‘Where?’ cried Frank. ‘Where? Where do you want to go?’ Did he want to crawl back into the desert like Jesus Christ? He was too old. He’d die, and it couldn’t be allowed, for Albert’s sake, for everybody’s sake. A black chilling emptiness spread through Frank at this unexpected bar to their departure, shrivelling his will, denuding every field in his world of hope and desire. He neither wanted to get on the ship nor go back to the war. His spirit sank into a pit of emptiness. Despair tightened his stomach as if it would never let go. Yet somehow he kept his hard physical controlling grip on John as if he were some animal he had to vanquish. He felt the revolver under his hand and took it from him, feeling an impulse not to use it on John, but to kill himself.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked again. ‘Tell me, you madman. Maybe I’ll learn something.’
‘Leave me. I want to stand up. I won’t run.’
‘Stop struggling, then.’ But he heaved and pushed, and Frank’s strength was breaking under it. ‘Do you hear?’ He took the revolver away from his own mouth. It was something he could not do. If he wanted to die, and at that moment he had suffered enough to find it possible, then he would go on living and kill himself that way. The gun was pressed against the wild beast that lay under John’s heart. ‘If you try to run again,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll shoot you, and get rid of you for good and all. One false move and you’ve got all that you ever wished for all rolled up into one big wish. Do you understand?’
He nodded.
‘Go in front of me. We’re almost at the beach. If I kill you no questions will be asked. Stand up and walk.’
Head down, John staggered towards the shore. For some reason Frank exulted, thought of his entry into Algeria when he had driven Shelley Jones forward at the point of a Sten-gun. Foam splashed onto the black rocks, sent curving lines up the gravel.
There was a cat on the beach, a small cat sitting by the rocks, hard to see because of its grey and white stripes. He had never seen a cat on a beach before. He found a stone shaped exactly like an egg and threw it at the sea. He imagined throwing real eggs into the sea, a black insult, like pelting life with life, a holy pagan waste, a madman’s defiance, potlash, eggs into the salt sea, a negative backward turning motion that you could not do.
They climbed on board the motor-launch, subdued and quiet, and set off through thickening mist towards the ship.
Part Five
Chapter Thirty-two
A cold orange fireball of dawn split up the semi-detached houses on the southern outskirts of Paris. Frosty clotheslines and lights in the unseeing windows, and the smooth whining eardrum-click of the train swaying along under its own track-lights, and the short no-man’s-land permanently laid between the dead-still established lives and the moving caravan of those who never stopped, registered on John’s glazed eyes and ears. A woman walked the corridor with an enormous borzoi hound, and smiled at him, the obvious oblivious Englishman, bald, well-shaved, and already dressed. It is dangerous to lean out of the win-down. He stood firm, even to a sudden sway, underfoot vibrations well controlled. Dawn was the time he felt so guilty at being on earth that he could face anything from breakfast to self-annihilation. The terrors of light and night met each other at daybreak — in dreams if you were still in bed. Either way you could not escape. Standing in a train you smiled at the reflection of your own face as the train swept under a bridge, a face going so quickly by that there was no time to take a gun and blast the glass that kept you from its actual yellowing flesh. The revolutionary struggle is also a spiritual struggle. He and Frank were in agreement, and both were right. Energy, Imagination and Intelligence were to replace the autocratic triumvirate of Inertia, Stagnation and Reaction. The coup d’état called for a parachute-drop, fireball surgery, and he wondered whether the creeping takeover of guerrilla warfare were enough. He needed like everyone to set the forces of liberation against his own heart and soul, the consciousness that controlled him, ambush the laws he lived by, mine and blow up all preconceptions, erode them away if they were too strong, retreat only to prepare further stratagems against these ancient enemies of a new and resurgent spirit, make all one’s life a protracted war against the flesh-built habits and indulgences of yourself. It is a method of ceasing to live under water, of eventually reaching higher consciousness where energy, intelligence and imagination can be used for the benefit of oneself and other people. Not yet fifty, he felt too old to go on living. It wasn’t a matter of age so much as being worn out in a struggle he should never have started and undertaken, maintained through false hope and stale pride and the softening idealism of the congenitally demented. The animal talent and human bravado had been given to his brother Albert — the imagination, energy and intelligence which he used for his work. The instinct to survive was good and necessary, but never enough, without the paraphernalia of self-assurance pushing you upstream at every lock and difficult weir. Lack of self-assurance was the basis of all illness that gave you the golden trinity of consumption, syphilis and cancer — or whatever three reigning death-monarchs happened to be on hand for those who denied themselves the life-force in any particular era. Lacking the spirit of force and fire you called on death to do its worst, and if you didn’t lack enough assurance for death to take up the call with avidity, it might be necessary to do the job yourself if you could stand the pain and poison of a razor’s-edge life after years and years of it.
He boarded a bus outside the station and rode across Paris, the wide cobbled avenues and boulevards coming to life, layered by exhaust petrol from Peugeot and Renault, Ondine and Simca. He read metal names on passing bonnets, smelt the drift of coffee and smoky frost under the wide open blue sky of cold northern Paris.
At the Gare du Nord he checked in his luggage and walked over the boulevard. His greying border of hair needed clipping, and he wanted the civilised barber’s perfume to float around him in place of petrol and dust. Dawley had gone to London by plane, indulged in the luxury of a cheap night-flight, for he wanted to see Myra and his son, and visit his wife and children in Nottingham. On landing at Gibraltar he had craved pork, but the first big chop had laid him up sick for three days in the Queen’s Hotel, cursing all the vile trichinoid pigs of Spain while retching into the chamberpot. John had said goodbye to him at the airport, then taken the ferry across to Algeciras. The idea of travelling by air was the one genuine fear left in his life, and though he valued it for that reason, he could not bring himself to give in and overcome it. He had, in any case, a strong premonition that whatever plane he flew in would crash, fall like an ironfisted boulder out of the sky as soon as everyone inside had been long enough there to feel safe and on their way. So he would not travel by that method with Dawley, his one last desire in the world being to see him safe back to England, delivered into the place where he would do the most damage and complete the work of revenge that John had dreamed of for twenty years, that his own soul had sweated and rotted over, and that his own body had never in any way been able to carry out. But Dawley was a man who had not suffered in the way John had. Those who can’t forget anything cannot learn anything and are unable to improve their lives or carry out their deepest wishes. But Dawley had been hard enough to undergo a baptism of fire in a real revolutionary war. His course was set, his strength gauged, his determination focused. He had no label, but his purpose was such that the safety of such a precious cargo could not be jeopardised. Even superstition must be used to guard him to his final destination.