The Flame of Life (36 page)

She gripped his hand. ‘Are you sure?'

His lips pursed, in pain and youthful anger. ‘It's got to happen, you know it has. Don't wait too long.'

Enid felt his strong young arms around her and, in spite of the rather hard grip, sensed infinite sweet tenderness in them. The sensation was strange for, instead of her seeming to embrace him like the youth he was, it felt as if she were a small girl being fondled by someone twice her size and age. This impression almost caused her to swoon, so that it was impossible to distrust it.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Rain descended, dark and heavy, as it often does in war at the end of the day, when the guns have stopped firing, and clouds relax after the awful tension of destruction. Handley stood at the window and relished his thought, a will-o'-the-wisp banality to which rainfall gave the piss of death – he grinned, turning to sit down when the others came in. Richard had unchained Eric Bloodaxe at dusk and the dog crouched gratefully in a new world of warmth and noise and plenty by Enid's chair. The company was now fourteen, pleasing to whoever felt superstitious.

The meal of cold meat and smoked fish and black bread and salad and sundry wines had gone on for nearly an hour, very little said because the day had made them wolfishly hungry. A cold chicken leg kept Eric quiet. Maricarmen sat by Cuthbert, as if he were the only one in the community on whom she could depend for protection. He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She didn't look up, but he knew she needed his warmth, for the flesh was cold to the touch through her blouse. He felt her tremble, as if life were coming back in her, which might be necessary, judging by her pale and stony face.

Handley noticed that both she and Cuthbert ate with one hand each, the other two joined under the table. In fact most of the company seemed similarly afflicted, being split more into couples than usual – except for Handley and Enid, who occasionally looked emptily at each other down the whole length of the table. Dean sat at her left side, he noted, still with that sly and satisfied look on his gullish face, which stayed there even while he butchered a loaf of bread.

Enid had an aura of happiness about her, as if she wanted to smile but daren't risk it in case it chased the happiness away. Or she was afraid someone might see it and wonder why? She wanted to hold Dean's hand, and it was plain a mile off that Dean wanted to touch her, for a vacuous self-important grin gave him away. But they didn't make contact, and this deliciously thwarted desire increased the air of glowing regard between them. Cuthbert felt sorry for them both – for the life sentence, he thought, that seemed in store for them.

Mandy and Ralph were together, and so were Catalina and Richard, and Maria and Adam. Myra was half-way along the table, and Dawley who was next to her had the blue envelope of John's letter conspicuously by his plate. Cuthbert wondered if he had read it already, he looked so wise and smug, or whether his hunched preoccupied pose of a misplaced Chelsea pensioner was fast becoming his normal burnt-out state. You couldn't tell with a man like that, who might be a vegetable one day, and a panther-like murderer the next. He gave an impression of great strength, an immense force that, if it suddenly lost its moral reasoning, could pull him so deeply under that he'd never surface again. Perhaps he didn't have a thought in his head nine-tenths of the time, though Cuthbert readily admitted that the thoughts he did have might conceivably support the dead nine-tenths of him buoyantly enough.

The wind outside grew to such strength that Eric Blood-axe growled at phantoms thrown by it round the yard. You didn't know how loose the windows were till the bang of the wind got up, Handley mused. The four young children of the community were in bed, and he hoped the racket wouldn't stop them getting a good sound rest. When not on duty at the guns during the war he'd slept through such salvoes it was a wonder the people in his dreams had any eardrums left. Sleep was the source of all strength, he told himself, and children needed it like meat or calcium. He nodded to Dawley while standing to reach for the wine: ‘You'd better read that letter, and get it over with.'

Richard lifted a tape-machine from behind the chair, and set it on the table. ‘We chose a stormy night right enough.'

‘You'll hear me just the same,' Dawley said, taking a clean knife and opening the envelope. He spread the sheets of paper, and began:

‘Queen's Hotel, Gibraltar. By the time Dawley reads this letter I'll be speaking from the dead. I imagine your smiles when I say this. Is he mad? you'll ask. Is he really off at last? No, you aren't so ordinary that you will describe me with such words. They say there are no forests in Arabia Deserta, but why are there so many trees in me? I am not mad, but the trees are getting thicker and closer together, so I'll have to die before they stifle me.

‘I can picture the scene, and feel I'm sitting at the same long table. Accept me back for a while so that I can tell you my thoughts. Maricarmen will be there, because Frank told me what Shelley had told him. It's natural she should visit you, if only to confirm that Dawley is not to be blamed for Shelley's death. The God of Revolution is an insatiable and jealous God, and drew them both equally into his savage mouth, and the mysterious ways that He moves in are not for anyone to question.

‘I'm speaking to you from the dead, so listen to what I say. Do you know where the land of the dead is? Nor do I, though I am there already. But I've had the final experience that you haven't yet come to.

‘I am able to go back and forward in time and space, between life and death. I'm sitting in this austere hotel room in Gibraltar. Dark clouds have hung over the Rock all day, and no doubt still do, which makes it as dull and chill as England – in spite of the smell of Spain. I also am with you one English summer's evening several months from now, having achieved the difficult state of being in two places at once, and at different times. I'm with you in life while this is being read. And I'm resting at a distance from you, in my own death. The light shines in both places. I am a man of faith. I love God, and He loves me in spite of everything. We respect each other.

‘I've been conscious of this twofold fundamental split all my life. When I was tormented in Singapore twenty years ago I encouraged and developed it so as not to go under from suffering and pain. I survived when others perished. God did not love them enough to send them mad. Even then this ability to create a grand canyon out of the psyche in order to survive wasn't new to me. I used it early in life when my father bullied and beat me. You remember what a foul temper he had, Albert? I protected you from him once and he hit me on the head with an iron poker that drew blood. But we combined forces, and that was the last time he was ever violent.

‘You took me into your home after I got back from the war. Enid and yourself were the angels who saved my life. You provided me with a room in your peaceful Lincolnshire house where I could store my books and assemble my equipment – by which I still contrived to be in two places at once, often to the distress of occasional strangers who stumbled on me while I was at work.

‘The state of being in two places at once meant that while my body was fixed to the radio as if I were on a foundering ship and trying to make my SOS heard before the water drowned me, my spirit was out in space among the stars searching for the word of God. Would the new Book of Genesis tap its way like bird noises into my brain from outer space? I waited avidly for it, but it never came – not at least in the way I expected. I learned Hebrew in case it appeared, for it was hard to believe that God would need to change. His language.

‘It is now midnight, and a ship's hooter is calling from the harbour. In the morning Dawley gets on the plane for London, and he'll take this letter. Before he does I will talk to you about Revolution and War, matters in which I have always had a profound interest. So I must try to make myself clear, to be in one mind, at one place, at the same time.

‘Revolution and War have absorbed and obsessed you. The decaying components of the brain and body won't wait, so I write quickly. Revolution means War, and we are
living
people, all of us at this table, so how can we speak the words War and Life in the same breath? Listen to me. Don't despair. Don't condemn me. I am innocent, therefore I will kill myself. Think deeply. Someone is shouting from the street in Spanish.

‘If War were a means of preserving life there would be no justification for this letter. But War is a method of acquiring more property, and killing in order to get that property. It is only another way of greed and death. It is not War however if a man has to struggle to save his family or his home – or even himself from imminent destruction. That is self-preservation. In the same holy language, a man who has nothing has a right and a duty to persuade he who has much to share his excess. Can the Prodigal Son become the Good Samaritan?

‘It is easy to keep a sense of reality, being so close to my earthly death. Self-preservation means individuals, small groups, tribes at most, a small country perhaps. War, which is organised aggression, needs the resources of a nation and religion to sustain it. Nearly everyone admits this, but are glad nothing can be done about it. We are lazy, and too close to the earth. The men who weild the sword or fire the gun don't get rich. They are hired labourers, because armies maintain their hierarchies and caste structures in order to preserve themselves for future robberies. Those at the top get everything, while those at the bottom receive nothing.

‘We know about the vicious war of aggression which calls itself defence, but educated people who should know better connive in this assassination of language so that robbery and murder can begin. The “involvements” in Africa and Asia are terrible for those deliberate victims stricken by these “defenders” from technologically superior nations.

‘Noted military writers have commented that War is a continuation of life by other means. It is a conceit as old as Empedocles, but death and maiming of the young, energetic and talented is an insult to life.

‘If the dead could speak we would know more about life. Would we know more about the nature of War from those who died by it? Those who do not want to die can say that War is evil. Coward is the most abominable word ever invented. Those who have died are the only ones who have a right to express an opinion. Perhaps they would say that death is good because they have already achieved it, and thus got over the dread of it. But the word “evil” may well sound hollow in such ears, and something far stronger would be spoken by them, because they have nostalgic memories of life when it was good, full of the love and peace which God intended they should have.

‘But only the living can speak for the dead, and who of the living can rend the imagination to the extent of telling us what death is like? The act of dying has been many times described, but can anyone make real and pertinent the non-sensation of being actually dead? I am dead, but I cannot do it.

‘Until the dead have spoken, those who are living may still find some among them who will say there is virtue in War, who will give out that there is pleasure and excitement in it, talk about the law of the jungle, and the survival of the fittest. There are poverty-stricken spirits who believe that to be a member of a diabolical army dedicated to the destruction of life and property will enrich themselves and their lives. They are always less poverty-stricken than the people they are about to destroy. The people they wish to destroy are nearly always spiritually richer. After they have destroyed them the aggressors can only be spiritually poorer themselves, too spiritually denuded in fact to realise it.

‘Show me a patriot, and I will show you a monster of the human race. Patriotism is akin to sex in the head, a sort of spiritual pornography. A patriot ends by killing children, and lives to an honourable old age. He mixes back into society like a fish in water, and society accepts him willingly. I read English newspapers here, and notice how it is rightly deplored when an unfortunate man is knocked on the head in the street for his money and dies from it. The newspapers make an outcry and call for the criminal to be hanged. Yet when the crew of a bomber kills men, women and children, they keep silent or try to justify it. Governments who do not condemn these atrocities are composed of bandits and butchers. The air-crews are pushbutton slaughterers from the stratosphere, who murder in my name. I have never wanted to hurt anyone. Each bomb has my name on it, but if I am dead it won't have, because my name will no longer exist. My guilt is expunged, by suicide. Society has given me no other way.

‘I think of Richard and Adam working over their theories of insurrection, sketching out timetables for a
coup d'état
, pinpointing the logic and hopes of Revolution. These are not fantasies. You would have them real. But Civil War is the same as any other war, its motives similar because the end result is death and an exchange of property. A country may fight for self-preservation, to keep out the robbers and butchers, but for no other reason.

‘But I took part for many years in your discussions, and my motive was that of revenge against British officers who betrayed me to the Japanese for starting a left-wing news sheet when I was a prisoner in Singapore. For their action they were rewarded by no longer having to do labouring work with their men.

‘So my revolutionary fervour arose from a desire for vengeance – to overthrow that system which willingly betrayed me for so little. But revenge belongs to God alone.'

‘I'm thinking slowly, so have the patience to hear my sermon. Revolution is a holy cause, and the pursuit of it must go on. But without a sense of God and goodness and justice Revolution is bound to fail. Revolution always has, and always will, only come as an act of God, or after a series of circumstances which must be considered acts of God because no single group of men could have brought them about.