The Flame of Life

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

He stood, but said nothing. Maricarmen gave a soft ironic smile, which suggested that maybe his own share of hell was also gathering. ‘I haven’t wasted my time searching for those bloody notebooks,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you think.’

‘So even you won’t help me?’

‘You got the gun, didn’t you?’ He lit a marijuana cigarette. ‘I hope they’ve gone for good.’ When she came close he offered her a smoke. She refused it as if he were trying to insult her, but held his hand: ‘What are you thinking about?’

He had tried to irritate her by passing the cigarette, and now responded to her tenderness by asking: ‘Do you love me, then?’

She wouldn’t speak, her face embroiled in some far-off world of her own. ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever been in love with,’ he went on. ‘I wasn’t thinking, though. I never think. My mind unfreezes now and again from the Ice-Age emptiness it was born into, when something startling happens, but it soon silts up and gets back to its state of comfortable polar ice.’

Her distant mood broke into a normal smile. ‘You always say you’re not thinking, and then show that you are.’

‘If I really began to think I’d tear the world apart! Anyway, if I had told you what I was thinking I’d only have lied.’

‘Do you always have to drive somebody mad to make them fall in love with you? I’m not very impressed with that sort of so-called love. You don’t love anything or believe in anything. You like to be cruel, that’s all.’

‘So that you’ll love me!’ he laughed. ‘You guessed right. I feel calm in here. God knows what’s going on outside. It’s nice to talk before the flood comes in. My father created this place. It’s got great peace. He rants against God, and does the most marvellous Old Testament paintings. I don’t know who else you’ve destroyed in your life, my sweet and heavy-breasted Maricarmen with the Iberian eyes and Cantabrian cheekbones — but don’t get too bloody close to me!’

‘You’re the only real person in this community.’

‘Thanks. But you’d like to see me at the knackers’ yard. I’ll walk there on my own one day. You’ve got to put up with me. Here I am. Something’s latched us together that’s more than love. Having to tolerate myself is the worst thing.’

He caught the same tone of trapped domestic fury in his voice that he noticed in his father’s, and wondered how it could have come so quickly unless he had wanted it to. Maybe it had nothing to do with domesticity at all. He waited for her to speak. It wasn’t rare for him to intimidate someone into silence, though he didn’t like it when he did. When in doubt, talk. ‘If I sit quietly for a minute’ — he took a long pull at his cigarette — ‘I see faint grey smoke drifting between my eyes. I get frightened sometimes, but I don’t know what of. A cigarette drives it away. It stops me thinking, and that’s what I like.’

She noted his precise movements, the sharpness of his eyes, and the self-satisfied smile when he’d forced her to speak at last. ‘All you have to do is to forgive yourself,’ she said. ‘The mind becomes clearer then.’

‘How did you learn to forgive yourself?’

‘It came to me in prison. As soon as you have stopped blaming yourself for all your sins, and for what crimes you’ve still to commit during the rest of your life, then everything becomes easier to bear. An anarchist friend told me that the only gaoler in the world is God, and guilt is the prison he locks us up in. But once you’ve talked somebody into killing Him for you, you’re free. Don’t try to kill him yourself, though. It does too much damage. Kill God for somebody else, and let them do the same for you. Isn’t that what we’re in this community for?’

He was pale. His hand trembled that held the cigarette, so he threw it down and put his foot on it. ‘I’d rather believe in God, because finally I belong to the world, and not to myself alone. Maybe I love you because I’ve always wanted to find someone worse than myself.’

She flinched when she had no intention of it. ‘Shelley used to say that belief in God is a cosmic form of self-pity.’

‘I believe,’ he said, ‘because in the end I have to.’

‘You’re not capable of suffering, that’s why.’

‘If I suffered it’d be even harder for you to tear me from what I believe: you don’t get wisdom from suffering. You only get more faith.’ He spat. Such phrases wore him down. They left him foul and dissatisfied. Maybe he had learned a lot by coming to this place, for it was the other side of the coin to his three years at college. It wasn’t too late to go back, get readmitted, and stay till he became a priest.

He said something so abruptly that it confirmed his love of God. He didn’t know why the command came into his mind, though it seemed absolutely right that it did:

‘Give me the gun.’

She took it from her handbag, and pointed it at his face.

Having burned the offending matter it was obvious he’d find nothing while searching the flat over the garage. Every member of the community was scurrying about the property looking for non-existent notebooks, as if an electric shock had gone through them, and it played on his sense of humour. He hadn’t felt so positive and well since before the hedgehog died, he thought, with a faint cut of sadness on reminding himself of it.

Now that his kleptomaniac coup had been discovered, he wondered how he could let them know — with suitable dramatics, and without bringing any shame on to himself that the notebooks had been fed to the Devil. That could come later, he smiled, as he leaned against the damp whitewash of the wall, though not as blame, for he felt no guilt from it, but as a victory for himself when he gloatingly told them that he’d taken the irreversible step of sending Shelley’s revolutionary paraphernalia up in smoke.

Yet there was always something to spoil it. Because nothing was ever perfect for him, nothing short of perfection could cure the corrosion in his heart. The fact was that his own crime was diminished by the theft of the gun. He’d give much to know who’d taken it, and where it was, for then he could fulfil his promise to Handley, who had begged him to look for it, and it would enhance still further his own act of burning the notebooks. Having done something, he wanted to do everything. Who could be satisfied with less when you lived in a community?

He didn’t dare search too closely for the gun in case he was seen at it, and suspicion fell on him for having taken the notebooks. Maybe it had been Handley’s idea to sow such distrust, and take it off his own sons. By marvelling at such deviousness, he gave more credit than Handley either deserved or wanted.

The garage-flat was daintily furnished. Myra’s mother, old Mrs Zimmermann, had stayed in it before she died. He stood by the curtains, and watched Adam searching Dawley’s caravans across the yard, observing his movements through the open door. If he’d saved a few pages of Shelley’s notebooks, even though burned half-way across by scorchmarks, he could have waved them under their noses. He cursed himself for his inability to see into the future.

‘We’d better hide them in the garage,’ Handley said. Adam had made coffee on Dawley’s spirit stove. ‘Nobody can be blamed for stealing ’em when they get found there. We can put ’em in the repair pit. I used it once to tighten the exhaust pipe on the Rambler when it came loose.’

Adam was proud of his father’s simplicity, which couldn’t but be effective. ‘We can look for clues on the faces of the others when they’re told where they were found,’ Richard said.

Handley slammed his mug down. ‘What brilliant sons I have! It’s a shame Shelley’s doodlings weren’t more instructive, though. Back to square one, I reckon.’

‘There’s no such thing as square one for us,’ said Richard.

‘I don’t know what you mean by that,’ Handley said, ‘but in the meantime let’s get rid of this pornographic muck.’