The idea of moving had started as a pastime, a dream, an exercise in transmigration of unequal physical comforts. The reality of it increased, shaded the outlines of an appealing picture and in spite of the English soil he mapped and trod on at present, it made him feel that a long time out would augment his love for it. He wouldn’t dream of applying such an argument to Myra. The deepest love could only go so far, that is, to inanimate things such as earth and animals. To apply it to human beings, who were capable of reasoning could only degrade them, and he was the last person impious enough to attempt that. Life was like a Roman road: straight as a die, even when it went over the hills. It wasn’t easy to construct this road, still less maintain it, but the surfacing went far enough down never to be washed away by time or storms. Most people made spidery trails through woods and wilderness, tracks that doubled back and tangled hopelessly in some morass: in real terms they fought like cat and dog, held on for as long as they could perhaps, then almost took pleasure in throwing down the barriers to let hate and chaos pour in. When the first passion vanished they moved to other beds and lovers.
Most of George and Myra’s friends were either divorced or living apart, children scattered like so much ash over the eroded roads they had failed to build. So it had become almost a point of honour with George to keep his marriage going, as if it were a competition of which only he knew the rules, or even the existence of the game. Myra didn’t know of it, but he had no fear of her ever going off with other men, betraying him in the worst way possible. Of course, if she said: ‘Look, George, it’s finished, I want to go. I’m in love with someone else,’ he’d say: ‘All right. If that’s how things have worked out. It’s good of you to be so straight about it,’ then he’d understand. He would suffer, of course, but he was capable of that, and in any case it wouldn’t be so bad as if she betrayed him while still living with him. There was only one way for the heart to move — honestly. Many people hadn’t the strength of character for it, regarded honesty only as a valve to keep them safe from the worst of life’s agonies, but George considered this to be false reasoning. To him the purpose of civilization was to make you aware of such agonies, to merge the undercurrents and the surface into one clear comprehensible mirror to life. To try and get behind such a mirror would mean wielding your fist to smash it, and that was the action of a madman.
He poured more coffee, and went to get the newspapers. He needn’t leave the house for another hour, never liked to leave it at all unless Myra were up first. A house with no one awake in it during the day was like a dead beehive, generating an unnecessarily sinister ambience.
On one page a civil war loomed in Cyprus, on another Algeria was blazing from end to end. He couldn’t see the sense of it with so much new work to be done. Clipping open to the middle he saw a caption: THE LINCOLNSHIRE POACHER CELEBRATES, above a photograph of a man with alarmingly open eyes who looked as if he had mistakenly stumbled into a firing squad. On one side of him was a younger man trying to hold him up, and on the other arm was Myra.
Eyes half closed, as if too much light had stabbed into them, his heart beat against the dozen questions that were crushed to death in the door of his mind. A smile covered the idea of not believing it. Good plain Myra in her new dress was wearing the faintest smile, a cross between contempt and modesty that he had often seen on her face but not defined so clearly until the shock of seeing her in a newspaper deepened his perceptions more than he would ever have thought either necessary or possible.
She was looking down at this famous Lincolnshire painter, who had sagged from the liquid weight of his own success. The other young man (he and Myra were described as friends of the artist) had a rather stalwart appearance as far as one could tell from such a picture, for the flash had caught him with a look of stolid disgust, as if, should Albert Handley really collapse, he would go over to the photographers and scatter them and their equipment up and down the space created by their lights. It was a visage made up of belligerence and sensibility, of intelligent spirit trying to push its way into a strong yet troubled face not easy to forget.
Sitting at the table by the kitchen window, with the morning light streaming over his large hands on the newspaper, George leafed open the top-people journal and found a review of the painter’s work though not, thank God, any mention of Myra. It was a perceptive though longwinded write-up. A certain flippancy was held against Albert Handley, but the reviewer balanced this by assuming that further development was sure to iron it out. Handley was compared to the unlettered primitive painters sometimes found in the nineteenth-century craftsmen’s guilds in the north of England, men with minds of simple outline and sombre colour who had disciplined their exuberant souls into rough conventional scenes of workbench or churchyard, hovel or chimney stack, a comrade in voluminous apron wielding outsize calipers and hammer with a motto on unity and brotherhood underneath. This was Handley’s tradition, the reviewer went on, but due to influences of the modern age, he had burst the bounds of these narrow limits and turned out something which was, after all, quite unique and original in that he had spanned both worlds. It was to be hoped that success would not ruin all this, and that he would respect his roots by leaving them as soon as possible and showing us the rest of the world coloured by his unique vision. The article ended by suggesting — tentatively — that perhaps Mr Handley’s appearance marked the beginning of some new wave in the bloodless and disorientated world of contemporary English painting.
George was not impressed, would like to have known how Myra had got mixed up with him and the other fellow to the extent of being shown on the middle page of the worst gutter newspaper of them all. There was no real harm in it, of course, no harm at all — reaching for his pipe, jacket and briefcase. It made him see Myra in a light never wondered at before.
He settled himself in his car and drove along the village street, passing shop, vicarage, and row of crumbled cottages, nodding at the milk-girl rattling her bottles towards the policeman’s door. He swung left at the mildewed war memorial. The river was still belly-swollen from last week’s rain, flowing heavily into the lowest meadows on either side. With the window open, the air smelt fresh and moist, having already tasted the sap of green buds, the jewelled balances of morning dew. The countryside was soddened, sunny and peaceful, a mosaic of livid green and brown. There was no evil in this part of England. Woods closed into the road, primroses matted along its banks. Even the low purring of his engine in top gear couldn’t hold back the languid harmonics of the birds. The other day he had heard the first cuckoo, a sound which gave him great pleasure. It would be a shame to leave this, find work in a harsher, hotter country at cross purposes to what his spirit really needed.
17
While Albert was down at the gents Teddy Greensleaves slipped Frank a bundle of fivers. Frank promptly slipped them back. ‘What was that for?’
‘Keeping an eye on Albert. You’ve done nothing else in the last fortnight.’
‘I don’t need paying for it,’ he said, in no way insulted at the offer.
‘You haven’t been to work, I notice. You have to live.’
‘I’ve got enough to live on.’
‘All the more reason for taking it,’ Teddy laughed. ‘If you had nothing you could be proud and refuse. People get kicks out of that. But go on, take it, Frank. We’ve got to keep Albert in one piece, see that he gets back to a long stretch of work in Lincolnshire.’