The Flame of Life (10 page)

The sky was churning with rain and more rain, the train shaking as if it would throw her into it. Two years of prison would take much time going from her spirit, and the passport was necessary if she were to survive and get to England. She gripped it tight, for fear it would fly of its own will on to the stony soil, and wear away under mouldering rain.

She loved Shelley as if he were alive and was to meet her next week in Sitges – as he'd done in former days. No love was ever lost. It buried itself into you, and could not disappear so that you didn't feel it any more. He was that rare person who'd been able to love her as much as he was capable of loving himself, so she lived now with the smarting memory of his tenderness. They had regarded each other as equals, and the feeling that linked them was like that of brother and sister, but without the built-in destructiveness of sibling rivalry.

The simplicities and complexities had been there from the beginning. Perhaps belonging to different countries meant something after all. She did know why, but ease with him had become such a stable fact that she felt all people could learn to treat each other in the same way, so that the world might gradually save itself by creating its own utopia. Only the patience and the will were lacking. From childhood she had grown with the principles of mutual self-help, had been taught to work for universal sisterhood and brotherhood – equality, labour, abundance, and happiness. Her father had died in one of Franco's prisons when she was six.

But the reality of society kicked such beliefs out of you, or eroded them by the fact of its monolithic presence. Or it turned its back on them. It did not matter. Civilisation – if that was the name for it – could be swept away in ten minutes, and if you were destroyed with it, you had no more problems. But if you survived, and others with you, perhaps only then could you build the new society in which you had always believed.

But society was stronger than you thought. Its nihilist underworld could never be contained or tamed. Society was modelled on its meanest jungle, and turned a blind eye to it. The cheeks and balances knitted themselves together, forming a locked mass of great strength, that could hardly be ripped apart.

She had walked up the Rambla and into the Plaza de Cataluña wondering: ‘How can I change it?' It had been tried so many times. The foreign tourists came and went. It was a new thing. They also would try to stop you, no doubt, because they wanted the old Spain, the old world. They loved the butchery and torment of bullfights, these pink-faced unthinking tourists.

You had to try. She had thought so a long time before meeting Shelley, and believed more strongly after being in prison. But nothing was simple any more. Shelley had attempted it, and been killed. It was her belief that he'd never wanted to go into Algeria and fight for the FLN. His attachment to violence, though sincere, was sentimental. He had his weaknesses. His principles and inclinations were never finally formulated. His philosophy was ruptured at the base of the tree. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end was Action, he used to say. He had talked about destroying the property of the oppressors, whereas other left-wing parties wanted to preserve the buildings of their oppressors so that they could inherit them for their own ends – in the name of the people, of course. A genuine revolutionary party would not only open the gaols, but would blow them up and build no more.

He talked, he argued, he intrigued, but never shot or bombed directly. If others did it, in order to bring about a society based on equality and justice, he was always willing to help as a line-of-communications or logistics man. The possibilities of giving actual assistance to revolution or civil war were not numerous, so he had run guns from Tangier over the Atlas Mountains to the edge of the Sahara desert. On one such delivery he had Frank Dawley as his co-driver. Shelley had not come back, but had done something entirely out of character by continuing into Algeria and fighting for the National Liberation Front.

Their affection for each other enabled her to form correct conclusions. If Shelley had been the typical man who made love regardless and then vanished into the safety of himself or joined his male friends at the nearest bar or café, and if her feelings had been those of a woman who accepted this with inner resentment but without complaint, then her senses may not have led her to such plain truth. She may not have cared that he was dead, not gone on feeling an unrelenting sexual want for him month after month, which concealed what was truly happening, and only slowly drew her numbed brain towards the final, bitter fact of their parting.

Dawley, with the same ideas, forced him into Algeria at gunpoint. There was no other explanation. There were many such hardliners who talked about equality of people and the redistribution of the earth's necessities – but they were monsters who did not believe in real freedom, in real love, in real women. Locked in the prison of their deprived hearts, they could not even know how much they fought against themselves. They believed in the power of the gun over the individual, till finally it was the gun that wielded them. Power did not corrupt such people, but reduced them utterly to an inhuman bit of steel called a trigger. It did this as surely as if they allowed tradition and society to crush them into a man with nothing more to his emotional credit than a stick of bone and gristle called a penis. It defiled them. They enjoyed it.

Dawley was as responsible for Shelley's death as if he had murdered him deliberately for his own twisted purpose. He had accepted the way of violence, and let go the reins of humanity. She had often talked it over with Shelley, and though her arguments had had sufficient effect on his reason, they had never got through to his dreams.

All she had to do was confront Dawley and, if he were as guilty as she knew him to be, indulge for the first time in the violence she had always tried to talk Shelley out of. There were some people in the world who killed in the name of innocence and purity, and they called it love of humanity or Revolution. Their feelings of innocence increased the more they were taken up by the force of their own unquestioning violence, and those whom they couldn't kill they corrupted instead. They had to be killed, therefore, so as to save the innocent they came daily into contact with. Such people had nothing to do with socialism.

Dawley was this sort of person, and his innocence was a menace to the good people of the world. Her own life's love had been destroyed because of it, and so it would be the most perfect justice to kill him.

The choice was not easy, and she didn't know where it would lead, or even whether she could do it, but as the train stopped at the frontier station and she stepped down from the high carriage, she knew that her made-up mind ought not to be altered. It was a new way of making a decision, with her heart instead of her head, and though this method was too much of a novelty for her to feel easy about it, she nevertheless sensed it to be a sort of letting go because it was something that she wanted with all her soul to happen.

She moved as if in a dream, as people do when they believe their minds are made up. That was the only way to act if the dream were to come true. She waited in the large hall for her trunk and other luggage to be brought to the customs counter by a porter. To anyone but herself and, for various reasons, to Mr Handley and Dawley, the trunk was valueless, but through its formidable presence Shelley seemed to be telling her that she had made the right decision. She was happy at the moment to stay in her dream, to take refuge in it. No one knew of the dream that was in her except herself and therein, she thought, lay its strength.

It was difficult to get a trunk and suitcase such a distance through Europe, travelling at full speed towards Paris. The trunk contained Shelley's belongings: a lightweight suit and a few shirts, several pipes and an unopened tin of Raleigh tobacco. But the few dozen notebooks, which she had been too locked in her grief to read, took up most space, and formed the deadly leaden weight that porters shied from – showing great regard for their limbs and sinews till she offered them fifty
pesetas
to take it out of train or taxi and hump it bodily through its next stage.

She had registered its contents, as careful and anxious as if Shelley's actual body were inside that she was for some weird reason taking to England. His soul was in those notebooks that he had pleasurably and laboriously written in during the years they had known each other. She did not know where his actual flesh and blood body was, though hoped that Dawley, his fellow-revolutionary and travelling companion, would tell her when she met him in England, describe the place and put it on the map in such detail that one day she would set off for Algeria, to find it and bury him properly, when Dawley was dead.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The raw sky made Cuthbert feel hungry. Purple clouds were clawing their way from nowhere to nowhere. Some were in rags, trying to climb over one another. The expressive English summer held a faint uneasy smell of decay.

He pandered to the fragmentation of his mental state by strolling among the traffic islands around Victoria Station. The day felt so heavy after a sleepless night that even the onset of afternoon didn't bring the usual sharpening of his faculties.

The widespread brick warrens of south London looked squalid and cosy. Would the towers of flat-dwellings blow over in a wind? The train cut through rows of small houses rubbed with the burnt cork of industrialism. Food and fruit and gaudy clothes made a patchwork snake in the street-market below. Backyards and slanting chimneys went on forever.

This, he thought, unable to leave the window and read his
Times
, is where the English would have stopped the Germans in 1940. Twenty Stalingrads. Even Hitler hadn't got such nerve or stomach so early on. Patriotism would have caught on like television. Cunning forms of self-immolation would have enabled them to ‘take one with you – even two'. The good old expendable working class would, in its generosity, have bled itself to death – at least so my father asserts, though he's a bit old-fashioned where history is concerned.

Better to save their souls by the God of Heaven than smash their bodies by the God of War. The train ran over a putrid stream, a factory near by, then a sports stadium, then modern factories and fewer but neater houses, a football field, rubbish tips, factories, more backyards, a mildewed shed, a patch of earth, cuttings and tunnels, birch trees, barbed wire, huts, swamps, squalor again. Orpington. A fire blazed on the banks of a cutting. Hop poles. Thank God we're out of it. Smoke in the sky.

He enjoyed the slight burn of sun on a far-off patch of field. It brought the dazzling emerald closer than the dull hedges broken now and again by blades of scruffy chalk. If he opened the window he'd throw his dregs of tea on to it, but drank it instead, and went back to his first-class carriage, empty because he'd scattered newspapers over the seat space, and the sunlight came right across. He was glad to be alone, hating to wonder why people on English railways didn't talk to each other.

Being away from the family, he felt a man of the world: Handley had put enough cash in his pocket for him not to appear mean and give the community a bad name to Maricarmen. Tall, fair-haired, chisel-nosed Cuthbert with the sardonic mouth and pale forehead had faint lines around his light blue eyes that gave an impression of uncertainty to anyone who got a close look. He'd noticed this defect while shaving, but his physical presence and quick speech rarely allowed anyone to see it. He wore an old grey suit, a black shirt and his clergyman's collar.

People in England made way for a parson. Even the most noxious middle-class atheists were finally deferential if you looked at them with the authority of ruthless and magnanimous sympathy. People might nail you with their sordid problems, but he had learned to deal with them in such a way that his victim would never again confide his or her troubles to a parson. He twitched his nostrils so that they moved more than his lips, and while this alarmed those who were timid, it enraged others who had more spirit. It separated the goats from the sheep.

‘My dear fellow,' he intoned, ‘I'm sad to hear your mother died today. Or was it yesterday? Well, you really should know, shouldn't you? It
is
a trying time. My own father died last week, and I'll never forget it. Or was it the week before? Have a cigarette, and don't think about it. What? You can't smoke at such a time? They're very good. Not at all expensive. Anyway, it's on the Church. You might as well get something out of it. Just back from the funeral? How shattering. I can't tell you how moved I am that you should turn to me at such a time. I shall do all I can to help. It's my job. Sure you won't have one? It's an unusual kind. Do you listen to religious broadcasting on the BBC? You should. A great lift in the early morning, though not, I might say, as great as you might get from these innocent-looking cigarettes. Calm yourself. If you don't smoke, you don't smoke. Far be it from me to force you. Hope you don't mind if I have one? Your mother was ninety-seven! They say that those who die of old age become flowers in God's garden. Isn't that a beautiful thought? It is for me, anyhow, though I haven't just lost my mother. Am I drunk, did you say? You should be ashamed of yourself, bursting into tears like that just because your vile old mother cracked out and you can't bear to live alone at sixty. You're a disgrace to the human race. Hey, don't get rough. I may wear a dog-collar but I've still got enough muscle to bash your face in. Get your hands off me or I'll call the police and tell them you're soliciting, you queer-eyed gett. For Christ's sake let me get away from this raving maniac!'

The ticket-collector looked in, heard his melodious bawling and dragged the door to because you can't disturb a parson rehearsing his sermon. It sounded so fiery that the bloody fool might turn like a holy lion and rend him if he insisted on bothering about such earthbound items as tickets. Just as well, thought Cuthbert, who only paid second-class when wearing his dog-collar.