The Flame of Life (18 page)

Tears were on his cheeks like acid. His lungs were contused and burning. ‘It's a nightmare with me. It goes on day and night. It gets worse.' He wanted to crawl into the middle of a wood, and rot painlessly to death.

She walked quickly. ‘Stop it.'

‘I hadn't started to live until that happened,' he shouted. He caught her up and pulled her close. ‘I don't expect to be forgiven.'

‘You won't be.' She regretted her words in case her hatred gave him comfort, only wishing she had a gun to kill him now.

‘We talked about you. You might have done the same thing. He told me you both believed in revolution to the point of being willing to go to war for it.'

She was silent.

Shelley had only hinted as much, but he felt the need to defend himself, not being utterly craven with guilt. They walked without talking, and when he took her warm hand she did not draw it away. But she could see no hope for him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The hedgehog made its way from the paddock, through the garden, and up to the back door, where Ralph found it two days later lying in the saucer from which it had eaten the custard. He had been looking for it.

Brought up on a farm, he didn't know whether this was the reason for the hedgehog coming back to him. His own slow nature burned with sympathy where such a creature was concerned. He was in touch with animals. As for people, that was another matter.

After his mother, Mandy was his longest involvement. He loved her but, being shy and not talkative, didn't know whether she loved him. Sometimes he was sure she did. At other times he was certain that she did not. Real love meant someone who loved him all the time, no matter what he did or in what state he was, giving continual ease, security, and total independence. He knew it was a ridiculous ideal, yet couldn't help hankering after it. But Mandy was volatile, and he was moody, she wanting an unattainable sort of real manly love, and he craving something which he had never got from his mother.

Now and again their expectations met half-way, and they could love for a few hours, or even a day or two, until both suddenly realised that life was bitter because they were only half-way towards what they wanted. And then the antagonism of disappointment tore them apart – which was happening at the moment.

He picked up the hedgehog, well defended against the world by its own prickly nature. Its face was not entirely covered by its attitude of self-defence. He noticed a small yellow and white area behind its ears, and realised with pity and horror that they were maggot-cases laid there by blowflies while it had been unprotected in the paddock. They had burrowed in, and put their eggs there, all their consciousness in the grip of nature.

With his fingernail he scraped a few of the cases away. There was a box in the garage, in which the children had once kept a white mouse. But the mouse had escaped, so he bent down at the edge of the paddock to fill the empty box with choice dock-leaves and juicy grass. He put the inert hedgehog inside, then set it in a cool far-corner of the garage.

He stood, unable to move for some minutes because he had a terrible feeling that the hedgehog was going to die, and that nothing he could do would save it. The savagery of the world came down with full black force as he put his hand among the grass to reassure the innocent creature that it was not alone.

It seemed obvious now that he should have brought the hedgehog into the protection of the garage when he had found it two days ago. It had occurred to him instinctively to do so at the time, but then the voice of reason told him that such animals die in captivity, and he had obeyed this stupid precept rather than his own common sense. In that vital time the blowflies had laid their eggs.

This is the animal world, he mused, asking himself if the human part was any better. In many ways it was not, and the great question as to why this was so hammered in his head. He got bits of cold bacon from the kitchen and put them in the hedgehog's box, stooping to see if it would eat. The feet scratched as it unwound itself, and its small nose came out. It ruminatively sucked at a piece of fat, then went back into its domain, either sensing that he was there, or giving in to the more immediate deathly presence inside itself that it couldn't now shake off. But Ralph took it out bodily and held it in his hand, stroked its sharp bristles till it unwound and stood on his palm with its webbed feet. Then he put it back.

All evening he was silent, saying nothing at dinner, not even listening to the transistor radio carried in his pocket. He was thinking of the hedgehog and its fate, as if it were some creature or even person with a soul whom he had known since birth and been in love with, or as if it were a child of his own, and perhaps in some way as if the animal were himself.

Next day he picked up the hedgehog and saw that the maggots had hatched. When he stroked it, and it opened for him, he felt its belly gone cold and damp. He got a saucer of water and disinfectant, and with a piece of cotton-wool tried to swab the maggots away in a last effort to save its life.

We are so helpless, he thought, because as he rubbed maggots off, others came out of its ears, small and white. The solution of dettol had no effect, and even disturbed the animal, who only wanted to die in peace.

Maggots were coming from its mouth. When he lifted its head they were pullulating at its throat. Its soul was being eaten away, its body consumed from within. He wept at such cruelty to an innocuous animal, his heart feeling as if it were being wrenched from his body.

There was nothing left but to put it back in the box. It coughed, its lungs full. His dettol had driven the maggots deeper inside, prodding them to greater industry. It rolled into as tight a ball as possible to escape their gnawing. He covered it with grass and leaves.

At midnight he was in bed with Mandy. Her hand touched his face in the dark. ‘What are you crying for?'

‘I rescued a hedgehog from the paddock a few days ago, and I think it's dying.'

She kissed him. ‘You are a great soft thing. That's why I love you, I suppose.'

‘Why do the innocent suffer so much?'

‘It's only an animal,' she said softly. ‘Don't cry, love. You make me want to.'

‘I can't help it,' he said, fobbing his tears back. ‘We are born into the world without meaning, and we die without reason!'

‘Oh stop it,' she wailed, ‘or I'll kill you!' She put her arms around him, and tears poured from her eyes: ‘Don't remind me. All I know is that I love you.'

He drew her soft body to him, until a great heat was generated between them. ‘Don't worry,' she wept. ‘And please don't cry.'

In the morning he went to look at the hedgehog, even before breakfast. He opened the garage door quietly, as if afraid to wake it. Pulling the leaves and grass back he found it was dead, the maggots busier now that all resistance had stopped. His tears were hot and bitter, and he tormented himself by thinking that if he had taken the hedgehog into shelter on the first day then it would not have been attacked by the flies. It seemed incontrovertible, and there was no way out.

He lifted the wooden box with the dried vegetation and put the hedgehog back inside, then took it to the paddock. He left it there while he collected all the wastepaper from the house. He made a great heap at the place of fire in the corner of the paddock and put the box, with the dead hedgehog and all its maggots, on top. Then he lit it from four sides, and watched the smoke and flames rise, till the whole mound was burnt to ash. He pushed the unburnt paper towards the centre to make sure not one maggot escaped, but it did not curb his black despair. The heat was so intense that the hairs on the back of his hands were singed.

‘Talk to me,' Mandy said on the bus coming back from Bedford.

‘I'm talking to you,' he said hoarsely.

‘Say something, though.'

‘What do you want me to say?'

‘You haven't said anything for days. What's making you so speechless and black? It can't be that hedgehog.'

The top deck of the bus was empty and they sat in front. They'd been shopping, and to the pictures to see a coloured mind-emptying extravaganza about the Wild West in which Ralph had flinched and squeezed her hand cruelly every time an Indian was shot.

‘I'm all right,' he said, feeling sorry for her at having to put up with someone like him. He'd been taught never to speak unless he had something to say, consequently he didn't know how to say anything at all. This maxim of his upbringing wasn't necessarily a bad one, but what was interesting was that he took it so seriously.

She fretted over his silence, knowing that an educated person thought a great deal, and so ought to say something. His only fault was in not sharing his mind with others. If an educated man was inarticulate he was either selfish or cruel, but she saw him, because he was her husband, as simply damaged by his early life. Information was fed into him but he held it inside as his method of keeping a grip on life. Ideas churned in his head, but he would not let them out because he did not know how to introduce them to whoever might listen. Someone with a giant pair of in vincible scissors had cut his communication tubes. Handley unjustly considered him a ‘dumb ox', but only she knew Ralph, and the madness which his irrepressible melancholy led him into.

He saw a pond when the bus stopped, with ducks on it, and chickens standing between its banks and the door of a slate-roofed stone house. Such a rough and peaceful scene took some of the anguish out of his soul.

The bus moved, and he remembered the man who had been watching him from the corner of the paddock where the enormous bramble hedge reached towards the children's play trench that Dawley had dug.

This man, whom he'd never met, blocked out the good sky of a moment before, dropping him into a sort of grass cellar with four high hedges around. The man's face, which took on an uncanny featureless power as it played in his memory, suddenly overwhelmed him. A pain stabbed into his bowels, and the noise which rushed from his mouth was like the last roar of a trapped bull before it disappears under the bog.

She wanted to hide her head, get under the seat, kill him, run off the bus, leave forever. But she could only stay fixed, put a hand on his hand, grip the rail and stare at the road in front. His great bellow broke down into a dog-wail, and then stopped.

The conductor stood at the top of the stairs: ‘What's going on?'

Ralph's face was bloodily flushed, but frozen into stillness, and he didn't turn round. Mandy smiled:

‘It's all right. He's only practising!'

‘I'm being followed, these days,' Ralph said casually, when they were left alone. The face had grinned, huge and important, not so close as to be intimidating, nor so distinct to be seen as either good or evil, but it was a peculiar memory to trundle over the earth at such a time. Had it come to him only because he was underground, in the mines of grass and brambles, among galleries of pungent soil? And if it had, wasn't it time he struggled up to daylight and proper life again?

‘What do you mean, followed?' she frowned, the inward sweat of his fit no longer trying to kill her.

‘Followed.'

She understood none of it. ‘Who by?'

‘Somebody. Just followed.'

‘It can't be,' she said, frightened. ‘Nobody wants to follow you.'

He smiled, all-knowing, trying to puzzle her. ‘How do you know?'

‘Stop it,' she cried. ‘It's stupid.'

He was alarming her even more than when he roared out, and her tears were sharper to him than the vision of the observing man. ‘Maybe I was wrong. It was probably somebody walking across the field who stopped to look over into the paddock. I won't mention it again.'

His willingness to be nice made her happy. ‘You are silly. Mention it if you want to. I ask you to talk to me, and when you do I say I don't want to hear it. Tell me. I don't mind. That's what we mean to each other.'

But he wouldn't be drawn. He was wary. She was waiting for him with daggers. The heavy trees hanging over the lane were freckled with green infant leaves, blue spots of sky just able to show through when they came to a bend. ‘I hope the summer's good,' she said, ‘because it's certainly been a difficult year so far, getting this bloody community going, then me having a miscarriage. Do you hope I get preggers again?'

‘You know I do, though I'd like to get out of the clutches of the community before it happens.'

‘We need money, and jobs.'

He squeezed her hand too hard for it to be affection. ‘We'll get it.'

She pulled away. ‘Listen, no stealing father's paintings, and trying to sell them like you did in Lincolnshire. Next time he'll get you ten years in the nick.'

He was silent for a moment, gritting his teeth. ‘I haven't stolen anything for months.'

She sighed heavily, the good mood going. ‘Just leave things alone.'

Not wanting to upset her, he counted the raindrops that kicked against the window, watched how they joined forces before streaming down the glass. ‘A blue van passed the house three times yesterday.'

‘Was your mother in it?'

‘I'm tired,' he said. ‘I can't wake up properly in the morning.'

‘Your mother's got a powder blue mini-van, but she's in Lincolnshire.'

‘There was a policeman in this one,' he said. ‘On the lookout.'

She kept up a normal response: ‘Don't worry, love. They aren't after you.'

There was a shine of superiority in his deep brown eyes, then a glint of reproach, ending in infinite regret that he had married such an uneducated slut. ‘You don't understand.'

I chose him, she thought, looking at him with a tender smile, not him me. When I first saw him. I wanted him to love me, and he fucked me nicely because he's big and slow and tried to care because he thought he wasn't able to. If he'd picked me I suppose I might have got a better deal because then his mother would have been on our side and given us some of her money, which would have made him happier. But I'd rather make the choice myself and get a dud, than be chosen by any bloody man like I was a slave, even if he did turn out to be better than Ralph.