The Flame of Life

CHAPTER FOUR

Rainspots fell as he crossed the yard and made his way between two caravans. The encampment slept, soothed by its futile work of the day, resting from the complex interaction of human relationships that such close living entailed.

He came back and leaned outside the kitchen door. Would he, after recovering his strength, get into the real world again? Having failed at college he not only hadn’t ‘got on’ but he hadn’t even been close to the ladder on which he could begin ascending. By going wrong he’d wounded himself. He couldn’t believe anybody else had done it. If he accepted that he’d have been closer to being a Christian, and so wouldn’t have fouled his chances at college in any case.

And yet, was he turning into a materialist, one of those narrow-minded, one-dimensional, all guts and no spirit, earth and no sky, lobotomised Neanderthal creatures like Frank Dawley who wallowed in the glory of his few months’ fighting in Algeria as if he was the poor man’s Lawrence of Arabia?

It was essential to get things straight in his own mind — unless you wanted to be sucked in by this community so that you didn’t know what sort of a person you were anymore.

A drift of fresh air revived him, and reminded him how tired he was. Even the month of May could give you pneumonia if you came out at night in pyjamas and slippers. Eric Bloodaxe the bulldog stirred its bulk by the gate — but a shape moved near the caravans, and he stood for it to come closer, unpleasantly surprised at his fear.

‘On the prowl?’ Mandy said.

‘Can’t my dear sister sleep, either?’

She leaned by the caravan wall. ‘Does it look like it, Brother Rat? My bloody husband sleeps like a sack of coal somebody’s dropped and left behind after nicking it from a railway wagon. He doesn’t sleep: he dies — and takes all my sleep with him. It’s impossible to be in the same bed with the unfeeling swine. It’s his mother’s fault. No wonder she laughed when he got married. That was the only wedding present we got, and as far as I know it didn’t even crack her junk-shop face. I suppose she’d laugh on the other side though if we got divorced and I sent him creeping back to her.’

‘You’d better have the baby first.’

‘That’s not for another three boring months.’

The moon made its light available again, and he looked at her face. He remembered hauling her as a baby in the pram with Adam and Richard to the village for their sweet ration. Afterwards they roamed fields and woods to see what they could plunder. Their family was in a perpetual state of destitution because Handley did nothing but paint day and night, a lone and frenzied figure up in his attic, wrapped in coats and scarves when the cold got too much of a grip around the windows. They lived on national assistance, sickness benefit, charity, relief, begging letters, the dole, and what they could loot from the surrounding countryside. And now that Handley sold his paintings at prices which made him rich beyond the dreams of his expectations, they thought he was miserly by refusing to hand over the money to which his new-found fortune entitled them.

As children they had done their bit to keep the family going. When chased by farmer or gardener they maintained a compact group around the pram, from which blonde, plump Mandy either joined in the general panic and screamed with fear, or stayed locked in her own private baby-world and laughed divinely at the worst it could do to her. And now she was a pregnant eighteen-year-old slut. ‘Don’t you think of your husband at a time like this?’

She laughed. ‘If I was planning to kill him, I suppose I would. But I’m not — yet. There’s a hard stone inside me first that’s got to grind its way through the floor. When that’s over I can start living again.’

‘What do you think you’re doing now?’

‘Since you ask, I’m multiplying. When Dad thought this house would be big enough for the community he reckoned without me. I’ll have at least a litter.’

Shameless and fetching, he thought, base and lecherous when she’s not too heavy to walk. The sway gives her away when her belly’s up, and the predatory shoulder-slope when she’s empty and ready. ‘Father’s a great Christian. He’ll feed any number of mouths.’

‘He’s a mean old rattlebag,’ she cried.

‘Not so loud. He’ll hear you.’

‘Are you frightened of him, as well? Everybody is. I must be the only one who isn’t. I tell him twenty times a day how mean he is. His brain’s pickled in vinegar and his heart’s clogged with salt. I can understand how he can sleep at night, but I don’t see how he can wake up in the morning.’

‘He’s brittle with good living,’ he said. ‘A well-charged magneto who lords it over us with all the authority of unexplainable drive and power — and the fact that his hands are on the cash.’

She clutched her stomach. ‘That’s the third bloody time.’

‘What is?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what woke me in the first place.’ She straightened, and smiled. ‘We’d all like to see the back of him. Give us a fag.’

‘I haven’t got any.’

‘You’re even meaner than he is.’ She took a packet from her padded and flowered dressing gown. ‘If he popped off one day to the South Seas who’d take his place?’

He lit a cigarette. ‘Who knows?’

‘As long as it’s not you. I’d rather die.’

‘I thought you were too generous to think that far ahead.’

She groaned. ‘Either I’ve eaten too much, or my appendix has burst.’

‘Take a pill.’

‘I’ll need at least forty to get a few winks before daylight.’

He couldn’t resist speaking his favourite interior thought, having often noticed that deciding not to say something was merely the first stage to letting it out. ‘I’d be such joy to see the last of father that there’s no point in thinking about what would happen afterwards. You’d never do anything if you considered the consequences.’

‘You certainly don’t think about getting pregnant when you’re humping around on a bed with a man,’ she said.

An owl sang its nightsong over the caravans, such a cool rhythmical warbling that they couldn’t but listen. She bent down, then straightened and turned her pale full face as if to see where the moon had gone. ‘If this keeps on I’ll have a miscarriage.’

‘It’ll get out so easily you won’t know it’s happened,’ he said lightly.

‘I tried to get rid of it when I knew I was preggers. But nothing bloody worked.’

‘Some loathsome member of this community could have given you an address, I expect.’

There was a movement on the higher ground of lawns and fruit trees at the back of the house. Whoever it was had been only a few yards from their conversation, hidden in the thin alleyway dividing the caravans. Cuthbert felt a chill, knowing himself to be a coward, otherwise he wouldn’t make so many plans.

‘I heard you,’ Handley shouted, coming down the steps. ‘Your pair of plotting nightbirds.’

Cuthbert backed away, smiling so that his father might believe his remarks had been merely a joke, crossed by one of defiant friendliness in case Handley hadn’t really heard and was only bluffing — which he often was.

Mandy clutched her belly, and Cuthbert was proud of her quick though dramatic response in trying to divert her father’s wrath. ‘It’s getting out,’ she said, pools of sweat breaking from her face.

Handley stood in his dressing gown, looking from one to the other. ‘Neither of us could sleep,’ Cuthbert informed him.

‘I can’t hold it,’ Mandy said. Between spasms she felt light enough to drift away bodily in the blue air despite her stony weight. It was a sensation of great happiness in which her past returned in one delicious moment, as if every minute of it had been a golden paradise that she’d always wanted to bring back but had never succeeded in till now, when it was totally unexpected and twice as sweet for almost reappearing.

Another spasm struck, and blacked it out. Two faces looked at her, made exaggeratedly clear because of the pain. She lost control of her life so utterly that she was both pleased and frightened by it. Her father’s sharp chisel nose, and his thin lined face bent down, eyes burning through to her in sympathy. He should have been named Oswald, she thought, a laugh even in her pain. Oswald the Chiking Viking. Cuthbert’s own clear eyes also looked, but knew nothing, as if he were still too young at twenty-five to tell himself what he did not want to know because he would be afraid when he found out.

Handley pushed him roughly aside. ‘You bloody fool,’ he said, putting an arm around her. ‘Can’t you see she’s having a miscarriage? Let’s get her into the house.’