Enid did not look malignantly at Albert but merely hard, and he was so busy in a dash to kill the religious heat of the radio’s breath that he didn’t notice it till sitting down again. She threw the magazine at him, one corner splaying across the open butter dish. ‘Read that.’
‘What? That bit about stately homes?’
‘Open it. You’ll see.’
He knew what it must be. ‘I’ll read it out loud. Listen, everybody. An article about me, and don’t double up till I’ve finished.’
‘Get on with it,’ she snapped.
The reproductions of his work were superb and should have been left unexplained, but accompanying them was an inflated view by Russell Jones on Handley at Work, and Handley at Home, Handley the half-mad inspired painter, the uneducated gypsy-like creature running amok with paint-brushes in a house without books, that was guarded by a pair of good old English bulldogs. After this drunken rubbish came a few sentences on how he actually worked, undeniably accurate, but then more personal detail reappeared, and this was obviously the cause of Enid’s dangerous set stare.
His female admirers were mentioned — to which Handley had presumably admitted — for, Jones wrote, when the photo of a pretty girl fell from his wallet Handley said with a smile that it happened to be of a girl with whom he was in love at the moment. A few general smears and critical sentences rounded off the article so beautifully printed and laid out.
‘What a laugh it is,’ said Richard. ‘They’ve got you, Dad. You might as well sit back and enjoy it.’
He tried to explain. Adam slid a mug of tea across, at which he sipped now and again. ‘It was a photo of Mandy. I saw his eyes pop, so thought I’d have a bit of fun. You know how irresistible it is. I don’t see how I can be blamed.’
Enid felt nothing but shame — not, she retorted, that she could ever be insulted by that dirty magazine, but because Handley had been so intent on having his senseless stupid fun that he hadn’t considered her feelings at all. They’d had this out before, often, but whenever journalists came crawling to the door, especially from posh papers, he just slobbered all over them like an adolescent instead of acting like a grown man, spewed out everything like a clown instead of behaving with dignity and sense. If you didn’t know how to handle them, why let them in at all? Slam the door in their faces and they’d think none the worse of you. And now your naïveté has led to this, a little weasel of the intellectual gutter smirking his foulness into a so-called reputable magazine.
‘That’s enough,’ Handley said, standing up again. ‘I know all about it now. I’ll get that jumped-up fretwork little bastard. I’ll make a wax figure and stick pins in it. I’ll burn his effigy on bonfire night. I’ll go down to London and pummel his putty head on every pavement in Knightsbridge.’
Adam and Richard cheered. Uncle John continued his silent reading of the newspaper, looking perhaps for some cryptogrammatical clue that would send him on another frantic and exhilarating search across the far-and-wide ether.
‘Wipe your mouth,’ Enid said, ‘there’s foam on it.’
‘I’ll write a letter to the Editor. I’ll sue them. I’ll go to the Press Council about it.’ She leaned towards him and shouted four words, as if they were the final message from a beleaguered and capitulating city before the defenders blew themselves up on the powder magazine: ‘WILL-YOU-NEVER-LEARN?’
Richard took her arm: ‘Mother, please, don’t get so upset.’
She snapped him away. ‘I’m supposed to be living in a house where your father is openly carrying on as if he had a harem.’
‘As long as it’s not true,’ Handley said desperately, wrathful and hurt by any attack on his wife’s dignity.
‘It would be better if it were. But now you want to make things worse by trying to do something about it. You’re deliberately ruining our world. Go on, though, smash it up. That’s what they want you to do. They’ll applaud you. The clown is performing again. A letter from you, and they’d gladly put it in, giving that interviewer the last crushing word of course.’
He felt emptied, blistered, pilloried. She was right — perhaps. A free spirit was abroad, and they were out to pull you down to the general level of nonentity that never thought to question anything. Woe betide any poor and stupid bastard who recognises himself as a free spirit, because once you did you weren’t free any more.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do nothing. You’re right, though it chokes me to say so. By driving me to say it, you’ve jumped onto their side.’
‘That’s your last word, is it?’
‘It is.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, it is. I’ll bump into him at a party some time, and then we’ll see.’
Richard pinned her down at the wrist. Nevertheless the full black pot of scalding tea capsized and ran over the table.
Chapter Eight
Code and cipher manuals brought out of the army, marked CONFIDENTIAL and NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY and TOP SECRET were stacked by the long-range communications receiver. Though useless and out-of-date, continual study enabled him to break any code piercing his earphones. A few nights of concentration and he worked them into plain language. There were no secrets he could not tap, useless commonplaces for the most part, yet they might one day yield a precise solution to the whole pattern of his life that he could fall down before and worship.
The set had not been switched on. He smoked a cigarette. It seemed a dead part of the week for exploring ether. It was no use trying to make contact with God or any other king of the universe with such misery in the house, Enid and Albert battling vindictively out of natures generous and broad-living. Tear-marks still on his cheeks, it shocked him that when prosperity entered by the front door peace packed its bags and left by one of the windows. An undeclared war went on continually. If they would acknowledge it, peace could be made, but when he spoke in all gentleness they’d claim to be happy, kiss and cuddle in front of everyone to prove it. They couldn’t bear to have their problems brought to the surface and solved, he thought. Nobody knew why they fought, blamed success, money, or the invidious snooping of newspapermen, but these symptoms, he knew, only concealed the disease, like bushes on fire surrounding a plantation of foul fungus. Sometimes Albert and Enid did try to discuss their troubles, but the soul was involved, and so words from the human mouth were not enough to isolate and cure it. He sat long hours at his desk and wept for them because they were beyond his help. He was always hoping to save them, head in hands and tears falling as if attuned to some divine heart-rending music, waiting for it to end and the magic oracle to speak from some far-off spot of the universe. His world, their world, the whole world seemed to be in his hands, the strain of it heavy, fetching forth the tears, breaking his spirit time and time again, yet leaving him with renewed faith, a strengthened conviction that he would find a solution and be everybody’s saviour — by which method he might therefore be his own.
Handley came in and sat on the spare stool. ‘Any news of Frank Dawley?’
‘Not yet,’ John said.
‘Let me know when it gets interesting down there. I’ll have that new aerial fixed in next week, then perhaps we’ll have better luck.’