer on the stage
Because you're such a tempting age
Of ravishing voice and doubtful taste
Because you haven't got much waist.
Your nose is long
Your mouth is wide
And I can almost see inside
You sing your song
And all your teeth
Stand dark among
That pound of beef
You call your tongue
You
call
your
tongue.
And yet you seem to light a fire
In me of all my heart's desire
Your flesh I yearn for like my mother's
Although you spurn me for another's
Don't have him, Sarah Yokeham, or
Plonk, plonk, before you're spoken for

Ever so quietly, and in pretty counterpart

Don't have him Sarah Yokeham or
Plonk, plonk, before you're spoken for.

Nothing could content them, having excited themselves so skilfully in there, but that the repetition of these huge absurdities must follow in canon, quite preventing them from hearing the oncoming crashing of feet. Constance glided smugly to her room and left the door ajar. The candle juddered. She got into bed and listened.

She could not hear what was being said. The racket had stopped. Laughter. She was just about to get out of bed again to join the departures when her bedroom door opened a little.

"Con...are you in bed? Can I come to say goodnight?"

And stay to say goodmorning.

Blinking prettily, she hoped, and sleepily, as if sleepily, to hide such embarrassing inspirations, Constance was about to sit up, having rescued her feet from under Philip's behind, when Frances came in and sat down next to him on the chair at the bottom of the divan. Philip put his head on Frances's shoulder. Frances got up. One would never pass Frances by, but when she pushed back her heavy hair to speak her mind, being as honest as she knew how, her eyes shining, then he must love her completely. Damn them. "Why don't you look at me, or smile at me?" Philip said to Frances, smiling. He got up. He took her hand. He was going to lead her away perhaps. But she did not want to go. She now sat down on Constance's bed, practically on Constance's knees. Lovely view of two backs if viewed longitudinally.

"You never told me how you liked The Man Who Fell Off Snowdon," Philip said.

Constance was well aware that her presence, much as Fran might hate it, would, Fran hoped, make Philip safe. No end to Fran's silliness.

"I didn't like it. It was an attack. Let the sun set on Frances, it said."

"Well," Philip laughed, "misunderstood again! When you hold up to me as a thousand times more significant to Man a city church which I know you may possibly have studied once and certainly never notice except wilfully, you inspire me, I turned you into a mountain..." (There seemed to Constance wide margins for misunderstanding there, if Philip were putting a fair care)

"It's no good joking, Philip." Frances withdrew her hand. He shook her shoulder gently. She seemed only embarrassed and angry, heavy. Her heaviness, the particular kind of immovable sense of her own righteousness irritated him. Anyway, it irritated Constance; anyone would think she Constance was invisible, like some servant, beneath notice.

"You've been arguing with Matthew. You get dreadfully...intense."

"But I learned something. Didn't you? Strange how my mere presence takes all the life out of you," Philip said. Constance moved off irritably about a foot down the bed, earhole exposed.

"In all your letters not one word have you said about staying in the Army."

"I talked to you about it in Wales. Nothing's definite."

"To me, it makes our writing to each other, our whole friendship, of little importance."

"Not that you mind my staying in the Army. You must be rather pleased. We can proceed on paper."

"What exactly does that mean?"

"I've told you what I could. I've only just decided to try. It's impossible to write everything. You don't write everything."

"I do!" Frances must have flushed at that, she was deeply offended. She stood up.

"Especially you." But he must have known she was only defending the importance of their letters in her life, because he turned to smile towards her again.

"There's something ...odd about this decision that you haven't told me," she said.

He shaded his eyes as if from the candlelight, screwing them up. "There are no rules for being yourself," he said. Frances was tense, holding her body hard, trembling a little in the dark room. Her face was crumpled, frowning, her eyes distant. They were both pained by what they saw wherever it was they were looking at. Then Frances turned to him. Her eyes pleaded. Let it be a first simple love. Constance shivered with the message and the insight, and covered her head.

"We can't talk here," Frances said.

"Oh my God! I can leave," said Constance and got furiously our of her bed. Not that that interrupted anybody.

"Certainly we can talk here. The very place you chose. Enjoy the world."

He did not want a first simple love. He moved away from Frances. "I'm back again on Saturday. I'll take you out to supper. How about that?" He looked at Frances hopefully, and took Constance's arm. The meaning of that, Constance looked down at his hand, was that he did not want to frighten Frances.

"No, that's impossible." Oh indeed! Spontaneity was not Fran's strong point. She obviously had not decided what to say to him. If she yearned for him now it was not for his company. Philip examined the junk on the mantelpiece. Constance sighed for all the waste. Frances, after a moment, left.

Philip turned rather helplessly towards the door. "Tell me if you change your mind about supper," he called, but in a way that made Constance feel angry with both of them.

POST 15

Aunt Molly came back, with Frances grinning behind her. Philip got up and took Molly by the arm. "How's your golf? How about golf next week when I get back?"

"Golf? Really, Philip? Will you have time? My dear, that would be a treat. You dear soul." Aunt Molly kissed him very fondly and patted him several times. "Darling boy," she said, "You always make me talk too much. Don't go off to that beastly war, that's all."

Constance leaped up, inexplicably unburdened and full of life.

"Tell Sarah for goodness' sake to stop that noise," Molly said. "And Constance, go to bed. It's nearly ten o'clock. School tomorrow!"

"Sarah, as always, is playing very well." Philip kissed Molly. "And I haven't finished with Constance."

"Well, off you go, anyway," Aunt Molly sent them off. "Goodnight!"

When they reached the sitting room, Frances said, "For God's sake Sarah!" Sarah slipped off the piano stool, lingered a moment, and disappeared, sucking her thumb.

Mrs. Kenys had not arrived; and the effect of the conversation with Philip was to make Constance ashamed that she had hoped Mrs. Kenys would not come. She went over and kissed Matthew lightly, playfully, but not really playfully, and when he took her hand and held it, the better to listen to Tom she did not snatch it away.

Tom was giving out his opinion on the atom bomb: it was, he said, disgraceful. For pure essence of ennui this was, after a while, hard to beat. Even so, she looked at Tom's plump hands, his large chin. In the matter of being known and Philip's not having finished with her, she could probably melt for Tom too tonight.

As for Philip, he made the night smell of the future. She watched him as he parted from the silky, sulky Camilla with a swift glow of intelligent amused enmity, returned with interest by Camilla. Constance did not know if he was handsome but could never have helped liking his face. He could easily become the object of her own most profound attention; without she in turn becoming the object of his. Does one-sidedness matter? It didn't matter. If he put his body against hers as he had done earlier, her own face would turn beautiful in his arms.

Even Frances she saw afresh. How Philip must love her. Frances being of large character in Constance's admiring opinion, had returned to life and power, forceful, wilful and radiant. She was putting it on of course, not quite at ease, but it was admirably done, tawny hair brushed unfashionably long, chin up as high as Philip's. Silvery Sarah would probably not come back. Sarah had no desire or perhaps no need to test her independence or her character in public.

If Philip and Frances had made love to each other, how could it possibly have gone so wrong? Something to do with Camilla? If they had not made love, perhaps that was the trouble? How did Philip make Frances so unlike herself? How could Frances even pretend to prefer, at the moment, Tom's attentions to those of Philip?

Well, Tom too is alive, meaning by that no singular thing but that he too lives and breathes and so, for that reason, this time of night and heat, is entirely loveable. What counts is that Constance is melting for all of them. All these men, all her friends. Wants to give to them, be taken by them. Out of herself. And they are being so boring.

"How's old Grodust?" Constance said to Philip who had put himself in a chair next to Frances. Frances was avoiding sofas.

"Grodust? You mean Barbara?" He looked as if he could eat her.

"Barbara? Seem to be a lot of them," she was excited by his intense interest. The Barbara behind the publication of Philip's poems? "Grodusts. No. I mean the General." She met Matthew's eye.

"Come and sit here," Matthew made room, "by your Uncle Matthew."

You are not my Uncle and the time when I wished you were is long past. You are Tom's father and Philip's uncle, and Tom and Philip living with us through the war does not, I hope, turn them into my cousins. In private you have been nakedly Matthew. We have indulged in awful practices. Sitting next to you now makes that seem very distasteful. She sat down.

Incidentally, said a Presence, if you ponder that distaste, persist with it, don't dash off from it, you might discover something quite interesting about fantasies. As to the rites, well, now there is Philip.

"So, you've cheered up. You've been teasing that boy Philip. I've been watching you," Matthew said. She smiled. "What's so amusing?"

"You're making love to me!"

"Am I? Let me tell you. You have a way of looking at people which is shy, mild and persistent, and I may add, calculating. And then you grin like a Cheshire cat. It's not unnoticeable."

"You admit it?" she said softly, taking a drink from his glass of champagne. "You're making love to me?"

"Better than making you cry isn't it?" He went on smiling, only his eyes now. "And how are you getting on at school?"

"All right, thank you," she said and got up, picking up a sponge finger to eat on the way. She stopped at the door leaning there. Oh God! How is School?! It was a lovely evening, but she was doing it all, the lovemaking for herself.

"It's gratifying to know I haven't wasted my cash on his education anyway," said Matthew behind her, looking at his son gratified. Tom was certainly educated; proper little Hitler Mrs. Sage always said he was, and Constance believed that domestic friend of long-standing.

Hating Matthew and envious of the attention Tom got from his father - but what matter? There they all were, a self-contained group under the lamps. They were on to Korea now, good and proper. What did they know? What did any of them really know? It was a very good question to which, she had, since reading the Book of Job, already worked out quite a good answer. They knew nothing, and they never remembered the important thing. God's great maw was after the lot of them. Where were they when God created the earth? Nowhere. They were nowhere. And it was the one thing none of them remembered. None of them remembered. It was, all, such a waste. Not remembering that turned so much to waste. Not remembering made their affairs seem so big and timeless. All of them, wasting her readiness, wasting their turn, our turn, to be alive. As Constance turned to go away, Philip got up, took her hand. "I need your company," he said, and brought her back to sit down by him. The others had not stopped talking. It was a beautiful moment. She would like to have told him how much she admired him, how strange and beautiful he could be to her. But there was no opportunity. Anyone would think there was a limitless number of fine summer nights in a life-time.

"I wouldn't say that," said Philip. "As a matter of fact, I don't understand quite ..."

Constance listened to the silence, much of it her own, as it exploded into the present. Philip arguing, Matthew analysing. No general conversation.

"The limiting political fact is this - no, listen for once. There is at the 38th parallel in Korea, a frontier between the East and the West; it has been attacked; it must be stabilised. We don't have to go any further into good and bad, metaphysics, abstractions, old labels, or ill-used words. This fact is so economic and limited that it has nothing to do with what you call `the needs of the Koreans themselves', leave them aside."

As Matthew Kellory came up formidable, Constance felt her own significance in the world and all the joy of her own thoughts and insights evaporating.

"Ha! That's a good admission anyway. Nothing to do with the needs of the Koreans!" Philip laughed. Nobody else did.

"Not at all." Matthew was quiet and strange. "You make the mistake of thinking you're God. You think that the needs and aspirations of Korea are simply, in one sticky clutch, easily accountable or dismissable by you as you choose."

"The history of the Koreans after four hundred years of waiting, and now we've pushed the Japs off their backs, suggests to me," said Philip, "that they should be united after all this long time; have a chance to re-identify themselves as a nation. We might make that possible if we went flat out against the North." Philip shuffled, went red and stubborn and obviously knowing only what he had picked up that week in the papers, was reluctant to argue but reactively bent on it. He was nowhere near as sure of what he thought as he wanted to sound. He just passionately resented Matthew's authority.

"I suppose you may say that the same thought has occurred to the North from their side. North attacks South. Unification. What's wrong with that?"

Constance sat up, looking anxiously from Philip to Matthew; she was being worked upon to take a side.

"Only your cynicism. Because to unite them from the South in a free-voting democracy is better than unifying them under North Korean Communism. I believe that. I ought to support my beliefs in action." Philip felt himself going much too far; what, after all, did he mean by `in action'? He noticed with relief he had been generally taken to have polemical rather than literal intentions.

"You may be wrong to fight Koreans for what you believe is best for them," said Matthew.

"But I may fight them for what is best for me?"

"That's right. That's the only such moral reason. And for that they will fight you. War as an extension of politics only means the most economic, limited war possible; war as an extension of ideals is limitless and hideous."

Fully-roused men talking; there was more violence than the talk of war in it. More in their voices than in their words. Constance put her head in her hands and looked at them through her fingers. It seemed just possible that she was going to lose one of them. Even Tom was quiet.

"You surely believe that democracy is right? If we can make it possible for everyone, every person in Korea to have his say then we ought." Philip leaned forward squarely, his well-built frame, elbows on thighs, keeping his ground for him.

"It's none of your business."

"War is hideous," said Philip. "We shouldn't go into it except on the most serious provocation, not for politics or power, but only for the highest ideals, and to win outright. If we believe it's a righteous war, we ought to put all our heart and force into it."

"Go ahead," said Matthew. "The old `one response possible'." Matthew sometimes got angry with Tom, but Constance had never heard Matthew speak like this to anyone else.

"The one response possible?" Philip felt all the advantage taken of him; his being put down. Constance felt that too from Frances blushing and leaning away from him.

"`Force to the utmost. Force without stint or limit. The righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world...' Woodrow Wilson, as it happens, but also the consoling and self-flattering satisfaction of tyrants and ideologues everywhere. Lenin. To make a clean sweep. How very self-ennobling, not to have to face the compromising complexities of facts that go against the pure idea. To be so easily able to give up the moderate, the fitting, the thick difficult reality for the emotional ease of your pure plain little abstracting idea of absolute right."

Well, damn Matthew, Constance thought.

Philip, who did not believe in absolute right or unlimited force, but only in unlimited moral courage and his own will, lost his temper and his line of argument. "I suppose one does not have to apply unlimited force even in a righteous war for a pure idea; but only so much as will conclusively win. I'm not inane..."

"Well, pure ideas and, likewise, ideas of purity have always been voracious feeders on flesh and blood. They are also pretty choosy feeders as I personally found out in Dachau five years ago. You may have a chance to judge for yourself, Philip. I agree, if the Americans can turn this into an anti-communist crusade they must. It puts the war on to a false premise, but a crusade will look better for the administration in next year's November elections. You can't put forward a war policy as subtle as limitation and peace-keeping and get away with it in America in election year."

"Because that would be thought to be immoral. Precisely." Philip's mind was working, and so of course his mouth and eyebrows were working and now his eyes were lighting up with ridiculous determination. He didn't know how ridiculous he looked. Constance loved him. Come on Philip. "It's you who's dealing in abstractions," he said. This direction seemed right to him at last and he let out at Matthew with violence and triumph. Frances looked at her feet and away up at the curtain rail. "Stand on the parallel you say. A parallel is an abstraction if anything is. A pretty new one too. And probably indefensible, or why the trouble? You can't have armies teetering on a rationalised imaginary line, on an abstraction like that ..."

"Oh yes, you can have armies teetering on an abstraction as you call it." Matthew took a huge breath. "Forever if you like. But it requires two things. A moral commitment to the stoic endurance of constantly unconsoling affairs, flux; and a deep conviction of the immorality of waste, and the immorality of the clean sweep, oh, and much else," he gasped and held his throat, breathing deeply. He wiped his forehead with the red silk and returned it to the hip pocket of his jacket out of sight.

Frances on account of the deep feeling generated was white now with rage, or was it embarrassment? Against Philip, of course, although she could not possibly have enjoyed Matthew's crack about Lenin. And yet Philip is right, right, right for me. Beowulf in person. The strength of thirty. Only listen to him, full-flood. Your one huge limitless effort. The sinews of your heart. The total heroism for the one right thing. "War is so hideous, how can you be half-hearted?" he asked again, after a moment, and with a visible conviction of it's being really unanswerable. "How can you fight without ideals?" And as if he had half-answered against himself, there was uncertainty and a plea there now.

Matthew smiled wryly and half-admiringly at Philip, and at that smile. Constance felt a rush of love for them both. Whereas Matthew with Tom was of small interest, except anthropologically, Philip and Matthew wrestling together were enormously fascinating, now that Matthew had smiled. As lovers, it would be almost impossible to choose between them. Mouths, those mouths full of words, are for kissing. Those hands, Matthew's teasing out his sense in fine small movements, Philip's freely chopping the air, how they would come to life on your back or your breast or your face, penetrators, love-makers, begetters of children. Her thoughts were not reckless, they were induced quietly now by a blissful, luxurious feeling brought on by just their company in the same room and by the contemplation of everything, mouths, legs, shoes, hands, that was masculine about these living, breathing, jewels of men.

She was offered, by Tom, and accepted, another glass of champagne. But it was impossible to accept the actual reality of the matter: that these men were blind and bound and uncaring of her, bound furthermore to ideas that totally denied her significance to them, wasting her life, while she was blooming for them. It was Frances now who sat on the arm of Matthew's chair.

"My dear Philip," Frances said. "You haven't a leg to stand on."

"So be it," he said mildly and stood up. "Come on, Cam. Camilla!" She was asleep on Tom's shoulder once more. Philip gently stroked her hair. Tom grinned.

"I'm inclined to agree with you, Phil, about all that," he nodded his head in his father's direction.

"Good," Philip said. "Wake her up. It's time we left. I must find Sarah." He left as Aunt Molly came in.

"I see some pleasure in the one huge limitless effort has touched his imagination," Matthew said slowly, gasping a little for breath.

"It might just turn out to be a war for principle," said Tom to his father. "You wouldn't understand that."

"How dare you speak to your father like that. He fought a long and bloody war for your thick hide," Aunt Molly said. "How you stand for it, Matthew, is a mystery to me..."

"I fought a war for him and myself. But I did not bring him up. And I came back a hero. He resents that quite rightly...Ah, hush Tom."

"Can't you see your father's not well. Matthew, my dear, Patricia would like you to telephone. She could not get away. Your car has come back."

"Ah, I see...Thank you. Philip's going to be all right."

"But there's such a thing as being killed," Molly said. "We lost his brother Jim."

"Jim," Matthew closed his eyes. "Ah, Molly, don't remind me." He got up. He was very tired.

"Matthew, are you stuffy? Shall I open more window?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine," he said brusquely, but nobody was fooled. "The Army will bring him back from wherever it sends him if its humanly possible. He pretends not, but it's Korea that's finally done it. Well. That's done all of us. Completely out of the blue."

"It's not just Korea," Molly said impatiently.

"He won't go to Korea," Tom said. "Or stay in the Army. It's just talk. I can tell. Fran agrees."

"He'll get there if he can, don't worry. I don't want him to go, but I understand him," Matthew said.

"One waits for it. In children. I suppose. The decisive act. The I-must-Go."

"Yes. Yes. And I must go Molly. Get some air and some sleep."

"Aren't you going to telephone Patricia?"

"When I get home."

"Go along with your father, Tom. And give him some peace."

Constance kissed Matthew goodnight kindly, but he could hardly wait to get away. His desire to get away restored some of her confidence in his self-hood, but he was a tired old man. She was unhappy now that Patricia had not come. Tom reluctantly went with him.

"Are you coming Philip?" Tom wanted to know.

"We'll follow you. Won't be long."

Constance was sorry to see them go because the evening was not yet at an end with Philip and Camilla still in the house.