The Flame of Life (19 page)

‘We'll get away from it all,' she said. ‘Just you and me. Find a cottage and live on our own. Then if I have a baby it'll be marvellous because nobody from the house will get their hands on it. We'll be happy, and you won't think people are trailing you. You'll be your old self again.'

‘What is my old self?' he asked mournfully.

‘You'll know when it happens, you big daft thing.'

‘I'll get some money so that we can buy a cottage.'

‘I'd like that,' she said, happy that he'd spoken more in half an hour than for a whole week.

‘Everytime that mini-van passed it had a different number-plate.'

She pulled her coat tight to keep out the cold. ‘It couldn't have been the same car, then.'

‘I recognised the driver. He must have altered the number before passing the house. It's easy. I once changed it on my mother's car – from an old car in the barn that we didn't use anymore – and she didn't notice till the policeman stopped her because her brake lights weren't working. He let her off because he knew her. Or he knew my father, who sends him a bottle of whisky every Christmas.'

‘You'll get pneumonia if you don't shut up,' she said. ‘You're always playing them rotten tricks.'

‘Why do you think it is?' he asked sadly.

‘How do I know if you don't?' she sulked.

‘I'm asking you. But nobody can give me a good answer. People aren't sympathetic. I ask your mother what's wrong with the world, and she tells me to wash the dishes. I ask Cuthbert and he tells me with a leer to believe in God. I ask your father, and he tells me to give him back the circle I cut from the painting I stole. I ask Dawley, and he tells me that if I get a job in a factory all my problems will be solved. Richard and Adam invite me to a game of guerrilla warfare on their maps. At the moment they've got a General Strike going, and they're working out schemes of deployment with all the army units in England.'

‘They play around like kids,' she said.

‘And when I ask you, you just tell me to shut up.'

‘It's a shame Uncle John isn't here anymore.'

‘He committed suicide,' he said, helping her down from the step. His large hulking form went in front, trailing a hand behind whose fingers she held. They walked along the village street, he in the same self-protective forward hunch, Mandy much smaller though no mean presence by his side. What was he trying to protect in himself by this loping stance? Sometimes it was worse, and he walked like a man who had just recovered from bronchitis. It had got really bad in the last few weeks. He was trying to hold something into himself which he couldn't live without – an illness, a weakness, even maybe a secret strength that he couldn't bear anyone to know existed. She was glad of the silence on their walk to the house.

The trouble is, he thought, I don't know myself, and so I don't exist. And if I don't exist, others don't exist either, so how can they know me, or even see me, and how can I know them, or see them? They don't see me, so first I've got to make them see me. What can I do to make them see me?

CHAPTER TWENTY

The longer she delayed opening Shelley's trunk and taking out the notebooks, the more afraid she became to do so. It lay under the bed, and the key was part of a bunch on the dressing-table by the window. They were warm from the sun when she picked them up. She put them down again, and finished dressing. Someone knocked at her door.

‘
Quien es?
'

‘Enid.'

‘Come in.'

‘I'm driving to Hitchin market. Do you want to help?'

‘All right. I won't be long.'

Enid sat on the bed. Her long hair was snaked up into a pile, and her face was remarkably unlined for a woman of over forty. ‘How do you like being with us?'

‘Time drifts by. I'm not sure I like being in England, but it's nice here.' She sprinkled perfume from a bottle of Maderas de Oriente on her neck and under the arms, where Enid saw demure sprouts of black hair. She put on a sweater.

‘You're very attractive. You'll have to find a boyfriend.'

‘That's not so easy. Do you have one?'

Enid laughed. ‘I've been too busy bringing up children.'

‘You should look for one.' She took her shoulder bag, and lifted the trunk keys to bring them with her, but thought Enid might see it as a gesture of mistrust against the community, so left them where they were. ‘Does Albert have girl friends?'

‘Not as far as I know.' Enid was ready to go. ‘At least I've never caught him at it. Neither of us has ever had many friends of any sort.' They stood close, and Maricarmen came forward. The kiss was brief on the dry skin, and they rested a few moments, arms on shoulders, a warmth of tranquillity and understanding. In sensing the youthfulness of Maricarmen's body Enid realised how much more alive she might become if she got to know a younger man. ‘Stay as long as you like,' she said, pressing Maricarmen's warm hands. Her own fingers were cold, and she enjoyed such contact.

Ralph watched them get into the Rambler. He had been up since early morning, but Mandy stayed in bed, exhausted by his menacing fluctuating moods of the last few days – though they had lifted slightly since the turgid mechanism of his mind had decided to
do something
.

He knew that every move depended on personal, spiritual energy. The only problem left in the world was how to stop going mad when that energy withdrew from you. If he felt ill, either in the stomach or the soul, he did not even have the strength to go to a doctor, or talk to anyone about it. But energy always lurked somewhere in the chaos of his mind, though it rarely turned into action. That which stayed was not energy at all. But when he acted without thought it never occurred to him to think he was energetic, and so it did not help to console him for all the times when he'd been listless and without hope.

The two women drove away, and he walked towards the back door with a large plastic bag folded neatly under his arm. How is it possible, he wondered, to stop what you are going to do if you are going to do it?

Cuthbert, sauntering down from the garden, watched from between the rose bushes. Ralph was a difficult bird to fathom, he decided. What could you make of a grown man who walked around the house with wet cheeks because, in the natural order of things, a hedgehog had died?

He plucked a budding rose to pieces, and thought that if Ralph had gone into the house intent on stealing something, one ought to find out what it was. No doubt Ralph would bungle it. Somebody would see him, kick his shins and raise an outcry. Or would they? Mandy was deep in her daytime dreams. Dawley was re-sweating his Algerian skylark. Richard and Adam were moving pins on maps. Myra was in the vegetable garden plucking early peas.

He began to shake at the idea of him upstairs looting John's stuff. It was no use thinking he wouldn't dare. Nothing was sacred to a founder-member of Kleptomaniacs Anonymous. Ralph had all the stupidity of an intelligent thief. He'd nick anything.

Cuthbert leapt down the steps, went in through the kitchen, then silently upstairs in his plimsolls, listening at every door. Mandy was snoring, and there was silence in all the rooms but Maricarmen's. Ear at the keyhole, a great deal of paper material was being stuffed into the plastic bag. A lid fell to. A bunch of keys jangled.

His brain revelled in such information. He went downstairs and out again. Eric Bloodaxe tried to grab his ankle, wrathful perhaps at not having challenged him on the way in. Cuthbert casually shot back his foot and pushed the dog into its kennel.

Among the rose bushes, his heart beat hard. Ralph was helping himself to Shelley's archives. Three people at least would bury him alive for it – Dawley, his father, and Maricarmen. And since Ralph was considered by the community to be the champion waste-burner of the Home Counties, Cuthbert had no doubt what he intended to do with such combustible material.

From behind the bushes he watched him walk to the garage with the plastic bag slung heavily over his shoulder. A moment later he came out with his two-two air rifle and strolled up the steps towards the paddock, trying to keep himself erect and proud, and make as complete a changeover as possible from cat-burglar to landowner. The community had bought an extra air rifle so that he could go on daily patrol to keep the pigeons off the peas and beans. His aim had improved, and since the death of his pet hedgehog he had scared two birds.

Cuthbert nipped along the path, and hid by the far side of the house. Ralph greeted Myra in the garden, his offer to help with the vegetables altruistically refused. In the garage Cuthbert saw half a dozen identical plastic bags lined along the wall. By opening each he found the notebook cargo he was after. It was a long time since he had done so much shifting and carrying, and he'd forgotten how one sweated.

Myra laid the bucket of peas on the kitchen floor, and made coffee at the Aga. The smell of it drifted to the caravan, and after taking a cup to Mandy she found Dawley sitting at the table waiting for his. She brought Mark down – who'd been looked after by Adam and Richard and clutched a piece of old map which he crisscrossed with pencil.

Dawley took his son on his knee: ‘How's my old Mark, then? What've you been up to?'

He dropped the map and pencil and began walking up his father's chest, held by each hand. ‘I was going to bring your coffee,' Myra said.

‘It's all right. I like to drink it in the bosom of my family.'

‘Which one? You have so many. Or you had before Nancy left. Have you heard from her?'

He put Mark on the floor and held Myra, kissing her gently. ‘I've only got one now. I love you and Mark, and that's about it. Things come plain at last. Nancy's making her own way, and I'm making mine.'

Mark crawled between their feet and, hands pinching his flesh at the calves, stood between them. ‘He heard me,' Dawley said. ‘He knows how I feel.'

‘He knows you're his father.' She held Dawley – not wanting him to let her go. ‘You work too hard. Give yourself a rest.'

‘What's rest? Idleness. Death. Boredom. Gives you time to think. I even feel lazy doing the so-called work I do.'

‘You're getting too thin.'

‘That never harmed anybody.' He drank his coffee black, without sugar. ‘Some for you?'

‘Please.'

He poured milk for Mark, and sat at the table with him on his knee: ‘Don't splash it all down me. Put it just there. Come on, open your little soup-box.'

‘Why don't you sleep with me at night?' Myra asked. The direct question sounded strange coming from the shy woman he knew her to be. But it was what he liked about her. On the day when they first met, she had been the one most direct in the approaches. It was a big reason for loving her, and still was. It simplified life, and made the sexual part so obvious that you were free to get to the greater complications underneath. ‘I want to,' he answered, ‘but I go dead for weeks at a time.'

‘Is it because Maricarmen's here?'

He laughed. ‘I could never be in love with her.'

‘That's not what I mean,' she said.

‘I don't know why I haven't been to you. Waiting to see how I felt maybe. But my love for you doesn't change.'

‘I suppose you've been waiting for half a hint – as Mandy puts it. We all go dead from time to time, but it's still pleasant to have someone in bed with you.'

Mark was looking at them intently, and Frank steadied his cup when the milk was about to spill. ‘I've been wrapped up in myself. I can't see the straight-edge of life any more.'

She smiled. ‘Who
can
? But things have a way of realigning themselves without too much worry or thought. As long as you talk about them – with somebody else.'

He set Mark's empty cup on the table. ‘I tell myself the same, but it goes on and on, inside my head and won't come out.' He put Mark on the floor, who crawled to his map and pencil. ‘I'd like to go to bed with you right now.'

‘We'll have to wait till tonight.'

He filled a mug with coffee, went out and up the path into the studio.

‘Do you want a brandy?' Handley offered.

‘Can't take it these days. Tastes like razor blades. How's the painting?'

‘All of a splash. I'm trying to expand my consciousness, to fight away the fear of death. Now that I'm over forty I'm beginning to remember my dreams again. Maybe the breakthrough is coming.'

Frank sat on a box to look at the canvas.

‘I'm trying to paint the world moving closer to the sun,' Handley said, swigging his coffee noisily. ‘But must it pass through the eye of a needle to get to it? Be blasted by a nuclear explosion, for example, to reach its good warmth? See all the green of that primeval forest? I dreamed it last night. And those figures? Dreamed them as well. Adam and Eve are in paradise, with the Bomb going up on the horizon. Time has no meaning when that happens. Maybe the earth shouldn't move closer to the sun. Perhaps its survival depends on it being equidistant from the sun and the moon – spiritually I mean. A shift of polarity and we're all for that high jump, and nobody can leap as high as to clear that cloud. The colours are coming about right. They'll blind everybody. If you want to see the world in its true colours you've got to be colour-blind. That's how I paint. I know nothing about colour. Or I don't allow myself to. To know is to kill. Naturally, I know everything. But I don't trust anything, so I always start from the beginning. Everything fresh, yivid in juxtaposition – all that crap. If you've got the form and the imagination, the colour will look after itself. The colour's in your own soul. Paint Jerusalem on the end of your nose.'

‘What do you think about the future?' Dawley asked.

He put down his mug, and laughed. ‘I'm an artist. I've got no future. Life is short: here for a minute and gone tomorrow. I paint till I croak. It's my nature. You go on and on doing your work, and keeping out of mischief as much as possible.'