The Flame of Life

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It nagged at him all night long, invaded his dreams through the sort of sleep that gave no rest. Towards dawn Enid said that if he didn’t stop scraping around like a rat in a trap he could go off to his own bed in the studio. Finally, he slept a couple of hours, though the gnawing fact of getting John’s lethal pistol under lock and key woke him sharply at eight.

In his dressing gown, and without that vital first swig of coffee, he went on to the landing and up the stairs. The unreal den of his dead brother’s room made the world real again. Its creation was an act of lunacy that pulled him with a soiled almost sexual immediacy back down the years and on to the landscape of childhood. Not that life in the small Staffordshire town had been all sunshine and lollipops. He spat in the firegrate: far bloody from it. His mother was forty when he was born, his father fifty, and they’d died within a year of each other when he was twenty-five, having given him the benefit of their dry hearts if nothing else.

His father, a small-time builder, had gone bankrupt just in time to retire, a hard old man who’d forced him out to work as soon as it was legal. The word ‘legal’ had been his ever-loving word: it was legal to do that, or it wasn’t legal. He used it so often he’d stoop to any illegality he could get away with — a bald-headed man of middle height with grey eyes so piercing that people never took him seriously.

When Handley went to work at fourteen he had no time for his father. He didn’t hate him. He just wanted to get out of his way, remembering him as a miserable creature, though it was no good feeling sorry for him, because while you did he’d kick you so hard you wouldn’t get up for ten minutes. Handley slipped out one day and didn’t see him tell the lid was fastened on his coffin. His parents hadn’t even loved each other, so how could they have been expected to love their children?

He had been particularly unobservant of his parents because they were so hard on him, which might explain why he was able to jettison their influence so painlessly. Later, the emptiness he found in rooting around the distant corners of his anguished mind drove him to painting — not in an attempt to discover himself, but to create a world in which it wasn’t necessary to do so.

He sat on the swivel chair by the radio table, and suddenly felt afraid of this replica-room and the touchingly placed paraphernalia that had belonged to John who had never lived in it. John had burned down his real room in the Lincolnshire house, having meant it should no longer exist after he’d set off for Algeria. His suicide dated from that mad act — unable to live anywhere but in the room he could no longer go back to. So why perpetuate his memory with this homely shrine? Don’t we trust ourselves to remember him? By keeping the room intact he was celebrating death, not John, because he distrusted his loving memories of him.

He walked to the window. He opened the curtains. Across the road, between two houses, were emerald meadows, and a glinting sluggish stream. John wouldn’t have liked such scenery. He loved the wolds of Lincolnshire.

No one had loved him more than Handley. He was his one and only elder brother, that last real line that connected him to far-off Staffordshire. This mocked-up signals cabin, this faked hermit’s cave, this phoney remembrance centre, had nothing to do with it. When you created your own ghosts there was little you could do to get rid of them.

He shook his head. The cigarette tasted foul before coffee and bread-and-butter. By the radio he lifted trays of nails and screws, a spirit-level and calipers, plumb-line and a pedometer, though John hardly ever walked, depth-gauge and spanners — his brother’s beloved gear without which life would have been even emptier. Man must have his tools, his toys of reality, aids to tame the world yet keep it at a distance, and not get too enmeshed in its despondencies.

The cigar-box lid was held down by small tacks. From the radio-operator’s odds and ends on the desk he took a one-bladed pen-knife, and forced it upen. He swung the powerful lamp to it. There was nothing inside, and no amount of light could fill it. He felt a fool before turning angry. It was hard to move. He was rabid. The sweat came, as he let the lid fall. With a gun loose, the community was a death-trap.

He switched off the lamp, went over and closed the curtains. A shade of day still came in, light which didn’t seem safe any longer. He sat on the bed and wondered what to do. His nature was to exaggerate everything, scare himself with the possibilities of disaster. The others thought that his bark was worse than his bite, and that he could never hold back what was on his mind, so for the moment he would say nothing, and hope to get some advantage from not letting Cuthbert know he’d found out about the gun.

He closed the door quietly. There was no reason to lock it anymore. Back in his room he dressed rapidly: underwear, a pair of corduroys, an old white shirt without the collar, waistcoat. Hunger would consume his chest-wall unless he got a mouthful soon.

Dawley had been up since seven to give Paul and Rachel their breakfasts and send them to school. He was glad of a day off from his Algerian travels, waiting in any case to read Shelley’s notebooks and get a few quotations to light up his reasons for going there in the first place. The abortive attack on Laghouat, and his encounter with the snake-eaters, had no time scale joining them together. The days were bruised and broken from each other, so what better way of poulticing the narrative than by a few earnest observations from Shelley’s truly revolutionary soul?

Handley was stubbled around his chin: ‘It’s flown. Where is he?’

‘He got up to do some gardening.’

‘Gardening? Cuthbert?’

He put a plate of scrambled eggs before him. ‘With Dean. They’re planting pot in a corner of the paddock, clearing the virgin lands for home consumption. It’s a dirty business, really.’

Handley sat with head bowed, then looked up and began eating: ‘A drug-crazed maniac with a gun! I should never have let him into the community.’

‘You couldn’t keep your own son out. Maybe he didn’t take it. There are plenty of others. Ralph, for instance. Who knows?’

Handley poured more coffee. ‘I bloody well do. A father knows more about his son than he does about himself. I may be a mystery to myself, but I brought Cuthbert up from unconsciousness. I watched every gesture as it came out. He’s got a wayward and villainous nature — though God knows where he gets it, because it’s not from Enid, and it ain’t me. It’s something totally different. But he was always delighted to exaggerate my bad traits, mimicking me behind my back in the hope I’d fall into a pit and get swallowed whole. What have I done to make him like that? I was so taken up by my painting that I had no time except to clout him when he cheeked his mother. It’s his way of getting his own back, I suppose. What a curse the family is. Where’s the bread and butter?’

‘We’re trying to solve that problem by this community,’ said Frank, passing it, ‘though we won’t feel the effect for twenty years.’

‘It’s just an idea for middle-aged people,’ Handley said, ‘this community. The young ones don’t want it, and won’t see the need of it till their own kids are grown up — by which time it’s too late, like it is with me. Cuthbert’s trying his best to ruin it. Ralph and Mandy want a nice little cottage thatched with daisies and buttercups so’s they can be all lovey-dovey in their pervy way. Adam and Richard are just a couple of lazy bastards pounding out revolutionary ideas in a permanently non-revolutionary society in order to avoid working. That’s not hearsay, it’s realistic. It’s costing me three hundred pounds a month to run this community, apart from what Myra puts in, so you can see what a bargain it is. It’s not that I’m worried about being ruined, but at least a man might expect peace at such a price. I want to get on with my work. That’s a natural desire, ain’t it? Domestic life is society’s secret weapon to stifle the artist. I’ve never had peace in my life, not with seven kids, but at least I don’t want a disaster with that bloody gun on the loose. The idea of killing never appealed to me, especially when it comes too close to my own skin.’

Dawley always knew that Handley only let his sons play at revolution so that he could get on with his painting. If revolution ever became so real that he had no electric light or couldn’t get razor-blades he’d be the first to turn against it. He wanted to paint just as most people wanted to work and live in peace, and as an artist he really did represent mankind in that respect. Volatile and unpredictable as he was, he still loved his family and tried to look after them, and if there was injustice on a larger scale he was the sort who would get up and do something about it. There was no doubt about that.

‘I must have that gun back,’ he said, ‘and put it in a safe place where nobody can find it.’

Dawley set plates and cups in racks of the dish-washing machine: ‘Ask Cuthbert point-blank what he’s done with it.’

‘He’d laugh in my face.’

Frank thought for a while. ‘Why don’t we call a meeting and read Shelley’s notebooks? It’ll break the ice, and might throw a hint on where the gun is. I don’t like the thought of it being on the loose, either.’

Handley was puzzled. ‘It’s a zany idea, though I suppose it can’t harm anybody.’

‘The indirect approach,’ Frank said. ‘Uproar in the East, strike in the West. Everyone will be at their ease, lulled by interest in the notebooks. That’ll be the time to pop the question.’

‘It’s too subtle,’ Handley said, ‘though it’s better than nothing. I’d almost forgotten about the notebooks. It is time we had a look. Do you think there’ll be much good in them?’

‘You never know.’

Handley went to his studio, and Frank cleaned the kitchen. Not only would he use the material of Shelley’s notebooks to pad out his narrative, but he needed to shore up his revolutionary enthusiasm, to point the difference between the true fighter for the freedom of the underprivileged, and that of a simple mercenary soldier who was paid for his actions by the excitement he got from it.

He was beginning to wonder whether it had been no more than a great screen to conceal his real feelings from himself and others. Only peace brought out the truth — which led him to see that Handley’s attitude might easily be the right one.