Richard was moving the pins, and Handley bent over the map with a feeling of satisfaction. ‘Sent off the plans of the secret bases yet to Moscow?’
‘Last week. Rolled them in a bundle of New Statesmans. Printed matter, unregistered, surface mail — to make sure they’ll get there.’
‘Send another batch then, this week.’
‘All right,’ Richard said. The telephone rang, and he listened.
‘Well?’
‘They’re liquidating the Coventry group. Regular army.’
He straightened up from the map, threw his cigar out of the window. ‘What did I tell you? Get them to melt, turn into carol-singers or poppy-sellers. I’ll call in this afternoon when I’m back from the pub. Maybe you’ll have better news.’
‘Father, there’s just one thing. Adam and I found a beautiful old printing-press in Louth. We can get it for fifteen pounds, then go ahead with the magazine. It’ll cost fifty pounds an issue if we set it up ourselves.’
He thought for a moment. They’ll be the ruin of me, if I’m not too stingy with them. And the same if I am. ‘Win that civil war to my satisfaction, and I’ll do it.’
‘That’ll take weeks. We could print some subversive leaflets in the meantime. I know a way to get them handed round factories in Nottingham. Also at Scunthorpe.’
He took half a dozen ten-pound notes from his pocket and, in mint-condition, they swallowed down onto the Thames valley. ‘Get the press, then, and we’ll see how it goes.’ Richard stood back to consider the overall situation. Handley’s head showed in again. ‘Shove the poetry out of your mind for a bit — do you hear me? — and get them fucking Welshmen up from the valleys.’
‘Yes, father.’
He walked aimlessly around the garden. Furrows underfoot were muddy, ridges of salt-loam beaten in by sea-wind, this part of the garden scarred by miniature craters where cabbages had been ripped out from mother earth. It smelt good, felt soft and rich, tender to his elastic-sided boots hardly meant for the treading of such intense soil. The fruit-trees — apple, plum, pear — were empty and withered. He felt dead, snuffed out by too much winter and isolation, as if his soul were drifting and he was unable to pull it back under control. Let it drift, he thought, let me go, idle and blind, stricken and numb. I don’t mind floating like a brainless fooclass="underline" the quicker I get to the end and die, the sooner I’m born again. I don’t believe in death, at least not in life, not for me. But oblivion is breathing close unless something happens.
Hoping to throw off such thoughts, he went in for dinner. Enid put veal and salad before him. ‘That journalist didn’t seem in a very good mood when he left. Walked down the hill as if he had an eagle on his back. He didn’t even talk to Mandy, and that’s rare.’
He cut up his meat, appetite good. ‘I gave him what for. He wanted to draw me out, so I let him overdraw me. That’s the only way.’
‘Is it?’ she said, setting her own plate down. They’d fallen in love when she was seventeen and he nineteen, in those far — off days on the Lincolnshire coast, and Enid was well pregnant at the marriage, soft-faced and big-bellied, earnestly looking at him, and he shy with a wide-open smile at being dragged into something that made him the butt of his mates’ jokes while also marking him down for some special unspoken respect. She had a slim straight nose, small chin, full mouth. Her light-blue eyes had a slight slant, upper and lower lids never far apart, Tartar almost in shape, one of those rare English faces that looked as if they had come from central Asia, then full smooth cheeks and fair hair, a face on which the troubles of life do not fall too hard, though Enid had been familiar with every one. Loving Handley, she wasn’t even aware of having ‘put up’ with him, which may have contributed to Handley’s youthfulness, while hers was certainly rooted in it. Her long bound-up hair was as pale as when they’d met, and her skin had an unchanging attractive pallor, in spite of bitter Lincolnshire winters and the never-ending work of seven children. Handley loved her also, and in some way they had never stopped being afraid of each other, but during their quarrels they loathed each other so profoundly that it couldn’t even be said that they were in love any more.
‘Why go out of your way to make enemies?’ she said. ‘If you try not to make them you’ll still have more than you can handle. You’re not sly enough. You let these people make mincemeat of you. They’ve only got to stick a pin in and you jump a mile. And they always get what they came for, whether it’s the posh papers or the gutter press. At your age you should know better.’
He spread butter over black rye-bread. ‘At thirty I’d have been as cunning as hell, and was, but what’s the point any more? I’m getting old enough not to bother about disguising my feelings.’
‘Too famous, you mean. It’s gone to your head.’
The house was stonily quiet, children at school, others either asleep or set on various pastimes. A cow moaned from the neighbouring field. ‘Whose side are you on?’
Whenever they argued it was as if a third and impartial person were present, taking down all that they said to each other — as if they would be ultimately judged on this. She stood up to change his plate. ‘See what I mean? Yours, but you’re too locked in your fame to know it.’
‘Fame!’ He spat. ‘I don’t have any.’
‘You do.’
‘I ignore it.’
‘You don’t. You can’t. I wish you did, but they’ve got you.’
‘So what? Is my work any the worse for it?’ He hated the word ‘work’ and knew that she knew it, and had made him use it, by angering him on this touchy subject. Art was not work, since it was something you were not forced to do in order to earn a living.
‘Not yet it isn’t,’ she said.
‘It won’t be. When I’m working I’m completely myself.’
‘And when you’re not working,’ she went on, eyes gleaming because a real quarrel was coming up, ‘we’ve all got to live with you.’
‘You mean you have. Why don’t we keep personal relationships out of this?’
‘You can’t live without them, that’s why.’
He ate his bread and Stilton, cut up an apple. ‘Stalemate. Let’s pack it in. Divide the spoils and go our different ways.’
She sat down and looked straight at him, a bad sign, portent of saying something unforgivable and bitter. ‘If you want to give in, you can. But I won’t surrender to all this muck you’ve dropped into. If you want to go, go. Kill yourself. If you left me you’d never paint another stroke, and if you don’t believe me, try it. We’ve suffered too much to fly apart just when the going gets difficult. It might have been possible before, but not now, not any more.’
‘I don’t want to leave you, but what gives you the idea that you’re my strength and mainstay?’
‘Because I am, though not any more than you are mine, I admit. You’ve got me, but you’ve also got your freedom. I don’t ask questions when you go to London for weeks at a time, so if you can’t manage in those limits you wouldn’t exist in any others.’
She boiled his coffee, poured it out. ‘We’ve got such a bond, Albert. It would be a pity if you smashed it. We’ve burned in this love and torment since we were almost kids, grown up while our own kids were growing up. If I were sentimental I might call a lot of it suffering, but there was too much love for that. It’s made me hard as well, but in a way that makes me sure of myself, and the more sure I am of myself the more I know that being together is the only thing that matters. We’ve never killed each other in a rotten married way. We’ve been very big about it, right above the rest of the world, and it can’t be shown to anyone else, or passed on, but we own it far more than this piece of property we’ve bought. It’s valuable and unique. It used to be the suffering that ennobles, but now it’s the sort that degrades. So ruin it if you like with your black heart. You can destroy your part of it, but not mine. My part of it’s out of your hands. And it’s safe in mine.’