The Flame of Life

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Day after day he bent close to the intricate colour and detail of the large-scale maps of the Algerian wilderness that covered the caravan table, trying to equate their contours and empty areas to the actual journey made on the ground.

Between reality and the pretty picture, memory posed its special problems when it came to fusing both into dull deadbeat words. What picture ever agreed with reality? Reality was one and indivisible, and the representative fraction of Dawley’s split mind as he gazed at his maps — more detailed and expressive by far than those used on the trek itself — showed little sign of coming together and recreating the vanished though recent past.

He was in England, and safe, and the war was over, and his memories had no clarity though they still, somewhere, had meaning. Having more or less marked out the course of his footslog from the Moroccan frontier to the Khabylie Mountains near the northern coast, and re-knit a daily account of what happened, much of it was nevertheless inaccurate because he felt that his recollections were not to be trusted, and possibly never would be.

Knowing that reality and the past were so bound up that they could not be brought back, created a larger drier desert in himself than the scorching sand and stone he had walked over. It made him see that, returned to the safety of England’s green and truly pleasant dead land, he did not know with any surety why he had gone to fight for the rebels in Algeria.

True, out of a sense of idealism, and to help the downtrodden of the world after a lifetime of believing that the international socialist brotherhood of man could cure the evils and inefficiencies of capitalist-imperialism, he had agreed to join Shelley Jones in driving a lorry of guns to the frontier beyond Tafilalet — a practical action that could never be confused with any dream.

After a successful ambush, he persuaded Shelley to go on to the war in Algeria. Shelley knew his limitations, and did not care to enter the battle-zone. But Dawley, drunk on the tactical superiority of the fighting, and the intoxicating though diminishing noise of their own gunfire, forced him to embark on the most stupid enterprise it was possible to concoct.

They struggled across desert and rocks and mountain ranges, hunted and hunting, half dead from sickness, hunger and thirst, yet somehow recuperating and surviving. Each day the sky altered, from darkness through scorching heat to darkness. Even now, it came back real enough when he descended down into the dream to think about it. During a night attack, Shelley was wounded in the foot, and died of gangrene a week later.

Maricarmen hadn’t come to England so that the Handleys could comb Shelley’s notebooks for aphorisms on revolution. They, after all, were ten-a-penny compared to the rarity of action. Who could say what the notebooks contained, anyway? Shelley had never been one for writing his great notions down, but usually spouted them to whoever was near by. His friendship with Shelley had been deep enough for him to laugh at the more impractical ideas. Maricarmen had another sort of friendship with him, and he saw that she had come to find out exactly how it was that Shelley had decided against his usual and better judgment to go into a country that was at war. Frank felt that the revolution had really come home to roost, and he was uneasy.

Later that night, when they went back to the caravan, Nancy sat opposite with her knitting, while he tried to scribble a few notes out of himself. The kids were tucked into their sleeping places, dead to the world after a day roaming the woods for cowslips and birds’ eggs.

His thoughts floated, idle and infertile, and because he was tired, and in a way content, he waited for them to tell him something new.

‘I can’t stand this life any longer,’ Nancy said, pausing in her needlework.

He looked up.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I want a home of my own, that’s what’s wrong with it. I don’t like living on top of other people.’ She was knitting a jumper for Simon, having bought a Fair Isle pattern from the store in the village, one of those fly-blown pamphlets paled by the sun that you see all over the country, with an illustration of a kid-on the envelope already wearing it, the sort of smiling nipper that never was except in Nancy’s mind.

‘I want to live in private, not public,’ she said. ‘Nor in a caravan, either. It’s like when I was a girl and lived in a slummy street, everybody sitting on their door-steps and shouting across to everybody else. I was glad when we went to the housing estate.’

‘You can’t compare this to a slum.’

The clicking needles showed off her mood. As if he needed them! She had a lot to say, and didn’t relish the fact that he was making her say it. He was sly as well as idle these days, and such people can’t love. ‘Perhaps not. But I’d like us to be more on our own.’

‘I wouldn’t want to,’ he said. ‘This is a good way to live.’

‘Where does that bleddy leave me, then?’ she demanded.

‘If we can’t agree, there’s not much point in things.’

‘If you’d agree with me,’ she answered, ‘we’d be all right. Depends which way you look at it, don’t it?’

‘I expect it does.’

She was not prepared for it to stay like that, though she didn’t doubt he would have been. ‘I’m going back to Nottingham, then.’

‘Oh ye’? Gonna get rooms?’

‘Not bleddy likely. I kept the house on.’

He hadn’t known about that. ‘You just came down for a holiday, like?’

They sat at the table, with a pot of tea between them — which he had made. ‘I’ve got two kids to think about, and I know I can’t rely on you to do anything. You’ve been back months and you haven’t even got a job yet.’

‘It’s not so important.’

‘It is for me,’ she said.

‘There’s plenty of others to sweat in factories. I’ve done my share.’

‘Twelve years isn’t a fair share. And where’s the money going to come from?’

He saw the lines already at her mouth, the hard-bitch determination to do nothing that wasn’t approved of in TV adverts and the Daily Retch. To her there was nought else to do but the done thing, to knuckle under and get back to it and pull your weight and feed the hungry mouths in the handpainted nest — mostly for the benefit of bastards who’d faint at the smell of an oil-rag, or who couldn’t even mend a fuse. He felt an ugly mood in him, and held it back. ‘Are you short of money? I’ll solve that problem if you are.’

‘You wouldn’t have talked like that in the old days,’ she shrugged. He’d be an old man if he stayed here much longer, doing something he was never cut out for. But he was shifting and unreliable. He’d left her once, and would do it again, so she might as well get it in first.

‘Times change,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well I change, then.’

He’d done the wrong thing going to see her in Nottingham after coming back. He couldn’t think why he’d done it now, except out of curiosity, and a wish to look at the children. But it was a useless waste, because even if they’d missed him they were used to him having vanished by then. Such a thoughtless return had ruined everything, and now it was being done again — by Nancy this time — so he had to do his bit and not make it look too easy: ‘Can’t you stick with things for a while? What about all the love you told me you had?’

He wouldn’t have said that a year ago, either. He felt a wave of self-dislike, yet at the same time knew he hadn’t come back from Algeria to get caught in this.

‘Maybe it’s gone so deep I can’t get to it,’ she said. ‘But I know what would be best for the kids.’

‘They’re happy here.’

They were, too.

‘They’ll be happier in Nottingham, even though I’ll have to go to work. It’ll be more real for them up there.’

More real! Good God! Wasn’t it real everywhere? But there was no moving her. Nor did he want to, finally. He was aware of being unjust in his indifference, but there was nothing he could do about it. He’d known for weeks it wasn’t working out.

‘I’ll pack tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And if you want to follow on, you can. But don’t leave it too late. Things have a way of altering for good. I’m only thirty, don’t forget.’

‘I won’t go back to work in a factory,’ he said quietly. ‘Not till I’ve tried something else.’

‘What, though?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘Well, you ought to be. You liked the factory at one time. That’s all you know how to do, anyway.’

‘Do you think that’s a good life?’

‘I don’t know. But I’ve worked as a bus conductress, and that wasn’t exactly fun. And I sweated in a stocking factory from fifteen, till I married you. I’ve done my share, and I know I’ll have to go on doing it — all my bloody life.’

So Nancy left. Nobody could persuade her not to, and they all missed her when she went, which made him feel quite bad about it. In fact he didn’t realise how much she and the children meant to him till afterwards.

A final set-to at the station showed that she knew Myra’s son Mark was his child, and that her pride would not let her live so close to them. He couldn’t blame her for it, and it was as clean a way of parting as he could think of. He did wonder though what vile gett had thought fit to tell her. It was strange, he brooded on his way back from the station, how she’d made up his mind for him, instead of it being the other way round.