The Flame of Life

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cuthbert shuffled in wearing carpet slippers. ‘Morning, everybody,’ he said genially, a fair imitation of his father. Then he touched Mandy affectionately on the shoulder, and took a seat as far from his father as he could get.

She pushed her brother’s hand off as he went by along the wall. ‘I hear you stopped my papers this morning,’ he said.

Richard turned: ‘And those of a few million others. We helped. Let’s not claim too much. The final decisions are always in the hands of the workers.’

‘The bishop didn’t get his Times,’ Handley called above the chatter, half-way through his first cigarette of the day.

Seeing both windows open, Cuthbert complained of the cold. Handley looked at him scornfully: ‘Put a coat on, if you’re nesh.’

Dawley passed a cigarette to Nancy, his wife. She took it, and allowed him to light it for her, but sat stiff and quiet, being too shy or uncaring to take much part in these gatherings. To say what she thought before all and sundry had never appealed to her. In fact she just couldn’t do it in front of people she hardly knew, so merely sat there and tried to look interested. But her silence at meetings had passed beyond them and into her life with Dawley, and so he could never tell what she was thinking, even when they were in bed and as close as they would ever get. She’d turn morose or sharp if he tried to talk to her about the way they lived now. The passion of their getting back together had come and gone in a few days.

The au pair girls, Maria and Catalina, appeared with trays of coffee cups. ‘Ask them to close the window,’ said Cuthbert.

Enid wanted to do it, and get on with the meeting, but Handley pushed her down with his left hand: ‘We’ll vote on it’ — unwilling to let Cuthbert off with an easy victory, even on such a small matter as this. Cuthbert noticed how smooth and cynical he looked, as on every occasion when he took to the vote-meter.

‘Say yes — those who want the windows open.’ Handley put three spoons of sugar into his tiny cup of black coffee like a real Turk, Enid noted. The vote-meter had been rigged up soon after Cuthbert’s arrival, and on the floor by each chair was a button that could be pressed whenever a motion was put, buttons so hidden it was impossible to say who assented and who did not, On the wall behind Handley was a huge clockface, a circle with ten divisions, so that if two members voted for a proposal the needle swung over that number of segments, and on the rare occasions of unanimity it turned full circle. Agreement was reached if six of the ten parts were covered.

Handley was proud of his democratic installation, but Cuthbert suspected it was fixed in his father’s favour, suggesting at each session that everyone sit in a different place to the one they had held before, especially Handley, since Cuthbert believed that his foot-button had several times the lighting-power of any other. The proposal had been defeated, as any would while Handley kept his present seat. But even if the gadget did not cheat it seemed an insult to the more subtle mechanics of the human make-up, a typical innovation of his father who fell for any modern contraption that came along. Cuthbert thought that one day, when his father was in town, he’d call an electrician and have the wires checked.

Seven segments filled with light. He had lost. No one had ever yet defeated Handley on that device, nor ever would, for he played it like a master — as if he were God in heaven, though Cuthbert reflected that he hadn’t thrown in his hand at theology just to be kept in place by this ten-bob Yahweh facing him through two lines of faces.

Dawley had voted with his father, and so had his wife Nancy who always did because it was the easiest way out. He’d have to get rid of her, which wouldn’t be difficult because she was obviously unhappy in the community. Her eternal silence at meetings was proof of that. All he had to do was drop the hint that Dawley was going to bed now and again with Myra, and she’d be off to Nottingham by next morning’s train.

Ralph was placed between Adam and Myra, a small transistor in his coat pocket, from which a thin cord went up to his left ear like a deaf-aid connection. It filled his brain with pop music, and even when his eyes weren’t closed there was a far-off look about him. He put a hand in his pocket to change stations when a news broadcast threatened to bring him half-way back to reality.

By such means he fobbed off the horror of living with the Handleys and escaped the malignant tremors passing around the table at meeting times. Personalities festered at cross purposes, and he was sensitised to all their different wavelengths at the same time — hence the teat-plug jammed into his ear in an effort to deflect them. He stayed sane by this appliance but, as Handley often observed, only at the cost of becoming barmy, which someone as congenitally crackers as Ralph wouldn’t in any case notice.

He was so involved in changing stations that he forgot to move his foot from the vote-meter, and a segment of the clock dial stayed lit up. Handley was pleased to see he’d voted for him, though knew Ralph always said yes to everybody so as to be left in peace.

Music spread like an occupying army to all points of the brain, bringing it under swift and complete submission. Yet despite this totality of control there was a separate and conscious part of Ralph that kept clear of music, a sharply defined zone of his otherwise reeling and flooded intelligence which told him that if he went on hating Handley (though without ever saying so) Handley would sooner or later do something to get rid of him. In fact he may right now be preparing to do just that. Why ever did I pick an artist for a father-in-law? Any man in an ordinary occupation would be far too tired at night, or bent on pleasure at the weekend, to give me such threatening attention, he erroneously thought — since Handley radiated more energy when he wasn’t working than when he was.

The community idea was fine because it created an area wherein Ralph could exist. He did what duties were set for him, mealtimes turned up regularly, and there was always warmth and fodder in the kitchen. He had all the benefits of a great mother without having one to nag at him whenever he put his face inside the door. When there was no work to do for the community, his solitary well-built figure stooped as he walked across the fields, as if going through the undergrowth of a dense forest.

Everything was on hand to make life perfect, and the community would have been splendid had it not been for the unsuitability of most people in it. But that was no fault of his, and when Handley’s spite against him for having married his daughter had been calmed by the passing of time, maybe he would suggest new people for the community, both to stop it dying, and to outvote the present members whom he would be glad to see walking away from it.

What Handley took as Ralph’s vacant stare, caused by too much deadbeat drum-and-tonic pounding in, was really the pleasant conflict of clear thinking against the opposition of the music. But he didn’t know this, and was angered by Ralph being cut off from what was about to be discussed.

He swallowed more coffee to take the waves of blue cigar smoke into his stomach. Between one painting and the next he pondered on ways to get rid of Ralph, which seemed vital if he weren’t to eat his own liver for the rest of his life.

In the idealism that set the community going (in fact it had come together by accident) it was decided that there should be no constitution — or set of rules. Handley came to see this as an absolutely hare-brained state of affairs, even though to an outsider the community seemed harmonious enough. But that hypothetical swine of an outsider, Handley argued with himself in his studio the night before, has not, and never will have, anything to do with the community. He felt the need of a constitution because it was impossible to expel any member without one. To try and get them voted out on his sole recommendation was too risky, and might split the whole system. Also, Ralph was married to his favourite daughter Mandy, and if he were to be expelled it would have to be by her connivance, which at the present rate of progress would be a long time coming.

Meanwhile, to give Ralph no inkling of his possible fate, Handley would push his quarrel with Cuthbert to the limits of civilised decency. He grinned at how the phrase fitted in with the sophisticated terms of the community. While he appeared to be savagely involved with Cuthbert he could sort out his moves to get Ralph either on to the psychiatrist’s scrap-heap or back at his mother’s tit.

But nothing was simple and straightforward, not even violence and change, because to force his fiery unpredictable daughter and her husband into the wilderness would be to destroy the community. Handley was enough of a socialist to believe in the power of the family, as well as enough of an artist to get on his knees before it now and again.

They were still drinking coffee, as if wanting to be even more awake for this particular meeting. The sky was clear outside, and Cuthbert felt drawn to lie on his back in some field and look into that flay-mouthed pit of widening mild blue. Meetings bored him — apart from the novelty of the first few minutes, after which he dwelt on how to turn his favourite obsession into a long-term policy, and pursue it to a favourable but acrimonious end.

He saw Dawley as the central pillar of the establishment, and realised that if he could get rid of him then he, Cuthbert Handley, would take control with firm but flamboyant ease. In order to deceive Dawley as to his true purpose he would engage in a deadly duel with his father, and while everyone watched this mummers’ bitter fight for the seasons of the world, Cuthbert would do what he could to destroy Dawley. Everything must be done thus, as far as Cuthbert was concerned: chased into coal and cornfield, through street or tunnel, forest of mud-swamp even if it took as long as death to get there, otherwise how could you ever reach what you wanted?

He caught Dawley looking at him, and smiled. Dawley lifted his hand to signal that he had seen. There was something about him that mystified Cuthbert, which may have been why he was so dead set on getting rid of him. Cuthbert wanted to dispense with mystery, because his soul had been poisoned by it. It had been pumped into him for years, scorching the most vulnerable part of his youth.

He had seen through it, however, and undergone all forms of repudiation, but now sensed phenomena in Dawley which disturbed him just as much. There was a depth of purpose in Dawley’s face, which recalled his original antagonism at the idea of being threatened by a mystery which had been artificially created in order to oppress and enslave the spirit of the people. Whatever troubled you in youth never vanished. It recurred, as he now found. Mystery was a threat, whether political or religious and would not let you live, nor ever allow you to consider what riches of the world were at your disposal. He knew that Dawley had to be taken seriously. Mysteries had to be thrust behind him like Satan. They took you out of yourself and so could not be ignored, otherwise their power multiplied.

Cuthbert felt some affinity with Dawley, but believed he could match him for power. He had spent years training to be a priest, while Dawley got his supposed authority from his time in the desert, which was said to have given him experience and wisdom. But this was yet to be proved, and Dawley had no pull over him, except that which forced him into the irritating position of having to think about him at all.

Dawley’s hand fell, and Cuthbert’s smile drifted. They felt friendly enough at that moment, as two people often do who are together in similar areas of thought, and imagine themselves to be alone in it.

Richard had detected their animosity, and hoped it was nothing serious. At these meetings he would find out whether any half-concealed trouble was likely to threaten the existence of the commune. Even in Lincolnshire, when the family had reigned, he had done the same, and the community didn’t feel as staid and safe as the family had in those days. The change of den meant that his father was no longer in proper control. He didn’t own the house or pay rent for it, and so felt insecure in his position — though he put in a generous amount towards running the community.

The family, as it were, had almost doubled in number, and was called a community. Its lack of organisation was attractive, yet any believer in guerrilla warfare and revolution must know — as his brother Adam said yesterday — that organisation and intelligence lie at the bedrock of any society. The easygoing almost chaotic everyday flowing along of the community denied the clear and founding principles on which they worked. They were left alone to indulge themselves in a sort of controlled disorder for as long as they liked each day, and this was its great advantage. Yet Richard was uneasy, for even in the days of Uncle John there had been enough rigidity of life to make them feel that their work and the way they lived were fundamentally connected.

But Adam also told him (they shared a room, and talked late into the night), that they must learn to look on the community as a test of adaptability — as befitted theoreticians of guerrilla warfare and addicts of the Handley way of life. They must recognise the needs of their father, who was an artist. If frequent changes of place and creed were called for by his internal motor, then they must put up with it. The artist always came before family, or community, or state — even the best of states.

Handley suffered enough: Adam and Richard acknowledged it. They had only to observe some of the pictures he occasionally let them see. Hadn’t their mother accepted this policy when she said that she liked the community because it gave Handley something to do when he wasn’t painting? They wouldn’t be so plain about this patriarchal attitude, but saw that to be more subtle might be unjust to Handley as a breadwinning artist.

Uncle John had said that they who believed in altering the social and productive forces of the earth must also honour their father and their mother. Adam tried to explain this heart-exploding paradox by seeing that John had made it because he never wanted them to go to extremes in their behaviour if ever it came to guerrilla warfare. In England, the foco of guerrilla warfare was to be the family.

Apart from military history, small-arms manuals, and strategical texts, Adam’s favourite reading was the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Because he had never been able to explain this, nor indeed wanted to, it seemed perfectly natural to him, one being a counterweight to the other. There were times, of course, when the undercurrents common to both the House of Usher and that of Handley appeared to be working in the same direction, and this he sensed, and tried to steer clear of while feeling helpless against it.

John’s Biblical exhortation to honour thy father and thy mother gave assistance in the right direction while lending an equal weight to John’s fervent lit-eyed Christ-like advocation of class warfare. Adam had always seen John as noble simply because he did not know any other word for it. He once asked him why he told them to respect their parents, and John answered: ‘Because they suffer. If a person does not suffer, he does not exist. Without suffering you lack imagination, intellect, endurance, and that persistent kindness to others which might eventually turn you into a civilised person.’

To go deeply into the maxims of Uncle John made Adam uneasy. Now and again he went up to gaze at the priceless relics of his life. He had once met Cuthbert coming down from the room, and they had passed in silence. Adam thought that perhaps he had something in common with his elder brother Cuthbert after all, which opened new feelings in him while at the same time making him wary. He also wondered why Handley had stopped them visiting John’s room, and sensed it might be because he wanted — after all — to diminish the effect of his teaching on them. The idea was so appalling that he couldn’t believe it.

Handley looked at him. Adam folded his thoughts away and smiled. Handley was about to start the meeting. They were ready to listen, and join in.