A Tree on Fire

Chapter One

With four-week-old Mark wrapped in his woollen shawl she went out to the upper deck. Early morning, and the liner was landlocked, grappled in stoneland near the beginning of March, white frost painted on the customs sheds under a smoky pink sky, brilliant and sharply cold, more beautiful than she’d expected, a trace of cirrus cloud, as if just scratched there by a cry from the baby and an unthinking motion of his hand. She held him upright against her shoulder, and his uneasiness subsided.

The ship had died, she thought, watching the steward move her luggage into the first-class saloon, lost its beauty and function. The grace of the sea had withdrawn from it, left dead wood, subsiding metal, a mighty ship disembowelled of its own true spirit. She was anxious to move beyond dock cranes and sheds and dismal marshes, but stood back from the rail, an hour still to go before landing, feeling as if she’d never been to England before, a tourist about to enter a country for which no guide-book had been written. Frank had gone into the sun — or whatever he liked to call it, and the role of gun-runner to Algerian Nationalists fitted him more than most, except that here she was, landing as if she had already suffered her greatest loss because he might be dead and out of her life forever.

Having read of a baby dying on a jet trip, she had taken the ferry from Tangier, and a liner from Gibraltar. The Rock was left in cloud and rain and green upchucking white-lipped sea, the launch packed with people ill from the squall and finally hooked to the enormous port-holed flank, so that she staggered along the gangway with Mark, luggage thrown after her. The safe ship took them in, dull luxury rocking monotonously through Biscay, enclosed among the fine yet doleful trapping of a generation ago, over the bleak Channel, three days of discomfort in balancing herself firmly to bathe the baby each evening, then sitting on the lower bunk and giving him the breast before setting him down to sleep, vivid face become tranquil, cries finished and wind gone. In the first hour of life he looked like a rabbi, the vigorous mature face of a Jewish scholar emerging from the bluntness of Frank Dawley’s fast-receding features. There was now a little more of Frank in him, but the subtleties seemed to be holding their own. By Talmudic law he was a Jew, which made her glad, though she had decided against his being circumcised in the hospital, and she was equally pleased that his father was not Jewish, proud of the rich mixture of his Saxon and Hebrew antecedents, and finally she was embarrassed at her own narrow brand of racism that, before having a child, would not have surfaced with such crudity.

Frank had gone into Algeria and never come back — not so far, anyway. During the birth her sufferings had seemed to be those of his own death, made her wonder why she had decided to bear it in Tangier instead of flying to England as she’d intended. The idea was to wait until the final possibility had beamed itself out. He’d said ten days, and she’d stayed two months beyond his point of no return. How long could one hang on? The umbilical string withered, and a new one flashed before her eyes through a smell of ether. Half conscious, she saw it, felt the final cut and heard the first cry, senses coming back fast and clear before the great inertia of sleep. She had until now looked on her life as a long, violent multi-scaled overture to an opera on which the curtain would never really go up. The magical lifting of it had not so far caught her eye. Yet she thought that perhaps one day it would after all lift and reveal a great new aspect of her life.

Faces passed, dazed like her own at the sudden upshoot of cranes and pink sky, calm frost and bottle-green frogwater. The classbound world of the liner had sheltered them since Malaya and India, wherein they had dressed for dinner as if the middle of the twentieth century hadn’t already passed them by. What would Frank have thought of it? She smiled at his stony nonconformity, the scorn that burned only in his eyes — as he did as he damn-well liked or turned his back on it. They were middle-aged and elderly, withered dummies, formal for fear of crumbling to powder at the sudden treachery of a false move, fashion-plates from romantic pulp-stories in magazines of the thirties. To themselves, they no doubt blazed from each centre, as if a tilting safety-lamp were always about to flare up — death-faces and corpse-skins surrounding and enclosing the fire of life.

As the sun broke clearer through, smoke and fog came smelting along the outlets of the dock, revealing masts and ship-funnels just in, or about to move. Morocco was a long way from these factories, power stations, bridges. On Sundays the power slept, but she saw beyond the ratchet-faces of the English, to the features of those Moslem youths marching down the Tangier boulevard, shouting for independence in Algeria, who would never be like their fathers, because they too hoped the smoke-flags of industry might one day drift over olive-groves and carob farms, when they would also wear the masks of ratchet-faces until all nobility and peace froze out of them.

The dead wood of the unyielding ship was pleasant, no more haunting terrible gale-wail playing at black midnight through the wires and superstructure, its overture of the medieval elements about to shatter and scatter two thousand people over the tight-lipped waves. Mark slept, as if both of them were still on the voyage, an oval face already formed, lips tight to keep the soul, peace and innocence, deliberately in. He had come out sallow and jaundiced, but the world air had tempered his skin to a normal tone. Coming through Biscay and grey humps of spume-crested sea-water as long as the boat, she’d stood one afternoon alone on the open deck, looking towards the shifting rain cliffs and the dark smudge of another ship, the baby held tight. Raindrops caught her hair, spread over glasses until she could barely see, and an impulse gripped her to lean too close, to look too far over and let her arms fall limp. Lightning shivered, a naked needle of it, piercing her infanticidal terror. The deck was empty, wet wood, chairs under cover, the ship lifting, shuddering as if to snap in spite of its liner bulk. It was nothing, they were all nothing. She would go as well, so that both of them like magic would merge with the cold green nothingness of the fish-sea.

A mad malignant nothing drew her back from the rail and the hypnotic, heaving fundamental water. One nothing was as good as any other, and you were closest to death’s bosom when in the deepest trough of some change. You struck the glimmer-light of nothing’s deepest eyes. She sipped hot coffee in the saloon, handed Mark to the nurse for a few hours, not going onto open deck again even by herself, till now when the ship was in dock and its very wood, steel, even light-switches, had died. She had left England with a man she hardly knew, got pregnant by him and ended up in Tangier while he went gun-running for the Algerians. So would run one version of her fate, she smiled. He had promised to come back in ten days, and certainly believed that he would, but his ideals must have got the better of him, and he had succumbed to them, unless he’d been killed crossing the invisible line of frontier that ran through the wilderness, and the baby had been fatherless even before birth. It all sounded too melodramatic — though such hard words might mean she was coming back to real earth and out of this ship.

But Dawley had vanished, and she’d never felt so much love for another person, though his love for her was such that it faded when his ideals took shape towards action. She said to him when he gone that he must not confuse ambition with fantasy. Ambition, she said to him — but to the empty blue-washed wall of her high-up terrace above Tangier — is what comes through patience, tact and skill. Fantasy is what you strive to bring about against reason and sense. Leave it alone. Call it fantasy if you like, but enjoy it in dreams. Ambition is something to attain because at the same time it works for you. Fantasy works against you, chops across the grain of your true personality like an axe. Only if it ultimately destroys you is it worth while.

People were moving off, first class first, which meant her, so she found her pile of luggage and joined the procession, held tightly to the rail as if the ship were still moving and she was afraid of being pitched, baby and all, too quickly down. Through the hangar-wide doorway Albert Handley stood on the quayside, talking to one of the stewards. She had written, not asking him to meet her, yet knowing he would. He wore a long brown overcoat, collar up, and a cap with a short peak. He’d offered a cigar to the steward, lit one himself, talking all the time and looking the ship’s length to try and find her. But he gazed offhandedly along the wrong deck, as if further gangplanks would slide out from there and she would descend, easy to see, all alone but for the baby. He seemed too close to the earth to look in the right place. She waved. He saw her. The great doors of the shed opened, luggage and people already going in. He flapped back: ‘Get off that coffin, before you start to love it. Come on, I’ve bribed the customs to let that pot and hashish through!’

She smiled at such rousing, had seen him only once, dead drunk at the opening of his first Bond Street show that made him catastrophically rich and famous as a painter. Being Frank’s friend, he was tenuously hers, and turned out to welcome her in spite of the final-sounding quarrel when he and Frank last met.

Tall, slim and swart, his eyes glowed with wellbeing, odours of cigar-smoke and after-shave. They neither kissed nor shook hands, but he uncovered the baby and bent close: ‘You go off with my best friend, and this is what you bring back!’ — grinning as they stood on the quay. ‘Come on, my Rambler’s waiting on the other side of that concentration-camp wire-fence. I’ll run you home to Buckinghamshire if that’s where you want to go. Shall I carry the heir to the Dawley millions? I expect he will end up as the bloody Emir of Khazakstan after Frank’s done freebooting around, in spite of his spine-communism. What’s he trying to do, anyway? Liberate colonial peoples from the gin-traps of modern imperialism? He can’t tell that to me. If he was a real liberator he’d be right back here trying to liberate us from these dead tectonic chiselheads about to open your case. Look at them. Go on, look at them! Then he’d really wither up under the napalm of their blank stares.’

She was early off the boat, and three came towards her. A pale long-lined face with bluebottle eyes, holding a notice in front of her saying what she could and could not bring into the country, asked her to read it. The baby cried, and two of the customs men frowned. The one who didn’t must be a Welshman, Handley thought, or a Scot.

‘Open that,’ Jack Lantern said, tapping one of her cases with his notice-board. Albert bent to do so. ‘Are you her husband?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t live together, either. We do it by post — registered.’

The man looked at her underwear, Moroccan slippers, a Moslem robe, filigree daggerwork from Fez. ‘Can I see your passport?’

‘I don’t have one,’ Handley said, ‘on me.’

‘How did you get into the country?’ A faint smile, as if seeing him already marched screaming back to the ship.

‘He came to meet me,’ Myra said, quietening Mark. More people were spreading bewildered into the enormous shed.

‘You’re not allowed in here,’ Jack Lantern said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘My car’s outside,’ Handley told them. ‘I had a word with the AA man and the RAC man as I came in. They’ll vouch for me.’

‘How are we to know you’re telling the truth?’ Jack Lantern’s pal put in with a sneer.

Handley made a genuine appeal. ‘Would you do me a favour?’

Now they’d got him. He was begging for something, the first stage towards tears and breakdown. They lightened in feature: ‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘Deport me. Go on. Get me on that ship so that I can leave when it turns round, away from the servile snuffed-out porridge-faces of this pissed-off country. It goes to Australia, doesn’t it? There’s a bit of the Ned Kelly in me, so send me there. Not to mention a touch of the tarbrush and a lick of the didacoi. I’m an alien right enough. I don’t even have one of your seed-catalogue passports. So deport me if you don’t believe me, and see if I grovel and scream to stay in this senile dumping-ground.’

He picked up Myra’s cases, and she followed him towards the exit, expecting at any moment to be pounced on and dragged back towards some sort of aliens’ pen. Albert didn’t look round, his neck and face, every pore and inch of skin, fighting to keep the blood from bursting out of him: ‘Frank was right. How can you start here? You can’t. It’ll be so desperate though, when it does start, that you’ll need the training-grounds of Algeria to stand any chance at all.’

His car was parked in the sunshine, a low-slung black American station-wagon with rear red indicators as round as traffic-lights. ‘I need this monster for my mob. Seven kids I’ve got, or did have when I last counted them, and they’ll never leave me now that I’ve struck money. Before, I thought there was a chance they might starve to death or get run over, but now they’re with me for life.’ He assembled a carrycot in the back. ‘I thought you might need it. It was Enid’s kind thought, really. We’ve got a dozen or two around the house and gardens. You can keep it till he walks. A coming-home present.’

Chapter Two

Because of his bellicose mood he drove slowly through the patched-up flat marshland of Essex. The radio played, the heater warmed, the baby slept after his psychic shouting at the customs. ‘They couldn’t touch me,’ he said. ‘They could deport me, they could put me inside for a bit, but I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Whatever happens boils up the old paint-pot for when the keel gets level again.’

‘You wouldn’t talk like that if you weren’t a well-known painter,’ she said, though knowing that he would.

He overtook a giant bowser full of milk-shake: ‘It makes me bitter, the way they treat people. All I did was scale a wall, snap open a door, and walk under a crane to get to the ship. When I meet people I meet them, not wait behind a gate as if I know my place. If I wasn’t a well-known painter I don’t suppose I’d be meeting somebody like you at all, coming off a big posh liner. I was at a party last night, and bumped into a publisher — Arbuthnot by name — who’s got your husband’s book on his list — George Bassingfield, isn’t it? — and he was raving about how superb it was. You’re a woman of the world, even if you have had a baby by my best gun-humping pal!’

There was no way to stop him ripping open wounds like letters with a paper-knife. She had sent George’s manuscript to the publisher he’d mentioned while still alive, and would sign the contract now that she was back in England.

She fed the baby in a pub, Handley tasting his first pint of the day at the bar, as the baby supped the milk of Myra’s nowadays ample breasts in a private room upstairs. They were taken for man and wife, Handley lean, sardonic and domineering; Myra cool, dark-haired, attentive to her baby — a couple who, being so hard to place and travelling in such a car, were thought by those who served them to have inherited vast amounts of money they could never have deserved. ‘Do not define yourself. Other people can do that,’ she thought, holding Mark high on her shoulder for his glass-eyed paradisal belch.

On the road again, gliding between frosty March fields to the almost silent sewing-machine engine, Myra thanked him for coming all the way down from Lincolnshire to meet her.

‘Let’s say it’s in memory of Frank, and at the same time to show hope that he’ll come back from Algeria. I only feel really generous when I’m walking in the rain to tell you the truth, not on a frosty day like this. I’d give all I’ve got, then, including the coat off my back. The rain makes me feel good, even when I start sneezing. It’s only when the sun comes out and I’ve got pneumonia that I feel foul. I haven’t done much in the last fortnight, so I came down to London for a break. I don’t paint so easily as I used to. Success is a funny thing: can eat your guts out. But the secret of beating such an enemy is not to regard it as success, to keep on thinking of yourself as an exiled, unemployed nobody — which doesn’t need much effort from me — though I suppose I was a bit brash and unnerved by it at first, as Frank no doubt told you. I’ve been so broody lately, that Enid was glad to get rid of me. It’s rough on her these days, though. In the autumn I’m hoping to go to Russia for a month if nothing goes wrong with my house and brood. Teddy Greensleaves, the man who owns the gallery, doesn’t want me to. Not that I’m finally decided about it. Says they’ll turn me into the tool of international communism — or some such thing — but I said it would take more than Russia to do that. I’m nobody’s tool, anyway, and certainly not his. I’m an artist, which means that nobody can tell me what to do. If they advise me to do the opposite of what they want me to do in the hope that I’ll go against them and so do the right thing they’ll still be disappointed because they can’t dream just how subtle and independent I can be.’

He roared his car along an empty hundred-yard stretch of dual carriageway, heading for the next narrow bottleneck of the woods. ‘I’ll drive to Russia if I go, through Berlin and Warsaw, strap my canvases to the roof, get a bit of work done while I’m there. Might paint a couple of tractors if they stuff me with caviare.’

Myra listened: the subtleties of a rogue-elephant flattering himself that he had enemies. He had. They’ll get him, she thought, by making him continue to the blind end the role they had forced him into. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Frank hadn’t been able to make him out — though that needn’t mean much, since they’d been friends for such a short time.

‘What are you going to do with a baby and without Frank?’ he asked.

‘Get home,’ she smiled. ‘And ponder things for a while.’

An AA man acknowledged his car, and he gave the clenched fist salute. ‘I was going to say and I talked it over with Enid, that if you’d like to come up to Lincolnshire and muck in with my mob, you’re welcome. I’m having an extension built on, and I’ve got two big caravans in the garden. You’ll find it friendly. Maybe Frank told you: we’re a bit rough, but don’t let that put you off. There are seven kids, a bulldog, six tom-cats and two au pair girls (one of them pregnant already) so you and the baby will be well looked after, fixed up in a room like the Ritz. The air’s good, walks lovely, and people say good-morning again now that I’ve stopped tapping them and stealing their rabbits and cabbages. You won’t even see me from one weekend to another, because though I complain, I’m working all the time for my next show. I’ll send one of the lads to fetch you if you like.’

‘After a fortnight at home,’ she said, ‘I might feel like a change.’ She couldn’t force herself to say much, though her mind was full. A bomb had fallen on her life, and the pieces hadn’t yet come together. Handley, for all his affluence, was rooted in the earth, a tree that died and flowered frequently but never changed colour or character, and she thought he wouldn’t understand the recent fragmentation she had undergone. Yet being an artist perhaps he would, though she still couldn’t begin to tell him until she could with absolute clarity begin to tell herself. Maybe the baby had completed the powerful outspreading flower of the explosion. Life before he was born seemed purifyingly simple, but now she was not only geared to her own unanswerable complexities, but also to Mark’s creature-like timetable wants that occupied her till midnight and claimed her again at six in the morning. His darkening hair and Dawley-blue eyes kept her body and soul separate from each other because they dominated both. He was her life and suicide, the great divider and conqueror that would not allow her to use the fragments of her past life in order to construct a future. With husband dead and lover missing he warmed her, an organism fully alive but not yet conscious, eyes to see and lungs to shout with, the facility to eat, excrete, inexorably grow yet everyday seem exactly the same. She was stunned by this ruthless parcel of give-and-take that nature had put into her arms. She could now understand how certain natives of the South Seas had never thought to connect childbirth with sexual intercourse, whereas before such an idea had seemed hilarious.

The integuments of passing landscape drifted by: layers of brown field and lead-green wood, cottages smoking like old men, a countryside at rest as if it had never worked to deserve it, peaceful, apathetic and full of beauty. The sky was clouding, as if they were driving towards rain, a softening watery grey that made the green grass picturesquely livid by the roadside, a piebald emerald covering the pre-Raphaelite soul of England. She existed in it, felt the cool grass-air on her cheek, merely by looking at it, still familiar after her years in the country with George.

‘I expect you’re glad to get back,’ Handley said, ‘orange-juice and cheap milk.’

‘There’s always some reason to come back,’ she answered, ‘usually unimportant. I need to put my house in order — literally.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know. But I shall.’

‘Come up to us for a while. There’s nothing like violent change to shake perspective into place. Not that I’m suggesting our place is violent. I hate violence because there’s so much in me. I love an ordered life — never having had one. I used to think that once I got money I’d achieve this peace that pisseth out understanding, but no such luck. My daughter Mandy banged at my studio door the other day. She’s seventeen: “Dad, can I have a car?” When I looked at her as if my eyes were hand-grenades she pouted and said: “Only a Mini.” I tried to throw her out, but she threw a fit and tipped paint on a big job I’d been working on for weeks and that I might have bought two Minis with. Then she shouted: “Do I have to go on the streets before I can get what I want, you tight-fisted rat?” That’s only one thing. I could go on, but why bother? Richard — one of my sons — he’s more devious. Wants to set up a magazine, devoted to pacifism and the arts — poems and things. Promised a whole issue to an intellectual assessment of my own work! My own son! I could have battered his skull in. But my life’s bloody-well plagued. I didn’t know how mean I was till I had money. But I’d be in the gutter again if I wasn’t. I’m thinking of buying a shotgun and mounting guard over my cheque-books. My wife’s all right, the angel in the house, so we could do twelve hours on and twelve off. As soon as the money started rolling in I began to really get into debt. There’s not a radio, furniture, books, clothes or food shop for miles around at which I don’t owe a few hundred pounds. My instinct told me this was right, for if ever the money stops rolling in I shan’t be the only one to suffer. The whole economy will go under with one terrible groan. I used to live by sending out begging letters, but nowadays it’s me that gets them, floods of them every morning. In fact if I get another begging letter I’ll do my nut, because I suffer when I read them. Not long after my money started to roll in all my relatives came up from Leicester to say hello, poured out of their cars and hinted how I ought to give them a few bungalows for holidays in summer. They didn’t notice the rural slum I was living in. I soon pushed that snipe-nosed lot off. They still drop in in ones and twos. One of the best begging letters I ever penned bounced back to me because Mandy had spent the stamp-money on sweets, so I had it mounted and framed, hung above the mantelpiece for all of them to see. Of course, then they said: “Aw, old Albert’s a bit of a lad! Likes a joke,” as they knock back some more of my whisky. Money is a bloody curse, when you think about it. They say that a fool and his money’s soon parted, but I wouldn’t regard him as a fool — though I’m learning to hang on to mine just the same. I used to think that what an indigent artist needed was money, until I’d got some, when I thought that all he wanted was to be indigent. But as long as he’s hard as iron it don’t matter what he wants nor what he gets. It’s being hard that’s made me an artist, nothing else, and it’s being hard that’ll keep me one. When I was poor a local bigwig who bought a picture now and again asked me if I was a catholic because I had so many kids. “You’re an artist, so you have plenty of other things to do besides that.” “Maybe,” I told him, “but it’s the Chinese you want to get at, not me. We can pack another fifty million into this country yet. Don’t talk to me about the population boom. I don’t mind sharing my dinner with you if you’ll share yours with me.” He got offended at that and humped off for good. I’m not saying they were fine days, but I was anybody’s equal and still am. Many’s the time I took off my watch before walking into the National Assistance Board. I was interviewed not long ago by some putty-faced pipe-smoking chubbyguts from that magazine Monthly Upchuck of the Arts and all he could do was try to needle me about “class”, wondering when the day was going to come when my “origins” — that’s his sickly word, not mine — were going to show more clearly in my work. So I asked him when his origins were going to stop showing in his stupid questions. I nearly puked over his snuff-coloured suit. The article never came out, thank God. Teddy Greensleaves was disappointed: “If you aren’t careful,” he said, “the critics will give you the kiss of death.” “As long as it’s a big kiss,” I said. “Why do you keep on acting the fool, Albert? It’s just that little bit passé, you know, to go on talking about money, and be forever ranting against the critics.” I didn’t answer, because that would be playing his game.’

‘Why do you?’ Myra asked, drawn at last from the somnolence of his car and monologue.

‘You know why? Because it’s a smoke-screen behind which I can carry on my real work — without being bothered by a lot of soapy-mouthed English stupidities. Mind if I roll the window up? I shan’t smoke another cigar: since I’ve been rich I feel the cold more. You’re right, though. It’s no use getting excited about it. We’re all a pack of grown-up half-educated neurasthenics. Camus came to the conclusion that, after all, the artist was a romantic. I began there. Where I am now I know exactly; but where I’m going I never shall know till I get there.’

Chapter Three

It was the sort of fine rain that would never soak you, rasping over the leaves, light enough in weight not to bend them, yet steady enough to turn the lawn soggy underfoot. Her only task in life was to resurrect the house, and look after the baby. The garden, which had been totally neglected, needed unearthing like the ruins of Troy, and she had hardly made a start on it. Vegetable proliferations feeding on rich soil had climbed and coiled from fence to fence. Paths had vanished under it. Flowerbeds with stone and tile borders could not be seen. Lush on top, it was rotten underneath after seven months’ absence. Frogs like small vivid leaves had come up from the river and made it their private jungle. She cleared the paths, but the rest did not matter.

Myra had darkened after the baby, and a more ample figure made her appear taller. Hair grown long made her seem plainer. She looked in the full-length bedroom mirror, a corner of the double-bed reflected at her knees and thighs. The baby slept in a heavy, antique wooden rocking-cradle set between the bed and far wall, a cradle that had been in the family for generations, passed on to her by Pam. Their grandmother, one of twelve who had slept their first months in it, had tugged and handled it from the far marches of eastern Europe — hardly any luggage, and pulling that huge heavy mahogany cradle across tracks and platforms and guarding it on the deck of a crowded rat-eaten rusting steamer from Hamburg. Mark looked safe in it, eternal, never wanting to grow up, grateful to that misty forgotten grandmother for taking so much trouble. It rocked him gently, high sides dwarfing the Dawley blood in him.

The house was a corpse, and she gave it the kiss of life — phone, gas, electricity, water. Everything shone again except the garden. The house glowed from within, warm from the baby out. Having a child alone with her, she was sometimes terrified of a disaster happening while asleep upstairs, that she would faint or die and, nobody aware of anything, and thinking she had gone to her parents in London, the baby would starve to death. The vision haunted her on deep and windy nights of spring, a penalty of winter’s end, and punishment for living alone.

Her body in the mirror shone back, had reshaped well from the birth, firm and immobile as she looked at it, different now that her breasts were full, aching slightly from the weight of the next feed, marked by blue veins where they rounded towards her arms. She drew back at the touch of her own thighs and slipped the nightdress over. Down in the darkness the garden was three sides around the house. She sat on the edge of the bed.

Outside it was mist and mud, primroses beyond the leaded windows, the elaborate cave of the house. Cat, paraffin, coal-smoke from the stove while the central heating was re-engineered. Wet grass, night birds continually, a cow in labour bellowing, dunghills steaming in the nearby farm. Buds, confetti stuck on thorns for the marriage of mist and mud under the hill of Thieving Grove. An aeroplane prowled on old-fashioned engines through low cloud. She’d read Wuthering Heights and Pilgrim’s Progress. Her house was under the cat-back of the hills. She’d bought mimosa in Aylesbury, but the house odours soon killed it. The toothless cat, old marmalade, sat on the outside windowsill downstairs, senile and independent. There had been no sun till four in the afternoon. Where was he? Lost in the vast freezing acreage of the bled? Her body shuddered for him, shook as she gripped herself.

The baby was fed, changed, back to sleep by the time Mrs Harrod unlatched the gate next morning. Mark was put to bed, and she was putting herself back to a lonelinesss similar to when George was with her, now that he wasn’t here any more. The day was cold, so she built a wood fire in the living room, heaped up logs and drew back furniture that might get scorched, smiling to realise there could be no danger of it. It was a waste of wood, for she still had work to do and could not be near it, but it was like another inhabitant of the house in which everything nevertheless was so strange. She wanted to fill the house with noise and fires and people, drench it in light and vigour. But at the moment that seemed a dream. So in her quiet way she worked to restore it to a common translucent state of ordinary comfort, oblivious to anything beyond the foundations of what had been built years before by George and herself. When perfection reigned and ruled you could venture elsewhere.

Chapter Four

Albert Handley’s house had been named The Gallery, and often he didn’t know whether one might call it an art gallery, a rogues’ gallery, or a shooting gallery, though mostly it was a bit of all three rolled into one mad house. It stood on a hill beyond the village, at the end of a lane that wound up from the paved road between two thick closed-off copses — a large simple house with two floors and a spacious attic, late Victorian country-nondescript that had at one time served the manager of an estate long since hammered up. The slate roof glistened in weak morning sunshine, its brick façade glowed. Two caravans stood in the large front garden, forming a sharp angle pointing away from the house like a scarp designed on Vauban’s defence system. Across the path, amid a marshalling-yard of tracks and rut-marks, stood a Land-Rover and a well polished Ford Rambler. A newly built kennel beside the front door stored a bulldog that, when standing belligerently out, looked like a miniature iron bedstead about to leap. Behind the house was a long newly-erected wooden hut used as a children’s playroom, and a solarium had been built nearby, as well as a new fuel store. This was the house that Handley had lived in while poor, and that he preferred to stay in now that he was better off.

After his unaccustomed toil up the hill Russell Jones noted these details of the Handley locale for when he sat in his London flat to write a monthly middle-piece on Albert Handley the painter. If his rise hadn’t been so sudden and from such obscurity Jones might have thought of him as an artist instead of a painter — but there, a man of his sort couldn’t have everything, though it looked as if he had much of it already to judge from the various mounds of obsolescent gear scattered around the house: ‘like the camp of some gypsy king who had struck it rich in middle age.’ Or should he say ‘Middle Ages’? He’d decide on the train going back. ‘Someone who had been through the biggest supermarket in the world and collected with a free pass more than he could ever need.’ If phrases came so quickly the article should be good. He’d been feeling rather stale of late, too many parties, too much drink, proved by the ache in his legs and the constriction in his lungs on his walk up from the village pub. His well-planted hair was too warm under his Moscow fur hat — he’d imagined frost and flecks of snow persisting on these northern wolds, but the worst of it had gone, and his London ears proved tougher than he’d even given them credit for.

He stood to light a cigarette. Handley should be expecting him, but the house seemed deserted. At nine in the morning where were the children on their way to school? He sensed that all was not right in the kennel. By the threshold lay a gnawed unheeded bone, and for a moment he thought of swinging his camera onto it, for a possibly symbolic shot in another illustrated article which he might publish under his mother’s maiden name. A piece of sacking hung over the kennel exit, and suddenly framed in its place was a wide-headed vile-toothed British bulldog. Jones didn’t know whether his fur hat flew off at the sight of it or whether it wasn’t released a second later as the dog sped through the air for his collar and tie.

In the far-off top-floor studio Albert stirred in his sleep. He’d worked till two, then undressed and slid into the camp-bed so as not to disturb Enid’s ever-fragile slumber. It was just about warm all through, though the cold was ever poised outside to heave against and overwhelm him. Pushing his legs straight, he tried to ignore it. It sounded as if somebody had left the wireless on, and a wild drama to which no one listened played in a dark room. He couldn’t believe it was morning. The noise ate into the old army blankets covering his long body. It seemed as if his great fear had at last come about, that the family had united against Eric Bloodaxe, the pride and prime of the bulldog breed to do him that final and fatal injury together that no one had the courage to attempt single-handed. Enid kept a crowbar in the hall should he ever get out of control, but that was only for reassurance since he had so far been the gentlest of pets where the family was concerned, kept when they were poor to hold creditors at bay, maintained now that Handley was rich to ward off gutter-press journalists, professional beggars, and ill-wishers from the village. There were shouts, doors banging, vague blows, and a rending series of howls from Eric Bloodaxe. Was the ship going under at last, and water about to pour through the portholes that fate had left maliciously open? His long thin body was naked, his face irascible and swarthy as he drew on trousers and shirt, not even a mug of black coffee to sustain him on a flying rush down the stairs.

Russell Jones crouched, back to the gate, a round and raddled face inadequately protected by his uplifted arm, an angular tear hanging from the sleeve of his expensive tweed overcoat.

‘Haven’t you heard of the bloody telephone?’ Handley shouted from the door. Eric, foam on his mouth, pulled on the extended radius of his chain, clawing the ground a few inches from Jones’s camera.

Enid stood with a bar suspended over the dog’s head should his chain snap. Three school-aged children grinned from the door of the nearest caravan. ‘It’s out of order,’ she said. ‘I tried to get the off-licence for more wine last night but couldn’t.’

‘Back!’ Handley commanded, and Eric shuffled inside. ‘He might have had the arse off you,’ he said to Jones. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for that. Who are you anyway?’

Jones stood up, pale as a bottle of milk that had been left all night in the snow: ‘I came to interview you. Did you receive our letter?’

‘Sunday Pulp was it? Or Old Nation? I didn’t think you were serious. Come in and have some breakfast. Don’t mind the dog: he does his best.’

Jones swore under his breath. Like hell he was serious. He’d passed much of last night at the pub buying drinks for the customers and finding out how much was known about the Handley Kraal up on the hill. As hearsay was so much more picturesque than the truth, and rang so convincingly as to sound like the truth, he’d discovered more than ever he hoped would be possible, facts still spinning in his head because that predatory dog had all but emptied it. Fortunately, working for respectable papers in England had advantages in that whatever you wrote was accepted as the truth. Articles weren’t his regular occupation, and he looked on such assignments as a holiday from the regular chore of reviewing. Not that Lincolnshire could be classed as vacation land at this or any other time of the year. What else could one do but become famous if one had been stuck in it for twenty years? Either that, or go mad, if you had anything about you, as Handley presumably had — though we’ll see about that.

They went into the hall. Where a portrait of the Queen had stood when he was poor, a framed photo of Mao Tse Tung hung now that he was, by comparison, rich. Handley, though tall, had a slight stoop at the shoulder, as if he had walked great distances at some time in his life. He also, Jones noted, had the faintest beginnings of a paunch, not uncommon in a man past forty, a painter who had had half a year of fame with which to glut himself. But Jones found the atmosphere bleak, and was glad when they descended into the large warm kitchen, where Enid passed them black coffee in Denbigh-ware bowls, and thick slices of white bread and butter on wooden plates. Jones thought there was a certain austerity about the house, though nothing that an extended visit to Heal’s wouldn’t fix.

‘What’s to be the tone of your article?’ Handley said, fastening the neck of his collarless shirt. ‘I’m perished. Still, we’ll have the central heating man in next week, then we can start to live.’

‘Don’t you think central heating makes people soft?’Jones said.

‘You mean like the Russians?’ Handley snapped. ‘I’ve nothing against it.’

Jones was glad of the coffee. The uptilted bowl almost hid his small mouth, and wide all-knowing eyes, brown curly hair coiled aggressively above. ‘Much to do with painting?’ Handley went on.

‘It’s more of a profile — painting, of course, but a general sort of article, something very respectable on you as a man, to explain your painting.’

‘High in tone, low in intent. That sort of thing?’

‘You’re mixing us up with another paper,’ Jones laughed.

‘I’ll tell you when I’ve seen it.’

‘What newspapers do you take?’

‘I don’t. I pick one up once a month, just to make sure I didn’t need to.’

‘Don’t you find yourself awfully cut off?’

‘From my painting?’

Enid filled his coffee-bowl without asking, and he absentmindedly helped himself to another slab of bread and butter. ‘London, for example?’

Handley reached for toothpicks. ‘Is this the interview already, or are we just chatting?’

‘Whatever you like,’ Jones said, managing a smile. An au pair girl came into the room, all black ringlets and bosom, a sallow Florentine face at the stove putting on hot water for more coffee. She must be dying in this dead-end, Jones thought, though from what people in the pub said she mightn’t be as bored as she looked. Probably just tired.

‘Whatever I like gives me a crick in the diaphragm,’ Handley said, ‘so we might as well get it over with.’

Enid was cutting vegetables at the other end of the table: ‘You could at least be polite now he’s here.’

‘I don’t need your advice.’ Albert said. ‘It’s taking me all my time not to choke. Just give me another pint of coffee and shut up.’

‘You encourage these people, then insult them, go on as if they were your mother and father or something. They’ve got to live. Everybody has their work. You ought to control your craven emotions a bit. I know you got out of bed a bit sudden, but it’s no use taking it out on him.’

Jones shrank, but soon it was plain that the more Enid spoke the more affable Handley became. ‘She doesn’t mean to insult you!’ he said.

Her face went cold and grey, but kept its remarkable beauty. Who wouldn’t become famous living with such a highly passionate handsome woman, Jones thought, who’d even allowed Handley to give her seven children? She spoke to Jones as if using language and enunciation she might once have had command of, but had lost after her marriage to Handley: ‘There are some people to whom being an out-and-out bastard gives strength. Oh, I don’t mean the weedy or puffy sort who never have the strength to be real bastards anyway, like you. But I mean the man who, not strong in the beginning, like Albert, soon finds himself becoming so when he gets money, and the urge to be a swine gets into his blood.’

Jones felt as if he had been struck in the face. He was ready to leave. Albert had also gone white at this whipcrack from Enid so early in the morning, a time when he found it extremely difficult to take such insults. He grasped Jones by the arm: ‘Let’s go to my studio. I’ll raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis, boil oil and sharpen spears. There’s brandy up there.’

‘I think I’ll leave,’ Jones stammered, hurt to the core. What kind of family was this, that took a total stranger to its quarrelling heart and clawed him to death?

‘Don’t go,’ Handley said, concerned for him. ‘I can’t let you come all this way for nothing. Enid’s got a bomb on her shoulders this morning though, and I don’t like shrapnel.’ They walked across the hall and towards the stair-foot. ‘I’ll buy a new overcoat if you aren’t insured, or don’t get danger-money. I’m sure editors are as mean as any other gaffer.’

They went in silence to the first floor, Russell Jones taking note of what regions of the house he was privileged to go through, trying to fix the many noises muffling from behind various closed doors. Handley’s studio was an enlarged attic, skylight windows showing grey clouds drifting overhead. It was bitterly cold, though Handley took off shirt and trousers, standing naked to put on underwear and dress properly. ‘You’ll excuse me,’ he said to embarrassed Jones, ‘but I’d die otherwise.’ Shirt, trousers and two pullovers went on, then a waistcoat and jacket, followed by a heavy woollen scarf, a cap and pair of mittens. ‘Sit down while I light this pot-bellied stove. It’s a cold as Stalingrad up here.’

Jones thought how strange it was that rough language from Handley had frightening barbaric undertones about it, while the same words from his London friends seemed neither uncivilised nor out of place. He watched him break an orange-box in pieces, rake out cold ash, and pull a lump of coal into cobbles with his bare hands. With such habits where did the subtlety come from to be found in many of his paintings? He looked around the room: apart from the bed were two large old-fashioned kitchen tables covered with the usual painter’s bric-a-brac — queer-shaped stones and pieces of wood Handley had picked up on his walks, odd drawing-pads, pictures from magazines, heaps of books, horseshoe, magnifying-glass, cigarette-lighter. Along one wall was a record-player, heart of a stereophonic system. The record on the turntable was Mozart’s Coronation Mass.

Under the skylight a large half-finished picture stood on an easel. Shelves were filled mostly with modern novels, books on country life and natural history. On a low table were bottles of brandy and beer, a packet of cigarettes and a box of Havana cigars. In an opposite corner was a small sink heaped with glasses and cups. What struck Jones with great force, and what he held his eyes from until the last, was the newly cured skin of an outsize fox pegged neatly on the frame of an old door — leaning beside the now closed door they had entered by. He only took his eyes from it to look at the presumably new painting from Handley’s brush.

Handley was making feverish work at the fire, which was now on the point of springing into strong life. ‘Whenever I’m painting I want to sleep. I want to sleep more than I want to paint whenever I pick up that brush, but somehow I paint, I work at it. I don’t go mad like any old Jack Spatula puttying away, mind you, but I think I’m right in saying it’s sleep that drives me along.’

In the painting he had used the shape of the fox pinned on the door, a fox motif, the spreadeagled vulpine set in an aureole of colours, a fox in the rising sun flaring over the sea. From subtlety and delicate feeling at the centre, the form and colours had been made to expand, reaching a brilliance and panache Jones had never seen before — a great spending of the daywake above the grey blue line of the Lincolnshire sea, and in the bottom left corner a man humping home from an all-night fish or poach with a moon in his net. Observing Handley’s face as he knelt by the stone brought the word ‘Byzantine’ to mind.

Handley took off his jacket and cap, poured two glasses of brandy. ‘A man from the Daily Retch came up a month ago, and needled me about being rich. He got ratty on the way out so I gave him what for. You should have seen the article: they really set the dogs on me. I don’t care about being rich. We’re rich, it’s true, compared to a year ago. But the stuff we lose or get nicked. If only I was rich enough to look after my things and lose nothing. Still, I wouldn’t be an artist then. Cheers!’

‘Cheers!’ Brandy after coffee brought his tone of confidence to exactly the right pitch. Handley stood before the picture, eyes glowing: ‘I’ll have to do it again. Nothing’s ever quite right. Never was.’

‘Do you manage to work all day and every day?’ Jones asked.

‘There are certain questions I can’t answer.’ Handley said, wrenching open a bottle of turps. ‘If I was a journalist I’d ask people the sort of question they only put to themselves in the pitch-black at four in the morning.’

‘I’m interested in how different painters work.’

Handley leant over and nudged him sharply with his elbow, an exaggerated wink and leer. ‘So you’re a bit of a voyeur, are you? Eh? Dirty old bastard! Still, don’t be ashamed of it. Do go on. Ask me something else.’

‘I’ll be quite happy,’ said Jones, ‘if you just talk.’

‘I’ll bet you will. But I’m not frightened of hanging myself. I was born in Wolverhampton. The old man had a builder’s yard. Left school at fourteen and worked for him, slaved, I should say. Nothing ragged-trousered about me: had no trousers at all most of the time. Never work for your father. The old bastard owned a row of slum houses, and we never knew it till he’d croaked. Six brothers, and we sold up the lot. Got forty pounds apiece after the lawyers had done. I’d left home by then, came up from London to collect it. Boozed it all up in three days, then joined the artillery. The war had just started, and I thought I’d get stuck into fascism. Knew all about it from fourteen because I read a lot and heard what was going on. Stuck on the Lincolnshire coast, bored to death so started painting, reading, demobbed, married, writing begging letters. A bad life with seven kids to keep, but there was no other way. Anything else?’

Jones found it difficult to believe that this lank man of forty had been able to paint such pictures. Rough and bordering on the primitive, they had yet a certain beauty almost belied by the rancorous striding bully in front of him. ‘What about politics?’ he asked mildly.

‘Politics?’ Handley sat in the other armchair. ‘I left off that sort of thing as soon as I felt they were necessary, as soon as I understood them and realised I had nothing left to learn. I’ll only take an interest in politics where there’s a civil war. In the meantime, let who will rule. If they want to indulge in that kind of self and mutual destruction it’s up to them. I’ve got too much work to do, and leave that sort of thing to people like Frank Dawley, who’s more fitted for it than me. He’s in Algeria somewhere, taking pot-shots at the French. At least I hope so: I wouldn’t like him to die on me, though I would feel better if he was taking pot-shots at some of the British I know.’ He poured some more brandy: ‘Let’s drink to good old Frank.’

‘Certainly. To Frank,’ — whoever he was, but it was good brandy, anyway. ‘Don’t you think the artist should take an interest in politics, Mr Handley?’

‘If you start mistering me I’ll shut up and sulk,’ he laughed. ‘Like the rest of the world I’m a split personality when it comes to art and politics: I can’t hear the glories of Mozart’s Coronation Mass without catching an echo of the Ça ira in the background, the sublime about to be pushed aside — temporarily, of course — by the clogs and sandals of the proletariat. So don’t ask me for an opinion, old rum-chum. Two of my lads are up to their necks in this Ban-the-Bomb stunt, so I’m involved to that extent.’

Like many people who drank a lot Jones got drunk too quickly. By the third large brandy his brain lost its usual middling sharpness, and the soporific warmth of the stove made his eyes heavy. ‘Aren’t there any political causes you help?’

Handley lit a cigar. ‘That depends. I do send money to certain organisations — if they look like causing enough trouble. That’s the only thing. So few of ’em do. It’s throwing away good money. Maybe something’ll turn up one day. You see, I have a system. I’ve invested five thousand pounds in industrial shares, and what dividends I get go into any trouble-making or revolutionary organisation aimed at disrupting the system we live under. You can’t be more apolitical than that, can you? Invest in the system in order to destroy it. Not that I think it’ll ever be destroyed, mind you, but if I thought it would last forever I’d not paint another thing. Maybe I’d be happy if I just lived on an ice-floe that never stopped drifting, painting until it melted under me and I took to the boat to find another ice-floe.’

Jones grinned. There were times when he seemed like one of us after all. ‘What if there were no boat?’

‘I’d sink.’

‘Would you mind?’

‘Not all that much. I’ve got a couple of heavy quick-firing ambush-guns defending this house, well-placed and concealed, a fine field of fire organised mainly, I must admit, by my son Richard, and my brother John, who’ve studied such matters. The cellars are stocked with food — self-perpetuating flour, expanding water — all that sort of thing.’

‘Don’t you find yourself a bit cut off from reality?’

‘Closer. How much closer to eternal reality can you get — an artist with a machine-gun waiting for the end of the world? I drink strong tea and walk through fields, fight with a cat-and-dog family, stand alone on the strand at Mablethorpe and watch the steamroller waves updrumming for me as I run back over the dunes dropping my notebook which they hobble-gobble, and cursing them as they spit defeated in my face. What do you mean, not normal? Do you think I should work in a factory? Hump shit around a farmyard? Paint fashionable nose-picking pictures that’ll reproduce nicely in the posh magazines? Get hooked. I’d rather listen to the wind and flirt with chaos.’

‘Do you often fall in love?’

Handley smiled. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I’m asking you, really.’

‘No, I’m asking you.’

‘I might say “yes”,’ Russell said.

‘You might be wrong. If I said “often” you’d say I was sentimental. If I said “rarely” you’d say I was cold. It’s hard to answer with a simple yes or no. But I do fall in love from time to time.’ He reached to the table and opened a book so that a photograph of his daughter Mandy fell out. Jones picked it up. ‘I’m in love with her at the moment,’ said Handley, snapping it back between the covers before Jones could twig the similarity of feature. ‘But I don’t see what it has to do with me as a painter.’

‘I was just curious.’

‘Anything else?’ Handley wanted to know.

‘What about theories?’

He closed one eye, and farted. ‘Theories?’

‘Regarding art — painting.’

‘You can fart as well — if you want to. Liberty Hall. I know it’s catching. A theory is only a way of explaining how your art died. I never use ’em.’

Jones was exasperated, needed a break. ‘Do you mind if I go to your john?’

‘Down the stairs and second on the right.’ Handley wondered how someone like Russell Jones had already become acquainted with his brother John.

He was at the door: ‘It’s all right. I’ll find it.’ Handley shrugged, turned to his painting. The head-down fox was falling back to earth after its trip to the sky, a visit to the foxgods who forthwith sent him speeding to the nether world, his life one long and agonising vacillation between air and fire, space and boiling rock, vulpine trap into which he had by chance of birth been driven. The blazing circular limits of the sun surrounded his existence, and yet at the same time the eternal powerhouse of his drive showed him him as the lit-up centre of Handley’s wide-scope world immediately forgotten as he plunged back in.

The stairs were narrow, but Jones found his way to the wider landing of the lower floor. A girl was pushing a sweeping brush ineffectually around dark corners. He thought of trying to kiss her, but his nerve for it wasn’t in the right place this morning. Opening the second door without hesitation, he found it didn’t give into a lavatory at all, but a normal-sized blind-drawn room flooded by brilliant electric light. Much space was taken by racks of wireless receivers and transmitters, wavemeters and goniometers, speakers and microphones. At a table beside it sat a bald, middle-aged man wearing earphones and with hands busy at a morse key. On being suddenly disturbed he sprang up, careful to unplug the earphones, lifted a heavy service revolver and set its spout towards Jones. ‘Get out!’ he cried hoarsely, ‘Get out!’ — an unforgettable picture.

The door had closed behind Jones who, being so certain he was in the right room, had advanced a good way into it before realizing the mistake which now seemed set for ludicrous and terrible proportions as this pop-eyed sallow-faced maniac came for him.

The door seemed to have locked itself: ‘I can’t get out. I can’t.’ Though unaccustomed to shouting, Jones did so now. It somehow humanised him, reduced the tension in the room to one of ordinary pathetic impotence, and at the panic-pitched sound of it the man who threatened him put down the gun, and a charming smile spread over his face.

The door knocked Jones in the back, and he stepped aside, forgetting the painful jolt in anticipation of the next surprise assault. The great menace was still the man with the earphones hanging round his neck like a stethoscope. He gave a fixed and fearful smile as if, having come from Italy to some bruto northern court in the Middle Ages, he was demonstrating it as a new invention for the human face — a subtle yet novel expression that could be used by anyone not absolutely perishing of melancholy, and that was now sweeping the Mediterranean world.

‘John,’ Handley said, ‘sit down and get back to work.’ Smile drained, John revealed a mature and gentle face, brown sensitive eyes, and a tan as if he either suffered with his liver or spent much time out of doors. He wore a grey finely-cut suit, well-polished shoes, collar and tie. Beside his morse-key was a gold fob-watch, and a writing-pad two-thirds covered by pencilled block-capitals. The opposite wall was racked with books, and one by the door was laid with a map of North Africa. Jones noted all this with a trained eye, while Handley explained: ‘You said to me “Do you mind if I go to your John?” Well, this is my brother John, and I admit I was mystified, but I thought you’d been talking to people in the pub last night and knew about him. You were my guest so I couldn’t come the “Am I my brother’s keeper?” lark. John, this is Russell Jones, a journalist who’s come to interview me.’

John mumbled a greeting, showing a nature basically shy, if at times unpredictably violent. ‘He lives in this room with his radio gear, has in fact ever since he came home from the Jap prison-camp in 1945. He was in the army — signals — had a commission, which I was brother enough never to hold against him.’

‘I didn’t mean to turn on you,’ John said. ‘I feel rather bewildered if I’m disturbed. It doesn’t happen often, I might say, which I suppose makes me react more noticeably than I need to when it does.’ He spoke gently, and now that the shock was wearing off Jones felt that here at least was one member of the Handley household with whom he might have something in common — even if he was a raving lunatic.

‘Mind you, he never does make contact,’ Handley said in a kindly voice. ‘Do you, John?’

His eyes gleamed, as if his whole life had been a disappointment, yet as if this continual state contained the seeds of hope. ‘Not yet, Albert. I keep on trying, though. Perhaps I just never get on the right wavelength at the right time, or maybe I’m asleep at the moment when I might be making contact. I get lots of false hope, and false messages even — as if somebody else engaged in the same thing is always trying to thwart me from making contact even though it may at the same time stop him doing so. It’s a dog-eat-dog world up in the ether, I suspect, all sorts of imps and birds and atmospherics trying to foil me, so that I’m sure the devil himself has a hand in it. The whole sky, from earth to stars and even beyond, is where my signals criss-cross, so you can imagine the scope I have, the space, the great, grandiloquent marvellous space! Oh, of course, I get plenty of ordinary messages, but they don’t count. I can send messages too, to ships or Moscow, but it’s not the same. I want to make contact with someone I’ve had in mind for a long time.’

Sweat ran down his leathery face as he felt for a case and took out a cigarette, a normally courteous man who, because he did not offer one, must have forgotten they were in the room. ‘It’s no easy task,’ he smiled, ‘but I feel that someone has to make the attempt, and I seem to have been cut out for it. As I go on trying in my mundane methodical fashion I also dream about the time when I will finally make contact. I can’t tell you how the thought of it thrills and sustains me. It’s as if the whole light of the world will go on, when my signals and those signals meet in the ether, and the great love of the universe illumines every face, when I ask the only question and an answer comes through at last, as it is bound to do. Still, I sometimes have to admit that it’s a lonely life. I hardly ever leave this room, for who knows that in the few minutes I’m away, it wouldn’t have been the time and opportunity for me to make the first contact? My eyes often ache, my hand often falters, and a touch of despair forces me into sleep when I should be awake, but I go on, losing count of time, listening to all the signals and waiting for the propitious time to send out my own words in order to make the great meeting. I suppose you find this uninteresting?’

Jones caught the dark threat of his question and replied that no, just the opposite, the idea seemed rather a thrilling one. What he wanted to know, but hadn’t the courage to ask, was what he was trying make contact with.

‘Someone,’ John continued, as if reading his query, ‘once stumbled into this room and had the temerity to ask what or with whom I was trying to make contact. But the world is full of such people, fools and doubters who want to drag all spiritual people like myself down to hell, tempters and demons continually hoping to annihilate one, who know plainly in their very bones what it is one must always strive to make contact with, but who can’t bear the sight and sound of anyone trying, and so attempt in all ways to destroy them and their faith. I fought with him desperately, for he nearly overcame me with his strength and valour — until I got him outside and threw him down the stairs.’

‘I remember,’ said Handley. ‘It was the window-cleaner.’

‘Don’t you think he deserved it?’ John demanded.

Jones leaned against the door, arms folded. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

‘Aren’t you sure? Are you one of them? Once upon a time I was interested in politics, and met quite a few of your sort. Maybe I’ll be interested in them again one day. In fact I’m sure I shall be, after I’ve made contact. But let me tell you, because I remember it clearly and can never forget it, when I was in the prison-camp at Singapore, not long after we were captured by the Japanese devils, some of us formed a left-wing group, all from the ranks except me. In those hell conditions we kept ourselves alive by talks and meetings, and managed to produce a sort of newspaper, in opposition to the British officers as well as the Japanese. Naturally, the officers got to know that we left-wingers were giving secret lectures on militarism and the class-war, in which we condemned their incompetence and cowardice. Do you know what they did? The Japanese had quite rightly ordered them to work with the rest of the men on building-sites, but in order that they would not persevere with this order the CO did a deal. He betrayed us, and agreed to keep them informed of any future suchlike activities, if he and his brother officers were not forced to work the same as the ordinary men. Out of those groups I was the only one who, by accident, came home alive. Shall I strip and show you my scars? Is it any wonder that I’m trying to make contact?’

Jones felt the blood draining out of himself. He was not so much horrified at the story, as at the effect on John while he was telling it. Handley stood at his brother’s side, an arm over his shoulder: ‘Get some sleep, John. Have a bit of rest. I’ll send Enid up with some soup.’

‘I’ll have the soup,’ John said, calm and forceful again, ‘But I’ll go on working for a while.’

The morse-key was rattling feverishly as they went quietly out. ‘At one time,’ Handley said when Jones came back from the lavatory, ‘I thought we’d have to have him certified, but he’s quietened down a bit since then. He went through such unimaginable horrors in those prison-camps that it almost finished him off. But he came to live with me, and bought that wireless stuff with his gratuity. Gets a pension still. The rest of the family wouldn’t have him, he was so much off his head. But I never thought so. He’s on some search, you know, Johnny is. He’s doing some of it for me, maybe for all of us — in this house. We believe in him. He’s the man in the boat whose spirit’s kept this place afloat for years.’

‘But that anecdote about the prison-camp,’ Jones said, ‘is it true?’

They went upstairs, back to the studio, and Handley turned at the top step: ‘Is that the only question you’ve got? You were privileged to see your John just now, though I don’t imagine it means much to you. There’s only one story in John’s life, and that’s it.’

Handley moved to the other side of the studio table and lit a cigar. He offered one, but Russell Jones took out a large curved pipe, so Albert pushed a tin of tobacco towards him. ‘Try this Spanish stuff. Teddy Greensleaves brought it back from the Canary Islands.’

It was dry and flaky, and Handley had put two cuts of apple in to keep it moist. One of these small pieces was inadvertently packed into the huge space of Russell’s pipe bowl, and before Handley could tell him, it was being lit, and a fragrant smell of burning fruit filled the room. Russell glanced uneasily, but continued puffing.

‘I think you took a chunk of my apple,’ Handley said, ‘moistener, you know.’ Russell looked as if he’d been poisoned, but didn’t know which of them had done it, then apologised and picked it out, dropping it like a dead black-clock in the ash-tray.

Handley put it back in his tin. ‘How do I know,’ he said, ‘what sort of an article you’re going to write?’ He prised up a skylight window and ledged it. Clean air rushed in, cold and ruthless, though sweet to Handley once the scarf was back round his neck.

‘You don’t, really,’ Russell smiled.

‘I have to take it on trust?’ Handley yawned, and at the sight and sound of it Russell felt an impulse to do the same, but fought it off in order not to appear imitative or weak. ‘I’m afraid you do, really.’

‘Really?’ He slammed the window, frame dropping as if to smash. ‘Fresh air’s the bane of my baleful life. Shakes the cobwebs. Makes me hate people. But listen: no lies. Do you hear? No lies, or I’ll come down to London and pull the tripes out of you.’

Russell smiled. That sort is ruthless, Handley thought, born and bred to it. But I’m ruthless as well. The trouble is that my ruthlessness makes me suffer. Nevertheless, mine wins in the end because it has a soul burning somewhere inside it. ‘You can smile,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen the way you scumpots and editors treat people who are trying to do real work. Not that you can really do them harm, but by God you do your best. The toffee-nosed posh papers are the worst of all, because those who write for them once fancied themselves a bit as well.’

‘You’re quite wrong,’ Russell said, standing up to fasten his overcoat. ‘Your work is much better than it was, so why do you have to make these unnecessary and insulting statements? Your personality isn’t that bad.’

‘I’m so bad that even breeding couldn’t make me perfect. But don’t patronise me. Just try and get close to the truth if you must scribble your impressions.’

‘I use a typewriter. I wanted to invite you down to the pub for lunch.’

‘If you don’t get out I’ll set the dog on you. I’ve nothing against you, personally. It’s just that everything you stand for sticks in my craw. Still, I’ll show you out. I suppose we must part on reasonable terms.’

The village clock struck eleven, a distant booming carried on the wind as they stood by the front door and shook hands.

Chapter Five

The mellow and subtle mood of many days had broken. He was poisoned but not dead, half-way between ashes and honey. What man could stand up to it? They hit you with vilification, thumped you with praise, and any day you might die of heart bruise. He could add nothing to the canvas, threw down his brush. Treat them civilly and you felt like a collaborator with the Germans who deserved to be shot or have your hair shorn. If you insulted them you betrayed your own easy and generous nature. It was no easy matter. Perhaps there was some clever and not unnatural balance between the two which his psyche had not yet struck (or was that merely the final proof that he wanted to cooperate with them?) which would put them in their place while leaving his self-respect unsoiled. Fortunately such questions were an aberration on the endless world of his work that he was king of and could walk across at will, that dominated all waking and sleeping hours as if life and sanity depended on it. Reaching beyond the end of what he had never seen any other artist do, he was out in the wilderness, crawling through fire with an unquiet soul.

He walked down, along the corridor to Richard’s room. It seemed amiable and light compared to his own cave hemmed in by cloud and canvases. A large space was taken up by a table covered by conjoined sheets of the Ordnance Survey quarter-inch map of England and Wales. On the walls were maps in enlarged detail, special tracings of atomic establishments and bomber bases drawn up by some draughtsman who knew his business well. ‘What’s the situation in our civil war?’ Handley wanted to know, lighting a cigar.

Richard’s fingers went over the intricate formation of coloured pins and labels, as if he were blind and the battle situation were set out in braille. Above an opposite notice board hung a huge Algerian FLN banner which Mandy had been pressed into painting during the long nights of last snowbound winter. ‘It’s confused,’ he said, ‘but at the moment, on balance, we seem to be losing.’

He was tall and swart, with black curly hair and a Roman nose, high cheek-bones, sallow below the eyes — which were quick to see through the hugely complex patterns that led to the main chance, a skill developed during twenty years learning how to deal with a father like Handley who never had one thought or action similar to any that had gone before. In that sense, Richard was dominated by his father, yet it had trained him to dominate everyone else. He wore a camel-hair sweater and smoked a home-rolled cigarette.

‘You’d better stop losing,’ Handley said.

‘After the A-flash over London and Liverpool, government troops are hounding all guerrillas into the Midlands. I don’t like the look of it.’

‘Break it off then,’ Handley said. ‘Melt ’em away and pull back through the Marches. Re-form in Wales. The Black Mountains’ll make a good base — plenty of blokes to draw on from the valleys. Good lads, them Taffies. Promise ’em self-government when it’s all over.’

Richard began to argue, the only way to find out what was on his father’s mind. ‘I’d thought of that, but …’

‘Got a better plan?’

‘What about some in the Lakes and Devon?’

‘No good. Keep ’em together at the moment. Wales is big enough. They’ll be too busy cleaning up to bother with us for a while. Then, but all in good time, we can come back, take Shrewsbury, and make for the Black Country. Like fish in water. Move in with the spring tides, with the people. They’ll rise for the bait, don’t worry. If not, we’ll suck our rings and drop dead.’

Richard was moving the pins, and Handley bent over the map with a feeling of satisfaction. ‘Sent off the plans of the secret bases yet to Moscow?’

‘Last week. Rolled them in a bundle of New Statesmans. Printed matter, unregistered, surface mail — to make sure they’ll get there.’

‘Send another batch then, this week.’

‘All right,’ Richard said. The telephone rang, and he listened.

‘Well?’

‘They’re liquidating the Coventry group. Regular army.’

He straightened up from the map, threw his cigar out of the window. ‘What did I tell you? Get them to melt, turn into carol-singers or poppy-sellers. I’ll call in this afternoon when I’m back from the pub. Maybe you’ll have better news.’

‘Father, there’s just one thing. Adam and I found a beautiful old printing-press in Louth. We can get it for fifteen pounds, then go ahead with the magazine. It’ll cost fifty pounds an issue if we set it up ourselves.’

He thought for a moment. They’ll be the ruin of me, if I’m not too stingy with them. And the same if I am. ‘Win that civil war to my satisfaction, and I’ll do it.’

‘That’ll take weeks. We could print some subversive leaflets in the meantime. I know a way to get them handed round factories in Nottingham. Also at Scunthorpe.’

He took half a dozen ten-pound notes from his pocket and, in mint-condition, they swallowed down onto the Thames valley. ‘Get the press, then, and we’ll see how it goes.’ Richard stood back to consider the overall situation. Handley’s head showed in again. ‘Shove the poetry out of your mind for a bit — do you hear me? — and get them fucking Welshmen up from the valleys.’

‘Yes, father.’

He walked aimlessly around the garden. Furrows underfoot were muddy, ridges of salt-loam beaten in by sea-wind, this part of the garden scarred by miniature craters where cabbages had been ripped out from mother earth. It smelt good, felt soft and rich, tender to his elastic-sided boots hardly meant for the treading of such intense soil. The fruit-trees — apple, plum, pear — were empty and withered. He felt dead, snuffed out by too much winter and isolation, as if his soul were drifting and he was unable to pull it back under control. Let it drift, he thought, let me go, idle and blind, stricken and numb. I don’t mind floating like a brainless fool: the quicker I get to the end and die, the sooner I’m born again. I don’t believe in death, at least not in life, not for me. But oblivion is breathing close unless something happens.

Hoping to throw off such thoughts, he went in for dinner. Enid put veal and salad before him. ‘That journalist didn’t seem in a very good mood when he left. Walked down the hill as if he had an eagle on his back. He didn’t even talk to Mandy, and that’s rare.’

He cut up his meat, appetite good. ‘I gave him what for. He wanted to draw me out, so I let him overdraw me. That’s the only way.’

‘Is it?’ she said, setting her own plate down. They’d fallen in love when she was seventeen and he nineteen, in those far — off days on the Lincolnshire coast, and Enid was well pregnant at the marriage, soft-faced and big-bellied, earnestly looking at him, and he shy with a wide-open smile at being dragged into something that made him the butt of his mates’ jokes while also marking him down for some special unspoken respect. She had a slim straight nose, small chin, full mouth. Her light-blue eyes had a slight slant, upper and lower lids never far apart, Tartar almost in shape, one of those rare English faces that looked as if they had come from central Asia, then full smooth cheeks and fair hair, a face on which the troubles of life do not fall too hard, though Enid had been familiar with every one. Loving Handley, she wasn’t even aware of having ‘put up’ with him, which may have contributed to Handley’s youthfulness, while hers was certainly rooted in it. Her long bound-up hair was as pale as when they’d met, and her skin had an unchanging attractive pallor, in spite of bitter Lincolnshire winters and the never-ending work of seven children. Handley loved her also, and in some way they had never stopped being afraid of each other, but during their quarrels they loathed each other so profoundly that it couldn’t even be said that they were in love any more.

‘Why go out of your way to make enemies?’ she said. ‘If you try not to make them you’ll still have more than you can handle. You’re not sly enough. You let these people make mincemeat of you. They’ve only got to stick a pin in and you jump a mile. And they always get what they came for, whether it’s the posh papers or the gutter press. At your age you should know better.’

He spread butter over black rye-bread. ‘At thirty I’d have been as cunning as hell, and was, but what’s the point any more? I’m getting old enough not to bother about disguising my feelings.’

‘Too famous, you mean. It’s gone to your head.’

The house was stonily quiet, children at school, others either asleep or set on various pastimes. A cow moaned from the neighbouring field. ‘Whose side are you on?’

Whenever they argued it was as if a third and impartial person were present, taking down all that they said to each other — as if they would be ultimately judged on this. She stood up to change his plate. ‘See what I mean? Yours, but you’re too locked in your fame to know it.’

‘Fame!’ He spat. ‘I don’t have any.’

‘You do.’

‘I ignore it.’

‘You don’t. You can’t. I wish you did, but they’ve got you.’

‘So what? Is my work any the worse for it?’ He hated the word ‘work’ and knew that she knew it, and had made him use it, by angering him on this touchy subject. Art was not work, since it was something you were not forced to do in order to earn a living.

‘Not yet it isn’t,’ she said.

‘It won’t be. When I’m working I’m completely myself.’

‘And when you’re not working,’ she went on, eyes gleaming because a real quarrel was coming up, ‘we’ve all got to live with you.’

‘You mean you have. Why don’t we keep personal relationships out of this?’

‘You can’t live without them, that’s why.’

He ate his bread and Stilton, cut up an apple. ‘Stalemate. Let’s pack it in. Divide the spoils and go our different ways.’

She sat down and looked straight at him, a bad sign, portent of saying something unforgivable and bitter. ‘If you want to give in, you can. But I won’t surrender to all this muck you’ve dropped into. If you want to go, go. Kill yourself. If you left me you’d never paint another stroke, and if you don’t believe me, try it. We’ve suffered too much to fly apart just when the going gets difficult. It might have been possible before, but not now, not any more.’

‘I don’t want to leave you, but what gives you the idea that you’re my strength and mainstay?’

‘Because I am, though not any more than you are mine, I admit. You’ve got me, but you’ve also got your freedom. I don’t ask questions when you go to London for weeks at a time, so if you can’t manage in those limits you wouldn’t exist in any others.’

She boiled his coffee, poured it out. ‘We’ve got such a bond, Albert. It would be a pity if you smashed it. We’ve burned in this love and torment since we were almost kids, grown up while our own kids were growing up. If I were sentimental I might call a lot of it suffering, but there was too much love for that. It’s made me hard as well, but in a way that makes me sure of myself, and the more sure I am of myself the more I know that being together is the only thing that matters. We’ve never killed each other in a rotten married way. We’ve been very big about it, right above the rest of the world, and it can’t be shown to anyone else, or passed on, but we own it far more than this piece of property we’ve bought. It’s valuable and unique. It used to be the suffering that ennobles, but now it’s the sort that degrades. So ruin it if you like with your black heart. You can destroy your part of it, but not mine. My part of it’s out of your hands. And it’s safe in mine.’

‘I wasn’t serious about ending it. Stop this talk.’

‘I shan’t. You were thinking it. You’ve often hinted it. If you want to run off with some girl for a dead and comfortable life, it’s up to you, but I’d never forgive you your lack of backbone in doing it.’

He smashed his fist on the table, shaking half his coffee out. ‘You’ve said enough. Stop it. You’re poisoning it. I can’t stand to have my love killed. The ancient feminine wrecker is on the move again!’

She stood by the sink, hands shaking, turned on a tap to stop them. Water ran out uselessly. ‘I’ve said all I want, but if you think I was raving like a lunatic, and that what I’ve said doesn’t mean anything, you’re a fool.’

‘You open your mouth, and kill things. It’s disgusting.’

‘Go on. I’ll never stop you. Why don’t you just go outside and throw up that rotten bile that’s choking you? Just because some tuppenny journalist has been twisting you around his little finger you have to come in and vent you spleen on me. Not, I notice, until after you’ve had your dinner. Oh no! Food usually sweetens people, but it makes you bilious and sour. I won’t put up with your tantrums. You’re not dealing with those spineless people from London who only say “What a genius!” but never see you as you really are.’

‘So that’s it! Jealous, are we? Jealousy brings out the spite, and all the things you weren’t quick enough to get out in our other quarrels but remembered afterwards when you brooded on them. Jealous! I thought you were bigger than that, sweeter and bigger, more intelligent, perhaps. But no.’

‘Life’s full of disappointments for the poor of spirit,’ she mocked.

‘Turn that tap off. You’re wasting water.’

‘I’m not the gallery owner. You don’t have to act the knowing peasant with me!’ But she turned it off, and wiped up his coffee mess. He snatched the rag, and threw it like a dead cat into the sink. ‘You’re going right to the bottom,’ she said. ‘One move and down you go, right into the mud. And once you’re there you’re like an alligator that rips at any living thing.’

They stood at each end of the kitchen. ‘You can’t run my life,’ he said. ‘You never could and you never will.’

‘It’s not worth running. Keep your life and foul it up in your own way. But leave mine alone. I want it for myself, out of what’s been good between us.’

‘Have it, then. I’m making you a present of it, tie it up in an old chocolate-box with blue ribbon. I’ll get the undertaker to make you a coffin, bury it with a bloody prayer book, send it to the bottom, all your love and ideals. You can have them, mine as well, when they take a turn for the worse like this.’

He didn’t see her hand shift. A full dinner-plate seemed to cut off the top of his head, stutter and break on the doorpost behind. ‘I don’t want this sort of marriage,’ she raved. ‘It’s nearly twenty-five years, and I’ve not put up with this. It’s low. It’s ignoble.’

He staggered, eyes closed, a wetness above the left eye. The salt of blood stuck like a leaf on his palate. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We had fine instincts, but you want to alter all that, crush it, destroy it.’ He spoke calmly, a ribbon of blood on his face. ‘You can’t do such a thing to me. I’m even more in the real world than you are.’ Keep away from it, he said to himself, a precipice in front of him, don’t throw anything. Smile. For Christ’s sake lick away the blood and smile, or it’s over for ever. Twenty years in jail and only bars to paint.

‘You’re weak,’ she cried, ‘bone weak. Your whole life’s been built up on weakness. You can’t pit your will against the ordinary hard life of the everyday world.’

His hands pressed onto the heavy kitchen table. ‘That’s what you always wanted, me going out to work every morning and bringing money in on Friday night, a nice steady husband with a nice steady job, an aspirin-wife and crispin-haired kids, a bungalow and little car. I’ve long suspected this.’

‘It’s not true. I mean weak in a better way than that. The way I mean is just not in your consciousness. You don’t know. You’re of poor material. You never could understand, because you’re idle, unreliable, a liar …’

He reached her with clenched fist, brought it at her, then emptied the sink of dishes, a demon scattering all the confetti of Sheffield and the Potteries at wall and window. ‘Go on,’ she cried. ‘What else can you do? This is the end, though, the end, I tell you.’

He spun like a windmill. Chairs shook and toppled, the table flew, drawers skimmed and blocked off the door. Deafness and blindness, the awful force of his own movements crushed him, caught him up so that he couldn’t stop. ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she wept. ‘Never, Never.’

‘You’ve got absolutely what you wanted at last,’ he said, sitting on the floor. ‘Are you satisfied?’

‘We’re done,’ she said, in tears. ‘Finished.’

‘Finished,’ he said. ‘That’s it, then.’

‘I can’t take this again.’

‘You won’t have to. All your so-called love isn’t worth it. Nobody’s going to possess me in that way.’

‘Nobody wants to, if only you could understand. You’d better go then. Let’s get it over with.’

‘I’m not leaving like a bloody lodger.’

‘Neither am I,’ she said. ‘It’s my house, remember. You got it in my name. You were too weak to get it for yourself. “I won’t be a property-owner,” you said. So I’m not going.’

‘Neither am I, I won’t be thrown out.’

‘It’s my house,’ she exulted.

‘Get the police then, you turncoat bourgeoise slut. You’d stoop to anything.’

From a sitting position his long thin body ricocheted across the room and caught her uplifted wrist. ‘Let go, or you’ll break it.’

She put the plate in the sink. ‘I’ll never give in,’ she said. ‘Not even if you crawl.’

The idea of it made him laugh, brought a spark of humour into his black day. ‘That’s what you’ve wanted all your life, but there’s less chance of it now than there ever was, and there was none then.’ He drew back, in danger being so close, though not of blows flying. He refused all temptation to inspect his aching cut, or touch the congealing blood.

‘I want nothing from you,’ she said, holding a hand over one eye. ‘If I’d ever wanted anything we wouldn’t have been together two minutes.’

‘But you’ve had plenty. I’m the sort of person who doesn’t even know when he is giving.’

Her voice was quieter, more even in tone. ‘Not knowing when you give is the same as not giving.’

‘You can wrap those bloody semantic floorcloths around your aphoristic neck.’ He couldn’t hold back, in for the kill when he didn’t want to kill, didn’t need to, and when there was nothing to kill. She stayed quiet, knowing it had to stop, her own impetus gone. Choler sharpened his face, staring for a reply that never came.

The door opened, pushed the table a few inches into the room, and when he snapped around Mandy stood by the pot dresser — the only furniture still upright, apart from her parents. ‘You two been arguing again?’

He was angered by her buxom insolence, long auburn hair and wide sensual mouth ruined by lipstick. ‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing, except a couple of quid to go to the pictures. I’ll go schizoid with boredom if I stay here.’

‘Get this room straight first,’ he said.

‘Clear up your own mess. I’m not a skivvy.’

Enid’s voice rang out. ‘Don’t talk to your father like that.’

‘I’ll clean it up when I come back,’ she said. ‘What about Maria and Catalina?’

‘Probably hiding in the cellars,’ Handley grinned.

‘All I want,’ said Mandy, ‘is approximately three hundred quid for a secondhand Mini. That’s not much to ask for, is it?’

‘I’ve told you approximately three hundred times the answer’s no. You cost me fifty quid for an abortion last year, and that was enough pin-money for a while.’ But even while talking he took pound notes from his pocket, as if held up at gunpoint. ‘Get going. Don’t let me see you before tea-time.’

‘I wish you two would settle your differences in a civilised way,’ she said, unable to move. ‘I hate it when you do this to each other. I suppose it’s the only way you can show love, but it gets me down. I’ll set the furniture on its legs, but don’t expect me to clean the blood up.’

Handley’s fist struck the dresser, seemed to break every bone, even those in his toes. ‘I’ll murder you when you come back!’ he roared, his grey face through the door she’d nipped out of.

‘You asked for that,’ Enid said righteously, pulling the table upright. ‘You’ve never hit them yet, and you see what happens when you try?’

‘I bloody-well miss,’ he said, numbed by the pain. ‘By God, the fat little trollop had better not come back too soon. My hand’s finished. I’ll never be able to paint again. What shall I tell Teddy? I’m ruined. And it’s no laughing matter. I can’t move it. Look.’ The back of it was blue and swollen, a short, dark cut in one place. He leaned it against the cool wall and pressed hard.

‘Do a bit of work,’ she said, ‘and forget it.’ Bleak sunlight planted itself through the window. He swept smashed plates into a dustpan, rubble chuting musically into the plastic waste-bucket. Taking up the broken chair he opened the window and threw it out onto the quagmire garden. ‘That’s that,’ he said, as if after an hour’s good work.

‘That’s that,’ she said, enraged. ‘But it isn’t.’

‘I wouldn’t want it to be, either,’ he said, lighting two cigarettes and passing her one. ‘I wouldn’t want all this to be for nothing. As forty-year-old Romeo said to his dear Juliet across the Sunday dinner-table. “What did you expect?” — before dodging the loaded teapot. They were in love though, I suppose, bless ’em.’ He dropped his cigarette into the sink, and slid an arm around her. ‘Every word we say is true,’ he said, ‘between us. But it doesn’t matter. It can’t touch my love, nor yours.’ She said nothing, no bitterness left, words crushed as they kissed, unable to withdraw from the black infesting lust.

Chapter Six

Mandy fastened her leather coat and ran down the muddy lane. When far enough from the house she walked, and took out the four notes her father had pushed at her, enough to get to Boston and back, and buy a meal for herself and Ralph. It was just after two by her watch, solid gold that Handley had bought in London and swore cost forty quid — though she knew he’d doubled the price on his way back just to impress her.

Since his success she’d wondered which was worse, being the daughter of a famous artist, or of a bone-idle penniless no-good. Certainly his fame hadn’t got her the Mini she craved and thought it should have. Before, men used to give her money buy her drinks and meals, now they expected her to pay for them, because her father was supposed to be rich and lavish. Nobody had done a thing for her this last year. It was as if she’d lost her purpose in life. All the force and wiles seriously expended piecemeal on other men now became one long ploy against her father, though, of course, in this relationship she could never play that final card of sexual attraction that she often had with others.

It rained in the village, and still needed forty minutes for a bus to the station. With a souped-up Mini she could reach Boston in thirty, while this way it was a day trip. Who would imagine that when your own father had seven thousand pounds in his current account (she’d been through his papers and seen his bank statements) he’d be so mean as to refuse you a secondhand Mini for a measly three hundred? What was he expecting to do with such a fortune? Shoot himself and leave it to a dog’s home? He was harder than nails. When she’d got pregnant last year, hoping he’d set her and Ralph up in a new house, since they would have to get married, he’d thrown a fit and made her have an abortion, and on top of it all met Ralph and punched him in the face for what he was supposed to have done, but actually hadn’t because another man had done it. So Ralph was chary of venturing up that neck of the county now, and she had to traipse all the way down to dismal Boston for a glimpse of him. What could you do with such a father? He was too knowing to do you any good at all. He’d never considered what damage an abortion did to you psychologically, especially at a time when all she’d wanted was to settle down with Ralph in a nice house and really have a kid if that was the price she had to pay for it. I can’t stay in a house like The Gallery all my life, she thought, with such terrible black upchucks going on all the time. Not that I really wanted to get married, for Jack Christ’s sake. Trust Dad to see through that one and get me off the hook. A trick that came today and went tomorrow. But what do I want to do with my life? I’m eighteen already and might be dead before I’m twenty-two. It’s all right reading Huxley and Lawrence (and those dirty books Dad brought back from Paris — he’d cut my throat if he knew I’d got at them as well) and brooding in my room over their slow-winded lies, but I suppose one day I’d better make up my mind and do something. Dad’s always on at me to get a job, and so I’d like to if one had any interest in it, but not like I did for six months in that estate-agent’s office, typing cards all day with particulars of houses on them to stick in the window, with Mr Awful-Fearnshaw trying to get his hands up my thighs.

Thank God for bus-shelters, anyway. He isn’t good for much else. I suppose the highest I can hope for is to be either a nurse, or a teacher, but I don’t want to be anything yet, except something good and worthwhile when I do, so that I can be of use to somebody in the world. I’ve got my School Cert, so I can get my A levels and go to University, because I know that’s what Dad would really like.

Miss Bigwell stopped in her new A40: ‘Want a lift?’

‘I’m going to Louth,’ Mandy said, ready to take anything to get out of the rain and sit between four wheels. Always prone to dislike someone before she could possibly grow to like them, Mandy made an exception for Miss Bigwell, for whom she had a vague admiration. In the old days, that is to say two or three years ago, half-frozen in her winter mittens, she sometimes made her way to Miss Bigwell’s cottage at the end of the village with a book of raffle-tickets hoping to sell a few at a shilling each for a painting of her father’s. Because Miss Bigwell usually bought half-a-dozen and at the same time never won a picture (no one did) she was careful not to go there too often.

Pulling into second gear, her car shot from the bus-stop. ‘Why on a day like this? It’s pouring mackerel. Boyfriend, I suppose. I’m off to see my brother Joe — not well again.’

Miss Bigwell was said to have a private income, in order to explain how she lived well and did no work. The reason people called it private was that few of them knew where it came from, though Handley said she was the only daughter of the Coningsby Bigwells. There was little he didn’t know about the rich families of the county, for he had tapped them all at one time or another. She and her brother Joe had sold all the land when the old man finally croaked and invested the money in the holiday-making industry of Skegness. She was a big shrewd woman of about sixty, with a moon-face and glasses, whom you might have thought rather common if she didn’t have money and a few of the ways that go with it. Like every local person she couldn’t resist pumping Mandy about how her father felt now that he was famous. It never ceased to amaze Mandy that local people almost respected him, while to her he was the same old stingy bastard he’d always been. Her aim in getting away from the family was simply to reach some state in life where there was so much money that it ceased to have either meaning or importance. Lack of it had always cramped her natural zest for living — and so it was more vital in her life than it ought to have been. When she was a child in school the headmistress had said hands high those who want to pay two shillings for a Christmas party. Mandy shot hers up because it was all her father could afford anyway. But no one else moved because they knew what was coming: hands high those who want to spend five shillings for a real party — as if this price included champagne, the sheep! A wheatfield fluttered, naturally. When they subsided she said let’s see again, (laughter already) those who even now want the cheap rate of two shillings. I still said yes, to everybody’s surprise. Imagine thinking I’d change my mind just because I was all on my own! The headmistress went, then came back with a beautifully bound hymn-book inscribed from her, which she was giving me for my ‘independent spirit’. I said thank you. What else could I say? She must have made about five pounds profit on that party, so what was a miserly hymn-book to her? Yet if she gave me something it ought to have been more than a book I never opened and couldn’t even sell to the girls. So I went through all that for him, and he won’t even buy me a car now that he’s rolling in it.

Once in the car and it stopped raining she wished she’d waited for a bus instead of putting up with Alice Bigwell’s endless ramblings about the best way of making compost-heaps. She pumped on concerning slops and vegetation and manure and proportions of water, (nothing after all except complex euphemisms for common shit) building it up and putting it to bed, taking temperatures and saying how long it took to become soil. Mandy wondered whether she hadn’t an incurable and repulsive obsession with birth and cannibalism, and whether she didn’t serve the stuff up as a first course to any starving and unsuspecting traveller who knocked at her door for a bite of bread and cheese. Nothing would surprise her from the people around here. Though born in the place, she didn’t really belong, for her father had come from Leicester (where they still went occasionally to visit hordes of the family) and didn’t have an occupation like everyone else round about. He’d always been either a malingering no-good on the scrounge or, as lately, a celebrity with a murky past they were so ready to forget that it would surely be thrown up in his face with real fury if ever he went back to scrounging. And with the confidence of people who had lived for generations in one place, they realised how possible this was.

Because there was no saying when his suddenly acquired fortune would vanish, Mandy wanted to get out before it did. She couldn’t believe that from now on he’d be able to earn good money doing something or other in the world of art. He could turn his hand to many things, but being pigheaded, would never do anything his integrity told him was wrong. Otherwise why had they lived a desperate existence for so many years? To deviate from such principles would turn it into an awful waste, and though she realised how much of a pity this would be, at the same time she didn’t want to go on living in the greater uncertainty that unexpected affluence had created. She was the daughter of a true aritst in that she wanted the sort of settled life her upbringing had denied her the means of acquring. And having the same determination as her father she would go to great lengths to get it, in the course of it justifying the inversion of the common maxim to say that the sins of the children are visited on the parents.

Sun flooded the coastal meadows with light, dust jumping from her train seat when she fell on to it for a better view of the fields embossed in green and yellow. Comfort was beauty, and she was always passing both. When you liked the landscape but had no feeling for the people set there, it was a place where you could live with pleasure but not grow up in, which at eighteen was a good reason to get out even though it broke your heart. The fact that her parents lived here would make it easier.

She met Ralph by the Stump. ‘I’d have waited all day and all night,’ he said, as if she’d been hurrying for his benefit. ‘Time never drags when I’m expecting you.’

‘I wish I knew when you were being sarcastic and when you weren’t.’

‘That’s easy,’ he laughed, as they walked arm in arm towards the bridge. ‘I never am. Bitter, disappointed, perhaps, but only a fool is sarcastic.’

Ralph had long ago made up his mind never to do any farming, and so was locked in an internecine conflict with his father who was determined that he should — who wished he’d never encouraged him to go to Cambridge, though in fact there’d been no choice. After getting his degree in English Ralph set out with fifty pounds on a trip round the world. His father drove him as far as Grantham, and shook hands with a grin that expected to see him back in a few days. Ralph felt this, but strode off south along the Great North Road in anticipation of his first real lift. Tall, ruddy-cheeked, a gleam in his eye that had not yet received its baptism of worldly irony as had his father’s, he travelled fast and reached Yugoslavia in a week. He there discovered a profitable frontier trade in foreign currency and so made enough money to live on the Dalmatian coast for a few weeks before resuming his advance through Greece and Turkey. In Ankara he translated letters for a business firm, then bought an old Italian motor-bike to ride across Iraq and Persia. He wore jeans and checked shirt, with a sheepskin coat for the mountains, and a pipe of cheap local choking tobacco was gripped in his teeth as he bumped at fifteen miles an hour over boulder roads. In place of his ruddiness came a sallow tan, permanently stamped when he became ill in Baluchistan with a violent form of liver-fluke. He lay for weeks on a rope bed in a remote khan, gaunt and bearded, raving at the cannonball lodged in his stomach. A junior consular official of the same age walked in one day as the worst of his fevers and cramps were leaving. He was taken to a salubrious Dak bungalow, and lived there on bacon and tinned carrots until fit to ride east again — which he did against the advice of the consul with so little grace that they afterwards marked him in their common memories as one of those northerners whose taciturnity is only a mask for a cretinous disposition.

The guts of his motor-bike dropped out above the high gorge of the Indus, and he picked it up bodily and threw it hundreds of feet towards the water, so that it narrowly missed a floating raft on which some family had spread their pots and tents.

Weeks later he reached Bangkok, and at Cook’s found three dozen letters from his parents begging him to come home. In one sense he was heading there, but not in the way they expected. They filled him with rage, then profoundly depressed him. He was getting out of their clutches at last. The fact that they’d done so little for him since he was born except send him to live with moronic relations was beginning to make them feel guilty, and so they didn’t want to lose him — which made him feel free and happy as he tore the letters up.

In Saigon he got work with the American ‘advisers’ typing inexplicable orders for the replacement of lethal supplies to the South Vietnamese army — in those early days. His genial and generous employers said his job could only be temporary, until he was politically ‘cleared’ by an organisation in Washington. For some reason he was not ‘cleared’, and regretfully told that he must go. He picked up his pipes and tobacco, helped himself to the contents of an unguarded cash-box, and walked out at six o’clock one evening. Two minutes later a tri-shaw loaded with TNT was pushed into the main door of the building, and no one inside escaped death or injury.

He was pulled from his mosquito-net next morning and questioned by American detectives, but he was too innocent for any blame to be laid on him. The astuteness that enabled him to see what was going on in South Vietnam also persuaded him to keep his mouth shut when speaking to people or being interviewed, as he was now, by two intelligent numskulls. He answered slowly and reasonably, as if to comprehend yet stay out of trouble merely showed an absence of passion. While talking he dimly sensed that he would acquire this passion only when he had lost both these talents. He was blessed with the good sense of a young man with a conventional upbringing suddenly out on a limb and doing something unusual — he reflected while travelling deck-class to Hong Kong. The rusting steamer slid through oily blue water under a sun that blistered down for six days. After a few hours he found it necessary to escape from the overcrowded decks, and the only way to do this was by taking refuge in himself. He knew what the boat must look like from shore or passing ship, having seen one once going down the Saigon river — a dilapidated steamer of four thousand tons whose decks, funnels and superstructure were completely hidden by human beings. Nothing else could be seen, not an air-vent, porthole, or derrick.

He gave English lessons in Hong Kong and caught a mild venereal disease from one of his earnest and beautiful slit-skirted pupils who only wanted to learn phrases of endearment for her work with those American advisers recuperating from their assistance to South Vietnam. He regretted that the lessons had taken such a practical turn, but was able to get his ailment cured in Japan, the next stop on his world tour, where he got respectable work lecturing on English literature at certain universities. He waited there for a visa that would allow him to pass through America on his way home, the whole journey having taken a year out of his life.

Leaning over the parapet of the bridge with Mandy he still hadn’t sorted out his impressions, even though a year had passed and he had reached the ripe age of twenty-five. The sheer built-up sides of the river had been left mildewed by the outgone tide, its water licking fitfully way out in the sand of Boston Deeps. Traffic stifled the air with fumes and thunder, and a coastal barge worked itself towards a quay downstream. Mandy had forgotten the fight with her father at home, being with Ralph and trying to talk to him, break her way through into that set face gazing along the river.

‘I told you we shouldn’t see each other again,’ he said, without turning round.

‘You were waiting for me.’

‘I happened to be here.’

She looked at him, glad he was turned away so that she could do so without starting a fight. ‘If you can stand it, I can. If you think you’re going to make me talk about love you’re mistaken. It doesn’t make me happy to go on like this, but it seems to satisfy you. I suppose hanging around for weeks is the only way you’ll make up your mind.’

His long sallow face became indignant at her accuracy. ‘You’re talking a lot of rubbish as usual. You’ll be threatening to put your head in the gas-oven next, if I’m not careful and don’t humour you.’

‘You’re marvellous when you say things like that,’ she laughed. ‘I feel you really mean it, so it’s the only time you look properly alive — except when we’re making love.’

‘It’s a pity you’re so young,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you’d have walked off instead of laughing.’ He was determined to get his own way, but was so strong in it that she never knew what it was. Neither, in fact, did he, and the force of this subterranean desire was sapping his life before he had even started to live. His trip around the world had thrown him so basically off balance that he was unable to make up his mind concerning a career, or even on taking another trip round the world, which he often wanted to do.

They went into a fish-bar, but neither was hungry. She split open the batter and ate some of the white flesh. Ralph drank thirstily at his cup of rotten tea. ‘Will you still come away with me?’

‘Yes,’ she said readily. ‘But I wouldn’t mind knowing where.’

‘Neither would I. The old man wants me to go to agricultural college and learn the trade of raping the earth. But it’s not in me, though I toyed with the idea just to please him.’

‘It doesn’t sound your style.’

‘What is my style?’

‘Not that.’

He pushed his plate away. ‘A lot of help you are.’

‘As much as you want me to be. You’re afraid of me helping you in case it should show that I love you. But I don’t anyway. Never have, never will, and never could.’ She stood up and fastened her coat. He took her elbow and opened the door, her shoulder against his chest as they went through.

They walked into the country invigorated by a forceful moist breeze coming from the sea. ‘What I really want to do,’ he said with an enthusiasm that irritated her, ‘is to get a house in Lincolnshire and fill it with books. Live on my own, I think, perhaps work as a teacher at some local school. It’s the only thing that appeals to me at the moment.’

It amazed and distressed her that he might after all know what he wanted, and that this might well be it. The life he drew appealed to her as well, and for this reason it seemed horrible, decadent, corrupting, a way of dying before you really started to live. She listened to him talking about gardens, dogs, a couple of guns to go shooting now and again, the rubbish-bin of his father’s already fulfilled and deadened desires. He’d furnish the house from auctions at market-towns round about so as to get beautiful antique furniture. She knew that if he really set his heart on it his ageing daddy might buy him a house simply to get rid of him.

‘That trip round the world knocked holes in you,’ she said.

‘It showed me what I wanted.’

‘When you know that you’re finished.’ They walked quickly, open country on either side, keeping well in to avoid traffic.

‘That sounds like another of your father’s sayings,’ he said. ‘I like his paintings, but I don’t like the way he justifies them.’

‘If you want to be with it,’ she said, ‘stop knowing what you want. Dad couldn’t have told me that.’

‘I’d still like to have one of his pictures, anyway,’ he said. She’d once taken him to the studio to see Handley’s work, about the time all the fuss had started. When he said he’d like to have one for his own room, she’d retorted that he should have thought of that a year ago when he could have chosen anything for a few quid.

‘I thought you were set on having a house? You can’t have both.’ Perhaps, he thought, but realised that it would be morally wrong, if not actually degenerate, not to try and get all he wanted while still young enough to remember what it was he had wanted in the first place.

‘I could,’ he suggested, ‘if you persuaded him to give me one. He hates my guts after what happened last year, but I don’t think he’d bear a grudge all his life.’

She laughed, showing her fine even teeth, before a cigarette went between her lips. ‘He wouldn’t give a pencil stroke away any more.’

He cupped his large hands and passed a light over. They were pale and smooth after the long recuperation from his trip, for he hadn’t even helped on his father’s farm, she thought, since coming back. ‘He’s got a trunk full of notebooks, that he’s written ideas in for the last twenty years. An American university offered him a fat sum for them, but he wouldn’t part. Keeping them for a rainy day, I suppose.’

‘Why don’t you just walk out with a painting for me?’

Grey clouds were torn into shreds by invisible dogs of wind. ‘I hope we bit Wainfleet before it rains,’ she said. ‘I get a bus from there. Still, it’s better doing this than moping around Boston. The only time you talk is when we’re walking. Your words are like tadpoles: they have to grow legs before they jump out.’ She waited for him to retaliate, but he became morose, which was his way of self-control. ‘What makes you so eager to get at the old man’s painting? You haven’t even seen the latest.’

‘I want to stick one on my wall for as long as I can stand it, and try and get to know something about you.’

‘There’s no connection between them and me. It’d probably send you absolutely off your bonce.’

‘It’s a good idea though. Don’t you think so?’

‘It gives us something to talk about,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d have known plenty about me. We’ve had it often enough.’

‘You’ve been reading too much Lawrence, I suppose. That sort of thing actually stops you getting to know somebody, blinds you to everything about a person. But to have one of your father’s pictures on my wall would really tell me something.’

‘What a love-affair ours is!’ she said. ‘You’ve burned me out at eighteen! I can get you one of my father’s paintings any time, but I expect I’d go to prison for it. He’d put his whole family behind bars if it’d interfered with his work. You’ve no idea what he’s like. Ruthless isn’t the word. He’d track us to the end of the world to recover a fading sketch in a penny notebook if he knew he might never have a chance of looking at it again. Give him a hundred for it, and that’s another matter.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘Not altogether. I could walk out with one, but I won’t. If you want one that badly you’d better break in and steal it, but it’ll be difficult. We’ve got alarm-wires on the gate and a bull-dog near the front door. Then there’s Uncle John who’s completely insane and sits awake all night listening to his radio with a loaded revolver nearby in case anybody comes to take him away.’

‘I hadn’t seriously considered it.’

‘That’s the only way,’ she said. ‘The trouble about dreams is that they cause so much trouble.’ They sat on a gate to enjoy a temporary burst of sun, his arms around her shoulders. She leaned comfortably close. ‘And if Richard and Adam got hold of you they’d be delighted to practise karate on one of the landed gentry. I can see it all.’

‘I’ll bet you damned well can.’

The kiss lasted till they lost balance and nearly fell off the gate. The surest way to make him do something was tease him about it. He knew it, too, but didn’t want to resist his fate unnaturally — while wanting to seem as if meeting it of his own free will. ‘You want the date and the time?’ he grinned. ‘I’m not so stupid as to tell you that.’

‘Life gets more exciting every day,’ she said, on the last mile towards Wainfleet, rain pouring onto them when they were too happy to worry about it any more.

Chapter Seven

After dusk light was abundant, as if they lived next door to a power station and tapped it free. More than anything else, they must have light. Once put on, a bulb was left blazing even in the smallest and most useless hall or cupboard, one, two, three-hundred-watt incandescences in every room — a thousand watts to the kitchen, another thousand to Albert’s studio, and what Uncle John consumed on his spiritual searches through the ether nobody could even guess. There was a uniting family passion for light when the world around them was dark. If Albert opened a door by mistake, and in passing noticed there was no light within, he absent-mindedly flicked down the switch so that from then on the light would permanently blaze in a renewed self-created aura. The lit up house was visible from far and wide, planted firmly on a high ridge backing against the sky.

Only Enid remarked, but just once, on the superabundance of light, and the possible waste of it. They were walking home after an hour at the pub, and from a bend in the lane four uncurtained windows were flooding the approaches with a sickly phosphorescence. Albert’s studio lights were eating at the sky above. The caravans were illuminated. Side windows shone from either flank of the house. ‘Anybody would think you were afraid of burglars,’ she said.

‘I’ve always liked light, I don’t know why. If there were a power failure I’d die.’

‘I suppose you need something to light up the black pits of your soul,’ she said.

From the right window came the full-blast noise of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, and from the left the rhythms and phrases of Uncle John’s ecstatic morse sounds mixed sublimely with the music, killed by it as the wind veered. Opening the gate, they trod carefully over power-lines supplying the caravans. ‘It’s good to have light,’ he said. ‘I can beat the moon. Get down, Eric,’ he said to the welcoming dog, ‘you bloody fool, get back.’

‘I don’t see what good it is,’ she said, ‘it might let you see every inch of the house inside, but once you’re in you can’t see at all beyond the windows. If you want to see outside you’ve got to switch ’em off.’

They went into the kitchen that was so clean not even the smell of cleanliness remained. Enid put on the kettle for tea and a hot-water bottle. Handley sat at the table, forgetting to take his cap off, and looking as if about to set off for the night-shift. ‘Perhaps I’m religious,’ he quipped, ‘being afraid of the dark.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you haven’t grown up, and that’s a fact.’

‘There’s plenty of time for that when I’m dead. I’m in no hurry. Grown-up, mature people are ten-a-penny. They’re all over the place, like flies in summer, strong-faced vacuous venomous pipe-smokers and happy savers and careful drivers. Don’t talk to me about the lumpen living-dead. Put them in a room with a strong light and they’d start to confess. Me, I’d ask ’em to turn it up a bit. Even take off my dark glasses to show good faith. Still, we can put a forty-watt bulb in your room if you ever want to escape and get back to reality.’

‘You’ve made your point,’ she said. ‘Do you want milk or lemon in your tea?’

‘Both.’

‘Milk or lemon?’

‘Lemon, then.’

The house at next morning’s breakfast fell into silence when papers and magazines were brought in, and the quiet concentration at the altars of soft-brained reading-matter began. Mandy looked up before turning a page and noticed her mother staring with unmixed loathing and malevolence at her father. She walked quietly out of the room with her particular newspaper, wondering what cloudburst they were in for now, and before closing the door she reached back and turned the radio full blast to some church service, thus drowning the door slam and her rush upstairs.

Windows were steamed from breakfast cooking, masking a thin continuous drizzle outside. On such days cold rain wedged them into the house, or shunting quietly from one caravan to another. A rush to the Rambler or Land-Rover, and a quick acceleration down the mud-flooding lane was the farthest anyone would get on such a day, to the village shop where they weren’t allowed to dawdle, but were served before other people because of the enormous bills they ran up with such thoughtlessness.

Maria dipped her bread in coffee. Brought up in a staid Milan family, it was as if she had now been pitched into a brood of Sicilian peasants who had won on the lottery, or killed grandma and inherited her secret wealth. The employment agency was a villain who had misrepresented the job to her — ‘a modern house belonging to an elderly childless couple on the northern outskirts of London.’ Handley had met her at Heathrow late one night, and the northern outskirts proved to be five hours away, ending in a pandemonium scream of rage and fear when she finally stepped from the Rambler into six inches of pure Lincolnshire mud as a wilful dawn light was breaking over the hills.

Enid did not look malignantly at Albert but merely hard, and he was so busy in a dash to kill the religious heat of the radio’s breath that he didn’t notice it till sitting down again. She threw the magazine at him, one corner splaying across the open butter dish. ‘Read that.’

‘What? That bit about stately homes?’

‘Open it. You’ll see.’

He knew what it must be. ‘I’ll read it out loud. Listen, everybody. An article about me, and don’t double up till I’ve finished.’

‘Get on with it,’ she snapped.

The reproductions of his work were superb and should have been left unexplained, but accompanying them was an inflated view by Russell Jones on Handley at Work, and Handley at Home, Handley the half-mad inspired painter, the uneducated gypsy-like creature running amok with paint-brushes in a house without books, that was guarded by a pair of good old English bulldogs. After this drunken rubbish came a few sentences on how he actually worked, undeniably accurate, but then more personal detail reappeared, and this was obviously the cause of Enid’s dangerous set stare.

His female admirers were mentioned — to which Handley had presumably admitted — for, Jones wrote, when the photo of a pretty girl fell from his wallet Handley said with a smile that it happened to be of a girl with whom he was in love at the moment. A few general smears and critical sentences rounded off the article so beautifully printed and laid out.

‘What a laugh it is,’ said Richard. ‘They’ve got you, Dad. You might as well sit back and enjoy it.’

He tried to explain. Adam slid a mug of tea across, at which he sipped now and again. ‘It was a photo of Mandy. I saw his eyes pop, so thought I’d have a bit of fun. You know how irresistible it is. I don’t see how I can be blamed.’

Enid felt nothing but shame — not, she retorted, that she could ever be insulted by that dirty magazine, but because Handley had been so intent on having his senseless stupid fun that he hadn’t considered her feelings at all. They’d had this out before, often, but whenever journalists came crawling to the door, especially from posh papers, he just slobbered all over them like an adolescent instead of acting like a grown man, spewed out everything like a clown instead of behaving with dignity and sense. If you didn’t know how to handle them, why let them in at all? Slam the door in their faces and they’d think none the worse of you. And now your naïveté has led to this, a little weasel of the intellectual gutter smirking his foulness into a so-called reputable magazine.

‘That’s enough,’ Handley said, standing up again. ‘I know all about it now. I’ll get that jumped-up fretwork little bastard. I’ll make a wax figure and stick pins in it. I’ll burn his effigy on bonfire night. I’ll go down to London and pummel his putty head on every pavement in Knightsbridge.’

Adam and Richard cheered. Uncle John continued his silent reading of the newspaper, looking perhaps for some cryptogrammatical clue that would send him on another frantic and exhilarating search across the far-and-wide ether.

‘Wipe your mouth,’ Enid said, ‘there’s foam on it.’

‘I’ll write a letter to the Editor. I’ll sue them. I’ll go to the Press Council about it.’ She leaned towards him and shouted four words, as if they were the final message from a beleaguered and capitulating city before the defenders blew themselves up on the powder magazine: ‘WILL-YOU-NEVER-LEARN?’

Richard took her arm: ‘Mother, please, don’t get so upset.’

She snapped him away. ‘I’m supposed to be living in a house where your father is openly carrying on as if he had a harem.’

‘As long as it’s not true,’ Handley said desperately, wrathful and hurt by any attack on his wife’s dignity.

‘It would be better if it were. But now you want to make things worse by trying to do something about it. You’re deliberately ruining our world. Go on, though, smash it up. That’s what they want you to do. They’ll applaud you. The clown is performing again. A letter from you, and they’d gladly put it in, giving that interviewer the last crushing word of course.’

He felt emptied, blistered, pilloried. She was right — perhaps. A free spirit was abroad, and they were out to pull you down to the general level of nonentity that never thought to question anything. Woe betide any poor and stupid bastard who recognises himself as a free spirit, because once you did you weren’t free any more.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do nothing. You’re right, though it chokes me to say so. By driving me to say it, you’ve jumped onto their side.’

‘That’s your last word, is it?’

‘It is.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes, it is. I’ll bump into him at a party some time, and then we’ll see.’

Richard pinned her down at the wrist. Nevertheless the full black pot of scalding tea capsized and ran over the table.

Chapter Eight

Code and cipher manuals brought out of the army, marked CONFIDENTIAL and NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY and TOP SECRET were stacked by the long-range communications receiver. Though useless and out-of-date, continual study enabled him to break any code piercing his earphones. A few nights of concentration and he worked them into plain language. There were no secrets he could not tap, useless commonplaces for the most part, yet they might one day yield a precise solution to the whole pattern of his life that he could fall down before and worship.

The set had not been switched on. He smoked a cigarette. It seemed a dead part of the week for exploring ether. It was no use trying to make contact with God or any other king of the universe with such misery in the house, Enid and Albert battling vindictively out of natures generous and broad-living. Tear-marks still on his cheeks, it shocked him that when prosperity entered by the front door peace packed its bags and left by one of the windows. An undeclared war went on continually. If they would acknowledge it, peace could be made, but when he spoke in all gentleness they’d claim to be happy, kiss and cuddle in front of everyone to prove it. They couldn’t bear to have their problems brought to the surface and solved, he thought. Nobody knew why they fought, blamed success, money, or the invidious snooping of newspapermen, but these symptoms, he knew, only concealed the disease, like bushes on fire surrounding a plantation of foul fungus. Sometimes Albert and Enid did try to discuss their troubles, but the soul was involved, and so words from the human mouth were not enough to isolate and cure it. He sat long hours at his desk and wept for them because they were beyond his help. He was always hoping to save them, head in hands and tears falling as if attuned to some divine heart-rending music, waiting for it to end and the magic oracle to speak from some far-off spot of the universe. His world, their world, the whole world seemed to be in his hands, the strain of it heavy, fetching forth the tears, breaking his spirit time and time again, yet leaving him with renewed faith, a strengthened conviction that he would find a solution and be everybody’s saviour — by which method he might therefore be his own.

Handley came in and sat on the spare stool. ‘Any news of Frank Dawley?’

‘Not yet,’ John said.

‘Let me know when it gets interesting down there. I’ll have that new aerial fixed in next week, then perhaps we’ll have better luck.’

When Handley left, he switched on, out of despair and away from it, electricity easing its weasel way through the whole superheterodyne system of valves and condensers and impedences. The magic eye came alive, green growing deeper and more vivid as if lid, pupil and retina had been lifted off the middle Polyphemus eye of God’s forehead, and was there for him to stare into. He searched and listened, when noise swelled into the earphones.

Handley got into the Rambler, knocked over a dustbin on a quick three-point turn, slid down the muddly lane like a barge, and sank between a line of bare-branched elms. He laughed, not really upset by the events of the morning. The god of the family had roared and scorched his hair, but that was all. Rain stopped as he wheeled onto the paved camber through the misty village. A few mid-morning light-bulbs glowed in cottage windows, and a group of men were making their way to the pub from work. He turned right for Catham and climbed a steep hill as if to roar into the sky, but he levelled at the top and went at seventy along the narrow lane.

Steaming fields beyond the hedges were humped and rich after winter, smells of earth and moisture reaching him through open windows. It was good to get away from the pointless bloody savagery of that house, that fogbound ship without lifeboats, and liable any minute to sink or go up in flames. A band of faint smoke stood up straight from a farmhouse chimney, and when his eyes came back to the road a large black jack-rabbit slipped from hedge to hedge.

He stopped the car on Bluestone Ridge, tasting silence of the indeterminate season, spring emerging from a brittle rat-trap of winter. Air was clearing over Catham and the flattish patchwork of fields by the coast, and he imagined slugbreakers coming in on slow rebounds from the vast level sea, flaking phosphorous breaking on shrub and gravel, as he had seen it so many times when walking on empty bereft beaches without a shilling in his pocket, waiting till dusk before starting the twenty miles home if he didn’t get a lift, back to Enid and the kids with their reasonable wants and he unable to do much about them.

Buds were sharpening on hawthorn hedges, and when the wind stopped drifting it was almost warm. Below a wood on the opposite hillside a tractor crawled along the furrows, breaking silence, undisturbing under the clouds. Every so often he felt it was time to make a change in his life, yet he distrusted this as the promptings of chaos. To swing violently onto another course was certain to kill your work for a while, and at the moment it was going well. He was deep in the industry of it, and only questioned it after some heart-shaking quarrel at home that set him to wonder whether he was living in the best possible way for his work. Such quarrels fragmented his confidence, and that was always bad. Yet without such threats, he smiled in the sweet headclearing air, the very force behind his work would rot.

He joined the main road and dropped two hundred feet towards Catham where it was raining again, a steady drift of fine spray against slate roofs and cobbled streets. It was almost as quiet as the countryside when he drove under the railway-bridge towards newer houses sprawled on the far side of town. She was in, he saw, even before turning into the crescent. Smoke came from the chimneypots, and her Hillman Minx stood outside. He could smell the sea as he stood to lock his car, grains of wet sand crossing the flats from Toddle Fen. There’d been no thought of coming to see her, yet in fleeing from home he’d landed without thought on her doorstep.

He hurried up the gravel, a tall figure bending from wind hitting the back of his head. Curtains flicked at the window, and the fancy glass panelling of the door swung open before a hand came out of his pockets to knock.

‘Hello, Albert!’

He stepped by her into the hall: bookcase, holding Principles of Banking, Practical Knowledge for All, Complete Ornithology and a few deadbeat thrillers. Then an umbrella-stand, mirror and coat-rack. ‘I thought you’d be out, so I came to see you.’

Her laugh stayed. ‘As long as you aren’t disappointed.’

‘I can’t tell yet.’ He pulled her to him, tall and buxom, long brown hair falling away. ‘Breadwinner in?’

Her brown eyes opened wide. ‘He’s gone birdwatching. Heard of some wild geese mating near the Wash. Went out at four this morning — instead of going to the bank.’

‘I hope they take their time over it.’ Sitting by the coal fire in the living-room she asked how things were at home. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t betray my wife if everything weren’t perfect between us. That’s why I haven’t been to see you lately. Too many rows.’

She was thirty-eight, a schoolteacher, strictly career woman and to hell with her husband when it came to a sweet knock or two on the side. Handley had met her in the bank on a Saturday morning, dropped one of his cheque-books, and who could ever say whether it was accident or design? If a handkerchief’s the only thing a man’ll pick up that a woman drops, he thought, a cheque-book’s the only thing a woman will remind a man that he’s dropped, whether it’s her husband or no. He stood on the bank step admiring the beautiful seventeenth-century houses round about like a tourist from the Home Counties. She tapped his shoulder: ‘You seem to have dropped this.’

‘So I have,’ he smiled familiarly. ‘How would I have got through the weekend without it? I only found it this morning, and was getting used to affluence already.’ Large brown eyes looked back at him, lips opened in a smile to reveal teeth that went well with ear-rings and fur coat. Mrs Joan Quickie in his mind’s eye, until she gave her real name.

‘If you did find it,’ she said, though not too certain of his seriousness, ‘don’t you think it would be a good idea to give it back?’

The chill autumn went through to his glum face: ‘Would you like to come for a drink with me so that I can think about it?’ — offering her a cigarette while she made up her mind.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Then let’s talk standing here. I’m very much attracted to you. Handley’s my name. I always am to someone who wants me to go straight. As a matter of fact I took it from the pocket of an old suit this morning before sending it to the cleaners. Did you think I’d really knocked it off?’

‘Not altogether,’ she said.

‘Let’s walk along. We’re nearly at the Queen’s Head. Good fire in there. You were coming out of the manager’s office. Been to get an overdraft?’

‘The bank manager’s my husband,’ she laughed, walking a few steps.

‘I’ve never known a bank manager to have such a personable wife,’ he said.

‘You live and learn,’ she said as they went in for a drink.

‘Now and again,’ he responded, taking her arm.

Her name, after all, was Joan, but Mallinson, though she was quick enough when it came to the point, which it did when he thought to call.

‘I’m glad to see you, though I don’t suppose I should say so to someone like you. Where have you been this last month?’

He took off his jacket and stood by the shelf. ‘Painting. Finished a few things.’ The morning papers were thrown over the padded velvet sofa. ‘I saw that article,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose your wife felt too good about it.’

‘Let’s not talk about that. Is there any coffee?’

‘I’ll get some.’ Before she could move he held her to him. ‘You had a quarrel,’ she said, a teasing smile.

‘Not exactly. The pots didn’t fly.’ He took off her glasses and set them on the shelf.

‘But you did,’ she said, ‘here.’

‘Shut up, and let me love you. I know you’re a happily married woman, but I’m a happily married man, so it’s not sinful.’ The day lay quiet over the house and whole road, keeping the world silent for them. Only the antique clock wrung out its bomb ticks from the shelf above. His hands were up under the back of her sweater, flattening between shoulder-blades, while her mouth writhed around his face, opened over his moustache and lips. ‘Come and see me more often,’ she said. ‘You can always phone to check whether it’s all right.’

He pressed her full breasts against him. ‘Tell me that when I’m about to leave’ — clearing his throat. Her mouth stopped him talking, an ether mask going over his windpipe and set for the silence and blackout of love. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

He forgot his lust to the extent of noticing the bedroom furniture: the bad taste opulence of wardrobes and dressing-tables marked His and Hers (how can he suspect anything with those staring at him on coming to bed every night?) and orange eiderdown and low head-boarded bed, round piano-stools with powderpuff tops, and white sheep’s-wool mats that, when barefoot, made you look as though you had no feet. The odour of bedroom cold lingered through sudden gasfire heat.

Her sweater came up and over, face flushed as if at the sight of what Handley could see. It was no love match, for she was like the sea, and Handley the little boy with his finger in the polder-hole. He wanted to take it easy, slowly, woo her, but the rush was on her, and therefore him. It’s not that when we’re in bed I try to make her come, he’d sometimes reflected after it was finished, so much as me trying to hold myself back. It was good, sweet, the whole point of the world, but like that, in complete abandon, would last thirty seconds before his explosion while hers was still a low rumble in the distance, a few spots of sail or seagull wing on the far horizon of a becalmed and enchanted sea. While loving her as both deserved, hand under buttocks and one around neck, kisses fronting between them, he breathed the cool air hard, counted up to ten, felt his impossible drilltip about to explode into a million diamonds deep in her, so tried to think of all the villages in Lincolnshire beginning with the letter N, and when that ran out tried to think of the names of individual seas in the world, stations on the railway up from London, every tree he knew, all spring flowers. He occasionally distrusted such a millstone system, yet it held them back from a headlong rush till they reached the calms and shallows, out of which he became an uninhibited savage and she a fishwife who came with ease and speed, Eddystone in a storm-blind sea, she upswamping as if to put out that top light with a hiss of fire and water, and a groan of triumphant chaos.

Handley wondered when he could decently get up and look for a cigarette. He kissed her and risked it, his long trouserless legs stretched white over the orange bedside. She pulled him back. ‘How can you be in such a hurry when it was so good?’ But her voice was calm, and she smiled in the dim light. In spite of all hurry, she’d drawn the curtains and locked the door, and he wondered whether in the opposite house they weren’t curious as to who had died. If someone came over and politely asked he wouldn’t be able to tell them at the moment.

He gave her a cigarette, flicked the lighter near her face. ‘I lead a dull life,’ she said, ‘as a schoolteacher in a small Lincolnshire town.’

‘You were born here.’

‘What difference does that make?’ The better they found it the more discontented she felt afterwards. So where will it ever end? he wondered.

‘You work hard. Why complain?’

‘I am complaining, though.’

‘I suppose you’d like us to go away together, drop everything and fly south to a romantic life in London or Majorca? I’m not twenty any more. I don’t even love you.’

‘But I love you.’

‘You’re lucky then. I wish to God I did, a piece of forked lightning come down from heaven and blasted me in two, one part glued to stay and the other wanting to go with some woman to the far side of the moon and rot there in a vile state of love. Fine. Randy and dandy, swoony and loony, a leper between the sun and moon. I say no thanks to it, until it hits me, and then I’ll have no say in it at all. When I’m not in love I can paint great pictures as big as a wall, but if I was in love I’d paint bloody miniatures and choke on them, or do futile pieces of wire-sculpture that I’d fall down in and strangle to death.’

‘How about that coffee?’ he said, putting an arm round her when they got downstairs. ‘Perhaps I’m dead inside, a wood-yard of seasoned timber nobody wants.’

‘You’re not,’ she said. ‘But let’s go away for a few days, to London or the South coast. We can make good excuses, and it would be so wonderful.’

‘It might well be. But I don’t like life in small doses — a teaspoonful three times a day. I don’t imagine you do, either. It’s bad for the system. When it happens it must be all or nothing, but with me it hasn’t happened yet. Oh yes, you’re charming, you’re beautiful, you’re passionate, all the things I like, but there’s something missing, and neither of us can risk saying what it is. Maybe the pinch of shit in a vat of cream that makes the best yoghourt. Who knows?’

‘You do,’ she said.

‘I know I do.’ She went to make coffee. Of course he did. It had happened before, and if he thought it might never happen again he’d drive his car at a hundred into the nearest tree. She came back with a tray: milk, coffee, delicate cups, sugar in lumps, biscuits. ‘I hope your husband takes his time,’ he said, ‘wandering around those marshes in his salt-and-pepper drag.’

Low in the armchair, her legs showed up well. ‘He’ll be in for lunch.’

‘So you read that article?’ He’d held the question back, not wanting to spoil their time together.

She put her glasses on, her brown eyes half closed behind them. ‘I did.’

Handley drank the scalding coffee in one gulp. ‘He made it all up. Oh well, I’ll bump into him. Nobody’s going to smear me from the safety of their newspapers and not get it back between the eyes. I’ll rip that chuckle out of his blackheads.’

‘It was certainly a nasty piece,’ she said, though laughing. He looked into her eyes, his narrow forehead and chiselnose, thin determined mouth, dark dry hair spread short and thick around his gypsy-like skull. She couldn’t imagine where he came from, but hoped that in all his bitter sharpness he’d come straight to her and stay there. He was lost in the vast spaces of his own isolation, wandering between the heat and cold of a continental climate, unconnected to her or anyone in the world, and she wanted to take care of him and manage his life, though in this she would find her own destruction, wall against wall, because there was nothing in him that could ever be looked after. Filled with the latest in modern psychology, she thought he might have been too savagely weaned as a baby, that he mightn’t have been fed regularly, or that he had somehow survived in spite of no care at all, not even nurtured by a wolf, that neither breast nor bottle were ever put to him unless he screamed down the whole sky first, stars, sun and moon, until the dust of hunger went into him and cut him off, the dust and flour of desolation making crusts that fed him through some form of bleak survival, placing him now beyond anyone but the she-wolf of the tundra, ice and sun, quartz crystals and pine-trees. Out of this came his painting, from a man in the middle of great earth-spaces who could not move one foot in any direction.

‘There’s a bit of suicide in all of us,’ he said, ‘but only the smallest bit in me.’

‘I think you do have a hard time living with the world,’ she said. He had taken away her desire, and she was angry at herself for letting him, falling into his trap. She wanted to get him away from a wife who did not understand him, who was alien to such an artist. It may have been all right while he was unknown, but now it would strangle him. To live in the same way as an important and famous painter as you had while struggling to become one was disastrous. She could show him how to take his place in the world of great and talented men, and she thought herself quite capable of doing this.

‘As long as I can live with myself,’ he said, ‘which is all a painter needs.’

She poured more coffee. ‘You have to live with the world, as well as yourself.’

‘Which world, though?’

‘There’s only one world for you — the one that buys your paintings. What other can there be?’

‘That’s the question,’ he retorted. ‘An artist makes his own world, through himself. He doesn’t go into one ready-made for him. He only started painting to get out of that one. If I was only half a man and half a painter I might not think so, but I have a bigger opinion of myself than anybody can imagine, and even had when I was unknown and struggling. Some people would like me to accept their world because they see themselves the highest common denominators of it, and the fact that I don’t is a poke in the eye to them. My heart just won’t let me take up with this big world you’re talking about, as you and they would like me to do. It’s got nothing for me, and maybe I’ve got nothing for it, but at least I have plenty of ideas and work to do and needn’t concern myself with it.’

‘Why do you complain when they attack you?’

‘I don’t. They attacked my wife. And there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m just letting off steam. Still, I’d like to punch that drunkard’s nose. He wouldn’t be able to get away with such a thing in my ideal, anarchistic, self-regulating society without getting beaten up for it.’

They gave up talking for kissing. Intellectual discussion, he said, always made him randy. There seemed nothing she could do with him in any case, which made her passion quick to return, though this time one point behind his.

Chapter Nine

Ralph steered his Land-Rover into the depths of a wood, tyres crushing over wet sawdust and wood-chippings of one clearing, and bumping towards another. Mud deepened so much beyond that he decided not to risk it, sat inside studying his large-scale map with the engine still running, memorising details of the terrain between this point and the Handley house so that he would not have to open it outside and see its beautifully decorated paper buckling and warping in the rain, a thought that tightened his lips with revulsion. Beyond the western edge of the wood were three fields to cross, the last rising twenty feet and crowned by a spinney of oak-trees. From such height and cover he could observe the house in all its detail, especially the side giving access to Handley’s studio.

He put on his cap, fastened the pegs of his duffel-coat, and climbed out. Mud parted around his feet, but once off the track dead twigs and leaves made it seem more solid. Primroses had deepened in the rain, speckled a whole yellowing bank like flag-day badges on the lapels of a football crowd. Bluebells and arum lilies sagged and were flattened by water. Other flower heads littered, but he’d scorned to notice them after the age of sixteen. To do so was a stage of adolescence, to swoon and rapturise over wild flowers, and all the false crap of Lawrence and Powys and Williamson, the ‘I am a wild beast and proud of it but still very sensitive school because my father was a bastard to my mother’ or ‘the cream of my generation was killed in Flanders or Libya’ — as they sat in warm cottages or Hampstead flats. Thank God that sort of thing is dead, he thought, which meant to say he hoped it was and was convinced it ought to be but was by no means sure, England being England and all the things it was.

He kept well in to the hedge, clumps of soil that looked solid enough in the lee of it now collapsing muddily underfoot, till his boots were so heavily caked that it was impossible to move and he had to pull off the earth with his hands. After a few minutes the same coagulation had built up so high under his boots that he almost overbalanced and hoped for drier weather on the chosen night so that his retreat would be easy and quick.

From the edge of the spinney he looked across four hundred yards of field at Handley’s residence, heard the misty depressing snap of a canine voice shifting towards him as if it had already picked up his scent. Through binoculars he saw it sniffing between caravans in the yard. After dark it was chained up, which was useful, but he’d carry a pound of best steak on the night just in case. Yet it barked continually at nothing, as his previous nocturnal scoutings had shown, so when he was actually climbing up no one would wonder what was disturbing it.

The village clock struck eleven. He ate a bar of chocolate. The house would be crawling with parents, six children, two au pair girls, a mad uncle, and a man-eating bulldog; though if he kept his nerve and moved like a bat he could shin his way up the tree, leap to the windowsill, and take the final floor by a nearby drainpipe. Once in Handley’s studio he could lower a picture on a piece of cord, and collect it on the ground after his own descent. It was easy to spell it out like this, but he knew something was wrong, that more was needed than a ball of string and a full moon, a tight lip and a sure grip as he entered that rotten domain. Without a dry night, the painting would be ruined, and if that happened there’d be nothing left to live for, except Mandy, and she wasn’t enough, otherwise he wouldn’t be planning to steal it in the first place.

Sweet-papers and beer-cans were scattered from previous hours of observation. His theory for committing the perfect crime was that you must carry it out with all possible speed, which meant scrupulous attention to the actual details of break in, though beyond that sphere of action one could be as careless as one’s temperament demanded, in which case a few sweet-papers were neither here nor there. An amateur could get away with murder — as it were — whereas the adept was always liable to betray himself over some clue he’d been too careful to eradicate. A motiveless job was the safest. If even he did not know why he wanted to steal the best painting in Handley’s studio, how then were the police to find out his motive? And if they couldn’t deduce a motive for the so-called crime then there was no reason why he should ever be tracked down. If he got clear of the house, he was away for good. Whoever could rationalise the various stages of a crime had a fair chance of never being detected. So it sometimes worried him that he hadn’t yet concretely pinned down his reasons for wanting to acquire the picture. Those he had outlined to Mandy had been little more than a legpull. If he simply needed to get his hands on a great picture in order to indulge in a lifetime of private viewing then why didn’t he go to Amsterdam and steal Rembrandt’s Night Watch from the Rijksmuseum? He daydreamed through the mechanics of such an operation, which would involve getting it in a taxi to the docks or on a porter’s barrow, then sweating with apprehension as clumsy workers levered it onto the boat. All limbs shook when he saw it slipping in a nightmarish vision from their hands into the slimy bed-green water. I’d better roll it up while in the museum, even if it cracks slightly here and there. But he relinquished the idea, and immediately felt better. A latest Handley would suffice, an easier job because he didn’t live far away and had the use of a Land-Rover. Such a chance came rarely, and the more he dwelt on it the more did his fear of actually stealing it increase. Such marvellous bouts of fear continually sweeping through him must mean there was little chance of his resisting what he had first broached with Mandy as a joke, and that when he came to cross the field and climb that tree all fear would go, and leave him free, cool and swift as he soundlessly scaled that wall to a dangerous height before forcing the window.

It was hopeless, but he would do it, and succeed because he knew it was hopeless and because he had absolutely no control over whether he did it or not. He sat for hours in the tree-fork trying every optic combination of the binoculars to bring that house a foot closer across the field, the house which contained two things he wanted most in his life. He’d been there once with Mandy and, having those dull louche-brown eyes of a born reconnoitrer, remembered everything. Framed by field, sky, fences and trees, he saw again into the rooms and stairways as if the walls were glass, recollecting the positions of doors, locks and windows. He knew the direction of Uncle John’s radio room, and where everyone slept, each secret nook of the worn-out worm-eaten labyrinth.

He reached into his pocket and took a long drink of brandy, careless of precarious balance, hoping to stave off an ulcerous hunger. An unfurled hedgehog came from a grassy bank and walked at leisure across the path, eyes calm under spiny impregnable defences. Ralph considered it put on a fine front against those it had no wish to be bothered with, an anti-social bore in the hedgehog world, when no one in his right mind could wish to be otherwise in any sort of world.

A single block of enlarged vision beyond the twin funnels of his binoculars scanned the multitudinous bricks of the great wall, broken only by the high elm leading to the side window of Handley’s studio. His will centred on it as he examined all possible angles and limits of that huge flank, always drawn back to the window until it seemed that if he spread his arms and gave one great foot-thrust from the fork of the tree he would fly across the deceptively narrow expanse of field and land in a few seconds by the window he so much wanted to go in by.

Lowering the glasses, it was as impossibly far off as ever. It didn’t worry him. Subtlety and solitude ruled out any shocks from life, and he smiled at the pleasures of continual observation, that nevertheless gave no results and got him no closer to what in such a desperate key he wanted to get his hands on. It was a game, and the course was an unstoppable zombie-like action leading to a double and satisfying jackpot. He smoked a pipe to comfort himself under the drizzle and raindrops from higher branches, which might have been torture to anyone less fundamentally preoccupied.

When he next allowed his focus to drift up to Handley’s window he saw that it was slightly open, a pleasant surprise, because he felt as if it had suddenly become more human. It had. A head fixed there had a sort of machine where the eyes should have been, and with a shock he realised that they were more powerful binoculars than the infantry glasses of his father’s slung round his neck. By some invidious mechanism of auto-attraction both sets of glasses seemed unable to cease observing the other, and this situation was painful to Ralph, because he’d been at it longer and could only be the cause of this unexpected retaliation. He wanted to smile, wave, and nonchalantly slip his glasses back in their case, but they seemed glued to his eyes, his arms frozen at the joints, and he would have been set in that pose all day if Handley’s window had not slammed shut. He imagined he’d heard the noise of it, though he couldn’t remember having actually seen the face rip aside even though he’d been fixed on it to the end.

Half in and half out of an overcoat, Handley ran at great speed across the yard, disappeared for a moment between the caravans, then seemed to go head first through the window of his Rambler. A few seconds later it dropped out of sight like a submarine.

Embarrassing questions stung his face like ants, and all the answers pointed to the fact that he’d better get out of the wood. He threw the empty bottle into a bush, and the ten-foot jump folded him like a joiner’s ruler, but he straightened and looked for a hollow tree-bole in which to hide his binoculars, where they would stay dry and safe till he returned for them in a few days.

When they were stowed, and the tree noted by pointing the bottleneck towards it from the far side of the path, he walked leisurely back to his car. Studying the map in its dry cabin, it was obvious which way Handley would go to bar his exit to the metalled road. And yet, perhaps when he dashed out so wildly to his car just now he’d only gone down to the village for a drink, and not because he’d seen him perched in the tree. But his paranoid senses told him that such an assumption was the dangerous road to normality, and that evasive tactics were necessary. To avoid Handley’s obvious manoeuvre, his best plan was not to turn back but to continue through the wood, in spite of the quagmire, and take the bridle track running through Waller’s farm, which would eventually bring him to a road miles out of harm’s way, so that while Handley was waiting in useless fury at the southern exit he would be through Catham and half-way to Boston.

After appalling difficulties in the mud, tackled with such noble restraint that he actually enjoyed them, he drove along the last stretch of hedgebound track before the paved road. Turning a bend on the last hundred yards his way was completely blocked by the longside view of a black twenty-foot station-waggon. Handley himself stood by it, smoking a long thin cigar to calm his impatience, and on first seeing the Land-Rover — which he thought for a moment might be Waller’s who also had one and who wore a cap the same style as Ralph’s — he felt a pang of disappointment, which then turned to joy at having an intensely complex plan worked out in a few seconds triumphantly succeed.

Being so neatly trapped made Ralph reflect that maybe older people were more devious after all, and had developed greater reserves of cunning in the extra time that one still had to suffer through. This reflection showed on his face in a cold look of neutrality, an unexpected meeting with someone he tried not to know.

Handley walked up to his cab. ‘Where are your binoculars?’

‘What binoculars?’

‘Eyes. Glass eyes. Spy rings.’ He looked inside but they weren’t to be seen.

‘I haven’t any,’ said Ralph.

‘You’ve been spying on my house for the last two hours. My sons were watching you, and I saw you as well. Get down.’

The sudden closing of the trap in a ten-to-one chance had unnerved Ralph. He wanted to stay in the protection of his car, but Handley came back from his own with a long heavy monkey-wrench. ‘If you don’t get down, I’ll smash your headlights.’

He lifted the spanner, and only a quick strangled cry from Ralph stopped it splintering the glass.

‘All right,’ Handley said, when he stood before him on the path. ‘If you don’t stop chasing Mandy I’ll break every bone in your body. You’ve no right or reason to sit like a batman in that wood for days with your binoculars trained on us. I’d think you were casing the joint if I thought there was anything worth nicking. But next time I see you spying you’ll be for it. I’ve got enough witnesses to peg you down. It’s called loitering with intent to commit a felony, and don’t think that because I’m an artist and an anarchist I wouldn’t call the police and have you put away. I could have done it any time this morning, and they’d have been on to you while you were still stuck up that tree hoping for a sight of Mandy, and you’d have been in the loony-bin already. All that stopped me was the thought that it might upset her, and no man in his right senses would want to do that, which makes me wonder how straight in the head you are if you’re supposed to have any regard for her at all.’

Ralph heard him, and did not hear. The words registered, but did not hurt. Paranoia absorbed his tirade, and vanity took the bite out of them. Handley didn’t like him, because he was almost as invulnerable as he was himself, with that firm jaw, penetrating brown eyes and a pride that, because it didn’t fit the final uncertainty of them, was flawed in a grave way.

‘Is that all?’ he wanted to know.

‘Yes, but it’s only the end if you make sure I’ve seen the last of you.’

There was no apology, explanation or voice of regret. He climbed into his Land-Rover in silence, started the engine as Handley, face pounding with rage, backed his car into the road and drove off.

Chapter Ten

The pint of coffee went cold as he paced his studio, but he swigged it off straight as if it were beer. It’s no use thinking about the state of the world when you lift that pot and wield your paint-brush at the great white canvas bigger than you are tall. In all ways vast, it dazzles you with off-white pallor, limited by the clear borders of a giant oblong, ambitious to become a tabloid of colours that mean something to every eye but only all to mine, my third Polyphemus peeper with the black patch off, opening into me and burning like magic its green and red rays over that canvas. I paint, and the world pours into the neck of an egg-timer, distilled sand in the bag of myself drowning out through that fragile lit-up funnel onto the sandless desert of my canvas.

I forget all else and others when the feeling for this big one is building up and over me like pot-seed culled from the far side of the sun and peppered in front so that my nose unknowingly breathes it in. Empty for weeks and never waiting, but living in the acceptable torment of domestic war until now I’m waking, walking, set to paint in the land of the dead. For I’m dead when painting, a corpse because nobody in the land of the living can get at me, paint best when I’m that sort of corpse, temporarily dead, self-induced deathly dead so that colours can pour in and I’m set for a trance like throwing a switch during those days or weeks, and in that trance I’m flying.

A time of inner torment is slowly building up from part of my submerged everyday life so that it’s almost unnoticed. Then as if at some pre-set signal the anguish stops, and I die, begin to paint a picture. It lasts some days or maybe more, and I die because while painting I’m not aware of my existence, become a vampire, half dead, a foot in the grave and one in life, wondering whether I’ll live to finish it, whether the world will end before I can — a stake to be driven in my heart to finally finish both me and this painting off.

I’m so sure of myself I don’t even hurry when priming the canvas, hours, days and weeks are insects crushed under my boots as they vanish into the land of the living. Forked lightning of way back and a sharp distance forward don’t flash by in a shocking and temporary junction but stay locked in me, shake hands in my brain and declare peace in my heart as they travel through me hand-in-hand like two filaments meeting to light me up, mixing energy in my hands to paint by day and night. I don’t call it anything or even think about it, because to explain at such a time is to destroy, refute, negate, spit at the stars, and belch at the sun when it comes from behind the clouds.

The biggest colour began as green, fields, oases, valleys, seaweed and estuary, life-perpetuation, love in the environs of Venice and Voronezh, vile green effluvia falling from bomb-canisters lobbed on paddy-fields, lodged in ditches where green men were fighting or burning (a change of colour here towards yellow, orange, saffron robes of Buddhist monks firing modern and complex artillery with deadly precision from fortified pagodas) or flashpanning out over hamlets from which men have fled but women and children cannot. Green gas yellowing over green fields to destroy all seeds and shoots of life. A leg goes green, gangrene, dead-green and livid, jealousy of green by those who are dead for the living flowers of people unconscious in life but full of work and struggle. Iron and steel go green in that humid green forest, blistering enmouldering green, emerald of defeat for the iron merchants and industrial strong whose chewing-gum tastes of spite and who try to belt down the guerrilla men and women of the coming world. The green hand lopped by the sinewy arm of a riceman who cometh for the whole lot to eject them into the green and boiling sea, is carried off by a green snake into a part of the forest-world no one can penetrate. The green mould from far away is rotten, the diseased soul trying to transplant itself on their earth, but the homegrown home-green forest of the sovietcongo partisans hides them in ambush and makes them invincible. Green is my fear, green is my friend, and on they go fighting with no end possible except the ultimate friendships of green because green will be my peace in which to paint the colours of mine or somebody’s soul.

Grey is a sky, a bird, turning into a dive-bomber I shot at in the war, now an airliner, a vanguard whale of a hundred people lifted into that grey cloud and through into the far-off corner blue of dome-sky, a hundred souls divided between four great engines bursting with primal power, making one co-ordinated soul of ascent and hoped-for descent. Grey is machinery, machines in a factory, each with its stream of sud-bile sizzling over metal and shavings, grey flour caked in years of grease, I’ve worked in long enough to know, like and dislike of long ago, remember how those grey faces turn pink or pallid on stepping into open air, as if that putty-colour was only in the noise of grey machines. Christ, what haven’t I done in my two-score paltry years, walked or crawled through every colour I can think of or make up. Take red, a rust-red blood on newspaper deadened with age in a green copse, dark brown, as if somebody had been wounded and spilled himself on print before staggering for help. The red blood left had been shone on by warm sun, dried, left by the green summer bush till going orange like the saffron of those Buddhist monks and composition returns to life, out of suicide which was only a trick to frighten it back into the cosmic order striven for. Blood on that mantrap, for evil be to him who poaches, and a shock of steel teeth grabs him round the waist when he walks towards a patch of cowslips all yellow and bright. You had no business here, you know, but neither had yellow, yet in it goes, over red, green and grey, blue and bile, throw my semen on the canvas and paint a magic eye in it, mark of generations and regeneration, showing the third eye, the cosmological squirt and squint in bile and blue and grey and green, far-seeing and deep-sighted as you step inside and look at it from foot and window-distance among work and colour there already.

The grand design comes up and gets my throat, starting with skeleton fabric, working from each rim and edging in, fix the middle and moving out, creating this engine with universal gears, forests and fields, sealine and winking sun, moon and magic eye, flanking fanbelt cogwheeling the existence of all men and making me momentarily wonder whether I’ll ever paint another picture after this, but knowing that I will before forgetting such an insane question and setting to.

Red is the thing I can’t get away from, blood-red and blind red, dazzling crimson and falsehood carmine streaking down the back of a shorthorn cow in one of the top corners, and vermilion merging to rust-red down the back of a man riding it. Red and rust, all forms of shamblemark making horrorpitch in various set places easing from the blues and greens of oblivion. That’s fine maybe, but what I’m always shying off is brown, the baking earth-cracked paper brown, meaningless cloaca brown unless perhaps it means the final unfeeling melting back into underneath with which I never can be bothered. I spit on my hands and leave such a vein, this pit-seam in my lowest galleries, turn my headlamp up and go on to red again and rust if temptation gets my throat and won’t let go. A hundred subtleties make big crude things, but even they can be refined, splayed and coaxed back into their subtle coats, yet this time grander still and more exactly what I wanted and will deem worth while.

Out of the forest, down from the mountains, back towards animals and men, yellow of butterflies meeting in valleys and vineyards of abundance, coming like smoke from farmhouse chimneys, bridging the banks of the lazuli river and patching the gardens among ox-blood and olive, emerald and Baltic-blue. Tributary streams burn quicksilver down the hillsides, a waterfall at one point verging to yellowy brown as it filters through soil and rocks and all this is the big eye of a cow under the chiselwedge of a slaughterer, the enormous bovine peephole of the world of Albert Handley’s painting growing day by day under my fungus hand and furtive eye.

The other eye is green, already done and gone, dead and finished with, a jungle holding its own, backed up by the men who make their own guns (or steal them, which is more my line), wear tyre sandals, grit rice between their teeth and call it a meal. When in doubt say yes, do it, walk, but best is never to be in doubt, like them, unless from caution, when weigh it in your hands before throwing it like a hand-grenade at the feet of whoever is coming forward without seeing you. Fight shy of the stiltmen of Spital Hill, because a demon has breathed on them, a tatterfoal haunting the lower slopes, lurking for unwary travellers that pass at night, facing a shaggy foal that leaps right out and hugs them to death in mist and darkness. A grey-black tatterfoal lurked at the exit to his abundant valley behind primeval cowland Lincolnshire before ditches were dug, its eyes so wide they must be blind, but deepening nostrils beamed on unwary people gloated with meat and knowledge staggering safe out of cottages but never to return, having laughed at legends but never taken them as warning, the wandering wild tatterfoal still and silent as a milestone on a mud road until it got you in the night and put the lights of that valley out of your eyes forever in death by hugger-mugger, as you swirled for eternity through the colours of the rainbow and some that the rainbow had never thought of, a painful spectrum paying you out for the sins of your art and the indiscretions of an occasionally unpalatable palette.

Mount your painting like a horse and ride it away, or better, let it carry you, control the uncontrollable so that the uncontrolled can control you. The burden of the spirit is a sack of flour that you need to live on. But the sack gets filled as you tread those fields of yellow corn and are born again, borne on the wings of Pegasus, no longer the shaggy tatterfoal of myth and nightmare from the quaint tales of old and scatty Lincolnshire.

In one far corner the sun turned blue, raylight merging with the sea that was always humid, made to appear limitless, and phosphorescent. The oxy-acetylene stars joined this enlivening universe, beneath which there had to be sea, for otherwise there would be no life. And so had the sun, because both were the soul of blue, the twin lifedip of electricity. Sweat bled and blood perspired in a land beyond all tarns and towers, hummocks and nipple-hills. The barbed wire had bled him white, but his own land had been claimed out by the brute force and iron in the soul of a born survivor, and the bridge of jungle rope from himself to the canvas, slim and dangerously swaying yet somehow eternally secure, was used by the jungle men cast off from himself who crossed it with grace and depth, colours on their backs as they flattened themselves onto the empty desert plains of the canvas to escape the devastation — guns of self-criticism and turned into a humanised landscape at last. Then the devil in him churned it up, goodness of evil that soon came closer to what he’d intended in the beginning when the work of transference was once more complete.

To crawl from the forest and slime of your work, fly above it and levitate by the engines of imagination, sit in that plane-seat and fasten your safety-belt when the dark-haired blue-eyed beautiful steward-goddess looks at you with a brain-scorching gaze that furnishes the energy of all joints and muscles, makes them move with you unaware of it. The earth of your painting is left behind, and trying to forget the fear of the plane floor shaking beneath you unclip the safety-belt and look out of the window at the colours and contours and inhabitants of the work you are making. It doesn’t exactly tally to the map spread on your knee, but that is usual and as it should be. Out of a nearby cloud come the unapproachable hooves of nightmare, but the plane veers and you look instead at the close configuration of ash-grey mountaintops, eyes at the end of binoculars, cocktail-sticks searching out the individual valleys of desolate beauty balanced by their inhabitants of men and animals. Eyes wilt and tire, fold back into you, and soon you become frightened at being so far above the earth with nothing to stop you bouldering down if the energy of one engine baulked against its supergravitational task. He sweated against death, spinning into the colours of creation and never waking up, every minute expecting it in the hope that it wouldn’t come. The journey went on, as dangerous as autumn when it won’t become winter, till suddenly the engines fluttered and the beautiful dark-haired woman stood at the door, and the descent was smooth coming down, down, a quiet and gentle drift towards the canvas once more in human proportion and set on its easel before him.

He stayed in his studio at night, strip-lighting dazzling the air brighter than day and throwing over the canvas a metallised glaze that, if the actual colour, could only have been done by a man in the last stages of kidney disease. The stopgap night of Lincolnshire blackened outside, and when he switched off the lights, opened a window and looked out in his shirt-sleeves the silence was profound and complete, not even a dog barking, or a crow shaking its mangy spirit free. It was mild June, smell of foxglove and late cowslips, the demise of spring, and a cool drift of fresh air threw a few heavy drops of rain against the leaves of an alder-tree below.

Colours mixed, and before him were two canvases, one for day and one for night, boodland and deepgreen forest that never came out of the swamp of fecundity boiling on pot and sleeplessness; butterflies and bovine eyes with world on the wing and in retina, the viable inexplicable shapes and colours, themes and highlit pictures of the land and spirit where he had no maps to follow, all came out of his blue-cooled ice-drawn soul-filled heart. Drugs and pot, I’m high all the time on the powders of my own brain, the tadpole blood of my veins — except when I’m not and am low in the swamps of life. I’m free-wheeling over this great plateau, neither young nor old, clock-smashed, calendar-burned and picking my teeth with the compass-needle after chewing flintlock lilies and limestone daisies.

He came out of the valley of life and death to look at it, green bulbs and bridges, windows into the green where the decomposed has been resurrected and composed, limited by other shapes and colours, log-brown trees across the green where the valley is blocked, branching out till finally a way is open into green, at night and in the morning an ochred sky striking terror and respect into the unruly inhabitants of Handley’s world. Worship is possible, the mutterings and blank stare of animal-men and women who can’t go mad because they do not believe in the past or the future. They have struck an eternal expression that was never seen before, yet is recognised as a universal truth now that it is set down plainly for everybody to see. He pulled it back with him out of the unknown desert-emptinesses that he’d stumbled into and taken the courage to cross. All of last year’s notebooks, sketches, cartoons had possessed these faces, gradually emerging from the subliminal slime and sand of his awkward, pertinacious vision.

One goes on for months, moody, will-less, unable to paint anything big and solid, then suddenly the tomb of oblivion is opened, the great boulder falls away (a little pull perhaps is all that’s necessary) and in you go, cartwheeling and energetic, phrenetically possessed, haggard and unshaven as you catch its treasure rolling towards you.

Chapter Eleven

George Bassingfield’s publishers owned a massive house in Belgravia and used it, not too frequently, for parries and receptions. Tonight they gave one of those long and lavish midweek parties which, because everyone could afford to stay in bed next day, made it seem like Saturday night. So it was a good party, though Handley wasn’t yet drowned in the mood and booze of it, and in fact had no intention of becoming so. He had learned, since enmeshing himself in the so-called cultural life of London, that soberness was the best weapon when faced with an excess of drunken bonhomie. Unable to paint except in his own pure and right senses, he could not insult people unless in that mind either. If an insult wasn’t creative it served no purpose. He preferred that people would leave him alone, would not approach him with fatuous and catty remarks that, when sober, they would only make in their articles.

Wearing a dark-grey suit, he moved about the large room looking for Myra. He was hungry, and one whisky put him at last into a good mood. Lady Ritmeester was involved with a group of men whose faces he half knew, and she took his arm as he tried to get by. ‘Here’s Handley. Let’s ask him!’

‘What?’ he smiled. ‘Are you inviting me to become a social being?’

Her piled hair was phosphorescent, clamped into place by a blue and gilded fish. ‘Good Lord, no!’

‘You haven’t even kissed me, and we can never be friends until we’re over that little obstacle.’

‘Now look, Albert, Kenneth here says that those who take no interest in political matters fit very well into a declining society.’

‘I don’t take an interest myself,’ Kenneth said with a fat chuckle, ‘so I’m not prejudiced.’

Not you, thought Albert. ‘An interest in politics is only valuable in a declining society. Then you might get enough blood and brains out of it to make a revolution. If you see what I mean.’

Lady Ritmeester yelped joyously as if someone had stepped on her tail. ‘I thought painters weren’t very revolutionary people?’

‘Some are, some aren’t,’ Kenneth put in. ‘Don’t you think so, Raymond?’

‘More or less,’ said Raymond, who didn’t know what they were talking about.

‘I didn’t think you were,’ Lady Ritmeester said to Handley, as if a look from her beautiful eyes would bring him back onto the true path.

‘I wouldn’t stand you up against a wall, Lady Ritmeester, and that’s a fact.’

John looked at Malcolm, as if wondering whether they should throw this boor out before the American cultural attaché arrived.

‘I’m a revolutionary by faith,’ he said, ‘though perhaps not by conviction, living in England, if you know what I mean, which lacks the imagination or energy to be revolutionary.’

This seemed more of an insult than his last remark to Lady Ritmeester. Mark and John linked arms and walked off, while only Kenneth was goodnatured about it: ‘You mustn’t mention the word energy at a party.’

‘Energy’s a relative thing,’ Handley said, mocking himself with his own pomposity. ‘I once knew a man who worked double-shifts in a factory, sixteen hours every single day, for three months. Then he took a week off to go to the Isle of Wight. On the station platform he dropped a box of matches and when he bent down he never got up again. That particular movement had never been in his job. All the chaps remembered the way he died, and from then on he was the man who never even had the energy to pick up a box of matches.’

‘I’m so glad you’re telling us how spineless the workers are, Albert.’

‘Imagine bending down to pick up your lap-dog,’ Handley said to her, ‘and pegging out that way.’

‘This conversation’s too morbid for me,’ Lady Ritmeester said, turning to another group and hoping to cut the ground from everyone’s feet except her own.

He moved towards the wall, where huge blown-up pictures of George Bassingfield, Myra’s late and never-lamented husband looked down from beyond the grave at this strange company drinking homage to his book. Broad forehead, dark smouldering eyes, and bushy moustache gave him the slightly old-fashioned appearance of a works foreman who had volunteered for the First World War and perished on the Somme — probably because the enlargement had been blown up from a snapshot. It was a very English face, of a man who saw and felt everything but had been unable to express anything, except that such a malaise had driven him to write what was by all accounts a quite marvellous book. Copies were stacked on a card-table by the door, and Handley flipped through one while Myra was talking to her dead husband’s publisher. A year ago she’d met Frank Dawley at Handley’s first show. They’d decided to go away together, she leaving her husband whose photograph now looked down so mournfully and proud. On the evening she was to leave him for good George got in his high-powered car intending to run into them and kill both on their way to the bus-stop. By some split-second mishap in his desperate and foolhardy brain he had killed himself, injured Frank, and missed Myra altogether.

The publisher, Larry, was regretting George’s untimely death. ‘On the showing of this book he had a lot to give the world. He was a poet, really, who’d have knocked Rachel Carson right out of the picture on this line of writing.’

She looked far from easy, for the party called all the life-changing events of the last year before her. Yet self-control increased her confidence, and set up in her a beauty that Albert had never seen before. Like many men of unstable temperament he tended to fall in love only with unhappy women, but Myra’s misfortunes had inspired her beyond such a state, for which transition he had a respect and tenderness he tried never to let her see.

The publisher was a tall dark middle-aged man wearing sweat-shirt, jeans and sneakers, who tried to inveigle authors into his net by looking young, being with it and getting rich. When Myra introduced him to Handley he gave a radiantly shy smile and asked if they could publish his autobiography.

‘I haven’t written it yet,’ Handley said, still holding Myra’s hand, which she’d given him by way of greeting. ‘My life’s so dull nobody’d be interested. Artists lead dull lives, otherwise how would they feed their imagination?’

Larry gave a great laugh. ‘There, you see? He says something like that, and wants us to believe he’d write a dull book. We’d give five hundred pounds on signature.’

‘If you gave me that much money I’d never write the book,’ Handley said. ‘I’m a painter, not a thief. Everyone I meet tries to get me to give up painting. Maybe I’m good, after all.’ Larry asked if he had any more of those long thin cigars he was smoking, on the principle that if you want to charm someone get them to do you a favour. Albert opened his tin. ‘You offer me five hundred pounds one minute and beg a cigar off me the next. I don’t know what the publishing world is coming to. I suppose you’ll have a knighthood soon.’

‘I’ll tell you what, then,’ said Larry, ‘why don’t you do a series of book-jackets for us?’ Relishing the cigar, he mentioned an artist who’d also done some, whom he considered to be Handley’s superior because all the critics applauded him, but whom Handley thought was the lowest kind of paint-smearer — obscene, bloody and perverse. When he said so, Larry gave up and moved away, so that Handley received his first silent compliment of the evening.

He released Myra’s hand. ‘It’s over two months since I saw you. Thanks for getting them to send an invitation.’

‘They were delighted, as you saw.’

‘I didn’t much like leaving you alone in your cold house when I drove you back from the ship.’

‘Everything’s all right. The baby’s fine. He’s with my sister in Hampstead.’

‘Everything?’ he said. She smiled, and it delighted him to see that life had for once ennobled someone. To say there was a bond between them would be too accurate for it to be helpful.

‘There’s no news of Frank,’ she said. ‘It’s over five months.’

‘I suppose he’s learned how to fix a bomb in a car and connect the contacts to the ignition. That’s all they seem to be doing these days in Algeria. When I first saw you tonight I thought you’d had news, you looked so radiant.’

‘He must still be in the desert,’ she said, ‘if he’s anywhere at all.’ She didn’t like to talk about it, and had argued with herself for hours as to whether she should have Albert invited to the party. It was bad enough to think about it on waking for hours in the middle of the night, but to talk of it with a friend who also knew Frank brought back the desperate ache in her heart and stomach, and it was difficult not to be stricken with tears. ‘I can’t wait for him to come back. I’m really unable to dwell on that part of it.’

It was possible that Frank would not come back, he thought. His life wasn’t worth much, having thrown it into such a desert. There was less chance of him returning than even she thought in her most pessimistic moments, though when speculation joined them as now he was wrong, because her hopes were often in a worse plight than that.

‘As I said before,’ he smiled, so that not even she could disbelieve him, ‘we’ll soon see Frank. And who knows, the time might not be too far off.’ Death isn’t the end of all idealists, he thought. Some live to tell the tale. They must. In her wildest moments she had imagined him coming out of it, a sudden turning up at the house that blinded her with all the happiness she’d ever dreamed about. But the swing into oblivion was more bitter. Hope and optimism were a sin to be paid for by the further sin of despair. Both were the deadly enemies of suffering mankind. Handley was trying to comfort her, when the only accurate opinion on the matter was total silence, to push it out of her mind and trust that such policy would never lead to indifference.

‘I’d rather talk about other people,’ she said. The party was gathering force. Someone fell down near the door, a crash of glass as he went. A prominent critic gave a halfhearted cheer, as if it were a shadow-faced novelist from the north about to indulge in another blackout.

‘My trouble,’ he said, ‘is that my daughter Mandy’s got herself in love with a farmer’s son who’s a bit of a layabout. Not that I mind that. I’m one myself, but he’s a bit of a nut as well. I caught him last week spying out the house with binoculars, trying to see how Mandy lives, I suppose, when she’s in the sanctity of the home.’

‘He seems moonstruck,’ she smiled.

‘I suppose I must give his binoculars back, because when he saw I was on to him he hid them, and made his getaway. I found them, so when he came back for them later he’d be unlucky. The people I get landed with. Still, I did a painting this last week that I’d have given my right arm for a couple of years ago. I don’t know what anybody else’ll think, but it’s left me all of a sweat.’

‘I’d like to see it,’ she said.

‘Any time. I’m going back tomorrow. Come up with me.’

‘What about Mark?’

‘Bring him. My kids’ll be all over him. You’ll have a comfortable journey in the car. I’ll pick you up at your sister’s at twelve.’

She was tempted. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ve got to see Teddy Greensleaves for an hour. After that I’ll call on you.’

She decided: ‘All right.’

‘I’m the happiest man in the world,’ he said.

‘Wasn’t that the village Frank lived in?’

‘That’s it. I’ll tell you all about it. He won’t mind.’ She was even clinging to that. ‘It’s marvellous, Lincolnshire. You’ll like it.’

She didn’t hear. ‘I’ve finished with this party. Can we go to supper?’ He collected her coat, sensed the inner fight to assuage her suffering. ‘We’ll go to the Blue Dumpling. It’s quiet there, plenty of space.’

‘Anywhere,’ she said. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘In a garage. We’ll get a taxi.’ She clung to his arm as they went through the hall. Someone greeted her, wanted to talk, but they walked on.

Outside, in the half-light, Albert recognised Russell Jones. From a happy and forgiving mood at the beginning of the party, Myra’s torment had now suffused acid into his blood and brought back his morose bitterness. He disengaged his arm — ‘See you in ten minutes’ — walked over and gripped Jones’s wrist.

‘Remember me?’

Jones greeted him with the friendliness of a journalist who imagines that no artist could have any success if it weren’t for them. ‘Albert! How are you? I thought you might be here, and decided to look out for you.’

‘I’ll bet you fucking well did,’ Handley said, half dragging him around the corner where it was dark. He slammed him against a wall. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

‘What the devil do you mean? Let go. Let go, for God’s sake.’ Handley saw that Jones was absolutely unaware how spiteful and slanderous his article had been. If you felt innocent you were innocent — and so such people escaped death by guilty conscience or hanging. Handley’s faith in the ultimate goodness of human nature was shaken once more. He’d never expected otherwise, and he relaxed his grip, though still enraged at the idea of vainly hoping someone like Jones could realise that by any standards he’d done wrong. ‘That article you wrote about me, remember it?’

‘Of course. It was a jolly good one.’

His fierce moustached face jutted out as if he were about to fight a battle with his head. ‘You said I had mistresses, was carrying on with God knows how many women, when you knew I was happily married with a wife and seven kids. Many people saw the lousy injustice of it. My lawyer said it was actionable, but I didn’t want to make you more notorious than you are by skinning you of every penny you drunken high-living word-spinning scumpot.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be taken in that way at all,’ Jones said, unabashed as he straightened his jacket.

‘My bloody lawyer didn’t think so,’ Handley raised his fist. ‘You bastards print what you like, foul up people’s lives and don’t even know it, never mind expect to pay for it when the time comes.’

Jones tried to push by, but the way was blocked. ‘Tell me honestly, what did you have against me that you’d write something like that? I’m just a bit curious about such an aberration of human nature.’

‘I wrote the truth. That’s what people want.’

‘I wish I had your editor here as well.’ So did Jones. ‘He allowed it to be printed, though I suppose he’d just smile and say it was nothing but the truth as well?’

‘If it wasn’t the truth,’ Jones said, ‘who was the woman you were with just now? Isn’t she one of your mistresses?’

Handley was afraid to strike. There were some people you couldn’t hit, unless you wanted all the pride sucked out of your marrow. And once you began, you didn’t stop till they were half-dead. He raised his screwed up fist and drew it back, saw the first sign of life in Jones’s eyes when they lit up with panic. Then he smashed his fist with all the human force he could muster — right into the wall behind Jones’s head. The pain nearly split him in two, but it was the only way to take the boiling power out of his body and yet save him from the humiliation of smashing Russell Jones. He held bruised knuckles to his pale, frightened face. ‘Your mug should have been like this,’ — lifted his good hand: ‘And I can still do it. But the respect I’ve got for myself is bigger than the loathing I’ve got for you. I might as well try to knock that wall down as think I can bash some humanity into such a drunken pimp.’

He left him shaken against the wall. As long as you knew you couldn’t win you could not humiliate yourself, and so they could not hurt you. You kept your faith, while reserving a special category for these innocents of the devil who did not even know when they were doing harm.

Chapter Twelve

While Eric Bloodaxe gorged on four pounds of shin-of-beef in the black of the morning, Ralph climbed up the wall with a chisel between his teeth and broke into Handley’s studio. Tall, well-built, lantern-jawed Ralph, pale in bone and fibre, jaundiced skin from his jaunt around the world, and brown eyes that had taken in too much of it, skimmed up by the drainpipe as if he were also hollow inside and weighing no more than a paper figure of himself. Green sweat of the night shone on him, and hot breath came from his slightly open, eager mouth. Action speaks louder than thought, he said as, wearing his old thornproofs and a cap, he pulled flatly up the wall that, though his enemy, he prayed would be his friend for the next few minutes. He’d also prayed while making the dog his friend during the break-in. Make friends with your enemies, and then defeat them, he smiled, as he slipped his sharp chisel under the latch. What else is an honest man to do whose only aim in life is to marry Handley’s daughter?

He unclipped the huge painting, spread it on the floor and rolled it up like a sheet of old lino. Stale cigar-smoke lay heavy, and the thought of kindling the whole studio into a fire made his heart race, but because Mandy was sleeping below, any conflagration he might cause, no matter how wild and orange when seen from the edge of the wood where he’d stand and watch it, might take her sweet face and nubile body away from him forever. And since he was only indulging in this felony as a roundabout way of winning her, where would be the sense in that? Such a scene moistened his eyes, and muttering that he must get on, get on, get on and act, he took a length of string from his pocket and tied it round the painting.

It had somehow been too easy, and therefore disappointing. His torch flashed around the room. Should he write a message in red paint across the wall, take out all the light-bulbs, slash the stocks of canvas, mix Handley’s drink in their bottles along the shelf? A multiplicity of ideas staggered and paralysed him, and deciding that ideas only killed action he opened the door and moved silently downstairs.

Light blinded him, and he switched off his torch so as to save the battery. All doors were closed, no snores coming from the sound sleepers. Silence was heavy in the whole house, the deadest hour of the twenty-four when nobody was awake unless ill or mad. Halfway along the corridor, he wondered if he should try the door of Mandy’s room. A goodnight in her bed would be pleasant while robbing the house she lived in. She’d let him out by the front door, so that he’d lose the peril of a sheer descent down the wall with his half-hundredweight of rolled-up masterpiece.

But he didn’t know which door led to her room. He wanted to retreat. The glittering light was bad for his confidence, the white metal of the cruel strip-lighting that seemed to mark every few feet of the long ceiling above. He looked for a fusebox, and when it dawned on him that there weren’t any, or in this illuminated madhouse were too cunningly hidden, he asked himself what he was doing in such a long and mercilessly exposed corridor, when he’d merely meant to break in Handley’s studio and flee with a painting. There was no answer except a heavy and inexplicable sense of having failed in his expedition and of now wanting to give in after so much success to the delicious experience of sitting on the carpet and weeping until someone found him and phoned the police, or threw him to the bulldog at the end of its meat-feast. Light wilted him, took his will away, so that life wasn’t worth living, and he hadn’t the strength to walk from its powerful pernicious illumination. This house of light was a prison. Did no one ever switch them off? Were they so rich or sane as not to mind? Mandy had told him about every occupant of the house, but they had become total strangers again due to this passion for light, a startling factor that she hadn’t thought to mention. If Handley suddenly appeared he would grovel and ask forgiveness — but he was two hundred miles away.

Such light seemed the greatest enemy of mankind. A door-latch clicked, and a baldheaded man of middle height, dressed in pyjamas and holding a writing-pad came up the corridor towards him as if knowing he was there, and merely wanting him to sign a paper before going back to a peaceful sleep. At the sight of another face the malignant and brilliant light lost its influence, and Ralph smiled, recognising the man as Handley’s brother and trying to draw back snatches of his psychotic history related at odd times by Mandy.

Ralph greeted him with his perfect nocturnal confidence. ‘I have a message for you.’

John’s eyes brightened at this figure he’d not seen before on his ramblings to and from the lavatory. The effort to hide his surprise and write the message robbed him of speech. ‘I’m on the same job as you,’ Ralph said. ‘The world is nowhere to be seen at night. That’s your message. Send it to all stations.’ He turned and walked quietly up the stairs.

He took a luggage-strap from his pocket and looped it around the painting, a roll so huge and long that when fastened to his back it looked like a stake to which he had tied himself before some ritual auto-execution. He climbed out of the window and descended safely. Mud jacked-up the sides of his boots as he ran across the field with his burden, wanting to be home before the loathsome day arrived, the dazzling light that turned his flesh so pale that his mother continually complained of how unwell he seemed, though when he came in late at night she would find nothing strange in his complexion. Wind beat against the outer limits of the wood, but deep within it never reached, and the darkness was warm as he walked the narrow path stooping under the nagging weight of his shoulder-roll.

He bumped along the wood track, then south along narrow lanes, flicking headlights at each bend or turn. Luminous lines of day would soon appear across the flat-lands and sea to his left, a flank attack pouring light over him alone, swamping him in molten sunless steel. The main road was wide open, and he drove hard down with a dawn sweat on his cheeks, the smell of wet cloud and grass out of the open window, nothing to see except the inexorable swing of the world spurring him on.

The cocks greeted him like the false dawn, for it was still more dark than light when he drove directly into the open barn, leapt down and pulled his bundle from the back. It fell in the mud, but he hauled it quickly across to the house. The night’s work had been planned, worked out for months and fearfully sweated over and, enraptured by the idea of possible success, he had often lain on his bed half-conscious, blinds pulled down, unable to stop the shivering of his arms and legs. A tree grew by his parents’ house also, and on several dark nights he’d taken a log of wood up and out again to show his limbs what they would have to do on the real job.

As he lifted the painting up the staircase his mother called him. She slept between one and four o’clock during the night, and for as long as he could remember she had not been to bed with his father. Refusing to take pills she read herself to sleep, and returned to her book on waking three hours later. He left his roll outside and went in, stepping warily across the room as if expecting to be shot as a Peeping Tom who had inexplicably changed at last to a man of action.

‘I knew you were out,’ she said. His room was above, so that she could hear every sound. ‘Where have you been?’ She lay in a double bed, a sidelight shining on an open book, face half in shadow. He kissed her lightly, as was customary and expected, bending over awkwardly so that he knocked her spectacles to the floor. She was forty-five, and not a handsome woman, but anaemic and strong, and who would often remind him, after affectionate feelings that she could not always resist, that she had nearly lost her life in bringing him into the world. But her affection pulled the shutters down over his consciousness, dazed and shattered him. He needed it so much that he couldn’t stand it, and only afterwards when his consciousness returned would he put his arm around her shyly — a time when her love for him had vanished and she felt repulsion at his touch because he reminded her of his father whom she hated.

He picked up her spectacles. ‘I spent the evening in Boston with friends. We had something to drink and forgot the time. I had a marvellous drive back.’

‘I thought you might have been with that Handley girl.’

‘I didn’t know you knew about her.’

‘I saw you together once, but you didn’t see me. Miss Bigwell told me a few things. She seems a common vicious little slut.’

Such terrible slander made it difficult for him to defend Mandy. ‘She’s all right,’ he said. Also it was the first time she’d mentioned any of his friends by name, and though angry, he was at the same time pleased to think she took some interest in him after all.

She shifted her weight across the bed. ‘So you have been with her tonight?’ Their few arguments had always taken place at night, now he came to think of it. ‘There are some good families around here, good Lincolnshire families, with nice young women among them, and I think it’s about time you settled yourself in a career so that you could see your way to marrying one of them.’

‘I don’t see why you should be so concerned about me,’ he said.

‘I want you to do some of the right things in your life before you ruin it,’ she rapped, ‘instead of ruining it before you do the right things.’ He remembered the story of a younger brother of her father’s, who went to Oxford and gassed himself at twenty-one. When his trunk came home they found it filled with gold sovereigns and pornographic books. He was immortalised eternally as a misguided young devil who should never have been born, but who nevertheless had broken his mother’s heart when he died. ‘According to Annie Bigwell that Handley girl is a disgrace, the things she’s been up to in her short lifetime, She wants horsewhipping. And her parents must be the lowest form of rubbish to let her carry on so.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. But it was useless to argue. Mandy had told him, indeed, that Annie Bigmouth Bigwell was a ferocious old dike who had once tried to lure her into bed, and whom she had bitten for her trouble — which explained the stories she would spread about her. There was no point in repeating this to his mother, for what she couldn’t understand simply did not exist.

‘It takes a long time to convince a fool,’ she said. ‘You’ll ruin yourself on her. This county’s full of nice people. I thought you liked Jennifer Snow? Don’t you?’

He knew there was no arguing with your own mother. You could only agree, and ignore her. ‘There are lots of creatures, all horse and no woman. I don’t want them.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d stay away from Mandy Handley if I were you. Her family’s rotten. A pack of beggars.’

‘Her father’s a talented artist.’

‘Oh yes, I saw the papers. He should be quietly put into some asylum, doing such fraudulent pictures. I don’t suppose he’s ever painted a horse in his life. Not capable, I should think. If I had a painting of his in my house I’d burn it. It’s a disgrace that he should deceive people so.’

‘They’re very good by any standards,’ he said, leaning uncomfortably, wanting to leave, but not able to while she was in this distraught attacking state.

‘Anyway, it’s very distressing to receive a letter from a man like that. It came a few days ago, but I’ve not known whether or not to tell you about it.’

He pressed his hands onto her dressing-table to stop himself trembling or falling. ‘What did he want?’

She was agitated, and he could only feel sorry for anyone receiving a letter from a man who was, after all, the lowest form of brute in spite of his talent. ‘He wrote about you. Said you were to stop pestering his daughter, which I suppose means this Mandy creature.’

He smiled at hearing her name from his mother’s lips, even in disapproval, for it brought the softening aura of her beauty right against him. ‘It does.’

‘I don’t know why you smile. It was an ugly letter. He also called you a thief. Said you might try to break in and steal his paintings. He must be absolutely insane.’

‘I must go now, mother. I’m awfully tired.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose you had better go and get some sleep,’ — the word ‘sleep’ contemptuously spoken, as if it were opium or marijuana that she’d never thought a child of hers would need. As he closed the door and went with a heavier step than usual to his room, she picked up her book hoping, in spite of everything set against it, that he might after all be changing his habits, and that his daily life would begin instead of end with the dawn.

He wasn’t conscious of total victory until closed in his room, with drawn curtains and light switched on. The largest and best room of the house, it was an act of spoliation after his return from Cambridge in order to make him feel more welcome. While on his world tour it stayed empty to lure him back, and this constant pampering by his parents (who when he was them didn’t seem to care whether he lived or died) drove him into a frantic melancholy. But at the moment he appreciated their kindness because, after moving table and chairs to the window enough space was left to flatten Handley’s canvas on the floor. He stood a chair-leg at each corner, holding it down like an unrolled map of some complex world with one layer of earth peeled off. It frightened him, the enormity of what he’d done. He flicked off the light and ran up a blind. His window looked eastwards over flat and saturated fields. The dawn was like pale lead, a long red knife-edged streak slit across it from end to end as if someone from a land of blood beyond were trying to prise the sky in two. The day would pour in like a bursting dam, and when you gave in to the dawn you were marked like a wounded animal, to be hunted down by the sundogs of the day.

Shirt, trousers, underwear went onto the floor. One had to sleep, and what was wrong with the day? Hide by the day in sleep, and those who slept at night could never get you. He had nothing against Handley when he was safe in his own room, and he stood naked, morosely conning the reasons why he had acquired the picture considering that in many ways he liked him. He was buoyant and bruto and had a crude sort of wit. There was no denying that. But at the same time he’d been a hard-bitten old-fashioned patriarchal beast when he’d wanted to marry Mandy, had forced her into the nastiness of an abortion, which accounted for her wild behaviour so that county baggages like old Miss Bigwell broadcast her exaggerated sins all over the place. He took his old Scout knife from a drawer.

The cowman sloshed across the yard in his waders, and the main gate squeaked as if it trapped a demon when pulled open. A tractor coughed out the cockcrow and cattle moans. Ralph stepped around the painting, slowly between the anchoring chairs, a widdershins at its disordered colourful soul, his naked faint shadow shimmering the desk and divan bed, the long thorn of knife hovering around the heart of Handley’s work. If I tear it, will it scream? Shall I cut it to shreds and drop it bit by bit down the lavatory during the next three months, or bury it under the barn floor at midnight with a storm-lamp glimmering on the rafters? Shall I wedge it in a trunk and send it by rail to a non-existent inhabitant of Thurso or Wick? I could burn it, but I don’t go by cremation — or by creation as Mrs Axeby, a farm labourer’s wife, put it: ‘When one of my relations died who had got on in Boston he asked to be created, not buried ordinary like the rest of us. What sort of a finish-off is that?’ No, I certainly shan’t ‘create’ it.

He pulled pyjamas from under the pillow and got into them, slipped on his dressing-gown. What made life rich was the urges you did not give in to. He spent many a fertile hour brooding on them — brewing up even finer urges that he did give in to. The knife went back in its case. He sat at his desk and picked up a pen. ‘If you give me your daughter’s hand in marriage I will send it back safe and sound. You know what I mean. But if you squeak about it to anyone beyond your family, I will cut it into little strips, and then into little squares, and mix it with my father’s linseed cake that he feeds his cattle with. I am not a man to be trifled with, as you may so far have thought. If you do not hurry I shall be only too glad to give in to my atavistic rage — after which I will fly to the ends of the earth. Yet somehow I don’t think that will be necessary, if we are sensible enough to open diplomatic negotiations immediately.’

He slept through the day as if it were night, intending to post the letter when he woke in the darkening balm of evening.

Chapter Thirteen

When he picked up the menu to order she noticed his damaged hand. He’d been pale and silent in the taxi, as if gritting his teeth for some reason, ‘Did you fight with that man?’

‘You know who it was?’

‘I thought he was a friend you were being particularly jovial with.’

‘It was Russell Jones. I’ve no secrets from you.’

She understood. ‘I meant to ask you whether it caused much of an upset. It was a pretty bad thing to write.’

‘There wasn’t too much trouble. But I still had to have a word with him.’

‘You need something over it,’ she said. ‘It might fester.’

‘If it does it’ll teach me not to shoot my mouth off. Enid’s right. It would have festered, though, if I had hit him.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I hit the wall. Come on, what would you like to start with? I fancy a bit of salmon, myself. The sight of a swine like that makes me gluttonous. I was only hungry up to then. Gluttony’s a good feeling now and again: it means you haven’t lost your will to live. You can’t let me down by ordering a grapefruit. Have some fish, then a steak, and we’ll wash it down with champagne. I’ll do the ordering, and you just sit quiet. You aren’t living alone while you’re out having a meal with me!’

She spread her napkin. ‘I’m used to it though, and it makes me afraid. I’m getting into a routine of coping with solitude, and I actually like it. It’s the first time in my life I’ve lived alone, and when you invite me to Lincolnshire I become cautious of leaving. It’s like a disease that you don’t want to lose because it gives you a sense of self-importance, and that’s a vital thing for me right now. In your own house nobody else’s spirit competes for the psychic space you need to feed on. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll be able to live with anyone again. Don’t be afraid,’ she smiled, ‘It hasn’t altered my love for Frank. It deepens it in a strange sort of way.’

The Scotch salmon lay like thin paper over their plates. ‘We’ll drink to Frank Dawley,’ he said.

‘I wonder whether he’s drinking champagne right now?’

‘Don’t wonder,’ he said. ‘To Frank.’

She held her glass up.

Instead of squeezing his lemon on the fish he pressed it over his knuckles and rubbed them, replacing the dull ache by sharp antiseptic stabs. ‘There’s plenty of time to be alone when you’re in the grave,’ he said. ‘You can’t live alone while you’re alive. I suppose the baby will change that even if Frank doesn’t come back for a while.’

‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘You’re more aware of yourself. Maybe after a while your personality would dissolve into a sort of low-grade insanity, but for a time you feel in greater control of yourself than you ever have. I think an individual can only exist if she’s living alone, though you’re not really allowed to live alone, unless you make a great effort. As long as you still feel lonely. Those who live alone, and don’t, have a dangerous kink in them, I suspect. When I stop feeling lonely, I’ll stop living alone.’

‘It’s twisty,’ he said, ‘but still not convincing.’

‘Here’s to the big painting you told me about.’

He lifted his glass and winked: ‘Cheers’.

‘Will you be able to drive back with your hand in that state?’

‘And paint with it,’ he said. ‘I’m always damaging my hands so as to be aware I’ve got them. It shows I love my work, at least. I feel in good form tonight, which stopped me punching Russell Jones the way he deserved.’

She cut into her steak. ‘I suppose all journalists are pretty bad. That’s just the way they are.’

‘Some have honour,’ he said. ‘Some don’t. It’s been my luck to meet one who didn’t.’

‘You know,’ she said after a while, ‘I still feel rather guilty about Frank. I was so shattered when George died, even though I didn’t love him in the least, so that I didn’t give Frank what love I really had for him. If I had, he might not have gone into Algeria.’

His laugh shocked her. ‘I’d never deny anybody’s guilt, or argue against it. It’s a precious thing that stops you going mad, the most precious thing some people have, just as real hatred stops you getting cancer. Still, I don’t think you knew Frank. Hundreds of years of suppressed idealism suddenly came up in him. He’s like a savage who finds an engine and takes it to pieces, sees exactly how it works all on his own, nobody telling him. He’s got the key to the universe. Or his universe, at any rate. Nobody could have stopped Frank. If he’d been an artist I’d say you should have argued him out of it, because no artist has the right to go and fight for the oppressed peoples, etc., unless he’s seen the enemy rape his wife and burn his house, in which case he’s got the same rights as any other man. But Frank was an ordinary man, must have felt before he went like I did years ago when I sensed some talent for painting. Nobody could have made me give it up, just as it would have been impossible for you or anybody else to make Frank forget his ideas. Love can’t do everything, sweetheart! It’s a good job it can’t, or the world would become desperate and degenerate in a day.’

She listened, handicapped when it came to replying. My love, my love, a pendulum swinging between bitterness and terror, telling the time till he comes back, moving across fields of primroses, wood-anemones, lesser celandines, violets, red campions, moths and seasons pulling me down. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, ‘to how long some people have had to wait. You hear about it and shake your head and say how sad, but never realise it’s like this.’

He called for another bottle of champagne, became troubled and soddened, mellow and complex, the longer they stayed at the table. The intensity reminded him of endless nights sat with John when first back from Singapore. He forgot Myra in telling her about him. As a shellshock case John had always thought he would die at the end of the day. He’d go to bed, after suitable goodbyes to everyone, which made them raw and edgy, with a copy of the Bible, a tin of corned beef, a candle, writing-paper and envelopes. When they fixed him up with his radio equipment, he recovered a flimsy sort of sanity. They lured the corned beef away from him one night and made a stew next day.

‘You must meet him when you come and see us.’

‘They’re waiting to close,’ she said. ‘Are you trying to drown my sorrows in talk or drink?’ She held his hand, and he wanted to draw it away, unable to bear the warmth and softness of it, knowing that her reasons for putting it there were not the same as his reasons for wanting to take it away.

‘Both,’ he said, looking directly at her. She met his gaze and smiled, drew her hand away as if she’d not known his was there when she put it in that direction. He called the waiter. ‘I’ll get a taxi and take you up to your sister’s.’

‘Are you sure you want to bother? It’s out of your way.’

‘I’ll enjoy the ride,’ he said.

Wearing the same formal suit as on the previous night he left the hotel early and walked across Berkeley Square, streets deserted but for the occasional delivery van. The underground garage was like an air-raid shelter. An attendant pointed to his washed and fuelled car, its nose set towards the exit. It disgusted him the way they lavished so many ‘sirs’. Such treatment turned him sour — which seemed to increase their deference. He once told one attendant not to call him sir, but from then on he ceased to be helpful, and actually disliked him for reminding him of his unconscious servility. If you have money people try to take away your self-respect, believing that no one has a right to both.

After a long breakfast with Teddy Greensleaves, haggling over conditions for a big autumn show, he filtered his car up Baker Street and steered north towards Hampstead. Traffic not too bad. Smaller fry shifted aside for his Mini-crusher. It was cloudy here, but maybe blue above patchwork fields and closed-in woods. He’d enjoy a sunny ride to the freshets of Wash and Humber with Myra, only hoping no great disaster had smitten his hearth and home. A myriad of little ones no doubt had locusted there to chew up his peace of mind for a few days, but that was to be expected. He was in the mood for work, to sing and fly over the off-white canvas world, and once settling Myra into the family bosom he would set to and hope for the whistling best. The black gloom of last night was blown away by the brisk wind of morning. He pulled to the kerb near Hampstead station to look up Myra’s street in the A to Z.

Someone tapped the window, drawing his eyes from complicated street angles. ‘You can’t park here.’

Handley waved the ill-printed map, and without winding down the window shaped out an obscene word before drifting calmly off. One might momentarily think that, with his cap, he was driving the car for his employer, yet his sharp face of authority and ownership was immediately confounding. Prejudices went to pieces against the barbs of Handley’s classlessness, which disconcerted most of the English he bumped into. He was so remotely old-fashioned, and at the same time so in advance of most other people that he had few friends. Living without the topo-marks of convention gave a strength and a naivety hard to penetrate, an unbreakable wall of social will that was necessary for life in England.

Myra was waiting in the hall, Mark in his carrycot on the kitchen table. ‘Would you like some coffee before we go?’

‘We can have a jug on the road,’ he said, picking up her case.

He did a calm unhurried ton on the outside lane of the M1. They seemed reluctant to talk after the openness of last night’s supper, almost as if we’d been to bed together, he thought, and to say as much to himself was showing the black side of his nature swelling up from the sewer depths with vindictive suddenness. In his civilised mind he’d never think such words, but sometimes they caught him unawares, and weren’t to be ignored, for their springs often hid some secret truth he’d otherwise never have known among the shallow verbiage of normal daydreams.

Mrs Harrod was tidying the bedrooms, but left her vacuum-cleaner to look at the baby, the downcurved mouth of her round face reshaped by a smile: ‘He’ll soon be sitting up,’ she said, holding a finger to him, a wonder in her voice as if such a development was the first time it had miraculously happened. Mark looked at her, full of love it seemed to Albert, who sat in the kitchen while Myra made coffee.

Leaving Mark with Mrs Harrod, she showed him the house, feeling pleased that it belonged to her. He was the first person to see it since George died, and it was only now, after a promenade through the living-room where George’s books still lined the walls, then to his study bordered by shelves and files of maps, around the garden whose lawns and plots had merged under the unifying heaps of the months, and up into the untouched uninhabited flat over the garage in which George’s mother had died, that she realised the value of what was totally hers. ‘It may be wrong to own property, but I’m glad to have this house. I can shut myself off, and feel free, and it’s a good place to wait in.’

They stood on the lawn, by the garage door. ‘There’s nothing wrong in owning your own place,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t exploit people by letting rooms and living off the rent. I’d always wanted to stop shelling out to a landlord, and the first thing I did on getting money was to buy the house we live in.’

When Mrs Harrod left, she insisted on making lunch, though he needed little prompting to accept. ‘I’m not expected till midnight,’ he said, ‘and if you read the map we’ll get across the country in no time.’

There was steak in the refrigerator, lettuce and potatoes in a box under the sink, and Albert went to the car for the bottle of champagne he’d been taking to Enid. He could give her the headscarf intended for Mandy, and give Mandy the necklace meant for Freda, and give Freda the Charlie Parker LP bought for the au pair girls, and the au pair girls would have to wait for their loot till he made another trip south or into Boston. Though creased by such manifold responsibilities he blessed them now as he set champagne on the table and saw the pleasure on Myra’s face at such delicate foresight. ‘I didn’t know when we’d need it,’ he said, ‘but I saw us parked in some desolate lay-by while you fed the baby. Since we’re drinking it here I can sling the paper cups, or use them some time to make sketches on if I’m stuck for paper!’

She went upstairs to feed Mark and change her clothes, came down wearing a white cotton blouse and dark skirt. While they were eating, the champagne dry enough to make a pleasurable meal, the air darkened and large pieces of rain flaked against the window. He frowned at it: ‘I was hoping for a sunny ride.’

‘Perhaps it’s only local,’ she said, ‘or it won’t last long.’

‘We’ll have a smoke after coffee, then go. I’ll switch on the heater and play soft music. If I could I’d draw the curtains and drive blind — radar-driving, switch on and go to sleep, with a bell to wake me after a hundred and umpteen miles. There was an article in that magazine Jerry-car. A good bit of steak, this.’

‘We’ve done nothing but eat since we met yesterday.’

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘we’ll go long walks over the wolds with Enid. We often set out for the day, sometimes walking as far as the coast and taking a taxi back.’

The pitch and splash of rain increased, till he thought the outside world might be an aquarium, and fish would appear at the window, opening their hobgobble mouths, and waiting for the glass to break. Myra switched on the lights. There would be a storm whose force would press her to stay in the house, unable to leave unless the sky was blue and empty. Wet leaves brushed and slopped in the wind in a way they hadn’t when George was here because the trees were regularly pruned. Her neglect had changed the character of the house. Surrounding noises differed as well as interior settings of furniture. It took on her own temperament. Never in love with George, it needed a long time to forget his thick presence. Life was long and grief short, but in this case it didn’t seem so because, having met Frank just before George died, a low-grade grief for the six-year habit of George was enduring at the same time as her wait for Frank that might turn out to be a greater and more terrifying grief if he never came back. To end George’s nagging unnecessary memory maybe she should sell the house and go elsewhere, though now when the blue light bumped at the French windows she couldn’t bear to leave it, remembering so much while there that she was torn between wanting to lock all doors and windows on herself, and going out of it never to comeback.

Thunder bullied and brawled, and she thought how comfortable a place it was in a storm, with such proportions and furnishing that she hoped the never-ending furore would become part of normal life, because its spreading calmness subjected all memories to the nullifying elements of the present. To become so purely herself, memory gone, future unimportant, was a rare and luxurious rest.

Handley noticed her mood, and didn’t speak. The controlled calm of last night that struck glamour in her face had gone, replaced by excitement which he put down to the heavy atmosphere that the storm was trying to break up. He disliked such storms, felt they cut open parts of himself that he wanted to keep hidden. They tormented him, and he walked around the room while Myra went to the kitchen for coffee. He wished they hadn’t stopped for lunch, had gone speeding along roads where thunder and lightning would hardly have been noticed, and not turned out to be so clearly responsible for something that he would only blame himself for.

When she set the coffeepot on the table he put his arms around her. She gave herself with such an open passion that he knew there could be no love in it for him, which vivid truth caused a black sadness that drove his embraces wild. She received it gladly, as telling herself also that this affair of the moment had no love that could ever prove embarrassing to them both.

Her body had been waiting for someone to hold and meet her kisses, and the lessening psychic force generated by the storm had enabled it to take place. He wanted to break away, but his body caught him in a trap that he’d made and hoped for since meeting her from the ship three months ago. Now that she was forcing him to it he could only accept it under some vague conditions of love that he’d never ceased to believe in. But he kissed her closed eyes softly, a hand on her face, tenderly because her gentle need had turned its privilege on him.

‘Come up to the bedroom,’ she said. He stood alone for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette, boyishly agitated. It was impossible. I’m falling in love with her, but she’s in love with somebody else, and always will be. He wasn’t capable of walking away. Too abrupt and brutal. Even his lust had vanished. God knows, I shouldn’t have brought in that champagne that’s launching a bloody strange ship. He heard the toilet go upstairs, water in the cistern drowning the noise of outside rain. He poured more coffee, slewed it down half-cold. Here am I, full of admiration for my friend Dawley, and while he in the prime of his guts gets on with his life’s slaughtering work I’m making love to Myra. Maybe the kickback will show me what my ideals are really worth, though to know might strip off my illusions, and nobody deserves a fate like that. A door clicked and, shedding his boots he walked up. Lying in bed, she turned to him. The room was dark, blue air beyond, rain locked out but trying to wear through the glass, its noise drumming away all words inside him.

They were startled later by a loud knock at the door. She smiled at his alarm: ‘It’s the grocery order. He’ll leave it in the garage.’

He sat up nevertheless. ‘We’d better go. It’s four, and there are a few miles to flatten before Lincolnshire.’

The sheets covered her. ‘Get dressed, then I’ll come down and heat some more coffee.’ He put on his underwear, kept his back to her, though knew she wasn’t looking at him. She wanted to get dressed with him out of the room, and this touch of modesty drove him to make love again, which she accepted with the same quick passion as before.

She came into the living-room as if nothing had happened, almost as if she hadn’t seen him for a few days. He didn’t even have the heart to grin, knowing exactly where he stood and hoping that some time he would be able to go on from there, yet not wanting to because she loved a person whom he respected too much to betray. They drank hot coffee in silence, until he said: ‘Shall we start?’ In Lincolnshire for a few days, he would at least be able to see her. ‘The storm’s letting up now.’

‘Do you think we can?’

‘Why not?’ He lit a cigar. ‘We can stick to our arrangement.’

‘We’d better not. I want to be alone. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course I do. But do as you want.’ At least it meant so much that she couldn’t now go with him. He moved to kiss her at the door, and she offered him her cheek, which he touched with his hand, and walked to his car parked on the road.

On the long drive he reproached himself for what he didn’t do and say that might have persuaded her to come with him. Even at forty, one made the same mistakes as a youth in love for the first time. One could go through it a hundred times and learn nothing. Only a nonentity could believe otherwise. But as hours stretched into darkness and headlights flooded the road he was glad it had ended like this, when there’d been no real wish for it to begin. Full of regret and turmoil till he saw her again, he nevertheless couldn’t really doubt that this was the end, whether he wanted it to be or not. The soft flush of engine-noise carried him to his studio and the large new picture, which took his mind back to colours and shapes and images flooding him for another piece of work that would keep him civilised and abstracted, as far as the family would be concerned, for the next fortnight.

He drew up to a pub beyond Sleaford for a pint of mild and a meat pie, his first stop, as if fleeing before Frank Dawley’s wrath, who’d magically known of his afternoon’s work though clambed and parched in some wild region of Algeria. He wished Frank had not vanished with such idealistic thoroughness, wanted to see him now, take him to the house and show the new big picture which he knew would interest him. I’ll dedicate it to him, dead or alive. Both he and Myra will like it, because its range and breadth fit him perfectly. The meat pie was so foul it deranged his hunger. He called the woman because he needed more cigars, having to bellow it into her ear to swamp a television speaker racketing above his head. Some radio maniac had fixed them through the pub, even installed a speaker in the lavatory.

‘I can hear you,’ she said. ‘You needn’t shout.’

‘Do you always have it on that loud, you vile old Lincolnshire hot-slot?’

‘What?’

‘I said have you got a match?’

‘Are you blind? They’re over there. I don’t know.’ She came down a ladder, all varicose veins and stocking-tops, a lovable Lincolnshire lollipop a long way past it, he surmised, but still full of salt. She shoved two boxes at him: ‘Do you want one for seven-and-six, or one at one-and-four?’

He passed two florins. ‘Give me four bob’s worth of the small ones. I’m rich, but not a millionaire.’

‘I don’t want to know about your private life. I’ve got enough trouble of my own. Some people are the end, the absolute bloody rhubarb-end. They buy a pint of beer and expect five years psycho-analysis thrown in. I’m fed up with it, I am. Feeding chickens all day and drudging around here at opening times.’ She passed him four cigars. He slid one back, trying to wring at least one bit of honesty out of the day. ‘Four bob’s worth is only three.’

She pondered this. ‘So it is. Are you trying to be funny?’ He lit a cigar and finished his drink, shouting ‘Good night, missis!’ — so loud that even the man reading the news seemed to lift an eyebrow as he walked out.

Lincolnshire was the county of silence and peace, especially when it was dark, of sandy coast and rolling wolds, and lowlands so waterlogged that he had secret plans in his drawer for a prefabricated fifty-foot fibreglass skull-hulled ark that could be put together in half an hour if the sky looked threatening. Which was why he’d chosen high land to live on. From three miles every light blazed, not a window thriftily blocked, no door closed or spotlight doused, a flared-up nomad camp in a land where all other houses had only twenty-watt bulbs, barely sufficient to stop those who lived in them bumping into the wainscot or treading on a mouse. He liked to see a living house with every eye wide open, lost sight of it entering the village and turning the narrow lane, less bumpy under the wheels at his speed, bushes on either side scratching the windows. Now that Myra wasn’t with him his entrance to the yard seemed so tame that he felt unfocused and irritable, his mind scratching over all that could have gone wrong during the two days he’d been away.

‘Did you have a good time?’ Enid said, arms around him for a kiss.

Mandy looked up from her Pan novel by the stove: ‘I wish you two wouldn’t slop so much.’ Handley gave Enid her headscarf and threw the necklace to Mandy, which was neatly caught. He noticed that she actually smiled. ‘I went to that party last night,’ he said, ‘and saw Teddy this morning. Made me have lunch with him, and I didn’t get away till four. What a life those ponces lead. The same routine day in and day out. Anyway, I’ll have a good show this autumn. We’ll be rolling in it, especially after that recent stuff.’

‘You can buy me a car, then,’ Mandy said.

‘That’s what you think, you fat little chuff. There’ll be no more cars here except mine, and I sometimes think that that’s one too many. Good God, I’m not in the house five minutes before I’m pestered for a car. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if I went back to begging letters.’

Enid put down a bowl of chicken soup and he ate hungrily. ‘There’s no going back to that,’ she said. ‘We can’t go back in this house.’

‘You say it like a threat.’

‘Don’t start,’ Mandy said. ‘I can’t stand it.’

He finished his meal in silence, and went up to take refuge in his studio, the place he needed to be, where he could sit and smoke in peace surrounded by his work. He knocked on John’s door and went in. He was in bed, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, hands by his side as if someone had given the order to go to sleep. The radio was switched off, his desk in shadow, earphones on a hook and gun, presumably, in the drawer.

Albert set a tin by the bed. ‘I got your favourite cigarettes in town.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Albert.’

‘Feeling well?’

John’s eyes relaxed and he turned with a smile: ‘All right, but I’m afraid there was some bad news today from Algeria. Reception was good from French army stations, and I broke their codes. Some of it was even in plain language they were in such a hurry to get it out. The trees were on fire. They’re burning down the trees.’

Handley’s pale face leaned over. ‘What else?’

‘Not much. I expect you’re thinking of your friend, but he may not be in this particular part. It’s bad news, though.’

‘Are you sure?’

He turned to the wall, ready for sleep. ‘I set up the new aerial system, and it came clear as a bell. I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Geurrillas are attacking a base in the South. It’s not finished yet by any means. There are many trees on fire.’

‘I know,’ said Handley. ‘I bloody well know. Thank you, John. Sleep well.’

He took the stairs slowly, opened his studio door and lit it up. But he didn’t bloody well know. Nobody knew. In the middle of a long great storm the ability to know was replaced by the necessity to act. It was chaos that decided what you could and would do, so that all you had to do was prepare for it, unless you were an artist, in which case every form of storm was already in you — everything.

He looked for confirmation of this to his recent painting, slid his eyes from wall to wall, over door and ceiling, under the bed. There were sketches, the skin of a dead fox, a map of Lincolnshire falling into strips, windows of blackness through which nothing could be seen. He leaned on the table, and looked again in a calm and clockwise fashion. Sickness muffled his sight after the vast day he’d gone through, senses losing the edges of their definition. Yet even under his tiredness he knew that everything was in place, stones, paints, pencils, horseshoes, cigars, knives.

Bursting open the door he launched himself downstairs, entered the living-room with an insane look on his face, though not too far gone to notice the way everyone was frightened at what they saw.

‘The painting,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

Enid poured him some black coffee. ‘What painting?’

‘Somebody took it out of my studio.’

‘Nobody’s been in there. It stayed locked all the time you were away. Only you had the key.’

He sat down. ‘It’s gone. No, it can’t be. I suppose it’s in the house, but who’d move it from my room?’

Back upstairs he saw that the window had been forced. ‘We’ll phone the police,’ Enid said. ‘They’ll soon get it back.’

‘No, I can’t do that. Let me think. I want to be alone.’

‘Who’d rob an artist of his work?’ she wondered.

‘Who would?’ he said. His hands trembled, he felt drained of all energy, as if he knew with horrifying accuracy and truth what it was like at last to be an old man. The heart was ripped from his autumn show, and if he didn’t get it back he’d never be able to repeat what he had done. Someone had poleaxed him, and he felt himself withering at the thought that there was a person in the world who wanted to do such a thing, a malevolence that for gain or spite would rip the living heart from you because they were unable to wait till you were dead. But since I’m an artist whatever bad happens must be turned into something good if I’m to survive and win. I’ll find who took it, and break whatever backbone is responsible before I’ll let anyone set fire to the tree I’ve grown into.