A Tree on Fire

Chapter Thirty-two

A cold orange fireball of dawn split up the semi-detached houses on the southern outskirts of Paris. Frosty clotheslines and lights in the unseeing windows, and the smooth whining eardrum-click of the train swaying along under its own track-lights, and the short no-man’s-land permanently laid between the dead-still established lives and the moving caravan of those who never stopped, registered on John’s glazed eyes and ears. A woman walked the corridor with an enormous borzoi hound, and smiled at him, the obvious oblivious Englishman, bald, well-shaved, and already dressed. It is dangerous to lean out of the win-down. He stood firm, even to a sudden sway, underfoot vibrations well controlled. Dawn was the time he felt so guilty at being on earth that he could face anything from breakfast to self-annihilation. The terrors of light and night met each other at daybreak — in dreams if you were still in bed. Either way you could not escape. Standing in a train you smiled at the reflection of your own face as the train swept under a bridge, a face going so quickly by that there was no time to take a gun and blast the glass that kept you from its actual yellowing flesh. The revolutionary struggle is also a spiritual struggle. He and Frank were in agreement, and both were right. Energy, Imagination and Intelligence were to replace the autocratic triumvirate of Inertia, Stagnation and Reaction. The coup d’état called for a parachute-drop, fireball surgery, and he wondered whether the creeping takeover of guerrilla warfare were enough. He needed like everyone to set the forces of liberation against his own heart and soul, the consciousness that controlled him, ambush the laws he lived by, mine and blow up all preconceptions, erode them away if they were too strong, retreat only to prepare further stratagems against these ancient enemies of a new and resurgent spirit, make all one’s life a protracted war against the flesh-built habits and indulgences of yourself. It is a method of ceasing to live under water, of eventually reaching higher consciousness where energy, intelligence and imagination can be used for the benefit of oneself and other people. Not yet fifty, he felt too old to go on living. It wasn’t a matter of age so much as being worn out in a struggle he should never have started and undertaken, maintained through false hope and stale pride and the softening idealism of the congenitally demented. The animal talent and human bravado had been given to his brother Albert — the imagination, energy and intelligence which he used for his work. The instinct to survive was good and necessary, but never enough, without the paraphernalia of self-assurance pushing you upstream at every lock and difficult weir. Lack of self-assurance was the basis of all illness that gave you the golden trinity of consumption, syphilis and cancer — or whatever three reigning death-monarchs happened to be on hand for those who denied themselves the life-force in any particular era. Lacking the spirit of force and fire you called on death to do its worst, and if you didn’t lack enough assurance for death to take up the call with avidity, it might be necessary to do the job yourself if you could stand the pain and poison of a razor’s-edge life after years and years of it.

He boarded a bus outside the station and rode across Paris, the wide cobbled avenues and boulevards coming to life, layered by exhaust petrol from Peugeot and Renault, Ondine and Simca. He read metal names on passing bonnets, smelt the drift of coffee and smoky frost under the wide open blue sky of cold northern Paris.

At the Gare du Nord he checked in his luggage and walked over the boulevard. His greying border of hair needed clipping, and he wanted the civilised barber’s perfume to float around him in place of petrol and dust. Dawley had gone to London by plane, indulged in the luxury of a cheap night-flight, for he wanted to see Myra and his son, and visit his wife and children in Nottingham. On landing at Gibraltar he had craved pork, but the first big chop had laid him up sick for three days in the Queen’s Hotel, cursing all the vile trichinoid pigs of Spain while retching into the chamberpot. John had said goodbye to him at the airport, then taken the ferry across to Algeciras. The idea of travelling by air was the one genuine fear left in his life, and though he valued it for that reason, he could not bring himself to give in and overcome it. He had, in any case, a strong premonition that whatever plane he flew in would crash, fall like an ironfisted boulder out of the sky as soon as everyone inside had been long enough there to feel safe and on their way. So he would not travel by that method with Dawley, his one last desire in the world being to see him safe back to England, delivered into the place where he would do the most damage and complete the work of revenge that John had dreamed of for twenty years, that his own soul had sweated and rotted over, and that his own body had never in any way been able to carry out. But Dawley was a man who had not suffered in the way John had. Those who can’t forget anything cannot learn anything and are unable to improve their lives or carry out their deepest wishes. But Dawley had been hard enough to undergo a baptism of fire in a real revolutionary war. His course was set, his strength gauged, his determination focused. He had no label, but his purpose was such that the safety of such a precious cargo could not be jeopardised. Even superstition must be used to guard him to his final destination.

The train going across northern France, towards a country he loved but never wanted to see again, seemed like a new home to him, a place he would like to settle down in on condition that it never stopped. He talked to a young man who had been teaching English in Madrid. A pale face, threadbare jacket and long hair made it seem a parsimonious living he had made. He was not glad to be going back to England, he said, hated the food, expense of wine and cigarettes, dourness and compliance of the people, weather, dirt, hard life and dogshit, ravelled up in his own tautologies and complaints. ‘Not that I dislike England,’ he went on. ‘I’m sure I’ll enjoy it as long as I can feel like a tourist. When that feeling stops I’ll have to swim the Channel, get back to sanity and the mainland.’

John’s eyes blazed, and the man grew silent, reaching for a bottle of Fundador brandy from one of his kitbags. He offered a drink, but John refused. Words went through John’s mind, insistent bangings at the back of his head so that he did not know whether or not he was breaking the sound-barrier and the person opposite was able to hear what he was saying. The country he was born in had, in the final throes of imperial rottenness, sent him to Malaya to fight for the retention of greedy mercantile piracy that he had no heart for and could never believe in. He had seen men starved and tortured to death — human, pathetic, mercy-pleading men — for wicked principles, a policy of grab-all and keep-all by the free use of men’s backs and blood. Since there was such base evil on all sides what was the use of surviving? And yet, around him during his imprisonment had been those who looked on with patience and cunning, waiting to assume the noble privilege of their own government and destiny. The soft-brained words blazed through him, circling at great speed the nearer he got to the coast. He let the window down for a fullblast smell of the sea, saw the open landscape billowing towards clifftops and a moving rash of white birds mute above the inexorable tread of the train.

He went to the door and opened it, held it from swinging out by the strength of his wiry suit-covered arm. As for England, he thought of its ageless and gentle countryside, mellow people with smooth and matey lives, and the ingrown spite of a failed and debased empire. Casual days without intelligence or equality, an octopus sinking back in clouds of inkiness and sloth, fobbed off by dreams and nostalgia for its vanishing manacled days. After all, one could see it at last, the English were an island people who had once been thrown into temporary greatness by a hundred-year bout of energy. They were insular plain-speakers once more who muddled through by clan and hierarchy, the eternal mean categorisation of a rattled élite, and a dead bourgeoisie, and the people who knew their place because they had taken into their systems the poison of centuries from this so-called élite, and into their bodies the serf-bones of degradation — except for the chosen few who were buried under the common mass. They stared such poison in the face as they flopped before telly or radio every evening after eight hours of labour which they at least enjoyed more though they would never admit it. They were all in all a good people, safe on their island, pottering around in rundown factories and protected farms. Frank had faith and patience, and did not believe any of this, and for him who had these qualities it need not be true with such devastating force that struck at John. Many people in the country had twentieth-century brains and energy but were held under by the eternal sub-strata of hierarchical soil-souled England. They didn’t even know how to pull themselves up by their own bootlaces, because they were made of silk and gold-tipped and might snap if yanked too hard. The soul of indoctrinated England was sprayed at the people every night like deadly insecticide, spew created by intellectual semi-demi-masterminds in the form of advertisements and songs of yesteryear, and those were the days, and these you have loved, and scrapbook for this and that, and as you were, and this is how you are as others see us, and O’Grady says, as you were then exactly and nothing more, and you’ll never be any different because that is how God made this right-little-tight-little offshore island and you should be proud of its past greatnesses.

He managed to close the door, sweat shining on his face. The train drew into the town and towards docks. Tonight he would be talking to Albert, Enid, Richard, Adam, Ralph, Mandy, Myra and perhaps even Frank if he was back already from Nottingham. He had neither sent nor received news since leaving two months ago, so was anxious to get the late train for Lincolnshire and bask in their congratulations for a great job safely done.

Yet when the ship crept out of Calais he considered staying in London for a few days. The delights of the wolds, and of his family, seemed as empty and unacceptable as the rest of the world. He did not even want to see Frank. There was no hurry, unless you lacked confidence and did not believe in what you were hurrying towards. He stood on the top deck of the ship, case at his feet, alone. A strong cold wind that rocked it among the waves buffeted him and played weird tunes in the aerial wires. Morse sang from the radio-operator’s cabin telling of gale-warnings and rising seas, the incoming weather of the final world in a language he understood. The last word was weather, elemental weather fearful to ships ploughing the white-green waves, a ship that bucked and furrowed, engines burning underneath it all.

The gullshit cliffs loomed out of drizzle and mist, sending a pain of hopeless love through him. England, he thought, if only you could begin again from nakedness, become a green infant born from the soil and salt sea, put a coat of all colours on your back of all colours, and start in intelligence and gentleness, but without me, without me.

He opened his suitcase on a wooden bench and hastily searched through it. Under the clothes lay stacks of loose papers in foolscap sheets, years of radio-logs compiled in his Lincolnshire room out of loneliness, a tenacious persistence in taking down radio-messages from a thousand sources in the hope of finding and hearing and recording for himself and everyone a message from some non-existent God or god-like fountain beyond all the layers of the stars that might contain the precious message of life that would fill him with energy, imagination and intelligence.

As the hundreds of sheets of paper covered with his neat writing scattered like birds and snowflakes and dead leaves over the arms of the harbour that the ship now entered John’s hand gripped the butt of his long guarded and loaded revolver. Forgive me, Lord; I know what I am doing. He opened his mouth wide, as if to shout at the pampered disputatious gulls of Dover and tell them to watch out for what was coming. Placing the barrel of the gun well inside, he tilted it to what he hoped in his final lucid moment was the correct angle, and pulled the trigger. The nearest gulls wheeled away sharply at the noise, and the humble abrasive boat-siren announced that he was home at last.

Chapter Thirty-three

‘Where have you been?’ Nancy demanded, as if he’d gone to the pub for some fags and come back two hours after the dinner had burned to a cinder. She stood aside so that he could set his suitcase in the hall. ‘The bad penny turned up again.’

‘How are you, love?’ he said, kissing her.

‘I’m all right. What the bleddy-hell was you doing all this time? How are you?

‘Going around Algeria. I’m fine, fit enough. Won’t you make me some tea?’ She’d altered little in thirty months, a few lines by the side of her hazel eyes, oval face paler — though everyone seemed pale in this country.

‘You’ve got a cheek,’ she cried, ‘leaving me all this time and then walking back in here as large as life and asking for a cup of tea.’

‘You didn’t expect me to crawl in, did you, and sup at the dog-bowl?’

She was trembling with surprise and anger, but managed to get the kettle under the tap and on the stove. ‘Why didn’t you send a telegram at least?’

‘You might have thought I was dead or something. I don’t like to frighten people.’

‘I suppose you wanted to see who I was living with?’

He noticed a uniform tunic hanging on the wall. ‘You live with who you like. I left you.’

‘You can hardly deny that.’

‘I don’t want to.’

She set out two cups. ‘Do you want some cheese on toast?’

‘Please.

‘I’m not living with anybody, except the kids, if you want to know. One bloody man’s enough in my life, especially if his name happens to be Frank Dawley.’

He pointed to the tunic. ‘Who’s is that? Where are the kids?’

‘The third degree. That tunic’s mine. I work on the buses, and I’m due on the afternoon shift in an hour. The kids are at school and when they finish they go to Mary’s for their tea. Then she comes and puts them to bed, so they’re fast asleep by the time I get home at eleven.’ She sliced dried-up mousetrap cheese onto toasted Miracle Bread and slid it back under the grill.

‘You look smart,’ he said, ‘in that shirt and skirt.’

‘I had to earn some money. I’t rather be independent than rely on a rotter like you.’

He embraced and kissed her. ‘It didn’t do either of us any harm.’

She snapped away. ‘The toast’ll burn. You do look altered, though, I must say. You’ve got less meat on you. And your hair’s gone grey. Did you have a lot to put up with out there?’

‘Not more than I could manage.’

‘So it seems. But still, you look in the prime as well.’

‘I had to get to it some time. Phone up the bus depot and tell them you’ve got flu.’

‘Pull up your chair and eat this. You make impossible demands on me.’

‘I don’t want you to dislike me, that’s why.’

They sat at the small kitchen table. Nancy drank tea. ‘I can’t dislike you, though that’s what you deserve.’

‘Is it? It’s not. You’ve never been out of my mind, you and the kids. In the tightest spots in Algeria, when I was close to being killed a dozen times — I don’t suppose you believe it — but you were all in my mind, you and others. I had to go out there for the sake of people like us, as well as to do what I could for the Algerians — all equally. I’ll tell you something about it soon. I’m not sentimental, but I couldn’t have kept up that sort of life for long if I hadn’t thought about certain people, good people whom I’d see again when it was over and if I got out of it.’

She looked at him, and their hands touched on the table. ‘Don’t let your toast get cold. You’d have wolfed that down at one time, without me telling you,’ she said. ‘I believe what you’re saying. But it’s been hard for us here. I’m not complaining though. I’m just telling you.’

‘I know, love, I know.’

‘But I won’t give up my job,’ she said. ‘Whether you’ve come back or not I’m going to stay independent. That’s one thing I believe in. If a man can be, a woman has a right to be. Nobody can take that from me any more.’

He stood to hang up his coat, then finished his meal. ‘Have you got four pennies for the phone?’ she asked.

Alone he wandered into the living-room. It was roughly tidy, the children’s toys swept into a corner. There was a new television set, and a transistor radio on the windowsill. The stair-carpet was badly worn. In their bedroom his record-player was closed up and wedged between the wardrobe and the wall, with a cardboard box of his books secured by string and set on top. On the dressing-table was a photo of himself taken three years ago, when he was twenty-seven, sporting his best suit and looking grim but youthful, a tight squat unopened face when compared to the grey middle-aged visage facing him in the mirror. Nearby was another photo, of a plain mannish sort of woman he did not know, with: ‘To Nancy, affectionately from Laura’ scrawled along the bottom. He assumed it to be some pal of hers from the bus depot — as if there weren’t enough men: though maybe not if they nipped off to Algeria and such places. The window looked on the untended plot of housing-estate garden, barren and frozen under the bitter haze of winter.

He went down and sat in the kitchen, poured himself another cup of tea, then ate an apple. He had come back out of friendliness to Nancy, and to see the children, and did not know what would come after this. He had undergone the discomfort of travel and war in order to obliterate and avoid the greater discomfort of life at home, she thought. But if that was so, why should he come back when the journey was finished? The truth was that for him it would never be ended.

She walked in, reddened by the cold air outside.

‘O.K.?’ he asked.

‘Just for today. I don’t like to let them down.’

‘Are you glad to see me back?’

‘You’re a stranger to me. I never expected to see you again. But the kids haven’t stopped asking for you, so they’ll be glad.’

‘That’s one thing’

She smiled. ‘Of course I’m happy to see you, you damn fool.’

‘I hoped you might be. You can’t kid me.’ Not that he would stay long, but he had gifts, and perhaps plans for them all. ‘Nobody ever leaves for good,’ he said, ‘unless they kick the bucket somewhere.’

In the living-room he emptied the scuttle onto the dying fire, moved coal around with the heel of his shoe, which he drew back to the carpet when a cloud of white smoke shrouded it. He remembered how he had left her two summers ago, packed and walked out one Saturday afternoon with few words, only the feeling of an unexploded bomb inside and the simple stark message that he had to go. His silence and her bitterness corroded all communication, so that the parting was inevitable and somehow too easy.

He sat by her on the sofa, drawn close to the flames. ‘You’ll have to tell me about Algeria,’ she said. ‘It must have been interesting doing something you’d always talked about. You are lucky. But I suppose you have lots of plans.’

‘Some,’ he said.

‘Do they include me? I’m not begging, don’t think that, but I just want to know.’

‘They’ll have to, I think. I’m glad the kids are all right.’

‘They’re fine.’ Simon was seven and Janet eight, and he saw a photo of them above the fire, augmented shadows of the smaller bodies he’d known yelling for first turn on his knee when back from work. He kissed her. Something had to take place before they could enter the sea of conversation both felt boiling inside and unable to break loose. ‘Let’s go up to bed, until they get back from their tea.’

She stood. ‘You won’t go for a few days though, will you? I’m glad you’re back for a while, anyway. Give me a few minutes, then follow me up.’

He didn’t wait for the bus, but made his own way to Myra’s from the station. He had grown accustomed to walking, finding the cross-country tracks and going from A to B in a straight line. It felt like a game he’d bought in a shop, a one-inch map from the bookstall and off he went on a seven-mile jaunt of mild English Trackopoly. Winter time, sludge on the footpaths — go back six squares; leave luggage at station — go forward ten. The space was small, but there was no one to run from yet, no need for lying low in copse or wood. Yet he was singling out patches of forest for the assembly of ambush groups, hideouts for murder gangs, secret routes for lone assassins, areas for concealing arms and food dumps, rearguard defence lines. At the edge of the town a car stopped and a man’s hand waved to give him a lift. ‘No thanks,’ he shouted. ‘I’m walking for my health.’ But the cold made his various scar-wounds ache, and he sat on stile or gate now and again for a smoke.

It was hard to believe all this rich land was his, that it belonged to him and everybody else. It was a good thought, yet false, though if anyone had tried to scare him from the footpath now, saying he was on private property and had no right there, he would have murdered them in a light-hearted revolutionary way, counting him the first casualty in his own personal war of national liberation. He cut a yew stick and walked along, musing on Handley’s surprise and maybe pleasure when he visited him next week in Lincolnshire. He’d come down that morning from Nottingham on the train, after spending a week with Nancy.

A woman rode along an intersecting path on a bicycle. She wore a blue mackintosh, and a knitted hat was pulled over her ears. On a special seat behind sat a young child, comfortably tied in, looking up and around at blackbirds crossing a field as his mother pedalled along, her body bent for more leverage. Frank stood and shouted after her. She rode on. By the farm was a large compound of pigs, the sun glistening on their pink backs. He called again, and started to run, but she hadn’t heard. The rasping sound of a machine-saw came from a close-by wood, and the lazy noise of a jet-engine filled the momentary space when it stopped, echoing high beyond the low hills. She had come from Wingham direction and was heaving along a flat unfenced cart-track, wobbling slightly to avoid ruts. There was a brown field to one side and a green one on the other, and she went towards Parkwell by her own short cut.

He stopped running, but gave a final shout ‘Myra!’ She came to a paved lane, and pedalled out of sight. His mountain eyes were mystified by damp fields. He had lost his desert certainty, and the split-second assurance of wide-open spaces. The calamity of narrowness made him doubt that it had been Myra. The longer you look the less convinced you are, because that which needs looking at for a long time is most open to doubt. The clear winter vision baffled him, and he walked on along the path, hoping he would find her at home. He’d telephoned from the station but had been answered by some childish shuddering idiot who said that Dad had gone to the funeral at Dover. She’d obviously changed her telephone number from the one two years ago.

He walked into the village street of thatched houses, and bus-shelter opposite shops and grey stone church, remembering his injuries when her husband had tried to kill them both. In the side-garden of her house were two large caravans, and the once impeccable lawn had been trodden into bare earth. A four-year-old girl in duffle-coat and pixie-hood smiled as he walked along the path. He recognised Myra’s old car standing beside a red Mini and a new M.G. A dark-haired girl came down the caravan steps and gave the younger one a glass of milk.

By the garage door was a pram in which a baby slept, a boy stowed under the blanket and windshield hood. He bent close and stared at him. The Italian girl pulled at his arm: ‘Here, what the bloody-’ell you think you are doing? Who are you?’

‘Whose baby’s this?’

She saw his smile. ‘You like children?’

‘Yes. Is it Myra’s?’

‘That’s all right.’

‘It is?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s my son, then.’

‘My God! You never seen him before?’

He slept. ‘I’ll wake him later.’

‘He’s a good baby,’ she said. ‘A very good boy.’

Twelve-year-old Paul stood by the back door, pulling the triggers of a double-barrelled shotgun. While Frank was wondering where he’d seen him before, Mandy came from the kitchen and pushed her brother outside: ‘If you want to play soldiers with that thing go up the gack garden. It’s a jungle enough for you to hide in. Hello,’ she said, recognising Frank, ‘where did you jump from?’

‘I came to see Myra. What are you doing here?’

‘Living. You’ll be unlucky. She went to Dover yesterday with Dad, to see about Uncle John’s funeral.

‘Uncle John? Which Uncle John?’

She stared at him. ‘Uncle John. I don’t suppose you knew. He blew his brains out. What few he had. Those who blow their brains out never had any to blow out. But by the time they know it they’re dead.’

They walked into the kitchen, Mandy weeping: ‘This is the fifth damn time I’ve cried today. I can’t stop. Poor Uncle John!’

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Don’t get upset.’ It seemed like a premeditated Handley-drama faked for his arrival.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘What else is there to do?’ No blinds were drawn, or black suits being aired, but then, the Handleys never went in for things like that. Had it really been a joke, they would have.

‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded. ‘Why are you all at Myra’s?’ He felt as if he’d walked into a nightmare and dream all thrown into one. Sun shot through the window over the checked linoleum tablecloth. He leaned on the washing-machine.

‘Back in Lincolnshire the house burned down, so we all came to live at Myra’s. I don’t know why. We aren’t short of cash. Dad just wanted to, so maybe he was knocking on with her. At least that’s what Mam threw at him when they were quarrelling one night.’

He shook her: ‘For Christ’s sake, tell me what happened to John.’

‘Take your cowing hands off me, or I’ll let fly. How should I know? He left on the night of the fire, and we still don’t know if he had anything to do with that little disaster, to look for you in Algeria. It seems he found you. Then the other day a copper knocked at the door. Dad started trembling like a leaf, till he remembered he was rich. Next thing we knew he was ready to shoot off to Dover with Myra. Mam thought it was an elaborate trick for a dirty weekend, and went with them as well — so don’t look so blue. Dad phoned this morning to say John had shot himself. They left me looking after the place, with a hundred mouths to feed. I’m married now, made it six weeks ago with the world’s most genuine zombie. There’ll be another little zombie in the world soon.’

He was back in Handley-land, where a manic non-stop gift of the claptrap reigned over all residents and comers. ‘Why did he shoot himself?’ he asked.

‘Pardon me,’ she said. ‘God isn’t back from lunch yet. But I’ll be sure to ask him though when he comes in. I expect John had had enough. Or maybe he thought he hadn’t had anything. He was always strange, apart from epilepsy. But he was so sweet and kind. Oh, don’t worry, I shan’t bawl again. I can see it troubles you.’

‘It’s the cause of it that disturbs me, not your crying. I can’t believe it, though. I said goodbye to him at Gibraltar airport. He wouldn’t come on the plane because he didn’t like flying. It might crash, and he’d get killed, he said. Maybe he thought he might be tempted to do it during the flight. He was in a hurry to get away from me because I kept pressing him to come on the plane, and I suppose he thought he might give in.’

‘You didn’t try hard enough,’ she said. ‘He must have tried a bloody sight harder when he went out there to find you.’

‘I didn’t ask him to come for me,’ he said.

‘You were glad to see him, I’ll bet.’

He hadn’t been, but this wasn’t the time to say it. ‘When is Albert due back?’

‘Late tonight. He’ll go again for the inquest, I suppose. He’s broken up about it. Sounded terrible on the phone. Sleep here if you like. There’s room in the flat.’

‘My luggage is at the station. I thought I might have to stay in town.’

‘Fetch it in the Mini, and buy a gallon of petrol on the way. If you’ve got no money tell ’em to put it on our account. Everybody does. We owe hundreds round here already. It’s a good job we left Lincolnshire, with the creditors closing in. I thought when I got married I’d stop living like a bandit, but Ralph’s mother cut him off without a penny, and so we’re still part of the worm-eaten ship.’

The regular thump-thump of a machine sounded from upstairs like a heavy loom or treadle worked by hand. ‘That’s Richard,’ she said, ‘and Adam at the printing-press. The turn out loads of stuff, send it every day all over the country. This house is the middle of the spider’s web of revolution, and it’s costing us the earth. Dad paints more than he used to, and earns more money, but it’ll ruin him in the end.’ Her oval heavily-lidded eyes speculated on a future she wanted, and wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t yet get before she was twenty — with less that a year to go. ‘My heart’s set on a simple life,’ she said. ‘Ralph and I would be happy if we could get a small house right away from here, where we could live in peace.’

Late that night the Ford Rambler drew up on the road outside. Handley, Myra and Enid came into the kitchen breathing smoke and frost.

Frank stood up. The picture of the day had altered, switched into complete indifference now that they were home. It had turned him from his own house with Nancy and the children packed off to school, through train corridors and a walk across countryside, to this establishment full of weird and fateful people. He saw it on their faces as they came in and he looked around.

Myra noticed a strange man in her house, another friend of Albert’s perhaps who had dropped by on his travels — either one of the family, or a recent painter acquaintance up from London. Handley, mouth down, took off his fur hat, and overcoat that reached his ankles. Enid pushed by him and put the kettle on, the tips of her long blonde hair brushing Frank’s shirt. The silence was bruising them, a strange quiet bout of recognition and surprise, and all wanting to speak and break it. Myra had taken off her glasses getting out of the car, resting her eyes by not forcing them to see clearly. Here was a different person, this man with an olive skin stretched over the bones of his face, a scar below his left ear, a face without a smile and not willing at the moment to say much. She thought how possible it would have been to pass him on the street — except for the eyes, which she would have noted in any man. The grey eyes looked at her, bringing no humour from the wilderness of his travels, and no mercy in the love he had pulled back with them. They were not the eyes he had gone away with, for the lustre was no longer there, the light had drawn back into the depths, shining onto the interior acres of his thought rather than too much and too shallowly on the outer world as they had done before. He stood more alone than anyone else in the room, though that may have been because her love was enveloping him and ready once more to attempt possession. But not entirely. He was alone, stronger, so that with such eyes and rendered features he would stay that way, the one controller of his own mind and actions. He had gone away with the idea of destroying his love and her love. But the cinders and dead ash had brought him back just the same. He wasn’t powerful enough to wreck anyone’s love, not even his own, and this knowledge had kept her thinking of him every day, wanting to talk to him, touch him, her visions all the more immediate because she had never been entirely convinced that he would come back. She’d had a hundred premonitions of his death, seen him so many scattered lumps of clay, tortured, hanged, shot, dead of hunger and thirst, wandering insane with his senses spread broadcast by hot sandy winds of the summer desert.

She smiled and went to him, hands touching. As I grow older I know better how to be young. She felt the flooding emotions of passionate love on seeing him again. Handley’s forehead creased, but he smiled nevertheless. ‘Let’s drink to your safe return, anyway.’

‘I’m sorry about John,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you about it. But there was nothing I could do. Nothing. I thought that once we got out of Algeria he’d be all right.’

‘I know,’ Handley said. ‘You don’t have to say it. I tried for over fifteen years, and failed. I softened his life, worked for him, nursed him, and yet, all the time at the back of my mind was the dread of this happening. It was always there, nagging and tormenting. I knew it over the years, a panther behind his face waiting to spring. My own brother does a thing like this, and the wickedest thought I have is: Why didn’t he do it at the beginning instead of wasting his life for another fifteen years? That’s wrong. If he had, none of us would have been here thinking about our own rich lives yet to be lived. I was the only one who tried to stop him when he first proposed going to Algeria. I should have locked him up: barred his window and fastened his door with wood. And yet, what can you do? What bloody right have you finally got to settle a man’s life when he’s set firm on his own way?’

He poured glasses of whisky for them all. Frank looked at Myra. Being in love, he remembered telling himself on the plane from Gibraltar, to fight down his rising emotion at the thought of seeing her again, is a state of paralysis and death. You can’t act when you are in love, or do anything, unless the woman is willing to follow you anywhere, which is not love. Love and passion combined make the pleasantest form of suicide, yet here he was, more in love with Myra than he’d ever been with any other woman. It was strange, falling in love with a woman who already had your child.

‘Have you seen Mark?’ she asked.

‘I was playing with him. He’s a beauty.’

Handley laughed. ‘There’ll be a few more soon. Enid’s having one — her last, I should think. And Mandy’s having her first. Let’s drink to them all!’

Chapter Thirty-four

Taking a flashlight he walked to the large studio-hut which Handley had erected at the end of the garden. Permanent heaters had been installed, and warmth and the smell of paint, the comforting reek of turps and glue met him as he came in out of the frost. He found the light-switches, and closed the door. The fantastic colour-cathedral of Handley’s life covered every wooden wall, so that it was like being in another man’s stomach, seeing with his eyes, smothered by his entire vision. He must be a machine to turn out so much. It was a wonder his arms had strength, never mind the imagination. If Mandy’s idea was right, John had tried to burn all this when he set fire to the house in Lincolnshire, before setting off for Algeria to pluck him from the raging fires of civil war. Even the Handleys needed their legends, since anarchy was not enough.

He sat by one of the large tables and smoked a cigarette. Of all places on the compound this was the quietest. Only faint waves of shouting penetrated from the inhabitated areas. Albert had done well to place himself here. The house, the caravans, the flat above the garage, all were eruptions of strife and metallic noise that only subsided for a few hours of darkness each night. He sometimes longed for the silence and danger of the desert. Eric Bloodaxe, that blue-blooded bulldog that held some corner of affection in Handley’s twisted heart, howled balefully over the roofs of the village.

John had been buried a fortnight. The inquest said he’d committed suicide while of unsound mind. No other verdict was possible. The lumpen-bourgeoisie demanded it. It had to be suicide if they were to keep their confidence and survive. The idea of actually choosing death in opposition to the best of all possible lives that they offered was alien to them. Well, they would keep it until it was ripped away from them by machine-guns and Molotov cocktails. The one infallible answer was always violence, violence and still more violence. In Algeria it was already succeeding in what it set out to do. It couldn’t fail, provided it was prolonged and violent enough. If the sky starts to fall in, pull down the stars as well. When you are surrounded by a ring of fire and can’t get out, all you can do is learn to jump. While learning to jump the fire goes out. You are free. Once free, burn every bush till there are no bushes left, till even the ash burns again to ash and the soil itself jumps into flame. Destruction appalls them. They are terrified of losing their property. The scorched-earth policy is the one sure answer to such endless indoctrination, and to defeat the easy power that they have. Threaten the fourth dimension of civil war, the end-all of life from which renewed life can spring more quickly than if no destruction had taken place.

This outpost-compound had its armoury of Sten-guns, rifles and shotguns. Handley had seen to that, stowed them under the garage floor from where they were taken out for a ritual pull-through and polish every week. There were stores of food, petrol, and John’s radio transceivers which Richard and Adam knew how to work. Even while poor they had been prepared, though no one knew precisely for what, with the possible exception of Richard. Certainly no one could accuse Handley of thinking himself to death, since he considered he needed no philosophical justification for what he thought and did. They had left the atavistic age of being content merely to live for the moment, and had entered the era of wanting to survive, which no one else seemed to have done, apart from the government and all its offices, which was only to be expected. Handley couldn’t work unless such supplies and equipments were close by. His spirit would be paralysed, hands crippled, brain sedated, eyes bandaged. They meant freedom to him, expansion, gave stature and a final sense of self-respect in face of the impending bourgeois atomic juggernaut. On their side they had the Bomb, and if he didn’t have a gun or two on his he would curl up and die at the vast injustice of it. He could only marvel at the fact that he’d fallen in with such a talented and bandit crew, franc-tireurs of the atomic and conformist age. Yet Frank considered that one had to be careful not to get rounded up in the incipient disorder of their lives, and to avoid this the community would have to be worked on, given security and direction in both social and military spheres. Handley was happy to let it run itself, to stagger from debt to debt and scandal to broiling set-to, but Frank and Adam talked of forming a permanent council to guide things in a more organised way. Frank thought they should begin immediately, but Adam, being a Handley, knew the ways of the family somewhat better, and so suggested that the present way of life went on until social and moral disintegration set in, at which point a permanent council would almost form itself with everyone’s automatic and grateful consent. There matters stood. And there, Frank saw, they might stay for a long time yet.

The door opened, and Handley came in. ‘I knew I’d find you here.’ He opened a cupboard and poured brandy. ‘I don’t suppose you had much of this among the Moslems.’

‘I didn’t need it, somehow. Where’s Myra?’

‘Feeding Mark. She’ll be in in a bit, as soon as he’s hit the sweet pillow. How do you like the community now? You’ve been here a fortnight.’

‘I’m part of it, it seems.’

‘You are.’ They smoked cigars, ash falling unnoticed. Handley was recovering from the shock and emptiness of his brother’s death, his mental landscape no longer swamped and intolerably burdened by it. He had breathed it fully in and knew that he had to work and live without John for the rest of his life. There had been no black sign on the house, for it was never one of the Handley colours. ‘I’m opposed to it,’ he had said, ‘in clothes, flags, food, excrement and paintings.’ But his love was too brotherly for him to forget his grief at this futile unnecessary suicide. Yet no spark had gone out of him, no lustre drained from his eyes. He seemed as energetic, abusive and lively as ever. He had worn his cap and topcoat to get from the house to the studio, always considerate of his health where the weather was concerned, and when he felt particularly well.

‘Am I stopping you from working?’ Frank asked.

‘Nobody ever did that. I can slap paint on, whoever’s around, as long as they don’t mind a blob now and again in the left eye. Did you talk to Myra about bringing Nancy and kids here?’

‘She agreed. I must go to Nottingham soon and collect them. They’ll take a bit of persuading, but I think I can manage it.’

‘We’ll fit in,’ Handley said. ‘It’ll make twenty of us, including Eric Bloodaxe. Twenty-one souls if Cuthbert comes back. I’ll have a few things to say to him though when he does. He’s bound to. Getting thrown out of that cushy theological college and about to be ordained. To think a son of mine could have been criminal enough to be so stupid! Still, if we get a bit overcrowded we’ll put up tents. Do a few of ’em good, a life under canvas. Or we can build a bungalow between here and the house, and a few can sleep in the Rambler. We could get hundreds in our little community, come to think of it. We’ll call it the Villa Back-to-Back if we want to give it a continental flourish. It’ll be so small and high, the whole packed lot, that if we sling a wall around it we’ll have a genuine medieval city on our hands. As for transport we could turn into a mobile column at a pinch, with three cars and two caravans. Send the Mini and four people ahead as a spearheading scout car with the quick-firing pulverine mounted on top, then the Rambler pulling the heavy caravan with five in each, and us poring over the map-tables, then the last eight in the light caravan, and the rest in the Morris as a rearguard. At night we’d form a laager in some lay-by and pitch tents. Still, I don’t see that being necessary for a while, though it’s as well to bear it in mind. Might be a way to have a continental holiday. Let my lot loose at the heart of Germany and they’d surrender in two minutes, though don’t ask me who.’

‘You’re the only one of us all who never seems to change,’ said Frank light-heartedly.

Handley slung his cigar into the bin: ‘I did my altering while you were in crappy-nappies. My first deep breath took me to the age of thirty or so, then I changed into the low dumps till I was thirty-six, when I switched gear into mainstream. Now I keep the black ship going to hell, all sails flapping, panache and spinnakers taut as drums and pointing across my cold uncharted sea. It’s not that simple, but it’s way of putting it, Frank, my old lad. We’ll be having the big reunion dinner tonight, so I’ll go and see how the organisation’s going on. Don’t get too drunk on my three-star plonk.’

He went out, coughing through the icy mist. The compound seemed unnaturally quiet as soon as the door fell to, an unnerving impossible silence as he sat in the dim light listening to it. He didn’t know at the moment for how long he would be able to immerse himself in the Handley round-about. But the stillness matched the temporary peace of his life long enough for him to make decisions out of the deeper quietness of his heart.

He stopped thinking while the noise stayed far away, switched off all lights but one and sat in his own dusk, smoking ruminatively. He had the nagging uncomfortable feeling of being a member of society once more, even though it was composed solely of Handleys. But the thought that perhaps he had only exchanged one form of guerrilla band for another made him feel more optimistic.

Myra came in. ‘Mark’s asleep at last. His teeth give him a lot of trouble.’

‘He’ll know how to bite on life, then!’

She sat by him. ‘Do you really approve of me giving my place to Albert and his family?’

‘It’s your house,’ he said.

‘Don’t evade the question.’

‘Their house burned down. You gave them yours.’

‘But Albert has enough money to buy another. In any case, I do consider it to be your house as well.’

‘If it had been I should have done the same.’

‘The village is already up in arms. Nobody talks to me at the shop any more, and I can’t have anything to do with the Womens’ Institute even if I wanted to. They complain every day to the police about noise and litter.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘No. Mrs Harrod even stopped coming.’

‘There are enough of the Handleys to make up a labour force. The au pair girls like it here because it’s nearer to London. You don’t mind me bringing Nancy and the kids down, then?’

She said she did not. ‘As long as they fit in, the more the better, I suppose I look on it as a sociological experiment, or I would if I didn’t like it so much.’

‘You do a lot of work,’ he said, ‘catering and caring for everyone. It must be like running a hostel.’

‘Most of it runs itself. I think it’s what I always wanted to do. I have you, so I feel happy at last. I’m fond of everyone who lives here.’

‘I hope you like Nancy.’

‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I hope she likes me.’

‘I think she will.’

‘Adam says you are going to collaborate on a book about your experiences in Algeria.’

‘Yes. I write it all down, then he’ll advise me on the finer points of style. I suppose he’ll actually rewrite it. We’ll become a literate community in spite of ourselves, a hotbed of books and conspiracy. Richard has many other ingenious plans, all sorts of stunts and tricks of sabotage. The Handleys are so mad and wild that no one would suspect them of intelligent planning.’ He stood up: ‘Let’s go over to the house and see about the big dinner.’

Chapter Thirty-five

He was blinded by a combination of strip-lighting, table-lamps, ordinary bulbs, and candles, that turned the room into a chamber of dazzling incandescent clarity, with such light pushing to the limits of all-white walls that there seemed to be smoke in the air, though no one had yet lit a cigarette. The dozen of Handley’s paintings spaced around the walls could only be seen as grey and metallic — unless one came in for a special show during light day. The house had turned into far more of a Handleydrome than his former Lincolnshire residence had ever been able to.

Bottles of Yugoslav Riesling stood along the table, and each person’s name was written on the back of a photo of Uncle John. Handley stood up from the head of the table and moved two chairs down to the left. ‘It’s got to stop,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘There’s to be no top of the table any more. Let’s kick off in the right way. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s an ordered life. Put the cards in your pockets and sit where you like. And if you’re forming factions already before I have time to wipe my nose, then on your own heads be it.’

There was a muted irritation at this deliberate displacement of seats, which gradually eased however as the first line of bottles wavered and disappeared. The main course was rabbit stew and rice, and the bottles of Riesling gave way to a stolid line of Nuits St Georges. Enid, in a thoughtless moment, had put Schubert’s quintet on the record-player, but reasonably low so that everyone could talk against it. Adam stood up, his glass dark red to the brim, and his mouth full. His elfish face was sad because Wendy Bonser had long since fallen out of love with him. Unable to stand the voices at the Conservative Club he had mimicked several of them brilliantly at the bar one night and been thrown bodily out. He was now deeply back in the family, more subversive than he’d ever been. ‘Let’s drink to living off the land. The dozen rabbits that make up this stew were caught the night before last by Richard and me, with the help of our twelve-year-old apprentice Paul. Of course, we were well-trained in traditional Lincolnshire poaching by our assiduous dad, and we have now transferred our skills to Buckinghamshire.’

‘You’re boasting,’ cried Mandy. ‘You’re drunk already. Sit down.’

Ralph had not spoken to anyone for days. In fact Richard thought he hadn’t opened his mouth since joining the Handley family except to push food and drink into it, but couldn’t be sure because he’d never been close enough until tonight. He now broke silence and stood up, leaned over the table supported by ten springy outspread fingers, dark hair splayed, face heavy and pale as he glared at them all: ‘You’re thieves. You can’t even keep your exploits quiet. You just want to embarrass Myra, and me.’

‘If you back me up again,’ Mandy called, ‘I’ll blind you. Nobody has a right to back me up. I can defend myself.’ He sat down, and though not a man of excessive weight the chair almost cracked under him at the ponderoushess of his smashed ego. He drained his glass at one long throatslide, and smiled to stop himself going mad and running amok.

‘We have a certain mission in this village,’ Richard said, facing his brother who now sat down. ‘Believe it or not, Ralph, we’re going to civilise it. I don’t suppose you know what that word means. For example when we came here there was a notice tacked up outside the village pub which said: NO DIDACOIS. NO GYPSIES. We found it repulsive in its racialist smear. Well, it was down the first night. They put it up again. In fact it goes up and down half-a-dozen times, but they no longer have it there now. We’re planning to have some of our gypsy friends go in, and if they don’t get served it’s war on that pub. Oh no, we’re not going to complain to the Civil Liberties Council. Nothing like that for us. Nobody’s going to get us on that bourgeois treadmill. That pub will go into the ground with everybody in it if it doesn’t serve all comers. So will a few pubs in neighbouring villages, as well. That’s just one of our minor campaigns. Now, about the ethics of poaching rabbits …’

Myra smiled. On her property they were safe, it was their ‘base zone’, and nothing from the outside world could move them. She was joined to them by her respect for Albert’s painting, and by an inexplicable fondness for the whole following. Her grief at the suicide of his brother (whose death she connected with his expedition to a civil war to bring back the father of her child) also welded her to this family. She lived in a compound where no relationships seemed fixed, and where no one temperament was like another. The final test and complication would be the arrival of Nancy and her children — whenever Frank chose to bring them in.

As for money, she had cleared twenty thousand pounds from the share-out of her father’s will, even after the death duties had been lopped off, and such a mountainous sum, invested on Handley’s advice in a London Borough Council, was accumulating interest for them all, an abundance of reserves that would hold them up for a long time. She was buying two fields near the village, satisfying her own desire to own more land, on which they could build, use it for picnics, or put it to any use that the community might decide on.

She looked at Frank across the table. He smiled. He was like a man back from famine rather than war, a traveller who had been to the magic circles of the moon and fought with the demonic apotheosis of evil till the bones went white within him and had suffered more than his soul had the capacity to take, as if he had been robbed of the ability to love, and had taken on the incurable sickness of compassion. His eyes were edged with chaos, and a strength that thrilled and frightened her. He was the man who was leaving the demanding sphere of the moon and entering the machine-age pull and energy of the sun, a man half-way there but who had been through the worst fire of getting free, and was now where it seemed that little could stop him making the great change of the world, though no one was to know yet what the cost would be.

Enid grew angrier the more Richard expatiated on the political significance of poaching. ‘Sit down,’ she said, when he came to the end. To break in before would be to tread on a holy theme of the Handley way of life. ‘I only believe in poaching if we’re too poor to buy food, and at the moment we’re not.’

‘That’s contrary to our policy of living off the land,’ Handley said quietly.

‘If I want any rabbits I can buy them at the Co-op,’ she said. ‘I never ask you to steal them for me.’

‘Death to all shopkeepers!’ cried Adam.

‘I don’t see why we should be driven out of this village,’ she said.

‘Let them try,’ said Richard. ‘We can hold them off for weeks.’

Only Handley and Enid were on their feet, the normal end of any upheaval, it seemed, in whatever house they occupied. Frank did not see how their community could exist for long under this internal tension. But he grew to see that because of such upheavals — which were, after all, merely the Handley method of debate and consensus — it could go on for ever. And if he could not stand it he could always remove himself to a land where the bonfires of insurrection had burst into reddening flame, to lead or follow against the dark forces of whoever governed.

‘I suppose,’ Handley said to Enid, ‘that you’re getting latched on to your usual neurotic dream of wanting an ideal place to live and die in, where you are on totally unrealistic terms with the people, and are unselfconsciously hobnobbing with the local gentry? I don’t have to ask where Mandy gets her death-wish from. All these ideas ought to be chased from the brains of such grown-up people. You can’t live at peace with the world. Not this world which won’t ever let you live at peace with it except on its own impossible strait-jacket terms. We’re not that sort of gang, family, tribe, or whatever you like to call us. The world hasn’t got to be only lived in, because even if you keep yourself at a distance it will corrupt and destroy you by forcing you to keep your distance, but it has to be continually attacked, raided, sabotaged, marauded, plundered, insulted and spat on. It’s not the sort of place you can walk around with your head cocked back in bollocky-eyed disdain and splendour, because even the birds of the air which they’ve trained and which had been trained without meaning to be, will go peep-peep and shit in your eye. You only make your mark and set up your score by giving no quarter either within or beyond the law. The village may not be ours by day, but it will be by night. We can’t at the moment melt in among the people like fish in water but after a few years the situation may be different.’

While he was speaking the lounge door opened, and a tall burly young man wearing a cap and overcoat stood a little inside the room. Handley noticed him but went on talking. The man slowly opened his overcoat at the food-heat, and took off his cap. He wore a black shirt, and the white reversed dog-collar of a priest. His face was sensitive though overfed. He had a long narrow nose and thin expressive lips, and curly fair hair that fell over his forehead and the depth of his brow. He could have been any age between twenty and forty. Listening at first with respect and attention in what may have been a habitual expression, his lips slowly took on the shape of contempt that finally was exactly duplicated on Handley’s face when he stopped talking and looked at him for a moment. That, thought Frank, must be Cuthbert.

Handley was determined to finish: ‘But we can forgive Enid balking at some of our activities, because she is basically a noble and gentle soul who can’t throw out her past because she’s still living in it. And as for Ralph, he should be ashamed of himself. His family are rich Lincolnshire loam-farmers who plundered their tenants and workers for decades, and when he shows a bit of individuality his pain-in-the-heart of a mother pitches him out without even a strip of field to use as a necktie or arserag. And as for Mandy she’s just got the same belly-yearnings as her mother, combined with my pitch of obstinacy, which she’s perverted to her own sybaritic use.’

‘You’re talking like a madman,’ Enid cried. ‘In a few years you’ll be in jail and we’ll be destitute. You’ll soon be as crazy and epileptic as John whom we sheltered and kept alive for so many years unless you get back to your painting and stop all this nonsense.’

Cuthbert broke in, shouting through his smile: ‘Well, well, I can see the old matrimonial death-grapple is still going on. Call it a community, call it what you like, but I can smell it a mile off for what it is. I come home and what do I find? The same old gluttons at the pig-trough. What you want around here is a bit of plain speaking!’

Enid’s back had been to the door, and only now did she notice his presence. She turned and smiled at her favourite and eldest son. ‘We didn’t expect you till next week, Cuthbert. How are you, my love?’

He ignored her. ‘Aren’t you going to welcome your firstborn, Dad?’

‘Sit down and get some stew,’ Handley said, grim-lipped. ‘Maybe it’ll stop your mouth up.’ Cuthbert was the perfect blend of his parents, in that you could not distinctly see either of them mirrored in his features, though at the same time you knew he could be none other than their son. Enid set him a place, and Maria brought a plate of stew. Richard, not too willingly, poured his wine. Frank sensed that the equilibrium of the house had been permanently displaced by his arrival.

‘I’ve got news for you, Dad,’ Cuthbert said between food. ‘I’ve been thinking that with everybody’s permission I’d like to stay here, because I’ve nowhere to go since leaving college. I hope nobody minds.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Handley said, ‘as long as you fit in like the rest of us. There’s plenty of work to do. We all earn our own keep.’

‘Give him time,’ Enid said indignantly. ‘He’s only just stepped through that door.’

‘And he can step right out of it again if there’s any trouble or disruption. He had the best bloody prospects in the world, of becoming an ordained priest in the Church-of-rotten-England, and he spoils it all through lust and greed, and I suspect a bit of simony and black mass thrown in. He could have infiltrated right into the middle of the enemy’s juiciest pie. What a chance gone to dust and ashes. It gives me the knee-ache to think of it.’

Cuthbert stepped up by his chair, kicked a couple of bottles aside and blew a candle out with the flap of his trousers. He stood full height on the table, his head bending slightly under the smooth chalk of the ceiling. With a deliberate gesture he ripped off his priestly white collar, so that only his black shirt remained. ‘In coming here I chose freedom. Do you hear, father? FREEDOM! I’ve had enough of being your germ in a sealed train steering for the heart of the imperial poxetten church. I resented being used by you, and used by them, which is what it amounted to. By intermittent intelligence, continual fawning, and eternal hypocrisy I nearly got stuffed into that pit of frayed hymnbooks and incensed cassockrags that you intended me for. But I’d rather risk my life than my spirit. I was beginning to like it, and if I’d stayed another month I’d have been so genuinely deep in it that you’d have lost all control of me. That’s what I call a crisis of conscience: getting out before you are too far in. I can’t lead a double life. I had to come back here so as to stay loyal to you and the family. It’s all right for you, Dad. You think it’s easy to live six lives at once, because you’re an artist, but me, I’m not an artist. I’m honest, and can’t stand having my guts corroded by playing false-face to something as corrupt as the Church of England. Oh no, not me. I can be treacherous to a cause which has been genuinely set up to help a large section of hapless mankind get out of its awful sufferings, and all that stuff. Find me a good cause to rip open like a rat from the inside, that I can believe in from the bottom of my heart, and I’ll enjoy no finer work destroying it. Then I’ll show you what skill and patience I’ve got in me, so that even you would pat me on the back — father.’

Handley had, for reasons of family solidarity and to put on a show of love and understanding in front of Frank and Myra, been rehearsing a few lily-white phrases of a welcome-home speech, but now they flew back in his mouth and choked him purple. ‘Sit down,’ he commanded, standing up. ‘You’re the only one of all my brood who is worse than me. One day you’ll steal my turps and cut my bollocks off. You’re the sort who in the Middle Ages would have taken a quiverful of poisoned arrows to the top of a brand-new cathedral built to the glory of God and picked off his friends first and his enemies second. Still, welcome back, Cuthbert. I think no one will object to such a valuable sackbag of assets joining our community. There was never much of “hear all, see all, say nought” about our Cuthbert — was there, Cuthbert? So I’m sure his time with the trainee clergy has been an admirable exercise in self-restraint. And when he does open his mouth nobody can accuse him of having a concentrated epigrammatic idiosyncratic style either. So before we get down to a night of drinking, talking, knifing, remembering John, and cracking nuts, I’m going to have the last ceremonial word, as an artist always should. We’ll found this community as a memorial to my brother John, and to his life, such as you all know it was. There should be enough money to keep this project going, but if there isn’t then we’ll have to find ways of getting it. England’s a rich country still, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t support us while we’re trying to bring it crashing down. And if ever it does crash we’ll be able to fend for ourselves, because some of us will be running it. And if it’s beyond a state when it can be run at all, by anybody, then we’ll still keep alive, because chaos is very conducive when it comes to the likes of us living off the land.’

Cuthbert turned his eyes from one member of the family to another, and to those who were strangers to him. Frank saw him, and burned his look away. Introductions would come later, but there were no smiles between them.

‘We all have our pledges,’ Handley went on. ‘Mine is to keep painting, to open the furnace-ovens and pull out the steel, work till I go mad or drop dead, to keep my patience and courage even when I can’t do a stroke for weeks, to work cheap and sell to the highest bidder. My labour and long hours cost nothing, is so dirt-cheap that it’s free where art is concerned, and in the end I place no money-value on what I turn out. But I know what it is worth to others, and I also know that my heart is never willing to sell it. But it’s no use creeping into a corner to have a quiet cry when Teddy Greensleaves takes half a dozen canvases away on a tumbril cart to their doom in his gallery, though I know that when they go a few more gobbets of irreplaceable flesh have been snapped off my backbone. And so all I can do is have bad dreams, and carry on painting — as long as the rest of you work with me.’

Cuthbert stood up with tears on his cheeks, and a glass in his hand. ‘We’ll drink to that, Dad. We’ll drink to that. And to Uncle John. And to Mother, and all of you.’

Everyone gathered around, including Ralph. Handley looked at them all with obvious distrust, but concealed love, then smiled sardonically and put an arm around Cuthbert. Frank was bemused, saw many weeks, even years of invigorating chaos ahead, of great ideas, and great work, and to this only he lifted his glass.