The Flame of Life (11 page)

‘Oh yes,' he would say, ‘you're quite right. I'm so absent-minded these days, with parish affairs in such a tangle. I'll have to find the right compartment. Wouldn't do to spend too much of the parish funds on a business visit to raise money for the new scouts hall. I may stay? How very kind of you. It's a delight to find some goodness in the world. Only five minutes before we get in? Oh dear, I simply must finish this report on juvenile delinquency.'

Once nearly a priest, always a priest. A woman gave him five pounds when in a similar quandary: ‘Please take it,' she said, ‘for your church.' Such a nice young curate. While discussing the ethics of his possible acceptance the ticket-collector quietly withdrew. That train, unique in his memory, had been on the Norfolk run, and with an hour of the afternoon still left, the rhythmical convenient clack of the wheels hid the rustlings and whispered nothings of the forty-year-old woman whose half-buried dreams took her by merciless surprise and guilt and pleasure. Later at her house (husband on business and kiddies at boarding-school) he discarded his priestly habit entirely, and passed two days with his partner that she ought not to forget either.

He paced the platform at Dover Marine, and took out the photo of Maricarmen – who didn't look the type for anything of that sort. The way to the quayside was marked by an enormous composite war memorial, of a soldier with a rifle and bayonet pointing his deadly gear towards any tourists (especially German) who might come to this country with anything but goodwill in their hearts and hard currency in their pockets. The forlorn figures had been erected and left there as a warning to the incoming hordes whose forefathers had shot and blown to bits them and a million others.

There was time to spare for a quick look around the group. With those sharp eyes inherited from Handley he saw that such statuary was, in truth, fit only for the rubbish tip. The soldier (to the right of the sailor) was in full Great War rig of helmet and rifle, pouches and boots, looked daxed or drunk. The two were held or half sheltered by a bare-breasted woman who seemed to represent Mother England or some such tosh. She'd got wings as if to fly (should it be necessary) from the common warriors if they got funny ideas. The soldier looked undersized, as if he belonged to one of those battalions of runts and midgets nicknamed Bantams by taller specimens, the fierce scouring of the slums let loose at the Germans when all else had failed and something – whatever it was – still needed to be done. Mostly, of course, it ended in several hundred poor wretches dead or howling in the mud – which was considered better than having them stay on the streets at home getting their hands on the property of the better-off. Cuthbert wondered what the young Germans thought of it when they came through. Trust the old country to be so welcoming.

He walked into the customs sheds. ‘I'm to meet one of my domestic staff from Spain,' he said briskly to a slate-eyed passport official of his own age. ‘Mind if I wander along? Might spot her coming down the gangway. Be no end of a help. Wouldn't like her to take the wrong turning at an awkward moment!'

The man smiled. ‘That's all right.' He was going to add ‘sir', but decided not to, a slightly disrespectful omission that made him feel better, and added pleasantly: ‘Go and wait on the left.'

Cuthbert set off beyond the specified point, on to the actual quay, where the ship was bumping into its berth. Seagulls peeled off strips of sky as they slid over the sheds and water. Uncle John's last sight of earth must have been this, before the addle-brained fool went to heaven. He'd opened his suitcase, wind scattering papers up among the seagulls, took out a monstrous revolver, and put it into his mouth. The last hunger of life. The real bite of a starving man. A final look showed gulls flying over Dover Beach, before the armies of the night rushed in.

What else can you do when you've sensed too much, and can't take any more? Maybe it wasn't such a lot he'd seen. One man's much may be another man's little, but it makes no difference in the end.

Suicide is the final act of infantilism, he thought, by those who are still so close to the womb they think they can double back into it when they can't go on. Such a memory spoiled the solid view he'd always had of himself, wondering why Maricarmen had been booked via the fraught place of Dover. Maybe Handley had machined it, to put him at the mercy of a dark omen which would rattle him if he tried to win her on the way home. Yet he sensed that his weak point was the belief that everything Handley did was conscious and calculated. It needn't be so at all, and he would rather have had anyone for a father than an artist, though there was nothing to do but learn how to live with it.

He took a pipe out, and a rubber tobacco pouch, part of his parson's kit that he loathed but had trained himself to work convincingly. He rattled around his pockets for the stubby box of matches, and the policeman walked by without returning his friendly nod. He lit up, but let it fade as the first passengers trod curiously down the gangplank.

He watched Maricarmen carry two suitcases along the quay without struggling, thinking it just as well that she was strong. He caught her up at the passport counter, heard her explaining with an American accent that someone was coming to meet her, and so introduced himself.

Letters were shown, and they allowed her through. One bridge crossed, he thought, silent as they walked to the custom sheds, even false words blocked for the first time in his life. She opened her cases, and the trunk that the porter set down. The customs man slid his hands between the books and papers as if, to warm his frozen self, he was putting them up the skirt of a beautiful woman – a look of distaste at being landed with such a job.

‘A lot of papers.'

‘I may study while I'm here.'

He opened a book called
Warfare in the Enemy's Rear
.

‘Politics and history,' she said.

He flipped through it, as if the title suggested an esoteric treatise on sodomy. ‘All these notebooks yours?' he asked, disappointed that it wasn't.

‘Yes.'

Cuthbert stepped in, but he made a chalkmark on the lid and walked away, leaving them to close it. The bland official atmosphere of England's well-guarded gates had no effect on her, as it had on a few of the English returning from their holidays who could not yet show the confidence that having had it so good for so long should have given them.

She was far from revealing whatever there was to hide, carrying herself with an air of Iberian dignity that made everyone around her seem physically warped. She had high cheekbones, and long black hair smoothed back from her forehead, but there the resemblance to a typical flamenco dancer ended. Her face was pale and thin, her nose small. There wasn't much beauty, he decided, but her pride shook his heart. She was tall, and her eyes had that look of sensibility that does not draw pity from anyone, though they are able instantly to see the marks of suffering in others. She wore a light grey overcoat none too heavy for the gusty day.

He was wary of getting too close for fear he wouldn't see her properly, yet wanted to be nearer so that people would know they were together. He enjoyed them looking, and wondering what a young parson had to do with such a woman. He wished he hadn't donned his dog-collar before leaving home – touching the small of her back to point their direction along the platform.

A porter had gone on with her luggage. ‘It's not far to London,' Cuthbert said. ‘A couple of hours. We'll get a taxi across town, and another train from St Pancras.'

‘I seem to have been travelling for ever,' she said. ‘It's a good feeling, though.'

He opened the carriage door. ‘You'll get there soon. England lies before you like a land of dreams!'

He paid her porter five shillings – rather less than he should have done – and got a dark look at his white collar before the man pocketed the coins and walked away. He regretted his meanness, which gave the wrong impression before this new and striking acquisition to the community. His hands were trembling as he pulled out his pipe and tobacco.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The carriage was full and stuffy – a light rain gusting along the foot of the cliffs, grey window-flashes of the sea as they threaded several tunnels.

He wondered what she was thinking, knowing that if he couldn't guess with the sharpened intuition of fresh acquaintance it would be far more difficult in the future. His priestly bent of mind could only get at somebody's thoughts by hearing them speak: having nothing on which to frame questions did not inspire him to use his imagination and make up something which, though colourful, might not be accurate. He thought too much of himself to want anything but the truth.

They sat quiet. At the dimness of each tunnel, glad to be leaving the locality of Uncle John's death, he looked at the illuminated vision of her face in the window, while she sat by his side with unfeeling blankness after a twenty-four-hour spirit-shaking journey from Barcelona. He was nagged by the feeling that he'd seen her before, and he couldn't fathom where.

The precious trunk was in the van, that heavy and sole reason why she had been sent for. As soon as Dawley and his father had their hands on the notebooks they'd kick her out – providing such humanitarian revolutionaries could contrive to get her pregnant and arrange for six-foot snow drifts to surround the house. He saw through their game all right. To fill up John's museum and shrine they wanted the word-picture of Shelley Jones' revolutionary soul fixed into a glass case.

But first they would put every last phrase and statement under the glare of their gritty logic, work on it like medieval alchemists to transmute the raw wires of ordinary metal into the purest gold of future example. Handley was running a country, not a community, and needed an historical museum to justify it. His first martyr was Uncle John, and a second had come along like a windfall in Shelley Jones. He wondered who was lined up for the third.

They wouldn't admit this, would swear to inviting Maricarmen for reasons of international solidarity, and affection for poor Shelley who had died fighting for the downtrodden inhabitants of the Third World. She would need a place to rest in and recover from her ordeal. If the first reason for enticing her to England was icy and heartless, the second was poisonous with sentimentality.

But he also wondered about Maricarmen's motive for coming to this island and latching on to the Handley roundabout. Some solid plan existed beneath the pronounced swell of her breasts – more visible now that her coat was open. The idea of bringing the notebooks hadn't been made till she accepted their invitation and had applied for a passport. The High Command of Dawley, Albert, Richard and Adam had made a chart of STEPS TOWARDS INVEIGLING MARICARMEN INTO ENGLAND and pinned it on the wall, filling in a coloured square every time a certain move had been accomplished. Well, not quite, but he was sure it would have been if they'd thought of it. He would struggle single-handed to protect this strange and unique woman beside him.

She was tired, but wondered what it would be like fulfilling her expected role – until she showed her true purpose for going there. Shelley's last letter had been posted from Tangier, and she knew one paragraph by heart: ‘There's this Englishman coming south for a little tourism (gun-running) beyond the mountains. He's hard, and as solid as a rock – especially in the head, I reckon. But he's the right meat, because this kind of travelling can be tough. We'll be back in ten days, and if he turns out well, we could do more sight-seeing later. He seems ideal for the job, a Limey worker who claims he's not long out of a factory. Providing he can read and write (and I think he can) we should make a good team. There is something about his eyes, a sort of abstract grey, but I can't decide whether such empty hardness will be better or worse for us. But since we don't intend shacking up, but only making this one trial run together, it doesn't much matter.'

Being an atheist she could not speak to the dead. So they were separated forever. Death proved and finalised her atheism. They had once lived in Malaga for three months, shared a cold and barrenly furnished flat on a cobbled street that led to a bald piece of rising ground behind the city called El Egido, into which were built many gypsy caves. The flat was so cold that some nights they would take food and wine and eat with the gypsies, the poorest of the poor who had been hounded and murdered by fascists during the Civil War.

Or they would go to Vicente's bar in town and drink Amontillado at one of the wooden tables, talking for hours, playing Ludo and Checkers. The walls of the cafe were decorated with pictures of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, showing his pathetic visage as he sat undiscouraged under the broken windmill sail. They grew warm with
vino y tapas
, and the flat seemed no longer desolate when they went back to it.

Walking through the square before the illuminated cathedral at midnight they saw a tree with tiny green leaves just breaking out of bud, points so livid and infinitesimal that it looked as if a cloud of green fireflies resting on all the tips of the branches before taking off into the dark blue sky towards Africa.

The curtain of death came over her memories, and a row of faces made up the safety-curtain of her mind. She didn't know where she was. A young man gazed out of the window with such a forlorn expression that she wondered if he too were thinking about death. A tight-lipped, severe, thin-faced woman looked into a book, while the man beside her was asleep. Another man tried to get a glimpse of her, but turned away when she met the gaze. They seemed a very far-sighted nation with such empty eyes.

Cuthbert took her to the dining carriage for tea, and they faced each other. Away from home he made it a rule to eat whenever food was available. You never knew where your next meal was coming from in this shifting world of frivolous uncertainties. If he were on his own he would eat and drink as if some invisible person were threatening to snatch the cup and plate away, but with Maricarmen so close the second and civilised Cuthbert took control.