The Flame of Life: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 3)

by Alan Sillitoe

  The nearest he came to a rebellion at school was one winter afternoon when he decided that if he heard another word about King Arthur and his screwy knights he’d go off his head. This state had been lately repeated at theological college when he had found himself beginning to accept the principles of Christianity that had been panned at him during the last three years. He dreaded losing his sacred assets of cunning and hypocrisy.

  Over the affair of King Arthur he had throttled his indignation because it only increased his interior scepticism, but the more recent threat to his lack of faith he took so seriously that he entered into months of lying, cheating, perjury and screwing. He hadn’t gone into precise details of his expulsion with Handley, yet saw them chuffing into their beers over it one jovial night, in which case the simile of the return of the prodigal might have some relevance after all, and he knew Handley in his heart wanted nothing more deeply than this.

  Under the livid strip-lighting he sliced more black rye and Camembert. During the day he could eat nothing, so throughout the night he was unable to overcome his insomnia while the wolf-rat of hunger pranced around in his stomach. At college he slung a loose cloth bag over the toprail of his bed so that when the famishings began he could dip in for biscuits and corned beef, slab cake and fruit – all the goodies he remembered wanting in childhood but hardly ever getting. In his hasty departure this precious piece of equipment had been left behind, so by night he turned into a shoeless marauder and made a sardonic trek for the icebox.

  Any change made him bitter, especially one over which he’d had no control. Yet the more he thought of it the less could he remember any over which he had been in charge. This made him realise that his bitterness was misplaced, a spectacle which awed him slightly.

  Even the acts which led to these alterations, carried out with much forethought, had somehow happened against his will – a will that was the most threatening part of him because he had never been united with it. Whenever he did something, he wondered why he had done it, and knew that this was not the best way to order your existence. His will was irresolute, disobedient and pernicious, and whatever happened in his life had never been connected to it.

  Being without will, almost without desire, momentous events happened to you, but he was too busy eating at the overlit kitchen table to consider them now. It was as if matters of volition and decision were a thing of the past. Having no will created self-regard, led him to suppose that if it had perished in him then it must also be on its way out for the rest of the world. Whether it were or not didn’t concern him, for he felt in no way influenced by it.

  The fact that he was without will did not mean that he could be manipulated by those who possessed it. Quite the opposite. He felt safe from the world, more his own master than if he were clutched by a rabid will-to-power. And under cover of your own pale lack of will what could not be perpetrated against friends and enemies alike?

  He didn’t know why he suffered so much from lack of will, yet thought it might be because he’d come into the world unable to remember his dreams. It may not go together with everyone, but it did with him. And having no will he was sometimes resented by people who said he was harbouring a secret and wicked will against them, a will-lessness that went so far into his core that they saw a deep disguise, a trick, a threat of such forceful intent that they would be powerless against it when its aims became known.

  Thus his father, whom Cuthbert suspected of having taken his share of both dreams and will – for what they were worth – and woven them into the fabric of his artistic life, distrusted his lazy contempt of all that went on in the house and its environs. He accused Cuthbert of brewing up black-souled mischief that boded ill for everyone.

  At dinner when he was seen to eat nothing, Handley let go a tirade that Cuthbert found entertaining, though unnecessary because he merely lacked appetite at that particular moment.

  ‘And in this particular company,’ Handley said. ‘Look at him, my one and only sly-eyed eldest son. He’s left-handed, born under the sign of Pisces, and has no lobes to his ears. Could anyone be more marked by the devil than that?’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said his mother. ‘Give him time to settle down.’

  ‘He can take as long as he likes,’ Handley said, getting back to his meat, ‘as long as he works in the meantime. The trouble is, he shows a sad inclination to mysticism, and there’s nothing makes you more bone-idle or treacherous.’

  ‘It was your idea to get me trained as a priest,’ Cuthbert shouted.

  ‘There was nothing wrong with that, until you gave it up. It’s part of a priest’s job to be mystical. The bishop might not like it, but they allow it. But you’re no longer a priest, so stop acting and behaving like one. And stow the bloody mysticism! We have a perfectly good way of life here, for the twenty souls in our community. It’s hard-working, happy, co-operative, and totally unproductive. But all you do is use it as a convenient hostel, drifting around between sleeping and eating – not that I see you do either, come to think of it – wrapped in a haze of self-defeating mysticism that threatens to take up all of us in a cloud of smoke. Don’t think I haven’t got you weighed up. You’ll find yourself in a factory one of these days, working for your living.’

  As he sat through the dregs of the night, and more than compensated for his gorge-block at dinner, he did indeed consider it easy to drop his senses into a sort of trance, though in a more uncertain moment he wondered whether this wasn’t the onset of a softening brain.

  He could sit down, go into emptiness, and not wake from it till hours had passed, without even having been asleep. Or he could daydream, have visions, project himself, reach three distinct modes of disassociation with no effort. For a long time he imagined these states of human sensory breadth as more or less available to everybody, and when he realised they might not be he loathed himself for being different, the effect of which was to make him intolerant of everyone else.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rainspots fell as he crossed the yard and made his way between two caravans. The encampment slept, soothed by its futile work of the day, resting from the complex interaction of human relationships that such close living entailed.

  He came back and leaned outside the kitchen door. Would he, after recovering his strength, get into the real world again? Having failed at college he not only hadn’t ‘got on’ but he hadn’t even been close to the ladder on which he could begin ascending. By going wrong he’d wounded himself. He couldn’t believe anybody else had done it. If he accepted that he’d have been closer to being a Christian, and so wouldn’t have fouled his chances at college in any case.

  And yet, was he turning into a materialist, one of those narrow-minded, one-dimensional, all guts and no spirit, earth and no sky, lobotomised Neanderthal creatures like Frank Dawley who wallowed in the glory of his few months’ fighting in Algeria as if he was the poor man’s Lawrence of Arabia?

  It was essential to get things straight in his own mind – unless you wanted to be sucked in by this community so that you didn’t know what sort of a person you were anymore.

  A drift of fresh air revived him, and reminded him how tired he was. Even the month of May could give you pneumonia if you came out at night in pyjamas and slippers. Eric Bloodaxe the bulldog stirred its bulk by the gate – but a shape moved near the caravans, and he stood for it to come closer, unpleasantly surprised at his fear.

  ‘On the prowl?’ Mandy said.

  ‘Can’t my dear sister sleep, either?’

  She leaned by the caravan wall. ‘Does it look like it, Brother Rat? My bloody husband sleeps like a sack of coal somebody’s dropped and left behind after nicking it from a railway wagon. He doesn’t sleep: he dies – and takes all my sleep with him. It’s impossible to be in the same bed with the unfeeling swine. It’s his mother’s fault. No wonder she laughed when he got married. That was the only wedding present we got, and as far as I know it didn’t even crack her junk-shop face. I suppose she’d laugh on th
e other side though if we got divorced and I sent him creeping back to her.’

  ‘You’d better have the baby first.’

  ‘That’s not for another three boring months.’

  The moon made its light available again, and he looked at her face. He remembered hauling her as a baby in the pram with Adam and Richard to the village for their sweet ration. Afterwards they roamed fields and woods to see what they could plunder. Their family was in a perpetual state of destitution because Handley did nothing but paint day and night, a lone and frenzied figure up in his attic, wrapped in coats and scarves when the cold got too much of a grip around the windows. They lived on national assistance, sickness benefit, charity, relief, begging letters, the dole, and what they could loot from the surrounding countryside. And now that Handley sold his paintings at prices which made him rich beyond the dreams of his expectations, they thought he was miserly by refusing to hand over the money to which his new-found fortune entitled them.

  As children they had done their bit to keep the family going. When chased by farmer or gardener they maintained a compact group around the pram, from which blonde, plump Mandy either joined in the general panic and screamed with fear, or stayed locked in her own private baby-world and laughed divinely at the worst it could do to her. And now she was a pregnant eighteen-year-old slut. ‘Don’t you think of your husband at a time like this?’

  She laughed. ‘If I was planning to kill him, I suppose I would. But I’m not – yet. There’s a hard stone inside me first that’s got to grind its way through the floor. When that’s over I can start living again.’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing now?’

  ‘Since you ask, I’m multiplying. When Dad thought this house would be big enough for the community he reckoned without me. I’ll have at least a litter.’

  Shameless and fetching, he thought, base and lecherous when she’s not too heavy to walk. The sway gives her away when her belly’s up, and the predatory shoulder-slope when she’s empty and ready. ‘Father’s a great Christian. He’ll feed any number of mouths.’

  ‘He’s a mean old rattlebag,’ she cried.

  ‘Not so loud. He’ll hear you.’

  ‘Are you frightened of him, as well? Everybody is. I must be the only one who isn’t. I tell him twenty times a day how mean he is. His brain’s pickled in vinegar and his heart’s clogged with salt. I can understand how he can sleep at night, but I don’t see how he can wake up in the morning.’

  ‘He’s brittle with good living,’ he said. ‘A well-charged magneto who lords it over us with all the authority of unexplainable drive and power – and the fact that his hands are on the cash.’

  She clutched her stomach. ‘That’s the third bloody time.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what woke me in the first place.’ She straightened, and smiled. ‘We’d all like to see the back of him. Give us a fag.’

  ‘I haven’t got any.’

  ‘You’re even meaner than he is.’ She took a packet from her padded and flowered dressing gown. ‘If he popped off one day to the South Seas who’d take his place?’

  He lit a cigarette. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘As long as it’s not you. I’d rather die.’

  ‘I thought you were too generous to think that far ahead.’

  She groaned. ‘Either I’ve eaten too much, or my appendix has burst.’

  ‘Take a pill.’

  ‘I’ll need at least forty to get a few winks before daylight.’

  He couldn’t resist speaking his favourite interior thought, having often noticed that deciding not to say something was merely the first stage to letting it out. ‘I’d be such joy to see the last of father that there’s no point in thinking about what would happen afterwards. You’d never do anything if you considered the consequences.’

  ‘You certainly don’t think about getting pregnant when you’re humping around on a bed with a man,’ she said.

  An owl sang its nightsong over the caravans, such a cool rhythmical warbling that they couldn’t but listen. She bent down, then straightened and turned her pale full face as if to see where the moon had gone. ‘If this keeps on I’ll have a miscarriage.’

  ‘It’ll get out so easily you won’t know it’s happened,’ he said lightly.

  ‘I tried to get rid of it when I knew I was preggers. But nothing bloody worked.’

  ‘Some loathsome member of this community could have given you an address, I expect.’

  There was a movement on the higher ground of lawns and fruit trees at the back of the house. Whoever it was had been only a few yards from their conversation, hidden in the thin alleyway dividing the caravans. Cuthbert felt a chill, knowing himself to be a coward, otherwise he wouldn’t make so many plans.

  ‘I heard you,’ Handley shouted, coming down the steps. ‘Your pair of plotting nightbirds.’

  Cuthbert backed away, smiling so that his father might believe his remarks had been merely a joke, crossed by one of defiant friendliness in case Handley hadn’t really heard and was only bluffing – which he often was.

  Mandy clutched her belly, and Cuthbert was proud of her quick though dramatic response in trying to divert her father’s wrath. ‘It’s getting out,’ she said, pools of sweat breaking from her face.

  Handley stood in his dressing gown, looking from one to the other. ‘Neither of us could sleep,’ Cuthbert informed him.

  ‘I can’t hold it,’ Mandy said. Between spasms she felt light enough to drift away bodily in the blue air despite her stony weight. It was a sensation of great happiness in which her past returned in one delicious moment, as if every minute of it had been a golden paradise that she’d always wanted to bring back but had never succeeded in till now, when it was totally unexpected and twice as sweet for almost reappearing.

  Another spasm struck, and blacked it out. Two faces looked at her, made exaggeratedly clear because of the pain. She lost control of her life so utterly that she was both pleased and frightened by it. Her father’s sharp chisel nose, and his thin lined face bent down, eyes burning through to her in sympathy. He should have been named Oswald, she thought, a laugh even in her pain. Oswald the Chiking Viking. Cuthbert’s own clear eyes also looked, but knew nothing, as if he were still too young at twenty-five to tell himself what he did not want to know because he would be afraid when he found out.

  Handley pushed him roughly aside. ‘You bloody fool,’ he said, putting an arm around her. ‘Can’t you see she’s having a miscarriage? Let’s get her into the house.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dawley could not sleep. He’d drunk too much brandy and got the heartburn. Or maybe the livid globe of the moon was reaching the dark corners of his heart at last, scooping away that mystery of peace in which he might have found rest.

  He stood by the caravan window and pulled on his trousers. Sure enough, the moon was there, queen of the thick white night for all to see, high above the chestnut trees of the opposite field. His belt was too tight at the waist, which came from Myra’s rich soups and Russian salads, jellied chicken buried in cream, baked potatoes, medium-done steaks, and heavy breakfasts of the sort he hadn’t eaten when working in the factory three years ago. English country walks didn’t slake flesh off like treks through the valleys and deserts of Algeria. He remembered that lean and mindless state of continual travelling, when staring blankly at a map in the evening was the nearest you got to intellectual refreshment.

  Printed matter rained into the community, but in the wilderness there’d been nothing but agonising foodless days, a flycrawl and pencil-scratch across a piece of coloured paper called a map, in memory more real than the actual fabulous land his feet had plodded through. It was a marvellous time.

  A wailing bitch-howl flew from the moon’s full face. He wanted to boot the dog out of existence for being as restless as himself. When the scream came again it wasn’t from Eric Bloodaxe but some poor wracked person in the house, and it startled him even m
ore. He’d almost got used to the oppressive tranquillity of the last few weeks. Certainly, if you had two quiet days in the Handley household you began to worry that it would go on forever, though the others acted as if it had never happened in their lives before.

  Myra created a kingdom of ease and plenty. She drove to the markets of Hitchin and Bedford, and came back with a car-load of baskets and bottles and boxes and crates, their son Mark strapped high in his chair beside her, watching rabbits run before them on the country lanes. The house prospered in its mildness, set for a warm summer and a comfortable year, which Frank felt the need of in spite of its dullness, because it was only a few months since he had left the perilous sands and hills of Algeria.

  Fetching Nancy and the kids from Nottingham hadn’t turned out as he’d expected, but he’d enjoyed the train ride, the usual thrill of going north again. At St Pancras he went by the ticket man to the waiting train – coiling upshoots of grey steam between each carriage.

  Passing a stretch of the M1 beyond Hendon the train was overtaking every car on it. Factory walls of Vauxhall and SKF at Luton slid past. A solitary man walked across some tips, seen as William Posters, that indefatigable fugitive from Dawley’s past who was nowadays turning more into a ghost and floating further from him than ever.

  Rich fields and soil showed the great wealth of England, Pylons rose and fell in their lines, laced up a couple of woods and a crest of rising ground. More farms, rich land, empty roads now that the motorway had sucked off traffic. Crossing the Trent he thought that in middle age one turned to the past so as to arm oneself against what was left of the future.

  He was almost sorry to leave the soothing train. The man of action is drawn deeper into rest than most. On a bus through town to the estate he noticed how the centre was splitting into car parks and one-way streets, dead acres and blocks of flats covering old houses now down and gone forever. It gave him a feeling that, in tune with his own travels and actions, the rest of the world had not lived either in vain or idleness. His favourite birthplace and city had done things for itself, though he didn’t suppose that those who had stayed thought about it in the same comfortable nostalgic way that he did going through on the bus.