Chapter Twenty-seven
Moonlight was pouring into her room. She could not sleep. No one could, on that side of the house. Its white glow shone at the walls and bed, masked her face as she put on her dressing-gown and sat by the window. Moonlight made streets across the room, and she stood to walk in its winding grey alleyways. Clouds shifted them, dissolving her city. At one corner she saw Frank, luminous and ash-grey, grey stubble on his chin, eyes empty as moonlight. He stood between two cartshafts of illumination, grinning because he felt he should not be there. It was not the moon he wanted, neither its face nor light. She was afraid of him, as she was of all people when she did not know what they wanted. Maybe he knew. If you were doing what you wanted, there was no need to know what it was that you wanted. One way or another, the sun and moon burned you up. What else were you born for? Certainly not to complain, only to know. He came forward, and she cried out as if the apparition would scorch her lips. He was the stake she would burn at, and she drew away.
Mark cried in his cot, alarmed at her vision, and she soothed him for fear he would waken the house. It was a momentary dream, and he slipped back into peace. To ask what she wanted from life was a wild and irresponsible question that she was unable to answer while Frank was missing from it. In London she once saw him walking along Oxford Street, and ran after him through packs of shopping people. An insane rush of hope pushed her along, yet when the man turned out to be someone else she was glad. If it had been Frank how would he have explained being in England and not back with her and their son? No excuse would have been good enough.
In spite of her body-and-soul ache to see him again maybe she did not want to until he had utterly purged himself of all desire to trek away from reality. Solitude had taught her to mistrust men’s ideals, especially those realised at her own desolation of spirit. She loathed her meanness but acknowledged it. To abandon Frank was a thought impossible to set in motion. She believed, but could not act. You could not act until you ceased to care. You didn’t act upon your own ideals. Other people did that, without deciding to do so. You made your ideals known, spun forth the message of love and brotherhood and war, but going out to forge and prove helped no one but hurt many. You split open the body and mind, let the sensibility and love fruitlessly pour over the desert sands, and in the end the damage was greater to yourself than even to the one you love. Man was not big enough for such a combined operation. Even Uncle John knew this, and would only leave on a mission of rescue rather than a jaunt of idealism, as Adam had been sharp enough to see. Frank will only succeed in what he wants to do if he dies at it. Perhaps that was why she did not want him to come back, because to look on a broken man for the rest of one’s life would be heartbreaking for her. If he came back he would be crippled, so she cried with bitter tears that there was no point in him doing so. When you abandon the moon, and walk too near the sun, your eyes are burned and blinded. The moon is gentler than the sun, might kill you slowly in the end or send you mad, but it doesn’t burn you up in one great flash when you step within the limit of its power. Why couldn’t she have told him this before he went? The transition was gradual, he would not have listened, and the moon confuses, weakens, does not allow the steel pivot of reason to be inserted. The moon demands that you be subtle, and subtlety does not work with someone enamoured of a scheme of the sun. He had to go. You had to let him, and the solitude his absence leaves teaches you to distrust men’s ideals and the harsh, rational ideas of the sun.
She sat by the window, the metal-grey moonlight pouring over her. People walked up and down the stairs, restless, looking for tea or cigarettes, or a final drink. Only John’s room was silent where he slept profoundly, she thought, exhausted by his intense and unremitting preparations for the long journey south, his own pathetic surrender to the hard time of the sun. It was a warm, full-mooned night, and the house smelled of food, drink and tobacco. She came back from the lavatory, and saw Handley walking up with a tray of bottles. He wore trousers and collarless striped shirt, stepped along in bare white feet. ‘Come to the studio,’ he said softly, ‘and I’ll show you my painting.’
She was about to say no, not wanting to be alone with him, but walked up behind, will-less because she did not want to be alone with herself. Enid was there, in any case, smoking a cigarette. The studio seemed unnaturally tidy compared to the disorder of the dining-room. Windows and skylight were open, but it was nevertheless hot from too much lighting.
‘Sit down,’ Enid said, a warm smile for her. ‘This is the hottest part of the house in summer, yet far from the maddening crowd. We’re thinking of building another house soon, two miles away, so that we can leave this one to the tribe. I’ll take the bus here every day to see if they’re all right, just as if I’m going to work.’
He poured brandy, water, slipped in ice and passed it around. ‘I’ll show you this painting now that the light’s right for it.’ A large cloth fell from a five feet by eight canvas standing on two boxes by the far wall. Sky took up some of it, a band of eggshell blue and grey smudges along the top, then came trees, valleys, the earth, animals and men, which loaded the greater area of the picture. Near the bottom was a band of soil, the thick chocolate skin of the crust, and finally a line of jet black where the depth of his consciousness had been reached.
‘It looks as if it’s coming to get me,’ Enid said. Handley explained that it was supposed to. What was the use of a painting if it didn’t get you by the scruff of the neck and pull you into either bathroom or jungle and show you things you’d never seen because you’d been afraid you might like the horror of them? It did the same to him, but he smashed them to bits on the anvil of his mind and re-arranged them on canvas so that it could do the same to others. Myra noticed a small hole in the middle of the painting: ‘What’s that for? Was it torn out?’
‘That’s another story,’ he said. ‘The ideal place for this picture to be hanged is between two trees, so that the closer you get to it the more you see through this hole into reality. It’s what I called Albert Handley’s Third Eye, the theme and keynote of my exhibition. It would work if you set it up at a window in the middle of a city and saw the slums and factories through it, or if it was physically possible you could hang it across a main road and while looking at the picture and wondering what the hole was for, a bus comes running through and blacks you out for dead. It’s the third eye that’s as plain as all piss-water but which nobody sees, the third eye of dream and reality that looks at you through the territory of my painting.’ He picked up small pieces of canvas, fitting them over the hole and blocking it, unable to choose one that harmonised. ‘Ralph cut out the original, when he stole the painting, a prime piece of Lincolnshire witchcraft to do me an ill-turn but which only gave me a fine idea.’ Over the hole he finally fixed an old photo of Uncle John as a young man in uniform, sad and raw, sepia-faced and faded, forlorn and wondering where the hell he was. Myra went forward and recognised him, dark hair showing under his service cap, his gentle eyes strengthened by the thinner and more youthful lines of his face. It fitted the picture so well that she shuddered, a heroic framework for this life-beaten man who in his resurrection was actually determined to carry out an act of heroism. They knew John would do it, or die doing it, and Handley’s inspired action in using him as the eye of the third eye in this one particular painting of his soul proved his extreme and brotherly faith in him.