The Flame of Life (28 page)

Handley and Ralph went on. ‘Not a bad stick,' Handley said. ‘He did well in the War, so I hear. Lost his whole battalion at Cassino. There were only sixty of 'em, though. The other five hundred went sick the day before the attack.'

Ralph spoke bitterly, and the serious tone of it surprised Handley. ‘You've no respect for anybody.'

‘That's as maybe,' Handley snapped back, ‘but you can tell me where that gun is. Remember?'

‘I don't know,' Ralph wailed, and before he could dodge it Handley felt a hard blow on the shoulder which almost pushed him down.

I should have known better, he thought later, than trust a man who has the doctrine of non-violence festering away in his heart. Timid and mild, he had a gorilla lurking inside, and not very deep in at that.

Ralph came up for a second lunge, but Handley had steadied himself, and dodged it easily, so that his large form lumbered by. In self-defence, though he wasn't hurt, Handley thought he'd better do something, so put his foot in a sort of kick, and caused him to trip in his clumsy Wellingtons. Ralph didn't fall at once, only ran more quickly because of it, which took him towards the bank of the lake. Handley saw what would happen and, with swift and compassionate energy, leapt at his flailing arm, and pulled him round, so that he fell into the grass only a foot short of the water.

Ralph brushed mud and grass from his trousers. ‘I'm sorry,' he said morosely.

‘So you didn't take that gun?'

‘No.'

‘That leaves only one person.'

‘I expect it's Cuthbert,' Ralph said when they reached the gate. He held it, and closed it after they had passed.

‘What makes you say so?' If Ralph didn't claim the credit for a robbery, his suspicions as to who had done it could be worth something.

‘I'm not sure. I'll find out, if you like.'

‘Can I trust you?' Handley said, feeling a new respect for his erring son-in-law because he wasn't shy of a fight if driven too far.

‘I won't mention it to the others. I'll see what I can do.'

Handley, though uneasy, would take on any ally to help him find that wandering firearm. When danger threatened he was a man who still had the ability to trust his senses.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Handley went into the paddock for a stroll because he didn't know where to put the next stroke of paint. The mass, the shape, the theme and the colour were slipping out of his hindsight.

It was no simple situation, he knew – padding through the thistles smoking a cigar. If somebody had told him a month ago he'd be worrying about John's missing side-arm it would have been laughable, but right now he wanted to get far from the house because, being the prime voice and mover in it, it seemed that whoever had the gun was only waiting for an opportunity to level it at his head and splash his brains against the nearest wall.

He'd always believed it good and necessary to live with his own full-blown unique ideas, and fatal to go by anybody else's. Yet this limitation had made him rancorous and self-opinionated, and showed off notions that he did have in a poor light, at the moment curtailing any imaginative ideas as to where the stolen gun might be.

It was like living in a state of war, and no artist (nor any man, either) could give of his talented best in such conditions. Only he, and whoever had the gun, knew that this war existed. The others still lived in a blessed zone of peace, and while he wished them luck for it, knew it couldn't last much longer.

He walked along the paddock hedge. Brambles sent tentacles into the grass and thistles, so he thought he'd come with the clippers later and rake them back. Such work kept his muscles hard at a time when they might be of use.

Regretting his scarcity of ideas at how to get the gun from Cuthbert, or discover who otherwise had it, he knew at the same time that hugging things to himself might not be the wrong tack for him. His instinct hadn't let him down yet. He needed infinite patience, and to keep his nerve while the peril developed, so as to wander slowly around the house and grounds, mulling over everything in the surety that some clue or solution would come to him. He was old enough and sly enough to try this way, though he was far from easy living under the menace of it.

Dawley's slit-trench, long neglected by the children, had soily water in the deepest part, and grass had grown on the parapet thrown in front. A few yards behind, concealed by tall thistles, lay a space that had recently been flattened. Someone had cut back the brambles, pulled them free, and dragged enough of them out by the roots to reach soft grass underneath. The briars had been clipped at wide parts of the creepers, so it was not the work of a child. What's more, the cuts were pale, and no more than a few days old.

It was an efficiently cleared and well-hidden love nest. Standing in it, and judging by the flattened area, whoever used it had done so in the last day or two. It was strange to find such a nest in any compound inhabited by him and his family. Weren't there enough dry and comfortable beds in house, caravans, or garage-flat? Not for this clandestine bit of sexual knockabout, evidently.

He wondered if it had been constructed by Cuthbert for his liaison with Maricarmen. He had the strength to cut the briars, and also the inclination, since he seemed to be in love to the fatuous extent of promising to supply her with a gun. Yet why such secrecy, unless the gun had already changed hands? If they were in love it seemed only in order to make war – on him, on the house, on the community. Life suddenly felt short and savage, a bit of string with both ends going nowhere.

His lingering fear came back. He laughed at it, for he'd always known that life had no meaning beyond the thick fence of his family and the spreading avenues of his painting. All the interest in violent revolution was only a wayward hope of blasting down whatever hemmed him in. He wouldn't know what to do if suddenly set free, so lived with the fact that there was no way out, forgetting it most of the time so that he could work and not go crazy.

He got on his knees, no call to do so except instinct, which was reason enough. He looked more closely at the grass, and then into the stumps of briar on either side. He swore, and drew his hand back when a thorn stuck in his finger, the pain pushing a dome of blood after it. He liked to bleed, though not too much, and pressed it into the cuff of his white shirt.

He picked a cigarette-end from under the briar, not an ordinary nub, but one so small it had been smoked to the bone. The plot thickens, he thought, like chicken soup with barley. Cuthbert smokes pot, but he wouldn't be doing it out here with Maricarmen because she's too much of a straight-laced revolutionist to let him. Her knickers would catch fire at the merest whiff of it.

So who was Dean's lady-friend? Who had driven him to fashion out his love-pad with the utmost cunning of his squirrel-brain? When there was a mystery to be solved Handley lost his sense of humour, as if the only way to get to the bottom of it were through the swamp of his self-esteem.

‘Who indeed would lay here with Dean, that scrag-end of a William Posters who had stumbled so unerringly on a cushy billet? He sucked blood from his finger, and walked away more thoughtfully than when he'd come.

It was obvious that the two large platters of
hors d'oeuvres
for lunch should have a centre column of salami, with black olives and spring onions spread to left and right. What other art was left to a woman? It got more like Mrs Beeton every day.

Salads were made with lettuces pulled out of the garden. Dishes of potato, cheese cubes, tomatoes and cucumber were laced with mayonnaise. For the main course there was veal in the oven, and water was heating on the Aga for rice. Fruit salads were fortified with muscatel – helped down by double cream for dessert.

It wasn't a special day, just her turn on the new domestic schedule, and Myra was nothing if not conscientious, intelligent and imaginative, working with a free hand because Dean was amusing Mark by playing the car radio.

The new arrangement had simply increased her discontent, the slight let-up giving her a glimmer of wider freedom. She even began to regret that the community was lodged in her house, for if it had been at somebody else's she could have walked away without deflating it completely. Yet she couldn't gainsay that this style of life had grown on her, and it was impossible to imagine what her existence would be without it.

Why were all arguments good, even the bad ones? Domestic slavery had palled, but at the beginning, when there was a real sense of community among them, she hadn't noticed it. Now she sensed the silences that lay so thick around, people pairing off, and secrets brewing up.

Maybe the conflicts that had brought them together were healing, or going underground, which meant that it was settling down and not, as she feared, in danger of blowing apart. She was fundamentally pessimistic, but hid it by a generosity that made everyone think they could not do without her. The pessimism remained – the inability to make up her mind – but the work she did was doubly blessed in that it benefitted her even more than the others.

She was reluctant to investigate too far, yet saw it as a miracle that the community had held together so long, being a marriage of such disparate characters. But she believed in it still, and would do her best to keep it firm, even if it meant the eternal organising of the kitchen. And if by such speculation she discovered flaws in the mechanics of the community, it was only so that she would be able to stop any rift in time.

It was obvious that Maricarmen had been weeping, and was struggling not to show it. A handkerchief grasped in her hand was no bigger than a marble. Her breasts were gently moving, her blank stare still fixed by some shock. Cuthbert took cutlery and plates from the cupboard to set the dining-room table.

‘What is it?' Myra asked, but Maricarmen lifted a platter of food to follow him: ‘I'll tell everyone at lunch.'

Myra was puzzled by such a melodramatic pose, wondering whether it could be so serious if they had to wait till lunch to hear. She sent a chute of rice into the water: why had she never before seen how stern and discontented Maricarmen's face could be?

The sky was darkening, as if thunderstorms promised by the radio were about to grumble on the horizon. Maricarmen put two olives on her plate, then chewed at one as if it were a stone. Handley was the first to comment on her distress: ‘Is the weather giving you a headache?'

She was silent.

‘You might as well tell everybody,' Cuthbert said.

Handley took salami, and pushed it with bread and butter into his mouth. ‘Anything bothering you?'

‘Give her time to speak,' Enid said. Dean turned to make sure that Mark, perched on his high chair, spooned up his food without spilling it.

Maricarmen stood. ‘I was cleaning my room just now, and pulled out Shelley's trunk to vacuum under the bed. It didn't seem heavy, and when I opened it I saw it was almost empty. Someone has stolen the notebooks.'

‘If you've been robbed, the community's been robbed.' That was all Handley could say. There was some devil loose, that had taken the gun, and now the precious notebooks. He wanted to stand but didn't think he'd be safe on his feet. He was being pushed under by forces outside his control.

‘You've stolen them,' Maricarmen said accusingly, a look of misery on her face. ‘You deceived me into bringing them. Shelley wouldn't have been tricked.'

Dawley threw down his knife and fork. Everyone looked in his direction. ‘Just because there's one mad dog running loose there's no need to brand everybody.'

‘We were going to do research on them,' Adam said, trying to feel the enormous loss of it. ‘They'd have been priceless.'

‘You talk as if they've been buried or burned,' Handley said. ‘But I'll find them if I have to take the house and grounds apart, stick by bloody stone. I'll not touch another bit of paint till they're found. So get plenty of grub down you, because after coffee we're going to form into search parties. We'll leave nothing unturned.'

‘I know it's too late,' Maricarmen wept, tears on the soft skin of her cheeks.

Enid stood behind and took her hand. ‘They'll be found. Albert would have been a policeman if he hadn't become a painter!'

Ralph felt as if an enormous stone had been lifted from his heart. After suffering a slow-burning attack of asthma and indigestion in the last few days he now, suddenly and miraculously, found the oppression gone. They could spend ten years looking for the notebooks, but all the perverted revolutionary data written in them had gone up in holy smoke to England's blue air.

The rice and veal came, and the news had certainly blighted no appetites. ‘We'll find who took them,' Handley said, ‘and whoever was bloody responsible will be publicly booted out never to return. By God, I'll know who it is. But as we're on the subject of thievery some light-handed lunatic has nicked the revolver and ammunition from John's room.'

Enid turned pale, and shouted in a frightened voice: ‘How long have you known?'

‘A while.'

‘You should have called the police,' she said. ‘Why have you been so tight-lipped about it? Do you want to get us killed?'

‘I thought somebody had taken it for a few sporting potshots with bottles in the woods. Or that it had been mislaid and would turn up. But now that the notebooks have been snatched I think things are getting a bit more serious – shall I say? I'm putting one and two together.'

Cuthbert looked on at the ants-nest he had kicked over, worried that Handley would suspect his uncontrollable silence. Giving in to a purely nervous twitch he smiled, then turned his head away too quickly. Dawley, hating the reason behind Cuthbert's smile, saw him as a man without honesty or generosity, a carcass of plot and counter-plot, out to do what damage he could to all and sundry because it was his only form of amusement or feeling.