The Flame of Life

CHAPTER SIX

The house was like a hornets’ nest, and Cuthbert wanted to cut off. He turned the handle and went into the room that had been fitted as a shrine to Uncle John, arranged precisely like his den in the far-off scorched-down house of Lincolnshire.

There were the same shelves of books, and on a wall were pinned Algerian maps, while along another were colourful sheets of RAF topographical charts covering South Vietnam. Under these was a single bed, and then an altar of radio equipment that hadn’t been switched on since it was set up.

He wondered which knob to turn for sound, as another shattering cry of pain shot up from Mandy somewhere below, followed by a heartburst of guilt and sympathy from her husband Ralph. The padded earphones muffled a shout from Handley, and a lugubrious howl by Eric Bloodaxe. He heard no more — and knew how it was that insane and epileptic John had clung to life and sensibility in this zoo-den for so long.

The light held him in its circle, head and hands outlined against the complicated façade of transmitter-receiver. His slender fingers reached across the desk for a pencil pad, as if to switch on, tune-in, take down a message. But he covered the paper in rounds and squares: getting words by morse or voice was not meant for the sane and jittery like him. The animal world was blocked off under the twin clamps of padded earphones. He felt safe. No one could ever tell anything that he would see sense in. Neither God nor father nor friend nor teacher with knowledge or authority could impart useful advice. He who sought good counsel only advertised his weakness. He who took messages and signs as having any relevance to himself merely showed his helplessness before the ways of the cruel and fully designing world.

Handley thought that no one came into this room without his permission, for he alone had the key. But Cuthbert borrowed it for a day and got another made. He liked it here. Even though John hadn’t lived between these particular bricks his spirit nevertheless seemed to have spread peace within. John had never been placid, as his suicide on the boat at Dover proved, but maybe this congenial aura was a last gift to the family, in which Cuthbert was able to rest from a world that he couldn’t tolerate either.

In the old days Uncle John had shaken his head over adolescent Cuthbert, for John’s gentle eyes were hurt at his unnecessary obstinacy. He had wistfully pronounced him to be politically ineducable — not like the others, who drank in his anarchistic and humane socialism with a greedy suspect interest. Cuthbert had always despised rules and principles, and before leaving Oxford he had formulated it thus: never listen or learn; never take advice; never work; never fall in love. You would then live a full and satisfying life. Allow yourself no way out. Hold these precepts like a magazine of musket balls for a last-ditch defence of your true and basic integrity, and you will need neither loyalty nor friends. To be an everything-man you had to be an ever-man and a no-man, an impermeable, invulnerable, impenetrable nothing-man living solely on the meat of your own life and nobody else’s.

Spinning the tuning-dial of John’s lit-up radio, he smiled at the news broadcasts. Various Peoples’ Armies were struggling in swamp and jungle, trains crashed and aeroplanes dug holes in the earth, a newly-launched battleship ran against a sandbank, a factory had doubled its futile output of unnecessary goods, a horse had puffed its guts to rags and won some race for a chinless wonder, the Prime Minister had spoken about containing Communism as if it were a foetus you could fasten into a jar, and another copper had been murdered trying to prevent a smash and grab of somebody else’s money. He laughed between the earphones, fingers gripping the morse keys as if to prevent himself rolling on the floor at the inanity of the world.

All one heard from the radio, or read in newspapers, was a continual stream of hilarious jokes. If you did not laugh your mind was diseased. Your sense of humour had gone rusty. Books, bulletins, articles were the comics of mankind. Uncle John’s mistake had been to search for meaning in it, fit signs and symbols into a pattern and give them a significance they could never have — except to a madman. No wonder he did himself in.

Handley kept the power-leads connected, as if John might reappear and once more get stuck into an ethereal square-search for messages from God which were meant, of course, for him alone. So Cuthbert threw a few switches, waited for the valves to warm up their orange and purple filaments, and had a half-kilowatt transmitter at his wilful disposal. Instead of listening to what the bloody-minded world was broadcasting in all its prejudice and tyranny, he had only to connect the microphone to give it a piece of his own mind.

For weeks he’d speculated on the kind of radio programme he’d run, between going on the air and getting tracked down by slow-moving post-office direction-finding vans. Instead of a sustained obscene assault on one particular channel of misinformation, perhaps he’d play the hit-and-run pirate on several frequencies, popping up here and there saying ‘God is dead, love live God’, while the announcer paused between lies to get breath.

Or maybe in a parched voice of the soul he’d put on the hellfire ravings of a priest — developed at college with the help of a tape-recorder — whose prophecies would tremble their way to the marrow of any listener ready for his master’s voice.

Perhaps, finally, he’d do nothing except dwell on what he’d do, and Radio Cuthbert from Unholy Island would stay a joke in the far-off corners of his megalomaniac veins. Ideas were more potent, and amusing, when you never put them into action. Action ruined them, took all spirit from a noble idea, brought it into the gutter of reality. To act was to share, and to share was to damage your integrity.

With the transmitter fully warm he kept his hand on the morse key, so that a long continuous squeak cut through both ears and was, he supposed, shooting across the sky, close enough to the BBC medium wave to make people reach for their knobs to shake off the interference.

There was a smell of camphor from John’s last suit hung behind the door, lovingly pressed by Myra because she thought him the saintliest of creatures after he had gone to Algeria and pulled her lover like a hot chestnut from the fires of revolution and civil war. This demented act of rescue did her little good because Frank Dawley was sleeping with his true and proper wife whom he’d cajoled out of the security of her Nottingham council house to come and live with him.

It was the world’s most experimental mix-up, the Achilles heel of benighted Handleyville. Now and again Dawley slept with Myra, but his wife didn’t know. She seemed a bit hazy about what went on, though perhaps she knew everything and was nursing her time for the jump. Dawley was too dim to notice, and that was a fact.

What Dawley didn’t know, and never would unless Cuthbert blurted it forth in order to shatter him, was that Cuthbert had passed a few nights with his wife. She wasn’t that good, but he’d serviced her — and himself — nevertheless. Maybe Dawley wouldn’t care, but if he did, it was one more thumb-tack in the coffin of the community.

The family house in Lincolnshire had killed Uncle John, and this community was emasculating his father. There was nothing to choose between them as far as Cuthbert could see. Only prisoners are obliged to make choices, and those who were out of touch with their subconscious, and in thrall to the demands of the tight society in which they lived. Once you realised that nothing was sacred you no longer had to make up your mind about anything. No choices were left. The world was yours when you wouldn’t care whether you had it or not. To want nothing was to get everything — in time. The only defeat you could possibly be landed with would be if what you eventually got caused any sort of surprise. That would be humiliation, if you hadn’t seen it coming. But it would be presumptuous to try and decide beforehand what it was that might surprise you. That would be a devious form of choice, and therefore to be shunned.

A box of John’s cigarettes lay by the morse key, in case he came back craving a smoke with the same intensity as he’d done during his four years as a prisoner of the Japanese. Cuthbert puffed one slowly, trying not to inhale or cough. A score had already been purloined on other nights, but Handley had not lifted the lid to check — during his daily visits to change the calendar and see that the clock above the transmitter was fully wound.

The silence saddened him, but he stuck to it like hunger. If you want something out of life be careful what you hope it is in case you ever get it. He opened the window and leaned out, pressing his fingers on the sill as if to support himself against the rabid noises of life from below. He felt such pity and love for Mandy that tears wetted the flesh of his cheeks, and he ached for daylight so that she might be better.

He’d believe in God if only she could stop screaming. He couldn’t bear it when she cried again, because her agony was his, just as, at certain times during his stay at college, she had shared her wealth with him. Living in such a hardup or tight-fisted family he could never decide where she got such money, but neither did he think to ask in his picture postcards of thanks. And now as he winced at her cries he only wondered about the impulse that caused her to send those occasional few pounds to her elder, no-good, cloistered brother. The rest of the family forgot him for months at a time, and he never blamed anybody for that, but loved Mandy for her sweet sacrifices that allowed him to buy unpriestly comforts in the town, so that on his penniless return to the dark towers of college he fervently hoped she had stolen the money from their father — otherwise he would feel too guilty to enjoy the next lot that came.

It was the one unblemished piece of generosity that had ever been bestowed on him, and he was grateful that it had come from Mandy, and not from someone he had grown to hate. He wanted to tear the night out of the sky for her and remake tomorrow with a sweep of his arms. But the stubborn stars held on, glittering studs keeping the black cloth down. Mandy’s great attempt to get away from the paralysing Handley dragnet had landed her with that blood-filled vampire Ralph, a failed country gentleman who was only good for the bright prospect of sponging off his rich parents. Since his marriage they had disowned him anyway, so that Handley had to take him in.

He shut the window and turned to the room, a wan and shabby memorial that made him think of smashing it to bits. A tin-chest tool-kit under the table had a stout hammer in it — but violence wasn’t Cuthbert’s way. It was a sure method of having no permanent effect. Leave such dark avenues to senseless Dawley, he thought, for whom brute force towards others was only an attempt to keep his own dead spirit alive.

The tempting hammer was balanced on the radio set, but he knew that he would lose all power of speculating on violence if he used it. It would be a bad bargain, to give up so much and achieve so little for a few lead-heavy blows of the hammer. But he went as far as he dare to the brink by rubbing the steel head slowly down his cheek and feeling the flat cold surface pressing into his flesh.

John had used the tools to make bookshelves, and keep his radio gear in good order. Cuthbert lifted a tray of nails and screws and brackets, brass hinges and fuses and small rolls of copper wire, and underneath was a large cigar box covered with an impressive label, a picture of a multi-chimneyed tobacco factory. Above it was an olive-skinned, green-eyed, smooth-haired young woman wearing a plain collarless common labouring shirt, her smooth thin lips meticulously engraved. He pulled down the hundred-watt Anglepoise for more light.

Who was she, with such a noble and sensible face? Did she work in the cigar factory, or did she own it? Since the cigars were Cuban he could make a case for both, but he wasn’t really interested in that. He was entranced by her face, the faint lines going from the mouth which showed that certain facets of life occasionally worried her. She had a sense of humour, though was not smiling at the moment. Faces he passed on the street or glimpsed behind a car wheel on country lanes floated or jerked by so that he could only feel contempt or pity for such utter lack of expression and inner life. But here was a small picture, a mere part of the cigar-label pageantry, and it fascinated him to the extent that he felt sorry for his own unworthiness.

The only way he could get closer to this woman of the cigar box was to prise open the lid and hope to find another good Havana inside, to sit a further half hour smoking it, and gloat on her inadequate though enticing portrait. Not that he believed she’d ever been real, yet her vulnerable improbability looked at him, her eyes fixed on the deepest inlays of his soul, a stare which affected him so deeply that he could not even think of anything cynical by which to turn it aside.

He could no longer take the picture in. It went dead on him. Wanting the promised cigar, he tried to lift the lid, but the small chromed nail held firm in the wood, and he searched the radio operator’s bric-à-brac for a knife. He forced it open, and the overhead lamp flooded the sharp grey line of the barrel, the curved trigger-guard, the rounded corrugated butt of a heavy revolver. Circling it, like torpedo-shaped sleeping tablets, were six rounds of ammunition. Along one side was the last cigar waiting to be smoked.

He stared, unable to believe, stricken at the picture of it. He now remembered the woman on the lid as if she had been real. His glazed look went to both in turn, Would this woman have made John happy? He laughed at the thought. It couldn’t have been the gun John blew his brains out with, for the police had nicked that. Maybe it was a twin, for John had certainly left it here, or hidden it where Handley had found it and returned it to the shrine. Cuthbert felt sick at a sudden uprush of love and death: he sensed danger — returning childhood mingled with smells of shit — the bite of knowing that decisions came from sources totally outside oneself. The change and destruction they brought might be more powerful than any man could withstand.

The fixed monochromatic picture of the woman made him smile, and the steel flesh of the gun brought down sweat. His finger itched towards it, touched the barrel and shot back as if it were new from a blacksmith’s fire. But heat was in his fingers, not the gun, and to someone thrown out of theological college, fire was more important than metal, because fire is alive and metal is dead, and if metal does come alive it is only through fire.

There was little hope of peace when Handley strode away from Dawley. A thunderclap of curses came from John’s room, followed by a crash of glass, as if a head had been used to break a window. He couldn’t make out the actual words of recrimination, and when something plopped at his feet he saw it was a cigar that had hardly been smoked.

Mandy’s bellowing scream was followed by a smack of fist on flesh. The moon covered itself with cloud to hide from Handley’s petulance and Cuthbert’s shallow taunting. Dawley felt he would be able to sleep if he went in now. He picked up the cigar that had survived the long fall, and tasted the first sweet lungful of Cuban tobacco. John’s room darkened and, after a final door slam, all was quiet.

Cuthbert came downstairs with Uncle John’s revolver in his pocket.