She sat by him. ‘Do you really approve of me giving my place to Albert and his family?’
‘It’s your house,’ he said.
‘Don’t evade the question.’
‘Their house burned down. You gave them yours.’
‘But Albert has enough money to buy another. In any case, I do consider it to be your house as well.’
‘If it had been I should have done the same.’
‘The village is already up in arms. Nobody talks to me at the shop any more, and I can’t have anything to do with the Womens’ Institute even if I wanted to. They complain every day to the police about noise and litter.’
‘Does it bother you?’
‘No. Mrs Harrod even stopped coming.’
‘There are enough of the Handleys to make up a labour force. The au pair girls like it here because it’s nearer to London. You don’t mind me bringing Nancy and the kids down, then?’
She said she did not. ‘As long as they fit in, the more the better, I suppose I look on it as a sociological experiment, or I would if I didn’t like it so much.’
‘You do a lot of work,’ he said, ‘catering and caring for everyone. It must be like running a hostel.’
‘Most of it runs itself. I think it’s what I always wanted to do. I have you, so I feel happy at last. I’m fond of everyone who lives here.’
‘I hope you like Nancy.’
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I hope she likes me.’
‘I think she will.’
‘Adam says you are going to collaborate on a book about your experiences in Algeria.’
‘Yes. I write it all down, then he’ll advise me on the finer points of style. I suppose he’ll actually rewrite it. We’ll become a literate community in spite of ourselves, a hotbed of books and conspiracy. Richard has many other ingenious plans, all sorts of stunts and tricks of sabotage. The Handleys are so mad and wild that no one would suspect them of intelligent planning.’ He stood up: ‘Let’s go over to the house and see about the big dinner.’
Chapter Thirty-five
He was blinded by a combination of strip-lighting, table-lamps, ordinary bulbs, and candles, that turned the room into a chamber of dazzling incandescent clarity, with such light pushing to the limits of all-white walls that there seemed to be smoke in the air, though no one had yet lit a cigarette. The dozen of Handley’s paintings spaced around the walls could only be seen as grey and metallic — unless one came in for a special show during light day. The house had turned into far more of a Handleydrome than his former Lincolnshire residence had ever been able to.
Bottles of Yugoslav Riesling stood along the table, and each person’s name was written on the back of a photo of Uncle John. Handley stood up from the head of the table and moved two chairs down to the left. ‘It’s got to stop,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘There’s to be no top of the table any more. Let’s kick off in the right way. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s an ordered life. Put the cards in your pockets and sit where you like. And if you’re forming factions already before I have time to wipe my nose, then on your own heads be it.’
There was a muted irritation at this deliberate displacement of seats, which gradually eased however as the first line of bottles wavered and disappeared. The main course was rabbit stew and rice, and the bottles of Riesling gave way to a stolid line of Nuits St Georges. Enid, in a thoughtless moment, had put Schubert’s quintet on the record-player, but reasonably low so that everyone could talk against it. Adam stood up, his glass dark red to the brim, and his mouth full. His elfish face was sad because Wendy Bonser had long since fallen out of love with him. Unable to stand the voices at the Conservative Club he had mimicked several of them brilliantly at the bar one night and been thrown bodily out. He was now deeply back in the family, more subversive than he’d ever been. ‘Let’s drink to living off the land. The dozen rabbits that make up this stew were caught the night before last by Richard and me, with the help of our twelve-year-old apprentice Paul. Of course, we were well-trained in traditional Lincolnshire poaching by our assiduous dad, and we have now transferred our skills to Buckinghamshire.’
‘You’re boasting,’ cried Mandy. ‘You’re drunk already. Sit down.’
Ralph had not spoken to anyone for days. In fact Richard thought he hadn’t opened his mouth since joining the Handley family except to push food and drink into it, but couldn’t be sure because he’d never been close enough until tonight. He now broke silence and stood up, leaned over the table supported by ten springy outspread fingers, dark hair splayed, face heavy and pale as he glared at them alclass="underline" ‘You’re thieves. You can’t even keep your exploits quiet. You just want to embarrass Myra, and me.’
‘If you back me up again,’ Mandy called, ‘I’ll blind you. Nobody has a right to back me up. I can defend myself.’ He sat down, and though not a man of excessive weight the chair almost cracked under him at the ponderoushess of his smashed ego. He drained his glass at one long throatslide, and smiled to stop himself going mad and running amok.
‘We have a certain mission in this village,’ Richard said, facing his brother who now sat down. ‘Believe it or not, Ralph, we’re going to civilise it. I don’t suppose you know what that word means. For example when we came here there was a notice tacked up outside the village pub which said: NO DIDACOIS. NO GYPSIES. We found it repulsive in its racialist smear. Well, it was down the first night. They put it up again. In fact it goes up and down half-a-dozen times, but they no longer have it there now. We’re planning to have some of our gypsy friends go in, and if they don’t get served it’s war on that pub. Oh no, we’re not going to complain to the Civil Liberties Council. Nothing like that for us. Nobody’s going to get us on that bourgeois treadmill. That pub will go into the ground with everybody in it if it doesn’t serve all comers. So will a few pubs in neighbouring villages, as well. That’s just one of our minor campaigns. Now, about the ethics of poaching rabbits …’
Myra smiled. On her property they were safe, it was their ‘base zone’, and nothing from the outside world could move them. She was joined to them by her respect for Albert’s painting, and by an inexplicable fondness for the whole following. Her grief at the suicide of his brother (whose death she connected with his expedition to a civil war to bring back the father of her child) also welded her to this family. She lived in a compound where no relationships seemed fixed, and where no one temperament was like another. The final test and complication would be the arrival of Nancy and her children — whenever Frank chose to bring them in.
As for money, she had cleared twenty thousand pounds from the share-out of her father’s will, even after the death duties had been lopped off, and such a mountainous sum, invested on Handley’s advice in a London Borough Council, was accumulating interest for them all, an abundance of reserves that would hold them up for a long time. She was buying two fields near the village, satisfying her own desire to own more land, on which they could build, use it for picnics, or put it to any use that the community might decide on.
She looked at Frank across the table. He smiled. He was like a man back from famine rather than war, a traveller who had been to the magic circles of the moon and fought with the demonic apotheosis of evil till the bones went white within him and had suffered more than his soul had the capacity to take, as if he had been robbed of the ability to love, and had taken on the incurable sickness of compassion. His eyes were edged with chaos, and a strength that thrilled and frightened her. He was the man who was leaving the demanding sphere of the moon and entering the machine-age pull and energy of the sun, a man half-way there but who had been through the worst fire of getting free, and was now where it seemed that little could stop him making the great change of the world, though no one was to know yet what the cost would be.