ne sprinkling day
novel
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Author interview on americymru.net.
The room darkens, the swollen sky has over-brimmed again. In Pendinas, rain will be running down the glazed brick and granite of Pensarn Villa, varnishing the iron thistles on the Salem railings, streaking the lead-barred, wired-glass canopy of the arcade in Paradise Road. “If only it would clear up,” Paul says aloud, gazing down the vivid garden, “perhaps we might go out?”
Not since those Brockhurst days had Lou pressed a flower or a fern, it was even longer since she had made patterns in plaster of Paris with winkles and cowries, small scallops and tellins, gathered as her father turned over the wrack on Pendinas beach after a storm. And her childish feeling for nature, awakened by him, was far removed from the anxious preoccupation of her adolescence. Yet she would soon know that it was strong in her still.
1, A Guest in Glangyffin
“You can find wisdom in the East, also false gurus”, the holy man brings out, "I myself have had the opportunity to encounter with some, who are guaranteeing to open your third eye but are nothing but fakes, exploiting the ignorrance of the masses.” (This, as opposed to a ‘higher understanding’, was the subject of his address.) “Now many young peoples like you are going to this sai babas, seeking the spirituality, who should be solving their problems at home.”
2, A Sadhu in the Suburbs
Paul gets home after dark—having ordered on the way Stern’s Mystics and Sceptics, just out—to hear from the hall a warm husky voice and to find their friend in the sitting-room, his long legs wrapped in a travelling-rug, peeling a tangerine. Mr Traube has caught a slight chill: he has gone round some of his old haunts again, and after saluting the ducks has had a plunge in the Serpentine. To this evening’s musicking, none the less, he contributes with brio, tackling accompaniments most enterprisingly; and when he joins in favourite songs by Gounod and Cornelius, Mrs Crouch is persuaded that he feels the appeal of the Christmas story, though she shrinks from speaking of it, suspecting he mightn’t wish to.
3, Mr Traube’s Return
“I may just foray into Abergyffin and have words with Myrddin—I need copies of some transactions in Archæologia Cambrensis (excellent publication!). Trouble is, that could bring on the old Heuschnupfen” (grimly). “I’ve avoided it so far this summer, and the weather’s just tolerable now, but after its recent freaks… Books were warping all over Cambridge, the Faculty and College libraries suffered disastrously. And my own—well, take my Beowulf, Klaeber’s edition, never before had I been moved to praise a set book, as I was by that handsome tome, and now it’ll have to be rebound at a cost of thirty-five shillings—no mean sum! But a truce to these woes. If you are venturing abroad you’d best head south—fewer cars, trippers, children and such Landplagen. Of course you won’t get far today, unless you’re biking it. Which was the other thing I had to mention. Come!"
4, Leo’s Little Difficulties
His interest in its history was part of his attachment to the place which had preserved that history as a spoil-heap had preserved the axe-head—to the present totality of a place in which all the layers of its past were visible, like the coloured sands from Allum Bay in that glass tube (a souvenir of early days with Kay’s parents) on his mother’s dressing-table. A place where through the summer glooming, down the Edwardian promenade with its elegant shelters and lamp-standards, came the beat of the jukebox from the beach café, all chrome and plastic. Where from the foundations of a medieval longhouse or of ‘Irishmen’s huts’ of the Iron Age, you could look down on Victorian villas and a caravan-park. Where the hydrolectric reservoir was fed by a leat from the Gyrach, whose water had been carried up to the dinas by slaves. Where—not so incongruously at least as standing-stones with striding pylons —a sky-roofed burial-chamber neighboured with a carnedd whose carved slate told the deaths of all the crew, here where 1st Lt William J. Brady’s ‘Flying Fortress’ had struck the fortress mountain.
5, A Walk in the Past
"Sometimes, taking stock of my own life, I find it so far short of the fulfilment I dream of, I think of ending it, though I’ve never actually pondered how. Miserable mortal! to think of such a thing, with all your kind, unconventional friends, a comfortable home, a garden for your creativity that way—Kavanagh, how can you? Only that leaves out my never-sated sensuality. Oh to be old and rid of it! Not that it’s only sensual gratifications that make my life bearable, and occasionally joyous, but I can’t do without them yet. And it’s little enough I ask, God knows. But there, I don’t want to spread depression, it’s poor fun for you, my feeling my emotional pulse, as it were, while revealing the muddle which is my mind. I won’t talk like this any more—unless you particularly want me to? If only the right partner would appear, perhaps I’d lead a different life, more reflective, and my conversation wouldn’t be so lacking in ideas. I did tackle Mystics and Sceptics, but it’s so much easier to begin books than to finish ’em—especially Stern’s! We have a super little bookshop now, owned by a handsome actor, with just the stuff for me, all ‘fringe’ subjects and ‘cult’ authors. I haven’t seen any Mancy, but I shall ask Ralph to get some. He’s roister-doistering in London at present.”
6, ‘Life is an Art’
Without Paul’s ceasing to listen to him as, on his front doorstep in Pendinas, at the end of the first stone terrace under the mountain, that other August afternoon, Mr Roberts had explained how the granite was brought down from the rock-face to the sea (in wagon-loads from quarry-floor to crushing-mill, by chute and conveyor to the great storage-hoppers, by wagon again and steep inclines to the loading-quay, from which the small service-hopper supplied road, railway and pier), it was the stone-age quarry that Paul had seemed to see above them then, with its chipping-floors where Mr Roberts’s forebears (men from the high hut-circles whose cooking-mounds—crescents of fire-cracked stones—were still visible a stone’s throw from the modern workings) had fashioned picks and axes, querns and spindles, from rough blocks among the scree.
The connexions of heat with light, with electricity, with work, weren’t unfamiliar to him, who had wimbled leaves in her sunny garden with his grandmother’s reading-glass, lifted the leaves of a book with an amber bead, and in nervous delight, amid splutters of hot oil, watched with Henry Wright his small brass stationary steam-engine, drunk on wood-alcohol, whirring on the kitchen table. And if Henry had seen in the engine a source of power for his balsa-wood Great Eastern—a supplier of energy for the work of propulsion—, even Paul had seen that the engine’s output of work was related to its consumption of the sickly-smelling spirit.
A truth then?—one account among many? Mr Wrinch must have found his own stool all too solid, since he had never sat on it without a cushion. In the human world an idea quite contrary to science might yet have its meaning. In Mr Wrinch’s form-room Paul had learnt that his heart was a pump, in Mrs Jenkins’s parlour he had asked for a heart that was pure. And at the highest level, by those who could reach that, electromagnetic radiation could meaningfully be called holy—
ofspring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of th’Eternal Coeternal beam.
Of course Paul no longer supposed that ‘reality’ meant the same in science as in religion, or in either as in everyday life. And since asking Song-Tao what was meant by ‘curved space’ he no longer thought of asking him what he had meant by saying that electrons were real, any more than of asking Dr Sprange his meaning in speaking of God as love. If in thunder and lightning he could perceive one event in two ways, need he wonder to have slumbered at two benches—the scorched and stained but solid one his senses knew, and that other, of vast spaces between whirling electrical charges, which alone was real according to Mr Wrinch? According to Song-Tao both were real, but as Paul now saw, the meaning of that word depended on the language in which it was used.
7, A Taoist in Bloomsbury
8, Kay and the Dragon
9, Paul Crouch’s Problemizing
10, Mr Wrinch’s Last Lesson
“And what if I’d been in one of my hideously shy moods? You know the shrink’s theory on them?” He sits in the rank grass. She then, looking about her: “Our cemeteries are horrible, all those rows of headstones, big elaborate ones striving for personality, just make the loss of it sadder. I’d rather people didn’t notice my grave,” (spreading her old fawn trenchcoat near him) “sat on it even,” (then sitting on it) “if they found the graveyard a beautiful place, like this.” Sadie shivers. “Whenever I think about dying I get very upset, the feeling runs all round my body and freezes my brain. Paul, I don’t wanna get old. I said my Aunt Rhoda was over just before I left? She’s getting an apartment in our building. She is really getting old! I hadn’t looked at her for a while, and I felt so badly I went into my room and smoked. Things got cheerier then.” She considers. “With Sherrod we’re reading all sorts of things about life. Supposedly. They’re mostly about death, or the miseries of life and the futility of being born. Uplifting it isn’t. Anyway, Sherrod was talking about the Romantics and he said—and I guess he meant it for everyone—, he said love isn’t enough. Well, maybe I am a romantic, but I think it should be. Being in love should provide everything for you. But it’s Ruth I said was a romantic, basically.”
11, ‘Love is Enough’
“I am pleased to have you asked me this. I had another thinking about God since our talk—when at leisure I always fall into deep thinking. You see, there are many things occur in past or present or near future, but not in infinite future. What can we explain? This is killer question, but I think” (fortunately replying to it himself, even as Paul was changing its ‘what’ to ‘how’) “there must be a force to make these things occur in finite time. Perhaps we may say that God is instructor of this force. I don’t suppose my viewpoint is correct,” he had added modestly, “the thought just only happen to my mind when in eye-glass store to get my glasses fixed. I don’t suppose it has something special, I am not mastering in these things, after all."
12, Song-Tao’s God
“And in a literal sense the expected event, which the Church still expects, fails to occur—although” (glancing at his listener sharply, as if Paul must be triumphing here, whereas only his bony forefinger, raised in a gesture as characteristic of him as clasping the Gita to his chest is of the Swami, and clapping his hands or scratching his shaven head is of the Lama,—only Dr Sprange’s lifted forefinger has checked an impulse on Paul’s part to seize his hand and thank him for his candour) “many scholars have urged that there was a real Parousia of the glorified Lord in the coming of the Spirit—I believe I state the view pretty much as noted by a learned body which re-thought many of the traditional doctrines in my youth."
13, Tea and the Kingdom
It wasn’t very pleasing, the Lama had said engagingly, to think that a person disappeared altogether. Paul didn’t know that the truth must be pleasing, but he was bound to ask why, if the individual wasn’t to survive, the great spiritual teachers had cared so much about individual salvation; why, if the suffering self was unreal, the Bodhisattvas had desired its release from suffering; or else what was to be saved or released. And with no sense of any but his familiar self (and what to him was ‘he’ else?) and his present life, with no sense then of profit or loss in lives foregone, could he be concerned if he was bound to the Wheel of Life?
14, A Maze Without a Plan?
“Mrs Navsaria has put her finger on the nail. To fulfil your life’s purpose, this is not a cakewalk. You must develop your individual talent, but as offering to the God, not for own sake. And to unlock the self (true self, not ego!), to gain knowledge of real nature, the atma vidya that is Brahma vidya,—this cannot be done snappily. How long depends on our own volition.”
15, The Wall of Paradise
"... a pity, though, the travelling takes so long, ’tisn’t nice to wait about on draughty platforms, is it, Paul,” (hearing him cough) “let’s hope you haven’t caught a fresh cold coming down, and after such a spell of them, you must coddle up a few days, a cough can be so teasing, the chemist gave me some syrup for mine, which eased it, White Pine with Tar, and what a time you’ve had, George, the after-effects worse than the ’flu, to have been so queer from it, I blame the raw weather for most of our ails, I wonder, Lois, d’you remember poor Mr Mann, next door to Mrs Todd in Herbert Road? he passed away last week, used to walk so slow, last time I saw him going by to chapel he’d a job to get along, so thankful I can toddle myself up to Samuels’ still, though I do do some falling, Eva always cheerful and the shop nice and clean, as you say, dear, it’s sad, he was a good living man.”
With the back of his hand he moved aside some trailing toadflax, to disclose a polished slate let into the pier and incised with the name ‘Piper’s Hill’.
16, Piper’s Hill
How strange it felt, Lou’s father thinks now, the past autumn, set down at the wayside halt here for what he supposed the first time, suddenly to remember, on gazing up the weedy track, that (already long since a confirmed trespasser) he had led Lucie up it eighteen years before, with their daughter in her arms, to pick for her album a yellow poppy, seen from the carriage window as the train was stopping.
17, Love and Frau Bernauer
So Paul had eyed the man beside him as they had waited to cross a busy thoroughfare on their way to the cinema once, when, excited though he was by the smell of petrol and the tumult in the streets, he’d not for a moment ceased thinking of what he had been told at lunch, and so had laid up other images besides, of flushed clouds at midnight above Ludgate Hill, leaping shadows on the dome of the Cathedral, a blizzard of sparks blowing through the City—images got only at second hand, from Mr Traube and his father, who had first evoked them on a Christmas-week morning as they stood at gaze together, still strangers to each other, amid twisted chandeliers and the fragments of a gilded ceiling.
Readers of One Sprinkling Day may be interested to read here the review The Past is Myself. Readers of the novel who wish to know more about Dannie Olszewski, the young fellow mentioned there briefly in connection with Mr and Mrs Grant’s daughter, may care to read also A Red Candle and Duettino.
18, A Choice of Life
One Sprinkling Day now available
from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.
Author interview on americymru.net.