‘My luggage is at the station. I thought I might have to stay in town.’
‘Fetch it in the Mini, and buy a gallon of petrol on the way. If you’ve got no money tell ’em to put it on our account. Everybody does. We owe hundreds round here already. It’s a good job we left Lincolnshire, with the creditors closing in. I thought when I got married I’d stop living like a bandit, but Ralph’s mother cut him off without a penny, and so we’re still part of the worm-eaten ship.’
The regular thump-thump of a machine sounded from upstairs like a heavy loom or treadle worked by hand. ‘That’s Richard,’ she said, ‘and Adam at the printing-press. The turn out loads of stuff, send it every day all over the country. This house is the middle of the spider’s web of revolution, and it’s costing us the earth. Dad paints more than he used to, and earns more money, but it’ll ruin him in the end.’ Her oval heavily-lidded eyes speculated on a future she wanted, and wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t yet get before she was twenty — with less that a year to go. ‘My heart’s set on a simple life,’ she said. ‘Ralph and I would be happy if we could get a small house right away from here, where we could live in peace.’
Late that night the Ford Rambler drew up on the road outside. Handley, Myra and Enid came into the kitchen breathing smoke and frost.
Frank stood up. The picture of the day had altered, switched into complete indifference now that they were home. It had turned him from his own house with Nancy and the children packed off to school, through train corridors and a walk across countryside, to this establishment full of weird and fateful people. He saw it on their faces as they came in and he looked around.
Myra noticed a strange man in her house, another friend of Albert’s perhaps who had dropped by on his travels — either one of the family, or a recent painter acquaintance up from London. Handley, mouth down, took off his fur hat, and overcoat that reached his ankles. Enid pushed by him and put the kettle on, the tips of her long blonde hair brushing Frank’s shirt. The silence was bruising them, a strange quiet bout of recognition and surprise, and all wanting to speak and break it. Myra had taken off her glasses getting out of the car, resting her eyes by not forcing them to see clearly. Here was a different person, this man with an olive skin stretched over the bones of his face, a scar below his left ear, a face without a smile and not willing at the moment to say much. She thought how possible it would have been to pass him on the street — except for the eyes, which she would have noted in any man. The grey eyes looked at her, bringing no humour from the wilderness of his travels, and no mercy in the love he had pulled back with them. They were not the eyes he had gone away with, for the lustre was no longer there, the light had drawn back into the depths, shining onto the interior acres of his thought rather than too much and too shallowly on the outer world as they had done before. He stood more alone than anyone else in the room, though that may have been because her love was enveloping him and ready once more to attempt possession. But not entirely. He was alone, stronger, so that with such eyes and rendered features he would stay that way, the one controller of his own mind and actions. He had gone away with the idea of destroying his love and her love. But the cinders and dead ash had brought him back just the same. He wasn’t powerful enough to wreck anyone’s love, not even his own, and this knowledge had kept her thinking of him every day, wanting to talk to him, touch him, her visions all the more immediate because she had never been entirely convinced that he would come back. She’d had a hundred premonitions of his death, seen him so many scattered lumps of clay, tortured, hanged, shot, dead of hunger and thirst, wandering insane with his senses spread broadcast by hot sandy winds of the summer desert.
She smiled and went to him, hands touching. As I grow older I know better how to be young. She felt the flooding emotions of passionate love on seeing him again. Handley’s forehead creased, but he smiled nevertheless. ‘Let’s drink to your safe return, anyway.’
‘I’m sorry about John,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you about it. But there was nothing I could do. Nothing. I thought that once we got out of Algeria he’d be all right.’
‘I know,’ Handley said. ‘You don’t have to say it. I tried for over fifteen years, and failed. I softened his life, worked for him, nursed him, and yet, all the time at the back of my mind was the dread of this happening. It was always there, nagging and tormenting. I knew it over the years, a panther behind his face waiting to spring. My own brother does a thing like this, and the wickedest thought I have is: Why didn’t he do it at the beginning instead of wasting his life for another fifteen years? That’s wrong. If he had, none of us would have been here thinking about our own rich lives yet to be lived. I was the only one who tried to stop him when he first proposed going to Algeria. I should have locked him up: barred his window and fastened his door with wood. And yet, what can you do? What bloody right have you finally got to settle a man’s life when he’s set firm on his own way?’
He poured glasses of whisky for them all. Frank looked at Myra. Being in love, he remembered telling himself on the plane from Gibraltar, to fight down his rising emotion at the thought of seeing her again, is a state of paralysis and death. You can’t act when you are in love, or do anything, unless the woman is willing to follow you anywhere, which is not love. Love and passion combined make the pleasantest form of suicide, yet here he was, more in love with Myra than he’d ever been with any other woman. It was strange, falling in love with a woman who already had your child.
‘Have you seen Mark?’ she asked.
‘I was playing with him. He’s a beauty.’
Handley laughed. ‘There’ll be a few more soon. Enid’s having one — her last, I should think. And Mandy’s having her first. Let’s drink to them all!’
Chapter Thirty-four
Taking a flashlight he walked to the large studio-hut which Handley had erected at the end of the garden. Permanent heaters had been installed, and warmth and the smell of paint, the comforting reek of turps and glue met him as he came in out of the frost. He found the light-switches, and closed the door. The fantastic colour-cathedral of Handley’s life covered every wooden wall, so that it was like being in another man’s stomach, seeing with his eyes, smothered by his entire vision. He must be a machine to turn out so much. It was a wonder his arms had strength, never mind the imagination. If Mandy’s idea was right, John had tried to burn all this when he set fire to the house in Lincolnshire, before setting off for Algeria to pluck him from the raging fires of civil war. Even the Handleys needed their legends, since anarchy was not enough.
He sat by one of the large tables and smoked a cigarette. Of all places on the compound this was the quietest. Only faint waves of shouting penetrated from the inhabitated areas. Albert had done well to place himself here. The house, the caravans, the flat above the garage, all were eruptions of strife and metallic noise that only subsided for a few hours of darkness each night. He sometimes longed for the silence and danger of the desert. Eric Bloodaxe, that blue-blooded bulldog that held some corner of affection in Handley’s twisted heart, howled balefully over the roofs of the village.
John had been buried a fortnight. The inquest said he’d committed suicide while of unsound mind. No other verdict was possible. The lumpen-bourgeoisie demanded it. It had to be suicide if they were to keep their confidence and survive. The idea of actually choosing death in opposition to the best of all possible lives that they offered was alien to them. Well, they would keep it until it was ripped away from them by machine-guns and Molotov cocktails. The one infallible answer was always violence, violence and still more violence. In Algeria it was already succeeding in what it set out to do. It couldn’t fail, provided it was prolonged and violent enough. If the sky starts to fall in, pull down the stars as well. When you are surrounded by a ring of fire and can’t get out, all you can do is learn to jump. While learning to jump the fire goes out. You are free. Once free, burn every bush till there are no bushes left, till even the ash burns again to ash and the soil itself jumps into flame. Destruction appalls them. They are terrified of losing their property. The scorched-earth policy is the one sure answer to such endless indoctrination, and to defeat the easy power that they have. Threaten the fourth dimension of civil war, the end-all of life from which renewed life can spring more quickly than if no destruction had taken place.