The Flame of Life (7 page)

He smiled at the decrease of weight. The door snapped open, kicked against the wall where a knob-dent had already been worn. Mandy came in with his breakfast tray. ‘You idle bed-rat. When are you going to get up?'

It was two weeks since her miscarriage and, he was glad to see, it hadn't left a mark on her. She was thinner than before her pregnancy, which might not be saying much, since she was almost plump again instead of merely gross. Mandy's glory was her long straight hair, tied with a purple ribbon and swaying down her well-padded back.

At eighteen her face had lost that live pale marble of early youth, though the newly sallow look gave her a more attractive waywardness. She was continually forced into brash assertions of independence so as to bring out that pure sense of her own dignity which all during childhood she had been unable to show in such a large family. And now this community stunt, she thought, had thrown her back to square one, forcing her once more to open her mouth loud every time she wanted something.

In spite of his five thousand tons Cuthbert was able to turn his head and smile. ‘It's nice to be awakened by such a charming sister. Did Ralph roll on top of you last night and forget to get off till daybreak?'

She stood over him, lovable, beautiful and foul-mouthed: ‘I'll tip this hot coffee over you if you don't stop calling Ralph, you bone-idle two-faced queer.'

‘I suppose anybody is queer,' he said, ‘if they don't go to bed with you. But I'm your brother, remember? Dad wouldn't like it. And he's your father. He'd be jealous. I know what goes on between you.'

She set the tray on his bedside table. He'd gone so far into the sludge of his mind there was nothing left to be angry about. ‘You'd better get up. The meeting begins' in half an hour. Dad says if you aren't there they'll come up and lob you out of the window. You're such a rotten bastard you'd burst when you hit the ground, even if you fell on soil. Or you'd dent one of the caravans with your dead weight. Be a pity. Cost a bob or two, them caravans did.'

The more she wanted to rile him the viler her accent got. She could put on a posh tone with no effort at all, speak speech in fact so purely demure that no one would guess her true base lingo. But she brutalised her tongue to remind him how he used to talk, and still wanted to from time to time but didn't for fear of giving himself away. Often he'd curse his luck at being born in England instead of France or Spain where, he'd heard, a beggar's accent could be the same as the king's. At college he'd choked back any trace of picturesque dialect or voluble argot, though when he'd perfected his aural neutrality and could expatiate with fair surety without giving himself away he discovered to his delight that if in an argument he switched into rabid and aggressive slang his opponents, where once they had been contemptuous of his voice, now became wary and impressed by it. They knew his self-assurance in their language and habits, but they could never be at all confident in his.

‘Sweetness and light,' he said, pouring coffee.

She stood by the door. ‘Myra set your breakfast out, not me. I only brought it up to please her. She don't want any trouble. I don't know why, though. It's liver and chops to this family. We'd starve without it. When there's no more trouble we'll pack our cardboard suitcases and go our separate ways. If she wants to get rid of us, all she's got to do is bring about a state of peace. The place 'ud empty in two minutes. Maybe that's what she's aiming at. I wouldn't blame her. I bet she rues the day she let our lot in.'

‘You're too rational,' he said, spreading butter over the toast, his mouth full of bacon. ‘I don't like you in that mood. You forgot the newspapers, by the way.'

‘They didn't come. There's a strike on.'

A twitch in his knee almost jerked the coffee over. ‘What are the lousy bone-idle improvident working-class shirkers downing tools for this time? It's shameful. When my National Theocracy gets in you can say goodbye to strikes. They'll be working double time at the incense factories, and building cathedrals in every street.'

‘Roger and Richard,' she said, to needle him more, ‘know the man who led the walk out. They even sent money to his strike committee.'

‘They're on strife,' he mused, cutting up his egg, ‘not strike. That's what it is. They've got no god left, and they get bored. I understand. Well, why are you standing there? Why aren't you downstairs pushing that vacuum cleaner around in your useless way? Or are you on strife, too?'

The pips of her eyes seemed to split two ways: ‘One night, when you're asleep, I'm going to come up here and cut you into little bits. ‘You're so dead from the scrotum up you wouldn't know till it was too late. You're just a sponging marauder living off everybody's good nature. You always have been and always will be. I hope I'm wrong, but I know I'm not. We all know where you go for hours at a time. You go to Uncle John's room. I expect you've got a corpse up there that you're sucking the blood out of and wanking off at.'

He appealed to her in an amicable voice: ‘Get me some more coffee. I can't do with less than a quart in the morning.'

‘You don't deserve it.'

He leaned on his pillow, and bellowed in a voice no one would suspect in him, so that the bedrail shook: ‘Get out then, you useless slut, and leave me alone. They can hold their meeting without me.'

The skin on the left part of her forehead, and towards the bridge of her nose, wrinkled in a charming manner. It showed him that she was disturbed, and didn't know how to act. It marked the edge of her tolerance, the beginning of vulnerability. It was nice to know she had limits, that there was a point at which her shame and pride (and even modesty) came out. As a very small girl her skin had wrinkled at this position when anyone indulged in undue spite or injustice towards her, and it was always the prelude to tantrums or tears. But now she simply walked away, and it almost made him feel sorry for her.

As the door closed he leapt out of bed, the five-thousand-ton-weight of sloth dissolved by Mandy's humanity in deigning to quarrel with him. He would go to the meeting, in spite of misgivings as to why it had been called. He put on a black collarless shirt over his vest, and fished a pair of old flannels from the bottom of the wardrobe. This garb was sure to ripple their communal equanimity, though he saw only innocence in it, especially when he wrapped a red cravat around his neck. One didn't want to go too far and leave everything black. As for the rule that one should not lounge in Uncle John's room in case its sanctity was blasted by too much common breath, such ordinances could only come from God – either direct, or through His Chosen Representative On Earth, he decided, moving the gun to another hiding-place.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cuthbert shuffled in wearing carpet slippers. ‘Morning, everybody,' he said genially, a fair imitation of his father. Then he touched Mandy affectionately on the shoulder, and took a seat as far from his father as he could get.

She pushed her brother's hand off as he went by along the wall. ‘I hear you stopped my papers this morning,' he said.

Richard turned: ‘And those of a few million others. We helped. Let's not claim too much. The final decisions are always in the hands of the workers.'

‘The bishop didn't get his
Times
,' Handley called above the chatter, half-way through his first cigarette of the day.

Seeing both windows open, Cuthbert complained of the cold. Handley looked at him scornfully: ‘Put a coat on, if you're nesh.'

Dawley passed a cigarette to Nancy, his wife. She took it, and allowed him to light it for her, but sat stiff and quiet, being too shy or uncaring to take much part in these gatherings. To say what she thought before all and sundry had never appealed to her. In fact she just couldn't do it in front of people she hardly knew, so merely sat there and tried to look interested. But her silence at meetings had passed beyond them and into her life with Dawley, and so he could never tell what she was thinking, even when they were in bed and as close as they would ever get. She'd turn morose or sharp if he tried to talk to her about the way they lived now. The passion of their getting back together had come and gone in a few days.

The
au pair
girls, Maria and Catalina, appeared with trays of coffee cups. ‘Ask them to close the window,' said Cuthbert.

Enid wanted to do it, and get on with the meeting, but Handley pushed her down with his left hand: ‘We'll vote on it' – unwilling to let Cuthbert off with an easy victory, even on such a small matter as this. Cuthbert noticed how smooth and cynical he looked, as on every occasion when he took to the vote-meter.

‘Say yes – those who want the windows open.' Handley put three spoons of sugar into his tiny cup of black coffee like a real Turk, Enid noted. The vote-meter had been rigged up soon after Cuthbert's arrival, and on the floor by each chair was a button that could be pressed whenever a motion was put, buttons so hidden it was impossible to say who assented and who did not, On the wall behind Handley was a huge clockface, a circle with ten divisions, so that if two members voted for a proposal the needle swung over that number of segments, and on the rare occasions of unanimity it turned full circle. Agreement was reached if six of the ten parts were covered.

Handley was proud of his democratic installation, but Cuthbert suspected it was fixed in his father's favour, suggesting at each session that everyone sit in a different place to the one they had held before, especially Handley, since Cuthbert believed that his foot-button had several times the lighting-power of any other. The proposal had been defeated, as any would while Handley kept his present seat. But even if the gadget did not cheat it seemed an insult to the more subtle mechanics of the human make-up, a typical innovation of his father who fell for any modern contraption that came along. Cuthbert thought that one day, when his father was in town, he'd call an electrician and have the wires checked.

Seven segments filled with light. He had lost. No one had ever yet defeated Handley on that device, nor ever would, for he played it like a master – as if he were God in heaven, though Cuthbert reflected that he hadn't thrown in his hand at theology just to be kept in place by this ten-bob Yahweh facing him through two lines of faces.

Dawley had voted with his father, and so had his wife Nancy who always did because it was the easiest way out. He'd have to get rid of her, which wouldn't be difficult because she was obviously unhappy in the community. Her eternal silence at meetings was proof of that. All he had to do was drop the hint that Dawley was going to bed now and again with Myra, and she'd be off to Nottingham by next morning's train.

Ralph was placed between Adam and Myra, a small transistor in his coat pocket, from which a thin cord went up to his left ear like a deaf-aid connection. It filled his brain with pop music, and even when his eyes weren't closed there was a far-off look about him. He put a hand in his pocket to change stations when a news broadcast threatened to bring him half-way back to reality.

By such means he fobbed off the horror of living with the Handleys and escaped the malignant tremors passing around the table at meeting times. Personalities festered at cross purposes, and he was sensitised to all their different wavelengths at the same time – hence the teat-plug jammed into his ear in an effort to deflect them. He stayed sane by this appliance but, as Handley often observed, only at the cost of becoming barmy, which someone as congenitally crackers as Ralph wouldn't in any case notice.

He was so involved in changing stations that he forgot to move his foot from the vote-meter, and a segment of the clock dial stayed lit up. Handley was pleased to see he'd voted for him, though knew Ralph always said yes to everybody so as to be left in peace.

Music spread like an occupying army to all points of the brain, bringing it under swift and complete submission. Yet despite this totality of control there was a separate and conscious part of Ralph that kept clear of music, a sharply defined zone of his otherwise reeling and flooded intelligence which told him that if he went on hating Handley (though without ever saying so) Handley would sooner or later do something to get rid of him. In fact he may right now be preparing to do just that. Why ever did I pick an artist for a father-in-law? Any man in an ordinary occupation would be far too tired at night, or bent on pleasure at the weekend, to give me such threatening attention, he erroneously thought – since Handley radiated more energy when he wasn't working than when he was.

The community idea was fine because it created an area wherein Ralph could exist. He did what duties were set for him, mealtimes turned up regularly, and there was always warmth and fodder in the kitchen. He had all the benefits of a great mother without having one to nag at him whenever he put his face inside the door. When there was no work to do for the community, his solitary well-built figure stooped as he walked across the fields, as if going through the undergrowth of a dense forest.

Everything was on hand to make life perfect, and the community would have been splendid had it not been for the unsuitability of most people in it. But that was no fault of his, and when Handley's spite against him for having married his daughter had been calmed by the passing of time, maybe he would suggest new people for the community, both to stop it dying, and to outvote the present members whom he would be glad to see walking away from it.

What Handley took as Ralph's vacant stare, caused by too much deadbeat drum-and-tonic pounding in, was really the pleasant conflict of clear thinking against the opposition of the music. But he didn't know this, and was angered by Ralph being cut off from what was about to be discussed.

He swallowed more coffee to take the waves of blue cigar smoke into his stomach. Between one painting and the next he pondered on ways to get rid of Ralph, which seemed vital if he weren't to eat his own liver for the rest of his life.