‘You can’t hate England,’ Myra said passionately. ‘You can’t. I’m sure you don’t.’
He was delighted. ‘You see it, then? You really get the intention?’
‘He never did hate it,’ Enid said, sipping her brandy.
‘We won’t talk about that. It’s too difficult. The last shot I fired in anger defending the maggoty homeland was at German bombers flying over the east coast to gut Nottingham in the war. After that I became an instructor. But our John in that uniform looks like somebody in 1914. There were plenty of photos of that sort in our family, the only thing left of them by 1918. A photo. A million dead. Someone has to bridge the gap between the million dead and the soul of today. It’s never been done. They were born of a tight-fisted nation that could not survive the loss of one million dead ripped from its cities and fields. Other countries did, and have. I’m monstrously English, frighteningly, rottenly marvellously English. So maybe I’m Jewish. I hope so. But wasn’t it fantastic that those millions didn’t walk away from it all? I brooded on it last night. It stopped me from sleeping. A million dead. Two million Germans. Two million French — though some of them at least had the sense to mutiny. I wondered why so many consented to die, and came to the conclusion that it was one vast, overcivilised homosexual international holocaust, a group of nations fucking each other to death in a cosmic daisy-chain, and each dead man the spermatozoa of countless millions crushed in the uncreative death-womb of the mud. It was the earth turning in on itself, inverted sexuality. As another sixty thousand perished in the mud a general in the headquarters chateau wanked himself off in the porcelain bog. I got them all weighed up. So had a few million Russians when they refused to take part in this obscenity and voted with their feet for peace. A country only deserves love when the potential for that sort of dirtiness has passed from it. Imagine what sexual dreams the generals and presidents must have when they know that the pressing of a single button can cause such massacres. I’ll paint a picture of a general masturbating with one hand, and launching rockets with the other.’
‘That wouldn’t be art,’ said Myra.
‘But it would be truth. What more do you want? I could do a series of cartoons, call ’em “The Pleasures of War” if it weren’t for good old Goya. It would be a fair title, anyway. The art wouldn’t be derivative, that I’d guarantee. But there’s an endless fascination for me in 1914 and thereabouts. It’s still in the English blood, because the artists and writers haven’t taken it in yet and let it flow back to the people. Nobody’s tried. Maybe they never can, and are never meant to. 1912: Rudolf Otto von Sachsenschloss, a twenty-year-old callow youth all down at mouth (because a sabre-scar hadn’t yet healed and lifted it up to a glittering smile of strength) a reserve ensign of a Wurtemberg sharpshooters’ regiment, met Lieutenant Oswald Burton of the Sherwood Foresters who was spending his leave in the Rhenish Palatinate complete with Baedeker guide-book, on a hiking tour of six weeks, whither he’d repaired after being blighted in love. It was a long hot summer (one of those they used to have before 1914) and the pine-smelling needlegums took flame, and fired large acres of forest. The two young men helped to fight the blaze, heroes side by side, so that they were fed and wined by grateful villagers after it was all out and over.
‘The following year they meet in the Pyrenees, go up to great heights on muleback, eat their picnic meals, take champagne, brandy and cigars to help down those delectable patés and sausages. They swim in mountain pools, discuss great battles of the past, and drink toasts to eternal friendship.
‘We now switch to Christmas 1914. Earthworks and molehills zigzag the fields and gentle humps of north-east France. British and German soldiers are playing football in no-man’s-land, laughing and running to keep warm. Lieutenant Oswald Burton, thin-faced and looking thirty, goes over the parapet with revolver in hand to get them back on the afternoon of Boxing Day. There is fury and hatred in his eyes, more for his own men than the Germans. The lads from Worksop and Mansfield, Radcliffe and Lenton hate his guts as well. On the German line Oberleutenant Rudolf Otto von Sachsenschloss borrows a rifle from his batman. He is looking for a little sport. It was the British who suggested football. He fixed this irate English officer in his sights who is threatening his own men with a revolver. He drops the rifle and picks up field-glasses. “Mein Gott! It is Oswald.” He reflects a few moments on the tragedy of war, chews a quotation from Goethe in his teeth which he finally spits out, then shrugs his shoulders and picks up the rifle again. Burton drops dead with a bullet in the middle of his forehead. No more Sherwood ale for that landowner’s son. At the same moment a random shell whistles over from a drunken battery of the Royal Horse Artillery, seems to hover in the sky as if not knowing quite where to land to do most damage. Men of both sides scatter and drop. Rudolf Otto, too proud to do so, is blown to pieces. Only the football was safe: the dizzying spiral of European history took one more savage plunge into the abyss — opening the door towards the vast oozing shit-pits of Passchendaele — as the football rolled into a crater and bobbed about among nub-ends and shellcases.’
They sat at either end of the divan, Handley in a chair. ‘People see everything through dark glasses. Without a third eye you are blind and lost, live in the abyss, unless you can read a book or look at a picture that can give you the use of one for an hour or so. There’s neither forward time, nor backward time, only vision, and a truth of scene that could never have occurred to you.’
‘You should write it in your manifesto,’ Myra said.
‘It’s all gobbledegook. It wouldn’t mean anything — except to critics, of course. It would be an act of megalomania to write it down, and an act of intellectual arrogance to try and interpret it. If people don’t see it without having it explained to them (after a continual viewing of fifty-six hours, which nobody ever gets) then the painting has failed.’
Enid walked to the window. ‘I certainly hope your next show is successful, because we’ll be needing money by the end of the year.’
‘That’s your invariable reaction,’ he said, ‘to when I talk about my work.’ Myra was ready to go back to bed. ‘Downstairs at our shambles of a dinner a month ago,’ Enid said, ‘I never got the opportunity to make my toast.’
‘Do it now,’ he said, glad of a diversion from her baiting.
They filled their glasses. ‘Here’s to my next child, then.’
He drank, but nearly choked. ‘You can’t be.’
Her head was held back. ‘Why not? I’ve had six already.’
‘Seven,’ he said.
‘Seven, then. So why can’t I be pregnant again? Eight is the figure of plenty. It often happens. I’m only forty-one. I knew I’d got seven already, but you were testing me, weren’t you? There are three here, three in the caravans, and one at college training to be a priest. Have I passed? If I hadn’t picked you up on it you’d never have forgiven me. Anyway, there’s no mistake. I knew a month ago, but couldn’t tell it to you till it hurt. I’m not an alarmist or a common trickster like Mandy. So look cheerful and drink to it. You always did before, if only with a glass of beer.’
‘And so I do now,’ he said, inwardly raging at her breaking the news with such intentional spite before Myra. He drank his brandy, and walked to the open window as if to heave himself over the ledge and out. But there was no point in flying, because you hit the earth and quick on a moon-night like this, plummeting through tree-branches and digging your own grave at the impact. ‘Don’t do it,’ she mocked. ‘It’s got to be born and fed. And so have we.’