‘As long as I can live with myself,’ he said, ‘which is all a painter needs.’
She poured more coffee. ‘You have to live with the world, as well as yourself.’
‘Which world, though?’
‘There’s only one world for you — the one that buys your paintings. What other can there be?’
‘That’s the question,’ he retorted. ‘An artist makes his own world, through himself. He doesn’t go into one ready-made for him. He only started painting to get out of that one. If I was only half a man and half a painter I might not think so, but I have a bigger opinion of myself than anybody can imagine, and even had when I was unknown and struggling. Some people would like me to accept their world because they see themselves the highest common denominators of it, and the fact that I don’t is a poke in the eye to them. My heart just won’t let me take up with this big world you’re talking about, as you and they would like me to do. It’s got nothing for me, and maybe I’ve got nothing for it, but at least I have plenty of ideas and work to do and needn’t concern myself with it.’
‘Why do you complain when they attack you?’
‘I don’t. They attacked my wife. And there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m just letting off steam. Still, I’d like to punch that drunkard’s nose. He wouldn’t be able to get away with such a thing in my ideal, anarchistic, self-regulating society without getting beaten up for it.’
They gave up talking for kissing. Intellectual discussion, he said, always made him randy. There seemed nothing she could do with him in any case, which made her passion quick to return, though this time one point behind his.
Chapter Nine
Ralph steered his Land-Rover into the depths of a wood, tyres crushing over wet sawdust and wood-chippings of one clearing, and bumping towards another. Mud deepened so much beyond that he decided not to risk it, sat inside studying his large-scale map with the engine still running, memorising details of the terrain between this point and the Handley house so that he would not have to open it outside and see its beautifully decorated paper buckling and warping in the rain, a thought that tightened his lips with revulsion. Beyond the western edge of the wood were three fields to cross, the last rising twenty feet and crowned by a spinney of oak-trees. From such height and cover he could observe the house in all its detail, especially the side giving access to Handley’s studio.
He put on his cap, fastened the pegs of his duffel-coat, and climbed out. Mud parted around his feet, but once off the track dead twigs and leaves made it seem more solid. Primroses had deepened in the rain, speckled a whole yellowing bank like flag-day badges on the lapels of a football crowd. Bluebells and arum lilies sagged and were flattened by water. Other flower heads littered, but he’d scorned to notice them after the age of sixteen. To do so was a stage of adolescence, to swoon and rapturise over wild flowers, and all the false crap of Lawrence and Powys and Williamson, the ‘I am a wild beast and proud of it but still very sensitive school because my father was a bastard to my mother’ or ‘the cream of my generation was killed in Flanders or Libya’ — as they sat in warm cottages or Hampstead flats. Thank God that sort of thing is dead, he thought, which meant to say he hoped it was and was convinced it ought to be but was by no means sure, England being England and all the things it was.
He kept well in to the hedge, clumps of soil that looked solid enough in the lee of it now collapsing muddily underfoot, till his boots were so heavily caked that it was impossible to move and he had to pull off the earth with his hands. After a few minutes the same coagulation had built up so high under his boots that he almost overbalanced and hoped for drier weather on the chosen night so that his retreat would be easy and quick.
From the edge of the spinney he looked across four hundred yards of field at Handley’s residence, heard the misty depressing snap of a canine voice shifting towards him as if it had already picked up his scent. Through binoculars he saw it sniffing between caravans in the yard. After dark it was chained up, which was useful, but he’d carry a pound of best steak on the night just in case. Yet it barked continually at nothing, as his previous nocturnal scoutings had shown, so when he was actually climbing up no one would wonder what was disturbing it.
The village clock struck eleven. He ate a bar of chocolate. The house would be crawling with parents, six children, two au pair girls, a mad uncle, and a man-eating bulldog; though if he kept his nerve and moved like a bat he could shin his way up the tree, leap to the windowsill, and take the final floor by a nearby drainpipe. Once in Handley’s studio he could lower a picture on a piece of cord, and collect it on the ground after his own descent. It was easy to spell it out like this, but he knew something was wrong, that more was needed than a ball of string and a full moon, a tight lip and a sure grip as he entered that rotten domain. Without a dry night, the painting would be ruined, and if that happened there’d be nothing left to live for, except Mandy, and she wasn’t enough, otherwise he wouldn’t be planning to steal it in the first place.
Sweet-papers and beer-cans were scattered from previous hours of observation. His theory for committing the perfect crime was that you must carry it out with all possible speed, which meant scrupulous attention to the actual details of break in, though beyond that sphere of action one could be as careless as one’s temperament demanded, in which case a few sweet-papers were neither here nor there. An amateur could get away with murder — as it were — whereas the adept was always liable to betray himself over some clue he’d been too careful to eradicate. A motiveless job was the safest. If even he did not know why he wanted to steal the best painting in Handley’s studio, how then were the police to find out his motive? And if they couldn’t deduce a motive for the so-called crime then there was no reason why he should ever be tracked down. If he got clear of the house, he was away for good. Whoever could rationalise the various stages of a crime had a fair chance of never being detected. So it sometimes worried him that he hadn’t yet concretely pinned down his reasons for wanting to acquire the picture. Those he had outlined to Mandy had been little more than a legpull. If he simply needed to get his hands on a great picture in order to indulge in a lifetime of private viewing then why didn’t he go to Amsterdam and steal Rembrandt’s Night Watch from the Rijksmuseum? He daydreamed through the mechanics of such an operation, which would involve getting it in a taxi to the docks or on a porter’s barrow, then sweating with apprehension as clumsy workers levered it onto the boat. All limbs shook when he saw it slipping in a nightmarish vision from their hands into the slimy bed-green water. I’d better roll it up while in the museum, even if it cracks slightly here and there. But he relinquished the idea, and immediately felt better. A latest Handley would suffice, an easier job because he didn’t live far away and had the use of a Land-Rover. Such a chance came rarely, and the more he dwelt on it the more did his fear of actually stealing it increase. Such marvellous bouts of fear continually sweeping through him must mean there was little chance of his resisting what he had first broached with Mandy as a joke, and that when he came to cross the field and climb that tree all fear would go, and leave him free, cool and swift as he soundlessly scaled that wall to a dangerous height before forcing the window.
It was hopeless, but he would do it, and succeed because he knew it was hopeless and because he had absolutely no control over whether he did it or not. He sat for hours in the tree-fork trying every optic combination of the binoculars to bring that house a foot closer across the field, the house which contained two things he wanted most in his life. He’d been there once with Mandy and, having those dull louche-brown eyes of a born reconnoitrer, remembered everything. Framed by field, sky, fences and trees, he saw again into the rooms and stairways as if the walls were glass, recollecting the positions of doors, locks and windows. He knew the direction of Uncle John’s radio room, and where everyone slept, each secret nook of the worn-out worm-eaten labyrinth.