The top of the snow had turned crisp, and boots cracked into it as they made their way through the shallower drifts. The sunken lane leading up to the Burrow had a three-foot depth to plough through, the only marks on it made by Handley on his way down. Even wild life shunned it on such a day.
‘The worst of living in the country,’ he said, ‘is that it’s not fit to live in.’
Frank was breathless. ‘I still like it.’
‘You’re not used to it, that’s why. Now and again I have a dull ache all over the left side of my chest, as if my heart is going to seize-up, and stop all life in me. I lie down and try to sleep, but it’s worse. I can’t paint when it’s on. If I dig in the garden I sweat. It lasts days, and when I wake up without it one morning I feel as if a fifty ton stone’s been lifted from my head. The pain’s terrible. It eats me up while it lasts but the local quack doesn’t know what it is. Nobody does. I always say it’s the wind — a special sort that just goes for that side of me. Why try to explain everything?’
The lane turned sharply, snow not too deep, so that a foot of it seemed like normal walking. ‘If you want your bus fare,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll lend it you. It can’t be much to Leicester.’
‘What the hell would I do in Leicester? Shoot roof rabbits?’
Back from the next bend stood a large three-storeyed plain-fronted brick cottage. ‘There’s the happy homestead,’ Albert said. ‘Fifteen shillings a week is what I shell out for it, and that’s all it’s worth, believe me. There are four buckets under the attic roof for when it rains, so thank God it’s snowing. We’re dreading the thaw. In winter it’s an igloo; in summer a cullender upside down.’
Within fences was a large garden: coal sheds and chicken coops next to the house: bike shelter, rabbit-hutches and wooden porch. It seemed a bargain to him. Two sacks served as doormats, iced waterbutts on either side. Some kids had scrawled in chalk: ‘Sticky bombs for sale.’ They kicked snow off before getting out of the deadly wind that Albert had been too busy talking about to notice what part of him it was getting at.
The hallway was bare except for a framed portrait of the Queen on one wall, and one of Albert’s larger pictures on the other. There were no mats or carpets on the wooden stairway, and it wasn’t much warmer in than out. A sea-like clatter of spoons and pots sounded from somewhere.
‘The family’s having something to eat. Let me show you this painting.’ Frank stood too close, stepped a few paces back, until he bumped into the Queen’s head on the wall facing. ‘Turn it round if it bothers you,’ Albert said. ‘I just keep her there because it looks good if somebody comes to see my paintings. They never used to buy any before I put that up. Then they thought I was a fine chap who should be helped. One of my best brainwaves.’
Frank got a good view, and nothing else bothered him. It was an epic combination of browns, greens, mauves and purple-blues, a massive background landscape as if meaning to depict the whole breadth of Lincolnshire. Against this was the vague grain of a brown cross, almost merging into it, and on the cross was the shadow of a man, his head not, as usual, hung in the hello death position, but somehow upheld and looking inland, over a violent shift of darkly coloured and merging symbols in the foreground. His outspread arms were drawn back over the wood and tied there. Hanging beneath the crosstrees was a row of small dead animals that looked in no way out of place. ‘They’re rabbits,’ Albert explained. ‘I call this picture “Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher”.’
Frank was transfixed. The totality of it reached a long way into his heart, touched a dark and not disagreeable world familiar to his senses and memory. It wasn’t so much the dramatic content, startling and effective though it was, as the colours and juxtapositions of shapes that weren’t relevant to the main theme, showing with terrible perfection a clash of personality punished by crucifixion. They were the colours he felt hidden between his everworking heart and disjointed soul, a coagulate of visual mechanism located somewhere behind the eyes. He had studied Gray’s Anatomy in Pat’s library over many weeks, but his idea of the body and its components retained the primitive impressionism of childhood. The plates, as clear and marvellous as coloured diagrams of the four-stroke engine, stood no chance against the eternal fixtures of his earthed imagination.
‘Someone from Grantham offered me forty pounds for it last week, but I asked fifty — what with the time it took, and materials I had to find. I think he’ll be back. Not that I’m worried. I could use the money, but I wouldn’t like to see it go either. I like it myself, and that means it might be good.’
‘It’s really got something,’ Frank said. ‘I can understand it, you know, but I can’t say much about it.’
‘Ah, well, that’s saying a lot in itself. I take small ones to Skegness in the summer, sell ’em for a few pounds on the front, but it’s hard. Every month or two I raffle one in the village, send my kids out with books of tickets at a shilling a throw. I clear twenty quid on a system like that. Then the odd few people come and buy one now and again. They must be scattered all over the county by now. I used to think it a funny thing, me being a painter, but I got over that long ago. I don’t know what sort you’d call me, a sort of primitive surrealistic realist I suppose — which means keck-all, but sounds like something. I just go on painting though, because I can’t do much else. I started during the war, saw some reproductions of modern stuff in a big book, bought an ordinary box of water-paints and some cartridge paper. An officer saw me one day and encouraged me, got me books, oils, canvas. Went out to Burma and got killed. He said I had talent, but also I’d got idleness, and that made it better.’
They went up to Albert’s studio, opened the beer. ‘I didn’t know there was somebody like you in the village.’
‘I keep low,’ Albert said. ‘I’m busy and harassed most of the time, and can’t be bothered with people.’ The room was bitterly cold, the floor carpeted with newspapers which Frank felt like kneeling down to read, as if one might contain the message of his life. He’d never been in an artist’s studio, looked at the vast square table scattered with utensils and bric-à-brac, all kinds of pictures leaning against it and the four walls. Some canvases were primed, others finished, but most were still raw wounds of thought split and laid open among odours of turps and damp dust. ‘I haven’t been in for a couple of days, that’s why it’s so cold. I might get back to it tomorrow, but I’m like a bloody motor car — can’t start in such weather. Maybe the wife’s got a bit of dinner, so bring the bottles.’
They walked along the corridor and down by the shaking banister. Two children, pinch-faced and happy, lay on the bare floor playing Monopoly. ‘It’s time you went to school,’ Albert said. ‘Don’t think you can stay away just because of a bit of snow. The vicar told me you played truant from Bible class last Sunday. If you don’t keep it up we won’t get another parcel at Christmas. See that you go.’
Via a bare parlour they entered a kitchen. A fire burned at the range, and down the middle of the room was a table flanked by wooden forms. Under the window was a huge pram, in which a baby played with blocks and rattles. A twelve-year-old girl with short straight hair and a face like her father’s was reading a book at the table, and an eighteen-year-old sister was washing up at the sink. Frank fixed his eyes on her. She was fair-haired with a sulky, thin face that didn’t altogether match her fine bust and mature hips well held by shirt and skirt. Her feet in carpet slippers, legs without stockings, she glanced at him with large blue eyes, a slight sneer on her lips.