The Flame of Life

CHAPTER TWENTY

The longer she delayed opening Shelley’s trunk and taking out the notebooks, the more afraid she became to do so. It lay under the bed, and the key was part of a bunch on the dressing-table by the window. They were warm from the sun when she picked them up. She put them down again, and finished dressing. Someone knocked at her door.

‘Quien es?’

‘Enid.’

‘Come in.’

‘I’m driving to Hitchin market. Do you want to help?’

‘All right. I won’t be long.’

Enid sat on the bed. Her long hair was snaked up into a pile, and her face was remarkably unlined for a woman of over forty. ‘How do you like being with us?’

‘Time drifts by. I’m not sure I like being in England, but it’s nice here.’ She sprinkled perfume from a bottle of Maderas de Oriente on her neck and under the arms, where Enid saw demure sprouts of black hair. She put on a sweater.

‘You’re very attractive. You’ll have to find a boyfriend.’

‘That’s not so easy. Do you have one?’

Enid laughed. ‘I’ve been too busy bringing up children.’

‘You should look for one.’ She took her shoulder bag, and lifted the trunk keys to bring them with her, but thought Enid might see it as a gesture of mistrust against the community, so left them where they were. ‘Does Albert have girl friends?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ Enid was ready to go. ‘At least I’ve never caught him at it. Neither of us has ever had many friends of any sort.’ They stood close, and Maricarmen came forward. The kiss was brief on the dry skin, and they rested a few moments, arms on shoulders, a warmth of tranquillity and understanding. In sensing the youthfulness of Maricarmen’s body Enid realised how much more alive she might become if she got to know a younger man. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ she said, pressing Maricarmen’s warm hands. Her own fingers were cold, and she enjoyed such contact.

Ralph watched them get into the Rambler. He had been up since early morning, but Mandy stayed in bed, exhausted by his menacing fluctuating moods of the last few days — though they had lifted slightly since the turgid mechanism of his mind had decided to do something.

He knew that every move depended on personal, spiritual energy. The only problem left in the world was how to stop going mad when that energy withdrew from you. If he felt ill, either in the stomach or the soul, he did not even have the strength to go to a doctor, or talk to anyone about it. But energy always lurked somewhere in the chaos of his mind, though it rarely turned into action. That which stayed was not energy at all. But when he acted without thought it never occurred to him to think he was energetic, and so it did not help to console him for all the times when he’d been listless and without hope.

The two women drove away, and he walked towards the back door with a large plastic bag folded neatly under his arm. How is it possible, he wondered, to stop what you are going to do if you are going to do it?

Cuthbert, sauntering down from the garden, watched from between the rose bushes. Ralph was a difficult bird to fathom, he decided. What could you make of a grown man who walked around the house with wet cheeks because, in the natural order of things, a hedgehog had died?

He plucked a budding rose to pieces, and thought that if Ralph had gone into the house intent on stealing something, one ought to find out what it was. No doubt Ralph would bungle it. Somebody would see him, kick his shins and raise an outcry. Or would they? Mandy was deep in her daytime dreams. Dawley was re-sweating his Algerian skylark. Richard and Adam were moving pins on maps. Myra was in the vegetable garden plucking early peas.

He began to shake at the idea of him upstairs looting John’s stuff. It was no use thinking he wouldn’t dare. Nothing was sacred to a founder-member of Kleptomaniacs Anonymous. Ralph had all the stupidity of an intelligent thief. He’d nick anything.

Cuthbert leapt down the steps, went in through the kitchen, then silently upstairs in his plimsolls, listening at every door. Mandy was snoring, and there was silence in all the rooms but Maricarmen’s. Ear at the keyhole, a great deal of paper material was being stuffed into the plastic bag. A lid fell to. A bunch of keys jangled.

His brain revelled in such information. He went downstairs and out again. Eric Bloodaxe tried to grab his ankle, wrathful perhaps at not having challenged him on the way in. Cuthbert casually shot back his foot and pushed the dog into its kennel.

Among the rose bushes, his heart beat hard. Ralph was helping himself to Shelley’s archives. Three people at least would bury him alive for it — Dawley, his father, and Maricarmen. And since Ralph was considered by the community to be the champion waste-burner of the Home Counties, Cuthbert had no doubt what he intended to do with such combustible material.

From behind the bushes he watched him walk to the garage with the plastic bag slung heavily over his shoulder. A moment later he came out with his two-two air rifle and strolled up the steps towards the paddock, trying to keep himself erect and proud, and make as complete a changeover as possible from cat-burglar to landowner. The community had bought an extra air rifle so that he could go on daily patrol to keep the pigeons off the peas and beans. His aim had improved, and since the death of his pet hedgehog he had scared two birds.

Cuthbert nipped along the path, and hid by the far side of the house. Ralph greeted Myra in the garden, his offer to help with the vegetables altruistically refused. In the garage Cuthbert saw half a dozen identical plastic bags lined along the wall. By opening each he found the notebook cargo he was after. It was a long time since he had done so much shifting and carrying, and he’d forgotten how one sweated.

Myra laid the bucket of peas on the kitchen floor, and made coffee at the Aga. The smell of it drifted to the caravan, and after taking a cup to Mandy she found Dawley sitting at the table waiting for his. She brought Mark down — who’d been looked after by Adam and Richard and clutched a piece of old map which he crisscrossed with pencil.

Dawley took his son on his knee: ‘How’s my old Mark, then? What’ve you been up to?’

He dropped the map and pencil and began walking up his father’s chest, held by each hand. ‘I was going to bring your coffee,’ Myra said.

‘It’s all right. I like to drink it in the bosom of my family.’

‘Which one? You have so many. Or you had before Nancy left. Have you heard from her?’

He put Mark on the floor and held Myra, kissing her gently. ‘I’ve only got one now. I love you and Mark, and that’s about it. Things come plain at last. Nancy’s making her own way, and I’m making mine.’

Mark crawled between their feet and, hands pinching his flesh at the calves, stood between them. ‘He heard me,’ Dawley said. ‘He knows how I feel.’

‘He knows you’re his father.’ She held Dawley — not wanting him to let her go. ‘You work too hard. Give yourself a rest.’

‘What’s rest? Idleness. Death. Boredom. Gives you time to think. I even feel lazy doing the so-called work I do.’

‘You’re getting too thin.’

‘That never harmed anybody.’ He drank his coffee black, without sugar. ‘Some for you?’

‘Please.’

He poured milk for Mark, and sat at the table with him on his knee: ‘Don’t splash it all down me. Put it just there. Come on, open your little soup-box.’

‘Why don’t you sleep with me at night?’ Myra asked. The direct question sounded strange coming from the shy woman he knew her to be. But it was what he liked about her. On the day when they first met, she had been the one most direct in the approaches. It was a big reason for loving her, and still was. It simplified life, and made the sexual part so obvious that you were free to get to the greater complications underneath. ‘I want to,’ he answered, ‘but I go dead for weeks at a time.’

‘Is it because Maricarmen’s here?’

He laughed. ‘I could never be in love with her.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ she said.

‘I don’t know why I haven’t been to you. Waiting to see how I felt maybe. But my love for you doesn’t change.’

‘I suppose you’ve been waiting for half a hint — as Mandy puts it. We all go dead from time to time, but it’s still pleasant to have someone in bed with you.’

Mark was looking at them intently, and Frank steadied his cup when the milk was about to spill. ‘I’ve been wrapped up in myself. I can’t see the straight-edge of life any more.’

She smiled. ‘Who can? But things have a way of realigning themselves without too much worry or thought. As long as you talk about them — with somebody else.’

He set Mark’s empty cup on the table. ‘I tell myself the same, but it goes on and on, inside my head and won’t come out.’ He put Mark on the floor, who crawled to his map and pencil. ‘I’d like to go to bed with you right now.’

‘We’ll have to wait till tonight.’

He filled a mug with coffee, went out and up the path into the studio.

‘Do you want a brandy?’ Handley offered.

‘Can’t take it these days. Tastes like razor blades. How’s the painting?’

‘All of a splash. I’m trying to expand my consciousness, to fight away the fear of death. Now that I’m over forty I’m beginning to remember my dreams again. Maybe the breakthrough is coming.’

Frank sat on a box to look at the canvas.

‘I’m trying to paint the world moving closer to the sun,’ Handley said, swigging his coffee noisily. ‘But must it pass through the eye of a needle to get to it? Be blasted by a nuclear explosion, for example, to reach its good warmth? See all the green of that primeval forest? I dreamed it last night. And those figures? Dreamed them as well. Adam and Eve are in paradise, with the Bomb going up on the horizon. Time has no meaning when that happens. Maybe the earth shouldn’t move closer to the sun. Perhaps its survival depends on it being equidistant from the sun and the moon — spiritually I mean. A shift of polarity and we’re all for that high jump, and nobody can leap as high as to clear that cloud. The colours are coming about right. They’ll blind everybody. If you want to see the world in its true colours you’ve got to be colour-blind. That’s how I paint. I know nothing about colour. Or I don’t allow myself to. To know is to kill. Naturally, I know everything. But I don’t trust anything, so I always start from the beginning. Everything fresh, yivid in juxtaposition — all that crap. If you’ve got the form and the imagination, the colour will look after itself. The colour’s in your own soul. Paint Jerusalem on the end of your nose.’

‘What do you think about the future?’ Dawley asked.

He put down his mug, and laughed. ‘I’m an artist. I’ve got no future. Life is short: here for a minute and gone tomorrow. I paint till I croak. It’s my nature. You go on and on doing your work, and keeping out of mischief as much as possible.’

‘What do you call mischief?’

‘Making people unhappy. I hate that.’

‘I know,’ Dawley said.

‘I know you do, old chuff. Otherwise I wouldn’t tell you. If you didn’t know it there’d be no point telling you.’

Dawley was interested. ‘You mean you can’t teach people anything?’

‘More or less. They only learn by experience. When the oppressed start to rebel it’s because they’ve got no food, or because they’ve just seen their brother shot. They don’t have to be told to rebel. By the time somebody comes along and says you’ve nothing to lose but your chains they know it. Experience had already told them. If nobody tried to rouse them they’d rouse themselves, and do it more effectively than if they’d never been got at by your middle-class socialists who only want to guide them in a great big circle, into becoming the same as they were before …’

‘Why do you encourage Richard and Adam in revolutionary studies, then?’

‘Because when the downtrodden realise they’re oppressed and start to rise there’ll be one or two people around to show them what to do. That’ll be useful — technically and tactically. But they don’t need to be told what’s really what.’

‘Do you think art and literature are useless, then?’

‘Bollocks, no. They keep the world from committing suicide. But to say that the brush or pen is mightier than the sword — well, that’s not true. When was the pen so contemptible that it had to compete with the sword? I assume the pen to be a noble instrument, like the brush for painting.’

Dawley was more receptive to other people’s opinions than he used to be. And yet, maybe because he was older and his own views had ossified, he found most of them irrelevant. Handley was an exception because he jig-sawed everything into his work, and what he said seemed to have significance.

Frank stood. ‘I’ll go back to my maps and notebooks.’

‘And I’ll finish this canvas,’ Handley said, ‘as long as there isn’t an earthquake.’

‘I’ll try to hold it off if I feel it coming,’ Frank called as he went out.

‘That’s what friends are for,’ Handley shouted after him.