A Tree on Fire

Chapter Twenty-one

His impulse was to get out of Lincolnshire, break camp and flee like some nomad chief who feels the approach of an almighty force that will sweep him away. To lose such a painting was a disaster, the thieving of his life’s soul, a base robbery of his best work that barred a desperate groping to achieve something in life.

He walked up and down all night, in his studio and then around the house. A trip to London always brought bad luck, stirred the cauldron of fate, cut all guidelines and distorted his compass-bearings. And yet, he decided, it wasn’t the time to flee, for he slowly realised with the coming of dawn that whenever he thought about abandoning everything he was on the point of solving whatever bothered him. A revelation was at hand. Standing far down under his studio window, by the old tree which leaned so close that it was continually lopped to give more light, he looked over the fence and across the field, towards the wood where, a fortnight ago, he had seen someone sniping him with field-glasses. It was such a facile explanation to all his troubles that it must be true. He lit another cigar. London hadn’t been entirely unlucky, merely confusing. He’d been in love with her for longer than he’d imagined, but their lovemaking only emphasised the unholy fact that she felt nothing comparable for him and never could, because she still hankered after Frank Dawley who had vanished months ago into Algeria on a bout of misguided and cranky idealism. If I leave Lincolnshire where do I go, with a wife and seven children, a dog, two cars and two caravans, and a brace of au pair girls? You don’t often hear of a flat to let in London with a car-park attached. He looked up at the stars for some time, before realising there weren’t any, I’m too old for baling out. Forty-three is the pineapple age, sweet and upright. Yet maybe I’d get young again if I blew all this up. The bourgeois trap is a long one, a tunnel without end, a burrow. You went into it though, and forgot your dynamite-Nobody lured you. I’m not trying to get out. I’m leaving nobody. I’m not that sort. I’m not at the end of my tether. But I don’t have ideals to help me off the hook and as an excuse to bolt.

A long tartan dressing-gown was drawn tightly around him, each hand lost in large sleeve folds and resting on the kitchen table. He was perfectly still, and when Enid entered she thought he was sleeping in that position. But his light-brown eyes were open, gazing at empty air. Water rattled in the kettle. ‘Haven’t you slept?’

He didn’t look round. ‘Why do I only crave what I’ve lost? A man should want more out of his life than that.’

‘What else is there though, except to want what you haven’t got?’

‘I want both,’ he said, smiling faintly to reflect the ice-old bitterness. ‘What you haven’t yet got is what you lost. They’re the same thing, let’s face it. God forgive me for getting all mystical, but when I look at those fields near the coast after a day of rain in the summer, and when it’s beginning to clear up about seven, and they go all soft and distinct under the sun reddening through cloud — then I begin to want what I haven’t yet got, and realise it’s something that I lost in the days when I was half-conscious and didn’t know I had anything to lose. In those days, I was king of myself and knew exactly what I wanted, which turned out to be this. I wish it weren’t true that I had everything a person is supposed to want, that I wasn’t in a position a left-handed person would give his left arm to be in. Even though I know I’ve got such a lot more work to do, I know that my life and all I’ll damn well do is a failure. If I didn’t have this lump of cold water always in my stomach maybe I’d never do these paintings that make me feel such a failure.’

Whenever he was in this rare mood of self-questioning and self-pity she felt full of love towards him. Yet at the same time she was afraid, knowing from experience that it was inevitably followed by a terrible frenetic bust-up. ‘You’ve always known your work is good, or you wouldn’t have done it.’

He took the coffee-grinder from her, turned the handle slowly. ‘Good, bad, what difference does it make? It doesn’t rip the despair out of my guts.’

‘You’re a successful artist,’ she said, knowing that he sometimes liked to hear her say this.

‘There’s no such thing. You can be a successful shopkeeper or football player or film-maker or critic, but you can never be a successful artist. As soon as you succeed you fail.’

She made the coffee, ran a skin of butter over some bread. He wolfed it, famished after no sleep. ‘Something must have got under your skin in London,’ she said.

‘I bumped into Russell Jones.’

‘So that was it. I wondered how you’d hurt your hand. You were stupid enough to hit him!’

‘Even my own wife doesn’t know how noble I am, so I’m bound to cut my throat one day. I was going to hit him, it’s true. But I resisted, hit the wall instead. There are some people you just can’t crack open. He was terrified, the little worm, and that was enough for me. I just wanted to see whether he was human after all. There’s a successful man for you. They get terrified at the wrong things.’

‘And you’re so nervous you won’t even call the police to find out who stole your picture.’

‘I’ll get it back without that.’

She knew it was something worse than losing a picture, which would bring out his rage, but not this hopeless despair. ‘Did you see this Myra, in London?’

‘Frank Dawley’s woman? I bumped into her at a party, had dinner with her and Greensleaves the night before last. I asked her to come back here and stay with us for a few days but she wouldn’t.’

‘A pity. We could do with a bit of company. I get fed up, seeing nobody week after week. We don’t even have to make ends meet any more. That at least took my mind off it.’

‘If we don’t get that picture back we might have to struggle again soon enough. I have a pretty good idea who did the job, but I’m not saying yet.’

The au pair girls shuffled in, sluttish and dreamily beautiful, sat down and waited for Enid to serve them coffee. He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had a letter last week from somebody who asked me what was wrong with the world, so I wrote back and said what do you think I am, a writer? If I could tell them that I wouldn’t be painting. And if I knew what was wrong with the world I’d know what was wrong with myself, and if I knew that I’d know how to put both right.’ He had that look of a short-sighted man whenever he sat at the table trying to clarify his thoughts. At the moment they eluded him, not because he wasn’t capable of clarity but because he was tired. Clarity only came as inspiration, unasked and unexpected, as a pleasure when it fitted into a scheme and enabled him to build some huge edifice beamed through with its light.

The girls went upstairs and plugged in the vacuum-cleaners, motor-noise whirring and shaking through the house. Mandy came in wearing her dressing-gown, sleepy and petulant, which made her face chubbier and pale as wax. She sat at the table as if never intending to leave it. ‘It’s about time you were down,’ Handley said.

‘Do you expect me to stay in bed when those vacuum-cleaners are going like pneumatic drills outside my door? You only got that sort out of pure bloody spite.’

‘Your eyes will look like three-coloured chrysanthemums if you talk to me like that,’ he said, bending close. ‘There are only two things that will get you from that stinking bed of a morning. One’s noise, and the other’s hunger. You could live off your puppy-fat for a week, so noise is the only hope. You wouldn’t think so though to see the fat little chuff scoffing away.’

‘What can you expect?’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Handley looked horrified, while Enid stayed calmly at the sink. When crisis or bad news broke, his feeling and expression matched perfectly, which was the one time he could guarantee that it would. ‘Again?’ he said. ‘I hope you aren’t playing any more tricks.’

‘It’s only the second time,’ she said. ‘And I’m nineteen, anyway.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Nineteen. It’s not the modern generation that’s at fault. They can’t be that bad. It’s just my daughter. I suppose it was that picture-stealing vampire called Ralph again?’

‘It wasn’t his the first time.’

‘I’m reeling,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me any more. You said you wanted to marry that apostle of spineless determination, remember, last year?’ He looked into the impenetrability of her pretty face. ‘Who the hell was it, then, eh? Tell me that. Oh, what the hell do I want to know for? It doesn’t matter.’

She stood up and brushed her wide-flounced housecoat by him, head in the air, which in any case came to below his chin, and walked up to the sink to empty her coffee slops before refilling the cup. ‘I don’t suppose it does interest you. But if you want to know who it was the first time, it was that friend you brought here early last year, when there was deep snow everywhere.’

Uncle John walked in, shaved and fully dressed, wearing his best dark suit with small golden links showing below the cuffs. Handley greeted him: ‘I’m glad there’s one good soul in the house who isn’t hellbent on doing me evil.’

‘You exaggerate, Albert. But it’s a pity we have to wait for the millennium to arrive before we learn to live amicably together. Isn’t it, Mandy?’ Enid plugged open a tin of fruit-juice and set it before him with a dish of cornflakes and a jug of cream. She then turned to the stove to fry egg and sausages, because he was the only one in the house who wanted the full gamut of breakfast — after his prison camp experiences. ‘Why don’t you tell him Mandy?’ John said. ‘He burst into my room first — looking for the toilet. I scared him away at gun-point. Then I suspect he found it, and as I came out to see what was happening in the hall, you were talking to him — and pulled him into your room, where he stayed about ten minutes. That, I suppose, was enough.’ He spooned up his cornflakes. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘You’re the only person I can stand in this house, Uncle John, but you see too much,’ she said, disgruntled at not being able to tell her own story.

Albert sat as if sand were being poured down his back. ‘Frank Dawley?’

‘I didn’t even know his name. He left me three pounds ten.’

‘You’re lying,’ he said, a weird smile, hands shaking.

She stood up, afraid of him. ‘I wasn’t pregnant then, but I was when he left. Poor Ralph got the blame.’

‘It couldn’t have been Frank,’ he said.

‘Albert!’ Enid shouted, the loaded frying-pan half towards the table. ‘Sit down. Don’t touch her.’ With her free hand she brought a heavy crash against Mandy’s cheek. ‘Get out, you.’

‘My best friend!’ Handley moaned. ‘My best bloody friend does such a thing!’

‘At that time,’ Enid said, ‘he was only a stray boozing companion you’d picked up.’

‘I saw him,’ Mandy sobbed, ‘and knew he was a man. I’ll never forget him. Why did he have to go off like that and never want to see me again?’ John ate his eggs and sausages in amiable silence with himself, as if in a transport cafe with a wild fight going on. But he absorbed each painful word stinging his heart, the tears bleeding into him.

Mandy sobbed in agony, and Handley stood up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? If you don’t speak, how do we know. I wouldn’t have talked you into having an abortion if I’d known it was Frank’s. I’d have got hold of the bastard, made him get a divorce, and you’d have been married by now with another kid on the way.’ The idea almost cheered him up. Life wasn’t a series of ups and downs: with this family it was a roller-coaster that never stopped.

Richard came in, black hair uncombed, shirt and trousers thrown on. ‘If only it would rain. At least then there’d be some noise outside the house as well.’

‘Don’t you start,’ Handley said. ‘I’m beginning to feel ringed. Do you or Adam know anything about that picture that was stolen from my studio the night before last?’ No one did. Albert stood, his face pale and packed tight with ancestral rage: ‘There’ll be a bleeding holocaust in this family if you don’t all set to and find it. I keep you in luxury and bone idleness month after month — which is fair enough I suppose because you’re my family, the family, the sacred bloody Christian Western civilised family that rots the foundations of any free and human spirit — so the least you can do is rally round when somebody like me who is an artist and as it so happens the breadwinner is attacked, and do something about it. Get your curved pipe, Richard, put on your deerstalker and take out Eric Bloodaxe. John will lend you his magnifying glass. Comb the county till you find it.’

Richard chewed at a roll and butter. ‘Talk sense, father. Adam and I were up half the night printing leaflets about American intervention in Vietnam. Last month’s batch were handed out around Scunthorpe steelworks, and at the Raleigh in Nottingham. Next week we do Birmingham and Leicester. That’s more important than finding your painting.’

John had come to marmalade and toast: ‘I know who it was, Albert.’

‘So do I, John. Let’s see if we tally.’

‘I saw that young man Ralph in the house the night before last, at four-thirty in the morning. I was at the radio getting news from Algeria. The FLN attacked a French base in the south.’

‘How did they go on?’

‘It failed. A shambles. The French are pursuing the guerrillas, as well as mopping up at another place. Then I went across to the bathroom and saw him.’

‘So it failed,’ Handley said, sweating. ‘Poor old Frank. He must have been in on it. Why didn’t you call Richard and Adam and have the young bastard thrown out? He’s the one I suspected.’

John wiped his hands on the napkin. ‘I thought he was staying with Mandy. I didn’t want to break up something ineffably tender.’

‘You needn’t have bothered,’ Mandy said. ‘I sometimes think you’re just a dirty old man, Uncle John. I slept as pure as driven snow. You must believe me, father.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Richard, get the text together about French tortures in Algeria. Call it: The Rights of Man: This Wicked Oppression Must Stop Now. Have a French version done as well so that we can send some to Paris. They’re cracking up, so we can help them on a bit.’

‘What about a letter to the press, signed by you?’

‘You know I never do that. If I dabbled in politics, they’d say I was forgetting my place, and that would upset them. They’d never take me seriously again. Let’s be realistic, and anonymous — for the time being. John, keep on to Algeria for me, will you?’

He took out a cigarette, and Albert flashed a lighter under it. ‘I’ve broken their codes. They’re pounding the guerrillas, but they’re worried, because there’s still plenty of trouble in the north, which they want to give the appearance of holding in check because of the talks going on.’

‘Get me a report on it, then. Adam will find you the maps. There are quite a few of us interested in Frank Dawley’s fate, not to mention the lives of those brave Algerians fighting for their freedom. Things are getting too complex for me. Oh, for the simple days that never existed. Richard, tell Adam to sort out his burglar’s tools, because he’s going on a little job. Mandy can draw us a plan of the house, because I’m sure she’s been to Ralph’s bedroom often enough.’

Mandy fetched the morning paper, and locked herself behind it. ‘I’m finished with him,’ she said, ‘if he’s got that painting.’

‘I wish you’d all come down for breakfast together,’ Enid said, as Adam walked in.

‘Sorry, Mother. I only want a cup of tea.’

‘We made coffee.’

‘Coffee, then.’ He dropped a pile of letters: ‘Post, Father.’

Bills, printed matter, income-tax demands, begging letters, a copy of Elgar’s Enigma Variations from an admirer, and a letter with a Boston postmark, which he opened at once. He’d been hoping for one from Myra, to say she’d decided to come after all, or that she wanted to see him again in London, or that she was in trouble — any word and he would have abandoned everything and gone to her. What moral obligation had he now not to betray Frank when he had made his own daughter pregnant and caused so much trouble? And yet, and yet, one should go to Algeria and save him if he weren’t dead already and the sun hadn’t dried up his brain and blood. How tragic and exciting life becomes when it loses its blind simplicity at last!

He stood up and glared at the shivering paper. To be angry while seated was ignominious. On your feet it was more dignified, did not allow your raging twisted anger to lock itself like a piranha in your bent torso.

‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘“If you give me your daughter’s hand in marriage I will send it back safe and sound. But if you make one squeak about it to anyone beyond your family, I will cut it into little strips, and then into little squares, and mix it up with …”’ He couldn’t finish, threw it to Richard who read it to the end.

For the first time that morning, probably for years, there was awe and silence at the breakfast-table. ‘You see the sort of people I have to deal with?’

‘It’s all Frank Dawley’s fault,’ Mandy said, letting her newspaper fall. ‘I’d never have taken up with Ralph if …’

Albert turned on her. ‘Don’t be so bloody cracked. Let’s not try finding people to blame. It’s too late for that. What I want is to get the painting, and see that Ralph lying face down in a brook with the back of his head blown off. Not that I’m vindictive, but I just don’t think he should be allowed to live, the great big corpse-faced loon, frightening the life out of me with such a letter. He even signs it. I could get him put inside for ten years. I’ll teach him to steal art treasures. What are you blubbering about again?’

‘You heard,’ Mandy said. ‘I said I was pregnant. And whose baby do you think it is? Now you want to get him ten years in gaol. Don’t you ever think of anybody but yourself? I’ve yet to meet somebody in this world who doesn’t. I know that much. I could starve or wither for all you care.’ Uncle John, a flicker in his left eyelid, sat with hands pressed together on the table, as if fixing them into position before bringing them to pray.

The sea roared in Handley’s head, waves flowing by a lighthouse flashing at the approach to some great empty ocean he dreaded drowning in. ‘I want to take action,’ he said from narrow tormented lips, ‘but there’s always something to hem me in. That child can rot in your womb, but I’ll get my picture back.’ John, unable to bear any more, walked from the room saying he preferred to listen out for Algeria.

‘Don’t say anything you’ll regret, Albert,’ Enid said, laying the tea-towel back on its rail.

‘Regret? Is it possible to open my trap and not say something that you lot wouldn’t like to cut my tongue out for?’ He rushed to Mandy and put his arms around her. ‘Mandy, my love, don’t cry. I’m sentimental; I can’t stand anybody crying. He won’t get ten years, I’ll see to that. Adam will sharpen his burglar’s kit, and we’ll get it back without any trouble, I promise. Don’t cry. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.’

Enid passed her a Kleenex, and more coffee. Mandy sat down at the table: ‘It’s not that. It’s just that all the men I get in with do such stupid things. It’s my own fault really.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ Handley said. ‘But don’t let’s have any guilt. We’ve got enough trouble without that. Thank God we’re not Christians. All I want is to get that painting. I was working well, but it’s put a full-stop on me. I shan’t do another for months.’

‘I’ll get it back,’ said Mandy, ‘all on my own. I’m the only one who can.’

‘No fear. He’d chop you up as well. He’s a homicidal suicidal maniac. He’s too pale for me. I never did trust pale people.’

‘He doesn’t sleep enough,’ Mandy said, ‘that’s all. But I’ll bring it back, I promise.’

‘I’m sure she will,’ Enid said. ‘Then we can forget about it and get back to normal life.’

Handley wondered whether this was a threat or a promise, but he agreed. ‘All right. And if you do it, I’ll buy you that new Mini you’ve been wanting. But you’d better work on it straightaway, otherwise me, Adam, Richard and Uncle John will go and pay him a visit, and if we do we’ll leave his old man’s farm a smoking ruin. If he thinks he’s going to commit the crime of the century and get away with it he’s mistaken.’

‘I wish I didn’t come from parents who were working-class,’ Mandy said. ‘What’s the point of being so violent?’

Handley, calmer now, lit his after-breakfast cigar. ‘If you came from any other class he’d be inside already. I’m treating him like a human being. I’ll just punch him up.’

Richard and Adam went off to their various subversive tasks. Mandy grabbed his hand to kiss it, and he dragged it away: ‘What the hell are you trying to do?’

‘You’re our lord and master, aren’t you?’

‘I’ll kick your arse,’ he said. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

‘Suicide,’ she laughed, and went upstairs to dress.

‘If there’s anybody in this family who’s likely to drive me off my head,’ he raved, ‘it’s that fat little trollop. I’d walk out if I thought it would do any harm, but I know it won’t, so I might as well stay.’

‘If I hear another word out of your mouth today,’ Enid said, ‘I’ll be the one to go. Get up to your studio and give us a rest. If one of your paintings had been stolen a couple of years ago when you were raffling them off at a shilling a ticket — couldn’t even give them away in fact — you wouldn’t have bothered about it.’

Chapter Twenty-two

The summer woods were thick and green, odours of broken elderberry stalks and a rabbit spinning across the clearing when he stood still a few minutes. He could tolerate the day only when he walked in the woods, abandoned the heavy sun and thunderous air, and whirled his stick through a bank of mildewed bluebells. Such cool shade was invigorating after sleepless days and nights. He’d left the house quite early, loth to be there when Handley’s black Rambler purred through yesterday’s mud and his family ranged forth to recover the painting and do him injury in the process. Handley was nothing if not impetuous. All the complexities that might make him stop and ponder went into his paintings, and such a man could not have it both ways. On the other hand he was dangerous when you did something to make him think he could, and that force and subtlety would combine to make a whole man of him.

He sat on a fallen tree-trunk and lit his pipe, agreeably at peace with the world whenever he could stop thinking. Usually this wasn’t necessary, but the hole he had cut in the middle of Handley’s painting blew an even larger hole in his tranquillity. He was a surgeon, a murderer and a vandal. The trouble about such decisive action was that it made him question himself, and therefore settled nothing. His mother this morning had nagged him about Mandy, and forbidden him to see her, a promise that seemed unreal except to make him realise how much he was in absolute conflict with his parents, and would therefore end up doing all they wanted him to do. They would wait, and give him everything he craved or even mentioned, which was the modern technique of parents who, far from being modern, wanted an even more traditional response from an only child. Parents lived a long time, and they could wait, wait till you were thirty, forty, fifty, or even dead, and only come to crisis-point in such patience if for some reason you were sent to prison. By making no positive decision they bred in their children equal disabilities and so ruined them for life. From prison they might disown you, and set you free, though there was always a chance that they’d forgive you, in which case you might as well hang yourself, for you’d lost, and forever. One could always go away, but then there’d be no anguish of the just, and all in life would lose its value. He’d tried it, discovered that being their son it was impossible to exist without this problem, and that they’d got him until they chose to let go — when he had his own children in a similar grip.

Pipe-smoke cleared the gnats away, but made him cough. By the time you ask yourself what you want out of life, you know already. He needed a house, land, income, book-lined idleness, and love for the rest of his days, to achieve which he would scheme against friends and enemies, and shatter his dream of peace and idleness to such an extent that he’d be sick at the advent of it.

Wind ruffled the treetops. Summer in England was his favourite season, and he wanted a continuation of it for ever and ever, short nights and long variable days. A twig cracked, and two arms closed around his neck. He cried out and jerked free, pipe spilled in the bracken.

‘Does my love frighten you so much?’ Mandy said. ‘It’s not going to kill you.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘Your father pointed this way. I went in ever decreasing circles till I — got you.’

He found his pipe, and smiled. ‘I love you. I’m sorry I jumped.’

‘It’s understandable,’ she said. ‘I love you too. I really do.’ They stood a few feet away, looking at different parts of the wood, he the centre, she towards the edge.

‘How are things at home?’

‘Wild,’ she answered. ‘If I don’t get out of that zoo soon I’ll have cubs.’

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘This wood belongs to my father. If I’d known you were coming I’d have brought some armchairs out, and a cocktail cabinet. What’s the matter then?’

‘The old man’s as sick as a dog. He lost a painting and blames it on poor Uncle John. As if he’d steal anything. He really is losing his grip.’

He was amused at this unexpected suspicion. ‘Did he get my letter?’

‘Look,’ she said after a silence, ‘if you’ve been writing stupid letters again asking for my hand in marriage I’ll do my nut. You know how crazy the last one drove him. It may be your little kick, but he doesn’t dig that sort of stuff. It’s county crap. If you want to marry me we can do it any time you like, and you know it.’

They sat by the tree. ‘True,’ he said. ‘But I have my mother to deal with first. If only we could be born without families.’

‘We’d starve to death,’ she said. ‘Where’s the painting?’

‘In my room.’

‘Let’s get it.’ She took his arm, twigs and bushes pressing her. ‘I know why you did it, but we must get Uncle John out of trouble.’

If Handley didn’t suspect and hadn’t received his letter (maybe that vicious bulldog gobbled it up), then there was little point in keeping it. And if, as Mandy said, he wouldn’t object to them getting married there was even less reason — except for the gaping hole in the middle.

‘I knew it was you,’ she said. ‘But there are times when Dad’s brain doesn’t work fast enough. He hasn’t cottoned on yet. He’s moaning in bed, covered in hot-water bottles and waiting for the doctor. Thinks he caught flu in London.’

Ralph’s father, a tall amiable man wearing an old jacket and a limp felt hat, was shovelling pigshit into a dumper truck. Mandy smiled and greeted him. ‘I can’t shake hands, my dear. If you both want a job you can help me clean this up.’

The humid heavy air drove the stench up her nostrils. ‘Perhaps one day,’ she said. ‘Ralph borrowed my father’s latest painting and I’ve come for it back. He’s getting an exhibition ready for the autumn, otherwise he wouldn’t bother.’

‘I’ll help you later,’ Ralph said sheepishly, no intention of doing so. His father knew it also, and smiled sadly. Spilsby was a humanist, a man who believes one gets wise with age, and that everyone else did also. He was often disappointed in this respect, but never admitted it, otherwise he would not have been a humanist. ‘Mother’s in town,’ he said. ‘Gone to get those curtains.’

‘Mandy and I love each other, father. We want to get married.’

He leaned his spade against the barn. ‘Want to? What a way to treat a girl! Speak like a man, Ralph, and say that you must!’

Mandy smiled, huddled close. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘So, you’d like to get married,’ he muttered. ‘We must have a drink.’ They walked into a parlour furnished with antique chairs and tables and a richly embroidered sofa, but with excruciatingly garish lampshades hanging from wall-brackets. Spilsby poured three glasses of brandy, and hoped they’d be happy. Mandy’s throat drew hers in with one graceful slide. Then she kissed Ralph modestly on the cheek, and shook hands with his father. Ralph shifted from one foot to the other, as if his unpredictable courage had tricked him into a situation he was now rather afraid of. ‘I imagine you’ll both be well looked after,’ Spilsby said. ‘We’ll have to have a long talk with your parents, Mandy, before anything can be settled.’

‘It is settled,’ she said, pouring a second glass of brandy and drinking it down. ‘I’m in the family way,’ she said, helping herself to a third, fulfilling her simple and effective philosophy of: If you want it, take it.

Spilsby put the bottle back in the cupboard. ‘Of course it is, my dear. But there are always details. Did I hear you say you were pregnant?’

‘You did, really.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Aren’t I, Ralph?’

‘Really?’ asked Ralph. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, really. Really really.’

‘Really?’ said Spilsby.

Ralph was reeling, his face white. It was the first time he’d heard about it, thinking at first it was one of her flippant jokes. ‘Well, yes,’ he said to his father, not knowing whether he ought to stand by her like a man, or back up her stupid joke.

‘Perhaps you’d better wait until your mother comes back before we talk about your engagement.’

Mandy saw him turning nasty if they stayed ten more minutes. ‘I want that painting for my father,’ she said. ‘He’s got the gallery man coming at twelve from London. I’d love to meet your wife, Mr Spilsby. Maybe I’ll call tomorrow.’

They went up to Ralph’s room. He’d been dreading this, though no one could say he lived by dread alone, which may have explained his continual jaundice and the liverish twitch that sometimes controlled his mouth. She went unsteadily to his bed, and lay on it, head resting on the spreadout palm of her hand, hair draped like a waterfall over the pillow: ‘Aren’t you going to get me a drink?’

He stood far off, to keep her tempting beauty in full view, and yet stay safe from it. ‘You’ve had three already. Are you really pregnant?’

‘Don’t start that again.’

‘Are you?’ he shouted, fists clenched. ‘Are you?’

‘I might be,’ she smiled. ‘I’m very late. I’ll fall down those stairs if I don’t have some black coffee. I suppose he sits up half the night making that brandy in the barn. He’ll break the last of his three-star bottles one day and nobody’ll be fooled anymore. It got me drunk too quickly to be any good. It’s ratbane and acid. I’ll get the customs and excise on to him. It got me right at the back of the head, here. Something’s inside, eating me away. Right here. Feel it?’

‘I get that,’ he said, a hand on her neck. ‘Is it like a lot of ants crawling about?’

‘That’s it. You are sensitive, after all. I suppose that’s your idea of sympathy. If somebody told you he had cancer you’d say you had it as well, then expect him to feel better by feeling sorry for you.’ She pointed to a huge roll standing in the opposite corner. ‘Is that the painting?’

‘Are you pregnant, or aren’t you?’

‘Of course I am,’ she cried, ‘till my period starts. What does it matter anyway? We’re engaged, aren’t we? I hope you don’t expect me to get that great canvas on a bus. They’ll have to tie it on top.’

‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be able to stay for lunch or anything.’

With such a weight on his shoulder he seemed relaxed to her, more fitted for life than she had ever seen him. He was unaware of raindrops falling between the house and Land-Rover. ‘When we’re married,’ she said, ‘maybe we should go to Canada.’

He slid the logroll of the painting in. ‘Why Canada?’

‘You might like it there.’

‘A good place to bring up children,’ he said, searching for his key. He backed out, to find his way blocked in the yard by his mother’s powder-blue Morris Traveller.

Mrs Spilsby unfolded from the door of her car. Her husband rushed over from his work. ‘We have a visitor, dear.’

‘Ralph,’ she cried, ‘where are you going?’

‘To take Mandy home.’

She came around for a better view. ‘Who?’

‘Mandy,’ Mandy said, her large eyes staring. Wind flipped raindrops across her face.

‘What are you taking from the house? There, in the car?’ She was almost Ralph’s height, her hair broken in its rolled shape by a brown hat. She pulled off her gloves as if about to drag the canvas out into the yard. She was short-sighted, but didn’t wear glasses even when driving. ‘Is it a carpet?’

‘Won’t anybody tell me who she is?’ Mandy said.

Spilsby was red-faced. ‘It’s my wife.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Mandy said, offering her hand.

She ignored it. ‘Take that carpet back.’

‘It’s a painting of my father’s. Ralph borrowed it one dark night from his studio.’

‘This is my carpet, and you’re stealing it. You belong to a notorious and thieving family.’

‘Mandy and I are engaged to be married,’ Ralph told her.

‘Leave that canvas alone. Your son stole it, not me.’

‘Engaged?’

‘I’m afraid it seems like it,’ her husband said.

Mandy held the door-handle of the Land-Rover, wanting to get away as soon as possible. ‘You’d better be careful if you’re going to be my mother-in-law. I’ll be the one that’s marrying into thieves, and it’s lucky your son wasn’t put away for five years for nicking that painting. My father sent me to get it back, instead of the police. Or my brothers would have come with guns. There’s no messing around in our family.’

Mrs Spilsby let go of the painting: ‘You’re a vicious little liar.’

‘It’s not true,’ Spilsby said. ‘It can’t be.’

‘We love each other,’ Mandy said, tears of rage in her eyes. ‘And nobody’ll stop us getting married.’

Ralph’s peculiar misery made him smile ‘Come on, Mandy.’

‘I’ll get the authorities on to this,’ his mother shouted.

‘Who the hell are they?’ Mandy wanted to know. ‘You’ll get the ground ripped from under you.’

‘You’re a disgraceful little baggage,’ she cried. ‘I’ve heard all about you. You’ll never marry my son.’

‘I won’t, if you’re not careful. You’re a nasty-tempered, dirty-minded, interfering old bag. And I’m not going to put up with it.’

Mrs Spilsby rushed towards her with uplifted hand: ‘I’ll thrash you, I’ll …’

Her husband held her. ‘She’s pregnant,’ Ralph said.

She swung round. ‘What? Oh my God!’

Mandy took the starting-handle from the Land-Rover and held it high with both hands: ‘Don’t let that stop you. Come on, try and thrash me, you domineering bitch. Your sort can’t frighten me. I’ll flatten you.’

Ralph pushed her into the car, got in the other side and sped out of the gate. ‘I’ll have him put away,’ his mother was shouting, and Spilsby’s condolences were scraped by engine-noise.

They drove in silence, until Mandy laughed. ‘Whether you marry me or not,’ she said, lighting a cigarette, ‘you’d better get away from her.’ A lane turned towards green hills, sun and rain mixing on the high crestline. ‘You’re twenty-five,’ she said. ‘How much longer will you put up with it?’

‘I’ll get away,’ he said, ‘when I’m ready. If your father says so we can be married in a fortnight.’

‘He’ll say yes. I would have killed her.’

‘It’s a good job you didn’t. It’s weird though. I’ve never felt like the son of my parents. Either they were born burned-out or I was.’

‘I expect you all were,’ she said. ‘Still, most other people are.’

He drove up the mud lane to Handley’s house. Binoculars were trained on the car when it entered the village. It disappeared under the tunnel of leafy trees, then came out at the turning, spitting mud and twigs from its tyres. Handley, dressed now, pale and tight-lipped, went down to greet them.

‘I’ll carry it into the hall,’ Ralph said, his heart on fire. ‘But first I’ll turn the car round.’

Mandy selected a dry patch of ground and climbed out: ‘Don’t be afraid. He’ll welcome you with open arms to get his painting back.’ And she would have her heart’s desire of a new red Mini, and Ralph after all had unknowingly set off the action which led to it.

‘I have to see someone in Boston,’ he said, ankle-deep in cold mud, ‘otherwise I’d stay.’

Handley stood at the door. ‘If you drop it you’re a dead man.’ Eric Bloodaxe licked Ralph’s hand, which so enraged Albert that he came from the doorway and kicked him between the jaws, sending him back into the kennel without a growl of protest.

They trod silently upstairs to the studio. He remembered Mandy saying Handley was prostrate and ill, but he seemed all right at the moment, albeit silent and grumpy.

‘Let’s open it,’ Albert said when they were inside, ‘and see those pretty games of noughts-and-crosses you’ve been playing.’

Ralph turned to run, but Handley’s scissor legs reached the studio door and slammed it shut. He spun the key in the lock: ‘Let’s be grown up, shall we? I want to see how vicious respectable people can behave. Unroll it.’

Ralph opened a heavy penknife. ‘Put that back in your pocket,’ Handley said. ‘I don’t want any last minute suicide sabotage. Undo them with your fingers.’ They watched. If it weren’t perfect Mandy saw her beautiful spruce car sinking into the quicksands. While knots and string were being undone, Handley lit a cigar and poured out a brandy. He was going to give Ralph one, but drew the bottle back until he saw the painting.

It seemed in perfect condition. Globes of sweat stood on Ralph’s face and his hands trembled. Mandy gasped when the painting lay flat. A hole had been cut neatly in the centre, meticulously measured, as if Ralph had wanted to contribute something to the total effect, a few inches in diameter, small compared to the whole area, but a hole nevertheless, through which all other details of the colourful and complex design seemed intent on flowing. If looked at long enough it hypnotised and psychically unsettled one, and appeared as if all the intricacies of Albert’s art had been born through it.

Something stopped him flying at Ralph across his sea of creation. They pored over it like ghosts, midday lights on, Handley noting the few threads of canvas sticking out loosely from the generally neat edges of the perfect circle. He had violated his painting, gouged out its eye with diabolical patience and delight.

‘So you think you’ve done for me?’ he said, with a faint smile.

Ralph stood up to his full height, a man who always used his courage at the wrong time. ‘No, I don’t. But you deserved it. What else could I do to make you feel ashamed of the way you treated Mandy last year?’

‘What’s he talking about?’ Handley said.

‘I don’t know,’ Mandy wept, her red Mini vanishing. ‘What did you do it for? How stupid can you get? What’s the point of it?’

He was stunned by sudden regret, wary at the sight of Handley who didn’t seem as upset as he ought to be.

‘You want my daughter’s hand in marriage, do you? Is that it? And you want a new Mini, do you? Well, you can have her for your wife with a bullet-hole right through her. And you can have a new car with a grenade-hole through it. Get out of my sight, both of you. Don’t let me see you again.’

Ralph unlocked the door and went down the stairs.

‘I’m not budging,’ Mandy cried, ‘unless I get that car.’

‘Aren’t you? Do you want to go flying out of that skylight window like batman there?’

‘I got the painting back. Now I want that car.’

He took out his wallet, and wrote a cheque for three hundred pounds.

‘It costs six hundred,’ she grumbled.

‘You think I’m buying it cash?’ he said. ‘Get it on the never-never, then we’ll never pay for it. Now get out.’

She kissed him. He called her back. ‘Tell your mam I’ve got the painting, and that it’s all right. And be careful on the roads.’

The sun went and came in again between pale blue water clouds. Fresh air hit him from an open window that he couldn’t yet lock after Ralph’s little job. He’d get Mandy to hem the painting round the hole. Maybe a patch would be possible. The green man of the tree shook its leaves and rustled. He couldn’t imagine leaving Lincolnshire, but lack of imagination was the state in which he committed his most decisive actions. The new record caught his eye, and he put it on the gramophone thinking it might relax him before going down for dinner.

Elgar’s Nimrod music was so sweet that he loathed it, yet listened to its long mellow pre-womb Edwardian English dirge as if playing before an impassable wall that the spirit of the music was too gutless to climb and cross, weaving out the soothing sounds of glorious resignation, the peculiar self-satisfied English pipe-smoking resignation that engenders viciousness and sadism if it goes on too long. It showed him the corrupt rotten soul of the English played out of a burning stillborn heart. He understood its suffering: such music lacked the messianic human love of great work, locked as it was on an island where no armies have moved or revolutions swayed for hundreds of years and where liberty has no meaning any more. Elgar had his hands in its entrails all right, writing music while his country rotted — not the Enigma Variations, but the Enema Variations, more like it.

He lifted the needle and slid the record back into its case, thinking he might give it to Ralph as a wedding-present. He reset the painting against the wall, flush on the biggest easel. Cancer is the sum of their unrealised ideals, the festering nation that hasn’t got rid of its king or queen recently. He stood back and surveyed the hole, the eye, the magic eye, the third eye and only eye, not my left or my right but my middle and best, straight from Tibet by P & O packet-boat. I’ll hem it round and paint it blue, and leave it like that, Albert Handley’s third eye looking out on this world of yours, with no one looking in on mine.

Chapter Twenty-three

She pulled up tufts of grass that grew from the borders of the path, and where she had worked already was clearly defined, but beyond, where she had not, only a thin uneven trail led between two apple-trees to the back fence. It was slow work, without purpose if there were more important things to do — which there were not. What had frightened her into sending Handley away? Was it fear of being deflected from her course of waiting for Frank to come back? From that sort of war she might wait ten years, then discover he’d died at the beginning. Or she might know nothing at all. Nevertheless, she could wait. She was fond of Handley, and to say she had sent him off out of fear was merely a way of gratuitously attacking her resolution, so she changed her reason to one of self-preservation in order to be more truthful and feel better.

After lunch she put Mark in his carrycot and wedged it in the back of the car. He was a fat pale baby, anything but placid, and objected to the movement and noise. Her father, seventy-five years old, was ill with a stomach-ache that wouldn’t leave him, and on warm days he lay in the garden on a special bedchair reading the Jewish Chronicle and shouting in rich Yiddish at the black torn from next door who stalked across his lawn after the birds.

Mark roared, but she couldn’t turn to him, being on the outside lane of the motorway and overtaking a line of cars at seventy miles an hour. The right-hand blinker flashed as she raced along in her new MG. A car from the middle lane suddenly set itself to swing out in front of her. She pressed the horn, and braked sharply. A ripple went through all lanes of traffic, and the ash of panic filled her mouth as she thought of Mark behind. She skidded, but stayed in control, and the car that had tried to join her lane slid back, allowing her to accelerate and roar by. Mark was no longer crying, mollified by the common danger. The only answer to English traffic, she thought, was to get a bigger car, which was safer because it tended to frighten the souped-up souls in their fast sardine-tins. The driver had been a young girl in a red Mini, now on the outer lane but a quarter of a mile behind.

Her mother came to the car and picked up Mark even before saying hello to her daughter. Myra smiled. Anyone over twelve was valueless to her mother, had to be looked after and deferred to perhaps, but lacked that spark of life in their eyes to say that they were still growing. ‘How’s father?’ Myra asked, struggling to get out the empty cot.

‘He’s asleep right now,’ she said. ‘What a lovely baby. He’s like you, you know. I suppose he gets his blue eyes from your grandfather, because George’s eyes were brown, weren’t they?’

She took off her coat in the hall, and Mark was already in the kitchen and propped in a high chair kept specially for him. The house smelled of the same floor-polish and mothballs, carpet-cleaner and paint, and places where dust wanted to settle but had never been allowed, as when she was a young girl rushing in from school to get out of the hat and uniform she loathed before going to meet friends.

The baby, whatever her own feelings, loved his grandmother, and never came so much alive as when he was at her house. To her, he was George’s child, and she only knew of Frank Dawley through vague stories from Pam, much of it speculation because Pam didn’t know much either, Myra thought, pleased at how secretive she’d been. Mrs Zimmerman made a bowl of cereal and mashed a banana in it. ‘He won’t be hungry,’ Myra said. ‘It isn’t his feeding time yet.’

‘Of course he’s hungry. Look how fat and beautiful he is. They’re always hungry at his age. Don’t think I don’t know. I’ve had three of my own, so I should. And I looked after Pam’s four when Harry left her and she went to get him back.’

‘That was rather shameless of her,’ said Myra. ‘I always thought she’d had more pride.’

‘He came back, didn’t he?’

‘And look how ecstatically happy they are.’

‘That’s not the point. The children are better for it. Your father and I were wondering the other day when you are going to get married again. It would make us very happy, you know, especially if you found someone who understood you a bit better. I know you weren’t very happy with George, but we never said anything.’

‘That’s true, you didn’t, though I don’t know what you could have said that wouldn’t have made it worse. But I’ve no intention of rearranging my life just yet.’

‘I know you went to Morocco with another man just after George died, but since you parted from each other perhaps you ought to get someone else, if only for the baby’s sake.’

‘Get someone?’ she smiled, hardly covering her irritation. ‘We don’t live in a slave supermarket.’ Yet it was no use being angry. Their two worlds simply could not meet. Mark, with wide smiles and an arm waving, devoured each spoon of food before him. He was happy, relaxed and lively here, whereas it had the opposite effect on her. If she fed him at this time he could have rejected it, but here, with the inane cuckooing ministrations of her mother, he puffed and blowed and gulped endearingly. ‘Thank goodness you have such a good child,’ she said. ‘And such fair hair. Go on, darling, eat, eat! You melt the ice in your grandmother’s heart. None of Pam’s were like him. He’s so knowing. He knows me, don’t you? And what about grandfather, then? You see, he’s looking for him. He is. You see it? Only seven months old. Eat. Go on, eat! Of course he’ll eat it all up, won’t you? No, he’s certainly not like any of Pam’s. They were never like this at his age.’ A baby in front of her, no matter what its faults, was better in every way than any other far-off baby no matter what its virtues. ‘And to think you waited so long before having one. You should get married again and have a few more. You can’t think how much pleasure that would give, and not only to me and your father. You make such a good mother. Look how marvellous he is!’

She was beginning to stifle. It was midsummer, and the central heating seemed to be full on. She didn’t feel she made such an ideal mother. Practical, conscientious, loving perhaps, but did that make you a real parent? There was no need to shape a career out of it, though she often felt that Mark might benefit by having a man around, and only time and her own passions could take care of that.

‘Do you have any news of George’s book?’ her mother asked, taking a huge cake out of the cupboard, a sight that sent a stab of indigestion to Myra’s heart, though she would enjoy eating it when offered a piece.

‘It’s being reprinted. I forgot to tell you in my letter. I got two hundred pounds in the post this morning.’

‘Poor George,’ said her mother, ‘that he can’t spend it.’

‘It’s over a year now,’ Myra said. ‘Such a stupid accident. It was unforgivable to do a thing like that. Mark was never George’s baby, you know. It came from the man he tried to kill, Frank Dawley. We were going away together.’

‘It never said that in the papers,’ she said sadly, sitting down.

‘I didn’t exactly tell lies, but I kept everything as simple as possible. No one saw the accident.’

‘Dreadful,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder you weren’t killed. And look at him, beautiful Mark, he didn’t suffer from it, thank goodness. None of you did, really.’

Her father came in, a frail old man with white hair and luminous eyes. He looked older every time she saw him, more brittle and fragile. His hair, always clipped close to his skull, had in the last few months been allowed to grow long, and instead of the sharp expression that had made him successful in business, his face had softened and become more noble. She had always loved him because he’d never posed the same threat as her mother, whom Myra dreaded turning into as she got older. He’d understood her rebellion, in the light of his own which he had generously and good-humouredly suppressed, realising that no matter how far she strayed from them, the cord of affection would never snap if he permitted her to do more or less as she liked. He had been wise and accurate, always too grown up to fall back on the heavy father-culture that had been perpetrated against him as a young man. He’d recently taken to ordering Yiddish novels from New York, and reading Hebrew again, and this made his wife glad, for it brought him closer to her, but it also made her weep, because it seemed as if he were preparing for the end of his life.

There was an air of doom about the house, which Myra remembered as a young girl. And yet it was cheerful enough. Surely the subtle spiritual organism of a baby would be able to detect it if it really existed, and here he was, laughing happily. Maybe it was in her rather than the house. Her father laughed too: ‘He is a little devil. I’ll have a piece of that cake, Gladys.’

They drank lemon-tea amid self-generating chatter, levity that would have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been fond of them. When you get old, life becomes less serious, she thought. Having thrown off their worries they made it seem like the prime of life. One had to think up something like that in order not to feel sorry for them.

Her father promised to come out to the country soon. ‘I’ll dig your garden when my aches have gone.’ He piled so much sugar on to the slice of lemon that it capsized and sank, then floated up to the surface for more.

‘One breath of a sparrow would blow you over,’ his wife said.

His eyes glittered, then sparked out, like a rocket on its highest curve. He opened them. ‘This pain gets sharp at times. Maybe some cake will settle it. If your stomach plays up, give it some food to work on.’

Myra stopped him giving a slab to Mark. ‘He’s still too young, father.’

Mark rattled his spoon and mug in a fine din, as if to say it wasn’t true, and he’d eat all the cake they gave him. ‘You can see that mouth shaping up already,’ he joked. ‘He’ll be a difficult man to live with. I don’t like the way that downward curve settles in when he’s not smiling.’

‘Don’t give him a bad character before he’s actually got one,’ she said. He bent over his tea, scooped out a spoonful and blew it cool, then put it towards Mark’s lips, who jumped up and down at the suspense of its slow approach.

‘Make sure it’s not too hot, dear.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he snapped, ‘by thinking I’m one.’

‘Forgive me for speaking,’ she said.

Myra smiled. Mark was waiting for it like a cat for an unsuspecting bird to come close before leaping. His large blue eyes were settled, as if they threw extra light onto the spoon. He took it, and an expression of uncertainty creased his cheeks.

‘He doesn’t like it.’

‘Be quiet!’

He did. He waved for more.

‘What a boy!’ he cried. ‘A real Russian, the way he takes to his tea.’ There was colour in the old man’s cheeks, and he stood without thinking of his stick. Myra knew that nothing could bother him at such a time. She saw there’d be somewhere safe to leave Mark if she wanted to go away, or be on her own for a while. It was comforting to know. She’d always cut herself from her parents’ orbit, and now realised how hard it had made her life. To stick in the same district, like Pam, had great advantages, for you and your parents alike, and she felt the dangerous lure of giving in and living close by, the life of a widow with one child who would maybe marry again into a state of eternal satisfaction from where you could laugh at things that happen to other people and feel superior because they don’t bother you. If you are part of a married couple living off each other’s spiritual fat and too busy ever to need anything from others, you turned narrow and blind to the rest of the world. It was a blessed and innocent state of self-induced death, protection and lethargy more than love, yet always an attraction to someone who rebelled against it so strongly. Fortunately, she thought, I am not the sort who could ever consider it. But the draw was so strong and real that the desire she felt to give into it almost frightened her with its sexual intensity. She had only to come home, however, to kill such an idea. The temptation she needed, but not the fulfilment.

For two hours they played with the baby, and then she wanted to go home, to get away before she stifled — or stayed for a week. The grip of ease was on her, and that was a sure mark that she must be off. Tomorrow they would quarrel, or she would be bored. It was better for them to go on liking each other than that she should stay.

‘Come again,’ they said, as she wrapped Mark in his shawl. ‘We love having you both.’

‘I enjoy it as well,’ she admitted. ‘I’ll see you next week, and phone you on Friday night.’ They stood by the front gate, her car moving from the kerb and gliding up the road, hidden by the Humber which her mother still drove.

Back at the house she telephoned Albert Handley to say she’d like to come to Lincolnshire — if it were still possible. It was a month since they’d seen each other, and she spoke of her visit as a break from her loneliness at the house, not particularly as a means of seeing him. ‘Don’t bring your car,’ he said. ‘I’ll send Richard for you. You’ll enjoy the journey that way. If he takes the route I tell him to you’ll see so much beauty in this clapped-out country it’ll make your heart race.’

‘When shall I come?’ — hoping he’d say soon.

‘When can you be ready? Make it at ten in the morning. You can? Richard will set out at four o’clock, and be there in plenty of time. No, it’s all right. He’ll be glad to. Loves being sent on errands in the Rambler, and you’re perfectly safe with him. Not a better driver anywhere. A very cool lad. Don’t let him charm you, though. No news, I suppose? Oh well, don’t worry — just wait. It’ll be all right in the end.’

‘Is there anything I can bring?’

‘Only yourself, and Mark. I’d come and get you myself, except that I’m doing a painting I can’t leave. If I left the house while I’m working my heart would drop out. So I’ll see you about three tomorrow, right? Right.’ He went off quickly, as if some menace were advancing on him at the other end, and she sat down to wonder how convenient her visit would be. Beyond the jollity of the telephone line she picked up trouble, then doubted her sharp senses, because it could have been the automatic feedback of her own low spirits after the few hours at her parents.

She had been buzzed by the same red Mini on the way back, and this time got a better look at the girl driver, with long fair hair and snubbed nose, an attractive fleshy face until it turned and the delectable lips shaped vile words through the greenhouse windows, and continued for half a minute while they were dead level at seventy miles an hour with only a few feet between them. Myra thought they wouldn’t forget each other’s face for a long time, each so vividly seen. Her own expression had been one of steady concentration, coolly observing the masterpiece of dumb obscenity from such a good-looking girl.

Chapter Twenty-four

The house was quiet for a few weeks, everyone locked in their various occupations. Handley painted and prepared for his exhibition, brooded on Myra, and the diabolical brewing up of disturbance whose root-cause one could never find when things appeared peaceful. He wanted to write to Myra, phone her, but always drew back at the last moment, because work was stronger than love. He painted in shirtsleeves, skylight open with the coming of summer, intent on blocking out white squares and oblongs with his demanding visions.

Mandy left three weeks ago, as soon as the red Mini had been delivered. She’d sent picture-postcards from various rest-stations on the M1 showing dramatic views from bridges, and wide-angle shots of complex entrance points — the eighth wonder of the world that crumbled under the mild frosts of winter. She’d headed for Nottingham and Leicester and had been three weeks going up and down the motorway, day and night, non-stop, nothing else, spending a fortune on petrol. He’d sent Adam to get her off, but Adam came back white-faced and shattered saying how many times he’d been near to cremation or manglement trying to hedge her into a service station and get her to listen to reason. She had no driving licence either, though judging by her skill at the wheel she had no need of one. Albert calculated that if she’d driven up and down the M1 since setting off with the car she’d already done over twenty thousand miles and slashed the car’s value by two-thirds, so the company wouldn’t find it worth their while taking it back when they realised that no more payments on the hire-purchase would be forthcoming. He at least expected her to come crying home for a new set of tyres.

John had his tea at four-thirty precisely, brought in on a large tray by one of the au pair girls. With a prolonged eye-giving smile as she walked from the door to his desk she set down a huge pot of tea, plate of bread and butter, ham and pork pie, jam and cakes. His only other meal was breakfast, and the occasional celebration-dinner.

He sat at His radio-set at certain hours of the day and night, impeccably dressed because he could never forget the rags of his prison-camp days, filling faint-lined limp-covered school exercise-books with messages which he filed away sadly when the vital link of his existence stayed unexplained, and when various reports on Algeria or Laos had been culled from them and passed on to Handley or his sons. His benevolent heart tuned in to the waywardness of the world made him the conscience and nerve-centre of the family, and they respected his knowledge, age, past sufferings, malarial fits and occasional epileptic violences, or his inexplicable choler at the sudden appearance of strangers who threatened his ordered life and whose stench of the jungle threw his delicate psychic balance out of true. Family turmoil was as much as his frail spiritual condition could stand. He had no wish to see the outside world, and this isolation had so far been his only way of learning to understand it again. And by thus pulling himself back from the precipice of disintegration he also became able to understand himself.

His amiable and highly educated presence had dominated the Handley household for longer than most of them could remember. He had educated Richard and Adam from the age of five in the romance and ethics of revolution, in the mechanics of insurrection. Being Handley’s children, born in chaos and brought up to fend for themselves, they had been willing learners, less likely to repudiate the teachings of a kind uncle than if the same laws had been poured out by their father. He had also passed on to them his saintly amiability, though this was sided with Handley’s strength and ruthlessness, and so gave a peculiar breadth of character that was unlikely to weaken with age. John’s library was a unique collection of War Office manuals, police instruction books on the handling of demonstrations, French tomes on the psychology of masses and crowds, German and Russian texts on street-fighting and revolution. His favourite words were from the Book of Joel: ‘Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.’

He switched off his high-powered receiver, laid down his earphones, and passed an hour eating, and idly looking through his notebook: ‘Turn your back on politics,’ it said. ‘Politics have nothing to do with Revolution. And civil disobedience is useless unless its principles are stiffened by the backbone of Revolution.’ On another page: ‘The American rocket and bomber bases must be treated as were German bases in occupied France during the war. Adopt the attitudes of the French Resistance to the Nazis. And not only the land of the bases, but also the land of the fox-hunters must come under the hammer. The police, the armed forces, civil defence personnel are an army of occupation. Those who join their ranks are traitors. Those who sit on jury service are traitors. Those who hold state secrets and do not try to divulge them to an enemy or to make them public knowledge are also traitors.’ He read more: ‘The people, by acquiescing to the possibility of nuclear war are giving in to their own death-wish, since they have allowed themselves to be diverted from their ability to become large in spirit and carry out a revolution. The ruling class prefer this death-wish to permeate and operate rather than that the will to revolution should develop. That is presumably what they mean by being better dead than Red. They are already dead. But are they dead beyond the powers of resurrection?’

‘All the time one must be ready. All through life one must educate and train oneself for the Revolution, imagine it in all its detail and in a thousand permutations. One must breathe and live for the Revolution, because a revolution is a mystical occurrence as much as something which is brought about and controlled by organisation. It is a healthy state of mind. The perfect and ordered world around one can crumble in a week, and one must be ready to step in and stoke up the fires of destruction in order that you may build when they have gone out — but not until.’

‘A revolution is not an impossible pipe-dream in this small old-fashioned country. One must make a career of helping to bring about the Revolution in face of the imponderable forces of inanition. This modern world could become prehistoric and half-empty in four flat minutes, and until that time the only political philosophy will be that of Positive Nihilism.’

He pursed his thin lips between cups of tea, smiled at his sense of humour. Revolution must become a religion, civil war a religious war. Ideological was a poor word for it and didn’t state the case well enough. A man who died for a political cause was a deeply religious man, though one should not ask too closely who his god was.

Tea finished, he lit a cigarette and sat back with the restfulness of sanity and good health, laying aside the turned-up papers of his notes. Flies landed and took off from the vertical landing-grounds of the window-panes above rows of books, but he saw no reason to kill them and still their engines. They flew where warm sun heated the glass, summer bluebottles at liberty to annoy him with their touch and noise, thoughtless and helpless innocents feeding from the effluvia of the rotten earth or refuelling on his jam-stained spoon. Flame crawled up the matchstick, and he let it fall into his waste-paper-basket. Worn-out carbon-paper soaked in thousands of words twisted under invisible heat. He should douse the fire out, but wondered how much the flame would eat before he grew afraid and leapt on it. Every man who owned a pen, shoes, a slice of bread, was an enemy of the Revolution he envisaged, if he did not consider that it also belonged to someone else. Everything on your back, feet, in your mouth was common property. There was to be no ownership whatsoever, and no state to distribute it, either. Your house was everyone’s house, provided everyone’s house was your house. Abolish private property, and you abolished privacy, for who would want privacy if they had no property. Privacy is piracy. The prime sin of the world was the ability and opportunity to possess, to have and to hold till the heart grew cold and became an object from which all evil sprang. Privacy was the root of compounded malice and evil. The only time privacy was essential was in order to preach all this, but even then you had no right to such privacy for long, even to the extent of owning a wastepaper-basket that was about to catch fire.

He opened the window, and bluebottles flew out, then picked up two dusters and lifted the basket at arm’s length before sending it down the side of the house like a missile to repel invisible invaders. It landed by a blackcurrant-bush, that did not take fire, though the noise brought forth frenzied growls from Eric Bloodaxe around the corner.

His hands shook, unable to plug in the earphones, so he listened from the loudspeaker instead. Signals fell over themselves to get at him, each with a different pitch and music. Fifteen years had gone by since he came to this house, and though he was wiser and steadier in the heart, he seemed no older, felt in fact more full of vigour and youth than he ever had.

He stood by the open window looking down at the charred basket and flakes of paper leaping in the wind. Sweat glistened below brown calm eyes that gazed beyond the garden at fields rising and falling towards knots of wood and coppice. At first it had repelled him, that vegetable charnel-house of the earth. Distance chilled him, space horrified. All he had wanted was four walls, the self-imposed limits of his own world. Yet without reason he thought of getting out, going on some journey to a place where he could put his so far wasted life to some ultimate use. Perhaps the impulse now set on him was what he had waited for all along, began as a vague but irresistible restlessness that unconsciously clarified itself while he continued his normal life and only occasionally brooded on it. The calamity of his existence came upon him as he stood by the window, the enormous gap of full consciousness that now gave back a promise of his native strength.

Hands under control, he switched off the radio, disconnected himself from the exterior telegraphic signals of common affairs and business scything and chipping and pulsing through the air, and pondered on the various world situations to decide in which direction he must go.

Chapter Twenty-five

Half-way across England they stood in a lay-by hoping for some fresh air, but all they got was a petrol reek whose rainbow stains beautifully coloured the road. ‘It’s foul,’ said Myra. ‘How long can one go on living in it?’

‘Get a mile up one of these side-lanes and it’s sweet enough,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll take a detour in Lincolnshire, and the air will be so clear you’ll faint. It’ll cut you in two. I like living in cities, though. I’m kinky for factory-smoke and petrol-fumes and plenty of machine-noise. I love it. It’s blood and gold-dust to me. Two years I spent in Leicester working in a factory were the best of my life. Factories, power stations, machines — that’s all that matters. When I look up and see a four-engined jet sliding across the sky I want to go and see my best girl-friend. I think of love.’

They drove on, and he continued talking. ‘I hitch-hiked to Cornwall last November to have a look around. Father thought of moving there, heard of a house, and wanted me to look at it. On the way back I got a lift and reached Oxford late at night, and I went into a place for some coffee. A group of students were standing at the counter, and when I went up they made sneering remarks about scholarship boys. I was amused. It was rather a nice experience to be taken for an undergraduate. The more roles I have in life the better.’

His head was held back slightly, as if to see more of the road. He had dark curly hair, and a long rather sharp nose that gave a piercing distant gaze to his eyes. ‘I drank my coffee, and singled out the ringleader. When he left I followed him, and caught him up as he turned off the main street. I became all the working-class scholarship boys rolled into one, and had an idea that this young blood or whatever they call themselves shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I’m a man of ideas, and sometimes they’re so strong that I’m forced into action.’ He laughed, reached a straight piece of road and overtook a lorry that had slowed him down for the last half-hour. ‘If I act from bravado or boredom and not out of an idea it’s usually a fiasco. So I have to be careful.’

‘What kind of an idea?’

‘Well, while talking to you just now I was wondering whether man can benefit from having his soul laid bare. It makes him hate himself so much that he’s going to destroy himself because he can’t stand it. He’ll lose all confidence, and that’s bad. Nevertheless, he’s got to learn to live with his own soul, with the depths of his own real and far-out soul, though sometimes I think he’d rather die than do it. That person who made the stupid remarks about scholarship boys didn’t have the human vision to have a soul. I tried to talk to him and make him listen to me, but he didn’t like it, so to defend myself I sunk my boots into him. His social hatred wasn’t enough for him to do much about it when it came to the crunch. It was all very silly, really. I don’t suppose for one minute it helped him to think next time before opening his trap. From then on, when I got a lift in a car or lorry I told them I was a student from Oxford. You’ve no idea how easy it made things. I did it as an experiment, and it worked so well I kept it up. I got so good at it I nearly vomited one day, and that ended it.’

‘You’re almost as bad as your father.’

‘That would really worry me. Father has great talent, but he’s ruthless, unscrupulous, over-generous when he feels like it, and being an artist his thoughts are totally disorganised. There are times when I actually have a great liking for him, even though he is my father. I nearly flattened him two years ago when he lifted his fist to my mother, but there were no ill-feelings about it. He wouldn’t have forgiven me if I hadn’t stopped him. Some silly quarrel or other.’

‘About money, I suppose,’ she said, ‘in those days. You were all terribly poor, weren’t you?’

‘That’s true. But they never argued about money, never. It was always about the children, or about his ideas as an artist, or — well, anything. They loved each other so much that everything was important enough to quarrel about, bitterly and violently at times. They had their hell, we had ours, so there was nothing to reproach them with. It was all out of love, you see — and still is. Father was determined never to go out to work, and Mother was determined never to let him. That was the whole basis of their happiness, so how could they quarrel about money? Their mutual agreement about what they would never disagree about saw them through. I often marvelled at it, as soon as I began to understand. I suppose we had a perfect childhood, really, having Father at home all the time, like any sons of the idle rich, and we never actually went hungry, thanks to all his tricks. He used to write begging letters, and say that when he was famous he’d get them published, and call the book: The Collected Begging Letters of Albert Handley, R.A. But he won’t, of course. Now he says he’ll save them in case we ever get poor again.’

To Myra he was an intelligent young man who, being so young, was a complete mystery until he explained himself. It was one of her faults that she rarely understood or sympathised with, those whose ages differed from her own. She drew Mark up to show him the road. Passing cars were clocked on his senses by a wave of his arms. He was in a peaceful and interested mood as the car funnelled through green landscape. Now and again the colic struck, and but came the rose-hip syrup, but travelling usually soothed his blood, as if he were already setting his gypsy eyes at the open road and thinking to search the world for his father. It calmed her also to be on the move, disencumbered from the house and all petty thoughts.

They were well on into the flat fen zones, the holland drains of the country. The air was different from any other part of England, with its smell of sun and water. Seabirds hovered over green and yellow fields, slipped across loam and worried at the tractors. A red Mini stood by a gate, barely parked off the road, and a girl leaned on it looking blankly at any traffic that passed. The bonnet of her car was up, but she did not wave.

‘I know that attitude of troublesome despair that bodes ill for all and sundry,’ Richard said. The car stopped smoothly, shot into reverse and drew up by the Mini’s side. He wound down the window, shouting: ‘Are you back from running in the M1?’

‘Drop dead,’ Mandy called, tear-marks on her face. ‘It took you long enough to find me.’

‘I wasn’t looking for you, love,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry to say. Had a breakdown?’

She smiled, as if to give him canker. ‘No, I’m smelling petrol. It sends me.’

‘Maybe the good wold wind’ll blow your bad mood away. This is Myra Bassingfield.’ Myra recognised her, the terror of the motorway for the last three weeks, the angel at the wheel who had buzzed her and whom she had passed at seventy miles an hour. They didn’t shake hands. ‘She’s coming home,’ Richard said, ‘to stay a while. A friend of father’s.’

‘Another one to feed,’ Mandy said. ‘That makes twelve of us.’

‘Thirteen,’ Richard laughed. ‘There’s a baby inside.’

‘Is it father’s?’ she asked. ‘I’ll never know how many brothers and sisters I’ve really got. It’s a horrible life.’

‘He’s not your brother,’ Myra said. ‘And don’t be afraid for your food.’

‘You’ll walk back if you’re not careful,’ Richard said. Myra offered a cigarette, and wrung a thanks from her. ‘I’m broke, flat broke. No fags and not even the price of a cup of tea, nor the money to phone a garage. There’s enough petrol in my tank to get home, but that’s about all, except that the bloody thing won’t start. Nearly six hundred pounds of brand-new British rubbish.’

‘You’ve knocked it to death,’ he said. She went sulkily into the Rambler, found some sandwiches in the glove-box and pulled them apart in a few seconds. Richard tried the Mini for ignition faults, fuel failure and mechanical defects, but could not start it. ‘We’ll lift it on to my luggage-rack, and carry it home like that.’

‘You only want to humiliate me,’ Mandy cried. Black rings of exhaustion made her eyes look bigger, big enough, Myra thought, to send any man mad. She had in fact hoped for a romantic rescue by some stranger, but much to her disgust no one had stopped. ‘We’d never get up the lane with it on your luggage rack because the tree branches are too low.’

‘Well,’ said Richard, smiling at her show of dignity, ‘we’ll just have to tow you. It’s only forty miles, and we can leave it at Stopes’s Garage.’ He uncoiled a rope and attached it to both cars. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to drive on tow.’

‘Just watch the brakes,’ he said. ‘I won’t go over thirty.’

‘Lend me some money and tell the next garage to send a breakdown truck. Then I’ll see you as soon as it’s fixed.’ He caught the glint in her eyes. If he lent her ten pounds and the car was mended there was no telling where she would head for next. He was afraid to let her go without a week’s rest, for there was a desperate look in her eyes as if, because of the breakdown, she couldn’t wait to get back on the road and plough into it. If she came home the house would stop worrying.

Myra offered to drive. ‘You can stay in with Richard, and look after Mark.’

Mandy looked fiercely at her, then at Richard. ‘All right. But if anybody scratches it, I’ll do my nut.’

‘I’ll take care,’ Myra smiled.

‘You didn’t buy the bloody car,’ Richard said, tired of her irrational stubbornness, ‘so shut up.’ At a wave from Myra he cruised along the road.

The Rambler, having discarded the Mini, made its way up the muddy lane, lush branches and nettles as high as a man clawing its sides as if to welcome their black panther back. Handley came out in shirt-sleeves to greet them, glad of an excuse not to work for a few days. He hoped to go for walks with Myra, or take her by car to the coast, or to the various high-spots of the county so that they could talk about many things. Enid would come too, of course, and a gay party would be made up.

Myra admired the caravans, the compound, the house. ‘Did he look after you well?’ Handley asked.

‘Perfectly,’ she said, feeling tired. ‘We drove Mandy the last forty miles, which made it merrier. Her car had broken down.’

‘Where is she?’ he snapped, then remembered that it wouldn’t be polite to break the month’s peace while Myra was here. ‘I’ve something to say to her.’

‘In the car,’ Richard said. ‘The Mini’s being fixed. Nothing serious.’

‘I hope not. That’s our second car.’ Handley looked thinner, browner, as if he were much of the day out of doors. But she also found him more open and nervous than during his time in London, as if gripped by continual worry and irritation. ‘Mandy! Come out of there.’

She sat up on the back seat, winding down the window. ‘I’m not. Tell Mam to throw me some sheets in. I want to sleep here.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Handley said. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all have breakdowns some time or other.’

But they could not persuade her, and went into the house, Handley carrying Myra’s case, while Richard followed with the baby. Enid had set out a cold lunch in the kitchen, of ham and cheese, cold fried fish and chicken, wine, beer and tea, and many kinds of bread. She met them at the door, wearing a beige woollen jersey-dress in which to shake hands. She was fair and tall, and Myra was impressed by her broad eyes and narrow smooth-skinned face, and an expression of passion and intelligence marking the curve of her lips. Here, she thought, is a woman who says yes to everything because there is nothing left to say no to. ‘I had a very good trip,’ she answered, ‘in such a superb car.’

Albert smiled with pleasure. ‘Yes, it’s not a bad old bus,’ and took her coat.

‘It’s his favourite toy,’ Enid said. ‘He’d be lost without it.’ Myra imagined so. They were immediately like two sisters trying to put the only man present in his place. He should have expected it, rather than bank on a society of equals, all pally and sexless until he made his grab, then appallingly and deliriously willing. He poured four tots of brandy: ‘Here’s to a peaceful and pleasant stay. We’ll have a bite now, and leave the banquet till tonight.’

‘I’ll have to see to Mark soon,’ Myra said.

Handley downed his brandy. ‘Don’t think about him. Helen will do that. She’s capable — be fourteen next birthday. I wouldn’t mind a pint of muscatel and a t-bone steak.’

Enid lifted a thick sheet of sweet ham on to a slice of bread: ‘London’s ruined you, I think.’

‘My imagination ruined me before ever I got to London.’

Enid watched Myra watching him and told herself that thay had been to bed together. When, she did not know, but surmised there must have been some opportunity between tragedies. Yet it couldn’t have been serious if Albert invited her to stay in the house. He had done it on her once or twice, she suspected, but had been painstakingly discreet. She didn’t really mind what he did, as long as he didn’t commit the ultimate foolishness of leaving her. She was convinced he would never do that, yet had to guard against it nevertheless. If he had brought this Myra to the house with any idea of fornication she would make a public announcement of her pregnancy — which the doctor had told her about only that morning. That would put a stop to it. And if he hadn’t, he would go into raptures at the news, as all men should, and as Albert had often enough for it to become a reflex action of cheer and jollity that led to a total blackout of drunkenness when the terrible truth went finally into his middle.

He poured tumblers of Bordeaux claret, little sensing what he was in for. Myra, who had a headache, preferred tea, while Richard, with a ton of dust in his throat, downed the glass and asked for more. ‘I don’t lag behind when there’s wine flowing like water — which is rare enough.’

‘It may be rare,’ Handley said wryly, ‘but I owe the wine-merchant three hundred pounds, which makes about five hundred bottles of steam in the last few months. I drink beer much of the time, so if we aren’t careful this family will be wiped out by cirrhosis of the liver.’

‘I found an empty crate in the caravan yesterday,’ said Enid, ‘which I suppose Maria and Catalina scoffed.’

‘I’ll put a stop to it,’ Handley said, corking the bottles.

‘What about Mandy?’ Richard said. ‘She’ll die of hunger.’

Enid pulled a tray from beside the sink, set down food and a cup of tea, then walked across the yard in the thin showering of rain. When she slid it through the car-window Mandy pulled it in greedily and began to eat. ‘Thanks, Ma. I’ll come to the kitchen as soon as they’ve finished at the trough.’

‘If you don’t,’ Enid said, ‘I’ll pull you out and give you a good hiding. We can’t have you upsetting everything with your tantrums.’

She showed Myra her room, next to Uncle John’s. It was carpeted from wall to wall, and in the middle was a low three-quarter divan with a white cotton bedspread touching the ash-blue carpet on all sides. A small chest of drawers painted yellow stood under the curtainless window. The walls were white, and facing the bed hung an early picture of Handley’s. It lacked the quality of his present work yet was easily recognisable. A small shed stood in the middle of a wood, with a slanting wall of red fire drawing towards it. She thought it might be rather terrifying to wake up from a nightmare and have it as the first sight of the real world.

‘It’s a beautiful room,’ she said, thinking it the apotheosis of colourful spartan negativism. She sat on the only chair, a thin cushion spread over the seat whose centre had broken through. Enid was curious: ‘Have you known Albert long?’

‘Just over a year. I was introduced at the opening of his exhibition, by a friend of mine, Frank Dawley.’

Enid opened the window. ‘This room hasn’t been aired since it was painted. Richard will close them all when he brings your baby up. Have you ever been to bed with Albert?’ The house had turned quiet, though the weather was roughening outside. Maybe it would grow calm with the new moon, which would be full tonight. Myra stood, and Enid noted her figure, a great deal younger than her own, yet not much better for all that. ‘I’d better leave,’ Myra said.

Enid laughed. ‘No, really, don’t do that. As soon as I saw you I knew we were going to be friends. The thought just popped into my mind, and I asked it.’

‘Why didn’t you ask Albert?’

‘I’d never get a straight answer. He doesn’t know the meaning of the truth, and never has. I wouldn’t want it, either, not in those details. Men and women can have secrets from each other, but not women.’

Myra liked her dignity and hard charm. Her presence explained much about Albert, because it seemed that with any other women he would have appeared smaller. ‘I did go to bed with him once. We weren’t in love, but neither of us could resist it. I’m in love with Frank Dawley, who gave me my child.’

Enid knew that Albert downstairs must be wondering what they were talking about, and that soon he would start pouring brandy down his throat or throwing chairs around, knowing it was about him. ‘Men are such babies,’ she said.

It seemed a banal remark, not worthy of her. Maybe she hadn’t known a man well enough yet. ‘I didn’t come up here to be with Albert on those terms. I’m not as stupid as that. Just to get out of my house for a few days.’

‘Albert told me,’ Enid said, believing her. ‘We were thinking of going to the seaside tomorrow in the Rambler. Not long ago poor Albert used to walk there, twenty miles, and take some drawings that he hoped to sell on the sea-front for a few shillings each. I often wonder how many there are stuck on people’s walls in Nottingham, or forgotten in drawers somewhere. Still, it kept him fit. He hasn’t succumbed to the soft life yet.’

‘I don’t think he will,’ said Myra. Mark was crying downstairs.

She took Myra’s hand: ‘I’m glad you came. Now that we’ve been honest we can really be friends.’

Mark sat quiet and smiling on Handley’s knee, who snapped his fingers and pushed out his tongue, winked and made popping noises with his mouth as if he were the father. Thirteen-year-old Helen begged to take him out. She was slightly built for her age, her face the same colour as Albert’s and similar to Handley in feature, with long black hair falling in ringlets down her back. Her great heroine was Mandy, and she followed her tantrums and victories as if all her body breath was needed to keep the glow of admiration in her eyes. Handley gave Mark to her, who enjoyed being passed around, and let her take him out. ‘Will he be all right?’ Myra asked.

‘Forget the little blue-eyed Dawley,’ he said. ‘They’ll feed, cuddle and worship him at the caravan. Helen will see to him. He can play with Rachel, as well. She’s our three-year-old. We’ve got them to suit all ages.’ Paul who was twelve sat in a corner surrounded by a thousand parts of some plastic construction set, unwilling to break off and talk. ‘He won a scholarship last year and got taken on at the local grammar school. The others were just as intelligent, but they never passed that pernicious test, I suppose because I was too broke at the time for them to be considered. Still, John took care of their education, taught them all sorts of useful arts like tactics and bomb-making. That reminds me, you’d better set his tea out. It’s nearly half-past four. I’ll go up and see how he is.’

The eyes of the radio were dim, its face of fifty dials cold and blue-black. John lay on his bed, shirt open at the neck, and gazing at the white ceiling. ‘No work today?’

‘None,’ said John. ‘I’m pondering.’

‘Am I disturbing you?’

He sat up. ‘Not at all. I’ve been thinking for some weeks, Albert, that my world is too small. I’ve outlived this room, and am wondering what to do, what for example would be the right course to take compatible with the way I’ve spent my time here. It must be something in tune with it, because the fifteen years ought to be given some meaning.’

‘I can see that,’ Albert said, ‘but it should come right from your heart, if it comes at all.’

John sat at his table, stacking the scattered logbooks into some sort of order. ‘You’re right, Albert. It’s good to have a brother who understands me so well. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. You gave me back my life.’

Albert gripped his hand. ‘Don’t overestimate it, John. You suffered, and I understood. It went right into my own bones. I wondered if you’d like tea downstairs today. Myra’s come to stay a few days with us. I mentioned her once, the woman of Frank Dawley who went off to Algeria last January and hasn’t been heard of since. Her life depends on him, but I’m beginning to think she’s given up hope, which is a pity. She’s the sort of person whose spirit withers without hope. She’s got his baby, too. It’d be easier I suppose if she had a telegram to say he’d been killed, but she never will, not from a guerrilla war. You either come back, or you disappear. He chose that sort of war, though no woman chooses to get left behind.’

‘If he went into the country through Morocco,’ John said, ‘and if he’s not dead yet, he must be somewhere in the Kabylie mountains. Last time we talked about him I looked at the map. He’d go to where there was most fighting, naturally, though the distance is so great that it would be a feat even in peacetime to reach the Grande Kabylie from southern Morocco on foot. There’s too much desert and wilderness.’

‘How much?’ Handley asked.

‘Could be over eight hundred miles. You can’t go a straight line over open country. Too dangerous. And zigzags could double it.’

‘Sixteen hundred?’

‘In the summer. A hundred and forty in the sun. No water. Nothing to eat. Hunted. She may be right.’ He looked sad, as if he’d spent days wearing himself out over it.

‘I’ve never thought about it in this realistic way,’ Handley said. ‘She has, obviously.’

‘You swim in the ocean of your paintings,’ said John. ‘It doesn’t excuse you, but it exonerates you.’

‘I don’t think it does,’ Handley said, his eyes glittering.

He switched on the radio, its panel lighting up. ‘I can hear anything on this, messages never sent, morse that forces my hands to write words that stick like hot needles in my guts. If you want to stay alive and see trouble, stick close to the devil, and maybe Dawley is all right after all. And if you get killed you’re still the winner, because you know nothing any more about the trouble you were in. When the devil betrays you there’s no pain attached to it. Limbo is worse torment than hell, because there’s always a hope that hell will be destroyed, shocked and shaken from within, broken down on all sides by the forces of torment and despair. What is the message I was waiting for, but never came? Well, it was written down in block capitals, and said: AN INSURRECTION BEGAN IN HELL THIS MORNING. GOD AND THE DEVIL WERE TAKEN OUT HAND-IN-HAND AND SHOT. THEY WERE SOBBING AND COMMISERATING LIKE TWO PANSIES. ALL SUFFERING HAS BEEN STOPPED BY DECREE. THOSE WHO CONTINUE SUFFERING UNNECESSARILY WILL BE SENTENCED AS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES.’

‘Stopped by decree until further notice,’ Handley said.

‘Forever,’ John said firmly. ‘Otherwise why should one wait so long. Isn’t fifteen years a long time to hope for such a telegram?’

‘What about heaven? Did the revolution strike there as well?’

‘Heaven does not exist. Never did, except perhaps as an abandoned suburb. God may have a villa there but he commutes every day to hell. Men were led to believe that heaven existed after death in order that they wouldn’t be moved to seek it on earth, and so destroy the flimsy social order in which they lived. In the twentieth century they’ve started, quite rightly, to seek it. When hell is destroyed, build heaven in its place, until neither exist. There is no room for them. People were persuaded that hell existed after death so that they would not try to create it on earth. But that never stopped them, so all we need is to build the most perfect earth possible without the help of such concepts and balances. Most people exist in ways that would qualify them for a certificate saying that they live in hell — men, women and children who are all innocent, but who in their sublime naïveté and sense of justice get hold of guns and join the rebellion. Your friend Frank Dawley is fighting in Algeria from the sickness of false pride, and in one way is as guilty as the French he is fighting against — though if he is still alive he probably qualifies for innocence because of his experience in suffering.’

‘Frank’s no idealist,’ Handley said, ‘but a workman who saw the futility of his life and used his energy to try and lift others out of their suffering. He’s on the right side, in spite of his using the revolution as a spiritual quest, like most of us. Revolution is the only remaining road of spiritual advance. I’m not on it, but I know it is. I don’t mean the revolution of those middle-class English marxists who live in Hampstead or the juiciest of Home Counties, because at the first sniff of civil strife they’d join the government militia or run to hide in the nearest police station. Frank Dawley isn’t one of these and never could be. What I’m talking about is the common quest for spiritual energy that you get from the idea of revolution.’

John went down for tea, and Myra had gone upstairs to sleep off her tiredness and headache. She lay down, her case not yet unpacked, wondering why she had come to this house. Though feeling some affinity to the more tender aspects of Handley and his art, she seemed nervous and raw among his family, while hoping she did not show it. But it was right that she had come, for there had been nothing else to do.

Her glasses lay off and open on the bedside table staring at the window, while she stared at the opposite wall. Her unaided eyes saw things more clearly than they used to, and she would either get a less powerful pair or perhaps go without them altogether. Yet they made her alert in the morning if she still felt sleepy, increased her range of hearing, and helped her to judge people better with her glasses on — in general more able to deal with the world. When among people you liked but did not know why, and could not ask the cool question as to why you were there, a higher reason obviously existed for your presence with them, that you could not understand at the moment, but that would be illumined later during the greater confusion of being alone.

She drifted into pleasant oblivion, but got up after an hour and washed her face. Mark was being fed in the infants’ caravan, and was glad to see her when she came in. But he soon clamoured once more for Helen, so she went outside. It was cooler and quieter along the lane she had ascended in the car that morning with Mandy sobbing beside her. The mud had not yet dried in the wind, and well-patterned car-treads were printed on it by a delivery-van coming up in response to a panic-call for more drink and food. She looked directly up at the sky through thick leaves that turned black against the broken glass of the blue, then climbed the steep bank, pulling herself up by stumps and branches, blue blouse and skirt merging into them. A wide field of stubble fell through the slit of sky, a well-marked footpath only a few inches wide cutting it diagonally across and spearing a small wood at its far-off tip.

Heavy clouds piled above the trees. It was an unnatural feeling, being so alone, without the baby, without Frank, and out of her own house, so far away from narrow ties and preoccupations of normal base-life. She felt better than at home. In the wood a man was plucking leaves from a bush and putting them to his lips. She had entered by a broken fence, so self-absorbed that her footsteps made no noise in the thick grass.

He bit at some of the leaves, took them away from his mouth so that they fluttered to the ground. He walked to the nearest tree and clipped off a piece of bark. He flaked it to dust, and smiled. The humid summer had eaten it through. The lazy call of a bird made him look up nervously. There was something tender and pathetic about him, and so no cruelty in secretly observing him. He broke a stick and smelled the white disfigured joint. She wondered where she’d seen the face before, or of whom it reminded her. Lines of pain creased his forehead at what he had done, and he straightened the stick and put it in the grass as if intending to come back later and bury it. What unease remained in his expression was caused by some vital disillusionment that his sensibility had taken years to overcome. The marks of the first great inhuman betrayal were still in the lines around his eyes, and would stay till he died because they had become a permanent part of his features. She made no noise, but he turned and they recognised each other; never having met before.

‘You must be Myra,’ he said. ‘Albert told me about you.’

‘You’re John. He told me about you, too.’

‘I recognised you by your hair and eyes.’

‘He must have described me well,’ she said. ‘He’s a painter, of course.’

‘It’s not that. It’s that air of being alone in the world that you carry about with you. I like to meet people who can’t conceal what they are, and what ails them. It’s very touching and refreshing. I hope you don’t mind me saying so?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Albert told me you never left the house.’

He took out a cigarette, and gave her one. ‘This is my first time in fifteen years. You are the first person I’ve met. I suppose you thought I was someone just escaped from a lunatic asylum. I was just renewing my contact with vegetation, trees and grass. It was very painful, until I knew someone was watching me, and I saw it was you.’

She noted how similar his voice was to Albert’s, but without the demonic edge of assertion. ‘I came to stay a few days,’ she said.

‘I know. I was to meet you at tea, but didn’t. It’s better this way.’ They went through the wood, John in front to clear the way. Reaching another field they walked side by side. ‘So neither of us know the way,’ she laughed. ‘But I don’t suppose we’ll get lost.’

‘I read your husband’s book,’ he said. ‘He must have been a profound and unhappy man. Those who write so lovingly and understandingly about the earth are really only happy when they become part of it. That may sound cruel, but it’s an observation I couldn’t help making as I read it. It must be a great success, because that sort of earthly love has an appeal for many people in this country.’

‘The critics approved,’ she said, not wanting to talk about it. He sensed this, and they walked a few minutes in silence. He pulled up a handful of grass. ‘Albert and Enid saved my life.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m glad you do. They’ve had hard lives, but found the love to save mine and not boast of it. I’m beginning to wonder what I can do to make my resurrection and their sacrifice worth while. I can’t continue to live at ease with myself and do nothing for the rest of my life.’

She waved away a cloud of thunderflies attracted by the sweat on her forehead. ‘I’d like to sit down for a moment.’

‘Of course. I don’t suppose you have any news?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You must forgive me, but that question was only a clumsy way of getting on to the subject. I’ve thought a good deal about him.’

‘I didn’t realise you knew Frank.’

‘Albert told me. Of all the people I’ve heard about and haven’t met he fascinates me the most.’ They walked two more fields and back in the direction of the house. Wheat was high in one, and the path through the middle was hidden by close high stalks, so they went by the hedge, bending when it arched towards the wheat. He walked with nimble assurrance for a man who hadn’t been beyond the house and garden in so many years, stepping quickly on any small patch of earth to avoid bending dozens of delicate rods. ‘I’d like to meet him,’ he added, ‘one day.’

‘I hope you do. I’m sure he’d like to meet you.’ He opened a gate for her to pass. ‘There’s only one way I can ever see him,’ he said, if he isn’t dead already, he thought. And neither of them talked any more before reaching the house.

Ralph was not unwelcome at The Gallery, which was the most one could say about his appearances there. Handley, being unable to obliterate him, had to forgive him for the desecration of his painting which, in its precision and black thought, had been almost German, which pained him since his forgiveness meant that Ralph would now be able to marry Mandy. He wanted no micrometered nightmares eating into his favourite daughter, yet what could you do if you didn’t intend to marry her yourself, except give her away with a good smile?

The question had been: Where was Mandy? Ralph looked at Handley with worry and loathing and disbelief when he said she’d departed for the battlefields of the M1 with the single-mindedness of an eleven-year-old girl in France from a bourgeois family during the war who’d set out with homemade bombs to join the Resistance. Ralph suspected Handley of having sent her away, hidden her until his passion was iced over.

He called every day to see if she had returned, and now found her locked in the Rambler and refusing to come out, playing patience on one of the lunch trays.

‘Mandy,’ he shouted, ‘please let’s go for a walk. I haven’t seen you for a month.’

‘That’s no reason,’ she said, letting down the window, ‘but I will soon. I can wait. I don’t want to miss the big dinner, though. You seen the booze-chariots going up and down? Dad will get bombed-out, gutter-drunk. He’s got his new bird up here. And Uncle John’s gone over the fields. Things are a bit upsetting, so I’m sticking around for the fun. Are you invited?’

‘I think so; your father mumbled something before pushing me aside.’

‘You’ll really see us in action.’

He’d heard this last phrase from his mother before leaving the house. ‘You’re going there again! Have you ever seen such a family in action?’ She was trying day by day to wear him down, but the guilt he felt after wrecking Handley’s painting had given him so much strength that he’d be able to resist her for years if necessary. It set him up with great self-assurance, which made her give up the loony-bin as a last resort for the dark and twisting path he had chosen, deciding that since he seemed strong again, more normal means of persuasion would be necessary.

He leaned by the car, looking in and down on her. ‘I think I know you all well enough by now.’

‘You think our bark is worse than our bite?’

‘It may be. Come out and give me a kiss. You can’t stay cooped up all the time.’

‘I feel safe in here. I’ve got the spare key in my pocket, and might take it into my head to light off, back to the motorway. With a powerful car like this I could show some of those rotten Minis where to get off, and leave a few wrecks smouldering on the hard shoulder! It weighs nearly two tons and does a hundred and twenty, the best thing Dad ever bought with his money. So don’t keep on about me coming out. What have I got to come out for? I’ve got all I want in here. Yeh, if people keep chipping their tinny faces in at me like rabbits I’ll slide off for another month’s fun.’

He stood back, appalled by her recklessness. Yet it was exactly this tendency that attracted him, Mandy being the only girl he knew who could threaten to crack open his mother’s skull with a starting-handle, which proved that she had more than a fair share for both of them. It was fortunate that she was a woman, and Mandy, and he felt that the sooner they were married the better. ‘It’s getting dark,’ he said.

‘When it does I’ll switch on the light.’

Handley was wisely leaving her alone, and so would Ralph, if only his feet would carry his heart away. He saw Myra come in through the gate with Uncle John, and wondered who she was. They went into the house without a greeting.

‘Give me your hand,’ Mandy said.

He rested it on the half-opened window, and she kissed the back of it, pressed her lips against the padded flesh, and spread his fingers wide. His face reddened, and a burning pleasure stirred him. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Come for a walk and don’t torment me so.’

‘I can’t. My legs ache.’

‘After all that sitting down and driving?’

To keep insisting would annoy her, whereas to stay quiet would at least prolong this charming tenderness. ‘I love you, too,’ she muttered, grinding her teeth into one of his fingers.

His yell of pain snapped at the whole house. ‘You bitch!’

Mark was startled by its savagery and began to cry. Helen stood at the caravan door, black hair spread and eyes indignant. ‘Can’t you be quiet? There’s a baby in here. Why don’t you do your courting somewhere else?’

Ralph got into his Land-Rover and bumped down the lane, while Mandy indulged in a new game of patience. He couldn’t take any more. It was impossible. Only Eric Bloodaxe was fond of him at that house, howled when he strode through the gate. Blood slid silently from his finger, went round the steering wheel and fell between his legs on to the floor covered with muddy sacks, not in actual fact a bad wound, but jumping so that it was hard to keep his grip. I’m not an old man, he thought, hanging around her for this sort of welcome which she must have nursed in her bloody little mind after three weeks on the road. He shot the junction beyond the village and almost caught the back fender of Miss Bigwell’s A40. Another story for Mother. It’s lucky I didn’t have an accident. Maybe I wouldn’t be so ready to go back to Mandy if I had. He turned the car, and stopped in the village to buy a newspaper as an excuse for having left The Gallery in such a hurry. Then he went back up the lane, licked and welcomed by the thick green leaves. He also wanted to see them in action at their banquet that night.

Chapter Twenty-six

Eight champagne-glasses had been stacked on the dining-room table, one base inside each bowl, making a tall slim tower that reached almost to the ceiling.

The long room was set between hall and kitchen, plainly whitewashed, with two large uncurtained windows on one side, and an empty wrought-iron fireplace on the other. The floor was bare planks, for Handley even in his affluence thought that carpets would somehow spoil it, liking to have at least one room where he could hear himself walk in bare feet. A ship’s oak table, bought at a sale in Louth, ran down the middle. A huge eighteenth-century dresser lined the top wall, covered and hung with dinner and tea services. The only other furniture was eight chairs around the table, at which eight people sat.

‘It’s the first real party I’ve had in this house,’ said Handley, taking up a bottle, ‘and I’ve had money for over a year.’ He was sprucely dressed in a charcoal-grey suit, and a white silk shirt with a light-blue rather broad clotted tie going into his waistcoat. ‘So I don’t want to see any murders at the end of it.’

Enid stood a candle on a shelf so that he could blow it out with champagne-corks. ‘I channel my aggression,’ he said, ‘onto unfeeling inanimate objects from now on, eh, Ralph?’

Ralph smiled, less formally knotted, an arm strongly around Mandy who looked demure and luscious in that state, her warm eyes fixed on the bottle gripped by her father. He slowly untwisted the wire and removed the cage from over the cork. Light was gloaming outside, softening the fields and wolds, dimming the room, until the row of tall candles were lit along the middle of the table.

Tradesman’s vans had been rumbling all day through the slush laden with fish, meat and drink. They were eager to serve Handley in the vain hope of getting paid. The fact that he had money made him even worse at paying. If he had money he wanted to spend it, not shell it out on food that he’d already got on credit. So in order to make him pay they supplied more and more, fought for his custom because he spent so freely. But he did not pay, and it was difficult to dun him while still spending. If they dun, buy, for if you start to pay they become insolent. ‘It’s a good thing I’m not living in a depressed area,’ Handley said to Enid, ‘or they’d string me up from the nearest lamp-post. Luckily it’s a good posh county with a long tradition of this sort of thing. I don’t think I’ll move, after all, at least not until they rumble me.’

Thumb pressed against the cork, the other hand turned the bottle in its palm. ‘We’ve a few things to celebrate tonight,’ he said, ‘but I dare say we shan’t know what till we come to them.’ The smell of roasting meat floated from the kitchen. ‘We’re welcoming Myra, for one thing. For another, we’re celebrating Mandy’s engagement. Ralph’s parents should be here, but they didn’t answer the invitation, though they might still come. Then of course there’s Frank Dawley, lest we forget.’ He levelled the bottleneck towards the candle-flame, the room quiet but for his own pattering voice. ‘And John is coming from his own world and back into ours, which might make a difference to somebody.’

The cork bulleted sharply out, left the candlewick smoking and flameless, but not waiting to see where it went Handley held the foaming bottlemouth over the topmost glass which was filled, overfilled, spilled into the one below, then overflowed and levelled up to the rim of the one underneath that, filling and spilling in the manner of a baroque fountain right down to the bottom glass. The second cork sent a sharp neat crack down the mirror above the mantle-shelf so that it seemed in danger of falling in two. ‘Seven years’ bad luck,’ Enid cried, taking plates of olives and anchovies from Maria and setting them along the edge of the table.

Handley laughed. ‘We’ve had them already.’ Each took a glass from the fountain, so that it ceased to exist. A great thirst gripped them after the heavy and troubled day. Six bottles went in the hour before dinner. Handley laced the first draught with Courvoisier and lit a cigar so that he could draw breath between each mouthful. ‘Don’t you feel guilty at such luxury?’ Adam said mischievously, ‘when where’s so much shortage in the world?’ Handley’s forceful laugh startled Richard and Myra from their quiet conversation by the window. John poured another glass for Mandy, who was anxious to wet her lips again because the dry wine seemed incapable of salving her thirst as it should. She grew light at heart and kissed her lover, which doused all his desire for more drink. Handley looked at them, a momentary glare, not knowing whether to envy Mandy’s freedom or his future son-in-law’s luck. He turned to Adam: ‘In some countries cigars are fourpence each, and champagne half-a-crown a bottle. It’s a luxury to us because the country needs bombs and napalm to rain down on the Frank Dawley’s of the world — or his equivalent in all sorts of countries. Every glass of this stuff means a bullet for them. Every packet of fags a workman smokes means the same. We’re all guilty if you like, but pour me some more, then it stops being guilt and becomes blame, and I can drown both with booze till it’s not too bad to bear.’

‘I just wanted to know how you felt,’ said Adam, a sudden disturbing note in his voice. He looked faunlike in the in the candle-shadows, curly hair and straight short nose, small teeth showing when he spoke and faced his father.

‘Do you want a private talk?’ Handley said, pouring more drink.

Adam put the rim of his glass under the same bottle: ‘I want to say it now.’

‘Go on, then.’ There was silence, as everyone waited for him to get up courage. Mandy giggled, and Handley snapped at her to shut up.

‘I’m tired of feeling guilty,’ Adam said. ‘The weight’s become too much for me these last few months. Every time I eat cornflakes or smoke a cigarette I’m tortured by doubt and guilt. I’m not so strong as you, or John, or Richard.’

‘I’m used to carrying weaklings on my back,’ Handley said. ‘Let’s get on with the booze, then the grub’ll come quicker.’

‘That’s not the point,’ Adam said with persistence and courage.

‘What have you done?’ Handley wanted to know.

With a great effort he said: ‘I joined the Young Conservatives last night.’

Mandy laughed, and Ralph cheered. Handley’s cigar dropped. ‘It won’t burn the floor,’ he said, as Enid rushed to pick it up. ‘Is that all? O God our help in ages rotten past, with no hope for tomorrow. I could have understood it when we were poor, but not now that we’re rich. What’s the girl’s name?’

‘Wendy Bonser.’

‘Bonser’s daughter? Some girl. So one of my family is marrying into the landed gentry? Do you love her?’

‘Passionately, Father.’

‘That’s a start, anyway. We send you off, and we welcome you back. Thank God I’m an artist, or you’d have broken my heart. I can stand anything. I even sent my eldest son to theological college, so you haven’t really shocked me.’

‘Yes, you thought it was a good thing in those days,’ said Richard.

‘Don’t you start. Our Cuthbert was a brilliant Sunday-school student. He had that superior smile of asceticism ticking away on his clock ever since he was a kid. He’d have been Jesus Christ if he’d been born one thousand nine hundred and sixty years ago. If the vicar hadn’t taken an interest in him he’d still have been here, poncing and sponging like the rest of you. Well, here’s to Adam and Wendy, and a long life to everybody.’

At the head of the table, he uncorked a bottleforest of Bordeaux red and white. Mandy was on his left, and Myra to his right. At the opposite end sat Enid. Adam was subdued, felt snubbed by his father who had not created a row and thrown him out. He sat to the right of Enid, and Ralph was on her left. In the middle and facing each other were Richard and Uncle John. Soup vanished quickly, followed by braised herring, the pride of Dogger Bank. It was a great feast, though the mechanics of chewing did not so far permit any of them to say it aloud.

Waiting for the next course Handley stood up, a glittery restlessness in his eyes. Eight candles were lit down the middle of the table, a flare-line leading to Enid at the other end through a maze of wine-bottles, bread rolls and platters. He took off his jacket, tall and slim in his waistcoat, shirtsleeves fastened by a pair of gold cufflinks. The character of each face prospered in candle-shadow. All were beautiful, Myra thought, their talk more fluid now that the first hunger-pangs had gone. They’d all made concessions, given up some of their lives to be here. Mandy returned from the motorway, John pulled out of his ethereal solitude, Myra travelled from her own rooted house, Ralph dodged his parental curse, Adam left the charms of his newly-found heiress, Richard gave his pamphlets and maps a rest, Enid relaxed her chatelaine role of mother and manager, and Handley descended from his forest-bound swamp-coloured studio. His dark leanness glared at them. The established order of lunacy, family and idealism shook the length of its barbed rope and dragged them in smiling to eat and talk, the subtle uniting captivity of organised deadness. But no, he thought, not with us. We’re different because it’s cold and bare outside, being set on an island between the North Sea and the Atlantic, bashed at by waves from east and west. Just a little dinner-party for family and friends. Is this what I’ve starved for as an artist all my life? As long as I’m still working, I suppose it is.

He smiled, but not for happiness or because he was amused. A smile covered a multitude of sins, not one of them original. ‘Are all your glasses filled to the brim, even Mandy’s? I’m wanting each of you to make a toast to the first thing that comes into your mind — anything, as long as it’s revealing.’

‘It’s a bad game,’ Enid said, assembling the plates. ‘Either it doesn’t work, or it causes trouble.’

He drank. ‘Don’t stab me in the back. It isn’t a game. It’s a way of thinking and drinking at the same time. There’s no significance attached to it. How could there be with simple passionate people like us?’

A chair scraped as John stood up. ‘Here’s my toast, to the war, the great hundred years’ war against imperialism and the established order, class war, civil war, dark and light war, the eternal conflict of them against us and us against them, whether it’s taking place underground as at the moment (except in a few choice spots of the world) or whether it’s breaking around us now in this twilit haven of peace. May such a war go on to the victory and hope of the bitter end.’

They cheered, and he stood, bald, erect, matching a stern face with subtle and gentle eyes. He wore a dark blue suit with the faintest of pin-stripes running down the cloth, a red tie at his shirt and a white rose in his buttonhole. He looked at them and spoke slowly, smiling as if knowing they would never take him seriously, long thin fingers of his left hand deliberately turning a glass, the other behind his back. Not all cheered, though the general noise was loud enough to spur him on. Myra and Ralph had kept silent, but Adam, in spite of his recent conversion, approved out of family loyalty and his special regard for Uncle John. ‘And I also propose,’ he continued, ‘a toast to a long journey I’m shortly to embark on, and about which I hope to say more later.’

They drank, but stayed quiet, puzzled by his last sentence. Was he going to leave them to a world without Uncle John? He lit a cigarette, and sat down on seeing Maria and Catalina enter with the platter of roast beef, a great haunch carried between them as if it were a dead man on a shutter. They set it before Handley who was on his feet saying: ‘My toast is to art, to art, do you hear? And to the war that goes on till the bitter end. We’ll leave the other toasts for later,’ he added, picking up knife and steel to carve, and brushing aside their cheers as if they might infect the meat. There was silence during beef, fried marrow and boiled potatoes. Small flat salads of sliced Lincolnshire cucumbers sat between each two plates. Myra admired the cooking and organisation that had gone into the meal, qualities she had tried to instil into the village women of the WI in those far-off days when George was alive and she was a prominent talker at their meetings. She congratulated her, and everyone threw in their agreement. Handley leaned close, a darkening flush to his face. ‘Glad you came, love?’

She nodded, and he said: ‘Do you still love me?’ Mandy listened, a smouldering cigarette between her fingers as she forked up the beef. Myra saw how irresponsible he was. ‘I didn’t come to hear this,’ she said, loud enough for Mandy though not for Enid. ‘I’m fond of you, and nothing else.’

But Enid saw what was happening, having taken a small portion, and finished already, breaking off knobs and beads of candle-wax from the nearest stick and putting them back in the flames. John rescued Myra by asking about Morocco. Had she been as far south as the Tafilalet, or gone through to Colomb-Bechar in Algeria? And if so, what was the landscape like? What months of the year had she been there? His questions implied so much more knowledge on his part than she had gleaned from her few months’ stay that she wondered if he had been to the country while hoodwinking everyone for a month that he had stayed in his room.

Richard and Adam sat side by side with mutual expressions of misery and betrayal. ‘Why did you do it?’ said Richard. ‘You must be on a secret mission for Uncle John, who wants you to join them and find out about their strength and organisation. What else could it be?’ He didn’t look at him, but spoke straight in front at the wavering candle-flame.

Handley stood with his glass high: ‘We’ll have a toast from Mandy before she passes out.’

‘Get crocked,’ she said. ‘I can swamp down as much as anybody.’ She pushed away her plate of meatscraps and cigarette-ends, and lifted her empty glass for Handley to fill. Adam fetched in another armful of bottles and began to uncork them. ‘Here’s my toast,’ said Mandy, ‘to the racing-car my good sweet father is going to get me as soon as the Mini’s worn out. Then I can go to Germany for a run on the autobahns. They’re hundreds of miles long.’ Her eyes moistened as she looked around, then slid back all her wine.

‘I have bad news for you,’ he said thickly. ‘That Mini you twisted my arm for hasn’t had a penny paid on it, apart from the deposit. They’ll be here in a few weeks to pull it from under you.’

‘If I get a sports car in part-exchange, it won’t cost all that much.’

‘You’d better enjoy that Mini while you can,’ he said. Their two voices were joined in a deadly duel, as if the loser would be shot dead and vanquished, pushed unsung into the earth.

‘I’m going to sell it,’ she said, ‘and put the money as down-payment on a sports.’

‘You’ll end up in jail,’ he said.

‘You will. You signed the guarantee.’

There was silence, while they stared at each other. Then Handley smiled and sat down, calling that those who wanted second helpings should push their plates along. While waiting for his to be filled Ralph made a toast, hands trembling and eyes averted, wanting to say: ‘A curse on this house.’ But it would stamp him as melodramatic, and they would roll his sanity in the mud. He had been their football for too long, but would get his revenge when he married Mandy, when they’d think twice about sending a son-in-law to prison. He looked at Handley whose eyebeams blazed across waiting for him to speak. Or would they? They might see it as a neat way of unloading him and at the same time striking a blow at his parents, who had not answered his invitation so as to injure their own son. You couldn’t jump off that spinning family roundabout without spilling your jelly brains in the dust. He held up his glass: ‘In all sincerity, I drink to Mandy.’

She was on her feet. ‘Oh no, you don’t. Why do you want to show me up? Can’t anybody leave me in peace?’

‘It’s a perfectly acceptable toast,’ said her father. ‘A bit wet, maybe. But here’s to the happy couple, the gentleman-farmer and his lady wife, Ralph and Mandy. I know they’re going to be very happy because they came into the world at the right time.’

Mandy resumed her chain-smoking. Even with a box of matches nearby she lit a fresh cigarette from the tiny end of the one just used. Handley swallowed and spoke: ‘I’d like to drink to this house, this Jerusalem-on-the-Wolds where I’ve spent twenty years. But I’m thinking of leaving it soon, packing us all off down south.’

‘That’s the first I knew,’ Enid said, flushed. ‘It’s my house, anyway, and I’ve no intention of moving. You were born in Leicester, but I belong to Lincolnshire.’

He took a scrap of newspaper from his pocket. ‘How’s this for a good buy? Listen: “Converted Thames dredger moored off Gravesend. A lovely home. Vast. On two floors. Seven bedrooms, three reception rooms, L-shaped bridge, cloaks, hall and two bathrooms” — not counting the rather large spare one outside! “Running water and gas central heating. Garden on shore. A snip at eight thousand pounds.” That’s for me, captain of a boat that never sailed and never will. My beautiful family squatting in the bilges. Garbage disposal through the portholes. If life gets too hard you scuttle it and swim away like a rat.’

Enid fetched a huge cartwheel of cherry-dotted cake, carved out portions and sent them around the table. ‘So you’re getting into that sort of mood are you? Wanderlust and family hate? Well, it won’t do you much good tonight, because I’m not going to put up with it. I’ve a little announcement, but it can wait until I do a little toasting of my own.’

He poured liberal glasses of muscatel. Myra wondered when they would get up and murder each other, but considered they were too open and violent for that. Anything so quick and merciful would be against the rules. A warm white flash swept across the room, and Richard lowered his camera. ‘Yes,’ Handley said, ‘it is a historic occasion. Pin us down forever so that we can look back on it as a great gathering. Make an album and call it The Family. It’s bound to sell well.’ He held Myra’s hand and kissed it. A score of bottles had been emptied. ‘The cake’s good,’ he said. He took Mandy’s hand also, but she dragged it away: ‘Not until I get my sports car.’

Pots of coffee were set out, sweets, brandy, cigars, bowls of fruit, cheese and more salad. The candles were burning low, flames shaking into cups of fat. John fetched fresh ones, walked along the table fixing them in.

‘What are you going to drink to?’ Handley said.

Myra hadn’t thought about it, but stood up. He filled her brandy glass. Should it be Mark first, and then Frank? Or because Frank was in danger maybe the toast would do him more good, for Mark was safely asleep in the caravan. ‘To Frank Dawley,’ she said, ‘and to his son. To Albert’s painting, Mandy’s happiness, Enid’s marvellous supper. To John’s liberation, Richard’s dedication, and Adam’s vacillation. All one can do here is drink to everyone.’ The camera drenched her in white phosphorous. All light blinded you, never showed the way. Only in the dark were you able to see, by keeping daylight as a far-off memory to guide you at the utmost pitch of blackness.

‘Put that camera away,’ Albert said. She sat down, but could not see. The candles wouldn’t emerge from the flashing shadows and refocus. She felt tired and dejected because she did not know what she was doing here. She felt part of them, a mute appendage of their mad society, yet as if she had no right to accept it. Yet her reason for being here was that in their noise and violence and madness they seemed nearer to Frank Dawley than she ever was, even though she’d lived with him and had his child. It helped in the sacred act of recollection, for it was hard to pull him back from the haze and fire of the desert, see his eyes and body in the specific action of walking, eating, drinking, talking to friends. This was difficult not through lack of imagination but because he was still alive. If he had died she would see him with greater clarity. George was complete in every nuance whenever he came to mind because he was no longer on this earth, while Frank was indistinct because he didn’t so much want her to remember him as be with him.

‘Toasts are meaningless,’ Richard said, ‘so here’s to all things of meaning. You have to persuade yourself that life has some significance otherwise you sink into the morass of the living dead. When you’ve persuaded yourself that your life has meaning it is your duty to help the living dead.’

‘Well put,’ Handley said. ‘I couldn’t have said fairer than that myself.’

‘I wouldn’t have wanted to.’ Adam stood up. Since announcing his conversion, and predilection for Wendy Bonser, he appeared more urbane, effete and supercilious. ‘Here’s to true love, and England, and, oh, all right then, Father, I drink also to the war against imperialism and the established order etcetera-etcetera.’ In view of this addendum there seemed little hope of winning him back to the more robust ways of the family. His pale blue tie had a nonchalant wave in it. He sipped his brandy, rather than threw it back in the good old Handley style that he’d followed till now. They drank with him nevertheless, for he was still their son and brother. In the world of the family it was sin now, pay later, whenever you have time, because we can wait, and your dying breath will smudge the mirror that the last member of it holds in front of your mouth. He sat down, uneasy at such a thought, and reached for the cigar-box.

Ralph leaned over for an approving light at the same candle. ‘Nobody loves it more than me,’ Handley said, ‘but I don’t like it very much.’

‘We’d all of us do the place more good,’ Adam retorted, ‘if we at least liked it. Any love for England in this room is destructive sentimentality. All love is destruction, that I’ll allow, but I like this country as well.’

Uncle John stood, cigarette still smoking, and sipped at his glass of muscatel. Brandy and cigars he’d never taken to. He spoke quietly, so that they had to listen. ‘In talking about love, and like, and England, you are losing a sense of proportion, Adam. We are no longer living in England, but in the world. It may be difficult to accept. In fact it took me fifteen years in a cell padded by my own thick thoughts to disentangle the tentacles of octopus England and discover that I belonged to the world. I’m forty-five years of age, not twenty. Many young people nowadays know it instinctively, are born with it, though I’m afraid that most do not. The world is one country, topographically speaking, divided by a system of seas and rivers and mountains. Those who say they love England are only in love with their childhood and youth, and those who stay in love with it go immature into the grave. Love of country is a fatal infatuation, especially to those whom you make your enemies.’ His eyes glittered, and the aura of gentleness shifted to one side. ‘It may take an act of cosmic violence to unite the world. We hope not. But it will certainly need innumerable civil wars and revolutions before the world can agree to become united. We are at the beginning of the hundred years’ war, a series of sporadic conflicts under which the world as we know it will disintegrate. At one of these, in Algeria, we have a mutual friend who set out to take part in it. Some of you know him, all of you except Ralph have met him in one way or another. He came to this house once, and left marks on various people. I drove him from my den and solitude at the point of a gun, because in those days my sanity turned to insanity when it was disturbed. My senses have now recovered their power and sense of proportion. Nine months ago Frank Dawley went to Algeria and hasn’t been heard of since. Anyone who takes on that task is helping in some unrewarded, idealistic, mystical way to bring about the unification of the world. In the future they may become the new yet unacknowledged saints, men who went into the desert, fasted by necessity, fought by conviction, and died by faith. A man who values his life at nothing, and whose belief in something good becomes everything to him, is a religious man. All great changes towards materialism and socialism are brought about by religious men. For a truly religious man the light can never fail, and if universalism becomes a religion and socialism is the way we have chosen to bring it about then even the mistakes and tragedies of socialism have to become acceptable. That fact alone is a severe test on a man’s faith, on his sense of spiritual quest, but the greater the test on his faith the greater his faith becomes. I imagine it is unfashionable to confuse religion with politics, but such a steel-like mixture is necessary if we are to fight not only our opponents but also sometimes the system we are using. To make religion politics, and politics religion, is the only way we can use our faith, and at the same time keep it, and not be dragged down by a defeat of the spirit. Religious faith sharpens the bayonets of a political system. The desert wind blows hot and cold, is covered by light and darkness, yet always exists around your feet. It has taken me fifteen years to get back a sound mind and formulate my faith, and now that it is accomplished, I’m going to leave the love and protection of my brother and this house and go on a journey. I don’t know how long I shall be away, or even if I shall ever come back, but I think it is fitting that someone from this family should make it his mission to go to Algeria, find Frank Dawley and help him, or bring him back if he is no longer fit for the fight. That will be my task, so my final toast is that we should drink to that journey, and to Frank Dawley who has already made it. After I’ve prepared myself and worked out the details I shall set off. You cannot sit thinking in a room all your life. Sooner or later you have to step outside and act.’

Handley did not drink with him. ‘You can’t do it, John.’

‘Is my brother going to fail me?’ he smiled.

‘It’s not a matter of failing. I’ll never do that. But you’ve made your life good and whole again. You can’t throw it away. It’d be a fool’s errand.’ He stopped, had a sense of betraying Myra who might, he thought with horror as he sat down, think he did not want John to go to Algeria and bring back Frank because he was too selfishly in love with her.

‘I shall go to Algiers,’ John said, ‘get into the Kabylie mountains, and some way or other join up with the FLN. Richard can print my papers on his press. I shall be a foreign but sympathetic journalist, and I shall find Frank Dawley, because I don’t imagine many Englishmen are involved in their fight. Do you want me to go, Myra?’

The question seemed unreal, buoyed up on the hot air of shimmering candles, cigar-smoke and wine smells. So did her answer: ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ Adam stood in such a hurry he upset his glass. ‘John’s going on a personal quest to help Myra by finding Dawley with whom she is in love. It’s no revolutionary idealistic project he’s indulging in, but an old-fashioned romantic search.’

‘There’s a bit in it for everybody,’ Handley observed. It was strange, the first toast that meant anything left them embarrassed and antagonistic. No tree burned in a swamp of indifference, for the miasma around it could not catch fire, and water would suck out the flames. John would be taking the soul out of the house. ‘You belong with us. Think it over for a few months.’

‘I belong where I want to go,’ he said. ‘It’s decided, so why don’t we bless it, the whole family, by drinking to it?’

‘You’re going over the bloody precipice,’ Handley said, ‘so be careful. We’re all part of you, and don’t want you to take us with you. Most of all, I don’t want to lose a brother. Dawley’s a young man: he’ll survive.’

‘It’s not a question of survival. Such a word is unworthy of you, Albert. Which of us here will survive?’

Myra stood up and walked outside, through the hall and into the garden. Their shouts could not bring her back. Had they no consideration for her feelings? Frank would laugh at such a party, such sentiments. It was indelicate of John to connect her with his breaking away from the house. He was noble in his intentions, but being noble left its scattering of hurt people. He could have talked about it rationally to her alone, or to Albert, but this set-piece drama before everyone made it trivial and embarrassing. Yet why should the contemplation of a noble deed be dragged into the mud? She should fall on her knees and thank him, wish him godspeed and all success in wanting to find her lover at the war. Sickness was smeared across her heart. A noise of shouting and smashing glass came from the house.

She went in immediately, and they were crowded around John, laughing and happy. Enid was setting more candles along the table. John was embracing them, shaking them all by the hand. Myra did not lie at his feet, but she kissed him, and said she would stay at the house until he left on his mission.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Moonlight was pouring into her room. She could not sleep. No one could, on that side of the house. Its white glow shone at the walls and bed, masked her face as she put on her dressing-gown and sat by the window. Moonlight made streets across the room, and she stood to walk in its winding grey alleyways. Clouds shifted them, dissolving her city. At one corner she saw Frank, luminous and ash-grey, grey stubble on his chin, eyes empty as moonlight. He stood between two cartshafts of illumination, grinning because he felt he should not be there. It was not the moon he wanted, neither its face nor light. She was afraid of him, as she was of all people when she did not know what they wanted. Maybe he knew. If you were doing what you wanted, there was no need to know what it was that you wanted. One way or another, the sun and moon burned you up. What else were you born for? Certainly not to complain, only to know. He came forward, and she cried out as if the apparition would scorch her lips. He was the stake she would burn at, and she drew away.

Mark cried in his cot, alarmed at her vision, and she soothed him for fear he would waken the house. It was a momentary dream, and he slipped back into peace. To ask what she wanted from life was a wild and irresponsible question that she was unable to answer while Frank was missing from it. In London she once saw him walking along Oxford Street, and ran after him through packs of shopping people. An insane rush of hope pushed her along, yet when the man turned out to be someone else she was glad. If it had been Frank how would he have explained being in England and not back with her and their son? No excuse would have been good enough.

In spite of her body-and-soul ache to see him again maybe she did not want to until he had utterly purged himself of all desire to trek away from reality. Solitude had taught her to mistrust men’s ideals, especially those realised at her own desolation of spirit. She loathed her meanness but acknowledged it. To abandon Frank was a thought impossible to set in motion. She believed, but could not act. You could not act until you ceased to care. You didn’t act upon your own ideals. Other people did that, without deciding to do so. You made your ideals known, spun forth the message of love and brotherhood and war, but going out to forge and prove helped no one but hurt many. You split open the body and mind, let the sensibility and love fruitlessly pour over the desert sands, and in the end the damage was greater to yourself than even to the one you love. Man was not big enough for such a combined operation. Even Uncle John knew this, and would only leave on a mission of rescue rather than a jaunt of idealism, as Adam had been sharp enough to see. Frank will only succeed in what he wants to do if he dies at it. Perhaps that was why she did not want him to come back, because to look on a broken man for the rest of one’s life would be heartbreaking for her. If he came back he would be crippled, so she cried with bitter tears that there was no point in him doing so. When you abandon the moon, and walk too near the sun, your eyes are burned and blinded. The moon is gentler than the sun, might kill you slowly in the end or send you mad, but it doesn’t burn you up in one great flash when you step within the limit of its power. Why couldn’t she have told him this before he went? The transition was gradual, he would not have listened, and the moon confuses, weakens, does not allow the steel pivot of reason to be inserted. The moon demands that you be subtle, and subtlety does not work with someone enamoured of a scheme of the sun. He had to go. You had to let him, and the solitude his absence leaves teaches you to distrust men’s ideals and the harsh, rational ideas of the sun.

She sat by the window, the metal-grey moonlight pouring over her. People walked up and down the stairs, restless, looking for tea or cigarettes, or a final drink. Only John’s room was silent where he slept profoundly, she thought, exhausted by his intense and unremitting preparations for the long journey south, his own pathetic surrender to the hard time of the sun. It was a warm, full-mooned night, and the house smelled of food, drink and tobacco. She came back from the lavatory, and saw Handley walking up with a tray of bottles. He wore trousers and collarless striped shirt, stepped along in bare white feet. ‘Come to the studio,’ he said softly, ‘and I’ll show you my painting.’

She was about to say no, not wanting to be alone with him, but walked up behind, will-less because she did not want to be alone with herself. Enid was there, in any case, smoking a cigarette. The studio seemed unnaturally tidy compared to the disorder of the dining-room. Windows and skylight were open, but it was nevertheless hot from too much lighting.

‘Sit down,’ Enid said, a warm smile for her. ‘This is the hottest part of the house in summer, yet far from the maddening crowd. We’re thinking of building another house soon, two miles away, so that we can leave this one to the tribe. I’ll take the bus here every day to see if they’re all right, just as if I’m going to work.’

He poured brandy, water, slipped in ice and passed it around. ‘I’ll show you this painting now that the light’s right for it.’ A large cloth fell from a five feet by eight canvas standing on two boxes by the far wall. Sky took up some of it, a band of eggshell blue and grey smudges along the top, then came trees, valleys, the earth, animals and men, which loaded the greater area of the picture. Near the bottom was a band of soil, the thick chocolate skin of the crust, and finally a line of jet black where the depth of his consciousness had been reached.

‘It looks as if it’s coming to get me,’ Enid said. Handley explained that it was supposed to. What was the use of a painting if it didn’t get you by the scruff of the neck and pull you into either bathroom or jungle and show you things you’d never seen because you’d been afraid you might like the horror of them? It did the same to him, but he smashed them to bits on the anvil of his mind and re-arranged them on canvas so that it could do the same to others. Myra noticed a small hole in the middle of the painting: ‘What’s that for? Was it torn out?’

‘That’s another story,’ he said. ‘The ideal place for this picture to be hanged is between two trees, so that the closer you get to it the more you see through this hole into reality. It’s what I called Albert Handley’s Third Eye, the theme and keynote of my exhibition. It would work if you set it up at a window in the middle of a city and saw the slums and factories through it, or if it was physically possible you could hang it across a main road and while looking at the picture and wondering what the hole was for, a bus comes running through and blacks you out for dead. It’s the third eye that’s as plain as all piss-water but which nobody sees, the third eye of dream and reality that looks at you through the territory of my painting.’ He picked up small pieces of canvas, fitting them over the hole and blocking it, unable to choose one that harmonised. ‘Ralph cut out the original, when he stole the painting, a prime piece of Lincolnshire witchcraft to do me an ill-turn but which only gave me a fine idea.’ Over the hole he finally fixed an old photo of Uncle John as a young man in uniform, sad and raw, sepia-faced and faded, forlorn and wondering where the hell he was. Myra went forward and recognised him, dark hair showing under his service cap, his gentle eyes strengthened by the thinner and more youthful lines of his face. It fitted the picture so well that she shuddered, a heroic framework for this life-beaten man who in his resurrection was actually determined to carry out an act of heroism. They knew John would do it, or die doing it, and Handley’s inspired action in using him as the eye of the third eye in this one particular painting of his soul proved his extreme and brotherly faith in him.

‘You can’t hate England,’ Myra said passionately. ‘You can’t. I’m sure you don’t.’

He was delighted. ‘You see it, then? You really get the intention?’

‘He never did hate it,’ Enid said, sipping her brandy.

‘We won’t talk about that. It’s too difficult. The last shot I fired in anger defending the maggoty homeland was at German bombers flying over the east coast to gut Nottingham in the war. After that I became an instructor. But our John in that uniform looks like somebody in 1914. There were plenty of photos of that sort in our family, the only thing left of them by 1918. A photo. A million dead. Someone has to bridge the gap between the million dead and the soul of today. It’s never been done. They were born of a tight-fisted nation that could not survive the loss of one million dead ripped from its cities and fields. Other countries did, and have. I’m monstrously English, frighteningly, rottenly marvellously English. So maybe I’m Jewish. I hope so. But wasn’t it fantastic that those millions didn’t walk away from it all? I brooded on it last night. It stopped me from sleeping. A million dead. Two million Germans. Two million French — though some of them at least had the sense to mutiny. I wondered why so many consented to die, and came to the conclusion that it was one vast, overcivilised homosexual international holocaust, a group of nations fucking each other to death in a cosmic daisy-chain, and each dead man the spermatozoa of countless millions crushed in the uncreative death-womb of the mud. It was the earth turning in on itself, inverted sexuality. As another sixty thousand perished in the mud a general in the headquarters chateau wanked himself off in the porcelain bog. I got them all weighed up. So had a few million Russians when they refused to take part in this obscenity and voted with their feet for peace. A country only deserves love when the potential for that sort of dirtiness has passed from it. Imagine what sexual dreams the generals and presidents must have when they know that the pressing of a single button can cause such massacres. I’ll paint a picture of a general masturbating with one hand, and launching rockets with the other.’

‘That wouldn’t be art,’ said Myra.

‘But it would be truth. What more do you want? I could do a series of cartoons, call ’em “The Pleasures of War” if it weren’t for good old Goya. It would be a fair title, anyway. The art wouldn’t be derivative, that I’d guarantee. But there’s an endless fascination for me in 1914 and thereabouts. It’s still in the English blood, because the artists and writers haven’t taken it in yet and let it flow back to the people. Nobody’s tried. Maybe they never can, and are never meant to. 1912: Rudolf Otto von Sachsenschloss, a twenty-year-old callow youth all down at mouth (because a sabre-scar hadn’t yet healed and lifted it up to a glittering smile of strength) a reserve ensign of a Wurtemberg sharpshooters’ regiment, met Lieutenant Oswald Burton of the Sherwood Foresters who was spending his leave in the Rhenish Palatinate complete with Baedeker guide-book, on a hiking tour of six weeks, whither he’d repaired after being blighted in love. It was a long hot summer (one of those they used to have before 1914) and the pine-smelling needlegums took flame, and fired large acres of forest. The two young men helped to fight the blaze, heroes side by side, so that they were fed and wined by grateful villagers after it was all out and over.

‘The following year they meet in the Pyrenees, go up to great heights on muleback, eat their picnic meals, take champagne, brandy and cigars to help down those delectable patés and sausages. They swim in mountain pools, discuss great battles of the past, and drink toasts to eternal friendship.

‘We now switch to Christmas 1914. Earthworks and molehills zigzag the fields and gentle humps of north-east France. British and German soldiers are playing football in no-man’s-land, laughing and running to keep warm. Lieutenant Oswald Burton, thin-faced and looking thirty, goes over the parapet with revolver in hand to get them back on the afternoon of Boxing Day. There is fury and hatred in his eyes, more for his own men than the Germans. The lads from Worksop and Mansfield, Radcliffe and Lenton hate his guts as well. On the German line Oberleutenant Rudolf Otto von Sachsenschloss borrows a rifle from his batman. He is looking for a little sport. It was the British who suggested football. He fixed this irate English officer in his sights who is threatening his own men with a revolver. He drops the rifle and picks up field-glasses. “Mein Gott! It is Oswald.” He reflects a few moments on the tragedy of war, chews a quotation from Goethe in his teeth which he finally spits out, then shrugs his shoulders and picks up the rifle again. Burton drops dead with a bullet in the middle of his forehead. No more Sherwood ale for that landowner’s son. At the same moment a random shell whistles over from a drunken battery of the Royal Horse Artillery, seems to hover in the sky as if not knowing quite where to land to do most damage. Men of both sides scatter and drop. Rudolf Otto, too proud to do so, is blown to pieces. Only the football was safe: the dizzying spiral of European history took one more savage plunge into the abyss — opening the door towards the vast oozing shit-pits of Passchendaele — as the football rolled into a crater and bobbed about among nub-ends and shellcases.’

They sat at either end of the divan, Handley in a chair. ‘People see everything through dark glasses. Without a third eye you are blind and lost, live in the abyss, unless you can read a book or look at a picture that can give you the use of one for an hour or so. There’s neither forward time, nor backward time, only vision, and a truth of scene that could never have occurred to you.’

‘You should write it in your manifesto,’ Myra said.

‘It’s all gobbledegook. It wouldn’t mean anything — except to critics, of course. It would be an act of megalomania to write it down, and an act of intellectual arrogance to try and interpret it. If people don’t see it without having it explained to them (after a continual viewing of fifty-six hours, which nobody ever gets) then the painting has failed.’

Enid walked to the window. ‘I certainly hope your next show is successful, because we’ll be needing money by the end of the year.’

‘That’s your invariable reaction,’ he said, ‘to when I talk about my work.’ Myra was ready to go back to bed. ‘Downstairs at our shambles of a dinner a month ago,’ Enid said, ‘I never got the opportunity to make my toast.’

‘Do it now,’ he said, glad of a diversion from her baiting.

They filled their glasses. ‘Here’s to my next child, then.’

He drank, but nearly choked. ‘You can’t be.’

Her head was held back. ‘Why not? I’ve had six already.’

‘Seven,’ he said.

‘Seven, then. So why can’t I be pregnant again? Eight is the figure of plenty. It often happens. I’m only forty-one. I knew I’d got seven already, but you were testing me, weren’t you? There are three here, three in the caravans, and one at college training to be a priest. Have I passed? If I hadn’t picked you up on it you’d never have forgiven me. Anyway, there’s no mistake. I knew a month ago, but couldn’t tell it to you till it hurt. I’m not an alarmist or a common trickster like Mandy. So look cheerful and drink to it. You always did before, if only with a glass of beer.’

‘And so I do now,’ he said, inwardly raging at her breaking the news with such intentional spite before Myra. He drank his brandy, and walked to the open window as if to heave himself over the ledge and out. But there was no point in flying, because you hit the earth and quick on a moon-night like this, plummeting through tree-branches and digging your own grave at the impact. ‘Don’t do it,’ she mocked. ‘It’s got to be born and fed. And so have we.’

Myra felt a sort of appalled admiration at the cruel way they went for each other, surprised that they could take it, and still stay together. ‘It won’t settle your problems that easily,’ he said, splashing out a large glass of soda-water and drinking it off. ‘It’s so damned hot in here. We must be in for a heat-wave.’ Enid also felt a strange warmth in the room, that pressed against her eyes and temples like a headache. ‘Give me a drink as well, and some for Myra.’

They stood by the table, as if for protection and reassurance. ‘I don’t like it tonight,’ Albert said. ‘The devil’s around, or maybe it’s just the bloody moon eating through my veins.’

Enid laughed. ‘You’re so funny when you get in this mood.’

‘As long as you love me,’ he said. Their hatred had gone, but Myra felt that something worse had taken its place, and wished for the hundredth time that she had not left her own house where she felt spiritually undisturbed. She preferred not to witness this sort of life while her own was so much confused.

‘You’re spoiled and self-indulgent,’ Enid said, ‘to get into such moods.’

He ignored her so successfully that she thought he might not be well. He leaned out of the window and sniffed, then turned an altered face towards them. Hot oily smoke, almost invisible yet pushing upwards like a wall, was coming from the kitchen.

He ran for the door. ‘The house is on fire.’

On the floor below he pulled Ralph out of Mandy’s bed, so that his thick naked figure stood tall before him. ‘Quick,’ Handley roared at his bleak face that even the pleasures of love had been unable to soften, ‘get up to my studio and steal every painting you can lay your hands on. The house is burning down.’

Mandy ran by with a bundle of clothes. ‘Get the Rambler and the caravans clear,’ he shouted. Richard and Adam had been talking, and were still fully dressed. Thank God for the gift of the gab, he thought, as the three of them descended to the kitchen. The skeleton of a flaming door fell across their toes, and they drew back. Handley picked up a carpet and, using it as a shield, fell inside. Acting blindly in flame and smoke he plugged both sinks and turned on the taps, then opened the window and dived out into the mud.

Paintings were sailing out of the sky like eagles, falling on fences, bushes, into mud, the ruination of his sweat and dreams. Mandy towed both caravans at once down the over-leafed lane, those inside not knowing what peril threatened as they swayed and bumped along in the safety of their bunks. At the bottom she met a fire-engine, and by a swift efficient manoeuvre drove clear and let it through.

Richard and Adam hosed water towards the centre of the fire, but heat and smoke drew it short. He knocked the rubber pipes from their hands. ‘Too late. Get out what you can.’

They ran up the stairway into his studio. Ralph who had made a rope, turned into a naked sweating demon impervious to sulphur and smoke. He hooked up boxes and bundles of papers and slid them down the still cool wall. Myra caught them, sent the rope back. Enid stacked them. Handley freed Eric Bloodaxe and tied him to the outer gate, then watched the house reddening slowly, put on its mantle of smoke so as to expire in dignified secrecy. He stored the more precious objects inside the large kennel, for a few drops of rain were scattering. The garden was littered with clothes, books, papers, bric-a-brac, furniture. A radiogram smashed to pieces on a concrete bench. It’s a good job I never furnished it Well, Handley thought, as fire-engines arrived and turned on the foam. Or had many possessions. The caravan idea was brighter than I thought. His limbs trembled, and he lit a cigar in order to feel more at home now that he plainly had none. ‘Anybody left inside?’ the fireman said. Handley pointed to the studio, still floodlit with electric light. ‘There are three in there, but they’ll get down by the tree.’

‘Where?’

He pointed. Adam was already in the tree-top, a bundle tied to his back. Enid and Myra were carrying things to the front of the house and laying them out tidily. Hot smoke boiled as floors and roof dropped into the centre. Foam seemed to help it. Richard fought his way through crinkled char-edged leaves, and with Ralph above him they slithered through in a few seconds and fell to the ground. Handley assembled his canvases by the gate before paint on them melted.

Lurid scorching air threw them back, pushing, until they were half-way down the lane. Red of the fire mixed with red of the morning. ‘What are we going to do, Albert?’

They stood with arms around each other. He’d always imagined that losing one’s house by fire was a great boon to a free spirit such as himself, that he’d laugh in its face as long as no one was hurt. But this impossible child-dream seemed to have burned him completely hollow. After such a fire there was a law of silence which you could not disobey. They sat among bushes on the damp bank of the lane. He walked up again, to see house and tree vanishing in their own cocoon of destruction, eating each other up. He couldn’t take his eyes from it. Even the fences were burning. A deep crumbling sound lay under the crash of great sparks. The past was burned out, and the future was unthinkable. The spoor of twenty years had gone. The whole edifice was rumbling and rendering down through an enormous mincing machine, fascinating, fantastic, frightening under the crude shock. Foam was still pouring over in a useless attempt to show willing, though Handley thought you might as well piss on it for all the good it would do. He shivered, gooseflesh patching his face and arms, teeth jumping so that his brain was drowned by the noise. He made a great effort, paced up and down till it stopped. A line of fencing collapsed, the limits of the house and its grounds merging with the fields.

‘There’s not much we can do, sir,’ a fireman said.

Handley offered a cigar from his tin. ‘It’s all right.’

‘Thank you, sir. A hell of a fire. I haven’t seen one round here like that for a long time.’ He put the cigar in his pocket: ‘I’ll smoke it later with my tea.’ Handley walked away. The intensity was weakening, the world falling apart.

Mandy had parked the caravans on open ground by the pub. Leaving the Italian girls in charge she backed the Rambler up the lane and passed out two tea-flasks and a bottle of whisky sent by the publican. ‘You’re an angel,’ Handley said. ‘A real heroine. What a family I’ve got, even though the house is down.’

‘They’re eating beans on toast,’ she said, wide-mouthed with pleasure at her father’s compliment. ‘They’ve never had such an adventure, all sitting on the caravan steps in their nightshirts. Even Mark’s awake and enjoying himself.’

‘It’s a bit of an adventure for me as well,’ he said wryly.

‘The whole village is around them.’ She wore slippers, and a coat over her nightdress, her long hair tied into a pony-tail flashing outside. ‘We can get your paintings on the back of the Rambler, Dad, and then they’ll be safe. They’re fixing up rooms at the pub for you lot up here.’

The whole lane was softly lit by the glow of the house. ‘If anyone asks what I’ve done with my life I can now truthfully say that I made a fire.’

‘Someone did,’ Enid said, drinking tea from a paper cup. Handley passed the whisky bottle, then took a drink himself. ‘But where are we going to live till we get somewhere?’

‘Come down to Buckinghamshire,’ Myra said. ‘I’ve a large house, and a flat over the garage. There’s room for everybody, and the caravans.’

‘There’s not much stuff to move,’ Handley said, relishing the fact now that whisky made him feel better.

‘You live near the motorway, don’t you?’ Mandy smiled. She seemed happy and decisive, even mulling on future pleasures, while the others were sluggish, and too wan to think about much.

‘You’ll get no time for that,’ said Handley. ‘We’ll be busy for the next month or two. We need a new burrow, but we can’t park on Myra. We don’t want to ruin more lives than necessary.’

‘You can, and stay as long as you like,’ she said, knowing that Frank would like such a thing. If John found him and they both came back, so much the better. She hadn’t seen John — no one had.

‘Mark’s all right,’ Handley said, at her terror. ‘Is that it?’

She fell into Enid’s arms, holding on, shuddering. They had forgotten him. No one had shouted his name. In saving the paintings they’d lost him out of their lives. She whispered his name to Enid.

‘Where’s John, then?’ Enid cried to them all. ‘Don’t look so dumbfounded, where is he?’

Mandy screamed, and led a frenzied stumbling run towards the smoking walls of the house. It was almost day on the hill-top, grey clouds rolling high. The firemen pulled Handley back. ‘What is it? You’re all out, aren’t you?’

Handley fought free, a demon running to the charred walls. ‘My brother!’ he screamed. ‘John! John!’ He was thrown back, slung onto the soil and cinders, the scorching clinkers of his ruin. He crawled away groaning. Enid and Myra lifted him up, a terrible wrenching misery possessing them all. ‘Did anybody see him?’ Richard cried. ‘We’d have seen him or heard something. He couldn’t have been in there.’

‘Nobody could have died like that. He didn’t even shout.’

‘It’s not true,’ Enid said. ‘I can’t believe it. He must have gone somewhere.’

At that moment he was standing on the platform at Louth station with two packed suitcases and a briefcase by his side, waiting for the first train to London. He flicked his lighter, and lit a cigarette with the sharp white flame.