A Tree on Fire (39 page)

‘Toasts are meaningless,' Richard said, ‘so here's to all things of meaning. You have to persuade yourself that life has some significance otherwise you sink into the morass of the living dead. When you've persuaded yourself that your life has meaning it is your duty to help the living dead.'

‘Well put,' Handley said. ‘I couldn't have said fairer than that myself.'

‘I wouldn't have wanted to.' Adam stood up. Since announcing his conversion, and predilection for Wendy Bonser, he appeared more urbane, effete and supercilious. ‘Here's to true love, and England, and, oh, all right then, Father, I drink also to the war against imperialism and the established order etcetera-etcetera.' In view of this addendum there seemed little hope of winning him back to the more robust ways of the family. His pale blue tie had a nonchalant wave in it. He sipped his brandy, rather than threw it back in the good old Handley style that he'd followed till now. They drank with him nevertheless, for he was still their son and brother. In the world of the family it was sin now, pay later, whenever you have time, because we can wait, and your dying breath will smudge the mirror that the last member of it holds in front of your mouth. He sat down, uneasy at such a thought, and reached for the cigar-box.

Ralph leaned over for an approving light at the same candle. ‘Nobody loves it more than me,' Handley said, ‘but I don't like it very much.'

‘We'd all of us do the place more good,' Adam retorted, ‘if we at least liked it. Any love for England in this room is destructive sentimentality. All love is destruction, that I'll allow, but I
like
this country as well.'

Uncle John stood, cigarette still smoking, and sipped at his glass of muscatel. Brandy and cigars he'd never taken to. He spoke quietly, so that they had to listen. ‘In talking about love, and like, and England, you are losing a sense of proportion, Adam. We are no longer living in England, but in the world. It may be difficult to accept. In fact it took me fifteen years in a cell padded by my own thick thoughts to disentangle the tentacles of octopus England and discover that I belonged to the world. I'm forty-five years of age, not twenty. Many young people nowadays know it instinctively, are born with it, though I'm afraid that most do not. The world is one country, topographically speaking, divided by a system of seas and rivers and mountains. Those who say they love England are only in love with their childhood and youth, and those who stay in love with it go immature into the grave. Love of country is a fatal infatuation, especially to those whom you make your enemies.' His eyes glittered, and the aura of gentleness shifted to one side. ‘It may take an act of cosmic violence to unite the world. We hope not. But it will certainly need innumerable civil wars and revolutions before the world can agree to become united. We are at the beginning of the hundred years' war, a series of sporadic conflicts under which the world as we know it will disintegrate. At one of these, in Algeria, we have a mutual friend who set out to take part in it. Some of you know him, all of you except Ralph have met him in one way or another. He came to this house once, and left marks on various people. I drove him from my den and solitude at the point of a gun, because in those days my sanity turned to insanity when it was disturbed. My senses have now recovered their power and sense of proportion. Nine months ago Frank Dawley went to Algeria and hasn't been heard of since. Anyone who takes on that task is helping in some unrewarded, idealistic, mystical way to bring about the unification of the world. In the future they may become the new yet unacknowledged saints, men who went into the desert, fasted by necessity, fought by conviction, and died by faith. A man who values his life at nothing, and whose belief in something good becomes everything to him, is a religious man. All great changes towards materialism and socialism are brought about by religious men. For a truly religious man the light can never fail, and if universalism becomes a religion and socialism is the way we have chosen to bring it about then even the mistakes and tragedies of socialism have to become acceptable. That fact alone is a severe test on a man's faith, on his sense of spiritual quest, but the greater the test on his faith the greater his faith becomes. I imagine it is unfashionable to confuse religion with politics, but such a steel-like mixture is necessary if we are to fight not only our opponents but also sometimes the system we are using. To make religion politics, and politics religion, is the only way we can use our faith, and at the same time keep it, and not be dragged down by a defeat of the spirit. Religious faith sharpens the bayonets of a political system. The desert wind blows hot and cold, is covered by light and darkness, yet always exists around your feet. It has taken me fifteen years to get back a sound mind and formulate my faith, and now that it is accomplished, I'm going to leave the love and protection of my brother and this house and go on a journey. I don't know how long I shall be away, or even if I shall ever come back, but I think it is fitting that someone from this family should make it his mission to go to Algeria, find Frank Dawley and help him, or bring him back if he is no longer fit for the fight. That will be my task, so my final toast is that we should drink to that journey, and to Frank Dawley who has already made it. After I've prepared myself and worked out the details I shall set off. You cannot sit thinking in a room all your life. Sooner or later you have to step outside and act.'

Handley did not drink with him. ‘You can't do it, John.'

‘Is my brother going to fail me?' he smiled.

‘It's not a matter of failing. I'll never do that. But you've made your life good and whole again. You can't throw it away. It'd be a fool's errand.' He stopped, had a sense of betraying Myra who might, he thought with horror as he sat down, think he did not want John to go to Algeria and bring back Frank because he was too selfishly in love with her.

‘I shall go to Algiers,' John said, ‘get into the Kabylie mountains, and some way or other join up with the FLN. Richard can print my papers on his press. I shall be a foreign but sympathetic journalist, and I shall find Frank Dawley, because I don't imagine many Englishmen are involved in their fight. Do you want me to go, Myra?'

The question seemed unreal, buoyed up on the hot air of shimmering candles, cigar-smoke and wine smells. So did her answer: ‘Yes,' she said.

‘Why not?' Adam stood in such a hurry he upset his glass. ‘John's going on a personal quest to help Myra by finding Dawley with whom she is in love. It's no revolutionary idealistic project he's indulging in, but an old-fashioned romantic search.'

‘There's a bit in it for everybody,' Handley observed. It was strange, the first toast that meant anything left them embarrassed and antagonistic. No tree burned in a swamp of indifference, for the miasma around it could not catch fire, and water would suck out the flames. John would be taking the soul out of the house. ‘You belong with us. Think it over for a few months.'

‘I belong where I want to go,' he said. ‘It's decided, so why don't we bless it, the whole family, by drinking to it?'

‘You're going over the bloody precipice,' Handley said, ‘so be careful. We're all part of you, and don't want you to take us with you. Most of all, I don't want to lose a brother. Dawley's a young man: he'll survive.'

‘It's not a question of survival. Such a word is unworthy of you, Albert. Which of us here will survive?'

Myra stood up and walked outside, through the hall and into the garden. Their shouts could not bring her back. Had they no consideration for her feelings? Frank would laugh at such a party, such sentiments. It was indelicate of John to connect her with his breaking away from the house. He was noble in his intentions, but being noble left its scattering of hurt people. He could have talked about it rationally to her alone, or to Albert, but this set-piece drama before everyone made it trivial and embarrassing. Yet why should the contemplation of a noble deed be dragged into the mud? She should fall on her knees and thank him, wish him godspeed and all success in wanting to find her lover at the war. Sickness was smeared across her heart. A noise of shouting and smashing glass came from the house.

She went in immediately, and they were crowded around John, laughing and happy. Enid was setting more candles along the table. John was embracing them, shaking them all by the hand. Myra did not lie at his feet, but she kissed him, and said she would stay at the house until he left on his mission.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Moonlight was pouring into her room. She could not sleep. No one could, on that side of the house. Its white glow shone at the walls and bed, masked her face as she put on her dressing-gown and sat by the window. Moonlight made streets across the room, and she stood to walk in its winding grey alleyways. Clouds shifted them, dissolving her city. At one corner she saw Frank, luminous and ash-grey, grey stubble on his chin, eyes empty as moonlight. He stood between two cartshafts of illumination, grinning because he felt he should not be there. It was not the moon he wanted, neither its face nor light. She was afraid of him, as she was of all people when she did not know what they wanted. Maybe he knew. If you were doing what you wanted, there was no need to know what it was that you wanted. One way or another, the sun and moon burned you up. What else were you born for? Certainly not to complain, only to know. He came forward, and she cried out as if the apparition would scorch her lips. He was the stake she would burn at, and she drew away.

Mark cried in his cot, alarmed at her vision, and she soothed him for fear he would waken the house. It was a momentary dream, and he slipped back into peace. To ask what she wanted from life was a wild and irresponsible question that she was unable to answer while Frank was missing from it. In London she once saw him walking along Oxford Street, and ran after him through packs of shopping people. An insane rush of hope pushed her along, yet when the man turned out to be someone else she was glad. If it had been Frank how would he have explained being in England and not back with her and their son? No excuse would have been good enough.

In spite of her body-and-soul ache to see him again maybe she did not want to until he had utterly purged himself of all desire to trek away from reality. Solitude had taught her to mistrust men's ideals, especially those realised at her own desolation of spirit. She loathed her meanness but acknowledged it. To abandon Frank was a thought impossible to set in motion. She believed, but could not act. You could not act until you ceased to care. You didn't act upon your own ideals. Other people did that, without deciding to do so. You made your ideals known, spun forth the message of love and brotherhood and war, but going out to forge and prove helped no one but hurt many. You split open the body and mind, let the sensibility and love fruitlessly pour over the desert sands, and in the end the damage was greater to yourself than even to the one you love. Man was not big enough for such a combined operation. Even Uncle John knew this, and would only leave on a mission of rescue rather than a jaunt of idealism, as Adam had been sharp enough to see. Frank will only succeed in what he wants to do if he dies at it. Perhaps that was why she did not want him to come back, because to look on a broken man for the rest of one's life would be heartbreaking for her. If he came back he would be crippled, so she cried with bitter tears that there was no point in him doing so. When you abandon the moon, and walk too near the sun, your eyes are burned and blinded. The moon is gentler than the sun, might kill you slowly in the end or send you mad, but it doesn't burn you up in one great flash when you step within the limit of its power. Why couldn't she have told him this before he went? The transition was gradual, he would not have listened, and the moon confuses, weakens, does not allow the steel pivot of reason to be inserted. The moon demands that you be subtle, and subtlety does not work with someone enamoured of a scheme of the sun. He had to go. You had to let him, and the solitude his absence leaves teaches you to distrust men's ideals and the harsh, rational ideas of the sun.

She sat by the window, the metal-grey moonlight pouring over her. People walked up and down the stairs, restless, looking for tea or cigarettes, or a final drink. Only John's room was silent where he slept profoundly, she thought, exhausted by his intense and unremitting preparations for the long journey south, his own pathetic surrender to the hard time of the sun. It was a warm, full-mooned night, and the house smelled of food, drink and tobacco. She came back from the lavatory, and saw Handley walking up with a tray of bottles. He wore trousers and collarless striped shirt, stepped along in bare white feet. ‘Come to the studio,' he said softly, ‘and I'll show you my painting.'

She was about to say no, not wanting to be alone with him, but walked up behind, will-less because she did not want to be alone with herself. Enid was there, in any case, smoking a cigarette. The studio seemed unnaturally tidy compared to the disorder of the dining-room. Windows and skylight were open, but it was nevertheless hot from too much lighting.

‘Sit down,' Enid said, a warm smile for her. ‘This is the hottest part of the house in summer, yet far from the maddening crowd. We're thinking of building another house soon, two miles away, so that we can leave this one to the tribe. I'll take the bus here every day to see if they're all right, just as if I'm going to work.'

He poured brandy, water, slipped in ice and passed it around. ‘I'll show you this painting now that the light's right for it.' A large cloth fell from a five feet by eight canvas standing on two boxes by the far wall. Sky took up some of it, a band of eggshell blue and grey smudges along the top, then came trees, valleys, the earth, animals and men, which loaded the greater area of the picture. Near the bottom was a band of soil, the thick chocolate skin of the crust, and finally a line of jet black where the depth of his consciousness had been reached.