‘Why don’t you just walk out with a painting for me?’
Grey clouds were torn into shreds by invisible dogs of wind. ‘I hope we bit Wainfleet before it rains,’ she said. ‘I get a bus from there. Still, it’s better doing this than moping around Boston. The only time you talk is when we’re walking. Your words are like tadpoles: they have to grow legs before they jump out.’ She waited for him to retaliate, but he became morose, which was his way of self-control. ‘What makes you so eager to get at the old man’s painting? You haven’t even seen the latest.’
‘I want to stick one on my wall for as long as I can stand it, and try and get to know something about you.’
‘There’s no connection between them and me. It’d probably send you absolutely off your bonce.’
‘It’s a good idea though. Don’t you think so?’
‘It gives us something to talk about,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d have known plenty about me. We’ve had it often enough.’
‘You’ve been reading too much Lawrence, I suppose. That sort of thing actually stops you getting to know somebody, blinds you to everything about a person. But to have one of your father’s pictures on my wall would really tell me something.’
‘What a love-affair ours is!’ she said. ‘You’ve burned me out at eighteen! I can get you one of my father’s paintings any time, but I expect I’d go to prison for it. He’d put his whole family behind bars if it’d interfered with his work. You’ve no idea what he’s like. Ruthless isn’t the word. He’d track us to the end of the world to recover a fading sketch in a penny notebook if he knew he might never have a chance of looking at it again. Give him a hundred for it, and that’s another matter.’
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘Not altogether. I could walk out with one, but I won’t. If you want one that badly you’d better break in and steal it, but it’ll be difficult. We’ve got alarm-wires on the gate and a bull-dog near the front door. Then there’s Uncle John who’s completely insane and sits awake all night listening to his radio with a loaded revolver nearby in case anybody comes to take him away.’
‘I hadn’t seriously considered it.’
‘That’s the only way,’ she said. ‘The trouble about dreams is that they cause so much trouble.’ They sat on a gate to enjoy a temporary burst of sun, his arms around her shoulders. She leaned comfortably close. ‘And if Richard and Adam got hold of you they’d be delighted to practise karate on one of the landed gentry. I can see it all.’
‘I’ll bet you damned well can.’
The kiss lasted till they lost balance and nearly fell off the gate. The surest way to make him do something was tease him about it. He knew it, too, but didn’t want to resist his fate unnaturally — while wanting to seem as if meeting it of his own free will. ‘You want the date and the time?’ he grinned. ‘I’m not so stupid as to tell you that.’
‘Life gets more exciting every day,’ she said, on the last mile towards Wainfleet, rain pouring onto them when they were too happy to worry about it any more.
Chapter Seven
After dusk light was abundant, as if they lived next door to a power station and tapped it free. More than anything else, they must have light. Once put on, a bulb was left blazing even in the smallest and most useless hall or cupboard, one, two, three-hundred-watt incandescences in every room — a thousand watts to the kitchen, another thousand to Albert’s studio, and what Uncle John consumed on his spiritual searches through the ether nobody could even guess. There was a uniting family passion for light when the world around them was dark. If Albert opened a door by mistake, and in passing noticed there was no light within, he absent-mindedly flicked down the switch so that from then on the light would permanently blaze in a renewed self-created aura. The lit up house was visible from far and wide, planted firmly on a high ridge backing against the sky.
Only Enid remarked, but just once, on the superabundance of light, and the possible waste of it. They were walking home after an hour at the pub, and from a bend in the lane four uncurtained windows were flooding the approaches with a sickly phosphorescence. Albert’s studio lights were eating at the sky above. The caravans were illuminated. Side windows shone from either flank of the house. ‘Anybody would think you were afraid of burglars,’ she said.
‘I’ve always liked light, I don’t know why. If there were a power failure I’d die.’
‘I suppose you need something to light up the black pits of your soul,’ she said.
From the right window came the full-blast noise of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, and from the left the rhythms and phrases of Uncle John’s ecstatic morse sounds mixed sublimely with the music, killed by it as the wind veered. Opening the gate, they trod carefully over power-lines supplying the caravans. ‘It’s good to have light,’ he said. ‘I can beat the moon. Get down, Eric,’ he said to the welcoming dog, ‘you bloody fool, get back.’
‘I don’t see what good it is,’ she said, ‘it might let you see every inch of the house inside, but once you’re in you can’t see at all beyond the windows. If you want to see outside you’ve got to switch ’em off.’
They went into the kitchen that was so clean not even the smell of cleanliness remained. Enid put on the kettle for tea and a hot-water bottle. Handley sat at the table, forgetting to take his cap off, and looking as if about to set off for the night-shift. ‘Perhaps I’m religious,’ he quipped, ‘being afraid of the dark.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you haven’t grown up, and that’s a fact.’
‘There’s plenty of time for that when I’m dead. I’m in no hurry. Grown-up, mature people are ten-a-penny. They’re all over the place, like flies in summer, strong-faced vacuous venomous pipe-smokers and happy savers and careful drivers. Don’t talk to me about the lumpen living-dead. Put them in a room with a strong light and they’d start to confess. Me, I’d ask ’em to turn it up a bit. Even take off my dark glasses to show good faith. Still, we can put a forty-watt bulb in your room if you ever want to escape and get back to reality.’
‘You’ve made your point,’ she said. ‘Do you want milk or lemon in your tea?’
‘Both.’
‘Milk or lemon?’
‘Lemon, then.’
The house at next morning’s breakfast fell into silence when papers and magazines were brought in, and the quiet concentration at the altars of soft-brained reading-matter began. Mandy looked up before turning a page and noticed her mother staring with unmixed loathing and malevolence at her father. She walked quietly out of the room with her particular newspaper, wondering what cloudburst they were in for now, and before closing the door she reached back and turned the radio full blast to some church service, thus drowning the door slam and her rush upstairs.
Windows were steamed from breakfast cooking, masking a thin continuous drizzle outside. On such days cold rain wedged them into the house, or shunting quietly from one caravan to another. A rush to the Rambler or Land-Rover, and a quick acceleration down the mud-flooding lane was the farthest anyone would get on such a day, to the village shop where they weren’t allowed to dawdle, but were served before other people because of the enormous bills they ran up with such thoughtlessness.
Maria dipped her bread in coffee. Brought up in a staid Milan family, it was as if she had now been pitched into a brood of Sicilian peasants who had won on the lottery, or killed grandma and inherited her secret wealth. The employment agency was a villain who had misrepresented the job to her — ‘a modern house belonging to an elderly childless couple on the northern outskirts of London.’ Handley had met her at Heathrow late one night, and the northern outskirts proved to be five hours away, ending in a pandemonium scream of rage and fear when she finally stepped from the Rambler into six inches of pure Lincolnshire mud as a wilful dawn light was breaking over the hills.