The Flame of Life

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Adam read to make certain there’d been no mistake. Having pulled a notebook from under Dawley’s bed, and made three ricketty piles on the floor, it was hard to see what all the fuss was for, because there was nothing subversive about these unhallowed slabs of prose.

Skimming the spidery open handwriting, he saw it might have been better if they’d been burned instead of stolen. Each story, sketch, paragraph and page of notes was signed by Shelley Jones, otherwise he’d have thought the books belonged to someone else. There were a few heavily marked quotations from some authority on guerrilla warfare, a clumsy sketch on how to lay explosives under railway sleepers, and one describing a silencer for a pistol, but mostly the writings were lewd, vivid, and humourless pornography that could never have been looked into by Maricarmen — or read by whoever had taken them from the trunk. He felt such awe at being the first to broach their covers that he broke into a goggle.

Richard stood on the step. He was tall and swart, with black curly hair, a year younger than his brother. ‘I’ve had no luck.’

Adam was red at the face. ‘I found the golden hoard, that’s why — the sacred mysteries, Shelley’s notebooks as I live and breathe! I don’t think we’ll get much out of them.’

‘So Dawley did it?’

‘Seems so. Can you see Dad anywhere?’

Richard bent his head to look. ‘Leaning on the front gate having a pleasant smoke. Shall I get him? I always feel guilty if I disturb an artist in his meditations!’

‘We’ll need somebody’s wisdom to sort this one out.’

‘His experience, anyway,’ Richard said, going down the steps. Adam opened another notebook. Four men were having a go at each other. On the next page, a group of women. It was abominable. How could a dedicated revolutionary indulge in such horny nonsense? Judging by the names they even belonged to the same family. Maybe Shelley had been preparing a long plain tome on the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, believing so much in the harmony of people living together in peace and love that it was necessary to work out every possible permutation of sexual congress in order to see if any snags cropped up. What right had he, Adam, to judge his motives? Either he’d been amusing himself, or his mastabatory musings were simply another twist to his idealism.

The caravan boards creaked under Handley’s walk. ‘In Dawley’s bloody quarters, too. That’s awkward.’

‘I suppose he needed them to help with the writing of his book.’

‘He’d ask for ’em,’ said Handley, ‘not nick ’em’ — taking a ball of string from his pocket and giving it to Richard. ‘Tie ’em up and let’s get ’em out of here. Neatly though, or they’ll slop all over the place.’

‘But he must have taken them,’ Richard said.

Handley stroked his moustache. ‘It’s obvious. As plain as day. But anything plain in this gang’s fit to baffle old Nick himself.’

‘But you’ll still get back to the indisputable fact in the end.’

‘What’s in the books?’ Handley asked. ‘I’m sure you’ve had a good look already.’

‘Dirty stories,’ Richard said. ‘They’re so filthy they can’t even deprave and corrupt. You could call ’em miscellaneous writings — to put a good face on it, but he must have had quite a sexual drive.’

‘Got it in the head, like everybody else,’ Handley said scornfully. ‘There’s no point in studying ’em, then?’

‘Not much. There’s the odd page of revolutionary stuff, but nothing we don’t know or couldn’t have thought up ourselves. Pornographic trash mostly.’

‘Be a bit of a let down for Maricarmen. And Dawley.’

‘Maybe he didn’t filch them,’ Richard admitted. ‘There wouldn’t be much point.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ Handley responded. ‘If you distrust the obvious you’ll soon find out who did it, even if it leads you back to the obvious, as aforesaid. What we do now is this, and we do it quick …’ Nobody was in much of a hurry for action, but they did it nevertheless, because there was nothing else to do.

Cuthbert walked through the yard. Noises were exaggerated in the sultry afternoon: he heard doors and cupboards banging, as if everybody for the first time in the life of the community were finding out what possessions everyone else had, almost as if the initial well-planned step towards common ownership of property within the compound down to the last razor blade and sanitary towel were finally taking place. It was amazing what devious means were needed to attain the simplest objective: you try to destroy the community, and unwittingly put it on the road to such a permanent foundation that it might never dissolve — if the others were but genuine enough to see it, which, being imperfect human beings and not fit for such an exalted form of society, they never would be.

He paused behind the lilac bush, water shaking on to the sleeve of his jacket. His father wasn’t sneaking around, so he went along the lawn path to the other side of the house. Looking up the wall to Maricarmen’s room, he noticed the window slightly open, and a convenient drainpipe located within a few feet of the ledge. The idea of searching for the gun in her room seemed insane, but his heart beat time to such insanity, and it was only the madness of the venture that gave him the strength to do it.

He gripped the pipe, rubber-soled shoes fastening on to the bricks as he levered himself up, hoping that by the time he got there his mother would have finished and gone elsewhere.

The climb went more quickly than expected, and soon he was level with the window. Nothing ventured, nothing lost, he smiled, breath pounding from stomach to head, legs trembling so that he wondered if they’d last the course. The broad pipe bent towards a bathroom, and it was little trouble to get himself along and reach the ledge. A spot of rain fell, but it was a false alarm, and he smelt the divine odours of damp grass and foliage coming from surrounding fields. It was as though he were about to enter the kingdom of heaven. A car roared along from the direction of the church, but trees hid him from the road.

Both feet lodged so tightly in the brackets of the drainpipe that he wondered if they’d ever snap out again. He heaved himself up till the ledge became his horizon and could see over it into the room. At first, looking keenly around its four walls, and wanting to believe it was empty, he was about to pull jubilantly in to look for the gun he had foolishly given up.

Two people were lying on the bed. Or, rather, it seemed at first as if it were one person, a single body, a demi-octopus with limbs still faintly writhing as if some noble intrepid warrior had nonchalantly delivered a death blow and gone on his merry unfeeling way.

It was clear that the short curly reddish head belonged to Dean. His bare arse would have been visible in all its narrow extent only if someone had been hanging from the ceiling — which they were not. He thought that the underneath part of the demi-octopus was Myra, or even Maricarmen who had nipped up after he had left her in the kitchen. But the hair was fair, and though the face in its ecstasy was turned away, he knew that it was his mother lying on the bed.

His head descended, an involuntary movement to stop crying out with surprise. He unlatched his feet, and went down at such speed that when he reached the earth he had scorched both hands. The pain was so intense that he wanted to go back into the kitchen for some Burnol, but his head was a junction-box of wild thoughts that spun in circles and lead him nowhere.

His first impulse was to go and tell his father, but impulse with Cuthbert was never a straight road, even in this situation. Don’t rely on instinct or intuition, he had often told himself. Never believe in anyone. Never trust those whom you trust absolutely — including yourself. It would be a terrible waste to blurt out his knowledge until it could be turned to some use or other.

He walked up the path and into his father’s studio, his face burning almost as intensely as his hands. His heart felt suddenly battered, his veins jammed. The only thing to do when your mother’s being humped by a kid of eighteen was give a good laugh and hope she enjoyed it, and that the old man would never know. At the same time he’d do his best to get rid of Dean before it went too far. It was all right trying to smash the community, but he had no wish to see his own family broken. Still, he had Dean to thank for the fact that he was at last able to see his mother as just another woman. The disadvantage, however, was that it made Cuthbert feel younger than his grown-up spirit could support. It made him feel sick.

Handley had set off the mechanism of this farcial search, though what had initiated things in the first place was too far lost in the backward swamp of timeless events even to bear thinking about. He sat on an upturned box. Handley’s bits and pieces were scattered over the table, and in the middle was an ancient two-ounce tobacco tin, the sort Handley kept his gear for tailor-made fags in, which he rolled with one hand — as became an old gunner — when he was in a mellow and contemplative slant of mind. A piece of fossil stood on top, and Cuthbert idly opened the tin to sniff the tobacco, as he’d often done as a child, when Handley offered it to his nose even before he’d been able to prise off the lid himself. It was one of his earliest memories, and he wanted to see if the smell would bring it back.

The tin was jammed tight with thirty neatly folded ten pound notes, three hundred pounds which his father had left lying there for any pilferer to come across, though the tin was in such an obvious position that no one would think it worth looking into. He wondered why he kept so much cash available, enough to get him to Australia, which would hardly be far enough if he discovered what was going on under his stupid unknowing nose.

He was sorry he’d seen it: one more black secret to carry under his armpit like a plague boil. He wished he had never come home and into this lunatic community. Theological college had been a haven of peace, a past life comparable only to paradise. He felt pity for his father, who had created this hell. Yet everything was bound to be hellish outside an ordered monastic life, and so Handley couldn’t be blamed for it. He only created this faction-house so as to escape whatever personal torment burned within him; and Handley often shouted in a light-hearted manner that for an artist any life was hell except during the short periods when he was painting — not knowing that a unique spate of it was brewing up for him.